Category: poetics

Summer reading list, for serious.

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I just looked at last summer’s book list, which I posted here last June. I didn’t read a single book on that list. This makes me think that perhaps I’m doomed to lose interest in any book that’s on the Summer Reading List. Or perhaps my list was made by just looking around my house at books I’ve been meaning to, but not especially wanting to, read (sometimes there’s a big difference between these two categories). This year’s book list features some books I’ve already read, so hopefully I’m not such a big liar this time around.

***

Le Summer Book List 2011.

The Fountainhead/Ayn Rand (check)

Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O’Hara (check) (swoon)

The Art of Recklessness/Dean Young (in middle of)

A Visit from the Good Squad/Jennifer Egan (as of today, check)

The Best of It/Kay Ryan (in middle of)

The Good Earth/Pearl S. Buck

Invisible Cities/Italo Calvino (this was on last year’s list too, but now I actually own it)

Collected John Berryman (all of it, of course)

Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction/ P.H. Matthews

Otherwise: New and Selected Poems/Jane Kenyon

Lighthead/Terrance Hayes

Siddhartha/Hermann Hesse

From A to B and Back Again: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol(/Andy Warhol)

The Maverick Poets: An Anthology/ed. Steve Kowitt

Tremor: Selected Poems/Adam Zagajewski (again)

Truth and Beauty/Ann Patchet (in middle of)

A Trip to the Stars/Nicholas Christopher

Come All You Ghosts/Matthew Zapruder

Bossypants/Tina Fey

 

The photograph below, by Elliot Erwitt, is where I’d prefer to do all of this reading. But my kitchen table will work, too.

“Friday evening in the universe” (Kerouac).

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Yes, it’s early, late or middle Friday evening in the universe. Oh, the sounds of time are pouring through the window and the key. All ideardian windows and bedarvled bedarvled mad bedraggled robes that rolled in the cave of Amontillado and all the sherried heroes lost and caved up, and transylvanian heroes mixing themselves up with glazer vup and the hydrogen bomb of hope.

 

(-Jack Kerouac, from his narration of the short film “Pull My Daisy,” part of which you can watch right here, with Italian subtitles, black and white versions of late afternoon Manhattan sunlight, and Kerouac, rambling long and short and narratively.) (I just learned how to embed videos on my site thanks to this really cool person’s daily song website. One small step for panache perhaps.)

Poem I have memorized (Terrance Hayes).

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New York Poem

In New York from a rooftop in Chinatown
one can see the sci-fi bridges and aisles
of buildings where there are more miles
of shortcuts and alternative takes than
there are Miles Davis alternative takes.
There is a white girl who looks hi-
jacked with feeling in her glittering jacket
and her boots that look made of dinosaur
skin and R is saying to her I love you
again and again. On a Chinatown rooftop
in New York anything can happen.
Someone says “abattoir” is such a pretty word
for “slaughterhouse.” Someone says
mermaids are just fish ladies. I am so
fucking vain I cannot believe anyone
is threatened by me. In New York
not everyone is forgiven. Dear New York,
dear girl with a bar code tattooed
on the side of your face, and everyone
writing poems about and inside and outside
the subways, dear people underground
in New York, on the sci-fi bridges and aisles
of New York, on the rooftops of Chinatown
where Miles Davis is pumping in,
and someone is telling me about the contranyms,
how “cleave” and “cleave” are the same word
looking in opposite directions. I now know
“bolt” is to lock and “bolt” is to run away.
That’s how I think of New York. Someone
jonesing for Grace Jones at the party,
and someone jonesing for grace.

photo taken headed uptown, disposable camera, December 2011

Dream Song 295 (John Berryman).

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You dear you, cleaning up Henry’s foreign affairs,
with your sword & armour heading for his bank,
a cable gone astray:
except for you he had hopped in the Liffey & sank.
Now what can he in return do: upstairs? downstairs?
You run your life every day

so well it’s hard to think    of anything you need
and I only supply needs, needs & ceremonies,
I’ll send you the last thirteen,
in all of which Henry is extremely dead
but talkative. To you with your peat moss & leaf-mould
& little soft wet holes

where you put ginger, bloodroot & blueheads
& pearly everlastings, —what can he say of worth?
In all his nine lives
he was seldom so pleased been to be on the same earth
with you, my dear. We get on better than
most husbands & wives.

 

 

The book I made in an edition of 4 (poem, photograph).

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Blanco y Negro (y Gris y Gris)

What a city should be like: angles of unfolding agave.

After noontime’s whistle, the streets are ripped asunder 

and the reassembled. The grey clouds of the sea’s

factory remove appointments like gloves. Beauty’s

nothing but a startled bird awaiting snow.

she gets it right by me (sonia sanchez).

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Welcome Home, My Prince

welcome home, my prince
into my white season of no you
welcome home
iiiiiiiiiiiito my songs
that touch yo/head
iiiiiiiiiiiiand rain green laughter
iiiiiiiiiiiiin greeting
welcome home
to this monday
iiiiiiiiiiiithat has grown up
with the sound of yo/name,
for i have chanted to yesterday’s sun
to hurry back with
his belly full of morning
iiiiiiiiiiiiand you have come
and i cannot look up at you.
iiiiiiiiiiiimy body
trembles and i mumble things as you
stand tall and sacred
so easily in yo/self
iiiiiiiiiiiibut i am here
to love you
iiiiiiiiiiiito carry yo/name on my
ankles like bells
iiiiiiiiiiiito dance in
yo/arena of love.
you are tattooed on the round/soft/
parts of me.
iiiiiiiiiiiiand yo/smell is
always with me.

Poet of today (John Berryman).

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The excerpt below is from a poem entitled “In Loving Memory of the Late Author of Dream Songs.” It was written by John Berryman’s good friend, William Meredith. William Meredith taught at Connecticut College for many years, and when he died our school held a memorial for him. I  picked up Richard Wilbur at his house in Connecticut in my 1998 Toyota Camry LXE so that he could read a poem at Meredith’s memorial service. His house was in the beautiful Connecticut countryside, and I was a little early so a woman who I assumed was his caretaker had me wait in the sitting room. It was late autumn. I sat on a very stiff couch and his Siamese cats entered while I waited, upright on the sofa: two of them. They stared into my soul with their four blue eyes. Richard Wilbur was much easier to be around than his cats. We talked about weather and dangerous curves of the highway, and he told me a story that took place in Key West, and he told me another story where the punch line involved some sentence which proved a poet he admired knew Latin even better than he did. His voice was very soft and I did not mention that I wrote poetry, or that I had found poetry relatively recently and now knew I had to study it and  keep writing poems. I stole a line from something he said to me during that car ride and put it in a poem, but I changed the phrase by taking out a word, and I didn’t credit him, though there’s an invisible footnote there that only I can see. I can show you to that poem, it’s in my thesis.  It’s a love poem, but that doesn’t help you much: they all are, especially the ones since the thesis.

Do we wave back now, or what do we do?
You were never reluctant to instruct.
I do what’s in character, I look for things
to praise on the riverbanks and I praise them.
We are all relicts, of some great joy, wearing black,
but this book is full of marvelous songs.
Don’t let us contract your dread recidivism
and start falling from our own iron railings.
Wave from the fat book again, make us wave back.

We are all relicts of some great joy, some of us even newer than relics–some of us perhaps just made.

Poem fragment (James Schuyler).

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(From the 48-page poem “The Morning of the Poem,” a poem of epic chitchat, a poem of window-watching and beverages and plants and seasons, which I read on the airplane and adored noisily in my cramped airplane seat.)

So many lousy poets
So few good ones
What’s the problem?
No innate love for
Words, no sense of
How the thing said
Is in the words, how
The words are themselves
The thing said: love,
Mistake, promise, auto
Crack-up, color, petal,
The color in the petal
Is merely light
And that’s refraction:
A word, that’s the poem.
A blackish-red nasturtium.
Roses shed on
A kitchen floor, a
Cool and scented bed
To loll and roll on,
I wish I had a rose
Or butterfly tattoo:
But where? Here on
My arm or my inner
Thigh, small, where
Only the happy few
might see it? I’ll
never forget that
Moving man, naked to
The waist a prize-
Fight buckle on his
Belt (Panama) and
Flying high on each
Pectoral a bluebird
On tan sky skin. I
Wanted to eat him up:
No such luck. East
28th Street, 1950.
How the roses pass.