Drugstore by Josh Bell

This is that young poet we read in class yesterday. I looked at some of his poetry online and I highly recommend that everyone read some of his other stuff. His style/voice is awesome, and his use of language is the definition of tight.

Unfortunately, his book is like 50+ dollars on amazon (used).

I finished the baggie of blue pills
that made the planets so tolerable.
The toy hula girl on top of my dresser

sends her regards, although she
doesn’t dance until I touch her,

and Ramona, do you have any new pills
you’re not using, any spare lows

for your only boy? I fell hard
for the mailbox, I sent flowers to

that mailbox, I went fishing
in the reservoir, but they’d drained it

twenty feet. Your lost lures glared
cheaply under the morning sun,

which was a plug in a reprobate
bathtub. Will we drain up

instead of down? If we go down
is that the first we’re heard of?

Yes. I’m tired of the astrologies,
the icy pharmaceutical rites

that are enough for me. I grow old.
I encounter philosophy at night.

I’m concerned that what we have
is each other, for as long
as prescribed, and I can tell

by the skin beneath your eyes
that as far as I go, it’s your word
against the universe and sleep.

Diatribes and Simon & Garfunkel

I’ll admit, I really enjoyed the Walcott lecture. I did have some qualms about it though.  As awesome and humbling as it is to be able to say that you were in the same room with such honored individual I really felt like he could have been a little more responsive to the audience’s questions.  And on that subject, I think we should have had more time at the end to ask questions; it felt like he read from Omeros for the majority of the time.  Honestly, I believe I would have gotten a lot more out of hearing him describe his aesthetics and his personal process of writing poetry.  Still, it was a honor to attend his lecture.

On the topic of artistic inspiration, and stories on the subject, I wanted to offer up the following Simon and Garfunkel song.  It’s a personal favorite, probably more because of the story behind its inspiration:  So apparently when the duo were doing their photoshoot for the Album “Wednesday Morning 3am” they noticed after several hours of standing against a subway wall, that there “written very legibly in the Baroque style common to New York City wall writers…was the old familiar suggestion [F*** You]“.  Unfortunately Columbia records would not let them use any of those pictures because they displayed the phrase, and so Simon wrote “A Poem on the Underground Wall” so as to keep some of that history alive.  Knowing the subject behind the song, I’m only more amazed by the nearly surrealist slant that S&G put on the act of writing graffiti.

The last train is nearly due,
The underground is closing soon,
And in the dark deserted station,
Restless in anticipation,
A man waits in the shadows.

His restless eyes leap and scratch,
At all that they can touch or catch,
And hidden deep within his pocket,
Safe within its silent socket,
He holds a colored crayon.

Now from the tunnels stony womb,
The carriage rides to meet the groom,
And opens wide and welcome doors,
But he hesitates, then withdraws
Deeper in the shadows.

And the train is gone suddenly
On wheels clicking silently
Like a gently tapping litany,
And he holds his crayon rosary
Tighter in his hand.

Now from his pocket quick he flashes,
The crayon on the wall he slashes,
Deep upon the advertising,
A single worded poem comprised
Of four letters.

And his heart is laughing, screaming, pounding
The poem across the tracks rebounding
Shadowed by the exit light
His legs take their ascending flight
To seek the breast of darkness and be suckled by the night.

To listen… http://www.last.fm/music/Simon%2B%2526%2BGarfunkel/_/A+Poem+on+the+Underground+Wall

lovely phrasing

Hey kids,

I’ve taken note of some lovely phrasing I’ve read this semester.  Most of it comes from our poetry packets.

“Like an illuminated curlicue,

The vine provides, with grace,

Importance.”

-Svoboda, “Conquistador”

 

“but

Hesitant, calling as if he didn’t really want to find her.”

-Svoboda, “The Ranchhand’s Daughter”

 

“the breaths that attach”

-Hicok, “String Theory”

 

Rhapsody in glow-blue.

 

“seeing what you’ve left

gets more beautiful, less specific”

-Doty “My Alexandria”

 

“with unparalleled efficiency

we wait”

            -Henry “Submarine”

Li-Young Lee on Jack Gilbert

“I was recently watching poet Jack Gilbert eat potato salad. He was eating all of it, his full self. It was epic.”

I love this.

knee painting

On visual art:Firstly, perhaps this isn’t quite what Derek Walcott had in mind, but check out the knee painting: Also, I really liked the description he used about all poems having a necessary light and contour. And David: I remember Walcott saying that all art inspires a joyous transcendence (or something or other, I can’t remember quite how he worded it)– but that it’s music that does it quickest. When I was writing my Watson proposal last semester, that was exactly the dilemma I was trying to describe. In both poetry and choral music I experience that sense of fullbody joy that art incites, but when singing in a choir something happens beyond the space of inhabiting or of even reading a poem out loud. I don’t know how to describe it, and it makes me a little bit nervous to admit– it seems to diminish the importance of poetry, but it really doesn’t.

Then D.W. quoted Pasternak:”Great poets have no time to be original.”I guess if you’re Derek Walcott you can say that. Thinking about this some more, I can almost agree, if we consider time spent as synonymous with focus, it does seem that a poet spending time focusing on originality would sink a poet in a quagmire of ego and overwork in the office of bad verse.

By the way: SURRENDER YOUR IDENTITY TO THE WORK. thoughts?

Also: did anyone notice that he clapped for himself a bit at the beginning of the Q&A? And that he signed books, even though he made such a hullabaloo about the importance of the work over the American Capitalist Egotistical Fame thing?… I guess he does have “More experience in humiliation” than we do.

The man himself

I was reading the poem “Ode to a Woman Gardening” by Pablo Neruda. Read this and let me know what you think. He even makes reference to Seamus Heaney in the poem. The way he describes and compares the woman to the earth, I think, reflects on our discussion of love and sex in poems. Pay close attention to the last few lines; I think they are the best in the entire poem.

For some reason, this love thing is really exciting me

Talk about a dirty poem! I just found my new inspiration and its by a poet named John Donne. The poem is titled “Elegy XX: To His Mistress Going to Bed”. Please read this:COME, madam, come, all rest my powers defy ;Until I labour, I in labour lie.The foe ofttimes, having the foe in sight,Is tired with standing, though he never fight.Off with that girdle, like heaven’s zone glittering,But a far fairer world encompassing.Unpin that spangled breast-plate, which you wear,That th’ eyes of busy fools may be stopp’d there.Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chimeTells me from you that now it is bed-time.Off with that happy busk, which I envy,That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.Your gown going off such beauteous state reveals,As when from flowery meads th’ hill’s shadow steals.Off with your wiry coronet, and showThe hairy diadems which on you do grow.Off with your hose and shoes ; then softly treadIn this love’s hallow’d temple, this soft bed.In such white robes heaven’s angels used to beRevealed to men ; thou, angel, bring’st with theeA heaven-like Mahomet’s paradise ; and thoughIll spirits walk in white, we easily knowBy this these angels from an evil sprite ;Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.Licence my roving hands, and let them goBefore, behind, between, above, below.O, my America, my Newfoundland,My kingdom, safest when with one man mann’d,My mine of precious stones, my empery ;How am I blest in thus discovering thee !To enter in these bonds, is to be free ;Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be.Full nakedness ! All joys are due to thee ;As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must beTo taste whole joys. Gems which you women useAre like Atlanta’s ball cast in men’s views ;That, when a fool’s eye lighteth on a gem,His earthly soul might court that, not them.Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings madeFor laymen, are all women thus array’d.Themselves are only mystic books, which we—Whom their imputed grace will dignify—Must see reveal’d. Then, since that I may know,As liberally as to thy midwife showThyself ; cast all, yea, this white linen hence ;There is no penance due to innocence :To teach thee, I am naked first ; why then,What needst thou have more covering than a man?  Ha great ending! For some reason, I feel like a naughty child that is not supposed to be reading this poem. I think that is what I might write about next time for poetry.

“it’s like a picture I’ve painted/ it’s so perfect/ Open ya eyes”-Beanie Sigel

So I went to that lunch thing with Derek Walcott and didn’t say a single word to him.  Why?  He was really into the Art students and their work.  It was all about French painter Jaque Cuwewemawuwu or Albert Frenchtoastcrepeeiffel.  Afterwards, he walked into a student’s art studio and looked at her work.  I tagged along and watched him examine her art.  Five minutes max.  He walked in, looked and developed this deeper understanding of the young lady’s art, drive, and soul.And of course I’m infinitely jealous. I mean, it’s f’ing Walcott looking at her work!  But I was more jealous of the damn painted artform as a whole.  I mean, a painting- it hits the eye and creates instantaneous reaction.  It sits on the wall and immediately, something artistic hits an eye.   Now, if I put a bunch of poems on my wall, I just look like the guy from Memento.  I mean, poetry (and music) has this unfolding process.  It takes a minute before that “aha” moment hits.  I mean, Dickinson’s strongest quality in my mind is her amazing first line or so.  They immediately pull you into the poem…but still nobody just reads her first lines and goes “ahhh nice.”   Walcott only had five minutes, and those minutes were better served looking at those paintings than he would reading my poems.  I mean, we workshop one in about 6-7 minutes and he looked at like three paintings.  Of course, he only had a basic understanding of the works, but that’s better than he would have done with a few poems.  And songs are no different…Yea a beat may get people’s attention, but sometimes it gets in the way of people understanding the lyrics better.  And people wanna talk to me about the song as they’re listening for the first time! If it were a painting, we could talk about the primaries and still analyze the art… Argh!  Damn artsy fartsy painty F*&^offs…I’m jealous 

blog housekeeping

There are some drafts that haven’t been published. I’m going to go ahead and publish them– they look finished. If you press “save” instead of “publish,” it won’t appear on the blog. Also, if you are having trouble posting, you may just need to simply log in. You have to log in at wordpress.com– not belchedwords.word..etc.  

Walcott wowza

So I just came from the Q&A. Which probably should have been called A. Did he really need a “moderator”? It was amusing–and fascinating–listening to him answer a question, because he just riffed his way around it in a million different ways, creating a body of waterthought around it leaving the tiny little question in the middle like an island.

Notice how three different people asked him about Omeros, each slightly clarifying or simplifying the question, to get him to talk about the relation of that poem to the Odyssey, and he just kept circling in wider arcs around the question?

The guy has an amazing mind. His talk about Stein, Cezanne, and Hemingway was brilliant. I also especially liked his last little monologue on the “man of war” bird, and the music of the different names for it, how the patois word is bad French but “great Creole.”

And that French is “bad Latin.”

Here are some excerpts from Walcott’s interviews and essays which you may find interesting:

“The English language is nobody’s special language. It is the property of the imagination.”

“Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main.”

This one is great: “Survival is the triumph of stubborness, and spiritual stubborness, a sublime stupidity, is what makes the occupation of poetry endure, when there are so many things that should make it futile. Those things added together can go under one collective noun: ‘the world.’”

A sublime stupidity!

“For every poet it is always morning in the world. History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History.”

“Pastoralists of the African revival should know that what is needed is not new names for old things, or old names for old things, but the faith of using the old names anew, so that mongrel as I am, something prickles in me when I see the word Ashantias with the word Warwickshire, both separately intimating my grandfathers’ roots, both baptising this neither proud nor ashamed bastard, this hybrid, this West Indian.”

That is exactly right. The faith of using the old names anew.