siLence

Poetry is distilled exhalation...

"I am attracted to ellipsis,

to the unsaid,

to suggestion,

to eloquent, deliberate silence.

… Often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary."

— Louise Glück

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InteResting Unrest

Quotes uncovered while reading Dennis O’Driscoll’s Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry:


“I started a PhD in English at the University of Chicago because I loved poetry – which I now realize is like saying I studied vivisection because I loved dogs.”

— Michael Donaghy

“We are all interested in our own poems, just as we are interested in the smell of our own armpits, because they are uniquely redolent of ourselves. We are not, for converse reasons, much interested, as a rule, in the slapdash maunderings of other people.”

— editorial in The Spectator

“My self-esteem is so low that getting the Pulitzer Prize just made me break even.”

— Franz Wright

“There’s nothing like a punch in the mouth to remind you that that poem about your next-door neighbor was not as clever as you thought.”

— Simon Armitage

*******

"There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls."

— George Carlin

"Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music."

— George Carlin

Warning:
Objects in the mirror of your perception appear larger than they are in real life.

- me (from The Book of Warnings)

"I think that all poetry is essentially optimistic, in that to write a poem is a "creative" act, therefore life affirming. A poem – a good poem – takes some of the chaos of life and orders it, contains it for a moment.

"The poem strikes a note or a chord – when it works – with which the reader vibrates sympathetically. It is a positive force.

"To write a poem requires a great deal of optimism: to believe that you have something to say and that someone, somewhere, wants to hear what you have to say, and to believe that somehow that will make some kind of unspecified difference."

– Louis Jenkins

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bLessed Unrest

Agnes de Mille, in her Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham, precedes a great Martha Graham quotation this way:

"The greatest thing she ever said to me was in 1943 after the opening of Oklahoma!, when I suddenly had unexpected, flamboyant success for a work I thought was only fairly good, after years of neglect for work I thought was fine. I was bewildered and worried that my entire scale of values was untrustworthy. I talked to Martha. I remember the conversation well. It was in a Schrafft's restaurant, over a soda. I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be. Martha said to me, very quietly...

"'There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.

'And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it.

'It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

'You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ...

'No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.' "



Also in that book is this:
"It was [American theater/scenic designer Robert Edmond] Jones who used to say to his classes, 'Some of you are doomed to be artists.' Martha picked up this phrase and used it many times thereafter. She also borrowed from him the phrase 'doom-eager,' which he had borrowed from Ibsen."

rAnts &

(Some jingles from a few years back)

Alas, Babylon

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.”
— “The Rubaiyat” Omar Khayyam, 12th century (trans. Edward Fitzgerald, 1859)

I
They are bombing
the poetry out of Iraq.
Who can write poems
when each one dead
is a dead poem?
Who can write
when even
the moving finger
stops, when
the wall has been bombed,
the handwriting lost?
Each one dead in Iraq
is a poem not written.
Iraq is filling with
dead poems.

They are bombing
the poetry out of Iraq.

In retaliation, the poetry of America
gives up its ghost,
ranting. A cold
moon over Babylon:
the poetry of America
drops its pants
on history.

II
Starting his Third-World
War, the president sends
his warheads –
Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice –
our appointed
war heads.

New Babylon
buries the old
for oil: blood
of Eden. Lost
where we found it,
exiled, buried
Eden. Living
off the bones
of our ancestors,
milking the black
blood of Eden
in our not-so-
original sin.

Drinking the blood of
Eden, drunk now
on the blood of war –
cut-rate Humvees
for the grunts, tricked-
out Hummers and SUVs
at home – it’s our
hangover. Every
drop counts, the
clock counting down...


["Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones."
— Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 17, 2002]



Preaching to the Choir

It is not by your patriotism that you support
and spread the new imperialism –
global corporate empire-building.
It is not by your Pledge of Allegiance that you keep flags covering truth.
Not your vote or your note to the editor.
No need to buy your vote.
They have bought your life
with your burger and fries,
the SUV and one-car-per-person.
Not by just the sweatshop
cranking out Nikes overseas,
but the imported produce pickers,
house-cleaners, cooks, dishwashers –
those who clean up after us, do
our dirty work –
the nuts and bolts, tape & glue holding
our way of life together.

*****

I'm sometimes asked why my work is so sad... why I'm so sad.

I'm not sad. But I am melancholy... I guess that's the best word for it, if one has to be chosen.

I believe my life is an elegy.

We have such short lives
and even shorter
memories.

So much has happened
and we have forgotten.

Maybe to make ourselves feel better,
we keep the pace of life fast,
faster, hurrying one thought
after another. Training ourselves
to feel it's OK that we forget,
that we lose things,
that so much is lost.

Time is made to be lost.
It's made to make tomorrows,
it's made to retire yesterdays into numbness.

So much history. So many generations. So many ancestors. So many fathers and mothers
and lost children.
We are our own lost children
waiting for parents.

We create societies and that creates power and that allows us the illusion
of independence, self-sufficiency.
Separation.

We're just a collection of things.

So caught up in things
we can't perceive the Whole.
The Whole
is not a thing.
It's not made up of little things
or big things.
It's not a collection of things.
The Whole is nothing like
a thing.

The Whole
requires a new way of thinking, relating,
communicating. Perhaps even
not thinking.
Our imagination might be a better
way of knowing
but as David Hume said,
how can you imagine a gold mountain?
You imagine gold,
you imagine a mountain,
but it's hard to really picture
a gold mountain.
We can only imagine things
we've known before.

We use words... those
things that were designed
to describe things, to explain
things. But the Whole
isn't described, isn't explained...
it's sensed, felt. Understood.
Or not.

We're missing the Whole.
We're seeking the Whole.

we aRtists

"We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell."
— Pablo Picasso




"You study, you learn, but you guard the original naiveté. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love within the lover."
— Henri Matisse



"There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls."
— George Carlin



"Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music."
— George Carlin


"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."
– Marcus Tullius Cicero, statesman, orator and writer (106-43 BCE)

niGht walks

The walk was something magical, with glimpsed visions as from an old-fashioned magic lantern show ... In the park, some young men and women who evidently work for the Chargers were practicing their cheer routines, using only the light from streetlamps - lifting each other up on their shoulders, flipping and twisting high and then leaping across the ground to great shouts of encouragement from each other. Just like coyotes playing ... On the second floor of the nearby Buddhist temple a monk at an open window, apparently sitting before his writing desk in the dimly lamplit room, and I heard what at first seemed the sound of monks chanting, too, so I crossed the street to hear better — the monk was actually singing along to Willie Nelson's singing "Always on My Mind" ... Then farther on a serenade of crickets suddenly chorused up from the canyon as I crossed it on the huge steel suspension bridge that arched high above it, swaying & creaking a bit in the darkness (so dark, one might have been crossing the void of sky itself), listening to crickets chanting their own sutras, I'm sure. Cricket sutras ... And, always as one walks, noticing the moving interplay of shadows and porchlight or streetlight on the textured walls and walkways — lengthening and diminishing, a tide of light ebbing and flowing — the sharpened geometries of plants at night, mysteries changing as one passes ... The key to retaining mystery is to keep moving.

****

The crows are crazy tonight. Having a wild sunset party. Must be the weather changing again. Easily 50 or 60 of them, arriving from the west in groups of about 20, cawing and swooping & diving in the air like leaves like tornadoes of their own devices. Torn-apart pieces of reality, shredded. Settling to roost in the tops of trees — ensconced in the darkest tall pines or exposed on the scraggly highest limbs of the eucalyptus — then raucously bursting up up & away, fountains of crows, playing exactly like the coyotes one used to love to spy on years ago ... Teasing each other, racing around in circles, settling down only to burst up again in a raggedy, rollicking uproar of their voices. Like nobody ever had more fun than them, and they knew it. Wild.

Wild. You could tell there was a real *wildness* to all this. No wonder both crows and coyotes were seen by the old ones as trickster gods, playful to the extreme, to whatever cost.

Tonight there were lots of people jogging by underneath them or walking their canine friends, busy "doing their thing," but not a single one looked up to see (let alone admire) what the ruckus in the air was all about. Did they even hear them? And here it is, 40 years after Hitchcock's The Birds ...

Me being the observer, standing off from both groups ... One wonders which group to belong to more. I could easily resonate with the crows, but could not for the life left in me identify let alone imagine what it would be like to be so self absorbed as to not notice — let alone gawk, jaw-struck — at those lovely birds cavorting around in the sunset air, making such a noise as to drown out the traffic and every other thought in one's head.

****





"Airplanes are now built to carry a pilot and a dog in the cockpit," says Arlen Rens, a Lockheed Martin test pilot. "The pilot's job is to feed the dog, and the dog's job is to bite the pilot if he touches anything."