Tom Waits and Two James Wright Poems

I was reminded of this Tom Waits song from a recent Facebook posting and it immediately put me in mind of two James Wright poems, one for obvious reasons, the other maybe not so obvious.  In any case, I'm thinking out loud here: Merry Christmas, good holidays, and Happy New Year, folks.  









Two poems by James Wright

Hook
   I was only a young man
  In those days. On that evening
  The cold was so God damned
  Bitter there was nothing.
  Nothing. I was in trouble
  With a woman, and there was nothing
  There but me and dead snow.

  I stood on the street corner
  In Minneapolis, lashed
  This way and that.
  Wind rose from some pit,
  Hunting me.
  Another bus to Saint Paul
  Would arrive in three hours,
  If I was lucky.

  Then the young Sioux
  Loomed beside me, his scars
  Were just my age.

  Ain't got no bus here
  A long time, he said.
  You got enough money
  To get home on?

  What did they do
  To your hand? I answered.
  He raised up his hook into the terrible starlight
  And slashed the wind.

  Oh, that? he said.
  I had a bad time with a woman. Here,
  You take this.

  Did you ever feel a man hold
  Sixty-five cents
  In a hook,
  And place it
  Gently
  In your freezing hand?

  I took it.
  It wasn't the money I needed.
  But I took it. 

   In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse 
   in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned

I will grieve alone,
As I strolled alone, years ago, down along
The Ohio shore.
I hid in the hobo jungle weeds
Upstream from the sewer main,
Pondering, gazing.

I saw, down river,
At Twenty-third and Water Streets
By the vinegar works,
The doors open in early evening.
Swinging their purses, the women
Poured down the long street to the river
And into the river
I do not know how it was
They could drown every evening.
What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore,
Drying their wings?

For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has only two shores:
The one in hell, the other
In Bridgeport, Ohio.

And nobody would commit suicide, only
To find beyond death
Bridgeport, Ohio.

--------------------

Finally, a poem from issue #51, back in 1993, by the fine poet, Christien Gholson, to commemorate the day today.  It was #18 in the "Brobdingnag Feature Poem" series, in which the editor slips in a little something beyond the normal ten-line constraint.  Enjoy.

Sudden Compassion in the Alley Behind

      The Apartment, Christmas Day

  The Lords of Trash

   ride the beerbox skidding across black ice.

  Their laughter calls down the dead

  who will not accept their death,

  waiting behind black windows made of sudden crow wings.

  They tumble into the world

  and enter the bodies of flying ragleaves,

  freed from the ice, tossed blind

  back up through the black crow windows

  without a sound.

  Everything is alive like a merciful warning.

  Alive!

  Even those souls gnashing each other

  behind sudden dark windows, desperate

  to finish something that's already finished.

  The tossed leaves shimmer over starlings

  praising the chimney smoke that warms them

  and the leftover smoke opens its mouth,

  drinking down the seed husk coins

  the sparrow let fly onto the wind.

New Year's day -

everything is in blossom!

I feel about average.

Issa

translated by Robert Hass

By way of explanation, under the classical calendar in Japan, New Years is later in the year, about the 2nd or 3rd week in February, around the coming of spring.    Also, it is tradition that everyone celebrated their birthday on New Years.  Issa's undercutting of tradition here is really his poetic signature.

And quite funny.

Happy Christmas all, and, for the coming New Year, may you feel about average.


best,
Don

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Ramble On: Issa's Sunday Service, #28

This week's LitRock entry on Issa's Sunday Service puts some of the rock back in the lit. Led Zeppelin offered many a gift to the first wave of serious Lord of the Rings maniacs stateside and none is arguably better than "Ramble On." Lyrics and music blend nicely into an infectious little number that bears up under repeated playings.

Here's a bonus video of Plant and Page performing a tasty version from 1995.






This week's Lilliput poem comes from issue #49, which was featured in a post previously this year. #42 was a homage issue, where poets got to have their say about idols, influences, and various imps of an impressionable nature. What follows is a real treat, Lilliput-wise: one of the many "Brobdingnag Feature Poems" that have appeared in the mag over the years. What is a Brobdingnag Feature Poem? Well simply put, it is a poem that goes beyond the normal 10 line limit for Lillie. One of the two forthcoming issues, which should see the light of day in December, will showcase #57 in the Brobdingnag series. So it is rather obvious that, though the mag is all about the size-challenged, sometimes my lack of math skills is readily apparent. This poem by Carl Mayfield is an outstanding little number; though it helps to know the work of Philip Larkin, it isn't totally necessary to appreciate how finely articulated and philosophically grounded my long-time correspondent Carl is.



To Philip Larkin

You spoke across the Atlantic
of high windows, of undiminished
youth living elsewhere--
lines of darkness too true
to be upstaged by any poet--
you, me, the saxophone player.
You were the genius
of what didn't happen,
conversant with the impulse
to notice the color of the sun
but fail to see the radiance.
You avoided being duped
by flesh and blood,
watched the light come up
wherever you were,
and the life go down
in your willingness to breathe.
You said you didn't know more
as you grew older, but who does?
Death takes the lot of us
and lets the wind decide who was tallest.
You exchanged your life
for the truth, only to discover
there is more truth
than there is life.
Ah Philip, so many years
of honesty, so many words
writ on water--is your soul
any lighter because you did it so well?

Carl Mayfield

And one from the master, a tad more succinct:





entrusting the thicket
to the field crow...
the lark sings

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Paperback Writer: Issa's Sunday Service, #23

This week folks everywhere will remember John Lennon on his birthday, October 9th. For this edition of Issa's Sunday Service, The Beatles' song "Paperback Writer" is featured.

Why "Paperback Writer" you might ask? Isn't that a Macca tune? Indeed, it is. However, as the story goes, John helped him finish it up and there are a couple of touches, which seem at once distinctly John and definitely litrock material. Here is, for the time, the brilliant first verse:

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?
It's based on a novel by a man named Lear
And I need a job, so I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.

If Lennon only contributed one word to the song, chances are that word was "Lear," after one of his famed influences in all-things verse, Edward Lear. John's propensity for punning and word play, which we already saw in a previous ISS selection, find a direct antecedent in Lear and making him the author of "a dirty story by a dirty man" was certainly right up John's street. In addition the background vocal by John and George singing the children's tune "Frere Jacques" is more than likely a John touch and perhaps one of the most brilliant throwaway bits ever. I probably heard this song 100's of times before I realized what was going on about 20 years ago and now I can barely hear anything else when I listen to it.

John, of course, was the literary one, the Beatle who published a book under his own name, In His Own Write, which was heavily influenced by Lear, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, and Bob Dylan. I always thought the song was, on some level, a little tweak of John by Paul, but the written record says otherwise, so I'll stand down on that one. In any case, the irony swings both ways, so to speak.


**********************************

This week's poem is aptly titled "Sermon" from Lilliput Review #34, June 1992, and is followed by a poem of Master Issa, from a few years before that. The Lillie poem is a "Brobdingnag Feature Poem" (an occasional poem over 10 lines that finds its way into the mag) by another master, Albert Huffstickler. Enjoy.

Sermon

All the old, grizzled men
sleeping it off in alleys.
Cold. Cold.
There should be a way
for ancient wine-soaked joints
not to be cold.
There should be a warm room
where they can sit together
immersed in their communal stink.
nodding away the hours

This is our disgrace
(and I don't ever forget it):
that there is no room
in the richest nation in history
for our fractured ancients to sit
nodding away the hours
warming their wine-soaked joints
immersed in their communal stink.

Albert Huffstickler

traveling geese--
the human heart, too
soars

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don