A Ferlinghetti of the Mind, Mr. Brautigan's Salmon Sonnet Extravaganza and Huff & Issa: The Road Movie

Cover by Wayne Hogan

This is the 50th anniversary of the publication of one of the books on the Near Perfect Books of Poetry list: A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This is one of the very first books of poetry I remember just pulling me in and, somehow, I just knew this was for me. Here, in celebration of the man and his body of work, both as poet and publisher, is a reading in the "Lunch Poems" series at the Morrison Library of the University of California, Berkeley, from 2005:





If you can hang in until the end, there is a very powerful anti-war poem, "The History of the Airplane." At 85, he hasn't lost a step.

Least we forget, there is always the City Lights Bookstore, the premiere independent bookshop in the US. Since lots of folks are beginning to realize the repercussions of the amazon.com phenomenon and the fall out from some of its recent strong arm tactics with publishers and merchants, both here and abroad, it might be a fine thing if we all make a special effort to continue to support our local independents and national treasures like City Lights. Yeah, you lose the deep discount, but that's all you lose.

That's all you lose.

Here's a poem with Ferlinghetti's signature gentle, insightful touch:

Allen Ginsberg Dying

Allen Ginsburg is dying
It's all in the papers
It's on the evening news
A great poet is dying
But his voice
    won't die
His voice is on the land
In Lower Manhattan
in his own bed
he is dying
There is nothing 
to do about it
He is dying the death that everyone dies
He is dying the death of a poet
He has a telephone in his hand
and he calls everyone
from his bed in Lower Manhattan
All around the world
late at night
the telephone is ringing
"This is Allen"
     The voice says
"Allen Ginsburg calling"
How many times have they heard it
over the long great years
He doesn't have to say Ginsburg
All around the world
in the world of poets
There is only one Allen
"I wanted to tell you" he says
He tells them what's happening
what's coming down
on him
Death the dark lover
going down on him
His voice goes by satellite
over the land
over the Sea of Japan
where he once stood naked
trident in hand
like a young Neptune
a young man  with black beard
standing on a stone beach
It is high tide and the seabirds cry
The waves break over him now
and the seabirds cry
on the San Francisco waterfront
There is a high wind
There are great white caps
lashing the Embarcadero
Allen is on the telephone
His voice is on the waves
I am reading Greek poetry
The sea is in it
Horses weep in it
The horses of Achilles
weep in it
here by the sea
in San Francisco
where the waves weep
they make a sibilant sound
a sibylline sound
Allen
      they whisper
     Allen
 
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, April 4, 1997

If you have a chance, check out Anne Stevenson's poem, "Living in America," which was featured this week on The Writer's Almanac. There also is a great little article on departing poet laureate, Charles Simic, one of my favorite contemporary poets.

If you can't make it up to Alaska this weekend, here's a little notice of something of interest that we might think about in passing during the day Sunday:

SUNDAY, AUGUST 3RD

1pm: 18TH ANNUAL RICHARD BRAUTIGAN & DICK WHITAKER MEMORIAL TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA POETRY SLAM & "SALMON SONNET" CONTEST at The New York Cafe, 207 Stedman St. Sponsored by Soho Coho Gallery, Parnassus Books, and The New York Cafe.

But why just think, let's feel too:

The Sidney Greenstreet Blues

I think something beautiful
and amusing is gained
by remembering Sydney Greentstreet,
but it is a fragile thing.

The hand picks up a glass.
The eye looks at the glass
and then hand, glass and eye
---fall away.

Richard Brautigan

Sometimes, the idea of the Net really pulls things together, other times it just seems like the big mystery that life is. For instance, what's up with blog alerts pinging items posted years ago? I certainly don't know but one thing I can say is that the random chaos of life, and so too the net, is sometimes very lyrical, indeed. I got beeped with this this past week and thought, ah, Huff's last poem. The tone, the feel, is of the old zen masters, composing their deathbed poems. Huff's manages summarizing the main concern of all his work: home, or the lack thereof:

Tired of being loved,
Tired of being left alone.
Tired of being loved,
Tired of being left alone.
Gonna find myself a place
Where all I feel is at home.

Albert Huffstickler

Issa's death poem, too, sums up his own personalized approach, full of humor and sadness

A bath when you're born,
A bath when you die,
how stupid.

Issa translated by Robert Hass

Continuing the project of providing sample poems from back issues and filling in the Back Issue Archive over at the Lilliput homepage, here's some work from issue #101, originally published back in January, 1999:

the circle so large
the curve imperceptible
we think we're moving
straight ahead

Julius Karl Schauer

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

knowledge
will protect us
from the darkness
but what will shield
us from the light?

Karl Koweski

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

The Letter M
The letter M
in green spray paint
on the gnarled bark
of a tall pine tree
its stately boughs
whispering quietly
in the afternoon breeze
is way too long for
a haiku but still
pretty fucking succinct.

Mark Terrill

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

another midnight
bare bulb illuminating
the back door of a slaughterhouse

M. Kettner

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

Later this week, I may have news about a contemporary poetry book I actually enjoyed.


Till next time,
Don

Note: If you would like to receive the two current issues of Lilliput 
Review free (or have your current subscription extended two issues),
just make a suggestion of a title or titles for the Near Perfect Books 
of Poetry page, either in a comment to this post, in email to lilliput
review at gmail dot com, or in snail mail to the address on the
homepage.

Robert Hass Reads Issa, Thoreau Grinds Away & Damned Baseball Haiku

Cover by John Bennett

Ran across a number of interesting pieces this week, including a video of Robert Hass reading Issa haiku at the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival. This short reading (less than 2 minutes) of 9 poems perfectly captures the playfulness and humor that endears Issa to so many. In addition, it a a model of how to perform haiku, no easy task. It misses the immense sadness of Issa, the other dimension that contributes to his immortality, but that was not the point of this reading as may be readily seen. This reading is part of a larger series entitled Poetry Everywhere, which includes such poets as Charles Simic, Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, and Robert Frost.

Fine, fine stuff. I've made it a permanent link in the Issa section of the sidebar.

In Monday's post, I mentioned The Blog of Henry David Thoreau; here is another gem from that journal, entitled Grinding Away.

Mary Karr has recently taken over the Poet's Choice column in the Washington Post and it has taken me a little time to warm up to her style and tastes. A recent post in which she began by admitting she never liked Emily Dickinson did the trick; she mentioned the anecdote that has long been making the rounds that you can sing almost any Dickinson poem to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas." Try it with Because I could not stop for Death.

Hmn.

Her latest column takes on something I just can 't abide: baseball haiku. It's not the fault of the haiku; I can't stand baseball fiction, baseball short stories etc. (n.b.: I am a big baseball fan). However, in her column covering the recent publication of Baseball Haiku: American and Japanese Haiku and Senryu on Baseball, she quotes the work of George Swede, among others. Congratulations to George, one of our finest purveyors of the haiku form. He ably proves why in the two poems quoted in the article:


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

empty baseball field
a dandelion seed floats through
the strike zone

video ball game
through knotholes in the old fence
evening sunbeams

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


Now, there are a couple of baseball haiku that even I like. The first is simply perfect and the use of the single word "evening" in the second has me on my back waiting for my tummy to be scratched (and you thought you could never really please an editor).

This week's selection of poems from a past issue of Lilliput Review takes us back to #89, July 1997. As the summer season begins, here are a couple of seasonal works from back then:


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

Tentative Summation

A poem is ocean -
without shore.

Tim Scannell

in my hand--
the rock smoothed
by part of the Pacific Ocean

Gary Hotham

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


And two by the late Joseph Semenovich:


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

narcissi

i present
whoever i am
both subject and object

and just like narcissus
how unlucky can you get
the pond became

the verb
he drowned
himself in

my step-father's paintings

the black rocks
the green frothy water breaking over them
the sky pulled apart like the innards of a pillow
one screaming gull

outside
the heavy trucks/the grinding
gears/the chug-a-lug
the way the world

is

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

best,
Don


Note: If you would like to receive the two current issues of Lilliput Review free (or have your current subscription extended two issues), just make a suggestion of a title or titles for the Near Perfect Books page.

Kooser's Valentines, Franz Wright, and Charles Simic

Had email from a local friend recommending some recent work by some of my current favorite poets. There is a new poem in the current New Yorker by the always interesting, deeply resonant Franz Wright, entitled The World of the Senses. The current Virginia Quarterly Review has 4 poems by Charles Simic featured, as well as an archive of things they have published by him, 3 of which grabbed me: An Address With Exclamation Points, Meditation in the Gutter, and House of Cards. All of them are well worth a look.

Someone I haven't connected with yet, until this month, is Ted Kooser. I'm not sure why; perhaps I had typecast him as a typical Midwestern poet, someone whose subjects and sensibilities are not things that often show up on my radar. In some recent reviews, I read about his latest collection, Valentines, and was intrigued. So when a copy came in for our "International Poetry Collection" at the library, I grabbed it. As he explains in his author's note, Kooser tells how he began sending out annual Valentine poems in 1986 to at first a select group of 50 women, the poems being printed on standard postcards. 21 years later, his list had burgeoned to 2600 and, he implies, all the printing and postage was getting to be a bit much. So the last card went out in 2007 and this book collects all the poems together, with one last one written especially for his wife.

The work in Valentines at once celebrates and transcends the genre of occasional verse. The poems are, of course, all relatively short since they were originally published on postcards and I have the feeling that different poems here will appeal to different people. I thought these two were quite good:



For You, Friend

this Valentine's Day, I intend to stand
for as long as I can on a kitchen stool
and hold back the hands of the clock,
so that wherever you are, you may walk
even more lightly in your loveliness;
so that the weak, mid-February sun
(whose chill I will feel from the face
of the clock) cannot in any way
lessen the lights in your hair, and the wind
(whose subtle insistence I will feel
in the minute hand) cannot tighten
the corners of your smiles. People
drearily walking the winter streets
will long remember this day:
how they glanced up to see you
there in a storefront window, glorious,
strolling along on the outside of time.




A Map Of The World

One of the ancient maps of the world
is heart-shaped, carefully drawn
and once washed with bright colors,
though the colors have faded
as you might expect feelings to fade
from a fragile old heart, the brown map
of a life. But feeling is indelible,
and longing infinite, a starburst compass
pointing in all the directions
two lovers might go, a fresh breeze
swelling their sails, the future uncharted,
still far from the edge
where the sea pours into the stars.



Needless to say, my sensibilities have been duly corrected and expanded. This delightful volume from the University of Nebraska Press is marvelously illustrated by Robert Hanna. If you are a Kooser fan, it is a must. If not, check it out and you might soon be.

Once again congratulations, go out to Jay Leeming; this morning The Writer's Almanac featured a wonderful reading of one of Jay's poems, Man Writes Poem. As noted previously, Jay has had 3 poems published in past issues of Lilliput Review.

Seems there is lot of poetry info this week, so here's one last note. Well worth reading is Robert Pinsky's column in Slate entitled Why Don't Modern Poems Rhyme Etc., in which he tersely answers typical questions about poetry with poems by William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Edgar Guest, Allen Ginsberg and more: no clunky exegesis for Robert! This will definitely strike a chord with (and perhaps provide a few ideas for) anyone who has taught a poetry appreciation class.

On to our tour of back issues of Lilliput. I've been struggling all morning with Blogger to get this post done and, at the moment, I can't seem to upload images so I'll eschew posting the cover right now (ah, finally got it: covers may be seen below) and go right to the featured issue, #95. #96 is a broadside by Albert Huffstickler entitled Pre-Dawn Cycle and, as such, not excerpt-able, hence the need to skip back to #95. This issue was originally published in April 1998, ten years ago this month. Here's a little taste of what was happening then:

from Poems to Eat and Say (from Octavio Paz)

Glowing butterflies:
one dreaming, one awake; all
of us tossed by wind.

Leonard Cirino

when the treetop sways
a thousand butterflies
stampede in me

William Hart

Quatrain

This moth fluttering against
the window screen. I could go on
killing 'til the end of time
and never be satisfied.

Greg Watson

And this final note from the incomparable Albert Huffstickler:

from Interim Notes

Those beautiful moments
I've sculpted from the past,
chiseling away the rubble
of conflict and sorrow.




best till next Thursday,
Don