A Pair of Nines (Plus): Richard Brautigan, Galway Kinnell, and the Lilliput Archive

Cover by Bobo

Tuesday just seems to swing around before you know it, so it's time to dip into the Lilliput Back Issue Archive. Before hitting that, let's thread some loose ends into a post-modern early Valentine and, oh, yeah, supply an update on all things (Lilliput) print and publishable.

I've begun printing up the new issues and stuffing contributor envelopes, a process that usually takes about two weeks. Following that, regular subscription copies of issues #'s 167 and 168 will begin shipping, that's about 3 weeks out. That process takes about 4 to 6 weeks on its own.

Simultaneously, I've received the Basho Haiku Challenge chapbook proof back from the proofer. The usual bonehead typos and logistic hiccups will be corrected and copies will begin to print up and probably ship sometime around March 1st (yeah, that's simultaneous with the above - don't ask). Stay tuned for further updates.

Meanwhile, back on the blog front, while checking out the work of Langston Hughes, Galway Kinnell and, Richard Brautigan, all who had birthdays over the past 5 days, I ran across a pair of nines I thought I'd share:

Nine Things

It's night
and a numbered beauty
lapses at the wind,
chortles with the
branches of a tree

-giggles

plays shadow dance
with a dead kite,
cajoles affection
from falling leaves,
and knows four
other things.
One is the color
of your hair.

Richard Brautigan

9

When one has lived a long time alone,
and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,
and the bullfrog head half out of water utters
the cantilliations he sang in his first spring,
and the snake lowers himself over the threshold
and creeps away over the stones, one sees
they all live to mate with their kind, and one knows,
after a long time of solitude, after the many steps
taken
away from one's kind, toward these other kingdoms,
the hard prayer inside one's own singing
is to come back, if one can, to one's own,
a world almost lost, in an exile that deepens,
when one has lived a long time alone.

Galway Kinnell

Because the Tuesday post usually has a few general lyrical news items, here's one to turn Valentine's day, um, inside out:






Two accounts relating the above "phenomenon" may be found here and here. Though the NYT's use of the above cover is salacious (spell check read this as "delicious"), Guardian UK nearly trumped it with a nice panel from the original "Night of the Living Dead." Truly, after Zombie Haiku Miss Jane could not be far behind.

Any day now, someone is going to officially declare the zombie revival (un)dead. My apologies; things have been a bit jumbled around here the last few weeks, so it seems perhaps I best leave my mixed up holidays right here. But a little humor goes a long way when untangling thread.

This week's back issue is Lilliput Review #53, from February 1994. This issue had an extra 8 pages, for a truly brobdingnagian total of 24. I believe I've mentioned before that the further back in time I go, the more removed I feel from the type of work I look for now. The magazine has been something of a life journey, a lyrical journal composed with the words of others. Who I was 15 years ago is at once distinctly different and fundamentally the same as who I am today. Perhaps even the selections I make from the work back then are tinted by the way I see things now. It's been a long strange, trip, as the poet Robert Hunter said. Next month will be the 20th anniversary of the publication of the 1st issue of Lillie and I guess that has me looking back, as well as forward. For now, let's dip in and see what was happening 15 years ago this month, on the short poem front, through the lens of a particular small press editor.




Doubt Robbing Perfect Faith

in the woods

a caterpillar covering itself
with the scales of a lizard.

Vogn

-----/ self serving /
like a simile

Tolek

zapruder moment

---------------the
---------------heart
rears back,
---------------spraying
---------------pink
---------------sawdust.

-----------Joy Sawyer

Gum

everywhere in
the pink dress,
her body snaps

Chad Buser

Pissing and trembling -
laugh at me crickets

Issa

Separation(s)
---with apologies to Issa

After dinner,
empty wine bottles stand in judgment.
I relieve myself from your porch
and fall ass-backwards
over the moon.

Richard D. Houff

the water so smooth the moon touched it
like a face
touches a mirror

Thomas Wiloch

1565.

shaved the poet
in half-moon
with words of broken ice.

Guy R. Beining

Since this was such a large issue and the selection above comes from only the first half, I'll revisit #55 next week for the second half.

One final side note of interest: this was Issa's first appearance in a Lilliput publication.


best,
Don

Langston Hughes and Galway Kinnell

Yesterday was the birthdays of two formidable poets of the 20th century: Langston Hughes and Galway Kinnell. In honor of their work, here are a couple of poems.

Passing Love

Because you are to me a song
I must not sing you over-long.

Because you are to me a prayer
I cannot say you everywhere.

Because you are to me a rose-
You will not stay when summer goes.

Langston Hughes

Cemetery Angels

On these cold days,
they stand over
our dead, who will
erupt into flower as soon
as memory and human shape
rot out of them, each bent
forward and with wings
partly opened as though
warming itself at a fire.

Galway Kinnell

Here's a beautiful impressionistic rendering of Langston Hughes's seminal poem, "Weary Blues."





Galway Kinnell follows, reading his poem "Rapture" from Imperfect Thirst:






best,
Don

From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright

A new book for the Near Perfect Books of Poetry list is From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright from Lost Hills Books of Duluth, Minnesota. I've been discussing two Wright books quite a bit lately: The Branch Will Not Break and Selected Poems and this book came as both a surprise and a revelation when I received it to review for The Small Press Review.

Frankly, I didn't have much hope. Books of homage are rarely up to the original and, so, what's the point, really? A writer such as James Wright might best be honored with a lyric rather than an elegy. As I say in my review "if there must be homage, let there be mystery, let there be revelation." And so there is, and then some.

Right out of the box, the first poem, by W. S. Merwin, nails it:

James

News comes that a friend far away
is dying now.

I look up and see small flowers appearing
in spring grass outside the window
and can't remember their name.

W. S. Merwin

I read that and thought, "time to close the book, it can't get better than that." In fact, there couldn't have been a truer assessment; yet, there were many poems that are up to Merwin's high standard set here. Galway Kinnell and C. K. Williams both have outstanding work here. Stanley Plumly has two excellent pieces. In an endnote, Robert Bly observes that the essence of Wright was his ability to transform a moment, to illuminate that transcendence, and the best work in this collection emulates Wright's strength without being derivative. Perhaps it is the highest honor of all to take the approach of another and to make of it something new. It is not a matter of style or allusion or voice; it is a matter of epiphanic moment. It is revelation.

In this collection, the occasional flat piece is the exception not the rule; the most critical I can be is to say perhaps the proliferation of horses throughout is unfortunate, but that is hardly fair since, in one particular sense, it is not so much what you say as how you say it. In "Two," Christina Lovin perfectly captures that moment, a la "The Blessing," when man meets nature and suddenly blends, realizing her/his place "in the family of things" as Mary Oliver so succinctly puts it. Instead of two horses, there are two deer, culled from seven by a cougar:




from Two

----------------There are two: just enough to take care
of the business of grooming. They stand neck-to-neck,
each licking, nuzzling, teasing the ticks and lice from the other's
coarse fur, enjoying the comfort, the contact, as horses do.
As humans do. As do you; as do I. Touch me here, then,
softly as deer's breath. I will touch you there, where
your mother held you in her arms, your neck against her shoulder.
Not where the raging fire begins, where undergrowth sparks
and catches and we are lost in its blaze. No, here,
where the hushed forest opens and the two quiet bodies
have disappeared into the green darkness within.

Christina Lovin

Ellen Seusy, too, finds an analogous moment in the seemingly pedestrian act of walking scraps out to the compost heap in the back yard:




from The Compost Bin

At the edge of the light, I look down,
then step into Ohio's dark night,
into what used to be forest.

The yard is quiet. This cold walk through the dark
takes me far. Who knows what will bloom
from what I bring. At the wooden bin

I tip the bowls onto the snow-covered compost.
Chemistry is going on in there
that I don't understand; pink peonies

could come from this decay. Sometimes
I wish not to go back, but to stay out
by the soft-armed hemlocks

out here by the compost bin,
this hearth way in the back of the yard,
and deep inside, the fire that no one's lit.

Ellen Seusy

Helen Ruggieri's poem is pure revelation, "The Kind of Poetry I Want," taken from a line by Wright in a direction he probably wouldn't have imagined and which he would have highly approved:




from The Kind of Poetry I Want

I want poetry from a woman who smiles with her teeth
you know her - she thinks like a man

I want poetry damp and shady:
trillium, bracken and fern

The kind of poetry I want takes my shape
not even knowing my name ...

Helen Ruggieri

This is just a dip into a fine collection of work that resonates just as Wright's best work does. Though it a quote from Wright himself, I'm not sure the title exactly captures the feel - perhaps "To the Other World" might have worked better, or even "Between Worlds" - but, in any case, this is a fine bit of business. As I said in closing my SPR review, "Since all these poets stand in unison, let one of their own stand for all. Listen to the close of "The Voices" by Michael Dennis Browne:"

from The Voices

From where I stand now,
I cannot see any singer,
but looking across the years,
listening in ways learned
only from them,
I can hear all the song.

Michael Dennis Browne

I can't think of a better analogy for poetry itself, its history, its tradition, what it is, and what it may be.

Revelation, indeed.




best,
Don