This week's programming is courtesy of the shuffle mode on my mp3 player. "Waiting for the Sun", by the Doors, this week's Sunday selection (note the reference to Eden in the first line) is exactly what we all seem to be doing in February in the Western Hemisphere, particularly those of us who live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So, this song brought a smile to my face as I negotiated the grey enshrouded back alleys of Bloomfield, Pittsburgh's Little Italy, alleys in which some formidable vegetables will be making themselves known a few mere months from now. Oddly enough, the song segued into a reading of a poem by Gerald Stern, his "(I Would Call It) Derangement." The promise of the sun seems to have come to fruition in this, another lovely poem by one of America's loveliest poets.
Back in the early 70s, the Byrds had one helluva a touring band - I know, I had the honor to see the Clarence White (in full leg cast) version of the Byrds. This popped up right after Mr. Stern and, somehow, it just seemed so right. I remember the Byrds closing their set with this song, captured well in this version recorded in Royal Albert Hall in 1971. An beautiful rendition, especially by a 'rock' band.
So, hopefully, there are a couple of hints of spring, along with the couple of bits of crocus heads that I've seen popping up here and there during my perambulations.
If you're a fan and you have ten minutes, check out the interview with legendary small press poet T. Kilgore Splake at Michigan Public Radio station WMUK. He touches all the Splake bases ...
Leaves
He was cleaning leaves for one at a time
was what he needed and a minute before the two
brown poodles walked by he looked at the stripped-down trees
from one more point of view and thought they were
part of a system in which the dappled was foreign
for he had arrived at his own conclusion and that was
for him a relief even if he was separated,
even if his hands were frozen,
even if the wind knocked him down,
even if his cat went into her helpless mode
inside the green and sheltering Japanese yew tree.
Gerald Stern
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Finally, very sad news - Bert Jansch, one of the most important figures in British and world folk music has died. I was privileged to see him when he came to Pittsburgh in an intimate setting at a local Unitarian Church. What a show. He will be missed.
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plum blossom scent--
a hazy memory
of my nanny's house
For this Friday, here is a full-length reading by Gerald Stern at Fishouse. It takes a bit to get started with a long intro and Stern taking some time to get to the mike (with many a nearly off-mike comment on the way), but it's worth the wait.
I also found part 1 of the Drexel Interview with Stern (which has been viewed by 3 people and I think I was 2 of them), with part 2 seemingly lost in the ether or just never posted, either at YouTube or on the Drexel page. Though it is only the first half, it is a solid, satisfying first half (about 15 minutes), which I highly recommend.
I've just begun reading the new Kabir translations by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Here is one of the poems from that collection which originally appeared in the New York Review of Books, who is also the publisher. I hope to report back on this collection sometime soon.
Except That It Robs You of Who You Are
Except that it robs you of who you are,
What can you say about speech?
Inconceivable to live without
And impossible to live with,
Speech diminishes you.
Speak with a wise man, there’ll be
Much to learn; speak with a fool,
All you get is prattle.
Strike a half-empty pot, and it’ll make
A loud sound; strike one that is full,
Says Kabir, and hear the silence.
Kabir, translated from the Hindi
by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
"moon" and "blossoms"
empty babble
of a floating world
Last year, Lee Isaac Chung made a full-length feature film of Gerald Stern's poem Lucky Life. Here is a charming 4-part interview with Chung, which is at once personal and honest and insightful.
Found in a used copy of Carl Jacobi's Revelations in Black
Herein, some misc items, seen around the web and in print, for your perusal while I knuckle under, working on the 4 presentations I have to do in the next 8 or so weeks: they are specifically on haiku, Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers, and, for work, customer service as a vocation or a way.
This first item, found in an old paperback copy of a horror novel I picked up probably 10 years ago, shows a shopper, on a meager (probably early 70's) budget, who has her priorities straight: Books, Drinks, Shop, and Food. We can only hope that the remaining $45 was as wisely allotted.
"Poetry and surety claims aren't as unlikely a combination as they may seem," observed Wallace Stevens.
Ancedote of the Jar
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Here is the short film, in three parts, on the magnificent Gerald Stern, entitled Still Burning. He has a brand new volume, Early Collected Poems, 1965-1992, which contains the books, Rejoicings, Lucky Life, The Red Coal, Paradise Poems, Lovesick, and Bread Without Sugar, his first six. It not only contains some of the best, most accessible, heartrending American poems of the 2nd half of the 20th century, but it is dedicated "To the Sorrowful."
In a very positive review (link is an excerpt) of the debut collection by Evgenia Citkowitz entitled Ether: Seven Stories and a Novella, Joyce Carol Oates pulls a great quote from W. H. Auden:
This [collection] is not elevated tragedy or even the more familiar fissures of domestic drama but the stoic-melancholy vision of W. H. Auden, for whom "the crack in the teacup opens / a lane to the land of the dead."
It is amazing, how a brief quote from a longer work can open up its world, ironically not unlike the little crack in the little teacup ...
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
"Love has no ending.
"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
"I'll love till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
"The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world."
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
"O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
"In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
"In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
Tomorrow or today.
"Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.
"O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.
"The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the teacup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
"Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.
"O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
"O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With all your crooked heart."
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
I like the way my little harp makes trees leap, how putting the metal between my teeth makes half the animals in my backyard quiver, how plucking the sweet tongue make the stars live together in love and ecstasy.
I bend my face and cock my head. My eyes are open wide listening to the sound. My hand goes up and down like a hummingbird. My mouth is opening and closing, I am singing in harmony, I am weeping and wailing.
I added this one personally as I have once again been reading Stern's selected poems entitled This Time in preparation for the "3 Poems By Discussion" next week at the library. While reading the selection there from Paradise Poems, I found myself saying, well, this one's great and this one's great etc. and every one was great, so I wanted to see which ones were not included and bought the original. It soon became apparent that nearly all the poems that weren't included were pretty great, too, hence the addition.
awaiting the stars-- even a turtle cools his behind
Today is the birthday of drummer Topper Headon of the Clash - this occasion of its celebration being something of a miracle and here's why - and, to that end, this week's selection for the Sunday Service is "Ghetto Defendent," from the album Combat Rock. The cut features a vocal reading by the indomitable, immortal AllenGinsberg. And now for something really special:
Mick Jones band, Carbon: Silicon, w/special guest
Since I am immersed in the poet Gerald Stern at the moment (more on this in Friday's post), here is Stern's lovely "Lilacs for Ginsberg." And an audio reading may be found here.
Lilacs for Ginsberg
I was most interested in what they looked like dead
and I could learn to love them so I waited
for three or four days until the brown set in
and there was a certain reverse curl to the leaf by
which in putting my finger on the main artery
beside the throat I knew the blood had passed on
to someplace else and he was talking to two
demons from the afterlife although it was
just like the mountains in New York State since there was
smoke in the sky and they were yelping and he was
speaking in his telltale New Jersey English
and saying the same thing over and over the way he
did when he was onstage and his white shirt was
perfect and the lack of air and the lack of light
aged the lilacs but he was sitting on a lily
in one or two seconds and he forgot about Eighth Street
and fame and cancer and bent down to pick a loose
diamond but more important than that he talked
to the demons in French and sang with his tinny voice
nor did he go on about his yellowing sickness
but counted the clusters and said they were only stars
and there were two universes entwined, the
white and the purple, or they were just crumbs or specks
that he could sprinkle on his pie nor could he
exactly remember his sorrow except when he pressed
the lilacs to his face or when he stooped
to bury himself in the bush, then for a moment
he almost did, for lilacs clear the mind
and all the elaborations were possible in their
dear smell and even his death which was so
good and thoughtful became, for a moment sorrowful.
Such lovely, amazing enjambment! As Gerald mentions in his reading, when we say lilacs, poetry fans think Whitman, so there you are. Lilacs for Lincoln, lilacs for Ginsberg!
And since we're smelling flowers here, of course, it's onto the man himself.
Sunflower Sutra
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and ----sat down under the huge shade of a Southern ----Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the ----box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron ----pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts ----of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, ----surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of ----machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun ----sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that ----stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves ----rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums ----on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray ----shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting ----dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--
--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower, ----memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes ----Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black ----treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the ----poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel ----knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck ----and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the ----past--
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, ----crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog ----and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like ----a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, ----soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays
obliterated on its hairy head like a dried ----wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures ----from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster ----fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O ----my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man's grime but death and human ----locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad ----skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black ----mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance ----of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial-- ----modern--all that civilization spotting your ----crazy golden crown--
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless ----eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the ----home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar ----bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards ----of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely ----tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what ----more could I name, the smoked ashes of some ----cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the ----milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs ----& sphincters of dynamos--all these
entangled in your mummied roots--and you there ----standing before me in the sunset, all your glory ----in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent ----lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye ----to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited ----grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden ----monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your ----grime, while you cursed the heavens of the ----railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a ----flower? when did you look at your skin and ----decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? ----the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and ----shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a ----sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me ----not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck ----it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul ----too, and anyone who'll listen,
--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread ----bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all ----beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed ----by our own seed & golden hairy naked ----accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black ----formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our ----eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive ----riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening ----sitdown vision.
Allen Ginsberg
This week's poem from the Lilliput archive comes from issue #79, June 1996.
driving through Ohio
the sun set
like a gutterball
ten-pen Columbus
refusing to go down
Without Gerald Stern, existence would be impossible. He is the grandmaster poet, you can see the spirit shiver through him as if pear leaves in a stiff, spring breeze. It is simple: there would be no poetry, anywhere, without Gerald Stern. I could read his poems everyday back before the beginning of time and forward decades past my supposed death. He is that one thing that the true master poets are; at once transparent and opaque, it isn't what he says, it's what he sings and dances, weeps over and cuddles, rages against and praises, blesses and curses.
It is life.
To celebrate the fact that a full-length motion picture, LuckyLife, has just been released based on the poem of the same title, here's a little something to be nostalgic for a month and half before it, June 4th, arrives (your timing and mileage may vary, dependent on "geographic" locale).
June Fourth
Today as I ride down Twenty-fifth street I smell honeysuckle rising from Shell and Victor Balata and K-Diner. The goddess of sweet memory is there staggering over fruit and drinking old blossoms. A man in white socks and a blue T-shirt is sitting on the grass outside Bethlehem Steel eating lunch and dreaming. Before he walks back inside he will be changed. He will remember when he stands again under the dirty windows a moment of great misgiving and puzzlement just before sweetness ruined him and thnking tore him apart. He will remember lying on his left elbow studying the sky, and the loss he felt, and the sudden freedom, the mixture of pain and pleasure - terror and hope - what he calls "honeysuckle."
Gerald Stern
plum blossom scent-- a hazy memory of my nanny's house
A report on the Jack Gilbert Tribute reading May 12th in NYC has just been posted at the Gilbert site on Facebook, courtesy of Jason Mashak and written by Boni Joi. For those of you as taken with Jack as I am, here it is:
The reading was great! Each reader was full of energy and anecdotes about knowing or being influenced by Jack's work. Jack sat right in the front row. The readers were introduced by Alice Quinn and they were supposed to go in alphabetical order but Alice introduced Linda Gregg first, which was a nice mistake. Each poet read their favorite poems and one or two from the new book "The Dance Most of All." Deb Garrison helped Jack pick the title, it is a fragment from one of the poems in the new collection (sorry I forgot which one). Linda asked Jack how he felt that morning and he said "Grateful." Jim called Jack a famous and great walker, who would walk two miles just for a loaf of bread and some cheese. Jack loves to walk. Henry Lyman said once a neighbor asked Jack "Are you a poet?" and Jack replied "On certain lucky days." Gerald told of days in Pittsburg and a trip they took once that Gerald wrote an essay about.
I will list the readers in order and what poems they read:
Linda Gregg Angelus A Description of Happiness in Kobenhavn Going Wrong We Are the Junction
Jim Finnegan Crusoe on the Mountain Gathering Faggots Me and Capablanca The Secret
Mary Karr The Abnormal is Not Courage The Plundering of Circe Don Giovanni on His Way to Hell Don Giovanni in Trouble
Henry Lyman In Views of Jeopardy Hunger Alone Refusing Heaven Ovid in Tears
Megan O'Rourke Tear It Down The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart Married Winter in the Night Fields
Gerald Stern Love Poem The Lives of Famous Men Music is the Memory of What Never Happened Hard Wired Neglecting the Kids
The reading concluded with a taped recording of Jack reading "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart."
To tell the truth, Storyville was brutal. The parlors of even the fancy whorehouses crawling with roaches and silverfish. The streets foul and the sex brawling. But in the shabby clapboard buildings on Franklin and Liberty and on Iberville was the invention. Throughout the District, you could hear Tony Jackson and King Oliver, Morton and Bechet, finding it night after night. Like the dream Bellocq's photographs found in the midst of Egypt Vanita and Mary Meathouse, Aunt Cora and Gold Tooth Gussie. It takes a long time to get the ruins right. The Japanese think it strange we paint our old wooden houses when it takes so long to find the wabi in them. They prefer the bonsai tree after the valiant blossoming is over, the leaves fallen. When bareness reveals a merit born in the vegetable struggling.
Jack's given it all: heart, mind, and soul. Each collection soars higher than the last. You can get Tough Heaven directly from Pond Road Press. It's probably cheaper at amazon, but why not support the small press and go direct.And there is The Dance Most of All, the best new American poetry book I've read this year so far.
Do yourself a favor: get 'em at the library, get 'em at a bookstore, just get 'em.
spring's begun-- the sky over my house too like old times
The publication in recent years of the retrospective Great Fires and the excellent Refusing Heavencollection has brought Jack some long deserved recognition. Here in Pittsburgh we cherish a more modest selection of work, published by the small press publisher Pond Road Press, entitled Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh has always been a backdrop for the work of Jack Gilbert, a symbol of youth and the not-so-nostalgic past. The Pittsburgh he remembers, like his fellow compatriot and good friend Gerald Stern, is a Pittsburgh long gone, a Pittsburgh forward looking politicians and the nouveau rich, whose hands are today mired in a different kind of grime, would sooner forget. But the ghosts are here, they are everywhere; just as those of us who walk these streets and struggle for a livelihood see them in the corner of our eyes, fleeting and gone in the early morning fog, they followed Gilbert everywhere he went, woven through his work as a thick tangle of twigs in a long abandoned nest.
And that work is at once beautiful, sad, and immensely moving. Here's a taste of that Pittsburgh long gone, the ghost of yesteryear and, yet, somehow the true hope of tomorrow, a hope without which no desperate economic Renaissance pogrom can ever dream of succeeding. We've lived through a few of those here and still we persist, because or despite of any measured, concerted efforts, because, in truth, on the best of days, we stand hand-in-hand with the very ghosts Jack Gilbert evokes.
The ghosts of ourselves.
Searching for Pittsburgh
The fox pushes softly, blindly through me at night, between the liver and the stomach. Comes to the heart and hesitates. Considers and then goes around it. Trying to escape the mildness of our violent world. Goes deeper, searching for what remains of Pittsburgh in me. The rusting mills sprawled gigantically along the three rivers. The authority of them. The gritty alleys where we played every everning were stained pink by the inferno always raging in the sky, as though Christ and the Father were still fashioning the Earth. Locomotives driving through the cold rain, lordly and bestial in their strength. Massive water flowing morning and night throughout a city girded with ninety bridges. Sumptuous-shouldered, sleek-thighed, obstinate and majestic, unquenchable. All grip and flood, mighty sucking and deep-rooted grace. A city of brick and tired wood. Ox and sovereign spirit. Primitive Pittsburgh. Winter month after month telling of death. The beauty forcing us as much as harshness. Our spirits forged in that wilderness, our minds forged by the heart. Making together a consequence of America. The fox watched me build my Pittsburgh again and again. In Paris afternoons on Buttes-Chaumont. On Greek islands with their fields of stone. In beds with women, sometimes, amid their gentleness. Now the fox will live in our ruined house. My tomatoes grow ripe among weeds and the sound of water. In this happy place my serious heart has made.
This past Sunday, February 27th, was the birthday of a personal favorite here at Issa's Untidy Hut: Gerald Stern. Stern was born in Pittsburgh, which has been my home for the last 18 years, and lives in New Jersey, where I was born and raised. Much of our non-mutual time was spent in the same haunts in Jersey, New York, Philly, and Pittsburgh. His imagery is familiar, I might almost say familial, an imagery that is spot-on in both detail and emotional sagacity. I won't belabor the point, as I've covered much of this territory in pastposts.
Happy birthday, Gerald. Wishing you all the happiness you have so generously given others in the sharing of your work and life.
Yesterday, I noted the recent anniversary of W. H. Auden's birth. I thought it might be nice to dovetail these birthdays together with a poem by Gerald Stern in memory of W. H. Auden. It's a bit longer than I usually post here, but a lyrical, insightful homage.
In Memory of W. H. Auden
I am going over my early rages again, my first laments and ecstasies, my old indictments and spiritualities. I am standing, like Schiller, in front of Auden's door waiting for his carved face to let me in. In my hand is The Poem of My Heart I dragged from one ruined continent to the other, all my feelings slipping out on the sidewalk. It was warm and hopeful in his small cave waiting for the right word to descend but it was cold and brutal outside on Fourth Street as I walked back to the Seventh Avenue subway, knowing, as I reached the crowded stairway, that I would have to wait for ten more years or maybe twenty more years for the first riches to come my way, and knowing that the stick of that old Prospero would never rest on my poor head, dear as he was with his robes and his books of magic, good and wise as he was in his wrinkled suit and his battered slippers —Oh good and wise, but not enough to comfort me, so loving was he with his other souls. I had to wait like clumsy Caliban, a sucker for every vagueness and degeneration. I had to find my own way back, I had to free myself, I had to find my own pleasure in my own sweet cave, with my own sweet music. --Once a year, later even once a month, I stood on the shores of Bleeker and Horatio waving good-bye to that ship all tight and yare and that great wizard, bobbing up and down like a dreaming sailor out there, disappearing just as he came, only this time his face more weary and his spirit more grave than when he first arrived to take us prisoner on our own small island, the poet I now could talk to, that wrinkled priest whose neck I'd hang on, that magician who could release me now, whom I release and remember.
Gerald Stern
And, since it is his birthday, here's a beautiful, touching, resonant, celebratory, and tragic piece of wonder, that high steps to all the right notes, perfectly pitched:
The Dancing
In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots I have never seen a postwar Philco with the automatic eye nor heard Ravel's "Bolero" the way I did in 1945 in that tiny living room on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming, my mother red with laughter, my father cupping his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum, half fart, the world at last a meadow, the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us screaming and falling, as if we were dying, as if we could never stop — in 1945 — in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away from the other dancing — in Poland and Germany — of God of mercy, oh wild God.
Gerald Stern
Though all of us wish an end to the long, senseless wars that rage on, perhaps none of us will ever dance as those who danced on that day in 1945.
If it's Tuesday, it's time for a dip into the Lilliput ReviewBack Issue Archive. This week it's issue #51, from December 1993. As I've mentioned previously, the further back in time we go, there is a noticeable change in tone and approach. This issue, I think, reflects this more than most. The sampling opens with a powerful piece by the excellent poet and Vietnam vet, Bill Shields.
dead poem #9
in the night I'm my dream
my enemy
rabid dogs suck my wet fingers
headless children sit in a circle of chairs around my bed stomping their feet
as the mattress burns the worms flow
my face fills
out
Bill Shields
what dostoyevsky might have meant
-----------as -----------dead dogs die
-----------let's -----------shiver
-----------for -----------them
------------Todd Kalinski
Orphans Adopting Themselves
from our fathers we inherit feet from our mothers long arms
we walk away always reaching back
Robert S. King
So It's Sometimes Said
Big Apple celebrityites are to the ontological plenitude of quotidian propinquity as Arnold Schwarzenegger (minus Great Garbo) are to the ruck of humanity. Or so it is sometimes said.
Wayne Hogan
Listening Where there is nothing to hear And no listener
James J. Langon
Issue #51 was dedicated to the memory of frequent contributor and correspondent during Lillie's first four years, Beatrice George. It's been almost 16 years since her passing.
This is still for you:
Something in the slight spring of the branch as the bird alights —
It's not every day you get a chance to hear a formidable American poet sing a Jimmy Durante song, if with an occasional off key note and in promotion of the release of a new issue of a magazine.
Well, more like a Jimmy who then. The best way to explain (as is often the case, Mrs. Calabash) is to simply show. Her's a beaut, with Jimmy serenading and dueting with ol' wasshisname.
A free 6 issue subscription to Lilliput Review,or a 6 issue extension of a current subscription, for the first person to identify the picture appended to the end of the video.
Happy Friday.
at my gate the crow laughs at the branch I grafted
It is with great pleasure that I announce that Roberta Beary is the winner of the 1st annual Basho Haiku Challenge for her poem:
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on the church steps a mourning dove with mother's eyes
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I'd like to thank Roberta and everyone for their enthusiastic participation in the challenge. The level and quality of work in the nearly 200 poems I received was so outstanding that I will be publishing a chapbook of the best 24 poems received sometime after the 1st of the year. 19 poets will be featured. As mentioned in my last post on the challenge, all poets included will receive two copies of the chapbook plus a six issue subscription to Lilliput Review (or a six issue extension of their current subscription). Roberta will receive Basho: The Complete Haiku, translated and edited by Jane Reichhold, contributor copies of the anthology, and a 15 issue subscription to Lillie. I will be informing the other 18 poets included sometime over the next week via email.
In addition, did you notice I said 1st annual?
I've decided that this was so successful, that the 2nd Basho Haiku Challenge will be taking place the same time, next year.
Finally for the poets who participated but did not have their work included, I will be thanking them with free copies of the two current issues of Lillie (or a two issue extension etc.).
My most sincere thanks to one and all for making what could have been a formidable task a real pleasure.
Last night, I gave a talk at the local library school on things librarianish (ok, collection development, if you're curious). I decided things needed to be put in the proper perspective and so opened up with a poem by Gerald Stern:
Stepping Out of Poetry
What would you give for one of the old yellow streetcars rocking toward you again through the thick snow?
What would give for the feeling of joy as you climbed up the three iron steps and took your place by the cold window?
Oh, what would you give to pick up your stack of books and walk down the icy path in front of the library?
What would you give for your dream to be as clear and simple as it was then in the dark afternoons, at the old scarred tables?
It just so happens that Stern grew up in Pittsburgh and chances are that he is speaking of the Main Library where I work and many of the students come. Though the fact resonates it isn't necessary to remain relevant. I suggested to them this wasn't so much of a geographic shout-out to the Burg, nor a poem about nostalgia per se, but a poem about what happens to dreams. And that I wanted them to not think about their dreams but those of the people who have come and continue to come to the library through all these many years.
I can report, despite many a renovation and reinvention (& for the sake of a little resonance), that those old scarred tables remain, as do those occasionally recaptured dreams.
On the way out in the elevator, a student from the class asked me if I was the publisher of Lilliput Review. When I said yes, she told me a delightful story of the poet Peggy Garrison coming to the bookstore where she worked in Manhattan and telling her proudly of her publication in the mag.
As we rode down in that tiny moving room, the small world of the small press expanded very briefly for a moment.
Featured this week from the Lillie archive is issue #72, from August 1995. Enjoy.
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Multiple Choice: Erotica
As condom is to skin
so poetry is to:
a) the act b) the art c) the ought
Ken Waldman
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A Study
One thousand views of Backbone Mountain. One hundred black-hair brushes. Seven stylistic changes. One or two regrets. Two hundred details. Ten thousand things forgotten.
Leslie Carroll
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Tableau
In a Renaissance painting whose title I've forgotten completely as a stronger man would have forgotten you, Lucifer holds a seat in the heavenly councils back benches,
the way you might think of me when I call, untangling the telephone cord from my horns.
J. D. Smith
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Apple Blossom
My first bar in Dixie-- all the usual beers but Brueghel would've loved it painting freightyard royalty displaced by urban renewal, bean soup, like ambrosia, 50¢ a bowl
Walt Franklin
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academics:
every word they write another earring melted down into the golden calf of American poetry.
scarecrow
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¶ i will not drown --rather i will raise the level of the ocean
Well, just when I thought I had everything reasonably under control I realized I've fallen behind in replies to poetry submissions, the bread and butter of a little magazine, or at least this one. So, although I'd planned to concentrate on proofing and tweaking the layout for issues #163 & 164 this weekend, I believe I'll be concentrating more on the mentioned work at hand.
For those waiting an inordinately long amount of time (over 90 days), my apologies. I should have that corrected within two weeks.
I mentioned in one of two posts last Sunday that I have been reading Gerald Stern's new book, Save the Last Dance. I finished it up yesterday and won't comment in depth until I've gone through it again at least once more, but confess to being mildly disappointed. As is usual with most modern books of poetry, there were 3 or 4 poems that grabbed me. This is exactly opposite to my usual reaction to Stern: there are usually only 3 or 4 poems that don't grab me. But, before I get ahead of myself, I obviously have some rereading to do. I'm also reading Adam Zagajewski's new volume, Eternal Enemies. Zagajewski is another poet I usually enjoy very much and I'm having a similar reaction, though there are more than 3 good poems. Perhaps more on that front later. In the meantime, here is one of the poems by Gerald Stern that did grab me (plus an audio of Stern reading it last year):
As for those who face their death by wind and call it by the weird name of forgiveness they alone have the right to marry birds, and those who stopped themselves from falling down by holding the wall up or the sink in place they can go without much shame for they have lived enough and they can go click, click if they want to, they can go tok, tok and they can marry anything, even hummingbirds.
I'm not sure if I'm getting a bit jaded, having a little "modern" poetry burnout, or if these are just two more examples of books that prompted my quest for books of poems that are nearly perfect. The reader contributed list is currently up to 36 books. If you'd like to make a suggestion for the list, just leave it in a comment to this post or send it in an email to lilliput review at google dot com. Meanwhile, I may find myself scurrying back to Han Shan's Cold Mountain, Basho's never ending road, or Issa's most accommodating, if decidedly disheveled, hut.
A tip of the hat goes out to Rus Bowden at The Poetic Ticker for pointing the way to last week's column by Ted Kooser at American Life in Poetry. Though I'm not much for parody, the item he posted last week by R. S. Gwynn is too good in and of itself not to share. First the much esteemed original by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
Glory be to God for dappled things— ---FFor skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; -------For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnuts fall; finches' wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; __And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange; _Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) __With swift, slow, sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: _________Praise him.
Glory be to God for breaded things— _Catfish, steak finger, pork chop, chicken thigh, ___ Sliced green tomatoes, pots full to the brim With french fries, fritters, life-flow onion rings, _-Hushpuppies, okra golden to the eye, ____ That in all oils, corn or canola, swim
Toward mastication's maw (O molared mouth!); __Whatever browns, is dumped to drain and dry ______On paper towels' sleek translucent scrim, These greasy, battered bounties of the South: ------------------ Eat them.
Yes, refreshing as that is, I believe a return to Cold Mountain is in order very soon. For now, it's time to take a look at some poems from Lilliput Review #86, from January 1997. This one opened with a beauty by Mary S. Rooney (with one more to follow):
One final note about something I am reading and enjoying very much: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. For many years I had been scared off this title as too complex, too hard, overwhelming etc.; I've found, in fact, that for me it is just the opposite. Though character names can be a bit difficult to follow, there is a family tree at the beginning of the book that untangles any twisted skeins. This is the art of storytelling at its finest, the oral tradition in written form. Though Louise Erdrich has long been one of my favorite contemporary writers, it's taken me until now to make the connection between these two writers. Fine stuff, indeed. And, if you are still scared off, check out Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold. It is one of my favorite novels and clocks in at an unthreatening 120 pages. I don't think you'll be sorry.
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