Because he once was a freckle on the place I was born. Because he pissed me off once. Because we agreed that Ginsberg was that good. Because there was a pastry shop I never knew about. Because he bought me a danish. Because steam off a cup of coffee always seems to rise in the direction of home. Because no one can touch him. Because he is that good.
From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That’s all
There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
“It’s time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening.”
I guess I like this because the image is so clear and evokes a mystery that prose can’t describe. I want someone to help me make sense of the opening line–I associate domes with capital buildings, but this doesn’t seem to be about politics. Maybe the domes connote enduring time or timelessness? I love the idea of a single snowflake as a storm–the infinite in something finite yet infinite with microsopic fractiles.
is it possible that the dome represents the enclosure of a consciousness (I.e. Plato’s myth of the cave allegory) its more the shadow that seems important in this instance because it seems to suggest exactly your experience with the image itself…being transfixed by images. its beautiful in its power to create desire in its reader, in wanting more.
Wow. That is interesting. I can see hints of Strand narrative in your work. I do like his work, but with mixed feelings. His narrative engulfs readers (like your work Lisa), but he always feels…I don’t know how to put this…maybe consumed by his own story. Maybe that is not such a bad thing? Maybe that is key to honest writing?
Maybe someone should interupt me before I gag on my foot…
I have liked a few of his poems, but didn’t go too far into reading him because there were so many that felt like they were so much in his head with so little for the reader to enter into.
Still, for me, when he’s on, he’s very on. Yes perhaps the dome of consciousness, like a skull of thought. However, I figured out that Sharon Horvath is an artist, so possibly her work evokes this poem’s imagery.
Posted 2 years, 6 months ago
Matt Mauch
says:
Oh—and Dobby Gibson’s “Skirmish.” If it fit in my pocket, I would carry it with me and would share it with strangers.
I had never heard of Dobby Gibson. The poem “Upon Discovering My Entire Solution to the Attainment of Immortality Erased From the Blackboard Except the Word ‘Save’” is beautiful.
Thank you for the reading lead Matt. I will be sure to order a copy of “Skirmish.”
Nicelle and Matt:
Thanks for pointing out the poet Gibson and his poem on poetry.org. I too had never read his work before and I love the surprising images that capture unspoken moments and subtle emotions, the way one flows into another. He makes use of juxtaposition, but there’s something smooth about the movement at the same time.
–Lisa
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
There’s a simplicity in this. There’s a wonderful musicality that happens between the lyricism of the line and the frank narrative. The first three lines just cause me to sink a little in my heart. Guilt is a huge part of my life and those three lines just eased some of it.
Noel, I have loved this poem for a long time. The first line really pulls you in, partly because it surprises right after the title. The harsh, exciting honk of geese is a great metaphor for the almost untenable beauty of this surrendering into living freely that she describes.
Yes! I was so surprised after the first line and the embedded narrative of flight and looseness was wonderful. I agree. I can only wish I could write like her. And Sharon Olds.
Posted 2 years, 6 months ago
Lisa Jones
says:
Here’s a poem that wows me for it’s sound. It’s meaning-power appears to be a little dependent on reading it in the biographic context of her other poems.
Plankton by Ruth Padel
The deck is dazzle, fish-stink, gauze-covered buckets.
Gelatinous ingots, rainbows of wet flinching amethyst
and flubbed, iridescent cream. All this
means he’s better; and working on a haul of lumpen light.
Polyps, plankton, jellyfish. Sea butterflies, the pteropods.
‘So low in the scale of nature, exquisite in their forms!
You wonder at so much beauty – created,
apparently, for such little purpose!’ They lower his creel
to blue pores of subtropical ocean. Wave-flicker, white
as a gun-flash over the blown heart of sapphire.
Peacock eyes, beaten and swollen,
tossing on lazuline steel.
I found the following description of the poem:
This was written by Ruth Padel, a descendant of Charles Darwin. In commemoration of Darwin’s bicentennial and the sequential of the Origin of Species, she has produced a book of poetry inspired by his writings – Darwin a life in poems. Here is what she has to say about this poem in particular:
“This marks the moment when Charles Darwin began actually to enjoy the Beagle, rather than lying seasick on the captain’s sofa. It is January 1832, he is 22, heading south through the north Atlantic, and starting work as a naturalist. The key ideas come in obliquely: Darwin still believes in biblical creation, yet his own language is readying him to doubt it (apparently). The rhymes often see-saw between the inside and the end of lines (ocean/swollen). The lyric description is inextricable from the imagery. A translator pointed out to me that I often use double images, an image for an image (those rainbows and amethysts). I like mixing tones and registers, complex sensuous imagery, vernacular and direct speech.”
(warning: this poem may make you jump up and down with excitement over gory good stories)
From Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
After shooting Gregory
this is what happened
I’d shot him well and careful
made it explode under his heart
so it wouldnt last long and
was about to walk away
when this chicken paddles out to him
and as he was falling hops on his neck
digs the beak into his throat
straightens legs and heaves
a red and blue vein out
Meanwhile he fell
and the chicken walks away
still tugging at the vein
till it was 12 yards long
as if it held that body like a kite
Gregory’s last words being
Tonight, for me the poet is Craig Arnold.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=220
Because he once was a freckle on the place I was born. Because he pissed me off once. Because we agreed that Ginsberg was that good. Because there was a pastry shop I never knew about. Because he bought me a danish. Because steam off a cup of coffee always seems to rise in the direction of home. Because no one can touch him. Because he is that good.
| Posted 2 years, 6 months agoAdam Zagajewski. Because:
Scarlet clouds grazed outside my window.
The spent day fled to a museum.
Etc.
| Posted 2 years, 6 months agoDear Matt,
I was lucky to have read Zagajewski for a class. Mysticism for Beginners was a good read. I can see why you would like him.
Thanks for the lines. Zagajewski does have a way of making the ordinary something magical and unexpected.
Thanks for the post,
| Posted 2 years, 6 months agoNicelle Davis
From Mark Strand . . .
A Piece of the Storm
For Sharon Horvath
From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That’s all
There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
“It’s time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening.”
I guess I like this because the image is so clear and evokes a mystery that prose can’t describe. I want someone to help me make sense of the opening line–I associate domes with capital buildings, but this doesn’t seem to be about politics. Maybe the domes connote enduring time or timelessness? I love the idea of a single snowflake as a storm–the infinite in something finite yet infinite with microsopic fractiles.
Thanks for doing this Nicelle!
| Posted 2 years, 6 months agois it possible that the dome represents the enclosure of a consciousness (I.e. Plato’s myth of the cave allegory) its more the shadow that seems important in this instance because it seems to suggest exactly your experience with the image itself…being transfixed by images. its beautiful in its power to create desire in its reader, in wanting more.
| Posted 2 years, 6 months agoHolly crap. Now that you have said it Mr. You-Are-So-Smart Johnny, I see it…well at least I like the reading of it.
Alright, I’m going to be brave and just say it: Mark Strand’s work makes me feel claustrophocbic and I don’t know why?
Do you have any thought on this one dear friend?
Posted 2 years, 6 months agoMuch love,
Nicelle Davis
Wow. That is interesting. I can see hints of Strand narrative in your work. I do like his work, but with mixed feelings. His narrative engulfs readers (like your work Lisa), but he always feels…I don’t know how to put this…maybe consumed by his own story. Maybe that is not such a bad thing? Maybe that is key to honest writing?
Maybe someone should interupt me before I gag on my foot…
Mark Strand…any thoughts?
| Posted 2 years, 6 months agoI have liked a few of his poems, but didn’t go too far into reading him because there were so many that felt like they were so much in his head with so little for the reader to enter into.
Still, for me, when he’s on, he’s very on. Yes perhaps the dome of consciousness, like a skull of thought. However, I figured out that Sharon Horvath is an artist, so possibly her work evokes this poem’s imagery.
Posted 2 years, 6 months agoOh—and Dobby Gibson’s “Skirmish.” If it fit in my pocket, I would carry it with me and would share it with strangers.
| Posted 2 years, 6 months agoI had never heard of Dobby Gibson. The poem “Upon Discovering My Entire Solution to the Attainment of Immortality Erased From the Blackboard Except the Word ‘Save’” is beautiful.
Thank you for the reading lead Matt. I will be sure to order a copy of “Skirmish.”
| Posted 2 years, 6 months agoNicelle and Matt:
| Posted 2 years, 6 months agoThanks for pointing out the poet Gibson and his poem on poetry.org. I too had never read his work before and I love the surprising images that capture unspoken moments and subtle emotions, the way one flows into another. He makes use of juxtaposition, but there’s something smooth about the movement at the same time.
–Lisa
I like the fact that I have an icon, and that I didn’t choose it—but that it chose me.
| Posted 2 years, 6 months agoFavorite Poem of the Moment:
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
There’s a simplicity in this. There’s a wonderful musicality that happens between the lyricism of the line and the frank narrative. The first three lines just cause me to sink a little in my heart. Guilt is a huge part of my life and those three lines just eased some of it.
| Posted 2 years, 6 months agoNoel, I have loved this poem for a long time. The first line really pulls you in, partly because it surprises right after the title. The harsh, exciting honk of geese is a great metaphor for the almost untenable beauty of this surrendering into living freely that she describes.
| Posted 2 years, 6 months agoLisa,
Yes! I was so surprised after the first line and the embedded narrative of flight and looseness was wonderful. I agree. I can only wish I could write like her. And Sharon Olds.
Posted 2 years, 6 months agoHere’s a poem that wows me for it’s sound. It’s meaning-power appears to be a little dependent on reading it in the biographic context of her other poems.
Plankton by Ruth Padel
The deck is dazzle, fish-stink, gauze-covered buckets.
Gelatinous ingots, rainbows of wet flinching amethyst
and flubbed, iridescent cream. All this
means he’s better; and working on a haul of lumpen light.
Polyps, plankton, jellyfish. Sea butterflies, the pteropods.
‘So low in the scale of nature, exquisite in their forms!
You wonder at so much beauty – created,
apparently, for such little purpose!’ They lower his creel
to blue pores of subtropical ocean. Wave-flicker, white
as a gun-flash over the blown heart of sapphire.
Peacock eyes, beaten and swollen,
tossing on lazuline steel.
I found the following description of the poem:
This was written by Ruth Padel, a descendant of Charles Darwin. In commemoration of Darwin’s bicentennial and the sequential of the Origin of Species, she has produced a book of poetry inspired by his writings – Darwin a life in poems. Here is what she has to say about this poem in particular:
“This marks the moment when Charles Darwin began actually to enjoy the Beagle, rather than lying seasick on the captain’s sofa. It is January 1832, he is 22, heading south through the north Atlantic, and starting work as a naturalist. The key ideas come in obliquely: Darwin still believes in biblical creation, yet his own language is readying him to doubt it (apparently). The rhymes often see-saw between the inside and the end of lines (ocean/swollen). The lyric description is inextricable from the imagery. A translator pointed out to me that I often use double images, an image for an image (those rainbows and amethysts). I like mixing tones and registers, complex sensuous imagery, vernacular and direct speech.”
| Posted 2 years, 5 months ago(warning: this poem may make you jump up and down with excitement over gory good stories)
From Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
After shooting Gregory
this is what happened
I’d shot him well and careful
made it explode under his heart
so it wouldnt last long and
was about to walk away
when this chicken paddles out to him
and as he was falling hops on his neck
digs the beak into his throat
straightens legs and heaves
a red and blue vein out
Meanwhile he fell
and the chicken walks away
still tugging at the vein
till it was 12 yards long
as if it held that body like a kite
Gregory’s last words being
get away from me yer stupid chicken
| Posted 2 years, 5 months agoI am falling in love with Lorine Niedecker, one page at a time. A small (very small) example of the fall:
Transition
Colours of October
| Posted 2 years, 3 months agowait with easy dignity–
like gorgeous quill-pens
in old inkwells
almost dry.