golempoem

GRACE

Glance at a woman on a train platform.
Suddenly we’ve been married for years.

I know all the delicate nuances
in her nine dialects of silence.

Can pick her from a thousand others
just with a sniff of her neck.

We sit next to each other, as we always have.

Our elbows touch, like the tips of matches.
Exactly the way I remember.

When she says excuse me, this is my stop,
there is nothing awkward about it.

–Jeffrey McDaniel

Photo credit: readers by phfig

No, I can’t pronounce it either, but iWmOaRgDe, which opens this Friday at Takoma Park’s Atrium Gallery, promises to be a fine exhibition of the works of DC-area artists and poets. The exhibition features collaborative creative efforts of the following artist-poet couplings: Sally Brucker & Ann Slayton, Bonnie Lee Holland & Anne Becker, James Landry & Greta Ehrig, Margot Neuhaus & Anne Dykers, Stephanie Sove Ney & Carol Beame, Howard Spector & Merrill Leffler, and Eric Wolinsky & Sydney.

The exhibition, curated by David Fogel and Anne Becker, runs for the two months between 13 June and 13 August in the gallery located at the Takoma Park Community Center (click that link for map and directions). But the artists and poets invite you to join them on site this Friday (13 June) between 7 and 9pm for the opening reception and performances (which start at 8). Hope to see you there!

For further information, contact Ms. Sara Daines at 301.891.7224.

Photo credit: A Mother and her Son by Thomas Hawk

UNANSWERED

Why are you taking me this way? Where does this road go? Tell me.
I can’t see a thing. This isn’t a road. Just stones.
Black beams. Lamp bracket. At least if I had
that cage–not this bird cage but that other one
with the heavy wire netting, with the naked statues. Back then
when they threw the dead bodies down from the roof terrace, I didn’t say anything,
I gathered up those statues–felt sorry for them. Now I know:
the last thing that dies is the body. So speak to me.
Why are you taking me this way? I can’t see a thing. It’s great I can’t see.
The biggest obstacle against thinking to the end is glory.

–Yannis Ritsos (b. 1 May 1909)

Translation by Edmund Keeley

Photo credi: Dark Wet Stone Floor by Luis Rodero-Merino

THE TALL FIGURES OF GIACOMETTI

We move by means of our mud bumps.
We bubble as do the dead but more slowly.

The products of excruciating purges
we are squeezed out thin hard and dry.

If we exude a stench it is petrified sainthood.
Our feet are large crude fused together

solid like anvils. Ugly as truth is ugly
we are meant to stand upright a long time

and shudder without motion
under the scintillating pins of light

that dart between our bodies
of pimpled mud and your eyes.

–May Swenson

Photo credit: Piazza (Alberto Giacometti) via Guggenheim Museum

LINES COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY

Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
‘Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
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FAME
If I didn’t care for fun and such,
I’d probably amount to much.
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.
–Dorothy Parker

CASCANDO

1

why not merely the despaired of
occasion of
wordshed

is it not better abort than be barren

the hours after you are gone are so leaden
they will always start dragging too soon
the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want
bringing up the bones the old loves
sockets filled once with eyes like yours
all always is it better too soon than never
the black want splashing their faces
saying again nine days never floated the loved
nor nine months
nor nine lives

2

saying again
if you do not teach me I shall not learn
saying again there is a last
even of last times
last times of begging
last times of loving
of knowing not knowing pretending
a last even of last times of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love

the churn of stale words in the heart again
love love love thud of the old plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words

terrified again
of not loving
of loving and not you
of being loved and not by you
of knowing not knowing pretending
pretending

I and all the others that will love you
if they love you

3

unless they love you

–Samuel Beckett (b. 13 April 1906)

Photo credit: Faded II by wit

Everett Wilson provides the animation as Eliot reads his 1915 poem.

Eliot’s speaking voice really seems to match the material. No?

One of the basic questions attending any presentation of a poem concerns sound. Good poems are equipped with good sound effects. Those effects involve considerations beyond rhyme. Always, the effects involve artifice. For example, when Yeats refers to Innisfree, he has no real interest in letting us know there are bees on the island. Rather, he conveys the sense of there being the sound of bees, using the resonant artifice of a phrase like “bee-loud glade.” That phrase, unlike a million paraphrases of it, is the one that moves us.

I want to investigate carefully the role of sound in presenting poems in a cyber gallery. The venue permits other dimensions of the poem to be realized with sound. That’s come up in earlier posts, particularly with respect to the odd coherence of Billy Collins’ speaking voice, his poems, and the computer. But it seems that even a little sound may sometimes be too much.

Today’s clip–a 30-second Dolby trailer–is one of my favorite sound effects ever. If you haven’t already played it and don’t recognize it, try to be conscious of your perceptions as you assemble the sounds and the visual. If you recognize the clip, do you find it infinitely replayable? Maybe it’s a just a guy thing, but I am deeply moved by it and love to play it again and again. Why? I can talk about all the subjective connotations and allusions to film history and romance I associate with this clip…but I’d prefer to hear from you first.