Dan Wilcox, host of the Third Thursday open mic at the Social Justice Center (33 Central Ave, Albany), recaps last week’s reading.
Leave a CommentTag: Poetry
(Note: Jen and I celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary today. I wrote this for a previous anniversary.)
The Menagerie
For Jennifer
I remember the menagerie –
red ants, cockroaches,
a dog that stole underwear.
Horned toad burying himself –
at least, we assumed it was a “him†–
under the bush beside the screen door.
Lime-green geckos clinging to
sun-warmed stucco, cooling
in the desert evening.
Blue plastic bowls with the name of
our furry practice child.
I remember the meeting –
front-row seats at a round table
just across the dance floor from the band.
Hesitantly approaching two women
and knowing instantly.
Suddenly the sets were twice as long
and the breaks twice as short.
I’d hurry to put down my saxophone
and continue the conversation.
I remember the desert –
long hike with fast-beating heart.
Brilliant moonlight washing over the hills,
air warm enough for shorts
even in the middle of the night.
The swelling drone of bees as they
awoke to the Sonoran sunrise.
A horizon so distant that we could watch
the sun pour onto the land like thick honey
filling the mountains’ bowl.
I remember the restaurant –
heart in my throat,
ring in my hand,
one knee on the hard tile floor.
You said “yes†and applause drifted over
to our table.
I remember the train –
exhausted after semi-circumnavigating the world.
Comatose kitten in a plastic box and
tired smiles as the train pulled away from Narita
and headed toward Tokyo, then north.
No jobs, no place to live.
All the world before us.
I remember the trees –
white cherry blossoms flowering
outside the second-floor window.
Early morning sounds of
baseball
from the sunken field below.
Waking at night as the house shook and
deciding there was trouble just as
the tremor stopped.
I remember our son –
watching in awe as life emerged
to the strains of Nat “King†Cole,
the same sounds that joined us together
in the desert now welcoming our newest bond.
Walking down the hall where the
others waited and bursting into tears.
“It’s a boy.â€
Crying again with worry in those
first harrowing hours.
The same emotions repeated three years later.
Mostly, I remember you.
Leave a Comment
A classic Burma-Shave sign poem
From today’s Albany Times-Union:
Greenfield residents use touch of humor to push town for road repairs
By DENNIS YUSKO, Staff writer
First published: Tuesday, March 10, 2009GREENFIELD — Denton Road residents have adopted an old advertising technique to protest the street’s poor condition.
Upset that the nearly 2-mile corridor straddling Greenfield and Saratoga Springs hasn’t been repaved in years, neighbors plugged campaign-style signs with balloons into nine bales of hay and planted them along the road.
In an echo of the old rhyming roadside ads for Burma-Shave shaving cream, the green placards form a jingle for passing motorists: “Try to avoid, The hazards here, And say out loud, Elections are near! A safe road, Is just a mirage, But we do have, A new town garage, Thank you Greenfield!”
Read the rest of the article at the TU site.
Leave a CommentPoet, teacher, author and Chicano activist Juan Felipe Herrera has collected some of his most provocative and autobiographical writing in this volume. These “undocuments” chronicle Herrera’s travels in the U.S. and Mexico, and his relentless search for the soul and story of a people.
Herrera’s poetry is shouted with an upraised fist at one moment, intoned with a somber brow the next. He has no illusions, but his best work is powered by a grand vision of the past and the future.
Some of the work is helped by a knowledge of Spanish, which I don’t possess. Even so, I had no trouble being caught up in the sound and spirit of Herrera’s writing.
We need more documentary poetry like this to capture the real history of this country, and of the peoples and cultures within it.
Highly recommended.
Leave a CommentJoseph Moncure March wrote this tale of debauchery and deception in rhyming couplets in 1928, just before the world descended into the depths of the Great Depression.
Decades later, artist and author Art Spiegelman (of MAUS fame), found a copy in a used bookstore and fell instantly in love with the darkness and depravity of March’s lost classic. In 1994, nearly 70 years after the publication of The Wild Party, Spiegelman published this illustrated version.
March’s short, taut thriller beautifully captures the grim determination of a group of down-but-not-out actors, dancers and vaudeville performers as they use drink and sex to mask the depression of their everyday lives. Spiegelman’s woodblock-style illustrations add the perfect touch of dark sensuality that at times turn to stale, harshly lit reality. The poem builds to an inevitable climax of violence that nevertheless leaves the reader sitting up straight and waiting for the end.
William S. Burroughs said of The Wild Party: “It’s the book that made me want to become a writer.”
Highly recommended.
Leave a CommentPatton Oswalt for Poet Laureate – watch more funny videos
Leave a Comment Poet Nikki Giovanni was on Bill Moyers’ Journal last week talking about her new book of poetry, Bicycles. She also talks about bicycles as a metaphor for life and reads her poem, “Bicycles.”
Leave a CommentIt isn’t merely the fashioning
of new meanings from the threads and whisps,
rather it is the intention, the
unsounded affirmation of a
relationship, woven into each
chosen strand and intricate pattern.
Pearls uncovered in the depths, the craft
rows back to shore, where it is met by
the warm wool and the gathering in.
One must take stock in it, and accept
the gift for what it is, speech rendered,
unspoken, as textile manuscript.
Jan Marin Tramontano
For the third time in as many weeks, I went to a poetry open mic last night. This one was the Live from the Living Room reading at the Capital District Gay & Lesbian Community Center on Hudson Ave.
The featured poet was Jan Marin Tramontano, an Albany-based poet and fiction writer. She read several poems about her trip to Paris and its museums from her book Woman Sitting in a Cafe. I quite enjoyed those poems, particularly a wry and observant take on the Mona Lisa. Tramontano also read several love poems, or as she described them, “love poems, self-love poems, and a love poem about our little boy.” All were very poignant, particularly those that mentioned her husband, who was sitting in the room.
Following the featured reading, a half dozen poets read a couple poems each. Dan Wilcox read a wonderful piece about wanting to read love poems to someone … a poet whose name I didn’t catch (but who I always see at the library where he works) read a funny poem about heaven as a gated community … and performance poet A.C. Everson recited a piece about what a bastard Cupid is. I read two recent pieces, “Luxury Hotel” and “Robby Burns’s Hat.”
I’m impressed with how diverse and active Albany’s poetry scene is. As I said at the reading last night, “I go to whichever poetry reading Dan Wilcox writes about.” Good advice, if I do say so myself.
3 CommentsPodcast: Play in new window | Download
I was listening to an interview with poet John Ashbery (from the excellent PennSound archive) and was struck by the following exchange with the host, Tom Smith. Smith is referring here to Ashbery’s collection of poems Hotel Lautreamont
Tom Smith: Does it have a particular principle of organization we could talk about, or does it reflect a span of time, a creative span of time?
John Ashbery: No, none of my collections of poetry has a principle of organization as some poets like to do. I suppose it merely reflects a span of time, the time in which it took to write the poems. I write pretty regularly, and when I feel I have enough to make a book, I put them together and send them to a publisher.
I was interested in this because so much of the received wisdom about publishing poetry suggests that Ashbery’s method is the wrong way to do it. Of course, it helps if you’re John Ashbery, but it was important to me to be reminded that there are as many ways to create a manuscript as there are poets to create them.
Leave a CommentLuxury Hotel
Room after room after room with no stopping, no let-up.
How many in a year? Five thousand? Six thousand?
The human body can only take so much.
So many liftings of the mattress, so many bends of the knees.
Then there are the chemicals, the solvents, the cleaners.
Scrubbing with your face right down in the fumes,
breathing deeply from the exertion.
Cracked skin, aching muscles, arms like rubber.
You can’t even lift your baby girl for a kiss.
Other people’s pubic hair, other people’s vomit and blood.
One time there was a man hiding in the closet.
He put one finger to his lips and told you to be quiet,
but how could you be quiet when there was a man in the closet?
So you screamed and ran and they gave you half a day off.
Another time you begged and begged for shoes,
the kind with the special soles so you wouldn’t slip.
After days and weeks and months, they ordered them
on the very day your head hit the tile floor,
the same day they cornered you in the manager’s office
and nobody called for a doctor, the same day
you passed out waiting for the bus and a passerby
took you to the emergency room. A stranger had to do that.
There are seven Dominicans and three women from Jamaica
and five Senegalese and one Vietnamese lady in the laundry
with no English who keeps to herself in the mouth of the furnace.
Eight hours, ten hours, twelve hours if it’s busy.
Then it’s home to cook and do your own laundry and help
Javi and Lisa with their homework. Make the lunches
for the next day. Shrink into the bed and fall asleep
to the throbbing in your joints. The alarm at 4 a.m.
Then it’s room after room after room with no stopping, no let-up.
How many in a year? Five thousand? Six thousand?
The human body can only take so much.
Last night I went to the Albany Poets Presents open mic at Valentine’s here in Albany. A recording of that reading is now available at AlbanyPoets.com. My section starts about 9:45 into the recording, but I encourage you to listen to the whole thing.
Leave a CommentKooser’s book is aimed at the beginning poet, but anyone could pick up useful ideas about revision, metaphor and simile, and imagining an audience. Kooser’s writing is warm and often funny, and his advice is realistic and practical. This is not a book to read if you’re looking for a quick way to become a famous poet. But if you’re interested in putting in the necessary hours (and hours and hours and hours) needed to turn out respectable writing, Kooser can help you use your time more productively and enjoyably.
Recommended.
Leave a CommentBookshelves
All our bookshelves were made by our fathers,
crafted by calloused hands from woods
soft or hard, fine-grained or no,
fashioned in damp basements or dusty barns
on Saturday afternoons while Black Magic Woman
or Love Me Do played on what used to be the nice radio.
The bookshelves are, like all fathers’ creations, imperfect,
slightly wider at the front,
fitting some books better than others.
In one, there is a pair of hearts carved,
delicate filigree surprising
from a splitter of logs, a man of the earth.
The bookshelves are a framework, intended
by our fathers to be filled with thoughts
of our own choosing, maybe with a gentle nudge
from a “doctor of books.â€
But it is we who must encumber the wood
with our own words, we who must choose
which volumes to stack or lean,
we who receive the hard or soft legacy
cast in simple wood by complex men.