Just for the heck of it - Morton Feldman & Emily Dickinson

I'm working on a bunch of things here throughout the morning and afternoon and while I do, thoughtful meandering has occurred. It includes google searching Morton Feldman, since he is the subject of the current chapter of "Digression on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara," which I am still making my way through.

http://popup.lala.com/popup/1657606142504337800


It also includes reading over some Emily Dickinson.

Elysium is as far as to
The very nearest room,
If in that room a friend await
Felicity or doom.

What fortitude the soul contains,
That is can so endure
The accent of a coming foot,
The opening of a door!

~good ol' Em

"Whoopie!!!" for Keith Waldrop

Hey look at that, what a neato thing. Keith Waldrop won the National Book Award for Poetry! Yay! For his book "Transcendental Studies."

http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2009_p_waldrop.html

And lucky me, I saw him read twice last March, and blogged about him reading his Baudelaire translations, including a poem with the phrase "make whoopie" in it, at the "Reconfiguring Romanticism" reading at Harvard. (Hence the title of this post.) I also told him that it was the second time I'd seen him read in a month and so I was turning into a groupie...Just kidding!! (Keith Waldrop was born in 1932 and is also married, to another neato poet Rosemarie Waldrop, so that's why such a thing is funny to say; at least in my head.)

More info:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/11/19/entertainment/main5711786.shtml

Pierre Joris has some slections from the book on his post about the award:
http://pierrejoris.com/blog/?p=2417

More from Poetry Feb 1965

I was reading a Wieners biographical essay that I printed off from some literary database of some sort and there was a quote from Denise Levertov about "Ace of Pentacles" to which I said to myself, "Self, don't you have the original from which this quote came?" And yes, I do have Poetry Feb 1965. Here's another gem to add to the previous one:

"[Wieners] working of poems is towards accuracy of notation for that experience, not in support of the superficial clarity that is only a compulsive neatness and takes insufficient care of the complexities of the live material." Poetry, Feb 1965, p. 327

Yup yup. Weirdly enough, she goes on to say she doesn't usually like that (dig at Duncan? were they fighting by then or still friends? do I really give a shit? no, not really; moving along) but does like it when it comes to Wieners.

More, "...but the peculiarities of language in these poems are, I have come to see, often the very crises of poignant truth, the pivots of the poem. They are not carelessness, just the contrary; change them and you change a note of a chord...It may seem 'anachronistic,' as one bewildered reader complained to me;"-- [note: that person sounds like someone who could have been one of my profs in grad school, the bad ones, that is] -- "but it is ourely functional in its own context..."

I <3 my printer

Yar, um, just scanned a bunch of John Wieners poems because my writing group and I are sharing our favorite writers with each as part of our next gathers. Scanned some "Asylum Poems" pages and some poems that had been re-typed up by me, clicked on the little boxes, clicked on "create pdf" button and BOOM! 6 page PDF of a hodge podge of John Wieners poems (not for public use, of course). Unbelievable! Technology!

New Books - Caterpillar 7, Paul Klee and even Anne Sexton

New books!

Took a trip to Pazzo as part of this mid week day off. I picked up a few titles...

- Caterpillar 7 Vol II #2: very provocative cover in purple and green, a grid of turn you head sideways picture of what is maybe? perhaps? could be? body parts or bodies in the act of conjugation or just something to make it look that way...Don't know. Inside is Chapter 4 of Robert Duncan's book about HD, poems from Paul Blackburn, Cid Corman, Garrit Lansing and Jess - no artowrk, but two poems, one with some sheet music in it, even - Ted Enlsin and Allen Ginsberg among others. What a fun find!

- a $3 mixed b & w and color book on the art of Paul Klee

-Selected Poem of Anne Sexton because my friend Pete and I got in a fight about poetry. He called the Beats the disco of poetry and asked how I could call myself a feminist and not like Sylvia Plath. I said the Confessional poets didn't really do it for me because it was too much about the drama and not enough about the whole art of poetry. Anyway, to be a sport, and because she's appreciated by others whom I like quite a bit, I got the Anne Sexton books. It's good to have a rounded out collection, I think. Heavy on what you love, smatterings of others, just to keep yourself in check, I say.

a poem for the old man by John Wieners

a poem for the old man

God love you
Dana my lover
lost in the horde
on this Friday night,
500 men are moving up
& down from the bath
room to the bar.
Remove this desire
from the man I love.
Who has opened
the savagery
of the sea to me.

See to it that
his wants are filled
on California street
Bestow on him lar-
gesse that allows him
peace in loins.

Leave him not
to the moths.
Make him out a lion
so that all who see him
heor worship his
think chest as I did
moving my mouth
over his back bringing
out hearts to heights
I hever hike over
anymore.
Let blond hair burn
on the back of his
neck, let no ache
screw his face
up in pain, his soul
is so hooked.
Not heroin.
Rather fix these hundred men as his
lovers & lift him
with the enormous bale
of their desire

6.20.58

Oh Lordy - my high school poetry

I'm at Mom's and went through the box under my old bed that has all my old writing: notebooks, journals and, eep, my poetry portfolio from senior year creative writing class. It's not as bad as I thought it might be, which is nice. Here's a haiku that I don't mind re-typing to share:


Earth intertwining
a light of white shining through
Born unto the world


and I put a sun and a sunflower sticker on it. "Unto" has to be the most pretentious preposition in the wide world

Here is another poem, one that is of the more embarrasing kind:

Another life ago
I was the girl with red hair
She and I played for the Queen
Our songs of joy and sorrow
(and she was quite impressed)
She was the hand and I was the mouth

This time, she is out there
(quite far, I must admit)
Today she is known to thte world
I am a quiet mouth
she is a loud hand

Bach we were
A slave, in our sorrow
And Indian from America
And a Queen geek

I love my ways
I love hers too
We have similar ways
Some out of admiration
Some out of oddness

So today I feel a closeness
To the girl I never met
Because we were each other
In another life.


Damn, that's mortifying. Did you see how I wrote "sorrow" twice? Sweet Jesus.