Detractors, beware! This here is an homage. I got love for this middle-of-the-map. What’s so great about this region? If you want to know the truth, the midwest does thunderstorms like no one else knows how. The beauty of those skies being torn open… gets me every time. Let’s go eat a tornado, boys.

John Mark Eberhardt works for the Kansas City Star and has a book of poetry out called Night Watch.

Farmers

Out here in the fields,
the distances can
defeat you. In our
pickup trucks, we
raise the dust on
gravel roads, looking
for signs of trouble–
corn smut, busted fences,
a daughter in the hay.

Now and then you see us, you
city folks in your rental cars,
when you take a wrong turn
off the interstate and onto
one of our country roads
that have no names or
numbers, just letters–
G or B or double A. The
roads are like us; they
don’t have much to say.

When we see you out here,
lost, your lips moving, your
eyes wide, looking for clues,
we’ll wave to you, or at least
lift two fingers off the wheel.
If you stop and roll down your
window, we’ll even give you
directions. We won’t ask
why you’re so quick to get
away; after all, you can’t
imagine why we stay.

Mental Graffiti, a slam team from Chicago performs a group piece: We’re from the Midwest. (The team’s 2008 incarnation was peopled by Dan Sully, Tristan Silverman, Alvin Lau, Billy Tuggle, K.Krown).

If what you seek a bit more self-derision from midwestern poetry, please see Kevin Young’s Ode to the Midwest.

For more Midwestern poetry read anything by B.H. Fairchild or the arm of the Cottonwood as it spits its dry storm clouds over a quiet town in spring.

This brings me to a D.H. Lawrence poem. I think he is so well-known for his animal poems because his other more erotic works were too… um… erotic for polite Edwardian society. This is The Mosquito.

When did you start your tricks
Monsieur?

What do you stand on such high legs for?
Why this length of shredded shank,
You exaltation?

Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwards
And weigh no more than air as you alight upon m,
Stand upon me weightless, you phantom?

I heard a woman call you the Winged Victory
In sluggish Venice.
You turn your head towards your tail, and smile.

How can you put so much devilry
Into that translucent phantom shred
Of a frail corpus?

Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legs
How you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air,
A nothingness.

Yet what an aura surrounds you;
Your evil little aura, prowling, and casting a numbness on my mind.

That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic:
Invisibility, and the anaesthetic power
To deaden my attention in your direction.

But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer.

Queer, how you stalk and prowl the air
In circles and evasions, enveloping me,
Ghoul on wings
Winged Victory.

Settle, and stand on long thin shanks
Eyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware,
You speck.

I hate the way you lurch off sideways into air
Having read my thoughts against you.

Come then, let us play at unawares,
And see who wins in this sly game of bluff.
Man or mosquito.

You don’t know that I exist, and I don’t know that you exist.
Now then!

It is your trump
It is your hateful little trump
You pointed fiend,
Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you:
It is your small, high, hateful bugle in my ear.

Why do you do it?
Surely it is bad policy.

They say you can’t help it.

If that is so, then I believe a little in Providence protecting the innocent.
But it sounds so amazingly like a slogan
A yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp.

Blood, red blood
Super-magical
Forbidden liquor.

I behold you stand
For a second enspasmed in oblivion,
Obscenely ecstasied
Sucking live blood
My blood.

Such silence, such suspended transport,
Such gorging,
Such obscenity of trespass.

You stagger
As well as you may.
Only your accursed hairy frailty
Your own imponderable weightlessness
Saves you, wafts you away on the very draught my anger makes in its snatching.

Away with a paean of derision
You winged blood-drop.
Can I not overtake you?
Are you one too many for me
Winged Victory?
Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?

Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makes
Beside the infinitesimal faint smear of you!
Queer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into!

Poetry Off the Shelf is a weekly podcast. Here, they celebrate the darker side of summer in their Cruel, Cruel Summer Episode. Includes poems of Weldon Kees, Howard Nemerov and Jane Kenyon. Curtis Fox gives a bit of commentary.

Matsuo Basho was a famous poet in 15th century Japan. He wrote haikus which as we all know consist of 17 syllables in 3 lines. That is, 5.7.5. Translating haikus must be a pain… I can only assume this was once 17 syllables in the original Japanese.

A cicada shell;
it sang itself
utterly away.

For another cicada poem, run on over to Poetry Foundation.

After this year’s National Poetry Slam, poet Anis Mojgani offered some sage advice via twitter:

1. Slam Family: Dont slam what you THINK will score well or what you think you are EXPECTED to compete with.6:02 PM Aug 9th via web

2. Slam Family: Instead, write what you are inspired by, write what you want to hear, & after you write those poems, perform them.6:03 PM Aug 9th via web

“So…poets prefer good writing, but won’t do it in a real slam?”–Amy David. Truth. Ante up family.6:04 PM Aug 9th via web

Now. I’m sure we can all look ourselves in the mirror and see someone who has written crap poetry. That’s not the point. But the point is also not to write as many “issue” poems as you can so you can move an audience by your acute perception of the ills of the world. You’re a poet. Your pen drips sadness without trying and you can pass for reflective while writing a poem about a carton of milk or a cow’s tooth. That is your majesty.

Let me say this: I have no qualifications that entitle me to speak candidly and critically on this topic. Let me add that I have much love for spoken word, even some of that “issue” stuff, believe-you-me.

I do not think spoken word sucks. That is, I think it is capable of wonder and greatness. Extreme ingenuity can be found in the medium. But there is also the inadvertently ridiculous. It’s alright. The ridiculous exists in all things.

Now. I present to you some truly bad spoken word (don’t cry, poets– they just make fun of what they can’t understand)!

“Oh you’re reading at a poetry open mic, huh? Like in I Married An Axe Murderer?”
“Oh please, Muses! I hope not….”

Demetri Martin. Slam. Poet. Slams. Poetry.

The following poems (at least I’ve deemed them poems) might not be printed in an anthology anytime soon. But they are on my list of brilliant things. I am still swayed by magic. And yes, finding handwritten proof that someone was here (and writing) to me is a magical thing.

Here are some pieces I’ve found (all in Lawrence, KS). The first is a fragment and the author is unknown… unknown to me anyway. It seems like part of a larger piece but I’ve had no luck securing answers on that.

the fragment

These acres are the measure of a man!
These, that teem with fire, wood and water!
This wind that robs the sail,
This hammer and anvil that built it up
from the very wheelhouse of Gov. Scratch himself
before they were the tools of man

The next piece is called The Chef Baker. It references a couple streets in Lawrence, KS.

Alive as the air became in
the kitchen, the wonderful loaves
of bread, hot as fresh pancakes
with the smell of maple syrup,
the chef baker left the hot water
faucet water running. At midnight
the loaves floated above
the bread pans as the water
ran out of the windows and
doors. Made you think that
a submarine was submerging
emptying the ballasts for
submersion. It all happened
on Massachusetts Street.

A police officer couldn’t
spell Massachusetts in his
police report, so he had
a hitch to the building
with rollers beneath
the building, and pulled,
and rolled the building
to New Jersey Street.

The next “found” piece is called Borrowed Time. If you look closely, you may find it is actually one incredible sentence. Is it a prose poem? Oh, I don’t know.

Bumping Jumbo in outerspace with sweat, blood, and tears with the crumbling of the House of Make Believe for the cropping of a final portrait worth the wonderment of how many stokes and strokes and much oil resin can remain in a place of delight of strobing for the looking keyhole no more, and beyond mere hostelry, a poke dream without the tussle of a registered social security number and card: what therefore novel will produce another adventure without water below to sail upon the seven seas of author Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, anon.

My hope is to continue to find more “poems” scattered throughout my environment. Cleaning up people’s discarded papers after a poetry reading: Not the same thing. Chance, folks. It’s all about chance.

Quick run-down on the Poetry Bomb for those who haven’t heard. It’s a bomb. Filled with poems. And this guy who was once associated with the Beats is hauling it around. In a van. And pissing off postal workers. He’ll be making his way to North Carolina on May 20-23. He will also be in Chicago May 26 at the Chopin Theatre– fundraising event for the Outspoken festival. Read about his efforts. (photo credit: AP)

The idea that anyone is taking the time to take poetry “to the streets” makes me smile. Surely, poetry is not an art form that needs to sit alone and holy and unread. (see what Chicago’s CJ Laity has to say about this…) What is interesting to me is how many of these “for the people” poetry groups use images of violence to draw attention to themselves, even if they are inherently peaceful groups. Lethal Poetry raises money for non-profits. One of their events is called Words That Kill. Louder than a Bomb is a youth poetry festival. Outlaw Poetry is a webservice that hosts poetry related pages. The Poetry Bomb is (as far as I can tell) a project about coexisting and, dare I say it, harmony.

The first poem I’ve got for you today is a translation of Nâzım Hikmet’s poem The Dead Little Girl. Hikmet was a Turkish poet, playwright and novelist. His Communist sympathies caused trouble for him in his home country– he spent most of his adult life in prison and eventually exile (he is buried in Moscow). His works were very innovative and have been translated into some 50 languages. The following piece was so dearly loved by the West, that Pete Seeger used an alternate translation of the poem for a song. Joan Biaz also sang a rendition.

It is me knocking at your door
-at how many doors I’ve been
But no one can see me
since the dead are invisible.

I died at Hiroshima
That was ten years ago
I am a girl of seven
Dead children do not grow.

First my hair caught fire
Then my eyes burnt out
I became a handful of ashes
Blown away by the wind.

I don’t wish anything for myself
for a child who is burnt to cinders
cannot even eat sweets.

I’m knocking at your doors
aunts and uncles, to get your signatures
so that never again children will burn
and so they can eat sweets.

An alternate translation (for the Pete Seeger song)
Listen in Turkish– sung by young girl

Carl Sandburg was a Pulitzer Prize winning American writer. He worked as a journalist, was active in the civil rights movement and wrote a lot of poetry. The following piece, Grass, might be considered an anti-war poem although it less of an anthem.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo
Shovel them under and let me work–
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What is this place?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

William Stafford was an American poet, born in Hutchinson, Kansas. He was a conscientious objector in the second world war, during which he performed some forestry work. He taught at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. This is Traveling Through the Dark from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems. You can listen to it here.

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow, to swerve might make more dead.

By the glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing
she had stiffened already, almost cold
I dragged her off, she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason–
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all– my only swerving–
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

D.H. Lawrence was an English poet, playwright and novelist. Not well-read during his life, he reached his height of fame after a Calvin Klein fragrance commercial. Um… So that’s a lie (I couldn’t resist… Back to something more truthful…) He was harassed by British military authorities during World War I because of his anti-militarism views and wife with German parents, and spent the rest of his days in a sort of voluntary exile which took him to Australia, Italy, United States, Mexico, Sri Lanka and France. I love the character of his poem, Snake. Here, a recording (not his voice).

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered father,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked around, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhing like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of the accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

Andrei Voznesensky is a Russian poet, currently living and working in Moscow. He studied to be an architect but eventually turned his full attention to poetry. During the 1960s, he performed for thousands of fans in stadiums, and other large venues, and also traveled through Europe and the United States. Also in the early 1960s, Khruschev led a State-sponsored attack on liberal, modernist writers and artists. During this time, Voznesensky and others were pressured to issue recantations of their previous works, and many books were taken out of print. The relative freedom they once had to travel abroad was suspended and Voznesensky spent many months after this trouble wandering Russia “as a bird diverts the hunters from its nest.” Although his clever rhyme and use of surprising slang and technical jargon cannot be properly translated out of its original form, here is a bit of his work. Hunting a Hare (for my friend Yuri), translated by W.H. Auden. (For those who can read Russian, I’ve included some scans of the original work…)

Hunting a hare. Our dogs are raising a racket;
Racing, barking, eager to kill, they go,
And each of us in a yellow jacket
Like oranges against the snow.

One for the road. Then, off to hound a hare,
My cab driver friend who hates a cop, I,
Buggins’ brother and his boy, away we tear.
Our jalopy,

That technological marvel, goes bounding,
scuttling along on its snow chains. Tallyho!
After a hare we go.
Or is it ourselves we’re hounding?

I’m all dressed up for the chase
In boots and jacket: the snow is ablaze.
But why, Yuri, why,
Do my gun sights dance? Something is wrong, I know,
When a glassful of living blood has to fly
In terror across the snow.

The urge to kill, like the urge to beget,
Is blind and sinister. Its craving is set
Today on the flesh of a hare: tomorrow it can
Howl the same way for the flesh of a man.

Out in the open the hare
Lay quivering there
Like the gray heart of an immense
Forest or the heart of silence:

Lay there, still breathing,
Its blue flanks heaving,
Its tormented eye a woe,
Blinking there on the cheek of the snow.

Then, suddenly, it got up,
Stood upright: suddenly,
Over the forest, over the dark river,
The air was shivered
By a human cry,

Pure, ultrasonic, wild,
Like the cry of a child.
I knew that hares moan, but not like this:
This was the note of life, the wail
Of a woman in travail,

The cry of leafless copses
And bushes hitherto dumb,
The unearthly cry of a life
Which death was about to succumb,

Nature is all wonder, all silence:
Forest and lake and field and hill
Are permitted to listen and feel,
But denied utterance.

Alpha and Omega, the first and the last
Word of Life as it ebbs away fast,
As, escaping the snare, it flies
Up to the skies.

For a second only, but while
It lasted we were turned to stone
Like actors in a movie-still.

The boot of the running cab driver hung in mid-air,
And four black pellets halted, it seemed,
Just short of their target:
Above the horizontal muscles,
The blood-clotted fur of the neck,
A face flashed out.

With slanting eyes set wide apart, a face
As in frescoes of Dionysus,
Staring at us in astonishment and anger,
It hovered there, made one with its cry,
Suspended in space,
The contorted transfigured face
Of an angel or a singer.

Like the long-legged archangel a golden mist
Swam through the forest.
“Shit!” spat the cab driver. “The little faking freak!”:
A tear rolled down the boy’s cheek.

Late at night we returned,
The wind scouring our faces: they burned
Like traffic lights as, without remark,
We hurtled through the dark.

Mario Benedetti was an Uruguayan poet and turned out to be a cute little old man, though it took 70-80 years to make that a reality. Although he is well known in the Spanish-speaking world, I can’t seem to find a whole lot of his works translated into English. For part of the 1970s and 1980s, Benedetti lived in exile (because of Uruguayan dictatorship) in Argentina, Peru, Cuba and Spain. In addition to his poetry, he wrote novels and short stories.

Ustedes y Nosotros

Ustedes cuando aman
exigen bienestar
una cama de cedro
y un colchón especial

nosotros cuando amamos
es fácil de arreglar
con sábanas qué bueno
sin sábanas da igual

ustedes cuando aman
calculan interés
y cuando se desaman
calculan otra vez

nosotros cuando amamos
es como renacer
y si nos desamamos
no la pasamos bien

ustedes cuando aman
son de otra magnitud
hay fotos chismes prensa
y el amor es un boom

nosotros cuando amamos
es un amor común
tan simple y tan sabroso
como tener salud

ustedes cuando aman
consultan el reloj
porque el tiempo que pierden
vale medio millón

nosotros cuando amamos
sin prisa y con fervor
gozamos y nos sale
barata la función

ustedes cuando aman
al analista van
él es quien dictamina
si lo hacen bien o mal

nosotros cuando amamos
sin tanta cortedad
el subconsciente piola
se pone a disfrutar

ustedes cuando aman
exigen bienestar
una cama de cedro
y un colchón especial

nosotros cuando amamos
es fácil de arreglar
con sábanas qué bueno
sin sábanas da igual.

see an english translation.

Lisel Mueller was born in Germany (Hamburg) in 1924 and moved to the States with her family when she was 15. She taught at Goddard College, University of Chicago, Elmhurst College.

Romantics
Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann

The modern biographers worry
“how far it went,” their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address, not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving nothing to overhear.

John Paul Davis writes poems, designs websites and does other things like keep a blog. A resident writer with Vox Ferus, he resides in Chicago. His poem, The Zombie, Rejected By His Human Lover, Responds was recently published by the Cordite Poetry Review. It can be found here. Given the shiny new date of publication and out of respect for the review, I haven’t included the text here, but it’s worth the click.

Theodore Wratislaw (1871-1933) was an English poet and solicitor. I know little else of this man, so I’ll leave it at this.

Sonnet Macabre

I love you for the grief that lurks within
Your languid spirit, and because you wear
Corruption with a vague and childish air,
And with your beauty know the depths of sin;

Because shame cuts and holds you like a gin,
And virtue dies in you slain by despair,
Since evil has you tangled in its snare
And triumphs on the soul good cannot win.

I love you since you know remorse and tears,
And in your troubled loveliness appears
The spot of ancient crimes that writhe and hiss:

I love you for your hands that calm and bless,
The perfume of your sad and slow caress,
The avid poison of your subtle kiss.

but twitter is atweet with news of some poet-guy doing this slam-thing on the opening ceremonies in vancouver this year. who? wha? when? if you missed it, see this.

olympics are a proud and celebratory event, but each one has its particular political elements. discord, hypocrisy, dissatisfaction. vancouver’s poet laureate declined to participate in the olympic ceremony due to some of these “political elements.” why? read here. his “olympic” poem , in praise of female athletes who were told no, was, therefore, not included in the ceremonies.

what is the future of poetry in the olympics? we’ll see. here’s a blurb from a couple years back about 2012 london olympics and poetry.

We’ll start with a Jack Kerouac quote from On the Road: “…the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”

Dylan Thomas, Welsh poet and writer. He worked briefly as a reporter for South Wales Daily Post, published his first book at 20 and was an anti-aircraft gunner in WW2. This celebrated poem is considered one of his finest works. Hear it. He sounds so musical.

Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Next… One of my favorite spoken wordists: Anis Mojgani. Anis lives in Portland, Oregon but actively tours with such groups as the Elephant Engine High Dive Revival. This is Shake The Dust. For a more dramatic version, you can see his performance at the Seattle Grand Slam ’06. It starts about 2/3 the way through this video.

Gregory Orr, master if short verse, is an American poet. He had a turbulent childhood, accidentally killing his brother on a hunting excursion, unexpectedly losing his mother, and watching his father succumb to addiction shortly after this. Perhaps this makes the following poem more acceptable to me. He teaches at University of Virginia and has published several books of poetry.

To be alive

To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That’s crudely put, but…

If we’re not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?

Here’s a recording of his Words Of Advice For Young People:

When things were looking really bad for Burroughs and he’d turned down a couple teaching gigs because of the mindlessness of the college masses… someone got the brilliant idea to put this guy on the touring circuit. So… we got this guy on record… cassette, cd and mp3. Yeah, and look how grateful he sounds for it all. Here’s his Thanksgiving Prayer.

Here’s one more… What Keeps Mankind Alive.