poets and written things

“birds sing sweeter than books tell how,” says e.e. cummings. And though he may be right, there is little will stop the poet from trying to write it down anyway.

Pablo Neruda, poeta y diplomático chileno. Su poesía abarcó el ámbito político y formó parte del “ataque literario” contra Hitler, por lo que le fue otorgado el Premio Stalin de la Paz.

Deber del poeta

A quien no escucha el mar en este viernes
por la mañana, a quien adentro de algo
casa, oficina, fábrica o mujer,
o calle o mina o seco calabozo:
a éste yo acudo y sin hablar ni ver
llego y abro la puerta del encierro
y un sin fin se oye vago en la insistencia,
un largo trueno roto se encadena
al peso del planeta y de la espuma,
surgen los ríos roncos del océano,
vibra veloz en su rosal la estrella
y el mar palpita, muere y continúa

Así por el destino conducido
debo sin tregua oír y conservar
el lamento marino en mi conciencia,
debo sentir el golpe de agua dura
y recogerlo en una taza eterna
para que donde esté el encarcelado,
donde sufra el castigo del otoño
yo esté presente con una ola errante,
yo cirucule a través de las ventanas
y al oírme levante la mirada
diciendo: cómo me acercaré al océano?
Y yo trasmitiré sin decir nada
los ecos estrellados de la ola,
un quebranto de espuma y arenales,
un susurro de sal que se retira,
el grito gris del ave de la costa.

Y así, por mí, la libertad y el mar
responderán al corazón oscuro.

..read it in english..

Bukowski (prolific drinker, writer, womanizer) wrote this poet, a far less beautiful account on poetry:

this poet he’
d been drink
ing 2 or 3 da
ys and he wa
lked out on t
he stage and
looked at th
at audience
and he just k
new he was
going to do i
t. there was
a grand pian
o on stage a
nd he walke
d over and li
fted the lid a
nd vomited i
nside the pia
no. then he c
losed the lid
and gave his
reading.

they had to r
emove the st
rings from t
he piano and
wash out the
insides and r
estring it.

I can unders
tand why th
ey never invi
ted him bac
k. but to pas
s the word o
n to other un
iversities tha
t he was a
poet who lik
ed to vomit i
nto grand pi
anos was un
fair.

they never c
onsidered th
e quality of
his reading.
I know this
poet: he’s ju
st like the re
st of us: he’l
l vomit anyw
here for mon
ey.

that little thing is the gift a “slam-ish” piece answering the question of “why write?” mayda del valle performs poetry with passion and grace. and to my knowledge… no hurling in pianos, so go ahead and book this poetess.

The Trouble With Poetry by Billy Collins, who will not be blessed with a bio in this post because he already got one here.

The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night –
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky –

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,

and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

Poetry fills me with joy
and I rise like a feather in the wind.
Poetry fills me with sorrow
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.

But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.

And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.

And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti –
to be perfectly honest for a moment –

the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.

Ok. And that’s all for now!

a smoke

since it’s new year’s day, i can only assume many more smoke-folks are valiantly attempting the transition from fumigator to non-smoker. in honor of that, the first post.

a little poet background: billy collins was Poet Laureate of US (2001, 2003)  and is a professor of english at Lehman College in NY. he’s done his fair share for poetry in the US since he can actually sell books and book tours… but honestly i resent the man and want nothing more than to break into his verse “with a flashlight and a ski mask.” because that’s the way i like this guy… quoting his own poems to show my “disdain.” (sigh)

b.h. fairchild grew up and worked in machine shops in small-town texas, oklahoma, kansas. he teaches english at California State University. his poem “cigarettes”  is published in his (award-winning) third book “the art of the lathe” which focuses on working class life in rural kansas.

Gross, loathsome. Trays and plates loaded
like rain gutters, butts crumpled and damp with gin,
ashes still shedding the rank breath of exhaustion —
nevertheless, an integral part of human evolution,
like reading. Cigarettes possess the nostalgic potency
of old songs: hand on the steering wheel, fat pack
of Pall Malls snug under my sleeve, skinny bicep
pressed against the car door so my muscle bulges,
and my girl, wanting a smoke, touches my arm.
Or 3 a.m. struggling with the Checkov paper, I break
the blue stamp with my thumb, nudge open petals of foil,
and the bloom of nicotine puts me right back in the feedstore
where my grandfather used to trade — leather, oats, burlap,
and red sawdust. Or at the beach, minute flares floating
in the deep dark, rising, falling in the hands of aunts
and uncles telling the old stories, drowsy with beer,
waves lapping the sand and dragging their voices down.
Consider the poverty of lungs drawing ordinary air,
the unreality of it, the lie it tells about quotidian existence.
Bad news craves cigarettes, whole heaps of them, sucking
in the bad air the way the drowning gulp river water,
though in hospital rooms I’ve seen grief let smoke
gather slowly into pools that rise, and rise again
to nothing. I’ve studied the insincere purity
of a mouth without the cigarette that gives the air form,
the hand focus, the lips a sense of identity.
The way Shirley Levin chattered after concerts:
her fingers mimicking piano keys and the cigarette
they held galloping in heart-like fibrillations until
the thrill of it had unravelled in frayed strands of smoke.
1979: Sweet Lorraine, seventh, eighth chorus, and
I’m looking at the small black scallops above the keyboard,
a little history of smoke and jazz, improvisation as
a kind of forgetting. The music of cigarettes:
dawn stirs and lifts the smoke in dove-gray striations
that hang, then break, scatter, and regroup along
the sill where paperbacks warp in sunlight and the cat
claws housespiders. Cigarettes are the only way
to make bleakness nutritional, or at least useful,
something to do while feeling terrified. They cling
to the despair of certain domestic scenes — my father,
for instance, smoking L & M’s all night in the kitchen,
a sea of smoke risen to neck-level as I wander in
like some small craft drifting and lost in fog
while a distant lighthouse flares awhile and swings away.
Yes, they kill you, but so do television and bureacrats
and the drugged tedium of certain rooms piped
with tasteful music where we have all sat waiting
for someone to enter with a silver plate laden
with Camels and Lucky Strikes, someone who leans
into our ears and tells us that the day’s work is done,
and done well, offers us black coffee in white cups,
and whispers the way trees whisper, yes, yes, oh yes.