A Little Poem

Factors

While tricycles of fat destroy lip parades
On the lecture circuit,
Gnomic genocidal peace laboratories
Crash the party.

Entangled tribes of infected speleologists
Convene another ecstatic remedy
Of growth and hegemony.
They allow no movement.
Our leaders have flown the coop.

J. H. Prynne's Red D Gypsum from the collection Furtherance

Here's a pretty representative excerpt from the amazing Red D Gypsum----


Top-work the frame to chalk white yet against less
clear tremolo flotation, sudden demerged racing
downsize nutrient plume to risk appetite so born
at here D plate mirror swap pleas can never shine;
depleted words all light and gladed in picket fault
back flattened silently. Crimpen interfold your
spectrum yellow, taunted now slippery bright, red
gully regained through the wood rewound in felt.

Peter Seaton's The Son Master

An exerpt from the long prose poem The Son Master
by Peter Seaton----


To which, to take charge, this feature could be any idea of the need for a substitute for an advantage
over the sound fracture plate extended rather than dug out, and I could use white line looks to a wall of dark
red stone. The shape of one too is so hard that to take charge we had all survived. The elastic remains in the
eyes to clear it over. This is a preposition, a possible sight of everyone's appearance without the business people
touching. Great logs of the moon used also for legs, light complicated by catastrophe instructions, to move
somewhere with a bang and a knock out of us, we know enough. Knocked flat near the conventional center,
rest and have dinner and wait all morning so it must have been the rain that fell. The machine cares, but those
two can be the same, the moon experience of space of sky throwing out dance and dance invasion.

Two Poems by Clark Coolidge (from the collection Own Face)

The Icing Up It Turns To
for M.P.'s without music


When, meaning where, will the wire go down,
meaning would, beneath the portion of tree,
substitute cracking, effected by the lower
portion, mood, of the sprung cloud, signifying
an uncompleted lace or lack of power.
A lash of wisdom for the bending.






But It Says Nothing


But it says nothing. And one is as quiet
as if to say nothing moves me. Then
there is the chair. And one speaks of
the chair sitting at the table.
Scraping against surfaces, opening the mouth.
The object is a piece of thing before. One
shifts in a chair and opens the talk.
And the time it says nothing one moves.
The table is too long as the wall. Not
a thing but it stays and one opens
as a mouth will begin. Speaking of
the table, nothing but to avoid that
of the wall. One could return over and over
to the chair, the wall one is sitting at.
Least ways it says nothing. And the
thing is, it stays still before
speaking of. The object of nothing, even
speech.

Two Poems by Bill Berkson (from Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems)

On Ice

Doors of jostled vicinity
An eager angle extending in the sky a grey chasm
Tip of island street morning wash
A waking minute pointed to end quote
Squeeze left in diamond-beaded industry
Wedgeful elaborations desist
Shut behind us without saying
White lights from the powder-keg days



If I Pray To Anyone It Is To You

If I pray to anyone it is to you.
You make a U-turn and are immediately apprehended
By the power vested in me and taken away from you
Because you are minus identity at this moment
Where you linger
In a bad frame of mind
Like some weather on earth
Perpetually stained, and it looks like home.

So borrow a shiny pen
From the highway patrol
And see the boats, instant pairs
That idle steadily
On the fortuitous tides.
A grey caulk-expanse for hammers,
As a lady takes a doughnut from a car trunk.

You never know what lands to the eye,
Seeing air stir water visibly.
But water comes to hide it.
Just a mole's margin of sand in any case.
And the nib flows.

Appreciating Philip Guston

I came to Guston's work years ago through my admiration for Morton Feldman's music and reading of their childhood friendship which Feldman broke off in the '60s when Guston abandoned abstract expressionism for the "cartoony" figural work seen in these paintings. Feldman's doctrinaire attitude seems ugly and narrow minded in the face of so much beauty (not to mention irony) in Guston's late works. They look especially good seen close up in person because of their textured surfaces.

Great Poetry by Natalie Lyalin and Julia Story

I've recently been very impressed by these two writers. The books are Natalie Lyalin's Pink and Hot Pink Habitat and Julia Story's Post Moxie.

Being mostly at a loss for explaining what it is that excites me about these and others of my favorite poetry books (I'm still very new at this), I'll be brief.

Both of these women are exploring similar formal and stylistic territory so excuse me if I lump them together somewhat. Both books consist of cycles of what are basically prose poems though the emphasis is clearly on the poetry here. Both also focus quite narrowly on the personal life experiences of a female narrator, presumably the author, and do so in highly evolved personal vocabularies. There are wonderfully odd conceptual juxtapositions and subtly evocative wordplay in both. Story's Post Moxie is the more delicate and introspective of the two while Lyalin's Pink and Hot Pink Habitat is the more brash and playful. Both are stunning in the sophistication of the writing skills on display and both were revelatory to me personally as examples of what I'm finding I most enjoy in contemporary poetry.