Posted on by waxyandpoetic

Oh My! That’s So Ekphrastic!

Ekphrasis, in Greek, means “description.” I’m a big fan of ekphrastic poetry, that genre that, on the most basic level, is writing something descriptive about a visual representation (a painting, a photo, a sculpture). As the Poetry Foundation defines it, “An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the ‘action’ of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning.” The Academy of American Poets offers some fine-tuning that syncs nicely with my own work, saying “[M]odern ekphrastic poems have generally shrugged off antiquity’s obsession with elaborate description, and instead have tried to interpret, inhabit, confront, and speak to their subjects.”

Since my first encounters with the poetry of Ferlinghetti, and my first attempts with the flaming giraffes of Dalì, I have grown quite fond of art as inspiration. Thus is born the first poem inspired by the art of David Sweeney. His work, if you’ll forgive the brief, Cliff Notes-style, non-poetic ekphrasis, reminds me of the dream-like canvases of the Surrealists; his paintings make use of collage, of mixed media, which always summon my attention, reminiscent of the way I gravitate to some of the works of Picasso, Ernst or Braque. I am especially drawn to the appearance of text–newspaper clippings, stenciled quotes, scribbled phrases–in his art; the intersection of image and word begging for the poet’s ekphrasis. Lest I ramble on too much, I leave you to look at his œuvre at your leisure. If you find something you like, snatch it up, it’s hard to find good original art these days.

And now, to the poem.

It was first inspired by David Sweeney’s painting #517.

It can also be found at http://www.davidsweeneyart.com/works/b/david-sweeney,paintings, the second painting from the top.
It can also be found at here, the second painting from the top.

The italics (except for the French), including the title, are taken from some articles in the NYTimes regarding air travel. The thrust of the poem, in language and subject, has changed repeatedly, and the last line was a surprise, unexpected in its return to a minor detail in the painting, as I finished this, draft version 1.5.

Whatever Happened to First Class?

First, let’s get things straight. The euphemism for first caste has got to go, cleared for takeoff–always a misnomer misnaming for misdirection. Even before da Vinci’s device and the Wrights’ winged wonder, the ocean-gliding, wave-riding masted masterpieces kept the dividing line pretty clear, offering free passage to free labor for the not-so-free folks packed in the hold, barely holding on to their humanity, barely holding on to their little-scrap lunch.

So what happened to first caste? Classy became the label rather than the behavior, fancy china replacing fine company, fancy curtain replacing fine linen. And in first caste, room to stretch and kick, lie flat as capital’s whore, 300 channels to choose as you charge IMac and IPad and IPod and IPhone and IBeeper and ISnob, sip champagne, the warm wet sandpaper towel wiping from your face the grime of those in the back of the bus, the tail of the plane, the bottom of the boat. High above, the 1 percent fly first class; the .1 percent fly Netjets; the .01 percent fly their own planes.

Meanwhile, tail-side, knees to chest, elbows tucked with three-pretzel packs and chocolate-chip puck, the chosen few of the 99% lucky to escape the surface, grouped into herds by booking for boarding, one movie on one screen, one position for your one-inch seat, unsettle in for takeoff and turbulence.

And on the ground, far below, the (un)lucky 99%, stick in traffic, hostage to the toll road trolls, opt for one of the 300 $ burgers at the 300 fast food joints for the 300 lbs, the only bubbles from the soda machine–bottom caste transport never felt good.

“You go into first class because it’s less horrible than coach.” No cash to pay outright, CapitalOne card hassled to the max? Then it is perhaps with the free upgrade, high miles in your frequent flier club, without mile high club fornicating to give the bumpy flight some purpose. Which seat do you book? Which level are you?

Platinum Premium or Bronze Business, Elite Economy or Cushy Coach
Poached Ivory or Plated Silver, Gaudy Gold or Dazzling Diamond
these are the new
Fabulous First, Satisfying Second, Thirsty Third, Struggling Steerage which were
Captain and mates and crew and slaves from
King and Court and Lords and Serfs. Plus ça change, the more it stays the same.

And somewhere in the middle, betwixt the heaven and the hell, the poet, drifting in his dirigible, observes them all.

Posted on by waxyandpoetic

Let’s get poetical, political, I wanna get poetical, political, let me hear the body politic talk!

For Margo.

W. S. Merwin once said that all poetry is political; Jean-Paul Sartre called for a littérature engagée, engaged in the politics, absurdities, and struggles of the human condition.  From Whitman to Merwin, Prévert to Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg to Chuck D, Gil Scott-Heron to Reg E. Gaines, Baudelaire to Césaire, Guru to Solaar, poetry has long been engaged with some struggle. The best poetry (or any art for that matter) frames for us a way to deal with the difficult; sometimes poets find just the right words to express our outrage or shock.  They speak in our silence, and use silence to speak.  Some avoid rhyme in their efforts to reason, some eschew reason so that we may escape through their rhyme.

Muddled clichés aside, my own attempts to grapple with Boston (and Newtown and Aurora and Oak Creek and Kabul and Baghdad and a million other  cities and lives) are still in process; being thunderstruck at the inaction of leaders and politicians, my own wordlessness still thumbs through Webster’s and the OED, looking for just the right utterance to break the silence.   Others have already cleared their throats, already put pen to paper, already clackety-clacked on keyboards.

So it is with Margo Berdeshevsky, brilliant poet and brilliant photographer; an artist, whose voice sings true, of whom Sartre and Merwin would be proud.  She is also a dear friend and kindred spirit, a “soul mate” in these days of increasing soullessness in our topsy-turvied world.  I share with you a brief excerpt from her “Postcards to the Body Politic” and link you to the full poem, as well as to ma chère Margo giving voice to the weight.  When, in troubled times, the politicos and the press fail to speak truth, to state the obvious, to ask the difficult questions, it is to the poets we must turn, and at this moment, to Margo:

Postcards to the Body Politic

i

But there’s more. First, I cannot write dear. I cannot call you dear. I am too deeply, deeply  — and I have never believed in. Before. But now so much less. No. So much less. Dear illusion of dear. Dear I-could-not-write. You will not mind. You do not love.

Dear body. Dear if-my-right-hand. Dear how can you love only your own soul? Dear why would you feed only one eye? Not the hand. Not the belly. How can you love the head, not skin, not the water?

You make me cry. You make me sadder than women, sadder than men, even sadder than your —No. You, and your guns. Do you even love your hands? Can you love your mind? Body dangerous. I try to call you dear. Enraged at your arms, enraged at your desire, enraged at your eyes. If I am too angry to love you — what, what will we do?

To read the entire poem, simply click here. And the streaming audio of Margo’s words.

Posted on by waxyandpoetic

M. Jordan, where is my painting? — NPM

The following is an attempt at a sonnet in French (panic not! a translation, rough like sandpaper, follows). For those francophones who follow the blog, it is not really a sonnet in French, given the sketchy scansion and non-rhymes of some lines. So let’s call it a faux-sonnet, or a fauxnnet, shall we?

 

 

La Société Surréaliste
 
 
Les araignées et les citrouilles font la grève,
dans laquelle je vois des immeubles flambés,
allumés par les dalmatiens-pompiers.
Au jardin, un chameau lit un journal, fume, rêve

de l’avenir, de l’eau.  Il feint d’ignorer l’élève
qui essayait de nouer un plan.  Mais il s’est
noué dans ses idées.  Et le chameau, il sait
libérer cette peste—ils s'associent à la grève.

Les araignées, les citrouilles sont sérieuses
bien que le chameau et l’élève dansent et chantent
en écoutant la musique des manifestants.

Je me demande:  Comment on capte le merveilleux?
La télé montre cette spectacle obsolète
et n’importe où quelque dieu se gratte la tête.

The spiders and pumpkins are on strike,
in which I see burning buildings
lit by firefighter-dalmatians.
In the park, a camel is reading a newspaper, smoking, dreaming
 
of the future, of water.  He pretends to ignore the student
who is trying to come up with a plan. But he's caught
up in his own ideas.  And the camel, he knows
how to free this pain in the neck--they join the strike.
 
The spiders and pumpkins are serious
even though the camel and the student sing and dance
while listening to the music of the protestors.
 
I wonder:  How do you get the marvelous?
The TV captures this obsolete spectacle
and where ever you like, some god is scratching his head.
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NPM–And afterwards, the villain wrote a villanelle!

Upon Discovering that the Only Thing in a Briefcase I Stole
Was a Bunch of Damn Poems
 
for robert phillips
 
What really pisses me off more than anything
(I mean, after the scraped and bloody hands)
is that some of these poems are rather interesting.

Most times I bring home CDs or something
I can sell easily, (like textbooks, nothing too grand).
What really pisses me off more than anything

is the absolute worthlessness of these stupid things,
no reward for a crime so perfectly planned,
though some of these poems are rather interesting.

It was late one afternoon, not a single
person walking in the lot, a literal no man’s land.
What really pisses me off more than anything

is not the broken glass tinkling
onto the ground, but the money I should have in my hand.
Though some of these poems are rather interesting

I can’t get a dime for their rambling,
(or the poet I’m sure), but damn
what really pisses me off more than anything
is that some of these poems are rather interesting.
Posted on by waxyandpoetic

Another NPM installment!

Making the Love Scene

 

you slamming the door is
(…a beautiful place to be born into
 
if you don’t mind some people dying all the time…)*
a smack of arrival.  I hear

squeak of Nike on linoleum, accented
by the rain outside.

it’s hard to pull myself off the couch
my butt lazily glued there during the

rainy day.  I do, to glue
my lips on your face before you

set down your bags.  Close your eyes
while my tongue dances on your

tongue, your lips.  My eyes close because
(Oh the world is a beautiful place to be born into
 
if you don’t much mind a few dead minds in the higher places)
your feel is a memory of my taste.

(Pictures of the Gone World can wait;
but then right in the middle of it comes the smiling mortician.)

And open—

Your skin smells of peppermint (that’s odd)
I never knew your tongue to be so sharp, nor your lips
to be so
                open.  Your mouth
     seems hollow.  Your eyes don’t follow mine
                                           as they dance from the nape of your neck
                                to your breast.

No bra?  Your nipples erect, a deep brown I
don’t know.  Your neck tastes like
candy.  Take hold of my hand
to the places I should know.

                                         I feel your left breast for the first time
                                         the white wet shirt a tease
                       I don’t know this panting
                       the heave that matches the pinch.
                                       Your hair breathes Herbal Essences, I thought
                                                    you used Pantene.

What happened to the cinnamon
that used to dance on your exhale?
The honey that used to drip from
your thighs?
                                                It’s all peppermint and crème,
                   it’s all liqueur and chocolate.  I don’t remember
                                              the join of your legs.  Wasn’t it
                               smoother?  Take
       my hand.  Do you know it?
Put it where I can remember.
Not between your legs, or at the sweat that
                                tingles between your breasts,
                                          but at the curve of your ear
                                                         or the slope of your navel,
                                                                take my hands
teach me.

I’ve never known you.

*all quotes, L. Ferlinghetti
Posted on by waxyandpoetic

Meanwhile at the Poetry Reading

Explaining the Poem

 

 

This first began percolating on the day I came across the corpse of a bird that flew into my sliding glass door, his head twisted like the bottom of a semi-colon, his wings brackets around the parenthetical body; of course it immediately drew recollections of Amelia Earhart, Kitty Hawk and the story of Daedalus and Icarus.  Interestingly enough, I had recently spilled melted wax near the spot where the bird lay, a souvenir or stain of a certain physical interlude involving, yes, candles, handcuffs and two…  Picking up the bird gave way to the Karate Kid movies, though I don’t really consider the third because it seemed so out of place.  The 80s reference is for me, and should be for the reader, a call to a simpler time in American cinema where stories were told, events shown and a special effect was added to drive a point home or try something new.  It is also a salute to The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet with which I have identified and immersed myself in my surfing on the net late at night, a cup of decaf in one hand, cordless mouse in the other.  As you can imagine the glories of 21st Century technology are dominant in the poem, foremost because it is typed.  The final line is a surrender, a sort of poetic salute to those who have braved death in the hopes of furthering some cause.  The final line is also a reference to the letter Ω which indeed means end, but can also be argued to be a representation of a U-turn thus turning the reader around to begin the poem again, a new journey with a new experience and perhaps, hopefully, a new end.

The Poem

freedom buzzing incessantly around my head,
a Zen moment, trapped in chopsticks
then clipped wings
on the table shuddering.  I recalled singing in a
musical called
Don’t You Wanna Be Free?
I nodded in unison with the seizing abstraction below me

Posted on by waxyandpoetic

National Poetry Month is here! Let’s celebrate with, well, a few poems.

In honor of NPM (not to be confused with NPH), every few days I’ll be posting a poem to the blog. Look for some things old, some things new, no things borrowed and maybe, just maybe, something purple.  I invite questions, comments, dialogue; let’s talk of poetry.

For our inaugural installment, I offer

First Words

 

I will wake quietly, only a hmmph to red-hued digits;
I will read aloud books, worderfalls flooding from tongue;
I will greet strangers and friends, poke fun at politicians and passers-by;
I will rise early to greet the sun, and join her as she puts herself to bed;
I will make phone calls and write letters, being careful to scratch out mistakes just so;
I will travel, getting lost in blank white spaces;
I will have cancellations, and be late due to my travels;
I will set giraffes on fire, a low flame that only barely begs attention;
I will drip water from my fingertips, and catch the drops in coffee cups;
I will drive late, jazz wafting from speakers, slow lolling French echoing in my ears;
I will beat the drum different, confusing marchers;
I will hope for mermaids with fish-heads and peach-flesh ripe for eating;
I will drink red wine and have my head spin burgundy thoughts;
I will make appointments, and arrive dressed in upside-down fedoras and corduroy pants;
I will scribble dribble and fall in love, not necessarily in that order;

I will ride zebras, sing incomprehensibly, walk rapidly and wear boxers; I will laugh out loud at
jokes in my head; I will cry when I read novels and see commercials;

I will have brief moments of silence,

and you will not know.

Posted on by waxyandpoetic

Un- Titled, in two parts

Un-

titled, in two parts

 

 

I.  Identity

crise always never knowing d’identité mirrors remain unhelpful crise photos only archival de conscience i’ve only ever known what i used to be, visions of what i will become crise what i am remains the (in)variable unknown d’identité reflection always foreign, a stranger—the ‘Hello my name is…’ forever blank;   i have at various times played the Black Widow Gambit, relying on who i was with Her and without;  and Her always either just leaving or just arriving; stay,  it seems, only applied to my execution  crise it is up for debate whether the scars make part of who i am or vice-versa d’identité  i’ve grown accustomed to not knowing my own name, moments where i do not respond to      … one time, after several drinks, i thought i met the man in the mirror—having passed out soon after, i forgot to ask his name   crise   i’ve carried around this cahier, grateful it’s never been lost (no one would know to whom it should be returned);  every word written with my right hand, but i can only tell you what the left looks like d’indentité  i remember very well what they both have caressed, including my own abandoned form;  no book i’ve ever owned has been inscribed; bills addressed to resident; despite regular prompt payments to the phone company, i’ve never heard it ring; it seems long ago i should have ceased posing the question, content with shadows, one-handed scribblings, unaddressed whispers, blank sheets, one hand, empty sheets… i’ve too often heard ‘Good bye.’  i’m holding out for just one ‘Good night ______’; just one.

II.  Obituary

 

The Greeks did not write obituaries; after a man died they only asked one question:
Did he have passion?
—Dean to Jonathan in “Serendipity”

 

DS, sometime poet, sometime friend, died last night due to complications under as yet misunderstood circumstances.  At this time, it is only confirmed that he died by his own hand.   His final days are a mystery, though it seems that pieces of his life remain less so.  It is certain that he loved, evidenced by the scarring of three vaguely female forms etched just below the skin on the left side of his chest. The women of his life were always either just leaving or just arriving (why wouldn’t they stay?)—reflections in his eyes and nothing more.  His struggle was complicated by the fact that he defined himself by what he used to be or what he would become; his inability to ever know who he was proved debilitating.                                           .   He was found with an un-dog-eared copy of Endless Life, a small black cahier and a fountain pen, from which the ink  would fall onto paper then leap onto loose lips, and  from loose lips, ink spatter, sprayed as much as said, would fall onto deaf ears and into mute eyes; we can say with confidence that too few understood.   His teeth were stained Bordeaux, he smelled of sage flower and vanilla.  Ink had shaded portions of his right hand and the tip of his left index finger.  His eyes were open. The room echoed with a sax and trumpet, a wine glass shatter.  Nearby, next to the drunken shards, a map, several roads marked “Too few, too few.”   He is survived by a few poems, some scattered, some tattered; by innumerous filled and dusty bookshelves; by the words bouleversant and authentic; by manuscripts long unopened.   Services have not yet been arranged, though it is thought that he only wanted one question to be asked by mourners, and if the answer should prove to be no, that he be buried without…