Poetry Matters with Barry Spacks

poem from the past I still like -- a true story

2011-03-13T22:45:00.000-07:00

SEARS & ROEBUCK

Mr. Roebuck upped and sold his shares
pretty early, having had it.

He lived the rest of his ninety years
modestly, in retirement.

Sniffing his garden's sensible airs,
marveling at his luck,

often he must have thought of Sears:
how Sears mucked on, poor cluck;

Sears making millions, millions! on his ashpit;
and Roebuck making...Roebuck.

Beautiful Faces

2010-12-10T11:38:00.000-08:00

A poem biding its time in the "possibles" file for years,
maybe with this morning's tweaking ready to be seen?

BEAUTIFUL FACES

Teachings that come in dreams are easily lost,
so teasing, ephemeral,
yet no use grabbing at them fist-like,
crushing dream-diamonds to sand.

Last night I woke from a dream of faces
poised between the male and female
and me as a dream figure there in the field among them
meditating, knees bending flat to the ground,

ideal posture: legs tucked, spine straight
-- mountain-like -- a dignity
I lack in waking life, for
there my knees strain upward, ungainly.

This dream-story focused
on those faces blending the genders,
skillful means and wisdom united.
The dream was telling me such union

would henceforth be my prime devotion,
to rise up from meditative calm
and go about the brutal world
reflecting grace. So, there on my cushion

my dreamed knees at last kept flatly down...
wait, wait, let me experiment with them here
in the so-called "real,"
in this actual body, fierce of will, frail, daunted by pride.

poem

2010-09-04T17:28:00.000-07:00

I must stop apologizing for how seldom I get to the blog.
Okay. Stopped.

Here's a piece that seemed to want to go out
into the world at this point.

TO A WRITER FRIEND WHO PONDERS HOW HE MIGHT ESCAPE
THE DISASTER OF ATTACHMENT TO AN OVERWHELMING "I"

IKI
sincere classiness
no excess, no
tawdry ostentation

SHISUMI
astringency
the blur
of melting sweetness
rots the palate
of the spirit

KARUMI
the ordinary
everyday graces

SABI
loneliness (better: "solitude")

spare brushstrokes the loved one's
single cry

WABI
simplicity

YUUGEN
the mystery

USHIN
with heart

Poem of a Purely Local Hero

2010-06-22T21:57:00.000-07:00

An earlier poem -- always a pleasure to work
at something playful:

WAY TO GO

Reading in my slippers
I follow written ways
to sniff fine dust in Kurdistan
where camels bow their knees.

I travel hardly moving,
by turning pages roam
where words declare they're countries
as love songs claim the moon.

From Turkish sweets and minarets
next moment I'm at sea
to brave a storm off Melbourne's coast
and never miss high tea.

There's comfort in such travel,
traversing a paper map --
the hard climb up the Matterhorn
with a kitten in my lap.

Rothko

2010-05-15T07:57:00.000-07:00

My friend Dan Gerber just returned from
NYC with great enthusiasm for the play
RED and its evocation of the ways of
Rothko, painter of profundities, and
this caused me to recall an early
poem of homage of mine:

PANELS FOR ROTHKO

Past Egypt's dead he made his way,
past shards and pipers, fragments of kouroi,
smiles on lips of archaic stone
in the humming tombs of the basement galleries;
to preach the righteousness of color,
the plainness at the life of things,
like warmth in food, like hearthfires
in deep caves.

In a suit and tie he painted this:
a meadow where a thousand birds
have gathered in their distances:
an apple that no yearning eye
has gazed upon: a light that comes
from itself, a light from itself alone,
no distillate of shade.

How like a snail a man bequeaths
a hole: a solitude: a cup.
And some a cup that pleasure fills
and overflows, and some a wound
that will not stop, that will not shut
its mouth. Here's driftwood, seasawed down
to honesty. Here's salt, once rock.
Here's silk, spun out of leafmeal
in a worm.

2010-04-08T20:26:00.000-07:00

Poor Blog, so long neglected! But I do return now
and then, getting in the habit of posting poems
that have been with me for a great while and are
unlikely to appear elsewhere. Poems (& blogs)
feel like intimates deserving attention and care:
Be considerate, Barry!

Here's an April poem:

SPRING

Meant for children & growing things,
for hope and lilies,
Spring seeks the swamp of the snakes to spread
her Cypress knees.

*

This warming season
the moth-fly scatters its dust,
the sage gnat and the tiddlywink flea
like piccolo music leap into day.

*

Tall & proud, the waifs of Spring,
little ones, sprites on a balance-bar,
bounce like lambs in the April fields.
Plump plum blossoms flirt with the bees.

2010-02-19T12:55:00.000-08:00

THE LOOSENING OF FORMS

My friend the poet Rebecca Foust
will be coming down to Santa Barbara
soon to teach a mini-course on
the sonnet while in town for
a reading. Been thinking about
the magic 8/6 structure of the
sonnet and the way it seems to
work even when unrhymed
("gigantesque," I believe Lowell
called the unrhymed sonnet effect
in his HISTORY).

Here's an example, loosely rhymed,
a poem that's "never been kissed,"
tinkered with over many years,
always rejected by editors (always,
to the poet, a mystery as to why).

PATTERNS OF IMPERFECTION

Some seek perfection, a seamless fit,
but something always muddens if
it’s found. Better an off-beat sound.
Better to cultivate rough weeds
to mar a neat, relentless lawn,
strike counterthrust of flint to stir
a spark to flare a shining on
from edges less well-met.

Take crystals: at a “chaos-point”
they seed -- where atoms make no sense.
From matter slightly out of joint
appears each little face that glints.
Weavers insert a deft flaw in their fabric
by which the soul of the maker springs free.

new poem

2010-01-28T22:21:00.000-08:00

Thought to offer a poem that just arrived;
will likely take at least twenty years to
believe with some assurance that it's
"right," in so-called final form.

LETTER

I wrote 206 words today, took
22,000 breaths of air
and released every one of them
back to the Commons.

I ate various creatures with my white teeth,
smiled twice meaningfully, 83 times for sake of diplomacy,
fell in love with my usual ration, 9,
and tried manfully to keep this letter brief

and I nominate for Notion of the Week
the fact that death is perfectly safe,
you can give yourself there with all your might
and off you'll drift, unendable ride.

Plus also I washed the dishes twice
managed to let 7 heart-knots slip...
the daily stuff, cat's dish, quip,
wended its way like Thy Will Be Done.

I remembered some goodnesses, also times
I played the prick; endured regret;
thought of this or that with no purpose or reason,
thought of you, and you. And sat like a mountain.

A Gist Poem

2010-01-08T20:47:00.000-08:00

Can't remember if I've already posted this
short poem on the blog before -- if so, it's
time seems to have come round again.

Very plain, it attempts with a certain
playfulness to summarize the gist of
Buddhist practice as I've experienced it
after close to twenty years of study.

Its most immediate reference to the
teachings would be the challenging and
quintessential Heart Sutra.

THE PRACTICE

understanding overcoming
understanding understanding
overcoming understanding
overcoming overcoming

poems about poem-making

2010-01-02T08:09:00.000-08:00

An abiding weakness for many poets
is the poem-about-itself. Often seen
as a sort of vice -- oh no, not another
one! -- we strive to avoid this subject
because it's so common, insular,
in consequence many poems about
poem-making turning out rather
playful as they try to find fresh
ways of saying "it's what we do."

Another offering of a piece from
way back:

LETTER FROM THE POEM-CAT

Dear Madam:

I'm a creature like your cat,
a sort of mini-muscled acrobat;
not flesh and fur, and yet I purr like her.

When you're obsessed, some project all astir,
a pencil in your teeth, books on the floor,
no room for even elbows anymore,

it's then cat leaps – "It must be time for love!" --
and settles on your lap. Well, I'm like that:
I lick your squiggly brain, my habitat.

I'm unheard music coiled in soft cat-sleep
gone yearning up toward sound through breath and heart.
You'll come awake with whiskers in your throat,

a little face intent behind your eyes
that stares and stares and wants its nice surprise:
some food for thought, a stroke, a scratch, a pat.

It's me!
Yours felinely,

The Poem-Cat.

end-year sum-up poem

2009-12-27T08:56:00.000-08:00

Delving around among the files I found
this one, never published, which seemed
to fit this time of the year.

WEATHER CHANGE

We sad and beautiful animals, strange
the way we yearn for weather-change!

A solid performer earns his kiss
through hummingbird-brilliance, nonetheless

wanders night-mazes of sought-importance
to fearful dead-ends, dank alleys sensed

as breakthroughs, though only time occurs
in labyrinths without Minotaurs.

Oh, endlessly Venus tires of Mars,
old plans implode like black-holed stars,

ramblers at neighborhood windows feel longing
for what sounds like love-play within (such crowing!),

tsunami-spirits with hopeful faces
seek sprightlier riffs that mock to pieces

misery-mongers whose fig-leaf claim
damps the sweet hours with animal-shame.

(Often I've dreamt of an elevator
filled with dear friends gathered in forever

lifting at speed in an urge toward bliss,
in a reverence for passion and happiness).

winter light

2009-12-24T16:12:00.000-08:00

An old poem came to hand answering
a request for a sonnet, and since it's
of the solstice season....

RECALLING MR. FROST
for Nick and Eva Linfield

A dauntless taper on a Christmas tree
where apples hang with old world stars of straw
brings Mr. Frost to mind -- his blazonry --
for though the other wicks give up to smoke
this last grows strong as if to tease the law
we alter by, and challenging its gist
burns on and on: the flicker of a joke
in favor of presuming to persist.

No miracles seem likely in our day;
no dove-fire eloquence or shaken flow
of flame tongues. Some achieve a wry display
burning for meaning bravely as they go
out to the dark that waits beyond each door
as if to tell us what a light is for.

My Gosh, Haven't Been Here Since October

2009-12-11T11:31:00.000-08:00

Thought I'd extend the notion of a strictly
"poetry" blog just a bit to allow for more
openness to associated chat.

For example, want to note that titles have
always appealed to me. I like to play
the name-it game for bands, books, babies.
Most recent idea for a new collection of poems
is FREEDOM AND THE NOW, probably too
portentious, pretentious to use, but still....

Sort of a Promised Land lilt of language.

Here's an old piece of mine, never published,
that seems to anticipate such a cover notion
for recent work.

SONG OF THE WOODEN MAN
after “The Jewel Mirror Samadhi”
by Ch’an Master Tung-shan Liang-chieh (Tozan Ryokai)

Because there is the base
there is house, cat, cow;
jeweled pedestals
fine clothing.

The stone woman offers up the dance;
the wooden man begins to sing.

Excitement, doubt—both pitfalls,
for nothing comes nor goes.
Path and traveler merging,
you are not it; it is actually you.

Hiding a heron in the moonlight;
filling a silver bowl with snow.

Yi with his archer’s skill
strikes home at hundreds of paces;
but arrow-heads meeting point-on? --
this lies beyond all targeting.

The stone woman offers up the dance;
the wooden man begins to sing.

This is the host within the host:
a tethered horse, secretly whirling,
ecstatic rat, outwardly calm.
You have it now, so keep it well.

Hiding a heron in the moonlight.
Filling a silver bowl with snow.

Memory Poems

2009-10-05T21:27:00.000-07:00

Many of my recent poems deal with
memories. Here's one that covers,
symbolically, a lot of personal
territory:

TURNING-UP

Being a mensch meant
turning-up,
like with schoolboy fights:
I never won, not once,
but never a time
I didn't turn-up
scared, hopeless, fighting
Georgie Beckman, Irving Berman,
a ring of guys around us shouting
"hit, hit."

The world kept saying
"I don't like you, Spacks,
meet me after school in the alley."

And I'd turn-up.

teacher's dream

2009-09-11T19:53:00.000-07:00

A persisting dream of being late
to teach a class has in recent
months given way to dreams
of getting there (though a
related dream of losing
items of value came up recently
with one of its most cunning
variations -- in this one I couldn't
find where I'd parked my car so
was roaming all over the place
searching for it, driving IN MY CAR).

Dreams, occasions for contemplation.

Here's a poem that tried to catch
the spirit of the late-teacher motif:

DAMNED DREAM

Oh no, not again, yes, here it comes,
another go at The Dream with its tons
of gothic buildings to wander through.

I'm late to teach, can't find the classroom...
couldn't I pick up a dream for once
where I'm early, ready, in the zone?

But wait, she's phoning for info, Ms. Hope,
English Department Secretary,
oh thank you, thank you, Precious One,

for she's got the room number, but speaking too fast,
I'd better jot down directions but can't
find a pencil and every scrap of paper's

filled with English Department words
margin to margin -- insanely late
and can you believe it? that's when they hit

the freeze frame on me, movie's over,
me in a frenzy from knowing (somehow)
that three dogged students grow old hanging on

in the old-fashioned classroom with yellowy shades
pulled low, and of course I understand
this dream, not hard to interpret, just

the story of my life: how
to get there get there help me to get there
before they've all gone away.

A MOVIE FOR POETS

2009-08-11T21:02:00.000-07:00

Wanted to urge y'all to see the film
JULIE & JULIA if you haven't already.

Please put it on your list.

In addition to the acting and writing
you've likely heard about, it reveals
extraordinary insights into female
nature and is also about the artist's
passion to gain recognition and
GET THINGS RIGHT.

Here's a poem of mine from way back,
one of several taking Julia for a hero.
Here she just makes a cameo appearance
which supports the point made above.
I dedicated it to one of my daughters
who is a particular stickler at getting
things right (and a weeper just like me),

WEEPER
for Simms Teramoto

Just because I tend to weep
at funerals, at weddings,

sometimes at well-spiced noodle-dishes;

once while reading Kurt Vonnegut
where he wrote that The Statler Brothers, great singers,
adopted the name of their band from a brand
of paper towels, and once when Julia
Child spent twenty-two pages telling
how properly to prepare french bread,

doesn't mean (recalling Goethe-,
Beethoven-loving Nazis) that I'm

a good guy, just because I weep...
but God, it feels that way!

Buddha-piece

2009-07-09T11:38:00.000-07:00

I've just discovered that what I've been
doing all these years as a painter has
a niche-name, NARRATIVE PAINTING
(who knew?) Also it might even count
as VISUAL POETRY, imagine!

This is a poetry blog, but given my
fall into cursed CATEGORY as above,
I can even post the words on paintings,
right? They count? Please say yes.

Here's the language on one Buddha-piece
currently under construction:

SOME WANT, SO DON'T HAVE

SOME HAVE!

SOME ARE JUST ANNOYING

a tiny poem

2009-07-07T14:38:00.000-07:00

Months go by (what else can they do?) and
the blog is neglected. But today something
(zazen?) urged me to offer a short poem
on zazen.

GREEN HAIR

Roshi, this sitting, so hard! Please say,
are enlightened people different from how
I seem to be?

"Oh yes: some chant mantra 'me, me!'
Some whine less loud than you,
some with green hair."

something to Blog-about

2009-05-07T11:21:00.000-07:00

Hello Dear Readers -- with the thought
that my poor blog, which has suffered
such neglect, deserves a more frequent
replenishment, here's today's post in
my long-running timed poem-exchange with
the young New York poet Jordan Rome.

15

11:05 a.m.

FIFTEEN MINUTE POEM

In the first three minutes,
with nothing, really, to say,
I'll breathe, seek aspiration,
hope to pass as someone somewhat loveable.

Along about minute four
there will gather a certain trepidation
(since words -- given time-scheme -- must shortly arrive)
and so will stir, strive

through two full minutes of my Fifteen Minute Poem:
note how I grew, studied, married,
suffered, divorced...
God-awful stuff to score through at once,

and in the next six minutes write
furiously as dark chords resound
my default Fifteen Minute Poem
which yet again will praise

wu wei, guys, doing nothing, letting it be,
living in my socks, no sweat, faking
enlightenment
in my as-if way.

11:20

- b
---

MEANDERING POEMS

2009-05-02T09:40:00.000-07:00

As a kind of exercise I've been experimenting
with light-hearted poems that slide from one
notation to another in pursuit of play on
sober "commentary."

I think such poems are likely the work of my
heteronym ZAYRE KASERLA, whose single
publication -- THE COMPLETE POEMS OF
ZAYRE KASERLA BY BARRY SPACKS --
may someday appear.

An example:

WATER

What is this thing about water? it's all over the place.
When they worry about Mars it's always
"Is there water?"

Consider how everybody would lighten up
if they'd hush about the sea, la mar
touched by moonlight,

or just stopped saying
"Much of our bodies are water"
or "Water finds its own level." This is true,

and there's washing of various body parts
to account for the stuff's popularity,
plus, come to think of it, cataracts

and wells and rafting
and have I mentioned kayaks?
all of these would go unsung, so maybe

it's asking too much to shut up about water,
for it's hard to imagine a single comment
about Hawaii surviving if we went that way.

do playful poems count?

2009-02-15T13:28:00.000-08:00

A SEAGULL

Let's say you brought a seagull home for a pet
and your mother said Watch out, they'll eat your eyes.
She sort of tosses that off on her way to work
but without the smirk that means she means it cute.

Okay, she has you worried -- you like your eyes.
This makes you think you'd better feed that bird
(You'd named her Erma, God know why)
so you open her a can of tuna fish --

hoo-boy, the way that gull goes at that fish! --
the can bangs through the kitchen spreading grease,
the gull beak-pecks it like a nail-drive gun,
you even thought she'd (Erma) eat the can

and hey, she tries! Watch out, the jagged edges!
That's you, forgetting birds are ignorant
and brutal. Is she gazing at your face?
Dessert? Or is she grateful, feeling love?

Admit it, you had feared she'd eat your eyes
but now you're mooning eye to eye with her.
Erma, you say, you're such a crazy fuck,
and here's the crazy part: she starts to coo.

She rubs her yellow beak against your cheek.
She hops up on your head and waves her wings.
She defecates white tuna-waste upon you
and damn it, shit, she goes and eats your eyes.

Somebody Stop Me

2009-02-14T16:13:00.000-08:00

This is the sort of poem it's hard not to write,
I guess because it gets the endorphins going
and you have the brief illusion that others
will be as tickled as you are while the words
do their thing.

WHY IS THAT?

"Why?" Now there's a question.
Why this cancer of the spleen,
this palmetto branch where the white moths hover,
these particular bangs and scrapes
from the recycling collectors?

Why this romance of Tim's with the albino girl,
why that particular Brenda of the pink eyelashes
among all the albino girls he might have chosen,
and why, come to think of it,
why the Albigensian Crusade?

Plus why is a dawn song called
an "Alba" in Spain
but an "Aubade" in France
when it's just a question of a few miles between,
and what to do about that?

And what to do
with the pressure within Tim
to get so far into shy Brenda
that he'd reach the chocolates and reds
she hides beneath her whiteness.

Or what to do
about my own distaste for Wonder Bread
(still thinking whiteness)
as if this made me
somehow special?

Just asking.

Brenda, on the other hand
has put up with one hell of a lot
during her 23 years on earth,
and is hoping she and Tim
might have conversations, like in the movies,

pert and sassy: he'll do Hugh Grant
and she'll reply in Monica -- no,
belay that, what was I thinking?
Reply as Jennifer, as Jay-Lo, whoever,
but Monica's no proper name

for a romantic stand-by.
Brenda would never fantasize herself
as a Monica, believe me,
and -- here my questioning goes a bit deeper --
what do Brenda and Monica share?

The two girls, what do they have in common?
Lust, of course, and an instinct for a nice profit,
also ecstasy while wandering the aisles
at Sur La Table, all those swish Espresso Machines,
the ceramic roosters, the little medallions

for placing round the neck of wine bottles,
telling them, in effect "You're white." "You're red."
And those gizmos measuring amounts of pasta,
this much for one, this much for two,
depending upon the number of guests to be fed.

back after a rest with 50 WORDS

2009-02-08T10:57:00.000-08:00

Hey, world-out-there, It's closing in on a year
since I last posted, shameful. Reason: I'd run
out of odds and ends of poetry items and
could only imagine pasting up my own
work, but today thought, well, and what the
hell, why not do that until something more
engaging came along.

So...a recent short one that seemed
appropriate for breaking a long silence:

50 WORDS

I gave up argument some years ago
along with cigarettes and misery,
but the words still hang around...
gotta cut down to a daily ration

always saving out a few
in case comes along a pressing need
to compose a bit of loveliness
to whisper to a lovely lady.

ESSENTIAL WORKER

2008-03-23T14:40:00.000-07:00

We're having another "poetry responds to images"
affair in Santa Barbara next week, with
10 local poets writing in response to photographs
of Essential Workers. Here's my contribution:

THE CROSSING GUARD
after a photograph by Nell Campbell

This is my poem about the Crossing Guard,
about the look of him in his reflector vest
with his whistle hanging down,
those bad super-size sunglasses,
the almost-full-scale cowboy hat.

We're talking one full-scale dude here, this Crossing Guard.
I know him only from his portrait,
holding his yellow Stop sign,
which likely says "Go" or "Slow" on the other side.

In the photograph he stands in a striped walkway
offering a quiet stare that could stop Bigfoot.
"Don't mess with me, Brother," this stare seems to say.
Don't mess with him, Annie, he's your Crossing Guard.

In my poem I want to record something nice about him,
how all the children go safely to and fro
because of him.

He might have turned out to be a Wisconsin Pavarotti.
He might have gone huge as a billionaire in hedge funds.
Instead he's the Crossing Guard.

It's good the children don't get run over.

It's good they skip off to learn fractions,
reach home for milk and cookies.

I think I'll steal an idea for this poem
from The Catcher in the Rye.
I'll say how he's one devoted hombre
who scorned to choose a career breaking heads
as a wrestler,
who'd never be the guy who shot your barking dog.
No, no, he skirted right around the darker side
to guide us on our way.
He's the Crossing Guard.

sestina

2008-02-26T10:56:00.000-08:00

Amazed to discover it's been so many months since
my last posting. I'll make amends by offering a
much too lengthy poem. This one comes from
an exchange with my former student Anna Burke.
Our rule is that we use one-word titles, and the
return poem must use that one word somewhere.

Haven't worked in forms for a time, so I burdened
Anna with the following. Now she has to use the
word "Sestina" in her reply (sorry Anna).

SESTINA

Speak of the Devil's a saying said
when a person just spoken-of enters a room,
or: Name him, the Evil One's here; Lord,
Your recipe has worked us up so
that we're always a changeable weather system,
each whiff of our sweetness edged with grim.

Call evil "Devil," fob guilt on that famous Grim
Eminence? When all's done and said
such naming misleads, it's clear this system's
arranged to give madness maximum room:
forever we're all at least half so 'n so's
unacceptable to a scourging Lord.

That's us -- but You made us this way, Lord.
We seek relief from split nature's grim
desiring, the very air we breathe so
in-out complex, cheering words must be said
to cover the ugly: the living room's
where we have to hang out with Others; the system

demands that we not insist how the system's
rigged to send praises to you, "benign" Lord,
our eyelids sewn shut in the Time-Out room
as we hide the sides of us sere and grim,
pursuer, pursued. Unkept brother, it's said
we fake a surplus of good in us, sew

each rip in life's cloth of gold, when it's torn so
cheerily faux-repaired -- the system
afflicts us with guilt for unkindly words said,
a threat of low grades from our teacher-Lord
with more snarky sides seeping through. Forgive grim
assessments of human nature, there's room

for change, blowing fairy dust through the room
to make all more comfortable, yearning so
to escape from cynics like me barking grim
pronouncements of evil as part of Your system;
confess, you like us that way, dear Lord.
"It's God's fault I'm handsome," the Devil said.

This poem, said the Devil, alive in my room,
razzes the Lord that He's culpable, so
should redact His system, unbearably grim.

Memoir Poem

2007-10-30T12:24:00.000-07:00

I'm about to teach my Early Personal History
course again, where we read various memoirs
of childhood and the students write about
some aspect of their lives up to the age of 17.

Most of them write prose memoir directly, but
I'm open to any form, could be a play or a
series of poems or a movie script.

Most of my own poems are, in effect, memoir.
Here's one that has worked the same
material over the years, stretching the
details out at times, at other times
condensing...the latest try at a final
version.

WORDS

I never learned a merchant's trade
but dwelt instead as a favored guest
in the slow house of the words.

My laboring father lugged sacks of potatoes,
banana stalks heaved on either shoulder,
napped at the "Y," owned no car;
set me to shelling lima beans
from rotting pods, spoke to me
in all his hard life
maybe three or four times.

The children of workers, urged to get A's,
finish school with ink-stained fingers,
an early sensitivity lost,
those weekend days when I worked at our fruit store:
easeful melons, gorgeous eggplant,
before the words words words.

Red

2007-10-23T12:02:00.000-07:00

A recent exchange-poem:

RED

painting my altar red
promptly a fly makes a sticky landing

by pencil-tip: emergency rescue

O fly, buzzy creature neatly set free,
now you have red red feet

I too, I too have often escaped
feet red and sometimes burning
spared by pencil-tip release
for what purpose, what learning?

the shames of red: some I've known
bleeding their red to lightest pink
tiptoe in memory out of sight
seeking a long lost white

and she oh she who bared (so sweet)
her carapace,
her red red feet

1957

2007-10-14T23:03:00.000-07:00

I was asked to write a poem for the opening of an
art show in town celebrating the year 1957.
Seemed like a good chance to be playful. Here it
is, down Memory Lane, in long lines that the
blog refuses to indent to show continuity,
but you can't have everything, or
whatchagonnado?

1957

All that concerned me in 1957 was my sex life,
and we don't want to go there.

Meanwhile that year
Liz Taylor shifted from one marriage to another;
a brave little black girl and eight friends
faced down slavering bigots in Little Rock,
Arkansas;
and Mario A. Gianini died, the inventor of the
maraschino cherry.
(I googled to recapture the details).

Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize in 1957
while In Tulsa, Oklahoma, they buried a brand
new Chevy Belvedere in a time capsule,
an atomic-bomb-proof vault under the lawn
of the Tulsa County Courthouse
along with some gasoline in case that fuel would
have disappeared from human memory by 2007
when the car was found blessedly safe from the
bomb but ruined by water seepage
and having no need for the thoughtfully supplied
gasoline.

Oh, and on Saturday October 5th of that Wunderyahr,
in game three of the World Series, a Yankee rookie
named Kubek,
provided two home runs against the Braves,
great stuff for a rookie, Kubek in fact
declared Rookie of the Year, and where is he now?

Oh, wait, lest we forget, the day before Game Three
the Soviets scared us shitless by launching Sputnik
and sending the country into an overdrive of strive
that still shows no sign of abating to this very day.

I noted all these happenings and more, of course,
back in '57;
I reacted, I babbled, I opined,
but my real interest was my sex life, should I be
ashamed to tell you that?
Should I lie and say that Sputnik or Kubic or the
Nobel prize
took the dominant seat in my consciousness
a while?
Or Liz Taylor? Or the Chevy Belvedere?

A Priest, a Rabbi and a Poet Walk into a Novel...

2007-10-05T08:23:00.000-07:00

I still write oh 4 or 5 poems a week at the
urging of various exchanges, but now,
composing a novel where one of the
characters is a poet, voila: a new opportunity.

Thought I'd post an example of this character's
pieces. It comes into the narrative to
amplify the notion that this loveable guy had a
penchant for "precocious deconstructivism,"
performing incomprehensibly even before
Ashbery.

Perpend:

DILEMMA OF THE FAT CATS

The oaken leaves attempt a take-off
at every flighty whim of the wind,
yet many's the twig won't let them go.

This serves as reminder for us that fat cats
can grow so clutchy-attached to themselves
they seldom will reach our enlightened ground.

Look how their rage sweeps them off at loose ends,
these Fat Cats, to cluster along a North Wall
where the chance remark of a Network Executive

stirs them to plunge with a lethal ice-dagger,
a jury-proof weapon that melts once it kills,
as (ha!) down here, we Others are basking

in kindlier weathers, with lucky toehold
on precincts made safe from intense foul play,
thus feeling no need to enhance our enchantments

as big pomposo clouds roll in
while sugar trees yield like affable uncles
and Eleanora unbuttons her shirt.

One of My Daily Poems

2007-09-20T22:55:00.000-07:00

So ashamed, been neglecting the Blog, also discovering
comments I never responded to -- will try to do better
(tied up with lots of obligations to lotsa different
writing projects).

I still keep up about 5 or 6 poem exchanges with various
friends. Here's a recent 10-minute poem from my
back 'n forth with Jordan Rome:

Madmen rage, crazed fanatics
promised virgins in heaven
handshakes from a killer god
who loves beards, they know,
and cowed women.

Arrogant clergy preach holy suicide
to cultists dreaming of fried Americans
their sick murder-hearts
bloody the house of our lives
screaming righteousness
as the dogs of endless war
leap from their foaming lips.

Yet someday, some say,
some long, long years away,
the very word "war"
as found on aging paper
may need footnote explanation
for the children.

"You see, dear ones,
once humans tore at each other,
mindlessly, to the death,
& no one now
knows why."

Poem in Progress

2007-07-29T14:15:00.000-07:00

Working on a new poem composed of fragments
all involved in one way or another in DEFINING
EROS (long-time obsession), I sent a copy to
my pal David Ferry and he said that the parts he
liked were "the raw bits." That helped to lessen
the thing, it was sprawling all over the place
and pontificating, I took it down by close to half,
sent that version to my pal Dan Gerber and he did
an "if it were mine" version for me, retrieving
some of the stuff from a longer version I'd shown
him earlier.

This offering, then, is a mini case-study.
I'm showing here the post-Dave version, then
the Dan version, then the present state of the
thing, the late July '07 Barry version, oh how sick
you will be of these verses, Faithful Reader, by the
time you fall away to blessed silence beyond the end
of an unforgivably lengthy post!

POST DAVID FERRY VERSION

DEFINING EROS

1.

Desire words of Rilke Catullus Rumi
lift the heavy body toward delicacy
as does the scent before the savoring
of tea.

*

That naked girl in spectacles
reading Borges.

*

May pleasuring prevail
and all dear bodies know full joy!

(Name one of us who'd not be kissed all over).

2.

Shall we whisper the shy secret?
that the lover feels Great Bliss
while feeling what he feels she feels
to feel his hands, his lips.

*

How beautiful we were
with our youth at play,
not even knowing
despite our heat
that we were burning.

3.

In the Golden Age
butterflies mated with humans:

from this our desire for light touches,
our yearning to fly.

*

What is she trying to tell me
with this daily traipsing from room to room
wearing nothing but tiny white socks?

*
The brain, vast sexual organ,
fed by fantasy, images, yes,
ah for centuries
engorged by words.

*

Mummy-wrapped words of Sappho:

may that shining girl
come to me.

*

Luscious
beneath a gauzy blouse and skirt...

unclothed already she would be
the meaning
without its poem

*

Glorious moment
as laughing she observes
how even the thought of her
transforms him.

4.

Seventeen, for a day I had a job
door to door with a book of pictures
supposed to sell refrigerators.

Insane. But one woman let me come in
to sales-talk as she ironed,
room curtained, dim.

She already had a refrigerator.

For years I carried a sense of the musk
in that room,

too young, too much a salesman to see

what she wanted to give away.

DAN GERBER'S RE-WRITE

DEFINING EROS

1.

"Love is a certain
inborn suffering," Andreas Capellanus said.

The beautiful young with their eyes sewn shut
flow by hand, by swirling of hair,
dark honey, like music.

Are these not the saints of Eros?

All praise to the vertical smile.
How else to be born again?

2.

Shall we whisper the shy secret?
that the lover feels Great Bliss
feeling what he feels she feels,
feeling his hands, his lips.

How beautiful
with our youth at play,
not even knowing
despite your heat
we were burning.

3.

In the Golden Age
butterflies mated with humans:
from this
our desire for light touches, from this
our yearning to fly.

What is she trying to tell me
daily traipsing from room to room
in nothing but tiny white socks?

That girl, naked in spectacles,
reading Borges.

The brain, vast sexual organ,
fed by fantasy, images, for centuries
engorged with words.

Mummy-wrapped words of Sappho:

may that shining girl
come to me.

Luscious
beneath her diaphanous dress....

unclothed already she would
be the meaning
without its poem

Glorious moment
as laughing she observes
how even the thought of her
transforms him.

4.

Seventeen,
a job I held for one day,
door to door with a book of photos
attempting to sell refrigerators.

Insane, but one lone woman let me in
to sales-talk as she ironed,
room curtained, dim. And
She already had a refrigerator.

For years
I have carried the sense of the
musk in that room,
too young,
too earnest to see
what she wanted to give away.

PRESENT STATE OF THE POEM:

DEFINING EROS

1.

The young with their eyes sewn shut
flow by hand, by swirling hair,
dark honey of desire...

are these not the saints of Eros?

All praise to the vertical smile --
how else to be born again?

2.

Shall we whisper the shy secret?
that the lover feels Great Bliss
feeling what he feels she feels,
feeling his hands, his lips.

How beautiful
with our youth at play,
not even knowing
despite our heat
that we were burning.

3.

In the Golden Age
butterflies mated with humans:
from this our desire for light touches;
from this our yearning to fly.

*

What is she trying to tell me
daily traipsing from room to room
in nothing but tiny white socks?

*

The brain, vast sexual organ,
fed by fantasy, images, for centuries
engorged with words.

*

That girl, naked, in spectacles,
reading Borges.

*

Mummy-wrapped words of Sappho:

may that shining girl
come to me.

*

Luscious
beneath her diaphanous dress....

unclothed already she would be
the meaning
without its poem.

*

Glorious moment
as laughing she observes
how even the thought of her
transforms him.

4.

Seventeen --
a job I held for one day
door to door with a book of photos
attempting to sell refrigerators.

Insane, but one lone woman let me in
to sales-talk as she ironed,
room curtained, dim.

She already had a refrigerator.

For years
I've carried the sense
of the musk in that room,

too young,
too earnest to see
what she'd wanted to give away.

Farewell Newspaper Column

2007-06-17T13:30:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the folks who commented on earlier posts, and
my-bad for being lost in samsara and out of the 'sphere
for a good while.

Turning over my poetry column in our local paper to the
new poet laureate of Santa Barbara, the gifted Perie Longo,
I finished my two year tour with a nod to one of my
life-long Faves, Richard Wilbur -- thought to post that
interview:

POETRY MATTERS

" Beauty joined to energy"
-- from "Museum Piece" by Richard Wilbur

At eighty-five, winner of two Pulitzer prizes among many
other recognitions, Richard Wilbur's still going strong in
his rustic retreat in Cummington, Massachusetts. The
last time he read here in town, we caught a beach walk
and he learned with awe and a guffaw that you can use
mayonnaise to treat a case of beach tar.

He's also a devoted gardener, as meticulous in that art
as he is with the use of words. I offered him on that
Santa Barbara visit four lines I wrote in celebration of
the way he approaches even the least exalted of activities
with a religious passion:

ARTIST-GARDENER

A lifetime deploying the high in the low,
with loam caulked hands amid vines he harvests
his okra, slicing the pods for frying
sidewise, so, that their star shapes show.

I've interviewed him again recently because he's about to
join the rare company of living authors who will have their
life's work enshrined in The Library of America.

I see you, along with Frost, as a great formal experimenter.
Does that characterization hit the mark for you?

"I'm honored by the comparison, and I hope it's true. Much
of the poetry which considers itself "experimental" is
characterized by leaving something out: meter, rhyme,
stanza, clarity, eloquence, breadth of reference,
memorability. It is really much more dangerous and
experimental to see if one can still play the whole
instrument as Frost did."

As a translator you're particularly known for your versions
of Moliere, but now I hear you're focused on Corneille?

"In New England it's good to have winter projects which are
the equivalent to quilt-making. Harcourt will bring out this
spring last winter's rendering of Corneille's The Theatre of
Illusion, and now I'm on the fifth act of his Le Menteur,
(The Teacher) which is exhilarating and morally precarious."

You've done children's verse and word-play books like
Opposites and Differences. How do these amusements
fit in with your other writing?

"However grown-up and straight-faced a poem may be, if
it's any good it has something in common with successful
children's verse: economy, surprise, aliveness of language,
and above all sure timing and control of tone. Actually, my
"opposites" poems are continuous with my more serious work
in their play with what I call the happy breakage of mental
patterns. They appeal to the child's secret knowledge that
the world is not tidy."

"Breaking of mental patterns" makes me think of one of my
favorites Wilbur poems, "Mind." Is it a central poem for you?

Yes, central to all my experience of poetry. (Reading):

Mind in its purest play is like some bat
That beats about in caverns all alone,
Contriving by a kind of senseless wit
Not to conclude against a wall of stone.

It has no need to falter or explore;
Darkly it knows what obstacles are there,
And so may weave and flitter, dip and soar
In perfect courses through the blackest air.

And has this simile a like perfection?
The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save
That in the very happiest intellection
A graceful error may correct the cave.

Any words of advice for a young poet first starting out?

Let that aspiring poet not be a comfortable, unambitious
captive of the contemporary, but instead read English-
language poetry all the way back to Beowulf, memorize
some of what delights, and conceive of poetry as a
conversation between the poets of all times.

I couldn't imagine a more satisfying final word for a final
column than this from a master practitioner, as Poetry
Matters passes on to the talented hands of my follower
as Santa Barbara's Poet Laureate, Perie Longo.

Learning from Ron Offen

2007-04-24T11:58:00.000-07:00

Carried away by our April Poetry Month Festival in
Santa Barbara, I haven't found my way back here in
a while.

Thought today I'd register a thank-you to Ron Offen,
editor of FREE LUNCH, who's one of those rare guys who
gives critique when you offer him a submission, I don't
know how he finds the time.

He accepted one poem of mine the other day after helping me
fiddle here and there with improving changes, and took me
in hand about another, where he loved the concluding stanza
but not the one leading up to it, his note turning me on
to a course of re-writing.

Have a glance at these two for the contrast.

ORIGINAL VERSION:

FALL AWAY

I looked everywhere
but could not find myself
until I sensed your inward sense
that once was only beauty
of the body.

We are a thirst that drinks itself.
We are the ringing and the bell
as we fall away
as we fall away
like water.

REVISED VERSION (responding to Ron's urging as to
the need for a stronger, more integrating "set-up"):

FALL AWAY

Thoughts pass through us
invisibly as breath.
We have no need to find ourselves
who learn to trust an inward sense
beyond the beauty of the body.

We are a thirst that drinks itself.
We are the ringing and the bell
as we fall away
as we fall away
like water.

Koan

2007-04-06T20:07:00.000-07:00

Back in February I posted some words about my New Year's
resolution, which came down to the intent to work at
understanding the compulsion we all (?) share to overcome
difficulties, resistence, lack, defeat.

That post went as follows:

My new year's resolution, as a life-long striver,
was "to understand overcoming." This turned into
a poem of aspiration yesterday, jotted down on my
last wallet-carried slip of paper:

TWO WORD POEM

Overcoming
overcoming

Then, just the other day, a solution to my self-imposed
koan floated into my mind -- lines from Eliot's "Ash Wednesday":

"Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still."

Yes: at one and same time, to care and not to care,
thus overcoming overcoming. And why, you might ask,
wouldn't one praise and welcome this compulsion to
overcome? Why bother overcoming-overcoming?

Ah, could be...that's YOUR koan!

The Zayre Archive

2007-04-04T07:15:00.000-07:00

Time for another Zayre Kaserla piece from the Zayre Archive
(Zayre seldom titles, often sprawls his lines around on the
page, but the Blog-Meister usually insists on regularizing
strictly to left-justification, ah well, neatliness, terrible
habit):

only human males
rage hot for sex
in every season
pulsing at chilled iron gates
closely locked till spring

and so in youth we called them
"great women,"
the girls who, miracle!
said "yes," (who knew
what urged them?)

that small
whispered word, it
entered us
and exploded

Words from one of my FAVES, Billy Collins

2007-04-03T12:57:00.000-07:00

In an interview for my poetry column recently,
Billy Collins told me a little story that shouldn't
be forgotten, so I offer it here in his words:

"Poetry seems to provide, more than ever,
an alternative to the din of public language
(advertising, politics, etc) and a more admirable
set of values than we find in consumer-mad
society. I read recently about a poetry
competition held in Barcelona every year. The
third place poet receives a silver rose, the
second place winner receives a golden rose,
and the first place poet--for having written
the very best poem--receives a real rose. So
take that, all you fans of bling."

Poetry Matters in the Local Paper

2007-03-26T15:53:00.000-07:00

Been off traveling for a week, back to the blog at last.

Thought I'd show one of the poetry columns I write
monthly for our local weekly.

The one I chose offers a short profile of Perie Longo,
the woman who has just been selected to take over from
me as the second official Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara.

Barry Spacks
1111 Bath Street
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
(805) 966-9959

POETRY MATTERS

And when the drum beats like thunder
that is the time to raise off earth.

-- Perie Longo, from "Coming of Age"

A poem's energy arrows fully home to our feelings when offered by the
living voice of its maker, so it's good to know that a new CD has
appeared with readings by a major Santa Barbara poetic talent,
Perie Longo,

Available at Chaucer's and at various poetry events, this compilation
--Waiting for Jamal -- gives us 26 key pieces drawn from the career of
this gifted whirlwind of a woman who has been a mainstay at the
Santa Barbara Writers Conference, a pioneer in the art of poetry-
therapy (President of the Association for Poetry Therapy) and area
coordinator and teacher for the California-Poets-in-the-Schools.

Recently Perie was asked to undertake what proved to be a strange,
funny, and unsettling experience as a woman writer performing in
Kuwait. Her reading and lecture stint received extensive front page
news coverage over there. Her poems tend to be expansive beyond
the limits of this column, but let me give you a taste, at least, of
one of her amusing and politically savvy Kuwait memory-pieces, a
poem in which the speaker finds herself rushed off to an appearance
driven by

...the driver, Habeep...
Habeep is a good name for him. Beep, beep.
...

The Sheraton lobby swarms with white robes,
not a woman in sight.

...

In the light, I am a crow
in a field of lilies

...

I shift foot to foot in my high heel shoes...
ask if anyone knows Jamal. “I am Jamal,” the man
says. I ask where the reception is for the Minister.
He shrugs his shoulders. “I am not that Jamal.”

-- from "Searching for Jamal"

In another poem from Kuwait, the visitor's official hostess can't be
dissuaded from pleasing her with gifts.

She buys me saffron in a bottle with its red filaments 
that will turn rice yellow, so yellow
you become  like the sun, eating it.
-- from "At the Kuwait Marketplace with Haifa"

The poet ranges among all sorts of subjects in her work,
but writes about relationships with a particularly compelling
tenderness and wit. Here's the ending of her celebrated
“Fishing With My Father,” which served as the title poem of
a literary anthology in 2005. The speaker records her pleasure
as a child just in "...being with my father  / in his joy" as a fisherman. The poem concludes:

If I blinked my eyes thirty-nine times, 
on the fortieth a muskie would strike, that fish  
my father’s dream he took to heaven I think. 
When I held his arm at his passing, 
clung to his hand like no fish ever had, 
he let go and I slipped off, like that.  
If I blink thirty-nine times, on the fortieth  
maybe I’ll catch a glimpse of him.

What else to say about Perie? She wrote the dedication
poem, carved in stone, for Santa Barbara's Douglas Family
Preserve, and runs the annual three day Santa Barbara Summer
Poetry Workshop, as well as teaching poem-making privately.
Her third print collection, Nothing Behind But Sky: a journey
through grief (Artamo Press) is also out this fall, and she's
featured in an anthology CD recently released, a Laureate Project
as a fund-raiser in support of April Poetry Month's yearly festival.
This one, Eight Santa Barbara Poets, offers a sampler from a pod-
casting project making spoken-word segments from local poets
available via iTUNES and on the Net. For more info on
The Podcasting Poets of Santa Barbara, tune in to www.sbpoetry.net.

By Anon the Irisher

2007-03-16T21:30:00.002-07:00

I owe so much to Irish poets, I wanted to
set something emerald green on the blog
for March 17th.

I don't recall where I picked up the following,
and hope I'm right that it's by Anon.

Let's call it a Secular Irish Prayer:

May those who love us, love us;
And those who don't love us,
May God turn their hearts....
And if He doesn't turn their hearts,
May He turn their ankles
So we may know them by their limps.

The Great Marina

2007-03-15T22:05:00.001-07:00

I've just completed another Reading & Writing Poetry course
in the College of Creative Studies at UCSB.

One of the most gifted students in the class, Kate Rogalsky,
added two translations from Tsvetaeva to her own work in
her final-project chapbook.

With her permission I want to display one of these renderings.
So, with thanks to the devoted hands of Ekaterina / Katia /
Kate / Kat, this untitled lyric from the great Marina:

I do not think, or argue, or complain.
Or sleep.
I long for neither sun, nor moon, nor sea.
Nor ship.

I do not feel the heat amidst these walls,
Nor garden’s green,
Nor do I long for a desired gift,
Foreseen.

Neither the morning gladdens nor the trolley’s
Ring-singing run.
I live, forgetting date and age
And daylight sun.

I am – a dancer on a tightrope slashed
And hewn.
I am – a shadow’s shadow: lunatic
Of two dark moons.

~M. Tsvetaeva, 1913, Translated from the Russian

A Homeless Poem

2007-03-14T08:16:00.000-07:00

Busy-busy, but here I am again.

I've been (among 97 other things) preparing
the text of a new collection, scheduled for August
from WordTech's Cherry Grove imprint.

This turns out to be a relatively brief
gathering of 50-some poems, with lots
left out for the sake of unified effect.

Which leaves quite a few pieces shivering,
feeling rejected by the very hand
that made them. So I thought I'd put
one or more out on the Blog now or then,
to make amends.

How come the following choice failed to be
chosen? Well, it's hard out here for a poem.

LEARNING TO SKY

The teacher who would show us how to sky
assumes we've known intricacies of pain,
have tumbled through the razor-vats of woe
respectfully, and slow.

At first this skying master has us slay
rage-monsters, cut the snake-vines of desire,
lead ignorance a way toward skillful means
as tamer of the hunger and the fire.

Such fasting done, the higher arts begin:
to practice laughter at the rage of thought
and sense how borrowed is this shroud our skin,
rapt tourists of the Emptiness we're in

where only loss of lust releases love.
Gone groundless through the bliss we're students of
we leave the formal coffins of the eye,
at last at one with sky, and sky, and sky!

Dream-Work

2007-03-06T13:36:00.000-08:00

Usually my literary dreams consist of long slow
improbable movies or national epics, but the
other night I was given the following, a
bit of advice from Who-Knows-What-or-Where.

Only when I wrote it down did I see that
it has the look of a haiku (if not the
necessary indirection):

It's not being good
that gets you into heaven
but your hours of joy

Free-Range Dust

2007-03-02T11:23:00.000-08:00

In now over 50 years of university teaching I've
mainly hammered away at cultivating Negative Capability
(allow complexity, resist fanaticism).

I mention this in a poetry blog because a stance
against fascistic modes of thought leads to a desire
that poetry be allowed to free-range beyond
the terror of imprisoning categories.

My manifesto asserts that every true poem is
an experiment, and I say down with procrustean
scholasticism.

There's a sort of poem-work I do which is more
playful, more casual than most of my productions;
at times I think of it as channeled by my
heteronym "Zayre Kaserla" (pronounced like
the country Zaire).

Here. for an example, is a recent Kaserla
which happens to center on the
anti-Procrustean theme.

POEM INTERMINGLING ASHES & DUST

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,"
but what does this mean?

That we wall off the ashes from the dust? --
for why?

Why all this need for fierce tidiness? --
because we've reached the messy end-times?

messy, messy, and some in denial
who wish to keep brains with the brains, hair

with hair? I myself would never complain
if your ashes happened to mix with my dust

but maybe that's me, maybe millions out there
keep watch on the ashes and dust each morning,

uh-oh, somebody's mixed in some ashes
and ruined our once-pure dust, we're stuck

with all this mucked up dust, not to mention
there's also dust in the ashes now

and you can't recycle commingled stuff,
gotta drive all the way to the dump.

From the Peruvian

2007-02-28T07:13:00.000-08:00

The other day we had a visit in town from
Clayton Eshelman, poet, editor, best known
as the devoted translator of the Peruvian
modernist Vallejo.

Clayton gave a magnificent presentation
of his Vallejo renderings for my group of
student poets and others at the College of
Creative Studies at UCSB.

A sample:

Paris, October 1936

From all of this I am the only one who leaves.
From this bench I go away, from my pants,
from my great situation, from my actions,
from my number split side to side,
from all of this I am the only one who leaves.

From the Champs Elysées or as the strange
alley of the Moon makes a turn,
my death goes away, my cradle leaves,
and, surrounded by people, alone, cut loose,
my human resemblance turns around
and dispatches its shadows one by one.

And I move away from everything, since everything
remains to create my alibi:
my shoe, its eyelet, as well as its mud
and even the bend in the elbow
of my own buttoned shirt.

Depending On One Capital Letter

2007-02-27T10:11:00.000-08:00

8-Letter Poem

more
Less

A Demand

2007-02-26T16:22:00.000-08:00

(draft of a poem)

Guy at the poetry reading
asks show-offy questions.
No interest in answers.

I gaze at the poet's
dusty shoes.

In a Q & A session
after a Dalai Lama teaching
a man demands he be told
"in a few simple words"

how to achieve Enlightenment.

The kindly teacher,
without any words,
gazes at him intently
for a good while

and begins to weep.

Every Paris in the Morning

2007-02-25T11:22:00.000-08:00

This blog centers on poetry matters, but wants
to range a bit today. The post still counts as poetry-
centered though what I'm offering isa a bit from a
recently completed screenplay (in collaboration
with my pal and UCSB colleague Ted Macker)
because the song below is adapted from an early
poem of mine.

Here's how it looks in the script...imagine a
youthful female blues-singer handling it, someone
like Joss Stone. BTW, the "Dylan" here is female.

INT. COMMUNITY COLLEGE OFFICE - DAY
Greg shakes hands with an imposingly professorial-
looking man (UNCLE ROB) who sits behind a large
desk in his drab office.

The scene plays out over Dylan’s soulful singing:

DYLAN (O.S.)
(singing)

Every Paris in the morning
When the mist is on the street
All the lovers fall to dreaming
Nose to nose and feet to feet
In the small-talk of the dawning
Like one body in their heat
Every Paris in the morning
When the mist...
Is on the street.

While the faithful dogs are yawning
While the suicides are scheming
All the lovers fall to dreaming
In this clearinghouse of woes
All the lovers fall to dreaming
And their dreams are bittersweet
Every Paris in the morning
When the mist...
Is on the street.

All the lovers fall to dreaming
And they dream their dreams of those
Lying under clumsy covers
Close beside their newer lovers
Who are dreaming dreams of others
Nose to nose and feet to feet
Every Paris in the morning
When the mist...
Is on the street.

Goodbye, Subtitle

2007-02-24T08:40:00.000-08:00

Been giving serious thought to the vexed question of
whether to add a sub-title to my next collection,
close to being ready to send it out.

The title is FOOD FOR THE JOURNEY (title poem
below).

Here's how it would look with the sub- tacked on:

FOOD FOR THE JOURNEY
a memoir in poems

Helpful, in pointing out the organizing notion
central to the book, or limiting in suggesting
that the contents shouldn't be read just as
individual poems?

Writing about the question here, I veer toeard
just keeping the sub-title to myself. Thank you,
Blog.

Goodbye, Subtitle.

Title poem:

WHITEWATER VISION

Like everyone else I've served my time
lying under the weight of a mountain
breathing stones; yet always my blood,
like leveling water, knows where it's wanted.

*

Once I had a whitewater vision:
beneath the rage of the rapids I sensed
the undersound of the river's sound,
indistinguishable from silence.

*

Who am I? Not a solving...a seeing.
I'd view the storm through eyes of calm.
I'd speak to say
where the silence is.

*

On days when it seems the food for the journey
is clay, not bread, and the spirit famished,
as dusk transfigures everything
I pause, near silence: listening.

Shoe-Haiku

2007-02-23T09:33:00.000-08:00

As the last example (for the moment) of my practice
of exchange-poetry, here's a completed renga with
Lawrence and Kerry as comrade players.

As you'll see, we ride very loosely on the rules,
most often veering into senryu, more inspired
by Kerouac's "American Haiku" than the astringencies
of the classic form.

OLD SHOES

Looking in his father's closet
after the funeral
ten pair of old shoes
-l

dust that hides under the bed
once sun-dazzled through the air
-b

Under the suitcase
Old workboots in the closet --
they were married then
-k

840,000,000 steps
on the way to the Bardo
-l

walk my path a while,
a teacher's path -- through darkness
children with bright eyes
-b

The path from his house to the stream --
walked while thinking of women
-k

huge, non-human, yes,
yet always for him the Muse
leaves girlish footprints
-b

the very first thing she noticed
his ancient Taryn Rose loafers
-l

the shoes in the hall,
thrown into a cardboard box,
car driving away.
-k

carried her into the house
warmed water to wash her feet
-b

home for a duck or death for a crow
just beneath the surface --
this fathomless ocean
-l

barefoot with toes painted coral,
won't hear talk of autumn leaves
-k

The Big Easy flooded and broken
high in that magnolia tree
hang a pair of old shoes
-l

a wave of great waters came;
winds, rouse waves of compassion
-b

wailing of children,
weeds and stones strewn in the houses
after retreating water
-k

that red wine of suffering
so many sipping
-l

hunters, gatherers,
a woman one hundred five
holding a child's hand
-b

mailing blankets to Houston,
her own children warm and fed
-k

when all's been taken,
oh for an old pair of shoes,
an old tossed out pot
-b

bronzed for his sixty-fifth birthday
his first pair of shoes
-l

Salt on the front steps,
Three gulls perched on the roof –
Still, three pictures hanging
-k

old eyes need a doctor's touch:
off he goes in his old shoes
-b

Art

2007-02-22T10:27:00.000-08:00

Just to show a bit of a sequence of 84s, here are a few links
from one where Lawrence started us off on the theme
of "Art." Note that his first posting has "+"-signs to indicate
that he's working with stanzas rather than a single 84.

ART

This calling to be fully present
with style
one does ask to be an artist
an old chair
so many asses eased

+

art
lurks alone,
waiting
for
dawn
and the passerby's unsuspecting gaze
to fall
just before the
gasp.

*

his family comfy at home
note this madman, fated to art,
out in the storm,
waiting for a masterstroke

*

"Burning down my house is the best thing I ever did."
said the Sufi to
the World's soul
from the flames.

*

the persistence of art

we were meant to play

here we are most excellent

unwearied by all
that is not art

This goes on for another 16 links, and there are hundreds of other thematic sequences.

*************

My new year's resolution, as a life-long striver, was "Understanding overcoming," which turned into
a poem of aspiration yesterday, jotted down on my last wallet-carried slip of paper:

TWO WORD POEM

Overcoming
overcoming

Introducing 84s

2007-02-21T19:18:00.000-08:00

My birthday, shared with W.H. Auden.

I want to continue putting out examples of ongoing poem-exchanges.
with a recently concluded sequence of 84s. Each link contains exactly
84 characters (letters or punctuation, not spaces). Why 84? Any arbitrary
number would do, for this is mainly a practice in seeking concision, but
84 represents a sort of modest tip of the hat to the Buddha, who was said
to have left 84,000 different teachings because of the variety of human
sensibilities -- the opposite of one-size-fits-all.

Lawrence and I keep two of these sequences going at all times, taking
turns starting new ones once a theme seems to have come to a natural
ending. Mostly a single 84 is sent (using the word-counter on the computer
to zero in on the required length). Now and then we get going on a sequence,
with "+" between links to indicate that we're into a multi-stanza
offering. Otherwise we just use a "*" to indicate the end of our turn,
and we don't bother to label who's writing what (the Buddha smiles
over that). This post is longening -- the example comes tomorrow!

POEM PING-PONG

2007-02-20T12:55:00.000-08:00

Since I started out yesterday talking about exchanges with other poets,
thought I'd follow up with a sample of my verbal ping-pong game
with Donna Rudolph. As mentioned, with this exchange the only rule
is to respond to the theme set by one's colleague poet at the
end of her/his contribution.

Here's a single exchange as an example ("-d" obviously is Donna, "-b" me):

(FIRE)

In the hand
in the bush
there's fire.

Let's tell it like it is
(or might be)
truth like water
Kali's tongue
pouring sorrows down the mountain
cleansing drenching
touching tearing
Routing out the quivering child
Delivering him,
basket-borne
down into the swaying green-eyed sea.

-d

(ASSERTION)

These words, half-lies we spend our strength on,
white acres of mist declared to be mountains,
cunning assertions of tuneful thought
like "decorous slow quadrilles of the stars"

must have a purpose, refusing to cease
despite our knowing that we must cease.
"The miniature thunder of amplified ants!"
"The hummingbird's wing-seethe!" Is there a use

in saying that blood is unsayably-purple

within us? that breath thrums the drums of the lungs?

Tell us this earth is God's terminal cancer,

We'll pour us some words out, like these, about that.

-b

next theme (KALI)

A POETRY BLOG

2007-02-19T11:36:00.000-08:00

This will be a poetry blog, sometimes involved with trying out
new stuff as it comes along.

I keep the daily energies flowing through exchanges with
friends, these based on various rules.

With Lawrence E. Lione of Santa Monica, CA. I do haiku renga
(the third hand here belongs to Kelly O'Keefe in Boston) and
a form I invented called "84's" (each link composed of exactly
84 characters).

With Donna Rudolph, northern CA., I exchange on themes
each poet sets the other.

With Jordan Rome, former student taking an MFA a Sarah
Lawrence in N.Y., the rule of exchange is time-limits: we shoot
5, 10, or 15 minute poems back and forth, have literally
thousands of pages of these stored up by now through four
years of practice.

As an illustration, here's what the Barry/Jordan exchange
came to today (now and then one of these warm-up exercises
leads to a draft taken seriously and promoted to the Active
Poem Writing file).

5

8:44 p.m.

no one eats what they want at all times
or gathers the pleats in the sewing as well
as they might at all times or wrestles with bears
hardly ever and no one murders as well
as they do on TV what an act to follow plus
no one clips at their toe nails a lot
if they're busy cooking the food they don't want
sometimes

and no one loves enough at all times
or at any time or speaks so sassy
that everyone in the room turns round
the way they do on TV when no one
loves enough or speaks so sassy
most of the time and let's not be fooled
because who believes he gets enough
cream for his hair or registered mail?

8:49

- b (me)
---

15

3:52 p.m.

Story of the Pumpkin

Back, back, back,
long time ago, so early in our culture
people living at that time
called it the past. Earth still flat
and Gawd had yet to create the Elk
or quartz. An orange tree
stood in an open field,
almost touching the incomplete
sky. Two oranges grew
on the same branch and were
constantly fighting.
Who was going to be sweeter,
more brilliant in color,
have more seeds. Their bickering
was heard for miles;
it’s why fish have no ears.
One day, a huge cloud appeared
and the two oranges thought
that, surely, the best orange was the biggest,
and so they swelled
and swelled, trying to out do each other
till eventually the tree branch could not hold them
and they fell. Over the years
they grew so angry at each other that they lost
most of their sweetness.
They stayed huge and had families,
giant competitions over who could get the biggest.
Then cross pollination was invented,
then genetic alteration. Today,
at State Fairs, there are pumpkins
the size of Volkswagens.

4:07

- j (Jordan)
---