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Thursday, June 13, 2024
Wednesday, June 12, 2024
Tuesday, June 11, 2024
Monday, June 10, 2024
GEORGE KALAMARAS ~
Walking the Night Woods, Taking the Darkness
into the Cells of My Body, I Realize All I've
Ever Realized Is Words Only and, Thus,
Only Part of Who I Am
And stood in a star-sparked meadow. And heard
lost parts of myself in the barred owl's screech,
thunder in the long wood. Cutover I
walked through. Deadfall in the hardwood river
bottom. Chokecherries. Ripple-wind. Marshy
maidenhair ferns among the hummock scrub.
Said I wished I. Said words that wouldn't work.
Said and said till I broke the saying whole.
Yes, I'm a hound-blur man. Scent is the way
I speak. Rabbit-scratch. Quail boiling out
of thicket cover. Fractured word-fracture
toward the primordial pull of pre-phrase
sound. Midnight as dawn in sugar maples.
Oak. In hound-dog snout taking in the ground.
_________________
George Kalamaras
What My Hound Dog
Is Scenting Through
the Sloughgrass Is a
Way of Scenting Me
Wolfson Press, 2023
Sunday, June 9, 2024
Saturday, June 8, 2024
Friday, June 7, 2024
NAM LE ~
36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem
[1. Diasporic]
In English, mind You.
You dink I write Yiknamee?
Shame on You.
It was Your violence dumbed me
Smeared me, reaved me —
Your war I don't remember
And won't let You forget —
Moved me
From place and sufficiency.
From everything I didn't know
I didn't know
I would've known
You would've known.
Dis place ment
Everything to me
Before the power went
Home. Shame on me.
What do I know?
What's Vietnamese in me
Could fit in a poem.
________________
Nam Le
36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem
Knopf 2024
Thursday, June 6, 2024
Wednesday, June 5, 2024
Tuesday, June 4, 2024
Monday, June 3, 2024
Sunday, June 2, 2024
Saturday, June 1, 2024
Friday, May 31, 2024
NEW YORKER DRAWINGS POEMS ~
_______________________________
Before I started writing and living poetry, which was about the same time I was studying judo, there was that time I picked up my father's pen, who was drawing out blueprints for construction jobs he was planning at the dining room table where we were both stationed, and in his dawdle away from the serious work, he would show me one more cartoon sketch he'd come up with, and I'd try to copy the flair and humor he had caught. I'm still drawing (see my book Poets Who Sleep), the judo outfit was worn into tatters, but the poetry is here every day. . .even if I see that most American poetry has expanded into a business, polemics and babbling, we still have those drawing cartoons, or what my weekly New Yorker subscription terms "Drawings." When I was a judo-boy at my local Boys' Club, which naturally took me to Japan, funny how it works — it also landed me more into the soft hidden nest of poetry and haiku, which is where I see the very best of the New Yorker drawings, these blessed cartoonists. I've been reading the magazine for now 50 years. Slipping past most of what is called poetry, never mind the short stories (I like to read books and wait to read Thomas McGuane and Alice Munro there) and gloriously catch myself in the flytrap of the cartoons. The best anywhere. I'm not sure if I have all the artists names right since I can barely read their haiku modest signatures, but I believe the three drawings I am showing here are by Andy Friedman, Harry Bliss, and Roland High. Poets if there ever were three.
[ BA ]
Harry Bliss
Roland High
Andy Friedman
The New Yorker
May 27, 2024
Thursday, May 30, 2024
Wednesday, May 29, 2024
Tuesday, May 28, 2024
Monday, May 27, 2024
Sunday, May 26, 2024
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