Summer Flowers for Denise, 1978
ARCHIVE
University of Washington
1994
daydreaming w/ Bob Arnold
Bright Sad Star
Bright sad star
fell down from the sky,
but she's going back there.
Brand new,
brand now
revenge.
She was going back up there,
blazing, falling star.
The world is a heaving bucket full-to-the-brim-of dirt
with a sparse sprinkling of joy on top
— and that sprinkling is made of stardom.
They'll all be sorry.
He thought about ugliness and beauty
and how things slip through
your fingers like powder,
and wondered whether or not
he had any real sympathy for
her,
who he knew, would in the future be tiny and
exposed and at the mercy of forces
that she could never control.
Beauty will save the world, he resolved — Idiot.
Her thoughts were in monochrome —
giving her the feeling and pressure of
an explicit migraine.
An austere psychological aesthetic.
It all droned on in her head
nihilistically.
Bright sad star
fell down from the sky.
______________________
Richard Cabut
Disorderly Magic
Far West Press, 2023
The Penny Poet of Portsmouth is definitely a wonder, quite a find, and actually a book I often wondered was anyone capable of writing — centering around Robert Dunn, who I believe once upon a time sent me poems as submission. A highly curious book that works against all odds being a biography of an essentially street poet in back bay old Portsmouth, N.H., who the author signs onto, much to her own surprise (and ours), gaining an excellent book size portrait of a 'nobody’. This isn’t supposed to work in big-name-poet America, but it does, searching into that interior existence far from the maddening crowd. This is where I believe actual life lives, rather than the hubbub that drives existence, and so few have the opportunity to ever feel or see this revealed. More interesting than Dunn is the book itself which seems a combined effort of the author’s eye and compassion, Dunn being available, and even the publisher (Counterpoint) taking on the project.
[ BA ]
Counterpoint, 2017
.
"My homeland is a suitcase"
MAHMOUD DARWISH (1941-2008)
ALSO READ:
"Heading Toward a Second Nakba" by David Shulman
New York Review of Books, October 19, 2023
Posted September 20, 2023, weeks before
the savagery in, and from, Israel
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There You Are
There you are
this cold day
boiling the water on the stove
pouring the herbs into the pot
hawthorn, rose;
buying the tulips
& looking at them, holding
your heart in your hands at the table
saying please, please, to nobody else
here in the kitchen with you.
How hard, how heavy this all is.
How beautiful, these things you do,
in case they help, these things you do
which, although you haven't said it yet,
say that you want to live.
The Call
"No" is the wildest word we consign to Language.
EMILY DICKINSON
Come, I'll give you everything: every glory,
the rarest and most beautiful of seeds
so as to plant more glories, flowers
that will explode from those seeds
and then bloom, poisonous and sweet
with an aftertang of delight and loathing —
look at this one, so dull, and yet so bright.
Even the leaves that will at last
all fall, in the guise of leaves,
more cutting than piano wire,
cruel, piercing music, splint-
ers of gold and death — all yours.
Yes, all you need ( how easy! ) is to say yes.
_______________
Ana Luisa Amaral
WORLD
translated by Margaret Jull Costa
New Directions, 2023