Category: Uncategorized

Someone says the darkness is inside you. Another says its in your neighbor. But there is no darkness, only poverty and wanton ignorance. The latter can be seen in daylight: the crowing for death, vengeance fixated on ideology–violent demagogues, "Baby Hitlers" are all over the place. Ding Dong! "Who 's there?" "Ann Coulter" or "Michelle Bachmann" or "The Westboro Baptists".

via www.planet-of-the-blind.com

The terrible violence in Boston gives us a chance to ask "what kind of nation do we want to be?" Stand or roll, wave your stick. But ask.

Posted with Blogsy

 

It begins with the mosaic standard from Ur: poets writing about poetry. Wallace Stevens puffed air into it like a moist uncle at a children’s party, and nowadays, what with 80% of American poets stuck in university elevators, most poems are about poetry. And the poets eat it up, like Hemingway’s hyena who tugs at his own dangling bits.

 

I don’t like poems about poetry and never have. I like poems about women, men, horses, sadnesses, longings, incipient comedies. “What about children?” you ask. I like poems about children too. Ah but what I like most is what Shelley called “unpremeditated art” for even a Romantic understands spirit does not reside in poems but in the skylark. 

 

What do I like? 

 

“O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

 

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes!” (Percy Bysshe Shelley)

 

What do I like?

 

“Come With Me”

 

“Come with me into those things that have felt this

despair for so long–

Those removed Chevrolet wheels that howl with a 

terrible loneliness,

Lying on their backs in the cindery dirt, like man

drunk and naked,

Staggering off down a hill at night to drown at last in 

a pond.

Those shredded inner tubes abandoned on the 

shoulders of thruways,

Black and collapsed bodies that tried and burst, and

were left behind.

And those curly steel shavings, scattered about on

garage benches,

Sometimes still warm, gritty when we hold them,

Who have given up and blame everything on the

government;

And those roads in South Dakota that feel around in

the darkness.”   (Robert Bly)

 

 

What do I like?

 

“Always on the Train”

 

 

Writing poems about writing poems

is like rolling bales of hay in Texas.

Nothing but the horizon to stop you.

 

But consider the railroad’s edge of metal trash;

bird perches, miles of telephone wires.

What is so innocent as grazing cattle?

If you think about it, it turns into words.

 

Trash is so cheerful; flying up

like grasshoppers in front of the reaper.

The dust devil whirls it aloft; bronze candy wrappers,

squares of clear plastic–windows on a house of air.

 

Below the weedy edge in last year’s mat,

red and silver beer cans.

In bits blown equally everywhere,

the gaiety of flying paper

and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds.

 

(Ruth Stone)

 

Someone says the darkness is inside you. Another says its in your neighbor. But there is no darkness, only poverty and wanton ignorance. The latter can be seen in daylight: the crowing for death, vengeance fixated on ideology–violent demagogues, “Baby Hitlers” are all over the place. Ding Dong! “Who ‘s there?” “Ann Coulter” or “Michelle Bachmann” or “The Westboro Baptists”.

 

I think darkness takes care of itself and stands for nothing. Ignorance is the foe. You can always identify it by its zeal for violence. George W, Bush convinced Americans Iraq was involved in 9-11 and harbored weapons of mass destruction. For over a decade the cycle of American violence has run unabated and has gone largely unexamined.

 

The terrible violence in Boston gives us a chance to ask “what kind of nation do we want to be?” Stand or roll, wave your stick. But ask.

By Andrea Scarpino

 

A house burns in the background of Joel Sternfeld’s photograph: orange flames rise in a slant from the roof, a fire truck’s long arm and basket draw near. In front of the burning house, what looks to be a roadside stand, some pumpkins stacked neatly for sale, some broken and rotting in the foreground as if thrown from the stand.

 

One firefighter in a yellow jacket, helmet, tall boots. Not fighting the fire in the background but choosing a pumpkin from the stand.

 

For as long as I can remember, I have had anxiety, panic attacks, have woken in the night to worry about things over which I have no control: the possibility of planes crashing, losing my job, nuclear attack, the sun exploding. I have vivid childhood memories of crying in bed with worry that my baby brother would someday use drugs.

 

Last year, an internal medicine specialist asked me if I spend most of my time thinking and living in the present, future, or past. We sat in an exam room while she clicked through PowerPoint slides of the brain. I wanted answers for my chronic pain and she kept turning the conversation to meditation and prefrontal cortex activation.

 

‘Future or past,’ I answered, annoyed, already narrating in my head the story I would tell about our interaction. She nodded.

 

Yesterday, overcome with distraction, I sat on my office floor and watched the sky outside my window: robin egg blue, quickly moving cumulous clouds. I thought about Sternfeld’s photograph: the house burning in the background, a firefighter buying a pumpkin. A metaphor for living in the present?

 

We have very little control of the future and no control of the past. My internist was clear: worry changes nothing except the neural pathways in our brain.

 

Backstory: the burning house was part of a training exercise; the firefighter choosing his pumpkin was on a break.

 

Boston Marathon bombings. Causalities. One photograph: a flash of orange flames as runners near the finish line.

 

“Write down this meditation,” my internist had said. Yesterday, I sat on my office floor, unfolded her words in my lap:

 

Let everything I see, let it be good.

Let everything I hear, let it be good.

Let everything I say, let it be good.

 

Again and again, I said her words quietly. I watched the sky.

The age of the great symphonies is over–the line from a Norwegian poem–and what else can you think when the world is now a clattering machine built from violence and propaganda? I know there are excellent composers alive and working. But it is our age, our time that’s the problem. We are smaller by the hour because we need to accommodate ourselves to an era that feels like we’re living in the London Underground.

 

I prayed last night as I often do. I thought what I try to imagine are large thoughts–prayed for souls lost, lives cut short, for those who suffer from violence and poverty. My prayer went up in the dark with a billion other prayers. That collective, untranslated, uncaptured prayer is the symphony of our age.

 

My house in Iowa City has brand new granite countertops. The house is for sale. It’s a beautiful place.

 

I have tried for years to answer the question: “what’s accomplishment for?” since I live in a nation where great universities have sanctioned and promoted imperial wars. The answer can’t rest with the protection of the inner life (as it does for many) but must have a good deal to do with a paratactic question: “what can I do to alleviate the sufferings of others?” Many poets who say they are “political” never ask the second question.

I know something about being “marked” as disability is always a performance. I am on the street in a conditional way: allowed or not allowed, accepted or not accepted according to the prejudices and educational attainments of others. And because I’ve been disabled since childhood I’ve lived with this dance of provisional life ever since I was small. In effect, if you have a disability, every neighborhood is a gated community.  

via www.planet-of-the-blind.com

I'm reposting this piece about the intersection of Trayvon Martin's tragedy and disability.

Enter the Rococo-Loco. Looks a lot like Paul Ryan. But wait! Looks like Barack Obama! Holy Cufflinks, Batman! The stylized wealthy have occupied the Democrats! No to Social Security (conceived as security). No to health care for impoverished women and children. No to special education. No to your damn uncle who fought in Iraq!

 

Half donkey, half elephant, even the blind men in the old joke know what this thing is. It’s Rococo-Loco by day, a Fascist-sauropod by night. See it snacking on the old and infirm.

I wanted to be productive so I wrote a poem–

It was about Orpheus and all his birds

So every bird was in it, the linnets and thrushes,

Arctic terns, birds clear with light.

All the birds in the world

And all the birds that had ever been

Were in the poem, and you know,

It was not beautiful but terribly alive

Like a god who assumes a single shape

In sudden wind.