{The first lines of a new Mark Halliday poem.
― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 13 September 2004 13:30 (twenty years ago) link
― Archel (Archel), Monday, 13 September 2004 14:10 (twenty years ago) link
― lauren (laurenp), Monday, 13 September 2004 14:41 (twenty years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 13 September 2004 15:09 (twenty years ago) link
-Evan Jones
― Fred (Fred), Tuesday, 14 September 2004 15:53 (twenty years ago) link
― Archel (Archel), Wednesday, 15 September 2004 09:38 (twenty years ago) link
― Fred (Fred), Wednesday, 15 September 2004 18:29 (twenty years ago) link
Are you happy? It's the onlyway to be, kid.Yes, be happy, it's a good niceway to be.But not happy-happy, kid, don'tbe too doubled-up doggone happy.It's the doubled-up doggone happy-happy people... bust hard... theydo bust hard... when they bust.Be happy, kid, go to it, but not toodoggone happy.
-Carl Sandburg
― j c (j c), Sunday, 19 September 2004 20:39 (twenty years ago) link
I want to get out of the train and go backTo see what they were beside the track.
I name all the flowers I am sure they weren't;Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt--
Not bluebells gracing a tunnel mouth--Not lupine living on sand and drouth.
Was something brushed across my mindThat no one on earth will ever find?
Heaven gives its glimpses only to thoseNot in position to look too close.
-Robert Frost
― Fred (Fred), Thursday, 7 October 2004 11:00 (nineteen years ago) link
― cºzen (Cozen), Saturday, 9 October 2004 21:37 (nineteen years ago) link
― Jordan (Jordan), Monday, 11 October 2004 19:56 (nineteen years ago) link
Westren wind when wilt thou blowThe small rain down can rainChrist that my love were in my armsAnd I in my bed again
― Jordan (Jordan), Monday, 11 October 2004 20:33 (nineteen years ago) link
Work from the original towardthe beautiful,unless the latter comes firstin which casereverse your efforts to finda model worthy of suchinane desire.
Even the mouth's beingdivided into two lips isnot enough to make wordsequal themselves.
Eavesdroppers fearthe hermit's soliloquy.
Wake up, wound, the knife said.
--Bill Knott
― bnw (bnw), Saturday, 23 October 2004 04:39 (nineteen years ago) link
― cºzen (Cozen), Monday, 25 October 2004 17:46 (nineteen years ago) link
― j c (j c), Monday, 25 October 2004 22:22 (nineteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 06:50 (nineteen years ago) link
― cºzen (Cozen), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 09:47 (nineteen years ago) link
It was taken some time ago.At first it seems to bea smearedprint: blurred lines and grey flecksblended with the paper;
then, as you scanit, you see in the left-hand cornera thing that is like a branch: part of a tree(balsam or spruce) emergingand, to the right, halfway upwhat ought to be a gentleslope, a small frame house.
In the background there is a lake,and beyond that, some low hills.
(The photograph was takenthe day after I drowned.
I am in the lake, in the centerof the picture, just under the surface.
It is difficult to say whereprecisely, or to sayhow large or small I am:the effect of wateron light is a distortion
but if you look long enough,eventuallyyou will be able to see me.)
― Fred (Fred), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 11:51 (nineteen years ago) link
xpost
― Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 11:53 (nineteen years ago) link
― cºzen (Cozen), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 13:46 (nineteen years ago) link
― cºzen (Cozen), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 13:47 (nineteen years ago) link
― cºzen (Cozen), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 13:50 (nineteen years ago) link
-Charles Bukowski
― Fred (Fred), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 16:52 (nineteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 17:37 (nineteen years ago) link
― Fred (Fred), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 20:15 (nineteen years ago) link
Now the heart sings with all its thousand voices To hear this city of cells, my body, sing. The tree through the stiff clay at long last forces Its thin strong roots and taps the secret spring.
And the sweet waters without intermission Climb to the tips of its green tenement; The breasts have borne the grace of their possession, The lips have felt the pressure of content.
Here I come home: in this expected country They know my name and speak it with delight. I am the dream and you my gates of entry, The means by which I waken into light.
--- AD Hope
― Archel (Archel), Monday, 1 November 2004 14:04 (nineteen years ago) link
Winter Love
Let us have winter loving that the heartMay be in peace and ready to partakeOf the slow pleasure spring would wish to hurryOr that in summer harshly would awake,And let us fall apart, O gladly weary,The white skin shaken like a white snowflake.
-Elizabeth Jennings
― Archel (Archel), Monday, 1 November 2004 14:07 (nineteen years ago) link
― bnw (bnw), Monday, 1 November 2004 17:23 (nineteen years ago) link
― Archel (Archel), Monday, 1 November 2004 17:31 (nineteen years ago) link
If no, then I'm not sure I understand the question.
― Archel (Archel), Monday, 1 November 2004 17:35 (nineteen years ago) link
(interesting tidbit/bragging: I talked to Dorraine Laux a bit about that article when I met her.)
― bnw (bnw), Monday, 1 November 2004 18:08 (nineteen years ago) link
Public Address (excerpt)
[...]The screen goes blank, all that was
etched there in light--a flashbulb'sthumbprint in the back of the skull.Sometimes we only die, sometimeschampagne corks fly from our wounds.
The coldest day of the year and stillthere's flowering. The lovers' bodies,once long grass, strike and strike each other.How else control fire but to make your own? A dye
must be squeezed from the poisonous berries,the sand melted translucent. each workan evasion, secret, clue, the subject alwaysmissing just as the dream is never
inside the sleeper but rises above likea sweet scum above boiling milk, the bodylike a dead body but warm, inviting,arousable. Who has not looked down the throat
of an orchid into color that can't be seenlike the cosmic black humming behindnoon blue? We want only to be admitted.We want only to be left out.
Dean Young
― bnw (bnw), Tuesday, 2 November 2004 04:39 (nineteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 2 November 2004 05:03 (nineteen years ago) link
When I've got my editor hat on, nothing sets the alarm bells off so quickly as randomly placed line breaks, put in just because the 'poet' is dimly convinced that poetry has line breaks.
(Then again, with some of the dodgy things that email can do to formatting, it's often anyone's guess where the line breaks are intended to be, if anywhere.)
― Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 2 November 2004 10:00 (nineteen years ago) link
― Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 2 November 2004 17:22 (nineteen years ago) link
That sentence sounds not wholly grammatical, yet still sufficiently suggestive.
― the bluefox, Tuesday, 2 November 2004 17:44 (nineteen years ago) link
I think what I'm talking about are those "prose w/ line breaks" pieces that seem to use breaks in such a way that disregard them as being a pause or an emphasis on the line's effect as an independent part of a larger whole.
I'd agee that ultra-conventional breaks are probably nothing to pat yourself on the back for either. They're worth experimenting with.
― bnw (bnw), Tuesday, 2 November 2004 18:54 (nineteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 2 November 2004 23:48 (nineteen years ago) link
CLAIRE BATEMANMONOGRAPH
It would later be said of our erathat even the boring parts were interesting,& vice versa.
Without the least trace of irony,officials christened space shuttlesafter doomed & sunkencities of yore.
Nearly all of usconstructed dashboard altarsupon which we lavishedparticular & minute devotionsas we cruised past scenesthat seemed to represent disaster’s aftermathbut almost always resolvedinto simple sequences of yard sales—derelict undergarments & mattressesexposed on sullenly tilting lawns—each just another item on the ever-growinglist of events not to be takenpersonally.
For their arcane significance,we pondered signs such as these: IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU'D BE HOME RIGHT NOW!
&
GOD SEES EVERYTHING, EVEN YOU READING THIS SIGN!
Though the varieties of available lip-gloss shades& the total number of famous people in historywere exponentially increasingso that it became ever more difficultto distinguish plum from maroonor the living from the dead,it still took approximatelythe same six yearsfor a single exhaled breathto become evenly mixed with the atmosphere.
For none of us was it ever clearwhether that rumbling sound we kept hearingwas static or heartfelt applause.
Everyone was professionally lonely,yet we ceased not our shining.
Many aspired to but did not actually achievethe office of Notary Public.
This was not considered a tragedy.
― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Saturday, 6 November 2004 20:46 (nineteen years ago) link
Seen
In your field of vision, there is a place where no image is fixed,where injury carved its cave of nothing,gathered blackness around a splinter's wooden slip.One eye, you say, scans the world.The other examines the self's invisible wanting.In that equation, I believe myself to bethe point connecting one destination to another,somewhere you paused to draw lines to the next warm station.I emit no light, no heatbut gather, in cupped hands, what fell to the groundwhen limbs were shaken by your grasping wind.
Mark Wunderlich
― bnw (bnw), Sunday, 7 November 2004 16:43 (nineteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 7 November 2004 18:00 (nineteen years ago) link
― bnw (bnw), Sunday, 7 November 2004 19:04 (nineteen years ago) link
― bnw (bnw), Sunday, 7 November 2004 19:05 (nineteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 7 November 2004 19:56 (nineteen years ago) link
From too much hope of living,From hope and fear set free,We thank with brief thanksgivingWhatever gods may beThat no life lives for ever;That dead men rise up never;That even the weariest riverWinds somewhere safe to sea.
-- A. C. Swinburne
― sceefy, Tuesday, 9 November 2004 22:26 (nineteen years ago) link
--- Thomas Hood
― Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 16 November 2004 10:15 (nineteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 16 November 2004 22:04 (nineteen years ago) link
I laugh at his poems, As he laughs at mine. They read like The words of a blind man Describing the sun.
― Fred (Fred), Saturday, 20 November 2004 22:25 (nineteen years ago) link