Poems.

Bass reverberates against
the slippery white slopes of my spinal column
otherwise rigid: now released
a sweet reprieve from high-backed chairs and
endless dirges of work, work, work…

the trilling of trumpets sounds echoic
against the white chamber of concrete
slabs and human beings,
thousands of teeming vapid dreams,
the scent of popcorn and nachos wafting
through the air to land, ultimately

on the noses of tens of hungry combatants:
Gladiatorially gifted, pituitarily lengthened
beasts.

As for me, the dream is immersion
In the soft fat deposits of rich
Humaneness, cheering
For teams,
Thinking of nothing.
Thinking of nothing at all.

–

The date that made you limitless.
The date whose fine lines belied her…personality.
The date whose father used to hit her.
The date in which you spilled coffee on your pants.
The date that never ended.
The date you wish had ended.
The date that ended in divorce.
The date that hurt you when she didn’t return your calls.
The date your father died.
The date of your first incarceration.
The date your mother died.
The date who kept looking at a spot on your neck.
The date who was a whore.
The date who was a banker.
The date who was an escort.
The date who stole all your pants.
The date we landed on the moon (20 July 1969).
The date in which you were over the moon.
The date in which you weren’t.

–

ORIGINAL POEM (Danish):

jeg klamrede mig til luften
imellem
dine druers springende kærner

Jeg klamrede mig til rummet
under
dine spredte ballers fladen

jeg klamrer mig til farven
hvor
den truer hver pixel med et fix

jeg klamrer mig til musen
mens
den sletter safternes nervøsitet.

–

MY POEM:

the sun bakes the rusks
expanding
under nature’s callow fire

the sun bakes bald heads
glistening
under uncovered swatches of terrace

the sun bakes the solidarity
swarthy
of teeming masses of soldiers resigned

the sun bakes the solid bulk
exposed
of bronzed and buttered naked flesh

Re: Snapshot Poem

In re: Snapshot poem (Ross)

Cry, cry the jagged whine!
That high pitch of liberated feeling
Wounded animal’s plight.

You’ve earned it from the times you didn’t cry
When in those nights, your
solitary sighs compelled not
tears, but dry eyes—
Tough resolve
dogged, stubborn pride…

Socked with a baseball
Hit in the balls—
When no one can blame you
you let it come to the surface
And peek its ugly head out:
Hurt, for the first time
exposed as a raw and beating
organ;
sand kicked on ends
of nerves,
vessels submerged
Drowned in viscous oil
Made to choke.

All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men…

Early draft of some Humpty stuff:

I was one of the king’s men who found him
Crazy bastard
Leaping off the top of a too-high wall,
Body bulbous, falling unprotected.

They say he stayed strange ‘til the moment before.
Then his caterwauling ceased
And he jumped into a scene—
A fat projectile mounted on
currents of air
Carrying him down in a graceless arc
To cobbled streets…
Below, Ground Zero.

Split open his innards oozed,
A filmy glaze of organs and booze,
And Humpty’s brain and eyes
Flowed fast
astream the runny
Eggwhite soup.

He lay there, spattered
Over two square blocks of commerce
Disrupted.
And strolling gentleman with
Handkerchiefs in hand,
Covering their noses,
Shielded their eyes.

As for me, I was among
the men who sorted him out,
or tried;
It was fruitless.
For all the king’s horses,
And all the king’s men,
We couldn’t put Humpty together again.

In-class poem.

Beginnings of “On the Building of Boxes”

Boxes that speed down tracks in trains
Contain stowaways looking for freedom
In a new land.

Constructed like coffins out of slabs
of Cedar, the boxes
are built by laborers’ hands;
The man who builds his coffin
out of rough wood and nails
claims it as his own,
and rides through the night
past mini-waterfalls and
abandoned warehouse parking lots.

My Great Uncle Norm used to
tell my father,
“Butch—these men are looking
for a better life, and they’re
coming here to find it.”
My father asks, “Why must
they hide?” Haven’t we all
been free since Old Abe
proclaimed it?

The boxes have no holes—just
the spaces the laborers leave to
breathe—
No mirrors or vanities. No
food, no bathrooms.

Navajo Blackberry poem

Writing requirements: Use five words out of several given, and weave them into a poem that includes a proverb or aphorism. (Words: cliff, whir, needle, voice, blackberry, clouds, mother, lick)

–

On the precipice of cliffs
We Navajo grow plump blackberries
to sell to hungry tourists.
Mouths purple with our juices,
Teeth stained, they tend to thank
us noble savages–
Voices soft and pedantic,
Humming in a vague whir,
Daunted by their place in our world.

Sometimes we are cruel, and
throw stinkberries into the mix
to watch their eyes go bug-eyed
as they lick the seeds from the
tops of their teeth
and grimace.

They pretend to be appeased
and smiling thinly, give
thanks.
Mother sees, and reminds us sternly,
“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

..

Following that we were asked to write the same poem in a different style.

Sometimes we put stinkberries in
Bushels of blackberries.
We do it because we’re tired of
Hearing you sympathetically say
“We mourn your loss,”
Like our displaced culture
Benefits from your sense
of Courtesy and Grace.

Snapshots.

First, let me link again to a GREAT COLLECTION OF POETRY (also visible on my sidebar). These are poems a writer from Stanford has collected on her blog. They’re all very good.

–

I told you I could pop them for you. Your veins. Meaty veins, the color of worms, that when I press against them wiggle in and out of place, navigating a terrain of thick strong flesh. Your eyes go wide and for a moment you fear me, your demented child, sick with curiosity. But your black eyes flash to my mother’s laughing face, and they crinkle like Christmas. You bounce me on your knee, then, and I am putty in your hands.
–
I hate it when you cry. You cry like a wounded animal does, like a dog does. It’s a keening sound, the hoarse high whine aside the gasping breaths. You let no one see your face, obscuring it from view with interwoven fingers on the sides, blinders from your shame. Socked with a baseball. Hit in the balls. Whatever. You’ve earned it from the times you didn’t cry, the times you watched and didn’t say a word, just let it come near the surface and peek its ugly head out.
–
You’re like a lobster with its claws clipped shut. An ineffectual lobster. You’re red all over, tears streaming down your face, and you’ve come at me with your fists bared. Karate fists…Secret weapons. You begin to pound on me, and your little frame is coiled tight like a spring, like all the force in the world couldn’t hold you back forever. It doesn’t. A nine-year-old does.

–

As a note, finepewterportraits is from a Ben Folds Five song (“Battle of Who Could Care Less,” Whatever and Ever Amen). I thought it’d be appropriate to share that here, given it’s from a song lyric (poetical in its own right). The full line goes “Fine pewter portraits of General Apathy / And Major Boredom / Singing, ‘Whatever and Ever Amen.’”

Unit Response.

Can be found here.

Reader Response (Hemingway).

First I’ll say what I think is funny about this piece. We were so convinced that the man was the one who held the power in this, and that the woman was appeasing him, but…no. Reading on we discover that, if anything, the dynamic shifts between the power of the man and the woman, with the woman holding most of it. She is the one who is about to have the abortion. She is the one whose language the man hones in on.

The abortion is of course never explicitly called that, and the closest we get to it is “the operation.” What we do have are brief allusions to it in phrases, words and tones. “It’s just to let the air in” is actually what clued me in to the meaning of the subject matter; ironically, the word “operation” did not. That image, of a “barren” woman (something I think I associate with abortion) is both economical and poignant. It doesn’t overstate the meaning, but we imagine a hollow with a wind passing through it, and that is the image that remains. Following that the man peppers the conversation with reassurances, saying everything will be fine, and he only wants the one (her; not the baby), and his insistence and his pleadings are further clues…

What highlights the conflict is the manner of Hemingway’s dialogue. It’s…rat-a-tat-tat? It’s one person speaking and then the other, no real attribution provided, just a starting place (the man speaks) and the variance of the two. There’s something very intimate in that—us as readers observing these two talking…and at a close distance—but also something distant: we don’t see into their heads. We only get what their responses allow. So Hemingway works to make his characters dueling forces. The woman, though she acquiesces to having the procedure done, is tired and unhappy. Her response to his reassurances (“…and they were all so happy.”) is sarcastic, and she follows that by saying “I don’t care about me.” In a way, she’s putting up a fight without putting up a fight at all.

This is all in the second half of the piece. In the first half, we see the dynamic as something slightly different. For though the girl exerts her influence early on (she reigns the man in, and provokes his speech), it has a different quality than later. Here we see the woman who is in love with the man, willing to do something for him and still actively trying to improve his mood. We see that he has power, because the woman would otherwise ignore him and allow him to be surly.

The effect of the scenery around them being so spare, and Hemingway’s minimalist descriptions, seems to heighten the mood of the piece before we even meet the characters. I didn’t expect, upon reading the first paragraph, for the characters to be ebullient. Happiness isn’t economical.

Also, and I don’t think this is a stretch: Hemingway’s two characters are foreigners in this land—or at least the man is. And because the unfamiliar is disquieting, I think it adds to the dampening of the mood. Add to that the aridness of their surroundings—the dry heat and whites and blank horizons—and it seems like Hemingway was constructing a metaphor for abortion.

Beyond that I can’t say. It is a spare piece, and I think I’m already delving a bit into literary theory.

Henry (finished).

Mostly finished…Sufficiently finished, anyway.

–

Can be found here in .doc format.

This may be inappropriate…

Considering it’s a writing blog and everything, but I thought I’d post it anyway. These are pieces of writing that I’ve read before and loved, and that, whether they relate to writing or not, relate to me, and probably inform my writing and influence my thoughts, so…Why not?

–

I’ve only known the first paragraph of this quotation for the past few years, but I’ve loved it since I read it. I acknowledge I’m a sucker for heroes, but one of the purposes of writing (one of the grandest purposes) is to elevate that which is mostly dreary. And since life has a tendency to be hard, sometimes it’s nice to escape into things like possibilities.

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world…

He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him…

The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”

- Raymond Chandler

–

What’s to say? There’s another great Emerson quotation (below) that talks about universal truths. I feel like this is saying something true for all human beings. It’s humbling and uplifting, which might be a rare thing, now I think of it…

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

- George Eliot, Middlemarch

–

Completely true of writing.

“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things we get ashamed of, because words diminish them. Words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in our head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever our secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure our enemies would love to steal away. And we may make revelations that cost us dearly, only to have people look at us in a funny way, not understanding what we’ve said at all, or why we were almost crying while we were saying it. That’s the worst, I think: when the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.”

- Stephen King

–

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

-George Bernard Shaw

–

“I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance