ars poetica

Yellow Bastard Between Teal Lines

Can any body out there ever
really hear me, not like the cat
hears me with eyes I
know are not about me?

I have a new friend who knows it all,
A lover I once had lots of sex with

(oh, how even here, when
I’m trying to be the one to listen to myself
I craft - can’t stand long with that preposition
I ended with will also end with
purposefully here to end with)

A shaman woman
woe’s man who helps freely then
shatters like a bubble
pricked by turnabout

(this uncertainty principle is impossible)

Cast your fate to the wind not
to friends the ones who poker and chess
One can josh but will only be serious about business

(“never do business with friends”)

The other, after games, prefers only reality T.V.
Another woman friend either hides from the world
or is too much in it, how like my friend who
having found enlightenment,
isolates in the desert but only because it’s cheaper there.

A new friend who loves the arts
totally active full of bright intensity
will not abide my shadow.

Then there are the poets
their community of terminal self-absorption:
Who broods over the poets but the poets?
Speaking for myself
what I seek from poets
is
my self
reflected

Am I the first poet to find Narcissus
winking back from the pg.,
yellow bastard between teal lines?

(yellow negative space – some use white-lined notebooks
I use yellow legal pads)

Better to stop this scribbling
now
Stare into the yellow void
Seek your most intimate
friend

—Ed Coletti

What Michael Richards Couldn’t Know About Poets Either

Poets are ferocious
dogs holding themselves
on short leashes
skinny kids on beaches
big animals within
kicking sand in their own faces
burying the poet’s head.

(makes me wonder about poets
who write sweetly of red roses)

When that insecure cougar
springs out from my rib cage
I too am freed to suffer
my singular oppression.

—Ed Coletti

—Ed Coletti
____
previously published in Kickass Review – Vol. VI, no. 6 - 2006

The Notion of Wings

It’s the notion of
wings, that’s what it is
More like flight the concept
or flying, a verb
Have you ever flown a verb?
Poets and lovers fly verbs all the time.
It’s the exhilaration, that’s what it is
straddling the latest verb soaring
bareback rider rodeoing space
landing with a thud, hard realization
rodeoing now requires redoing.
Shake off the stardust, mount up anew.
It’s the notion of wings and flying the verbs
That’s what it is.

—Ed Coletti

WORDS LIKE SMOKE

Words like smoke
like mist
like smoke

Feathers
smoke
fur
smoke

Perhaps each

—Richard Denner

SENSATIONS

Words are familiar.
Only their positions are uncertain.
A pink diver circles Squaretop.
A dark hood caps Little Brother.

A chorus line of kachinas high step.
A bony dakini drinks from a skull cup.
Soft words become hard.
Quiet words become loud.

—Richard Denner

METHOD IN THE MADNESS

I write, then I type.
I retrieve, I retype.
I cut and paste images of real objects.

A process of recovery and discovery,
a contemplation of silence
in this maelstrom of violence.

—Richard Denner

REFUGE

Don't look at this poem.
You are staring.
I stare back.
Your eyes are clamped here.
It is damp here, but my throat is dry.

This poem is a shamble down an alley of broken glass,
relief from rowdy talk in the Tav.
You are asking questions this poem cannot answer.
At best you can rest here.
I cannot answer, but I sing a ragged song.

—Richard Denner

POETICS

What is the point, Jack?
Is poetry a conversation among the dead
and the poet gets it second hand,
a vampire moon sucking off the sun?

What is the poet, Jack?
A battered radio transmitting static between the stations
on a lonely stretch of road or a punch-drunk fighter
who's taken one too many hooks to the head?

Powerful emotions recollected?
The most exasperating art?
Potts makes an analogy with Mahamudra.
Williams hears a sort of song.
Garcia invents a ragged song,
and Yeats sees tattered clothes upon a stick.

Poetry is experience.
I awake to morning light,
thoughts sweet as honey buzzing in my brain.
Swatting them I get stung by real bees in a dream garden.

—Richard Denner

PARRIED ENDLESSLY

If poems can't slug it out
with kids and mayhem and shopping life
overdrafts and broken cars and jobs
they're not worth shit: of course
sometimes it's necessary to be sleepy
and on that day a sleepy poem is the true poem
Sometimes one is filled with questionings:
            The Grand Canal
            Endless Life
            Difficulties and Exultations
            The Wasted Land
            Friend
            The Piano
            Rationality
            Paradise Regained
but these are only the answers
and they're not of much use
It's the spaces between the blocks of words
we love and inhabit
The anticipation of what's coming next
neither empty nor silent
Your expectations seem to be eternally denied
You think that's bad
but it's not bad
though we're given to understand it's necessary

—Martin Stannard
____
First published as part of the sequence "Arising" in "Writing Down The
Days — New & Selected Poems" (Stride, 2001 — www.stridebooks.co.uk)

MUTE VOWEL SOUNDS

whale of a poet suddenly removed his eyeglasses
crooked gaze displayed all pathos of secret relish
passionate letter stripped of white handkerchief
forecast unaware of secret visits in the garden
show this letter to the proper author
I have ventured a scheme to lock me into my room
what instinct betrays vast error
illustrious fool filled with big picture innuendo
she didn't think there was anything funny in that book

—Audacia Dangereyes

Good Friday Recessional

The silence.
Clinks from the chain
of the censer.
Wood groaning beneath
the weight of feet.
No song, no celebration.
Only the unspeakable speaks.
So we come to terms with
what we are without
our word, our art.

—Gale Swiontkowski

Darwin’s Cathedral

I have never understood
how foot soldiers at
Gettysburg, or in Flanders
or Attica, could trample
crops in a field, uproot
another man’s fences.
They, of all men, would
comprehend the labor lost.
We make the world we live in,
as birds form their nests,
termites their tunnels and hills.
Even the realm of God and sin
and goodness and song
is ours. We build like coral
on the efforts of our ancestors.
What we destroy is a breach
in the honeycomb.

—Gale Swiontkowski
____
(Title from the book by David Sloan Wilson, 2002)

TO JEAN VALENTINE

our place
of harp
and john player
specials

our place dubbed
sligo’s hall
or simple hell

whose broagh forgets
new turns
the presence
before
a birth
before being born
or forgotten
still?

—Lawrence Welsh

ELEGY FOR JOHN WIENERS

Space defines old motels:
maybe the Jayhawker
in Kansas or hitching to Gloucester
for one last
Maximus go round

*

Who burns every letter
lets manuscripts go
like caged butterflies
keeps a room tight, squeaky
clean like vestiges are
no more?

They’ll have to pick through
erasers, chirp like black sparrows
see the beauty in absence
call up treats with invisible ink
dance around the table radio:

Mozart and The Supremes
Bird and a coroner’s cap

*

The stars hold with offshore breezes
the trinity of Olson, Duncan
and you never get left
they just search harder and farther

they just mumble and fumble
your name

—Lawrence Welsh
____
“Elegy for John Wieners” originally appeared in GYPSY

IF HE’S DEAD

for Ed Dorn

in souls
bold enough
to chance
or break down
and whisper
peace will find
its own
reward
slip through ink
get removed
then stamped
on invisible pages

—Lawrence Welsh

POEM
          to Al Filreis

Even John Cage worked within the limits of his name.
I am only describing something—and that never stopped
Cage from introducing himself.
You have a question for the six-year-olds;
a question for all-the-same-height third graders;
a question for the spinning middle school kids
          who also sing.
You have a follow-up question for the one-word answer:
yes, no, Whitman high school students;
and many questions for the I-like-it, I-don’t-like it
college students—the college students.
And for openers you problemitize “problemitizing”
          for the graduate students.
And you have a question for the adults
          and many more for yourself.
Or the question you asked me—to gloss
          the Wallace Stevens line:
“Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
And where do questions come from—
          and where do they go?
“Nothing + Nothing = Something, that is ‘Nothing,’
which is really Something,” I said not knowing
where that came from. But is it all about the questions?
It’s the amplitude you feel, hear, see, and
for the moment—and longer (we hope)—we feel,
          hear, and see too.
I am describing you at our limits, that is, our best
          failed distinctions.
As there are suppers and there are suppers:
a butterflied fillet of sole resting on its crunchy skin.
And it’s not that you grew your beard, but
you never shaved it off, and that it continues to grow.
Your beard in its place is an invisible element
of that place—made visible.
Here is a line for not talking, which isn’t silence,
(the privacy of public communion).
Here is a line for braving dark distances on foot.
Here is a line for space and classical amber bees.
And one for all the ones crossed-out.
I am only describing, as words are one way,
          and walking is another.
So cross the street and step out for a walk,
one we will never take again. I am only describing something,
the way the finest grit becomes the sand we love.
And its warm color comes from whatever light there is,
even if there isn’t much at all.
And old John Cage doesn’t go away—new John Cages
          just get added.
And where, dear John, is where?

—Thomas Devaney
________
First published in jubilat and from A SERIES OF SMALL BOXES (Fish Drum Press, 2007).

Poetry is

the antidote to the poison of rationality; the best friend
entropy ever had; the botany of the impossible wedded
to the chemistry of the ineffable; the jewel in the heart
of the flotsam; the mote in the eye of the lotus; the
canary in the mind. Or else, to lift an image from one
old poet, it is “all the history of grief” consolidated into
“an empty doorway and a maple leaf.” Or perhaps it is
a vision of the harsh mugs on Mount Rushmore, aeons
hence, eroding into long, mournful portraits by the
geological equivalent of Modigliani; or that of two
crows perched on a withered limb, just across the
street from the county seat. Or maybe it is simply
the antique urgency of this mouth moving at this
moment, with all these other mouths, continuing to
shape and tune a common tongue, a common song,
leaping from the body into someone’s arms, or head,
or breakfast, leaping into the very air that mothered
it in the lungs, dancing and leaping even as we sleep,
even as we sag, bend, curdle, and vote Republican

—Mikhail Horowitz

Look Over Me
          for Merle Haggard

I’ve got a mind to see the internal world

as those felt and faithful places

ready for the restless form towards grace

the acceptance

of the inaudible male tames the cede from stakes

assumes the cause is free

since it turns to closeness and is overcome

in the broad outshine of the small town

together as it is

as together they dance and promise

to task the boundaries

as together they sing me back home

—Jordan Stempleman

MY FIRST BOOK OF POETRY WAS LIKE MY FIRST BABY

since I don't plan to have children. I wanted people to love it
and make a fuss, and, in turn, tell me what a great job I'd done.
My book wasn't reviewed in that many places, and when it was,
one reviewer even called it sloppy. The grandparents weren't as doting
as I'd expected. They went on with their own lives
and didn't buy the book any presents. No one took a picture of me
holding the book in my lap. My husband wasn't jealous
that I was spending too much time with the book. My dog
sniffed the book and walked away, unthreatened. Other books
were getting cooed and fussed over, books cuter and more enchanting than mine.
There is no greater pain for a mother--seeing her child left out. Soon I knew
I had a book that would never accomplish much with its life,
that it wouldn't win prizes or be displayed in prestigious bookstores.
That my book would probably be a drop-out, that I'd have nothing
to brag about when my cousins showed me graduation pictures of their kids.
That my book wouldn't buy me dinner or take care of me
when I grew old. I tried not to let the book sense my disappointment.
I tried to love it for the book that it was, but it began to have the telltale signs
of depression, hanging out with the wrong crowd,
dressing like a rebel. The book reminded me of myself as a teenager,
but when I told it that it shivered in disgust, blaming me
for bringing it into this world in the first place.

—Denise Duhamel
____
previously published in Gargoyle magazine

Referencing Vast Leakage or temporary extrusion

Roland Barthes, interior@speech.noise

The opposition spread under the protection of power. There are
those that no conscious illusion is perpetrated. An entire orality
which produces a drift of bliss & fear. Fetish objects on the
other hand leaves expression to the pheno-text. As a creature
of language which permeates him very quietly the subject
returns were we fond of neologisms. This text bores me like a
spider dissolving. The text you write must prove the sentence is
hierarchical. Similarly, it is not only establishing the opposition of
the way two girls must be politicized. Where is this elsewhere?
Nine times out of ten societies object to undifferentiated eye &
noteworthy Desire. Do not deign to be the persistence of the
thing. Neurosis are the means of ungratiated sucking, a glimpse
of scandalous truth, still far too much heroism to identify
accurately language’s image. We are scientific clandestine sites.
This is to want a text which seizes the subject the way the
reversal of origins could not be written. And when something
remains a potlatch under respectable appearances, this is how I
have my best ideas.

The text is (should be) that uninhibited person,
non-site): anachronic subject, adrift
At least some examples?
of an epoch, of a character?
word for word?
denote a class notion?
another edge, mobile, bleak?
the institutions of text?
but the opposite?
doesn’t every narrative lead to Oedipus?
an anagram of the body?
my reader’s pleasure?
the sentence is a body?
all this verbal display?
the very materiality of that once existed?
how can we read criticism?
boredom of all narratives?

Roland Barthes, grief@ruthless.sexuality

the more ravaging term
then perhaps the subject
concerned with destruction
grasps at every point
but quickly exposes itself
we are all caught up in the truth
the leisure of bygone readings
where we can hear the grain of the throat
whenever I attempt
without ever introducing anything
the very utterance
the other reading skips nothing
psychoanalysis must be traversed
but it is doubtless
violence must be coded
if it were possible to imagine
we have either the course
outside bliss but not necessarily
deplored except
like a bird who understand nothing
only in total atopia

—mIEKAL aND

Growing Up

One part’s abstract-- listening
to an underground river clearing
its throat in the desert & thinking
about the Yucca tapping their roots

down to those drops-- &
the other part’s a scene
from a movie: waking up
to a pale moon in half-

morning light feeling the tip
of a knife at your throat, and
just before hearing him say,
there’s a scorpion on your neck;
I’m going to flick it into

the fire thinking I guess
this is it, he’s finally going
to do it. On one side
of this is hearing the sharp

sizzle of a scorpion
in flames; on the other
is the rest
of your life.

—Rick Benjamin

Two Arts

My old last name
nearly rhymed
with taxidermy.

Rhymes with “attorney”
my mother would say
to anyone who asked how
to pronounce it.

& If my sister’s life
had been hers
to draw up
she’d be a lawyer

today, not just someone
who meditated for twenty
years in the middle
of a forest never making

a name for herself. She should
have used her head for something else
besides a hair garden, mother says.

My sister’s name still rhymes
with attorney. If you take out
the “t” in the word poverty
and put an “n” in its place

that’s how you spell it.
It’s not that hard
to change your name.
You fill out some forms

& they put an ad in the paper
in case you’re changing it
for the wrong reasons.
The rest is like blowing

air through a pipe & making
a glass bubble.
Or that other art,

bringing back to nearly
life some dead form,
performing that act
of animation.

—Rick Benjamin

AND UT PICTURA POESIS CALLS HER NAME

I think of you, the mistress of ceremonies with your fist held
In a tiger's grin, a bouquet resembling delphinium
Between your teeth. Every man I love becomes a woman.
First, there is the critique of the human subject,
Where "subject" comes out into the open, lights his fingertips,
And disappears a gold-plated elephant, entirely remaining
A free agent unmoved by historical and cultural acrobatics.
Like most battles, many bottles are closed, out of reach,
Never opened. Either way, the laurelled genie knows her way
In. She persuades, sketches, or merely snakes through
The backdoor the audience forgot to spot long before.
Of course, there are many rusty hinges, all with equal access.
Rising, one may move by the tendrilled whispers heard
Within each framework, but pretend concern for open sesame.
Eventually, she approached me about a missing kiss—
Mechanics of another kind? Two lips, tender teeth, a tongue
Dewy wet, and still, in a distant neighbor's eyes, we
Could hear the urban decay through some Holiday imitation.
Her voice fell a beat behind mine. Her skill at jazz phrasing,
Variation and vibrato wrenched diamond-cut moods from
My seediest pop songs. Someone should study
The extracting power one has with another: only everything's
A signal when you turn your radar on. Interlocking legs twirl
Voices out of words. The smallest story of two people coming
Together imitates a circus tent in winter holding
Everyone beneath it. The sheer beauty of ten thousand minds
Colliding with seesaws, airborne, trampolines, top hats,
Harmonized buzzsaws, skirts with wax feathers
On phonographs, contortionists, brick-a-brac, eggshell
Statuettes, painted miniatures onto photographs,
A lush Ashberian medley blends discord to dance to,
So that understanding may begin with seclusions,
Ignite collusions, and a body may ask,
Where do you live? And, Why aren't you with me
In this room here tonight? There're a million ways apart
When two or more prayers gather in conjugal thought,
And a painter lifts his pen, arouses the medallion of a kiss
That will gently float always on the air between our lips.

—Amy King
____
This poem will be included in the forthcoming collection, I'M THE MAN WHO LOVES YOU (Blazevox Books 2007)