Ciceronian Review

Belli

The collection of Belli sonnets I have (translated) is small compared to the overall production.  He wrote about 2200 sonnets.  Here is quick overview of the work and man.  The poems are quite amusing.  I may get to some literary studies at some point.  On my first read, they remind me of Baudelaire.  Maybe it was the air.  Belli seems a good deal rowdier, and cruder in the usual sense.  I got interested because of the odd memorial to Belli in Trastavere, right by the Tiber. 

Here is how the little book starts:

The Recollection

The day that Camardella faced the gallows,
I got confirmed...still seems like yesterday--
Godfather, me, the fairground games I played,
the treats I got (some knick-knacks and marshmallows).

My father booked a two-horse coach for us,
though first there was the hanging to enjoy.
"That scaffold,, eh?" he said, "the real McCoy!"
and hoicked me up so I could feel the buzz.

The very moment that the hangman thwacked
the prisoner's sorry arse cheeks into space,
Papa struck a blow across my face--

"Take that," he said, "so one day you'll look back
and understand: this fate is destined to
take down a thousand better men than you."

tr. Mike Stocks.

Stevenson

My office computer has become so slow at loading that I now have a book at the desk to read while waiting for the programs to load.  Every morning I get about 10 minutes of reading in.  (One of the reasons the machines at home do not run on Microsoft products.)  The new book for this purpose is Anne Stevenson: Selected Poems.  It starts very well.  Here is the first poem in the book:

Living in America

'Living in America,'
the intelligent people at Harvard say,
'is the price you pay for living in New England.'

Californians think
living in America is a reward
for managing not to live anywhere else.

The rest if the country?
Could it be sagging between two poles,
tastelessly decorated, dangerously overwieght?

No.  Look closely.
Under cover of light and noise
both shores are hurrying towards each other.

San Francisco
is already halfway to Omaha.
Boston is nervously losing its way in Detroit.

Desperately the inhabitants
hoped to be saved in the middle.
Pray to the mountains and deserts to keep them apart.

Her work is new to me; I just picked it off the bookshelf and started.  I keep collecting books faster than I read them.  As a result, I sometimes come across books I can't recall buying.  It is a defect of character I suppose.  The upside is little treats like this one, someone completely new to me.  (Stevenson is hardly new as a poet.  She has been publishing since the 60's.) 

Dog Day

OSTEoSARCOMA: A LOVE POEM BY YVONNE ZIPTER For Easton, Zooey, and Nacho Cancer loves the long bone, the femur and the fibula, the humerus and ulna, the greyhound’s sleek physique, a calumet, ribboned with fur and eddies of dust churned to a smoke, the sweet slenderness of that languorous lick of calcium, like an ivory flute or a stalk of  Spiegelau stemware, its bowl bruised, for an eye blink, with burgundy, a reed, a wand, the violin’s bow — loves the generous line of  your lanky limbs, the distance between points A and D, epic as Western Avenue, which never seems to end but then of course it does, emptying its miles into the Cal-Sag Channel that river of waste and sorrow. I’ve begun a scrapbook: here the limp that started it all, here your scream when the shoulder bone broke, here that walk to the water dish, your leg trailing like a length of   black bunting. And here the words I whispered when your ears lay like spent milkweed pods on that beautiful silky head: Run. Run, my boy-o, in that madcap zigzag, unzipping the air. Source: Poetry (May 2008). I like this for good and bad reasons.  'boy-o" is what I call my dog from time to time, when we are playing certain games.  Makes him sound a bit Irish, which is not a bad thing for a dog of his kind (namely, smart).  Also because I have been worrying a little about him - he has new behaviors which do not go with the monster of even a year ago.  No evidence of any kind that he has a cancer, but close enough for civilian work.  And dead, thinking about dead, so a piece of a theme.

Rorty's Shadow

A very late essay by Richard Rorty, published post-mortem, discussing what he thought about as death approached -- here.  It is interesting, and came as a surprise to me.  I was not a Rorty fan (I thought much of the late work was passing time and bloviating), but it surprised me (I said that) that it was not philosophy of any kind that he finally turned to, nor even the great work of literature.  What would I read were I to be in his soon to be empty shoes?  I have lots I could list, but it is one of the situations about which it is quite easy to propose but rather hard to predict reliably.  In any event, let me recommend the essay.  In fact, the whole series what poetry means to me by people who are not part of the professional poetry production world -- has been quite interesting.

Philosophy and Poetry

Borrowed from another source; this is a charming, and a nice bit of mistaken philosophy.


The Solipsist 

            by  Troy  Jollimore   

Don't be misled:

that sea-song you hear

when the shell's at your ear?

It's all in your head.

That primordial tide—

the slurp and salt-slosh

of the brain's briny wash—

is on the inside.

Truth be told, the whole place,

everything that the eye

can take in, to the sky

and beyond into space,

lives inside of your skull.

When you set your sad head

down on Procrustes' bed,

you lay down the whole

universe. You recline

on the pillow: the cosmos

grows dim. The soft ghost

in the squishy machine,

which the world is, retires.

Someday it will expire.

Then all will go silent

and dark. For the moment,

however, the black-

ness is just temporary.

The planet you carry

will shortly swing back

from the far nether regions.

And life will continue—

but only within you.

Which raises a question

that comes up again and again,

as to why

God would make ear and eye

to face outward, not in?

Speak Up

I have been listening to the American Academy of Poets' cds.  There are four or five in the set so far, I've listened to two.  Each is a selection of poems by various poets, each reading their own poem (or reciting; hard to tell from the cd).  I have not noticed a particular theme or organizing principle, at least for the first two.  The style of recitation varies widely, which is no surprise.  It is what I find myself thinking most about as I listen.  (The disks are left in for a longish period, so I listen to them over and over, which is not so bad as my commute is all of 12 minutes.  That is time for about 3 or 4 cuts.)  Nor is it a surprise that many of the poets are poor readers (or is it reciters?) of their own work.  Attend more than a couple of readings and both of those points become obvious.  I have strong preferences about presentation.  One style is to read each line, rising tone at the end, as portentously as possible.  Do not like that at all, no matter the poem.  All of the syntax is lost, and most of the meaning.  There are also those who read the rhyme and the line break, but in monotone.  Does reflect the written word, but it is nevertheless a bad idea normally.  There is no thought there for the fat that it is an oral presentation, not visual.  Some poems are all on the page (Un coup de des) - but then do not read it aloud.  I prefer the poet to speak, to read the words as spoken language.  It is harder to hear the artifice, t'is true.  But the artifice is also then less for its own sake, and the words do what they should.

Good News

THE GOOD NEWS

                David Yazzi

            A friend calls, so I ask him to stop by.
We sip old Scotch, the good stuff, order in,
some Indian—no frills too fine for him
or me, particularly since it's been
                     ages since we made the time.

             Two drinks in, we've caught up on our plans.
I've sleepwalked through the past few years by rote;
he's had a nasty rough patch, quote unquote,
on the home front. So, we commiserate,
                     cupping our lowballs in our hands.

            It's great to see him, good to have a friend
who feels the same as you about his lot—
that, while some grass is greener, your small plot
is crudely arable, and though you're not
                     so young, it's still not quite the end.

             As if remembering then, he spills his news.
Though I was pretty lit, I swear it's true,
it was as if a gold glow filled the room
and shone on him, a sun-shaft piercing through
                    dense clouds, behind which swept long views.

             In that rich light, he looked not like my friend
but some acquaintance brushed by on the train.
Had his good fortune kept me from the same,
I had to wonder, a zero-sum game
                    that gave the night its early end?

             Nothing strange. Our drinks were done, that's all.
We haven't spoken since. By morning, I
couldn't remember half of what the guy
had said, just his good news, my slurred goodbye,
                      the click of the latch, the quiet hall.               

Misspent

Misspent
    A.E Stallings

Because in the time it took
To blink I had mislaid
A sum, I stopped to look,
And this is what I paid:
I spent the shining day
Badly, like a coin
I found along the way
And pocketed to join
The jangle of loose change,
Amounts I never heed
But squander on a range
Of cheap things I don't need,
A day stamped with the face
Of the sun,  a whole day lost,
And no way to replace
The currency it cost.

Bunny rule

The Bunny Gives Us a Lesson in Eternity
    Mary Ruefle

We are a sad people, without hats.
The history of our nation is tragically benign.
We like to watch the rabbits screwing in the graveyard.
We are fond of the little bunny with the bent ear
who stands alone in the moonlight
reading what little text there is on the graves.
He looks quite desireable like that.
He looks like the center of the universe.
Look how his mouth moves mouthing the words
while the others are busy making more of him.
Soon the more will ask of him to write their love
letters and he will oblige, using the language
of our ancestors, those poor clouds in the ground,
beloved by us who have been standing here for hours,
a proud people after all.

In the Bay

Poeta en San Francisco is a lovely book, nicely designed and quite attractive.  (Kudos to TinFish for putting out a well-designed book,)  A simple cover and well placed red dividers among the pages.  It was published to quite a bit of praise, which it continues to garner.  (Some of the praise is idiotic -- oh oh a trilingual book!, but most is addressed to the quality of the writing.)  My misfortune is I cannot join in the praise of Ms. Reyes' book.  You can find a selection of her poems here.
I could not bring myself to finish the book.  I found it largely wanting, redolent of self-indulgence, posturing, a self-congratulatory foolishness.  I do not know where the disconnect is, why my reaction is so far from that of others.  Some of it comes from distance.  Reyes has a couple of poems built around a little ditty about 'Charlie don't surf'.  But I found the pieces so postured and impossible, as to be ridiculous.  No, not ridiculous, offensive.  One of the poems is below.  I just do not see how anyone who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and knows enough to think the ditty is connected to the 101st could think it about anything other than Viet Cong.  Not enough to have the little "embarrassed to say," as that is plain horseshit. The politics seem to be almost thoughtless, which at least would excuse the cliched bigotry of the thing.  But they aren't; this is the work of an engaged person.  But most others seem to be having very different reactions to her work, so I suggest you take the trouble to read on, or go to her page, linked above.

   

From the streetcorner's beat up boombox
Charlie don't surf and we think he should
Charlie don't surf and you that it ain't no good
Charlie don't surf for his hamburger Momma
Charlie's gonna be a napalm star

And I laugh at the coincidence,
because up until yesterday
(I am embarrassed to say),
I did not know who Charlie was,
mistook him for GI slang for some
US Airborne Cavalry Division's
blond American killing machine,
a freckled boy from the landlocked
middle of this country, homecoming
king and all star quarterback,
who'd knocked up his girl in a barn
or in the back of beat up Chevy,
who'd never seen beyond cornfields
until crouched eye to eye,
machine gun to machete,
with his slanty-eyed animal enemy
in some malarial jungle --

The opposite of Eden.

He inhabited a blank landmass on my map;
and this is why I thought Charlie don't surf.