Ciceronian Review

The Third

Without Warning

By Sarah Lindsay

Elizabeth Bishop leaned on a table, it cracked,

both fell to the floor. A gesture

gone sadly awry. This was close to fact

and quickly became symbolic, bound to occur

in Florida, where she was surrounded

by rotting abundance and greedy insects.

One moment a laughing smile, a graceful hand

alighting on solid furniture,

a casual shift of weight,

the next, undignified splayed legs.

The shell of the table

proved to be stuffed with termite eggs.

True, it was a fall from no great height—

merely the height of herself,

and although the hollowed-out table failed,

at least the floor held,

though probably infested by termites as well,

and possibly built on a latent sinkhole,

how can you tell?

And how could she, smiling and easy,

arm moving without forethought and permission,

have forgotten fear, apparently

let go of a hard-learned lesson?

Enter a room as though it is strange.

What you recognize may have changed,

or may change without warning.

Trees fall in hurricanes

and on windless mornings,

breaching houses where people you knew

have vanished or died or stopped loving you.

She regained her feet, already composed,

brushing dust from an elbow. There would be a bruise,

but it would remind her that words are full of holes;

flung hard, like paper they fly sideways.

And a call to joy—a landscape, a face—

may, though scarcely moving, perhaps by not moving, go

in one breath from heartening to ominous,

proving to children who need more proof

that we don’t know what we know.

Source: Poetry (May 2011).

A Dugdale Poem

Dawn Chorus
March 29, 2010

Every morning since the time changed
I have woken to the dawn chorus
And even before it sounded, I dreamed of it
Loud, unbelievably loud, shameless, raucous

And for once I rose and twitched the curtains apart
Expecting the birds to be pressing in fright
Against the pane like passengers
But the garden was empty and it was night

Not a slither of light at the horizon
Still the birds were bawling through the mists
Terrible, invisible
A million small evangelists

How they sing: as if each had pecked up a smoldering coal
Their throats singed and swollen with song
In dissonance as befits the dark world
Where only travelers and the sleepless belong

 

Sasha Dugdale

May Issue Poetry

 

I like that poem.  A good issue.

Skim Milk

The following, from the February issue of Poetry, is very good.  I do not know why, but it went well with lunch.

 

Why Poetry Cannot Be Skimmed

By Jessica Jopp

In response to a student who told me he just “skims” the poetry right before class

The barn was in the Netherlands,

in a field where fierce night wind

caught the straw as if to fuse

the winter stars to their coldness.

A farmer, woken by the sound, knowing

his animals would be agitated,

walked to the barn and by lantern

brushed the tails of his horses.

In calming them he gathered

many long, gleaming strands

of their nut-brown hair. Given over

to what he heard in the swishing of their tails—

the lash, the taut string of grief, turned slow,

persistence turned to rhythmic movement—

he hoped that if he listened long enough

the layered sound would become a salve.

He rolled the strands together, laid out

along the windowsills of the barn.

Then, once dry enough in spring,

he rolled them in paraffin wax

to preserve the sound

and left them to absorb

all the varied rays of sun, the spills

of rain, and then snow flying fast

across the latched windows and the slats,

the rhythm of other breathing,

animals plodding by the barn walls.

The wax melted as the years progressed

and other horses resided in the stalls,

and their tail strands were added

to the aging threads.  From that encased sound

deepening over years, a rope,

pulled strong and taut, would resonate.

Then another generation worked the land

and waxed the horse-tail cord again,

and in turn when it caught

that century’s light, was spun

into amber. Woven into the cells of hair:

the tones of canal and field,

pasture, furrows of plough,

leaf and shadow, straw and stone,

the human calling, the animal uttering.

And when melted again, incrementally

strands from other horses living there

were added until there were enough

layers of sound, set with the nourishment

of grass and salt, to be given away

and the space the hair had occupied

would be returned to emptiness.

The horse-hair cord was brought

by a farmer to a luthier’s shop

along a canal, and it was a perfect fit,

she said, for a violin bow

she had carved a few months earlier,

waiting, and for the bow-less violin

someone had just given her.  She knew

rosin carrying a current through

pastures, filled thirst, and the grief

of night wind and scavenged apples

made the gathered pieces a whole.

And now they are together in your hands

this moment to make

unrehearsed, immediate,

after all those animals’ years,

when you bring the instrument to your chin,

when you raise the hair-strung bow,

again their elemental sounding,

and then their measured note, their first.

Source: Poetry (February 2011).

Roddy

Up too early reading, but the following which I think amusing came to the eyes:

Yeast

By Roddy Lumsden

A word you can’t quite say

without itching, flinching; it’s not easy

to ignore its squirming appetite, stay

your primal juddering. And yes, at

night, each microbe gurns in the salty sea

of gut and gullet, born again, boldly eats

as you ate it, brews its own queasy tea

of proto-raunch which it will quickly sate,

birthing wanderlusting vigors, as yet

unknown to microscience. They sashay, set

out for the toes or gape through your eyes at

your drooping lids, your fat bunch of keys, at

this internal motel’s boss, bellhop, lackey, sat

in the throne of his slumber, a mercy seat.

Source: Poetry (April 2011).

For more from Lumsden, see here.

The issue of Poetry also has some great translations of some of Rimbaud's Illuminations by Ashberry. 

I went back to bed after that.

 

 

Poem Today

The American Academy of Poets sends out a poem every day.  You can sign up for the service here.  It is a nice service.  The poems are quite varied in style and subject, and range over a long time period.  One day is Keats and the next Anne Stevenson and the next Marilyn Krysl.  They come early in the day, so for many people it is a way to start the email review, with a breath and a moment of thought. 

Someone Else's Good Poem

Litany

 

O you gods, you long-limbed animals, you

astride the sea and you unhammocked

in the cyprus grove and you with your hair

full of horses, please.  My thoughts have turned

from the savor of plums to the merits

of pity – touch and interrupt me,

chasten me with waking, humble me

for wonder again.  Seed god and husk god,

god of the open palm, you know me, you

know my mettle.  See, my wrists are small.

O you, with glass-colored wind at your call

and you, whose voice is soft as a turned page,

whose voice unrolls paper, whose voice returns

air to its forms, send me a word for faith

that also means his thrum, his coax and surge

and her soft hollow, please – friend gods, lend me

a word that means whiat I would aask him for

so when he says: You give it all away,

I can say: I am not sorry. I sing.

 

 

By Rebecca Lindenberg

Philosophyical Poetry

Cabaret Ludwig

 

I’ll fly off to a fjord in Norway

Post “Oh the pain” above the doorway

If you insist on going your way,

                        For this is not a duck.

 

That is what cowards say, and realists

Who run away, shun the appeal its

Rare white fur holds, although they fell it’s

                        A rabbit full of pluck.

 

Let’s multiply, let’s twitch our noses,

Let’s walk among the night’s dark roses,

Though where the oldest story goes is

                        A place where tongues migh cluck.

 

I’ve had my share of quacks and hisses;

Whereof mouth cannot speak, it kisses;

Hop to it, man, and realize this is

                        A lovely bit of luck.

 

 

Rachel Wetzsteon

 

Goodbye George

George Hitchcock died August 27.  (An obituary is here.)  Hitchcock was on the faculty at then College V at UCSC when I was there.  I took a couple of classes from him.  An interesting teacher, and quite dedicated to poetry as an art.  I learned a good deal from him; perhaps the most important thing I took from his classes was that, however skilled I became, I just did not have the talent for a career in that art.  It was a good thing to learn early.  Nevertheless, I found his classes rewarding.  Hitchcock was honest, and I think the sort of direct reader many need in college.  Although Hitchcock himself wrote in a sort of surrealist, deep image vein, he had very good analytic skills.  He was very demanding concerning the the integrity of images, and alert to the import of images in language.  I remember him being particularly sensitive to use of what might be called 'orientalizing' images -- language about people in which the nationality or race was used in ways that made the person into a novelty or object.  E.g., using Black or African-American (this was the late 70's so the latter was not the term used by many people) as a sign of mystery or exotic.  

Marge Percy gave a reading at College V, which resulted in a rumpus.  Percy was introduced by Lynne Sukenick (Ron and Lynne Sukenick were both at UCSC then, I believe, although based at one of the east side colleges -- Stevenson is my guess) who I think was associated with English.  Percy gets up and recites some work.  Percy's style of recitation used the "Poetry voice" with rather sing-song kind of performance.  At the end, there was an invitation for questions.  Hitchcock stood up and complained about the recitation -- basically that the the style of reading was ridiculous, demeaned the language, an insult to listeners.  He may have said something about the poems as well.  Percy did not like the remarks, and after some general shouting back and forth (Percy and Sukenick on one side, Hitchcock on the other), the event broke up.  

Hitchcock took his teaching duties seriously, which is something given how little he was paid.  He showed up for every class and every class was worthwhile and on topic.  Plenty in his role did not -- Hitchcock did much better by his students that Ray Carver, for example.  Or so it was for those couple of years.

Goodbye George.  Thanks.

Living on Music

How to Live on Bread and Music is a quite good collection of poetry.  Perhaps 5 weak pieces, or pieces not as good as the rest.  The book as a whole is interesting.  The language, as expected, is interesting.  More importantly, the poems give one something to think about.  Not just a collection of images or psuedo-profundities.  I would not describe them as modest, but also not a bravura showing of erudition or he muck of fake philosophy.  Insightful and lovely.  I would like to be able to say I knew what I was getting, but that is not right.  The book won an award and showed up in the mail -- Laughlin award I think.   It is not the revelations the Anne Stevenson collection was, but this is a good book and the poet one to follow.

Thank you Ms. Sweeney.  And Perugia Press -- the book is well made and lovely to the touch. 

Some Praise That Isn't

Her are the first sentences of an introduction to this year's winnner of Wallace Stevens Award:

Jean Valentine is, in my view, the great lyric poet of American poetry today.  From her first published poems, which were stark, devoutly original, and slant, to her latest and her latest-latest, there appears to be an inevitable trajectory that has taken her, and us, to a place at once deeply simple, as the world is simple, yet deeply mysterious, as the world -- as life -- is.

This sort of praise fails.  What is a "slant" poem?  Written on an angle?  What could that mean about a poem?  Are we to dig into etymological and dig up something like 'outside the church'?  But the poems are "devoutly original" so maybe the (ridiculous) etymological intent is at work.  Well, how is that helpful?  Setting aside that almost no one would get that link, and that it would embody an fairly silly view about use fo language, just what is 'devout' supposed to mean here?  How is one devout with respect to originality (of writing)?  Is there some doctrine or church that is at work, some theory or ideology?   Next up is the poems which are simple as the world is simple.  It appears this is meant in the simple sense, that is, as saying the poems are simple and the world is simple and the two share the simplicity.  A view that is inane.  Perhaps Stern is being ironic or clever or something and intends instead that the poems are simple in just the way the world is simple, and, as the world is anything but simple the poems too are not simple.  I rather doubt that was the thought, as he also says a couple lines later that Valentine is not an ironic poet, and the rest of the essay seems quite sincere.  This is an awful introduction to any poet, on two levels.  It is an awful introduction because it says nothing at all about the poetry or the poet.  And it is an awful introduction because it is awful writing.