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Archive for the ‘Writer’ Category

Poem of the Day: Atlas

Posted in poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, words, Write, Writer, writing on 04/06/2008| 1 Comment »

Atlas

There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it

Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget
The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;

Which answers letters; which knows the way
The money goes; which deals with dentists

And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,
And postcards to the lonely; which upholds

The permanently rickety elaborate
Structures of living, which is Atlas.

And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in air,
As Atlas did the sky.

-U.A. Fanthorpe

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Poem of the Day: The Galloping Cat

Posted in poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, Write, Writer, writing on 04/02/2008| 1 Comment »

The Galloping Cat

Oh I am a cat that likes to
Gallop about doing good
So
One day when I was
Galloping about doing good, I saw
A figure in the path; I said
Get off! (Be-
cause
I am a cat that likes to
Gallop about doing good)
But he did not move, instead
He raised his hand as if
To land me a cuff
So I made to dodge so as to
Prevent him bringing it orf,
Un-for-tune-ately I slid
On a banana skin
Some Ass had left instead
Of putting in the bin. So
His hand caught me on the cheek
I tried
To lay his arm open from wrist to elbow
With my sharp teeth
Because I am
A cat that likes to gallop about doing good.
Would you believe it?
He wasn’t there
My teeth met nothing but air,
But a Voice said: Poor Cat,
(Meaning me) and a soft stroke
Came on me head
Since when
I have been bald.
I regard myself as
A martyr to doing good
Also I heard a swoosh
As of wings, and saw
A halo shining at the height of
Mrs Gubbins’s backyard fence,
So I thought: What’s the good
Of galloping about doing good
When angels stand in the path
And do not do as they should
Such as having an arm to be bitten off
All the same I
Intend to go on being
A cat that likes to
Gallop about doing good
So
Now with my bald head I go,
Chopping the untidy flowers down, to
and fro,
An’ scooping up the grass to show
Underneath
The cinder path of wrath
Ha ha ha ha, ho,
Angels aren’t the only ones who do
not know
What’s what and that
Galloping about doing good
Is a full time job
That needs
An experienced eye of earthly
Sharpness, worth I dare say
(if you’ll forgive a personal note)
A good deal more
Than all that skyey stuff
Of angels that make so bold as
To pity a cat like me that
Gallops about doing good.

-Stevie Smith

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Poem of the Day: A Spirit Passed Before Me

Posted in a spirit passed, byron, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, spirit, Write, Writer, writing on 04/02/2008| 2 Comments »

A Spirit Passed Before Me

From Job

A spirit passed before me: I beheld
The face of immortality unveiled—
Deep sleep came down on every eye save mine—
And there it stood,—all formless—but divine:
Along my bones the creeping flesh did quake;
And as my damp hair stiffened, thus it spake:

“Is man more just than God? Is man more pure
Than He who deems even Seraphs insecure?
Creatures of clay—vain dwellers in the dust!
The moth survives you, and are ye more just?
Things of a day! you wither ere the night,
Heedless and blind to Wisdom’s wasted light!”

-George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron

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Poem of the Day: The Purpose of this Writing is to Pluck the Fruit

Posted in alvarez, life, nina, philosophy, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, Write, Writer, writing on 02/26/2008| 1 Comment »

The purpose of this writing is to pluck the fruit. Les fruits. Des fruits. Fru-its.

Leave me alone, Nietzsche, your aphorisms telling me one way, then the next, your contradictory sentiments, your unphilosophical philosophy, your hardness, which I love too well. I gave my hardness to a bourgeois boy with a doctor wife. Do all rejected people secretly feel they are superior to the one rejecting them?

I came out here, six months ago, in bliss, to write by my parent’s poolside. There was a novel. It was happening.

Oh, good thing no one has married me. Wouldn’t I be the saddest wife? No one wants a sad wife.

My name would be nested at the middle of the table. My big fat father would hover in his muscle shirt. The legs of the tables would attach to my mother in law and sister in law and I would be sacrificed to the family, like a turkey.

I would come here, from across a far distance, to tell you something. I am the voiceless voice, the sin of sons, I am joy in your bosom.

In this time of psychic excesses, what else to do but siphon it into art?

I have heard the call of the miracle cure. It was coming down the long hall. It was effervescent, ever ready. It had a hard hat and hard timing of staying afloat. It couldn’t look at us. It did not have coordinates for directed movement. It was a mass of particles. We did not know where to put it or where to hide it. I was coming, unconsciously, down the corridor of images.

And progress wept. In me. The last of the long gods disappeared, following out a gray cloud to the West. I stood in a field of bodies and screamed my hollow hole to the last chroniclers. They were dancing the dance of Baccus, but had no joy. I felt how still the earth was, and forever would be from this moment.

I felt how good, how golden, I had planned to be. And how the gray skin seemed instead to say, “No one may be golden in a gray world.”

I have no eyes, save the eyes that see particles and parts.

Do you know how important you are to this world? How much they need you? You are not just some schmuck sitting in a suburb and contemplating death. You have the Grand Mission to them. The voice, the help, the responsibility. Sweet succor. Nietzsche said people needed to suffer more, not less.

Beware the handsome voice, the courteous voice, the nascent voice.

Beware the pleasant afternoon, the pleasant morning, the pleasant fuck.

Beware the dream that doesn’t awake you in cold steam, or with hate in your heart.

Beware the dogged doggerel of egolessness.

Beware technique. Beware trend. Beware answers.

The pretty small palms by the blue kidney shaped pool in Seminole, FL are not suburban trees, no suburban water, not suburban sky, but the same self-composed solar system of grandeur as the nebulae and must not be assumed to be pleasant.

The rest of the world cuts out for me.

I waver between jealousy and disdain of those happy actors who act their parts so well.

In cities, love is more intense, because the pain of daily living is nearly excruciating.

I don’t know where to go, or why life should be such a game of shifting floors.

-Nina Alvarez

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Poem of the Day: A Rabbit As King Of The Ghosts

Posted in king, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, rabbit, stevens, wallace, Write, Writer, writing on 02/09/2008| 1 Comment »

A Rabbit As King Of The Ghosts

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten on the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

-Wallace Stevens

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Poem of the Day: Far Company

Posted in merwin, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, w.s. merwin, Write, Writer, writing on 02/07/2008| Leave a Comment »

Thanks Paul, for this suggestion!

Far Company

At times now from some margin of the day
I can hear birds of another country
not the whole song but a brief phrase of it
out of a music that I may have heard
once in a moment I appear to have
forgotten for the most part that full day
no sight of which I can remember now
though it must have been where my eyes were then
that knew it as the present while I thought
of somewhere else without noticing that
singing when it was there and still went on
whether or not I noticed now it falls
silent when I listen and leaves the day
and flies before it to be heard again
somewhere ahead when I have forgotten

-W. S. Merwin

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Poem of the Day: To Not Be Here

Posted in Nina Alvarez, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, to not be here, Write, Writer, writing on 01/31/2008| Leave a Comment »

To Not Be Here

How I want to wet myself in that languid black well
Where Oppen and Gadamer and the Beats and Roethke
Shook off so easily the eeriness of life.
They had some sort of shelf just hidden from the TV

Or the violent street, there was time then
For poetry, for a person to get lost in an autumn
And never be found again.
Today, there is no time for words,

The flash of good video is too much, they’ve made it
Really good, you know, the pull of a solid show
Is inescapable, and it’s so much more real than this white noise.

Who am I to long for sixty years ago, or for some imagined romance
With a man I kissed one night, in the kitchen where he kisses his
Wife, where the feast of bodies lives on in a big idea that only
Cracks slightly, so much slighter than than a life convinced by longing.

-Nina Alvarez

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Poem of the Day: Who Shall Doubt

Posted in doubt, oppen, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, Write, Writer, writing on 01/30/2008| 3 Comments »

Who Shall Doubt
  
consciousness

        in itself

of itself carrying

    'the principle

        of the actual' being

actual

itself ((but maybe this is a love 

poem

Mary) ) nevertheless

        neither

the power

of the self nor the racing 

car nor the lilly

        is sweet but this   -George Oppen

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Poem of the Day: Man of War

Posted in carol, man of war, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, Write, Writer, writing on 01/15/2008| Leave a Comment »

Man of War

After there were no women, men, and children,

from the somber deeps horseshoe crabs crawled up on somber shores: …(read more)

-Carol Frost

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Poem of the Day: Days of Me

Posted in Dischell, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, Write, Writer, writing on 01/11/2008| 1 Comment »

Days of Me

When people say they miss me,

I think how much I miss me too,

Me, the old me, the great me,

Lover of three women in one day,

Modest me, the best me, friend

To waiters and bartenders, hearty

Laugher and name rememberer,

Proud me, handsome and hirsute

In soccer shoes and shorts

On the ball fields behind MIT,

Strong me in a weightbelt at the gym,

Mutual sweat dripper in and out

Of the sauna, furtive observer

Of the coeducated and scantily clad,

Speedy me, cyclist of rivers,

Goose and peregrine falcon

Counter, all season venturer,

Chatterer-up of corner cops,

Groundskeepers, mothers with strollers,

Outwitter of panhandlers and bill

Collectors, avoider of levies, excises,

Me in a taxi in the rain,

Pressing my luck all the way home.

That’s me at the dice table, baby,

Betting come, little Joe, and yo,

Blowing the coals, laying thunder,

My foot on top a fifty dollar chip

Some drunk spilled on the floor,

Dishonest me, evener of scores,

Eager accepter of the extra change,

Hotel towel pilferer, coffee spoon

Lifter, fervent retailer of others’

Fumor, blackhearted gossiper,

Poisoner at the well, dweller

In unsavory detail, delighted sayer

Of the vulgar, off course belier

Of the true me, empiric builder

Newly haircutted, stickerer-up

For pals, jam unpriser, medic

To the self-inflicted, attorney

To the self-indicted, petty accountant

And keeper of the double books,

Great divider of the universe

And all its forms of existence

Into its relationship to me,

Fellow trembler to the future,

Thin air gawker, apprehender

Of the frameless door.

-Stuart Dischell

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