Robert Duncan

Poetry, a Natural Thing

     Neither our vices nor our virtues
further the poem. "They came up
     and died
just like they do every year
     on the rocks."

     The poem
feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,
     to breed   itself,
a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping.

This beauty is an inner persistence
     toward the source
striving against (within) down-rushet of the river,
     a call we heard and answer
in the lateness of the world
     primordial bellowings
from with the youngest world might spring,

salmon not in the well where the
     hazelnut falls
but at the falls battling, inarticulate,
     blindly making it.

This is one picture apt for the mind.

A second: a moose painted by Stubbs,
where last year's extragent antlers
     lie on the ground.
The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears
     new antler-buds,
     the same,

"a little heavy, a little contrived",

his only beauty to be
     all moose.

Jackson Mac Low

1st Light Poem: For Iris -- 10 June 1962

The light of a student-lamp
sapphire light
shimmer
the light of a smoking-lampLight from the Magellanic Clouds
the light of a Nernst lamp
the light of a naphtha-lamp
light from meteorites
Evanescent light
ether
the light of an electric lamp
extra light
Citrine light
kineographic light
the light of a Kitson lamp
kindly light
Ice light
irradiation
ignition
altar light
The light of a spotlight
a sunbeam
sunrise
solar light
Mustard-oil light
maroon light
the light of a magnesium flare
light from a meteor
Evanescent light
ether
light from an electric lamp
an extra light
Light from a student-lamp
sapphire light
a shimmer
smoking-lamp light
Ordinary light
orgone lumination
light from a lamp burning olive oil
opal light
Actinism
atom-bomb light
the light of an alcohol lamp
the light of a lamp burning anda-oil

fr. 22 Light Poems
[Black Sparrow Press, 1968] 

Ron Padgett

The Art of the Sonnet 

Last night I said hello
to the little muse
the smaller than usual muse

She was floating toward me
a plaster figurine
on a cloud

but her plaster lips
could not return my greeting.
That's the first part

and in Japan.
Now the figurine
drifts past and turns

a smile erasing
her face


fr. How to Be Perfect

Jack Spicer

Phonemics

No love deserves the death it has. An archipelago

Rocks cropping out of ocean. Seabirds shit on it. Live out their

     lives on it.

What was once a mountain.

Or was it once a mountain? Did Lemuria, Atlantis, Mu ever

     exist except in the minds of old men fevered by the distances

     and the rocks they saw?

Was it true? Can the ocean of time claim to own us now adrift

Over that land. In that land. If memory serves

There (that rock out there)

Is more to it.

-----

Wake up one warm morning. See the sea in the distance.

Die Ferne, water

Because mainly it is not land. A hot day too

The shreads of fog have already vaporized

Have gone back where they came from . There may be a whale

     in this ocean.

Empty fragments, like the shards of pots found in some

     Mesopotamian expedition. Found but not put together. The

     unstable

Universe has distance but not much else.

No one’s weather or room to breathe in.

-----

On the tele-phone (distant sound) you sounded no distant than

     if you were talking to me in San Francisco on the telephone

     or in a bar or in a room. Long

Distance calls. They break sound

Into electrical impulses and put it back again. Like the long

     telesexual route to the brain or the even longer teleerotic

     route to the heart. The numbers dialed badly, the

     connection faint.

Your voice

                  consisted of sounds that I had

To route to phonemes, then to bound and free morphemes, then

     to syntactic structures. Telekinesis

Would not have been possible even if we were sitting at the

     same table. Long

Distance calls your father, your mother, your friend, your

     lover. The lips

Are never quite as far away as when you kiss.

An electric system.

“Gk. ήλέκτρον, amber, also shining metal; allied to

     ήλέκτωρ, gleaming.”

-----

Malice aforethought. Every sound

You can make making music.

Tough lips.

This is no nightingale. No-

Body’s waxen image burned. Only

Believe me. Linguistics is divided like Graves’ mythology of

     mythology, a triple goddess—morphology, phonology, and

     syntax.

Tough lips that cannot quite make the sounds of love

The language

Has so misshaped them.

Malicious afterthought. None of you bastards

Knows how Charlie Parker died. And dances now in some brief

     kingdom (Oz) two phonemes

That were never paired before in the language.

-----

Aleph did not come before Beth. The Semitic languages kept as

     strict a separation between consonant and vowel as between

     men and women. Vowels somehow got between to produce

     children. J V H

Was male. The Mycenaean bookkeepers

Mixed them up (one to every 4.5)

     (A = 1, E = 5, I = 9, O = 15, U = 21)

Alpha being chosen as the queen of the alphabet because she

     meant “not.”

Punched

              IBM cards follow this custom.

What I have chosen to follow is what schoolteachers call a

     blend, but which is not, since the sounds are very little

     changed by each other

Two consonants (floating in the sea of some truth together)

Immediately preceded and/or followed by a vowel.

-----

The emotional disturbance echoes down the canyons of the

     heart.

Echoes there—sounds cut off—merely phonemes. A ground-

     rules double. You recognize them by pattern. Try.

Hello shouted down a canyon becomes huhluh. You, and the

     canyons of the heart,

Recognize feebly what you shouted. The vowels

Are indistinguishable. The consonants

A pattern for imagination. Phonemes,

In the true sense, that are dead before their burial. Constructs

Of the imagination

Of the real canyon and the heart’s

Construct.

fr. Language 

in The Collected Books of Jack Spicer

[Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975]

Allen Ginsberg

Siesta in Xbalba
and Return to the States
          dedicated to Karena Shields

I.

Late sun opening the book,
          blank page like light,
invisible words unscrawled,
          impossible syntax
of apocalypse--
          Uxmal : Noble Ruins
No construction--

          let the mind fall down.

--One could pass valuable months
and years perhaps a lifetime
doing nothing but lying in a hammock
reading prose with the white doves
          copulating underneath
and monkeys barking in the interior
          of the mountain
and I have succumbed to this
          temptation--

'They go mad in the Selva--'
          the madman read
and laughed in his hammock

          eyes watching me:
unease not of the jungle
          the poor dear,
can tire one--
          all that mud
and all those bugs . . .
          ugh . . .

Dreaming back I saw
an eternal kodachrome
souvenir of a gathering
of souls at a party,
crowded in an oval flash :
cigarettes, suggestions,
laughter in drunkenness,
broken sweet conversation,
acquaintance in the halls,
faces posed together,
stylized gestures,
odd familiar visages
and singular recognitions
that registered indifferent
greeting across time :
Anson reading Horace
with a rolling head,
white-handed Hohnsbean
camping gravely
with an absent glance,
bald Kingsland drinking
out of a huge glass,
Dusty in a party dress,
Durgin in white shoes
gesturing from a chair,
Keck in a corner waiting
for subterranean music,
Helen Parker lifting
her hands in surprise :
all posturing in one frame,
superficially gay
or tragic as may be,
illumed with the fatal
character and intelligent
actions of their lives.

And I in a concrete room
          above the abandoned
labyrinth of Palenque
          measuring my fate,
wandering solitary in the wild
          --blinking singleminded
at a bleak idea--
          until exhausted with
its action and contemplation
          my soul might shatter
at one primal moment's
          sensation of the vast
movement of divinity.

As I leaned against a tree
          inside a forest
expiring of self-begotten love,
I looked up at the stars absently,
          as if looking for
something else in the blue night
          through the boughs,
and for a moment saw myself
          leaning against a tree . . .

. . . back there the noise of a great party
          in the apartments of New York,
half-created paintings on the walls, fame,
          cocksucking and tears,
money and arguments of great affairs,
          the culture of my generation . . .

          my own crude night imaginings,
my own crude soul notes taken down
          in moments of isolation, dreams,
piercings, sequences of nocturnal thought
          and primitive illuminations

--uncanny feeling the white cat
          sleeping on the table
will open its eyes in a moment
          and be looking at me--.

One might sit in this Chiapas
recording the apparitions in the field
          visible from a hammock
looking out across the shadow of the pasture
in all the semblance of Eternity

          . . . a dwarfed thatch roof
down in the grass in a hollow slope
under the tall crowd of vegetation
          waiting at the wild edge :
the long shade of the mountain beyond
          in the near distance,
its individual hairline of trees
traced fine and dark along the ridge
          against the transparent sky light,
rifts and holes in the blue air
          and amber brightenings of clouds
disappearing down the other side
          into the South . . .

          palms with lethargic feelers
rattling in presage of rain,
          shifting their fronds
in the direction of the balmy wind,
          monstrous animals
sprayed up out of the ground
          settling and unsettling
as in water . . .
          and later in the night
a moment of premonition
when the plenilunar cloudfilled sky
          is still and small.

So spent a night
          with drug and hammock
at Chichen Itza on the Castle :--

          I can see the moon
moving over the edge of the night forest
          and follow its destination
through the clear dimensions of the sky
          from end to end of the dark
circular horizon.

          High dim stone portals,
entablatures of illegible scripture,
bas-reliefs of unknown perceptions :
          and now the flicker of my lamp
and smell of kerosene on dust-
          strewn floor where ant wends
its nightly ritual way toward great faces
          worn down by rain.
In front of me a deathshead
          half a thousand years old
--and have seen cocks a thousand
old grown over with moss and batshit
          stuck out of the wall
in a dripping vaulted house of rock--
          but deathshead's here
on portal still and thinks its way
          through centuries the thought
of the same night in which I sit
          in skully meditation
--sat in many times before by
          artisan other than me
until his image of ghostly change
          appeared unalterable--
but now his fine thought's vaguer
          than my dream of him :
and only the crude skull figurement's
          gaunt insensible lare is left,
with its broken plumes of sensation
and indecipherable headdresses of intellect
          scattered in the madness of oblivion
in holes and notes of elemental stone,
blind face of animal transcendency
          over the holy ruin of the world
dissolving into the sunless wall of a blackened room
          on a time-rude pyramid rebuilt
          in the bleak flat night of Yucatan
where I come with my own mad mind to study
          alien hieroglyphs of Eternity.

A creak in the rooms scared me.

Some sort of bird, vampire or swallow,
          flees with little paper wingflap
around the summit in its own air unconcerned
          with the great stone tree I perch on.

          Continual metallic
whirr of chicharras,
          then lesser chirps
of cricket : 5 blasts
          of the leg whistle.
The creak of an opening
          door in the forest,
some sort of weird birdsong
          or reptile croak.

My hat woven of hennequin
          on the stone floor
as a leaf on the waters,
          as perishable;
my candle wavers continuously
          and will go out.

Pale Uxmal,
          unhistoric, like a dream,
Tuluum shimmering on the coast in ruins;
Chichen Itza naked
          constructed on a plain;
Palenque, broken chapels in the green
          basement of a mount;
lone Kabah by the highway;
          Piedras Negras buried again
by dark archaeologists;
          Yaxchilan
resurrected in the wild,
and all the limbo of Xbalba still unknown--

          floors under roofcomb of branch,
foundation to ornament
          tumbled to the flowers,
pyramids and stairways
          raced with vine,
limestone corbels
          down in the river of trees,
pillars and corridors
          sunken under the flood of years :

Time's slow wall overtopping
          all that firmament of mind,
as if a shining waterfall of leaves and rain
were built down solid from the endless sky
          through which no thought can pass.

A great fat rooster
mounted on a tree stump
in the green afternoon,
the ego of the very fields,
screams in the holy sunlight!

--I can't think with that
supersonic cock intensity
crucifying my skull
in its imaginery sleep.

          --was looking back
with eyes shut to
          where they crawled
like ants on brown old temples
          building their minute ruins
and disappearing into the wild
          leaving many mysteries
of deathly volition
          to be divined.

I alone know the great crystal door
          to the House of Night,
a legend of centuries
          --I and a few indians.

And had I mules and money I could find
          the Cave of Amber
and the Cave of Gold
          rumored of the cliffs of Tumbala.

I found the face of one
          of the Nine Guardians of the Night
hidden in a mahogany hut
          in the Area of Lost Souls
--the first relic of kind for that place.

And I found as well a green leaf
          shaped like a human heart;
but to whom shall I send this
          anachronistic valentine?

Yet these ruins so much
          woke me to nostalgia
for the classic stations
          of the earth,
the ancient continent
          I have not seen
and the last few years
          of memory left
before the ultimate night
          of war.

As if these ruins were not enough,
          as if man could go
no further before heaven
          till he exhausted
the physical round
          of his own mortality
in the obscure cities
          hidden in the ageing world

. . . the few actual
          ecstatic conscious souls
certain to be found,
          familiars . . .
returning after years
          to my own scene
transfigured :
          to hurry change
to hurry the years
          bring me to my fate.

So I dream nightly of an embarcation,
          captains, captains,
iron passageways, cabin lights,
          Brooklyn across the waters,
the great dull boat, visitors, farewells,
          the blurred vast sea--
one trip a lifetime's loss or gain :

as Europe is my own imagination
          --many shall see her,
          many shall not--
though it's only the old familiar world
and not some abstract mystical dream.



         

Philip Lamantia

It is the oaken village that falls, splintered through a dust of visage where I gallop, no more flint than air, to think of cabalist hope: a universal alteration in the germination of planets.

But, the mystagogic chairs smashed in seed wars, I'm conceived again by the imponderables of total conjunction--even my shadow with another's that left its organs (sex-ploding suns) some distance from the translations of matter into an image.

This way the poem becomes an open sluice for darkness. Only the most obscure body is the brightest unity.

I catch hold of a train inside an iris.

Time at the window of maternal cosmetic, the high-heeled foot garlanded by a silken phallus spectates the forest where the uterine furnishings sink into drawers at bay from that twilight flashing in a mirror of dressing and undressing.

The preternatural identities beat the clouds from their barks, a child's chance look at the raging smolder of roses. Nearing sleep, this same wind rustles the void of blood-stained horses (my first cabals) whose galaxy dissolves with a kiss the victorious rescue of the palpable shadow streaming stars, her face: this bed, the undulant phantom: her hips.

We ride wooden horses

Always a desert marries the boiling water.

John Ashbery

Bird's Eye View of the Tool and Die Co.

For a long time I used to get up early.
20-30 vision, hemorrhoids intact, he checks into the
Enclosure of time familiarizing dreams
For better or worse. The edges rub off,
The slant gets lost. Whatever the villagers
Are celebrating with less conviction is
The less you. Index of own organ-music playing,
Machinations over the architecture (too
Light to make much of a dent) against meditated
Gang-wars, ice cream, loss, palm terrain.

Under and around the quick background
Surface is improvisation. The force of
Living hopelessly backward into a past of striped
Conversations. As long as none of them ends this side
Of the mirrored desert in terrorist chorales.
The finest car is as the simplest home off the coast
Of all small cliffs too short to be haze. You turn
To speak to someone beside the dock and the lighthouse
Shines like garnets. It has become a stricture.

[Houseboat Days, 1977]

Vladimír Holan

Snow

The snow began to fall at midnight. And it's true
that the best place to sit is in the kitchen,
even if it's the kitchen of insomnia.
It's warm there, you fix some food, drink wine
and look out the window into the familiar eternity.
Why should you worry whether birth and death are only two points,
when life is not a straight line after all.
Why should you torture yourself staring at the calendar
and wondering how much is at stake.
And why should you admit you have no money
to buy Saskia a pair of slippers?
And why should you boast
that you suffer more than others.

Even if there were no silence on earth,
that snow would have dreamed it up.
You're alone. As few gestures as possible. Nothing for show.

tr. C. G. Hanzlicek & Dana Hábová

Ha Jin

Reproach

My letter warned you not to go

--the war was merciless, the road

to the fleeing court equally difficult.

But bewitched, you set out

and left your wife and children behind.

Heaven knows how they get by--

perhaps starving, at night

trembling under a broken roof.

True, our duty is to serve the country,

but you, what can you do?

Can you wield a sword or lead troops?

Can you wave a banner or blow a bugle?

See, how easily the rebels

caught you and brought you here

to smell burned animals

and taste their barbaric music.

*

Five months ago we were besieged,

outside the city wall

the rebel army ready to charge in,

inside, our troops mounting defense.

Then the Emperor changed his mind--

the entire court fled toward Szechwan

leaving us civilians to defend Chang An.

How could we fight a quarter million

cavalry and swordsmen!

Just in one day the capital fell--

killing, screaming everywhere,

smoke blocking out daylight.

*

Now that you are in this trap

you'd better take it easy.

For the time being we are safe

(I gave a singing girl

to a rebel general).

But don't stroll on the streets

with your neck so straight.

Don't wear your official cap--

allegiance to the court is a crime.

Don't chant in the park.

Some barbarians understand your words

and will behead you for that.

Don't try to escape--

if they catch you, you'll be a goner.

Don't cry after drinking.

Many people are more miserable

than you and I.

Yesterday

after hearing you recite your poems

Lu Ben, the herbalist, took to his bed

saying he missed home.

He lost his only child last fall.

The country is broken,

but mountains and rivers remain.

Spring is here again,

cherries and apricots blooming.

Look, under the charred eaves

swallows are rebuilding their nests,

dragonflies flitting with skinny wings.

fr. Wreckage

[Brooklyn, New York: Hanging Loose Press, 2001]

William Bronk

Aspects of the World Like Coral Reefs

In the spring woods, how good it is to see
again the trees, old company,
how they have withstood the winter, their girth.

By gradual actions, how the gross earth
gathers around us and grows real, is there,
as though it were really there, and is good.

Certain stars, of stupendous size, are said
to be such and such distances away,--
oh, farther than our eyes along would ever see.

Thus magnified, the whole evidence
of our senses is belied. For it is not
possible for miles to add miles to miles

forever, not even if expressed as the speed of light.
The fault lies partly in the idea of miles.
It is absurd to describe the world in sensible terms.

How good that even so, aspects of the world
that are real, or seem to be real, should rise like reefs
whose rough agglomerate smashes the sea.


fr. Origin VI, Summer 1952

in The Gist of Origin ed. Cid Corman
[New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975]

Kenneth Fearing

Dirge

1-2-3 was the number he played but today the number came 3-2-1;

   bought his Carbide at 30 and it went to 29; had the favorite at Bowie but the track was slow—

O, executive type, would you like to drive a floating power, knee-action, silk-upholstered six? Wed a Hollywood star? Shoot the course in 58? Draw to the ace, king, jack?

   O, fellow with a will who won't take no, watch out for three cigarettes on the same, single match; O democratic voter born in August under Mars, beware of liquidated rails—

Denouement to denouement, he took a personal pride in the certain, certain way he lived his own, private life,

   but nevertheless, they shut off his gas; nevertheless, the bank foreclosed; nevertheless, the landlord called; nevertheless, the radio broke,

And twelve o'clock arrived just once too often,

   just the same he wore one gray tweed suit, bought one straw hat, drank one straight Scotch, walked one short step, took one long look, drew one deep breath,

   just one too many,

And wow he died as wow he lived,

   going whop to the office and blooie home to sleep and biff got married and bam had children and oof got fired,

   zowie did he live and zowie did he die,

With who the hell are you at the corner of his casket, and where the hell we going on the right-hand silver knob, and who

the hell cares walking second from the end with an American Beauty wreath from why the hell not,

Very much missed by the circulation staff of the New York Evening Post; deeply, deeply mourned by the B.M.T.,

Wham, Mr. Roosevelt; pow, Sears Roebuck; awk, big dipper; bop, summer rain;

   Bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong.

Jackson Mac Low

Radio Turnbuckle Destiny twinned and paid therapeutic counselors like a human being getting better and doesn't bind people or make them clean toilets. Very few people are free and when one of them gets you you can look at it this way somewhat. His religion is not taken away from him and he's given financial help until just before the beginning of the religion. He did know him and taught him how to drive. They still held their jobs. And never went back. They wouldn't allow them radios and precipitated a great to-do, aware of the real problems. Do you remember that? He'd had a lobotomy and were worth their weight in gold and three meals a day, exactly how they were used. Es- pecially. I was teaching them how to live and were faced with being sterilized, hopelessly crippled, a clock hung around your neck. See it. You were in perpetual humiliation all the time, how he would ask astute questions. He was never attacked, benevolent and all that great. His clay feet triumphed all the time. Regardless of whether your column is syndicated, exclusively written and very good to talk to where there's self-interest at work, you have to look at those things. An interesting thing is happening and did not survive forced changing and transferring. Liable for the defendant's costs, amongst the papers, designed to cost money, and will constantly keep under threat, he had a very interesting career. You'll have to bear some of the costs. He was treated with kid gloves. Afraid of the legend, he went to incorporate, allegedly high-class and all in capital letters. Who had the snake? He's out of there now. Did they escape? They still had a large facility. They considered him a martyr and lost that one. He may well yet. He's been sent and it really doesn't matter. I'll put it this way to mobilize all the members against one another. They begin to ferret out the most effective form of mind control, baring your soul and its gets very aggressive. They enjoy intimacy and everybody gets a turn. I managed to slide and was just in for the darlingness at a weak moment in a part of the whole process. This is very rough. It's so hard and all-encompassing. Engineered to a degree, they left. They had to go on and went through a stage. We do this and then after that they forget it. You find out shortly afterward. No, I haven't. I've seen so many people absorbed and they gave remarkably convincing speeches to try that first. They tend toward that sort of thing, refilled with the good stuff and real informed decisions, very involved with all sorts of symbols. Going through a ritual again and again, they learned their therapeutics. He remains permanently and they go there. They are made dependent. I know someone. I know several people who fall down a big step forward. It makes participation more exciting. There's no such thing as an in-between if it's all involved with poison. Everybody else was quoted. They were battling Satan. A relation would never go into any details. You move up first. It's what you know and it is very hard for them. Your whole life is a problem. A thrill from Christian Scientists can tell you one experience if you leave it alone. I just can't. It's really fine. If you are exactly the same, can I say the one thing I'll be back to in a little while? I wouldn't be thinking about it. Where is it coming from? Body and soul have no foundation and have tumbled from of old. When you take up the exact wording, more will be seen. They talked about it and were lonesome 22 June 1982 New York fr. Bloomsday [Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1984]