radiant fracture

Maybe you don’t carry
a dark hot mystery in your core

Except the same secret as everyone else:
the heart and its bloody signals
the dank furnace of the intestines
the cooling lungs that pull the world
through the body in currents
the wet seething sorrowful brain

You could tell that;
It might be enough.

In writing group tonight, some beautiful poem prompts, including this, by the only just lost Louise Glück. She is almost still here.


Telescope
Louise Glück

There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you’ve been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You’ve stopped being here in the world.
You’re in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.

You’re not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you’re in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.

You see again how far away
each thing is from every other thing.

* * * * * *

I love moments of displacement and disorientation, though this one contains a lot of grief.

I like how mortality is here as the shadow of the eternal rather than evoked directly. I can feel the precise cold of this night, the clarity of the sky. I have looked through this telescope.

I like the refining of the thought as the poet goes on, in the way of Elizabeth Bishop or Robert Hass -- "not that the image is false / but the relation is false." I would not have said that, would have stayed with the illusion of transcendence, clung to it. Glück is brave to put it away so neatly with the telescope.

{rf}

( https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/poetry/dorothea-lasky-reads-louise-bogan )

This was going to be a podcast-Friday post, but then it was more poem- than podcast-centric, and then it wasn't Friday any more. I liked the podcast episode, but mostly I liked Dorothea Lasky's discussion of Louise Bogan's poem "Little Lobelia's Song."

Imaginary Photograph: Dorothea Lasky laughing apologetically as she changes my brain about poetry and fear.

Lasky has a new collection coming out, The Shining, about her obsession with that film, and so she's been thinking about the poetry of fear.

You know, I hadn't really thought of poems as a source of fear -- even that which evokes fear, or terror, or horror, is transmuted into awe by the aesthetic context. Every angel is terrifying, but also sort of hot.

Emily Dickinson can freak me out -- "I felt a funeral in my brain." There's "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forché. That has horror. Maybe "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" freaks me out a little?

Are there poems that evoke fear for you? Not just describe it, but make your body awaken to danger?

Anyway, Lasky convinced me about Louise Bogan. The deepest knowledge I had of Bogan's work until now was from the nine-minute Essential American Poets episode about her. So I was sleeping on Louise Bogan, and now I'll never sleep again.

Lasky chose the triptych "Three Songs," published in The New Yorker in 1967 and in her collection The Blue Estuaries in 1968.

Here's the first of the three, a weird little singsong right out of a horror film:

Little Lobelia's Song

I was once a part
of your blood and bone.
Now no longer --
I'm alone, I'm alone.

Each day, at dawn
I come out of your sleep;
I can't get back.
I weep, I weep.

Not lost but abandoned,
left behind,
this is my hand
upon your mind.

I know nothing.
I can barely speak.
But this is my hand
upon your cheek.

You look at your face
in the looking glass.
This is the face
My likeness has.

Give me back your sleep,
until you die,
Else I weep, weep.
Else I cry, cry.

* * * * * *

Creepy.

I don't know whether it was just my mood, but as Lasky read out the poems she'd chosen, I exclaimed aloud in my kitchen (mixing the chocolate and butterscotch and peanut butter chips into the batter) -- "what the fuck." The fear felt so present in the lines as she spoke them -- that uncanny fear of the child and of the unconscious, that which comes from you but is alien to you.

Lasky provides some autobiographical context for the poem; it's just as unsettling. Bogan used to wake up crying uncontrollably, and "Little Lobelia" is the name Bogan's daughter gave "the thing that made her cry." Lasky says that "Bogan thought of it as this child ghost inhabiting her ... and making her cry."

"I've always seen rhyme as having a haunting quality, and not necessarily being innocuous," Lasky said, which is a wonderful thought to turn over and try out.

What's the most frightening couplet one could write, I wonder. Maybe post your chilling rhymes below?

{rf}

P.S.I've remembered a poem -- song really -- that terrified me. "The Worms Crawl In" -- it was in a children's book of creepy things and it ruined me.

Autumn Day
Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell


Lord, it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine:
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one
whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening
and wander on the boulevards up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.



And a variation (incomplete)

Friends, here we are: the summer stretched and shrank
like a slinky as it lurched
headless into the fall. Each squeaky step
announced a question.

From the fire, imprinted on his clay
surface, an indelible story,
an incised script I read over and over,
not for its sense, but for its mystery.

Always the same question:
what did we make
of what we were given?

The lattice of purple apples and the tree
with her mother’s name — June —
offered their fragrance as we heaped
her furniture in the kitchen.

It's Wednesday somewhen.

Somewhere recently -- (searches) -- oh, on The Poetry Magazine podcast, the terrific June 20th episode on ""queer use, cynicism,and falling in love" -- I ran into the work of poet Omar Sakr and went to look for more of his writing.

This is from his essay "Tweets to a Queer Arab Poet," from the collection This Arab is Queer: an Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers, edited by Elias Jahshan. It's a numbered list -- like tweets, of course, but also like a religious text.

4. All things being equal, be a fox or an otter; the former for its cunning, its dashing color, and the latter for its softness, the ability to sleep in rivers holding onto each other, a lesson in holiness even the prophet Isa never learned.
5. Do not mistake cynicism for criticism, or criticism for intelligence. Rid yourself of cynicism, which is self-loathing projected outward. It's an inability or unwillingness to account for one's actions and intentions without condemning yourself, and so you damn everyone.

I like it a lot -- it's aphoristic, as you can see -- sometimes lyrical, often urgent. He quotes, and wrestles with, Ammo Adonis throughout, from An Introduction to Arab Poetics, so I have impulsively ordered that from a reputable online used bookstore. Which is the sort of thing a friendly corrective hand (antique-style pointer) can direct me to when I puzzle over why I am always broke, but I am just now convinced I need it. For research.

Queer use, also mentioned on the podcast, itself seems like a beautiful way of thinking. I would like to order that book (Sara Ahmed's What's the Use?) but cannot find it for impulse-buy prices. (The University library does not have it, though they do offer access to an e-book of Ahmed's Queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others (2006). The college library doesn't have it either, but they do have Complaint! (2021) and Living a Feminist Life (2017). But it's this idea of queer use, strange use, repurposing, beyond bricolage, that appeals to me.

{rf}

Some notes on my morning's wander through Indigenous poetry.

This morning I have a very fun task -- searching for poems by Indigenous poets for the next writing workshop at the friendship center. I had originally thought to use Abigail Chabitnoy's "If You're Going to Look Like a Wolf, They Have to Love You More than They Fear You" and
dg nanouk okpik's "If Oil is Drilled in Bristol Bay," -- both northern poets, Chabitnoy Alutiiq and okpik Inupiaq-Inuit.

These are wonderful poems -- I'd like to do a post on okpik's, which is new to me -- but I was chatting to the co-ordinator about themes (last time happened to fall close to Louis Riel Day and so reading Métis poets was natural) -- and when I asked her for ideas, she suggested that we look for spring poems and poems about indigenous plants. She said, "let's save the northern poems for the summer, when we're all hot."

I thought yes, I like that better, so now I am looking for spring poems and poems about plants.

Kimberly Blaeser (Minnesota Chippewa) is a naturalist. Here's "The Way We Love Something Small," and "The Where in My Belly." There are seasons here, and plants and animals, but I think I can get closer if I keep going.

This is cool -- a collaboration between Blaeser, Molly McGlennan, and Margaret Doodin, "Meshkadoonaawaa Ikidowinan: Exchanging Words."

The second poem or reflection there is very much the sort of thing I think the co-ordinator meant. The action here is the weaving of a sweetgrass basket.

wiingashk—sweetgrass

How she stitched the rim, gashkigwaadan.
Leaf blades and needle fingers circled,
smallest curve, waaganagamod, of song—
endless like the scent.

Held, there are, atenoon, some parts
one cannot see—
but she knows, gikendaang, what they hold.
Words from bogs and marshes.

Heaven fits neatly, mii gwayak, under
the snug lid, shut tight as lips
long used to gaadood, keeping secrets
of grandmothers and crane companions.


I think that's one to keep, yeah?

Here's an essay on how the poets wrote it.

Now I'm over here on poetryinvoice looking at the poems they chose, and Nehiyaw poet Jessica Johns' "How Not to Spill" isn't what I'm looking for today but damn.

And here's one about land by Lakota poet Trevino L. Brings Plenty, "Will," that takes my breath both with its exploration of land loss and its spot-on evocation on what it's like to eat Curiously Strong Peppermints -- hey, I just counted lines and that's a sonnet, so it can come on over and be part of Sonnet Day in my general literature course.

That's the great thing about this wander -- if the poems don't work for the writing group, they can still come be part of other courses and conversations.

{rf}

Excellent shark valentines from james have arrived! One with a sticker!

* * * * * *

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth Bishop, slightly Canadian poet, whom I nickname Liz Bish solely because it pleases me. I own The Complete Poems, in a sun-faded dust jacket where a yolk-yellow swathe has faded to white below a less delible still-navy arch. It must have sat in some window a long time, maybe stacked under another book for display or from indifference. However, Edgar Allen Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments is my cherished artifact -- also, I see, a little faded in the spine now, as if in companionship.

I would have heard about this book's release on Bookworm, when the show and Michael Silverblatt were at their zenith, in 2006.
It's edited by Alice Quinn, the real one, former poetry editor of the New Yorker, and it contains a little more -- though still only such a small amount -- of Bishop's queer life, the comical juvenalia of "I introduce Penelope Gwin" and the concentrated eroticism of "Vague Poem (Vaguely Love Poem)":


Vague Poem (Vaguely Love Poem)

The trip west.
—I think I dreamed that trip.
They talked a lot of “rose rocks”
or maybe “rock roses”
—I’m not sure now, but someone tried to get me some.
(And two or three students had.)

She said she had some at her house.
They were by the back door, she said.
—A ramshackle house.
An Army house? No, “a Navy house.” Yes,
                                        that far inland.
There was nothing by the back door but dirt
or that same dry, monochrome, sepia straw I’d seen everywhere.
Oh, she said, the dog has carried them off.
(A big black dog, female, was dancing around us.)

Later, as we drank tea from mugs, she found one
“a sort of one.” “This one is just beginning. See—
you can see here, it’s beginning to look like a rose.
It’s—well, a crystal, crystals form—
I don’t know any geology myself …”
(Neither did I.)
Faintly, I could make out—perhaps—in the dull,
rose-red lump of, apparently, soil
a rose-like shape; faint glitters . . . Yes, perhaps
there was a secret, powerful crystal at work inside.

I almost saw it: turning into a rose
without any of the intervening
roots, stem, buds, and so on; just
earth to rose and back again.
Crystallography and its laws:
something I once wanted badly to study,
until I learned that it would involve a lot of arithmetic,
that is, mathematics.

Just now, when I saw you naked again,
I thought the same words: rose-rock, rock-rose . . .
Rose, trying, working, to show itself,
forming, folding over,
unimaginable connections, unseen, shining edges.
Rose-rock, unformed, flesh beginning, crystal by crystal,
clear pink breasts and darker, crystalline nipples,
rose-rock, rose-quartz, roses, roses, roses,
exacting roses from the body,
and the even darker, accurate, rose of sex—

* * * * * *
That last stanza. That last line.

For queerness, there is also the tenderness of "The Shampoo, " which made it into the Complete Poems but was rejected by the New Yorker poetry editor for being too indiscreet, which, I ask you --


The Shampoo

The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you've been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
--Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.


* * * * * *

I think I have, or had, some letters, too, between Bishop and the New Yorker. Love letters of a kind, I guess.

{rf}



Grumpy Postscript

(I'm still having trouble with Dreamwidth doing weird things to my formatting. I go over to HTML to add some non-breaking spaces to create stable lineation in the poem, then switch back to Rich Text to look at it, and when I switch back to HTML the spaces have been deleted (!!).

When I check the box for "Disable Auto-Formatting", thinking that must be the trouble, all of my line breaks vanish. (Which is not surprising, but also not helpful.) I did not need this change and do not find it useful.

You can tell me this always happened and I can't prove it didn't but this frustration is exciting and new.)

Dear Future Me (#11)
~ Lena Moses-Schmitt

You are a character
made entirely of desire.
I don't want a car
or a career or even a house
with a flight of stairs
necessarily.
I would like to live, though.
The most unattainable commodity: a plot
with no last page. You're very abstract.
Blue growths and blue fields
on a canvas. Of Joan Mitchell's
Les Bluets, Lydia Davis wrote
that in her confrontation of
marks seemingly without symbol,
she understood she couldn't understand.
And that was a revelation.
When I look at the painting I think
I'm seeing Mitchell
as she builds her own seeing,
closely and carefully, trial
and error. Which is how I make
myself. Reanimating
a memory by moving
back and forth over it until
the familiar accumulates
into the unrecognizable.
You'll probably never meet me.
We never see
the same thing twice.

Our Zoom writing facilitator has been finding incredible poems lately. Here I am trying to tease out what makes tonight's poem so brilliant.

Content note: grief, death


Miss You. Would Like to Take a Walk with You.
~ Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Do not care if you just arrive in your skeleton.
Would love to take a walk with you. Miss you.
Would love to make you shrimp saganaki.
Like you used to make me when you were alive.
Love to feed you. Sit over steaming
bowls of pilaf. Little roasted tomatoes
covered in pepper and nutmeg. Miss you.
Would love to walk to the post office with you.
Bring the ghost dog. We’ll walk past the waterfall
and you can tell me about the after.
Wish you. Wish you would come back for a while.
Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know
you. I know you will know me even though. I’m
bigger now. Grayer. I’ll show you my garden.
I’d like to hop in the leaf pile you raked but if you
want to jump in? I’ll rake it for you. Miss you
standing looking out at the river with your rake
in your hand. Miss you in your puffy blue jacket.
They’re hip now. I can bring you a new one
if you’ll only come by. Know I told you
it was okay to go. Know I told you
it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me?
You always believed me. Wish you would
come back so we could talk about truth.
Miss you. Wish you would walk through my
door. Stare out from the mirror. Come through
the pipes.

* * * * * *

Again, I would read it out loud to hear your own voice say these things. And thoroughly break your own heart. Why else read poetry?

So the big gesture Calvocoressi is going to make us notice is the way she chops off sentence parts, especially the subjects (I) and auxiliary verbs that indicate tense or mood (would). She beheads her sentences, peels her verbs.

This is direct speech, but truncated, like a text message or a note -- an utterance simultaneously direct and at a slight remove from the person being addressed.

Isn't that first line incredible?


I imagine someone so decentred by loss that they can't speak from "I" but only from the emotion itself. To say "I" is to say "I-without-you" and this is impossible -- the whole address is to the you.

In fact the form of this first statement blurs from the declarative into the imperative -- "Do not care" could be an instruction, "don't (you) worry if you arrive in your skeleton --

In your skeleton! --

I do not think that's what the speaker means, but I like the way the verb collapses the I/you -- whose verb is this? -- and that slight priming may come in handy later.

In a similar way,


relies on the previous fragments


--to make us, the readers, assume the "would" in "love to feed you," (We assume the speaker means "I would love to feed you.")

But!

Dropping the auxiliary verb also allows this love to remain in the present tense: I still do love to feed you, even though truly I can't. Yet I do.

The tender alliteration of "little roasted tomatoes." The whole sound of "little roasted tomatoes / covered in pepper and nutmeg." I feel like I'm chewing as I say it.

"Bring the ghost dog," is sweet, but "you can tell me about the after" is perfect -- not afterlife, not afterworld -- no promise of continuance. You may have gone into oblivion. Come back and tell me all about it.


Oh god.

This could be stuttering, a failure to complete a thought because of pain -- "Wish you. Wish you would come back" -- but "wish you" is also a whole thought in the way "miss you" is.

(Have you wished someone? Me, I have wished several yous in my time.)
What I really care about here is the infinite tenderness -- the skin sack that parallels the skeleton, the contempt for any worries about the body and decay -- the material is immaterial. I'll know you.

Oh god.

But there is something else I notice:


Hey, the "I" comes back into grammar once the moment of facing you again is imagined. If you come back, I can come back. "You can tell me" -- and suddenly there is a me again.

We many of us thicken as we get older, but "bigger" is so purely descriptive, so neutral. A tree gets bigger, a city. Things just grow. It sounds like the speaker may have become monumental, more than human. A stone.

Look at that -- the I-less speaker ("know", not "I know") can yet speak about the I of the past ("I told you," not "told you") -- maybe because in that past the you was still -- just -- alive.

(Or, just to allow the counter-argument, maybe because "[I] know told you" would truncate the sentence past useful ambiguity into incoherence. English only allows certain kinds of interference.)

The wish to rewrite the message: I said it was okay to go (that is the thing you say), but now I want to say something else. I want in our long entanglement the space to change my mind. I want to send a text saying "Don't want you to go. Not okay."

The little tender rhyme there (leave/believe) like a fragment of song sung at a graveside or while crying and washing the dishes.

The ending. What can I say about the ending? Oh, maybe this:


So yes, the refrain of "miss you," with the assumed "I," and then here's that "would" again, so that we carry both of those over, assume that what's being said is "[I] [wish you would] stare out from the mirror."

But -- that imperative, that order from way back -- "do not care" -- isn't that imperative now fully activated, though it wasn't before? Isn't this ending also an invocation, a summoning, a cry?

{rf}

PS. "Come through the door" is a human action; "stare out from the mirror" a ghostly thing; "come through the pipes" -- monstrous, or elemental? I'm not sure.

PPS I don't know about the leaves and the blue jacket. What do you think?

PPPS I didn't even get to enjambment.

The poem below by Danez Smith, "a note on the body" was a prompt from the writing group facilitator, and I liked it very much.

[Edited to make it clear that I didn't write this wonderful thing.]



a note on the body

~ Danez Smith



your body still your body

your arms still wing

your mouth still a gun



          you tragic, misfiring bird



you have all you need to be a hero

don’t save the world, save yourself



you worship too much & you worship too much



when prayer doesn’t work:      dance, fly, fire



this is your hardest scene

when you think the whole sad thing might end



but you live      oh, you live



everyday you wake you raise the dead



           everything you do is a miracle