State of the poetry room, late August
Notley, Pettit, Vitale, Šalamun, Crawford, Blecher, Joudah, McClure
There, dim and peripheral at the top of the stairs, adjacent to the large event gallery with its refulgent double-hung windows, is the poetry room, small and warm and waiting. If my office is the Bachelardian cellar of the publick house, the poetry room is the attic, a nest of dreams through which the HVAC groans like an adolescent zephyr.
Many are the Zoomers and students who pass daily by, oblivious to the poetry room’s faint life-saving glow. I, too, have been neglecting the poetry room lately, which is to say that there are multiple heaping cairns of new editions, classic and contemporary, that have fallen from the fold-out desk to the floor like banyan roots, bolstering the body-poetic against blue moon hurricanes of attention.
Here, then, is a sampling of the voices that have gathered like kindling in the chamber of reveries, nuclear whispers in the charnel ground of perpetual hope. Enjoy—
Being Reflected Upon by Alice Notley
It doesn’t matter if a poem is clear or not
hard or not It’s basic and ongoing creation
of the universe in terms of its particles as I speak
it the poem If you’re reading it you hear me too
the bits of sound thought word seen, without senses
if you’re dead All you have to do with it is nothing
Everything else is such a big deal thing poetry’s
mere reality No proof just be here Proving’s
a human invention poetry is what you do with
mind which is what there is just listen a little.
No one cares if you understand it who understands
why we’re alive
Goat in the Snow by Emily Pettit
How it is flickering. How there are deer
and cattle too. How horns might mean
something. How to become star-shaped.
How some people can sing. How you
hold a hammer and practice and skill,
it’s all related to the bones in the body.
You are my giraffe in this igloo, in this
orange. And the table is orange too.
And the orange is on the edge. And I am
on the edge. And later I will repeat, I am
on the edge. The edge is both the point
at which something is likely to begin
and end. This is the astonishing power
of generosity! How it is infinitely complex.
How it cools outside. How we wonder
is this acceptable? How you hear so often,
Ok ok ok ok ok. I’m ok.
Time Without Keys by Ida Vitale, trans. by Sarah Pollack
To see the fruit, the sea with desert eyes,
unreason with deaf eyes,
the past as a volcano seen by its lava striations,
and the future’s infancy in abeyance,
when an astonished wisdom
hastened sorrows
and the only incontestable certainty in life
is the audacity of light:
if only once there’d be
peace in the net,
not a sea of doubt.
Kiss the Eyes of Peace by Tomaž Šalamun, trans. by Brian Henry
I demand
unconditional
love
and
total
freedom.
That’s why
I am
terrible.
With my tongue,
like a loyal devoted
dog, I lick your
golden head,
reader.
Terrible is my
love.
Be Broken to Be Whole by Tom Crawford
Over the phone
from the other side of the world
my dear friend tells me
my old cat has died.
I can see Gati now, curled up,
asleep
in a box of marigolds
where I left her
in the warm sun in August
in America.
Dying is always choosing
between one pale star
and another—groping around
out there for the beloved.
It’s the oldest poem alive—
what is given to us for the asking,
then taken.
Transparent Body by Max Blecher, trans. by Christina Tudor-Sideri
Your hands on the piano like two horses
With hooves of marble
Your hands on the vertebrae like two horses
With hooves of roses
Your hands in the blue like two birds
With wings of silk
Your hands on my head
Like two stones on one grave.
Tethered to the Stars by Fady Joudah
For eight years her parents tried
and couldn’t conceive. A bedouin woman
passing through spoke her prescription: “Sacrifice
a white chicken together
on a moonless night, around
no artificial light, then go to bed.”
An overwhelming majority
of the chickens were brown.
The entire quarter searched and found,
and nine months later the girl came out fair
“like her father,” said the woman. “No,”
the daughter says, “my complexion
I got from the chicken.”
The Gone Thing by Monica McClure
Months, sometimes years,
Go by with no results.
But I don’t forget to wear perfume.
Peasants and saints are in fashion
And rising yeast is a fad.
If you throw your crust on a stone
A bird probably won’t come.
Mid-gestation I’m a stick in the mud
And a volcano stirring the ocean
Blending salt with molecules and algae
In a creation that’s beginning again.
This time heavier and woolen
Like a Victorian bathing suit pooling
Around a woman’s midsection
While a lake does what it does: lies there.
I almost can’t stand the smell
Of my own body with its hidden fluids
Which keep me safe and animal
Bound up in survival
When I want to live, just really live!
