Big Window

Green Animals

"It may happen that we do not always want the most beautiful form, but one of our own designing."

        —Shirley Hibberd (qtd. in The Book of Topiary, by Charles H. Curtis)

My Topiary Is a Hedge against Confusion

You have to come at it from a distance,
to walk up close to it to see the animal
is only from a distance:
then to be charmed by it.
The closer you get the more abstract.

        The dog is named for the variegated privet.
Walk away & the wind shakes Spot & the little leaves flicker,
perhaps, as if in happiness,
or, the water off.
It is not giving up anything nor is it
literal to a fault.

The Privacy the Privet Promised

What had seemed headed in one direction took on suddenly,
a life of its own, the one thing forbidden.

The rule of time is you feel yourself growing older.

You see yourself from a distance that keeps getting longer.

There is a Failure in the Topiary

yet here we are in the way the growing season
never lets the ragged ends of things be still.

Something will get us closer & then         Poof!
I think you see me for nearly what I am.

by Michele  Glazer

 

published in American Letters & Commentary
    Number 19: Special Feature: Collaborations

republished by Verse Daily

photo by Vanita via flickr
 

Great Sleeps I Have Known

Once in a cradle in Norway folded
like Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir
as a ship in full sail transported the dead to Valhalla

Once on a mountain in Taos after making love
in my thirties the decade of turquoise and silver

After your brother walked into the Atlantic
to scatter your mothers ashes his khakis soaked
to the knees his shirtsleeves blowing

At the top of the cottage in a thunderstorm
once or twice each summer covetous of my solitude

Immediately following lunch
against circadian rhythms, once
in a bunk bed in a dormitory in the White Mountains

Once in a hollow tree in Wyoming
A snow squall blew in the guide said tie up your horses

The last night in the Katmandu guest house
where I saw a bird fly from a monk's mouth
a consolidated sleep of East and West

Once on a horsehair mattress two feet thick
I woke up singing
as in the apocryphal story of my birth
at Temple University Hospital

On the mesa with the burrowing owls
on the mesa with the prairie dogs

Willing to be lucky
I ran the perimeter road in my sleep
entrained to the cycles of light and dark
Sometimes my dead sister visited my dreams

Once on the beach in New Jersey
after the turtles deposited their eggs
before my parents grew old, nocturnal

by Robin Becker

From Domain of Perfect Affection © 2006.

I Know a Man by Robert Creeley

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,--John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

by Robert Creeley

photo by ___cath via flickr

DIM GO. VOID GO. LONGING GO.

Avoid go but went Went where, out out amongst words there

So, being benign void longing ethics then bending

How about it roustabout drilling deeply into middle earth

I was a roughneck land laborer I mowed endless civic greens

The men said slow down with the weed whacking

Exchanging sky with campground fire Went venting picking up

Refuse We wore boots of thick cow leather

The roof slanted toward the lake

Peterson announced the great tureen of ear

We partook, we partook

Colons bulging eggplant proportions were the shipwrecks

Gunky oil yet she managed to wear a ravishing corona

Bobbing bubbly scanning scansion with thick inside saying    

You done it

I'll have tea with this ear, thank you   

Then bobbing again

For appellations

Horrible tablatures in a picnic setting Sincerity danced a Balanchine ballet       

With mental commitment robots      

The jewels bled blood    

Ketchup in a revolving rebellion, GM   

I-ness witness   

They weren't born me said death

by Brenda Iijima
published in the new issue of Coconut

One Day Poem Pavilion

My friend Ann Sieber sent me a link this week to Jiyeon Song's site Experiential Typography, saying she thought I might like it. I do!

"The One Day Poem Pavilion demonstrates the poetic, transitory, site-sensitive and time-based nature of light and shadow. Using a complex array of perforations, the pavilion’s surface allows light to pass through creating shifting patterns, which–during specific times of the year–transform into the legible text of a poem. The specific arrangements of the perforations reveal different shadow-poems according to the solar calendar...."

The poem Song chose is a sijo, a form from classical Korean poetry.  Here's the breakdown:

You can learn more about this form here or here.  And you can see the pavilion through time-lapse photography on YouTube.

Song did this project as part of a master's thesis at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

The Definition of Gardening

Jim just loves to garden, yes he does.
He likes nothing better than to put on
his little overalls and his straw hat.
He says, "Let's go get those tools, Jim."
But then doubt begins to set in.
He says, "What is a garden, anyway?"
And thoughts about a "modernistic" garden
begin to trouble him, eat away at his resolve.
He stands in the driveway a long time.
"Horticulture is a groping in the dark
into the obscure and unfamiliar,
kneeling before a disinterested secret,
slapping it, punching it like a Chinese puzzle,
birdbrained babbling gibberish, dig and
destroy, pull out and apply salt,
hoe and spray, before it spreads, burn roots,
where not desired, with gloved hands, poisonous,
the self-sacrifice of it, the self-love,
into the interior, thunderclap, excruciating,
through the nose, the earsplitting necrology
of it, the withering, shrivelling,
the handy hose holder and Persian insect powder
and smut fungi, the enemies of the iris,
wireworms are worse than their parents,
there is no way out, flowers as big as heads,
pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently
at me, the me who so loves to garden
because it prevents the heaving of the ground
and the untimely death of porch furniture,
and dark, murky days in a large city
and the dream home under a permanent storm
is also a factor to keep in mind."

by James Tate

Containers by Vincent Zompa

Check out Containers, an amazing poem by Vincent Zompa that's published in Octopus 10.  (From the grid of dots, go down 6 and across 3.)
 

AND / OR

was foraging outside a patch of burning birds,
papering and evaporated blue over a thin field

and caught myself inside a nest like an eroded cliff
or the strutted gap between vent and vented, formally

and humming or I was the wing and circle saw
full of hungry throats or bound to them and fleeing

or trees pierced into a scatter of trajectory, or cars
torched and chiming, and/or you were there:

carrier cloud, you empty along the bottled breakers, or
you the jealousy harp, you the scenting dog, and

you the lakeward, the forget.
you the clapper of each bell.

by Hillary Gravendyk

published in Octopus 10

& lens

Your coming here, pure accident. Dodging. The barometer was wrong; it promised grey and wet. Heavy skies. Instead, it is black and on me. Some sun in my ear. I feel it in the back of my eyes: the confusion to focus. How close? How much to get closer? How many slowly rolled before you said, “Come here. You’re getting too wet.”

Maybe you’ll always see a window. I can’t stop myself from looking, and looking again. And maybe again.

by Mackenzie Carignan

published in Anti-

Copyright Anti- and Mackenzie Carignan ©2007–2008

Octopus 10 Seeks and Rocks

Check out the enormous reach of Octopus 10.  Yes, it's another great issue of Octopus edited by Zachary Schomburg and Mathias Svalina.  Here's the lineup:

Claire Hero, Jane Wong, CD Wright, Phil Cordelli, Demosthenes Agrafiotis translated by John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis, Paul Fattaruso, Cecily Parks, Laura Sims, Ada Limon, Anthony Hawley, Karyna Mcglynn, Jessica Bozek, David Goldstein, Hillary Gravendyk, Christopher Salerno, Martha Ronk, Lewis Warsh, Geoff Bouvier, Jeff Downey, Matvei Yankelevich, Juliet Cook, Dorothea Lasky, Linh Dinh, Julie Doxsee, Greta Wrolstad, GC Waldrep, Vincent Zompa, Cesar Vallejo translated by Rachel Galvin, Jordan Davis, Sandra Simonds, Emily Kendal Frey, Will Oldham, Hiraide Takashi translated by Sawako Nakayasu, Caroline Knox, Bronwen Tate, Allison Titus, Erica Ehrenberg, Cynthia Cruz, Lara Glenum, Brett Price, Karen Volkman, Laura Mullen, Rob Schlegel, Sara Veglahn, Adam Clay, Nathan Bartel, Sandra Miller, Brenda Hillman, Robyn Schiff, Tomaz Salamun translated by Brian Henry, Steve Langan, Cate Peebles, Chad Reynolds, Sandy Florian, Dave Carillo, DA Powell, Dan Hoy, Daniel Coudriet, Craig Foltz, Laura Solomon, Eugen Jebeleanu translated by Matthew Zapruder & Radu Ioanid, Claire Becker, Jason Bredle, Jen Tynes, Cynthia Arrieu King, Peter Jay Shippy, KC Trommer, Stephanie Strickland, Susan Cronin, Stephanie Anderson, Michael Ives, Bethany Wright, Anne Marie Rooney, Shane MacRae, Michael Loughran, Karla Kelsey & Peter Yumi, Raymond Queneau translated by Rachel Galvin, Heather Green, Grace Egbert, and Brenda Iijima.

(via International Exchange for Poetic Invention)

[photo by Silent Bright via flickr]

Kid Poems for Everyone

Celebrate National Poetry Month with WITS.  You know you want to, right?

I Wrote a Good Poem about You by Aaron Belz

I wrote a good poem about you
and erased it until the paper wore through
until the eraser shredded and the desktop
was covered with granular pink shreds
the visible debris of second thought
mixed among shreds of notebook paper
the compound debris of what might have been written
about you and your longing brown eyes
and almost black hair and your dissatisfaction
with the things you'd written I wrote
a noble poem that described you heroically
a woman waiting for her real heart to be born
from her paper heart and her pencil heart
but erased it a half hour later sore
from the writing of it sore from thinking
about you too hard indeed sore from
looking at paper and lines of graphite
smears of graphite on loose leaf notebook paper
memories of tests taken in school
and of looking directly into your eyes
as though your eyes were all there were
to look into in this life or the next
I wrote a good poem about all of this
and regretted not only writing it
but the memory of looking into your eyes
and kissing your lips and you softly
kissing mine too softly almost sadly
as if you knew that none of it could be held
for very long that what you'd written
would also have to be erased before long
that what you'd done you had not really done
and that it could be deleted and begun anew
on a new day with a fresh sheet of notebook paper
and a newly sharpened pencil after
the sharpener had done its circular grinding
after you had done all of your grinding
on a new morning when the paper was new
your real heart still yet to be born
I wrote a good poem about you
but where is it now I just want to know

by Aaron Belz

Check out more work by Aaron on his site, meaningless.com. http://meaningless.com/home.asp?poem=i_wrote_a_good_poem

Hell, acc. to Jason Bredle

I wouldn't be surprised if some oratorical
dynamo were to describe Hell as a place where
your favorite television program is pre-
empted by baseball every week
and you wind up passed out on the floor
after a night of watching cat documentaries
on four different channels
simultaneously, or a region where you
end up in one of the area's
top five romantic restaurants blowing a
fourth of your week's salary on food
whose only desire it seems at the time
is to be rolled up in the complementary
bread and eaten like a burrito. The next
thing you know you're walking out
of the concert like you're escaping the bad smell
of Terre Haute or a girl who stalked you
from Terre Haute and find yourself in a bar
where some woman in a poorly fitted, extremely
troublesome sweater hands you a cocktail napkin
with her phone number and the words carpe diem
scrawled across it. So you walk fourteen blocks to a party
only to be cornered most of the night by a Chinese
lawyer instead of that quintessential babe
you'd been hoping for, which in turn sends
you home where you stand in front of the sink
scraping dog excrement from the bottom of your shoe
with a butter knife before crawling into bed
and crying yourself to sleep. Yeah, it could
be that. Or it could be the place where
you find yourself helplessly watching
a seventy-year-old, white-haired woman
tumble down a hill toward a river.
She could be your grandmother. It could be
this movie theater where you see Rhubarb
and his swirly arm at the popcorn stand
waving his moose poem at you, making
incoherent references to snack cakes, you could be
gnawing at the delicious grasshoppers when in
walks the woman you love with your old college
roommate—you know, the guy who enjoyed
wrestling llamas and throwing ham radios
and tackleboxes out the window—telling you all
about the amazing sex they just had
in the storeroom of the Country Junction.
It's possible it could involve remembering
your father's birthday was yesterday while Tim
O'Brien reads and repeats how he's
from Minnesota in front of the home repair
section of the local bookstore while this guy
next to you is completely soused
and bumping into you every twenty
seconds. It could be a lot of things. Poems
that begin with long sentences and end with shorter
ones. Metapoemas of the Golden Age.
Getting stuck with Canadian money. Having
your wallet stolen at Space Camp. Being
trapped in Nepal with horrifying diarrhea
while a tiger circles the outhouse. Losing
your virginity on the hood of a Pontiac like Tim
O'Brien. Feeling the need to dominate your pets like
the cat documentaries say males tend
to do. Hell could be all these things
wadded into a pink box and delivered to you
by an old man with goggles riding a bicycle
from the fifties, but most likely it involves
driving down the highway being repeatedly
bitten by a mosquito with "Pike County Breakdown"
blaring from the stereo, altogether disbelieving
the existence of love.

by Jason Bredle 

published in Standing in Line for the Beast, New Issues Poetry & Prose

and then again in Verse Daily
 

Whalen by Noelle Kocot

    What I mean is the sea.
    What I mean is a pale
    Piano filled with rainwater.
    What I mean is a box (colored blue)
    And an animal of light
    And air rushing through these vacant rooms.
    What I mean is, I'm sorry
    If things are lazy and not the same,
    If I travel without my candy soup.
    I no longer wish for what I cannot have,
    And yet I love you,
    Your being and recklessness,
    The way the light strands
    Itself in tomorrow,
    The way that book on dreams
    Seeps out dreams onto a plastic couch.
    What I mean is man, I don't believe
    That oranges are not squares, that you
    Are not a paper ghost, that a balloon
    Of thought doesn't clap its hands
    Lightly, over the frozen summer moon.

by Noelle Kocot
published in Slope #24

Poem in Blue and White by Laura Solórzano

            We have in our body the earth’s fertile hemisphere: to feel the white seed in the fear of our bones. And an opaque, damp consistency. Corporeal music furrowed by aqueous conduits, when our blood throbs. Increasing delirium. Intimacy blossoms like offal blossoms, with its pistils in an ecstasy of useless softness. So many times we can see them bud: blue flowers from the husks of our suffering, they rise up like the first and last notes of an imperious song.

Poema en blanco y azul

            Tenemos en el cuerpo el hemisferio fértil de la tierra: sentir la blanca semilla en el temor de los huesos. Y una consistencia opaca y húmeda. Corpórea música surcada por conductos acuosos, cuando late la sangre. Delirio en crecimiento. Florece la intimidad como florece el despojo con los pistilos extasiados de suavidad inservible. Tantas veces podemos verlas brotar: flores azules desde las cáscaras de nuestra pena, se elevan como las notas primeras y últimas de una imperiosa canción.

written by Laura Solórzano

translated by Jen Hofer

published in HOW2