"Song of Perfect Propriety" by Dorothy Parker

SONG OF PERFECT PROPRIETY

Oh, I should like to ride the seas,

    A roaring buccaneer;

A cutlass banging at my knees,

    A dirk behind my ear.

And when my captives’ chains would clank

    I’d howl with glee and drink,

And then fling out the quivering plank

    And watch the beggars sink.

I’d like to straddle gory decks,

    And dig in laden sands,

And know the feel of throbbing necks

    Between my knotted hands.

Oh, I should like to strut and curse

    Among my blackguard crew. . . .

But I am writing little verse,

    As little ladies do.

Oh, I should like to dance and laugh

    And pose and preen and sway,

And rip the hearts of men in half,

    And toss the bits away.

I’d like to view the reeling years

    Through unastonished eyes,

And dip my finger-tips in tears,

    And give my smiles for sighs.

I’d stroll beyond the ancient bounds,

    And tap at fastened gates,

And hear the prettiest of sounds—

    The clink of shattered fates.

My slaves I’d like to bind with thongs

    That cut and burn and chill. . . .

But I am writing little songs,

    As little ladies will.

Source of the text – Dorothy Parker, The Collected Poems of Dorothy Parker.  New York: The Modern Library, 1959, p. 56-57.

TJB: Arr, the same joke twice. The poet politely & with musical, stately-homely rhythm, glorifies the lives of pirates, then other, crueler folk.

"Columba aspexit" by Hildegard of Bingen, translated by Peter Dronke

Columba aspexit

[original text in Latin]

Columba aspexit

per cancellos fenestrae,

ubi ante faciem eius

sudando sudavit balsamum

de lucido Maximino.

Calor solis exarsit

et in tenebras resplenduit,

unde gemma surrexit

in edificatione templi

purissimi cordis benivoli.

Iste, turris excelsa

de ligno Libani et cipresso facta,

iacincto et sardio ornata est,

urbs precellens artes

aliorum artificum.

Ipse, velox cervus,

cucurrit ad fontem purissime aque

fluentis de fortissimo lapide,

qui dulcia aromata irrigavit.

O pigmentarii!

qui estis in suavissima viriditate

hortorum regis,

ascendentes in altum

quando sanctum sacrificium

in arietibus perfecistis:

Inter vos fulget hic artifex,

paries templi,

qui desideravit alas aquile,

osculando nutricem Sapientiam

in gloriosa fecunditate

Ecclesie.

O Maximine,

mons et vallis es,

et in utroque alta

edificatio appares,

ubi capricornus

cum elephante exivit,

et Sapientia

in deliciis fuit.

Tu es fortis et suavis

in cerimoniis

et in choruscatione altaris,

ascendens ut fumus aromatum

ad columpnam laudis:

Ubi intercedis pro populo

qui tendit ad speculum lucis,

cui laus est in altis.

[English translation by Peter Dronke]

1a.   The dove peered in

        through the latticed window,

        where before her gaze

        raining, a balm rained down

        from the brightness of Maximinus.

1b.   The sun’s heat blazed

        and streamed into the darkness

        from which blossomed the gem

        —in the building of the temple—

        of the purest generous heart.

2a.   He, the sublime tower

        made of Lebanon’s tree,

        made of cypress,

        is decked with jacinth and sardonyx,

        city that no architect’s skill can match.

2b.   He, the swift hart

        ran up to the fountain

        of purest water

        bubbling from the mightiest stone

        whose moisture made the sweet perfumes flow.

3a.   You perfumers

        who live in the gentlest greenness

        of the king’s gardens,

        you who mount into the heights

        when you have consummated

        the holy sacrifice among the rams,

3b.   Lucent among you

        is this architect, wall of the temple,

        he who longed

        for an eagle’s wings as he kissed

        his foster-mother, Wisdom,

        in Ekklesia’s glorious fecundity!

4a.   Maximinus, you are mountain and valley,

        and in both you appear, a pinnacle,

        where the mountain-goat walked, and the elephant,

        and Wisdom played in her delight.

4b.   You are both brave and gentle;

        in the rites and in the sparkling of the altar

        you mount as a smoke of fragrant spices

        to the column of praise

5.    Where you plead the cause of your people

       who aspire to the mirror of light

       for which there is praise on high.

Source of the text in Latin: Fiona Maddocks, Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of Her Age.  New York: Doubleday, 2001, p. 195-197.

Source of the English translation: The Medieval Lyric, Third Edition, edited by Peter Dronke.  Suffolk, England: D.S. Brewer, 1996, p. 76-77.

TJB: 9 ways of looking at a saint. This hagiography-verse uses great moving-image-scenes: the saint as tower, deer, lush mountain, altar-smoke.

"The Tyre" by Simon Armitage

THE TYRE

Just how it came to rest where it rested,

miles out, miles from the last farmhouse even,

was a fair question. Dropped by hurricane

or aeroplane perhaps for some reason,

put down as a cairn or marker, then lost.

Tractor-size, six or seven feet across,

it was sloughed, unconscious, warm to the touch,

its gashed, rhinoceros, sea-lion skin

nursing a gallon of rain in its gut.

Lashed to the planet with grasses and roots,

it had to be cut. Stood up it was drunk

or slugged, wanted nothing more than to slump,

to spiral back to its circle of sleep,

dream another year in its nest of peat.

We bullied it over the moor, drove it,

pushed from the back or turned it from the side,

unspooling a thread in the shape and form

of its tread, in its length and in its line,

rolled its weight through broken walls, felt the shock

when it met with stones, guided its sleepwalk

down to meadows, fields, onto level ground.

There and then we were one connected thing,

five of us, all hands steering a tall ship

or one hand fingering a coin or ring.

Once on the road it picked up pace, free-wheeled,

then moved up through the gears, and wouldn’t give

to shoulder-charges, kicks; resisted force

until to tangle with it would have been

to test bone against engine or machine,

to be dragged in, broken, thrown out again

minus a limb. So we let the thing go,

leaning into the bends and corners,

balanced and centred, riding the camber,

carried away with its own momentum.

We pictured an incident up ahead:

life carved open, gardens in half, parted,

a man on a motorbike taken down,

a phone-box upended, children erased,

police and an ambulance in attendance,

scuff-marks and the smell of burning rubber,

the tyre itself embedded in a house

or lying in the gutter, playing dead.

But down in the village the tyre was gone,

and not just gone but unseen and unheard of,

not curled like a cat in the graveyard, not

cornered in the playground like a reptile,

or found and kept like a giant fossil.

Not there or anywhere. No trace. Thin air.

Being more in tune with the feel of things

than science and facts, we knew that the tyre

had travelled too fast for its size and mass,

and broken through some barrier of speed,

outrun the act of being driven, steered,

and at that moment gone beyond itself

towards some other sphere, and disappeared.

Source of the text – Simon Armitage, The Shout: Selected Poems.  Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2005, p. 67-68.

TJB: Unsteerable. Like a Frost woodpile or jar in Tennessee only cut loose, moved, then disappearing. This rolling story chews on its many verbs.

"Loco" by Deborah Slicer

Loco

If titmouse wags her song at me again like a scolding finger—you-loco—

          I aim to pop her,

then lie down among the cows and rusting tractors along the creekside,

          frigid,

while the bull soliloquizes like widower Macbeth.

          For the milk of human kindness doth flow from mine ears

and I have murderous thoughts

          against myself

because I didn’t grieve you better.

If that same murder of crows bobs the back field in their blackcoats

          like a convention of metaphysicians

muttering Kant-kant-kant-kant,

          I’ll give them one barrel of heaven, the other hell.

My buck fawn’s back legs yodel through the early morning plenary,

          my buck fawn runs their arguments reductio

loco. His tongue shinnies up their one-eyed sunflower stalks,

          his back talk pins their heavy-headed arguments to the ground.

Come winter I’ll eat my own hands before those oily axioms touch my mouth.

If bobwhite calls her lover’s name in her sleep at dusk,

          reminding me, again, I’m loverless, lonesome

as a criminal past, well, then—

          what? Make another meal of self-pity?

Oh World, blow your noise through the keyhole of me,

          so when Night walks by on its tip-toes with its ear to the wall of my bedroom

let it hear the loco-commotion

          of the bus stop at five-fifteen on any Friday afternoon.

I have a crazy angel in my throat.

          She grabs sorrow by the ankles, swings it round,

round in my mouth,

          until it’s a tale of childish fury,

signifying the best it can—

          a fluster of wings in the chimney, ashes sassing.

Blood bird,

          my bird, she eats the ashes;

these ashes are enough.

Source of the text – Deborah Slicer, the white calf kicks.  Pittsburgh: Autumn House Press, 2003, p. 3-4.

TJB: Angry at birds. The long-lined semi-sonnet, with Shakespearean-natural images, threatens violence of the little bird-poems the poet invokes.

"Silver Star" by Richard Hugo

Silver Star

This is the final resting place for engines,
farm equipment and that rare, never more
than occasional man. Population:
17. Altitude: unknown. For no
good reason you can guess, the woman
in the local store is kind. Old steam trains
have been rusting here so long, you feel
the urge to oil them, to lay new track, to start
the west again. The Jefferson
drifts by in no great hurry on its way
to wed the Madison, to be a tributary
to the ultimately dirty brown Missouri.
This town supports your need to run alone.

What if you’d lived here young, gone full of fear
to that stark brick school, the cruel teacher
supported by your guardian? Think well
of the day you ran away to Whitehall.
Think evil of the cop who found you starving
and returned you, siren open, to the house
you cannot find today. You question
everyone you see.  The answer comes back wrong.
There was no house.  They never heard your name.

When you leave here, leave in a flashy car
and wave goodbye.  You are a stranger
every day.  Let the engines and the farm
equipment die, and know that rivers
end and never end, lose and never lose
their famous names.  What if your first girl
ended certain she was animal, barking
at the aides and licking floors?  You know
you have no answers.  The empty school
burns red in heavy snow.


Source of the text – Richard Hugo, Selected Poems.  New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979, p. 87-88.

TJB: Timor mortis conturbat this tiny town. Using details visible from the highway, the poet imagines the reader imagining youth in this hamlet.

"View of Delft" by Carol Ann Davis

View of Delft

The human figures

seem to match in vacancy

the waiting boat,

its scrubbed planks and face.

Like an afterthought, the water

cuts through the picture below-meridian,

shines at a slant like a knife on a cutting board—

     from this view,

one can guess how the customs house door

arches into total darkness, which is to say

fine buildings are reflected

in the brown water, nothing more

than a shallow swath

catching imaginary light

from the sky;

                      the city floats

between this water

and insubstantial heaven,

the water, between blue shingles of castle

and two nuns—

one thin, one round—

their habits set

against the weight

and business of the wharf,

they must think:

what we are God is not.

Detail on the steeples.

God is not.  Perfect angles.

Source of the text – Carol Ann Davis, Psalm.  Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press, 2007, p. 18.

TJB: Disagree those are nuns or that heaven’s insubstantial. Otherwise, this poem describes some of what’s visible or implied in the masterpiece.

"Penmaen Pool" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Penmaen Pool

For the Visitors’ Book at the Inn

Who long for rest, who look for pleasure
Away from counter, court, or school
O where live well your lease of leisure
But here at, here at Penmaen Pool ?

You’ll dare the Alp ? you’ll dart the skiff ?—
Each sport has here its tackle and tool :
Come, plant the staff by Cadair cliff ;
Come, swing the sculls on Penmaen Pool.

What’s yonder ?—Grizzled Dyphwys dim :
The triple-hummocked Giant’s stool,
Hoar messmate, hobs and nobs with him
To halve the bowl of Penmaen Pool.

And all the landscape under survey,
At tranquil turns, by nature’s rule,
Rides repeated topsyturvy
In frank, in fairy Penmaen Pool.

And Charles’s Wain, the wondrous seven,
And sheep-flock clouds like worlds of wool,
For all they shine so, high in heaven,
Shew brighter shaken in Penmaen Pool.

The Mawddach, how she trips ! though throttled
If floodtide teeming thrills her full,
And mazy sands all water-wattled
Waylay her at ebb, past Penmaen Pool.

But what’s to see in stormy weather,
When grey showers gather and gusts are cool ?—
Why, raindrop-roundels looped together
That lace the face of Penmaen Pool.

Then even in weariest wintry hour
Of New Year’s month or surly Yule
Furred snows, charged tuft above tuft, tower
From darksome darksome Penmaen Pool.

And ever, if bound here hardest home,
You’ve parlour-pastime left and (who’ll
Not honour it ?) ale like goldy foam
That frocks an oar in Penmaen Pool.

Then come who pine for peace or pleasure
Away from counter, court, or school,
Spend here your measure of time and treasure
And taste the treats of Penmaen Pool.

Source of the text – Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, now first published, Edited with notes by Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate.  London: Humphrey Milford, 1918.

TJB: Born adman? Perhaps the best poem composed in a guest log, this light verse—intensely alliterated & interrupted—names a litany of features.

"The Loba Addresses the Goddess / or The Poet as Priestess Addresses the Loba-Goddess" by Diane di Prima

THE LOBA ADDRESSES THE GODDESS / OR THE

   POET AS PRIESTESS ADDRESSES THE LOBA-

                                    GODDESS

Is it not in yr service that I wear myself out

running ragged among these hills, driving children

to forgotten movies? In yr service

broom & pen. The monstrous feasts

we serve the others on the outer porch

(within the house there is only rice & salt)

And we wear exhaustion like a painted robe

I & my sisters

wresting the goods from the niggardly

dying fathers

healing each other w / water & bitter herbs

that when we stand naked in the circle of lamps

(beside the small water, in the inner grove)

we show

no blemish, but also no superfluous beauty.

It had burned off in watches of the night.

O Nut, O mantle of stars, we catch at you

lean mournful

ragged triumphant

shaggy as grass

our skins ache of emergence / dark o’ the moon

Source of the text – Diane di Prima, Loba.  New York: Penguin Books, 1998.

TJB: In priestly grandeur & amplifying asides, we hear poetry as hard work, as sacred self-sacrifice. What would the bricklayers or nurses think?

"Transparent" by Carla Harryman

Transparent

Have I ever had a real vision? I wonder about this, even as I can easily describe one associated with something I ate once—several months before I met you. It was during Easter break in the late spring of 1971, and the vision happened on a Laguna Beach mesa overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was early morning when I went through the ritual of consuming the toxic buttons. After a prolonged bout of nausea from which I could find relief only by lying in my shower with the shower head pointing directly at my body and continuously spraying a soft mist onto my back and stomach, I was at last able to slip on a dress and sometime after midday wander down a short hill to the sandy mesa where a man in a transparent shirt tapped me on the shoulder. I was not exactly startled, but I had been enjoying the feeling of warm sand on my bare feet, so I reacted to this touching with irritation. A personal project in those years was to find fulfillment in being alone—a challenge of sorts for a young person living in zones of rampaging libido. I had to talk myself into turning around to see who was touching me, with the sense that if I didn’t something might go wrong. He said something I can no longer recall, but I do remember his shirt, which simultaneously sheathed and revealed his lean high definition body. The shirt was composed of a blend of threads—the sky blue of Pacific air after the fog had burned off and the pale adobe pink of the Spanish style rooftops in the area. When I realized that his shirt was the rooftop meeting the sky, he faded in front of my eyes. Until today, however, I hadn’t thought that this vision had to do with actual things in the sense that real things were the compositional materials of the hallucination. Instead, I had experienced the things around me as having been constituted by the vision. I believe I relied on that oddly distorted sensation in order to retain the memory, which otherwise might never have been recorded.

Source of the text - Carla Harryman, Adorno’s Noise. Ithaca, NY: Essay Press 2008.

TJB: Novelistic memory of a vision. Intensely visual, it is as “transparent” as a page-turner but still makes us pay attention to sound & style.

("some token or") by Larry Eigner

                                                                                                                     March 20 81    # 1 2 4 9

s  o  m  e    t  o  k  e  n       o  r

                                                    for
a  metalanguage  maybe                                a farewell to
they  can  call  writing                    Jim             Elizabeth
                                                       Weil        
like  a  title
come  up  with  to

belong  to  the  poem

is  there  on  the  page



Source of the text - The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner, Volume 4, edited by Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier.  Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 1418.

TJB: Metasimile: writing is like adding a title to a poem on a page. This poem gently asks us to confront the relationship of title and body.

("where any sound") by Larry Eigner

                                                                                                 February 22-March 7 81    # 1 2 4 8

w  h  e  r  e      a  n  y      s  o  u  n  d


      all
      this
      space

          watch  it
          get  dark

               cars  moving
               in  the  streets

                    travel    far
                               sleep

                        puts  number
                               distances
                            in  the  head

                            don’t  think

                            darker  and  darker
                              on
                              the  turning  earth




Source of the text - The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner, Volume 4, edited by Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier.  Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 1418.

TJB: The title alludes to sound but these minimal utterances describe darkening space—page/world; mental/physical divides—& resist contemplation.

"Flirtation" by Rita Dove

FLIRTATION

After all, there’s no need

to say anything

at first. An orange, peeled

and quartered, flares

like a tulip on a wedgwood plate.

Anything can happen.

Outside the sun

has rolled up her rugs

and night strewn salt

across the sky. My heart

is humming a tune

I haven’t heard in years!

Quiet’s cool flesh—

let’s sniff and eat it.

There are ways

to make of the moment

a topiary

so the pleasure’s in

walking through.

Source of the text – Rita Dove, Museum.  Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon Press, 1992, p. 70.

TJB: With short-lined, simple-elegant images alive to sensual detail—viewing sculpted shrubs!—the poem captures the thrill of being flirted with.

"Dortmunder" by Samuel Beckett

Dortmunder

In the magic the Homer dusk
past the red spire of sanctuary
I null she royal hulk
hasten to the violet lamp to the thin K’in music of the bawd.
She stands before me in the bright stall
sustaining the jade splinters
the scarred signaculum of purity quiet
the eyes the eyes black till the plagal east
shall resolve the long night phrase.
Then, as a scroll, folded,
and the glory of her dissolution enlarged
in me, Habbakuk, mard of all sinners.
Schopenhauer is dead, the bawd
puts her lute away.

Source of the text - Samuel Beckett, Collected Poems in English & French. New York: Grove Press, 1977.

TJB: Brothelyrical. The narrative—in which the poet goes a-maying—bows to precocious-cryptic language, with little mortar between the bricks.

"Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond" by Sylvia Plath

Flute Notes
from a Reedy Pond

Now coldness comes sifting down, layer after layer,

To our bower at the lily root.

Overhead the old umbrellas of summer

Wither like pithless hands. There is little shelter.

Hourly the eye of the sky enlarges its blank

Dominion. The stars are no nearer.

Already frog-mouth and fish-mouth drink

The liquor of indolence, and all thing sink

Into a soft caul of forgetfulness.

The fugitive colors die.

Caddis worms drowse in their silk cases,

The lamp-headed nymphs are nodding to sleep like

             statues.

Puppets, loosed from the strings of the puppet-

             master,

Wear masks of horn to bed.

This is not death, it is something safer.

The wingy myths won’t tug at us anymore:

The molts are tongueless that sang from above the

             water

Of golgotha at the tip of a reed,

And how a god flimsy as a baby’s finger

Shall unhusk himself and steer into the air. 

Source of the text - Sylvia Plath, Colossus. New York: Vintage Books, 1968, p. 80-81.

TJB: In simple-bold declarations, a pond—& the things you’d notice while flyfishing—begins to hibernate as the great god Pan arises insectlike.

"Mocking Bird Hotel" by Valzhyna Mort

Mocking Bird Hotel

A woman’s hallelujah! washes the foot of Mocking Bird

Hill, her face eclipsed by her black mouth,

her eyes rolled up like workman’s sleeves.

Stirred up, a fly speaks in the tongue of the hotel

doorbell, where, on the sun-ridden straw terrace

my salvation means less than praise

to a dumb child. Damned, blinded by ice cubes,

the fly surrenders its life into the waiter’s clean hands.

Behind the kitchen of the Mocking Bird Hotel

a rooster repeats hallelujah! until it loses its head.

A man harvests the Family Tree before his forefathers’

features have a chance to ripen on their faces. Parakeets

watch him from the bare nerves of the garden. He harvests

before the worms that eat his father turn into demons.

Do not eat the fruit from your Family Tree. You have

eyes not to see them, hands not to pick them, teeth

not to bite them, tongue not to taste them even in speech.

The waiter slashes the table with our bill. We descend

Mocking Bird Hill without raising dust. Dogs,

their fur hanging like wet feathers off their backs,

piss yellow smoke without lifting a leg. Gulls

smash their heads between their wings.

Light lays eggs of shadows under the shrubs.

Produce shacks stand empty like football gates.

What appeared blue from afar, turns green.

             I hold it all in, even my own urine.

But the mother of vowels slumps from my throat

like the queen of a havocked beehive.

Higher than hallelujah! rising like smoke over the hill,

I scream at the top of that green lung,

             why, in the Mocking Bird

Hell, do you value your blood over your sweat,

that bitterness over this salt, that wound over this

crystal? But often to shed light on the darkness,

light isn’t enough. Often what I need is an even darker

darkness. Like in those hours before the sun incriminates this

hotel, his two nostrils that illuminate our benighted bodies.

Source of the text – Valzhyna Mort, Collected Body.  Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2011, p. 4-5.

TJB: Poetry as mimicry. On an American hill, the Belarusian poet flings rhetoric, images, St. Paul, & deigns to pluck verse from her family tree.

"Thought" by Henry Real Bird

Thought

“Thought is like a cloud

You can see through shadow to see nothing

But you can see shadow

When it touches something you know,

Like that cloud’s shadow

Touching the Wolf Teeth Mountains.

When the clouds touch the mountain's top

Or where it is high

The wind is good

When you’re among the clouds

Blurred ground among fog,

You are close to He Who First Did Everything,”

Said my Grandfather Owns Painted Horse.

We are but nomads asking for nothing

But the blessings upon our Mother Earth.

We are born as someone new

So then

We have to be taught

The good from the bad.

What is good, we want you to know.

What is good, we want you to use,

In the way that you are a person.

Source of the text – Henry Real Bird, Horse Tracks.  Sandpoint, ID: Lost Horse Press, 2010.

TJB: Thought bubble. In Grandfather’s voice, shadows, clouds & thus thought are equated to godliness. The poem’s second half is itself a thought.