"The Satyr's Heart" by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

The Satyr’s Heart

Now I rest my head on the satyr’s carved chest,

The hollow where the heart would have been, if sandstone

Had a heart, if a headless goat man could have a heart.

His neck rises to a dull point, points upward

To something long gone, elusive, and at his feet

The small flowers swarm, earnest and sweet, a clamor

Of white, a clamor of blue, and black the sweating soil

They breed in....If I sit without moving, how quickly

Things change, birds turning tricks in the trees,

Colorless birds and those with color, the wind fingering

The twigs, and the furred creatures doing whatever

Furred creatures do. So, and so. There is the smell of fruit

And the smell of wet coins. There is the sound of a bird

Crying, and the sound of water that does not move....

If I pick the dead iris? If I wave it above me

Like a flag, a blazoned flag? My fanfare? Little fare

With which I buy my way, making things brave?

No, that is not it.  Uncovering what is brave.  The way

Now I bend over and with my foot turn up a stone,

And there they are: the armies of pale creatures who

Without cease or doubt sew the sweet sad earth.

Source of the text – Brigit Pegeen Kelly, The Orchard.  Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2004, p. 29.

Bourguignomicon: Heart murmur. Making music by reusing words in proximity, the poet doesn’t make beauty but finds it, doesn’t move but sees everything move.

"Hendecasyllabics" by Algernon Charles Swinburne

HENDECASYLLABICS.

IN the month of the long decline of roses

I, beholding the summer dead before me,

Set my face to the sea and journeyed silent,

Gazing eagerly where above the sea-mark

Flame as fierce as the fervid eyes of lions

Half divided the eyelids of the sunset;

Till I heard as it were a noise of waters

Moving tremulous under feet of angels

Multitudinous, out of all the heavens;

Knew the fluttering wind, the fluttered foliage,

Shaken fitfully, full of sound and shadow;

And saw, trodden upon by noiseless angels,

Long mysterious reaches fed with moonlight,

Sweet sad straits in a soft subsiding channel,

Blown about by the lips of winds I knew not,

Winds not born in the north nor any quarter,

Winds not warm with the south nor any sunshine;

Heard between them a voice of exultation,

“Lo, the summer is dead, the sun is faded,

Even like as a leaf the year is withered,

All the fruits of the day from all her branches

Gathered, neither is any left to gather.

All the flowers are dead, the tender blossoms,

All are taken away; the season wasted,

Like an ember among the fallen ashes.

Now with light of the winter days, with moonlight,

Light of snow, and the bitter light of hoarfrost,

We bring flowers that fade not after autumn,

Pale white chaplets and crowns of latter seasons,

Fair false leaves (but the summer leaves were falser),

Woven under the eyes of stars and planets

When low light was upon the windy reaches

Where the flower of foam was blown, a lily

Dropt among the sonorous fruitless furrows

And green fields of the sea that make no pasture:

Since the winter begins, the weeping winter,

All whose flowers are tears, and round his temples

Iron blossom of frost is bound for ever.”

Source of the text – Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, Third Edition. London: John Camden Hotten, 1868, pp. 233-234. 

TJB: How to make Hellenic poetry English: use every trochaic word you know, make it seasonchanging & vatic as hell, use 40 lines when 2 will do.

from "Nomina" by Karen Volkman

Now you nerve.  Flurred, avid as the raw
worm in the bird's throat.  It weirds the song.
The day die darkly in the ear all wrong—
all wreck, all riot—the maiden spins the straw,

the forest falters.  Night is what she saw,
in opaque increments deafening the tongue.
Sleep bird, sleep body that the silence strung,
myrrh-moon, bright maudlin, weeping as you draw

white tears, pearl iris in a net of eyes.
The spinning maiden quickens her design.
Gold gut spooling, integument of awe,

a baby breathing as a bird is wise
(the bird-bright heart that flutters like a law)
which eats the excess.  The strangle in the shine.



Source of the text - Karen Volkman, Nomina.  Rochester, NY: Boa Editions, Ltd., 2008, p. 33.

TJB:  Superterse, every phrase is gold in this alliterated Petrarchan bird-eye-song sonnet where the chick from Rumpelstiltskin spins gold herself.

XV and LIX from "The Sonnets" by Ted Berrigan

XV


In Joe Brainard's collage its white arrow
He is not in it, the hungry dead doctor.
Of Marilyn Monroe, her white teeth white-
I am truly horribly upset because Marilyn
and ate King Kong popcorn," he wrote in his
of glass in Joe Brainard's collage
Doctor, but they say "I LOVE YOU"
and the sonnet is not dead.
takes the eye away from the gray words,
Diary.  The black heart beside the fifteen pieces
Monroe died, so I went to a matinee B-movie
washed by Joe's throbbing hands.  "Today
What is in it is sixteen ripped pictures
does not point to William Carlos Williams.


LIX


In Joe Brainard's collage its white arrow
does not point to William Carlos Williams.
He is not in it, the hungry dead doctor.
What is in it is sixteen ripped pictures
Of Marilyn Monroe, her white teeth white-
washed by Joe's throbbing hands.  "Today
I am truly horribly upset because Marilyn
Monroe died, so I went to a matinee B-movie
and ate King Kong popcorn," he wrote in his
Diary.  The black heart beside the fifteen pieces
of glass in Joe Brainard's collage
takes the eye away from the gray words,
Doctor, but they say "I LOVE YOU"
and the sonnet is not dead.



Source of the text - Ted Berrigan, The Sonnets.  New York: Penguin Books, 2000, pp. 14, 54.

TJB: The same sonnet-collage twice: in sixteen ripped pictures; then, the thing itself, a little machine focused on what’s in it and what’s not.

from "The Black Riders" by Stephen Crane

XXI

There was, before me,
Mile upon mile
Of snow, ice, burning sand.
And yet I could look beyond all this,
To a place of infinite beauty;
And I could see the loveliness of her
Who walked in the shade of the trees.
When I gazed,
All was lost
But this place of beauty and her.
When I gazed,
And in my gazing, desired,
Then came again
Mile upon mile,
Of snow, ice, burning sand.



Source of the text - Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines.  [Boston]: Privately reprinted by courtesy of Small, Maynard & Co., 1905.

TJB: Poem as mirage; or, a metaphor anticipating Heisenberg uncertainty? Well-paced short phrases take us into and out of a telescope of sorts.

"Rabbit Song" by Arlene Kim

Rabbit Song


I stood too near the warren
and when I stumbled back, the rabbits stamped in alarm.


Iambic admonition, cautionary song.


Of what in the wood did they warn? Of whom?



Source of the text - Arlene Kim, What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?  Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2011, p. 50

Bourguignomicon: Hare iambs; poem as a Paul Revere ride. Not just the poet’s closing questions but also: who’s being warned? If rabbits are poets, who is I?

from "Oraclau/Oracles" by Geoffrey Hill

10: i. m. T. H. Parry-Williams

     The mountain ash, the rowan tree,
Turning a riot, most unlikely flesh,
     Erectile on the hazing sky
Its peaceful foliage instinct with clash:
     The pacifist in his own head
          Sees things past what they are,
Their heightened colour blood unpacified;
The hallowed conscience followed through despair
Put to the torch entangled with the wire.


Source of the text - Geoffrey Hill, Oraclau/Oracles. Thame, U.K.: Clutag Press, 2010, p. 4.

TJB: Outer peace. A mountain tree, looking peaceful but clashing within, compared Hopkinslike to a pacifist looking peaceful but clashing within.

 

 

 

 

"The Not Tale (Funeral)" by Caroline Bergvall

The Not Tale (Funeral)

From "Shorter Chaucer Tales" (2006)

The great labour of appearance
Served the making of the pyre.
But how
Nor how
How also
How they
Shal nat be toold
Shall not be told.
Nor how the gods
Nor how the beestes and the birds
Nor how the ground agast
Nor how the fire
First with straw
And then with drye
And then with grene
And then with gold
And then
Now how a site is laid like this.
Nor what
Nor how
Nor how
Nor what she spak nor what was her desir
Nor what jewels
When the fire
Nor how some threw their
And some their
And their
And cups full of wine and milk
And blood
Into the fyr
Into the fire.
Nor how three times
And three times with
And three times how.
And how that
Nor how
Nor how
Nor how
Nor who
I cannot tell
Nor can I say
But shortly to the point I turn
And make of my tale an ende.


Note: Part of Bergvall's ongoing cycle of texts, "Shorter Chaucer Tales" developed using a range of writing methods and languages, including direct quotes from Chaucer in Middle English.  The short "The Not Tale" was very simply created by translating and excerpting the negatives that make up Chaucer's description of Arcite's funeral in "The Knight's Tale."

Source of the text - Poetry, July/August 2009, pp. 332-333, 341.

TJB: The poet goes medieval on flarf’s ass, stripping out actions and objects to expose the winsome beauty of the rhetorical superstructure.

 

 

 

 

"Brooklyn English" by Ange Mlinko

BROOKLYN ENGLISH

The liftoff from a rooftop coop
distant thunder of the icemaker
child in a tenement stairwell
a cement echo in the art deco
shambles: these are not the
terms to discern a sentence by,
except a sentence that wraps
its back in a negative embrace
against you, made a fence.
It is a sentence so philosophical
naturally asymptotic butterflies
shudder to land on obvious
subjects, topiaries.
(Monarch migration season—
a Lincoln-slept-here glamour
to the rose-of-sharon.)
Perennials flare out of lots
in which legs of chairs
suspended in the tangle extrude
hidden toys in the foliage
and last blossoms like teacup sets
smashed till only odd ones left.
When tractor trailers roar past
tripping anti-theft alarms
we all cease to speak, honoring
the uncertain fate awaiting things
whose words retain the sound
of  verse: victoria, brougham, caleche. . . .
The sky has an ardor for clouds,
avatars of lambs when lambs
populated the vocabulary.
Take the treated flannel cloth
that in jewel blue'll rub the smears
out of the lenses, put on glasses.
Spiderwebs on underside buttresses.
But now, reader, get ready for
a real scene of horror:
There's not a word demanded of you
by all this air and leafery.  Not a word.


Source of the text - Ange Mlinko, Shoulder Season.  Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2010, pp. 78-79.

Bourguignomicon: Sound-scene & semidoggerel. The poet seeks more challenging verse by writing unimpeachable leafery: “echo in the art deco,” “jewel blue’ll.”

"April 3" by Cole Swensen

April 3

Curve
now my
love these trees, three
careful arcs
arching away

from
create the space of

the way that turning your back on

The small
trees that border worlds on

Two men alone in boats.


Source of the text - Cole Swensen, Such Rich Hour.  Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001, p. 45.

TJB: When the speaker looks at trees in a painting, she sees a strange fashion of forsaking. Vantage point and erasure are her poetic principles.