poem sent to me today by an ocean of a woman

SCHOOL OF FISH by Eileen Myles

Everything's equal now. Blue leash blue bike
blue socks covering my ankles today
what about my friend -- I never wear socks
for a week or two she lived in the streets &
it was such an illumination. What's this human
addiction to light. One morning I dreamt about
homelessness, joked about it. Life reduced
or expanded to getting doggie her very
next can. Dog's inexcusable addiction to
eating. At the bottom of the sea, David said,
the fishies are inexcusably addicted to light.
Same day I and my dog were left on the street.
No home, no keys, streams of pouring grey
rain. Now what is this grey, in relationship
to blue. Ask some painter is it less light
or is it what. What kind of hat should
I have worn yesterday in my crisis.
The dog's blue leash was gone. My feet reaching
over the bounds of the sidewalks, its curbs
and waves, pavement splashing up
hard and grey. Where did I see that man?
Someplace so human they even had one of them.
In a dark blue teeshirt, laughing. There is nothing
to my anecdote, my predicament, my color
crisis. There is nothing but blue & grey.
A glint hits the golden key, and it's a bad one
not the original and I kept turning and turning
there were copies everywhere in the neighborhood
that's what I am trying to say. I simply walked
and the apologies kept coming streaming in
and I said I simply walked and the tree
turned, no the key and the bottom of the sea
is flooded with light, we just get used to it
the deeper and deeper we go and the harder
it is to turn the key and eventually we
go and it is very very dark
we just get used to the light
but the blues and the greys and the feelings
of lostness, it's like home, it's like family.

I'm Gonna Learn How To Fly

Why somebody would decide to remake the 1980 film "Fame" in 2009 is not illogical -- American culture is currently obsessed with the idea of "making it," whether you're a cook, a singer, a clothing designer, or even someone with no perceivable talent other than the insane drive to appear on a reality TV show, we've got a place for you on national television, a way to make your name "known" in America's Next Top Whatever. So, deciding to remake "Fame," a movie about high school kids in an intensely competitive New York City performing arts school... it's not a hugely difficult sell to the studios. But really, dear director, whoever you are, did you have to make it so cardboard, so G-rated, so bereft of flesh & urgency? Did you have to cast only the lead kids who'd look good on posters, the ones with... well, talent, but for the most part, boring, boring, boring ass talent? Did you have to - OH MY GOSH - so deeply insult the insanely and uniquely talented Bebe Newirth by casting her as a dance teacher who never appears dancing? Pardon me while I puke all over my tap shoes / comfort Bob Fosse while he turns in his grave. Did you, dear director, have to cut almost every interesting and weighty plot line? Do you think there's not BUCKETS of grit in 2009 for you to deal with? What the hell are you doing? Do you think you don't have any responsibility to the world we live in? How can you make a movie about the theater and teenagers and New York while wholly ignoring all of the issues - teen pregnancy, homosexuality, poverty, addiction, abuse - which the 1980's movie frankly and lovingly embraced? (Poverty and violence, while alluded to, are kept way off screen -- in the 2009 version, we see nice apartments, parents who are, at worst, busy but present. In the 1980's version, we see the squalor. We get exactly why these kids are so desperate to break out of their circumstances. ) Dear director, aren't there dozens more issues now clear in light that was somewhat murky (or did not exist) in the early 80's - New York post-9/11, AIDS, eating disorders, our culture of hyper-spectacle, mental illnesses, etc etc- couldn't you have chosen to embrace something... I don't know, important? And instead, your only big cultural update was to give the whole thing a little hip-hop flava, and get a few kids involved with the TV business. What the fuck, dear director. Shame on you. P.S. The new songs pretty much sucked too.

Here's the 1980's real deal:


Forgive the outrage, chickadees. "Fame" has been my favorite movie since, oh, I don't know, age 15. Seeing it helped me to live in that dreamlife as long as it made sense to. Anyway, yes, apologies, the tiny room in my heart where musical theater still lives & breathes got all irritated & I had to let it speak.

For the waltz of To, / The pinch of Where

Quick, very quick, think of three favorite poems by different authors. Now, of those authors, how much more of their work have you read? For me, just as my three favorite poems might vary from day to day, so does the length to which I may have investigated their authors. This is why it has been so wonderful for me to read The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. While I have read well-known poems like "My Papa's Waltz"and "The Waking" many times, and even have kept a copy of the latter on my walls for many years, I never dove into Roethke's work. I was entirely delighted to find that what I imagined of Roethke - a serious-minded writer knit closely to meter, and, well, a dark sense of the inevitable - was, of course, only a small piece of this writer's world. There have been only few times where my pre-conceived notions/expectations of poets have been so completely dismantled. For those of you unfamiliar with Roethke, here is his poem "The Waking," which had stood for years in my mind as exemplary of what he was all about:

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.


Now, imagine my astonishment when happening upon work such as the following, the first section from a poem called "Praise To The End!" :

It's dark in this wood, soft mocker.
For whom have I swelled like a seed?
What a bone-ache I have.
Father of tensions, I'm down to my skin at last.

It's a great day for the mice.
Pickle-me, tickle-me, close stems.
Bumpkin, he can dance alone.
Ooh, ooh, I'm a duke of eels.

Arch my back, pretty-bones, I'm dead at both ends.
Softly softly, you'll wake the clams.
I'll feed the ghost alone.
Father, forgive my hands.

The rings have gone from the pond.
The river's alone with its water.
All risings
Fall.


..... The strangeness of Roethke is far, far beyond what I had ever expected. And now, because I cannot choose just one poem of his to speak this strangeness, a collection of strange lines:

from "I Cry, Love! Love!" : "Bless me and the maze I'm in!/Hello thingy spirit."

from "O, Thou Opening, O": "I'm king of another condition, /So alive I could die!"

from "O Lull Me, Lull Me" : "In this, the diocese of mice, / Who's bishop of breathing?"

from "The Renewal" : "A raw ghost drinks the fluid from my spine"


.......(makes a sound like pleasure/the wind knocking from lungs)... Roethke's a more complicated & talented writer than I ever imagined. Three cheers. Go kiss a stone.

Haikusday #2

Haikusday has returned, chickadees.
Here are some by Basho:


Weathered bones
on my mind,
a wind-pierced body.


Midfield,
attached to nothing,
the skylark singing.


Not this human sadness,
cuckoo,
but your solitary cry.


Coolness:
the clean lines
of the wild pine.


How admirable!
to see lightning and not think
life is fleeting.

Letter to a Vague You

Give me an inch & I'll take the reflection of your hands like memory to the marrow. Paint with that for a month of night. When the hymnal begins I'll be cupping a flame to a mouth just risen from the edge of sleep. What I mean is, woman, how'd you get so beauty-torn. The alphabet arranges in your veins like a vine hell-bent on the sun. You speak to the thief in me; my dreams turn to box-cars & blues, a fistful of dirt, your air.

It's not you, it's me?

I lied to you. Tuesday was here and went, and no haiku appeared on this blog as promised. My commitment issue is far reaching. Will you ever forgive me? Is our broken trust repairable? Am I an unreliable narrator? Aren't we all?

In hope that you will forgive me, I will offer a personal story, though personal stories are less than a dime a dozen these days: Everywhere, I am drawn to lilacs. The lilac bushes have just come into bloom in Pittsburgh, and it's almost as if I can sense their presence before I see them, on my daily meanderings. Thief-heart, I imagine stealing dozens of blossoms by night, traveling though the lilac map in my head, creeping to each bush in a stranger's yard, filling the passenger seat with the scent of them, sleeping buried in the tiny blooms.

It's raining sideways in Pittsburgh this evening, the trees burning their brighter green. Last night just as I crossed the threshold of my apartment, within half a mile someone fired six or seven shots. And I, I'd thought all this violence was just in my head.

Next week, chickadees, Haikusday will return.

LIke a sky I was speckled with distance

It is National Poetry Month, by the way. Have you found a way to recognize the poetry in your life?

HOLY WHAT!

HOLY CRAP HOW DID I NOT KNOW THERE IS A NEW BOOK BY ANNE CARSON CALLED NOX AND I'M SO EXCITED I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHA- JUST BOUGHT THE BOOK ON AMAZON HERE'S A REVIEW-ISH THING OH SWEET PICKLED JESUS WHAT A LOVELY DAY ITS BEEN

Haikusday

Every Tuesday, until _____ I am going to post some haiku; it shall henceforth be known as HAIKUSDAY. These are by Issa. Enjoy.


How much
are you enjoying yourself,
tiger moth?


Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
is not art.


Mother I never knew,
every time I see the ocean,
every time--


The world of dew
is the world of dew.
And yet, and yet--


Why did the wild pink break?
O why
did it break?

(before this last haiku, it is noted, "On the death of my son:")

You wanted to be blessed

Good morning, spring, sweat, so many second chances it no longer makes sense to count them; stammer nervous a little prayer to no one, step into the sunlight, just love it, just think of kissing and almost kissing and the dark and the last low moon you dreamed of. It all comes down to Yes, to No. There's a door that is locked or unlocked, someone who holds your gaze or drops it into that deep well of all that's irretrievable. Let's just be now, in early April, with the windows open & seeds streaming across parking lot, & leave the blossoming until tomorrow, for we have, after all, so little to do with it.

It's Gigantic!

Snazzy, eh? This is what issue 1.2 of Gigantic Sequins looks like.

poetry by Kathleen Rooney, Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle, Leigh Alexander, Adam Falkner, Jeff Laughlin, Cheena Marie Lo, Kyle Tacsik, Sophia Natasha Sunseri, Ryan Hunton, Joe Letourneau, & Kiara Kharpertian

fiction by Zach Yontz, Lucretia Zappi & Ben Dover

art by Mark Toneff

Submissions for issue 2.2 are currently open...