Not a willful churl

trust me, churl has a will all its own & comes when it pleases. Don't get me wrong, Poetry is still one of the priemiere (it has been around since the beginning of time- badum-ching. Could have resisted that) Lit journal out there & i usu get over my irritation with the editors choice of just completely incomprehensible poetry once i find the hidden gems. As could have predicted, i loved Kevin Young's Bling Bling Blues- a humorous take on hip hop culture (though, what part of hip hop culture isn't funny?), w/ lines like:
...Now my diamond shoes
hurting my feet...
I'd like to thank
God, my agent.(wish God was my agent too!)
My teeth went platinum last week.
And Billy Collins is such a, seemingly, effortless master of drawing people into his world of words - the man usually has me w/ just the title of the poem(e.g Evasive Manuevers). His love of words, finding out the meaning and histories of things, comes across in his work. I like how he reminds me of when I was a just a kid learning to read & letters were a mystery to solve. And he makes me glad that it's so effortless now to know things. But not as easy to capture again childhood wonder. I get the feeling he's just a benevolent buddha of a guy. You just want to bask in those spaces between the meaning of whatever he's saying. It's probably a conscious decision to draw us into his life as gently as possible. And i appreciate the kindness.

Rattle

I hope that Rattle is the new go-to journal for the 21st Century literati. Due to my current unemployment i've been trying to
make my way through the back issues of the less boring literary journals @ the New York Public Library's main branch on 40th St & 5th Av. I've been slogging my thru the July/Aug. '07 issue of Poetry and i guess in the time since i've been busy living hand-to-mouth and not paying attention to the literary journal world this new Q&A form seem to have sprung up (after the poem the writer then do a Q&A format on the attributes of the poem). Well, i'll tell you right now, i was pretty much tired of it after the first two (Poetry's editors seem to have published all the ones that was sent in). But after I read the third one, I was officially done with it-- though the John Brehm grew on me. Why i keep putting up with this journal at all? Beats me.(Well maybe because I wanted to rd whatever Kevin Young and Billy Collins had sent in). But I'm telling you, I'm pretty sick of all the crap i have to slog thru before rding anything that isn't completely tiresome. (Let me say this to cover myself)Not that there aren't some really great poems in it. I'm usually better off rding the fiction and commentaries in the back. Those were all really good. Naeem Murr & Michael Lewis both had really imaginative and humorous pieces. Murr's My Poet, about a fiction writer and his live-in girlfriend whose a poet, and Lewis' faux diary transcription of a frustrated coaching assistant: Poetry In Motion: A Diary of the Collapse of the 2006 New York Giants.... Anyway, this is all just to say that as soon as i get a job I'm going to subscribe to Rattle. In the meantime I need to put a subscription suggestion in w/ the NYPL.

Today

Man yesterday was cold. But today is the way i like it-- sunny, brisk...Mood right now? Uplifted.

Henri Cole

In the midst of all that has gone so very wrong with my life I've discovered Henri Cole. Right now i'm reading Blackbird and Wolf, which he read from when i went to The Academy of American Poets 2008 awards ceremony a couple of weeks ago in The New School Auditorium. This was the second Awards event i've been to for The Academy & I seem to "discover" some new poet-- or one that i've never been conscious of before anyway. I was young and in the extremely snarky years of my twenties when Ruth Stone read her quiet spacious poems as she got The Wallace Stevens Award. After the awards I was walking home w/ my friend and when i asked him who he liked and he said he really only liked her, the well of antagonism that rose up in me.... I was going through my Sylvia Plath phase where i felt persecuted at every turn -- by whom? Mostly by my own paranoia-- to be striving at something concrete in order to become the "successful woman" or lacking that, to produce that multitudinous manifestation of womanhood: the child-- which would have been an acceptable excuse as to what i was doing with my life. Anyway, anything domestic to me was suspect. My reasoning was that domesticity was the reason why Sylvia Plath was dead. Society of the 50's and early 60's had dictated that being a working woman was optional but motherhood was a necessity. As she read her poetry--which she had preface with a brief synopsis of how she had focused on raising her children first & her writing second-- the tug I felt toward her self-possession and quietude was met w/ just this mutinous upwelling of feelings: I refuse to be drawn in. House and family is not the answer! And my friend-- late teens, chubby and gay-- what the hell does he know! I was incredulous and told him that i liked someone else who had read (who i don't even remember now). I know it wasn't Galway Kinnell, who's the only one else i remember getting an award that night-- and whose poetry i've yet to even come close to understanding. Anyway, long story short, it only took time and the passing years for me to gradually come to understand how valuable the comforts of home are. How the insights of a life lived w/ such a degree of balance is a hard earned commodity. These are lessons that i'm learning the hard way.

turn, turn, turn

I've always felt the ancient Celtic tradition of Samhain to fit best my feelings about this time of year. November was considered the beginning of the year. January's "New Year" never felt as significant to me. This season of the year evokes so much more for me and, I think, for so many people. We had a series of windy days last week and now most of the trees in my neighborhood have been denuded. I didn't realize until Friday night when I was walking from the train station. I had reached one of the close by community gardens and the fullness of the fall beauty of one of the trees, that overhangs the fence and provide desperately needed shade during the sweltering summer months, was considerably thinned. It's also why we commemorate the dead this time of year. We're reminded that the beauty of this life inevitably fades. That like the greening of life that Spring ushered in & that Summer brought into full ripening, we gain in the full glory of all our flowering by Fall and then we fade away. "To everything - turn, turn, turn. There is a season..."

Spring and Fall
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918)

to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Autumn Offering

by Judith A. Lawrence

I shall be Autumn

this Halloween,

with leaf draped skirt,

and folds of

boysenberry velvet wine

flowing to the ground.

Brown stained face,

eyes rimmed in gold,

nails dripping sunset,

a crown of twigs

to cover my head.

You may gather from me

the spring of my youth,

my summer of maturity,

and hold onto with me,

the solace of these days

of remembering

before the frost.