National Poetry Month: Yael Kropsky

George Tooker

"Government Bureau"

(1956)

Dear _________:

(Yael Kropsky)

Perhaps the connecting noun is a bone
Washed over, over
Set by a whale or gust of generosity
Gray vapor of winter 
The silence of this parking lot

I was trying to lilt you off the page
Fishing with my whole handcuff
Then with straddles
Finally pathos, curled as in a flag
Diatonic laughter 

                       As soon as you come        you go 

Without accompaniment

            Naturally, we
Sire the thoughts
We do not want

The metaphor I’ve been looking for —

Snow drifts 
Discreetly over the Superfund site
We expect to be defeated
Completely within a day

Stay

         Whoever you are

Let me carry you over my head

***

"Dear _________" appeared online at 30 x Lace, a website curated by Carrie Murphy. Murphy's accompanying notes: 

Yael’s recommendation:

I’ve really been enjoying Moving Blanket, by Kostas Anagnopoulos from Ugly Duckling Presse. These poems are high-flying and intimate at the same time, teasing out subtle shifts in language and awareness while staying (mostly) anchored to the physical world. There’s also something just rare and generous about this book. It’s good people.

Yael Kropsky is a digital media junkie, non-practicing librarian, parent, and poet who lives and works in Ithaca and Brooklyn, NY.

National Poetry Month: Jack Spicer

Jack Spicer

30 January, 1925 - 17 August, 1965

"Sporting Life"

(Jack Spicer)

The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios

     don't develop scar-tissue. The tubes burn out, or with a

     transistor, which most souls are, the battery or diagram

     burns out replacable or not replacable, but not like that

     punchdrunk fighter in a bar. The poet

Takes too many messages. The right to the ear that floored 
     him in New Jersey. The right to say that he stood six 
     rounds with a champion.

Then they sell beer or go on sporting commissions, or, if the

     scar tissue is too heavy, demonstrate in a bar where the

     invisible champions might not have hit him. Too many of

     them.

The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a

     counterpunching radio.

And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even

     know they are champions.

(1964)

"Sporting Life" appears in The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (Black Sparrow Press). Several of his books were published only posthumously; many of his poems were either withheld or appeared during his lifetime in small poetry zines. The poetry journal that Spicer briefly published in mimeograph went by the suggestive initial, J, a mere letter away from the autobiographical I. 

He had highbrow and pop obsessions — baseball, Rimbaud, Greek mythology, Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus films -- but his poetry was often deliberately awkward, often with a break in the middle of a word that threatens to annul its meaning, “In- / Ability,” “Limit- / Less,” “No- / Body.” In the book After Lorca, he includes fairly orthodox translations of a smattering of Lorca’s poems, with some distinctive Spicer poetics mixed in:

"I yell 'Shit' down a cliff at an ocean. Even in my lifetime the immediacy of that word will fade. It will be as dead as 'Alas.' But if I put the real cliff and the real ocean into the poem, the word 'Shit' will ride along with them, travel the time-machine until cliffs and oceans disappear …. Words are what sticks to the real…. The perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary."


In 2010 Wesleyan Poetry Series published an anthology edited by Kevin Killian and Peter Gizzi, My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer.

National Poetry Month: Frank Sherlock

"Oil Bottle Poems Found in Harry's Occult Shop"

(Frank Sherlock)

                    Lucky Root

                    Lucky Hand

                    Hi John Con

                    Lucky Black Cat

                    

                    __________

                    Oriental Love

                    Come to Me

                    True Love

                    French Love

                    __________

                    Happy Marriage

                    Intimacy

                    Trust Me

                    You Me Forever

                    __________

        G is for geometry

        G is everywhere

        G is glowing over

               Ben Franklin's shoulder

                    Quick w/ the dip

                & improv

                            in the shop 

                               the orgy in the lodge

                    of the 9 muses

    

            He watches us

                  in his apron wig & beaver

                                 If drag queens ruled the world

                no kabals no secrets

                                   the temple of solomon

                            could be re-imagined    differently

Conrad: "  We need to look at some

chocolate after  that  experience."  A

chocolate  ear  on a  plate  is  sold as

"The Mike Tyson Special."  A choc-

olate man I think is Teddy Roosevelt

is nobody, really. I'm seeing Masons

everywhere.

"Oil Bottle Poems Found in Harry's Occult Shop" by Philadelphia poet Frank Sherlock appears online at the poet's website. He is the author of Over Here (2008) and collaborated with poet CA Conrad on the book The City Real and Imagined (2010). In an online interview in Mad Poets Society, Sherlock commented after a struggle with meningitis: "Well, having the opportunity to have an outlook on life has done wonders for my outlook on life. I think about it less as a battle than a surf outing. Just without the water, the temptations, the sun, or the speedo. But I did have an assless gown in the hospital, which was less comfortable and even less flattering, if you can believe that. Surfing in a hospital bed in late January takes some imagination- or in this case, sick delusions & hallucinogenic painkillers."

National Poetry Month: Wisława Szymborska

"Hatred"

(Wisława Szymborska)

Look, how constantly capable

and how well maintained

in our century: hatred.

How lightly she regards high impediments.

How easily she leaps and overtakes.

She's not like other feelings.

She's both older and younger than they.

She herself gives birth to causes

which awaken her to life.

If she ever dozes, it's not an eternal sleep.

Insomnia does not sap her strength, but adds to it.

Religion or no religion,

as long as one kneels at the starting-block.

Fatherland or no fatherland,

as long as one tears off at the start.

She begins as fairness and equity.

Then she propels herself.

Hatred. Hatred.

She veils her face with a mien

of romantic ecstasy.

Oh, the other feelings --

decrepit and sluggish.

Since when could that brotherhood

count on crowds?

Did ever empathy

urge on toward the goal?

How many clients did doubt abduct?

Only she abducts who knows her own.

Talented, intelligent, very industrious.

Do we need to say how many songs she has written.

How many pages of history she has numbered.

How many carpets of people she has spread out

over how many squares and stadiums!

Let's not lie to ourselves:

She's capable of creating beauty.

Wonderful is her aura on a black night.

Magnificent cloud masses at rosy dawn.

It's difficult to deny her pathos of ruins

and her coarse humor

mightily towering above them columns.

She's the mistress of contrast

between clatter and silence,

between red blood and white snow.

And above all she never tires of

the motif of the tidy hangman

above the defiled victim.

She's ready for new tasks at any moment.

If she must wait she'll wait.

She said she was blind. Blind?

She has the keen eyes of a sniper

and boldly looks into the future

--she alone.

"Hatred" by Wisława Szymborska and translated by J.M. Trzeciak appears online at Polish American Network, the Polish culture website. Szymborska won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. In awarding the prize, the Academy praised her “poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.” Readers of Szymborska’s poetry have often noted its wit, irony, and deceptive simplicity. She has an eye for domestic details and occasions, playing these against the backdrop of history. In the poem “The End and the Beginning,” Szymborska writes, “After every war / someone’s got to tidy up.” Her latest collection is Here, published in fall, 2010. 

National Poetry Month: Amy Scattergood

"The Secrecy of Animals"
(Amy Scattergood)


You take the fragments of the world
and put them into boxes, each one
smaller than the last. Lock each one.

It's a kind of violence. The blue
triangles of your mother's dress, or
the birds that flew backwards that morning.

It was an unremarkable day.
Flat weather. Repeating cycles of traffic.
There was nothing to read.

What your husband said had adjectives and nouns.
You can see them from outer space.
Inside that box are cold animals.

Your hands are so far away, as when
the magician separates his assistant
into territories of herself.

No wind. Porcelain stars.
The name on your nametag 
is unrecognizable.


Amy Scattergood's book of poems is The Grammar of Nails. She has a blog called 1000 Bread, 1000 Cattle, an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and went on to train at the California School of Culinary Arts. She also has a masters in religion from the Yale Divinity School. 

.

National Poetry Month: J. Allyn Rosser

"China Map"
(J. Allyn Rosser)


I was worn out, lost, and sixteen 
in China at 6 p.m., everyone 
suddenly in a purchasing frenzy, 
when he stopped me with a smile 
that just turned me upside down:
gold caps on one side, gaps on the other.
I could tell he was more human 
than most people, or more kind.
He was old the way everyone is old 
when you're sixteen: maybe fifty, or seventy.
I had passed through the village of pork, 
the village of shoes, the village of cotton shirts 
and linen. Each few blocks the commodity 
changed, the sounds and smells trans-laundered 
the air you walked in. He held out to me 
a section of the oddly shaped fruit 
with a rough, nubbly green rind, 
smooth amber glistening inside, 
a taste divine, beyond my tongue.
He was a busy man with buyers, 
we were smack at the core of the village 
of fruit. All of his globes were selling.
I was a ready target, fanning out 
the colored bills, raising my brows.
He looked at my hotel's card,
looked into both of my eyes, as if to say 
it was going to get dark fast, 
and sat us down on two crates side by side, 
and stopped his hawking then to draw, 
in deft, meticulous detail, a map 
to get me back: the splashing fountain 
with the fish inside the osprey's mouth, 
the statue of the sword-bearing giant, 
the dog-legging street that led 
to a cat's-paw alley just before the really 
sharp turn. When he drew an intersection, 
the stoplight had all three circles 
with diagonal hyphens radiating out—
and that fountain! He spent a lot of time 
making it sparkle on the paper bag 
under his knife-sharpened, spit-greased pencil.
I remember his ropy hand veins working.
I remember this fruit I carried back 
to my hotel and up the stairs, glowing and round 
like the truth. Like the globe of the truth 
of everything in the whole wide world.
I didn't know how to go about eating it 
when I got back to my room:
no knife, no dish, no napkin.
I sat and watched it ripen in the dusk, 
breathing its aroma, which seemed 
the antidote to every wrong thing.
In the morning I can't believe I just 
left it behind. That fruit.
Also, doubtless, the map.


"China Map" by J. Allyn Rosser appears online at Bunyip's Creative Cave and in print in the Winter 2006-07 issue of Ploughshares. Her 2001 book of poetry is Misery Prefigured; her most recent collection is Foiled Again (2007).

National Poetry Month: Warren Zevon

Warren Zevon

(1947-2003)

"Transverse City"
(Warren Zevon)




Told my little Pollyanna 
There's a place for you and me 
We'll go down to Transverse City 
Life is cheap and Death is free 
Past the condensation silos 
Past the all-night trauma stand 
We'll be there before tomorrow 
Pollyanna take my hand 

Show us endless neon vistas 
Castles made of laser lights 
Take us to the shopping sector 
In the vortex of the night 
Past the shiny mylar towers 
Past the ravaged tenements 
To a place we can't remember 
For a time we won't forget 

Here's the hum of desperation 
Heres the test tube mating call 
Here's the latest carbon cycle 
Here's the clergy of the mall 
Here's the song of shear and torsion 
Here's the bloodbath magazine 
Here's the harvest of contusions 
Here's the narcoleptic dream 

Told my little Pollyanna 
Here's a place where we can stay 
We have come to see tomorrow 
We have given up today 
Down among the dancing quanta 
Everything exists at once 
Up above in Transverse City 
Every weekend lasts for months 

Here's the hum of desperation 
Heres the test tube mating call 
Here's the latest carbon cycle 
Here's the clergy of the mall 
Here's the witness and the victim 
Here's the relatives' remains 
Here's the well-known double helix 
Here's the poisoned waves of grain 
Here's the song of shear and torsion 
Here's the bloodbath magazine 
Here's the harvest of contusions 
Here's the narcoleptic dream 
Here's the hum of desperation . . . 



"Transverse City" is the title track from Warren Zevon's 1989's futuristic concept album inspired by Zevon's interest in the work of cyberpunk science fiction author William Gibson: "I write songs about things that I'm simultaneously trying to not think about." (Warren Zevon interviewed in 2003.)