National Poetry Month: Daniel Tobin

"The Decoy"

(Daniel Tobin)

When I read about the eagle that soared
Down from its heaven, having spied from the heights
That lone duck it assumed would be its dinner,
And thought how its single-minded eye
Must have clicked on its prey like a camera's shutter
Before it glided along its own rifling image
In the water, then caught in its relentless grip
The decoy a fisherman chained to the lakebed
Before it rose aloft, knowing itself
Again the flawless master of its realm,
I thought of the time I dialed by instinct
My dead parents' phone, how I sat in the room
As the forwarded number came up as my own,
Like some unalterable link of fate
Snapping me back to my past, and think now
How I perched on the numbed edge of my world
The way the eagle must have hovered in bewilderment
After the anchor, immoveable below, wrenched
The wooden bird from its talons, the chain
An iron cord splashing back into the deep,
Then silence. And both of us stunned by gravity.

"The Decoy" by Daniel Tobin appears in issue 44/45 of Artful Dodge. His work has been anthologized elsewhere including Hammer and Blaze, The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn, and Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll.

National Poetry Month: Daisy Fried

"Econo Motel, Ocean City"
(Daisy Fried)

Korean monster movie on the SyFy channel,

lurid Dora the Explorer blanket draped tentlike

over Baby’s portacrib to shield us from unearned

innocence. The monster slings its carapace

in reverse swan dive up the embankment, triple-jointed bug legs

clattering, bathroom door ajar, exhaust roaring,

both of us naked, monster chomps

fast food stands, all that quilted aluminum, eats through streams

of running people, the promiscuously cheerful guilty American

scientist dies horribly. Grease-dusted ceiling fan

paddles erratically, two spars missing. Sheets whirled

to the polluted rug. I reach under the bed, fish out

somebody else’s crunched beer can, my forearm comes out

dirty. Monster brachiates from bridge girders like a gibbon

looping round and around uneven bars, those are your fingers

in my tangles or my fingers, my head hangs

half off the king-size, monster takes tiny child actor

to its bone stash. Pillow’s wet. The warped ceiling mirror

makes us look like fat porno dwarfs

in centripetal silver nitrate ripples. My glasses on the side table

tipped onto scratchproof lenses, earpieces sticking up

like arms out of disaster rubble. Your feet hooked over my feet. What miasma

lays gold dander down on forms of temporary

survivors wandering the promenade? You pull Dora

back over us—Baby’s dead to the world—intrude

your propagandistic intimacy jokes,

unforgiving. “What, in a motel room?” I say.

Purple clouds roll back to reveal Armageddon

a dream in bad digital unreality. Explosions repeat patterns like

fake flames dance on fake fireplace logs. Sad Armageddon

of marriage: how pretty much nice

we meant to be, and couldn’t make a difference.

 "Econo Motel, Ocean City" by Daisy Fried appeared in Poetry magazine, 2005. Fried is the author of Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice (2013), My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (2006) and She Didn’t Mean to Do It (2000), all from University of Pittsburgh Press. In a 2009 essay in Poetry magazine, Fried discusses her mixed feelings of reading poetry on the web: It's hard for me to feel published unless it's on the page. But recently I met this guy at a party who told me he saw a poem of mine on a website. "That's the way I like to read poems, by accident," he said. "Like once I saw a poem by—have you heard of William Carlos Williams? I read it online and then bought this book, Desert Music. I sat down and read it through." I asked if he'd read any other books by Williams. Of course not. Just as he never read another poem of mine. He had to get on with his life. But take heart, poets who stay up nights worrying about audiences for poetry. Clearly, the web disseminates our work more widely than ever before.

National Poetry Month: Jane Kenyon

"Walking Alone in Late Winter"
(Jane Kenyon)

How long the winter has lasted—like a Mahler
symphony, or an hour in the dentist's chair.
In the fields the grasses are matted
and gray, making me think of June, when hay
and vetch burgeon in the heat, and warm rain
swells the globed buds of the peony.

Ice on the pond breaks into huge planes. One
sticks like a barge gone awry at the neck
of the bridge....The reeds
and shrubby brush along the shore
gleam with ice that shatters when the breeze
moves them. From beyond the bog
the sound of water rushing over trees
felled by the zealous beavers,
who bring them crashing down.... Sometimes
it seems they do it just for fun.

Those days of anger and remorse
come back to me; you fidgeting with your ring,
sliding it off, then jabbing it on again.

The wind is keen coming over the ice;
it carries the sound of breaking glass.
And the sun, bright but not warm,
has gone behind the hill. Chill, or the fear
of chill, sends me hurrying home.

"Walking Alone in Late Winter" by Jane Kenyon appears in her collection The Boat of Quiet Hours. Kenyon (1947-1995) published four books of poetry that echo themes of a darkly interior life, including a long period of personal depression, that found some solace in nature. A critic noted that her poetry reflected "intense calmness in the face of routine disappointments and tragedies." Kenyon was New Hampshire's poet laureate at the time of her death from leukemia at age forty-seven.

published four books of poetry—Constance (1993), Let Evening Come (1990), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), and From Room to Room (1978)—and a book of translation, Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova (1985). In December 1993 she and Donald Hall were the subject of an Emmy Award-winning Bill Moyers documentary, "A Life Together." In 1995 Kenyon was named poet laureate of New Hampshire; she died later that year, on April 22, from leukemia. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/361#sthash.hJYvCqKB.dpuf

published four books of poetry—Constance (1993), Let Evening Come (1990), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), and From Room to Room (1978)—and a book of translation, Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova (1985). In December 1993 she and Donald Hall were the subject of an Emmy Award-winning Bill Moyers documentary, "A Life Together." In 1995 Kenyon was named poet laureate of New Hampshire; she died later that year, on April 22, from leukemia. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/361#sthash.hJYvCqKB.dpuf

National Poetry Month: Jack Spicer

"A Book of Music"
(Jack Spicer)

Coming at an end, the lovers

Are exhausted like two swimmers.  Where

Did it end?  There is no telling.  No love is

Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries

From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye

Like death.

Coming at an end.  Rather, I would say, like a length

Of coiled rope

Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths

Its endings.

But, you will say, we loved

And some parts of us loved

And the rest of us will remain

Two persons.  Yes,

Poetry ends like a rope.

"A Book of Music" by Jack Spicer appears in The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer  (Wesleyan University Press). While attending college at the University of California-Berkeley, Spicer met fellow poets Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan. The friendship among these three poets would develop into what they referred to as “The Berkeley Renaissance,” which would in turn become the San Francisco Renaissance after Spicer, Blaser and Duncan moved to San Francisco in the 1950s. Spicer helped to form the 6 Gallery with five painter friends in 1954, and it was at the 6 Gallery during Spicer’s sojourn east that Allen Ginsberg first read "Howl." As a native Californian, Spicer tended to view the Beats as usurpers and criticized the poetry and self-promotion of poets like Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as well as the Beat ethos in general. [Photo of Jack Spicer from Jacket magazine]

National Poetry Month: Thomas Lux

"Otomonomania"
(Thomas Lux)

the word for the inability to find the right word,
leads me to self-diagnose: onomatomaniac. It’s not
the 20 volume OED, I need,
nor Dr. Roget’s book, which offers
equals only, never discovery.
I accept the fallibility of language,
its spastic elasticity,
its jake-leg, as well as prima ballerina, dances.
I accept that language
can be manipulated towards deceit
(ex.: The Mahatmapropaganda, i.e., Goebbels);
I accept, and mourn, though not a lot,
the loss of the dash/semi-colon pair.
It’s the sound of a pause unlike no other pause.
And when the words are tedious
and tedious also their order—sew me up
in a rug and toss me in the sea!
Language is dying, the novel is dying, poetry
is a corpse colder than the Ice Man,
they’ve all been dying for thousands of years,
yet people still write, people still read,
and everyone knows that nothing is really real
until it is written.
Until it is written!
Even those who cannot read
know that.

"Otomonomania" by Thomas Lux appears online at the Poets.org website.  Lux lives in Atlanta, where he is the Bourne Professor of Poetry and director of the McEver Visiting Writers program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He’s also directs the Poetry at Tech program. In a recent interview he downplayed the idea of surrealism apparent in his work, but commented that "Sometimes there are lucky accidents though I think they’re more likely to happen if one has sweat a little blood." His most recent collections are Child Made of Sand (2012) and God Particles (2008).

"Memories, Dreams and Reflections": at 67, Marianne Faithfull's own telling of her rocky past

Listeners unfamiliar with Marianne Faithfull may wonder what all the fuss is about: her voice seems like a ruin, and her songs are a gothic landscape of unfulfilled longing. Yet it's just these qualities that long-time fans find redeem her pop-star past and underscore her singular career as a singer, fearlessly chain-smoking her way from songs by Harry Nilsson to Nick Cave to Bertolt Brecht. She's a one-woman Weimar Republic of a chanteuse, and with the current economy in its tottering, sorry state her music sounds as timely as ever, and just as dark.

At 67, Marianne continues to record 50 years after "As Tears Go By" was an international hit in 1964. In 2011 she continued her string of recent collections with an album recorded in New Orleans, Horses and High Heels, with musical appearances by Lou Reed, Dr. John, and Wayne Kramer of the MC5. The album -- 19th in her long career -- contains four songs co-written by Faithfull; the rest are covers of mainly well known songs such as Dusty Springfield's "Goin' Back" and the Shangri-Las' "Past, Present, Future" It continues her association with producer Hal Wilner, who first collaborated with the singer on 1979's Broken English.

Interview magazine featured a talk Faithfull had with the writer Evelyn McDonnell, whose line of questioning is heavy on the Stones references and high on the decadence image, which the singer doesn't exactly discourage ("I don't do much that is decadent in my life. But I still am decadent. It's a state of mind.")

It's a pose she wears well, and with some cause; she is the grandniece of the writer whose own descriptions of decadence took on the family name in the term "masochism," Leopold Sacher-Masoch. But she's become absolutely at home in her world-weary persona, like any rock star who can slip in-and-out of character, and certainly the audience for Interview can live vicariously through a brief retelling of Marianne's own wobbly past.

" ... people will think what they think, and sometimes some of it will be really bad shit. But I don't think my fans want me to be anyone else. I couldn't anyway ... it is a persona, but it doesn't look like a persona because I've been working all my life to get my persona and my true self a bit more together, so that I don't have to pretend. And now I think I've done it."

McDonnell doesn't do anything to explain this appeal to decadence (you either enjoy Marianne's voice and songs -- and I do -- or you find them inexplicable), but the interview does trace a line from past to present with a directness that Marianne finds astonishing in the telling: how did I get here from there?

It's an old twist on the celebrity tale when Ms. Faithfull -- after being at the center of the cultural '60s storm, thanks in part to the Stones' manager Andrew Loog Oldham -- admits that "(I've) learned to live life as it actually is, which helps a lot ... it's wise to try to be realistic." You can take that remark at face value, or it can serve as the ultimate cautionary tale of wretched excess survived, from the co-writer of "Sister Morphine."

The attitude is a good way to sell albums and books, too, if after all Faithfull has gone through in her life she's still astounded by the presumptions and attitudes of others. Speaking of her shock at a director who wrote a script based on Faithfull, her 1994 down-and-out, rock-life autobiography, she then laughs: "I didn't realize they could do that -- that they would just buy a book title and then make it all up."

Even more astounding is the fact it's Carrie Fisher who explains the wicked, wicked ways of Hollywood to her: "She said, 'You know, you may think that your story has been degraded enough' -- which I do think, that in my life it has been quite degraded enough -- 'but there are people who will want to degrade you more.'" Later in the interview Faithfull comes back to the topic of the director and the fabricated scene:

"I did assume that anybody who wanted to make a film of my book -- and this guy is very well-known and very respected -- would do it because they wanted to and because they liked me. But I was completely wrong. He just wanted to put me down. He thought I was not only a prostitute in the time when I was living on the street, but a prostitute in art, which I'm not."

Her 2007 autobiography, now out in paperback, is called Memories, Dreams and Reflections; it's "a nice little book" in contrast to her earlier memoir, of which she says now, "everybody said I should do it -- get it out of my system. So I did." The new album contains a collection of cover songs ranging from Carole King to the Shangri-Las, as well as some unfamiliar song territory: 'We chose some soul material this time which I was very unsure of at first ... It's all a very different style for me." But fans can be re-assured: about the original "Why Did We Have to Part," she comments that 'I just couldn't resist a break-up song -- and the pain is over."

""All the songs are about now, you know?" she said about the music of Horses and High Heels. But the new album, like the 2009 collaboration Easy Come, Easy Go, are part of a continuing portrait: "All the way through these songs," Faithfull tells the interviewer, "there are one or two lines that, if I'd put them together, would make my story. I like that. I believe we have to have a story and we have to express it, and I've got one."

(Photographs from the April 2009 issue of Interview by Paolo Roversi)