National Poetry Month: Charley Seagraves



"Somebody With a Gun" - Charley Seagraves

Somebody with a gun
walked into a convenience store
just outside of Charlotte,
pulled on a stocking mask,
pointed a .44 Magnum
in the clerk's face,
and that began his fall from grace,
and now he's on the run,
somebody with a gun.

Somebody with a gun,
in a drive-by with an A-K
just outside of Atlanta,
accidentally hit a 7-year-old
who died in the emergency room--
he didn't mean to kill that kid,
but he did,
and now he's on the run,
somebody with a gun.

Somebody with a gun
got into an argument with her spouse
just outside of Topeka,
reached into her purse
and pulled out a 9mm Glock--
he ended up dead,
a single shot through his head,
and now she's on the run,
somebody with a gun.

Somebody with a gun
is knocking on the door of despair
just outside of your hometown,
oh lord, it's a jungle out there,
and their life is slowly coming undone
and it's somebody's daughter
and it's somebody's son
and soon they too will be on the run,
somebody with a gun.

Photo of Charley Seagraves at The Globe, Athens, Georgia, by David Noah [2014].

National Poetry Month: Warren Zevon

 



"My Shit's Fucked Up" - Warren Zevon

 

Well, I went to the doctor
I said, "I'm feeling kind of rough"
He said "I'll break it to you, son,
Your shit's fucked up."
I said "my shit's fucked up?
Well, I don't see how."
He said, "The shit that used to work
It won't work now."

I had a dream
Ah, shucks, oh, well
Now it's all fucked up
It's shot to hell

Yeah, yeah, my shit's fucked up
It has to happen to the best of us
The rich folks suffer like the rest of us
It'll happen to you

That amazing grace
Sort of passed you by
You wake up every day
And you start to cry
Yeah, you want to die
But you just can't quit
Let me break it on down:
It's the fucked up shit

 

Warren Zevon  was an occasional visitor to the home of  Ivor Stravinsky, where he briefly studied modern classical music. When he was 16 years old he quit high school and moved from Los Angeles to New York City to become a folk singer. In 1992 he told an Australian interviewer: “My advice to starting-out songwriters – not that I ever get the opportunity to say this to them – is that all those songs you’ve written have probably got a couple good lines in ‘em. Throw out everything but those and start over. Then build those up on a couple songs – then combine the two. That’s it. Be ruthless.” He died of cancer in 2003.

 

National Poetry Month: W.S. Merwin

 

"Before the Flood" 
(W.S. Merwin)

Why did he promise me
that we would build ourselves
an ark all by ourselves
out in back of the house
on New York Avenue
in Union City New Jersey
to the singing of the streetcars
after the story
of Noah whom nobody
believed about the waters
that would rise over everything
when I told my father
I wanted us to build
an ark of our own there
in the back yard under
the kitchen could we do that
he told me that we could
I want to I said and will we
he promised me that we would
why did he promise that
I wanted us to start then
nobody will believe us
I said that we are building
an ark because the rains
are coming and that was true
nobody ever believed
we would build an ark there
nobody would believe
that the waters were coming


W.S. Merwin, 90 later this year, began his writing career at the age of five by writing hymns for his father, who was a Presbyterian minister. ("I was very disappointed that they weren’t used in church"). His first book, A Mask for Janus, was chosen by W.H. Auden in 1952 for the Yale Younger Poets series. He has lived in Majorca, London, France, Mexico, as well as the United States; in 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaii to study with Robert Aitken, the Zen Buddhist teacher, and he now lives on Maui with his wife Paula. In his 1987 Paris Review interview he tells Ed Hirsch: "Writing poetry is never a wholly deliberate act over which you have complete control. It’s important to recognize that writing is at the disposition of all sorts of forces, some of which you don’t know anything at all about. You can describe them as parts of your own psyche, if you like, they probably are, but there are lots of other ways of describing them that are as good, or better—the muses, or the collective unconscious. More suggestive and so, in a way, more accurate. Any means of invoking these forces is good, as far as I’m concerned."

National Poetry Month: Joy Harjo

 

    
"Ah Ah"

for Lurline McGregor

Ah, ah cries the crow arching toward the heavy sky over the marina.

Lands on the crown of the palm tree.

Ah, ah slaps the urgent cove of ocean swimming through the slips.

We carry canoes to the edge of the salt.

Ah, ah groans the crew with the weight, the winds cutting skin.

We claim our seats. Pelicans perch in the draft for fish.

Ah, ah beats our lungs and we are racing into the waves.

Though there are worlds below us and above us, we are straight ahead.

Ah, ah tattoos the engines of your plane against the sky—away from these waters.

Each paddle stroke follows the curve from reach to loss.

Ah, ah calls the sun from a fishing boat with a pale, yellow sail. We fly by

on our return, over the net of eternity thrown out for stars.

Ah, ah scrapes the hull of my soul. Ah, ah.

 

 

"Ah, Ah" originally appeared in  How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems:1975-2001. Joy Harjo 's most recent collection is Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015). Harjo is the first Native {Creek] to win the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, which bestows the honor annually “to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.” In a 2015 interview, she comments that "I came to realize that as poets we just write songs. So, we have to take it all on, these stages of life, every seven years, create community, be creative, and make art. You have to open up, accept frailty, failure, there’s really no failure, you’re learning, it’s like sketches. You are giving back, like breathing, like life, like death, you take that place in the circle, part of the gift is to give back. And you are really giving forward."

National Poetry Month: Deacon Lunchbox

Deacon Lunchbox was the stage name of Atlanta performance artist and poet Timothy Tyson Ruttenber. A construction worker by day, he was popular in the Atlanta area for his flamboyant spoken-word performances. He often punctuated each line of his poems by banging an old torpedo casing or metal bucket with a hammer. His onstage props included a chainsaw, and often a bra was part of his costume. Deacon is credited with giving the Atlanta alternative country music scene its name - the Redneck Underground. He died in an auto accident, along with two members of the Atlanta group The Jody Grind, in April 1992.

More about Deacon Lunchbox, the Jody Grind, and the Cabbagetown music scene here.

National Poetry Month: Jo Podvin

 

 "My cells with giddy recall reel and spin"
 (Jo Podvin)

My cells with giddy recall reel and spin
Ancestral trick of photosynthesis
Dendrites have turned to fuzzy buds within
My interstitial spaces sing of this
What is not green of shoots is blue of sky
The scent of bee seduction fills the air
There is no where, no what, no who, no why
There is no past, and certainly no care
This drunken blossoming expands and grows
This blooming fills up all possible space
Here there is only yes, no room for nos
Intoxicating sweetness, hazy grace
Expanding yes, as birdsong from above
Love, then, is yes, and yes, oh yes, is love


Jo Podvin lives in Oakland, CA, and is the program manager for a small non-profit, Youth Enrichment Strategies (YES). 

National Poetry Month: Terry Kattleman

"The I Bing: The Book of Exchanges #1" (Terry Kattleman)

Hexagram 1: Ch’ien—The Creative

Dry dollars the ninth
day of every month. Hidden
dragon: do not use.

Tin dragon: do see
adults. A gentleman’s dry
all day, a watchful

tiger, no blame in
a guilt-free sky, flying deep
in time. Concubine

logistics work the
engine; a good long hang will
also benefit.

Vigorous thing to
do: announcing sufficient
justice is solid

enough, without the
stuffy, boring music, so
one cannot worry

the contrary; it
cannot be drawn. Evil is
good governance and

easy, great virtue.
The faithful German course is
inferior and

without pride. Be dry,
dry and watchful, and despite
adversity, be

without blame of cloud.
Disaster preparedness
is world governance.

The United States
is energy potential,
civilization

accompanying
the poles of temperament,
leather together.

The Ephesians! Pure
essence of imperial
days, benevolent

evidence, latent,
but implicit, the seasons
of order. Play the

bypass and breach the
ghost of Robert Frost for good
or ill luck. Knowledge

in its turn, but do
not know the dead, and do not
know death. Only saints

advance and retreat
in life and death. Only saints
advance and retreat.

[Original Chinese (auto-detected as Chinese Simplified) via Bing translator]


If the word is a virus, according to Burroughs, it is always subject to a series of recombinant permutations: the artist is free to manipulate the word as any substance and from any source. THE BOOK OF HAIKU REVELATION is the home of Terry S. Kattleman's Bingian Translational Reanalysis. In his own incantory words: Gysinian Haikuistics® (aka The Process™) is a constrained volitional cut-up methodology formulated by Terry S. Kattleman, Moriarty dean of the Department of Poetic Assemblage, College of Etheric Arts, Interzone University, and Chief Executive Offertory of the Society for Bingian Translational Reanalysis. Bingian Translational Reanalysis™ is a modality of language permutation contingent upon erratic Internet translation procedures. Deus Ex Logos Machina. Note on quote formation: Quasi-quotations, registered with the Patagonian Patent Office as Squotations™ (an e-adaptation of “misquotation”), are constructed entirely from the selected Internet quote site content of the quotee (see Incitements).
Kattleman is currently publicity director/production editor at the literary magazine Confrontation. In addition to the Death Palette Trilogy, he is the author of It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Ka-ching): A History of Federal Jazz Policy.