National Poetry Month: CA Conrad

from The Book of Frank

CA Conrad

Frank’s sister grew long blue feathers

she said it was worse than cutting teeth

she spent a month screaming in the cave

pushing them out

Frank would lie in bed at night

touching his own back

crying

praying it wouldn’t

come to him

but the day his sister flew to the house

he stood by the window in awe

giant blue spread coming in across the lake

he heard the hunter’s shot before she did

...

Frank remembers

shirts of buried generals

flying in formation

over schoolyards

blowing wasps from sleeves

...

Frank knows a

butterfly

who wonders

about her old

caterpillar

friends

...

she was exotic company

her mouth

full of mouse

Frank never heard a word

his gaze

steady on the mouse

disappearing to reappear

with every syllable

devoted

he prayed

to God she’d

marry him

but late in the night

she touched his hand

Frank recoiled

and realized

it was really

the mouse

in her mouth

he loved

From a review by Mary Wilson at Make: A Chicago Literary Magazine: The Book of Frank (Wave Books, second edition 2010) collects sixteen years worth of CA Conrad's semi-autobiographical “Frank” poems into one volume, which includes previously unpublished poems and a new afterword by Eileen Myles. Frank is Conrad’s alter ego in the vein of John Berryman’s “Huffy Henry” of The Dream Songs, a third person embodiment of Conrad’s psychic unease. Conrad was raised in rural Pennsylvania and “escaped” to Philadelphia in 1986, where he met a number of artists and writers, including writer and publisher Gil Ott, who soon became something of a mentor to him. Ott was at that time publishing writers like Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman in his magazine Paper Air, and through him Conrad quickly found his contemporaries. He is now hosting poetry readings, designing and leading “(Soma)tic poetry” workshops, giving tarot readings (he’s interested in the occult) and writing with and about fellow poets in the group blog PhillySound.

National Poetry Month: Robert Creeley

"Help"

Robert Creeley

Who said you didn't want

to keep what you got

and would help the other guy

share the bulging pot

of goodies you got

just by being bought

on time by the plot

wouldn't give you a dime

sick or not

you've got to stay well

if you want to buy time

for a piece of the lot

where you all can hang out

when you aren't sick in bed

blood running out

bones broken down

eyes going blind

ears stuffed up

stomach a bloat

you battered old goat

but nothing to keep up

no payments to make

no insurance is fine

when you plan to die

when you don't mind the wait

if you can't stand up

and all the others are busy

still making money

"Help" appeared in the collection Life & Death by Robert Creeley (New Directions, 1998). Creeley died March 30, 2005. From the 1998 review by Tom Clark, SF Gate: For the poet now starting his eighth decade, what could be more natural than to find the foremost of those ties in the inexorably approaching fact of closure? Death in these poems is not simply a "subject,/ or a place / in time," but an ever-encroaching presence, hauntingly pervasive. Physical decline in the poems of "Life & Death" is unswervingly confronted. Tonally, such ruminations sometimes waver riskily between stoic wit and simple self-pity. How does one bid adieu without seeming maudlin? What finally saves these poems from the potential bathos of their grimly obsessive subject matter is an unflinching honesty, exercised at the expense of a gallant self-image; that honesty earns important rewards of reader trust. Even at their most insistently morbid, the poems win us over by reminding us how much of what they reveal about the author's condition is, like it or not, ours to share.

National Poetry Month: Delia Gist Gardner

"Hail and Farewell"

Delia Gist Gardner

(Reflection from a cabin in Skull Valley, Arizona, over an old Indian camping ground, 1945)

Think not on my brittle bones mingling with dust, for

These

Are but a handful added

To those gone before.

Think, rather, that on this borrowed hilltop

One lived joyously, and died content.

In this dark soil

I found reminders, saying:

"You, too, will pass; savor for us

The wind and the sun."

From the smoke-blackened earth

I dug

A frail shell bracelet, shaped lovingly, skillfully,

For a brown skinned wrist, now dust.

The broken piece of clay

Was a doll's foot and leg, artfully curved ,

Made for brown-eyed child.

Pottery shards saying:

"Yours for a little time only

Take delight in this, as we did."

The tree will die; the vine wither and rattle in the wind.

For I broke a law of Nature.

I carried the water to the hilltop. Nevertheless,

For those after me there will be

These things I have loved:

Morning sun rays, slanting across the hilltop,

Lighting the great trees in the green meadow.

Wind, the great blue sky,

Peace of the encircling hills

And flaming glow of sunset.

"Hail and Farewell" appears in Cowgirl Poetry: One Hundred Years of Ropin' and Ridin', edited by Virginia Bennett, published by Gibbs-Smith, 2001. From the introduction: "Vintage writings were a rich discovery. 'Hail and Farewell,' found recited as a dramatic ending to Gail Steiger's CD of truthful cowboy music, was penned by Delia Gist Gardner, whose husband, Gail Gardner, wrote many classic cowboy poems, including 'The Sierry Petes' (better known as 'Tying Knots in the Devil's Tail'). Steiger related that no one knew that his grandmother had been a writer, yet after her death, this single poem as found among her things."