for those interested, my wayward children can currently be found in the following places:
"Oneiromancy, Late Afternoon" in Blood Orange Revew -- http://www.bloodorangereview.com/v5-2/fry_oneiromancy.htm --
"Drunk At Dodge City On Karaoke Night Watching Him Play Pool" in Breadcrumb Scabs, issue 22 -- http://breadcrumbscabs.com/issue22.php --
& poems are forthcoming in Bare Root Review & St. Sebastian Review.
muchisimas gracias to all of these editors.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Thursday, July 1, 2010
by way of explanation
. . . granted, it's been nearly an age (almost wrote 'nary') since any sort of post -- & one of the resolutions for the summer, come hell, since the high water & hurricane waters have already washed over tejas, is to write more regularly about whatever strikes me as wondrous in the things i read -- but i originally intended to offer a gloss on the why's & wherefor's of my blog's name & url, as both are, after a fashion, homages to the work of writers i keep close to my chest & even closer to my bedside table.
1)
re: the url -- "washboard prayers" -- i'd nearly swear on the holy candlewick of the virgin that i happened upon that phrase in one of wright's poems from an earlier book, but the closest i've come to finding what i thought was there are these lines from "why ralph refuses to dance" (collected in string light):
"After sitting so long, his heart could give out.
and tomorrow would unleash another spell of spare-rib theology
People will be stepped on. A fight ensue."
now i'm thinking the original lies in the pages of cooling time, but because i no longer have the copy i made my first notes, i can't be sure, though it evokes, for me, an emotional inscape akin to lines like the last stanza of "the secret life of musical instruments" (from translations of the gospel back into tongues),
"Bring your own light.
Come in. Be lost. Be still.
If you miss us at home
we'll be on our way to the reckoning."
& also this, from the section titled "now:," in cooling time, where wright's conjuring the photograph of deborah luster:
"The light's sultriness rubs off on the subfusc of flesh, foliage, clothing. Tobacco-stained light. Sparerib theology. A ludic tendency participates in all but the most sobering images. And in the most sobering images, one has to shut one's own eyes because the music is so loud. So one can believe one's own eyes."
. . . which, at least to the occasionally hoary & bleary lights that illuminate the insides of my own skull, stands as apt a descriptor of how wright's own poetry affects me mind, soul, & body as anything i myself could come up with.
& as for where the washboard came from, i genuinely don't believe i came up with that metaphor all on my own -- but i still retain enough of the old testament in me to agree with ecclesiastes while simultaneously agreeing with rembrandt in that what matters is how one perceives. as in, even if we can never fully be as transparent as the eyeball of emerson's transcendental dreams, at the very least we each must do what we can to open our eyes. wide.
2)
"You can only go wild
in the away---tracking
your miles like words in the sky
Each act is extinct
As soon as invented
and each thing too
This way you know it's not fame
but a high
time you are hunting
for in the way of
I AM."
---from "the tunnel is a lung," in the end. whenever i try to describe fanny howe's poetry to anyone -- why i learn so much from it, why it stirs & provokes (endlessly) the ache in the tooth of my childhood christian upbringing -- i just end up recommending her books. all of them. to be read in full. & not, necessarily, in any particular order. (tho if i 'had' to choose a book, i'd probably recommend her selected poems. & her novel indivisible. & the wedding dress.) honestly, i think it's the still-smarting preacher's son, who knows that he can neither stand being fully in the church anymore than being completely apart from it, who responds to her work so strongly.
i know of next to no contemporary poet whose writing chronicles the lives of the spirit where they lie down with the flesh's as searingly as fanny howe's writing does.
"If this world isn't good enough for us,
then an afterlife won't be enough." (from "lines out to silence")
that this world doesn't seem to be enough, at least on a macro-level that funnels all the way down into the microcosms orbiting inside our viscera, is why she relentlessly takes on the celestial spheres -- as did augustine, as did aquinas, as did pascal, as did weil -- but restlessly resists ignoring the material world in the process.
"Now theology is necessary
for the way there are these holes & questions." (ibid)
because howe's writings, be they poems or prose or something in-between both genres, are of a cyclical & spiraling & serial nature -- despite their aphoristic and fragmentary qualities, both of which are also true -- they don't separate into discrete pieces all too easily. if i had to hazard a classification -- knowing how delimiting such can be -- i'd call her a "lyric artist" in the same way that i'd call carole maso one though (most of the time, or only sometimes?) she writes "novels." having said that, however, some of her poems do seem to stand more alone than others:
"The End"
Multi-gems in
dragon backing.
Cubes, gold,
set up tight
by ruby rocks:
Life in a heart.
And under
deeper mulch,
same old pulse.
Again it's you:
now the worm
I travel to.
In earth
as it was
in Heaven.
---i don't know about you, but the poet who can piece together something like that is the kind of person i'd want to stand in line behind to receive the eucharist.
1)
re: the url -- "washboard prayers" -- i'd nearly swear on the holy candlewick of the virgin that i happened upon that phrase in one of wright's poems from an earlier book, but the closest i've come to finding what i thought was there are these lines from "why ralph refuses to dance" (collected in string light):
"After sitting so long, his heart could give out.
and tomorrow would unleash another spell of spare-rib theology
People will be stepped on. A fight ensue."
now i'm thinking the original lies in the pages of cooling time, but because i no longer have the copy i made my first notes, i can't be sure, though it evokes, for me, an emotional inscape akin to lines like the last stanza of "the secret life of musical instruments" (from translations of the gospel back into tongues),
"Bring your own light.
Come in. Be lost. Be still.
If you miss us at home
we'll be on our way to the reckoning."
& also this, from the section titled "now:," in cooling time, where wright's conjuring the photograph of deborah luster:
"The light's sultriness rubs off on the subfusc of flesh, foliage, clothing. Tobacco-stained light. Sparerib theology. A ludic tendency participates in all but the most sobering images. And in the most sobering images, one has to shut one's own eyes because the music is so loud. So one can believe one's own eyes."
. . . which, at least to the occasionally hoary & bleary lights that illuminate the insides of my own skull, stands as apt a descriptor of how wright's own poetry affects me mind, soul, & body as anything i myself could come up with.
& as for where the washboard came from, i genuinely don't believe i came up with that metaphor all on my own -- but i still retain enough of the old testament in me to agree with ecclesiastes while simultaneously agreeing with rembrandt in that what matters is how one perceives. as in, even if we can never fully be as transparent as the eyeball of emerson's transcendental dreams, at the very least we each must do what we can to open our eyes. wide.
2)
"You can only go wild
in the away---tracking
your miles like words in the sky
Each act is extinct
As soon as invented
and each thing too
This way you know it's not fame
but a high
time you are hunting
for in the way of
I AM."
---from "the tunnel is a lung," in the end. whenever i try to describe fanny howe's poetry to anyone -- why i learn so much from it, why it stirs & provokes (endlessly) the ache in the tooth of my childhood christian upbringing -- i just end up recommending her books. all of them. to be read in full. & not, necessarily, in any particular order. (tho if i 'had' to choose a book, i'd probably recommend her selected poems. & her novel indivisible. & the wedding dress.) honestly, i think it's the still-smarting preacher's son, who knows that he can neither stand being fully in the church anymore than being completely apart from it, who responds to her work so strongly.
i know of next to no contemporary poet whose writing chronicles the lives of the spirit where they lie down with the flesh's as searingly as fanny howe's writing does.
"If this world isn't good enough for us,
then an afterlife won't be enough." (from "lines out to silence")
that this world doesn't seem to be enough, at least on a macro-level that funnels all the way down into the microcosms orbiting inside our viscera, is why she relentlessly takes on the celestial spheres -- as did augustine, as did aquinas, as did pascal, as did weil -- but restlessly resists ignoring the material world in the process.
"Now theology is necessary
for the way there are these holes & questions." (ibid)
because howe's writings, be they poems or prose or something in-between both genres, are of a cyclical & spiraling & serial nature -- despite their aphoristic and fragmentary qualities, both of which are also true -- they don't separate into discrete pieces all too easily. if i had to hazard a classification -- knowing how delimiting such can be -- i'd call her a "lyric artist" in the same way that i'd call carole maso one though (most of the time, or only sometimes?) she writes "novels." having said that, however, some of her poems do seem to stand more alone than others:
"The End"
Multi-gems in
dragon backing.
Cubes, gold,
set up tight
by ruby rocks:
Life in a heart.
And under
deeper mulch,
same old pulse.
Again it's you:
now the worm
I travel to.
In earth
as it was
in Heaven.
---i don't know about you, but the poet who can piece together something like that is the kind of person i'd want to stand in line behind to receive the eucharist.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
blessing her boat
i can't pinpoint precisely when i first encountered lucille clifton's poems -- definitely in an anthology of some kind -- but i do remember it was my sophomore year of high school. while knee-deep in denying the arc of my (homo)erotic desire. sometime just before, or soon after, alice walker's the color purple broke my world apart & remade it between the covers of that novel. & then zora neale hurston; toni morrison; gayl jones; ntozake shange; leslie marmon silko (who taught me what a novel could do aesthetically, aside from the compelling story); audre lorde; joy harjo; adrienne rich. bright lights, patron saints, talismanic all.
but lucille! i want to say it was "miss rosie." (& soon after i wrote a ridiculous imitation spin-off of the poem, one of those fledgling ones where you reach for words without understanding what/how you're doing what you're doing.) something about her poem(s) got under my white skin. & i didn't know what to do with it. except look for her words everywhere i could find . . .
but i will never forget when i encountered her work in its true, taking-the-head-clean-off power. (thank you, ms. dickinson for the foolproof definition.) perhaps also in an anthology. maybe every shut eye 'aint asleep. maybe the third woman. her "lost baby poem," yes. unbelievable. but what undid me, slayed me, moved me beyond words & tears, was "slaveships" (which i enclose here):
"loaded like spoons
into the belly of Jesus
where we lay for weeks for months
in the sweat and stink
of our own breathing
Jesus
why do you not protect us
chained to the heart of the Angel
where the prayers we never tell
are hot and red
as our bloody ankles
Jesus
Angel
can these be men
who vomit us out from ships
called Jesus Angel Grace Of God
onto a heathen country
Jesus
Angel
ever again
can this tongue speak
can these bones walk
Grace Of God
can this sin live"
--which, i think, speaks for itself. & an innumerable number of tongueless voices. what i remember thinking, then, was that this was what poetry can do. as i later learned from lorde, from harjo, from rich. what muriel rukeyser so shatteringly articulates in "the speed of darkness":
"My night awake
staring at the broad rough jewel
the copper roof across the way
thinking of the poet
yet unborn in this dark
who will be the throat of these hours.
No. Of those hours.
Who will speak these days,
if not I,
if not you?"
---which is what clifton did, poem to poem, book to book, throughout her life. for african-americans - even more, for black women - everywhere. & even for an angst-ridden, lonely, out-of-place white gay preacher's son like me.
bless her, bless her. & may she dwell in beauty now, & forever, as she did in life.
but lucille! i want to say it was "miss rosie." (& soon after i wrote a ridiculous imitation spin-off of the poem, one of those fledgling ones where you reach for words without understanding what/how you're doing what you're doing.) something about her poem(s) got under my white skin. & i didn't know what to do with it. except look for her words everywhere i could find . . .
but i will never forget when i encountered her work in its true, taking-the-head-clean-off power. (thank you, ms. dickinson for the foolproof definition.) perhaps also in an anthology. maybe every shut eye 'aint asleep. maybe the third woman. her "lost baby poem," yes. unbelievable. but what undid me, slayed me, moved me beyond words & tears, was "slaveships" (which i enclose here):
"loaded like spoons
into the belly of Jesus
where we lay for weeks for months
in the sweat and stink
of our own breathing
Jesus
why do you not protect us
chained to the heart of the Angel
where the prayers we never tell
are hot and red
as our bloody ankles
Jesus
Angel
can these be men
who vomit us out from ships
called Jesus Angel Grace Of God
onto a heathen country
Jesus
Angel
ever again
can this tongue speak
can these bones walk
Grace Of God
can this sin live"
--which, i think, speaks for itself. & an innumerable number of tongueless voices. what i remember thinking, then, was that this was what poetry can do. as i later learned from lorde, from harjo, from rich. what muriel rukeyser so shatteringly articulates in "the speed of darkness":
"My night awake
staring at the broad rough jewel
the copper roof across the way
thinking of the poet
yet unborn in this dark
who will be the throat of these hours.
No. Of those hours.
Who will speak these days,
if not I,
if not you?"
---which is what clifton did, poem to poem, book to book, throughout her life. for african-americans - even more, for black women - everywhere. & even for an angst-ridden, lonely, out-of-place white gay preacher's son like me.
bless her, bless her. & may she dwell in beauty now, & forever, as she did in life.
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