Chris Toll - I’m Nostalgic for the Future

A melancholy refrigerator
knits a movie theatre.
Fame is blind
and fortune is lame.
The irrefutable irreducible pond
appeals to winter
for a new pair of shopping malls.
The stars kneel down,
the sky leaps mournful,
and the rivers stand up.
A liquor cabinet
meanders toward a wolf pack.

—Chris Toll
from I’ll Be the Invisible Girl Till the Day I Die!

Paul Violi - On Longing

Where won’t you be
when I’m alone . . .

the leaf-shaped spaces between the leaves

Paul Violi

Malinda Markham - To Understand Flight

Wet hands work quickly, cartilage shines into light.
No need to repeat what you’ve seen

Of me, but yes I would anchor this house
To the ground if I could. One day,

The grass said to the rain, Do not leave.
Outside this house of memory and bricks, I plucked

A wing to see the mechanics of flight. How could
Anyone have moved with skin

Exposed like that and waiting? Don’t think that the pull
Didn’t hurt or the sound. I feared the sky

Ready to answer in rain. To loosen feathers,
First close the eyes to spare them.

That day, gray light spilled into crevices,
Covered my hands in down. I was warm.

Malinda Markham

September*

I will sleep
in my little cup.

*I like to get a head start. Cf. Padgett, Ron.

Guillaume Apollinaire - Hunting Horns

Our story is noble and tragic
As the mask of a tyrant
No high-risk drama or magic
No unconsidered detail
To render our love pathetic

And Thomas de Quincey drinking
His opium sweet and chaste
Went to his poor Anne dreaming
Let’s go let’s go as everything goes
Often I am returning

Memories are hunting horns
Whose noises die in the wind

___________________________

And in the original:

Cors de chasse

Notre histoire est noble et tragique
Comme le masque d’un tyran
Nul drame hasardeux ou magique
Aucun détail indifférent
Ne rend notre amour pathétique

Et Thomas de Quincey buvant
L’opium poison doux et chaste
A sa pauvre Anne allait rêvant
Passons passons puisque tout passe
Je me retournerai souvent

Les souvenirs sont cors de chasse
Dont meurt le bruit parmi le vent

Rainer Maria Rilke “Autumn Day” / Ted Berrigan “Autumn’s Day”

• Eight translations of Rilke’s “Autumn Day” including a couple of the more popular ones (Bly and Snow, or maybe the Snow is only popular in my mind because it was fresh at the time I started reading poetry) and the one-time standard (Norton).
• Stephen Mitchell’s translation, the most popular and for the past thirty to forty years the standard.
• Three more translations.
• Other relatively common ones:  Flemming’s and MacIntyre’s.
• And ones readily turned up by Google:  Felstiner,  Foreman, Crego, Kinzie, Wilkins, and the worst, from 1916,  Münsterberg

A Google Search for “Ted Berrigan” and “Autumn’s Day” turns up only nine results, yet it’s better than most of the above. The Norton and Mitchell are close. And I have a soft spot for the Snow.

Autumn’s Day

           after Rilke

Lord, it is time. Summer was very great.
Now cast your shadow upon sundials.
Let winds remind meadows it is late.

Mellow now the last fruits on the vine.
Allow them only two more southern days.
Hasten them to fulness, and press
The last heavy sweetness through the wine.

Who has no home can not build now.
Who dwells alone must now remain alone;
Will waken, read, write long letters, and
Will wander restlessly when leaves are blowing.
                 —Ted Berrigan

Dorothea Lasky - I Like Weird Ass Hippies

I Like Weird Ass Hippies from Dorothea Lasky on Vimeo.

Stevie Smith - From the French

Grow

Was going through some old files and came across an old favorite by Joe Ceravolo that I had typed up.

Grow
by Joseph Ceravolo

I fight and fight.
I wake up.
The oasis is now dark.
I cannot hear anything.

The wind is felt
and the stars and the sand
so that no one
will be taken by pain.

I sit next to the bushes,
Hercules couldn’t move me,
and sleep and dream.

The sand, the stars are solid
in this sleeping oasis,
alone with the desert and
the metaphysical cigarette.
 

Hum

by Ann Lauterbach

The days are beautiful
The days are beautiful.

I know what days are.
The other is weather.

I know what weather is.
The days are beautiful.

Things are incidental.
Someone is weeping.

I weep for the incidental.
The days are beautiful.

Where is tomorrow?
Everyone will weep.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
The days are beautiful.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
Today is weather.

The sound of the weather
Is everyone weeping.

Everyone is incidental.
Everyone weeps.

The tears of today
Will put out tomorrow.

The rain is ashes.
The days are beautiful.

The rain falls down.
The sound is falling.

The sky is a cloud.
The days are beautiful.

The sky is dust.
The weather is yesterday.

The weather is yesterday.
The sound is weeping.

What is this dust?
The weather is nothing.

The days are beautiful.
The towers are yesterday.

The towers are incidental.
What are these ashes?

Here is the hate
That does not travel.

Here is the robe
That smells of the night

Here are the words
Retired to their books

Here are the stones
Loosed from their settings

Here is the bridge
Over the water

Here is the place
Where the sun came up

Here is a season
Dry in the fireplace.

Here are the ashes.
The days are beautiful.

Incantation for Jaguar Macaw Madness, for the desire this madness brings

Translated from the Mayan by Dennis Tedlock

One Lord, one and only Four Lord, Sky
Lord would have been in chaos, Sky Lord
would have been dark when you were
born. Who are you, owner of chaos? Who
are you, owner of night? You are in chaos,
Great Lord of Days, the eye of the sun was
plucked out when you were born. Who is
your mother, what father begets you when
you do penance? She is Red Rainbow,
White Rainbow, she is the point of the
lancet, the tip of the penis, this is your
mother, your father, begetter,

together behind there, together behind
the sweat bath when you were born, the
desire in that chaos, desire in that darkness,
the spitting snake was in the tree,
the spitting snake was on the rock when
you were born, desire in the darkness.
Master of Drunken Madness, you are the
desire in the chaos, you are Master of
Stupid Madness, you are Lascivious Madness,
you are Jaguar Madness, you are
Master of Macaw Madness, you are Deer
Madness. Who is your tree? Who is your
bush? What served as your bed, your
bower when you were born?

If that doesn't get your blood boiling, well, there's no accounting for taste, right? Anyway, that's just the first two passages; you can read the rest in this PDF. Tedlock's book 2000 Years of Mayan Literature is forthcoming from the University of California Press (2010) and it looks (and reads, from what I've been able to glimpse so far) f'in amazing. Thunderstorm is still there in the sky, perhaps, closing his eyes as he slips behind Fire-Bellied Rainbow.

Things To Do In New York City (Cool Upright Remix)

Link (updated to mp3): Things To Do In New York City (Cool Upright Remix).

Ingredients:
1. Ted Berrigan recorded in 1973 reading his poem “Things To Do In New York (City).”
2. The “Cool Upright 02” bass loop in GarageBand.
3. Various clips from dobroide's City Noise audio pack.
4. A modest drum track I laid down.

You're Going To Die

Words by Timothy Furstnau
Narration by Vito Acconci
Direction by Dennis Palazzolo



Hat tip: Pallimed Arts & Humanities

Survival: Infantry

by George Oppen

And the world changed.
There had been trees and people,
Sidewalks and roads

There were fish in the sea.

Where did all the rocks come from?
And the smell of explosives
Iron standing in mud
We crawled everywhere on the ground without seeing the earth again

We were ashamed of our half life and our misery; we saw that
        everything had died.

And the letters came. People who addressed us thru our lives
They left us gasping. And in tears
In the same mud in the terrible ground
 

Doveglion

by E. E. Cummings

he isn’t looking at anything
he isn’t looking for something
he isn’t looking
he is seeing

what

not something outside himself
not anything inside himself
but himself

himself how

not as some anyone
not as any someone

only as a noone(who is everyone)

A Haiku

by Paul Éluard (translated from the French by Google)

A feather gives to the hat
An air of lightness
The chimney smokes.

Speaking of falsely attributed poems

Lint City Runaway is “lost” poems by . . . Punky Brewster? Whatever, from the Olson epigraph to “Mtv watch[ing] / from a phonebooth in the sky” these pieces, if nothing else, seem to be reaching after something more than the anthology hoax.

A hoax anthology

I like the idea behind the hoax anthology posted recently by the folks at for godot: a collection of poems attributed to poets who didn't actually write them. But I'm not as keen on the execution. Are these seemingly computer-generated texts supposed to be parodies? If not, then is one poem by each poet enough to allow this project to do or say anything significant? I think maybe the project could have worked if the editors built up a kind of false context for each poet in the “issue.” Issue, I guess, means that this will be an annual or something? That's fine. I have no idea what they expected to gain by including me and a host of other poets most have never heard of. Were the editors trying to say something about the vast number of publishing poets these day? Or were they just trying to create an absurdly huge issue? Whatever the faults so far, I'd be interested to see what these guys come up with if they make a second stab at it. If they can give it a point or two. But if the point is only supposed to be that there is no point—yawn—or if this is just another faux heralding of the death of the author—yawn, yawn—that would only be worth it if the pieces succeeded as art, which they don't.

Here's “my” poem (from page 2580!)—

The imperial ways

Delirium turned like red
Little as a key

A piece of
                  ways
A thread of periods
The imperial orbits
Using silver
A foot of emeralds

Making ice
________________________________________
Hat tip: Geof Huth.

Kevin Young - I shall be released

I'm not a big fan of Poetry Daily, but today's poem, “I shall be released” by Kevin Young, who is definitely one of my favorites among the living, is definitely worth checking out.

Passion for the Sky

by Joseph Ceravolo

You are near me. The night
is rectilinear and light
in the new lipstick
on your mouth and on the colored
flowers. The irises are blue.
As far as I look we are across. A
boat crosses by. There is no monkey in me
left: sleep. There is something
sold, lemons. Corn is whizzing from the
ground. You are sleeping
and day starts its lipstick.
Where do we go from here?
Blue irises.