Tag Archives: poetry

Hostage

books poetry lit August 22, 2014 Leave a comment

Really rather blown away by the below poem by Eric Raanan Fischman (an MFA candidate at Naropa University)

Hostage

for Jennifer Faylor

By the time you read this, the air

will turn white.  The Sun will wake up

like a winter bloom, harvesting

its own light, and the barren clouds will break

like mirrors in a house of mourning.

There will be no more storms, no bombs,

no more seeds of ice.  Only the stark feel

of white paper, and the blue sound of my voice.

 

This is not the first letter I’ve written you,

but all the others were composed

on the backs of sealed, stamped envelopes.

A woman in Boise, Idaho believes

that I cannot live without her.  A man

in Tennessee keeps my soul on his bed-stand.

A Nicaraguan coffee farmer is the sole proprietor

of warm, passionate, August nights.

 

Here inside the mailbox, it is always

  1. Under the rectangular moon, the stamps

and envelopes make love like fireflies.

Magazines peek from beneath their covers.

And I fashion this letter, on a Cosmo’s table

of contents, on a Chinese take-out menu,

on my arms, my lips, and the steam of my breath,

hoping that it will reach you.

 

-Eric Raanan Fischman, published in Sixers Review

Eleanor Writes She’s Reading Rimbaud

books poetry lit August 20, 2014 Leave a comment

No one’s serious at seventeen.
—by A. Rimbaud

I’ve been reading Rimbaud again & I must confess
that his beautiful nights & scents of vineyards & beer—
his green lindens—all of it—takes me back, a little,

even though I know better than to get nostalgic,
to those early years in Cortland, the smell of apples
like a sweet red fog all over town when the orchards

bloomed each fall. We’d work a day shift at Smith Corona,
lie in the dark fields at night. I can still hear the cars
rushing by on the highway, see the stars overhead,

so many more than I’d ever seen back in Brooklyn.
It all seemed so romantic, the gun in the glove box,
a shoe box stash of acid & speed, a boy whose touch

on a pool cue brought him to my room early mornings,
flush with cash he’d taken off the dumb-bunny freshmen
at the college up the hill. I swear we even played

that scene, tossing bills over ourselves, high & naked,
in my narrow bed. I don’t want to think of our lies,
our petty thieving, how we stitched kangaroo pockets

into the linings of our coats. Or how for weeks we
lived on boosted steaks & candy. I don’t want to think
again of next-door L., how her toddler stared all day

out the window above the crummy bar where she danced,
while she & her junkie lover slept off their latest
derangement. All I ever gave that kid was a wave

of my hand. Still, some days she wants out, that girl I was,
wants them back — her reckless nights & slow, stoned afternoons.
—Sometimes the air is so sweet that you close your eyes—

-Susan Eisenberg, via Blackbird

Don’t Go Far Off

books poetry lit August 17, 2014 Leave a comment

Don’t go far off, not even for a day, because —
because — I don’t know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don’t leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don’t leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you’ll have gone so far
I’ll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

-Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda Documentary – “The Poet’s Calling” featuring Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Isabel Allende and more

books poetry lit August 13, 2014 Comments: 2

There’s a documentary about Pablo Neruda in the works, from nonprofit Red Poppy which specializes in promoting Latin America poetry. The documentary is titled “Poet’s Calling” and they’ve managed to get interviews with top poets and Neruda’s friends, among them Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Isabel Allende. See a clip below and read more here. 


According to the website – “The film is composed of stunning shots of his native land, captivating poetic sequences, and unique archival material. Our interviews are crucial to the storytelling, especially with their breadth of variety. These include his few living close friends, students, bestselling Chilean author Isabel Allende, and legendary poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The intent is to raise social awareness by demonstrating how, through his words, Neruda gave voice to others, and how for Neruda, poetry was a rallying cry for the social function of art: a way to bear witness to social and environmental wrongs. We want viewers to see—and feel–how poetry can illuminate them intellectually, spiritually, and socially.”

It’s not the bed that’s a boat

books poetry lit August 11, 2014 Leave a comment

It’s not the bed that’s a boat

but sleep. On a rumple of waves, two           loosed canoes.

Soon I’ll find you
in your wooden ribs.

I’ll tie a rope. I’ll climb on.

-Corinna McClanahan Schroeder in Cellpoems

Premonitions and Stately Building

books poetry lit August 8, 2014 Leave a comment

I hear the dead sea move
In my legs, waves overhead

Child, the wild jetty-walk
Man, the echoed illusion

Pure eyes in the woods
Weeping seek the hospitable head

-Nancy Naomi Carlson translating René Char, via Sakura Review

Delphiniums in a Window Box

film & television August 5, 2014 Leave a comment

Every sunrise, even strangers’ eyes.
Not necessarily swans, even crows,
even the evening fusillade of bats.
That place where the creek goes underground,
how many weeks before I see you again?
Stacks of books, every page, characters’
rages and poets’ strange contraptions
of syntax and song, every song
even when there isn’t one.
Every thistle, splinter, butterfly
over the drainage ditches. Every stray.
Did you see the meteor shower?
Did it feel like something swallowed?
Every question, conversation
even with almost nothing, cricket, cloud,
because of you I’m talking to crickets, clouds,
confiding in a cat. Everyone says,
Come to your senses, and I do, of you.
Every touch electric, every taste you,
every smell, even burning sugar, every
cry and laugh. Toothpicked samples
at the farmers’ market, every melon,
plum, I come undone, undone.

-Dean Young

The Steeple-Jack

books poetry lit July 30, 2014 Leave a comment

Dürer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house
on a fine day, from water etched
with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish.

One by one in two’s and three’s, the seagulls keep
flying back and forth over the town clock,
or sailing around the lighthouse without moving their wings –
rising steadily with a slight
quiver of the body — or flock
mewing where

a sea the purple of the peacock’s neck is
paled to greenish azure as Dürer changed
the pine green of the Tyrol to peacock blue and guinea
gray. You can see a twenty-five-
pound lobster; and fish nets arranged
to dry. The

whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt
marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the
star on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so
much confusion. Disguised by what
might seem the opposite, the sea-
side flowers and

Continue reading →

Old Chinese Women

books poetry lit July 27, 2014 Leave a comment

They are moving, these women,

as if time were a vegetable to eat slowly
for dinner—as if bicycles were mountains
that could raise them to the sky.

-Meredith Johnson, from “Old Chinese Women” in Rattle

Drench

books poetry lit July 24, 2014 Leave a comment

You sleep with a dream of summer weather,

wake to the thrum of rain – roped down by rain.

Nothing out there but drop-heavy feathers of grass

and rainy air. The plastic table on the terrace

has shed three legs on its way to the garden fence.

The mountains have had the sense to disappear.

It’s the Celtic temperament – wind, then torrents, then remorse.

Glory rising like a curtain over distant water.

Old stonehouse, having steered us through the dark,

docks in a pool of shadows all its own.

That widening crack in the gloom is like good luck.

Luck, which neither you nor tomorrow can depend on.

– Anne Stevenson