Poetry, Reading, Writing

Origin of “text”

No Comments

On a lark, I looked up the word “text” in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here’s what that Good Book gives as the origin:

“Etymology: < French texte, also Old Northern French tixte, tiste (12th cent. in Godefroy), the Scriptures, etc., < medieval Latin textus the Gospel, written character (Du Cange), Latin textus (u-stem) style, tissue of a literary work (Quintilian), lit. that which is woven, web, texture, < text-, participial stem of tex-ĕre to weave."

I had never thought of text as a tissue or something that is woven into a tissue. It always seemed a linear train of words flopped one over the other, then stacked sheet over sheet. Or typed up and pasted in. A product to be stored. Had never considered it as a planned fabric both lateral and longitudinal. I like that very much.

Art, Poetry, Writing

From lump to bean

3 Comments

A book of Anne Sexton poems have been on my nightstand for about a year. I can only read 1-2 poems at a time before saturation. On those nights, chances run high I’ll dream about Sexton. Mostly her voice and sitting around in living rooms and dining rooms. Don’t even know what we talk about. Tried to write her back, with Father’s Day on my mind.

Women are born twice, men once.

But for us, son, the drying off is slow.

From lump to sapling to tree to bean.

And in between we watch and attend.

Watch clumsiness turn to grace to poise to squeezing life out again.

Help from the outside, only let in in small ways.

We are builders and servants, boasters and protectors.

Anne, what would you have made of us

Had you seen us grow from lump around again to bean? Seen us

Fuller, slower than invaders and thralls.

Between you and your slender friend in a Boston cab,

Breaking away from Lord Lowell. Brobdingnag jokes.

You both would catch in my eyes when I saw you as vessels.

As I would see in yours whether I was politic and small or rescuer and hunter.

Consigning you to gray sparking damp clouds would not happen on my watch.

Talking with trained strangers and medicinal minuets probably would.

Son, see how a poem to you turns to apostrophe

Of desire and dreams and duties?

Those are all of the things we do.

Do not let them be all the things you are.

Do not be afraid to take taxi cab rides alone.

Do not take all of your taxi cab rides alone.

Poetry, Writing

Beats

No Comments

Giving semi-solace to mock sadness during a fast song.

Salmon, smoked salmon, on that salad, please (as a smart choice).

Shiva playful poses through a mist frosted bathroom’s glass pane.

Hard plastic inside soft plastic rattling of kinship to say hey, me too.

The drawer openings and closings, faucet openings and closings, day over day would hit a rhythm more measured than the most meticulous drummer. Not a rhythm that shakes the world, but a pulse.

Poetry

“Who goes with Fergus?”

1 Comment

Who will go drive with Fergus now,
And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade
And dance upon the level shore?
Young man, lift up your russet brow,
And lift your tender eyelids, maid,
And brood on hopes and fears no more.

And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love’s bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all dishevelled, wandering stars.

Earlier I lamented about having no poems memorized, then recalled a few days later I had this one memorized about 20 years ago and am pleased it’s still rattling around in there. And “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll will NEVER be shaken. A head injury may knock “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold or “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins loose.

“Leda and the Swan” by Yeats was part of a high school English class. Other than that, I didn’t encounter Yeats until studying, then re-reading, and re-re-reading, then re-studying and re-re-re-reading Ulysses by James Joyce. The younger lead character, Stephen Dedalus, has memories of singing the poem to his dying mother and fragments work their way into his day.

Poetry fragments sometimes pop in while out and about. Often context-free – more an echo of a word or phrase or the rhythm of something nearby. “And no more turn aside and brood” is the one that most often gives its (to my conscious mind) advice flicking its tongue into the corners of the day.

Poetry

“The Country Wife” by Dana Gioia

No Comments

She makes her way through the dark trees
Down to the lake to be alone.
Following their voices on the breeze,
She makes her way. Through the dark trees
The distant stars are all she sees.
They cannot light the way she’s gone.
She makes her way through the dark trees
Down to the lake to be alone.

The night reflected on the lake,
The fire of stars changed into water.
She cannot see the winds that break
The night reflected on the lake
But knows they motion for her sake.
These are the choices they have brought her:
The night reflected on the lake,
The fire of stars changed into water.

 

Dana GioiaAnother poem from Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism a friend recommended. The form used here is double triolet (which I had to look up, as I barely understand poetry) defined as “ a three stanza poem of eight lines. Its rhyme scheme is ABaAabAB and often all lines are in iambic tetrameter: the first, fourth and seventh lines are identical, as are the second and final lines, thereby making the initial and final couplets identical as well.”

I liked this poem (tending to read in bed when grogginess comes galumphing in), and didn’t even conceive that “the winds that break” would bring a laugh during alert waking hours.

Music, Poetry, Pop Culture, Reading

Ah, I get it now! “Popsicle” = tumescent male appendage!

No Comments

“California Gurls” [excerpt] by Katy Perry

Daisy dukes, bikinis on top.
Sun-kissed skin, so hot
We’ll melt your popsicle.

Uh-whoah-oah. Uh-whoah-oah.

 

For AGES I took these lyrics to be a flat, scientific statement. Of COURSE human skin, exposed, presumably at normothermia let alone warmed by the sun, would carry sufficient heat to melt a popsicle that will turn liquid well before reaching 98.6 degrees Farenheit (37 degrees Celsius for the rest of the world).

Nearly two years after this poem was released in 2010, it finally occurred to me this was a metaphor. See, a man’s popsicle (i.e. penis), normally rigid in a state of arousal, would find itself liquified due to the allure and heat generated by the narrator’s Daisy Duked clan. Fine enough considered blithely. To give longer thought to an organ melting, though, seems horrible. Like what happens to that Nazi’s face when the Ark of the Covenant is opened in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Thanks but no thanks, Ms. Perry. Has anyone checked that Snoop Dogg is okay?

 

Poetry, Writing

Hill of beans

No Comments

We are a speck
On the Earth which is a speck
In the Solar system
A speck in a galaxy
Which is a speck in space among other galaxies
In a universe of light matter that is a speck amid dark matter.

Our primate brains seek patterns and causes and effects and correlations.
Loads of primate brains throw a god(s) speck in there
Because they need a speck traffic cop directing these fluffy materials.

Speck and space and Ur-space.
Makes our speck to speck clinging and latching
Everything we can have. Statistically nothing.
But two specks are larger than one speck.

Art, Poetry

“Lovesong” by Ted Hughes, and beef with Sylvia Plath

3 Comments

Ted Hughes and Sylvia PlathI have a beef with Sylvia Plath, but it’s not her fault.

I was on a roll in high school, sure of a 5 for 5 score on the A.P. English Lit test I was taking until I came to the poem “Sow”, and I shanked it. Brain gears ground to a halt. I could not interpret anything beyond “this is a big pig”. Crumpled, if there were anything after to fill out the remainder of the test it was probably doodles of approximations of Prince album art.

Years later I was on a walk listening to poetry read by authors, when Sylvia Plath’s voice came on reading “Sow”. For certain, when I made the connection I stopped in place. Memory flits between either my saying “Oh, fuck!” or taking my headphones off to look at them, as if I could shake that extra 1 point that would have boosted my 4 score to a 5.

Here’s a poem by Ted Hughes. Difficult to not read his tempestuous courtship and marriage with Sylvia Plath into it. Though this poem is dedicated to Assia Wevill, a paramour of Hughes’ who ALSO killed herself and their daughter by gassing. That was how Plath killed herself, and Anne Sexton killed herself through gassing. What’s up with that? Why did suicidal poets in the 50s-70s lack a sense for physical adventure – jumping off a bridge, skydiving without a parachute, hari-kari – and go for passive, slow-fade, wasteful natural gas/gasoline methods for languidly shuffling off their mortal coils?

“Lovesong” by Ted Hughes

He loved her and she loved him
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Ted Hughes and Carol OrchardHer eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment’s brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was

Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin’s attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Assia WevillHer love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon’s gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other’s face

Art, Poetry, Politics

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms”

No Comments

Muriel RukeyserThe first stanza is apt today given the stupid backwards direction misogynistic politicians are taking against women determining what they do with their bodies. Worse than that, the insistence by these self-hating assholes to linger and intrude and control and KNOW what women do with their bodies.

“The Speed of Darkness” by Muriel Rukeyser

        1
Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis
Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt
Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child.

Resurrection music,     silence,     and surf.

        2
No longer speaking
Listening with the whole body
And with every drop of blood
Overtaken by silence

But this same silence is become speech
With the speed of darkness.  

        3
Stillness during war, the lake.
The unmoving spruces.
Glints over the water.
Faces, voices.     You are far away.
A tree that trembles and trembles.

        4
After the lifting of the mist
after the heavy rains
the sky stands clear
and the cries of the city risen in day
I remember the buildings are space
walled, to let space be used for living
I mind this room is space
this drinking glass is space
whose boundary of glass
lets me give you drink and space to drink
your hand, my hand being space
containing skies and constellations
your face
carries the reaches of air
I know I am space
my words are the air.

        5
Between     between
the man  :  act     exact
woman  :  in curve     senses in their maze
frail orbits, green tries,     games of stars
shape of the body speaking its evidence

        6
I look across at the real
vulnerable     involved     naked
devoted to the present of all I care for
the world of history leading to this moment.

        7
Life is the announcer.
I assure you
there are many ways to have a child.
I bastard mother
promise you
there are many ways to be born.
They all come forth
in their own grace.

        8
Ends of the earth join tonight
with blazing stars upon thier meeting.

These sons,      these sons
fall burning into Asia.

        9
Time comes into it.
Say it.     Say it.
The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.

        10
Lying
blazing beside me
you rear beautifully up—
your thinking face—
erotic body reaching
in all its colors and lights—
your erotic face
colored and lit—
not colored body-and-face
but now entire,
colors     lights     the world of thinking and reaching.

        11
The river flows past the city.

Water goes down to tomorrow
making its children     I hear their unborn voices
I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

        12
Big-boned man young and of my dream
Struggles to get the live bird out of his throat.
I am he am I?     Dreaming?
I am the bird am I?     I am the throat?

A brid with a curved beak.
It could slit anything, the throat-bird.
Drawn up slowly.     The curved blades, not large.
Bird emerges     wet     being born
Begins to sing.

        13
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?