Don’t know why this footage exists, but it’s compelling. The Spanish subtitles add to it. Does attunement and sublime expression require someone to be cracked?
“My Makeup” by Rochelle Kraut
This sits in the malaise that sighs in the between-beat parts of Pink’s “Get This Party Started” or Ke$ha “choose debauchery” anthems.
My Makeup
by Rochelle Kraut
on my cheeks I wear
the flush of two beers
on my eyes I use
the dark circles of sleepless nights
to great advantage
for lipstick
I wear my lips
“Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold
A zillion years ago in a Victorian Lit class in college, the professor required that students memorize “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold. We were reading several of Arnold’s essays, esp. “Culture and Anarchy” so reading some of the poems in the same book was CONVENIENT, but the face-making at having to ABSORB something and recite it before the class was HUGE. How DARE this professor at a middling state university require his students memorize & recite a poem like we were in elementary school! And the professor, at the time the head of the department, RELISHED the pained looks we were giving out. “It’s important that you have at least one poem in your life you can recite,” he admonished. The more time passes, the more I respect that.
The last five lines are the only ones that spill into conscious thought. So, not a poetry share from the core, but as a show of respect for the professor who insisted a room full of 20-something ponces LEARN something. National Poetry Month has only a few days left, so expect the posts to get cruder come May.
Dover Beach
by Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; — on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
“We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks is from Topeka, Kansas. As a fellow Kansan, I love that.
We Real Cool
by Gwendolyn Brooks
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
“Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats
My favorite poem in my twenties. Though Yeats wrote it at the age of 62, its boasting and yearning resonated with my aspirations to write. Every few years I return to it to check in with the young man and measure what I had in mind for myself back THEN compared to what I’ve accomplished NOW. Similar to what I do with locations in the real world – return to old haunts. If the location has bad memories, revisiting it in presumably a happier time (or less melodramatic) let me take the power of the moment back. An idle fancy may strike where a shimmer of Future Me might be visible to assure Then Me that the trial of that moment would be temporary: only endure it, lad.
Sailing to Byzantium
by William Butler Yeats
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
— Those dying generations — at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling
To keep a drowsy emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.