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The Poet Poem

stanley
plumley
ivy alvarez
pier paolo pasolini
alison fell

faiz
ahmed faiz
ono no komachi
cornelius eady
galway kinnell

william
carlos williams
lucille clifton
ishikawa takuboku
william kloefkorn

vassar
miller
yehuda halevi
salvatore quasimodo
ed dorn

andre
codrescu
june jordan
nazim hikmet
d. j. enright

randall
jarrell
lawrence ferlinghetti
alicia suskin ostriker
kate light

This entry was posted Saturday, March 10th, 2007 at 8:25 pm and is filed under Poems & poem-like things.  Print

8 Responses to “The Poet Poem”

1. Rachel says:

   March 10, 2007 at 11:58 pm

   Such words!

   I am entertained and delighted. I love reading this aloud.

   Reply
2. Dave says:

   March 11, 2007 at 11:09 am

   Oh good! I thought about posting my own audio version, but decided it would be better if I left it up to y’all to read out loud.

   Hope you’re having a good time at SxSW! (Austin is always a good time, I have to think, as long as one stays a prudent distance away from the state capitol.)

   Reply
3. twitches says:

   March 12, 2007 at 12:48 pm

   I’m curious as to why you picked these certain authors…the sound of the names only?

   Reply
4. Dave says:

   March 12, 2007 at 1:32 pm

   Yep, just that. (Same reason I didn’t capitalize the names – I wanted to fucus attention on the sounds.)

   Reply
5. Ivy says:

   March 12, 2007 at 3:25 pm

   I heard that! ;-) And I think you meant to spell ficus.

   Reply
6. Dave says:

   March 12, 2007 at 5:29 pm

   Oh, fig! I don’t know what it is with my and typos today.

   Reply
7. Richard Lawrence Cohen says:

   March 14, 2007 at 3:59 pm

   What, no Hayden Corruth?

   Reply
8. Dave says:

   March 14, 2007 at 4:05 pm

   I forgot abut Hayden Carruth! And he’s on my bookshelf, too (Collected Shorter Poems).

   Reply

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This is the weblog of Dave Bonta, a poet, editor, and shutterbug from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.

   

 

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    And then, when they were done, I turned my head and saw, on a video screen, my own heart. It was golden, and pulsing, and resembled a cross between a Georgia O'Keefe flower and a jellyfish.
    ----

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    ----

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    But Hopper didn’t paint any snowy landscapes, did he? I wonder why. The loneliness and solitude of people in his cityscapes would, it seems to me, be accentuated in a street filled with snow. I can almost imagine the effect of streetlamp light bouncing off the snow, and the resulting shadows on nearby objects.
    ----

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    I may yet soften the massed patterning of leaves and branches, but it nevertheless has to be present, carefully arranged to suggest a foliate barricade made by a careful gardener to create a safe oasis from the wilderness beyond. Perhaps I'll put some sheep on the distant hills rising to the upper edge of the painting. And some low mounds of rock plants. The painting evolves and becomes dense with shapes and patterning, shadow and highlight, colour and tone.
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    This cold has eyes, not menacing or even intent ones, but the limpid eyes of the cold dead, the kind of eyes that feel every nape’s tooth marks. This cold moves as slowly as black water, silently as the far side of fish: unpied, canopied — the crosshatch of hawks.
    ----

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    Somewhere along those dusty Philippine roads my fascination with war turned to recoiling as I realized it was one thing to reenact battles with my friends, but quite another to walk endless miles along a trail of brutality, hopelessness and murder. I think it was then that the idea of war began to move from fantasy to nightmare as we walked through Bataan imagining the sheer horror of the reality our reenactment was meant to remember.
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    except that hope
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