May 21st, 2008
A reckless poem crushed between ads —
there’s nothing to see here, folks.
Keep moving.
__________
I’m not done writing tool odes, yet, don’t worry! I just got this other idea for what will probably be a shorter series — poems to be placed in public spaces, written with an awareness of their contexts. I’d welcome suggestions of other locations for these poems.
For examples of actual public poems, see the archives of NYC’s Poetry in Motion project, the Pennsylvania Center for the Book’s Public Poetry Project, and especially the CityPoem World Index at the New Urbanist website ErasmusPC.
May 22nd, 2008
While you sway, tired, staring, your electronic earplugs
delivering their intravenous drip of distraction,
it is still there, running just
under everything,
that third rail.
May 24th, 2008
Attention suicides: please have the consideration
to drown elsewhere. It is not that your body
would be especially toxic — that’s a myth.
But what we crave in water is an absence of taste,
not the taste of absence.
Also, kindly make sure your water bill is paid up.
It’s the least you can do for your neighbors,
who will soon probably be needing to recharge
their own reservoirs, those brown or blue pools
in which on occasion you may have glimpsed yourself,
smaller than life.
May 26th, 2008
Veterans beware: remembering is a form of lying
at which politicians and war-mongers are especially adept.
Flag-burners beware: the U.S. Flag Code identifies fire
as the only proper & respectful way to dispose of a flag.
War memorial builders beware: pigeons are a kind of dove.
Whatever you do, they will have the last say, & it won’t be pretty.
Readers beware: all poets are traitors.
This poem was written from the prison of a bad conscience.
May 27th, 2008
To enter fully into another’s words
is to leave your own fixed residence,
part coffin, part cocoon.
The walls fall away.
Letters the color of night
swell with sirens & the call
of the whip-poor-will.
Out in the open book,
anything can happen except sleep.
Dreams may be redeemed
for a small deposit.
This is why, in the public library,
everyone is homeless.
May 28th, 2008
The doors swing
both ways; be careful.
From either side,
the other looks like out.
This mystery your body
is like a Klein bottle,
all surface, no way in.
From the inevitably
flawed models, it appears
to intersect itself:
it dwells within the without.
That’s why the wind —
or is it breath? — can’t
be held, & you need
a fourth dimension
to lose those edges
called sickness,
to become whole.
May 30th, 2008
Abandon hype, ye who enter
these sound-proofed rooms:
you can fight City Hall all you want, really,
provided that your words
are bland as water & promise
jobs—drip—development—drip—growth—drip.
Open bribes will not be tolerated.
The voters expect transparency
& paper trails, sometimes even
the anodyne of a Town Hall meeting
where one by one they can stand
& state their names for
the record, that stagnant pool
that reflects everything
but their weariness, their anger,
the way their hands rise
like saprophytic flowers toward the sun,
their touching gratitude at finally
being recognized to speak.
June 5th, 2008
Why is there no battlefield memorial
here, where generations of workers
ground down their lives?
Why no place for the veterans to return,
pride mingling with grief,
clutching made-in-China flags
& mumbling about sacrifice?
Why doesn’t the county historical society
raise money to preserve this site just as it was,
before the pink slips came—
a mass unmanning—
& the great steel taskmasters were unbolted
from the shop floor & sold for scrap?
Why doesn’t anyone except us trespassers,
sneaking in like the weeds & sparrows,
want to remember which parts
were assembled here
& where they fit?
June 10th, 2008
Second-hand poetry has
been linked to
the cancer
of unanswerable
questions. Even
if it’s safely
out of mind,
like a dessicated seed
or a leaf in darkness,
mouths with
no memory
can still turn
the blanks where
letters were
into seditious
little Os. So
thank you for
not reading.
June 13th, 2008
Sometimes, you need a bridge
where there is no river.
The ground falls away
& you need that pique experience —
looking down on everything
without ever having climbed,
sky & water wearing the calm
blue uniform of authority.
Held up by high-strung cables,
speeding through our lives,
we could all use a pause
to adjust our perspective,
get in touch with who
we really are & what
brings us here, dry-
mouthed or sweaty,
death as close
as a sudden, wild leap.
June 20th, 2008
(click on image to enlarge)
[audio:http://www.vianegativa.us/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/public-poems-condensed-version.mp3]
Some people don’t “get” poetry because they’re exclusively visual thinkers. For many others of a more practical frame of mind, the seemingly arbitrary arrangement of words into lines, stanzas, and units of meaning constitutes the main stumbling-block. Debates about how to reach those kinds of folks are anything but academic if you’re on a committee charged with selecting and presenting poetry to an indifferent public.
Well, I’m here to help. I’ve taken the complete texts of the first ten poems in my Public Poems series and run them through Wordle (thanks, John) which discards the most common words (a, on, the, etc.) and puts all the others into a configurable word cloud, a variation on the tag clouds familiar to anyone who spends an appreciable amount of time online. I then made an audio recording of the cloud (here’s a download link for those who can’t see the Flash player above). This sort of thing could be broadcast over a public address system at regular intervals wherever the poetry clouds are displayed, with results perhaps comparable to the well-known consequences of backmasking on vinyl records of heavy metal music back in the 1980s, only without the sacrifices of family pets. From these dense clouds a kind of condensation would take place, poetry falling like rain on the parched soil of the imagination. Or not.
Podcast: Play in new window
| Download (1.7MB)
June 29th, 2008
Eyes front, soldier.
The general looks hard for signs
of deviation.
Don’t show too much interest
even in this poem,
which is probably gay.
There were trees here once
where you stand relieving yourself
against a hollow trunk.
They would not have known
what to do
with so much saltpeter.
__________
Note: Saltpeter, or potassium nitrate — a critical component of gunpowder — readily precipitates out of urine.
July 27th, 2008
The concrete dreams
of bindweed & beggar-tick,
burdock & wineberry,
gravid mosquito mothers,
copperheads, a wild rose
equipped with grappling hooks.
The concrete wants to be loved,
not merely walked upon.
It wants to go home with you,
clinging to your pants leg,
or at least take a bite
your skin will remember.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
The concrete was our gift
to an unimproved land
where woods & weeds ran riot.
At best, we might condescend
to preserve some open space,
a light-green stripe across the grid.
But the pavement, too,
begins to bulge open.
There are no motels in this vacancy.
The flag of our alienation
goes down to kudzu.
August 15th, 2008
No porridge here!
Everything is always
just right.
Times & temperatures are set
by central decree.
They strain the plankton from the fryers
once a shift.
Here, you have choices.
You can pick a different
transnational brand of transfat
for every course.
You serve yourself — who better? –
in bucket-shaped seats.
Discrimination has no place here;
there’s room for everyone
with six dollars in their wallet.
True, the fixed gap between seat
& table edge may make
hunchbacks of some
& force others to sit sideways,
the prow of a distended gut
catching crumbs in lieu of a tray.
But they’re neither too hard
nor too soft, these seats.
E pluribus unum:
all asses conform
to Formica.
For the Read Write Poem prompt, political poetry. Other responses here.
August 28th, 2008
Memo to the original planners:
this is what the future
actually looks like.
How do you explain
to yourselves our vagrant,
flagrant refusal to fit
into your uniformed vision?
Or perhaps we fit all too well,
making this project
into an efficient projection
of someone’s self-loathing
onto the cosmos?
For surely these highrises
amount to another Babel.
Some aspect of their conception
disrespected the natural order,
& now they are as hollow
as spent shells.
And just as in scripture,
we barely understand
the lingo of our own
flown children,
who say — we think –
that the prison feels like home,
that it has a yard,
that they might be
a little safer there
from stray
projectiles.
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