Month: July 2011

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Petition to Fullness

This entry is part 19 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

 

Heart grown gray, heart
tressed with care: tell me why
the bowl never seems to fill
though I’ve poured all the sweet
water I could find, countless trips
through the years— And winters,
I’ve cut off my hair and bartered
its gloss for coin to line it with broth
or glistening fat and the russet
of vegetables grown rich in the soil;
and in summer I’ve waited beneath
the trees to catch what gleanings might
thicken, of wood thrush or cardinal
song: but still you will not eat—

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Horror Fictions

This entry is part 8 of 20 in the series Highgate Cemetery Poems

 

DEAD (Patrick Caulfield grave)

At some point in every horror film
comes the line: It’s alive!
Is this the way the dead feel
when we disturb their rest with
our roots & our pickaxes, our squirming
purple larvae & our blind snouts?
We are the zero in their bones,
that slick thick marrow, mother
of blood. We are their unlucky
rabbits’ feet, the throw of their dice.
We creep & crawl. We erupt,
dangerous as magma.
Someday the sun will bring us
all together, living & dead, in one
molten paroxysm, but until then we can meet
only in the briefest of spasms, & are listed
together in the credits for moan, rattle
& almost imperceptible sigh.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Defense

This entry is part 18 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

 

In the morning, the new sprouted leaves
of basil in the earthen pot have been chewed
to lace. I’m not sure how it happens, for I
never see the slugs, though I’ve read
of a woman’s account of how she
watched one for months while bedridden,
and could hear it chewing on a leaf
of celery. I wonder, why don’t they defend
themselves? The yellow roses have
their spurs. The broad leaves of comfrey
are mean enough to drop into a salve
or tincture. Even the hordes of wild
garlic heads aim their spears at a sky
that threatens another day of rain.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Learn Harmonica Today

This entry is part 27 of 37 in the series Bridge to Nowhere: poems at mid-life

 

Start without the harmonica. Scarves, messengers, sections of a tangerine: anything can teach you grace. Hold a small bird & blow on it as if it were the first feeble flame in a trash burner with rain already starting to fall. Draw a map of everywhere you can walk with one tapping foot. Because honey is golden, we think we know how it will taste, but the tongue has other rendezvous. Reach without looking into a drawerful of knives, patting gently with your fingertips as if it were the head of a large dog. Practice saying, This one’s for the ladies. Anyone who knows how to breathe knows how to play.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

One for Sorrow, Two for Joy

This entry is part 7 of 20 in the series Highgate Cemetery Poems

 

Weed whacker

Magpies have been observed engaging in elaborate social rituals, possibly including the expression of grief.
—Wikipedia

So those are magpies!
They do look acquisitive.
They hover over
the graves like eyebrows
or second thoughts, tails
held decorously aloft.
Each time I raise the camera
they take flight—proof
they’re not spirits
but among the quick.
They are, in their black-
&-white way, shiny.
They remind me of
our shared mission:
to rob the dead.
Their chatter offers
a refuge from this refuge
where even the weed
eater keens, though
among their own kind,
blessed with sufficient wit
to comprehend loss,
they’re said to indulge
in rituals of grief.
I try counting them:
one, one, one.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser

This entry is part 17 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

 

[ Also a partly found poem after Brian Doyle’s Joyas Voladoras; with thanks to Lina Sagaral Reyes for the link ]

I don’t know whose translucent wings those are
twitching, disappearing into a knothole in the ceiling;

but in the throes of great uncertainty I am
asked to consider the miniature:

– A heart the size of a pencil eraser, beating ten
times a second, hammering faster than we could hear.

– A heart that fuels flights more than five
hundred miles without stopping to rest.

– Hot heart that kisses at least a thousand flowers a day
but cold, slides into a torpor from which it might no longer rouse.

– Oh my constellation of fears, shamed by a wingstroke
smaller than a baby’s fingernail, thunderous as the world’s wild waterfalls.

– Heart like a race car engined by color, buffered
by wind, stripped for nothing but flight.

– Chant of bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails,
violet-tailed sylphs and crimson topazes.

– Rosary of charismatic names: amethyst woodstars and
rainbow-bearded thornbills, pufflegs and spatuletails.

– You’ve found me out: I have a bag of tortoise coins. I’ve spent them
like a miser, hoarding each little bit of copper against that one stupendous day.

– I’ve lived mostly alone in the bricked-up house of my heart,
but a wind teeters at the door, smelling of skin and apple breath.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Happiness

This entry is part 16 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

 

Sometimes what changes is what makes
the landscape finally familiar, why it never
is becalmed for long: the way the air’s clarity—

stabbed with golden light and glistening
like new skin on the birches— can’t stay
that way. A blur’s already unlatching the frame.

I know this even as my friend turns to me
and says, But surely you deserve some
happiness too? I’m rueful, I know. In that

still life by the window, for instance: my eye
is drawn not to the table with the creamy damask
and the plain but heavy silver. It’s the ochre veins

streaked through the magnolias, it’s their ivory
skirts beginning to droop from the lip of the urn.
It’s the crayon line of fuzz that outlines the too-

soft peaches in the bowl; and beside them, it’s the fly
that’s drowned and gone to heaven in their honey.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Audio poetry contributions of the day

Apparently my process notes about yesterday’s videopoem gave Cynthia Cox the nudge she needed to take the leap into videopoetry herself. This morning she messaged me on Facebook:

I need a male voice to read a poem for my very low-budget, first-time video/poem thing. Would you be willing to record it and send it to me, or do you know of a male who would be willing do so?

She did her best to lower my expectations:

All I have is a little P&S camera & video of me undressing some dolls, so don’t expect much (I am cheap). And, I don’t think the poem is my best either – it’s just the one that came to me when I got the idea.

So of course I said yes, did the reading (four takes), and sent it off. Here’s what she came up with. This is way better than my earliest videopoetry experiments (also done with a point-and-shoot camera and Windows Movie Maker):


Watch on YouTube.

Cynthia Cox is a long-time online acquaintance whose poetry I admire, and she’s currently blogging poems for a new chapbook manuscript as part of her editing/polishing process — clearly a poet-blogger after my own heart.

My other poetry reading-related contribution today (aside from the usual podcast at qarrtsiluni — a poem called “Neon in a Jar” by the amazing Susan Elbe) was a new post at the group blog Voice Alpha, “From bookstore to telephone: the incredible shrinking poetry reading.” It was just going to be a simple link-post, but, well, you know how it goes. I talk about the success Heather Christle has been having with her offer to read poems over the telephone for anyone who wants to call (which includes coverage at the BBC!) and speculate that perhaps the era of chasing big audiences at bookstores is over, and we should instead concentrate on more intimate “microaudiences” — telephone, video chat, door-to-door readings… Because who are we kidding? Poetry is never going to be even remotely popular in this country. We’re freaks. Even videopoems on YouTube struggle to amass 100 views, with a few notable exceptions. If you don’t write to amuse yourself and entertain your friends first and foremost, you’re screwed.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

What Cannot Eat

This entry is part 15 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

 

[ With thanks, too, to Nic S. and Dave Bonta for this… ]

How long does hunger hold? Or joy
forestalled? I know that hunger climbs

the trunk of the tree, persistent at its task.
If only each open cup, each well

of blossom had drink enough to douse
that flame— If only the moth that scrolled

its richly tattered cape across
the bark had a mouth; if only its four

half-moons were radiant feast,
enough to settle my restless songs.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Dark and like a videopoem


Watch on Vimeo.

Yesterday, my dad spotted a cecropia moth — newly eclosed, from the looks of it — on the side of one of the black walnut trees in the yard. This is the largest moth in North America, and it’s in the same Saturniidae family as polyphemus and luna moths (which have appeared on this same tree or its immediate neighbor two years in a row, in early August). I shot some video footage of it right away, but figured it wouldn’t be flying until after dark, so I went back at dusk with a flashlight to shoot some more footage.

This morning, it occurred to me that the nighttime footage might make a good fit with one of Nic S.’s poems from her recent nanopress chapbook, Dark And Like a Web: Brief Notes On and To the Divine, edited by Beth Adams. Nic had given me “blanket permission to use any and all of my stuff out there, any time” in a comment on my post about the new videopoetry album, so I didn’t have to worry about the fact that she’s off on vacation somewhere and probably not reading emails. The poem I had in mind, “on being constantly civil towards death,” is very short, but I’ve made at least half a dozen videos for haiku poems, and this is twice the length of a haiku. Would the text and the footage make a good pair? Maybe. It would depend on what I did with the soundtrack.

I downloaded the MP3 link off the chapbook’s website and listened to it a few more times. Due to the poem’s brevity, each line does a lot of work, so the first order of business was to make sure they didn’t go by so quickly that they wouldn’t register with a viewer. I could have slowed down Nic’s reading — my audio software has a function that lets you change the speed of a track without altering its pitch — but unlike many poets, Nic already seems to read at just about the right speed. So instead I lengthened almost every pause, a strategy that seemed to work well with the first poem of hers I did a video for, “the wanderers’ blessing.” This made the poem half again longer, though it was still pretty brief.

After listening to a bunch of Creative Commons-licensed pieces of music at Jamendo.com and ccmixter.org, I decided not to use any background music this time — it just didn’t seem to fit a poem dominated by a “great black stillness.” But from one death-metal track with a telephone ring in it, I got the idea of turning the poem into a phone call. It seemed appropriate for the overall theme of Nic’s chapbook — attempting to commune with a perhaps unreachable Other. This was good, because I conceive of the video not just as Moving Poems material, but also as something akin to a trailer for the book. (It helps that, as a paying customer of Vimeo, I now have the ability to conclude embedded videos with a clickable link.)

But yes, I did briefly consider using death metal in the soundtrack. Which is why you should probably be very careful about giving someone like me blanket permission to monkey with your work.