Category: Greatest Hits

The best posts, based mostly on author preference but influenced also by reader reaction.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Three (More) Improvisations

This entry is part 10 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

[see earlier “Three Improvisations” from the Spring Morning Porch series]

1

Hail raining down on lake water means I have hurt you.

Translation: The burn that makes no noise,
the scarlet inflorescence of the skin.
The moon’s neon sign reads smolder. Why
do you think you hear fire sirens in the valley?
But you don’t move, you stay.

2

And the leaf was no longer a leaf but a trellis of itself.

Translation: Coming back from a walk
in the woods he spoke of a ribbon of floating green;
of how, going closer, he saw the near-invisible
spider silk, its tether to the canopy. Say lace,
say beautiful flayed skin.

3

Light is always liminal.

Translation: Spittlebug striped cinnabar and clove,
frothy beard caught in the hollows. Nearby
is beebalm, nearby is sage. Such overdrawn
tenderness we cannot help. We finger each
slick bubble, think we hear the tiny pop.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Aubade

This entry is part 7 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

The pressure of a wheel turning on soft gravel,
a window sliding open. What sound is made

when something slips away and the hand closes
and opens on nothing but cool air in its wake?

The man stirs in the dark and sees the fog
caught in the treetops, the water beyond

just beginning to catch the light as it rises.
He’s restless, or he’s preoccupied with worry.

It begins to rain but he takes his bike
out of the garage, thinking he might follow

the distant chirping of quarry trucks to their source.
It’s early, and even the dog won’t go. Too early

for the dog; it won’t go, but watches him
pedal away in the rain to try to trace the sounds

that roused him, back to their source— not birdsong
though a restless wingbeat rises in the air, and the light

begins to catch at the edges of water. It passes
like fog through the treetops, through his hair;

it passes like a hand closing and opening. That’s
the heart missing what it wants to hold fast.

Look out the window— flicker of narrow
tires on the road; rain, soft earth, loose stones.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

How to be a poet

This entry is part 39 of 39 in the series Manual

Write from a place of deep fear, which the authors of the Old Testament rightly considered the beginning of wisdom. Turn your poems into cunning traps and instruments of fraud. Writer’s block is primordial and best left uncarved; create only in its shadow.

Prize your digressions. Revise nothing, and put all your poems into books that self-destruct after a single reading. Wallow in idleness. Treat inspiration as a sworn enemy.

Practice abstinence; it’s the only way to know what love and hunger are really all about. Find something absurd to believe in and cling to it as passionately as Pound clung to fascism or Neruda to Stalinism. Watch a lot of television.

“First thought, best thought”: get it down and go do something useful, like cleaning the toilet. In lieu of reading, listen to audiobooks. Write about what you don’t know and didn’t think you cared about. Stay in your cave until you start seeing beasts on the walls.

Cultivate suspicion and distrust toward the universe — after all, it is out to kill you. If you must be sociable, avoid poets, for they are boring at best and petty at worst. Hang out with artists and musicians instead.

And for god’s sake, learn HTML.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Landscape, with Ruby-Throated Hummingbird

This entry is part 3 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

Sliver of ruby in the emerald grass,
flash of sun— You’ve promised me

the rain’s curtain of beads won’t drown
the flickering wish uttered by the hibiscus;

you’ve sworn the bees in the hive won’t fold
their lemon-colored cards deckle-edged

with sugar. I believe you as I believe
the wind ruffling the orderly hedges,

turning the hapless pair of green
plastic garden pails on their sides.

You teach my heart to set itself
afloat on the skin of the sea,

tiny urn bearing its few remaining
cubes of sweetness. If I am calm,

it’s only because your name thrums
a feathered bruise just under my lips.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Where Bluegrass Comes From (videopoem)


Watch on Vimeo.

See yesterday’s post for the text. And where did the poem come from? As I explained in the comments yesterday, I went to a multi-day bluegrass festival with my banjo-playing cousin and his family this past weekend. That’s the origin of most of the video footage. The first two sentences that I ascribe to the banjo player are in fact pretty close to what I overheard in a workshop for banjo players on Saturday. But I wrote the opening lines in response to footage of a beetle on a blade of grass, shot yesterday morning in front of my garden. So the video and the poem came along together.

I’m more of a fan of older-style Appalachian string band music, but I do enjoy bluegrass, too, when I’m in the mood. Its relentless pursuit of speed combined with its potent nostalgia for a simpler way of life strike me as quintessentially American, though I realize it’s spread all over the world now.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Sacred Teachings of the Ancient Victorians

This entry is part 2 of 20 in the series Highgate Cemetery Poems

Deep in our oughts

What did the Victorians know that we have forgotten? That sorrow is a strong medicine with dangerous side-effects. That all our crops are grown in linear graves. That the angels’ only super-power is empathy. That ruins can be beautiful because they are free of their original purpose. That a camera can impart something like second sight. That the devil too quotes scripture. That sex is inherently scandalous. That bad air can kill you & pine-scented air can prolong life. That the grave is a kind of well that never runs dry.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Anniversary

This entry is part 86 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

“Summer specializes in time, slows it down almost to dream….” ~ Jennifer Grotz

I too was bent on it, eager to jump
out of the pockmarked skillet and into

the heated cauldron of marriage— Hurry,
hurry, said the wind, all the while boring

escape hatches in the tall reeds. Hurry
said the lilac, and the jeweled hummingbird

that revved the throttle on its small engine.
Oh, I let them sing their songs of scorching

and I rushed to drink the wine. And oh,
my fingers bled from threading silk

into the needle, from slipping on
my rings of twine. The dish of nectar

tilts from the brittle branches, and the weeds
remain the feathery vagabonds they are… Now

I try to learn the gold-slow rhythms of afternoons,
the thrift of hours from the longer bones of time.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Wanderers and garden eels


Watch on Vimeo.

More footage from the algae exhibit at the Kew Gardens. The garden eels were fascinating to watch: shy creatures, but more or less habituated to the steady stream of humans on the other side of the glass. Rooted as they were, they were clearly very far from home indeed. I somehow got the idea of pairing them with a poem by Nic S. from her collection Forever Will End on Thursday, which I read and wrote about in April. Fortunately, Nic saw the logic in my seemingly bizarre choice, as she wrote in an email and subsequently blogged:

I would never have thought of pairing the footage and the poem, but the footage speaks to the themes in the poem — solidarity yet separateness; deep wariness and alertness to the environment; the need for camouflage and the longing for connection — all things that characterize the ‘order of strangers and interlopers.’ The music resonates as well – made me think of yearning and unfinishedness. It’s an unexpected connection you made, but I think it works.

This is the third videopoem I’ve made with a Nic S. reading in the soundtrack, but the first for one of her own poems. If you only know her as the editor and main reader for the audiopoetry magazine Whale Sound, you’re missing a real treat: her own poems are wonderful, too. I hope this video helps win her a few more fans.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Letter to Myself, Reading a Letter

This entry is part 67 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

Yellowing aerogramme passed from hand
to hand, creases striped with naphthalene dust,

salt-tang over sleepy villages— here’s
the broken line of hills, the sweep of coast

caught in a curl of cursive, shadowed
cul-de-sac of consonants bent at elbow

and knee. I’ll never know again the knotted
lace of curtains behind which we as children hid,

convinced the sounds behind the heavy doors
were the dead coming to claim our souls.

Here in a sunlit house not my own, I polish
the furniture and floor with oils smelling of fruit

until the heart of the wood is glossy
as an oriole’s song, and the rooms

where you come to me again
are a palace of leaves. Summer light,

thick as honey, pooling in squares at our feet:
we ask to be touched, before being taken.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.