You believe my body a map. It is an island to which you flock only to lose yourself,
to find solace or right angles to answer the simple question: how do you get
from where you are, to here—the heart. You walk the streets blind and don’t know
on which side of my waist the sun will set, or that the route you charted
will take you nowhere you intended to go. You’re lost and call me
all hours of the morning for direction. But roads you travel lead up and out. Traffic lights
say, go. Here is the red line that runs the length of my body. Because you study maps, you believe
this is the key. It is nothing more than my heart saying pass through, pass
through. Lover, there is no more land, no more West. There is no place for you to stay.
–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009 Tribute to African American Poets
_________________ " How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." - Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” -Thich Nhat Hahn
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Re: Poetry Fridays: 2010 Festival Poets
KWAME DAWES Poet, playwright, musician, essayist, novelist and creator of multidiscipline performance pieces, Kwame Dawes uses the human voice as an instrument to fill the shared space that connects speaker and listener. He reminds us that song, incantation, rhythm and verse are essential elements in all ceremonies and rituals, and that the incantatory rhythms of a great reggae song or poem can transport the listener to a place that breaks down the barriers between self and other. Born in Ghana, Dawes spent most of his childhood and early adult life in Jamaica. Author of 13 books of poetry and many books of fiction, nonfiction and drama, Dawes won an Emmy Award for his work documenting the AIDS crisis in Jamaica. Dawes has been awarded the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, a Poetry Business Prize and a Pushcart Prize for Poetry. He is Distinguished Poet in Residence at the University of South Carolina.
I am a tornado child. I come like a swirl of black and darken up your day; I whip it all into my womb, lift you and your things, carry you to where you've never been, and maybe, if I feel good, I might bring you back, all warm and scared, heart humming wild like a bird after early sudden flight.
I am a tornado child. I tremble at the elements. When thunder rolls my womb trembles, remembering the tweak of contractions that tightened to a wail when my mother pushed me out into the black of tornado night.
I am a tornado child, you can tell us from far, by the crazy of our hair; couldn't tame it if we tried. Even now I tie a bandanna to silence the din of anarchy in these coir-thick plaits.
I am a tornado child born in the whirl of clouds; the centre crumbled, then I came. My lovers know the blast of my chaotic giving; they tremble at the whip of my supple thighs; you cross me at your peril, I swallow light when the warm of anger lashes me into a spin, the pine trees bend to me swept in my gyrations.
I am a tornado child. When the spirit takes my head, I hurtle into the vacuum of white sheets billowing and paint a swirl of color, streaked with my many songs.
Joined: Apr 2008 Posts: 2638 Images: 5 Location: Round Hill, VA
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Re: Poetry Fridays: 2010 Festival Poets
MICHAEL DICKMANMichael Dickman's verbal economy makes every image-driven line resonate against the heavy silence that surrounds it. He does not so much tell us stories as lower us into them until, once immersed, we feel that even the speaker’s most private and intimate memories seem our own. Born and raised in the Lents District of Portland, Oregon, Dickman has received fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been profiled in Poets & Writers and The New Yorker with his twin brother, poet Matthew Dickman. He was awarded a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University for 2009–2010. His first collection of poems, The End of the West, was published in 2009. His second collection, Flies, was chosen by poets Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Major Jackson and Michael Ryan to receive the 2010 James Laughlin Award and is due out in 2011.
Lest the wolves loose their whistles and shopkeepers inquire, keep moving, though your knees flush red as two chapped apples, keep moving, head up, past the beggar's cold cup, past the kiosk's trumpet tales of odyssey and heartbreak- until, turning a corner, you stand, staring: ambushed by a window of canaries bright as a thousand golden narcissi.
Golden Oldie
I made it home early, only to get stalled in the driveway-swaying at the wheel like a blind pianist caught in a tune meant for more than two hands playing. The words were easy, crooned by a young girl dying to feel alive, to discover a pain majestic enough to live by. I turned the air conditioning off, leaned back to float on a film of sweat, and listened to her sentiment: Baby, where did our love go?-a lament I greedily took in without a clue who my lover might be, or where to start looking.
Exit
Just when hope withers, the visa is granted. The door opens to a street like in the movies, clean of people, of cats; except it is your street you are leaving. A visa has been granted, "provisionally"-a fretful word. The windows you have closed behind you are turning pink, doing what they do every dawn. Here it's gray. The door to the taxicab waits. This suitcase, the saddest object in the world. Well, the world's open. And now through the windshield the sky begins to blush as you did when your mother told you what it took to be a woman in this life.
Inheritance of Waterfalls and Sharks by Martín Espada
for my son Klemnte
In 1898, with the infantry from Illinois, the boy who would become the poet Sandburg rowed his captain's Saint Bernard ashore at Guánica, and watched as the captain lobbed cubes of steak at the canine snout. The troops speared mangos with bayonets like many suns thudding with shredded yellow flesh to earth. General Miles, who chained Geronimo for the photograph in sepia of the last renegade, promised Puerto Rico the blessings of enlightened civilization. Private Sandburg marched, peeking at a book nested in his palm for the words of Shakespeare.
Dazed in blue wool and sunstroke, they stumbled up the mountain to Utuado, learned the war was over, and stumbled away. Sandburg never met great-great-grand uncle Don Luis, who wore a linen suit that would not wrinkle, read with baritone clarity scenes from Hamlet house to house for meals of rice and beans, the Danish prince and his soliloquy—ser o no ser— saluted by rum, the ghost of Hamlet's father wandering through the ceremonial ballcourts of the Taíno.
In Caguas or Cayey Don Luis was the reader at the cigar factory, newspapers in the morning, Cervantes or Marx in the afternoon, rocking with the whirl of unseen sword when Quijote roared his challenge to giants, weaving the tendrils of his beard when he spoke of labor and capital, as the tabaqueros rolled leaves of tobacco to smolder in distant mouths.
Maybe he was the man of the same name who published a sonnet in the magazine of browning leaves from the year of the Great War and the cigar strike. He disappeared; there were rumors of Brazil, inciting canecutters or marrying the patrón's daughter, maybe both, but always the reader, whipping Quijote's sword overhead.
Another century, and still the warships scavenge Puerto Rico's beaches with wet snouts. For practice, Navy guns hail shells coated with uranium over Vieques like a boy spinning his first curveball; to the fisherman on the shore, the lung is a net and the tumor is a creature with his own face, gasping.
This family has no will, no house, no farm, no island. But today the great-great-great-grand nephew of Don Luis, not yet ten, named for a jailed poet and fathered by another poet, in a church of the Puritan colony called Massachusetts, wobbles on a crate and grabs the podium to read his poem about El Yunque waterfalls and Achill basking sharks, and shouts: I love this.
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Re: Poetry Fridays: 2010 Festival Poets
SANTEE FRAZIER Santee Frazier’s debut collection, Dark Thirty (2009), is a book of unflinching witness and testimony. Frazier’s gifts as an observer and storyteller, combined with his sense of humor and compassion for the denizens of Dry Creek, Oklahoma, lead the reader to become deeply vested in the complex lives of those living on the margins, roaming the dirt roads of Cherokee country. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Frazier holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an M.F.A. from Syracuse University. He has received several awards including the Truman Capote Scholarship, a Syracuse University Fellowship and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship. His poems have appeared in American Poet, Narrative, Ontario Review and other literary journals. He lives in Syracuse, New York.
Mama tucked the coffee can between her wrist and hip and walked down Dry Creek Road. Her eyes lined-up, blush and lipstick, her Levi shorts cut above the thigh. And what it was to see those farmers cutting down wheat, side-glancing mama, barefoot and brown. Sometimes it’s flour, sometimes money when she empties the can. Her workin the quiet corners of barns on the hay, on hot days when locusts launch themselves out of thickets. I stare down Dry Creek Road looking for her wrist and hip, her splayed hair and small toes walking out of a pone-colored dust.
_________________ " How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." - Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” -Thich Nhat Hahn
What starts as one more Monday morning class merges to a collective Dickinson separate vessels pooling some huge truth sampled bit by bit of each of us.
She sings the pain of loneliness for one. Another sees a life of wasted youth; then one long flinching from what lay beneath green earth: last, pallid peerings at the stone
she too now knows the secret of.
Alone, together, we'd decipher BIRD SOULBEE dialect humdrum only until heard with the rapt nervy patience, Emily, you showed us that we owed you. One small bird opens its wings. They spread. They cover us: myriad lives foreshortened into Word.
Little by Little
Let nothing be too big or small to say or see. End of the world; cockroach on the counter; deja vu; tail of a dream; anonymous phone call; child asleep; kettle begins to boil. Over the ribbon of winter river creeps the sun. The pigeon preening on the synagogue wall ruffles its wings and tucks its head back down.
The daily touch of hands by gradual degrees turns white to black. And there are other signs of tender wear. Cats softly rub their chins on edges they make dingy. Slow concavities, step by step, hollow out the hardest granite stair. Such are the markings I sit down to make.
The Hawaiian bobtail squid forages in the night surf while waves of moonlight, of starlight fall like sediment into the sea.
Its globular eyes pulse green; its spotted body glows orange, brown and blue.
Smaller than my thumb, it is a galaxy, an organ of light inhabited by millions of luminescent bacteria.
In the abyss beneath these squid other nocturnal predators prowl; yet they can not see the bobtails whose bacteria protect them, shining in the wavelength of the stars and of the moon.
What have we learned to do for the Earth that means as much?
_________________ " How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." - Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” -Thich Nhat Hahn
Poetry may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “Music History,” unless you’ve been reading Rita Dove’s Sonata Mulattica, or leadbelly by Tyehimba Jess. Through poems in the voice of Leadbelly and characters in his life (listen to freedom and see martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935) and through letters, quotes, dialogue, song lyrics, and prose pieces (see harris county chain gang and home again), Jess brings the fascinating life of American folk and blues musician, Huddie William Ledbetter (Leadbelly), into verse. Perhaps for him, history is not only a matter of fact, but one of perspective and imagination.
martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935 by Tyehimba Jess
when your man comes home from prison, when he comes back like the wound and you are the stitch, when he comes back with pennies in his pocket and prayer fresh on his lips, you got to wash him down first.
you got to have the wildweed and treebark boiled and calmed, waiting for his skin like a shining baptism back into what he was before gun barrels and bars chewed their claim in his hide and spit him stumbling backwards into screaming sunlight.
you got to scrub loose the jailtime fingersmears from ashy skin, lather down the cuffmarks from ankle and wrist, rinse solitary’s stench loose from his hair, scrape curse and confession from the welted and the smooth, the hard and the soft, the furrowed and the lax.
you got to hold tight that shadrach’s face between your palms, take crease and lid and lip and brow and rinse slow with river water, and when he opens his eyes you tell him calm and sure how a woman birthed him back whole again
In a publishing career that has spanned more than five decades, GALWAY KINNELL has emerged as one of the most distinctive and influential poets of his generation. In all 12 of his collections—including The Book of Nightmares (1971), When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990), Imperfect Thirst (1994) and most recently Strong Is Your Hold (2006)—he gives the clear sense that every word has its own weight, texture, taste and mouth feel—which, as he writes in “Blackberry Eating,” “I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well.” His poems have a keen appreciation for the value of words for their unique existence as corporeal things, a savoring of the pure “languageness” of language. A lifelong advocate for a strong poetry community, he has taught writing at colleges both abroad and in the U.S. Kinnell has received many honors for his poetry including the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and has published numerous translations. A former MacArthur Fellow and State Poet of Vermont, he now lives in northern Vermont.
After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
For I can snore like a bullhorn or play loud music or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman and Fergus will only sink deeper into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash, but let there be that heavy breathing or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house and he will wrench himself awake and make for it on the run - as now, we lie together, after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies, familiar touch of the long-married, and he appears - in his baseball pajamas, it happens, the neck opening so small he has to screw them on, which one day may make him wonder about the mental capacity of baseball players - and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep, his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.
In the half darkness we look at each other and smile and touch arms across his little, startling muscled body - this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making, sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake, this blessing love gives again into our arms.
Blackberry Eating
I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry -- eating in late September.
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