DWill wrote:OMG--those are words, but as Wordsworth said (not exact quote), "by what species of courtesy can we extend it the name of poetry?" Maybe it's some kind of metrical exercise or is supposed to be a word collage? I always thought a poem needed more than three or four verbs. A preposition or two would be nice as well.

When I made my post it originally included a comment by me, but I decided to nix the quote because I thought that if any reader made sense of the poem I'd reveal myself a dolt. I only posted it because it had a 26 in it and was the only one I could find. Maybe it would have been better to take a pass on 26?!

The poet, one Jackson Mac Low was born in 1922 or I would have suspected him of being a Dada poet (Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922.[1] "Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of World War I. This international movement was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, anarchy, irrationality and intuition. wikipedia). It turns out though that I was not too far off in that thought. Here is was Wikipedia has to say about Low.

Jackson Mac Low (September 12, 1922 – December 8, 2004) was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practioneer of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work of John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff.

One type of non-intentional composition that he used relied on an algorithm he dubbed "diastic", by analogy to acrostic. He used words or phrases drawn from source material to spell out a source word or phrase, with the first word having the first letter of the source, the second word having the second letter, and so forth, reading through (dia in Greek) the source. During the last 25 years of his life, he often collaborated with Anne Tardos.

Me again (not wiki), systematic chance operations explains the poem to me and it seems again I was not to far off in thinking the poem was meaningless or rather maybe all the meaning is in the method by which the poem was created.

This is a contribution from Oblivion via a pm to me earlier in the month for #27.


Kurt Schwitters
To Anna Blume

You, oh you, beloved of my twenty-seven senses, I
love ya! - You thine thou yours, I you, you me.
- Us?
This (incidentally) does not belong here.
Who are you, countless woman? You are
- are you? - People say you are - let
them say it, they don't know where the steeple is.
You wear a hat on your feet and stand
on your hands, on your hands you walk.
Hello, your red clothes, sawed into white pleats.
Red I love, Anna Blume, red I love ya! - You
thine thou yours, I you, you me. - Us?
That (incidentally) belongs in the cold embers.
Red flower, red Anna Blume, what are people saying?
Prize question: 1. Anna Blume has a bird.
2. Anna Blume is red.
3. What color is the bird?
Blue is the color of your yellow hair.
Red is the cooing of your green bird.
You plain girl in an everyday dress, you dear
green animal, I love ya! - You thine thou yours, I
you, you me - us?
That (incidentally) belongs in the ember box.
Anna Blume! Anna, a-n-n-a, I am dripping your
name. Your name drips like soft suet.
Do you know, Anna, do you know yet?
You can also be read from back to front, and you, you
most marvelous creature of them all, you are from the back
as you are from the front: »a-n-n-a.«
Suet drips caress my back.
Anna Blume, you droppy animal, I love ya!

To Anna Blume

This is a translation of a German Expressionist poem into English.

SPEECH NUMBER TWENTY-SEVEN – Kishwar Naheed


Kishwar Naheed was born in 1940 at Bulundshehr, she was educated at Punjab University. She is a leading woman poet in Urdu. Her book of poems, Streets, Sunshine and Doors, won wide acclaim. Kishwar Naheed writes in free verse and has translated poets such as Pablo Neruda into Urdu. She lives in Pakistan.

SPEECH NUMBER TWENTY-SEVEN

My voice is the voice of my city.
My voice is the voice of my age.
My voice will influence generations.
What do you think it is,
that you call my voice a clamour?
How can you call my voice
the voice of madness?
How can you think
the coming storm a mere illusion?

I am no prophet,
I only see today with open eyes.
Your barbaric acts
diffused like the stink of money,
you recline in the back seat
of your limousine
so that the harsh sunlight of poverty
will not destroy the surgical creation
that is your face.
Now you can remember each speech
by it’s number:
Speech number 10, To arouse the poor
Speech number 15, To create consciousness amongst women
Speech number 27, To advise the writers and intellectuals.

Voices, voices, voices -
What is a clamour?
A crescendo of conflicting sounds,
or waves of unconnected speeches?
Stones rolling down the hillside -
Throw a stone in a desert
and it sinks noiselessly in the sand.
But my voice is not a stone,
it is lightening;
after its flash everyone can hear the thunder.
Putting your hands to your ears
will not stop the storm.

Why should those who read about the weather
and make speeches
come to see the flowing gutters in the alley?
Sowing a little seed of revolution
in its season
will not create a forest of revolution.
You can buy red colour cheaply
but scarves stained with the red of blood
are not so easily bought.

If I am aware of all this,
why aren’t you?
I speak the truth.
I am no prophet,
I only see today with open eyes.
That is all.

Since I do not have a poem for April 27th I've decide to do something else. Earlier in the month I made a post about how some poems seem to be constructed on a frame of numbers. I have three poems that fit this description - all quite different, but share a connection in that all three by the use of numbers convey the complexity of the competing aspects of the human mind. The first poem is quite a simple little thing and address just the basics of the human being. The other two are more alike and quite a bit longer. I will post 2 poems in this post and then the 3rd in a seperate post - for readability sake. One more thing, I believe the Li-Young Lee poem is referencing The Seven Sorrows of Mary (the Virgin Mother).
#1
The Tree
by Alfred Kreymborg

I am four monkeys.
One hangs from a limb,
tail-wise,
chattering at the earth;
another is cramming his belly with cocoanut;
the third is up in the top branches,
quizzing the sky,
and the fourth—
he's chasing another monkey.
How many monkeys are you?

#2
THE SEVENTH
BY ATTILA JOZSEF

If you set out in this world,
better be born seven times.
Once, in a house on fire,
once, in a freezing flood,
once, in a wild madhouse,
once, in a field of ripe wheat,
once, in an empty cloister,
and once among pigs in sty.
Six babes crying, not enough:
you yourself must be the seventh.

When you must fight to survive,
let your enemy see seven.
One, away from work on Sunday,
one, starting his work on Monday,
one, who teaches without payment,
one, who learned to swim by drowning,
one, who is the seed of a forest,
and one, whom wild forefathers protect,
but all their tricks are not enough:
you yourself must be the seventh.

If you want to find a woman,
let seven men go for her.
One, who gives heart for words,
one, who takes care of himself,
one, who claims to be a dreamer,
one, who through her skirt can feel her,
one, who knows the hooks and snaps,
one, who steps upon her scarf:
let them buzz like flies around her.
You yourself must be the seventh.

If you write and can afford it,
let seven men write your poem.
One, who builds a marble village,
one, who was born in his sleep,
one, who charts the sky and knows it,
one, whom words call by his name,
one, who perfected his soul,
one, who dissects living rats.
Two are brave and four are wise;
You yourself must be the seventh.

And if all went as was written,
you will die for seven men.
One, who is rocked and suckled,
one, who grabs a hard young breast,
one, who throws down empty dishes,
one, who helps the poor win;
one, who worked till he goes to pieces,
one, who just stares at the moon.
The world will be your tombstone:
you yourself must be the seventh.

And the final poem

#3
Seven Marys
Li-Young Lee

Father John,
I have seven Marys.
What am I to do?

Ancient when I was born,
each sings to me in three colors.

Growing younger while I die faster
every year, they speak to me
in four languages; Thinking, dreaming,
drowning, and guitar.

And one never knows what to do with her hair.
And one rocks me in and out of moonlight.
One cauterizes broken wing joints with black honey.
And one lifts my heart
onto the weighing pan opposite hunger.

Seven Marys, Father, and one
sets me on her lap and opens a book
and moves her finger from word to word

while I sound out evening’s encrypted sentences.
And one is the book itself.

Seven, Father John, Marys, Father John,
the fulcrum, the eye, the heart enthroned, the dove
without person, homing.

And I can’t tell the one who’s always looking ahead
from the one who’s always looking behind,

the one who’s late for everything
from the one who’s quick to remind me:

who stays too long at childhood’s window
leaves earth’s shadow unsung.

Seven Marys, Father John, seven laughing Sarahs.

One to kiss my mouth and one to tie my hands.
One to build the pyre and one to assure me:

Don’t be afraid. Find yourself
inside good-bye, one with life,
one with death.

Seven mothers, their backs turned,
walk ahead of me forever.

Rachels underneath my bed, they decide
the fate of my sleep.

Bells tolling my solitude,
they’re seven zeroes
trumping every count.

Marys, Father, Rachels and Sarahs,
and I can’t tell one from the other.

Is it Rachel who sings to remember the flood?
Is it Sarah who sings to forget it?
Is it Mary making my bed?
Which one can tell me
the shape of my destiny?

Section 11 from "Leaves of Grass."

11

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.

She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.

Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.

Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their
long hair,
Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.

An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to
the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending
arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray. (Whitman 73)

This is weird. I was out mowing my lawn and thought of "leaves of grass." Immediately I realized that the poem is in the bookLeaves of Grass, but of course is from the poem, "Song of Myself." Rushed in to fix the error.

28
By Jane Miller b. 1949 Jane Miller

Dressed as a Moor in curtain and towel and plastered in rice powder

a servant gravely recites a semi-invented tale

The Palace of Pearls of which little is recorded

but much might be imagined

for the delectation of two enthralled brothers

with black shiny hair and white starched blouses

as white as funereal roses and black eyes as black

as a sleeveless summer dress of mourning

for an endless hour in an Andalusian garden

before these well-off kids are called to eat lemony squid

and forced to nap from the heat such that years shall pass thus

before they awaken to a day their Granada is surrounded

by Nationalist soldiers who are sneering at them

saying that those who don’t wear uniforms should wear skirts

I imagine at night more bullshit with their short cigars

while they search house to house accusing the one slight man

of contacting Russia and hiding

the radio in his piano a vile invention of armed civil authority

who murder Federico García Lorca

on native soil to this day no one saying

exactly where exactly by which olive trees

does he fall like a puppet do the Guard piss afterward on the shallow
grave

there comes a reckoning that it might be a failure

to theorize and anyway what’s art

all about if it merely lengthens the shadows

that make the cowards evil and the poet immortal

nevertheless even the lowliest poet

would rather go home

to a meal of fireplace embers than not

go down that deserted road

of red earth and imagine the bloody worst

because necessity dictates one must

BE CAREFUL OF MURDERERS IN A PALACE OF PEARLS

Wow, does she end all her poems in caps (see your 23)? I kind of like seeing political poems once in a while.

DWill wrote:Wow, does she end all her poems in caps (see your 23)? I kind of like seeing political poems once in a while.

The two poems, "23" & "28" are from a book-length poem, A Palace of Pearls (2005), Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townshend, WA 98368-0271, coppercanyonpress.org. To answer your question, yes and no. All the poems in this book every poems last line is in all caps, but this in not the case in her other work. Oh, and the numbers, they are just the numbers of the poems.

http://www.amazon.com/A-Palace-Pearls-J ... 1556592221

My 29 wasn't that hard to find, as a search brought up the "nyne and twenty" pilgrims from the Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, still one of my favorite passages. I had forgotten about the number of pilgrims, though.

The Prologue - Middle English


Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(so priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of engelond to caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
Bifil that in that seson on a day,
In southwerk at the tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye,
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward caunterbury wolden ryde.
The chambres and the stables weren wyde,
And wel we weren esed atte beste.
And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,
So hadde I spoken with hem everichon
That I was of hir felaweshipe anon,
And made forward erly for to ryse,
To take oure wey ther as I yow devyse.