Let's see if Discussion Via Hubski is gonna work (or not. So far, we're still working on it.)
Perhaps one has to be logged into wordpress to see Discussion via Hubski. D'ya think?
On my blog, DvH doesn't come up unless you click 0 comments - then voila. Now who's going to click 0 comments, so I add a comment (usually "read DvH")and then should a person click bloggers 1 comment, they see DvH). Poems on the Wall Great topic, and great poems. I have poems on my wall: The song of the Wandering Aengus by William Butler Yeats; Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther, BY A. E. Stallings: the beautiful Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon. And a giant Periodic Table.
Not Waving, But Drowning by Stevie Smith; Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night,
The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?
Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons
And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night?
I do the same thing. I have a page of collected Raymond Chandler poems a friend and English teacher gave me on the spur of the moment (it was a handout for one of his classes) that I cherish. I was talking to him about that recently, too, and mentioned that it was still on my wall and how much I loved the poems. He was surprised, but pleased, because most - in fact, probably all - of his students just throw away those sorts of handouts. I also have Koyczan's 6:59am, handwritten by me, because it's a stunningly beautiful sentiment and I love the way it lays out. That's all that's up at the moment, because I just moved, but I'm going to write out a short story by Murakami (*The Fall of the Roman Empire, the 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler's Invasion of Poland, and the Realm of Raging Winds* if you're interested) because it stuns me into silence whenever I read it. PS: Looks like DvH isn't working yet.
More people do this than I realized! I figure, it is both my passion, and my dream - and the best way to ensure I succeed in such a thing is by inundating myself with it, and the best way to inundate myself is to make that immersion easy. Poems all over my walls, to catch my eye at any time - an easy thing to add a little more poetry to my day. Thanks. Not sure what's up with DvH, I know Wordpress can be very finicky. We'll try and work it out.
Back in my other home office in another city. On the wall here I have Lost by David Wagoner "In a Dark Time" by Theodore Roethke and the unbearably powerful poem by Nigerian poet Ken Saro-Wiwa The True Prison
also "I know It's a Bad Bad World But" by John Grey. Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
I don't have any poems on my wall, but I do have poems that kind of prop up the walls of the poetry space inside my brain. I've shared some of them here on hubski. I think we've talked about how I love Dean Young and Kenneth Koch, James Tate and Alan Dugan. One of my favorites though, is Dean Young's elegy for Kenneth Koch and the titular poem of Young's book, Elegy on Toy Piano. I don't know for sure why I love elegies, but it might just be that they're prayers that I can believe. An epitaph will fade in time and surely poems are forgotten, but that someone takes the time to construct a poem in order to snatch another person or thing out of time is to me, part of what poems are all about. I've said before that I consider poems to be little machines, designed to perform small feats of magic. That poems exist on paper and the fact that someone took the time to arrange those words in a certain way so that the intangible object that is the poem, the poem as it exists in the mind, is to me a wonderful thing. It cannot be touched. Even if it is forgotten, it still exists somewhere in that in-between space between the page and memory, creation and oblivion. I like to think that the space I'm talking about receives impressions of things said or made and that has an overall effect on whatever this is, no matter how small it may be. I don't really care if it's true or not. "Necessary it is to live to love" and "Necessary it is to love to live."
One might complain that Young is a surrealist and as such, does not deliver on that front in this poem. But for me, I like being familiar with Young's style and seeing the restrain involved in this poem and instead of the usual irreverence, reverence for whom I consider to be one of the great poets of the 20th century. It's a love poem in the way that elegies are love poems. Elegy on Toy Piano
BY DEAN YOUNG
For Kenneth Koch
You don't need a pony
to connect you to the unseeable
or an airplane to connect you to the sky.
Necessary it is to love to live
and there are many manuals
but in all important ways
one is on one's own.
You need not cut off your hand.
No need to eat a bouquet.
Your head becomes a peach pit.
Your tongue a honeycomb.
Necessary it is to live to love,
to charge into the burning tower
then charge back out
and necessary it is to die.
Even for the trees, even for the pony
connecting you to what can't be grasped.
The injured gazelle falls behind the
herd. One last wild enjambment.
Because of the sores in his mouth,
the great poet struggles with a dumpling.
His work has enlarged the world
but the world is about to stop including him.
He is the tower the world runs out of.
When something becomes ash,
there's nothing you can do to turn it back.
About this, even diamonds do not lie.
I would like to feature your thoughts on poems in a future blog post. Maybe an informal pseudo-interview sort of thing. I really love your viewpoint of poems as little machines and would like to talk about it on the blog - best way is to get you in on it, instead of stealing and mangling your words. I will PM/e-mail you as I think about how to structure this a bit more. But, you down? Also, thank you for sharing this poem. I think I've read it before, but it is very lovely.
I see it there now! _refugee_ it looks great! You have a really nicely put together site there. It's clean.
First of all, I apologize for accidentally unfollowung and re-following you. We really need a mobile version, or i need more precise thumbs. Let me know how that plug-in works, I'm excited about it. I look forward to seeing it on your site! Hope the move went well and the kitty is happy.
Oh no that's fine. I seem to have a hard 'base' of followers and then a top layer that fluctuates. If it wasn't for the fact that Hubski emailed you when you got a new follower, I wouldn't really ever know. Kitty is now on antibiotics. Here, here is the little monster: http://imgur.com/At3IvEw And hopefully soon I will have the time to update the blog and install that plug in. Fuck, the plug-in I should be able to do now. Edit: Why isn't it embedding???
Hope the kitty feels better.. cute little monster. Plug-in good?
