Phriday Photo Gallery: Lunch Time…

…for Mr. Wasp…

…Curtains for Mr. Inch-Worm…

(click gallery to view large images)

Quoets for Poets: 8/8/13

(Many thanks to KB and Tiffany for showing me where to go with this one.  It’s not their fault I ramble so…I’m not always good at following directions…and besides, they probably had no idea…they were undoubtedly just pointing at trees or something and I, of course, said, “Yes!  That way!  Of Course!” and went crashing off into the trees…)

“What if the delight in poetic form were actually a delight in and return to infantile sensualities?”

“…we see that what is childlike and infantile lies in the form, what is adult in the content.  Content and form then make two poles, across which the magnetic energy of the poem arches.”

“The form pole pulls the poem back then toward infancy, the content pole pulls it forward into adulthood.  Adulthood seems to be the recognition that there are others in the universe besides you, greater causes and greater beings.  the poem surely needs character–the drive forward into experiences–probably embodying pain–that the infant never dreams of in his crib.”

—-Robert Bly 

…and this is why–in that arching electric zone of contact and conflict–

…and precisely where–in that very place within
where mind meets body…

“where the reader’s mind reaches toward something heard or uttered as though vocality were one of the senses.”

—-Robert Pinsky

…where mind meat’s body, where inspiration mixes into the elixir of expiration, where fantasy confronts reality, where…

“…the social realm is invoked with a special intimacy at the barely voluntary level of voice itself.”

—-Robert Pinsky

…where, in the beating of the suffering heart…

“Embarrassment–a halting consciousness of other people, the sudden barricade of social awareness, obstructing emotion and threatening to take over the mind–is in a way the most basic, irreducible manifestation of social reality.”

—-Robert Pinsky

…the blossom of suffering…

“To be thrown back “forever” on oneself alone suggests a degree of mobility, a freedom from constraint and dependence, that is potentially exhilarating as well as deranging: a liberation, as well as a void.”

—-Robert Pinsky

…becomes the creative act…

…and poetry leads to compassion…

“The path itself does not lie there waiting for you to walk along it.  It needs to be cultivated, nurtured—literally, “brought into being.”  Such a path might open up in a revealing moment of insight, only to be lost again through subsequent neglect.  To believe in a path is not enough.  One has to create and maintain it.  The practice of the eightfold path is a creative act.”

—-Stephen Batchelor

…for this path we walk…

…this path we all walk…

…is always walked alone…

…this we remember as we walk…

Hum(m)us

(Susan challenged me to write a poem about hummus back in....umm...April, I think.  
I get around to things eventually...)


Hum(m)us

Hearth of soil and soul of 
stone, gather us 
to your bosom.  Hum us
like warmth into
winter’s close conjuring.
Hum us into 
the bellies of our love.

Heirlooms live in 
ancient ovens leavened 
with our tailings, 
leavings telling of our 
ordinary 
meals, the most sacred shared
by us, alone.

Pulses from one 
to the one that sprang from 
her very soil
(earth murmurs), the maker
passes on the
notes of a melody
for the making. 

Six simple gifts, the land's 
material,
ascend in scales, soft sound 
offerings of 
humble place; ordinals 
older than words;
sounds fat and round and full 

of life.  "Fully
formed and transformed by the 
mouth’s own making,
the soil's song sings itself
in tongues' silence,"
mumbles humus, a tune
down in its roots.

Phriday Photo Gallery: New Friends…

…The Approach

(click gallery to view large images)

Quoets for Poets: 8/21/13 — Oysters, Roots, Constellations

I am often struck (dumb?…or perhaps ‘struck’ like a bell!)
by the thought that words carry with them haunting constellations of spirits,
the meanings, associations, undertones, overtones, subtle reverberations, cultural references,….

“In description words adhere to certain objects, and have the effect on the sense of oysters, or barnacles.”

–W. C. Williams

…and that these constellations, just like spirits–like ghosts–are always changing
their disposition, their demeanor, and yes their meaning and intention.

“And the good writer chooses his words for their ‘meaning’, but that meaning is not a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.”

–Ezra Pound

They go from well-intentioned to demonic in a blink of context,
a switch that can be flipped and tripped again, and yet….

“A labor no less difficult, no less phantasmagoric than alchemy.  But then, of course, the condition of the lyric is the belief in the impossible.”
–Charles Simic

…they are still just words, not even real “things” which is what perhaps makes them all the more haunting, for in their vagueness, their lack of reality…

“Words mean something because they always threaten to sound like something else.”
–James Longenbach

The Red Dwarf Wheelbarrow

There may in fact be a 
supermassive black hole
 
at the center of our galaxy, 
in the midst of all that light,

and I am convinced beyond 
any dark matter of a doubt

that through that hole,
on the other side of 
that event horizon, 
through that single 
singularity, 

there is a 

wet red wheel 
barrow 

and some white 
chickens. 

Everything depends 
on it.