Incendiary Lit

This was published in the Fall/Winter 2006 issue of Black Warrior Review. Very nice.

Let it Come Down
Ian Harris

Despite being afraid of catching cholera
from standing water,
I am playing with ships in the bath.
This is maybe 1983.
After my bath I will look at a National Geographic.
The stereo is playing a Shankar record
and my mother is reading the tarot.
I am too young to know it yet but
I will hold a state record in the 200-meter butterfly
and fall in love with a girl from the coast of Oregon.
Other things are less clear. Colors of cars rode in?
Names of girls fucked at swim meets?
I once thought I remembered looking onto a Persian city
spread in the night like a phosphorescent octopus,
but it turns out it was a scene I’d read from a Paul Bowles novel
in which a man whose pockets are filled with good ganja
finds himself about to enter a city he’s never been in.
It wasn’t in the cards for him, so you know. It ends badly.

The Shrinking Lonely Sestina
by Miller Williams

Somewhere in everyone’s head something points toward home,
a dashboard’s floating compass, turning all the time
to keep from turning. It doesn’t matter how we come
to be wherever we are, someplace where nothing goes
the way it went once, where nothing holds fast
to where it belongs, or what you’ve risen or fallen to.

What the bubble always points to,
whether we notice it or not, is home.
It may be true that if you move fast
everything fades away, that given time
and noise enough, every memory goes
into the blackness, and if new ones come–

small, mole-like memories that come
to live in the furry dark–they, too,
curl up and die. But Carol goes
to high school now. John works at home
what days he can to spend some time
with Sue and the kids. He drives too fast.

Ellen won’t eat her breakfast.
Your sister was going to come
but didn’t have the time.
Some mornings at one or two
or three I want you home
a lot, but then it goes.

It all goes.
Hold on fast
to thoughts of home
when they come.
They’re going to
less with time.

Time
goes
too
fast.
Come
home.

Forgive me that. One time it wasn’t fast.
A myth goes that when the quick years come
then you will, too. Me, I’ll still be home.

Yep, the Contemporary Verse 2 2-day poem contest is here, and it’s half over. The ten words are Vessel, filament, proof, article, thorax, wrench, buckle, sienna, rattle, and nervous. The real wrench in the gears is thorax. Filament is a cool word, and easy to use because it sounds so cool. They have a clock on the guidelines site here.
So far, I’ve written 3 different versions. A sestina, a double abecedarian, and a white space happy free verse poem. All with different narratives (the 2xABCDian is loosely a narrative).

I planned on writing a more standard for me “kind of quirky and ironic free verse” poem, and maybe try something even more crazy, like a paradelle. That would be pretty sweet, but I make no promises.

After the contest is closed, I hope to post some participant’s alternate poems as well as my own in a little permanent link page by the Firestarter Challenges. You know the address: zebulonhuset (a - t) gmail (dot) com.

Oranges
by Gary Soto

The first time I walked
With a girl, I was twelve,
Cold, and weighted down
With two oranges in my jacket.
December. Frost cracking
Beneath my steps, my breath
Before me, then gone,
As I walked toward
Her house, the one whose
Porch light burned yellow
Night and day, in any weather.
A dog barked at me, until
She came out pulling
At her gloves, face bright
With rouge. I smiled,
Touched her shoulder, and led
Her down the street, across
A used car lot and a line
Of newly planted trees,
Until we were breathing
Before a drugstore. We
Entered, the tiny bell
Bringing a saleslady
Down a narrow aisle of goods.
I turned to the candies
Tiered like bleachers,
And asked what she wanted -
Light in her eyes, a smile
Starting at the corners
Of her mouth. I fingered
A nickle in my pocket,
And when she lifted a chocolate
That cost a dime,
I didn’t say anything.
I took the nickle from
My pocket, then an orange,
And set them quietly on
The counter. When I looked up,
The lady’s eyes met mine,
And held them, knowing
Very well what it was all
About.

Outside,
A few cars hissing past,
Fog hanging like old
Coats between the trees.
I took my girl’s hand
In mine for two blocks,
Then released it to let
Her unwrap the chocolate.
I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands.

Adams Avenue
by James Patrick Rodey

This is my favorite time
in San Diego–
just before dawn,
when the fog hangs thick
in Normal Heights,
settled over a silent city.

The 7-11’s lights look like
heaven to me,
across the street,
amidst the clouds
of marine layer mist.

Throwing punctuated glances out the window,
I imagine
that I am an angel
overlooking the calm of Adams Avenue.

—
This appeared in the 04-05 Acorn Review from Grossmont College.

RIP James.

Based on a sestina, only written in tercets (So I guess a more accurate hybrid titled would be the terctina, but hey, I didn’t come up with it first). The pattern of end words and stanzas is:

ABC, CAB, BCA, then a floating line using ABC in that order… so, coming up with words that work very well together is a must. Give it a shot. Here’s an Australian website that has a few tritinas, and sonnetinas (shortened sonnets) and their rules.

Sunday Morning by Corrine Hales

Crowded around the glowing open mouth
Of the electric oven, the children
Pull on clothes and eat brown-sugared oatmeal.

The broiler strains, buzzing to keep up
500 degrees, and the mother
Is already scrubbing at a dark streak

On the kitchen wall. Last night she’d been
Ironing shirts and trying her best to explain
Something important to the children

When the old mother cat’s surviving
Two kittens’ insistent squealing and scrambling
Out of their cardboard box began

To get to her. The baby screamed every time
The oldest girl set him on the cold floor
While she carried a kitten back to its place

Near the stove, and the mother cat kept reaching
For the butter dish on the table. Twice, the woman
Stopped talking and set her iron down to swat

A quick kitten away from the dangling cord,
And she saw that one of the boys had begun to feed
Margarine to his favorite by the fingerful.

When it finally jumped from his lap and squatted
To piss on a pale man’s shirt dropped below
Her inroning board, the woman calmly stopped, unplugged

Her iron, picked up the gray kitten with one hand
And threw it, as if it were a housefly, hard
And straight at the yellow flowered wall

Across the room. It hit, cracked, and seemed to slide
Into a heap on the floor, leaving an od silence
In the house. They all stood still

Staring at the thing, until one child,
The middle boy, walked slowly out of the room
And down the hall without looking

At his mother or what she’d done. The others followed
And by morning everything was back to normal
Except for the mother standing there scrubbing.

This is a wonderful example of a poem building tension subtly. It’s amazing, really. Even before knowing what’s coming, you start to feel something’s amiss. It’s a believable situation of an overworked woman snapping. And as one of the kids… what, really, could you do? Be extra nice to cats in the future maybe… but really, a tremendous poem about a horrible event.

I, for some reason, absolutely love Kay Ryan’s book Say Uncle, and though I can’t quite explain it (other than the move in poetry toward brevity may have gone a little past what you could call “generally enjoyable” into the realm of visual art) but Ryan’s very terse, jokey, rhymey poems toe the edge while giving you enough to keep you busy. They’re thinkers, but not because they’re incomprehensible. Here’s one of my favorites, which has already been much anthologized.

Blandeur by Kay Ryan

If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth’s
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your glaciers
and silence
their calving,
halving or doubling
all geographical features
toward the mean.
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
from these parts.

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbor to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler’s wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
– your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers…

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grasscutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume.

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner’s daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in an act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler’s wife. Smell me.

Here is the poem.

The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

——

OK, I’ll break this down via form, and meaning. Not to say this is what was intended by Mr. Williams, but this is how I’m looking it, so take it as you will.

——

Form: Syllabically the poem is structured, line by line: 4/2 - 3/2 - 3/2 - 4/2. That’s only 22 syllables total. Remember that. The middle two stanzas break a compound word at the line break, without a hyphen. Very short poem, very tightly structured.

——

Meaning: OK, it’s imagistic. It’s minimalistic. The last three stanzas set the scene. We see the red wheelbarrow, that it is out in the rain, and that there are chickens. So much depends upon the words “So much depends / upon” in this poem. You can bring literary theory about the symbolism of rain, or color theory with the red, but in my mind those are less important. The first stanza, that’s another story. Why would so much depend upon a wheelbarrow? What do we know about, well, anything, in the universe of this poem, but what do we know of the location, the world? We know there are chickens and a wheelbarrow. Where would you find those two things? A farm is my guess. Why would so much depend on the wheelbarrow? What is a wheelbarrow to a farmer? A necessity. A farmer needs a wheelbarrow to complete his tasks, maintain his livelihood, his very life. Thus, so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens.

When we’re talking visual aesthetics it’s hard to not give an example. I wrote this quick poem to show one way the poem could take shape, but it is by no means the only way it could look.
(more…)

Moving Water, Tucson

Thunderclouds gathered every afternoon during the monsoons. Warm rain felt good on faces lifted to lick water from the sky. We played outside, having sense enough to go out and revel in the rain. We savored the first cool hours since summer hit.

The arroyo behind our house trickled with moving water. Kids gathered to see what it might bring. Tumbleweed, spears of ocotillo, creosote, a doll’s arm, some kid’s fort. Broken bottles, a red sweater. Whatever was nailed down, torn loose.

We stood on edges of sand, waiting for brown walls of water. We could hear it, massive water, not far off. The whole desert might come apart at once, might send horny toads and Gila monsters swirling, wet nightmares clawing both banks of the worst they could imagine and then some.

Under sheet lightning cracking the sky, somebody’s teenaged brother decided to ride the flash flood. He stood on wood in the bottom of the ditch, straddling the puny stream. “Get out, it’s coming,” kids yelled. “GET OUT,” we yelled. The kid bent his knees, held out his arms.

Land turned liquid that fast, water yanked our feet, stole our thongs, pulled in the edges of the arroyo, dragged whole trees root wads and all along, battering rams thrust downstream, anything you left there gone, anything you meant to go back and get, history, water so high you couldn’t touch bottom, water so fast you couldn’t get out of it, water so huge the earth couldn’t take it, water. We couldn’t step back. We had to be there, to see for ourselves. Water in a place where water’s always holy. Water remaking the world.

That kid on plywood, that kid waiting for the flood. He stood and the water lifted him. He stood, his eyes not seeing us. For a moment, we all wanted to be him, to be part of something so wet, so fast, so powerful, so much bigger than ourselves. That kid rode the flash flood inside us, the flash flood outside us. Artist unglued on a scrap of glued wood. For a few drenched seconds, he rode. The water took him, faster than you can believe. He kept his head up. Water you couldn’t see through, water half dirt, water whirling hard. Heavy rain weighed down our clothes. We stepped closer to the crumbling shore, saw him downstream smash against the footbridge at the end of the block. Water held him there, rushing on.

—

Here’s an essay by Peggy Shumaker titled Prose Poems, Paragraphs, Brief Lyric Nonfiction. The 400 word story, flash fiction, narrative prose poem, short short, whatever, appeared in the collection Short Takes, which is a really cool book about the short-short in creative non fiction. Definitely a worthwhile read. It got me hooked on cnf short-shorts. Thanks also, to Sydney Brown. Word.

Lying In a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

by James Wright

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Aubade at the Train Station

At 4 AM, these station lights grow bright,
the “City of New Orleans” late again,
delayed for some freight train derailed tonight.
You’re here to see me off, awake to send
me far away across the land, a trip
I planned without a notion of how hard
it would be to part, not to have your lips
waking me up tomorrow, no reward
from you to motivate me from my bed.
Around us sleepy passengers look grim,
arms sagging on their suitcases, their heads
as bent as wilted stalks, eyes dull, sight dim.
I look at you and hope the train remains
far from this town, still stuck out on the plains.

This poem was published as the first poem in Volume XVII of the Evansville Review. They always seem to be one of the best journals by percentage. More poems are really good than are decent, and only rarely will you find something that you don’t feel the need to finish after reading half of it. A rare feat. I salute you, Evansville Review poetry editor Corinna McClanahan. Tremendous poems you’ve picked.

Super Tuesday is coming up, so in the spirit of the occasion, here’s a poem written in the last week of October, 1980 by Los Angeles poet Bill Mohr.

Not Voting
Bill Mohr

Not voting is realizing that the important things
don’t get voted on. You don’t vote on who gets to carry
a gun in your neighborhood. You don’t vote on who gets to
teach your children. You don’t vote on who makes decisions
about zoning property. You don’t even vote on who arranges
bus and train schedules. So what’s the big fucking privilege
in voting for the person who has nuclear warheads
at his disposal. I don’t vote on who’s the official coroner.
I’m not angry. If I were,
I’d vote. You can’t bait me
by making my vote itself
appear to be the lesser of two evils.

The politicians insist that not voting
proves you are no better than a convicted arsonist,
who’s serving time with a pimp who murdered his mother,
with a rapist who melted down the wedding rings of
his victims, with a mail fraud artist who specializes
in insurance policies for inmates at old age homes.

Not voting is refusing to memorize
history: Alexander the Great defeated the Persians
at Issus. He then marched to the Indus,
and died. Gaul, North Africa, Carthage, Rome,
the cities fallen, barbarians, exile and return,
Valley Forge, Verdun, victory,
Pearl Harbor, the Camps. Not voting is altering
the course of history, while voting changes it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m for voting.
I want to vote on who gets drafted.
I want to vote on who gets killed in
friendly fire, hostile fire, fever.
I want to vote on who dies in the womb and who escapes.
I want to vote on the dead, on who gets brought
back to life, who gets to stay dead and famous,
and who, among the billions, gets to stay quite simply dead.

I want to vote on who gets to assassinate the next tyrant of ….
I think of assassins, the ones who are lucky,
Judith, dreaming of a sword, and the ones who weren’t, whose bomb
missed Hitler by seconds; Assassination and language.
In 1968, Eldridge Cleaver, standing in front
of 6,000 students, could chant
Fuck Ronald Reagan, and call him a motherfucker.
Frisson. The Lenny Bruce of politics.
But Cleaver knew better than to say Kill Ronald Reagan.
You can’t threaten a public official,
even in a poem. So when I say I want to vote
on who gets to assassinate the next tyrant of ….
I leave the country blank, because I don’t want to go to jail.
If I’m in jail, I don’t get to vote.

In her wonderful collection Tell Me, Kim Addonizio plays around with the pantoum form in poems like “A Childhood” “Spill” and this poem:

“The Revered Poet Instructs Her Students on the Importance of Revision”
by Kim Addonizio

Listen. I’m trying to tell you
how easily the poem you thought
was a beautiful woman becomes
cronelike by a kind of witchery.

How easy, you thought, to write a poem:
you scrawled last night in your journal
and in the morning, by a kind of witchery,
the poem was born, perfect, immortal.

But soon, too soon, what you scrawled in your journal
begins moaning, pitches forward and wails, hating
itself, the fact that it was ever born - imperfect, mortal
and suffering the way everything suffers,

every moaning lover, every wailing child,
each creature destined to be isolate and alone
and suffering the way everything suffers,
but I said that, didn’t I, I explained alreadya bout suffering

and about each one of you, destined to be isolate and alone
because writing is lonely work, is what I’m trying to say,
did I say that, did I explain already? I’m suffering
through your poems, and my own, oh God I feel

so desperately lonely is what I’m trying to say,
look at you you’re so young all of you,
I don’t care about your poems, or my own,
do you know how fast it goes, all I want is to be

as young as all of you, look at you
you’re so fucking clueless, oh I want
my life back, where did it go, I want it all to be
different but I’m standing here, lecturing again-

on what, on what? Oh fuck it,
listen, I was a beautiful woman,
you think I want to be standing here, lecturing? Look again
Listen. I’m trying to tell you.

(Notice how the poet plays on words and  alters them slightly to completely change the meaning of the repeated line? Try it yourself! Here’s info for the basic pantoum form, try to tweak one in a similar way.)

There it is right below us, so why not try to use the basic structure as a jumping point for a poem of your own? Use an interesting fact about an animal, such facts can be found here and here and here amongst a million other, likely better resources. Animal Planet, and National Geographic Channel often have really interesting animal stuff, take an hour out of your day and do some “research” for a poem. Learn a little.  Find a fact that can be used as a metaphor for a relationship. Begin the poem with a scientific sounding statement of that fact, be as specific as is feasible. Consider that metaphor in the terms of three other animals/earthy examples, then finally relate it to the relationship. Explain it as simply and quickly as you can, no more than two lines. Then move immediately (no dawdling, because dawdling is not trusting your reader is overwriting is weakening your poem) onto a recent event from the character’s relationship. Be it first or third person. (Second… well, if you want, but be wary of the second person.)  This event should expand the metaphor with a brief narrative. Move on to three things that once were, be it in the relationship, or before the relationship, depending on the lean you take (I love love! or One is the loneliest number, or any shades of tangerine in between) . Then take that metaphor to its end, as in, if the metaphor is about the negatives of dependency, then seperate (break up, walk away etc)  If it’s about animals migrating to a beautiful, far away breeding place, clear the hill and see the valley (This can be about happiness, a monumental event like marriage, erotica, plenty of room to make like a penguin, spread your wings and walk around.)

If this is seen separate from the poem, here it is: Lucia Perillo’s Martha 

Came across this wonderful poem by Lucia Perillo in Indiana Review’s Summer 2007 issue.

Martha
Nearly all the remaining quarter million Passenger Pigeons were killed in one day in 1896

They named the last one Martha
and she died September 1st, 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo,
she who was once one of so many billions
the sky went dark for days
when they flew past.
Makes me wonder what else could go,

some multitudinous widget like clouds or leaves
or the jellyfish ghosting the water in autumn
or the shore-shards of crushed clams?
Goodbye kisses:
once I had so many of you but now I notice
your numbers growing slim—

Yesterday a man stood me up in the sea
behind the big rock where the sand dollars live.
And when I said: Now we should kiss
it seemed we’d grown too peculiar
and I thought: oh-ho, kisses are you leaving too
like the man’s hair? Or like

the taut bellies we once had
or the menstrual period that was mine alone—
time flew its coop
our days had skid
and now see my commas going too
the way they say art mimics life?

So I did no hem-haw with the man
I told him to grab hold of my ears
since daylight’s burning
time’s a wasting
let’s fire it to feathereens—
perhaps the last of our wild flock.

What Narcissism Means to Me to me, means a great deal. One of my favorite books of poetry. Its bold statements and hesitant conditioning. Witty conversations (Hoagland uses many proper names and dialog) and interesting observations. You get a chuckle out of almost every poem, and every poem is worth reading more than once. This is one of the few poems in the collection that was previously unpublished. Enjoy.

Wasteful Gesture Only Not by Tony Hoagland.

Ruth visits her mother’s grave in the California hills.
She knows her mother isn’t there but the rectangle of grass
marks off the place where the memories are kept,

like a library book named Dorothy.
Some of the chapters might be: Dorothy:
Better Bird-Watcher Than Cook;

Dorothy, Wife and Atheist;
Passionate Recycler Dorothy, Here Lies But Not.
In the summer hills, where the tall tough grass

reminds you of persistence
and the endless wind
reminds you of indifference,

Ruth brings batches of white roses,
extravagant gesture not entirely wasteful
because as soon as she is gone she knows
the deer come out of the woods to eat them.

What was made for the eye
goes into the mouth,
thinks Ruth to herself as she drives away,
and in bed when she tries to remember her mother,

she drifts instead to the roses,
and when she thinks about the roses she
sees instead the deer chewing them—

pale petals of the roses in the dark
warm bellies of the sleeping deer—
that’s what going to sleep is like.

I was writing a paper on Yusef Komunyakaa recently, and thought I came up with a pretty good reading of his awesome poem “You and I are disappearing” and it’s a really good poem, deceptively simple, so I figured I’d share, in case anyone cares, or needs to write an essay on this and searches for the poem. If so: Jackpot! Also, here is Yusef Komunyakaa reading the poem. So if you’re interested in a possible narrative progression through the poem, then this is the place for you.

“You and I Are Disappearing” is an anaphoric poem riddled with similes. It is free verse in its purest essence., holding no syllabic, metric, or rhyming patterns. The poem is about a young Vietnamese woman wronged. In this case she is burned alive in a fire set by the American soldiers, and the narrator carries the memory of her screaming like shackles. The sequence of similes used by Komunyakaa is very specific, and through these sidelong glances into the narrator’s guilt we see his true feelings about the war.

The poem’s first simile is “she burns like a piece of paper.” (L4) This indicates the quick burn of something small, inconsequential. But yet, he still hears it, the cry “still burning / inside my head.” (L2) The narrator is trying to think of the screaming as something small. It continues to “She burns like foxfire” (L5) which is the narrator trying to see the death as something natural, like foxfire. Then she burns “like a sack of dry ice” (L13) meaning that there was a false sense of smoke. Here the narrator’s trying to convince himself that it wasn’t as painful as it sounded, wasn’t as horrible. Immediately following that thought the narrator contradicts that defensive image with the next when “She burns like oil on water.” (L14) A distinct burning. This image is the narrator reminding himself that there is a stark difference between burning a section of field and burning a village. The human cost is intentionally called to mind, in a way, to remain human. That return to humanity returns the narrator to a familiar image from home, “a cattail torch / dipped in gasoline.” (L15) Yet, the narrator is still in Vietnam, and this fact draws out the next simile where she “glows like the fat tip / of a banker’s cigar.” (L16) The war is not one of the narrator’s choosing. He was stolen from his home to fight a war to keep the rich rich, and the poor, like himself, poor. That glowing tip, the real movement behind the war is “silent as quicksilver.” (L17) Komunyakaa then takes a brief respite from similes to lay on the beautiful and misleading image of a tiger under a rainbow at night. The tiger is a pretty, but deadly animal. The girl, whether only in the narrator’s mind or actuality, is a Viet Cong agent. A beautiful saboteur. But still, she is a real girl that died, and that thought “burns like a shot glass of vodka.” (L20) When vodka was not enough, the next step taken to forget the human cost: opiates from poppy fields. But still “she rises like dragonsmoke / to my nostrils.” (L21) He is still unable to forget her, to lose that cry. It has set in motion a major change in the narrator’s sense of humanity that is a very lengthy and painful process, a forced exodus, “a burning bush / driven by a godawful wind.” (L23)