black shoe, in which i have lived like a foot

sylvia plath's son committed suicide this month. you can get quite a full story here. what feels odd for me, as the article reflects, is that this man's life seems overshadowed by his parents, more specifically the barrage of suicides that surrounded them. i think plath's career was overshadowed by her death. what i mean is that her death became more famous than her poems.

one of many things that i find strange about this article is the way that the author quotes the poetry of plath and hughes when talking about their son. that just seems so weird to quote poetry in an article as though it were some kind of personal statement or as if it pertains to anything concrete.

i resisted plath for a long time because i really just thought of her as a narcissistically depressed, one-note type poet. i became more interested in her when i heard two of her poems read theatrically this year at sarah lawrence. the first was "daddy" which may be her most famous poem. i  don't know what this poem does for me on the page, but when read aloud, by a guy no less, it was some freaky, freaky shit.

"lady lazarus" is the other. i have to say i enjoy this poem much more for the reason that it actually scares the bejeezus out of me. it's incredibly haunting. i love when a speaker can be totally vulnerable and remain on the offensive in a poem-- it's like the speaker doesn't compromise- sticks with a confident tone. 

the key line in "lady lazarus," the one that highlights intent and tone is "do i terrify?--" the dashes, as though there is some lingering silence after the question. as a reader, this is the first line where i feel the anxiety in this poem, and what i love about it, is that when it's asked, my internal response is not an automatic yes, but suddenly i am receiving the poem differently, understanding the speaker's tone differently. plath is a little more subtle than i initially gave her credit for. 

while on the subject of dead poets, read this poem by hayden carruth.

Graves

Both of us had been close 

to Joel, and at Joel's death

my friend had gone to the wake

and the memorial service

and more recently he had 

visited Joel's grave, there

at the back of the grassy

cemetery among the trees,

"a quiet, gentle place," he said,

"befitting Joel." And I said,

"What's the point of going

to look at graves?" I went 

into one of my celebrated

tirades. "People go to look

at the grave of Keats or Hart

Crane, they go traveling just to

do it. What a waste of time. 

What do they find there? Hell,

I wouldn't go look at the grave of

Shakespeare if it was just

down the street. I wouldn't 

look at-" And then I stopped. I

was about to say the grave of God

until I realized I'm looking at it

all the time....

when can i go to the supermarket and buy what i need with my good looks?

i'm so psyched that when poets die hot people get picked to play them in the biopic.

allen ginsberg, as i mentioned in my jersey post, was born in newark and raised in paterson, nj. 

i never got that down with ginsberg, or any of the beat poets really. kind of boring, self-referential, eh. or maybe their whole attitude is so over-expressed at this point that it's impossible for me to appreciate it. i liked other things by them. on the road, burroughs' naked lunch (would have made a great video game, trust.) my favorite poem by ginsberg is "america". it's a good example of the merging of his playfulness in a supermarket in california, and the darkness of howl.

god, ginsberg, you're so jersey. i mean just look at the last lines of howl:

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-

journey on the highway across america in tears

to the door of my cottage in the western night.

it's like a goddamn springsteen lyric!!

rambo, rimbaud, which is best?

following up

some afterthoughts i've been having about that paul celan poem...

why does the last line, "it is time," have to be there? i don't like it. "it is time it were time" is not much stronger. i question the necessity of these two lines. they're too heavy handed for me, and don't do anything interesting. they're flat and feel like add ons and they're lame. get that shit outta here. 

the part of the poem i'm really digging is the line "we sleep like wine in the conches." that's beautiful. this image is completely invented; something i've never seen before or thought of, and yet when i read that line it's totally there. i can see the stillness, heaviness, thickness of the sleep. it's a perfect example of something abstract grounded in a concrete image. it works so well. it's especially nice because of the line that follows it: "like the sea in the moon's blood ray." i'm a really big fan of the double-simile when it's done right, and in this case i really think it is. the sea picks up on the conch, and the moon's blood ray picks up on the color of the wine. but, even though these two images "match" in a way, they are images of different things. in the second one, i see the sea still at night in the light of the moon. sometimes the moon is red? right? doesn't that happen? i'm not sure, but even if not, there's still something matchy-matchy about the sea under a blood ray and a pool of wine inside a conch shell. it's working. 

you my quiet, my open one, and-

tonight i bought the complete poems of paul celan (born paul antschel, apparently- thanks wikipedia.) most of my teachers have been recommending him to me for a while, so i'm here. he lead a pretty interesting life. paul celan (i'm so jealous of the name celan) was born in romania to a german speaking jewish family. both celan's parents were killed in concentration camps during world war II, which provides a good deal of subject matter for his poems.

"there is nothing on earth that can keep a poet from writing, not even the fact that he's jewish and german is the language of his poems." -paul celan

the book i bought has the german on the right side of the page and the english translation on the left. i wish i spoke german so badly. i want to understand how he's using the language. it's been suggested that some of the poems show a deep frustration and dismantling of german. i wish i could observe this better. imagine a poet who hates his own language, and yet is confined to it as a means to express himself. not that he only spoke one language. he also got down with russian, romanian, french and yiddish, but german was his first language- and thus the language of his poetry.

here is a poem by him. it's not my favorite, but it was my gateway poem in realizing that i liked him. so i think you guys might like it too. it's also a little lighter than some of his other stuff, which is pretty dark. enjoy.

Corona

Autumn eats its leaf out of my hands: we are friends.

From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:

then time returns to the shell.

In the mirror it's Sunday,

in dream there is room for sleeping,

our mouths speak the truth.

My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one:

we look at each other,

we exchange dark words,

we love each other like poppy and recollection,

we sleep like wine in the conches,

like the sea in the moon's blood ray.

We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from the street:

it is time they knew!

It is time the stone made an effort to flower,

time unrest had a beating heart.

It is time it were time.

It is time.

IS THERE ANYBODY REALLY ALIVE!?!

mm-- sing it bruce. i love new jersey. i do. listen to darkness on the edge of town by bruce springsteen and try to tell me it's not the most genuine thing you've ever heard. the state feels alive to me. it has a voice. lacking in pretense and brimming in all things quintessential when it comes to your most romantic idea of america, jersey is the place 4 me.

come on, tell me you don't want to get some burgers on that grill and hang with my tikki torches. (hi dad!)

it wasn't until i moved to new jersey that i started writing poetry. i'm not sure why, but new jersey definitely unlocked something in me that led to poetry. a lot of poets are from new jersey. it's one of the most poetic states around. allow me to explain. 

walt whitan! uncle walt! you can go visit his grave in camden, if you're into that kind of thing (i'm not.)

william carlos williams from rutherford

allen ginsberg fucked a latin teacher from my high school. no really.

amiri baraka born and raised in newark. nj poet laureate until there was some, uh, unpleasantness. 

w.s. merwin raised in union city, nj. graduated from princeton.

robert pinksy born in long branch, undergrad at rutgers newark

joyce carol oates wrote about the smell of nj. nice. 

there's a lot more i'm just going to leave out, but look into jersey poets. for those of you interested, i highly recommend this anthology: poets of new jersey.

my copy is in the mail!

please enjoy some words on nj:

"new jersey's gift to its poets... is that it's a place of many places, essentially amorphous, freeing us to look at the world." - stephen dunn

Night Driving

by joyce carol oates

South into Jersey on I-95 rain and

windshield wipers and someone you love asleep

in the seat beside you, light on all sides

like teeth winking and that smell like baking

bread gone wrong and you want 

to die it's so beautiful-

you love the enormous trucks floating in spray

and the tall smokestacks rimmed with flame

and this hammering in your head

this magnet drawing what's deepest

in you you can't name

exactly to know it's there.

<3

can poetry matter?

that's the title of a book, and an essay by dana gioia. as a poet gioia (pronounced joy! ah!) is only so-so, but this essay actually makes a lot of good points. can poetry matter? ..well, it matters to me. it matters to the other poets in my classes, and the teachers i've had. but that's kind of what he's saying- that poetry is only being read by other poets and this is a problem because poetry IS for everyone. i swear. it's about being human, it's about taking your private language (we all have one or many, come on, don't lie) and fitting it together like a little puzzle that hopefully makes someone else feel something. it's cool! you should try. i would like to see poetry appeal to the general population outside of colleges and MFA programs.  i mean it would be nice to not feel completely embarrassed when someone asks me what my major is (literally my least favorite conversation to have.) i bet a lot of aspiring "professional" artists feel this way. it makes one vulnerable to admit that they care about something that they could fail so easily and miserably at. i remember someone once asking me how i would do an internship for a career in poetry and i said i guess i'd spend a lot of time looking out the window. it's really not easy at the college level to say "i want to be a musician." but still, music is so much more widely appreciated in our culture than poetry. same goes for movies, acting, photography and a bunch of other different visual medias. even novels and short fiction are way way way more popular.

WHY!?!?! for real, everyone is a poet. there is not one person that i know who i haven't heard say or do something poetic at one time or another, and the poetry that i like best is the kind that sneaks up on me when i'm out in the real world (i.e. not my blog.)

check out this poem by jeffrey mcdaniel, my advisor here at school. he has four books: alibi school, the forgiveness parade, the splinter factory, and the endarkenment (such a bangin title.) he rules. get into him. 

Poetry Nation

In the capital square there is a statue of Jack Spicer,

puking his guts out, his last words- my vocabulary

did this to me! - inscribed in the marble base. 

In nightclubs, supermodels stomp their heels

and dream of their small, dark hearts

being enlarged with compassion implants,

as the poetess gets all the attention.

Guys in trendy rock bands mope like damp rats

whenever a poet storms into a room.

Everyone wants to be a poet, even the coroner

scribbling in his note pad at the crime scene:

a drowned man is judged only by his piers.

Carjackers pause in mid-heist to consider the moon. 

Hallmark is burned to a crisp. Bill Knot's sillhouette

appears on every thirteen dollar bill. 

Homeless people stand in line for Pablo Neruda. 

In hospitals, they feed cancer patients Carolyn Forche.

In churches there are giant wooden replicas 

of Emily Dickinson nailed to a cross. 

Instead of NBC and CBS, there is W.S. Merwin,

the Walt Whitman channel, and Sappho at Nite.

The Constitution was written by Tristan Tzara.

All men are created equal under Dada.

The drug czar makes sure everyone gets enough.

Lucille Clifton for president!

Charlie Parker is the national bird.

Howl  is recited before pro football games.

You can pay for groceries with words.