Poemunity — your poem community

Our Box Henry hid    away. John Berryman’s Ol’ Henry sulked. I see his point—he was trying to put one over. It was that he thought that we thought he could do it that breaks our Henry out this-a-way. So, here he will come out and talk. All the world like a fool-bent lover once did see from Ol’ Henry’s side. Here comes a departure: hereafter, something falls out. Now, it might go fraught. Let us see how Box Henry, pried open for all to see, survives. What he has now to say is a long wonder the world can bear and see. Once, with his black-face worn, John was glad all at the top. And he sang. Here, in this land where some strong be, let Box Henry grow in every head. From Dream Song 1

a commingling sky a semi-tropic night that cast the blackest shadow of the easily torn, untrembling banana leaf or Quebec! what a horrible city so Steubenville is better? the sinking sensation when someone drowns thinking, “This can’t be happening to me!” the profit of excavating the battlefield where Hannibal whomped the Romans the sinuous beauty of words like allergy the tonic resonance of pill when used as in “she is a pill” on the other hand I am not going to espouse any short stories in which lawn mowers clack. No, it is absolutely forbidden for words to echo the act described; or try to. Except very directly as in bong. And tickle. Oh it is inescapable kiss. Marriages of the atmosphere are worth celebrating where Tudor City catches the sky or the glass side of a building lit up at night in fog “What is that gold-green tetrahedron down the river?” “You are experiencing a new sensation.” if the touch-me-nots are not in bloom neither are the chrysanthemums

1. Someone plays & the breaking mounts. Raw material for worthy forthcoming; indecipherable, discrete. Plays rhapsodies as the air cools and vanquishes: nothing sits still, yet. The land is a result of its use, I explained. Everything else rested while the kids made a girdle removed from classical syntax. Shed, and something breaks, mounting the small hill to its vista: I saw a rope of trees in another country. I could not say I am lost in the proper way. The season is huge. This house is haunted: I planted it. Where? In the shed, and spoiled by attention. You see? Every bit counts, when the morning displays the serious ratio of the given stars. What made us tear the hours into lines? So things became a burden to shed, and astute as a hungry pilgrim but not brave, not expert. It is impolite to stare. Is unwise to plunder the easily forgotten, easily shed, and 2. They drummed and drummed, attached to a vestigial clamor. The heat splayed; sparklers ravished the fog. Morning tore the dead back to shore; enemy ships floundered and were forgotten. Still, nothing was appeased: the living silhouette drifted into view like an ephemeral sail promoting ease between wreckages. Not speaking a word of English she animated the landscape with abundance, a chosen self lively translated into the color of her eyes. Awkward and luminous, a stilted charm separating figure from ground, and solving it. What pushed up toward the abysmal with such new appraisals, such sure interest? The mute girl had seen glories but what had she come to know? A finite figure in a rainy field. A naked figure in a pool. A skipping figure across a bridge. A lost figure on a city street. A moaning figure on a huge bed. A smiling face in a photograph. All summer, I circled the garden for her sake. In memory of my sister Jennifer

If only I could forget him, the Frenchman I saw outside our quarters, creeping round near daybreak in that density of garden as if he'd almost grown into the ground. He was just looking back, peering about him to check that he was safe here and alone: once he was sure, his plunder was all his! Whatever chanced, he'd not be moving on. He was already eating. He was wolfing a pilfered turnip hidden in his rags. Eating raw cattle feed. But he'd no sooner swallowed a mouthful than it made him gag; and the sweet food encountered on his tongue delight and then disgust, as it might be the unhappy and the happy, meeting in their bodies' all-consuming ecstasy. Only forget that body. . . Shoulder blades trembling, and a hand all skin and bone, the palm cramming his mouth in such a way that it too seemed to feed in clinging on. And then the furious and desperate shame of organs galled with one another, forced to tear from one another what should bind them together in community at last. The way his clumsy feet had been left out of all that gibbering bestial joy; and how they stood splayed out and paralyzed beneath the body's torture and fierce rapture now. And his look too—if I could forget that! Retching, he went on gobbling as if driven on and on, just to eat, no matter what, anything, this or that, himself even. Why go on? It turned out that he'd escaped from the prison camp nearby—guards came for him. I wander, as I did then in that garden, among my garden shadows here at home. "If only I could forget him, the Frenchman"— I'm looking through my notes, I read one out, and from my ears, my eyes, my mouth, the seething memory boils over in his shout: "I'm hungry!" And immediately I feel the undying hunger which this wretched creature has long since ceased to feel, for which there is no mitigating nourishment in nature. He feeds on me. More and more hungrily! And I'm less and less sufficient, for my part. Now he, who would have been contented once with any kind of food, demands my heart.

Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy! For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood Upon our side, we who were strong in love! Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!—Oh! times, In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways Of custom, law, and statute, took at once The attraction of a country in romance! When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights, When most intent on making of herself A prime Enchantress—to assist the work Which then was going forward in her name! Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth, The beauty wore of promise, that which sets (As at some moment might not be unfelt Among the bowers of paradise itself ) The budding rose above the rose full blown. What temper at the prospect did not wake To happiness unthought of? The inert Were roused, and lively natures rapt away! They who had fed their childhood upon dreams, The playfellows of fancy, who had made All powers of swiftness, subtilty, and strength Their ministers,—who in lordly wise had stirred Among the grandest objects of the sense, And dealt with whatsoever they found there As if they had within some lurking right To wield it;—they, too, who, of gentle mood, Had watched all gentle motions, and to these Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more wild, And in the region of their peaceful selves;— Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty Did both find, helpers to their heart's desire, And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish; Were called upon to exercise their skill, Not in Utopia, subterranean fields, Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us,—the place where in the end We find our happiness, or not at all!

you are listening to the transmission via seed pearl, aural irritant clockwork and sparkgap ultra high and superlow precious black opal crystal and glass shudders and sings broad cast scattered the seeds among the apocrypha each agent at land or sea satellite or space direct conversion of royal register and groove high in fidelity to our regenerative radio hisses and shouts everything that cannot be owned belongs now to us irradiant waves oscillate below visible light to arrive and reside requires no medium but occupies vacuum and air transformational emission follow your radiotelegraph we are your conductor our amplitude varies we fluctuate the frequency we are not subject to static interference we embed the subcarrier hush y’all you need not know that language if you know this sound

Do you see current events differently because you were raised by a black father and are married to a black man? I am surprised they haven’t left already — things have gotten downright frosty, nearly unbearable. A mob of them is apparently mouthing off outside when I put down my newspaper and we all gather to stand beside my daughter in the bay of kitchen windows.Quiscalus quiscula: this name sounds like a spell which, after its casting, will make things crumble into a complement of unanswerable questions. Though, if you need me to tell you God’s honest truth, I know nothing but their common name the morning we watch them attack our feeder. I complain about the mess they leave. Hulls I’ll have to sweep up or ignore. My father — who I am thankful is still alive — says We could use a different kind of seed

At a bus stop in Arles a fellow wounded in the Last War winced into sunlight:Oui, they are beating the drums against les juifs again, and the Moors. France is an old man!

I have come again to the perfumed city. Houses with tiered porches, some decorated with shells. You know from the windows that the houses are from a different time. I am not to blame for what changes, though sometimes I have trouble sleeping. Between the carriage houses, there are little gardens separated by gates. Lately, I have been thinking about the gates. The one ornamented with the brass lion, I remember it was warm to the touch even in what passes here for winter. But last night, when I closed my eyes, it was not the lion that I pictured first.

I At the Poem Society a black-haired man stands up to say “You make me sick with all your talk about restraint and mature talent! Haven’t you ever looked out the window at a painting by Matisse, Or did you always stay in hotels where there were too many spiders crawling on your visages? Did you ever glance inside a bottle of sparkling pop, Or see a citizen split in two by the lightning? I am afraid you have never smiled at the hibernation Of bear cubs except that you saw in it some deep relation To human suffering and wishes, oh what a bunch of crackpots!” The black-haired man sits down, and the others shoot arrows at him. A blond man stands up and says, “He is right! Why should we be organized to defend the kingdom Of dullness? There are so many slimy people connected with poetry, Too, and people who know nothing about it! I am not recommending that poets like each other and organize to fight them, But simply that lightning should strike them.” Then the assembled mediocrities shot arrows at the blond-haired man. The chairman stood up on the platform, oh he was physically ugly! He was small-limbed and –boned and thought he was quite seductive, But he was bald with certain hideous black hairs, And his voice had the sound of water leaving a vaseline bathtub, And he said, “The subject for this evening’s discussion is poetry On the subject of love between swans.” And everyone threw candy hearts At the disgusting man, and they stuck to his bib and tucker, And he danced up and down on the platform in terrific glee And recited the poetry of his little friends—but the blond man stuck his head Out of a cloud and recited poems about the east and thunder, And the black-haired man moved through the stratosphere chanting Poems of the relationships between terrific prehistoric charcoal whales, And the slimy man with candy hearts sticking all over him Wilted away like a cigarette paper on which the bumblebees have urinated, And all the professors left the room to go back to their duty, And all that were left in the room were five or six poets And together they sang the new poem of the twentieth century Which, though influenced by Mallarmé, Shelley, Byron, and Whitman, Plus a million other poets, is still entirely original And is so exciting that it cannot be here repeated. You must go to the Poem Society and wait for it to happen. Once you have heard this poem you will not love any other, Once you have dreamed this dream you will be inconsolable, Once you have loved this dream you will be as one dead, Once you have visited the passages of this time’s great art! 2 “Oh to be seventeen years old Once again,” sang the red-haired man, “and not know that poetry Is ruled with the sceptre of the dumb, the deaf, and the creepy!” And the shouting persons battered his immortal body with stones And threw his primitive comedy into the sea From which it sang forth poems irrevocably blue. Who are the great poets of our time, and what are their names? Yeats of the baleful influence, Auden of the baleful influence, Eliot of the baleful influence (Is Eliot a great poet? no one knows), Hardy, Stevens, Williams (is Hardy of our time?), Hopkins (is Hopkins of our time?), Rilke (is Rilke of our time?), Lorca (is Lorca of our time?), who is still of our time? Mallarmé, Valéry, Apollinaire, Éluard, Reverdy, French poets are still of our time, Pasternak and Mayakovsky, is Jouve of our time? Where are young poets in America, they are trembling in publishing houses and universities, Above all they are trembling in universities, they are bathing the library steps with their spit, They are gargling out innocuous (to whom?) poems about maple trees and their children, Sometimes they brave a subject like the Villa d’Este or a lighthouse in Rhode Island, Oh what worms they are! they wish to perfect their form. Yet could not these young men, put in another profession, Succeed admirably, say at sailing a ship? I do not doubt it, Sir, and I wish we could try them. (A plane flies over the ship holding a bomb but perhaps it will not drop the bomb, The young poets from the universities are staring anxiously at the skies, Oh they are remembering their days on the campus when they looked up to watch birds excrete, They are remembering the days they spent making their elegant poems.) Is there no voice to cry out from the wind and say what it is like to be the wind, To be roughed up by the trees and to bring music from the scattered houses And the stones, and to be in such intimate relationship with the sea That you cannot understand it? Is there no one who feels like a pair of pants? 3 Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.” The yellow hobbyhorse rocks to and fro, and from the chimney Drops the Strangler! The white and pink roses are slightly agitated by the struggle, But afterwards beside the dead “poet” they cuddle up comfortingly against their vase. They are safer now, no one will compare them to the sea. Here on the railroad train, one more time, is the Strangler. He is going to get that one there, who is on his way to a poetry reading. Agh! Biff! A body falls to the moving floor. In the football stadium I also see him, He leaps through the frosty air at the maker of comparisons Between football and life and silently, silently strangles him! Here is the Strangler dressed in a cowboy suit Leaping from his horse to annihilate the students of myth! The Strangler’s ear is alert for the names of Orpheus, Cuchulain, Gawain, and Odysseus, And for poems addressed to Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, To Ezra Pound, and to personages no longer living Even in anyone’s thoughts—O Strangler the Strangler! He lies on his back in the waves of the Pacific Ocean. 4 Supposing that one walks out into the air On a fresh spring day and has the misfortune To encounter an article on modern poetry In New World Writing, or has the misfortune To see some examples of some of the poetry Written by the men with their eyes on the myth And the Missus and the midterms, in the Hudson Review, Or, if one is abroad, in Botteghe Oscure, Or indeed in Encounter, what is one to do With the rest of one’s day that lies blasted to ruins All bluely about one, what is one to do? O surely one cannot complain to the President, Nor even to the deans of Columbia College, Nor to T. S. Eliot, nor to Ezra Pound, And supposing one writes to the Princess Caetani, “Your poets are awful!” what good would it do? And supposing one goes to the Hudson Review With a package of matches and sets fire to the building? One ends up in prison with trial subscriptions To the Partisan, Sewanee, and Kenyon Review! 5 Sun out! perhaps there is a reason for the lack of poetry In these ill-contented souls, perhaps they need air! Blue air, fresh air, come in, I welcome you, you are an art student, Take off your cap and gown and sit down on the chair. Together we shall paint the poets—but no, air! perhaps you should go to them, quickly, Give them a little inspiration, they need it, perhaps they are out of breath, Give them a little inhuman company before they freeze the English language to death! (And rust their typewriters a little, be sea air! be noxious! kill them, if you must, but stop their poetry! I remember I saw you dancing on the surf on the Côte d’Azur, And I stopped, taking my hat off, but you did not remember me, Then afterwards you came to my room bearing a handful of orange flowers And we were together all through the summer night!) That we might go away together, it is so beautiful on the sea, there are a few white clouds in the sky! But no, air! you must go . . . Ah, stay! But she has departed and . . . Ugh! what poisonous fumes and clouds! what a suffocating atmosphere! Cough! whose are these hideous faces I see, what is this rigor Infecting the mind? where are the green Azores, Fond memories of childhood, and the pleasant orange trolleys, A girl’s face, red-white, and her breasts and calves, blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes, fahrenheit Temperatures, dandelions, and trains, O blue?! Wind, wind, what is happening? Wind! I can’t see any bird but the gull, and I feel it should symbolize . . . Oh, pardon me, there’s a swan, one two three swans, a great white swan, hahaha how pretty they are! Smack! Oh! stop! help! yes, I see—disrespect for my superiors—forgive me, dear Zeus, nice Zeus, parabolic bird, O feathered excellence! white! There is Achilles too, and there’s Ulysses, I’ve always wanted to see them, And there is Helen of Troy, I suppose she is Zeus too, she’s so terribly pretty—hello, Zeus, my you are beautiful, Bang! One more mistake and I get thrown out of the Modern Poetry Association, help! Why aren’t there any adjectives around? Oh there are, there’s practically nothing else—look, here’s grey, utter,agonized, total, phenomenal, gracile, invidious, sundered, and fused, Elegant, absolute, pyramidal, and . . . Scream! but what can I describe with these words? States! States symbolized and divided by two, complex states, magic states, states of consciousness governed by an aroused sincerity, cockadoodle doo! Another bird! is it morning? Help! where am I? am I in the barnyard? oink oink, scratch, moo! Splash! My first lesson. “Look around you. What do you think and feel?”Uhhh. . . “Quickly!”This Connecticut landscape would have pleasedVermeer. Wham! A-Plus. “Congratulations!” I am promoted. OOOhhhhh I wish I were dead, what a headache! My second lesson: “Rewrite your first lesson line six hundred times. Try to make it into a magnetic field.” I can do it too. But my poor line! What a nightmare! Here comes a tremendous horse, Trojan, I presume. No, it’s my third lesson. “Look, look! Watch him, see what he’s doing? That’s what we want you to do. Of course it won’t be the same as his at first, but . . .” I demur. Is there no other way to fertilize minds? Bang! I give in . . . Already I see my name in two or three anthologies, a serving girl comes into the barn bringing me the anthologies, She is very pretty and I smile at her a little sadly, perhaps it is my last smile! Perhaps she will hit me! But no, she smiles in return, and she takes my hand. My hand, my hand! what is this strange thing I feel in my hand, on my arm, on my chest, my face—can it be . . . ? it is! AIR! Air, air, you’ve come back! Did you have any success? “What do you think?” I don’t know, air. You are so strong, air. And she breaks my chains of straw, and we walk down the road, behind us the hideous fumes! Soon we reach the seaside, she is a young art student who places her head on my shoulder, I kiss her warm red lips, and here is the Strangler, reading the KenyonReview! Good luck to you, Strangler! Goodbye, Helen! goodbye, fumes! goodbye, abstracted dried-up boys! goodbye, dead trees! goodbye, skunks! Goodbye, manure! goodbye, critical manicure! goodbye, you big fat men standing on the east coast as well as the west giving poems the test! farewell, Valéry’s stern dictum! Until tomorrow, then, scum floating on the surface of poetry! goodbye for a moment, refuse that happens to land in poetry’s boundaries! adieu, stale eggs teaching imbeciles poetry to bolster up your egos! adios, boring anomalies of these same stale eggs! Ah, but the scum is deep! Come, let me help you! and soon we pass into the clear blue water. Oh GOODBYE, castrati of poetry! farewell, stale pale skunky pentameters (the only honest English meter, gloop gloop!) until tomorrow, horrors! oh, farewell! Hello, sea! good morning, sea! hello, clarity and excitement, you great expanse of green— O green, beneath which all of them shall drown!