1269 Arts and sciences poems

ou plutôt les chanter Recite your lines aloud, Ronsard advised, Or, even better, sing them. Common speech Held all the rhythmic measures that he prized In poetry. He had much more to teach, But first he taught that. Several poets paid Him heed. The odd one even made the grade, Building a pretty castle on the beach. But on the whole it’s useless to point out That making the thing musical is part Of pinning down what you are on about. The voice leads to the craft, the craft to art: All this is patent to the gifted few Who know, before they can, what they must do To make the mind a spokesman for the heart. As for the million others, they are blessed: This is their age. Their slapdash in demand From all who would take fright were thought expressed In ways that showed a hint of being planned, They may say anything, in any way. Why not? Why shouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they? Nothing to study, nothing to understand. And yet it could be that their flight from rhyme And reason is a technically precise Response to the confusion of a time When nothing, said once, merits hearing twice. It isn’t that their deafness fails to match The chaos. It’s the only thing they catch. No form, no pattern. Just the rolling dice Of idle talk. Always a blight before, It finds a place today, fulfills a need: As those who cannot write increase the store Of verses fit for those who cannot read, For those who can do both the field is clear To meet and trade their wares, the only fear That mutual benefit might look like greed. It isn’t, though. It’s just the interchange Of showpiece and attention that has been There since the cavemen took pains to arrange Pictures of deer and bison to be seen To best advantage in the flickering light. Our luck is to sell tickets on the night Only to those who might know what we mean, And they are drawn to us by love of sound. In the first instance, it is how we sing That brings them in. No mystery more profound Than how a melody soars from a string Of syllables, and yet this much we know: Ronsard was right to emphasize it so, Even in his day. Now, it’s everything: The language falls apart before our eyes, But what it once was echoes in our ears As poetry, whose gathered force defies Even the drift of our declining years. A single lilting line, a single turn Of phrase: these always proved, at last we learn, Life cries for joy though it must end in tears.

There is no audience because there is no audience. So if you speak only to imagined beings what does "only" mean? -------------------------- This building formerly a restaurant . . . this small room has been scraped of its paint and denuded of most former furniture: but also it has grown in size—can a building be enticed to grow? Because it is now as big as an airplane hangar. -------------------------- Your beautiful face unbloodied beneath flies Mother of flies your beauty to turn to. If only the audience could see how you are peaceful and the flies languid, glossy But the audience will still bring its own feelings to these words not seeing you not seeing what I am present for. -------------------------- Who has left me here, I have. Who are your familiars Come into the enlarging page if you dare -------------------------- Because he invented your shape I do mean structure because he invented you badly everything is still hidden. -------------------------- I was to impale myself on a quadrangular steel rod, with a blunt end with a blunt end which would make puncture more difficult and I tried—it's too hard. I can't Okay said the voice. I can't Okay then I was weeping But it's blood! I'm crying blood! I screamed That's part of it said the voice. --------------------------- I think this is hard. (That's part of it) How they prefer him must go. I think this is difficult singing Length and repetition create power If this voice can return like a body It resembles something that's already been, Changing. ------------------------------ Chestnuts broken autumnal fungi so you will remember, that it's fall outside falling. you'll go down this is no story for the puling social classes No not at all it's for us my familiars say who let me weep blood on their ground.

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel— Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens— But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof. Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, Ballades by the score with the same old thought: The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished; And what is love but a rose that fades? Life all around me here in the village: Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth, Courage, constancy, heroism, failure— All in the loom, and oh what patterns! Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers— Blind to all of it all my life long. Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics, While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines?

Nico Vassilakis uses various processes to bring us to his visual poems. In “phabetical” he uses a toy microscope with a built-in video camera to capture highly magnified images of text, often with his hand moving the microscope across the page to capture still text in motion. As he has done here, Vassilakis sometimes modifies the settings on the camera so that the texts are captured in unnatural colors, and he sometimes reverses the polarity of these to further alter their materiality. In this poem, he has used a software process to band many slips of texts into columns and rows, and he has captured these blocks of text in motion so that we can see all of the middle column but only half of the two columns to either side of it. The result uses Greek letters (an homage to his ancestry) so abstracted that they appear before us almost as concrete images: birds, an arm reaching out, a child kicking a ball. He forces us to see not the common symbols of our alphabet but instead the “phabet”: the pictographs from which all alphabets arose.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry > >

“That all these dyings may be life in death” I was living in San Francisco My heart was in Manhattan It made no sense, no reference point Hearing the sad horns at night, fragile evocations of female stuff The 3 tones (the last most resonant) were like warnings, haiku-muezzins at dawn The call came in the afternoon “Frank, is that really you?” I'd awake chilled at dawn in the wooden house like an old ship Stay bundled through the day sitting on the stoop to catch the sun I lived near the park whose deep green over my shoulder made life cooler Was my spirit faltering, grown duller? I want to be free of poetry's ornaments, its duty, free of constant irritation, me in it, what was grander reason for being? Do it, why? (Why, Frank?) To make the energies dance etc. My coat a cape of horrors I'd walk through town or impending earthquake. Was that it? Ominous days. Street shiny with hallucinatory light on sad dogs, too many religious people, or a woman startled me by her look of indecision near the empty stadium I walked back spooked by my own darkness Then Frank called to say “What? Not done complaining yet? Can't you smell the eucalyptus, have you never neared the Pacific? ‘While frank and free/call for musick while your veins swell’” he sang, quoting a metaphysician "Don't you know the secret, how to wake up and see you don't exist, but that does, don't you see phenomena is so much more important than this? I always love that.” “Always?” I cried, wanting to believe him “Yes.” “But say more! How can you if it's sad & dead?” “But that's just it! If! It isn't. It doesn't want to be Do you want to be?” He was warming to his song “Of course I don't have to put up with as much as you do these days. These years. But I do miss the color, the architecture, the talk. You know, it was the life! And dying is such an insult. After all I was in love with breath and I loved embracing those others, the lovers, with my body.” He sighed & laughed He wasn't quite as I'd remembered him Not less generous, but more abstract Did he even have a voice now, I wondered or did I think it up in the middle of this long day, phone in hand now dialing Manhattan

A character representing sound. Or. A machine invented by Thomas Edison by which noise is recorded and reproduced. And. An instrument capable of being attached to pianofortes and organs by means of which they are rendered. Melographic. Capable of writing any music played upon them. For. If the instrument makes probable this oral hahucination, you spin the record of your reddened choice. Or. You mimic the melody and its blank harmony. You accompany the symphony with a tenor of all tomorrows. While I, lost in the Maze of Mirrors, ask you to tell me again the story. You say, First. You say, Make. First, make your mouth make a sound. Speak into the mouthpiece and cause the tremors in the thin diaphragm. Then. The steel point makes tracings upon the hard wax. Fix the thing upon a spinning cylinder. And. By means of the tracings, the diaphragm will repeat with perfection your original voice. Or. The echoes in the mountains of your lamentations. As. Cries in a haunted brothel. Or. Whispers in a ghostly tavern. The instrument has spoken in our hearing. Listen. It is a natural outcome of the telephone. Listen. The old man's laugh comes to us as out of a phonograph. I say, Perfect. I say, Yet. This instrument warbles. And. This record is warped. And. The tongue of this snake. Has scratched this disk. For. Your voice is skipping. And. As I put the conch to my same hear, I listen to the echo of. I listen to the echo of. The raspy susurrations of your adieu. Applied to a person or thing that exactly reproduces the utterances of another person or thing. Hence, the transitive verb. To report in Pitman's phonograph. As. It is a great loss to me that your song was not phonographed and preserved. And. Whether it be so, it is phonographed in the mind of the mindful God. All out of sync.

in Riddles, for Mary * How many suns will cross its coign before the last freeze? What pennywhistle spun its point on the glass breeze? Whose airs are loosened in the pane like miniature degrees, where breath condenses into rain among the apple trees? Here tesserae have turned to earth, here blossoms may attend to birth as sun becoming leaves; here branches seem to lead the glass, whose scenes compose as seasons pass, the lifetime, piece by piece.... A sphere * Begins and ends: suppose, as glaciers drop their catch, as memory’s a ragged seine, as grain by grain a dead morraine the sky is softly sifting ash, as constellations each rescind to embers, umbral lees—alas, the crown lens will surely tear to end the long, sweet refrain of sun to moon to sun again, of E from M C2— and then what breath once shaped the pane may lose itself (we pray) in airs our children, too, had breathed in time, and theirs, and theirs. * If oracles recall in riddles orreries in orreries, the quantum of the apple’s arc the piper’s tune, the dancer’s turning crown of sonnets in the dark by starlight ground between the querns spun withershins of dawn and dusk to wreathe a green and weathered earth— it’s moonshine, love, and loneliness. Do looney jigs unwind the suns? Might jugglers drop them every one? Are seeds resewn, or tales respun? When pipers stop to play the bones the very stones are left undone. * To please the Sphinx all life unreels through black magnetic stone-strewn fields where pitchblende blinks its slow decay tic-tic-tic de-lightedly by alpha, beta, gamma, delta— time dilates and starlight bends in gravity like roundelays. All light, partic- ulate, licks out one way, in waves; electric clouds expand in spheres whose uncracked shells concentrically unrecalled across the parsecs and the years ring out, shift red (like Hell), disperse the edges of the universe— * Eclectic quarks a dish collects to parse into initial text— miraculous, exotic sky!— a Book of Kells whose quirkish tale in optical if stale effects is mirrored in the lemur’s eye, as through the hatchling’s candled egg comes first light to the cockerel— As Sol dissolves against the clock, and seismographic needles track, and continents incline to raft, uranium sines off to lead or raindrops pock a full carafe to lilypads inside the head— * Assymmetries: no wave contracts—

How can we believe he did it— every day—for all those years? We remember how the musicians gathered for him—and the prostitutes arranged themselves the way he wanted— and even the helmeted monkeys with their little toy car cerebella— posed—and the fish on the plate— remained after he ate the fish— Bones—What do we do with this life?—except announce:Joy. Joy.Joy—from the lead— to the oil—to the stretch of bright canvas—stretched—to the end of it all.

THE NIGHT THAT LORCA COMES SHALL BE A STRANGE NIGHT IN THE SOUTH, IT SHALL BE THE TIME WHEN NEGROES LEAVE THE SOUTH FOREVER, GREEN TRAINS SHALL ARRIVE FROM RED PLANET MARS CRACKLING BLUENESS SHALL SEND TOOTH-COVERED CARS FOR THEM TO LEAVE IN, TO GO INTO THE NORTH FOREVER, AND I SEE MY LITTLE GIRL MOTHER AGAIN WITH HER CROSS THAT IS NOT BURNING, HER SKIRTS OF BLACK, OF ALL COLORS, HER AURA OF FAMILIARITY. THE SOUTH SHALL WEEP BITTER TEARS TO NO AVAIL, THE NEGROES HAVE GONE INTO CRACKLING BLUENESS. CRISPUS ATTUCKS SHALL ARRIVE WITH THE BOSTON COMMONS, TO TAKE ELISSI LANDI NORTH, CRISPUS ATTUCKS SHALL BE LAYING ON BOSTON COMMONS, ELISSI LANDI SHALL FEEL ALIVE AGAIN. I SHALL CALL HER NAME AS SHE STEPS ON TO THE BOSTON COMMONS, AND FLIES NORTH FOREVER, LINCOLN SHALL BE THERE, TO SEE THEM LEAVE THE SOUTH FOREVER, ELISSI LANDI, SHE WILL BE GREEN. THE WHITE SOUTH SHALL GATHER AT PRESERVATION HALL.

Your body, hard vowels In a soft dress, is still. What you can't know is that after you died All the black poets In New York City Took a deep breath, And breathed you out; Dark corners of small clubs, The silence you left twitching On the floors of the gigs You turned your back on, The balled-up fists of notes Flung, angry from a keyboard. You won't be able to hear us Try to etch what rose Off your eyes, from your throat. Out you bleed, not as sweet, or sweaty, Through our dark fingertips. We drum rest We drum thank you We drum stay .