Carl Sanburg - The People Yes

The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
"I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time."

The people is a tragic and comic two-face: hero and hoodlum:
phantom and gorilla twisting to moan with a gargoyle mouth:
"They buy me and sell me...it's a game...sometime I'll
break loose..."

from The People Yes by Carl Sanburg


Recently the word Socialism has been batted around by protesters and political pundits. Carl Sanburg's Socialism is not the perverted straw man of modern media shouting. It is instead something deeper, sharper and more meaningful. It is an acknowledgement of the glorious, primal drive or perseverance that human beings share at their most basic cores. It bears witness both the the glory of a modern world built from the brow sweat of resilient men and women and to the soul crushing hardships that the same world rends from their flesh.

Sanburg's words are terse, honed for maximum impact, not a syllable wasted. There are no victim's here, only those who have been done wrong, time and again, and who yet continue forward no matter how clumsy, mongrel and idiotic their stubborn progress may appear.

I had though about this poem since grade school. Then, in 2006, I was listening to n recording of Sci-fi author / futurist visionary Bruce Sterling's annual SXSW speech. 2006 was a pretty grim year and Sterling was bringing the The Fear™. Then, as a quasi-benediction, he closed by reading the above section from Sanburg's book length poem.

The conviction and emotion in his voice struck me like a cold slap across the face. A man for whom The Future was his stock and trade was read a poem from the depths of the Great Depression, the words resonanting as if they were crafted that very morning, was chilling. Since that moment this poem, sadly, becomes more prescient with ever passing year.

Buy The People Yes

Bruce Sterling reads from The People Yes at SXSW 06

Roger Robinson - Misuse of Magic

"14. The magician destroys an object only to restore it back to its natural state"

Roger Robinson reading from his excellent book Suckle.

Of course Robinson is best know as the vocalist for the mighty King Midas Sound but don't sleep on his written poetry. It is full of warmth and spirit while still cutting clean through to the emotional bone.

Check a nice post by John Eden on all Robinson's books: here

Tristan Tzara - dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love

XIII

DADA is a virgin microbe
DADA is against the high cost of living
DADA
limited company for the exploitation of ideas
DADA has 391 different attitudes and colours according to the sex of the president
It changes ? affirms ? says the opposite at the same time ? no importance? shouts ?goes fishing.
Dada is the chameleon of rapid and self?interested change.
Dada is against the future. Dada is dead. Dada is absurd. Long live Dada.
Dada is not a literary school, howl

from dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love
- Tristan Tzara


If I have ever been seduced or corrupted by a particular dogma or orthodoxy it was the anti-dogma of Dada and if Dada has an (un)holy scripture to rival the Psalms it is the poems and manifesto's of Tristan Tzara. The austere earnestness of Tzara's emphatic declarations coupled with the puckish absurdity of the wordplay yields a novel sensation of extreme emotion borne of intellectual discourse.

Tzara demands that you join him in zealotic commitment to a cheap joke and in so doing liberates the reader from the mundane and conscribes her in his plot of poetical terror.


dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love

also check out: How To Make A Dadaist Poem

Swingshift: Dog Days' Nights - Part III

"Rex steadied himself with one hand on the doorjamb, traced an intricate sigil in the grime above the dog’s head and muttered a short incantation that sounded like a Welshman learning Yiddish. It took him a few attempts to get his numbed tongue around the unforgiving syllables but eventually the door did not so much open as simply dissipate into the air. As we crossed the threshold, a rush of crowd heat, incense smoke and loud music enveloped us."


Part III of Dog Days' Nights is live at T21. It's a party/club scene. You knew there would be at least one. In this instalment we get the low down on Jimmy The Pop Magus, discover that our damsel in distress may not be so distressed and learn that The Muppet Show did in fact reach the shores of Norway.

This was the most difficult part of the story to write. There are a lot of moving parts and events in this section are essential to not only this story but those that follow. Keeping the action moving and the pace lively was a challenge. In the end I am pleased with the results.





Swingshift: Dog Days' Nights - Part III

Swingshift Archive

W.S. Merwin - Youth

Youth

Through all of youth I was looking for you
without knowing what I was looking for

or what to call you I think I did not
even know I was looking how would I

have known you when I saw you as I did
time after time when you appeared to me

as you did naked offering yourself
entirely at that moment and you let

me breathe you touch you taste you knowing
no more than I did and only when I

began to think of losing you did I
recognize you when you were already

part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you

from what we cannot hold the stars are made

from W.S. Merwin's collection The Shadow of Sirius.


For me, it is all about that final line; so full of insight that breeds wonder instead of complacency. The line is just on the verge of sounding cheap and clichéd. I wonder whether I would feel the same way about it if it had been written by the author in his twenties rather than his eighties? Either way, it lights my eyes every time I read it.

I'm a pretty young man but I feel I am on the cusp of the moment Merwin is invoking here; that place in one's lifetime where the adventures of youth become "part memory part distance".

There is a great Bill Moyers interview where Merwin, who has won Pulitzers in both 1971 and 2009, shares some wonderful insight into craft and process. This quote is a personal favorite:


"Poetry's really about what can't be said. And you address it when you can't find words for something. And the idea is, is that the poet probably finds words for things. But if you ask the poet, the poet will tell you, you can't find words for it. Nobody finds words for grief. Nobody finds words for love. Nobody finds words for lust. Nobody found — finds words for real anger. These are things that always escape words."


Youth and Good Night at Writer's Almanac

Buy The Shadow of Sirius

Interview with Bill Moyers

LBR8 in Popshot!

I have a new poem, cleverly titled LBR8, in the new Liberate issue of Popshot magazine. Contrary to images the name conjures, Popshot is not a pornographers trade mag. It is a wonderfully designed zine determined to drag poetry away from the stuffy university presses and into the 21C.

Each issue, twenty five short poems on a theme are chosen and handed over to twenty five brilliant illustrators who give each piece a visual accomplice. My poem is coupled with a fittingly irreverent illustration by the excellent David Sparshott.

More Popshot info: here

Excellent interview with Popshot's Jacob Denno: here

Cyrus Cassells - Beautiful Signor

Hear me when I say
our love’s not meant to be
an opiate;
helpmate,
you are the reachable mirror
that dares me to risk
the caravan back
to the apogee, the longed-for
arms of the Beloved—

from Cyrus Cassells - Beautiful Signor


There are two things in particular that I love about the work of Cyrus Cassells and this poem in particular. The first is the asymmetric lyrical quality of the verse. The rhythms are not straight forward, the line breaks and punctuation clip, join or contextualize thoughts and imagary with a seemingly free form liberty. Yet the words resonate with glorious lyricism. The lines undulate with a rhythmical freedom and a sensual richness of tone that perfectly accentuates the subject matter.

This lush sensuality in Cassells' poems is intertwined with a revelatory spirituality in a way that opens up both aspects to unique insight. At its best Cassells' work, especially in the book Beautiful Signor, melds the sensual and spiritual into one ecstatic sensation that is primal and familiar yet surprisingly revealing.

I got turned on to Cassells by artists/poet William Allen during a workshop he was teaching. At the time I was obsessed with the interaction between the spiritual and profane. However, unlike Cassells I was interested in smashing signifiers of both concepts together and documenting the shrapnel. By introducing me to Cassells' work I think Allen was trying to show me another way to get at the problem. I only sort of understood that at the time. It was one of those lessons I did not fully learn, or at least did not put in to practise, until years later.

In an effort to get both the blogging and poetical juices flowing, I'm going to try and share a few of my favorite poems over the next few weeks. There will be some canonical classics, some fresh unkowns and a few obscure artifacts but they will all be pieces that I have a personal affinity for.

Buy Beautiful Signor

also check out Cassells' Soul Make a Path Through Shouting