read a good poem: travelling

"secret spot," versailles park

***

Travelling

This is the spot:—how mildly does the sun
Shine in between the fading leaves! the air
In the habitual silence of this wood
Is more than silent: and this bed of heath,
Where shall we find so sweet a resting-place?
Come!—let me see thee sink into a dream
Of quiet thoughts,—protracted till thine eye
Be calm as water when the winds are gone
And no one can tell whither.—my sweet friend!
We two have had such happy hours together
That my heart melts in me to think of it.

--William Wordsworth via poets.org

read a good poem: lilac sunday

at la closerie des lilas, may 29, 2011.

oh, it's like fate. or internet voodoo.

the very day after i post about la closerie des lilas, the writer's almanac delivers a poem about...lilacs. does that seem like an amazing coincidence to you, too?

in any case, it's my excuse to post one more photo of a sweet older couple (and share more sweet words).

***

lilac sunday

Let us agree to meet
here some winter
when the park

gates are locked,
and the arches thinned
of their vaulting green

to climb the wall,
thaw the icicles
and watch the rain

like flowering
cherry and lilacs
that kissed your hair;

some winter
when the fog is heavy,—
to return to this light.

--Diana Der-Hovanessian, via the writer's almanac

***

ok, one more:

"He looked very fine, Marshal Ney in his top-boots, gesturing with his sword among the green horse-chestnut leaves."

--E. Hemingway, "The Sun Also Rises"

photo: may 23, 2011

inspiration: la closerie des lilas

la closerie des lilas. may 23, 2011

© anita aguilar

i've fallen into an unfortunate pattern on tuesdays at work. it goes something like meeting-meeting, meeting-meeting-meeting. by the time night falls, i am burning for inspiration.

on a walk home some months back, i tried to think of ways to re-align "the tuesday" so that ended on a finer note. i remembered: tuesday nights in paris were open poetry night for hemingway and his coterie at la closerie des lilas. fantastic-- i'd make it my poetry night, too.

in that spirit, i wanted to structure it toward writers that had some connection to the place. naturally, i started with hemingway. his verse, at least from what i could find online, is pretty awful, or at least not what i cared for, sort of cold and aggressive. i tried others from an earlier time (appollinaire, andre salmon) but didn't get much of a feeling for their work either (too weepy, too structured, too not-translated-into-english). it was a disappointing start. but it felt like a good exercise and i've kept it up (while giving up on the closerie-specific writers). in that way it's become my own "open" poetry night.

here's a favorite, writing-related one from last night. hope you like it.

on punctuation

not for me the dogma of the period
preaching order and a sure conclusion
and no not for me the prissy
formality or tight-lipped fence
of the colon and as for the semi-
colon call it what it is
a period slumming
with the commas
a poser at the bar
feigning liberation with one hand
tightening the leash with the other
oh give me the headlong run-on
fragment dangling its feet
over the edge give me the sly
comma with its come-hither
wave teasing all the characters
on either side give me ellipses
not just a gang of periods
a trail of possibilities
or give me the sweet interrupting dash
the running leaping joining dash all the voices
gleeing out over one another
oh if I must
punctuate
give me the YIPPEE
of the exclamation point
give me give me the curling
cupping curve mounting the period
with voluptuous uncertainty

-by elizabeth austen via the writer's almanac

read a good poem: the antilamentation

"regret nothing."

***

nyc, jan 2010.

photo © anita aguilar

***

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punch line, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.
Relax. Don't bother remembering any of it. Let's stop here,
under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

--dorianne laux via the writer's almanac, march 7, 2011

read a good poem: april rain song

park ave. april 19, 2010.

Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.
The rain makes running pools in the gutter.
The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night—

And I love the rain.

--langston hughes via the poetry foundation

read a good poem: on the origin of things

take off, 1956.

oil and enamel on canvas

helen frankenthaler

take off (detail) ...

taken at the metropolitan museum of art, dec 3, 2009

photo © anita aguilar

***

On The Origins Of Things

Everyone knows that the moon started out

as a renegade fragment of the sun, a solar

flare that fled that hellish furnace

and congealed into a flat frozen pond suspended

between the planets. But did you know

that anger began as music, played

too often and too loudly by drunken performers

at weddings and garden parties? Or that turtles

evolved from knuckles, ice from tears, and darkness

from misunderstanding? As for the dominant

thesis regarding the origin of love, I

abstain from comment, nor will I allow

myself to address the idea that dance

began as a kiss, that happiness was

an accidental import from Spain, that the ancient

game of jump-the-fire gave rise

to politics. But I will confess

that I began as an astronomer—a liking

for bright flashes, vast distances, unreachable things,

a hand stretched always toward the furthest limit—

and that my longing for you has not taken me

very far from that original desire

to inscribe a comet's orbit around the walls

of our city, to gently stroke the surface of the stars.

--by Troy Jollimore via poets.org, february 8, 2010

read a good poem: silence

at joseph leonard...jan 30, 2010

photo © anita aguilar

There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.

The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.

The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.

And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night

like snow falling in the darkness of the house—
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.

--billy collins, via the poetry foundation

read a good poem: chaplinesque

fdr drive. nov 21, 2010. © anita aguilar

***

the resonant, true (and not outrageous) thing i read yesterday about the wikileaks:

The quality of the conversation is determined by the level of trust.

(via david brooks)

i spent part of last evening, then, reading poems on the idea of trust.

but i eventually found my way here (not sure what it may mean to you, but hope you like it)

****

Chaplinesque

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

--Hart Crane (via the poetry foundation)

read a good poem: waving goodbye

the lovely natalia vodianova in "brief encounter."

photographed by annie leibovitz for vogue, feb 2010 issue.

i have this thing about goodbyes-- not just the breakup goodbye or the big bon voyage.
sometimes the common ones get to me.

i'll go a few extra blocks out of my way to walk a friend to her subway stop or the bus station.

there have been times, after having friends over after a party or a visit, when i'm not quite ready to close the door. literally. i'll tiptoe out into the hallway, peek my head around the corner for a quick chat, until the elevator picks them up.

i've been known to stand a bit too long on the platform.

maybe hang on a little tighter and linger a little longer than i should.

i suppose i'm greedy for extra moments?

***

i read this poem for the first time many months ago and remembered it today.
"this small flag" leaves me on the brink every time, "when the space gets too large for words."

i hope you like it.

***

Waving Goodbye


Why, when we say goodbye
at the end of an evening, do we deny
we are saying it at all, as in We'll
be seeing you, or I'll call, or Stop in,
somebody's always at home? Meanwhile, our friends,
telling us the same things, go on disappearing
beyond the porch light into the space
which except for a moment here or there
is always between us, no matter what we do.
Waving goodbye, of course, is what happens
when the space gets too large
for words – a gesture so innocent
and lonely, it could make a person weep
for days. Think of the hundreds of unknown
voyagers in the old, fluttering newsreel
patting and stroking the growing distance
between their nameless ship and the port
they are leaving, as if to promise I'll always
remember, and just as urgently, Always
remember me. It is loneliness, too,
that makes the neighbor down the road lift
two fingers up from his steering wheel as he passes
day after day on his way to work in the hello
that turns into goodbye? What can our own raised
fingers do for him, locked in his masculine
purposes and speeding away inside the glass?
How can our waving wipe away the reflex
so deep in the woman next door to smile
and wave on her way into her house with the mail,
we'll never know if she is happy
or sad or lost? It can't. Yet in that moment
before she and all the others and we ourselves
turn back to our disparate lives, how
extraordinary it is that we make this small flag
with our hands to show the closeness we wish for
in spite of what pulls us apart again
and again: the porch light snapping off,
the car picking its way down the road through the dark.

-by Wesley McNair via The Writer's Almanac, April 29, 2010.

read a good poem: hotel lautréamont

east 33rd street/park avenue. election day.

nov 2, 2010.

photo @ anita aguilar

1.

Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society

working as a team. They didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork.

The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.

We see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well.”

Working as a team, they didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork.

The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds

we see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well,”

or, on a more modern note, in the finale of the Sibelius violin concerto.

The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds

the world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passé,

or in the finale of the Sibelius violin concerto.

Not to worry, many hands are making work light again.

The world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passé.

In any case the ruling was long overdue.

Not to worry, many hands are making work light again,

so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure.

2.

In any case, the ruling was long overdue.

The people are beside themselves with rapture

so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure

and the solution problematic, at any rate far off in the future.

The people are beside themselves with rapture

yet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria,

and the solution: problematic, at any rate far off in the future.

The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained.

Yet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria.

In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel.

The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained,

and night like black swansdown settles on the city.

In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel.

Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward,

and night like black swansdown settles on the city.

If we tried to leave, would being naked help us?

3.

Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward.

Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside.

If we tried to leave, would being naked help us?

And what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river?

Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside,

when all we think of is how much we can carry with us.

And what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river?

All the behemoths have filed through the maze of time.

When all we think of is how much we can carry with us

small wonder that those at home sit, nervous, by the unlit grate.

All the behemoths have filed through the maze of time.

It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality.

Small wonder that those at home sit nervous by the unlit grate.

It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination.

It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality

and in so doing deprive time of further hostages.

4.

It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination.

Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open

and in so doing deprive time of further hostages,

to end the standoff that history long ago began.

Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open

but it is shrouded, veiled: We must have made some ghastly error.

To end the standoff that history long ago began

must we thrust ever onward, into perversity?

But it is shrouded, veiled: We must have made some ghastly error.

You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns.

Must we thrust ever onward, into perversity?

Only night knows for sure; the secret is safe with her.

You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns.

Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society;

only night knows for sure. The secret is safe with her:

The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.

-john ashbery, via the poetryfoundation.org

read a good poem: sleepers awake

the big teas. @ TeaGschwendner, rockefeller center, nyc. oct 10, 2010.

Cervantes was asleep when he wrote Don Quixote.

Joyce slept during the Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses.

Homer nodded and occasionally slept during the greater part of the Iliad; he was awake however when he wrote the Odyssey.

Proust snored his way through The Captive, as have legions of his readers after him.

Melville was asleep at the wheel for much of Moby-Dick.

Fitzgerald slept through Tender Is the Night, which is perhaps not so surprising,

but the fact that Mann slumbered on the very slopes of The Magic Mountain is quite extraordinary—that he wrote it, even more so.

Kafka, of course, never slept, even while not writing or on bank holidays.

No one knows too much about George Eliot’s writing habits—my guess is she would sleep a few minutes, wake up and write something, then pop back to sleep again.

Lew Wallace’s forty winks came, incredibly, during the chariot race in Ben-Hur.

Emily Dickinson slept on her cold, narrow bed in Amherst.

When she awoke there would be a new poem inscribed by Jack Frost on the windowpane; outside, glass foliage chimed.

Good old Walt snored as he wrote and, like so many of us, insisted he didn’t.

Maugham snored on the Riviera.

Agatha Christie slept daintily, as a woman sleeps, which is why her novels are like tea sandwiches—artistic, for the most part.

I sleep when I cannot avoid it; my writing and sleeping are constantly improving.

--John Ashbery, via the poetry foundation

(read the rest here)

***

sleep, write well...

read a good poem: pura vida

this is where we should be, yes?

(¡Pura vida! —Costa Rican phrase for "O.K." or "Great!")

Such heat! It brings the brain back to its basic blank.
Small, recurrent events become the daily news—
the white-nosed coati treading the cecropia's
bending thin branches like sidewalks in the sky,
the scarlet-rumped tanager flitting like a spark
in the tinder of dank green, the nodding palm leaves
perforated like Jacquard cards in a code of wormholes,
the black hawk skimming nothingness over and over.

What does the world's wide brimming mean, with hunger
the unstated secret, dying the proximate reality?
Con mucho gusto—the muchness extends to the stars,
as wet and numerous as larvae underground
where the ants in their preset patterns scurry and nurture,
and the queen, immobilized, pours forth her eggs
in the dark. We are far from oaks and stoplights,
from England's chill classrooms and Tuscany's paved hills.

For thought is a stridulation, an insect sizzling,
knit of the moment's headlines and temperate-zone quips,
viable in the debris of our rotting educations,
that thatch where peer-groups call each to each in semes
ecosystematically. Great God Himself
wilts with a rise in temperature, a drop in soil acidity,
a new language in its grimacing opacity.
The brain's dry buzz revives, a bit, as evening falls.

--john updike

photos (philippines, 2009) © anita aguilar

read a good poem: new york

new york, madame,

is a monument to a city

it is

TA-DA

a gigantic pike

whose scales

bristled up stunned

and what used to be just smoke

found a fire that gave it birth

champagne foam

melted into metal

glass rivers

flowing upwards

and things you won't tell to a priest

you reveal to a cabdriver

even time is sold out

when to the public's "wow" and "shhh"

out of a black top hat

a tailed magician

is pulling new york out

by the ears of skyscrapers

- vakzhyna mort (translated by franz wright and elizabeth oehlkers wright)

via the poetryfoundation.org

***
***

photos © anita aguilar

read a good poem: things i didn’t know i loved: after nazim hikmet

metronorth...winter 2010

I always knew I loved the sky,
the way it seems solid and insubstantial at the same time;
the way it disappears above us
even as we pursue it in a climbing plane,
like wishes or answers to certain questions—always out of reach;
the way it embodies blue,
even when it is gray.

But I didn't know I loved the clouds,
those shaggy eyebrows glowering
over the face of the sun.
Perhaps I only love the strange shapes clouds can take,
as if they are sketches by an artist
who keeps changing her mind.
Perhaps I love their deceptive softness,
like a bosom I'd like to rest my head against
but never can.

And I know I love the grass, even as I am cutting it as short
as the hair on my grandson's newly barbered head.
I love the way the smell of grass can fill my nostrils
with intimations of youth and lust;
the way it stains my handkerchief with meanings
that never wash out.

Sometimes I love the rain, staccato on the roof,
and always the snow when I am inside looking out
at the blurring around the edges of parked cars
and trees. And I love trees,
in winter when their austere shapes
are like the cutout silhouettes artists sell at fairs
and in May when their branches
are fuzzy with growth, the leaves poking out
like new green horns on a young deer.

But how about the sound of trains,
those drawn-out whistles of longing in the night,
like coyotes made of steam and steel, no color at all,
reminding me of prisoners on chain gangs I've only seen
in movies, defeated men hammering spikes into rails,
the burly guards watching over them?

Those whistles give loneliness and departure a voice.
It is the kind of loneliness I can take in my arms, tasting
of tears that comfort even as they burn, dampening the pillows
and all the feathers of all the geese who were plucked to fill
them.

Perhaps I embrace the music of departure—song without lyrics,
so I can learn to love it, though I don't love it now.
For at the end of the story, when sky and clouds and grass,
and even you my love of so many years,
have almost disappeared,
it will be all there is left to love.

--Linda Pastan

via the writer's almanac, may 27, 2010

read a good poem: bel canto

happy earth day.
from plaza cataluna, BA. march 2010.

i've been guided toward new poets and poems lately, a few i like, but no single work leaped to mind to share for this occasion: earth day. i decided to consult the poetry foundation site, knowing i could be overwhelmed by the possibilities (have you seen it? you can search by poet, school, first line, category, keyword. i knew i'd need to be pretty specific or i'd be here all day. but what to look for: something about a tree? "earth"? something frost-y?).

i decided to search a broader theme and found this one almost immediately. it felt right...

it's a long one. and i'll be reading it slowly.

not sure what it may mean for you, but i hope you like it...

***

Bel Canto

The sun is high, the seaside air is sharp,

And salty light reveals the Mayan School.

The Irish hope their names are on the harp,

We see the sheep's advertisement for wool,

Boulders are here, to throw against a tarp,

From which comes bursting forth a puzzled mule.

Perceval seizes it and mounts it, then

The blood-dimmed tide recedes and then comes in again.

Fateful connections that we make to things

Whose functioning's oblivious to our lives!

How sidewise news of light from darkness springs,

How blue bees buzz from big blooms back to hives

And make the honey while the queen bee sings

Leadbelly in arrangements by Burl Ives—

How long ago I saw the misted pine trees

And hoped, no matter how, to get them into poetry!

Stendhal, at fifty, gazing as it happened

On Rome from the Janiculum, decided

That one way he could give his life a stipend

Was to suspend his being Amour's fighter

And get to know himself. Here he had ripened

Accomplished, loved, and lived, was a great writer

But never had explored in true detail

His childhood and his growing up. So he set sail

Composing La Vie de Henry Brulard

But in five hundred pages scarcely got

Beyond his seventeenth year, for it is hard

To take into account what happens here

And fit it all onto an index card.

Even one moment of it is too hot,

Complex and cannibalistically connected

To every other, which is what might be expected.

Sterne's hero has a greater problem, never

Getting much past his birth. I've had a third one.

My autobiography, if I should ever

Start out to write it, quickly seems a burden

An I-will-do-that-the-next-time endeavor.

Whatever life I do write's an absurd one

As if some crazy person with a knife

Cut up and made a jigsaw puzzle of a life.

In any case a life that's hardly possible

In the conditions that we really live in,

Where easy flying leaps to inaccessible

Mountainy places where love is a given

And misery, if there, infinitesimal,

Are quite the norm. Here none by pain is driven

That is not curable by the romanza

That's kept in readiness to finish any stanza.

Whatever, then, I see at this late stage of

My life I may or may not have stayed ignorant

Of that great book I've strained to write one page of

Yet always hoping my page was significant.

Be it or not, for me and for the ages

I leave it as it is. Yet as a figurant

Who has not stopped, I'm writing in addition

More lines to clarify my present disposition.

One person in a million finds out something

Perhaps each fifty years and that is knowledge.

Newton, Copernicus, Einstein are cunning.

The rest of us just rise and go to college

With no more hope to come home with the bunting

Than a stray dachshund going through the village.

However, what a treat our small successes

Of present and of past, at various addresses!

To be in all those places where I tarried

Too little or too late or bright and early

To love again the first woman I married

To marvel at such things as melancholy,

Sophistication, drums, a baby carriage,

A John Cage concert heard at Alice Tully—

How my desire when young to be a poet

Made me attentive and oblivious every moment!

Do you remember Oceanview the Fair?

The heights above the river? The canoes?

The place we beached them and the grass was bare?

Those days the sandbars gave our knees a truce?

The crooked line of pantry shelves, with pear

And cherry jam? And Pancho, with his noose?

Do you remember Full and Half and Empty?

Do you remember sorrow standing in the entry?

Do you remember thought, and talking plainly?

Michel and I went walking after Chartres

Cathedral had engaged our spirits mainly

By giving us an insight into Barthes.

Michel said he was capable of feigning

Renewed intentions of the soul's deep part,

Like this cathedral's artificial forces

That press a kind of artless thought into our faces.

And yet— The moor is dark beneath the moon.

The porcupine turns over on its belly

And new conceptions rap at the cocoon.

Civilization, dealing with us fairly,

For once, releases its Erectheion

Of understanding, which consoles us, nearly.

Later we study certain characteristics

That may give us a better chance with the statistics.

How much I'd like to live the whole thing over,

But making some corrections as I go!

To be a better husband and a father,

Be with my babies on a sled in snow.

By twenty I'd have understood my mother

And by compassion found a way to know

What separates the what-I-started-out-as

From what-I-sometimes-wished-I-was-when-in-the-mountains.

To be once more the one who what was worthy

Of courtship courted—it was quite as stressful

As trying to, er, as they say, give birth to

A poem and as often unsuccessful,

But it was nice to be sublime and flirty

With radiant girls, and, in some strange way, restful.

I could be everything I wasn't usually—

And then to get somebody else to feel it mutually!

In poems the same problem or a similar.

Desire of course not only to do old things

But things unheard of yet by nuns or visitors

And of the melancholy finch be co-finch

In singing songs with such a broad parameter

That seamstresses would stare, forget to sew things,

Astronauts quit the sky, athletes the stadium

To hear them, and the rest of what they hear be tedium.

Such wild desires, I think it's recognizable

Are part and parcel of the Human Image

And in a way, I'd say, no less predictable

Than Popeye's feelings for a can of spinach.

Yet if we're set on course by the Invisible,

All pre-determined, what about the language

That teases me each morning with its leanings

Toward the Unprogrammed Altitudes beyond its meanings?

Are you, O particles, O atoms, nominatives

Like Percevals and Stendhals, set in motion

By some Ordaining Will that is definitive?

Is this invading chill and high emotion,

This tendency to know one is regenerative,

Is this, all, tidal take-home like the ocean?

Be what you may, my thanks for your society

Through the long life I've had, your jokes and your variety,

The warmth you've shown in giving me a temperature

That I can live with, and the strength you've shared with me

In arms and legs—and for your part in literature,

What can I say? It is as if life stared at me

And kissed my lips and left it as a signature.

Thank you for that, and thank you for preparing me

For love itself, and friendship, its co-agent.

Thank you for being this, and for its inspiration.

-Kenneth Koch, via the poetry foundation