Lumpy pudding
Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work. Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant; what is irrelevant has been excluded, like lumps from pudding and 'bugs' from machinery. (Wimsatt & Beardsley)
Here we celebrate the excluded, lumpy parts of the pudding!
Robert Gibbons: Moanin’
***
When Django Reinhardt came on
in out of the Blue, I misread it
as Improvisation #1, but then
settled on Body & Soul,
forgiving myself
in the process,
especially
when
the image
of having seen
Stéphane Grappelli
at Sandy’s in Beverly
on Cabot, which street
I crossed all by my lonesome
on the way to 1st & 2d grades at
the Abraham Edwards elementary
school, a dungeon if there ever was
one there in the bottom of the bottom
floor in 1951 & 1952 to be specific &
resentful at the same time, but I was urged
on past Sandy’s standing there to the 5-6-year
old, as if it didn’t exist at all, by a nickel box of
pretzels at the corner store, until much later taking
Marilyn Crispell there to hear Illinois Jacquet openly
accuse Sandy of burning down Lennies on the Turnpike,
that kind of sleazy entrepreneurial musical control in cahoots
with the State against highs acquired illicitly by Bird & Mingus
& many others hounded out of their ghords, freedom, & cabaret cards, for what?
No, at 5 & 6, I didn’t know.
So,
haphazardly
Mingus comes on
in out of the Blue on
Moanin’ with obscure baritone
sax by Pepper Adams, & no loss
at all of any kind of Freedom, band
as gang, John Handy on alto for crying
out loud, the great Mal Waldron, who played
piano for Billie in O’Hara’s recollection of seeing
her Death as Headline in the papers, although I remember
the so-called insanity of Mingus & Monk, their unique, artistic
individuation thwarted by the Powers-That-Be along with the likes
of aforesaid Holiday, or Chet Baker, & Jackie McLean, here on Moanin’
on alto, not to mention Lenny Bruce, who also sang in his own way, all busted.
Moanin’ by Mingus comes on in
out of the Blue, & yet once more makes
one think of Kerouac downthere in Denver,
Lowell, San Francisco, Mexico City, at the edge
of Utah, hearing God say, Go thou across the ground;
go moan for man; go moan, go groan, go groan alone go
roll your bones, alone; gothou and be little beneath my sight;
go thou, and be minute and as seed in the pod…
Poetry, June 1963
McClure, 82 today…
William Stafford: Traveling through the Dark
Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.
My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.
The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.
– from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1998)
”
A poem by Chilean poet, Nicanor Parra - soon to turn 100…
Above: La Cruz - from “Six Holograph Poems”; publ. in STONY BOOK 1/2 1968, ed. George Quasha
Federico García Lorca (June 5, 1898 - 1936), Spanish poet - an emblematic member of the Generation of ‘27; murdered at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War…
Above: The ending of “Ode to Walt Whitman”, 1929
Photo of Lorca in New York (Columbia University), 1929
Theodore Roethke: May 25, 1908 - 1963…
Word Jazz Maestro, Ken Nordine - 94 today…
Ken Nordine: Spectrum - from You’re Getting Better: The Word Jazz Dot Masters, (rec 1967)
(via mrsdentonorahippo)
Frank O’Hara, 1965, reading his poem “Song”
SONG
Is it dirty
does it look dirty
that’s what you think of in the city
does it just seem dirty
that’s what you think of in the city
you don’t refuse to breathe do you
someone comes along with a very bad character
he seems attractive. is he really. yes very
he’s attractive as his character is bad. is it. yes
that’s what you think of in the city
run your finger along your no-moss mind
that’s not a thought that’s soot
and you take a lot of dirt off someone
is the character less bad. no. it improves constantly
you don’t refuse to breathe do you
(1951, publ. 2013)
(via aspiringivory)
Robert Gibbons: On This Day at This Age, March 13, 2014
On this day at this age
I want to turn
a bit more
toward the Eastern way.
What with snow on boughs of trees
out the window
framing
a few Asian books & imagery
on the desk
like some sequestered monk I could reach
for brush & ink
to make
calligraphic lettering accompany
a mountainside.
But I can’t get out
of this Western skin.
Winter here simply
another brutal stretch of Time
to get through till Spring
exactly a week
away.
Ill.: Jack Kerouac: Face of the Buddha, 1958
Richard Wilbur - 93 today…
Above: Asides from the ‘New Poems’ section of his Collected Poems, 1943 - 2004
Jacques Prévert: I Am as I Am
I am as I am
I’m made that way
When I feel like laughing
I burst right out
I love the one who loves me
Is it my fault especially
If it’s not the same one
I love each time
(Translation Lawrence Ferlinghetti)
Photo: Jacques Prévert and Jacqueline Laurent, Paris 1937 - by Wols
Jack Spicer: A Diamond
A Translation for Robert Jones
A diamond
Is there
At the heart of the moon or the branches or my nakedness
And there is nothing in the universe like diamond
Nothing in the whole mind.
The poem is a seagull resting on a pier at the end of the ocean.
A dog howls at the moon
A dog howls at the branches
A dog howls at the nakedness
A dog howling with pure mind.
I ask for the poem to be as pure as a seagull’s belly.
The universe falls apart and discloses a diamond
Two words called seagull are peacefully floating out where the waves are.
The dog is dead there with the moon, with the branches, with my nakedness
And there is nothing in the universe like diamond
Nothing in the whole mind.
– from My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer
Robinson Jeffers: Their Beauty Has More Meaning
Yesterday morning enormous the moon hung low on the ocean,
Round and yellow-rose in the glow of dawn;
The night-herons flapping home wore dawn on their wings. Today
Black is the ocean, black and sulphur the sky,
And white seas leap. I honestly do not know which day is more beautiful.
I know that tomorrow or next year or in twenty years
I shall not see these things—and it does not matter, it does not hurt;
They will be here. And when the whole human race
Has been like me rubbed out, they will still be here: storms, moon and ocean,
Dawn and the birds. And I say this: their beauty has more meaning
Than the whole human race and the race of birds.
– Poetry, October 1947
Photo: Edward Weston
R.I.P.
Charles Olson: Christmas
dirty Christmas
which Origen
and Clement
both showed up
for the junk it
is – as though,
sd O, he was a
mere Pharaoh. Or,
says Clement, do
we have here some
child baptism to
go gee-gaw over?
in long favorably
embroidered gown
a boy? instead of
a man standing
in desire in the
Jordan, with the green
banks on either
side, a naked man
treated by another
adult man who also
has found out that
to be as harmless
as a dove is what
a man gets as wise
as a serpent for,
the river
of life?
