Poetry

[Lhoffman]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/oct/24/art-theatre-tennessee-williams

[pugetopolis]

[pugetopolis]

Charles Bernstein

“I prefer poems in anthologies
to poems in individual books.
A poem in an anthology has
forgotten its author.”
—Tan Lin, “ambient stylistics,”
Telling It Slant

Brute design—beltway bozos
dEmocracy—lewd propositions
guRly boyz—knowing the truth
thiNk about—halliburton haves and those
scabS of the—ratty mourning have-nots
gangsTer lobbyists—hoodlum politicians
silhouEtting—formaldehyde artifices
uncertaInties—nightly snarky fox-tv
discrepaNcies—elephantine lies

Seed text = BERNSTEIN
Source text = Charles Bernstein’s
“Ballad of the Girly Man,” Girly Man (2000)

(Using the diastic method, the writer reads through the source text and successively finds words or other linguistic units that have the letters of the seed text in positions that correspond to those they occupy in the seed text.)

http://quarterlyconversation.com/thing-of-beauty-by-jackson-mac-low

(Using the cleave method, the writer reads through the diastic text—hyphenating the horizontal text into2 vertical texts. The resulting text is a diastic / cleave intertext—with 3 poems in positions that correspond to each in a unique polymorphosely vocal / textual way.

http://cleavepoetry.wordpress.com/2008/10/07/dennis-kellys-further-thoughts-on-cleave-poetics/

http://www.snarke.com/2008/10/cleave-poetics.html

http://www.snarke.com/2008/10/cleave-poetics-15-19.html

[pugetopolis]

Cinema Zutique

“O Lilies! O Garden swing!
O silver Enema bags!!!”
—Arthur Rimbaud
“Lilies,” Album Zutique

Niagara

Sad queen—done in
By butch—rough trade
She falls—and sprawls
Showing some—nice leg

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane

Two sick—young fruits
Drastically—pursuing
A pair of—big black boots
Quick licks—then kicks!!!

Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

In Papal Rome—Vivien Leigh
Parties with the—Fast Lane
Every night—Italian boyz
Full of hot—jizzmatic snuff

Night of the Iguana

Ava Gardner—has two boyz
Each with a—nice scaly iguana
She pets nightly—in hammocks
Beneath a humid—full moon

Mysterious Skin

Whitewashed—white trash
Bored kid—in the trailer park
Eating lots of—black licorice
His shit—looks like dirty blood

Gone With the Wind

O Dixie Land—Scarlet O’Hara
Distaining all—the young dudes
In favor of—a more experienced
Descent of Vaseline—from heaven

Summer and Smoke

Summer night—by the fountain
Cheap cigars—traveling salesman
Earl Holliman—puffing away
Geraldine Page—ankles in the air

The Haunting

With my bedside books—helping to
Haunt me nightly—Lovecraftian
Black and white—Nightmare noir
Meandering dark mansion—mine

Tabu

Taking the 107—downtown
The Samoan kid—falling asleep
Leaning his head—on my shoulder
All the way to Seattle—Polynesia

Casablanca

I’d probably prefer—Rick’s Place
Full of Frenchmen—escaping Paris
Sitting at a back table—sipping
Absinthe with—Peter Lorre

The Last Picture Show

Ben Johnson—says goodbye
The No Tell Motel—finally closes
The last movie—at the Royal Theater
Gone Odéon—from another era

Elizabeth

Cate Blanchett—haughty queen
Amidst a court—of gawking eyes
Performing—for her compatriots
Sneering at—neat black Spaniards

Midnight Cowboy

The young cowboy—newly arrived
In New York Times Square—soon
Finds out that—there’s more to life
Than washing dishes—in Dallas

I Was a Teenage Werewolf

I howled at the moon—too much
The woods—drapes of the night
The Gypsy life—appealed to me
You see—I had this certain habit

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Afterwards—I asked him where
He’d like to have—breakfast and
He said—I’d like to have breakfast
At Tiffany’s—such butch naiveté

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Big Daddy—dying of rectal cancer
Big Daddy’s son—reluctant husband
Mourning over—Skipper & his past
Elizabeth Taylor—not giving up

House on Haunted Hill

O seasons—O haunted châteaus
Vincent Price—Last Man on Earth
Where are you—when I need you
Movies blow—my words away!!!

[pugetopolis]

Hispanic Heart of Darkness

“This river, this concrete river,
Becomes a steaming, bubbling
Snake of water”—Luis J. Rodriguez
“The Concrete River”

The Hispanic Heart of Darkness—
Below El Paso—waking up slowly
A whole continent—somnambulant

I welcome the change—to be
Sculptured in—silver and turquoise
Speaking words—for the river

A pulsating darkness—perpetually
In love with—young barrio women
An electrified hum—in my teeth

I’m no longer your son—seeking
The security of shadows—now that
The Southwest is my brother again

The river—this river of language
Surging through new young poets
Tattooed San Salvadorian gods!!!

[pugetopolis]

Plathian Moment
—for Sylvia Plath

Ariel is like—being winged Pegasus
When you’re—poet-within-the-poet
Cubist collages—that’s how you think

Snapshots—of a lightening strike
Gotta be quick—tres self-reflexive
What you see—is what you get

Later on—cold mean London winter
The kids got the flu—the lights out
What would I do—without you?

[pugetopolis]

Waiting for Lucia

“But the biographers
are a side issue.”
—Joan Acocella,
“A Fire in the Brain,”
The New Yorker*

Her name was Lucia—she was Joyce’s daughter
She was talkative—illiterate in four languages:
German, French, English & Triestine Italian
She was cross-eyed like our mother Nora
Was that why—she’d stare off into space?

She was a writer’s daughter—she was difficult
Her Daddy was like Plath’s Daddy—Big Daddy
He’d write all day—she’d always dance for him
Finnegan’s Wake—was actually performance art
Both danced with language—a wordy funeral

Please remember—I’m writing sybolisme
I’m chatting a biography—a Laingian artform
I was Georgio—her pimp brother marrying rich
My wealthy beautiful wife—my car & chauffeur
My swank apartment—Lucia’s lassiez-faire idol

Please forget Plath—along with the others
Vivienne Eliot—her long suppressed agonies
Poor Zelda Fitzgerald—and Nora my mother
Forget Georgie—medium-wife of Yeats and
Véra—Vladimir Nabokov’s lovely wife

Lucia was the true blue literary goddess
Inspiring, melding, sharing her personality
With my great writer father—James Joyce
Until she ended up with “A Room One’s Own”
Only then was he able—to finish the Wake

“Devoutly to be wish'd.
To die, to sleep; To sleep:
perchance to dream: ay,
there's the rub; For in that
sleep of death what dreams
may come when we have
shuffled off this mortal coil”
—William Shakespeare,
Hamlet

I get the heebie-jeebies—a lot lately
Like when I’m thinking—about death
Death like Sleep—Sleeping & Dreaming
What if it’s like Shakespeare opined—
Hamlet’s strange solitary soliloquy? 

How many nightmares—one goes thru
Happy to wake up again—and be alive?
No matter how surrealistic & horrible
Don’t we in dreams think it’s all real
Waiting for Godot—but No Exit for us?

So that when we die—Sleeping nicely…
Dreaming might be lurking there again
Dreams of losing one’s billfold or pants?
Losing one’s identity—in dream cities?
Not being able to wake up—once again?

Even if I’m lucid enough to know—
It’s only dreaming that torments me
What if there was No Escape No Exit—
Once I die except to live in Dreamland
Drifting thru oneiric dystopias forever?

My father must have thought that way—
The way his stream of consciousness worked
Especially Finnegan’s Wake—his circular
Meditation on how images morph thru puns
And wordplay—ludic Eidetic foreplay?

Is that the reason why—Joyce took my sister
To see Carl Jung the great mystical Herr Doktor?
Was my sister mad—already dreamy Other?
Deep inside her ebb & flow—continuous dreaming
A flowing Irish river—stream of consciousness

"usylessly unreadable
Blue Book of Eccles”
—James Joyce
Wake of Ulysses

A useless muck—of obscure language
Abandoned plot—character development
Lost in the Sea of Jabberwocky schmooze
Where everybody dreams in their sleep
And nobody comes up—to breathe air?

Father’s eyesight failing—no longer able to
Collage the cards—Beckett created for him
But still able to play the Wordplay game
Beginning Finnegan’s Wake—and ending it
With the same ideal literary insomnia …

Riverrun—running past Eve and Adam
Swerving from shore—to bending bay
Punning Vico—a commodius vicus
Replaying the story over & over again
Back to Howth Castle—and Enviorns

How his mind worked—thru punning
Even now “quark”—worming its way
Thru “Thee Quarks for Muster Mark”
And “sithome”—Lacan’s intertextuality
Playing psychosis—into literature


*http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/12/08/031208crbo_books

[pugetopolis]

The Horror

“The shade of the original Kurtz
frequented the bedside of the hollow
sham, whose fate it was to be buried
presently in the mold of primeval earth”
—Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness

Kurtz was dying—but still the horror
The horror of the jungle’s diabolic love
Its unearthly mysteries—wanted him

He’d penetrated—the heart of horror
Having lost interest—in lying fame and
The shams of distinction—success & power

He’d become —impenetrable darkness
Lying at the bottom—of a lightless precipice
Down where the sun—never shines

He was losing it—that somber ivory face
His proud ruthless power—fading quickly
Now craven terror—plus intense despair

“The horror!!!”—“The horror!!!”
I blew out the candle—left the cabin
Later Mistah Kurtz—was dead

[oilcanbody]

there was a young lady named Hubbard
who stored wooden cocks in her cupboard

being made of cheap wood
they splintered more than they should

and had to be multiply rubber'd.

[pugetopolis]

Jim Carroll

http://www.snarke.com/

The horror on your face—
You look a lot older than
Just 60-years-old
But who knows how
Deep you went into—
The heart of darkness
Like Kurtz—

[barton]

There was a young cowboy named Clyde,
Who fashioned a  of rawhide,
He lubed it with tallow,
And sweetened with marshmallow,
Just as he had done for his bride.

[pugetopolis]

"Jim Carroll dies at 60; poet and punk rocker wrote about travails in 'The Basketball Diaries'"

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-jim-carroll15-2009sep15,0,7425211.story

Speaking of dead, here’s a poem by Jim Carroll about many of his early friends that ended up dead. Now it’s come full-circle. For the poet as well.

People Who Died
—by Jim Carroll

Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet in the head
Bobby OD'd on Drano on the night that he was wed
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you brother

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Herbie pushed Tony from the Boys' Club roof
Tony thought that his rage was just some goof
But Herbie sure gave Tony some bitchen proof
"Hey," Herbie said, "Tony, can you fly?"
But Tony couldn't fly, Tony died

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Brian got busted on a narco rap
He beat the rap by rattin' on some bikers
He said, "Hey, I know it's dangerous, but it sure beats Riker's"
But the next day he got offed by the very same bikers

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet in the head
Bobby OD'd on Drano on the night that he was wed
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you brother

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

[barton]

A whore in old Rawalpindi,
Ate lentils which made her quite windy,
When fucked in the ass,
It compressed all that gas,
Till her butt could speak Urdu, and Hindi!

[pugetopolis]

Behold those vulgarian Borgias,
Amid all those dead Georgios and Georgias,
Their robes disarrayed,
They incestuously splayed
Their legs, in high Renaissance orgias

—for Barton

[pugetopolis]

A certified expert in math,
At the baths said, “I’m here for a laugh,
So don’t get upset
When the number you get,
Is a mere six inches and a half

—for oilcanbody