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OLD SCHOOL
How much better off would we beif every poet and wanna be werecompelled to write using only paperand a quill pen dipped regularlyinto a small glass inkwell? You must wonder if we would seemore elegance, villanelles, sonnets,and the other forms now lying jumbledin the great literary waste bin. What would we discover if leftto our…
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A LOST PEN
I wrote a poem for my father,about how one afternoonthe oddly green ’57 Caddyappeared in the drivewayand he polished its chrome for hours,even waxed the black bumper bullets.It was the love of his lifehe said, except for his wife,he added after a moment.The years would provethat addition was most likely false.I could send him the…
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LEX
Well before there wasAristotle, there was aa,which comes as no surpriseto geologists who neverdoubted the historyand creation ofthis planet. Well after the zebrathere was the zygote,which a biologistwould tell youis putting the cartwell before the horse. The lexicographer will saythat he did not createthis disconnect, for heor she is a mere recorder,so you’d have to…
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詩
The Japanese inventedhaiku certain that a paintingof great beauty couldbe completed with onlya few strokes of the brush. The Japanese have no wordfor what we claim is higherorder poetry, academic andpedantic are two other Englishwords which easily apply.And the Japanese are hard putto comprehend so much of whatwe deem experimental, the result,a friend named Yoshi…
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INSIDE THE PAGE
She asks innocently,listening to the wind whisperingthrough the bare branches of the oak,“How long have you livedin this poem,” pointingto the page of markedand remarked typescript.He looks at her as if discoveringshe’d grown another head,peeking out from betweenher well-polished teeth.“I have no idea what you mean,”he says, “I write the poems—it is up to you…
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FOR NOW
Tomorrow this poem willmost assuredly no longer be here,though when during the nightit will slip away, never againto be seen, I don’t know or perhaps itwill return in a form I would not recognize,recrafted by the hand of an unseen editor. It may take on a meaning unfamiliar,or translate itself into a tonguethat I can…
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HAIKU
I picked up a bookoff the shelf this morningone hundred haiku it was like sitting downa word starved man, tiredof searching for an alwaysdenied sustenance, and herelaid out before me, a repastof the sweetest grapes,bits of sugar caressinga tongue grown usedto the often bitternessof ill-considered prose. As midday approachedI knew that this was a mealto…
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IN THE WETLANDS
Walking through a nature preservelike Wakodahatchee Wetlands youmust always keep a sharp eye. The birds are everywhere, they areunavoidable and even the alligators,imagining themselves coy are soon enough easily recognized,snouts appear just above the surfacewary eyes scanning the shore. Here you are also surroundedby poems, but they are far moreable to hide, among the eggs…
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POETS GATHER
One deep and abiding beauty of dreamsis that it is entirely logical forMarina Tsvetaeva to be engagedIn an animated discussion withCorso and Ginsberg where none willacknowledge that the world theywrote and imagined is a total mess. Over in the corner, Mandelstam andReznikoff have agreed that for eternityevery game of chess they play willresult in a…
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SONGWRITER
Bob Dylan is, to the best of my knowledge,the only songwriter to successfully rhymeoutrageous and contagious, which doesn’texplain why I knew I could never bea successful songwriter in this life. The explanation is far simpler, it was whenLeonard Cohen served me tea and apricots,said he hated the river even living in Montrealand said I should…
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an old writer and his words 