I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain --and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

-- Robert Frost

Source: stephenfrug.blogspot

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If you’ve been following along with his tweets and personal Tumblr, you’ll know that David All, founder of the now-shuttered digital communications firm, the David All Group, is a new man. A man of art, creativity and positive energy. Or he’s on something. On Sunday, All posted an unbearably long epic poem to his Facebook using rugs as a theme.

It has been “liked” five times. To make matters more bizarre, All posted an audio version of the poem to another site, with himself reading it. It lasts for 12 minutes, though a few seconds are spent only on All coughing and clearing his throat.

Since closing down David All Group… he created a short-lived social networking smartphone application called Crumbly. It launched in October and shut down in early 2013. He now lives in San Francisco where he’s, according to his Tumblr, “in the process of creating” his next company.

In addition to that, he spends his time tweeting whimsical things (“Juice is love. Red, yellow and green peppers, blood orange, Fuji apple, cilantro and Meyer lemon…”) and updating his Tumblr. His tweets often include the hash tag “GiftingRug.” This, judging by his Tumblr, is simply a place he meets with friends and others at a local park where they sing and do other fun-loving things.

“The #GiftingRug is a place to sit. To feel the warmth. Safe. Happy. Home,” a Tumblr post from last week says. “The #GiftingRug is a platform to stand and be seen. To express the gift within.”All of this from a guy who was once called “Karl Rove 2.0.”

Source: mediabistro

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I’ll close with one choice item from my stash of non-poetry poetry. A block of medieval prose I find exquisitely moving. You have to read it outloud, though. I found it in a paperback called Anglo-Saxon Prose, a collection of interesting specimens selected and translated by Michael Swanton (Everyman, 1993). Swanton calls the piece “The Discriminating Reeve,” and dates it tenth or eleventh century. Here is the finale—

[…] He can always find something to repair on the manor—he need never be idle when he is in it: put the house in good order, set to rights and make it clean, and fence drains, repair breaches in the dykes, make good the fences, root out weeds, make walk-ways between the houses, make tables and benches, provide horse-stalls, maintain the flooring, or such things as may be profitable.

¶ He must provide many tools for the manor, and keep many implements for the buildings: axe, adze, bill, awl, plane, saw, spoke-shave, tie hook, auger, mattock, crow-bar, share, coulter; and also goad-iron, scythe, sickle, hoe, spade, shovel, woad-trowel, barrow, broom, mallet, rake, fork, ladder, curry-comb and shears, fire-tongs, steelyard; and many cloth-working tools: flax-lines, spindle, reel, yarn-winder, stoddle, beams, press, comb, card, weft, woof, wool-comb, roller, slay, crank, shuttle, seam-pegs, shears, needle, beater.

¶ And if he has skilled workmen, he must assist them with tools: miller, shoe-maker, lead-founder, and other workers—each occupation will itself show what pertains to it; there is no man that can enumerate all the tools which one must have.

¶ One must have: wagon covers, ploughing gear, harrowing tackle and many things which I cannot now name, as well as: a measure, awl, threshing-floor flail, and many utensils: cauldron, leaden vessel, kettle, ladle, pans, pots, fire-dog, dishes, skillets, tubs, bucket, churn, cheese-vat, bags, punnets, bushels, sieves, seed-basket, riddle, hair-sieve, sieve-rack, fans, troughs, ash-wood pails, hives, honey bins, beer-barrels, bath-tub, dishes, flasks, bowls, basins, cups, strainers, candlesticks, salt-cellar, spoon-case, pepper-horn, chests, coffers, yeast-boxes, seats, stools, chairs, bowls, lamp, lantern, leather bottles, resin-box, comb, cattle bin, manger, fire-screen, meal-store, eel-tank, oven-rake, dung-shovel.

¶ It is difficult to tell all that he who looks after the administration must think of. He must neglect nothing that might ever prove useful: not even a mousetrap therefore, or what is still more trivial, a hasp-peg. Many things are necessary for the faithful reeve of a household and a frugal governor of men. I have set out what I know; let him who is better informed explain it more fully.
I want to mention: I don’t fully understand this, but when the reeve pauses to say “There is no man that can enumerate all the tools which one must have”—and then resumes: “One must have…,”—when he does that, I cry. Tears come out of my eyes. The last paragraph is moving, too, heaven knows, but there is something special about that middle moment. I perceive a beautiful stoic dignity in the estate manager’s attempt to row upstream against that avalanche of any-angled objects.
The clean, cataloguing mind facing down the impossible task—and the storm of stuff.

Source: poetryfoundation

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The trees by the metro
are chilled hands in fingerless gloves,
evergreen ivy wrapped around
their knuckles.

Smaller trees are fingers
wound with vines
like rosaries;
the old leaves are beads.

Trees wait for the wind to stop.
They wait for new leaves.
They wait to touch the warm sun.

The trees in our neighbor’s yards
grow fat crows
and fuzzy red buds.
These trees are not cherries
or dogwoods.

They are black locusts
and red maples,
ordinary shade trees in May or June.
They are not waiting for anything.
Their time will soon be gone.

The new tree in our yard
spits cherry blossoms
into the air
as the sun sets.
This tree does not wait either.
It’s time to bloom.

Marianne Szlyk is an associate professor of English at Montgomery College, Rockville as well as an associate editor at the Potomac Review. This poem is a sequel to "Winter into Spring," a poem that appeared in Jellyfish Whispers. Most recently, her poems have appeared in the Ishaan Literary Review and Aberration Labyrinth. Other poems may appear soon in the Blue Hour Literary Magazine.

Source: jellyfishwhispers

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This riverbend must have always been lovely.
Take the one-lane iron bridge shortcut across
the town's west end and look downstream
to where the water backs up by the falls.
Boys once fished there with butterball bait
because the creamery churned by hydro
and the trout were so rich, says my ancient neighbor,
they tasted like heaven, but better. Try to
stop on the bridge if no one's coming
to see the back of the furniture mill

in upside-down detail on the river,
assuming the day is clear and still.
I've lived here and driven this road forever.
Strange therefore that I've never taken
the same advice I'm offering you.
I've lived here, but I've too often been racing
to get to work or else back home
to my wife and our younger school-age children,
the fifth and last of whom will be headed
away to college starting this autumn.

I hope I paid enough attention
to her and the others, in spite of the lawn,
the plowing, the bills, the urgent concerns
of career and upkeep. Soon she'll be gone.
Try to stop on the bridge in fall:
that is, when hardwood trees by the river
drop carmine and amber onto the surface;
or in spring, when the foliage has gotten no bigger
than any newborn infant's ear
such that the light from sky to stream

makes the world, as I've said—or at least this corner—
complete, in fact double. I'd never have dreamed
a household entirely empty of children.
It'll be the first time in some decades,
which may mean depression, and if so indifference
to the river's reflections, to leaves and shades,
but more likely—like you, if you shrug off my counsel
or even take it—it'll be through tears
that I witness each of these things, so lovely.
They must have been lovely all these years.


SYDNEY LEA
I Was Thinking of Beauty
Four Way Books

Source: poems

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That a cardinal's bright dart alights upon the branch
means Non cogito, ergo sum—
I don't think, therefore I am.

But that's not Mandarin!
Still the tree's petal-fall dusts us angelic,
our arms feathered wings.

A fool's errand, this search for meaning,
metaphor the bed we lie and awaken in.
Hey there, get off our cloud!

In this we grow lonely though not alone,
the way my Cortland shimmers
in a cloud of her own making.

I know what I said. I said her.
You'd like to know what I make
of her secret, also ours.

Try this: forget the fate we'll share,
warm from the oven of our unmaking,
soon these limbs winter bare.

Just don't, let's say,
our arms petaled feathers.
This once: Don't think.


KEVIN STEIN
Wrestling Li Po for the Remote
Fifth Star Press

Source: poems

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he doesn't let the herd eat the forsythia but
knows they like to be amidst its blazing yellows. He stands they graze he watches. Ida watches. She puzzles him he puzzles himself. Her old plaid sportscoat his tendency to befriend catastrophe. She is innocent and filled with mood like a very tough experimental baby. Her drawing book open on her knees. Blackish iridescent hides shine green as sharks amid the herd. A lone white one (Io) glows like an idol and is Ida's favorite. She looks at her drawing looks back at Io sets her drawing book down on the grass. They smell she says. Why they're called musk oxen he says it's in a gland by the knee. What is? The musk. Some people hate it he says. You ever see a musk ox dip its head to touch its knee get out of the way it's going to charge but Ida is no longer listening. The oxen move slowly. They chew coarse gaps in the weeds shifting ever so slightly sideways with their great brows bent and the long fur sweeping their ankles. Each head has two horns that part as neatly as a boy about to play the piano wets his hair and hopes it stays flat for the whole recital. G faintly smiles. It's their looking down he loves the steady way they pay attention downward yet are watching everything else too. A musk ox can see 310 degrees around in a circle. Like cats he thinks. Like cats Ida says. What? Look easy to draw but it's so not true. Ah he says. I don't hate it she says but G is frowning now. His wings are rising up on his back and he wants to know why.

Source: poems

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It's a compelling fusion of artistic inspiration and possibilities. In a construct hoping to connect the artist with the landscape, Poetry of the Wild is an outdoor sculpture exhibition where participants craft "poetry boxes" out of found material or recycled containers.

A poem is affixed to the box, and decorations reflect the text of the poem. Also, each work includes an open journal for written public reaction after the piece is installed at any of the different sites around the region.

There will be two Poetry of the Wild installations this year, in April at UConn Avery Point's Sculpture Path in Groton, and at Mystic Arts Center in June. Artists interested in participating are invited to attend a Poetry Box Presentation tonight at the Mystic Arts Center. Ecological designer/sculptor Ana Flores will explain the history of Poetry of the Wild and how to get involved in the upcoming shows.

Source: theday

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Ron Smith, author of the poetry collections Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery and Moon Road, is the poetry editor for Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature. Winner of the Carole Weinstein Prize and other poetry awards, he holds the George Squires Chair of Distinguished Teaching and serves as Writer-in-Residence at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Virginia. He is also an adjunct associate professor at the University of Richmond.

Source: poems

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This week's poem, "The snow whirls over the courtyard's roses," is by the Finland-Swedish writer, Tua Forsström, translated from the Swedish by Stina Katchadourian. It's the first poem in her 1998 collection After Spending a Night Among Horses, which is included in the four-part Bloodaxe collection of Forsström's work.

The poems in After Spending a Night Among Horses are inspired by the film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky and are interleaved with quotations from Tarkovsky's film, Stalker, and from his prose-book, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Tarkovsky once said, "There is only one way of thinking in cinema: poetically." Forsström expresses the reverse idea, of thinking in poetry cinematically. The collection itself is a montage, and many of the individual poems, like this one, draw on a similar technique, combining different settings, seasons, voices and moods in one imaginative sweep. All have a dream-like and open-ended quality.

In fact, the collection opens with five verses from the film-maker's father, the poet Arseny Tarkovsky – some melancholy stanzas, based on Per-Arne Bodin's translation from the Russian, beginning "Now the summer's gone/ as if it never was./ It's still warm in the clearing./ But that's not enough." This is followed by a quotation from the character of the wife, spoken to the camera at the end of Stalker: "Of course it's quite possible that I'm inventing this after the fact. But that time, he just came up to me and said: 'Follow me,' and I did. And I've never regretted that. Never." Both voice themes of compulsion, restlessness and sacrifice.

Forsström's first line "The snow whirls over the courtyard's roses" is like a camera direction. The image is arrestingly visual, with implied contrasts of colour, temperature and movement. While the rose-garden appears literally frozen in time, the scene elsewhere is busy, with the whirling unseasonal snowflakes and the speaker's excited, abbreviated thoughts: "Didn't bring my boots and scarf … don't know what to do with all this light!" She's not simply talking to herself but to the film-maker, testing her poet's material against his cinematic vision: "You wouldn't approve of the colours./ It's too striking, Andrei Arsenyevich, too/ much, too much of everything!"

There's a tension between abundance – too much colour, too much light, too much to remember – and the concentration and "cutting" needed for making art. But, if art is represented by the frost's grip on the iconic rose garden, destruction must be the inevitable result of such preservation. Perhaps the attraction of cinema is that it combines art with apparent fluidity and process. But creative limitations are suggested by the references to the flight and crash of the hot-air balloon at the beginning of another Tarkovsky film, Andrei Rublev. Originally, Tarkovsky had shown a peasant attempting flight with home-made wings, and the poet seems critical of his editorial decision. Depicting the "aerial balloon, a clumsy/ creation cobbled together from rope and rags," the translation catches the contraption's awkwardness in its alliteration: clumsy/ creation/ cobbled/ropes/rags. It's not immediately clear how wings would have been an improvement.

The memory triggers thoughts which seem rather abstract and personal. "Before, I had a lot and didn't remember. Difficult/ to stick to the subject. Difficult to stick to the subject. /Hope to return. Hope to return to the principle/ of wings." These repeated statements are like memos to self. Perhaps they allude to abandoned poems, and plans for future poems. Several themes from "The snow whirls …" will be explored later on.

The memory of the high twittering heard from a Benidorm hotel, for instance, is reprised in a poem where the speaker hears caged willow warblers singing from a barber's shop. Perhaps the birdsong in "The snow whirls …" is associated with hearing the news of Tarkovsky's death. The hare, though it belongs to the "zone" of the frozen rose garden, is also out of place when it almost hops into the "entrance hall here at the Foundation." These poems value the effects of dislocation, but, read sequentially, they strike up echoes with each other. Another poem begins "It doesn't usually snow in Central Sweden in October." This helps explain "the hare's calendar," and its implied disharmony with the seasonal alterations caused by humans.

Before the hare appears, the poet quotes a passage from Sculpting in Time where Tarkovsky apparently comments on Stalker, "The zone is a zone, the zone is life,/ and a person can either be ruined or survive when/ she makes her way through this life. Whether she makes it or/ not depends on her self-esteem." The poem's gently sceptical tone elsewhere destabilises a quotation which could almost be a banal homily out of a self-help manual. "Self-esteem" becomes credible, though, if translated into artistic independence and conviction.

In the end, the poem owns up to a traditional expression of piety, again suggesting Rublev, but with a characteristic twist: "one should/ not constantly give thanks, one should definitely give thanks." Maybe this chimes in with the earlier desire "to return to the principle/ of wings." The strong colours at the end bring us back to the frozen roses. Defiantly contrasting the leaden Swedish lake with the body-and-blood, white and red of the snow and roses, the poem also evokes the shift from black-and-white photography into glowing "sovcolour" near the end of Andrei Rublev.

Forsström has said that she writes every poem 50 or 60 times, and that she often travels with her notebooks to a foreign city in order to complete a poem. "The snow whirls over the courtyard's roses" seems to open a poetry workbook, to show us an intriguing display of raw material. It's a series of comments, notes and sketches for future writing, held together by the casual but constantly-renewed conversation with Tarkovsky. There are moments of lyric concentration and heightened rhythm, but they're held in a framework of increasingly long and enjambed lines which seem to exert an outward pull. While the imagery of snow and roses recalls Louis MacNeice's poem "Snow," Forsström's vision of the world's incorrigible plurality is far more discursive. There's really no zone, it seems to say, and no magical room, even for the poet: there's only the journey.

The snow whirls over the courtyard's roses
The snow whirls over the courtyard's roses.
Didn't bring my boots and scarf, leafing
through books, don't know what to do with all this light!
You wouldn't approve of the colours.
It's too striking, Andrei Arsenyevich, too
much, too much of everything!
You exchanged the wings for an aerial balloon, a clumsy
creation cobbled together from rope and rags, I remember so well.
Before, I had a lot and didn't remember. Difficult
to stick to the subject. Difficult to stick to the subject.
Hope to return. Hope to return to the principle
of wings. The fact remains: the freeze preserved
the rose garden last night. 'The zone is a zone, the zone is life,
and a person can either be ruined or survive when
she makes her way through this life. Whether she makes it or
not depends on her sense of self-esteem-' A hare
almost hopped into the entrance hall here at the Foundation,
mottled against the snow; it's October in the hare's calendar.
You seem to be a moody sort of person
and it's possible that none of this is of interest to you.
On the other hand, you yourself complain fairly often.
I'm writing because you are dead and because I woke up
last spring in my streetside hotel room in Benidorm to that wonderful
high twittering. One shouldn't constantly say one is sorry, one should
not constantly give thanks, one should definitely give thanks. Lake
Mälaren like lead down there. The rest is white and red.

Source: guardian

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