Poetry Focus: Poem by C.D. Wright

What a week we have been having here at Eyewear in chilly London... first, a poem by Robert Pinsky, and now, tonight, a new poem by C.D. Wright.

C.D. Wright, American Poet

Wright is one of the best-known, and most influential, of major contemporary American poets.  Her stylish innovative poetics is a brilliant reminder of how there are still aspects of American poetry that we in the UK can learn from, and admire.

Wright was born in Mountain Home, Arkansas. She received an MFA from the University of Arkansas in 1976. She has published numerous volumes of poetry including One With Others (Copper Canyon Press, 2010) which received the 2011 Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; 40 Watts (Octopus Books, 2009); Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize; Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (2005); Steal Away: New and Selected Poems (2002); and One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2003), with photographer Deborah Luster.  Honours include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, the Bunting Institute, as well as awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Witter Bynner Prize, and a Whiting Award. In 1994 she was named Poet Laureate of Rhode Island, a five-year post. In 2013, Wright was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Obscurity and Voyaging

The hand was having a hard time holding the pen.

A superficial cut.

A long clear silent night.

A book held open by a dolostone.

The occupant selects a sentence, No one knows

how small the smallest life is.

If there’s a call, it will not be answered.

A bath; the burning of sweetgrass soothe the limbs.

As a memory stings the brain.

The furniture serviceable but weird, on the verge

of grotesque.

The vein of light under the door comforted

the occupant.

The air inhales the passerine lines of a single singer.

   

A motorcycle saws through the song and goes.

An appliance purrs at intervals.

The pen was bought in Gubbio near

the thin band marking the great dying of dinosaurs.

The pen was a gift.

It has been designed to coax a scream

of beauty from a fissure

of  hairiness.

Iridium in the nib.       


poem published online with permission of the author; copyright remains with C.D. Wright 2013.

Poetry Focus: Poem by Robert Pinsky

Pinsky as a young poet

Eyewear is very fortunate, this Tuesday in cold London, to be able to feature a poem from Robert Pinsky.  This is from his Selected Poems.  Robert Pinsky, a former Poet Laureate of America, is one of the greatest of living poets in the English language.

Rhyme

Air an instrument of the tongue,

The tongue an instrument

Of the body, the body

An instrument of spirit,

The spirit a being of the air.

A bird the medium of its song.

A song a world, a containment

Like a hotel room, ready

For us guests who inherit

Our compartment of time there.

In the Cornell box, among

Ephemera as its element,

The preserved bird— a study

In spontaneous elegy, the parrot

Art, mortal in its cornered sphere.

The room a stanza rung

In a laddered filament

Clambered by all the unsteady

Chambered voices that share it,

Each reciting I too was here—

In a room, a rhyme, a song.

In the box, in books: each element

An instrument, the body

Still straining to parrot

The spirit, a being of air.

poem reprinted online with permission of Robert Pinsky; from Selected Poems; copyright 2013.

Poetry Focus: 3 New Poems by Kathleen Ossip

Eyewear is thoroughly chuffed to feature the superb American poet Kathleen Ossip (pictured above) this rainy London Friday, by showcasing three new poems of hers.  Ossip is the author of The Cold War, which was named one of Publishers Weekly's best books of 2011; The Search Engine, which was selected by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize; and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, the Washington Post, The Believer, Fence, and Poetry Review (London). She teaches at The New School and online for The Poetry School in London. She was a co-founder of LIT (the journal of the graduate writing program at The New School), and she's the poetry editor of Women's Studies Quarterly. She has received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

 

3 Poems from “The Great Man”

Here I come with my magnifying glass,

a supple performance, a thought disorder. Around your x, y boils and will die in camera’s sound. Democrats, Republicans all a-growing, all undergoing the re-dark re-nights they’d thought never to have—the supporting conditions for newness ever present when the baths of ruin spill—each mind saturated and strange. But can they imagine that in some sense they go as they please? When I wanted a revolution, I discovered fun, tendered with a bite; beneath the bite a verve of oneness. During the eternal round of mind-states, when to live, why to do paddled: there were we, oarless. A lull in the talk, cold spot in a lake, leads to failure, failure as a subject, and we need to know that we exist,

I think. Closed system here, like a beast unlicking itself. But the tragedy (she wants us to live sincerely and she wants us to make fresh art) backs away from their clearly happy faces. Lateral shifting can cause all kinds of problems, says the Great Man outlining the Next War. In laying down your weapons, do not but keep them near. The system costs and costs but teaches at last.

The Great Man puts $5000

in a box by the bed. His nuclear philosophy is everywhere, his supersleaze drawl a horrifying but not unheard of crime. A petal, a temple, a knife, a figurine—all these would have said affection. Why did he have to use a case with a lock? A crude or boorish person, a potbelly? He makes me cry, writes checks. My ipod his distraction. He won’t let me forget the time I slid down his “hill.”

In my dream, a person with indeterminate clothing strolls at his right side, a child at his left. He has too much ambition and not enough skill. Or too much skill, not enough inspiration. Wasted potential, whispers Tragedy; Comedy weighs in with all his lesser flaws—both stone masks intent on him. I wake up and notice the “button” on the “toaster,” the little bit extra, and the smell of crap on the avenue.

Leave the money, take the box.

Take the money, leave the box.

Take the money, take the box.

From here I will fall into a purity.

Thank you for reading this scar.

The Great Man has one Great Skill:

burying. And I tired of his hinting, his spume.

Fingering his seam in Kabul, my pointer snags a shred of polyester. What you had here was a human being, a bright spirit, who could, I knew, have been good. Care should have cushioned every blow, but his parents found him dreary, not to be labored over. And so he was spiritual in the service of $ % €  ¥ ®.

I have something in the case for you. Open it. But there’s no way to open it. The stars, the sun and the earth will die, evaporating into radiation, and there will be no light, only a soup of subatomic particles and that case, still unopened. Kindness is too much to ask, exuberance seldom rates a statue.

Undoing the zipper in Kirkuk, I ordered a decaf green tea and admired the modesty of the aluminum pitcher of cream. Focus is an overrated skill.

The colors on the weather map inched westerly, polyesterly. I couldn’t see the next instant, but he could. He buried it. Kindly he gives me permission, drop by drop.

Es popular. Es verde. Es hermosa. Wrong language, but he tried.

all poem published online with permission of the author; copyright Kathleen Ossip 2013.

Poetry Focus: Jerome Rothenberg

Eyewear is thrilled to feature Jerome Rothenberg (pictured)  at the start of this week, as he is one of the great figures in American poetry.  I've had books of his on my shelves for over thirty years.

He is an internationally known poet with over eighty books of poetry and twelve assemblages of traditional and avant-garde poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred and, with Pierre Joris and Jeffrey Robinson, Poems for the Millennium, volumes 1-3. Recent books of poems include Triptych, Gematria Complete, Concealments & Caprichos, Retrievals: Uncollected & New Poems 1955-2010, and A Cruel Nirvana (just published by SplitLevel Texts). He is now working on a global anthology of “outsider and subterranean poetry” and, with Heriberto Yépez, Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader for Black Widow Press. He has until recently been a professor of visual arts and literature at the University of California, San Diego.

A CRUEL NIRVANA

Half dead

is still alive

& half alive is too.

So keep it rolling

I declare.

The others mingle in a room

atop the city

where a fire burns.

They sing.

I sing among them.

Then I push my way through

with my thumbs.

I eke a living

from a stone.

Hard knocks are bound to follow.

I can hear

a water song

close by my ear

& track it

where it leads me.

It is summer

but the trees

are dead.

They vanish with

our fallen friends.

The eye in torment

brings them down

each mind a little world

a cruel nirvana.

poem by Jerome Rothenberg; reprinted online with permission of the author.

Poetry Focus On: Richard Brammer

Richard Brammer (pictured) was born in 1975 in the UK. He is a poet and is also the Editor of Flexipress. His work has previously appeared in Fulcrum, The Battersea Review, Popshot, among other magazines.

The British poet Richard Brammer in no way conforming to the stereotype of the British poet

Death of a Salesman

William Burroughs — ‘Burroughs’ — signs a copy

of The Naked Lunch over to you

not like a baton

on the 4^th October 1982, whilst The Smiths

play their first gig at The Ritz

just down the road.

It sat on your gas fire for years

the one you can’t turn on anymore

because it gasses the man next door.

 ///

Pharmakon

My new pills, remedially labelled

with all the days of the week,

an anti-depressant advent calendar,

I choose Saturday

and pull on my Danish Noir pullover

for the café, the hub of my operation.

I shake sugar into my coffee

— hub, a wheelwright’s word,

first became common currency

in the early nineteenth century,

during a craze for bicycles.

poem by Richard Brammer; reprinted online with permission of the author.