Author: Meryl

Making an enemy?

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

I hope not, but I am going to repost a poem here from the poem-a-day feature of the Academy of American poets. Reading it, I had an idea about what I would suggest were I an editor and this poem came to me. But poets are rarely open to suggestions as radical as mine. Editing others’ work as I see it is part of my belief that poets are all really working on one big quilt of words, and it’s important to be open to others thoughts about one’s particular needlework. Of course, it’s easier to be open to editing others’ work than to accept suggestions about one’s own.

In any case, here is the poem as written, followed by my suggestion.

Early Fall

Rain decays dawn—
everything in the yard

leaning, beaded, broken in.
A lucid dream

the weather
assembles; a pain particular

as light seeping
into an alley

narrowed by overgrowth.
To articulate what slips

the instant
speech moves

to apprehend it.

Cinder blocks stacked
by a metal shed door

totem-like
in haze

of evaporated rain.

Joseph Massey

My suggested edit: Continue reading “Making an enemy?” →

Raw

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

In a workshop once, Marie Howe suggested: write a poem from the point of view of someone who throws trash out the car window. Nobody could. But here Frank Bidart manages a harder task–write a poem in the voice of a pedophile.

Herbert White

“When I hit her on the head, it was good,

and then I did it to her a couple of times,—
but it was funny,—afterwards,
it was as if somebody else did it…

Everything flat, without sharpness, richness or line.

Still, I liked to drive past the woods where she lay,
tell the old lady and the kids I had to take a piss,
hop out and do it to her…

The whole buggy of them waiting for me
made me feel good;
but still, just like I knew all along,
she didn’t move.

When the body got too discomposed,
I’d just jack off, letting it fall on her…

—It sounds crazy, but I tell you
sometimes it was beautiful—; I don’t know how
to say it, but for a minute, everything was possible—;
and then,
then,—
well, like I said, she didn’t move: and I saw,
under me, a little girl was just lying there in the mud:

and I knew I couldn’t have done that,—
somebody else had to have done that,—
standing above her there,
in those ordinary, shitty leaves…

—One time, I went to see Dad in a motel where he was
staying with a woman; but she was gone;
you could smell the wine in the air; and he started,
real embarrassing, to cry…
He was still a little drunk,
and he asked me to forgive him for
all he hadn’t done—; but, What the shit?
Who would have wanted to stay with Mom? with bastards
not even his own kids?

I got in the truck, and started to drive,
and saw a little girl—
who I picked up, hit on the head, and
screwed, and screwed, and screwed, and screwed, then

buried,
in the garden of the motel…

—You see, ever since I was a kid I wanted
to feel things make sense: I remember

looking out the window of my room back home,—
and being almost suffocated by the asphalt;
and grass; and trees; and glass;
just there, just there, doing nothing!
not saying anything! filling me up—
but also being a wall; dead, and stopping me;
—how I wanted to see beneath it, cut

beneath it, and make it
somehow, come alive…

The salt of the earth;
Mom once said, ‘Man’s spunk is the salt of the earth…’
—That night, at that Twenty-nine Palms Motel
I had passed a million times on the road, everything

fit together; was alright;
it seemed like
everything had to be there, like I had spent years
trying, and at last finally finished drawing this
huge circle…

—But then, suddenly I knew
somebody else did it, some bastard
had hurt a little girl—; the motel
I could see again, it had been

itself all the time, a lousy
pile of bricks, plaster, that didn’t seem to
have to be there,—but was, just by chance…

—Once, on the farm, when I was a kid,
I was screwing a goat; and the rope around his neck
when he tried to get away
pulled tight;—and just when I came,
he died…
I came back the next day; jacked off over his body;
but it didn’t do any good…

Mom once said:
‘Man’s spunk is the salt of the earth, and grows kids.’

I tried so hard to come; more pain than anything else;
but didn’t do any good…

—About six months ago, I heard Dad remarried,
so I drove over to Connecticut to see him and see
if he was happy.
She was twenty-five years younger than him:
she had lots of little kids, and I don’t know why,
I felt shaky…
I stopped in front of the address; and
snuck up to the window to look in…
—There he was, a kid
six months old on his lap, laughing
and bouncing the kid, happy in his old age
to play the papa after years of sleeping around,—
it twisted me up…
To think that what he wouldn’t give me,
he wanted to give them…

I could have killed the bastard…

—Naturally, I just got right back in the car,
and believe me, was determined, determined,
to head straight for home…

but the more I drove,
I kept thinking about getting a girl,
and the more I thought I shouldn’t do it,
the more I had to—

I saw her coming out of the movies,
saw she was alone, and
kept circling the blocks as she walked along them,
saying, ‘You’re going to leave her alone.’
‘You’re going to leave her alone.’

—The woods were scary!
As the seasons changed, and you saw more and more
of the skull show through, the nights became clearer,
and the buds,—erect, like nipples…

—But then, one night,
nothing worked…
Nothing in the sky
would blur like I wanted it to;
and I couldn’t, couldn’t,
get it to seem to me
that somebody else did it…

I tried, and tried, but there was just me there,
and her, and the sharp trees
saying, ‘That’s you standing there.
You’re…
just you.’

I hope I fry.

—Hell came when I saw
MYSELF…
and couldn’t stand
what I see…”

Frank Bidart

Hats

Posted on by Meryl in Art

We made it over to the exhibit of impressionist paintings of all thing millinery today. It was billed as an exhibit of Degas’ paintings about that include hats, but had many impressionists and also glass cases with sample hats from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. You can read about it and see paintings here.  It was great fun, and I was tempted by a hat at the museum store:

But it was $200.  Instead, I kept wearing my blue hat that I bought at a thrift shop this week for $2.

Then I took a couple of pictures of others with good hats:

 

 

 

 

Continue reading “Hats” →

A poem not just for tax season

Posted on by Meryl in Uncategorized

Lat time I was at Squaw Valley Community of Writers I discovered that there was another poet not just from my very small town, but who lives on my short block, seven or eight houses down from me. How lucky!

Here is one of her poems:

Discussing Useful Life at the Tax Depreciation Seminar
While Remembering a Line by David Baker

The depreciable life of a parking garage is fifteen, unless its roof

is the floor of the building above it, in which case it’s thirty-nine.

Office furniture is seven, the stove five and the fax machine five.

But if a machine has its wires embedded in the wall behind it,

so they ease through the wall like veins, it can make that wall part

of the machine, thus five, as if there’s a contagion there, a life-changing Continue reading “A poem not just for tax season” →

Ilya Kaminsky

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

A fellow poet recommended his work to me, and I have been reading his book, Dancing in Odessa. Here’s a poem from that book that I really like:

Envoi

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxYou will die on a boat from Yalta to Odessa.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx–a fortune teller, 1992

What ties me to this earth? In Massachusetts,
the birds force themselves into my lines–
the sea repeats itself, repeats, repeats.

I bless the boat from Yalta to Odessa
and bless each passenger, his bones, his genitals,
bless the sky inside his body,
the sky my medicine, the sky my country.

I bless the continent of gulls, the argument of their order.
The wind, my master
insists on the joy of poplars, swallows,– Continue reading “Ilya Kaminsky” →

Exemplary sentences

Posted on by Meryl in Prose

I am reading Adam Zagajewsky’s new book of essays–more really diary entries–called Slight Exaggeration. I’m a fan of both his prose and his poetry. His standard of literacy and breadth of knowledge is so high. I came across this passage, which he wrote about the generation that came of age on the cusp of the First World War but which seems to me to apply perfectly to the baby boomers.

“What other people of that race, in other nations and times had achieved and attained over generations, through the course of age-long efforts at the cost of life, or of sacrifice and renunciations greater than life, this lay before hem like a chance inheritance, destiny’s perilous gift. It seemed fantastic and unlikely, but it was genuine: they could do whatever they wished with their youth.”

Somehow I thought we’d do more with this opportunity than we did.

Another phrase that caught my attention was from Samin Nosrat, who is now the food writer for the NY Times Maazine. Continue reading “Exemplary sentences” →

Waking to fog

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

After two summery days in a row the fog is back. It made me think of this by Marvin Bell:

People Walking in Fog

They try to watch themselves, drifting in a white sigh,
the boats and trees, themselves, too,
when they think of it, spun from sheets of gauzy droplets
with which to tar the morning white and walk upon it.
The horizon yawns. The earth is liquid. They can feel
it, and not just it but the blanket meaning of it.
Here, bravado is the pretense of the immortal
before the infinite. There being no other side,
they just surrender to this, seeing they cannot
see far, find a door, hack a hole, or mark a spot.
Goats love fog. Parked lovers and beachcombers
love fog, and those who fear the authorities,
and the camera-shy love it, and they adore it
who wish to be wrapped in beauty so delicate
one must step outside to be able to see it.

Marvin Bell, from Mars Being Red

The eclipse

Posted on by Meryl in Stuff Larry Sez

Watching the sun disappear in gradual increments today, what amazed me most was how little you would notice if you weren’t looking at it with glasses. The light did change towards the end, but not so much. Of course, we didn’t go to total eclipeseville to see it, just to east county where the sun wasn’t obscured by fog.

What Larry said: “I don’t know what amazes me more, the sense of the bodies moving in space or the ability of the scientists to predict their movement to the minute.”

Oh, and if you want to see the poetry reading last Thursday, here it is: https://www.facebook.com/beltiblibrary/

I’m the second of three readers.

New work and old

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry, Uncategorized

I’m going to be reading at the Tiburon-Belvedere Library this Thursday, the 17th, at 7 pm. Mostly, I’m going to read new work. I’ve been writing some prose poems inspired by Carlo Rovelli’s wonderful books on physics. I’m including one here. But you can also see some of my older work (and some interesting work by others) at this site, created by Beate Sigriddaughter.

Here’s the prose poem:

Lying on the massage table at the mudbaths

after 12 minutes immersed in a tub of hot volcanic mud and 12 minutes in a bath of hot mineral water my heart thumps against the padded surface and I remember that I have a heart that I am a thermodynamic system that chugs along with little conscious thought blood in blood out every artery vein tiny capillary breathe in leafy oxygen and breathe out CO2 and I understand with my hot pumping body that we exist in relation to every other thing that we weave together a universe of beginnings and endings in a ever changing reality composed of individual particles that know nothing of heat or up or before or tomorrow that what I call self is inextricable from the body here on this table the flannel blanket absorbing particles of me as I slowly cool the new age music bothering my sensibility like a persistent gnat the laugh track last night on the episode of Friends the forgotten French vocabulary and Pythagorean Theorem the anxieties waiting to swarm when I return to my usual state every encounter and memory since my small hot self emerged on this planet till the engine finally stops and I cool for good and the cells of me transform into earth ash air as my spirit into yours as you read these words