November 2011
19 posts
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Poetry Friday
The Remains
Love, you probably think this is funny, dangling
the piece of fruit that could break the camel’s back.
Ripe, ready to devour
but how many times?
Juice runs down my chin;
nectar coats my throat,
but once the core is exposed,
what use have I for the remains?
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Poetry Friday
Conjure
Funny how someone you never really knew
can lay latent in a signature
and this man, a father of six,
a veteran of foreign war
now sitting numbly in your wallet
can be conjured by running your fingers
over faded black type
like a genie in a bottle.
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Excerpt from the Paris Review
INTERVIEWER: Where does a poem begin for you? Do you take notes for poems? Do you get up in the middle of the night?
PHILIP LEVINE: They begin in different ways, and over the course of my writing life the process has changed. When I was a kid speaking poetry I never wrote it down; those poems began with a phrase and then I would try to employ the vocabulary and the structure of the phrase to create a fabric of repetitions. When I started writing poetry at eighteen, the poems seemed to spring outward from a visual image. It was that precise visual image I was out to capture, that’s what excited me; the poem became the means for pushing forward the images I wanted the reader to devour. Then Yeats set me on fire. I mean the language is exalted, yet it sounds like somebody talking and singing at the same time. I thought, This is it. And I still kind of feel this is it. This is the perfection of form. It’s got speech, song, it’s high rhetoric and yet it doesn’t sound remote or false. A poem like “Easter, 1916.” I said, Jesus Christ, this is so much what I want. It doesn’t matter about his stupid attitudes. He wrote one poem about his daughter, such a sexist poem. But it’s so beautifully done. I remember telling a woman friend of mine, “Isn’t this an incredible poem?” And she got very angry with me; “It’s so sexist,” she said, “look at this!” I said, sure, it’s like Eliot’s anti-Semitic stuff, “the Jew squats on the windowsill”; fuck you, Eliot, but the poem is exquisite. Then somewhere in my forties I hit a kind of phase of automatic writing. I would really be taken, sort of seized, and just write the stuff! It would just come pouring out, hundreds of lines. Then the process of making a poem became quite different: it became seeing what was inside this great blast of language and imagery, and finding the core.
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“There was a fraud case in Ohio last year where some single black mother lied...”
– Matt Taibbi
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The Giving Tree →
If The Giving Tree doesn’t cross your mind when someone asks you what your favorite book is, your childhood was cold and unfulfilling. Check out this animated version from 1973 narrated by the legendary Shel Silverstein.
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Music Monday
Childish Gambino - Camp
I love that NPR spans the gamut of music from James Taylor to Wynton Marsalis to Ye and Jay and now to Childish Gambino. There’s something about connecting with a song or an artist and then reading a talented writer’s interpretation of the same thing. I think that’s what I love about poetry (and art in a larger sense). It’s the recreation of one...
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forbeslist:
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