Sunday, January 26, 2020

Gerard Sarnat writes


POETPOURRI 



i. Writers’ Revenge On Reality

Repug razzamatazz
whether old stanzaslinesproseblocks
or new GIFs, we only-humans
recognize the five-hundredth anniversary
of  Venice’s ghetto  --

Geto means Italian foundry 
where us swarthy Jews were locked at night
although kike physicians’re permitted out
to tend blond patients too squeamish
to allow believers in Jesus to touch their bodies.


ii. Nitroglycerin Terminology

 “What I am trying to get at is a general, all-purpose experience — like those stretch socks that fit all sizes,” John Ashbery



Splenic
cosmopolitan
wrathful
climate crisis
denier --
clicks & brick
battery
blows up chest
pains



iii. lonelyhearted misanthrope

neon planet DNA howl, lab
sow or cease cow passages
north, hungry chimera still
point streetcake patchwork,
paperlined mothy penniless
press wolfs words w/out jam



iv. Beckoning

Thoroughly deranged by Rimbaud, quit tagging at 18, we're poles apart
giraffes and groundhogs - he a genius, precocial, hatched full form;
me more accountant, pasticheur, froggy, altricial.



Still, apothecary Keats and doc Williams managed to be read.
Kunitz succeeded Sophocles and Frost as the oldest working poet,
peaked in his 90's, may Stan’s word storm rust in peace.

                                                      

Healer molt to anecdotalist at sixty-two, 
soup stewing back of the stove bubbles up chance memories.
Only once in a while chunks of reality drop in.



Future problematic, address book tattered, thinned;
more meditative present merges with wilier pasts;    divisions 
time  truth   breakdown    ellipse     branch       bog in begin.



Polonius, don't overreach as Wally Steven’s mickey mocker:
after shaving (how are you tied to that jowly ripe man?),
sing your stories outloud as the nascent troubadour I am.


1 comment:

  1. Stanley Kunitz published his 1st poetry collection, "Intellectual Things," in 1930, when he was 25; it took him 14 years to publish a 2nd volume, "Passport to the War." Between books he had married and divorced the 1st 2 of his 3 wives and drafted into the US army as a conscientious objector. His 3rd book, "Selected Poems: 1928-1958," was published in 1959 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. "The TestingTree" followed in 1971, and his later works followed a similar pace; "Passing Through, The Later Poems, New and Selected" (1995) won the National Book Award. In 1974 he was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congres, the precursor title to Poet laureate, which he became in 2000. But he was still writing poems as late as his 100th year. As death neared he wrote "The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden" (2005), a collection of essays, and died in 2006.

    In a murderous time
    the heart breaks and breaks
    and lives by breaking.
    It is necessary to go
    through dark and deeper dark
    and not to turn.

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