Anne Waldman Fever Is Upon Us

A Dying Empire - metal band from Lafayette.

Anne Waldman fever is upon us. One friend told me of Waldman's recent performance at her induction into  American Academy of Poets. Bold, dramatic, and singularly nonacademic. Further, a small press, great weather for media, will lead with Anne Waldman's work in their next anthology. I'm in it, too. And the latest issue of Posit features Waldman alongside artist Pamela Lawton.

Attenuate the Loss and Find

For Adrienne Rich

[Our burden to carry as she did

shift the weight of song, heft and gnosis

“body poetics”

as a total event

her fullness rare in the amnesiac Kulchur

awake, awareness & urgency when poetry serves]

name appears 

everywhere and in dream

body armor removed

what now, legacy, archivum

we female archons preserve of

intensity a durance a hand you recognize

(sounds sound)

assurance as lives on

drank of that

drank of this

almost suffocated, then drowned

downed but never

what only she could only know

as herself living in the brute time

speak of a syntax of rendition?

the politics of Empire chip away

as poetry attests, give it up

curve of a water-starved globe

to follow and be following?

racism, sexism, struggle

everything in intense grasp of

consciousness — cut in crystal observation

for her rapid and perched intellectus

privacy opens to vibrant light

this is stuff of Eros, of empathy

passionate edge of Adrienne

the American Skeptic

I feel you consociational in this light

a term of anthropology, to study

intersections in the annals we share

intergenerational, interspecies, interlanguage

move in parallelograms

getting it right as she did

Solstice, Boulder, Colorado 2012

High Park fires distress

Source: Poetry (March 2014)._____________

c/o http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/247336

Songbook (She's Fabulous! She's Fabulous!)

Songbook

 Overture (for Red Bricks)  

Hickory! Hank! Zeke! (Farmboys’ Swing)

Dorothy’s Dream

It’s Green Glittering Glinda!

Mambo for a Daid Witch

I’m Thinkin’ I’m Thinkin’ I’m Thinkin’ Thinkin’ Thinkin’

Lamentation in Yellow (Waltz for Poppy)

Hands Are Only Idle When They’re Not Helping You

Ruff!

Is That You, Professor Marvel?

Not Gonna Be a Witch No Mo’ (No Mo’)

Red Shoes Polka (Ballet)

Heal Me (of the Bad Witch in My Soul)

Dorothy’s Dream (Reprise)

She’s Fabulous! She’s Fabulous! Auntie Em Is Fabulous!

_____ 

Sarah Sarai, 2015. In hopes yet another musical is made of The Wizard of Oz.   

Wheat grows between the pages of books ... Nazir Qabanni, Syrian poet

A draft of a Nizar Qabanni poem. 

A Syrian poet, publisher, diplomat, Nizar Qabbani was born on March 21, 1923. He died in 1998.  I was looking for a poet born today, the first day of Spring, when flowers spring up. Love is a flower or so I'm told.

When I Love You

When I love you
A new language springs up,
New cities, new countries discovered.
The hours breathe like puppies,
Wheat grows between the pages of books,
Birds fly from your eyes with tiding of honey,
Caravans ride from your breasts carrying Indian herbs,
The mangoes fall all around, the forests catch fire
And Nubian drums beat.

When I love you your breasts shake off their shame,
Turn into lightning and thunder, a sword, a sandy storm.
When I love you the Arab cities leap up and demonstrate
Against the ages of repression
And the ages
Of revenge against the laws of the tribe.
And I, when I love you,
March against ugliness,
Against the kings of salt,
Against the institutionalization of the desert.
And I shall continue to love you until the world flood arrives;
I shall continue to love you untill the world flood arrives.

______________

Nizar Qabbani, from On Entering the Sea: The Erotic and Other Poetry of Nizar Qabbani, translated by Lena Jayyusi and Jack Collum.

God is whatever makes us better

Salvation

 It’s the weirdest thing, 

to be in love with a woman. 

Nothing else matters. 

Even that campy hate scorn is 

rick rack on a little black dress — 

you kidding me? 

Your woman is a body of miracle fiber, 

a tote accommodating 

a change of clothes and good shampoo, 

a heated embrace, an epicenter 

a little sun next to you 

preparing you for your dangerous salvation.

 You have to find a way 

and a sherpa anxious to 

shake out, lean over, 

anchor raw minerals 

on the four directions, 

the four elements, 

the nonrefundable missteps.

 God is whatever makes us better. 

Who’s seen Her, besides 

          William Blake 

          and ten million mothers. 

Do they agree how shining her hair is 

or that her voice is the unified theory 

of everything arranged for strings?

 The idea is to be led to something 

          that is not you. 

If it is the solar system in your arms, 

          pinging you, well, that works. 

_______

®2015. Sarah Sarai, Ping-Pong, Literary Journal of the Henry Miller Library, 2014. 

Early Jazz

from a Swingle Singers cover

It was during the yearly Bach Festival, over the Christmas holiday. WQXR plays solid Bach. Bach, who is solid, is on 24/7. All Bach, all-the-time, and any variations are Bach's invention. The organ was inevitable. Fugue, concerti, prelude, chorale. I only remember thinking, This is jazz. THIS is jazz. Something I'd not previously heard, noticed, sensed, understood. I repeated that to a jazz singer and daughter of a musician. We were going into or out of a meditation at the Edgar Cayce Center in NYC. She said yeah. So, yeah.

              Early Jazz

          Like most artists,

Johann Sebastian Bach

moved to the city. 

Sometimes you need

a point of entrance for

ornamental notes and flourishes.  

So a crazy organist

can staff the future with

musicians who rest, yeah,

but mainly soar.

                          ______
                         Sarah Sarai. Published in The Wallace Stevens Journal, 
                         Volume 38, Number 1, Spring 2014.