Longing for Prophets. Shirley Kaufman poem. Story of my life.

**

I figure since today is a holy day for distant ancestors running from the Cossacks back there in Georgia near Azerbaijan-- not that anyone on my father's side was religious or observant of much of anything but the world's inconsistencies (which need observation and witness, so I'm not complaining)-- I'll post a poem about longing for holiness, answers, a freaking needed explanation for the suffering.  On my mother's side, in Sweden, they're looking at the dark skies and cursing fate, then laughing. Someone's wondering what's funny.

Longing for Prophets

Not for their ice-pick eyes,
their weeping willow hair,
and their clenched fists beating at heaven.
Not for their warnings, predictions
of doom. But what they promised.
I don't care if their beards
are mildewed, and the ladders
are broken. Let them go on
picking the wormy fruit. Let the one
with the yoke around his neck
climb out of the cistern.
Let them come down from the heights
in their radiant despair
like the Sankei Juko dancers descending
on ropes, down from the hills
to the earth of their first existence.
Let them follow the track
we've cut on the sides of the mountains
into the desert, and stumble again
through the great rift, littered
with bones and the walls of cities.
Let them sift through the ashes
with their burned hands.  Let them
tell us what will come after.

Shirley Kaufman, from Field (journal) and Rivers of Salt (collection)
Drunken Boat interview with Shirley Kaufman
**& as you know the photo's a still from Bunuel's Simon of the Desert

On Rage or Righteous Anger / On Letting Go of a Friend

I'm home waiting for a phone call I agreed to take several weeks ago. I didn't sleep in, but I didn't have to race to work to squint at a slew of documents needing copyediting. I like what I do as much as I can like what I do, ie, I'm not complaining. I'm saying.

Having time to wander the Web (after I spent two hours hashing out drafts of poems), I came across an article that annoyed and a photograph that infuriated. The article was on poetry and the photo was of Nicki Minaj; it was on The Atlantic website and intended to depict her as anyone but Rudyard Kipling. Whom to she was being contrasted.

Nicki was eating fried chicken. The photo was out of context. In fact (I am told), she was eating fried chicken on stage at a concert. As performance. Got it. But that wasn't clarified.

Out of my whalish spout on my whalish back I spewed Twitters and a Facebook post. The author of the article responded to me--we conversed as much as is possible in the context of Twitter. The Atlantic didn't respond. I suspect they are a) bemused and b) happy for the attention and c) waiting to see if anyone else cares. I doubt if anyone else will care. It's Nicki Minaj. A rapper. A woman. A Black woman.

A few months ago, a friend made fun of me for being so (relatively) volatile and then said rather cruel things via assessment of me. Though after four years of "friendship" she was finally able to tell me, in a begrudging, shaking voice, that my poetry was of a "High Level," we're no longer friends. Too many put downs. Trust me on that.

This posting is itself a release of steam and water and dross. I'm changing every day but what to change. Is a question. I have no answer but asking helps.

Image is from Frigid Hare, a Looney Tunes cartoon. For more info, click on info.

John Renbourn singing John Donne's "Song"

On his debut album, John Renbourn (later of Pentangle) recorded a version of John Donne's "Song" (the first line of which is "Go and catch a falling star"). Renbourn changed the last line to "False, ere I count one, two three.." Courtesy of Bartleby.com.

Song

GO and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot;
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,	5
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
If thou be'st born to strange sights,	10
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights
Till Age snow white hairs on thee;
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me
All strange wonders that befell thee,	15
And swear
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.
If thou find'st one, let me know;
Such a pilgrimage were sweet.	20
Yet do not; I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet.
Though she were true when you met her,
And last till you write your letter,
Yet she	25
Will be
False, ere I come, to two or three.

JOHN DONNE (1573-1631). from The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900, Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. 

Count the images in a Kristine Ong Muslim poem. "The Pilot." Go on.

Turner.  Who else?

& today I was led to this poem. (Led how? Alls I can say is, I held my hand out to the goddess of chance and expedience. She embraced it, almost gently -- her nail dug into my palm -- guiding it to waters of luck, random but never coincidental. I'd kind of hinted the poet's name before we began our journey.) Kristine Ong Muslim is a poet of many wonders, "The Pilot." among them. That first image, the six-month tests, the flight plan -- foreboding, all of it.

The Pilot.

The sky is a bed nailed to the ceiling; it turns

when I sleep. I do not think about it that much

these days. It may show up in my psychological

tests, the ones I have to take every six months.

Most of the time I imagine the plane growing

outward, throttling the last breath of a giant tin can,

thickening the fog as it arches from takeoff;

the path of air lengthening in its wake.

______________________

by Kristine Ong Muslim, read more here

Lee Upton's "Drunk at a Party" . "What latch keeps a brain from spinning like a prawn dropped on a stranger’s parquet?" (poem)

* painting by Colin Page

Lee Upton's "The Coast of Apples" flew off my bulletin board today. I'd cut it out from Boston Review and stuck it next to my bird calendar.  So here is a poem of hers which first appeared in Agni (2009). I like "get lugubrious with that woman / from the controller's office" and all the rest.

Drunk at a Party 

He couldn’t imagine it now,
kicking back, back kicking,
wandering around with a glass,
weirdly morose or—what’s the word?—
jolly. His voice sounding vaguely Swiss
or Peruvian or Dutch. Could he
pick up the rhythm
of the lush he once was,
get lugubrious with that woman
from the controller’s office?
Break down, regret everything or—
the opposite—
boast? What latch keeps a brain
from spinning like a prawn
dropped on a stranger’s parquet?
Ages ago in a land far away
lucky people got three martinis for lunch.
Whole lifetimes hung on a ledge
disgorging the slippery
feelers of sloe gin.
Who would he be
if he passed out again?
Or if love plucked his eyes
and made any throat glisten?
This descendant of men who broke
their necks
in buckets of hard cider?
Why am I speaking
at this moment
as if I were a man?
What ruse am I guilty of?
What keeps a lobster out of a tank?

____
Lee Upton, 2009. For more info on the poet, who teaches at Layfayette College in PA, click on her name.
*artist Colin Page, painting Lobster Fuel Tanks
*more on Colin Page

Confessions of a Type Z: Making a List of My Short Stories

I don't work-work until tomorrow. Work-work is one of my names for real world money earning, for those stretches of time when the coffee is free, the air conditioning is full blast, and every hour at a desk and computer is reimbursed.

Money is good. I wish I had more, but at least my nut gets covered.

I recently saw a listing for a personal financial guide, The Type-Z Guide to Success by Marc Allen. I haven't read it but holy cow, that's me. Type Z. (Assuming that means a slacker who excels at slackerdom.) It's not that I don't have Type A urges, but they manifest mainly when I am trying to get to work on time, i.e., somewhere near the subway. Otherwise, it is a miracle of the Almighty's grace and compassion that anything I write gets accepted for publication, or gets written in the first place. Or that any monies enter my life.

Complexities abound in my infrastructure and you better believe I have examined each of them as if my understanding might earn me a Nobel (pictured) in introspection. Not that I'm trying for one.  I just need the money.

A short story of mine was accepted for publication (2014) this week. It's the first story of a novella of sorts. So it occurs to me to pull the rest of the novella together. Like really do it, and not assume each file is "pretty much okay." Everything as-of-yet unpublished bears another look. So I need to prioritize. Last month I drew up a list of my published short stories, and wrote a three-sentence descriptor of each.

Now I need a full list, published and unpublished, with arrows and stars for what needs fixing and finishing. As anyone of any sensibility knows, every task takes longer than planned for unless the planner astutely plans large chunks of time for each task.

Regardless, irregardless, I believe such a list would motivate me, de-cobweb my brain a bit, force my hand to finish stories I've forgotten, improve stories I thought finished, abandon hope where necessary, and feel great satisfaction about what I have accomplished. Onward.

"My cups were B" -FOR THE TIDE BEING- {a poem}

I can't figure out why this poem hasn't made it into any of the big anthologies. Well, I accept a life of ignominy with my usual genial disillusion. Read and then tell me your life hasn't been changed by Sarah Sarai. And no, I am not posting it to fulfill my ongoing need for content. I don't think it has any.

For the Tide Being

  

I was adrift
5 billion years
& then I swept ashore
 

w/ a jig & a tra
& a Ain’t I
Miss La De Da
  

The sand was firm,
my legs were not,
upon the moundy beach 

  

w/ a ho & a heave           
& a In your cups,
again?
  

My cups were B,
I cleaved to earth:
o! sandy Mama Dear
 

w/ a cry & a whoop
& a Worried
I’m all wet? 

___
Of for and by Sarah Sarai. Written in the previous century, but latish, like the 1998s.
...The delightful illustration is from the Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly and part of a series illuminating the fiction of Nagib Mahfouz (who won a Nobel in 1988).

I would like / to be Phoenician...from my poem "The Quiet Softness" ("Don't you like me / more, now?")

The Quiet Softness

About Queen Dido, you wonder,

if at some point early enough for 

self-prevention she could have 

hung up mythology for a safe 

nakedness of, hey, herself, even 

if judged (when the world sees you 

as you were born it confronts fear 

of isolation and transformation, 

and the world detests confrontation 

unless it’s brutal and there’s victory 

or a shield or rhymed manuscript 

rendering titanic loss as fame).  

Dido was Phoenician. I would like 

to be Phoenician, say it with me, 

Phoenician.  Don’t you like me 

more, now?  Forgetting rapture in 

the arms of an accomplished heart 

or the quiet softness of a penis 

sighing, Aeneas sailed his cock 

to Rome, leaving her in Carthage, 

the city of her breasts stomach 

hips, configurations of the universe.  

Dido.  Were his promises to be 

believed, really.  You can still 

tell him no.  And it’s going to be 

a while before translations of war 

and abandonment no longer make 

sense.  In your lovely city you can

weep.  Yours, you built it, weep. 
_____
Sarah Sarai, published in Gargoyle 57, 2011, edited by Richard Peabody.

I know a poet who lives in one of the many Phoenicas; a lucky Phoenician.

Photo: a San Francisco company's production of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. More on the Urban Opera HERE.

Poem: "On Being Criticized for Identifying Ishmael Reed as a MacArthur Fellow"

On Being Criticized for Identifying Ishmael Reed as a MacArthur Fellow

Writer, public intellectual, media commentator, Berkeley professor, recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, father, and 75-year-old man-of-color, Ishmael Reed was hassled by three clerks today at a Walgreens on Shattuck. He was shopping for a bargain pack of bottled water.

Taking a break from hiding out from the Nazis in an attic with his family in Holland, teenaged girl Ishmael Reed was harassed today by three clerks at a Walgreens in Berkeley. As he noted in his famous diary, it was a hot day in July and he was shopping for bottled water.

Long known as Walt Disney’s favorite Mouseketeer, buxom Ishmael Reed, who died earlier this year from complications of MS, was targeted today by three clerks at Walgreens. He was thirsty and looking to buy a bottle of water.

Hunted across the seas by the bookish Captain Ahab of New England, large white whale Ishmael Reed was profiled by three clerks at a Walgreens in Berkeley. It was July, the Pacific was hot, and he had tired of salt water.

Holding a bag of Skittles and a cell phone, and wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt, 17-year old Ishmael Reed was challenged today by three clerks at a Walgreens in Berkeley.  Mr. Reed was shot dead by George Zimmerman on the night of February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida.  He had set out to buy a bottle of water.

______

Sarah Sarai, July 18, 2013 

For info on Ishmael Reed, click.

I was questioned by a friend (a good friend, whose outrage I am spinning off) when I identified Reed as a MacArthur Fellow, and, yes, some of my outrage came from that, and his age, and his Ishmael Reedness. Last Sunday night when I was demonstrating at Union Square my outrage came from, in part, the fact that Trayvon Martin was a silly kid with a bag of Skittles.  We're defined by how we present but that doesn't make the circumstances enacted on us worse or better, or not entirely.

I didn't post this poem when I wrote it because I am not sure it should see the light of day.  But here I go, foolhardy as always.

The astonishing artwork is from http://www.comicvine.com/moby-dick/4005-65442/images/. Chris Doom is the artist.

Don't miss Sapphire this Sunday, 7/21, t.b.d. bar Greenpoint Brooklyn, ORP reading

*

I'll be reading with Sapphire & 6 other poets this Sunday at t.d.b. bar in Brooklyn in an Other Rooms Press extravaganza get the details H-e=Er & this poem is a blatant lure a siren call without any rocks to crash on except the ice cubes in your glass.  Sunday, 7/21. 1-3 pm. Here's a poem by the astonishing Sapphire.

Breaking Kharma #5

I

It is like a scene in a play.
His bald spot shines upward between dark tufts of hair.
We are sitting in a pool of light on the plastic
covered couch, Ernestine, his last live-in,
ended up with. But that is the end.

We are sitting in the beginning of our lives now
looking at our father upright in his black
reclining chair. It's four of us then, children,
new to Los Angeles--drugs, sex, Watts burning,
Aretha, Michael Jackson, the murder of King,
haven't happened yet.

He is explaining how things will be--
Which one will cook, which one will clean.
"Your mama," he announces, "is not coming."

Two thousand miles away in the yellow
linoleum light of her kitchen, my mother
is sitting in the easy tan-colored man's lap.
Kissing him. Her perfect legs golden like
whiskey, his white shirt rolled up arms
that surround her like the smell of cake baking.

"Forget about her," my father's voice drops like
a curtain, "she doesn't want you. She never did."

II

Holding the photograph by its serrated edges, staring,
I know the dark grey of her lips is "Jubilee Red"
her face brown silk. I start with the slick
corner of the photograph, put it in my mouth like it's
pizza or something. I close my eyes, chew, swallow.

___
From Black Wings & Blind Angels by Sapphire. Copyright © 1999 by Sapphire. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher And yet here I've reproduced it. I will apologize to Sapphire on Sunday.

*info on hoodie ...which I found googling kharma...at Rebels Market  

I Won't Say It Isn't Easy to Hate. Our Million Good Wishes for Trayvon Martin.

painting by Anthony B. Lee, Memphis Tennessee*

I won't say it isn't easy to hate. I won't say that hatred is not some part of the evolutionary playbook, because it is there, here,  making itself available.

I won't say the "fuck you George Zimmerman" and similar I have heard over the past twelve hours aren't a lot more real and comforting than the less felt, more intellectual explanations I've balked at, explanations of Florida or racism in American.

And I won't say we need any more lessons about racism and hatred.  I sure won't say that the point-blank homicidal shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman was anything other than the Klan in a not-so-new guise, in action.

I won't say I got all the comfort I need today when I went to church BECAUSE of the verdict, because I needed help.

I won't say I don't worry for every Black teenage boy, every Black man, every male-of-color in the United States, because I do and I see no end to the reasons for my concern. 

I won't say that in a week when I'm having fun with friends or reading a book at a park or grumbling about how I loath working, I will not have moved on in my life. I'm alive.

But I do know I won't forget. After Katrina my niece said, "Well, and now everyone is going to forget."  I knew she was wrong but that she wouldn't hear it from me. People haven't forgotten. The government abandoned abandons and will abandon but New Orleans and Katrina? Remembered.

I've given up my interpretive belief in an afterlife. As an artist I used the solace of metaphor and image. We might be lucky to meld with a star, be bright and unconscious, but that's it.

I won't say more.  I don't have more to say.  I still believe in prayer.  I still believe there is some spirit of Trayvon Martin and that the spirit of Trayvon Martin feels our million good wishes. 

Good wishes, Trayvon.  Fuck you, Zimmerman.

Painting url: Go, Memphis

Are You Tired of Hanging Out with the High-minded & Moral? Then Come to the Other Rooms Reading, 7/21..STARRING Sapphire!

Many apologies to the great Sapphire, poet and genius and moralist and probably the most fun of the lot. Certainly the prettiest.

Them's what I had in mind when writing that title are the two Other Rooms Press instigators, Ed Go and Mike Whalen. Indeed I suspect they left me as the last reader because they figured I'd be so wearied by that point, in the afternoon, I'd buy them a drink. Nice try.

Melissa Christine Goodrum is the editor of The Or Panthology: Ocellus Reseau, which this reading celebrates. We like her. Please join us, SUNDAY, July 21, at t.b.d. bar, 224 Franklin Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Any Other New Yorkers Notice? COPYEDITOR NEEDED!

Hoorah for recycling and hoorah-with-a-bullet for the continued attention paid to recycling by the New York City Department of Sanitation. But someone in the department's Central Correspondence Unit needs to hire a proofreader.

Yesterday I received a mailer detailing expanded criteria for types of PLASTICS. Also, PAPER. It can be ripped from a can and recycled (we are reminded). Hoorah and no argument with that.

But the mailer, sent to each and every 8 MILLION GIVE-OR-TAKE of us was printed as being "First-Class Mail." It wasn't first-class mail. Someone in the department must have noticed, and god knows just who had to manually cross out, with a marker, that portion on each mailer.

How long did it take to cross out 8 million "First Class Mail"s? I thought it was funny, not a hugely costly gaffe, just a gaffe under the watchful eye of Bloomberg who spends so much time instructing the police to stop and frisk, especially to stop and frisk nonwhites. He wasn't aware of his schnoz or that which was under it.

I like to imagine pizzas brought in and disgruntled teenager, children of city workers. I like to imagine a weekend devoted to correcting the mistake, having to send out a team to find an all-night Staples for more markers, someone paying for them himself.

HIRE A COPYEDITOR. If you can't find a good one, who is "thoughtful" (to quote an art director talking about my work), be aware I am here, at your service. No pizza required. (It's hard to proofread yourself, by the way. I know.)

David "88 Constellations" Clark ... And Sarah Sarai Coins a Term

David Clark has been creating witty AND PROBING electronic artsophy (Sarah Sarai's TERM--I coin it) for a good, if not very good, while. I posted a link to his 2010 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the left hand) here on My 3,000 Loving Arms (they're quite loving, trust me) (veering on rapturous).

Sign After the X is one of his earliest works: Mind, Body, Language (a Ouija Planchette), Land (a Monopoly board-I'd like to put a few houses on "Citizen Kane" with its "false displaced center" of Rosebud), Law.  None of this will make sense unless you click and explore. Or will it.

I found Sign After the X on 88constellations.net/blog. More electronic artsophy, notices, links.

Who loves ya, baby? Join the dots.

Stanzas Concerning An Ecstasy Experienced In High Contemplation -- Hippity Birthday to my 2nd Favorite Discalced Carmelite

His Converso father died young. His mother supported the family. As is often the case, education was the way out and up - he was given the basics through a church-run school, and promoted and then grandly and deeply educated, as one would expect of St. John of the Cross.  Trying to reform the Carmelites, as he and my favorite Discalced Carmelite, St. Teresa of Avila, did, was a bad move. He was imprisoned, but then again, lots suffering is good for maybe one in one million sufferers (the other 999,999 just suffer in torment and loneliness - no immortality as odd compensation). He was lashed in front of the community, weekly. (For instance.) There's lots more to him and the community and of course to St. Teresa. But let me not spoil birthday celebrations for this genius poet and enlightened theologian.

Stanzas Concerning An Ecstasy Experienced In High Contemplation

I entered into unknowing,
and there I remained unknowing
transcending all knowledge.

1. I entered into unknowing,
yet when I saw myself there,
without knowing where I was,
I understood great things;
I will not say what I felt
for I remained in unknowing
transcending all knowledge.

2. That perfect knowledge
was of peace and holiness
held at no remove
in profound solitude;
it was something so secret
that I was left stammering,
transcending all knowledge.

3. I was so ‘whelmed,
so absorbed and withdrawn,
that my senses were left
deprived of all their sensing,
and my spirit was given
an understanding while not understanding,
transcending all knowledge.

4. He who truly arrives there
cuts free from himself;
all that he knew before
now seems worthless,
and his knowledge so soars
that he is left in unknowing
transcending all knowledge.

5. The higher he ascends
the less he understands,
because the cloud is dark
which lit up the night;
whoever knows this
remains always in unknowing
transcending all knowledge.

6. This knowledge in unknowing
is so overwhelming
that wise men disputing
can never overthrow it,
for their knowledge does not reach
to the understanding of not
understanding,
transcending all knowledge.

7. And this supreme knowledge
is so exalted
that no power of man or learning
can grasp it;
he who masters himself
will, with knowledge in
unknowing,
always be transcending.

8. And if you should want to hear:
this highest knowledge lies
in the loftiest sense
of the essence of God;
this is a work of his mercy,
to leave one without
understanding,
transcending all knowledge.

by St. John of the Cross, from The Works of St. John of the Cross

Copyright ICS Publications. Permission is hereby granted for any non-commercial use, if this copyright notice is included.

88 constellations - a Wondrous Way of Learning About Wittgenstein

Here's a particularly brilliant and imaginative, what, insight into? riff on? amplification of? next generationing of? the great, off-putting, daring, brave, lovable, not lovable, sad, distant Wittgenstein. Soldier, brother, bad teacher, philosopher, maybe lover but probably not, and European - brushing suede elbows with other post WW I Europeans of note. 88 Constellations. Created by David Clark.

It doesn't take long to learn to navigate the site. Even if you have never heard of Wittgenstein, the site itself is a plaything and learning tool. And since I was staring at the skies and fat-happy golden moon last night, more sky staring is in order.

The Arbour to Joyful Rain - though he's not so joyful - poem by Su Shi / Dong Po

That's him.

The Arbour to Joyful Rain

Should Heaven rain pearls, the cold cannot wear them as clothes;
Should Heaven rain jade, the hungry cannot use it as food.
It has rained without cease for three days -
Whose was the influence at work?
Should you say it was that of your Governor,
The Governor himself refers it to the Son of Heaven.
But the Son of Heaven says "No! It was God."
And God says "No! It was Nature."
And as Nature lies beyond the ken of man,
I christen this arbour instead. 

 

by Su Shi / Dong Po (1037-1101) / translated by Herbert A. Giles