Poetic Conversation - draft
1this country might have been a pion eer land. once. and it still is. check out the falling gun/shells on our blk/tomorrows 3You would not know that the souls of old Texans are in jeopardy in a way not common to other men, my singular friend. You would not know of the long plains night where they carry on and arrange their genetic duels with men of other states-- 5What's going on here? Can no one help them? Must everyone witness their downfall? This reduces us all. Someone must show up at once to save them, to take everything off their hands right now, every trace of this life before this humiliation goes on any longer. Someone must do something. I reach for my wallet and that is how I understand it: 6we lay waste our powers;-- Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hears away, a sordid boon! 9Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot The armless ambidextrian was lighting A match between his great and second toe And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb - Quite unexpectedly the top blew off: 12And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens 13I have split the earth and the hard coal and rocks and the solid bed of the sea And went down to reconnoitre there a long time, And bring back a report 15A man has to begin over and over – to try to think and feel only in a very limited field, the house on the street, the man at the corner drug store. 17You can know all about what Henry James really meant, or the art of the fugue, but if you are not at home in the world under your feet and before your eyes, you are actually uncivilized. 19There is a kind of love called maintenance, Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it; Which checks the insurance, and doesn't forget The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs; 21what matters is that you graft the right slip onto the right tree (selah) if the executioners then knock on the door they come too late a few ice-ages pass and the youngsters will then savor your delicious apricots 23Mind your own yard. | 4No water in the water fountain No phone in the phone booth […] He gave me a dollar A blood-soaked dollar I cannot get the spot out but It's okay it still works in the store 7A collection of loud tales Concentrating eternal stupidities, That in remote ages lived unhaltered, Roaming through a fenceless world. 8[Aldous] Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions. 10creating a sequencing of information so random, so disparate in scale and value, as to be incoherent, even psychotic. 11I am not interested in preventing Asia from being Asia and the governments of Russia and Asia will rise and fall but Asia and Russia will not fall the government of America also will fall but how can America fall I doubt if anyone will ever fall anymore except governments fortunately all the governments will fall the only ones which won't fall are the good ones and the good ones don't yet exist But they have to begin existing they exist in my poems 14Dictated a long time ago, but its time has still Not arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limited Steps that can be taken against danger Now and in the future, in cool yards, In quiet small houses in the country, Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets. 16ἔπειτα γονέας εἰ εὖ ποιεῖ, καὶ τὰ τέλη εἰ τελεῖ, καὶ τὰς στρατείας εἰ ἐστράτευται. (Whether he treats his parents well, and whether he paid the taxes he owes, and whether he served his military service.) 18a car had passed over the clay just where the ant came out busily with its pine needle now […] Time after time it slid back down with its tottering load and worked its way up again 20it's you, Potentilla Anserina, an old acquaintance from Tartumaa and Vorumaa farmyards we can never forget as we cannot also forget gooseshit I so often stepped in and that stuck between my toes 22My young son asks me: Must I learn history? What is the use, I feel like saying. Learn to stick Your head in the earth, and maybe you'll still survive. Yes, learn mathematics, I tell him! Learn your French, learn your history! |
Sources:
1. “Right on: white america,” Sonia Sanchez
2. Tombstone marker for Washakie, Chief of the Eastern Shonone, Ft. Washakie Cemetery, Wind River Indian Reservation, Wyoming
3. “Slinger, Book 1,” Edward Dorn
4. “Water Fountain,” Tune Yards
5. “Distress Sale,” Raymond Carver
6. “The World is Too Much With Us,” William Wordsworth
7. "War is Kind," XII 'A Newspaper is a Collection of Half-Injustices,' Stephen Crane
8. Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman, p. 111, 1985
9. “The End of the World,” Archibald MacLeish
10. Introduction to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman, p. xi, Andrew Postman, 2005
11. "Death to Van Gogh's Ear!" Allen Ginsberg
12. "Shine, Perishing Republic," Robinson Jeffers
13. “I am the Poet,” Walt Whitman
14. "The One Thing That Can Save America," John Ashbery
15. Sherwood Anderson, from a letter (to Roger Sergel, 1939)
16. Question set 55.3, Constitution of Athenians, per Josh Nudell, “Bring Back Dokimasia”
17. Kenneth Rexroth, His Corner of the World, NYT Book Review, October 27, 1957
18. “Rubber,” Rolf Jacobsen
19. “Atlas,” U.A. Fanthorpe
20. “My Wife and Children,” Jaan Kaplinski (trans. with Sam Hamill and Riina Tamm)
21. “Cultivate Your Garden,” Hans Magnus Enzensberger (trans. Eduoard Roditi)
22. “My Young Son Asks Me,” Bertolt Brecht
23. Jack Hicks, Emeritus Professor of English, UC Davis, circa 2000
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