Poets Nick Flynn and Matthew Dickman

It’s been awhile since I shared some of my favorite poems, so here goes.  These are poems by the incredibly talented Nick Flynn from his book Some Ether (also the author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City which was turned into the movie “Being Flynn”) and Matthew Dickman from his All-American Poem book of poetry.  Amazing shit, read on.

Nick Flynn (Some Ether)

 

 

 

 

FATHER OUTSIDE

 

A black river flows down the center

of each page

 

& on either side the banks

are wrapped in snow.  My father is ink falling

 

in tiny blossoms, a bottle

wrapped in a paperbag.  I want to believe

that if I get the story right

 

we will rise, newly formed,

 

that I will stand over him again

as he sleeps outside under the church halogen

only this time I will know

An Amazing Poem by Heather Sawaya

So I had the very fortunate luck of coming across a poem“Pull Me Down” by blogger and poet Heather Sawaya over at Heather Sawaya Poetry.  It made me cry. A lot.  And it’s so insightful as to what it’s like for a caregiver/lover/best friend/helper of someone with so much suffering.   She’s an advocate for survivors.  Here’s what she says about “Pull Me Down”:

“The poem, Pull Me Down, means a great deal to me.  It speaks of both my purpose for writing, and also the inspiration for my next book.  I am most moved by people who have gone through the worst life has to offer, yet, find the strength to keep moving toward something better.”

I’ve just started speaking with her on her facebook page and never have I met a more compassionate person.  Visit her page, you’ll see what I mean.  She has given me permission to share Pull Me Down with all of you.  Enjoy.

(all rights to this poem solely belong to Heather Sawaya)

(I apologize if her formatting doesn’t publish correctly)

PULL ME DOWN

Pull me down

to that place

you don’t allow words.

I have never been

“And I Said to My Soul, Be Loud” Christian Wiman

Christian Wiman, from Every Riven Thing

And I Said to My Soul, Be Loud

Madden me back to an afternoon
I carry in me
not like a wound
but like a will against a wound

Give me again enough man
to be the child
choosing my own annihilations

To make of this severed limb
a wand to conjure
a weapon to shatter
dark matter of the dirt daubers’ nests
galaxies of glass

Whacking glints
bash-dancing on the cellar’s fire
I am the sound the sun would make
if the sun could make a sound

and the gasp of not
stabbed from the compost’s lumpen living death
is me

O my life my war in a jar
I shake you and shake you
and may the best ant win

For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things
and I will ride this tantrum back to God

until my fixed self, my flourescent self
my grief-nibbling, unbewildered, wall-to-wall self
withers in me like a salted slug

From “Mutable Earth” Louise Gluck

f”…So you couldn’t protect yourself?

The absolute
erodes; the boundary, the wall
around the self erodes.
If I was waiting I had been
invaded by time.

But do you think you’re free?

I think I recognize the patterns of my nature.

Bud do you think you’re free?

I had nothing
and I was still changed.
Like a costume, my numbness
was taken away.  Then
hunger was added.”

–Louise Gluck, from Vita Nova

Excerpts from Carl Adamshick’s “The Emptiness”

“…the forked branch of my existence
was lit like a crackof lightning.
My breath, my tongue, the broken font

of my voice had wanted to praise.
And when I didn’t speak

I became a secret, a testimony
against my own body. I lived
and lived

with the fact that I watched others
struggle and pray.

I watched them lie on the shore
with their heads adrift in a shine if stars

and wanted their hunger
to finally consume their sad,
hurting bodies.

I watched, hoping
when the tide came and lifted them away

I could live without shame.
The emptiness. The tongue bound

to the betrayal held in the mouth,
to the apology held

in the mouth, to the brutal remains
held in the socket of the mouth.

And still, under it all,
I feel an orchid, the cold river flow

around my feet. I see the stars
as the shimmering bones

Of migratory birds
and swallow the humiliating taste

of beauty. I am the dirt,
the worm-dirge, the lament and procession

winding through a garden burning
with flowers.

I am not the body that dies naked,
swollen and torn,

infested with beetles.
I am not the body that lacks

the funeral and its offering of plums.
I am not the body,

the empty midnight station.
I am not the bombed-out factory…

…I am the severed hands of a war

and feel it escape into me like a tired lover

I am comfort into the dark hours,
where my body, swathed with heat

and sorrow, listens to air
pass through the gate of its teeth.

…When light around the field is spilt moon
and memory is a nest

of mud and grass hidden in the bright
summer branches,

when emptiness is an open door,
the well-black pupil of an iris.

I am lost in the living, in the acceptance
of rain filling a bucket,

in the belief
that the chemical burn was a washing

for the exodus
and the smoke rising through
the chimneys

into the pale-blue morning was
a love song.
There are days when I wake

and find my face is a hole
and I have nowhere to hang my
mask.”

Quotes

“I have to block out thoughts of you so I don’t lose my head/ they crawl in like a cockroach leaving babies in my bed/dropping little reels of tape to remind me that I’m alone/playing movies in my head that make a porno feel like home/there’s a burning in my pride, a nervous bleeding in my brain/an ounce of peace is all I want for you/will you never call again…” –Blue October “Hate Me”

When we let ourselves feel fear, the discontent, the difficulties we have always avoided, our heart softens…allow ourselves to be touched by the pain of life…The knowledge that we can do this and survive helps us to awaken the greatness of our heart. With greatness of heart, we can sustain a presence in the midst of life’s suffering…We can open to the world–its ten thousands joys and ten thousand sorrows. ***With wise understanding we ALLOW OURSELVES TO CONTAIN ALL THINGS, BOTH DARK AND LIGHT, AND WE COME TO SENSE OF PEACE…THE PEACE WE FIND IN THE HEART THAT HAS REJECTED NOTHING, THAT TOUCHES ALL THINGS WITH COMPASSION.

–from A PATH WITH HEART

“In any event, as regards the correlation between mind and body, we may note…that the poet will naturally tend to write about that which most deeply engrosses him–and nothing more deeply engrosses a man than his burdens, including those of a physical nature, such as disease. We win by capitalizing on our debts, by turning our liabilities into assets, by using our burdens as a basis of insight.” –Kenneth Burke

• HENRY MILLER

HOWL, Allen Ginsberg

“…who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together…

Return by kylanrice on SoundCloud

http://soundcloud.com/kylanrice/return This is the most beautiful ppoem EVER. YOU MUST LISTEN

The Lonesome Dream by Lisel Mueller

I wanted to share this awesome poem by Lisel Mueller I found in her Pulitzer Prize winning book I bought called Alive Together: New and Selected Poems.  Here goes

THE LONESOME DREAM

In the America of the dream

the first rise of the moon

swings free of the ocean,

and she reigns in her shining flesh

over a good, great valley

of plumed, untrampled grasses

and beasts with solemn eyes,

of lovers infallibly pitched

in their ascendant phase.

 

In this America, death

is virginal also, roaming

the good, great valley

in his huge boots, his shadow

steady and lean, his pistol

silver, his greeting clear

and courteous as a stranger’s

who looks for another, a mind

to share his peaceable evenings.

 

Dreaming, we are another

race than the one which wakes

in the cold sweat of fear,

fires wild shots at death,

builds slippery towers of glass

to head him off, waylays him

with alcohol traps, rides him down

in canyons of sex, and hides

in teetering ghost towns.

 

Dreaming, we are the mad

who swear by the blood of trees

and speak with the tongues of streams

through props of steel and sawdust,

a colony of souls

ravaged by visions, bound

to some wild, secret cove

not yet possessed, a place

still innocent in us.

 

—Lisel Mueller

Jorie Graham’s “Prayer” (part of it)

motion that forces change—
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

In the Mouth of Language

A poem I found at The Poetry Foundation by Lisel Mueller

WHEN I AM ASKED

When I am asked

how I began writing poems,

I talk about the indifference of nature.

It was soon after my mother died,

a brilliant June day,

everything blooming.

I sat on a gray stone bench

in a lovingly planted garden,

but the day lilies were as deaf

as the ears of drunken sleepers

and the roses curved inward.

Nothing was black or broken

and not a leaf fell

and the sun blared endless commercials

for summer holidays.

I sat on a gray stone bench

ringed with the ingenue faces

of pink and white impatiens

and placed my grief

in the mouth of language,

the only thing that would grieve with me.

from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems, Copyright 1996 by Lisel Mueller

from the Poetry Foundation, Here

I love this poem.  And it got me thinking about when I really began to write.  My writing came out in a strange, feverish way.  I knew for years and years I had all these words inside me, but I was apparently too ill and numb to pick up a pen.  I had to shut off for a few years and then when my biological father died from drinking himself to death, literally, (and at the time I was well on my way to becoming a serious alcoholic and druggie) I had my first mental breakdown.  I spent about two years recovering, with psychotherapy projects like re-raising myself and being my own mother (that took a year in itself), I had a beautiful baby, and I was confident again and optimistic and put myself in college.  First I went to the tech college for Occupational Therapy but I was suddenly changing–big time.  I was suddenly aware of how my life had to mean something to me–that all material possessions and acts were meaningless and I wanted out.  I wanted to take my child to India and never return.  I wanted to grow my own food, work in fields, write, sing, but most importantly, teach my daughter the wonders this life could hold.  And I didn’t know what to do.  My soc professor and I were drawn to each other.  She was the one that asked me “Why aren’t you going to school to write?” and thus our relationship developed.  Turned out she was part of the Lakota tribe and she was White Buffalo Woman.  She guided me through my confusion.  She read me my animal totems (which are appallingly RIGHT ON—my animal totem was the possum, known for playing dead in danger, which I didn’t believe until PTSD hit years later.  She wrote letters of recommendations for me and helped get me into the private college to pursue writing (Northland College).  My professors there were goddamn amazing.  Each class and assignment was so new to me because I’d never really written before, yet I knew exactly what I had to say–the essays and poems and stories had been in me for years.  I was nominated for a writing scholarship in New York at the NY Summer Writing Workshop.  My adviser said there was a lot of talk about me.  I made the Dean’s List.  I was a full-time student, mama, and I had a job.  I felt invincible.  Healthy.  But into my third year I began to deteriorate.  What I was writing was getting more and more real, getting closer and closer to shut doors in my heart and body.  I was writing in a fever about abuse, therapy, feeling empty and lost and numb and that I knew something–something terrible–was coming, only I didn’t know what it was.  I began missing classes and would return to my professors’ offices with fractions of essays and stories because I couldn’t piece them together anymore, it was too big for me.  What I was writing was good enough to excuse me, and one professor wanted to work on my future book with me.  But I was crumbling.  I vanished and hid myself in a housekeeping job and then it hit–psychosis and complex ptsd, also diagnosed with bipolar and ADHD.  It was my second mental breakdown, but far worse.  After about a year of madness, I picked up the pen.  I began blogging and writing and piecing my story together.  Now I’m stuck on whether to write a memoir at all, if I’m ready to even, or if I should do autobiographical fiction.  ??  So my question to you is–how did you start writing?  Did something trigger it?  Or did writing trigger something?  I know that writing has played a HUGE part in my healing.  Share your story, I’m very curious.

Bukowski

Excerpt from a Poem “The Emptiness”

Here are my favorite lines from Carl Adamshick’s poem “The Emptiness” (I believe it’s taken from his book Curses and Wishes: Poems (think I found it in either The Seashell Anthology or Good Poems for Hard Times ??)–or maybe A Book of Luminous Things –Czeslaw Milosz (my favorite anthology of poetry of all-time :

 

“…the forked branch of my existence
was lit like a crack

of lightning.
My breath, my tongue, the broken font

of my voice had wanted to praise.
And when I didn’t speak

I became a secret, a testimony
against my own body. I lived
and lived

with the fact that I watched others
struggle and pray.

I watched them lie on the shore
with their heads adrift in a shine if stars

and wanted their hunger
to finally consume their sad,
hurting bodies.

I watched, hoping
when the tide came and lifted them away

I could live without shame.
The emptiness. The tongue bound

to the betrayal held in the mouth,
to the apology held

in the mouth, to the brutal remains
held in the socket of the mouth.

And still, under it all,
I feel an orchid, the cold river flow

around my feet. I see the stars
as the shimmering bones

Of migratory birds
and swallow the humiliating taste

of beauty. I am the dirt,
the worm-dirge, the lament and procession

winding through a garden burning
with flowers.

I am not the body that dies naked,
swollen and torn,

infested with beetles.
I am not the body that lacks

the funeral and its offering of plums.
I am not the body,

the empty midnight station.
I am not the bombed-out factory…

…I am the severed hands of a war

and feel it escape into me like a tired lover

I am comfort into the dark hours,
where my body, swathed with heat

and sorrow, listens to air
pass through the gate of its teeth.

…When light around the field is spilt moon
and memory is a nest

of mud and grass hidden in the bright
summer branches,

when emptiness is an open door,
the well-black pupil of an iris.

I am lost in the living, in the acceptance
of rain filling a bucket,

in the belief
that the chemical burn was a washing

for the exodus
and the smoke rising through
the chimneys

into the pale-blue morning was
a love song.
There are days when I wake

and find my face is a hole
and I have nowhere to hang my
mask.”

“…the unsaid (in a poem)…exerts great power” Louise Gluck on Poetry

–from Modern American Poetry; Louise Gluck (my favorite)

 

Glück On “the Unsaid” in Poetry

---

from “Disruption, Hesitation, Silence”

[In this meditative essay, Glück defends in more detail the aesthetics of paradox and simple language that she had earlier sketched in "Education of the Poet." In this more developed presentation, that aesthetics is rooted in a sense of a work of art as provocatively unfinished. The artists Glück discusses – the poets include Rilke, Berryman, Oppen and Eliot – are, as she demonstrates, practitioners of "not saying," of leaving out so as to suggest.]

What I share with [poets in my generation] is ambition; what I dispute is its definition. I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied. There is no moment in which their first home is felt to be the museum. … It seems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysteries. The problem is to make a whole that does not forfeit this power.

From Louise Glück, “Disruption, Hesitation, Silence,” Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry (New York: Ecco, 1994) 74-75. Copyright 1994 by Louise Glück.

---

Jack Kerouac’s Modern Prose Belief & Techniques

Kerouac 1960

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

Crush : The New Yorker: Poem by Ada Limon

Crush : The New Yorker.

Talking with Furniture: Blake Butler « Used Furniture Review

Talking with Furniture: Blake Butler « Used Furniture Review.

BOMBLOG: Blue Sky by Matthew Dickman

BOMBLOG: Blue Sky by Matthew Dickman.

Time-Travel by Sharon Olds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time-Travel     —Sharon Olds

 

 

I have learned to go back and walk
around

and find the windows and doors.
Outside

it is hot, the pines are black, the
lake

laps.  It is 1955 and I am

looking for my father.

I walk from a small room to a big
one

through a doorway.  The walls and floors are
pine,

full of splinters.

I come upon him.

I can possess him like this, the
funnies

rising and falling on his big
stomach,

his big solid secret body

where he puts the bourbon.

He belongs to me forever like
this,

the red plaid shirt, the baggy
pants,

the long perfectly turned
legs,

the soft padded hands folded across his
body,

the hair dark as a burnt
match,

the domed, round eyes
closed,

the firm mouth.  Sleeping it
off

in the last summer the family was
together.

I have learned to walk

so quietly into that summer

no one knows I am there.  He
rests

easy as a baby.  Upstairs

mother weeps.  Out in the
tent

my brother reads my diary.  My
sister

is changing boyfriends somewhere in a
car

and down by the shore of the lake there is a
girl

twelve years old, watching the
water

fold and disappear.  I walk up behind
her,

I touch her shoulder, she turns her
head–

I see my face.  She looks through me,

up at the house.  This is the one I
have

come for.  I gaze in her eyes, the
waves,

thick as the air in hell, curling
in

over and over.  She does not
know

any of this will ever stop.

She does not know she is the
one

survivor.

In Your Absence by Judith Harris : The Poetry Foundation [poem]

In Your Absence by Judith Harris : The Poetry Foundation [poem].

In Your Absence

In Your Absence

By Judith Harris Judith Harris

Not yet summer,

but unseasonable heat

pries open the cherry tree.

It stands there stupefied,

in its sham, pink frills,

dense with early blooming.

Then, as afternoon cools

into more furtive winds,

I look up to see

a blizzard of petals

rushing the sky.

It is only April.

I can’t stop my own life

from hurrying by.

The moon, already pacing.

Poem copyright ©2007 by Judith Harris, whose most recent collection of poems is The Bad Secret, Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Reprinted by permission of Judith Harris.

Puppet-Maker by Charles Simic : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine]

from The Poetry Foundation

Puppet-Maker

 

By Charles Simic b. 1938 Charles Simic

In his fear of solitude, he made us.

Fearing eternity, he gave us time.

I hear his white cane thumping

Up and down the hall.

I expect neighbors to complain, but no.

The little girl who sobbed

When her daddy crawled into her bed

Is quiet now.

It’s quarter to two.

On this street of darkened pawnshops,

Welfare hotels and tenements,

One or two ragged puppets are awake.

Source: Poetry (June 2008).