THE SAME OLD ME WHEREVER

A pretty photo for your entertainment...

This will be a short one. The book American Poetry: twentieth century, Vol I is a marvelous and all inclusive accomplishment. Musicians are included and folk poetry, more black poets and women poets than probably few other collections of 20th Century poets have included, though I can't be certain of that fact, but it certainly represents a wide range of poetic forms and poets too. 

In my mind, my new bucket list includes the follow item — "to write as many good and true poems as I can in my 80s."  Today I finished another rewrite of the poetry ms of lüshi [a Chinese form of 8 line poetry employed by my current poet hero, Hanshan]. Here's one of them. The idea certainly isn't new, but it's my expression of the idea "wherever you go, there you find yourself."

LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION

After all my early tramping, Hanshan, you’d think I’d recall,

But the urge to get away always got in the way.

I’d hope a new hat rack might hold everything the old could not.

Off I’d go on a wing and a prayer, wearing my chapeau at a jaunty angle.

To hell with everything I left behind — wife, kids, the rental payment.

In those days, I never could afford a mortgage to nail my feet.

Of course the new hat rack functioned very much like the old,

And I’d find myself again, the same old me in the mirror behind the bar.

WRITING WRITING WRITING .... POETRY

Marsden Hartley. Like this one.

Tonight was looking over Marsden Hartley's art as his poetry is included in American Poetry: The Twentieth Century. It's late, nearing midnight on Friday. For weeks, I've been writing and rewriting the ms of lüshi I now call, Plain As Day: Old Grayhouse Consults Hanshan. I'm hooked on poetry again. Can't write enough of it. It's wonderful to feel this way about writing poetry again. Poetry was, I think, my first love, but I saw there was little money in it, and, crass as I've been, I put it aside except for occasional spurts of energy. My eye is still on a final rewrite of the sci fi novel, Ghoul World. I'm sure I'll get to it in time. If I don't, my bucket list is bust, or I'll have to add "to write all the best poetry I can in my 80s. I'm pretty happy about the poetry so far, quite happy.

WRITING AT THE SAVONA

Writing at the Savona, sounds like a movie title or a song. I like this little place with stars covering all the lights. There's an abstract painting leaned against a wall behind a plant I can't identify. Five stuffed couches, a writing bar against a window facing on the Columbia River, two TVs without sound but with closed captions if you want to, ice cream, sandwiches, soups and what all. I ate a sinful cinnamon roll this morning when I first got here. I took a Miro art book out of the library yesterday and will go get another one today before I drive home. Writing was slow this morning. Awful tired after exercise class. It's 3:00. Time to go to the library and get another art book to look at. I used to take art library books out all the time back in Ohio, back when I was young and carefree.

NOT SO SILENT DISAPPOINTED BEATNIK BOOMER

Interesting experience with a poetry submission today. I sent four poems out on New Years

Here, for example was a troubled male...

Day and got them back today from Three Penny Review. Two days. Though nobody anymore comments except through form letters, I was disappointed by the brevity with which they were considered. The four poems take the point of view of very troubled males who have troubled relationships with the women in the poems. So many women these days are offended by such material that they can't recognize the quality of the poems. I will continue to send them out, hoping that someday, someone, somewhere will recognize their artistry. I have written a novel too with such a plot, and one Facebook woman said she would not read such material if she encountered it. Three of the poems were based on women I knew and the fourth was built out of the kind of loving/controlling mentality of some men who put women on pedestals only to try and control them for fear of their appeal to other men. Dostoevsky wrote a wonderful short story on just such a theme. I cannot recall its name. I will share one of the more lyric poems to get a reaction, if any is forthcoming. I was trying to employ the loving/threatening voice of a controlling male:  

A WOMAN LIKE FLOWERS

Oooh, I thinking, what would want me her

When carry I my briefcase life home to rest me?

I think me: a flower wee

To never drop her pretty petals

Even though transplanted into a watery myworld,

Crystal vase surrounding it, like …?

So pretty a world as who would complain of it?

A flower most delicate like orchids,

And always,

An opening to me face of sunflowers.

Rue, as of delicate small petals,

Trustworthy as perennials,

She to bloom under my careful tenderness

As who wouldn't?

O such a beauteous treasure

To sit so up highness on my mantelpiece

And me stare at from my flower-hungry eyes,

Secateurs held loosely in my tendering hand.

POETRY MADNESS CONTINUES BEATNIKING MY HEAD

Another poem has found a home just in time for Christmas vacation. It won't like young Mr. Scrooge be forced to stay at school over the holiday. This time a haiku that I think very highly of has found its way onto the internet pages of Haikuniverse:

quantum effects—
an electron
lost in space

After so much end of year success with poetry, what will happen to my bucket list? I don't know. Recently I recalled when a friend some long time ago told me that I was a natural poet. It's been on my mind to get busy on the rewrite of Ghoul World, but I'm having so much fun messing around with poetry.

BEATNIKING MY WAY BACK TO POETRY

I'm sorry. Twenty days plus since my last entry. Here's why. I've done little to no work towards either of the entries on my bucket list. I've been working on old poetry and a few new poems that represent my style since my lyric days are past, the poetry of my past that came alive from dreams and intuition. I plod nowadays but am rewriting and reworking old poetry. My next goal is to enter into contests a book of poetry that I wrote 25 years ago in a certain pedestrian style that was inspired by the poetry of Hanshan as translated by Gary Snyder. Here's one of them:

DREAM OF FAME

Twenty-five summers since I wrote these poems, Han-shan,

Inspired by the pedestrian style that shunned the forms and fashions

Of the Tang Dynasty you were living in, abandoned on rocks,

On cliff faces that you passed by in your wanderings. Unlike you,

I must admit that all these years I’ve craved fame and found none.

Now the lyric flights that rose from my dreams have flown away. I’m left

Barren, abandoned, old master, limping along with unanswered questions.

Did you dream of fame as I did, and why did your thoughts turn to stone?

The reference to stone comes from the fact that no one knows who Hanshan was and by the fact that "his poems were written on rocks in the mountains he called home." Quotation from Wikipedia.

SALINGER & HAWTHORNE: STYLISTIC TWINS?

you know who

If what I say today sounds a little blurry, it's because my eyes are dilated. At exercise today, a beautiful new inky floater bloomed in my right eyeball accompanied by a ton of tiny circular floaters. After my cataracts were removed, I was told to watch out for this phenomenon as it might be a sign of retinal detachment. Thus I hurried to a nearby optometrist and had the eyeball looked into. No detachment, but now I have a bleeder on my optic nerve, the sign of a "violent" but fairly common detachment of vitreous matter [floater] from the back of the eye that will now drift in my eye in perpetuity. 

Salinger at war. PTSD in later life?

As to literature, the supposed purpose of this writer's blog. I'm giving up at the halfway point on reading House of the Seven Gables by Mr. Hawthorne. When I was working on my Masters, I was drawn to his writing, but no longer, it appears. His rhetorical flourishes are too much for me. However I was surprised when, as an antidote, I picked up Ten Stories by J.D. Salinger and realized that Salinger's method of writing can be traced back to Hawthorne — the p.o.v. of their narrators', the rhetorical flourishes and asides they employ, the way both take the reader into their cubbyholes, so to speak, to talk to them about their subjects and subject matter. If ever there were a scholarly article, there is one to pursue, i.e. similarities in technique and p.o.v. between Salinger and Hawthorne. I did a quick Google and found none. For reading, I've got Durrell's Judith and, somewhere in the limbo of inter-library loan, Ron Padgett's poetry is plodding its way toward my home. 

Durrell

It's obvious to me now that I can no longer write lyric poetry. My lines no longer sing, but Padgett's poetry may be my out. I've now written 6 or 7 poems in the style I imagined I saw in the Jarmusch movie, Patterson. So I continue to rewrite some of my 8 line poetry in the mode of Han-shan's poetry with an eye to creating a chapbook length work for submission to contests, etcetera, while also trying to create a few original poems. Still in the tube, the rewrite of my science fiction novel Ghoul World to remove some of the cleverness I thought was just too precious for words. And another movie???