Lunch Sonnet

I’ve been on kind of a Frank O’Hara kick lately, as I am wont to do. I feel like when spring comes, it’s much easier to keep an eye out for the strange and somewhat uneasy side of New York; the truism is that the crazies come out when it gets warm. (Even though everyone gets a little bit crazy when it’s warm.) And since I’ve been reading Lunch Poems again, and since Poets & Writers asked for sonnets yesterday, and since I did indeed eat lunch today, here is an O’Hara send-up. No, it’s not a strict sonnet, but it rhymes very nicely and Petrarchanishly, I think. You could call it semi-persona, maybe. Anyway, it was fun to write.

Lunch Sonnet

I came for peace and quiet: lunch standing up, at small round
silver tables grit with crumbs, garlic, red pepper flakes,
two slices and a Coke two seventy-five. The thick-chin boy takes
two paper plates and lifts my lunch like I am about to be crowned
street-food royalty, I am starved with thanks.
Patient standing the art student and Titus who marked his place
with bundled trash, the paranoid Honduran girl and that half-face
dogfighter with scarred dewlaps. Dissension in the goddamn ranks
when a guy cuts in front, wheelchair tires squealing
he hoists his plastic leg like a truncheon. Some fucking respect
for a Eye-rack vet he bleats and I think, just let it happen, best
avoid trouble. Peace. and. quiet. In here we’re used to feeling
lullabied by salsa radio and grill smoke, when the mood is wrecked,
when he snarls up to my table, I keep my change. I leave the rest.

Karma

One more before I go make dinner and then proceed to a friend’s graduation-from-acting-school show. (I know, look at me, such the social butterfly today.) Miz Quickly is asking for sonnets. The thing with me and sonnets — and I may have given this story before — is that, back in high school (during the first era of poetry, when I was a high school poet like everyone else), I used to be part of, and eventually run, this online poetry group thing on Saturday evenings, because I was totally one of the Cool Kids. And one of the challenges we used to do was Seven-Minute Sonnets (sometimes Six-), where you were given a line/a theme/three specific words, and had that length of time to do a sonnet. So I got very practiced at doing rapid rhyme and pentameter, and when lucky, a volta (as every good sonnet should have).

The downside is that I can almost never think of a theme for sonnets. Every sonnet prompt I’ve seen is, I think, simply “write a sonnet”, because that’s usually enough. Which means I have to go hunting for ideas; I refuse, point-blank, to default to doing a love sonnet. I cruised over to Verse Daily and ended up at the Charles Simic poem “Roadside Stand”; I only read the first line before immediately rushing back to write the sonnet, after an experience from childhood I’m probably mis-remembering. The sonnet is about as regular and exactas I get with them; the narrative is pretty self-explanatory. And this is one of my rare actual narrative poems, with very little else going on it (except for maybe a too-subtle allusion here or there), so… enjoy!

Karma

My mother swings off-course and cries, fresh corn!
The sign hangs awkward, painted red and white:
she knows the market. We are sometimes born-
again to local farms, lapsed converts sworn
then swayed and swayed again. A secret right,
an unpaved road, the farmer’s gingham wife
up to our window. Taste this, have a bite–
but we crave corn. The wife sighs, money’s tight,
we had to sell. Instead, she has black plums
like far-off planets ready for the knife.
Of course, desire denied is hard-replaced:
but see the yard, the house. My mother thumbs
through dollars: we’ll make cobbler, or still-life.
The fruit is passed; my mother’s hand, embraced.

The Artist’s Dream

Ten minutes to spare, and I am beasting out a poem before bed. This is actually not an original: Poets and Writers asked for translations, though I think they were half-serious. Maybe tomorrow I’ll do a looser, more goofy one, but since I just wanted to exercise some part of my brain creatively before calling it quits tonight*, I grabbed the book of Émile Nelligan poems I picked up in Montréal last time I was there, and chose one at random. He’s a very formal poet from the last century, so his style is quite unlike mine, but I don’t mind it so much. Viv can probably do a much better one; this was rushed, and pretty free with the perfect alexandrine sonnet form of the original. Anyway, it’s something, which (this month) is almost always better than nothing.

(* My caveat is that I did have workshop tonight, and I was very proud of what I wrote for it; I think they liked it better than the one I actually revised/prepared for discussion. But as I don’t make a habit of posting workshop poems on here… another was needed.)

The original French:

Rêve d’artiste

Parfois j’ai le désir d’une sœur bonne et tendre,
D’une sœur angélique au sourire discret :
Sœur qui m’enseignera doucement le secret
De prier comme il faut, d’ésperer et d’attendre.

J’ai ce désir très pur d’une sœur éternelle,
D’une sœur d’amitié dans le règne de l’Art,
Qui me saura veillant à ma lampe très tard
Et qui me couvrira des cieux de sa prunelle ;

Qui me prendra les mains quelquefois dans les siennes
Et me chuchotera d’immaculés conseils,
Avec le charme alié des voix musiciennes ;

Et pour qui je ferai, si j’aborde à la gloire,
Fleurir tout un jardin de lys et de soleils
Dans l’azur d’un poème offert à sa mémoire.

…and, my translation:

The Artist’s Dream

Sometimes I wish for a sister, gentle and kind,
angelic, and with a Mona Lisa smile:
a sister who will softly teach me the way
to pray as one must, to hope for a while.

I have this pure wish for a sister, eternal,
who keeps company with the essence of Art,
who’ll know me by the lamp that burns late
and come cover me with the sky in her heart.

Sometimes she’ll take my hands in her own
and whisper in my ear some sisterly advice
in a strange melody that charms with its tone.

And if I can follow her out of the world,
I’ll grow a garden sown with lilies and stars
to her honor, in a sky-blue poem I’ve unfurled.

Ghazal at a Rave

Happy February! A friend of a friend of mine is doing a creative challenge thing for the month called 28K/28D, that is, 28000 words in 28 days. I’m going to spin it a bit: I want to try to meet a creative goal every day, because I have an assortment of them this month. (A poem will obviously count as one, but I have a couple prose projects that have been lying in the dust since December, and some crafty things to take care of.) As I’ve said before, new resolutions are a slow, accumulative process for me: I’ve been reasonably revising my lifestyle through January, and now it’s time to take it to the second level in February. I’m hoping additional electric shocks to the creativity will effect that.

Samuel Peralta has a prompt at dVerse to combine the ghazal and sonnet. I often end up doing iambic pentameter in ghazals anyway, but this time I have also made efforts to get a sonnet-fashion thematic turn, some internal rhymes and strong pre-refrain ghazal rhymes going (though I snuck in that extra syllable for kicks). Patricia Smith, with her Hip-Hop Ghazal (still one of my favorites!) is my spirit guide. The poem has a pretty simple narrative — I could call it “the time I went to a rave with the deaf pill-popper guy I had a huge crush on” — that doesn’t really betray any depth of emotion. In the workshop, I was accused (well, maybe “labeled” is a less fiery word) of being a virtuoso for bringing a carefully-crafted, lyrical poem that didn’t have enough dimension to it. I’m trying to fix that, but not on this one: the form is hard enough to do interestingly without giving it veins.

Ghazal at a Rave

Got spattered boots tied low to kiss the downbeat,
got phosphorescence strung to wrists. The downbeat–

all anabolic glow, you’re rhapsody
in blue, all star-shot when you miss the downbeat–

I love imperfect flow. I love to see
such un-restraint. Your debut. Hiss the downbeat–

hold high those fingers, throw mirage on me.
I’ll sidle up and watch you twist the downbeat–

you sign for pills? and no more ecstasy.
I fumble, sorry, shrug through this. The downbeat–

our grinding hips, your crowing wordless glee
before you move to find new bliss, the downbeat–

transcending speech. Say Joe by hand when we
part ways. Then pause and lift two fists. The downbeat–

Winter Begins Like A Cataract

Three hours later, here I am at the neighborhood Starbucks (walking distance from the parental house: yeah!), looking at the absolutely dismal sky. It’s very wintry today, even if it’s not snowing: chilly, superbly windy, damp, drab, bare, llwyd*, and throwing into sharp relief all the more the glories of being wrapped in a snug coat with a mug of something steamy, having friends and family and candles nearby in the night. That’s winter, to me. DVerse is asking for kyrielles, which I loathe, and kyrielle sonnets, which I find marginally more interesting, so this is the latter. I did see two hawks doing their little courtship circle over what could have been (today) a post-apocalyptic supermarket parking lot, but I have never had cataracts. Truth be told, though, the whole world turning to dirty canvas like it is, I’d not be surprised if it is like this.

* Llwyd is one of my favorite words in any language. It’s Welsh for “grey”, but it covers more than just smoke or steel or donkey coat color. It’s also that drab brown of winter earth, the color of stripped trees, the cloud-covered sky, the spectrum from “dun” to “ashen” to “taupe”. At least, that’s what I was taught; maybe it just means “grey” to most people.

On multiple occasions lately, I’ve seen one blind person leading another on Seventh Avenue. It’s a marvelous thing to observe, given the proverb about such situations.

Winter Begins Like a Cataract

Two hawks circling the nicotine sky
forget the sun. The red-rimmed eye
whispers, must the mysteries of sight
dive low to drink? The end of light
has starved them to an ambient grey.
Two hawks with swallowing throats display
their plumage. And we– you and I–
dive low, too. Drink the end of light
from plastic cups, take in the scene:
two hawks hunting, the lots picked clean,
quiet wait-in-the-weeds. Blind men sigh,
dive low. Here’s to the end. A flight:
two hawks circling the nicotine sky
dive low to drink the end of light.

The Wake

This has not been a good summer for anyone, it seems like. Today we lost a family friend (my brother’s godfather), who had been struggling with illness for a long time. It’s unsettling when there just seems to be nothing but death and misfortune in your life and the lives of others that you know, but I suppose we must reach the bottom of things before they can improve, sometimes. Anyway, DVerse asked for a sonnet, so this was on my mind today. I think that really, no one is good at funerals, but some people are just better at faking it than me. A happier one tomorrow, I hope…

The Wake

I don’t know what to say at funerals;
I have no words of remedy, no cures.
(The ancients wrote them somewhere, to be sure,
in sea-drowned tomes or black incunables.)
I know the minute’s worth in numerals,
how necessary that each hour endures.
I know the things to say to sound mature;
but nothing easy, nothing beautiful.
So silence is the haven where I go:
dealt out with hands, drawn in with memory.
I know my observations: husbands, wives,
this dim grey peace, this timeless undertow.
I know enough to know this treasury,
these things that fill our dreamless afterlives.

Stolen Sermon

Ugh. I am not satisfied with this one, but I felt like I had to do some kind of poem this evening. This is for Donna’s prompt, inspired by Melissa Stein’s “Robber Girl”; I’ve heard nothing but praises for her collection Rough Honey, and this poem is a clear example. I tried to appropriate (rob!) as much of the aspect of it as I could in one go, and fell woefully flat. But this is an attempt, at least, to have the “robber girl” persona show through a bit, as well as be a somewhat simplified sonnet and have a word-becoming-another-word. Tried to concentrate certain sounds through the poem, keep a bit of rhyme in, and have a sort-of-turn that didn’t work at all. I’m proud of how transpose can be re-arranged to patroness though.

But still, I need to go think of something better.

Stolen Sermon

What does the goddess of thieves desire?
Intangible things: the taste of apples
in August, the juice scooped from skins like rough
gems offered with a slight hand. She appears
when the lock is broken, the knot undone.
And your prayer’s never answered without a price:
a bee dance, a genie of ice and fire.
What does the woman with everything want?
You’ll know it when it slips through your fingers:
a jeweled word, a song, dimly unwound and
unheard. She swallows a little more light
out of the world: just a scrap at a time.
How easy does knighted transpose to night:
what does its patroness crave as she nears?

Concertina

Monday, Monday, why do you persecute me? Why do you send me project vendors who can’t get work done on time, refuse to email you to let you know what’s going on, and still manage to do the assignments improperly? And on top of that, why do you give me over one hundred emails to read, then keep piling them on, as the rain that follows the flood?

Sorry, I just needed to gripe about work for a minute.

This one is for Donna‘s prompt about instruments and all the things they summon up; it ended up as a sonnet of some kind. (If you don’t pay attention to the sonnets I write, let me point out that I often follow the 14 lines of iambic pentameter rule, and usually the volta, then openly flout the normal rhyme schemes in favor of my own. Though I guess the only volta here is really just a transition from memory/nostalgia to a rawer emotion.) I listened to the Amélie soundtrack while I wrote this to get me in the mood for it. Concertinas and accordions of all sorts always make me wish I lived back in Montmartre or Dublin or Argentina during the turn of the 20th century. Or, barring that, on the Paris Métro listening to a busker, because that happens too. If wishes were pegasi, then I would be up in the clouds.

Concertina

I love all things that speak in many tongues,
two languages at once. The left hand says:
remember Ireland in the needling rain,
the céilí’s shadows, pubs with ragged light.
And then the right hand presses on the lungs,
collapses ribs: remember Paris as
it tangoes down the dusty years. I love
unsteady things that quaver: bittersweet,
exultant things that empty every vein
to fill them up with birdsong, clipped and coy.
The belly of the beast’s reserved, polite:
it paints the colors of the mourning dove
across the world. I love its sighed retreat
that squeezes out the sepia drops of joy.

meta-blogging: a day off

Home sick from work today. Not like, really sick, just kind of sick: as has become the norm, the swollen tonsils are the clear early indicator of my illnesses. I’m going to try to become some kind of curandero of the savaged throat, able to divine the type and extent of any illness by how much it fills my lymph nodes. (Going between ping-pong and golf ball size: sinusitis, will last three sleepless nights and one week of days of tearful misery. Though I hope my prediction is wrong.)

Anyway, I’m a little bit loopy from not-eating (swallowing hurts), pills (all the Vitamin C!), and tiredness, but I’ve tottered over to the cafe to do some poetry. My excuse was that they would make me a pot of herbal tea with honey.

I’m continuing to think about poetic growth. I haven’t submitted anything in months, and I’m sitting on a big pile of poems that I’m proud of, ashamed for, confused by, or indifferent to. A friend of mine keeps suggesting we go to an open mic where I can read, and I think the fear has finally faded away into nonchalance. Prompts have ceased to tickle me when the same ones come round again and again without summoning up deep dark things that I can work with to create something truly satisfying. And I’m so distractable by all the other things in life that I feel like I need to take an extended vacation without Internet or other connection, to just write in a book with a pen, etc. That’s taking center stage in my right-brain, more than being productive…

But I want to share two poems that I love (and I hope Donna considers them for Poetry Mix Tape, if she’s not familiar with them already!) If you dabble in formalism, I hope you’ll appreciate the things the poets have done with traditional forms. First, have a look at Christian Campbell’s “The First Time I Made Curry”:

You left your scrunchee here that last time.
On the dresser, there forgetting your scent.
You only wore it when you smoked (slim, mint
Nat Shermans), to spare your hair. The first time
I made curry, there was smoke. Six whole nights
it stained the air – a thing in my kitchen
alive. I think you were gone by then.
But it was good, plenty channa, not too mild.

I stopped cutting my hair again, just in
time for the cold. Haven’t met any other
West Indians yet. I don’t have time to miss
a beat. Every dayclean I still swim –
like nothing. Like every Friday, Next Door
must still cuss out her married man and fry fish.

There are numerous things to love in here: the use of dialect and reference to heritage, hair as a symbol of affection/connection, the personification of curry, the allusions to private names and stories, etc. But also, there’s an undercurrent of sonnet in here, if you look carefully. It’s too easy to hold up Derek Walcott’s poetry as a mirror to Campbell’s, but (and I say this without knowing much more of this work, though here’s another three that break the mold a bit) the similarities are clear.

Another one is Patricia Smith’s “Hip-Hop Ghazal“. I can’t remember if I brought this up several Reveries ago as an example of an excellent modern take on the ghazal, but in case I didn’t, here it is:

Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips,
decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.

As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,
inhaling bassline, cracking backbone and singing thru hips.

Like something boneless, we glide silent, seeping ‘tween floorboards,
wrapping around the hims, and ooh wee, clinging like glue hips.

Engines grinding, rotating, smokin’, gotta pull back some.
Natural minds are lost at the mere sight of ringing true hips.

Gotta love us girls, just struttin’ down Manhattan streets
killing the menfolk with a dose of that stinging view. Hips.

Crying ’bout getting old—Patricia, you need to get up off
what God gave you. Say a prayer and start slinging. Cue hips.

Again, there’s dialect and casual speech in there (you have to read this poem out loud, it doesn’t work when you just read it silently), and there’s a clear sense of who the poet is and what she is claiming as part of her origin. But this also respects all the ghazal requirements: has a refrain and the rhyme before it, has more-or-less equal lines, has to do with unrequited love (or at least fanning the flames of desire), mentions the poet’s name in the last couplet, the right length… perfect!

I guess the point of this is to demonstrate that it is possible to strike a perfect balance between formal, traditional verse, and modern, boundless verse; and oftentimes the theme and voice can help create that balance. Formalist poetry’s blessing-curse is that it is intimately tied to the time and place it came from, and you have to find a way to adopt it without either destroying its elegance or watering it down. I think these two are excellent example of how to do it right; they’re an inspiration.

One more random thing to talk about: who is going to the Dodge Festival? I’d like to connect with a couple other poets if possible… I’ve never been (because it has almost always fallen on the weekend of my birthday), and as I’m right across the river now, there’s really no excuse not to go. I’ll probably get a weekend pass and just slum around Newark on the Saturday and Sunday. But if you’re a reader of this blog, and want to try and make time to have coffee, talk, etc., it would be neat to meet some people in person. Do let me know!

More tea. And then perhaps a poem… let’s see if I can do anything with this draft wiggling around in my head.

Dreams For A Night When The Heat Goes Out

It’s ridiculously cold round these parts today, and while our heat works, my bedroom is right by a drafty window that we haven’t had the time or inclination to weather-proof and insulate properly. So I’ve been waking up pretty chilly the last few weeks while here, and my brain keeps playing the trick of giving me dreams set in the middle of August. Dammit, subconscious. There’s not much else substantial to this, theme-wise, but it’s written for Donna Vorreyer‘s third installment of Poetry Mix Tape, which is to write a sonnet that evokes tone and/or breaks with the conventional stanza structure. So this is a secret sonnet, as I am wont to write from time to time (look for the meter and rhyme in there, I promise you’ll find them). I kept the volta, though, because it’s such a cool word.

Dreams for a Night When the Heat Goes Out

An afternoon submerged in tea,
molasses lake, the water slithering through the crinkled
summer earth: above, concealed,
the passage of the sun,
below, the wood ducks drinking while
mosquitoes talk their strange phonetics:
light, malignant, climbing up the siding of the chipped
blue boathouse– steeped light, getting boozy:
sweat-bead afternoon, wild-eyed;

until the moon resolves
the quilt, the pillow, January things,
mirage already gone in a memorial puff
of steam: that’s how it goes, cold blood
collected, filling up the spaces in a frostbit head
with shivered mercy,
cruel as it may seem.