We're Swimming

This was me playing with repetition. Also, the short images used by Beckman were intriguing, so I wanted to play with that too. I was too scared to share it last night, after how good everyone elses poems were, but here it is.

We're Swimming
___
Your long legs
Like push pops
Sweaty swingsets
The sun rising; combusting
Your father's loveseat
Your father's countenance

That long countenance
It doesn't really say anything
It writes folk songs
It wears flower in it's hair
It holds mixing bowls right to it's cheek
So it can hear it's heart beat

The painful heartbeat counts
The footsteps of it's tenants
It listens to the fuzzy
scalp of an earthworm

Embarrasingly ignorant of the painful earthworm
Swimming in the rain

Kiki's poem!

Hey After Hourlies,

So my friend Kiki's first book is coming out soon, and she'll actually be giving a reading over at Quad City Arts after the book comes out. You should all go because she's awesome, as proven by this.

Check it, foos!

Hi poets,

To make this blog a little more lively I've decided to post some poems I like. I start out with one of my favorite poets Wislawa Szymborska. She is a polish poet, essayist and translator and received the Nobel Price in Literature in 1996. (thanks Wikipedia)
I chose this poem because it reminds me of my own family, where no one, reads. My stepdad once interrupted me while I was reading a book and said, highly amused with himself and his own wittiness: "Imagine if you would read non fiction instead Elina. Think about how much you would know then."
I mean, how do you even respond to that? I just laugh at him and read this poem for some comfort.



In praise of my sister

My sister doesn't write poems,
and it's unlikely that she'll suddenly start writing poems.
She takes after her mother, who didn't write poems,
and also her father, who likewise didn't write poems.
I feel safe beneath my sister's roof:
my sister's husband would rather die than write poems.
And, even though this is starting to sound as
repetitive as Peter Piper,
the truth is, none of my relatives write poems.

My sister's desk drawers don't hold old poems,
and her handbag doesn't hold new ones.
When my sister asks me over for lunch,
I know she doesn't want to read me her poems.
Her soups are delicious without ulterior motives.
Her coffee doesn't spill on manuscripts.

There are many families in which nobody writes poems,
but once it starts up it's hard to quarantine.
Sometimes poetry cascades down through the generations,
creating fatal whirlpools where family love may founder.

My sister has tackled oral prose with some success,
but her entire written opus consists of postcards from vacations
whose text is only the same promise every year:
when she gets back, she'll have
so much
much
much to tell.

Christian Bök

Taking the surface of language to new heights, Christian Bök is a leading experimental poet.

The book I mentioned briefly this week, Eunoia, really means "beautiful thinking." See if you like what you hear and see here:

Here's chapter "i," with a link to the man himself reading an excerpt!

Check out a fancy Flash version of chapter "e" as well!

And, to push your tolerance for silly sounds to new and exciting levels, check out this excerpt of a "sound poem" of his.

With love,
Dr. Peters
(Just kidding it's Dan)

6 Word Stories

My girlfriend's sister is interning at Smith Magazine and they have 6 word story contests, and the good ones get published...so if you want to be published in a book with little to a lot of effort then try this. www.smithmag.net

The Manliest Hopkins

Here's a classic poem by that twisted sonneteer, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Notice that it has the right number of lines, and the right rhyme scheme, but the heavy enjambment and constant internal rhyming make the form essentially invisible. Read this one aloud for some crazy tongue-twisters, or hear someone else read it.


The Windhover
To Christ our Lord

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Dan's next poem recommendation

This next poem is one of my favorites from one of my all-time favorite poets, Zbigniew Herbert. Herbert was one of the premier poets of the twentieth century -- and the rest of the world was left wondering what was in the drinking water of Poland, that it could give rise to him, Czeslaw Milosz, and Wislawa Szymborska all in the same century. Herbert wrote on a tremendous range of subjects, but even when he chooses the most mundane of subjects -- a pebble, an armchair -- his poems resound with depth of feeling and meaning.

Part of the accomplishment of this poem is that he locates a very real, very personal tragedy in such an absurd object -- How can we feel pity for an armchair? -- with the kind of quiet confidence that makes the reader accept the world on his terms, to see the world through his eyes, to find that melancholy in this completely unexpected place.

It's in prose, if that means simply that it's not written in lines. But if this isn't poetry, I don't know what is. I hope you enjoy it. And if you have thoughts, questions, comments, I'd love to see them!


ARMCHAIRS

by Zbigniew Herbert

Who ever thought a warm neck would become an armrest, or legs eager for flight and joy could stiffen into four simple stilts? Armchairs were once noble flower-eating creatures. However, they allowed themselves too easily to be domesticated and today they are the most wretched species of quadrupeds. They have lost all their stubbornness and courage. They are only meek. They haven't trampled anyone or galloped off with anyone. They are, for certain, conscious of a wasted life.
The despair of armchairs is revealed in their creaking.