#poets

tony@diasporasocial.net

So oft have I invoked thee for my muse,
And found such fair assistance in my verse,
As every alien pen hath got my use,
And under thee their poesy disperse.
Thine eyes, that taught the dumb on high to sing,
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly,
Have added feathers to the learned’s wing,
And given grace a double majesty.
Yet be most proud of that which I compile,
Whose influence is thine, and born of thee;
In others’ works thou dost but mend the style,
And arts with thy sweet graces graced be.
But thou art all my art, and dost advance,
As high as learning, my rude ignorance.

#WilliamShakespeare #poets

kennychaffin@diasp.org

Juke
By Diane Seuss

What kind of juke do you prefer?
For me, it’s the kind with three
songs and thirty-seven blank
title strips. Three songs, and two
are “Luckenbach, Texas.”
The third is beautiful and arcane,
but the patrons hate it,
and the record skips.
I prefer the three-song juke
and the three-toothed human

smile. I found the juke of my dreams
in a bar called “Chums,” no clue
the origin or meaning
of the quotation marks. It was a prime
number of a bar, and now it’s dead.
One night, drinking half-and-
halfs, half beer, half tomato juice,
with schnapps chasers, a cheap
source of hallucination.
A soon-to-be-defrocked Catholic

priest, Vic Jr., my mother, and me,
our faces streaked blue with pool
chalk, juke red as a beating heart,
and just a strip of hollyhocks
and a tree line between us
and the northern lights.
I was young. I looked like a Rubens
painting of a woman half-eaten
by moths. What lucky
debauchery, the ride back

on a washboard dirt road,
taking everything for granted,
flipping off the aurora borealis
like it was some three-toothed human
in flashy clothes dancing
to get my attention.
I wasn’t a mean drunk then,
just honest.
Next morning, mom walked in
on the naked priest

in the shack’s garage,
washing himself with a rag
and cold water from the well
in a metal dishpan. I’d later do dishes
in that pan and wash my hair
in that pan. We popped popcorn
on the one-burner wood-burning
stove and ate it out of that pan.
I’m talking about a time and a place.
All I can say of it is that it was real.

The song choices were limited,
so the grooves were dug deep.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/161499/juke?mc_cid=4530d316f0
#poem #poetry #poets #literature

kennychaffin@diasp.org

Happy Birthday Anne Sexton!!

Her Kind
By Anne Sexton

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,

learning the last bright routes, survivor

where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

I have been her kind.


one of my favorites (it's like all my dreams/nightmares) and basis of Peter Gabriel's Mercy Street

45 Mercy Street
by Anne Sexton

In my dream,
drilling into the marrow
of my entire bone,
my real dream,
I'm walking up and down Beacon Hill
searching for a street sign —
namely MERCY STREET.
Not there.

I try the Back Bay.
Not there.
Not there.
And yet I know the number.
45 Mercy Street.
I know the stained-glass window
of the foyer,
the three flights of the house
with its parquet floors.
I know the furniture and
mother, grandmother, great-grandmother,
the servants.
I know the cupboard of Spode
the boat of ice, solid silver,
where the butter sits in neat squares
like strange giant's teeth
on the big mahogany table.
I know it well.
Not there.

Where did you go?
45 Mercy Street,
with great-grandmother
kneeling in her whale-bone corset
and praying gently but fiercely
to the wash basin,
at five A.M.
at noon
dozing in her wiggy rocker,
grandfather taking a nap in the pantry,
grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid,
and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower
on her forehead to cover the curl
of when she was good and when she was…
And where she was begat
and in a generation
the third she will beget,
me,
with the stranger's seed blooming
into the flower called Horrid.

I walk in a yellow dress
and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,
enough pills, my wallet, my keys,
and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?
I walk. I walk.
I hold matches at street signs
for it is dark,
as dark as the leathery dead
and I have lost my green Ford,
my house in the suburbs,
two little kids
sucked up like pollen by the bee in me
and a husband
who has wiped off his eyes
in order not to see my inside out
and I am walking and looking
and this is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime.

Pull the shades down —
I don't care!
Bolt the door, mercy,
erase the number,
rip down the street sign,
what can it matter,
what can it matter to this cheapskate
who wants to own the past
that went out on a dead ship
and left me only with paper?

Not there.

I open my pocketbook,
as women do,
and fish swim back and forth
between the dollars and the lipstick.
I pick them out,
one by one
and throw them at the street signs,
and shoot my pocketbook
into the Charles River.
Next I pull the dream off
and slam into the cement wall
of the clumsy calendar
I live in,
my life,
and its hauled up
notebooks.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anne-sexton

#poem #poetry #poets #literature

kennychaffin@diasp.org

Happy Birthday Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night
Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

#poem #poetry #poets #literature

https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night

tony@diasporasocial.net

Autumn Song
Charles Baudelaire
I

Soon we will plunge into the cold darkness;
Farewell, bright light of our too short summers!
I can already hear falling with funereal shocks
The wood resounding on the pavement of the courtyards.

All winter will enter my being: anger,
Hatred, shivers, horror, hard and forced labor,
And, like the sun in its polar hell,
My heart will be nothing more than a red and frozen block.

I listen with a shudder to each log that falls;
The scaffold that is being built has no more muted echo.
My mind is like the tower that succumbs
Under the blows of the tireless and heavy battering ram.

It seems to me, rocked by this monotonous shock,
That a coffin is being nailed in great haste somewhere.
For whom? - Yesterday was summer; here is autumn!
This mysterious noise sounds like a departure.

II

I love the greenish light of your long eyes,
Sweet beauty, but everything today is bitter to me,
And nothing, neither your love, nor the boudoir, nor the hearth,
Is worth to me the sun radiating on the sea.

And yet love me, tender heart! be a mother,
Even for an ungrateful, even for a wicked man;
A lover or sister, be the ephemeral sweetness
Of a glorious autumn or a setting sun.

Short task! The grave awaits; it is greedy!
Ah! let me, my forehead resting on your knees,
Taste, regretting the white and torrid summer,
Of the late season the yellow and sweet ray!

( Music: Samuel Barber - Adagio for Strings )
#poets #CharlesBaudelaire https://youtu.be/Y8M3L-RHE_o

tord_dellsen@diasp.eu

So Israel has now been bombing a lot of #schools, that is the next thing they’ve moved on to. They’ve already obliterated every #hospital in Gaza. They’ve obliterated most or all #universities, they’ve assassinated most of the high level #professors, […] #poets that actually had a lot of meaning as leaders in the community, #journalists - killed more journalists than World War II […]

— Lee Camp, August 12

#Palestine #Gaza #genocide

kennychaffin@diasp.org

Golden Retrievals
BY Mark Doty

Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention
seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so.
Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh
joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then

I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue
of any thrillingly dead thing. And you?
Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk,
thinking of what you never can bring back,

or else you’re off in some fog concerning
—tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work:
to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving,
my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,

a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here,
entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47252/golden-retrievals

#poem #poetry #poets #literature

kennychaffin@diasp.org

Narcissus
Callie Siskel

Time "Person of the Year" was "You."
I was a sophomore in college. I held the mirror up to my friend.
Outside a fraternity, I stood in a circle of women telling each other how pretty they were.
On the walk back to my room, I passed a monument: water running over granite.
The man I loved wanted me in his bed, so I could tell him he was exceptional.
There is a difference between Echo and the spring: one repeats, one colludes.
In his childhood bed, we had sex, and I turned bright red.
He said, "Someone had a good time," and I knew it was over.
I moved out of the dorm with a friend, paid less for the smaller room.
At dinner, she said the chef was staring at her. I agreed.
If I told you how she stranded me, the focus would shift to her, as it always did.
There is beauty in submission, but it depends on what one gains from it.
When a poet came to campus, old and failing, she bared herself like a wet stone drying.

(My guess is that the poet that came to campus was Sharon Olds. :) )

from the book TWO MINDS / W. W. Norton & Company

https://mailchi.mp/poems/todays-poem-narcissus-by-callie-siskel-6079344?e=6ec42bce63

#poem #poetry #poets #literature

tony@diasporasocial.net

Tribute to everyday life

I like everyday life
Most of all, I like everyday life
The slow awakening to the familiar view
which is not quite so well known anyway
The family's at once familiar and, after the remoteness of sleep, alien faces

The morning kisses
The post's bang in the entrance
The smell of coffee
The ritual walk to the grocery store around the corner for milk, cigarettes, newspapers -
I like everyday life
Even through all its annoyances
The bus rattling outside on the street
The phone that incessantly disturbs the most beautiful, shiny still nothingness in my aquarium
The birds chirping from their cages
The old neighbor who looks by
The child that needs to be picked up from the kindergarten just as you have started
The constant shopping list in the jacket pocket
with its fixed demands for meat, potatoes, coffee and biscuits
The little fast on the local
when will everyone meet with shopping bags and wipe sweat from their foreheads -
I like everyday life
The agenda
Also the biological one
The inevitable procedures in the bath and on the toilet
The obligatory razor
The letters to be written
The rent collection
The reconciliation of the checkbook
The dishes
The realization of being out of diapers or tape -
I like everyday life
Not unlike party and colors, tent and balfaldera
It has to
with all its leftover dross
So much unsaid and approximate
weaving and hanging in the air afterwards
Like a kind of mental hangover
Only everyday morning coffee can cure -
Nice enough with parties! All room for the euphoria!
Let the thousand pearls bubble!
But what happiness afterwards to lie down
in the bed of rest and everyday life
to the familiar and yet not so familiar same view

I like everyday life
I love it
Have a full holiday where I enjoy everyday life
I really like everyday life.
Dan Turell (Danish poet)
#Danish #poets https://youtu.be/77jiPMXR3Aw

kennychaffin@diasp.org

AGAINST THE SOLAR ECLIPSE
by Alejandro Escudé

It’s a black swath that cuts across
A part of the country that’s a myth.
Does Ohio even exist? Not here,
Where the post office blends
With the sky and the cops drive
Black and white cars off freeway
Overpasses. In one photo, a man
Peers down at a brass contraption
Like some 21st century Galileo,
A pinprick on the sun shadowed
By that communist rock in the sky.
Or was it the other way around?
I can’t recall. It’s all mathematical
Gibberish, if you ask me. A train
Stopped the traffic the other day
And that was more real than the
Eclipse. The sun is like an orange
At the grocery store at age fifty.
Who still buys the citrusy orbs?
If fact, the supermarket aisles
Are too bright these days. I should
Wear those ISO glasses they all
Wore to observe the eclipse.
See what? Nature? Apocalypse?
Down on this planet, it’s light
Pandemonium. Hysteria denied.
I’ve had enough of branded news.
Music mimicking music. It’s called
The cosmos. That death-trap
Beyond the atmosphere. Boneless
Graveyard, aqueduct to nothingness.
Honestly, I’ll take God. He’s not
In fashion right now. But I prefer
The ambiguity of faith to ignorance,
Which is what you see in crowds,
Lawn chairs and binoculars, tents,
Motorhomes, a sheet afloat, the sun
Figured there, reflected, swallowed
By time’s stupid, arcing mouth.

—from Poets Respond
April 14, 2024


Alejandro Escudé: “Human beings, in my point of view, are absolute masters of denial and distraction. The eclipse was just another event that reminded me of how well society can turn its gaze up and away from real societal issues, personal problems, true miracles, thought, insight, love, in order to participate in one more pointless venture.” 

https://www.rattle.com/against-the-solar-eclipse-by-alejandro-escude/

#poem #poetry #poets #literature

kennychaffin@diasp.org

What do you see as the role of art in public life at this moment in time?

I think that art has many different roles in public life. But if there is one thing I keep coming back to, I believe that art, and poetry in particular, can make you feel something, anything. It’s not always a soothing feeling, most times it’s actually more of a disruption, a piercing of the thick armor we must wear to move through life. But we need that disruption, that reminder of our humanity, of our desires, rage, and our tenderness.

Stopping by with Ada Limón

#poems #poetry #literature #poets