Diane Seuss

 

Mountains black today, hiding when the wind cooperates

Mountains black today, hiding when the wind cooperates behind Whitman
beards, legless homeless talking to themselves on red dirt corners, laughing 
at the nothing there is to laugh at, holding up blank cardboard signs, 
the want so great they can’t put words to it, and I belong nowhere, have 
never belonged anywhere, not where I was raised, not where I was not raised, 
not in any classroom or strip motel or restaurant of any false or real ethnicity, 
not chic, not invisible, not urban but no farm where my apron can flap 
in the wind, not in any workplace, my god, workplaces, I know this is 
the wail of a teenager and yet I’m not really wailing, am I, am I wailing, 
I’m saying this body has never been a home, my shack a shackle, dog 
is a good boy but he bites, poems are someone else’s clothes I slipped 
into so I could skip town, even the hospital where I was born was borrowed 
from the Catholics, nuns thought I was odd and tried to foist me off 
on the Buddhists but they reached through the fog and handed me back

Diane Seuss

 [I hope when it happens]

I hope when it happens I have time to say oh so this is how it is happening

unlike Frank hit by a jeep on Fire Island but not like dad who knew too

long six goddamn years in a young man’s life so long it made a sweet guy sarcastic

I want enough time to say oh so this is how I’ll go and smirk at that last rhyme

I rhymed at times because I wanted to make something pretty especially for Mikel

who liked pretty things soft and small things who cried into a white towel when I hurt

myself when it happens I don’t want to be afraid I want to be curious was Mikel curious

I’m afraid by then he was only sad he had no money left was living on green oranges

had kissed all his friends goodbye I kissed lips that kissed Frank’s lips though not

for me a willing kiss I willingly kissed lips that kissed Howard’s deathbed lips

I happily kissed lips that kissed lips that kissed Basquiat’s lips I know a man who said

he kissed lips that kissed lips that kissed lips that kissed Whitman’s

lips who will say of me I kissed her who will say of me I kissed someone who kissed

her or I kissed someone who kissed someone who kissed someone who kissed her.

Cedar Sigo

 Here is a tiny bit from the introduction followed by my own translation:

Mallarme’s track changes often and without warning, but still somehow maintains the sense of an aged storyboard, how its colors being bleached by the sun only turns them brighter. (Kenneth Anger’s early film Fireworks also springs to mind.) The pleasure of translation comes as the poet begins to flail around in the trenches of a foreign syntax, obliterating all sense of time.

Cedar Sigo

Cedar Sigo

Henri Cole

 

Gravity and Center

I'm sorry I cannot say I love you when you say

you love me. The words, like moist fingers,

appear before me full of promise but then run away

to a narrow black room that is always dark,

where they are silent, elegant, like antique gold,

devouring the thing I feel. I want the force

of attraction to crush the force of repulsion

and my inner and outer worlds to pierce

one another, like a horse whipped by a man.

I don't want words to sever me from reality.

I don't want to need them. I want nothing

to reveal feeling but feeling—as in freedom,

or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond,

or the sound of water poured in a bowl.

Henri Cole

 

“Ginger and Sorrow”

My skin is the cover of my body.
It keeps me bound to my surroundings.
It is the leather over my spine.
It is the silk over the corneas of my eyes.
Where I am hairless, at the lips and groin,
there is pinkness and vulnerability.
Despite a protective covering of horny skin,
there is no such problem with my fingers,
whose ridges and grooves are so gratifying
to both the lover and the criminologist.
I think perhaps the entire history
of me is here—viper of memory,
stab of regret, red light of oblivion.
Hell would be living without them.

Alice Notley

Sonnet

 Pink & white, chiffon & chenille, & cherubs

They frame oval mirror cracked across
No reflection of me it’s rented newly
My books on & under a vanity
Bamboo’s here too, Southamptonese, chair
A library’s dark desk, austere
I rearrange change them which change me
I’ll often forget to see
Pink & white to be lost after 90 days
Town’s as foreign-looking & mine
No town fits—not my image of one, but sense
That a town might make sense.
Clean cold-weather town, historical interest
Winter emptied, slickly plain downtown

 

Donald Revell

 

THE PIANO LESSON

                                                                       for Karla Kelsey

A few notes, like planets of the remaining
Color, hunger here, sated only by distance,
Only by distance sated. There are no cabs.

Our Spaniard, perhaps as near as the next room,
Would bellow pathos into the gash where child
Keeps his eye. Wise child. Tenderness is not
For such, not for lions. We stare across

The music, meeting you there, planets
Of laundry and an iron tree, green for Christmas.
I have invented a simple balcony for Christ

Behind the piano. Even in daylight,
There stands a ghost against the rail. Her toque
Is thrown into the traffic noise. A few notes,
Yellow as tender to the sun, hang there.

 

RAPTURE

Time might be anything, even the least
Portion of shadow in the blaze, that helpless
Hare of darkness in the hawk’s world.
I’d forgotten, in the haste of me, to reach
Backwards into time one hand. Come along.
I’ve seen a rainbow where no rain was.
The colors were slain children of the wind
Alive again because time might be anything,
And earth a broken astrolabe
Plunged into blackness by force of sunlight
These latter days. There is a flower
In the hawk’s mouth once was an animal.
It hurries towards the sun, and the hawk,
Helpless in the color of it, becomes rain.

Terrance Hayes

Maybe I was too hard on Derek Walcott.
In preschool while I lay on a nylon cot
In a church basement staring at God knows
What, I was not asleep when the old deacon
Snuck downstairs to let the two sisters
Watching us lay hands against his advances.
His crown was haloed in gray, but eyebrows
And eyelashes swirled black as calligraphy
Around his gaze. “Cut it out,” I’d hear the girl
With plump, plum lips say. He wore a silver
Bracelet, he spoke with a radiant sway,
Everywhere he was known to pray a prayer
So blood-filled & persuasive some listeners
Were said to fever, kneel, beg, break, levitate.

Terrance Hayes

AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

Aryans, Betty Crocker, Bettye Lavette,
Blowfish, briar bushes, Bubbas, Buckras,
Archie Bunkers, bullhorns, bullwhips, bullets,
All cancers kill me, car crashes, cavemen, chakras,
Crackers, discord, dissonance, doves, Elvis,
Ghosts, the grim reaper herself, a heart attack
While making love, hangmen, Hillbillies exist,
Lillies, Martha Stewarts, Mayflower maniacs,
Money grubbers, Gwen Brooks’ “The Mother,”
(My mother’s bipolar as bacon), pancakes kill me,
Phonies, dead roaches, big roaches & smaller
Roaches, the sheepish, snakes, all seven seas,
Snow avalanches, swansongs, sciatica, Killer
Wasps, yee-haws, you, now & then, disease.

Alice Notley

 

Sonnet

The late Gracie Allen was a very lucid comedienne,

Especially in the way that lucid means shining and bright.

What her husband George Burns called her illogical logic

Made a halo around our syntax and ourselves as we laughed.

George Burns most often was her artful inconspicuous straight man.

He could move people about stage, construct skits and scenes, write

And gather jokes. They were married as long as ordinary magic

Would allow, thirty-eight years, until Gracie Allen's death.

In her fifties Gracie Allen developed a heart condition.

She would call George Burns when her heart felt funny and fluttered

He'd give her a pill and they'd hold each other till the palpitation

Stopped—just a few minutes, many times and pills. As magic fills

Then fulfilled must leave a space, one day Gracie Allen's

               heart fluttered

And hurt and stopped. George Burns said unbelievingly to the doctor,

               "But I still have some of the pills."

Michael Robbins

Of course I think of Keats’s “misers of sound and syllable” and D. G. Rossetti’s “moment’s monument,” which suggest that it is the tension of the form that attracts poets—miserly and momentary yet monumental and garlanded. From Thomas Wyatt to Bernadette Mayer, the sonnet in English has almost no fixed rules, just tendencies. Think of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s curtal sonnets or the not-quite-sonnets of The Dream Songs or Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets. The sonnet is as adaptable as capitalism. As for whether it has a particular politics, you can get graduate students to believe anything, but no. However, I should note that Anahid Nersessian, in her recent Utopia, Limited, has a fascinating reading of Wordsworth’s sonnets, whose “scanty plot of ground” frees him from “the weight of too much liberty.” She argues they mirror our own political and ecological situation in their play of constraint and liberation—it is precisely through constraint (on production, on consumption) that we must now seek liberation.

Karen Volkman

Sonnet 

Nice knuckle, uncle. Nice hat, hornet. 
Nice is nervouser than eye or at, 
the gone get going, the icons eat 
a lawful loin, an iridescent sweet

glows its grid-iris, the noun forget.
Plier! keep folding, administer the that, 
perennials languished in a pliant heat
stay go come stay, white nunca, red meat—

green is the color of time or green is gram
or green as mold is the house of oblivion
and green how I want you green, that house of am

loves its numberables, the Tamping sham—
quick candle, click the trigger in the tun,
red now, green when, that shocks the shaking sun.