Anthony Thomas Lombardi

 

Lazarus rises from the grave, New York City, 2023

after Nick Cave

               judging by the canary feathers jutting from your mouth
i’d say you’ve come bearing mercy but sometimes
               a cigar is just a cigar. you’ve been feasting on roadkill again.

centuries from Bethany, in a city where only factories close
               quicker than caskets, the lights of New York dissolve before you
like ice on a bruise. you graffiti your grave on every subway map

               in Crown Heights, Astoria, Van Cortlandt Park, always east
of Eden. poor Larry. you never asked to be raised from your tomb.
               you only longed to win the love of longshoremen

swilling lagers & dirty jokes in a bygone Red Hook bar
               to hold the heat & pull of a dying sun. instead you lingered
like a carcass turned cadaver & smudged the air

               with a song no one asked for. stumbling downtown
swallowed by a clash of churls & chants, you recall Jesus & his love
               of lepers as scrawled placards knock your halo

into a surge of traffic. even the angels posted above you snicker
               as they play your spine like a Steinway, biting tongues
that could open a bottle of wine. armed with nothing

               but a psalm, you are reminded of the samurai stripped
of their swords who found their flutes’ bamboo to be the perfect
               cudgel. outside a church, you are drawn to a side door’s

static glow, ghosts rattling their chains & moaning beneath
               the crackle. as a string of sinners, reborn or recently fallen
file out, you recite omens for tomorrow’s blood moon

               like a mockingbird perched on a prophet’s shoulder
but they only throw their day-one chips in your coffee.
               you see no crosses, no scruples & sulking past

the freshly scrubbed window of a storefront, no reflection.
               Heaven is a place where nothing happens & it happens
all day, God often dismissed as rust. like the archer

               surrounded by wolves who reaches into his quiver
& pulls out gladioli, you raise your arms & reach for the stars
               to surrender.

Brenda Hillman

 

Concerning the Meaning Molecule in Poetry

Long ago a man told me, If you write poetry
            keep your subjects small;

i was a tiny skinny girl at that point …

Much later, i heard a meaning molecule
in the call of a dove pretending to be an owl in the pine,

a song-speck circling in a thought throughout all time
            (like the man said, extremely small!)

traveling from before literature
through the blue centuries until quite recently

when a radiant instance of the unknown

           paused our bafflement but kept
that little meaning absolutely elusive, & erotic …

                                    for AC & NS

 

Julia Bloch

 

APOLOGY TO LOS ANGELES

I’m sorry because winter.
I’m sorry because “Lost Angeles.”
I’m sorry because the hand is the
most versatile of instruments and even zero
is a position. I’m sorry for the
poem, I’m sorry for the email, I’m sorry
for the subject line in the email, I’m sorry
about that line about the email in the poem.
The window was open and a hard
piece of metal flew in from the street, I think
that must have been what happened, it was
just the dirty structure of everything.
In the mornings the peacocks at Hollywood
Forever walked around and around
in caged circles and I was the cat, I was the housecat.

Owen Dodson

 SORROW IS THE ONLY FAITHFUL ONE

Sorrow is the only faithful One

Sorrow is the only faithful one:
The lone companion clinging like a season
To its original skin no matter what the variations.

If all the mountains paraded
Eating the valleys as they went
And the sun were a coiffure on the highest peak,

Sorrow would be there between
The sparkling and the giant laughter
Of the enemy when the clouds come down to swim.

But I am less, unmagic, black,
Sorrow clings to me more than to doomsday mountains
Or erosion scars on a palisade.

Sorrow has a song like a leech
Crying because the sand’s blood is dry
And the stars reflected in the lake

Are water for all their twinkling
And bloodless for all their charm.
I have blood, and a song.

Sorrow is the only faithful one.

Richard Powers

“Social developments often collect such a massy inertia that years pass before a tendency shows its results. The private automobile provides a good illustration. Ford perfected the under-five-hundred-dollar automobile in the first decade of the century, but it took another seventy years for this country to find itself hostage to oil-rich nations, increasingly susceptible to respiratory and oncological diseases, unable to get from A to B except through private ownership, and every fifteen years acquiring enough highway fatalities to level the city of Houston.” 
********

“...legend crystallized her life (Sarah Bernhardt) until she became her observers' rumors. At the end, we all become edited copy".” 

                               -----Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

Richard Powers

 “We found that trees could communicate, over the air and through their roots. Common sense hooted us down. We found that trees take care of each other. Collective science dismissed the idea. Outsiders discovered how seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and set buds accordingly. Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks. “Here’s a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.” 

― Richard Powers, The Overstory

Catherine Wagner

WAVE ECHO

For the public art component of the Ocean Avenue South, Santa Monica, I have made a multilayered, narrative, and interactive artwork involving community and site specificity. It consists of a perforated metal screen in the shape of a 36-foot ellipse located underneath the sky bridge. LED lights, which sit behind the ellipse, are activated by two separate layers of information: one coming from generative algorithms of waves influenced by data collected from research buoys in Santa Monica Bay, and the other created by visitors’ and residents’ movements within the village. When thermal sensors detect passersby, the patterns of their movement interrupt and build upon the waveforms. In this piece, light and movement create a visual rethinking of the poetry of waves.

Michael McClure

portrait photograph by Grand Malanga (197

Mephistos and other poems

"A landmark work of bio-romanticism, Mephistos and Other Poems is the first completely new collection in five years from legendary Beat and SF Renaissance poet Michael McClure, reflecting his interests in mammal consciousness and ecological survival. The title sequence stems from McClure's ongoing "grafting" experiment, growing new poems from fragments of previously ones. "Some Fringes" is a series of haiku-like nature poems, while the seventeen-part "Rose Breaths" derives from the poet's practice of meditation. The freestanding poems grouped under the title "Being" pay homage to many of McClure's collaborators and fellow travelers like Bruce Conner, Terry Riley, and Dave Haselwood. The book climaxes with "Song Heavy," recounting McClure's recent encounter with a beached whale in Rockport, Massachusetts, and recalling his classic "For the Death of 100 Whales," which he read at the Six Gallery in 1955-the inaugural moment of American eco-poetics. Michael McClure is an award-winning American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving from Kansas to San Francisco as a young man, he was one of the five poets who participated in the Six Gallery reading that featured the public debut of Allen Ginsberg's landmark poem "Howl." A key figure of the Beat Generation, McClure is immortalized as Pat McLear in Jack Kerouac's novels The Dharma Bums and Big Sur. He also participated in the sixties counterculture alongside musicians like Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. McClure remains active as a poet, essayist, and playwright and lives with his second wife, Amy, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Michael and I have been twisting the Dharma for twenty years now. He reads his poetry like a mad lion or a hummingbird or a soft evening tidal pool or a wild California thunderstorm. His words are of a new realm of love and joy and terror. What a pleasure to play with such a perceptive artist. It's always been my great joy to make music to his words."--Ray Manzarek [C]ertainly a genius in thought and writing it out. McClure is one of the few contemporaries to have understood Kerouac as a literary poet-and learned some joyous classic invention therefrom. Thus we have a McClure poet, a McClure natural philosopher, and a McClure prosateur and novelist. Hardly anyone in America with equal range and sharpness, liveness. What more?"--Allen Ginsberg In Mephistos we are again thrown into Michael McClure's lavish lair of forceful magic. Its actions are literal ones, handfuls of jewels disintegrate as a firewall rises to a solid prism. There is no poet more adept at calling forth the elements, only to fashion them later as eternal amulets for his readers. 'NEW MOON ((BLACK!)) /STAR CLOUDS/ HALOES/ Flashlight reflects/ into two small eyes.' You will find your body changed through the labyrinth these poems initiate."--Cedar Sigo  "Close attention will be rewarded in kind. Keep Mephisto near at hand, read only a poem or two at a time, let the imagery possess you. It's okay, you can trust it. It's McClure: he'll never steer you wrong."--Robert Hunter, lyricist, poet, songwriter"-- Provided by publisher.