Incendiary

I bite the apple of his address
under the striped umbrella without compunction,
knowing this ends in smithereeni.

The cars screech in the car chase, the Gardaí
with their country faces spraying
rain-epaulettes on the Dublin pavement,
strips of diamond along the stain of yellow streetlights:
"Let me guide you through the mayhem."

At the crime scene the sky lit up with flames and beacons:
a young girl cajoling on her cellphone,
“Be a star, a little daisy, and wait up for me
- This world’s gone to blazes.”

Inchoate, arm in arm - two strangers -
through the smoke and sirens: up the river, past
the news reporters, television cameras, to the Ferryman

(Demeter searching for Persephone :
Mother, I might learn to love this darkness yet)

to sink Chianti, embark on conversation.
The spark between us as we view the ships departing:
"Something's been ignited, yes?"

*The Gardaí are the Irish police. "Little daisy" is a Dublin term of endearment - like "sweetheart". The Ferryman is a Dublin hotel and bar, overlooking the river.

Learning from Salt

The off-kilter paintings on my wall, a man
Buried alive whose eyes orbit wobbily
In the cave-in of his face
Whose hand reaches beyond the painting
Into the space of my living room
Like a tree sprouting out of spite
On the side of a New York street:
How many nights have I tried to rescue
The drowning figures in paintings,
Attempted to give Icarus one last gust
Of wind with mine own breath
Or turned lead crow and led the gawkers
From an Arles cornfield
Into a sky of absinthe and treachery
But it always fails, is supposed to really:
Here is a memory with its grooves
Worn down like a junkie’s right arm
Plattered and whispering to me
As one by one the stars edge closer
Like penny nails in a loafer
And winter violates the streets, drugging
Passersby with molecular chloroform:
Only a horizon like a butcher’s board
Sun strewn out intestinely red
Having walked around its quartering tree
And a few lone walkers studying
The newly-rising moon
Preparing to answer questions of cold:
Where have all my days gone, off to
Africa with chattering mad chanteuses
Who adorn themselves in ex-lover teeth
And play instruments, howling
By dessicated light from tree-torn moon
Or in plains wider than imagination
With no horizon or shadow
Or in houses pregnant with purpose
Or simply into breath?
If this is worth a thousand words, what
Could they ever be? Hand slipping
Back into its coffin, a blossom of feathers
On the Aegean, a curious crow
Feeding a glassy eye to its swarming nest,
A sea, a sea more terrifying than water
Drying out in the corner.

Jackpot: Another Awesome Writer to Add to our Little Group

Folks:

Please join me in welcoming Dreux Moreland to our little mix. He is a stupendous writer who has blown my mind since the first time I read his work, oh-so-many years ago. I believe it was "To the Girl with Vowels in Her Nausea" -- or something to that effect....

Welcome aboard, Dreux. I can hardly wait to read you again!!!

Namaste,
Sherrie

Please join me in welcoming Ronberge to Molten Language.

Molteners, it's nice that we're expanding our little group of poets, and that we come from such diverse backgrounds. I dabble in science, am amazed by it, in fact, I feel as if I stand in the presence of God (as I understand it) each time I learn more about our universe and all that's in it. We are fortunate to have a scientist in our midst who can help us as we attempt to quantify our assumptions in language.

Welcome aboard, Ronberge! We look forward to reading you here.

Namaste,
Sherrie Kolb-Cassel

Waving Goodbye To Blackrock Castle

For Gerry Linford

Looking down on Swallow Falls
where the white anger of the Llugwy
struck me like the emptying of commuters
into the City (any city). Purposeful in
changing what lay ahead. I felt forced
backwards, towards potential of being
more than just water.

And it reminded me of . . .

. . . a bridge over the Leam on my way
home from school. Looking down
into the water that raged
like a snowstorm on an apathetic day.
It felt that there was movement
backwards, towards potential of being
more than just water.

And it reminded me of . . .

. . . when we stood at the stern of the
Inesfallen, leaving Cork behind.
looking down on the Irish Channel that
shook its fist at our betrayal as we waved
goodbye to Blackrock Castle, going
backwards, towards potential of being
more than just water.

The Inerrancy of the Word


The wisp of well being wafts
on a billowy cloud
of redemptive softness,

cool and clean
as a righteous life.
Whoever said

there is none [...],
no, not one,

was criminally misinterpreted.

Yes, in fact, he was
misquoted for all time.
Just watch her soar

so effortlessly,

navigating the air
like language in the hands of
a master.

By Sherrie

Welcome Denis Joe

Denis, we look forward to your poetic contributions

at Molten Language.

Welcome aboard, fellow poet!

I've reposted Denis' heartfelt comment underneath the post "Invitation to Denis Joe".

OMG!!!! We have 7,000 hits!!!!

Thanks, Everyone....


;-)

Invitation to Denis Joe

Hey Folks...I've invited Denis to join our little group of serious poets....I'm leaving town for the day, so, if he accepts, please give him a warm welcome.

Denis, I'll go ahead and presumptuously add your name to our masthead. If you decline, I'll delete it, of course.

Namaste.

Sherrie Kolb-Cassel
Administrator of Molten Language

A New Year's Gift

Here's my new year's gift to ML. The concert, on TV earlier, was two hour's long. The conductor conducted it all from memory. He's 86 years old and believes it's "all in the eyes". Beautiful.

Tomas' "Roaming"

This keeps evolving, getting into trouble, improving, and here are my suggestions in the version below. Such a kool poem!! Jefe

I am in a space craft made of maths.

The meaning of the craft is human.

I call it destination. This is deduction

based on first-mate double checking what am I

and what is the I in me up to?

Me+I =Mei, the Dutch word for May.

I am looking forward to spring

through some sort of trickery,

any way I can foresee it.

There again, spring is great

no matter which way it comes,

even starting off in the head

and blossoming out of a space ship made of maths

Ach, to go roaming is to air out.

No journey is ever finished,

we are still going towards

places with a Roman feel to them,

a Latin way, the ablative case,

Appian via Appia,

a long leg with a thick thigh,

foot soldiers with aqueduct foreheads,

conquering, through pilum and phalanx,

the known world in sandals.

2010???

Molteners:

I'm just up for a few minutes....long enough to let the dogs out and feed them breakfast, and then I'm getting my tired self back to bed! I just wanted to wish you all best wishes for the new decade in this new year.

You're all amazing writers and fun folks to have at this blog. Any resolutions? I'm resolving to pour myself into my university experience this year and continue my 4.0 GPA --- and beyond that...I'm resolving to get my overworked rear-end back to bed.

Mwah....that's my onomatopoeiac kiss coming your way.
Happy New Year!

Sherrie Kolb-Cassel

Guided Missile - Looks like a hand grenade, huh?

Maslow's Bottom Rung


Demands fall like lost dreams
from your ineffectual lips,

hitting the ground like the dead
weight of your perception.

The gala begins in only 13 hours,
but you, Mister Alligator Snapping

Turtle, choose instead to remain
enshrouded in your shell,

and miss the parade
of life teeming around you.

By Sherrie Kolb-Cassel

"Noetry"

"A friend of mine is accustomed to say that there is poetry and there is prose, and a something which, though often most interesting, and even moving, is yet neither one nor the other. To this he applies the curious term "noetry"; a word ingenious persons derive from the Greek word nous, and consider descriptive of verse which though full of intellectual faculty, is lacking in imaginative impulse. I do not know my friend's own derivation of his word, but find "noetry," whatever its derivation be, a term of most constant utility."
W.B. Yeats, the Bookman, Sept 1892.

*I like "noetry" too. But I want to take it further. If "noetry" is full of intellectual faculty, then what can we term poetry that lacks both intellect and imagination? Woetry? Poet, Noet, Woet.. Amateur Woetry Sites...

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL. Hope it brings inspiration and peace. There is an eclipse of the moon between 7 and 8pm our time, so if you feel a stirring in your waters, it's only a shadow passing...

Roaming

I am in a space craft made of maths.

The meaning of the craft is human.

I call it destination. This is deduction

based on first-mate double checking what am I

and what is the I in me up to?

Me+I =Mei, the Dutch word for May.

I am looking forward to spring

through some sort of trickery,

through any way I can foresee it.

There again, spring is great

no matter which way it comes,

even starting off in the head

and blossoming out of a space ship made of maths

Ach, to go roaming is to air out;

questioning the grain of sand

in the hour glass of a wet eye

in a sandstorm. Although destined,

no journey is ever finished,

we are still going towards

places with a Roman feel to them,

a Latin way, the ablative case,

Appian via Appia;

a long leg with a thick thigh;

foot soldiers with aqueduct foreheads,

conquering,

through pilum and phalanx the know world in sandals.

"Prana" Revised (apology)

Molters, sorry to re-post this, but I like it a lot and followed Wendy's suggestions for revising lines 9 and 10. More responses would cheer me up at the end of this fucked-up year. Jefe

PRANA

Breath directed to the ache my teacher

calls congested energy, the candle blown out

& I’m off, headlong & Occidental, to the OTB.

I told my teacher yoga helps me bet.

Pure energy, the horses on the monitor,

a post parade of shimmering prana.

Give me a $10 trifecta box! If I were

any more present, I’d be a stone balloon,

both elbows on the bar. A phrase floats past,

another surreal personal ad? A new poem?

Wanted: Christian woman with thin legs

who’s attended Walk-Like-a-Cop Camp.

I jot it down on a bar napkin. How do you say,

right now, I’m content? Simple. I’m content.

Away

* So this happened earlier...another (dangerous-to-post) draught.

That time we got
high and you dressed
in my red jumpsuit and said you had travelled
on the Starship Enterprise

to save me -

striding the alley between
our houses like a Bolshoi dancer -
not a sinner behind you - “touched”, “away” -
the palaces, the space-cicadas, of the planet you hailed from,
pink houses of an alien street, invading you.

Close your eyes, you said,
and join me in a city of brown sandstone where
it hasn’t rained for days but where
there are flowers just like ours
in the palaces, the little courtyards;
old men playing cards

in a café with no
windows, the sun on the back
of your legs on that street:

Breathe, breathe the bougainvillea, the stock,
see the light on purples, whites...
all the glitzy stars, the storms,
the fires we have come through.

But I was already miles away:
in a valley with giant evergreens and snow-capped mountains,
happening on a lone woman with her back to me
as she stepped into the water
saying, Frio! Frio! to the lake.

Submitted for your approval (or dis-)

One of my favorite poets, George Oppen, had this to say:

"Because I am not silent the poems are bad."

Where would you put an emphasis? Would you put it on the word I, not, or silent -- any place? What do you think he meant by this?

Would love your thoughts on this. I, for one, don't find anything magical or even mystical about the poetic process. I also don't share the same position that many of you here do, the position that states: Poetry is my life. I'd be interested in how you would explain Oppen's claim.

Thanks, Molteners...

I just wanted to take this opportunity to get a little sappy, and say what a great group of poets you all are. I learn much from your constructive criticism, and -- good natured jabs (ahem, Jefe). I know that I am growing as a writer, partly because of all the expertise you impart as an educated collective, and/or  because of experiences you all have as poets and quality people. Keep up the good work...when school starts again for me....please continue to contribute and keep up the blog. I will peek in as time allows...and for decompression time.

Namaste.

Paul Muldoon Interview

Science as Inspiration

Molteners, before classes begin, I'm overdosing on fun stuff to read. I've been working my way through THE MEASURED WORD: On Poetry and Science, edited by Kurt Brown. I am hugely inspired by science -- no two ways about it. If you have the opportunity to pick this book up and pore through it, it's, IMO, well worth the money and the time.

A Slippery Slope

by Sherrie Kolb-Cassel

I'd like to extend your despair,
coax it out,

and watch you spin
like a dreidel

attaching itself to the center
whorl of your thumb,

to unravel you
like a superstring,

peristaltic,
in vibrations

that shatter glass
into jagged shards

of color, stained glass
in images of God

reflected on walls,
deceptively whole.

86ed

by Sherrie (Gonzales) Kolb-Cassel

The clover is overgrown
around your laugh lines.

It grows like bacteria
in a Petri dish,

frantic and impatient.
Knowing eyes avert

from yours, downcast
as a mole

in sunlight,
desperate for air.



_________________________________________________________

Okay, Molteners, I think the rhythm is lost in the last couplet...it needs a phoneme...any suggestions??

A lovely rerun

Renewal, by Delia Tolz

Hey Molteners -- Happy New Year! Jefferson shared this poem with us last year, and even though it is very much a "9/11" poem, I found it to be a poem of renewal as well. Enjoy....


From the Towers

BY HEATHER MCHUGH

Insanity is not a want of reason.
It is reason's overgrowth, a calculating kudzu.

Explaining why, in two-ton manifesti, thinkers sally forth
with testaments and pipe bombs. Heaven help us:

spare us all your meaningful designs. Shine down or
shower forth, but (for the earthling's sake) ignore
all prayers followed by against, or for. Teach us to bear

life's senselessness, our insignificance, and more;
let's call that sanity. The terrifying prospect isn't some
escapist with a novel, fond of comfort, munching sweets—

it is the busy hermeneut, so serious he's sour, intent on making
meaning of us all, and bursting from the towers to the streets.

Linguicide

An infant with its hand around my index finger -
cross-eyed, faint-breathing in the interstices of the winter noon;
closing one lid against the glow of the energy-saving bulb:
crack of a bird breaking seed outside;
kick of the rabbit in its pen.

How long - we wonder then - before
the brash arrive? Lacking rhythm,
insensitive to the stir
of shoots beneath the frosted earth of our driveway;
christening you, for Christ's sake, in unnatural accents
with a foreign idiom.


A boy with a giant penny not of our currency,
the broad vowels of Gaelic, once grew up here -
come to shine his coin to brassy sun again
when we kneel by your cotside:
tongues deadened with the killer-language,
the deep unsayable.

Mystery and Confusion

Molters, I remember going nuts in a workshop with Jon Anderson; the members would either label a poem "mysterious" (good) or "confusing" (bad). Many poets, including Sherrie and me, have problems writing "statement" poems that are both clear and fresh. I've revised the statement poem below, focusing on clarity of position, of the speaker's attitude and the addressee's attitude because attitude and viewpoint are central to experiencing the poem. I've probably lost a certain snap, crackle and pop in the language. And, unfortunately, since there really are no new ideas under the sun, my statement poem is now less than richly and unpredictably original.

CLASSISM

for Linh Dinh

Now that I’m nicer,

I chide those who put

down bankers for being

bankers or lawyers for

being lawyers. Next time

you’re sued, I joke,

call a poet!

Yes, maybe they are

“cadavers,” your word

when you glimpsed

your audience. Yes,

they’re wearing silk ties.

Would bib overalls

be better? Just be your

sunny, foul-mouthed self.

Here’s your chance

to knock the dead dead.

For "reals" now -- Merry Christmas, Molteners

My cynical contribution -- to accompany John's

Keeping Up with the Joneses


He watched his babies playing
with bowls and wooden spoons,
smiles on their chubby, cherub faces.

The boy turned his bowl upside down
and began singing, The Little Drummer Boy:
I have no gift to bring parumpapumpum,

And the girl made imaginary sugar cookies,
while their mother sat, warm and cozy, thinking,
'Life doesn't get any sweeter than this.'

There was nothing on television except
commercials exposing his
deeply rooted inadequacies,

parumpapumpumrapapumpumrapapumpum, 
incessant, and
unmerciful,

tormenting him like bamboo splinters
rammed underneath his fingernails.
How could he tell them there would be

no Christmas this year?
'C'mon kids, Honey, get your jackets.
Let's go for a drive.'

'To see the lights? ' they asked.
'Yes, to see the lights.'
The police found their bodies about a month later.

Someone had tripped over one tiny, little hand
reaching out of the snow as if to say,
'Daddy, look! Look at all the stars in the sky.'



**based on actual events**

Sherrie Kolb-Cassel
Christmas, 2007

As published in BIGFOOT REVIEW

Christmas Poem


by John Kay

With a Joe Pesci twist,
she drew back, aimed,

and quickly jabbed him
in the jugular with a jagged

red and white candy cane
that had been broken

earlier-the other half eaten
by their son who went off

to bed whistling the theme
from White Christmas, snug

in his sugarplum dream,
-still a believer

posted with the permission of John Kay, Pushcart nominee

Dirty Exercise

Molters, here's an interesting (I hope) exchange between me and the writer Sheila Bender.

Sheila Bender December 16 at 1:58pm

Hi!
I am in the midst of writing a book for McGraw-Hill’s

education department. It’s in the their “Demystified”

series—their answer to the dummies and idiots guides.

It’s a LARGE topic: Creative Writing Demystified (and

I know, how can we really demystify the mystery we

love about writing?).
At any rate, it is a book intended for intro to creative writing

courses. I will have a section for fiction, creative non-fiction

and poetry exercises. I’d love to have the voices of many writers

in the book as well as to be able to introduce students

and teachers to the writers I admire!
Do you have a favorite exercise for creating work in the

genre you write in that you can share with me? I’d love to

attribute the exercise to you, list one or two book titles

so readers can find your work, and include a quote about

writing in your genre if you would like to write down

something you are fond of saying.
Thank you so much for giving this request your consideration.

And please feel free to pass this on to writers you know who

teach and might have something. What I can promise is a

wide audience who will learn about you and your work. Oh,

so including a bio is a good idea!
Yours,
Sheila

Jefferson Carter December 18 at 12:14pm

Oh, boy, poetry for dummies!! Just what this country needs!

I'm not sure I support the apparent premise behind the book,

but I'm thinking of an exercise I'd use if I weren't a retired

poetry writing teacher. I suspect all us teachers dip into

the same old pool of exercises provided by Behn, Kowit. and

others. Here's something I'd try (from REAL life! which

should give it that reality tv imprimatur). My 91-year-old

mother bought five copies of my new poetry book sight

unseen. A week later, I received a letter from her, saying

she wanted to give the books back to my publisher

because of the profanity in some of the poems: she wrote

"I don't agree with your using cuss words for emphasis

in making a point. It seems there are enough words in

the dictionary to get some that will do the trick! Especially

for an English major! Your cuss words are an affront to

educated, refined people...." So, I'd use the poem below

(or some other "dirty" poem) and ask the students to

replace the offensive word(s) with something more

"refined"and then consider the resulting effect. The

exercise could initiate a lively and useful discussion

about appropriate diction, about tone, about censorship,

and self-censorship.
OTIS

The vet opens our dog’s mouth
& shows us the gray mass on his palate,
the tumor that’s grown so big
his breath whistles through one nostril.
Our options--$6000 for radiation
or do nothing. Goddamn anyone
who denies him a soul. My wife squats
beside him on the linoleum floor,
crooning as he whistles into her palm.

Sheila Bender December 23 at 10:27pm

Hi Jefferson,
I will try to use the exercise. I like it and the poem. What book

would you like me to use as the attribution for you?
The audience for this book are students in intro to creative

writing classes. I think my effort will turn out to be quite a

few steps up from the dummies and idiots guides (though

I have to say most of the ones I've peeked into are not bad

at all in terms of the quantity of info they contain), and I

am writing to create a tool for students and their teachers

that will introduce them to the field and to the vision of

those of us in creative writing.
Thanks for responding and I'll send you the chapter when I

have it all together so you can see how I used the exercise.
Yours,
Sheila

Sheila, how cool you're using the exercise! The poem is in

my new book from Chax Press, "My Kind of Animal."
I know you won't dumb down creative writing, but I'm leery

of the whole let's-teach-everyone-to-write-poetry movement;

I'd also like to see a let's-teach-everyone-to-READ poetry

movement! Again, thanks for your kindness. Jefferson

Jefferson Carter December 23 at 11:09pm

± ∞

± ∞

by Sherrie Kolb-Cassel

I thought, therefore,
I was --
yesterday.

Today is a new world
constructed in memes
competing for my attention

deficit disordered mind
in bytes,
brutally,

unmercifully,
relentlessly.
A synonym

for singularity
is elegant, but
paring down

to zero,
actually,
means nothing.

_________________________________________________________

Not entirely pleased with this yet....any suggestions? Ben hates that I used an extraordinarily common quote...but likes the rest....well, I'll keep at it until I'm satisfied.

Thanks.

Comic Relief

from RUNNING WITH SCISSORS

(so funny! IMO)

News Flash

Hey Molteners: I just heard from Lori Boulard that John Kay has been nominated for a Pushcart Award!

Congratulations, John --.

Awesome....thrilled to see that GREAT poetry is still being recognized in arenas where it matters.

Namaste.

Is there a place for icky poetry???

The Good, the Bad, and the Good Bad
Our ongoing fascination with terrible poetry.


by Abigail Deutsch

Original illustrations by Paul Killebrew.

What are we to do with lines like these?

We have seen thee, queen of cheese,
Lying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze,
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.

All gaily dressed soon you’ll go
To the great Provincial show,
To be admired by many a beau
In the city of Toronto.

We might grow slightly nauseated. We might (who knows?) get hungry. We might gleefully illuminate the poetic palsies that weaken the frame of this work, James McIntyre’s “Ode on the Mammoth Cheese”: the clanging rhymes, the collapsing meter, the misguided coronation of a Canadian dairy queen.

Alternatively—as we reread in delight, as we probably just did—we might note the workings of a mysterious alchemy. Just as milk ferments into cheese, so can bad poetry, in this and other cases, transform into something rather enjoyable. Like a pungent Roquefort, bad poetry can stink in marvelously complex ways.

Yet just as cheese sometimes gets too moldy—to plunge forward with my metaphor in the blithe manner of James McIntyre—so can bad poetry rot beyond possible appreciation. Charles Lee and D.B. Wyndham Lewis discussed this problem in their famed anthology The Stuffed Owl (1930), a collection of bad poetry that has served as a model for many such volumes to follow. They outlined distinctions between “good Bad Verse,” which they sought for their book, and “bad Bad Verse,” which they avoided. “The field of bad Bad Verse is vast, and confusing in its tropical luxuriance,” they opined, before launching into a description of its authors (“the illiterate, the semi-literate, the Babu, the nature-loving contributor to the county newspaper, the retired station-master, the spinster lady coyly attuned to Life and Spring”). When it came to explaining their preference for the elusive “good Bad” variety, however, Lewis and Lee grew cagey:

It would, indeed, be a permissible exercise in dialectic to prove here conclusively and inclusively, if we had the time, that good Bad Verse has an eerie, supernal beauty comparable in its accidents with the beauty of Good Verse. . . . We will merely assert here that good Bad verse . . . is devilish pleasing.

To what do we owe the devilish pleasure—and how has it grown powerful enough to prompt the succession of bad-poetry anthologies that followed The Stuffed Owl? These works include, but are not limited to, The Worst English Poets (1958), Pegasus Descending: A Book of the Best Bad Verse (1971), The Joy of Bad Verse (1988), In Search of the World’s Worst Writers (2000), and Very Bad Poetry (1997), edited by a brother-and-sister team who also published The 776 Stupidest Things Ever Said (1993) and The 776 Even Stupider Things Ever Said (1994). In 2009, according to Nielsen BookScan, Very Bad Poetry has sold as many copies as Richard Ellmann’s Oxford Book of Verse, suggesting that the anthology-worshiping public values the good Bad as much as the good Good. But why?

Is it because lovers of bad verse are bad people?

Dan Chiasson’s 2003 review of the reprinted Stuffed Owl lends support to this possibility. “These poems join us to generations of supercilious snobs,” he wrote. “We all harbor an inner sherry drinker, and this book belongs in his billiards room.” The gleeful nastiness to which Chiasson refers dates at least as far back as Alexander Pope. In Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, Pope classified bad writers according to the animals they most closely resembled: “The Eels are obscure Authors, that wrap themselves up in their own Mud, but are mighty nimble and pert.”

In constructing this zoology of poetasters, Pope hinted that he himself was no eel. Accordingly, we might enjoy bad poetry because it helps us feel better than its floundering authors.

But that assertion of superiority becomes paradoxical—like the “good-bad” label itself—the moment we confess that we like the bad stuff. Is it bad if we feel good when we read it? What do “good” and “bad” mean in this context—and would any two readers define them the same way? The very terms that designate this type of poetry muddle its analysis.

Perhaps it is with good Bad Poetry as it is with camp in Susan Sontag’s treatise on the subject: “Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn’t reverse things. It doesn’t argue that the good is bad, or that bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a different—a supplementary—set of standards.”

Good Bad Poetry, likewise, seems to inhabit an aesthetic universe governed by unique laws (where gravity, for instance, often results in levity). Take, for example, Theophile Marzials’s “A Tragedy”:


Death!
Plop.
The barges down in the river flop.
Flop, plop. . . .

Sontag didn’t quite define standards for judging camp; she emphasized that its protean nature renders it difficult to evaluate. Much, after all, comes down to taste. And yet bad-poetry contests proliferate, particularly around August 18, which Ruth and Thomas Roy of wellcat.com (inventors of Happy Mew Year for Cats Day, among other festivities) labeled Bad Poetry Day. Slate ran a bad-poetry contest two summers ago; myjewishlearning.com started one this August, prompting an administrator to note ruefully the plenitude of “hip-hop verses where the M.C.’s yell ‘Challah!’” Small Press Distribution conducted one at this year’s Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference. (That competition’s worst postmodern lyric counters the notion, espoused by Billy Collins and others, that bad poetry must be formal. A few lines: “Of an / unguent . . . / unslept / ‘bed.’”). All such events challenge writers to produce the best of the worst, whatever that might be.

The competition that succumbed to the complications of this charge—the Julia Moore Good Bad Poetry Contest, named for the eponymous “sweet singer of Michigan”—closed in 2006. The Oakland Tribune reported that “the Society was looking for Good Bad Poetry; but it kept getting Bad Bad Poetry.”

As head-spinning as these categories appear, the existence of bad-poetry contestants suggests that firm conceptions of “good” and “bad” endure. While authors of anthologized bad poetry—McIntyre, Moore, and Co.—thought their poetry was good, the authors of contest entries think their poetry is so bad it’s good. Theirs is bad poetry, to borrow Sontag’s language, in quotation marks. They break rules because they know rules, and in so doing testify to the rules’ survival. The inner sherry drinkers of bad-poetry contestants go on sipping, unperturbed, through the whole ordeal: by imitating the outsider, the contestant proves he is truly an insider.

* * *
Lest we get carried away in presuming the fastness of boundaries between insider and outsider, good and bad, bad Bad and good Bad, it’s helpful to recall the Ern Malley hoax. In the 1940s, two Australian poets bearing a grudge against Modernism in general, and against an avant-gardist named Max Harris in particular, spent an afternoon crafting Ern Malley and his “tragic life-work”—a purposefully bad product of collage and other Modernist technique. Ethel Malley, Ern’s equally nonexistent sister, sent his poetry, along with a brave biography (“As he wished, he was cremated at Rookwood”) to Harris’s magazine, Angry Penguins. Harris adored and printed Malley’s work. The mischief-makers, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, outed Ern as fake and the poems as jokes. Hilarity ensued.

And yet—as David Lehman wrote in Jacket magazine—Max Harris and his colleagues insisted to the end that the poems were good. “The myth is sometimes greater than the creator,” Harris remarked. Lehman noted that the 1992 Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry includes all of Malley’s writing. A sample:

Where I have lived
The bed-bug sleeps in the seam, the cockroach
Inhabits the crack and the careful spider
Spins his aphorisms in the corner. . . .
There is a moment when the pelvis
Explodes like a grenade.

Considering he wasn’t real, Malley certainly read a lot. The second line may borrow its headlong velocity from Tennyson’s “Mariana,” whose “blue fly sung in the pane”; the deft spider recalls Pound’s in The Cantos and perhaps Eliot’s in “Gerontion.” This haunting passage paints the home as a seat for unease, and orgasm as an act of war, an explosion that counters the cautious quiet of the spider. (That insect, weaving unanswerable messages in private, may function as a figure for Malley himself.)

I wonder if it’s coincidence that the Malley debacle—like the age of the bad-poetry anthology, and George Orwell’s seminal writing on “good bad” literature—came in the thick of the Modernist era, when standards shifted disorientingly, blurring the already-contested boundaries of “good” and “bad.” The manifestos of the time announced new styles in no uncertain terms. Collections of bad poetry, by contrast, provide manifestos in the negative, shadow poetics that emphasize what editors don’t stand for. And that hint of preference, however indirect, might be part of the point—an unstated statement of taste, as defined against the embarrassments within the book.

For all its potential to insult, “good bad” is the most noncommittal, the most passive-aggressive of aesthetic categories: a means for critical equivocation. And perhaps equivocation is an appropriate response to a literary form whose complexities and ever-evolving styles can render it difficult to judge—a form that itself often suggests contradictory ideas in elliptical language. Sometimes, even, it argues for its own quality—good or bad—while it nauseates one reader, and sets another dreaming of cheese plates.

December edition of Poetry Magazine 2009

Irish Parliament (Dail Eireann) 11 December 2009

Christmas spirit from a guilt-stricken Green...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1skPgw-hQCM

One man's filth is another man's...or woman's...

Saturn Devouring His Son

Francisco Jose de Goya

Goya

by Conrad Aiken


Goya drew a pig on a wall.
The five-year-old hairdresser’s son
Saw, graved on a silver tray,
The lion; and sunsets were begun.

Goya smelt the bull-fight blood.
The pupil of the Carmelite
Gave his hands to a goldsmith, learned
To gild an aureole aright.

Goya saw the Puzzel’s eyes:
Sang in the street (with a guitar)
And climbed the balcony; but Keats
(Under the halyards) wrote ‘Bright star.’

Goya saw the Great Slut pick
The chirping human puppets up,
And laugh, with pendulous mountain lip,
And drown them in a coffee cup;

Or squeeze their little juices out
In arid hands, insensitive,
To make them gibber . . . Goya went
Among the catacombs to live.

He saw gross Ronyons of the air,
Harelipped and goitered, raped in flight
By hairless pimps, umbrella-winged:
Tumult above Madrid at night.

He heard the seconds in his clock
Crack like seeds, divulge, and pour
Abysmal filth of Nothingness
Between the pendulum and the floor:

Torrents of dead veins, rotted cells,
Tonsils decayed, and fingernails:
Dead hair, dead fur, dead claws, dead skin:
Nostrils and lids; and cauls and veils;

And eyes that still, in death, remained
(Unlidded and unlashed) aware
Of the foul core, and, fouler yet,
The region worm that ravins there.

Stench flowed out of the second’s tick.
And Goya swam with it through Space,
Sweating the fetor from his limbs,
And stared upon the unfeatured face

That did not see, and sheltered naught,
But was, and is. The second gone,
Goya returned, and drew the face;
And scrawled beneath it, ‘This I have known’ . . .

And drew four slatterns, in an attic,
Heavy, with heads on arms, asleep:
And underscribed it, ‘Let them slumber,
Who, if they woke, could only weep’ . . .

Conrad Aiken, “Goya” from Collected Poems. Copyright 1953 by Conrad Aiken.

Hugh Behm-Steinberg's Pushcart-nominated poem

This is a "prose-poem" (no, no!! let's NOT discuss the difference between prose and poetry!!) written by a friend I knew in Tucson and now talk to on Facebook. It was published in "Puerto del Sol" and is nominated for a Pushcart. I think it's remarkable, most especially for its originality. Jefe

Heaven

When people get here, at first they’re disappointed they can’t have sex. They try but it isn’t pleasurable, the urge gets filled in by other activities like mass singing, marching in formation, the coordinated movement of flags so that works of art and inspiring messages both can be seen at great distances. But all one of the angels has to do is point, the divine enters you and it’s orgasmic, it’s unimaginable. And because you’re an angel, when you’re not singing or waving a flag, you can make people come like motherfuckers. It gets to be hard to hold a serious conversation, especially when we’re practicing kung fu.

JEFFERSON'S BOOK LAUNCH RAVE SUCCESS!

Jefferson's book launch was a well-attended event yesterday night at the Congress Hotel in Tucson. When not signing copies of MY KIND OF ANIMAL, Jefferson moved
about the many well-wishers to the tunes of an all-girl, three-piece band featuring
great vocalists, guitarists. The poet, Tucson's Volunteer of The Year (Sky Island Alliance to which a portion of the proceeds were donated,) read "Please" and "Helen" the first, and last, poems from his new collection from Chax Press, his eighth.

TO MY SISTER

I did what you asked, delivered

the “care package” to your son,

three grocery bags of kleenex,

toilet paper, face soap & half-used vials

of Depakote & Lamictal, leaning them

against the broken wicker chair

on the front porch. I taped

the envelope to the torn screen door,

his prescriptions & past-due bills

folded inside your letter. Lights on,

nobody home. A bad joke.

I’m sorry. The floodlights scorched

the dusty grass of the yard.

Here I’d use a simile, “the yard

like a demilitarized zone between

himself & the unbearable world.”

Or I’d use an inexpressibility topos,

“words can’t convey. . . .” I’m sorry.

You know my finicky academic soul.

If it’s true poetry makes nothing happen,

your son’s no subject for a poem.

Please, just throw this away.

Along the same lines....

Structure Is Structure
Fiction writer and Proust translator Lydia Davis takes on a Catalan carol.


Lydia Davis interviewed by Jason McBride

Many of Lydia Davis’s best stories involve problems of language, its insufficiencies and irregularities, how lives can be undone—or remade—by a preposition or pronoun. A sound. Punctuation. Misunderstandings pivot on the misapplication of an adjective or the absence of one. Quite literally, tenses make people tense. The page-long story “A Mown Lawn” was included in Best American Poetry 2001. Its opening lines: “She hated a mown lawn. Maybe that was because mow was the reverse of wom, the beginning of the name of what she was—a woman.”

Davis is almost as well known for her translations (of, among others, books by Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot, and Marcel Proust) as for her fiction. William Gass has described translation as reading (“of the best, the most essential, kind”), but for Davis it’s the obverse, a kind of writing: “everything but the invention.” The work of translation is indeed, on one hand, very Davisian labor, a way of creating and engaging with entirely new problems of language as well as new solutions.

In the April issue of Poetry, Davis translates the traditional Catalan carol “The Song of the Birds,” which she first heard sung in Spain soon after the Madrid bombings in 2004. Here she discusses the specific difficulties of translating the poem, how her musical training informs her writing, and the pleasures of translation.

Jason McBride: To my untrained eye, “The Song of the Birds” seems as though it might have been a relatively easy poem to translate. How difficult was it actually?

Lydia Davis: Well, “relatively” is a relative term. It was definitely much easier than many other poems would have been, starting with the works of the most difficult poets, such as Mallarmé or Celan. But it wasn’t entirely easy, either. One problem being in fact that its narrative appears so simple, another being its religious content, given our present political context. Beyond those two problems, there were the usual questions: for instance, how to handle the rhyming “sight,” “light,” and “night” in the first verse so as not to come down on them too heavily (they are, unavoidably perhaps, just a little too prominent as it is); and how far to depart from the original, of course—in the original, the eagle flies through the air rather than soaring on the wind. In a longer prose translation, I would probably follow my usual practice, keeping closer to the original and also not “enhancing” the original, as I think “soaring” and “wind” enhance this. But one defense that is always useful to the translator, of course, is that since one is losing the force of the original in certain places, one has some liberty to make it up in others. Lastly, a major element missing from this poem is the melody of the song for which it served as lyric. There is hardly any way to supply that lack.

Is there any difference in technique when you translate from different languages? In this case, is translating from Spanish much different from, say, translating from French or German?

First of all, this poem comes from the Catalan and not the Spanish—that difference is very important to the Catalan people but tends to be confusing to outsiders. And in fact the languages are quite different, Catalan being closer to French than Spanish is. Take the word “amb”—a strange-looking one, to us, and very un-Spanish. It means “with”; compare French avec and Spanish con. It’s not really like either one. I’m guessing it’s from the Latin amb-, “ambi-” meaning “both.” But to answer your question—I think the greater difference is in translating a poem as opposed to a piece of prose. Beyond that, though the languages are different, once you understand what is happening in the poem or prose, you proceed the same way. (Right now I’m trying to read German, and I’m feeling almost physically how different it is from French—those long attributives!)

What is the difference, for you, between translating a poem and translating a piece of prose?

The more formal constraints there are, in a text, the more difficult it is to stay very close to the original. In a poem with line breaks, and especially, of course, in a poem with a regular meter and a rhyme scheme, you have to compromise right and left. If you’re going to keep some sort of a rhyme scheme and meter, something else will have to go. The translator has to do more inventing, substituting, creating equivalents. In a piece of prose, you’re much more likely to be able to stay very close to the original.

Why did you choose to translate this shorter version of the song, rather than the full 14 verses?

I was familiar with the shorter version and only discovered the longer one after I had embarked on the translation. I suppose I thought this presented enough problems as it was—but that is a good idea!

I know that you studied music quite seriously when you were younger. Do you still play piano or violin? How does that training inform your own writing, and how useful was it in translating this particular poem?

I still play both, although my violin playing is not something anyone should witness. It took me years to realize how studying musical structures—which I did in very good music theory classes in high school—must have laid down matrices in my brain that later influenced the forms of my writing. Structure is structure, whether in music or writing. I learned structural patterns, but I also learned to listen very closely. Again, although it was music that I was being taught to listen to, the close listening then became an ability that could be applied to texts, and to linguistic meaning. That awareness of structure, and of course sound, and the close attention, all come into play in translation.

Your translation of Du côté de chez Swann has been described as “understated” and “disciplined.” That is to say, you didn’t impose your own narrative voice but tried to hew as literally as possible to the style of the original text. Is that an ideal that you strive for in all of your translations? Does it apply here?

Yes, it is an ideal of mine to stay as close as I can to the original while still producing a living, breathing text in English—which is primary. In fact, imposing my own style would take away some of the enjoyment of translating for me—which is to leave my own style and my own sensibility behind and enter fully into the sensibility and style of another writer, to be able, in a sense, to take a vacation from my own writing, while still writing. Certainly, this approach applies to anything I translate. In this poem, as I explained earlier, I felt I had to depart more from the literal—and that would be true with almost any translation of a poem, I think. But that did not mean imposing my own style.

The Song of the Birds

by Anonymous


At the sight of
the great light dawning
in that glad night,
small birds come singing
to celebrate him
with their sweet voices.

And even the imperial
eagle, soaring on the wind,
sings a melodious song,
saying: Jesus is born
to lift us from sin
and bring us joy.

Translated by Lydia Davis


Poetry Magazine

New work in progress

It is a mistake to talk, as though it were unattainable.

The fact is another north, seen as if between, and so unsusceptible to fact, or else may be the excess within, or against the line, exhibited as the form of that line.

The figure sounds the more of something already known.

We work up to general principles in the moves of the ideal; the mirage breaks outwards, reading the one from which we started.

Dead space there, though we have not seen anyone answer. Take away this conviction, and the sky declares that the bridge is cut.

One may be declared to be a ground otherwise embedded.

Fused with the unknown, the past with knowing leaf.

And in leafed the future. The commonest acts fail, no watching the mirage placed as plunging flower.

And the inference I draw is so and so. In the departing figure, the eccentric reason for asserting the same as thing, the attempt that bespeaks origin. In fact we are the formless passing of the stranger.

Were it not for this presumption (which is not unreal, although in itself no product of reason,) one’s measures would become radiant only to anticipate like results from like forms.

Along the curve of that vague instinct which the clouds are necessarily merged into one, conversion is an immediate play, the pure act of the grounded.

We proceed from the less to the touch that is other.

Sun is an insensible thing: the wood gaze of things, enacted as this quality - namely this sunshine, which does no more than maintain its position as isolated fact, alight in the verdigris aspect.

Then you are, they are not ciphers, and the gratuitous stone, being animal, comes next to figure. (Is parallel to stone a body?) Nothing can be clearer than to have none: to say “therefore I am.”

But all the same, therefore is neither, if the charge is true. Inasmuch as it destroys the “does not,” what follows can only maintain that whatever is, is also.

The verb, as such, is world in some manner more or less not recognized. Ourselves again upon a larger scale of parts that come before the whole.

Whether a life might be denied another, plus the sign of that denial.

When I think of life I take refuge, to the extent that one can know how to see into these matters; even now, I pretend when we say that it can be conceived.

Can I pretend when we say it can be conceived? To see into the matter even now, to exist by itself.

Perhaps this is to say that “tomorrow” may be analyzed into existing.

In either case the tense, perhaps fatal consequences. One belongs equally.

It seems simpler at first, to suppose the manifold.

It is the occasion of that sense which will enable, as the collection interferes with the idea, having originated in an upheaval of the collection itself.

The phrase would “getting up” or “growing taller,” all indications tending towards agreement, as if there were to be a rising, a singular form of the never seen.

We say, for instance, that “the crowd” looks improbable. We look at the we as something in the somehow, the other thought in, or of, the act of rising.

The man cuts. Is that sufficiently literal? When the noun has the other of its persons, who again are its particles being weathered away? Washed down in speaking, and a way of forming, remembering the who’s of cut paper.

We look, since we cannot look.

Looking at the shape (for we can look when we are among ourselves,) some quality which is with the shape we are in looking.

(Of a nature that must be possessed fully, or not at all.)

As we are engrossed in form, that is, in the additional word, in something outside all the words thus used.

Anything, which we similarly say for conscience’ sake. Never that it rises, without lifting our apostrophe. Should we cease thinking about ourselves, and cease thinking about ourselves.

“I am almost ready” meaning “I am thinking of the shape.”


*

Kudos, Mick!!!

Two of Mick's poems from ARTIFICIAL LIFE are in the new issue of

Web del Sol:  http://delsolreview.webdelsol.com/index.htm

Congrats, Mick!!!!

THEORY OF CONSPIRACY

The conspirators are all around us.
It is true. This is not mental illness,
say, paranoia. It is not thinking
about our thinking that makes their threat real.

They are concocting the next illusion,
and belong to a secret society.
No one knows why. They will
promise you anything.

The conspirators are responsible for the way we see
the world. For example, they tell us
we must personalize them
when they are not personal at all.

The society works in unison; we see this
clearly in our aspirations--visiting
the world itself, or achieving some measure
of prominence, as when we were

young, and full of electricity, and always
hungry. The feed on this. The agents
are everywhere. Informants pay.
Everyone, it seems, is doing their work now.

Market Forecast

by Alexa Selph

Adjectives continue
their downward spiral,
with adverbs likely to follow.

Wisdom, grace, and beauty
can be had three for a dollar,
as they head for a recession.

Diaphanous, filigree,
pearlescent, and love
are now available
at wholesale prices.

Verbs are still blue-chip investments,
but not many are willing to sell.

The image market is still strong,
but only for those rated AA or higher.
Beware of cheap imitations
sold by the side of the road.

Only the most conservative
consider rhyme a good option,
but its success in certain circles
warrants a brief mention.

The ongoing search for fresh
metaphor has caused concern
among environmental activists,
who warn that both the moon and the sea
have measurably diminished
since the dawn of the Romantic era.

Latter-day prosodists are having to settle
for menial positions in poultry plants,
where an aptitude for repetitive rhythms
is considered a valuable trait.

The outlook for the future remains uncertain,
and troubled times may lie ahead.
Supply will continue to outpace demand,
and the best of the lot will remain unread.

Source: Poetry (November 2001).

Stay Tuned!!

Jefe will read a poem from his new collection on KXCI Community Radio Tucson 91.3 FM (or google KXCI website) on Wed 3 & 10 pm, Sat 8 am, Sun 2 pm, Mon 10 am. He hopes you'll tune in!

Here's to 6,000 More

Congratulations, Molteners!

6,004 hits!!!

Keep reelin' 'em in with your exceptional work.

Accompaniment for Hoodoos

HOODOOS

The Hoodoos of history
are almost always deformed,
and deformities matter;
Pope trying to tie his shoelaces,
Byron gone skating,
Lincoln at midnight
skulking about the Old Soldiers’
Home looking for some wounded boy.

They are the twisted totems of tabloids,
of an imaginary island, each standing
outside a tent of their belongings,
where only beetles enter,
while the collective mind is attracted
to the curious figures of central casting,
Seneca slumping with his jewels and pinky ring,
beckoning Vice from an overstuffed chair,
and to other front-page headlines:

Chatterton complains to friendly apothecary
of rodent infestation.
Woolf consults Ophelia on streams and stones.
Poe in mirror discusses effects of laudanum
and other hallucinogens with Coleridge.
Plath and Sexton debate nature of gases,
and Tesla meets Hughes in secret vault
for talks on hygiene
and that death ray designed
to disinfect the mysophobe.

The geology of adoration
must be disfigured. No stone is left unmarked,
a hammer will be taken to the hoodoo
every time. We cannot tolerate perfection
for long. We must find its fatal flaw
which is the flaw of the fallen.

Victim gossip and victim art
converse while beetles inventory the tents,
and the great hoodoos of history
stand bowed and broken. Even for those
who have no greatness to give, they have
work to do if only in sharing their own
victimizations, before the aliens
arrive, green and ghastly,
gnashing their spiked teeth
out of the lumps growing on our backs.

Molteners, give yourselves one of these...

We're at almost 6,000 hits, Poets! I can't thank each of you enough for your contributions. We're getting over 50 hits a day! Many of them are from the UK, but also, we're just getting tons of hits from all over the world. Mick, your "Poe's Wissahiccon" has gotten several hits over the past two days.

Keep up the good work, and again, thank you so much for your contributions, all of you!!!

Sherrie

Mixed-Media for Molten Language...

Love these guys...new wine in old wine skins!

Some Tabloid Headlines

From The Spring 2008 MAGBAG:


EVEN MORE NEW ISSUES OF THE WEEKLY WORLD NEWS?



— Special to the MAGBAG



Unconfirmed reports of new issues of the defunct Weekly World News continue to proliferate. An unemployed farmer claims to have seen an issue on sale at a Piggly Wiggly in Pascagoula, MS and a truck driver says he saw an issue at a truckstop in New Madrid, MO.



The Pascagoula copy was said to have contained the stories, 'ST. VALENTINE & CUPID WERE SECRET LOVERS!', 'JOHN MCCAIN ENDORSED BY UFO ALIEN' and , 'ELEPHANT SHUNNED BY HERD... after making love to a rhino!', while the truck driver could only remember seeing the headline: 'DOIN' THE JAILHOUSE ROCK... 73-y.o. Elvis had been allowed to fake his death so fans wouldn't know he'd been jailed on drug charges!'

For example...or make up your own...

Just for fun!