Category: Poetry

And finally…poems

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry10 Comments

I recognize that I hunger for poetry – periodically I canvas new poetry books and the old on my shelves to be STRUCK – to be wakened – charged – re-membered – into some leaping alive sensibility awareness delight sorrow grief ecstasy – that the vividness and risk of well-made poems incite…

for me, anyway.

Thus, the Bolano.  A beginning.

Thus, returning to Nooteboom, a certainty.

Thus, the new arrivals shelf – Wichita Public Library.

and then…today…BOOM.

Bob Hicok, tested favorite, “new arrival,” Elegy Owed

the jump-start.

the activation.

something like recognition and instigation at once.

what poetry does.

and having no idea where to begin to share it with you

to recommend

to commend to you

I’ll just offer the opening poem:

Pilgrimage - Bob Hicok

and the closer…

Good-bye

Hicok - Good-bye

and to tell you that everything in between is every bit as good

and some even better….

Good-bye

 

Small white church at the edge of my yard.

A bell will ring in a few hours.

People who believe in eternity will sing.

I’ll hear an emotion resembling the sea from over a hill.

One time I sat with my back to the church to give their singing

to my spine, there’s a brown llama you can watch

while you do this in a field if you’d like to try.

I don’t think even calendars believe in eternity.

Beyond the church is a trail that leads to a bassinet in a tree.

Someone put it there when the oak and sky were young.

I’m afraid to climb the tree.

That I’ll find bones inside.

That they’ll be mine.

I want to be with  my wife forever but not as we are.

She’ll become a bear, I a season: Kodiak, spring.

Part of loving bagpipes haunting the gloaming is knowing

the bloodsinging will stop.

Beyond the church I pulled a hammer from the river.

What were you building, I asked its rust, from water and without nails?

This is where I get self-conscious about language,

words are love affairs or séances or harpoons, there isn’t a sentence

that isn’t a plea.

This is where I don’t care that I’m half wrong when I say everything

is made entirely of light.

This is where my wife and I hold hands.

Over there is where our shadows do a better job.

– Bob Hicok, Elegy Owed

New Arrivals, with poetry and music

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Music, Poetry7 Comments

Submerged in due dates.

Here’s what’s arrived in the center of (my) radar:

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and then, from Roberto Bolano

DON’T WRITE POEMS BUT SENTENCES

Write prayers that you will whisper

before writing those poems

you will think you never wrote

Bolano - Unknown University

Strange gratuitous occupation    To go losing your hair

and your teeth     The ancient ways of being educated

Odd complacency     (The poet doesn’t wish to be greater

than others)     Not wealth or fame or even just

poetry     Maybe this is the only way

to avoid fear     Settle into fear

like one inhabiting slowness

Ghosts we all possess    Simply

waiting for someone or something in the ruins

and finally,

MY LITERARY CAREER

Rejections from Anagrama, Grijalbo, Planeta, certainly also

            from Alfaguara,

Mondadori.  A no from Muchnik, Seix Barral, Destino… All

            the publishers… All the readers

All the sales managers…

Under the bridge, while it rains, a golden opportunity

to take a look at myself:

like a snake in the North Pole, but writing.

Writing poetry in the land of idiots.

Writing with my son on my knee.

Writing until night falls

with the thunder of a thousand demons.

The demons who will carry me to hell,

but writing.

all poem like creatures – Roberto Bolano

Excerpts of Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry3 Comments

Ideal
by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
1

I did not know beforehand what would count for me as a new color. Its beauty is an analysis
of things I believe in or experience, but seems to alter events very little. The significance of a bird
flying out of grapes in a store relates to the beauty of the color of the translucency of grapes.
There is a space among some objects on a table that reminded her of a person, the way the bird reminded her,
a sense of the ideal of the space she would be able to see. Beauty can look like this around objects.
A plastic bag on a bush, moving slightly, makes an alcove, a glove or mist, holding the hill.
Time can look like this. The plane of yourself separates from the plane of spaces between objects,
an ordered succession a person apprehends, in order to be reminded.

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Red Quiet, Section 3
by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Our conversation is a wing below my consciousness, like organization in blowing cloth, eddies of water, its order of light on film with no lens.

A higher resonance of story finds its way to higher organization: data swirl into group dreams.

Then story surfaces, as if recognized; flies buzzing in your room suddenly translate to “Oh! You’re crying!”

So, here I hug the old person, who’s not “light” until I embrace him.

My happiness at seeing him, my French suit constitute at the interface of wing and occasion.

Postulate whether the friendship is fulfilling.

Reduce by small increments your worry about the nature of compassion or the chill of emotional identification among girlfriends, your wish to be held in the consciousness of another, like a person waiting for you to wake.

Postulate the wave nature of wanting him to wait (white space) and the quanta of fractal conflict, point to point, along the outline of a petal, shore from a small boat.

Words spoken with force create particles.

He calls the location of accidents a morphic field; their recurrence is resonance, as of an archetype with the vibration of a seed.

My last thoughts were bitter and helpless.

Friends witnessing grief enter your consciousness, illuminating your form, so quiet comes.

berssenbrugge red quiet

A Reading of Red Quiet

Mood Construction

On By NW FilbertIn Music, Poetry, Traces6 Comments

because I have been wanting to share the subtlety and nuance of Elena Tonra & band “Daughter,” and after a day on repeat words became…

mobius, ever,

turning ribbon gyre

.

under foot, a soaker hose

immersing.

a sprinkler fountain

saturates

.

entrailing

an emanation –

tangled collisions –

of stars.  of light.

.

and here, supine

undone

amiss

absorbed

in aimless ache

.

while there, ever,

slight twist in the band,

an error,

a mark-miss,

.

and bypass.

N Filbert 2013

Borrowed Mask 1.

On By NW FilbertIn Poetry2 Comments

The only rule,

the only law

of genius, of imagination, of abandonment, of truth,

is change.

.

Not reworking, but change.

.

What is this borrowed mask?

The same old song once more?

Will Apollinaire defend us

this time?

As he did Renoir,

                       his Arcadia, his nudes.

Who will bring back

the soul of art?

Who will bring it back

from the Underworld?

                      Picasso having played

                      Orpheus this go round.

2.

Never rework,

the influence being imaginary

at best, but isn’t that

enough?

.

Always new again,

though there is no new

                    matter.

No new paint.

Only rearrangement.

No change.

Nothing to be changed.

No looking back.

No back upon which

                               to look.

-Percival Everett-

Henry Magazine

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Experimenctes, Philosophy, Photography, Poetry, Traces, Writing3 Comments

Greetings all – thanks to the continuous hard work of Lisa Thatcher et. al., the experimental literary-aesthetic new magazine Henry is live!  I’m excited about this project, not only because Thatcher’s own work and interests are so astute and lively, but the principle of the thing and the open energy of the legacy of Henry Miller.  I invite you all to check it out (helps if you are able to read French), and you will also find a piece of creative writing by myself within.  Thanks Lisa & co., thanks Henry for verve and example, thanks writers and readers – it manifests!

a link to my piece on The Whole Hurly Burly

Rhizome

On By NW FilbertIn Poetry1 Comment

Rhizome

(click for text)

with addendum: Deleuze-Guattari – Rhizome

Perambulating

On By NW FilbertIn PoetryLeave a comment

photograph - Jennifer Koe

Perambulating.

How can I not?

On By NW FilbertIn Poetry3 Comments
A Puzzle by Jim Harrison
A Puzzle by Jim Harrison

 

Going Back, Going Forward

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Poetry2 Comments

I hastily grabbed a notebook of primarily blank pages as I whooshed the children off for a swim.  I needed to study and make notes while they splashed about and played and require pen & paper for the process.  It turned out that the pages containing my writing dated some 15 years ago – journaling from a 4-day solo hike I had made in the Colorado mountains.  Included was this me-of-20-something’s poem:

Ars Poetica 1995

The whole notebook was nostalgic for me – my youthful vibrant concerns for solitude and justice, freedom and nature and virtue.  What struck me about this little number was how consistent (or persistent) the concerns and interests worded here have been (obviously) throughout most of my life.  Seeking purpose, expression, control – recognizing somehow that once language is entered, is invoked, everything changes.  Our purposes, searches, availabilities, capacities, expressions, knowledge, – all gets reworked and revised as we engage in the broader activity of language.

If, as John Canfield theorizes, “in language we never leave the sphere of the social” and that “language is a vague concept with unclear boundaries,” in part because it “grows as more language-games are added to the mix, and as existing ones are enriched in various ways,”  that, fundamentally “language is a set of customs in which words play a role, a set of patterned, culturally determined modes of interaction..” so that with “increasing cultural complexity come increasing complexity of our patterns of interaction” then my lifelong hunches that I’ll never get a handle on it, or master its use, or turn it explicitly to my purposes are a matter of course.

M. A. K. Halliday’s Triangle

Which is also what fascinates, compels and rewards its use.  Again, with such a limited arsenal of units – (take a look at your keyboard and consider for a moment to what gargantuan and variable use we put those 100 keys or so) – every engagement with the tool is interactive, reciprocally shaping and shaped by us, and unfailingly externalizing for our organism – the medium thrusts and immerses us into our society and culture and history and possible futures, as well as all the “thinks you can think” and more!

On the right day, then, my bewilderment in the face of language as my vocational practice gets to be an adventure of constant discovery, novelty, and learning – immersing me in some infinite-like context, warping and woofing my organism into a universe of threads…

all quotations from John Canfield’s Becoming Human: The Development of Language, Self and Self-Consciousness