Last Bender

Thomas Hardy
These are perfect sonnets by the master. His thought is crabbed, his metre a little eccentric at times, so that he reminds me of Emily Dickinson, but also of Sydney and Shakespeare, who contorted themselves to fit the little sonnet, and of Yeats, especially the first of the She, to Him poems, which I […]

Tim Congdon
Tim sent me this in February of 2008. I will miss him. He ‘tore through the iron gates of time’. My love to Zach, who lost a father. The rest of us lost a poet and a sort of human wolverine who refused to concede to disease or reality one quark more than they […]

This is a quixotic post, more personal than I usually do, and really, it’s just a signal sent out into the void, hoping for contact with anyone who lived at 3 Berry Place in Darwin, Australia in 1983. I lived in a tent in the back yard for 3 months, I forget which three but […]

Studs Terkel used to describe himself as a radical conservative. Radical, in the sense of ‘root’, and conservative, in the sense of preserving this root. I am certain that the root or radical he wanted to conserve was a radical notion of freedom, and that he saw radical freedom as the core value of America, […]

Over at Cahiers de Corey Josh has a post about poetry that just depresses the hell out of me, though maybe it’s just the jolly season that has me so down. He seems to suggest that a poetry stripped of beautiful language, that is aesthetically distrustful of the poetic itself, is more honest, or at […]

I’ve been writing poetry again. it’s difficult to overcome my disgust with poetry, but really, my disgust is for the business, not the art; for the theory, not the practice. every time I pick up a book of new poetry, I read three lines and feel a deadness overcome me, a numb depression and boredom […]

Manerly Margery Mylk and Ale
Ay, beshrewe yow! Be my fay
This wanton clarkis be nyse allway.
Avent, avent, my popagay!
“What, will ye do nothing but play”
Tully, valy, strawe, let be I say!
Gup, Cristian Clowte, gup, Jak of the Vale,
With manerly Margery Mylk and Ale.
“Be Gadm nye be a praty pode
And I love you an hole cart lode.”
Strawe, […]

Lang Po and its descendents are the poetic equivalent of the Progressive, Jazz/Rock fusion music of the 1970’s. They are the Emerson Lake and Palmer of the poetry world. The Mahuvishnu Orchestra of the poetry world. The Yes, Genesis and Gentle Giant of the poetry world. The Strawbs of the poetry world. The Chick Correa […]

Evil
While the red-stained mouths of machine guns ring
Across the infinite expanse of day;
While red or green, before their posturing king,
The massed battalions break and melt away;
And while a monstrous frenzy runs a course
that makes of a thousand men a smoking pile–
Poor fools!–dead, in summer, in the grass,
On Nature’s breast, who meant these men to smile;
There […]

This is the apocalyptic, visionary Whitman, the Whitman who is akin to Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Here, in a single stanza he goes from a vision of ice to a vision of an unearthly city, utterly destroyed. This was before the civil war. He seems to have ascended to a Hurqulayan Interzone. Or else he fell asleep […]