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Wikileaks and Poetry

Mole

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Mar 20, 2008
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20,284
If you liked the poem, "All the Sciences", you can see the poet by clicking on - http://creativewriting.wisc.edu/fellowships.html.

Laura Eve Engel is the second from the left.

Don't be shy. Ring USA 608-263-3658 and ask for Laura Eve Engel, and tell her you liked her poem, and you just wanted to hear the sound of her voice.
 

Mole

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Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Hacked last night and revealed today -

A Crow's Elegy for the Farmer's Daughter

We gathered in the fern-thin treetops at dusk
or in the flat sear of noon
strutted among puddles and spoke only
of the sky's empty torment
or ourselves. Once in awhile

we flapped in the dust and silver rain
and disparaged wind with our bevel-winged plummetings
and soundless glides.
We did not care
who shot at us for our raucous predawn menacing
or for settling like a plague of black books in fields
under the blindness of those homespun effigies
leering and motionless and coming unstuffed.

We did not care for you
though we saw the cortege winding past the arbor
and drunken berry rows, the ghosts of peach trees bowing
to acknowledge death's grand simplicity at last
revealed.

We were pieces of a blackboard
upon which last rites were written and did not care
who could or could not see
that we were gods and you were not
ever coming home,

in spite of the mourners' deeply foolish love
we could imagine only by flying
into the sun, where every grief is charred
and finally burned away.

- Christopher Howell.
 

Mole

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Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
If you liked, "A Crow's Elegy for the Farmer's Daughter", you might like to see the poet Christopher Howell by clicking on - http://www.ewumfa.com/howell.html

And if you would like to tell him you enjoyed his poem, you might like to ring USA 509.359.4956 and ask for Chrisopher Howell and tell him you wanted to hear the sound of his voice.
 

Mole

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Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Hacked last night and released today -

Tabasco in Space

I hear a generator buzz, I taste those days,
citronella swirled with cardboard meals
and ice unlimited, and the welcome thrill
of Katrina's king cake dolls, half-ounce bottles
of Tabasco packed with MREs marked
"Chicken Fajitas." People thought our food
was special made, a little heat singing
to the tongue of home, but I knew better.
Long have the McIlhennys been men in arms,
and Tabasco has always traveled with them,
from saddlebags, to officers' tables,
to the final frontier—Tabasco in space,
floating from the dripper to the spaceman's lip.

What could be more American than
a Yankee banker ruined by the Civil War
come south to make it big with pepper sauce?

My worst job, worse than Taco Bell cashier,
was at Hill Memorial, a special collections library,
where it fell to me to tackle patrons fool enough
to sneak a pencil in the reading room.
Afternoons I worked behind the scenes
sorting donations, mostly major donor
McIlhenny stuff, his great-grands dumping crates
of a rich life's ticket stubs and corsages.

The librarians couldn't flat out refuse,
which meant shelf space dog-eared in the stacks
for resin hummingbird statuettes alongside
Audubon's Wild Turkey, collectible most high,
and print number one in Birds of America.
Protocol demanded white gloves, as on butlers of yore,
be worn when turning the folio pages
with tissue paper in between meant to keep
the reds from fading, red berries and beaks
living mostly in the archived dark.

They didn't end well, my library months.
I got so tired of filing letters to the world,
letters meant for home, the family bible's
apocrypha intercepted, transcribed, and shellacked.
Moss Madonna decoupage, and photographs
of slaves around the sugar pot, the children
battling stillness so hard that in the aftermath,
to history, they're just a blur.

I wonder
when they noticed my long, long lunch,
my blazer left behind on its peg, work
unfinished on the desk like an exhibit
at the Gallier House, all but the threshold
of the room roped off. If only I'd have thought
to tease them with a prank, something harmless,
like sharpening the golf pencils at both ends,
little footprints, Tabasco bottles placed
at random in the stacks—near Kingfish's
windbag letters, between gilt books in cages.
A fake collection, "The Hot Stuff Chronicles"—
among its contents a list of nonfood uses:
sentry-watch eye drops, cure-all for a sassy tongue.

Tabasco released a C-ration cookbook
as a joke. Somebody sent me one
in a letter not long ago—did they jest,
or fear I'd turned survivalist after a peek
at my post-Katrina stash? So many ways
to spend a mouthful of vinegar and smoke.
Maybe I am crazy—awaiting the end of days,
except for me and mine, who'll be hydrated and fed,
dressed in desert fatigues, and off the grid.

- Alison Pelegrin.
 

Mole

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Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
If you liked, "Tabasco in Space", you can see the poet Alison Pelegrin by clicking on - http://www.selu.edu/acad_research/programs/writing_center/index.html . And Alison is the blonde poet in the middle of the photo.

Why not give Alison a nice surprise and ring her on USA (985)549-2076 and thank her for her poem, "Tabasco in Space", and say you wanted to hear the sound of her voice.

But under no circumstance mention you found her poem in the Poetry Section of Wikileaks. This is simply on a need to know basis, and Alison has no need to know anything except you want to hear the sound of her voice, her poet's voice. Discretion is the better part of valour. You don't want the Danes to be taking an interest in your romantic life.
 

Mole

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Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Hacked last night and released today -

Without Ceremony

Once, many skies ago, we drove across the ache
of Kansas straight to the base of a large mountain.
We were nearly engaged. We were close to knowing
each other. At the peak I couldn't breathe and I
was elated. A fear with a name and I named it. Hypoxia.
Asphyxia. Things we might call a daughter. Later,
we played on pinball machines from the '30s.

There was a natural soda spring. I still can't explain it.
Something else I loved. There were animals
that popped from the mountainsides, built of curled horns
and indifference. Our raft nearly wrapped
around a boulder. At the take-out point, I jumped in
and almost drowned from the weight of water
ballooning my jacket. I didn't drown. Neither

did you. I loved that, too. I learned that gin
comes from the juniper tree. Could we name
a daughter Juniper? There was an early evening the color
of whiskey, all the trees sending out their air
of clean and quiet, six hummingbirds spinning
their wings around us on our cabin porch. On a hike
too hard, lightning flashed. The ground growled.

Here, too, I thought we might die. Then we didn't.
That night the primavera had just been invented.
We were toasting syrah to luck and odds. Outside,
the night dropped its blanket of lake water.
But inside a fire burned. It was meant to be
rustic. It succeeded, or we let it. Something
always worried me, my fear a constant shark,

but there it stopped circling, grew feathers.
It nested in the rafters, suddenly a quiet starling.
One night we ate chili rellenos. One night we drove
far out. We were lost in a strange neighborhood.
Meteors blitzed over the dome of sky without ceremony.
You held my head in your hands. We stood there.
We stood and heard lowing. We stood and heard wind.

- Catherine Pierce.
 

Mole

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Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
So without further ado and without ceremony, if you would like to see the poet Catherine Pierce, just click on - http://www.english.msstate.edu/faculty/pierce.html

And if you liked her poem, "Without Ceremony", and remembering that their voice is what a poet most respects, why not ring USA (662) 325-3644 and ask for Catherine Pierce. Tell her you have just read her poem and wanted to hear the sound of her voice.
 

Mole

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Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Hacked last night and released today -

Do the Right Thing
(Spike Lee, 1989)

The days were a skillet on a red-hot eye of a stove.
The men on the corner, the couple in their apartment,
the kids playing under a fire hydrant's relief
were all sitting, loving, or playing in a skillet.

Heat rose off the assonance of summer language.
Some called it music; others called it fire.
The days were a skillet but the nights were a match
lighting the gas. No moon appeared, only steam

rising off the sidewalks from the day. Feet
danced on the skillet, and smoke alarms sounded.
Moths burst from musty closets fierce
as kids at play on a summer day. People were evicted,

put out like butter sliding across a skillet's face.
Most of us were outside by then, swatting bees,
swatting flies; we outlived the life span
of giraffes and cheetahs, made for this weather,

or we sat on our stoops, indolent but defiant,
simply escaping the drama of our own lives.
Even those indoors without air conditioning—
we like to believe, at least—escaped the heat

somehow. Mookie, to cool her fire, melted
ice cubes on Tina's nipples.
Radio Raheem stole ink off
Robert Mitchum's knuckles; took the heat,

too, to cast LOVE and HATE into digital bling.
When did "soul brother" become an anachronism
too hot for air-conditioned conversation? In Sal's
Pizzeria, Buggin Out bugs:

"Sal, Why ain't no brothers up on your wall?"
Smiley, auguring smoke to come before nightfall,
carried matches. The day is a skillet on a
red-hot eye of a stove; later, a cop has Radio Raheem

in a choke hold. Later we will light candles
for Radio Raheem. If a man takes a baseball bat
to another man's property, that's a skillet, too.
If a man throws a barrel through a plate glass window,

others will follow. A pyrrhic victory is a pyre of life
possessions set ablaze to save lives. Catharsis is the moth's
flight toward the flame, fluttering in the spotlight, or
first fluttering then fighting the power

to flutter, but consumed by the heat until all we know
of its shimmer is how one smolders to survive.

- A. Van Jordan
 

Mole

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Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Hacked last night and revealed today -

Red Herring

I say “my love” in a reluctant French,
even though I hate the French, not the people
who never did me harm, just the nectar-hearted
sounds of mon amour, mon chérie, that always
live in the right mouth on the brink
of tumbling into beauty, a sad truth
revealed to me when I overheard a socialite
ordering a café noisette on the Champs-Élysées
with the same river of honey
spilling from the lips of a street vendor
offering directions to the nearest toilet.
With all apologies to the French, I’m deaf
and dumb to harmony, unless it’s guttural,
which is my shortcoming, one of many to be sure,
and so to the reader whose uncle dresses hair
in Marseilles or whose grandparents sell tires
or blue eggs or both in the wards of Haiti
and New Orleans and Algeria, dear reader,
to you who wonder why my tin ear
even bothered with your native tongue
instead of following Romeo’s lead
and saying “O teacher of bright torches,” or Goethe’s
Die Leiden . . . for that matter, which is no less accurate
no matter how you translate sorrows,
my whole point was to use a romance
language to persuade you cher lecteur
that this is really a poem about love,
and not smoked fish or the vagaries of words,
although one could love a herring
I suppose if the timing was right and the moon
shone just so and the fish could order a pizza
for two in near perfect French,
which I could never do over the phone
in any language without repeating myself,
but which my elegant herring would have no trouble
doing on account of her thinner lips
and mezzo-soprano which has the power to save
some pitiful soul from the torture
of wrestling my mumbled request for black olives,
mushrooms, pepperoni, from English into English.

- Tomás Q. Morín
 

Mole

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Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Hacked last night and revealed today -

Trouble

That is what the Odyssey means.
Love can leave you nowhere in New Mexico
raising peacocks for the rest of your life.
The seriously happy heart is a problem.
Not the easy excitement, but summer
in the Mediterranean mixed with
the rain and bitter cold of February
on the Riviera, everything on fire
in the violent winds. The pregnant heart
is driven to hopes that are the wrong
size for this world. Love is always
disturbing in the heavenly kingdom.
Eden cannot manage so much ambition.
The kids ran from all over the piazza
yelling and pointing and jeering
at the young Saint Chrysostom
standing dazed in the church doorway
with the shining around his mouth
where the Madonna had kissed him.

- Jack Gilbert
 

Mole

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Messages
20,284
From the Gulag in 1920 to Central in 2012 -

The Necklace

Take, from my palms, for joy, for ease,
A little honey, a little sun,
That we may obey Persephone's bees.

You can't untie a boat unmoored.
Fur-shod shadows can't be heard,
Nor terror, in this life, mastered.

Love, what's left for us, and of us, is this
Living remnant, loving revenant, brief kiss
Like a bee flying completed dying hiveless

To find in the forest's heart a home,
Night's never-ending hum,
Thriving on meadowsweet, mint, and time.

Take, for all that is good, for all that is gone,
That it may lie rough and real against your collarbone,
This string of bees, that once turned honey into sun.

(NOVEMBER 1920)

- Osip Mandelstam
translated from the Russian by Christian Wiman
 

Mole

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Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) was born and raised in St. Petersburg, and died in the Gulag Archipelago, but still he sends us, "The Necklace", via his translator.

Even in the Communist death camps, poetry kept their spirits alive.

If you would like to see the translator, Christian Wiman, click on - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVRUPPV6ddI
 

Mole

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Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Hacked last night and released by Wikileaks, Poetry Section, today -

The Room on Naxos

In that room on Naxos,
the hotel room in the
little one-street har-
bor town we walked a
mile or two from to
the perfect mile-long
beach with only a few
Germans Gerhard and
Ulrike and the wiz-
ened woman archeolo-
gist with her much
younger lover and
that sweet taverna
just for us the daz-
zling beach where we
swam nude and where
I tried to lift you
out of the water like
a goddess doing beau-
tifully until the wa-
ter wasn't under you
—in that lamplit bed-
room (or was it on the
ferry was it later?)
when I tried to tell
you it had been won-
derful but it was
over you didn't hear
me didn't understand
what I was saying and
I kept on going so as
not to hurt you and
then fell in love a-
gain: Where would we
be now if you had
heard me if our is-
land time had been a
sun-dazed moment not
the prelude to a long
long story rife with
declarations and ad-
missions one or the
other of us didn't
hear?

- Jonathan Galassi.
 

Mole

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Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
If you liked, "The Room on Naxos", you might like to see the poet, Jonathan Galassi, by clicking on - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QreFPkzxau4

And if we can overcome our shyness, we can ring USA (212) 274-0343 and ask for the poet, Jonathan Galassi, to say we enjoyed his poem, but we just wanted to hear the sound of his voice.
 

Mole

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Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
The Goose and the Poet

If we like pâté de foie gras, we should never meet the goose. And in the same vein, if we like a poem, we should never meet the poet.
 
Last edited:

Mole

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Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Hacked last night and released by Wikileaks, Poetry Section, today -

A Colored Girl Will Slice You
If You Talk Wrong about Motown


The men and women who coupled, causing us, first
arrived confounded. Surrounded by teetering towers
of no, not now, and you shoulda known better, they
cowered and built little boxes of Northern home,
crammed themselves inside, feasted on the familiar
of fat skin and the unskimmed, made gods of doors.
When we came—the same insistent bloody and question
we would have been down South—they clutched us,
plumped us on government cereal drenched in Carnation,
slathered our hair, faces, our fat wiggling arms and legs
with Vaseline. We shined like the new things we were.
The city squared its teeth, smiled oil, smelled the sour
each hour left at the corner of our mouths. Our parents
threw darts at the day. They romanced shut factories,
waged hot battle with skittering roaches and vermin,
lumbered after hunches. Their newborn children grew
like streetlights. We grew like insurance payments.
We grew like resentment. And since no tall sweet gum
thrived to offer its shouldered shade, no front porch
lesson spun wide to craft our wrong or righteous,

our parents loosed us into the crumble, into the glass,
into the hips of a new city. They trusted exploded
summer hydrants, scarlet licorice whips, and crumbling
rocks of government cheese to conjure a sort of joy,
trusted joy to school us in the woeful limits of jukeboxes
and moonwash. Freshly dunked in church water, slapped
away from double negatives and country ways, we were
orphans of the North Star, dutifully sacrificed, our young
bodies arranged on sharp slabs of boulevard. We learned
what we needed, not from our parents and their rumored
South, but from the gospel seeping through the sad gap
in Mary Wells's grin. Smokey slow-sketched pictures
of our husbands, their future skins flooded with white light,
their voices all remorse and atmospheric coo. Little Stevie
squeezed his eyes shut on the soul notes, replacing his
dark with ours. Diana was the bone our mamas coveted,
the flow of slip silver they knew was buried deep beneath
their rollicking heft. Every lyric, growled or sweet from
perfect brown throats, was instruction: Sit pert, pout, and
seamed silk. Then watch him beg. Every spun line was
consolation: You're such a good girl. If he has not arrived,
he will. Every wall of horn, every slick choreographed
swivel, threaded us with the rhythm of the mildly wild.
We slept with transistor radios, worked the two silver knobs,
one tiny earbud blocking out the roar of our parents' tardy
attempts to retrieve us. Instead, we snuggled with the Temps,
lined up five pretty men across. And damned if they didn't
begin every one of their songs with the same word: Girl.

- Patricia Smith.
 
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