napowrimo - April 5 -- 100%

The prompt, 100%... and meeting with fellow "Beets", Tricia providing a word list which included "aglet" -- the part of a shoelace that gathers all the threads and fastens them, keeps them together... The idea of Cavalcanti, addressing his Ballatetta entered as well... Running Back Home 100% trouble has not yet begun to unravel. However, you see the start of it, in the damaged aglet holding your shoelace threads together. You are running over rubble and gravel stumbling to reach the other edge of the city to deliver a message. Whether you and the message have become traveling companions is not yet clear. You are sure the message is tethered to you, as if pinned to your tongue. Nothing will keep it from arriving. But you arrive at your door, out of breath, your shoe laces tangled, panting— as if you have escaped from a den of thieves and you press the latch, enter and there is your mother, and all you can say is mommie, mommie, mommie. ** use of the 2nd person... effective? as the poem unraveled, by the end, it revealed the memory of being maybe 5-6, and the scariness of straying up the street with my older sister and our neighbor, and ducking down as we passed a house with shades drawn -- not because someone had died, but because BURGLARS lived there!

napowrimo April 4 -- Univ. of Rock

univ. of rock* In rock-shaped-sun today by the cairn, in the shimmy of a grove of skinny hawthorns he brings new rocks, hoists a dragon head with a clean-split jaw, just as a roar of March arrives to whistle through. Here, let me show you the slit, how rock too, shifts how at one point, a man in the sun of spring day can find a dragon-head, roll the rock, find pleasure as he shifts it into a place. It’s his rock, now, sun-shaped, shadow licked. *This is his universe, not where he works, called by caller ID, univ of roc ** One poem prompt was to write a "communication poem" -- a tweet... postcard... just about anything. I wouldn’t have written the above without my dear man emailing me (while I was in a different part of the country) about working with rocks, and how he found that dragon head. What a contrast with the sort of message that just gets deleted, to clean out the “in box”, or one of the stuffed envelopes asking for money from an organization you don’t know, or countless appeals to subscribe to services and goods you neither want nor need. Real communication, as opposed to phone calls a computer identifies as pub-intrst-grp, out-of-area, not-provided. When my good man calls from work to tell me he’s on his way, the caller ID tells me, "univ of rock" and my heart skips a beat!

Napowrimo April 3 -- Caught in the gazing

Caught in Gazing You cannot see the sun yet, nor know the gold in the slit of scurried cloud will be tossed to the field below. Even as the sun bulges, bouffant, gravid flaming up out of the horizon, you cannot predict how it will shrink, as it rises through orange-flecks in a mauve sky, nor augur what happens next: a veil of cloud bank drops like deadweight curtains all light, so quick on the heels of a scoop of golden perhaps admired in gazing's catch. ** this is thanks to a friend's kind observations two drafts ago; Wordsworth's Glad sight wherever new with old Glad sight wherever new with old Is joined through some dear homeborn tie; The life of all that we behold Depends upon that mystery. Vain is the glory of the sky, The beauty vain of field and grove Unless, while with admiring eye We gaze, we also learn to love. ** Artist Breakfast Group. Comments on collaborations; on pros and cons of technology; on looking again at the futurist manifesto and speed being coupled with beauty -- and finding antidote in the beauty of slowing down to share. Very golden scoops !

Napowrimo April 2 -- Anagram KATHRYN

Yesterday the idea of friends providing oars, balanced with filling our boat with what we need as we seek our direction came to mind. A prompt was to write an acronym of your first name. I chose KATHRYN, my given name, eponymous for my grandmother. Knowing’s silent K paddles past Act after act, Tightening yes and no, like wings. How heartening the knell Resonating Yes, No ** good comment: 'tightening yes and no like wings" I want to know more. Take out or unpack. I think take out. yes and no would not be a very good pair of wings, in contrary motion, and I'm not sure I see how you would tighten. Knowing’s silent K paddles past Act after act, Triggered by yes, no. How heartening the knell Resonating Yes, No

NAPOWRIMO -- April 1 : Spring(____ A.D.)

There is so much to write about with April 1st, a beautiful sunrise, a sense of beginning... the role of fools... but today, I will start with this poem, penned in response to a fracking compressing accident in Pennsylvania which happened the same day Adrienne Rich passed away. In honor of her courage to speak authentically. APRIL 1 Spring ( _ _ _ _ Anno Domine) What is danger but D with anger daggering some message awake. What is anger but A for age blazing, for announcing someone figured out how to go to the moon, fracture the earth to extract gas, create amazing weapons of mass destruction. (This is not an order.) An age of something doesn’t feel right as we prepare over-plump chicken, tasteless, but perfect tomatoes, and our ears. This morning, a fracking compressor exploded for some, somewhat close for others somewhere in someone else’s neck of the woods for others, billowing black smoke blows through the window. What is dungeon but D without unguent, few awake. A dark age of someone says using the eye to view screens instead of each other. Domine, Domine. To some sort of god, some sort of time.

poems for April 4

Passionate political activist, feminist who appeared in the 50’s, Adrienne Rich says that “Art means nothing if it simply decorates the table of the power which holds it hostage.” You can hear her read her poems on the right hand column at this site. http://article.wn.com/view/2012/03/30/Feminist_poet_and_essayist_Adrienne_Rich_dies_at_82/ 3 poems by Adrienne Rich: What Kind of Times Are These Delta The Burning of Paper Instead of Children I chose the final poem in Ellen Bryant Voigt's book "Kyrie" (published 1995) which tells of the 1918 influenza epidemic through a sequence of linked blank verse sonnets which addresses some of its repercussions. There are sonnets of reflections; sonnets about different people, like Mattie, the Doctor; sonnets that are strictly metaphor. The epilogue, written in six tercets draws the curtain with a snow storm Epilogue: by Ellen Bryant Voigt

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) and political poetry:

How strange, just 3 weeks ago, I was finishing 695 page "Outlaw Bible of American Poetry,(OBOAP)(published in 1999) preparing a 2.5 hr lecture on "political poetry"and now, today, am re-reading Adrienne Rich's poem, "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children" which has an epigraph from Berrigan, who figures in the OBAP. What is political poetry? Should not all poetry be in some way, of, for, about the people? Which audience does it reach? The OBoAP gives examples of experiments beyond slammers, renegades, unbearables...some is outrageous. Some political poems are lyrical rage shaped for consumption and what Kenneth Patchen calls poems written in the evening of the two-fisted prayer. Some are merely personal diaries of frustration. In the OBoAP there are poems which address the difficulty of being identified as American where you don’t feel like the American who is providing a reputation for you. There is George Tsongas imagining a summary of America this way: “The States” – It’s an/ amazing /place, where/ no one enjoys// life// but they/all want/to live/forever. There are snapshots of McDonalds, poems which look at abstract art, fortune cookies and Woody Woodpecker and Barbie. Poems which explain living on the edge, and embrace NOW is THEN’S only tomorrow. There is Father Daniel Berrigan next to mention of drunkard Jack Kerouac and Burroughs who shot his wife. A short poem about relationship by Ken Kesey (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest) next to French rebel Rimbaud ressurected to see the dentist. Adrienne Rich started her political activism in the mid 50's -- and has lived an authentic life, with hope that her words serve truth. Not only did she believe art and politics could co-exist, but must co-exist. She considered herself a socialist because "socialism represents moral value - the dignity and human rights of all citizens," she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005. "That is, the resources of a society should be shared and the wealth redistributed as widely as possible." **In 2006, Adrienne Rich published an essay “Legislators of the World” in The Guardian saying, “In our dark times we need poetry more than ever." I enclose the entire text below. In “The Defence of Poetry” 1821, Shelley claimed that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. This has been taken to suggest that simply by virtue of composing verse, poets exert some exemplary moral power – in a vague unthreatening way. In fact, in his earlier political essay, “A Philosophic View of Reform,” Shelley had written that “Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged” etc. The philosophers he was talking about were revolutionary-minded: Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft. And Shelley was, no mistake, out to change the legislation of his time. For him there was no contradiction between poetry, political philosophy, and active confrontation with illegitimate authority. For him, art bore an integral relationship to the “struggle between Revolution and Oppression”. His “West Wind” was the “trumpet of a prophecy”, driving “dead thoughts … like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth”. I’m both a poet and one of the “everybodies” of my country. I live with manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion and social antagonism huddling together on the faultline of an empire. I hope never to idealise poetry – it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry, anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong. There is room, indeed necessity, for both Neruda and César Valléjo, for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alfonsina Storni, for both Ezra Pound and Nelly Sachs. Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. And there are colonised poetics and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily traced.