Laurie Duggan, Word Ocean: Some Notes on Philip Whalen.

[Homage to Richard Lovelace]

There is a redbird eating rowan berries in the leafbare tree
whatever taken from its living source till there is nothing left
leaves such witness in its self-consuming sacrifice
these all-pled falling depths
                                        The Gods that wanton in the aire
                                             Know no such Liberty

blow the heart out with its spume-foam dirt from each tip of 
    the reach, down that gutter-neck hiss
to see the self cell once again, more incandescent flame elect
    than ever since conception
and through the double reinforcing veils of waking and of
    dream, consume to utter blankness at the heart, pav'd
    floore, calme Ravisher
in each afterimage no other landscape that can be known,
    but landscape after landscape nonetheless
and the pictures offered, withdrawn into the other room
    and shut the door and come back out with all the
    guardian poem places in the palm flashed hold
each winding Law and poyze
                                         a warme seate to our rest
wine-red leaves of burning bush, wahoo, and gone
where a bluejay shrieks to-be, insatiate, in the next bare tree

Kenneth Irby

Contributors: Robert Adamson, Jeremy Adler, Tim Atkins, Ted Berrigan, Jen Bervin, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Christian Bök, Sean Bonney, Ebbe Borregaard, Jonathan Brannen, Pam Brown, Laynie Browne, Thomas A Clark, Adrian Clarke, John Clarke, Bob Cobbing, Clark Coolidge, Kelvin Corcoran, Beverly Dahlen, Ian Davidson, Edwin Denby, Laurie Duggan, Paul Dutton, Ken Edwards, Michael Farrell, Allen Fisher, Kathleen Fraser, William Fuller, John Gibbens, Harry Gilonis, Giles Goodland, Bill Griffiths, Alan Halsey, Robert Hampson, Jeff Hilson, Anselm Hollo, Lyn Hejinian, Piers Hugill, Peter Jaeger, Elizabeth James, Lisa Jarnot, Keith Jebb, Justin Katko, John Kinsella, Philip Kuhn, Michelle Leggott, Tony Lopez, Chris McCabe, Steve McCaffery, Jackson Mac Low, Richard Makin, Peter Manson, Brian Marley, Bernadette Mayer, Jay Millar, David Miller, Peter Minter, Geraldine Monk, Harryette Mullen, Philip Nikolayev, Alice Notley, Abigail Oborne, Ron Padgett, Bern Porter, Frances Presley, John A Scott, Tom Raworth, Peter Riley, Sophie Robinson, Stephen Rodefer, Maurice Scully, Gavin Selerie, Robert Sheppard, Aaron Shurin, Eléni Sikélianòs, Simon Smith, Mary Ellen Solt, Juliana Spahr, Lawrence Upton, Carol Watts, Ian Wedde, John Welch, Johan de Wit, Geoff Young.

The Grassehopper

To My Noble Friend, Mr. Charles Cotton.

Ode.

                         I.

O thou, that swing'st upon the waving eare 
   Of some well-fillèd oaten beard, 
Drunk ev'ry night with a delicious teare 
   Dropped thee from heav'n, where now th'art reared. 

                         II.

The joyes of earth and ayre are thine intire, 
   That with thy feet and wings dost hop and flye; 
And when thy poppy works, thou dost retire 
   To thy carv'd acorn-bed to lye. 

                         III.

Up with the day, the Sun thou welcomst then, 
   Sportst in the guilt plats of his beames, 
And all these merry days mak'st merry men, 
   Thy selfe, and melancholy streames. 

                         IV.

But ah, the sickle! Golden eares are cropped; 
   Ceres and Bacchus bid good-night; 
Sharpe frosty fingers all your flowrs have topt, 
   And what sithes spar'd, winds shave off quite. 

                         V.

Poore verdant foole! and now green ice, thy joys, 
   Large and as lasting as thy peirch of grasse, 
Bid us lay in 'gainst winter raine, and poize 
   Their flouds with an o'erflowing glasse. 

                         VI.

Thou best of men and friends? we will create 
   A genuine summer in each others breast; 
And spite of this cold Time and frozen Fate, 
   Thaw us a warme seate to our rest. 

                         VII.

Our sacred harthes shall burne eternally, 
   As vestal flames; the North-Wind, he 
Shall strike his frost-stretch'd winges, dissolve, and flye 
   This AEtna in epitome. 

                         VIII.

Dropping December shall come weeping in, 
   Bewail th' usurping of his raigne; 
But when in show'rs of old Greeke we beginne, 
   Shall crie, he hath his crowne againe! 

                         IX.

Night as cleare Hesper shall our tapers whip 
   From the light casements, where we play, 
And the darke hagge from her black mantle strip, 
   And sticke there everlasting day. 

                         X.

Thus richer then untempted kings are we, 
   That asking nothing, nothing need: 
Though lords of all what seas imbrace, yet he 
   That wants himselfe, is poore indeed.

Richard Lovelace

Bookplate in a recently acquired copy of The Poetical Works of Richard Lovelace: 'A little house but many books'.

Black Box Manifold

Dance? The image of the dance has haunted poetics at least since Yeats and Charles Williams and William Carlos Williams. Each age of poetry seems to have a pet metaphor drawn from other arts for an inwward vision of its own nature; so in the sixteenth the stage, seventeenth the choir, eighteenth the senate or coffee-house, so in our century we seem to have toyed with the image of ourselves as dancers and our shared work as a most complex dance. Clearest here to me is Duncan's offering of the 'attend/dance' - the poet's constant attention to the behavior of phonemes and syllables in the very act of his articulation, 'vowel-leading', following the tones in (what we would love to describe as) the words' own way. Writing the poem, then, is discovery, trobar, finding the music and cooperating with the linguistic event - a dance sometimes of standing aside.

Dance? Perhaps the metaphor is obsolescent, or gradually turns into an image of the poet as scientist, with mind, heartmind, eye all fixed on the work "under hand". Dance or not dance, I point to something that would describe what the sounds of words do. How they lead and defer to one another, or how a word hurries in and blocks with its sharp vowel a whole chain of darker metaphones. Metaphony. Beyond the gap of "word" or even syntax. Dance, why not, the light limbs of the lovers as a metaphor for the air we breathe into our own intricate passages, air that takes shape and color there, returns to the world to say what process it has moved through and now restores to the public air.

Robert Kelly

Cresses

Take a
paddle
boat to
harvest
these;

the sheaves
a spray,
not sprig,
of leaves

John Bevis

Damn the Caesars, vol. IV

CONTRIBUTORS

Lisa Samuels • Alan Gilbert • Meg Foulkes • Stacy Szymaszek • Matvei Yankelevich
• Hoa Nguyen • Simon Pettet • Aaron Lowinger • mIEKAL aND • Linda Russo • Tom
Leonard • Peter Makin • C.J. Martin • Hugo Garcia Manríquez • Billy Mills •
Richard Kostelanetz • Harry Gilonis • Erica Van Horn • Gerry Loose • Shin Yu Pai
& Andrew Schelling • Catherine Walsh
FEATURE

The Family • Kyle Schlesinger
with a foreword by Michael Cross

As Michael Cross writes in his foreword, "A variation on Ted Greenwald's In Your
Dreams (a manuscript he was proofreading when the work began), Schlesinger's
practice is a wash, a kind of laundering of the violent content of the social
through the aperture of a heuristic architecture that discovers and subsequently
challenges in degrees."

This update: Robert Archambeau, Derrick Buisch, Jeff Clark, Sarah Conner, Cary Conover, Beth Cook, Jon Curley, Norman Finkelstein, Matthew Henriksen, Michael Henson, Eric Hoffman, Philip Jenks, Amanda Nadelberg, Peter O'Leary, Gregory Ott, Chuck Stebelton, Shannon Tharp, John Tipton, Jamie Townsend, & Tyrone Williams.

The Cultural Society"

Readings: Response and Reactions to Poetries

For Using

Material things are only tools
Or they're nothing.
Food is a sort of tool,
Fire a warming tool,
And paint-brushses, pencils, cameras, books
All tools of a kind
For making a life
Or lives.
But too much food is poison,
Comfort a permanent anaesthetic,
And too many paint-brushes, cameras, books
Waste away as toys.
A tool has the feel of the user's hand on it
If it's a real tool.
A tool that is fully used
Gets a bloom on it
From its own essential-ness.
All other bits and things are clutter.

Margaret Tait

After Midsummer

Love, we curve downwards, we are set to night
After our midsummer of longest light,
After hay harvest, though the days are warmer
And fruit is rounding in the lap of summer.

Still as in youth in this time of our fruition
Thought sifts to space through the worlds of definition,
But strangeness darkens now to a constant mood
Like hands shone dark with use or hafts of wood;

And over our dense days of activity
Brooding like stillness and satiety
The wonder deepens as clouds mass over corn
That here we are wakened and to this world born

That with its few colours so steeps and dyes
Our hearts, and with its runic signs implies
Meaning we doubt we read, yet love and fear
The forms more for the darkened light they bear.

It was so in youth too; now youth's spaces gone
And death of parents and our time's dark tone
Shadow our days - even children too, whose birth
And care through by-ways bring our thoughts to death;

Whose force of life speaks of the distant future,
Their helplessness of helpless animal nature;
Who, like the old in their shroud of age, close bound
In childhood, impress our natural pattern and end.

The springy twigs arch over walls and beds
Of lilac buddleia, and the long flower-heads
Run down the air like valleys. Not by force
But weight, the flowers of summer bend our course;

And whether we live or die, from this time on
We must know death better; though here as we stand upon
The rounded summit we think how softly the slope
And the sky have changed, and the further dales come up.

E. J. Scovell

Firefly Evening

Heft of earth, under;
evening's heft, thunder;
evening of fireflies;
thunder in western skies.

Airs through windows yet
and through the downstairs let
that over pastures come
thunder from.

George Johnston

Oystercatcher Press

Peter Hughes, from The Summer of Agios Dimitrios

Bill Griffiths at SoundEye.

A new issue of How 2

On a day
so bright how
can any

one die? And
yet it does
happen. Now.

Cid Corman

The Necessary Goddess

Seeds on my desk
rotate, take root before me, my
mind dreaming controls
"the nature of plants, bodies, etc."
"How bud we our way into spring
combined bringer of forsythia?
                       (soil)
                       crocus the locus,
cloak us in blue skies
fuck us in sunlight
rook us in birdflight north
invoke odd gods, on the brownstone stoops
       joke with broads in the sunlight
       poke at the railings, flowers & branches
make
old women jealous, old men
sick to their stomach, failing
to join the season
                          give back
what winter took," she sed,
& disappeared into the bushes     .

Paul Blackburn