A loaf of poetry…

A Loaf of Poetry
by Naoshi Koriyama

you mix
the dough
of experience
with
the yeast
of inspiration
and knead it well
with love
and pound it
with all your might
and then
leave it
until
it puffs out big
with its own inner force
and then
knead it again
and
shape it
into a round form
and bake it
in the oven
of your heart

…on the experience of a teacher letting go, or of students on graduation night…

isn’t this what you must do for a friendship, every time?

Simply food for thought.

peace ❤

The Poet’s Occasional Alternative

The Poet’s Occasional Alternative

I was going to write a poem 
I made a pie instead     it took
about the same amount of time 
of course the pie was a final
draft     a poem would have had some
distance to go     days and weeks and
much crumpled paper

the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine on 
the kitchen floor 

everybody will like this pie
it will have apples and cranberries
dried apricots in it     many friends
will say     why in the world did you 
make only one

this does not happen with poems

because of unreportable
sadness I decided to
settle this morning for a re-
sponsive eatership     I do not
want to wait a week     a year     a
generation for the right
consumer to come along

 

Perception: one of the top things a UConn english class can teach you.

Perhaps this is why no one can ever remember the same thing the same way, because the things that have happened have further defined their individual personalities…

Perception: a poem or a pie?

Pie is instant gratification. Pie is gooooooood. 🙂

but pie is fleeting.

A poem, given time for it and the reader both to mature, can bring a similar sense of satisfaction and will last

will change

will evolve with the reader.

Of course, the writer realizes this and brings this to the table

…pun intended…

as she chooses a pie

 

but that is what the audience of the moment demands.

 

And what are we but slaves to the demands of others in reward for the instant gratification of their praise, rather than the maturing pleasure of personal fulfilment?

Grace Paley

This Life

 

My friend tells me
a man in my house jumped off the roof
the roof is the eighth floor of this building
the roof door was locked how did he manage?
his girlfriend had said goodbye I’m leaving
he was 22
his mother and father were hurrying
at that very moment
from upstate to help him move out of Brooklyn
they had heard about the girl

the people who usually look up
and call jump jump did not see him
the life savers who creep around the back staircases
and reach the roof’s edge just in time
never got their chance he meant it he wanted
only one person to know

did he imagine that she would grieve
all her young life away tell everyone
this boy I kind of lived with last year
he died on account of me

my friend was not interested he said you’re always
inventing stuff what I want to know how could he throw
his life away how do these guys do it
just like that and here I am fighting this
ferocious insane vindictive virus day and
night day and night and for what? for only
one thing this life this life

 

**I guess that the one thing that I came away from this poem with when I first read it was how fleeting life is, and also, at the  same time, how inevitable it is.

It’s inescapable…not, Stop the world I want to get off!!!

 

If anyone doubts these, think back. How slowly time crawled forward to your last big vacation, to a big event, but now that event seems like so long ago. 

How much can you change the past? How much can one person be perfect and avoid failure? How blind are we all to fate, and how much of our lives are dictated by the standards in which we are living?

 

In so many words, I believe that this is an underlying theme, if not message, in this poem, for this is a reminiscence on the end of life for someone as others’ lives continue to change around them.

However, they are also reminders of the lives we live, and a message from beyond; to enjoy the time we have, to never take anything for granted.

 

Seasons change, and people grow older, but the essentials never do. 

Adrienne Rich

Shattered Head

 
A life hauls itself uphill

through hoar-mist steaming
the sun’s tongue licking
leaf upon leaf into stricken liquid
When? When? cry the soothseekers
but time is a bloodshot eye
seeing its last of beauty its own
foreclosure
a bloodshot mind
finding itself unspeakable
What is the last thought?
Now I will let you know?
or, Now I know?
(porridge of skull-splinters, brain tissue
mouth and throat membrane, cranial fluid)

Shattered head on the breast
of a wooded hill
Laid down there endlessly so
tendrils soaked into matted compose
became a root
torqued over the faint springhead
groin whence illegible
matter leaches: worm-borings, spurts of silt
volumes of sporic changes
hair long blown into far follicles
blasted into a chosen place

Revenge on the head (genitals, breast, untouched)
revenge on the mouth
packed with its inarticulate confessions
revenge on the eyes
green-gray and restless
revenge on the big and searching lips
the tender tongue
revenge on the sensual, on the nose the
carrier of history
revenge on the life devoured
in another incineration

You can walk by such a place, the earth is
made of them
where the stretched tissue of a field or woods
is humid
with beloved matter
the soothseekers have withdrawn
you feel no ghost, only a sporic chorus
when that place utters its worn sigh
let us have peace

And the shattered head answers back

And I believed I was loved, I believed I loved
Who did this to us?

 

This poem reminds me of the perpetual struggle of the human race for acknowledgement and confirmation of individuality, for although the topic itself scarce appears here, the greatest gift from one human to another is that of love.

Love is the affirmation of self worth, the answer to the question ‘Am I worthy?’

Love is the answer to the questions that people face in life, the bandage that eases the pain of the inevitable.

Love is key, and this caused the last phrase of thie piece to leap out at me and spark this  idea.

Love is intangible, belief is intangible.

Are they the same thing?

…Perhaps.

Elizabeth Bishop

One Art
Elizabeth Bishop

 

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

 

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

 

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

 

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

 

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

 

 

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied.  It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

 

 

I read this poem with a bittersweet eye as the end of another academic year closes in, about to release those students in their fluprescent cells to the steamy summer outdoors.

Losing completes the circle of the school year, losing detracts from the ‘finding’ you finish as you exit those halls of knowledge every May and June, and losing brings that sad, sweet taste to everyone’s mouth as they look upon those people, those familiar faces and places, only to know that like their favorite flavor of candy, somehow those favorites will melt away in the summer heat and will change, sometimes beyond recognition.

A stellar way to evoke all these things in such simple language, Elizabeth Bishop draws upon perhaps one of the few universally shared emotions and experiences, and again the reader loses themselves to the simple beauty of the flowing language that here sums up the perpetual sense of loss so well known, especially to students in june.

Frank O’Hara

Meditations in an Emergency

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

   Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

   Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?

   I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

   Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.

   However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

   My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I’m curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

   Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)

   St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

   Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!

   It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It’s like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

   “Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale.

I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I’ll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

 

Alright, so the thing that first caught me about this piece was the topic.

What does one think about during an emergency?

The one thing I can remember that counts as an emergency in my life was from when I was four…I had just run into the corner of a wall and split my forehead open down to my skull, and there was blood everywhere, or so I am told. The only thing I remember about the incident is that when we reached the emergency room, the doctors offered me a box of toys to play with, and I was happy- I honestly don’t think i was registering anything as being the matter, since I got booboos all the time. Then, after picking out a sparkly wand to play with, they strapped me to a body-board so they could stitch up my head without my arms getting in the way…

…

…

…and when they were done, they took away the wand before I could play with it.

Seriously, that’s what I remember about that incident, not the pain, not the stupidity, but the hypocrisy of the emergency room physician assistants.

figures.

And that’s the only real emergency I’ve ever been in- even dislocating my knee wasn’t an emergency until later, after I figured out what I did to myself…at teh time, it went back into joint and I was like, oh, I can finish my martial arts class now…back to throwing people. 🙂

William Blake

The Tiger

TIGER, tiger, burning bright 

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?  

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare seize the fire?  

And what shoulder and what art

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And, when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand and what dread feet?  

 What the hammer?

What the chain? I

n what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil?

What dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?  

When the stars threw down their spears,

And water’d heaven with their tears,

Did He smile His work to see?

Did He who made the lamb make thee?  

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

THIS IS MY FAVORITE POEM EVER!!!

I like the fact that this poem seems contrasting with so many other poems attempts at describing humanity.

Instead, this is utterly inhuman, a mystery.

This tone creates a beautiful underlying sense of awe as you read this piece, plus the rhythm throughout.

I think the fact that for me, this is undescribable except within the words that they have already used, is one of the reasons that I enjoy this poem so much.

Lorna Dee Cervantes

Valentine Cherry plums suck a week’s soak, overnight they explode into the scenery of before your touch. The curtains open on the end of our past. Pink trumpets on the vines bare to the hummingbirds. Butterflies unclasp from the purse of their couplings, they light and open on the doubled hands of eucalyptus fronds. They sip from the pistils for seven generations that bear them through another tongue as the first year of our punishing mathematic begins clicking the calendar forward. They land like seasoned rocks on the decks of the cliffs. They take another turn on the spiral of life where the blossoms blush & pale in a day of dirty dawn where the ghost of you webs your limbs through branches of cherry plum. Rare bird, extinct color, you stay in my dreams in x-ray. In rerun, the bone of you stripping sweethearts folds and layers the shedding petals of my grief into a decayed holo- gram—my for ever empty art. I seem to be stuck on the topic of love within these poems…

This piece seems to be melancholy, for all that it talks about love.

But how is that any different from people?

They’re not in love, so they’re unsure about themselves, wishing for what they don’t have.

Then they crush on someone, unsure of what to do but sure they have more than they did before, in silent agony over the course of actions to take. 

Then they’re in love, and certain they’re happy, certain of everything but the path this relationship will take, and saddened by the thought of an end.

Then, finally, they’re breaking up and torn to bits and mad about what they’ve lost.

but have they lost anything? it seems they’ve held onto the uncertainty and the pain of being human throughout this all, and that is what they mourn- being human. they mourn the imperfections.

–> this all from those last lines,  

shedding petals of my grief into a decayed holo- gram—my for ever empty art. “

Yusef Komunyakaa

My Father’s Love Letters 

On Fridays he’d open a can of Jax
After coming home from the mill,
& ask me to write a letter to my mother
Who sent postcards of desert flowers
Taller than men. He would beg,
Promising to never beat her
Again. Somehow I was happy
She had gone, & sometimes wanted
To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou
Williams’ “Polka Dots & Moonbeams”
Never made the swelling go down.
His carpenter’s apron always bulged
With old nails, a claw hammer
Looped at his side & extension cords
Coiled around his feet.
Words rolled from under the pressure
Of my ballpoint: Love,
Baby, Honey, Please.
We sat in the quiet brutality
Of voltage meters & pipe threaders,
Lost between sentences . . .
The gleam of a five-pound wedge
On the concrete floor
Pulled a sunset
Through the doorway of his toolshed.
I wondered if she laughed
& held them over a gas burner.
My father could only sign
His name, but he’d look at blueprints
& say how many bricks
Formed each wall. This man,
Who stole roses & hyacinth
For his yard, would stand there
With eyes closed & fists balled,
Laboring over a simple word, almost
Redeemed by what he tried to say.

This piece is not what comes to mind when one thinks of a love letter, I thought as I read the line “promising never to beat her again.”

but what constitutes a love letter?

how can you say, ‘this is not about love”.

WE are taught that love is unconditional, that love is everlasting and that it is through our faults that love can end and that you can never, ever get it back.

but sometimes, isn’t loving something in passing, loving something that you know cannot stay just as beautiful as loving something constant?

isn’t loving something fleeting more?

more and more involved, for you are in love with them and their journey and what they were, are, and will be?

isn’t this stronger?

Gerald Manley Hopkins

Pied Beauty 

Glory be to God for dappled things

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

        Landscapes plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

                And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise Him.

The thing I liked most about this piece was the topic- a beauty that was not perfect. The idea that something can be loved and enjoyed without being judged against a warped ideal is liberating, since it goes against most of today’s society’s conceptions.

If you create something imperfect, and love it for what it is, Hopkins seems to be saying, good for you.

There are communities where artisans avoid creating something perfect, and purposefully create things that have a fault when they work, that their work be more appreciated than the results of the machine made products that our communities thrive on.

If your significant other were perfect, and everything else were perfect, they would all be the same. And then what makes your significant other outstanding to you? Nothing.

In order to appreciate something, you need to not only appreciate their strengths, but also theirv weaknesses, and the history that brought them to where they are today.