I don't know if I'm dreaming or awake,
If I should go to sleep or wake up,
Quit dreaming I'm awake
Or imagining I'm asleep.
I don't know whether to
Spectate, participate, or abrogate.
---o0o---
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Poem: The Fog
I don't know if I'm dreaming or awake,
If I should go to sleep or wake up,
Quit dreaming I'm awake
Or imagining I'm asleep.
I don't know whether to
Spectate, participate, or abrogate.
---o0o---
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Poem: Torches & Pitchforks
With crackling torches lit
And pitchforks raised,
The peasant horde
Marches ungoverned,
Searching for real
And confected monsters.
The posse is a mindless beast,
And the agglomerated mob
Brims with blood-lust
And madness. The whole
Is far less than the sum
Of its parts:
Each new body adds mass,
But each fresh outrage
Diminishes the hive's brain.
One if by land; two if by sea.
They're coming for you
And coming for me.
---o0o---
Monday, October 12, 2009
A letter from Son of Sam during the Summer of Sam
When I moved to NYC, it was, as Spike Lee called it, "The Summer of Sam." David Berkowitz was nabbed in a few months, and deposited in the Brooklyn House of Detention, right across the street from our apartment. This is one of the letters he wrote to the press as his killing spree continued. . .
click Sam's letter to enlarge
---o0o---
Poetry Reading in Iraklion, Crete
This is kind of interesting, but possibly to only me. I wrote this when I was in Greece fifteen months ago and it was buried in the drafts folder on my blog. So, a year and change later, here it is...
Jack in Crete. July, 2008.
We stumbled into a Greek poetry bookstore today. We chatted with the owner, and I picked out a handful of books (being constitutionally unable to walk out of a bookstore empty-handed) I was surprised to see translated into English. Nikos Migiakis is the world-wise,and amiable proproietor of the Poetry Bookstore in Heraklion, on the island of Crete. We warmed up to each other and started asking questions back and forth. Keelin and I asked him where we would find some of those incredible honey doughtnuts/frittters we had on our last visit here. Guess what? They are just as illusory as the formerly ubiquitous barelled restsina, which he also confessed was now very hard to find. In fact on this trip to Greece, I never saw Retsina dispensed from a wooden barrel. Every single restaurant and bar served it in the bottle.
We kept chatting, and I would point to a book and we would both make these unlikely name drops of people we mutually loved. The owner looked up some of my poetry on the internet and then hauled out a big jug of home-made wine. He wanted to talk poetry. After a glass of wine, he rolled a cigarette and handed me two books of translations of Kazanstakis and Odysseus Elytis. He wanted me to read two long poems in English. He had never heard the poems in English. We both had a great time hearing them. The Elytis was a shorter poem, and later Del told me he thought it was a great poem. It is a very good one, I decided later when I read it. I couldn't tell while I was reading it in the bookstore, alond. Tourists stumbled in to buy the guidebooks he sold to fund his poetry enterprise.
Next, I read the long Sequel to the Odyssey. By now, we'd had two or three glasses of that fruity but crackling crisp home-made Cretan wine. People were smoking cigarettes. The owner, paused every few minutes to roll another.
Here we were, in the middle of the day, laughing in the store, drinking wine, and whenever a tourist came in to buy a book, he was glad to see them, but he didn't really want to get overly involved with their purchase of a Greek history book or a Lonely Planet guide. But alas, friendos, you don't think he makes a living selling Greek versions of Leonard Cohen or Garcia Lorca, do you? No. Thank God, he is across the street from the magnificent Heraklion Museum, and he has art books, tour books, books on Greece in general, in racks out front of his store. But none of those books seemed to enter the inner sanctum. . .the poetry bookstore proper.
Nikos had an amazing selection of Greek translations of modern poets...He also had me make a list of ten more people he should have. Of course, his mainstay was Greek poets in Greek, with a huge section of translations into Greek. His selections of the classics, and the beat and beat descendants was good, except he did not have Phillip Whalen, or Gregory Corso. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Leonard Cohen, Ferlinghetti, even Denise Levertov and Charles Bukowski and Bob Dylan were represented. I urged him to find John Berryman, Emily Dickinson, James Wright, William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas,
William Wordsworth--most of them he knew, but was often unable to secure them in translation into Greek.
I was limbered up by now, and although I hadn't read the Sequel for twenty-five years, I was totally swept up in the fantastic moment. . .me in this temple of down home culture, barely able to read the Greek letters this time around, and now jumping on the reading. Reading cold can so often be extremely harrowing. But in this reading, somehow I was filled with the spirit of Greece, and I channeled Kaz' and I felt Odysseus running through every single line. I kept almost stumbling, but the poem was so perfect for this wonderful moment, that I somehow pulled it off. What a great, random find and event. I have now had my first European poetry reading, and made a friend in the poetry world of Greece.
Jack in Crete. July, 2008.
We stumbled into a Greek poetry bookstore today. We chatted with the owner, and I picked out a handful of books (being constitutionally unable to walk out of a bookstore empty-handed) I was surprised to see translated into English. Nikos Migiakis is the world-wise,and amiable proproietor of the Poetry Bookstore in Heraklion, on the island of Crete. We warmed up to each other and started asking questions back and forth. Keelin and I asked him where we would find some of those incredible honey doughtnuts/frittters we had on our last visit here. Guess what? They are just as illusory as the formerly ubiquitous barelled restsina, which he also confessed was now very hard to find. In fact on this trip to Greece, I never saw Retsina dispensed from a wooden barrel. Every single restaurant and bar served it in the bottle.
We kept chatting, and I would point to a book and we would both make these unlikely name drops of people we mutually loved. The owner looked up some of my poetry on the internet and then hauled out a big jug of home-made wine. He wanted to talk poetry. After a glass of wine, he rolled a cigarette and handed me two books of translations of Kazanstakis and Odysseus Elytis. He wanted me to read two long poems in English. He had never heard the poems in English. We both had a great time hearing them. The Elytis was a shorter poem, and later Del told me he thought it was a great poem. It is a very good one, I decided later when I read it. I couldn't tell while I was reading it in the bookstore, alond. Tourists stumbled in to buy the guidebooks he sold to fund his poetry enterprise.
Next, I read the long Sequel to the Odyssey. By now, we'd had two or three glasses of that fruity but crackling crisp home-made Cretan wine. People were smoking cigarettes. The owner, paused every few minutes to roll another.
Here we were, in the middle of the day, laughing in the store, drinking wine, and whenever a tourist came in to buy a book, he was glad to see them, but he didn't really want to get overly involved with their purchase of a Greek history book or a Lonely Planet guide. But alas, friendos, you don't think he makes a living selling Greek versions of Leonard Cohen or Garcia Lorca, do you? No. Thank God, he is across the street from the magnificent Heraklion Museum, and he has art books, tour books, books on Greece in general, in racks out front of his store. But none of those books seemed to enter the inner sanctum. . .the poetry bookstore proper.
Nikos had an amazing selection of Greek translations of modern poets...He also had me make a list of ten more people he should have. Of course, his mainstay was Greek poets in Greek, with a huge section of translations into Greek. His selections of the classics, and the beat and beat descendants was good, except he did not have Phillip Whalen, or Gregory Corso. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Leonard Cohen, Ferlinghetti, even Denise Levertov and Charles Bukowski and Bob Dylan were represented. I urged him to find John Berryman, Emily Dickinson, James Wright, William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas,
William Wordsworth--most of them he knew, but was often unable to secure them in translation into Greek.
I was limbered up by now, and although I hadn't read the Sequel for twenty-five years, I was totally swept up in the fantastic moment. . .me in this temple of down home culture, barely able to read the Greek letters this time around, and now jumping on the reading. Reading cold can so often be extremely harrowing. But in this reading, somehow I was filled with the spirit of Greece, and I channeled Kaz' and I felt Odysseus running through every single line. I kept almost stumbling, but the poem was so perfect for this wonderful moment, that I somehow pulled it off. What a great, random find and event. I have now had my first European poetry reading, and made a friend in the poetry world of Greece.
[1] Hi! This is a satellite data-cluster that is tangentially related to the subject in the article, but interesting on its own.
The homonym for Cretan is, unfortunately, cretin--which describes a person with severely stunted physical and mental growth , but, like such words as spastic, idiot, and lunatic, also is a word of less enlightened times (and believe me, I often have a hard time thinking of us as enlightened in the least). buse. Cretin became a medical term in the 18th century, from an Alpine French dialect prevalent in a region where persons with such a condition were especially common (see below); it saw wide medical use in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and then spread more widely in popular English as a markedly derogatory term for a person who behaves stupidly. Because of its pejorative connotations in popular speech, health-care workers have mostly abandoned cretin.
Cretinism is a condition of due to untreated congenital deficiency of thyroid hormones (hypothyroidism) or from prolonged nutritional deficiency of iodine.
---o0o---
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Mini-editorial: Pablo Fanque weighs in on BHO's surprise Nobel Peace Prize
By Pablo Fanque,
All This Is That National Affairs Editor
Yes, I too think BHO's Peace Prize may be just a tad bit premature, but that aside, it's been well worth it to enjoy the agony and apoplexy of the pundits and foot soldiers on the far right. A couple of them--I am pretty sure--were on... the brink of achieving self-ignition. Flame on knuckleheads! Spontaneous combustion can actually be a good thing!
---o0o---
Friday, October 09, 2009
God, The Moon, and F***ing With The Formula
Appropos of the space agency dropping a spent rocket on the moon about three hours from now —
Although, in many ways, I think NASA is one of the coolest things we have ever done, I am always slightly mystified at the way they relentlessly search our corner of the universe for carbon-based life forms, and for water. All this seems to presume that God, as he created Life in other sectors, wouldn't have been somehow tempted to "F*** With The Formula."
---o0o---
Thursday, October 08, 2009
The Day Lady Died by Frank O'Hara
Frank O'Hara is one of my favorite American poets, not only did he pioneer a loose, but wisely and charmingly idiomatic verse form, but he also happened to be a curator of the Museum of Modern Art, probably my favorite museum in the United States. And Billie Holiday is by far and away my favorite jazz singer of all time, even 'though I usually tend to think of jazz vocals in the same category as rock instrumentals. . .
The Day Lady Died
by Frank O'Hara
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
---o0o---
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