Wheels Up!
Wheels up! Time to go
A soldier’s duty calls
To the desert from the snow
The winds of war will blow
Through every nerve, every pore
Silence echoes from the walls
Wheels up! Time to go
A soldier’s duty calls
KBris 11/29/2005
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
The Empty Chair
The Empty Chair
Seeking depth, one finds only shallow language
To convey emotion of the vacant chair.
Quiet prayers quell the usual celebration
The silence deafens
Memory jogged by the yellow ribbon
Tied to the empty chair, recollections
Steeped in love, inundate, scuttle the mind
Take away one’s breath
In denial, through fear, reality abated
One pretends the unfilled chair doesn’t matter
A stoic posture hides the pain of parenthood
Pushing tears inward
Soft table talk, reminiscences of a son,
A fine father, honor the chair not taken
Singing praises, reserved for a cherished child
Sacred and holy
Worried and uneasy, the Thanksgiving table frowns
Then smiles, remembers the face in the empty chair;
A father, a son, a brother, a loving man
Off to war again
KBris 2005
Seeking depth, one finds only shallow language
To convey emotion of the vacant chair.
Quiet prayers quell the usual celebration
The silence deafens
Memory jogged by the yellow ribbon
Tied to the empty chair, recollections
Steeped in love, inundate, scuttle the mind
Take away one’s breath
In denial, through fear, reality abated
One pretends the unfilled chair doesn’t matter
A stoic posture hides the pain of parenthood
Pushing tears inward
Soft table talk, reminiscences of a son,
A fine father, honor the chair not taken
Singing praises, reserved for a cherished child
Sacred and holy
Worried and uneasy, the Thanksgiving table frowns
Then smiles, remembers the face in the empty chair;
A father, a son, a brother, a loving man
Off to war again
KBris 2005
Friday, November 11, 2005
Poetry Quotes and Thoughts
Poetry Quotes and Thoughts
"A poem begins with a lump in the throat". ~Robert Frost Often, my poems do begin with a "lump in the throat", a feeling that something is amiss and needs to be explored. At times a simple statement by someone begs to be written about in a poem. At other times. dark, uncomprehensible fragmented thoughts rattling about in my subconcious scream to surface for air. today, I'm thinking about poetry and what it means. Here is a page of several poetry quotes of famous writers and poets, who define poetry from their particular perspectives. I do not have my own definition of poetry, but I suspect that my feelings about it are a composite of several slanted perspectives. Particularly, I am attracted to Archibald McCleish's statement that a "poem should not mean, but be". I cannot always explain the meaning of my poems, but, like a song, I can always feel them.
posted by Coach @ 11:40 AM
"A poem begins with a lump in the throat". ~Robert Frost Often, my poems do begin with a "lump in the throat", a feeling that something is amiss and needs to be explored. At times a simple statement by someone begs to be written about in a poem. At other times. dark, uncomprehensible fragmented thoughts rattling about in my subconcious scream to surface for air. today, I'm thinking about poetry and what it means. Here is a page of several poetry quotes of famous writers and poets, who define poetry from their particular perspectives. I do not have my own definition of poetry, but I suspect that my feelings about it are a composite of several slanted perspectives. Particularly, I am attracted to Archibald McCleish's statement that a "poem should not mean, but be". I cannot always explain the meaning of my poems, but, like a song, I can always feel them.
posted by Coach @ 11:40 AM
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Standoff
tortoise
Originally uploaded by hombreciego.
Standoff
Like a rock
A desert tortoise lays still
Hides from the housecats
Slowly crawls
From under the mesquite bush
A water-seeking turtle
Spies the bowl
Moves ahead, an army tank
Ready for the kill
Yellow cat
Crouches, stalking this strange prey
Leaps like a lion
Fur meets stone
Lions don't eat chariots!
Dumb Kitty, she says.
KBris 2005
Mulch
Cornucopia
Originally uploaded by hombreciego.
Mulch
This is the season when friends gather
Around the hearth, the parlor, and table.
This is the time of changing weather
The trees transform, yellow elms, red maple
Autumn’s breathe blows, then sighs lovingly
Admires her work, bright orange and dark sable
Under a crimson sky; a portrait heavenly
Of nature’s brush, transient, a fall fable
Where breezes falter, start, move again evenly
Over the sea, across the ice, portend affable
Subtle change. A chill which lingers in the night
Under stars, with windy currents unstable
Imbues the being, and renovates October’s light
With icy glaze; we cease and continue as
Dead leaves, fertile mulch from winter’s blight
Flamboyant food of harvest’s repast
This is the season when friend’s gather
Around the hearth, the parlor, and table
This is the time of changing weather.
KBris 200s
Yellow cat
yellow cat
Originally uploaded by hombreciego.
Yellow Cat
Cats always disappear like dark clouds
She says. Same as people always leave
She wistfully voiced, with tears, aloud
No exception yellow cat, I won’t grieve
Nocturnal fool, warned you about foxes
In the night, as you sat purring in the eaves
We kept good company, I’ll miss our talks
Gray kitty longs for your old love songs
The morning dove avoids your stalks
Old stray, you hung around much too long
And touched my heart with your whiskered face
I’m proved not wrong, now that you’re gone
Our time together was no disgrace
Cats always disappear like dark clouds
KBris
Terrorist
story.baby.bomb
Originally uploaded by hombreciego.
Terrorist
Strapped to his back, a dynamite pack
An angry blister, festering to explode
Self-destructive homicide won't turn back
Strapped to his back a dynamite pack
Lessons from Al- Zarqawi in Iraq
Drug-induced extremism the mode
Strapped to his back, a dynamite pack
An angry blister festering to explode
Kbris 2005
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
America's Mountain (Pike's Peak)
Pike's Peak
Originally uploaded by hombreciego.
America’s Mountain (Pike’s Peak)
Under the shadow of America’s mountain
Swirling voices echo in the canyon winds.
Ghosts of gold-seekers, pioneers, heading west
Cry “Pike’s Peak or bust”!
Under the shadow of America’s mountain
Clacking flat cars transport over glacial gorges
Armament for infantry; tanks, thirsty camels
On rails towards war
Under the shadow of America’s mountain
Young men and women ready for battle
Consume final meals, like death-row inmates
Silent and thoughtful
Under the shadow of America’s mountain
A father mulls, meditates the pending days
Quietly watches as his soldier-son soothes
Saddened small daughters
Under the shadow of America’s mountain
A grandfather remembers bygone war days
Beneath Marble, Da Nang’s Asian mountain
A chilling nightmare
Under the shadow of America’s mountain
Awaits the soldier’s wife, frozen in time for
News that comforts eases her purgatory,
Stills loneliness, fear
Under the shadow of America’s mountain
Lies Cheyenne Mountain, America’s Watchtower
Vast and vigilant, a massive palace guard
Impenetrable
Under the shadow of America’s mountain
War and peace, hope and despair, a microcosm
Of suffering resides, yearning for freedom's
Pure mountain breezes
Kbris 2005
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Poetry Ramblings
"Tell All the Truth but tell it slant": First-Person Usage in Poetry by Cate Marvin
...the lyric poetÂ’s images are nothing but the poet himself, and only different objectifications of himself, which is why, as the moving centre of that world, he is able to say "I": this self is not that of the waking, empirically real man, however, but rather the sole, truly existing and eternal self that dwells at the base of being, through whose depictions the lyric genius sees right through to the very basis of being. --Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy"
"I hate writing; I hate art--there’s always something else there. I won’t have you choosing words about me. If you ever start that, your diary will become a horrible trap, and I shan’t feel safe with you any more. I like you to think, in a sort of way; I like to think of you going like a watch. But between you and me there must never be any thoughts." (Eddie to Portia) --Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
Despite the fact that the terms for the genres of poetry and fiction delineate both as separate from nonfiction, writers are all too frequently visited with the readerÂ’s speculation that the work arose from personal experience and is, to a large extent, autobiographical. This method of interpretation, often verging on Victorian in its application, has been employed with greater frequency since American poetry steered away from the model of the closed form as perpetuated by the New Criticism movement, when the Beat and Confessional poets emerged in the 1950s. And it is natural for one to be curious as to how a literary work corresponds with the life of the artist, but only so because the process of creation is unique to each artist and always a mystery, indeed, probably most of all for its author. But when I consider just such a curious reader, I imagine someone trying to pull a hot-air balloon to the ground only to peer into its basket to find out what makes it float.
In fact, my dog could interpret a poem better than these readers who insist on the literal. My dog doesn’t care if what happens in my poems actually happened to me in "real life." I write poetry because it allows me to step outside the "real world" in which I, the person, must maintain cordial relations with my neighbors, change the litter box, drag fifty pounds of accumulated laundry to the virtual hellhole that is the laundromat, and show up to work. When I regard a completed poem, I relish the fact that I am thoroughly divorced from it. That said, I am also somewhat pleased to discover I’ve tricked someone into believing the world of my poems is "true"; the sensation is akin, to paraphrase W. H. Auden, to feeling as if I’ve picked the reader’s pocket.
However, I find it obvious that the "I" of my poems, when I employ first-person, could never be me. The speaker of my poems couldn’t live in my world: she wouldn't wake for work, she’d tell the neighbors to shut up, she’d be arrested for public indecency, she’d no doubt be locked up eventually. My life would be far too boring for her to stand for more than fifteen minutes. That’s not to say that her concerns aren’t my own, or that don’t see the inflection of my genes, the language of my dreams, imprinted in her every statement and action. But I can’t write poems without being assured that they will not be understood as autobiography. Inherent in the act of writing for me is a complete lack of censorship where content is concerned. There’s more than a bit of paradox at the heart of this approach. When composing, I feel free to tap into any literal and emotional experience I’ve had; I don’t let myself worry about whether people in my life might recognize themselves in poems I have written. I trust the language of poetry, its rhetoric and its figures, to distort the literal and remove it from the realm of lived experience.
Sylvia Plath, a poet whose extraordinary talent is so often neglected in favor of scrutinizing the facts of her life, articulated these boundaries in an interview:
I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.
Readers also scrutinize the relationship between the "I" of a poem and its author because it’s a scary thing to contemplate that a seemingly normal person is capable of rearranging, through language, an experience to the extent that one is moved to feel it as his or her own. And there is another fear: readers who have a relationship to an author may be afraid of his or her powers of depiction. In Elizabeth Bowen's 1938 novel, The Death of the Heart, when Eddie admonishes Portia for keeping a diary (which, unbeknownst to her, has been scoured by the very people sheÂ’s been writing about), he reveals his fear that he might recognize something unsavory about himself in her vision. And this is why I extract the promise from my writing students that they refrain from showing their creative efforts to their friends, family, or lovers. ItÂ’s important for young writers to recognize that they have access to enormous freedoms when they write for an audience outside their social and familial sphere. One cannot learn how to transform visceral experience into art if one writes with the anxious awareness that his or her grandmother may be a potential reader of the poem.
A good poem is like the space shuttle. It enters the reader’s mind and heart like a rocket. On leaving the atmosphere, it drops the launching gear of experience that served as impetus for its creation. Who wrote the poem, the life the person lived or is living, will not matter once the poem takes on a life of its own. We are familiar with the poem that has failed to rid itself of the person who wrote it. Sentiment, cloying love of the self, and damages done to the self cling to the poem like the lingering smell of body odor one sometimes encounters when entering an elevator. The doors close, and while we are inside the poem, reading it to the end (if one does not get off and take the stairs instead) is a claustrophobic experience, a forced cohabitance with a stench that is mortal. Good poems live long after their authors died. Good poems by the living make the lives of their authors cease to matter.
...the lyric poetÂ’s images are nothing but the poet himself, and only different objectifications of himself, which is why, as the moving centre of that world, he is able to say "I": this self is not that of the waking, empirically real man, however, but rather the sole, truly existing and eternal self that dwells at the base of being, through whose depictions the lyric genius sees right through to the very basis of being. --Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy"
"I hate writing; I hate art--there’s always something else there. I won’t have you choosing words about me. If you ever start that, your diary will become a horrible trap, and I shan’t feel safe with you any more. I like you to think, in a sort of way; I like to think of you going like a watch. But between you and me there must never be any thoughts." (Eddie to Portia) --Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
Despite the fact that the terms for the genres of poetry and fiction delineate both as separate from nonfiction, writers are all too frequently visited with the readerÂ’s speculation that the work arose from personal experience and is, to a large extent, autobiographical. This method of interpretation, often verging on Victorian in its application, has been employed with greater frequency since American poetry steered away from the model of the closed form as perpetuated by the New Criticism movement, when the Beat and Confessional poets emerged in the 1950s. And it is natural for one to be curious as to how a literary work corresponds with the life of the artist, but only so because the process of creation is unique to each artist and always a mystery, indeed, probably most of all for its author. But when I consider just such a curious reader, I imagine someone trying to pull a hot-air balloon to the ground only to peer into its basket to find out what makes it float.
In fact, my dog could interpret a poem better than these readers who insist on the literal. My dog doesn’t care if what happens in my poems actually happened to me in "real life." I write poetry because it allows me to step outside the "real world" in which I, the person, must maintain cordial relations with my neighbors, change the litter box, drag fifty pounds of accumulated laundry to the virtual hellhole that is the laundromat, and show up to work. When I regard a completed poem, I relish the fact that I am thoroughly divorced from it. That said, I am also somewhat pleased to discover I’ve tricked someone into believing the world of my poems is "true"; the sensation is akin, to paraphrase W. H. Auden, to feeling as if I’ve picked the reader’s pocket.
However, I find it obvious that the "I" of my poems, when I employ first-person, could never be me. The speaker of my poems couldn’t live in my world: she wouldn't wake for work, she’d tell the neighbors to shut up, she’d be arrested for public indecency, she’d no doubt be locked up eventually. My life would be far too boring for her to stand for more than fifteen minutes. That’s not to say that her concerns aren’t my own, or that don’t see the inflection of my genes, the language of my dreams, imprinted in her every statement and action. But I can’t write poems without being assured that they will not be understood as autobiography. Inherent in the act of writing for me is a complete lack of censorship where content is concerned. There’s more than a bit of paradox at the heart of this approach. When composing, I feel free to tap into any literal and emotional experience I’ve had; I don’t let myself worry about whether people in my life might recognize themselves in poems I have written. I trust the language of poetry, its rhetoric and its figures, to distort the literal and remove it from the realm of lived experience.
Sylvia Plath, a poet whose extraordinary talent is so often neglected in favor of scrutinizing the facts of her life, articulated these boundaries in an interview:
I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.
Readers also scrutinize the relationship between the "I" of a poem and its author because it’s a scary thing to contemplate that a seemingly normal person is capable of rearranging, through language, an experience to the extent that one is moved to feel it as his or her own. And there is another fear: readers who have a relationship to an author may be afraid of his or her powers of depiction. In Elizabeth Bowen's 1938 novel, The Death of the Heart, when Eddie admonishes Portia for keeping a diary (which, unbeknownst to her, has been scoured by the very people sheÂ’s been writing about), he reveals his fear that he might recognize something unsavory about himself in her vision. And this is why I extract the promise from my writing students that they refrain from showing their creative efforts to their friends, family, or lovers. ItÂ’s important for young writers to recognize that they have access to enormous freedoms when they write for an audience outside their social and familial sphere. One cannot learn how to transform visceral experience into art if one writes with the anxious awareness that his or her grandmother may be a potential reader of the poem.
A good poem is like the space shuttle. It enters the reader’s mind and heart like a rocket. On leaving the atmosphere, it drops the launching gear of experience that served as impetus for its creation. Who wrote the poem, the life the person lived or is living, will not matter once the poem takes on a life of its own. We are familiar with the poem that has failed to rid itself of the person who wrote it. Sentiment, cloying love of the self, and damages done to the self cling to the poem like the lingering smell of body odor one sometimes encounters when entering an elevator. The doors close, and while we are inside the poem, reading it to the end (if one does not get off and take the stairs instead) is a claustrophobic experience, a forced cohabitance with a stench that is mortal. Good poems live long after their authors died. Good poems by the living make the lives of their authors cease to matter.
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