(note, I cant get the spacing in the text to work the way I'd like.)
That white flutter chancing just above the roiling water is a Brazilian Swallow crossing the Rio Negro in a rainstorm.
Between each wing thrust the bird dips towards a wet oblivion;
Her hard grey tongue shape shouts her life forwards
into the
crosswind.
Hesitant, she is half-way across the wide channel.
Her tail, the most delicate thing, forks
and tapers to points like the Christmas time candy cane that you sharpened to a white spike between your teeth and the rolling lathe of your teenage tongue.
You held it there, suspended in your mouth
hesitant to try on your hands the sharp point
that your young tongue had fashioned
from such sweetness.
Aaron Allen
Monday, February 25, 2008
Self Portrait 23 Feb 2008
We were waiting for the sharpened tramp
To rumble from the lumber camps
His purpose in his arm like a two sided axe.
Here, where there is timber, we have been expecting him
to come sing songing across a meadow or at night
like a specter to tap on our misted windows.
We even spotted a plume of white smoke
Twisting on the mountain side and rejoiced
There he must be, one last campfire on the long journey
From the east.
Jinney marked the trees, cleared the debris from the
Woodshed, said she’d made the perfect hat for him
White enough to keep him seen and tight enough not to
Spin with a swing or an impact.
We’d waited for the TIMBER shout, the winter’s warmth,
An icon man. When we’d waited far too long
The old men, creaky shouldered, did the job.
He hasn’t come.
Aaron Allen
To rumble from the lumber camps
His purpose in his arm like a two sided axe.
Here, where there is timber, we have been expecting him
to come sing songing across a meadow or at night
like a specter to tap on our misted windows.
We even spotted a plume of white smoke
Twisting on the mountain side and rejoiced
There he must be, one last campfire on the long journey
From the east.
Jinney marked the trees, cleared the debris from the
Woodshed, said she’d made the perfect hat for him
White enough to keep him seen and tight enough not to
Spin with a swing or an impact.
We’d waited for the TIMBER shout, the winter’s warmth,
An icon man. When we’d waited far too long
The old men, creaky shouldered, did the job.
He hasn’t come.
Aaron Allen
Portrait Project
I realize its easier for me to compartmentalize my writing into projects. Right now the Thesis project is dominating my writing time, but there are 4 or 5 other projects that really have me excited. One is a series of portraits of my friends/acquaintances here in Brooklyn. Not painted portraits but "word portraits" as a friend suggested I call them. The idea is to have the subject physically in front of me while I write, and for the genesis of the poem to come out of some insight into or energy recieved from the sitting subject. I'm shooting for minimal revision and a sense of "capturing" the moment of the sitting, the interplay of themes and psyches that would create the nexus for art in that moment. The sitter then gets a chance to interact with the poem in some way I havent thought up yet, maybe colors on a printed copy, or something of that nature. I am very enthused by it, and although i haven't had the chance to physically sit people down (thesis), i have completed some preliminaries, or "studies" of a few people (with their permission of course). I will post them here.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Love Poem
Someone asked me this week if I still had it in me to write love poems. I'm not so sure, but here is something close.
October
I am in a room with October.
She is wearing a crimson sweater.
I lean back in my folding chair,
and ask her quietly
(so as not to interrupt the speaker)
where she will go when she leaves here.
She makes no reply but a shrug of her shoulders
as if to say “its better if we don’t think about it”.
I turn away in mute agreement.
In my mind, Winter, dark, long haired, waits
in the outside street with an unlit cigarette.
I am early September--Summer and Fall
at once--my gift, my curse.
I am laden fruit trees and their fallen uneaten fruit--
heat, sweat, youth, sugary popsicles.
People drive for miles to see me.
I pull the leaves from the trees.
I tell her all this, in a fierce whisper, leaning back.
“Then what do you need from me” she says after a pause,
“to stay close when my days are short.”
“my days are shorter”
“ok then, to come be September.”
She looks forward to the speaker at the front of the room
And says nothing.
I can tell she is very sad. I ask, “who is that guy anyway?”
“He is God. He makes the seasons.”
“Today, I hate him.”
October
I am in a room with October.
She is wearing a crimson sweater.
I lean back in my folding chair,
and ask her quietly
(so as not to interrupt the speaker)
where she will go when she leaves here.
She makes no reply but a shrug of her shoulders
as if to say “its better if we don’t think about it”.
I turn away in mute agreement.
In my mind, Winter, dark, long haired, waits
in the outside street with an unlit cigarette.
I am early September--Summer and Fall
at once--my gift, my curse.
I am laden fruit trees and their fallen uneaten fruit--
heat, sweat, youth, sugary popsicles.
People drive for miles to see me.
I pull the leaves from the trees.
I tell her all this, in a fierce whisper, leaning back.
“Then what do you need from me” she says after a pause,
“to stay close when my days are short.”
“my days are shorter”
“ok then, to come be September.”
She looks forward to the speaker at the front of the room
And says nothing.
I can tell she is very sad. I ask, “who is that guy anyway?”
“He is God. He makes the seasons.”
“Today, I hate him.”
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Poem: Chevalier
New Work before I jump into the can of worms. This is a piece unaffiliated with my MA. It is interesting to me to see how my style has changed in the 6 months since I have written anything non-thesis related. Still rough, feel free to comment.
Chevalier
I have a head cold, and it is early October outside my window.
This is the first poem I have ever written on the black
Ikea couch we bought on the extra day we had the Uhual.
Someone not you and not here asked me to describe here and I said
“cat shit and wine” and felt bad, cause I knew it meant
I was on my way to being local.
The right of passage being a head cold, and public animal feces,
and using the extra Uhaul day to go to an Ikea.
All the windowsill candles we brought from San Diego
have burned out in their cups or half out in their cups
and left the lids all black-ringed.
They match the couch and the couch I can say
matches the candles in the spots I spilled hot wax.
And then there is the coffee table,
and the laminate wood shelf underneath,
where you wanted to butterfly well written magazines.
The shelf has bowed from my half Indian style way of
resting my shins upon it.
Other things have been changed by my weight upon them:
the solid oak rocker has a jiggle, and every couple
of weeks I find a random Ikea wood peg,
fallen from one of our U-hualed treasures.
Things creak, the faucet is leaking, the corners of floors dip.
No, I haven’t been sitting on the faucet. Youre funny.
I could see you thinking it.
I can see you too on the fourth flight of stairs, crimson
holding up a black couch with your broken knuckled hand
while I fought with the door.
Oh my Pioneer, my Venus, my Brave One!
Oh my Chevalier!
I am sitting by the window with a head cold.
It is New York City in October. I sneeze.
Winny-puppy clips a guitar string.
Suddenly I can hear an uprising of sirens,
two bright ambulances, God’s skirmishers,
flash on the road to the hospital.
Chevalier
I have a head cold, and it is early October outside my window.
This is the first poem I have ever written on the black
Ikea couch we bought on the extra day we had the Uhual.
Someone not you and not here asked me to describe here and I said
“cat shit and wine” and felt bad, cause I knew it meant
I was on my way to being local.
The right of passage being a head cold, and public animal feces,
and using the extra Uhaul day to go to an Ikea.
All the windowsill candles we brought from San Diego
have burned out in their cups or half out in their cups
and left the lids all black-ringed.
They match the couch and the couch I can say
matches the candles in the spots I spilled hot wax.
And then there is the coffee table,
and the laminate wood shelf underneath,
where you wanted to butterfly well written magazines.
The shelf has bowed from my half Indian style way of
resting my shins upon it.
Other things have been changed by my weight upon them:
the solid oak rocker has a jiggle, and every couple
of weeks I find a random Ikea wood peg,
fallen from one of our U-hualed treasures.
Things creak, the faucet is leaking, the corners of floors dip.
No, I haven’t been sitting on the faucet. Youre funny.
I could see you thinking it.
I can see you too on the fourth flight of stairs, crimson
holding up a black couch with your broken knuckled hand
while I fought with the door.
Oh my Pioneer, my Venus, my Brave One!
Oh my Chevalier!
I am sitting by the window with a head cold.
It is New York City in October. I sneeze.
Winny-puppy clips a guitar string.
Suddenly I can hear an uprising of sirens,
two bright ambulances, God’s skirmishers,
flash on the road to the hospital.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Dr. Zhivago part 1
I have just finished reading Boris Pasternak’s “Dr.Zhivago”. I found the book enthralling on many levels and wanted to pass along some quotes with commentary. Enjoy
Nikolai Nikolaievich on Faith pg 10 “Now what is History? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies. Now, you can’t advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can’t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one’s neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the two basic ideals of modern man—without them he is unthinkable—the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice.”
I don’t necessarily agree completely with the “idea of free personality” but the rest of what he says interests me greatly. 1) Humanity is driven to solve riddles, the central riddle being death, and most works of art/life are created (knowingly and otherwise) for this purpose. 2) Faith is the fuel of this process. 3) Love is the supreme motive, energizing force.
Yura’s description of the peace he felt as a child, before he lost his mother is stunning, though too long to quote. Its on pg. 87 of the 1958 Pantheon edition and begins “this inaccesably high…” Pasternak was a poet first and a Novelist second, and this passage makes it stunningly through the translation.
Yura’s epiphany after the death of his future mother-in-law: pg89 “In answer to the desolation brought by death to the people slowly pacing after him he was drawn, as irresistibly as water funneling downward, to dream, to think, to work out new forms, to create beauty. More vividly than ever before he realized that art has two constant, two unending concerns: it always meditates on death and thus always creates life.”
I think this quote is a great description of a state beyond grief. Or maybe it is a transmutation of grief energy into creative force…but either way Yura does not respond like the rest of the mourners. He is physically removed from their black lace and tears, though not any less of a mourner. I am not as interested in his two concepts of art, although they validate Nikolai’s quote, as I am the creative state he describes. I think the tragedy of the book is that he is not ever able/does not really justify the creative state with the requisite work.
Pg 107: “Antipov sat down on the overturned boat and looked at the stars. The thoughts to which he had become accustomed in the last few years assailed him with alarming strength. It seemed to him sooner or later that they would have to be thought out to the end, and that it might as well be done now”
I feel like I have been sitting on the overturned boat for the past 5 years, attempting to live an American life while also trying to think great sweet thoughts to their end. But finding no end to them, as through the process of postmodernism each believed end only becomes a new beginning, I am wondering now if the acceptance of the lack of an end is enough of an end. There will undoubtedly be more to come on this.
I think Pasternak is a great writer, if only because he allows Yura to speak freely through a precious set of journal entries 277-87. I don’t know if such a narrative form was common at the time, or if in 1958 it threw a lot of people off, but I am continually impressed by Pasternak’s sense of control over his book. He treats certain events with alarming specificity, excessively detailing minute conversations between old men. Other times he jumps whole years, whole journeys to and from Moscow by the principal characters without any explanation or remorse. The reader is being told things, the reader is DELIBERATELY not being told others. And then, in the middle, the reader is deliberately shown these journal entries, another window on the unrealized creative potential of Dr. Z. I am struck that, despite the sweeping tragedy and characters of the book, Pasternak the author remains the force behind it. It seems his deliberate decisions overshadow the tragedy of the narrative. I am impressed and intimidated by this.
281: Dr. Z continues to muse on art, repeating a concept I have often heard and sometimes subscribe to , that art is the core, the indefinite internal genius that gives merit to the work it blesses. "A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways—by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art.” 2 years ago I was very drawn to Althusser’s concept of the “genius” of art for the same reasons. Here was Althusser, a man so committed to showing the structure/motive/influence/hegemony behind any “universal” concept or “truth”, claiming that “Art” (in the same way that Dr. Z defines it)in the hands of “genius” is able to remain a sublime thing despite its army of motivators. I was enthralled originally by Althusser’s apparent capitulation, and remain intrigued by this concept of “art” as the impossible to define magic leaven of creation, though I would call the entire concept by a different name.
I will stop here for the day because I realize the next quote I want to cite is going to open up a whole new can of worms.
Much Love,
AA
Nikolai Nikolaievich on Faith pg 10 “Now what is History? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies. Now, you can’t advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can’t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one’s neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the two basic ideals of modern man—without them he is unthinkable—the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice.”
I don’t necessarily agree completely with the “idea of free personality” but the rest of what he says interests me greatly. 1) Humanity is driven to solve riddles, the central riddle being death, and most works of art/life are created (knowingly and otherwise) for this purpose. 2) Faith is the fuel of this process. 3) Love is the supreme motive, energizing force.
Yura’s description of the peace he felt as a child, before he lost his mother is stunning, though too long to quote. Its on pg. 87 of the 1958 Pantheon edition and begins “this inaccesably high…” Pasternak was a poet first and a Novelist second, and this passage makes it stunningly through the translation.
Yura’s epiphany after the death of his future mother-in-law: pg89 “In answer to the desolation brought by death to the people slowly pacing after him he was drawn, as irresistibly as water funneling downward, to dream, to think, to work out new forms, to create beauty. More vividly than ever before he realized that art has two constant, two unending concerns: it always meditates on death and thus always creates life.”
I think this quote is a great description of a state beyond grief. Or maybe it is a transmutation of grief energy into creative force…but either way Yura does not respond like the rest of the mourners. He is physically removed from their black lace and tears, though not any less of a mourner. I am not as interested in his two concepts of art, although they validate Nikolai’s quote, as I am the creative state he describes. I think the tragedy of the book is that he is not ever able/does not really justify the creative state with the requisite work.
Pg 107: “Antipov sat down on the overturned boat and looked at the stars. The thoughts to which he had become accustomed in the last few years assailed him with alarming strength. It seemed to him sooner or later that they would have to be thought out to the end, and that it might as well be done now”
I feel like I have been sitting on the overturned boat for the past 5 years, attempting to live an American life while also trying to think great sweet thoughts to their end. But finding no end to them, as through the process of postmodernism each believed end only becomes a new beginning, I am wondering now if the acceptance of the lack of an end is enough of an end. There will undoubtedly be more to come on this.
I think Pasternak is a great writer, if only because he allows Yura to speak freely through a precious set of journal entries 277-87. I don’t know if such a narrative form was common at the time, or if in 1958 it threw a lot of people off, but I am continually impressed by Pasternak’s sense of control over his book. He treats certain events with alarming specificity, excessively detailing minute conversations between old men. Other times he jumps whole years, whole journeys to and from Moscow by the principal characters without any explanation or remorse. The reader is being told things, the reader is DELIBERATELY not being told others. And then, in the middle, the reader is deliberately shown these journal entries, another window on the unrealized creative potential of Dr. Z. I am struck that, despite the sweeping tragedy and characters of the book, Pasternak the author remains the force behind it. It seems his deliberate decisions overshadow the tragedy of the narrative. I am impressed and intimidated by this.
281: Dr. Z continues to muse on art, repeating a concept I have often heard and sometimes subscribe to , that art is the core, the indefinite internal genius that gives merit to the work it blesses. "A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways—by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art.” 2 years ago I was very drawn to Althusser’s concept of the “genius” of art for the same reasons. Here was Althusser, a man so committed to showing the structure/motive/influence/hegemony behind any “universal” concept or “truth”, claiming that “Art” (in the same way that Dr. Z defines it)in the hands of “genius” is able to remain a sublime thing despite its army of motivators. I was enthralled originally by Althusser’s apparent capitulation, and remain intrigued by this concept of “art” as the impossible to define magic leaven of creation, though I would call the entire concept by a different name.
I will stop here for the day because I realize the next quote I want to cite is going to open up a whole new can of worms.
Much Love,
AA
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Subway Wisdom #1
Riding the subway always helps me realize my mortality...and produce aphorisms
The only thing I can claim is my mind. The process of owning it, mastering it, and day by day developing it is at the crux of human growth/happiness
Stasis is Regression
I have learned that you can blink and lose whole days/weeks
I think many in my generation are stuck in a malaise of overintelligence. Many of us have lost control of the tool that is the mind, and overanalyzation paralyzes our decision making. I like to call us the "getting lost" generation, because we so actively participate in the process of going nowhere.
-AA
The only thing I can claim is my mind. The process of owning it, mastering it, and day by day developing it is at the crux of human growth/happiness
Stasis is Regression
I have learned that you can blink and lose whole days/weeks
I think many in my generation are stuck in a malaise of overintelligence. Many of us have lost control of the tool that is the mind, and overanalyzation paralyzes our decision making. I like to call us the "getting lost" generation, because we so actively participate in the process of going nowhere.
-AA
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