sometimes days are defined by a book of poems
i wonder how many people still have that experience
it doesn't happen often but when it does
it is a special day, no doubt
some years ago i set out on a writing project
one of the few i have lying around that remain
largely unfinished never it seems having come to terms
with my inner derelict
one of the pieces of the book i intended to write
centered around the presentation of local poets
i knew of a book of poems that existed that was
quintessentially local and bore pertinance to the
subject at hand which is always good if you're trying to do something
well lo and behold
yesterday a person came to my office door and handed me a packet
inside this little envelope packet was a book
and this book is entitled
THE MAN WHO MARRIED THE DEER
by
Mark McKeon
Pine Knob #8
Sometimes she stays in the hills a long time.
Once I thought i would find her, and make her come back.
And at first I thought I was lucky, there
Were tracks everywhere and they were easy to follow.
And once I saw her, slipping away through timber on another slope.
But the tracks didn't go anywhere, they just
Petered out on hard ground, and I gave up
And went home.
She showed up the next day on Pine Knob.
I started yelling, "How can I be a poet if you keep running off?"
But she was wild and naked and didn't care about poetry anyway.
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14 comments:
see now
this is what the folks
plugging california's prop 8
warned us about
if we allow gays to marry
then folks will want
to marry their dog
or a deer for that matter
fortunately this particular deer
was smart enough
to keep to herself
and to her own kind
great poem though
i can identify with it
i've looked
into the eyes of a deer
on a pine-covered knob
at st johns
and wondered what
she thought of me
gosh sally interesting take on the eh poem
i like to stick with the primitive romantic sort of assessment
i mean the guy is laying it all on the line about love and i think i may be wrong but i think he's using the woodland and plaines indigenous people's reference to shapeshifting
i wish i could use the word gay in an older gayer way i have cognitive dissonance whenever i hear the term
ah well
i have some prep to do for
tonite's performance
easy with the rampant publicity we don't want to overwhelm people
the idea is get them to watch and then charge them a lot of money (o no i didn't say that did i mean well i'm not really a capitalist but i think rewards must go to entrepeneurial enterprises and well ehey c'mon folks what are we talkin about heeAH!!)but they have to be way in before they know what hit 'em and then i suspect they'll pay big money just to stay informed
i mean most everyone wants to be hip
i do sort of wonder about gov't sanctioning sexual arrangements
but i guess people have to live together and life gets pretty wierd
i mean take the monastery for instance
i guess soemplaces allow for the marriage of first cousins i have a very beautiful first cousin and i've often thought why o why is this beautiful woman not married but then perhaps sometimes i have too much time to think about things
the boys who want to sort of act like girls are acting up in the monastery these days seems a bishop noted for a severe stance on the matter said mass here and there were demonstrations (see what i miss when i run off to see you) and then there were homilies and then there were workshops and writers and o bg ole gylzbogndrstff
to the point where heck
i'm just sort of sick of it
in a good ole fashioned minnesota sense of things don't ya know
but heck i guess i can be patient some more what the hell winter's commin on who knows how da heck people learn ta suhrvife
i'm all for everyone having an equal shot at unhappiness
<-> /<->
/
/
-
`````` '
~
\ /
flabbergasted hunter watching his wife turn into a deer
Interesting words-- remind me of Jeffers a bit.
Speaking of monks and their ...amorias, G-G-M's Cien Años de Soledad (probably ..un- sanctified...scuzi) featured a curious tale of a monk often spied near sunset carrying a stool as he hastened towards the stables.....those be the guys to watch out for....
ok
yes the poem is even more haunting
when read as you suggest
thanks
hola J
At times poetry, including the classic sort, seems mainly an exercise in futility and bourgeois escapism, if not eloquent brain farts ( Shelley, who knew greek and latin up and down, wrote 8 uglies for every 1 beauty--what can the average Caliban expect to accomplish--beyond a few innocuous beatnik belches )
Hola Dr. Sally.
j
there are some poets
who couldn't write a bad verse if they tried
wallace stevens seems to be one of those maybe he would see it differently maybe he threw away more than he saved
in that sense maybe sculpture is a good metaphor from a stone a sculptor imagines an image and chisels and breaks and sands away much more than he retains in the final image
these days i wonder who is really putting it out there in a way that wallace stevens did or frost
or wc williams
i'm sure it's out there i just don't come across it very often and i tend to think of myself as someone with pretty good poetry radar
maybe the very best stuff will turn up in another generation or two
some of the poetry today suffers from too much publicity
we need a few poets around
and the more people who claim to be into poetry the more confidant we can be that at least some form of literacy is apparent
in iceland you can stop at a gas station and the attendant will recite a long long verse from his favorite poet if you ask him to
there it seems they tend to retain some of the vital oral tradition
whereas here we've descended into hype and spectacle and misplaced priorities and noise
maybe it's all just bad horse poetry
jh
Poet Im not but a few years ago I read through a good chunk of Simic's unique verse and ....thought maybe that was the end of poesy , not in a bad sense, but that it was finite, and every, or nearly every possible combination of words had been formulated (even if translated into euro languages)--similar to James Joyce in prose. Or, like Bartok's musick, which following Debussy and atonality exhausted about every remaining tonal combination you could imagine.
Humans might make use of previous material, forms, etc or write things in their diary that are perhaps meaningful to them (or just combine things randomly ala S-man), but ....in ways it's very difficult if not impossible to "make it new" as Pound once said, especially for mere mortals, or those who don't know Ulysses from U-haul. That's why Im sort of contra-Ahhts, really (literature, music, the fine sort, etc). James Joyces or Bartoks or Coltranes might create something new, but for most it's pretty much a snipe hunt or just a hustle. Scuzi, but that's how I feel.
then again
for those of us
who've not read
a whole lot of poetry
even the old stuff is new
but mainly i'm intrigued
but this phenomenon jh mentions
at icelandic gas stations
i feel i may need to schedule
a trip to iceland just to check that out
i mean how the heck would jh know that?
has he actually been to iceland?
i think this sort of thing requires
first-hand knowledge
which i intend to pursue
as soon as possible
ok i'll admit that there are
other reasons a geologist
might want to visit iceland
volcanoes, glaciers, hot springs
to name a few
i'm repeating what i heard said by a great minnesota poet named bill holm who died not long ago...he went back to his maternal roots iceland quite a lot so i's told
br paul jasmer is our answer to icelandic poets
i bought 4 volumes of iceland poetry with english translations at the reykyavik airport once i remember the guy at the counter smiled and showed me a favorite poem of his
i would love to explore both the cold and hot water of iceland
they must have earthquakes in iceland
it would seem to me that bjork is a sort of an icelandic poetess to the modern world
something so fundamental to human activity - the poem - the making
some lines will last
i keep coming back to that line: but she was wild and naked and didn't care about poetry anyway
that's a line worth repeating
i think that's a great line
but that's just me
more than ever we need good poems
jh
ok so you *have* been to iceland
even if just the airport
that's a step ahead of me
yes i agree
about that last line
iceland can brag about the oldest
parliamentary gov't
shape shifting through the cosmos
here's a blog toast to the people of iceland
summer and winter are obviously much richer there
what is community like in iceland
i wonder
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