BROOKE BLANKEMEYER: 1 POEM

SO

Let’s push back this curtain of uncertain truths
And finally see through the dirty pane of glass
(What a pane in my glass!) we’ll see
That words are words, blah blah blah
And I’ll admit that everything is boring
Except what I find interesting but
All else is rubbish. Let’s be Frank,
Colliding with greatness is all fine and good,
What could be better? But being great is underrated
And of course impossible for anyone under 40.
Mediocre middle man (woman?), my
Icarus-ness is astounding.
Historic days never held my attention for
Too long, sorry you bleeping beepers, but
I don’t know why you’re so exuberant.
Exhume, expel, excrete, exude?
This muddle of expletives is exhausting.
All I want is to be affected by something!
Someone(thing) save me from this numb death.

Amen

*****

Brooke Blankemeyer is a Junior majoring in Illustration at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
Originally from Columbus, Ohio, she is drawn to beautiful things and feeling interesting textures.
She also really enjoys all aspects of food.

SARA RELOJO: TWO POEMS

(Click on the links for the poems)

1. I AM: ALREADY

2. River Scene: Men Dragging a Net


*****

Northern Kentuckian Sara Relojo is a 2009 Art Academy Graduate, where she earned her BFA in Illustration. She currently enjoys teaching her three year-old students how to replicate Cy Twombly's magic.

SEEING IS READING #2: POET NATE PRITTS READS ROBERT DUNCAN'S "OFTEN I AM PERMITTED TO RETURN TO A MEADOW"

On Coleridge, Duncan, Nate Pritts & a Yeare Full of Wonders--by Nate Pritts

Samuel Taylor Coleridge had me convinced that I was some kind of organic harp waiting for a breeze, that rather than being happy it was perhaps preferable “to be bereft of promis'd good, / That we may lift the soul, and contemplate / With lively joy the joys we cannot share.” As an apprentice poet, I found Coleridge’s thought pattern seductive – that the actual events of the poet’s autobiography were secondary to the poem’s primary purpose as a record of consciousness, as enacting the formation of identity.


1. Irritable Reachings

In Chapter XII of the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge considers the way we organize & record our perceptions saying, “During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs. There is here no first and second; both are coinstantaneous and one.” Further in Chapter XII, Coleridge asserts “being and knowing are identical,” that “a subject…becomes a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself.” Though Coleridge is still talking primarily about the mind & its functions, the implications for poetry are clear; he has challenged himself to create a kind of poetry that works the way the mind does.

However, Coleridge’s work didn’t always walk the talk. His poems succeed, for me, when they represent a dynamic sense of identity but often the language of the poem resorts to describing the process rather than enacting it. An impulse towards clarification & oversimplification pulls the reader outside the process & merely annotates its larger motions. Though Coleridge’s strength may lie in his ability to create & maintain a reality constructed from myriad sense perceptions, his weakness is that a reader is never more than nominally present during the process.

John Keats’ famous concept of Negative Capability, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” sets Coleridge as the antithesis, actually naming him as an example of a man “incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.”


2. a dream of the grass blowing


Robert Duncan’s work hit me square in the head but left me with an ache in my heart. The first poem in his book The Opening of the Field is “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” a breathless rush of a poem that, to me, seems spoken directly from the brain without the muddying influence of a mouth. Where Coleridge seemed always to need to mediate his impulses & ideas & big concepts through some kind of physical, objective articulation, Duncan had the bravery (it seemed brave to me when I first read it & still does now) to simply & directly & powerfully assert his thoughts as important enough to carry the poem:

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought […]

I experienced an exhilarating liberation reading these lines with Duncan asserting the power of the subjective intellect & creative capacity over the objective spaces & experiences of this world. In short, he was saying that we regular old normal people, without any special gear or attachments, without having to be a harp in a window, could create things that were as good as things we didn’t create. Further, he was saying that this was true by simply doing it, by writing the poem & demonstrating it. Coleridge’s impulse toward explanation wasn’t in evidence here & as a result the whole process felt incredibly empowering.

What’s more, the poem itself is incredibly flexible, fluent, coursing through different perceptions & intellectual planes of thought with a confidence & certainty that is rare to find in poetry, so much of which can be complicated by asking forgiveness or understanding. Duncan’s work trusts the reader in a way that should be a little unnerving (am I up to this?) & humbling.


3. sicke at heart


The section of Duncan’s poem quoted above is one of four epigraphs to my new book The Wonderfull Yeare – a shepherd’s calendar composed of four seasonal sections.

Each of the seasons in the book are written differently – though constructed might be a better word for how they came into being. They were created through various cut & paste methods, using specific constraints & patterns that differed from season to season. The source poems for each section were my own – things I’d written sometimes as long ago as the mid-1990s – poems that I could no longer understand in some of the most important ways. I had literally forgotten what I was writing; the poems were devoid of context for me, the writer of the poems, the person who had experienced the things the poems were talking about.

I felt like I was sitting in a lime-tree bower trying to imagine my friends having fun.

It all began as notes for an experiment. I removed the last remaining context the poems had (syntactic) by breaking apart the sentences, letting the lines hang out there by themselves. What happened is that I was able to see that the personal history the poems were notating didn’t matter, that the lines & words were themselves more like musical notes that could be used & reused. In fact, repetition became an integral feature of the poem as I constructed what I imagined was a complex internal monologue where the speaker was by turns certain, sorrowful, angry, resentful & full of the kinds of hesitancies that mark my own thoughts. The poems became more responsive to my intellect, my me, than anything I had ever written.

I allowed myself to revise the pieces after they were constructed, & the cut & paste collage was by no means arbitrary (I was asked once if I just plunked the lines down in random order as if pulled out of a hat; the answer is no).

I was able to deprive myself of those irritable reachings, plant my feet firmly in a meadow I had once been in but had no memory of, & compose something that was, at heart, sicke in all the ways I once was, in all the ways I am, in all the ways I always will be.

References:

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. London: Oxford UP, 1969.
Duncan, Robert. The Opening of the Field. New York: New Directions P, 1973.
Keats, John. Complete Poems & Selected Letters. New York: Random House,2001.
Pritts, Nate. The Wonderfull Yeare. San Diego: Cooper Dillon, 2010.

*****

Click here to read "Endless Summer," a season from The Wonderfull Yeare.

Nate Pritts is the author of two full length books of poetry - Sensational Spectacular and Honorary Astronaut - with a third, The Wonderfull Yeare, due in early 2010. The founder & editor of H_NGM_N, Nate teaches poetry at the Downtown Writers Center/YMCA in Syracuse, NY.