Art Star: poem

Showing posts with label poem. Show all posts

The Fallen

The fallen know the definition of a word
We use it all the time: hard
But only they know what it means
The electricity in your veins
The foot that twitches
The pounding in your head
Bang-bang-bang
Sending a message
Maybe I hurt
But the source cannot be found
And the source hardly even matters
There’s a bicycle that makes a noise
Clank-clank-clank
The wheels turn, the rider flies smoothly on
And yet.
The multitude of voices
Singing praises, sending prayers
Attempting aid with their minds
But it sounds more like a
Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh
A sea of love that never reaches the dry, awaiting sands
What good can the vibrations of a larynx do
When the grounds of the earth are shaking
When the ants have stopped marching
When at last the only sound is silence.

--Amy Kristen

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The Ballad of You and I.

Photograph by Amy Kristen

Maybe I’m ready.
Maybe it’s time.
Tomorrow I could take a step
And will my limbs to climb.

But how do you make the change
From a Maybe to a Yes?

Maybe I’ll say I’m sorry.
Maybe you’ll say it’s fine.
Or perhaps you’ll say goodbye,
And leave me clutching to the line.

I want to say I love you,
But instead I’ll fade away.

Maybe hearts mend.
Maybe wounds heal.
Maybe it’s time to change,
Though reality seems unreal.

I know I’m no fortune teller,
Because all I see is mist.

Maybe you’ll come find me.
Maybe I’ll let you in.
Your pillow lies shapeless on my bed
And I’m drowning in the din.

A simple button can rewind a disk,
But you and I keep spinning forward.

--Amy Kristen

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Flirting with Poetry Analysis: Harryette Mullen

As you read this, I am now two full years into my love affair with Harryette Mullen and her poetry. For someone who never fully “got” what poetry was all about, who is just now building a lexicon of terms to define the types of prose I come across -- in rhyme, slant rhyme, iambic pentameter -- it came as a shock to read an author whose work almost instantly expanded my mindscape, whose words were no longer clumps of alphabet soup, but virile, moving images. A poet’s pressures, lifestyle, and location drastically influence the product they create, and Mullen crafts works endowed with such divergent meaning that her every stanza reflects the massive network of influences and emotions that culminate from a lifetime of teaching and absorbing. In doing so, her poetry pulls your mind outside itself: a sensual, psychedelic journey.

In Mullen’s first book, Trimmings, she fashions a collection of “serial prose poems that use playful, punning, fragmented language to explore sexuality, femininity, and domesticity,” corresponding to the “Objects” section of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (Mullen, ix). In reading Tender Buttons as a reference point, I found that Mullen’s style -- sexual, entendre-laden stream-of-consciousness -- was indeed a direct reflection of Stein’s influence. While Trimmings poems go unnamed, their structure -- often short bursts of streaming thought -- allow for many of the one to five line pieces to be quoted in their entirety:

“Starving to muffler moans, boa scarfs her up. Feathers tickle

her nose. Kerchief, fichu. Gesundheit.” (Mullen 6)

When this collection was published in 1991, Mulled had just begun teaching at Cornell University in New York. I find it hard to understand just what this poem’s tone is, but the many ways the language could be dissected keep the mind occupied past the initial mood assessment. The muffler could be a scarf, connecting to the boa the unknown subject wears, or could refer to stifling her moans, which connects to “fichu” in the second line. Fichu is a French word, from the past participle of “ficher”: to stick in. Muffler: scarf, as moans: stick in. The feather boa calls to mind a provocatively dressed woman, while “boa” itself could refer to a snake, and, in turn, a (large) penis. “Scarfs her up,” suggests the garment wrapped around her, or the woman gobbled down via oral sex.

In all, Mullen’s work forces us to ask just what is poetic language? Does a simple sentence like the previous work qualify? How should the way the words are structured compare in importance to the actual words? Is it enough for a poet to choose language that sets the reader off their expectations, or does it need to be eclectic as well? Consider the final poem from Trimmings:

“Thinking thought to be a body wearing language as clothing or language a body of thought which is a soul or body the clothing of a soul, she is veiled in silence. A veiled, unavailable body makes an available space.” (Mullen 62)

Formatted with no particular structure save that dictated by the confines of the page, this poem is a great capstone for the poet’s first collection. The interplay between alliteration, repetition, and the varied interpretations of tense mood and bundled symbol goes off like a subconscious explosion. There is nothing extraordinary about her vocabulary here, but her form suggests a connection between the mental and the tangible, that the two are intertwined and inseparable.

S*PeRM**K*T, released one year after Trimmings, again responds to Stein’s Tender Buttons, albeit this time the “Food” section. Appropriately, the collection was fully realized through Mullen’s culinary memories with Cornell friend Gil Ott, who provided the photographs of his local supermarket. In her own words, S*PeRM**K*T materialized from an interest in “the stuff of life” combined with “the collision of contemporary poetry with the language of advertising and marketing, the clash of fine art aesthetics with mass consumption and globalization, and the interaction of literacy and identity.” (Mullen, x) As a result, many of the works read like this (also unnamed) poem:

“Plushy soft tissues off screen generic rolls as the world turns on re-vivid revivals rewinds reruns recycling itself. A box of blue movie equals smurf sex. Poor peewee couldn’t shake it. Wished he had a bigger one. Per inch of clear resolution’s color window, more thick squares snag a softer touch.” (Mullen, 78)

Mullen represents branding and pop culture via “Pee-wee Herman” (Paul Reubens) and his 1991 indecent exposure arrest and the daytime soap opera “As The World Turns.” This and further brand imagery gets swirled with technology references (clear resolution and color window could refer to a television), an aside of sexual anxiety (penis size being a major component of masculine identity), and the supermarket consumer conflict of generic versus name brand purchasing power. Mullen never attempts to provide a sort of answer or solution to the images she summons; that would be anathema to her style -- as poet, her words merely point you in the right direction. It becomes the reader’s job to interpret the prose accordingly.

By the time Muse & Drudge was published in 1995, Harryette Mullen had returned to California, and was teaching at UCLA. Her poems changing structure reflects the change in situation. In a pattern holding throughout the entire book, four tight, lyrical stanzas have replaced Mullen’s trademark sips of lucid thought. An imagined meeting of Sappho, the Greek poet, with Sapphire, “an iconic black woman who refuses to be silenced”, inspired the shift. (Mullen, xi) The overall effect is not as poignant as her first two collections, but she still provides her reader with intriguing imagery:

“I dream a world

and then what

my soul is resting

but my feet are tired” (Mullen, 101)

Through this first stanza of yet another unnamed poem, Mullen asks the reader (and, more importantly, herself) the most inspiring or damning question available to an artist: what next? What is the point of dreaming these perfectly false landscapes if all we create are shadows on a cave wall?

Continued next week in Part 2: Jayne Cortez

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The Slam Spoken. Word.

When I think of poets, I imagine a prophetic William Blake, an eccentric Allen Ginsberg, an aloof Ezra Pound…not Miles Walser. Hailing from Minneapolis, Minnesota this curly headed wide-eyed kid took the stage this past week at the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI) hosted at Emerson College in Boston. The event stands as the national poetry slam competition for undergraduate students. This year CUPSI featured almost 40 teams from across the country, all spitting poetics in hopes of being crowned the CUPSI champions at the end of the week.

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Los Angeles - Deep Muck Cultural Concerns

Tearing scabs off the cultural landscape
reveals bloody layers of previously picked
and poked layers of man-made icons,
celebrity bandages, and billboard gauze
barely covering the oozing yellow infection
of our self-inflicted wounds.

Forever recycling endless pretty impostors
not truly believing the lines written for them,
A hint of understanding lurks too deeply behind the surface
of dissassociated denial
to take anything at face value.
The face has been cosmetically altered
anyway,
sabatoging the wisdom of age from celebrating
anything remotely substantial.

Irony splashs shiny glossy over
neo-reality, post-realism, nilism and hip-hop.
A new paint job hurriedly washes the slick
oily walls of current ideas,
leaving barely a moment of fresh, if not quiet,
rectangles of silence, before a new multiplicity of
one sheets, TV sweeps, .coms, or yet unpublished
graffitti take fleeting residence.

Poets move words around each other
searching for new turns and embraces
to end
the pain of separation.
Few can describe the eternity of their recurrent
anguish.

Artists rehash history, reinvent conceptual redundancy
then beat themselves to death for not communicating
their deepest struggle for transformation and ascension .

How many can break thru barriers of their own forgotten making
into realms of the invisible, unspeakable fullness?
Some actions take the courage of outrage
Some, the strength of a whisper
Whatever the form, faith is the master.

Some true mad souls keep reaching
Thru the quicksands of culture.
Not clinging to the seeking,
they struggle.
Not clinging to the struggle,
they seek.

- Ellen Giamportone

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September and More Great Slam Poems

Because before a lot of people started reading this blog, and we got those weird Scientology ads, the idea was just to have a place where we could share stuff with each other - without having to actually make paragraphs.

Below is Buddy Wakefield

Anis Mojgani below. His third poem "Shake The Dust" is what's really good.

And all of this spoken word has made me want to write a poem on the page. Yep I still do that :)