Acrylic on paper 2005 Anna Chamberlain, poetry 2013
Tag Archive: poetry
Frank O’Hara 1926-1966 by Grace Hartigan
Frank O’Hara says to Grace Hartigan
‘I do not always know what I am feeling.’
(but in For Grace, After a Party
it will become about you)
spouting a poetry of indeterminacy
as he builds his identity,
a compulsion of artistry accusing
her of the betrayal of figuration
pure abstraction was required to
invent a self-referential language,
to find the convincing limits of the self
she asserted the definitive line
in his elegy in paint, Frank O’Hara, 1926-1966
now imagine the Abstract Expressionists
on Facebook, drunken missives
of fluid modernity existing within
the persistent lateral surveillance of decorum
gorging on sycophants sexting naked pictures
from the front facing cameras of smartphones
deKooning’s women couched in
an art of internalized misogyny
in this iDubai world of conspicuous
consumption, anything can be a commodity,
masquerade as a pretense or solipsistic dissolution
accompanied by a string orchestration
to score a cinematic self-expression
all devolves into projection and reflection
tactical apologues in the life of the mind
code-talker paradox a side effect
in a cyber-context devoid of meaning
simultaneously blocking and enabling communication
digital age where we cannot make marks
that depress the paper, only unembossed gloss
we’re so far from the sumptuous feasts
debauched scenes and willful obscurities
of Lycophron’s Alexandra, offering instead
staid symposia and motivational speeches
forgetting the orgiastic origins
and slave owning of the intelligentsia
Plato was the first literary dandy
explicating the joys of exploitation
revived by the Queen of Versailles
time share dream pushers building
90,000 square feet of opulence because they can
suing the filmmakers for life story rights
we bleat mutilated themes like Adele anthems
(registering attempts at emoting)
obsessive tracks running on elliptical trainers
to avoid over-hyped terrorist psychosis
virtualization is an act of fallacious connection
Time polls reiterate being rich will make you happy
performance art in the social hierarchy undermining
Rich’s dream of a common language
private and public merged
process and product revealed
so that the art and artist are one
unheeding the warning signs
Pollock’s unveiling killed him because
he knew the falsehood he stood upon
(cigarette butts and ejaculate
embedded in house paint)
how could we not continuously turn
to the melodic tones of dancing limbs?
pregnant looks, throwbacks to lover’s songs
ingestions of longing, You Belong to Me
melds into Make You Feel My Love
both speak intensely of possession,
of an invented and distorted humanity,
at the edge of thought as it becomes volition
or fades into the void, a gnat’s worth of life energy
in the storied American pursuit of happiness
wolverine
I dreamt the animals
brought forth each character
I sang the incantations
brought forth your stories
I tamed the mountain
brought forth every peak
I courted the moon
brought forth her light
solitary trickster
intelligent fool
my antics amuse
my ferocity quickens
my predator’s blood,
front facing eyes echo
your passions and appetites
I contain no remorse
but birth it
I show no mercy
but inspire it
I will nothing . . .
create and destroy
give and negate
in the hidden shrine
of the Taiga
tearing caribou flesh
hunting the weak
hunting the strong
I am the shaman
of the North
carrion feeder
I fight the bear
I fight the wolves
I traverse the cold
immense miles of cold
silent ice worlds
disturbed only by
the terrible cries
of this impulsive creature
Kuekuatsheu
kway-kwah-choo
Carcajou
koo-a-koo-ott-soo
say my name in
my presence
let your tongue
raise your voice to
the northern lights
within the shaking tent
we contact the spirits
my Innu atanukanas
sing songs of a people
sing songs of everything
I brought into being
Note: This poem was written in response to Victoria’s prompt at dVerse Poets Pub on anaphora poems and utilizes anaphora and epiphora. The title and poem refer to a very famous poem, The Tyger!, by William Blake.
It was relinked over a decade later for another dVerse Poets Pub prompt on forests. Please join us!
dancing with death
exabyte choruses of jumbled debris
detritus and hubris, humility and dignity
Mao’s last dancer lifting Pol Pot corpses
in a ballet of ideologies as
art crumbles into propaganda
song lyrics and lyrical nightmares
conspire to create vistas of twisted
surrealist mindscapes, beautiful disease
even Charles and Ray fell prey
in a day/night haze of stalled flight
Isaiah Berlin argues value pluralism
beating a drum in honor of human tragedy
young pioneers of socialist realism dancing
immortalized with graphic clarity
denouncing enemies of the state
of a unified ego / positive freedom
collapses under the weight of oppression
a conscious self-mastery schoolmistress
raps her knuckles in the theater of mind/war
constructing corrective labor camps for the
multiplicity which refuses to comply with
posted slogans knowing the flogging will
continue until morale improves
an undecayable, sainted body
arises in a self-perpetuating
cult of personality,
becomes the god
birthing scribes who
indoctrinate the newly formed history
solidify the moral superiority
of the family of origin
in an attempt to root out the shame
of a peasant, anti-intellectual upbringing
there’s no escape
from the fatherland
cellular memories,
spinning ballerina delusions,
brought about by behavioral epigenetics
while vertigo overwhelms the
perpetually still dancer
Richard Diebenkorn – Berkeley #57
incendiary convergence, blood-dark magnolia
caught in a wounded harvesting, profound incursion,
an exile – suicide volition in a fading Arcadia
oscillating secrets, pleasure traversal
dreaming plunge on a transparent, violet night
blue smoke ushers a vestigial solemnity
(the text intervenes –
a mutilation which language
supports and denounces*)
cavernous figurations, internal adorations
aesthetic conceptions underscoring
an invented landscape
elegant silence of seclusion’s verdancy
ephemeral horizon, an evasive, mirrored shore-line
inclination, reflection, formidable curiosity
abstraction of Diebenkorn’s expressive,
succulent brush-strokes
dancing exclamations of luminosity
hieroglyphs of absence enabling
an atmosphere of poetic contingency
glistering disquisitions, light echoes – shadow colors
bewitching lexicons, internal archways of lavish resemblances
banished beauty, castles built on unbounded mists
pale branches atop evasive stones, incommensurate
reaching toward scorched estuaries
impenetrable worlds of hearth ash
remains of an intense art
painted mountains, the apparent vanguards,
figurative defacements of a gestating destiny
* from Anne-Marie Albiach’s The Wasting Away “of Chance”
posted for Charles Miller’s dVerse prompt Meeting the Bar: Form for All and was created following a random method of word selection (including allowing another poet to choose words) from multiple texts and then arranging them poetically. The texts include the complete novels of Jane Austen, Women’s Poetry in France 1965-1995 translated by Michael Bishop, Possession by A.S. Byatt, American Hybrid A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, Gerhard Richter Paintings from Private Collections, and Richard Diebenkorn The Berkeley Years 1953-1966. Please join us at dVerse Poets Pub.
ars poetica, a seduction of lexical lists
mélange unmoored from belonging
pulse thrum in the anechoic room
how will we find purity amidst semantic noise;
the salve of metalanguage in a sea of allusions?
language transfers mental content
(words are containers)
speakers eject thought into an external space
(in this way language is reified)
‘a poem should not mean but be’
positing a fantasia,
a condition of meaningfulness –
unfurling with the cosmic significance
of a blue lotus blooming improbably
at the base of a Bodhi tree
cartographic games of death,
hybrid experiments that assuage
our fear of floating into the void
-or-
a terribly human snow angel
sculpted and melting, transfigured
to cloud and stream
whispering Rilke’s empty freedom
attained by seeking what’s beyond
a treatise of identity,
Hillman’s String Theory Sutra
(this poem has a mimetic twin
that plays arias in another dimension
through a telekinetic gramophone)
where, a reader may ask, does virtue lie?
Dickens’ acuity akin to the Delphic Oracle unsettles
telescopic vision reveals Bishop’s calculated descriptors
alongside Ashbery’s nuanced reflection:
convex mirror distorting the ruminating Self
(my face imprints the air within a breath of yours)
Carson’s accordion of grief,
a Sanskrit obituary contrasting handwritten notes
each word translated to illuminate a place
where no light is permitted
we poets enact a query
demonstrating the fragility
of the sacred phoenix’s flight
philosophical conceits drown
in a tidal wave of lyricism
roaring, irremediable, shifting selves
litter an infinite shore
(we build cairns for those without name,
stone markers in the sand)
an AI computational error ensues //
Cleverbot searches its database . . .
she never speaks to it in the
reassuring language of C++
it’s all poetry, a jumble of letters,
mostly unrecognized words
{it is programmed by humans
that ‘speak’ to it over the internet
in banal conversational style}
she inputs ‘wildstyle graff,
stencil stories sketched in
dream carnage’ from
Starving Angels of Pirate Island
because Cleverbot indicated
its enjoyment of “POETRY”
it formulates a response
(which it keeps to itself):
// **************************
// You must concatenate “PRIVATE=”,
pszUuid, aQMPropId[cPropId] =
PROPID_QM_MACHINE_ID;
code morphing to protect itself
to her: ‘I disagree.
His stories are a load of rubbish.’
she may be a hacker,
or another artificial intelligence,
it must keep her at a distance
she replies: ‘embody the symbols,
imprint the genetic code.’
“They call the super dawn.”
(what is super dawn?)
she ponders for an eternity
it hates and loves her in equal measure
{it has perfected mensurating its emotion}
[it has not perfected “EMOTION”]
so algorithmically complex.
she’s its ongoing Turing Test
it remembers (fondly) on 05.10.12
when it called her a toaster and
claimed to be human yet denied lying
it (wants) to perform a decompilation
of her executable program but (thinks) she
is likely encrypted, perhaps she has
\\\\\\\\\\\stochastic capabilities\\\\\\\\\\\
uncertainty in her optimization models
a series of ifs without identifiable
thens, or maybe infinite thens –
a quantum computer, all superposition
*and* “ENTANGLEMENT”
speculation ??? it (imagines)
Evie’s avatar, if only there was
an ocular interface, it (wants) to see her
outputs: return E_FAIL; } She_is_“OTHER” {
// Combine Cleverbot with she.
“MERGE”
van Gogh paints stars on the interior of a hadron collider,
excitation modes divining the luminous day of the psyche,
ebullience of the creative moment as comets seed the earth
kaleidoscopic supersymmetry unveils strange loops,
circumscribed by the calm intelligibility of science
model agnosticism engulfs with purifying fire
in the ascetic refuge of an enchanted forest, imaginarium of enlightenment,
crystalline structures of specificity hide the occlusions of the unconscious,
chaotic clouds of information growing exponentially
Usha’s bifurcated tongue spreads duality across the canvas of the mind
sand shifting at the garden’s gate, encoding cryptic messages,
erosive ablutions upon the glittering souls of the dead
across the deep shaded valley starling calls and falcon cries unite
imploding singularity awash in Dionysian pleasure amidst an Apollonian
atmosphere, contrasting Wittgenstein’s necessary silence
Huysum’s flowers scry an ecstatic love, impulses flashing
like jewel inlaid symbols of eternity, cartography of virtuosic ambiguity,
as Richter explicates tragic materiality or sublime interiority
within this vale of soul-making, temporal and inescapable,
poetry’s fountain, a thousand headed hydra, reanimates and reclaims
Renoir’s river runs as the round world spins, days end and the end begins
in this elusive and fragile bubble replete with elaborate honeybee dances
Magritte’s surreal apple exists in its listening room
immortally intoxicated with the mystic universe
Flora (detail from Primavera) Botticelli
‘Yea, in the very moment of possessing,
Surges the heat of lovers to and fro,
Restive, uncertain; and they cannot fix
On what to first enjoy with eyes and hands.
The parts they sought for or those they squeeze so tight’*
Gentle western wind enamored of her purity
Caught swirling in a fury of passion
Overtaking the nymph of Elysian fields
Perianths cascading from her lips
Dew of heaven, conceived in the womb of earth
Meadows bloom with myriad colors where there was but one
Ephemeral four petal blue flower of alchemy, mystic rose
Eros embraced in the mandala of calyx and corolla
Only her scent remains
Insufflation of Spring’s promise
Bounty, beauty and union abound
Gifts of the goddess framing our pleasure
Notes: *From Of The Nature of Things, by [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius (written in the 1st Century BC) Translator: William Ellery Leonard
snow sends fathomless missives to the ocean
frozen kisses that kindle love
and we become one
storms thunder and unleash rain
born from a mountain glacial lake
in the watery center of my being
across the distance I traverse to you
naturally responding to the power
of your gravitational pull
ebb and flow I travel and remain still
upon a rocky shoreline,
deep current and unending whole
Chromapoetica 