Burt Blume is a long-term resident of Tokyo. These poems are from his collection Evasions, published by Corycian Press in 1978.
Moonspeak
You lie in a quiet Los Angeles room
with nothing but the sound of traffic.
The moon is full again, its dumb mouth sealed.
For once you wish the sky hard & clear
like the pure depth of polished stone. Or more.
It is always the more that bothers you, wishing for
more wishes, an all night station:
The band is playing a dance tune
‘La Tortuga de la Noche’
you rise on cue, step into the night & go on.
The freeways so flawless you do 70, fogbound
through the hills of manzanita & still don’t care,
Or care out of pride alone, recalling
the ride to the desert in her squat car.
Now you leave the city for the 43rd time
thinking you are satisfied, & go on.
The night is of chrome & the white fire of magnesium,
as your lightly muffled machine
bears you into a landscape of deepest agate.
A momentary herald, tinctured
by the dust of precious metals & gasoline, you move on.
You go on as a wish,
trailing its oriental gown of light,
sifting through thicknest air,
a song of stone, a measure of moonlight…
You go on.
Sea Story
after Ibsen
The lighthouse keeper’s daughter
married long ago. With her scarf
and small luggage she has gone
from the headland, leaning on the railing
with a red-haired man.
Past the village boats
the island steamer
slipped fogbound out to sea.
She does not go among
the rocks anymore, trailing a bucket
for shellfish, stooping over chiton
and mussel till her feet bleed.
Her father’s knotted lines
have tangled in the reef.
She is gone in her one good dress.
Squalls, equinoctial storms
and the ice breaking away,
drifting out…
Penitent ships
veer from the council of rocks
where albatross preen their coarse feathers.
Blind with rum
the old man sits quietly inside.
Tired father whispers
to himself, Ellida,
turns on the great light and goes to bed.
Far in the southern coves
the lamp fishermen
are calling softly from their skiffs
as they bend to the water woonless nights.
We’re happy to announce that my study of slavery in Carroll County, Maryland will be available at this site later today. The book is called The Witness and it presents the trial records of Rebecca McCormick, the first person to be executed in Carroll County. The story surrounding her death makes compelling reading. In addition, the book provides a chronological listing of newspaper sources on the subject of Carroll County slavery and lots more. We hope to bring out a “hard copy” version of this book in the next year or so, but in the meantime, the information will be available in this form.
Update: The Witness is available for download here.
To continue with Catherine Daly on this beautiful, but Bush-mandated morning in the world. I mentioned Mina Loy and Catherine in one breath yesterday, but actually, her writing style is closer to Elsa Von Freytag Loringhoven’s telegraphic im/explosions from c.1927. (A few examples of the Baroness’ work can de found in the Die Young Archives on this site.) Mina Loy relied almost exclusively on alliteration in her memorable Lunar Baedeker, so there is a softening effect on the ear. There are also more concessions to grammar in Loy. Contiguity and juxtaposition take its place in much of Daly’s DaDaDa. Here’s an example:
Use
You syrupy you.
–adulate you!
You musical,
requisite naught,
treasure,
treasure.
You succor. You count.
During infatuation–torture’s surcease–
purchased,
precarious, burning trunk
doused,
you youth unspoiled,
gauze-camouflaged.
Struck, wounded outrageously.
Which is a good place, I believe to end this extended quote. This is the “telegraphic style” of writing and Catherine does it well. (As does Geraldine Monk and Cathy Wagner.) There’s an accumulative power generated by it, no doubt. It would be interesting to hear Catherine Daly read selections from DaDaDa. More on performance and the telegraphic style later.
DaDaDa
Salt Publishing, 2003.
Perfect Bound (POD), 208 Pages. No price listed.
Well it’s very late here, but I’d like to begin to consider this book. Catherine Daly’s poems have the sweep and intellectual verve of Mina Loy on a good day. In fact, I checked out the back of DaDaDa to see if she’d listed Arthur Cravan as her significant other. She does real battle in these pages with her Catholic past, and I believe she finally slays the beast with her vorpel sword, or at least decidedly puts the pope in his place. In addition she rings the changes on such icons of pop culture as Coco Chanel, Mary Cassat, Georgia O’Keefe, and [write the name here]. There’s fragmentation, erasure, encoding, decoding, floating clouds of words, charts and Latin–a veritable tool box of the post-post modern. She even quotes Led Zepplin as a head note to a poem called “Ahs”. It’s all here, folks. To top it off, she has drop dead good looks as evidenced by the photo on the back. This is yet another characteristic she shares with Mina Loy, who was a Futurist, a Dadaist, a Vorticist, and lots of other ists besides being a Gibson Girl. That was not a male chauvanist grunt, but a mere statement of fact. I hope in a future posting to reprint at least one of the poems from DaDaDa, if I may.
In short, buy and read this book. More soon.
Now, finally, to bed! What a day and what an election!
People do not consider the ability to forget an advantage. But without it, it would be impossible to live in this world. Imagine that you would constantly recall all that we know about the future world.
There is an angel with a thousand heads.
Each head has a thousand tongues.
Each tongue has a thousand voices.
Each voice has a thousand melodies.
Imagine the indescribable beauty of this angel’s song.
If you could imagine such things without forgetting, you would constantly be comparing your own limited abilities to the immensity of such a being. It would be utterly impossible for you to endure life. You would be so disgusted with your worldly life, that you would die before your time.
191
The Rebbe once came inside and said, “What do you do when a great mountain of fire stands before you? A very great treasure lies on the other side. The treasure cannot be reached without passing through this fiery mountain. And you have no choice but to reach this precious treasure….”
After several days, the Rebbe spoke about this again. He said, “It has already been revealed to me what must be done in such a case.”
Rabbi Nakhman of Bratslev (1772-1810) remains the spiritual leader of the “Dead” Hasidim–a group of Jews who still consider his parables and stories his living words of wisdom. And what fantastic stories they are! He even had a theory concerning the correct telling of these stories, and how, once they were in place in the believer’s hearts and minds, they would help “mend the Vessels of Light” that had been broken when men and women fell from grace into sin. Whether you believe this or not, Nachman was a master of prose poetry, with an imaginative grasp of our impossible condition comparable to Chuang-Tzu and Yun-men. Nachman died of tuberculosis when he was 38. These translations are by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplin.
Over the years I’ve been involved in translating from the Old English. I’ve translated “Deor” and “Wulf and Eadwacer,” (the latter is available on line at three sites: Perihelion, www.webdelsol.com/Perihelion/wulfpoetry.htm; Other OE Poetry, a website run by a Professor Betcher at the State University of Iowa, (www.public.iastate.edu/~gbetcher/373/OtherOE.htm); and at a Poetry Page at (communication.students.rmit.edu.au/1996/John_Roda/poetry.html) and am now working my way through “The Wanderer” and “The Ruin”. I’ve also done some of Beowulf. I work from the originals with my trusty Old English dictionary by my side. For Beowulf, I use the excellent Penguin O.E. text with copious glosses provided by Michael Alexander. I’ve just finished a funny little charm against Wens, this evening, originally found in Anglo-Saxon poetic Records, vol 6.
A Charm
Wen, Wen, Wenichenchen!
Here neither build nor shall you linger
but you shall go north to the nearest hill
for there, poor wretch, you have a brother.
He shall lay a leaf at your head.
Under a wolf’s foot, under an eagle’s feather,
under an eagle’s claw, be ever-fading.
Fall to ash like a coal on the hearth.
Abrade away like dust on the wall,
and so disappear as water long in bucket.
Become as small as the linseed kernel,
and smaller still than the handworm’s hipbone.
So shrink till shrinking has to nothing shrunk.
Try it when you have a pimple and let me know if it works!
The first word that comes to mind is brilliant. As a 19 year old hotshot in the English department at Western Maryland College (just rescued from the factories), I thought I knew just about everything, but he quickly showed me otherwise. I took several classes from him, including one on the New Novel in which Malloy, Malone, and those other Beckett novels were part and parcel. This allowed Bob to indulge his black humor and his cynical wit, much of which was lost on his dewy, starry-eyed charges at Western Maryland College. What I most enjoyed were my private conversations with him. I showed him my poetry, of course, because everyone knew that he was a good poet, and he suggested that my shocking works were not shocking enough. It was good advice, which I now regularly pass on to young poets seeking to shock. Now looking at his poems, I see that he was indeed a fine craftsman, leaning towards the Confessional poets, who were all the rage way back when. After he killed himself, I remember sitting up all night by myself at my security guard post working through his manuscripts in an attempt to divine the intention behind certain worksheets and scraps of poems. “Death, I Will Do You In” was one of the resulting poems. It’s too bad. Perhaps he would have become a major voice. I’ve heard that he was a good friend of Al Poulin, so his potential connections with “Po-Biz” were there. He is buried in Westminster Cemetery with an excerpt from the famous poem by Yeats on his tomstone. You know, the one that goes “Cast a Cold eye…” And ends with the passing of a horseman. Rest in peace, Robert W. Lawler.
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