The Fifth Death of Saul Bellow
I wishing to die (in America-
A warm rain, wet, melancholy,
Satisfaction, completion-
Full,) circular breasts in my bed,
Pink tea kettle nipples.
Upright, upstanding, lifted, & surging with life he bursts into mornings
Of sepulchral dream;
He, wanting nothing but -
-My hands are always those of my father’s
-Paws, darlin’, and you are on a ship
-No, see, well, mhhh, ha!
-See that’s why the water is never water
-Read me and watch the world collapse
-I can’t but you know I used to paint?
-I enjoy drinking coffee with you next Friday
-I thought I saw you once but I think it was just a…never mind
(the death of Saul Bellow and all his damned books)
Let me show you what you’ve never seen before-
Pink
Tea
Kettle
Nipples, read fine parchment
Covered in lovely fire tongues- archaic saliva read by Americans as
novelty.
I’ll burn you if you tuck me in by the roots of your dreams.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Why I'll Never Eat Wheaties
The crimson light crept into my mouth at dawn;
A child no older than four
teeming with life and cheerios,
grasping clay forms with sausage stubs,
building-
cities of thin, shiny plastic.
Your overcast eyes are always searching,
through a storm of oranges,
for the cheer in cheerios.
(Palm full of wool,
eyes of hearth,
a paper heart)
The sea caresses
With foamy fingers
Where the storm is breaking
On the cotton shoulder
Of
The
Coast.
A child no older than four
teeming with life and cheerios,
grasping clay forms with sausage stubs,
building-
cities of thin, shiny plastic.
Your overcast eyes are always searching,
through a storm of oranges,
for the cheer in cheerios.
(Palm full of wool,
eyes of hearth,
a paper heart)
The sea caresses
With foamy fingers
Where the storm is breaking
On the cotton shoulder
Of
The
Coast.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
William De Witt Snodgrass (W.D. Snodgrass)
-Pseudonym: S.S. Gardons
Biography:
On January 5th, 1926, W.D. Snodgrass was born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. He attended Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania and was in the U.S. Navy until 1946. During this time he was stationed on Saipan in the Pacific. Following World War II he attended the University of Iowa and married his first wife Lila Jean Hank. In 1953 he earned his M.F.A. and divorced his first wife. In 1954 he married his second wife Janice Marie Ferguson Wilson. In 1955 he became the leader of the “Morehead Writers” conference; appointed instructor of English at Cornell University. In 1958 he receives the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award and the Hudson Review fellowship in poetry.
In 1959 Snodgrass published his first book of poetry, Heart’s Needle. The following year Snodgrass received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Over the next few years he received a variety of awards and recognition for his poetry and in 1966 he divorced his second wife. In 1967 he publishes a translation of Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern and marries his third wife Camille Rykowski. In 1968 he publishes After Experience and in 1970 S.S. Gardons publishes Remains.
In 1972 Snodgrass became a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1975 he published In Radical Pursuit and in 1977 he published The Fuhrer Bunker and Six Troubadour Songs. Since 1977 he has published numerous books of poetry and is now retired from teaching. He retired in 1994 and now lives with his fourth wife Kathleen Snodgrass in New York and Mexico.
Works:
Poetry
Heart's Needle (1959)
After Experience: Poems and Translations (1968)
Leaving the Motel (1968)
Remains (1970)
The Fuhrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress (1977)
If Birds Build with Your Hair (1979)
These Trees Stand (1981)
Heinrich Himmler (1982)
The Boy Made of Meat (1983)
Magda Goebbels (1983)
6 Minnesinger Songs (Burning Deck, 1983)
D. D. Byrde Callying Jennie Wrenn (1984)
The Kinder Capers (1986)
A Locked House (1986)
Selected Poems: 1957-1987 (1987)
W. D.'s Midnight Carnival (1988)
The Death of Cock Robin (1989)
Each in His Season (1993)
The Fuhrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (1995)
Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (2006)
Prose
In Radical Pursuit: Critical Essays and Lectures (1975)
De/Compositions (2001)
To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry (2002)
Anthology
Gallows Song (1967)
Six Troubadour Songs (1977)
Traditional Hungarian Songs (1978)
Six Minnesinger Songs (1983)
The Four Seasons (1984)
Five Romanian Ballads, Cartea Romaneasca (1993)
Selected Translations (1998)
Drama
The Fuhrer Bunker (1981)
Moods:
Intimate
Sentimental
Retrospective
Mystic
Melancholy
“And I went on/ Rich in the loss of all I sing/To the threshold of waking light,/ To larksong and the live, gray dawn./ So night by night, my life has gone.”
-“Orpheus”
Movement:
Confessionalist poetry discusses the intimate details of one’s personal life. The poetry concerned in this field is responsible for the “unmasked” accounts of writers lives. It is not what the poet is describing that defines confessionalist poetry but how the author explores the topic.
Snodgrass can be classified as a confessionalist writer by the way he explores the issues of love and relationship in his poetry. It is most undoubtedly Snodgrass speaking to the reader in a most retrospective manner. He speaks sentimentally of the past, but at the same time does not romanticize the nostalgia of his past. He is a realist who beautifully captures the fragility of life and the way it can be broken. Snodgrass is defined as a confessionalist for groundbreaking for the publication of sentimental poetry during a time period that has been described as “the age of hard-boiledom”.
Similar Artists: Allen Ginsberg, John Berryman
Follower: Marie Howe
Influenced By: Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell
Works Cited:
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/15.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._D._Snodgrass.
Bernadette Mayer
Biography: Bernadette Mayer was born in Brooklyn in 1945. She received a B.A. in 1967 from the New School for Social Research. Since 1967 she has published numerous books of poetry. In 1972 up until 1974 she edited the journal 0 to 9 and has taught numerous poetry workshops. She currently lives in New York.
Works:
Story, New York: 0 to 9 Press, 1968.
Moving, New York: Angel Hair, 1971.
Memory, Plainfield, VT: North Atlantic Books, 1976.
Ceremony Latin (1964), New York: Angel Hair, 1975.
Studying Hunger, New York: Adventures in Poetry/ Bolinas, CA: Big Sky, 1976.
Poetry, New York: Kulchur Foundation, 1976.
Eruditio Ex Memoria, Lenox, MA: Angel Hair, 1977.
The Golden Book of Words, Lenox, MA: Angel Hair, 1978.
Midwinter Day, Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island Foundation, 1982.
Utopia, New York: United Artists Books, 1984.
Mutual Aid (Mademoiselle de la Mole Press, 1985)
Sonnets, New York: Tender Buttons, 1989.
The Formal Field of Kissing, New York: Catchword Papers, 1990.
A Bernadette Mayer Reader, New York: New Directions, 1992.
The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, West Stockbridge, MA: Hard Press, 1994.
Another Smashed Pinecone, New York: United Artists Books, 1998.
Proper Name & other stories, New York: New Directions, 1996.
Two Haloed Mourners: Poems, New York: Granary Books, 1998.
Midwinter Day, New York: New Directions, 1999 (reprint of 1982 edition).
Scarlet Tanager, New York: New Directions, 2005.
Mood:
Playful
Witty
Charming
Earthy
Reflective
-Pseudonym: S.S. Gardons
Biography:
On January 5th, 1926, W.D. Snodgrass was born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. He attended Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania and was in the U.S. Navy until 1946. During this time he was stationed on Saipan in the Pacific. Following World War II he attended the University of Iowa and married his first wife Lila Jean Hank. In 1953 he earned his M.F.A. and divorced his first wife. In 1954 he married his second wife Janice Marie Ferguson Wilson. In 1955 he became the leader of the “Morehead Writers” conference; appointed instructor of English at Cornell University. In 1958 he receives the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award and the Hudson Review fellowship in poetry.
In 1959 Snodgrass published his first book of poetry, Heart’s Needle. The following year Snodgrass received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Over the next few years he received a variety of awards and recognition for his poetry and in 1966 he divorced his second wife. In 1967 he publishes a translation of Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern and marries his third wife Camille Rykowski. In 1968 he publishes After Experience and in 1970 S.S. Gardons publishes Remains.
In 1972 Snodgrass became a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1975 he published In Radical Pursuit and in 1977 he published The Fuhrer Bunker and Six Troubadour Songs. Since 1977 he has published numerous books of poetry and is now retired from teaching. He retired in 1994 and now lives with his fourth wife Kathleen Snodgrass in New York and Mexico.
Works:
Poetry
Heart's Needle (1959)
After Experience: Poems and Translations (1968)
Leaving the Motel (1968)
Remains (1970)
The Fuhrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress (1977)
If Birds Build with Your Hair (1979)
These Trees Stand (1981)
Heinrich Himmler (1982)
The Boy Made of Meat (1983)
Magda Goebbels (1983)
6 Minnesinger Songs (Burning Deck, 1983)
D. D. Byrde Callying Jennie Wrenn (1984)
The Kinder Capers (1986)
A Locked House (1986)
Selected Poems: 1957-1987 (1987)
W. D.'s Midnight Carnival (1988)
The Death of Cock Robin (1989)
Each in His Season (1993)
The Fuhrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (1995)
Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (2006)
Prose
In Radical Pursuit: Critical Essays and Lectures (1975)
De/Compositions (2001)
To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry (2002)
Anthology
Gallows Song (1967)
Six Troubadour Songs (1977)
Traditional Hungarian Songs (1978)
Six Minnesinger Songs (1983)
The Four Seasons (1984)
Five Romanian Ballads, Cartea Romaneasca (1993)
Selected Translations (1998)
Drama
The Fuhrer Bunker (1981)
Moods:
Intimate
Sentimental
Retrospective
Mystic
Melancholy
“And I went on/ Rich in the loss of all I sing/To the threshold of waking light,/ To larksong and the live, gray dawn./ So night by night, my life has gone.”
-“Orpheus”
Movement:
Confessionalist poetry discusses the intimate details of one’s personal life. The poetry concerned in this field is responsible for the “unmasked” accounts of writers lives. It is not what the poet is describing that defines confessionalist poetry but how the author explores the topic.
Snodgrass can be classified as a confessionalist writer by the way he explores the issues of love and relationship in his poetry. It is most undoubtedly Snodgrass speaking to the reader in a most retrospective manner. He speaks sentimentally of the past, but at the same time does not romanticize the nostalgia of his past. He is a realist who beautifully captures the fragility of life and the way it can be broken. Snodgrass is defined as a confessionalist for groundbreaking for the publication of sentimental poetry during a time period that has been described as “the age of hard-boiledom”.
Similar Artists: Allen Ginsberg, John Berryman
Follower: Marie Howe
Influenced By: Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell
Works Cited:
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/15.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._D._Snodgrass.
Bernadette Mayer
Biography: Bernadette Mayer was born in Brooklyn in 1945. She received a B.A. in 1967 from the New School for Social Research. Since 1967 she has published numerous books of poetry. In 1972 up until 1974 she edited the journal 0 to 9 and has taught numerous poetry workshops. She currently lives in New York.
Works:
Story, New York: 0 to 9 Press, 1968.
Moving, New York: Angel Hair, 1971.
Memory, Plainfield, VT: North Atlantic Books, 1976.
Ceremony Latin (1964), New York: Angel Hair, 1975.
Studying Hunger, New York: Adventures in Poetry/ Bolinas, CA: Big Sky, 1976.
Poetry, New York: Kulchur Foundation, 1976.
Eruditio Ex Memoria, Lenox, MA: Angel Hair, 1977.
The Golden Book of Words, Lenox, MA: Angel Hair, 1978.
Midwinter Day, Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island Foundation, 1982.
Utopia, New York: United Artists Books, 1984.
Mutual Aid (Mademoiselle de la Mole Press, 1985)
Sonnets, New York: Tender Buttons, 1989.
The Formal Field of Kissing, New York: Catchword Papers, 1990.
A Bernadette Mayer Reader, New York: New Directions, 1992.
The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, West Stockbridge, MA: Hard Press, 1994.
Another Smashed Pinecone, New York: United Artists Books, 1998.
Proper Name & other stories, New York: New Directions, 1996.
Two Haloed Mourners: Poems, New York: Granary Books, 1998.
Midwinter Day, New York: New Directions, 1999 (reprint of 1982 edition).
Scarlet Tanager, New York: New Directions, 2005.
Mood:
Playful
Witty
Charming
Earthy
Reflective
Monday, October 6, 2008
Poem
The way your lover fall has stood unbalanced in the back drop of Vermont, scattering all his leaves amongst the wool and jackets (Smells of crisp); cold were Grandpa Carl’s glass eye visits and Cousin Jack too, the green Ford pickup truck- all the way to New Hampshire. Her kisses are the sweet flower nectar of the great oaks and maples of this land.
And Fire never bloomed?
I remember when I was ten years old; I walked the land with Dad.
-This five acre patch was my great grandfather’s.
He said
-Was it always on fire?
I said
-As long as I can remember.
He said
-This land screams toothless.
He said
-I know
I said
-I don’t know how Whitman ever heard singing; She is always crying salt tears of her evenings in recluse.
I said
Silently
The fields were ours to sew the ashes of my grandfather
I awoke this morning to find blue-jays eating the remnants of a claret sky.
I ran into the streets crying about the collapse of it all,
The very sky was disintegrating above.
I remembered that people drank cigarettes
Smoked coffee and cider
Although it was askew I smiled and pretended that he was ok.
He was transforming equine before everyone’s eyes.
He had blinders and feed given to him by the general public,
Issued by general mills in cardboard packages with sleeping pills and plastic toys that made his day.
It is my favorite season-
One of boots, scarves, and theater.
Outside is the exuberantly gaudy fashion exhibition full of drag and queeny figures flaunting boughs in flamboyant hues of rusted mustard, sweetened crimson, and royal bronze.
These are days when I wait for the mail
On the bench
Beside the blueberry bushes,
When the rain clouds hang
Like pending arguments that never settle.
He never looked at the roots of a tree, but I know they are beautiful works of nature. People make comparisons to ice-bergs as if they were the crystallized daguerreotypes of perfection, but a tree is the same in respect to the paradigm of glass. Think of a tree as the reversed replication of this image. The surface is a beautiful bouquet, while,
Underneath,
In the dirt,
Is the song of toil heard in the catacombs of deciduous forests.
They are the unseen forces of the masses,
They are the fingers and thumbs,
They are the single mother working the night shift,
They are the grandfather and his magnificent beard of history,
They are the immigrant dishwasher making minimum wage overtime while attending ESL two nights a week,
They are the father with children in school and retirement funds depleting,
They are the inner city youth in a uniform of release,
They are the philosopher.
Show me that we won’t fall
Show me that this isn’t a fall
Show me that I can’t fall
Show me the beauty in falling
Show me how to fall
Show me where to fall
Show me when to fall
Show me which fall is which
Show me that falling is necessary
Show me that falling can be melodramatic
Show me what time I will fall
Show me all in fall
Fall with me
Red and yellow ones
Turn over the blustery
Wind, all drops as such.
-Antonio Hernandez
The way your lover fall has stood unbalanced in the back drop of Vermont, scattering all his leaves amongst the wool and jackets (Smells of crisp); cold were Grandpa Carl’s glass eye visits and Cousin Jack too, the green Ford pickup truck- all the way to New Hampshire. Her kisses are the sweet flower nectar of the great oaks and maples of this land.
And Fire never bloomed?
I remember when I was ten years old; I walked the land with Dad.
-This five acre patch was my great grandfather’s.
He said
-Was it always on fire?
I said
-As long as I can remember.
He said
-This land screams toothless.
He said
-I know
I said
-I don’t know how Whitman ever heard singing; She is always crying salt tears of her evenings in recluse.
I said
Silently
The fields were ours to sew the ashes of my grandfather
I awoke this morning to find blue-jays eating the remnants of a claret sky.
I ran into the streets crying about the collapse of it all,
The very sky was disintegrating above.
I remembered that people drank cigarettes
Smoked coffee and cider
Although it was askew I smiled and pretended that he was ok.
He was transforming equine before everyone’s eyes.
He had blinders and feed given to him by the general public,
Issued by general mills in cardboard packages with sleeping pills and plastic toys that made his day.
It is my favorite season-
One of boots, scarves, and theater.
Outside is the exuberantly gaudy fashion exhibition full of drag and queeny figures flaunting boughs in flamboyant hues of rusted mustard, sweetened crimson, and royal bronze.
These are days when I wait for the mail
On the bench
Beside the blueberry bushes,
When the rain clouds hang
Like pending arguments that never settle.
He never looked at the roots of a tree, but I know they are beautiful works of nature. People make comparisons to ice-bergs as if they were the crystallized daguerreotypes of perfection, but a tree is the same in respect to the paradigm of glass. Think of a tree as the reversed replication of this image. The surface is a beautiful bouquet, while,
Underneath,
In the dirt,
Is the song of toil heard in the catacombs of deciduous forests.
They are the unseen forces of the masses,
They are the fingers and thumbs,
They are the single mother working the night shift,
They are the grandfather and his magnificent beard of history,
They are the immigrant dishwasher making minimum wage overtime while attending ESL two nights a week,
They are the father with children in school and retirement funds depleting,
They are the inner city youth in a uniform of release,
They are the philosopher.
Show me that we won’t fall
Show me that this isn’t a fall
Show me that I can’t fall
Show me the beauty in falling
Show me how to fall
Show me where to fall
Show me when to fall
Show me which fall is which
Show me that falling is necessary
Show me that falling can be melodramatic
Show me what time I will fall
Show me all in fall
Fall with me
Red and yellow ones
Turn over the blustery
Wind, all drops as such.
-Antonio Hernandez
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