·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

No facts, Ip-
so, what
Love favors
Is a pure malt
Not mango milkshake

Simple charms
Lovely arms
a-
round you
Her love
Strums.

from Trellis, a work in progress

I have been continuing my project of using randomly chosen poems Trevor Joyce’s What’s in Store as a means to create syllabic counts for the lines of new poems of my own. It is a quite simple process (described a couple of blog entries back). I just count the syllables per line, and limit my poem to the total number of lines in Trevor’ original. Occasionally my content reflects, counters or makes a tangent off of Trevor’s content. I have limited the project to 100 poems that are randomly chosen from different parts of the book. In fact, I will not be surprised if I have used some of the same poems twice! I work quickly and revise little on a kind of ‘first thought, best thought’ writing method. I think Trevor works more closely from ancient Chinese, Irish and Hungarian poems and songs. His poems have a profound, resonant quality of consideration that - regardless of his lyric velocity - suggests a sense of pain staking revision as a way of making sure he gets things right. Perhaps I am wrong on that. But I work quickly because I think my ‘unconscious intelligence’ is much more likely to be on the mark than most of what I would do and screw up with ‘conscious manipulation’ of the text. Eventually I will squeeze the poems down to 50 or so. There is no way I will have all 100 good ones.

Here are few new ones:

Whip grief under
Blue horse thief
Broken
Spirit

Hands-up, stranger, do
Not embrace my last daughter.

**

I find this work sometimes eerily fun to write. I suspect Trevor Joyce’s immersion in archaic materials from ancient societies provokes work that is primal in character. (We’re not talking Henry James here!) Nothing felt and its correlative response or action is either repressed or taken off the table. The poems become like a form of house-cleaning in which, most importantly, the attic is emptied, skeletons, laid bare, whatever woe or ecstacy is made incarnate, a place of transparent manifestaton.

What the hell! I thow in a new one partly brought on by Easter:

Blessed be she
Who folds cloth
Pleases hands
Clearly given

Vigorous are simple lovers
Subtle, robust
No one loves God at ease
Nor the Devil
Please me.
*
And happy holidays and - wherever they still exist - happy spring break and/or vacation.

Exquisite or what
Else could be said
Pride of Madeira, conical
Blue aspirant flourish
Only heaven knows such measure

Thick Acacia
Apple blossom
Also thick
Amaze the eye

Treacherous
Citizen
Mr. President
Was smiling

In
The rimless
Tub
I
Am
Witless
Grown
Simple
Purely.

from Trellis
a work-in-progress

The cedar dies
from the top,
the prisoner dies
in the pit

Of nine strong bonds
I’ve worn out eight
the ninth one
wearies me.

Prisoners’ Song from the Hungarian
Trevor Joyce, What’s in Store (Gig / New Writers Press, 2008)

Good-by old man
Turn the key
Darkness is not your friend
The willows bend

Knock, knock, dear Reaper
Open the black door
Kill the cat
Jump over me.

Stephen Vincent, Untitled poem from the English of Trevor Joyce’s Prisoner Song in Folk Songs from the Hungarian.

Lately I have dropped my ’sweet reed’, that is my Haptic making Faber-Castel India ink brush, to pick up various ball-point pens, filling my journal pages with a series of poems in a project I call Trellis. The writing process is built on a metrical patterns from which I have copied and/or improvised off poems by Trevor Joyce in his recent, and I think, brilliant volume, What’s In Store [If you not read my new review of the work, it’s published in Galatea Resurrects #9]

With a Trevor poem, I simply match the line count, and then pair the lines either by their word count, or syllable count. I do closely read the originating poem and, sometimes, my content will mirror and comment on Trevor’s content, though, often any thematic relationship is, at best, oblique or not there at all. Trevor’s poems give my pieces a formal frame on which to rise and make words that fit. As with Trevor’s work, his forms compel a making that is similar to the challenges faced by a stone mason where the stones first need to be chosen in a way that will fit the structure. Imagination comes in to play as a means to pick words with an appropriate texture, color, etc. Those choices make the difference between a dull or interesting poem.
The excitement of this kind of making is that the poem’s formal structure may provoke content/rhythms & a ‘music’ that in turns - sometimes an abrupt torque - may constantly surprise. What’s opened up on the page is, ideally, revelatory to both maker and reader. How this process is similar to surrealist and Ouilipo exercises, I suspect, has been discussed elsewhere. It does not interest me to go there right now. I am have too much obsessive fun watching new stuff pop out of the hat.

Gone
Sure blessing
Cross without nails
Beauty burns
Such holes

Pure
Crimson.

Smoke waxes
Kill
The
Sooner than
Later

Honestly, I don’t take much or often to calling things or persons or plants as Angels. But, hell, when opportunity offers, or something splits the mind-set, why not? This one, this morning, does/did seem in full rapturous flight.Yes, why not? Definitely, spring in the City and why not?

This past weekend we were finally able to visit the town of Locke - a levee town on the Sacramento River about 30 minutes below the State Capit0l. Arriving in the late afteroon after a night in the upper-foothills near the Yuba River, we dropped down off Highway 160 - atop the levee - down on to Locke’s one lane Main Street where we parked near the art gallery where Laura worked weekends for the last ten years or so. The Chinese man who owns the business next door was a good friend of Laura’s, deeply shocked by her death and absence. “I did not even get a chance to say good-bye. I miss her so much. She kept to herself and her garden. People only got upset when she had too many animals. I made a plaque for her. You can see it in the Memorial Park.”

Actually I don’t think Laura kept to herself as much as the man implied. Whenever I visited her she was quick to talk about Locke’s community issues - whether it be a new sewage pipe, or determining the nature’s of the town’s ownership, etc. It was so lovely, actually. to talk to this man - whose name I unfortunately did not get - to get a sense of how her presence was felt, and that she was appreciated. “I so miss her.” he said. “You know I went to the University of San Francisco in the Sixties and we could talk about what it was like in the Haight.”
“Did you know her coffee shop, the I & Thou?
He did not remember it. That was 40 years ago. She had named it after the Martin Buber title. (A book I have yet read, but well known in late ’50’s and early ’60’s). In a time of vast drug intake among the young - young who were only interested in rock & roll, and pscyhedelic rock - it was the only place on Haight Street that featured poetry readings, then to usually very small audiences. [It was not until 1976 that The Grand Piano - also on Haight Street - began to feature poetry readings and, ironically, became the initial venue for what became known as Language Poetry . Indeed, as poetry, a very heady reversal and a relief from the early anti-book period of the Sixties! By then, however, Laura had long gone to live in Locke, intentionally or not, a kind of exile from the intense social mix of the City.]

Yes, gardens were at Laura’s core. Her apartment in the City - also on Haight Street - was wall to ceiling with planters and vines falling everywhere. Something often grows inside her poems, as well. They are sources of memory, ways to establish character, and means to address the question of what separates wild from civilized. As in the poem “Michigan” from her one book The Inheritance.

My lady-mother of discipline would strip the ramblers
Selecting the taut buds over the spring clusters –
Buds hinting promise. It was her patient joy
To place them in a vase to watch them open.
Always they came out common, sprawling. She fed
Their earth; they grew more cluttered. By nines and fifteens
To the bunch, those “Seven Sisters”. All one evening
She pressed one against her cheek in secret
Crying because she’d forgot their name in Polish.
And dug them out next day to set in tea roses.
White “Pilars” that stood singly on thornless stalks.
The winter hit them back to below the graft,
That second winter. Come summer, Grandfather
Steffan laughed, “You buy a wilderness
Of briars for your garden? And pay good money””
She took this, never as omen, but as cold lesson,
Planted again, and each year plucked her roses.
Nor did she travel, after this, far
From her will or garden – except for funerals.

During our visit we will also went to visit her house, now rented by a man who was a neighbord and friend. “I keep finding things of her poetry,” he says. “I am not a big poetry reader, but I can tell these are good. I find revisions and things like that. Stuff I think she was writing recently. I don’t throw anything out.” Once things are more gathered, he will send them off to Laura’s cousin in Chicago. Ah yes, some day all this will gather into a volume, and we can keep another invaluable poet from going to loss.

I regret to have forgotten to take a picture of Laura’s house overlooking her garden. Or her two enormous, thick furred friendly dogs. I will save that for next visit. Indeed it felt so good to Locke and finally offer our respects.

Though there work is stylistically quite different, it is interesting that both Lorine Niedecker and Laura are poet-gardener-river rats - both much at home in marsh, dank and wet soil! Laura’s work, I have a suspicion, gains some of its permission - though not in style - from Theodore Roethke’s poems that take place inside his father’s greenhouse nursery.

Yes, of the Yuba River, just a visual touch: green, white, swift, slicing through white and black granite boulders. Spring and - note those kids in the kayaks - and the burst is on! Spring rites and the recent passing of Laura, they do seem to talk to each other, an ancient cycle redux.