Is it just me, or does it look as though Johnny Depp got his Tonto gear confused with his Barnabas Collins persona — I mean, is that a bat or a bird perched on his head? (Photo: Promo from Disney’s upcoming remake of “The Lone Ranger” starring Johnny Depp as Tonto and Armie Hammer as John Reid. Select to enlarge.)
No hippie worth his or her salt lacks a soft spot for Richard Brautigan. His tragic death still haunts me years later.
I won’t try to explain why I love his prose and poetry — if you need a road map you won’t find it anyway. I’ll simply share this image of Brautigan and Lawrence Ferlinghetti from Robert Altman Photography and this poem from Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork.
Toward the Pleasures of
A Reconstituted Crow
Toward the pleasures of a reconstituted crow
I collect darkness within myself like the shadow
of a blind lighthouse.
(Another Poetry Month day, another dollar.)
When it comes to maximum results from an economy of language, few poets rival the Japanese haiku no renga master, Matsuo Bashō.
I was first introduced to the hokku form in high school in Okinawa. My teacher wove a story of the poet lying drunk on sake in the bottom of a boat on a lake, composing odes to the night sky and the full moon. To this day I can’t find any collaboration of what may well have been a fabrication, but I recall thinking that if poets could lie drunk in a boat, then they weren’t the effete, limp-wristed, frill-wearing artistes I imagined them to be. Lying drunk in a boat staring up at the night sky actually sounded like decent work if one could get it.
After the teacher had us write a few haiku, I thought it was pretty easy work, too.
This was before I understood what was going on inside the poems. Today I admire the simple genius of Bashō’s work. My own efforts are frustrated by it. Elegant simplicity is harder than it looks.
Maybe I need a boat, a lake, a night sky, and a bottle of sake.
Haiku
Scarecrow in the hillock
Paddy field—
How unaware! How useful.
—Matsuo Bashō
(Day seven in a month-long celebration of poetry.)
Carl Sandburg’s Complete Poems seems to be out of print. (One has to figure that if “rude, contemptuous, arrogant and subversive” Amazon.com doesn’t have it in stock, no one does. (Barnes & Noble is also out.))
It saddens me. Of all the poets I’ve read, Sandburg is most essentially American — not even Walt Whitman shares his love of common people or celebrates them with such candor and empathy.
He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry back in the day when the Pulitzer meant something, when journalism was a sacred craft inhabited by hard-drinking, chain-smoking reporters brought up as copy boys who got the facts straight before hammering them out as simple declarative sentences and not a profession populated by Ivy League assholes showing off their grasp of semiotics.
His work speaks to me in a way that few others do: I can spend hours poring over it and never grow weary. I get his images. He writes of common people in ordinary words that somehow become extraordinary when he strings them together.
Today’s entry in the poem-a-day for the month of April is a serenade for his wife.
Paula
Nothing else in this song—only your face.
Nothing else here—only your drinking, night-gray eyes.
The pier runs into the lake straight as a rifle barrel.
I stand on the pier and sing how I know you mornings.
It is not your eyes, your face, I remember.
It is not your dancing, race-horse feet.
It is something else I remember you for on the pier mornings.
Your hands are sweeter than nut-brown bread when you touch me.
Your shoulder brushes my arm—a south-west wind crosses the pier.
I forget your hands and your shoulder and I say again:
Nothing else in this song—only your face.
Nothing else here—only your drinking, night-gray eyes.
—Carl Sandburg
Three of Sandburg’s early books are available online at Bartleby.com. They’re well worth reading.
If reincarnation is inevitable and if I have to come back as a lower life form (because karma is a bitch and I haven’t done a bang-up job with this life), I prefer the climbing gorami (Anabas testudineus). (Video)
It seems the best of all possible worlds. (Of course, if they were also flying fish, it would be all the better.)
Feast -
I had forgotten what a feast for the eyes Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” is. Nearly every frame is gorgeous.
[video]
In my best dreams, I sit Lords Tennyson and Byron down at a dinner table together and let them go at one another about “what God and man is.” It would likely be a conversation worth hearing.
The Victorians fascinate and irritate me, Tennyson especially. This poem always makes me think of spring, partly because it’s the most apt time to pull a flower from a wall, “root and all,” and partly because the season inspires similar pondering.
‘Flower in the crannied wall’
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
(Another poetry month posting.)
A high school teacher once defined poetry to me as “the distillation of language down to its purest essence.” While a lot of other things from that time have slipped my mind, her definition remains with me. I’m not sure I fully agree with it, but there are times when poetry is exactly that. It’s the reason this poem by Langston Hughes has always intrigued me. I’ve seen this woman, yearned for her, wondered the same thing without as beautifully articulating it.
I also like the play on “grapes of wrath.”
Midnight Dancer
Wine-maiden
Of the jazz-tuned night,
Lips
Sweet as purple dew,
Breasts
Like the pillows of all sweet dreams,
Who crushed
The grapes of joy
And dripped their juice
On you?
(Another post in honor of poetry month. It was supposed to post yesterday, but something didn’t go as planned. Technology isn’t perfect.)
For further reading: Harlem Renaissance (PDF).
Apparently April is poetry month. Okay. I’ll bite. Though I’ve missed two days in ignorance, I’ll share a poem a day through the month of April. Favorites.
Yes, this Shakespearean sonnet is too often reproduced, but I love it still for its conclusion. Shakespeare predicts that as long as this poem survives and is read, his lover will live and her beauty will be remembered. He was right. She has endured more than four centuries.
Not bad for fourteen lines of iambic pentameter.
Sonnet XVIII
Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft’ is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
—William Shakespeare