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poem today : It Is a Living Coral, William Carlos Williams

By: ste!!a
20-02-2010
reading

a trou­ble

archaically fet­tered
to produce

E Pluribus Unum an
island

in the sea a Capi­tol
surmounted

by Armed Lib­erty—
painting

sculp­ture strad­dled by
a dome

eight mil­lion pounds
in weight

iron plates con­structed
to expand

and con­tract with
variations

of tem­per­a­ture
the folding

and unfold­ing of a lily.
And Congress

autho­rized and the
Commission

was entrusted was
entrusted!

a sculp­tured group
Mars

in Roman mail plac­ing
a wreath

of lau­rel on the brow
of Washington

Com­merce Min­erva
Thomas

Jef­fer­son John Han­cock
at

the table Mrs. Motte
presenting

Indian burn­ing arrows
to Generals

Mar­ion and Lee to fire
her mansion

and dis­lodge the British—
this scaleless

jum­ble is superb

and accu­rate in its
expression

of the thing they
would destroy—

Bap­tism of Poca–
hontas

with a lit­tle card
hanging

under it to tell
the persons

in the picture.

It climbs

it runs, it is Geo.
Shoup

of Idaho it wears
a beard

it fetches naked
Indian

women from a river
Trumbull

Var­num Hen­der­son
Frances

Willard’s corset is
absurd—

Banks White Colum­bus
stretched

in bed men felling trees

The Hon. Michael
C. Kerr

one­time Speaker of
the House

of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives
Perry

in a row­boat on Lake
Erie

chang­ing ships the
dead

among the wreck­age
sickly green

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poem today : Blizzard, William Carlos Williams

By: ste!!a
08-02-2010
reading

Snow:
years of anger fol­low­ing
hours that float idly down —
the bliz­zard
drifts its weight
deeper and deeper for three days
or sixty years, eh? Then
the sun! a clut­ter of
yel­low and blue flakes —
Hairy look­ing trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild soli­tude.
The man turns and there —
his soli­tary track stretched out
upon the world.

 

 

 

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James Joyce, the beauty of words

By: ste!!a
17-01-2010
reading

It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and head­stones, on the spears of the lit­tle gate, on the bar­ren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the uni­verse and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the liv­ing and the dead.

- the end of The Dead, by James Joyce

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poem today : turtle, kay ryan

By: ste!!a
02-01-2010
reading

Who would be a tur­tle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared hel­met,
She can ill afford the chances she must take
In row­ing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is grace­less, like drag­ging
A packing-case places, and almost any slope
Defeats her mod­est hopes. Even being prac­ti­cal,
She’s often stuck up to the axle on her way
To some­thing edi­ble. With every­thing opti­mal,
She skirts the ditch which would con­vert
Her shell into a serv­ing dish. She lives
Below luck-level, never imag­in­ing some lot­tery
Will change her load of pot­tery to wings.
Her only lev­ity is patience,
The sport of truly chas­tened things.

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poem today : In the Gallery of the Ordinary

By: ste!!a
07-12-2009
reading

In their excess, their blowsy dream­ing
and King Solomon-like tem­pers, the clouds
pos­sess the grandeur of eighteenth-century oils,

when a painter earned his pro­fes­sion
as an anatomist. Those artists of verdi­gris
and gam­boge, too gorged on joy, perhaps,

treated that blank pas­ture of the “heav­ens”
like some­thing that had lived.
Their crawly undo­ings remind us

of the mean curiosi­ties of sheep, the sea’s
half-remembered boil, or a few twisted bolls
of cotton—the morn­ing phosphorescent

or sun­set a dull, worn-out gilt.
The nights there were scum­bled with light.
How could we ever have taken them

for the absti­nence of art?

by William Logan

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poem today : true love, nate klug

By: ste!!a
02-12-2009
news, reading

Off rows of wind­shields
in the Amtrak lot
rain in sud­den
clumps like jacks. Parked cars
with peo­ple in them
await­ing peo­ple they imag­ine
hurtling through sub­urbs
of sil­ver woods
await­ing them. True
love needs inter­fer­ence,
a cer­tain bliz­zard dis­tance,
for the words to worm through.
Remem­ber Iowa?
August storms that would self-spark
as if our fights could trip
the finest wire beneath the side­walk.
And the sun­light, harder after.

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A feminist of the second wave.

By: ste!!a
28-11-2009
reading

I just fin­ished read­ing A Fem­i­nist Till I Die by Arshia Sat­tar
It is a strange thing to be old enough to remem­ber when there was a woman’s move­ment. Not lit­tle undu­la­tions but a wave that rose and washed down on my generation.

Read­ing the words of Arshia Sat­tar made my heart beat faster. It helped me te real­ize that I too will be a fem­i­nist till I die. How can I be any­thing else. When “many men want to believe that fem­i­nism has lived its life, that it’s had its day, that women really need to move on—either because we’ve got all we were ask­ing for or because we’re never really going to get it anyway.”

I am a prod­uct of the sec­ond wave.

What then of the third wave? Will it find sol­i­dar­ity with my gen­er­a­tion while remain­ing dynamic and respond­ing to new cir­cum­stances? I will hap­pily be swept up into the third wave just call on me. I will hear my sisters.

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Poem Today : In Memory of Radio

By: ste!!a
21-10-2009
reading

by Amiri Baraka

Who has ever stopped to think of the divin­ity of Lam­ont Cranston?
(Only jack Ker­ouac, that I know of: & me.
The rest of you prob­a­bly had on WCBS and Kate Smith,
Or some­thing equally unattractive.)

What can I say?
It is bet­ter to haved loved and lost
Than to put linoleum in your liv­ing rooms?

Am I a sage or some­thing?
Mandrake’s hyp­notic ges­ture of the week?
(Remem­ber, I do not have the heal­ing pow­ers of Oral Roberts…
I can­not, like F. J. Sheen, tell you how to get saved & rich!
I can­not even order you to the gascham­ber satori like Hitler or Goddy Knight)

& love is an evil word.
Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean?
An evol word. & besides
who under­stands it?
I cer­tainly wouldn’t like to go out on that kind of limb.

Sat­ur­day morn­ings we lis­tened to the Red Lantern & his under­sea folk.
At 11, Let’s Pre­tend
& we did
& I, the poet, still do. Thank God!

What was it he used to say (after the trans­for­ma­tion when he was safe
& invis­i­ble & the unbe­liev­ers couldn’t throw stones?) “Heh, heh, heh.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.”

O, yes he does
O, yes he does
An evil word it is,
This Love.

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Poem Today : Fever 103°

By: ste!!a
16-10-2009
reading

Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple

Tongues of dull, fat Cer­berus
Who wheezes at the gate. Inca­pable
Of lick­ing clean

The aguey ten­don, the sin, the sin.
The tin­der cries.
The indeli­ble smell

Of a snuffed can­dle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright

One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel,
Such yel­low sullen smokes
Make their own ele­ment. They will not rise,

But trun­dle round the globe
Chok­ing the aged and the meek,
The weak

Hot­house baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hang­ing its hang­ing gar­den in the air,

Dev­il­ish leop­ard!
Radi­a­tion turned it white
And killed it in an hour.

Greas­ing the bod­ies of adul­ter­ers
Like Hiroshima ash and eat­ing in.
The sin. The sin.

Dar­ling, all night
I have been flick­er­ing, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.

Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.

I am too pure for you or any­one.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern——

My head a moon
Of Japan­ese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infi­nitely del­i­cate and infi­nitely expensive.

Does not my heat astound you! And my light!
All by myself I am a huge camel­lia
Glow­ing and com­ing and going, flush on flush.

I think I am going up,
I think I may rise——
The beads of hot metal fly, and I love, I

Am a pure acety­lene
Vir­gin
Attended by roses,

By kisses, by cheru­bim,
By what­ever these pink things mean!
Not you, nor him

Nor him, nor him
(My selves dis­solv­ing, old whore pet­ti­coats)——
To Par­adise.
Sylvia Plath, “Fever 103°” from The Col­lected Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes. Copy­right © 1966 and renewed 1994 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted with the per­mis­sion of Harper­Collins Pub­lish­ers, Inc.

Source: Poetry (August 1963).

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Saturn Equinox 2009

By: ste!!a
11-08-2009
news, reading

saturn rings picture

August 11, 2009—A mys­tery object that punched through one of Sat­urn’s thin outer rings cre­ated a glit­ter­ing spray of ice crys­tals and pulled some mate­r­ial along in its wake, as seen in this rare image recently released by NASA’s Cassini orbiter.

It’s believed that the object is a moon­let. yes a lit­tle moon. There are some 60 moon­lets around Sat­urn. Ok so this is what hap­pens to make Sat­urn disappear:

“When­ever equinox occurs on Sat­urn, sun­light will hit Saturn’s thin rings, the ring plane, edge-on,” said Spilker.“The light reflect­ing off this extremely nar­row band is so small that for all intents and pur­poses the rings sim­ply vanish.”

Saturn’s rings are 200,000 miles wide, but amaz­ingly are only about 30 feet thick.

see :
Sci­ence Daily
Cassini Equinox Mission

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