Strategy Response, Week 11

One technique that Jillian Wiese uses throughout her collection is the act of naming and what is also implicit with naming—which is claiming. In “Below Water” the speaker notices “you staring at the railroad tracks / along my spine, and I thought / Mine, mine.” In “Notes on the Body (2)” the speaker states that “they call me patient”—in “Body as Harbor” the speaker points out “here is a painting of a harbor, / I will call you Captain, there is / your ship”—in “The Body in Pain” we see “This is the spine )” and then this is not only a declaration of naming—this is the spine—but there is an object given to become a embodiment of the spine in text form. The whole collection, of course, acts as an embodiment to fill the physical lack the speaker possesses as an amputee. And it is not a revelation to claim that a poet’s job to name, yet, this collection seems to want to be reclaiming or claiming more than words. What I am still trying to connect in my own mind as reader and as practicing poet is how the collection goes beyond the sheer act of naming and what is being created out of absence and how that is being done textually. What complicates this discovery for me seems to be the element of gender and the powers of gender that are also at play. In particular, “Abscission” bestows upon the male “you” in the poem the act of naming: “Your favorite post-coital pastime / is nicknaming my scars.” Here, the speaker seems to give back to the male the historical and/or Biblical role of namer and relinquishes her authoritative position. What I think enables the speaker to regain power, however, is then the males throughout throughout the collection fall into the feminine position of questioning and generating cyclical states of being: Do you sleep with it on? Do you bathe with it on? Will you take it off in front of me? Is it all right if I touch it? (“The Old Questions”) Just like our previous discussions on the rejection of the traditional, patriarchal linear-ness of poetry by Estes and Fagan, we engage here with another role reversal and possible rejection with Weise being the namer. Even after several reads of this collection I am still trying to parse my way through what is going on. I feel that is maybe because it is not textual apparent as say Fagan or Estes—but none the less still as equally demanding of our attention.

Free Entry 2, Week 11

Cow Mysticism

The great philosophers of this world eat
green tomatoes and graze among the dormant
orange groves. I'm on philosopher watch.
Day three: no such luck. The fallen oranges
haven't been touched by a tongue in days.
The sandy grass begs for hooves
to trample wisdom into their blades,
to postulate the coming of water,
or the clumsy hand that drops a cigarette
to end it all. I want to be level
with the nostrils of wisdom.
To ask the rotating chew if having four feet
is better than two. If a tail is better
than this sack of hair on my head
or if this talking world means more
than a grazing one. I'm on philosopher watch.
So far not even a bell, not even a rustle.

Free Entry 1, Week 11

The lung of Cuba
resembles so much the explosion
of sand when lightning strikes.
How this is possible
is only known by true Cubans,
they ones who stood
on street corners when missiles
threatened to ruin dinner.
The brackish wheels of the 1950s
roadster, now used as a taxi,
tremble with the quake of sand.
A young boy, never having seen
lightning before, emits a flooding
of tears down his sun-blistered cheeks.
Just lightning, his father exhales,
surrendering an answer
as brackish as the wheels of the roadster.
The boy breathes in the burning air
and gets a lungful of glass, or what would be
glass had the storm only struck a little
harder. Later that night,
at dinner, the boy asked his father
when the sunshine would stop,
when sand would become the only way to see.
Words blistered inside the father's mouth,
fighting departure from his lips.
Cuba will never be without
sunshine, he said, we ride out our days
as lungs in each other's chest.
You in mine and i in your's.
This will be possible, but only known by us.

Improv 2, Week 11

Abscission
-Jillian Weise

Your favorite post-coital position
is nicknaming my scars.
The name for the railroad track
along my back--Engine.

The dots on my wrists from IVs
Spot. These are not-me, the not-leg
beside the bed for you to trip over
like the beautiful word: abscission,

to cut off, in botany, to shed leaves.
Medical terms must communicate
clearly, I tell you, but that doesn't stop
you from asking what it feels like

when your hand is here, now here
over here. I think of the wives
of the twenty thousand masons
who raised the Taj Mahal. And how,

when it was finished, the emperor
ordered a mass amputation of thumbs
so the craftsmen could never build
a more perfect mausoleum. Did their

wives ask question while playing
with the remaining fingers of their
husbands' hands? Did they ask, Can
you feel my hand here? How about now?


-------------------------------------------------------------------------

And I don’t stop you from asking why I exit
the room directly after sex to shine your clocks.
Nor do I require you to ring me after five days
in which we lay on my grandmother’s quilt,

naked except for socks and my tiger’s eye necklace.
I trust in the shape of your mouth as you formulate
words that sound like stay, eyelids, peeled peaches.
We give into this clockworked habit of apologies

when it comes to departures but I pale at the hard luck
of settling. I arouse in you myself and word of mouth.
What remains as whispers is everything you find ugly
about me, but you are drunk on my body so we part

post-coitally clean as an abscission. Nothing is clean.
We learn that from our mothers and what we also learn
is that you should never over-stay your welcome.
I’m running out of polish and you are running out

of clocks. I’ve buffed the two in the dinning room
eight times this week. They are starting to know my hands
as well as you do and that I always wink when I’m through.
Let me tell you that by my birthday I’ll be gone
and you’ll have to peel peaches with somebody new.

Improv 1, Week 11

Introductions
-Jillian Weise

After we're introduced ourselves
with gin and tonic and jazz,
a woman asks to read our palms.
We decide that we are worth
at least one night together/

In the bed without sheets,
the room with blank walls
and cobwebbed windows, a green
light bulb shines, reminds you
of the ocean.

You tell me about your house
catching fire, your parents dying
while you gambled in Las Vegas.
I tell you about airport alarms set off
by metal rods in my back.

You trace the scar along me spine
and I imagine what it must feel like.
We determine the arrangement of parts,
hip bones and shoulders, your Adam's
apple to my nose.

We decide all of this without speaking.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


We meet like two anatomy charts
rubbing together, wedged between
the introduction is our thighs.
In the bed of my backseat we stumble
over buttons and regrets of current
location. Packed in the far corner

of the church lot, the street lamp
fails to reach us in our mission.
There must be a punishment for this—
for this moment when you watch me
tug out my tampon and then I smile

at your eyes as they watch my hands.
I’m convinced this moment will be
goose-fleshed, robbed of cinematography,
but this is better than any movie.
We ration our limbs, verb each other,

hope the cops don’t cruise by.
You crack the window to let the night
in and cover us like sheets. This all reminds
me of where we are not. That somewhere
outside the car, next to a puddle, is my tampon.

So this is love, this is how we meet.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 11

"God wants you to name a baby after him."
--Baby name book

"When you're in love the whole world is Welsh"

"Break hearts with liquid nitrogen."

"The art of turtle stacking."
--www.buzzfeed.com

"Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines."
--Steven Wright

Free Entry 2, Week 10

Let’s bury the hammer and nail the steel
Door to pratice our balance. Once the pond
overflows the dam we can build a new.
We can sling and lug wood like we were built
for hard labor, though I really rather tea time
or paint-by-number a felt unicorn, but only use
aqua. Florida uses aqua to line the floor of pools.
I know this because I’ve seen them all with my toes.
Once a team of men built a door in the bottom
of a pool. They tired to hammer and nail the door
without removing the water. I waved to them
from above the surface. Turns out they were drowning.
So when take the last bit of aqua to the hoof
of my horse I think of the men nailing the bottom.

Free Entry 1. Week 10

Think of Herb Alpert playing 3 O’clock Jump
on a Sunday in your backyard
while your father mows the lawn.
How much would he have to gleam
pressure to his his lips to overcome
the loud, twirling blade of your father’s
weekend ritual? Your father primming
the bulb as Herb prims his brass.
The weekends have morphed into lawnmowers,
and the mailboxes curb us
with their electric bills.
Praise the bottles of cheap beer,
for there’s too many hands.
And by that I mean there’s not enough
watches—or at least Herb doesn’t have one,
because for him its always 3 o’clock.
My father once tried to brew his own ale.
He called it Tijuana Brass,
and drank it as he mowed the lawn.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 10

"Segovia Castle, located in an ancient town of Segovia in central Spain, started off as an Arab fort in the 12th century. Its unique shape of the bow of a ship makes the fortress one of the most distinctive castles in the country. In the Middle Ages Alcazar was a key fortress in the defense of the country. Apparently, it was a source of inspiration for many of the castles produced by Walt Disney."

"Remembering Where People Get Their News"
--Columbia Journalism Review

"The armature: the body of the bird is a straight tube attached to two bulbs, approximately the same size, one at either end. The tube flows into the upper bulb, like the neck of a funnel, and extends almost to the bottom of the lower bulb, like the straw in a lemonade."
--What is a Dippy Bird, and how is it used?
www.math.ucr.edu

"The airspace above the mine is closed for helicopters because of a few incidents in which they were sucked in by the downward air flow."
--fact on the Mir Diamond Mine in Mirny, Russia

"I thought it better -- at the expense of truth -- to put into his mouth language familiar to the domestic circle."
--W. Somerset Maugham on minced oaths

Strategy Response, Week 10

What strikes me in Kathy Fagan’s collection Lip as a venue for further exploration is not just word play, but form/structure play. The entire collection ranges in form from the prose poem, “Constant Craving,” to “Butter” which contains only one period at the end and no other punctuation, to “Progressive Lenses” which can be read as almost a list of commands in stanzas of varying lengths. What also proves interesting is that from time to time Fagan’s titles, if we are supposed to refer to them as such, are quotes taken from singers, authors, poets, the Bible, and so on. When looking at the poem that begins “In lieu of the latkes” that itself begins with the “title”—an Eartha Kitt quote: “There’s just one thing: a ring. I don’t mean on the phone.”—a survey of this collection starts to take the argument that we presented in class last week with Angie Estes’ Tryst—a departure from the traditional, patriarchal standards in poetic form and a forge in a feminine realm of non-linear, an absence of terminal punctuation, and an almost circular, disorientating flow of words in how they are physically placed on the page. Yet, Fagan plays with the classic form of the pantoum with poems such as, “Postmodern Penelope at Her Loom Pantoum,” “Pontoon Pantoum #505,” “Saloon Pantoum,” “Womb to Tomb Pantoum,” and “Go to Your Room, Pantoum.” In each of these poems, however, she tweaks the traditional form of having the second and fourth lines of each quatrain repeat in the first and third lines of the next. At times Fagan will keep the line exactly as it is and others she will keep on a common word or rearrange the phrase with the same words from the previous lines. Perhaps this slight mocking—if that is in fact the correct word for this particular poetic action—also highlights the mocking of the content and titles. Looking specifically at “Saloon Pantoum” Fagan uses the traditional pantoum form as a venue to tell a dirty joke, or just a plain bad joke. There is a definite mixing of high and low art here. The poem’s framing lines: “Tell if you’ve heard this one before” and “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before” also plays on the possible archaicness of patriarchal poetic traditions. The question becomes then with Fagan’s collection is what is purpose of calling attention to conventional art forms only to manipulate their structure? Not just with the pantoum, but extending as a metaphor to the entire collection?

Improv 2, Week 10

Kathy Fagan

Darling,

you slayed
in your starling
suit at midnight,

the only goldfish
in the castle.
How aqueous backyards

were back then,
how silver the
streets, like a

bevel of thermometer
still slick with
your tongue. You

bet you were
fluent in exhale.
You were just that

gone.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You bloomed,
for the third year,
in your slick October

suit. Your teeth
purpled like a drunk’s
nose from the wine.

We were peacocks
then, or were we
more lions? No.

Lions travel in prides.
Bet you don’t
remember when

I spilled wine
on the stars. Never
did I tell a lie,

but this one is true.

Improv 1, Week 10

Go To Your Room, Pantoum
--Kathy Fagan

My room is in Angers, France.
A rind grows around it.
A bear sleeps under the window.
My room is in Grandioser, Illinois,

The painted Desert, Arizona,
Big Savage Mountain, USA.
I have a runaway truck ramp
In that room, I have plenty

Of local color. My room is in
Caliban, Mass., Indigo, Japan,
Aporcrypha, OK. Sundays we grill
Panhandle-Hellenic, and feel the residual

Blues. Xerox the corn & you'll
Find us. Cut out the pictures of fog.
You won't get a proper pantoum
In my room, but I'll paint you

A portrait of lonely from memory:
A nest of red bees are the baby
Mice, a roof made of birds
Is the Steller's Jay laughing.

My room's on the corner of Castle
& Liberty, Wormwood & 116th.
You've seen the signs everywhere.
My room is in Angers, France.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

My daybed is five acre cornfield, not golden
but yellow. Sheets move like a forbidden lover
across a creaky floor board with popping knee.
My pillows huddle as mice, though not grey

But sequenced in ruffles of varying blues.
Some even have threads that poke
to make whiskers. Cat naps—I have plenty.
I curl the sheets into chocolate swirls

that never mix in my mug. Never understanding
500-count means that somewhere in India
a worm spun its legs for my domesticity.
I cut out the possibility of my legs tangling

in the carpet as I trek gloss eyed for tap water.
I make noises like people trying to not make noises.
You know the sounds: the laugh door hinges offer,
the rude scoff of toe on wooden chair, the flutter

of terrycloth robe as it cascades from the chair’s back.
Only in silence the robe sounds like a dying bird
crashing to a sidewalk. In India, families sleep
in the dirt, similar to flowerbeds. Tunneling as mice

would to find warm under a layer of earth.
Heavy in bird heat, if birds go into heat, the dirt
bows under the body weight of India’s children.
All spun in the sounds of silence, quiet as silk corn husks.

Strategy Response, Week 9

In Angie’s Estes “Wrap in Parchment and Also Pink Paper” I became particularly interested in the permanence of memory as it is passes through manifestations of text or language. The first stanza gives us the “first images of the human face” as it was “carved on limestone / slabs” (lines 3-4). The faces are anonymous, yet the exist just the same in the limestone—as if upon examination today we would see these peoples as they were in the third millennium B.C. There stands the idea of permanence for this particular group of peoples through a textual representation of their appearance on the stones slabs. What I find jarring in relation to the remainder of the poem is the second stanza allusions to silence—“faces with no ears or / mouth—as if, in the place they were / headed, they’d have no desire / to speak or hear, never need to / eat” (6-10). Silence comes back into the poem with the figure of Mina Pachter, a woman who starved to death in a concentration camp; and who, ultimately, was physically silenced. Just like the faces in limestone, Pachter and the other women from Terezin became victims of extinction and the limestone faces eerily function as a symbol of future fate for the women of the camp. Just like the representations of the humans on the stone slabs the women also have created a text of themselves to exist in the permanence of memory. Through the language of familial recipes Patcher creates a cookbook that can continue as a representation of a physical embodiment of her after death. There is legacy in language/text and that is especially true in this poem; and also extends to the overarching collection. One question I have for this piece is how does Estes make that turn from the third millennium B.C. to the shaded allusions to holocaust? Is it in the silence of “faces with no ears or / mouth” with “no desire / to speak or hear, never need / to eat”? What is this text saying about both social and poetic traditions? The text speaks to other poets/poems we have covered this semester—Matejka and Meeks mainly come to mind with strategy and the theme of allusion; but also Trethewey and a more maternal link through Estes’ figure of Pachter who passes down her recipe, her textual representation, and her memory of existence through language.

Free Entry 2, Week 9

Draft 3--Formally "We're All Getting Somewhere"

Jackknife

Today, I unfurl like the hem
of your favorite sweater, I forget

you don't care, like when your mother plowed
into the mailbox with her Plymouth.

A torrent of letters cascaded her hood,
like chickens flocking a trough.

I'm tired of flagging you down, reminding
you elms don’t flourish in deserts,

however deep their roots plunge,
water won’t congregate in sand.

The best jackknife I ever saw was on I-85:
hundreds of chickens skidded

the pavement, traffic jammed for miles.
It was like a pillow factory exploding.

I embroidered a pillow once with the inscription:
Please wipe your feet here. I wish I could

tighten the bolts of my four speed Huffy,
comb the streamers with my fingers. Maybe I will

scrap the bike for your birthday, become lone walkers
together. Pedaling uphill is rough

on my ulcer anyway. They say George Hincapie once biked
from Portugal to Austria in three days,

he said it was so easy it was like pedaling
in his sleep. In my sleep the desert was awash

in those feathers, all the lightness,
that airiness, floating down to the ground.

You, however, were never one for travel.

Free Entry 1, Week 9

Draft 2—Formally “Three Cows in a Pick-up"

Georgia O’Keefe in a Truck Stop

I am qualified for warning: which is to say
my clichés aren’t original. In New Mexico,
they put warnings down like rabid coyotes.
Those free-wheeling vagrants that prowl
the ditches for road kill like drunks digging
in payphones for forgotten quarters. Tuesday,

cactus pollination reduced monoxide emissions
to dwarf-sized complaints. Keyholes, really.
If the mayor of San Juan gave Georgia O'Keefe
a key to the city would she key the town dealership?
Call her vandalism a postage stamp? The gift of the forgotten
is that they force remembrance. I saw her:
Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills,
once at a truck stop, next to a shot glass

with three cows in a pick-up, and a pig at the wheel.
Both collector’s items. Incapable in the art of driving,
I once heard that O’Keefe bought a Model-A
right off the line. Secondary green like mildew
flowering in the split of the ram’s skull.
I drive without warning, she said, It’s key
to sand myself in landscape, to hound.
I would hock my teeth for all those dead coyotes.

Improv 2, Week 9

Last Words
-Angie Estes

Let us cross over
the river and sit in the shade
of the trees. Pardonnez-moi, Monsiuer,
wait 'til I have finished
my problem. It's been a long time
since I've had champagne. Too late
for fruit, too soon for
flowers: hold the cross
high so I may see it through
the flames. Get my swan costume
ready. I am about to--or I am
going to die--die: either expression
is used. Who is it? Ah, Luisa, you
always arrive just as I am
leaving. Sweet Rosabel, I leave you
the truth: if you can read this,
you've come too close. L.
is doing the rhododendrons,
the boat is going down, and I'm going
into the bathroom to read. More
light. Am I dying
or is this my birthday? I should have
drunk more champagne. Either
that wallpaper goes or
I go. What is the answer?
Very well, then, what
is the question? Oh why
does it take so long
to come?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Let us mingle over the warble
Of wallpaper that hangs in my aunt
Louisa’s dining room and drink the petals
of rhododendrons in our tea.
Funny how you have honored the petals
Like champagne, how you crush
The leaves over the rim of the cup
like a ship on its maiden voyage.
It’s always your lipstick that I remember
You by, biting the white of the cup
Just beyond your fingers . And after
I wash my hands, looking forward to leaving
The lace of the afternoon and I find
A tube of lipstick bathing in the outline
Of Aunt Louisa’s china hutch. I twist
Until you poke up, all curious
Like a baby pig and I run your wax
Over my lips. This is our tea time.
This is you in a spring-time shade,
Champagne. Here in my hands,
very well and pink , costumed
to the very crook of a promise.

Improv 1, Week 9

Gloss
-Angie Estes

My mother said that Uncle Fred had a purple
heart, the right side of his body
blown off in Italy in World War II,
and I saw reddish blue figs
dropping from the hole
in his chest, the violent litter
of the jacaranda, heard the sentence
buckle, unbuckle like a belt
before opening the way
a feed sack opens all
at once when the string is pulled
in just the right place;

--------------------------------------------------------------------------


When I was young my grandfather threatened to sell me
to the gypsies. The sale would be final,
he said, no returns. Forced to their caravan,
made to wear rags and chains.
Every broken lamp or carpet stain
summoned his threat.
Every fib that floundered
past teeth meant a life of dirt, scrubbing
wagon wheels, or polishing stolen silver.
Once I dropped a jar of beets
on the white carpet of my grandmother’s kitchen.
All at once I saw my life as gone.
A blackboard in its finite blackness.
And after the boat ride
to France comes dismantle as I’m stripped
of my sweater and given a hand sewn smock,
fashioned miss-matched
pieces of fabric resembling
my grandmother’s quilt.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 9

"In Tom Piper’s suggestive set, the island is a circle of white sand in the middle of a light-blue stage floor, a space that stands out against the behemoth terra-cotta back wall onto which the actors’ long shadows are projected like gargantuan ghosts."
-John Lahr, Big Magic, The New Yorker

"A sculpture's instruments find second homes."
-tagline for article, Tools, The New Yorker


"By 1899, Tesla was able to power 200 light bulbs using one electric motor 26 miles away."
-everythingishistory.com

"The quantum wave can split in two and recombine, like ripples flowing around a stump in a pond."
-sciencemag.org

"It seems like a hell of a time for us to smile and warble: "Brothers!" It is a rather flabby battle cry."
-Dr. Seuss