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.