David Bartone
The Prince’s Downfall Involved Li Po in a Second Exile
The trouble with being good at courting patrons.
The prince’s downfall involved Li Po in a second exile, though they spoke of it an excursion.
…
The fall has now entered fog fall as a way to help Li Po understand himself, which he accepts.
He’ll be back by Indian summer.
…
Exile: drink, write nothing until Indian summer.
The energy of his thighs enough to carry him.
…
Attention wolf fans:
Indian summer has already garnered tons of praise and will arrive just in time for Halloween.
…
It has been thus far a four-colored fall.
Kitchen window light. Stove light. Sink light. Lamp.
…
Spry sprung into a full force of passion, lovers obey this time of year approaching with their ears to the leaf crinkle.
Old lovers leave-taking in old friends.
…
To see through the thick now, sense of a band playing down low over the hill.
This, the prince’s downfall: always sensing down low over the hill.
An international literary journal from 1984 to 2018, Verse now administers the Tomaž Šalamun Prize.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
NEW! 2 poems by Jesse Nissim
Jesse Nissim
Your city with love on the benches
Where the harbor shrinks back
from its edge
Thousands of dead fish
take a nap
in the library.
Smell the harbor’s ordinary
objects, trusting us, with
all that stuff in here.
If you string them
together, will these fragments form
a recognizable mirror?
If you trust in
the frictionless
narrative.
We’re all the same
down to the lawn ornaments
Christmas & Hanukkah
black and white and even
down to the lesbians.
We coordinate mailboxes in taupe
our names curled in gold.
All the same font.
Yellow stakes flag the yard’s perimeter
indicating our pests
Yes, every neighborhood has pests
even here
Where we can benefit from
the foul smell
that deadens the wonderful.
Someday
The light presses down
imitating summer
and need presses down
imitating a fire-escape
and want falls empty
unloved and alone
and bushes flop like
need imitating belief and
the church is a true
empty head alone imitating
an oven dying.
They need never escape.
Some of them like stones
sleeping under firelight.
The spying dawn
alone is light
pressing in
upon the fire escape.
I was alone and unloved light.
I was as hot as a church.
I was the dying swan. For a long time
I could not escape the fire of that swan
and little girls’ who believed in it’s existence.
The girls pressed down instead of falling
while I was imitating a stone.
When I escaped from falling. I escaped from my heart.
In my head, I was need, belief, and truth.
My head was a peculiar bush.
It flopped in an empty oven.
This poem is constructed almost entirely of lines- randomly taken and freely scrambled- from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, Ed. Donald Allen.
i want someday / to have a fire-escape (471)
this would mean, i think, that summer need never come (471)
and snow falls down upon / the streets of our peculiar hearts
the Seine believed it to be true / that i was unloved and alone (473)
the light presses down / in an empty head the trees / and bushes flop like / a little girl imitating / The Dying Swan the stone / is hot the church is a / Russian oven... (475)
Your city with love on the benches
Where the harbor shrinks back
from its edge
Thousands of dead fish
take a nap
in the library.
Smell the harbor’s ordinary
objects, trusting us, with
all that stuff in here.
If you string them
together, will these fragments form
a recognizable mirror?
If you trust in
the frictionless
narrative.
We’re all the same
down to the lawn ornaments
Christmas & Hanukkah
black and white and even
down to the lesbians.
We coordinate mailboxes in taupe
our names curled in gold.
All the same font.
Yellow stakes flag the yard’s perimeter
indicating our pests
Yes, every neighborhood has pests
even here
Where we can benefit from
the foul smell
that deadens the wonderful.
Someday
The light presses down
imitating summer
and need presses down
imitating a fire-escape
and want falls empty
unloved and alone
and bushes flop like
need imitating belief and
the church is a true
empty head alone imitating
an oven dying.
They need never escape.
Some of them like stones
sleeping under firelight.
The spying dawn
alone is light
pressing in
upon the fire escape.
I was alone and unloved light.
I was as hot as a church.
I was the dying swan. For a long time
I could not escape the fire of that swan
and little girls’ who believed in it’s existence.
The girls pressed down instead of falling
while I was imitating a stone.
When I escaped from falling. I escaped from my heart.
In my head, I was need, belief, and truth.
My head was a peculiar bush.
It flopped in an empty oven.
This poem is constructed almost entirely of lines- randomly taken and freely scrambled- from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, Ed. Donald Allen.
i want someday / to have a fire-escape (471)
this would mean, i think, that summer need never come (471)
and snow falls down upon / the streets of our peculiar hearts
the Seine believed it to be true / that i was unloved and alone (473)
the light presses down / in an empty head the trees / and bushes flop like / a little girl imitating / The Dying Swan the stone / is hot the church is a / Russian oven... (475)
Friday, June 10, 2011
NEW! David Bartone
David Bartone
Beekeeping and Hearth-cooking
Consider what Thoreau proposes:
“There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance, is a very slight interference. It is like directing the sunbeams. All nations, from the remotest antiquity, have thus fingered nature. There are Hymettus and Hybla, and how many bee-renowned spots beside! There is nothing gross in the idea of these little herds—their hum like the faintest low of kine in the meads. A pleasant reviewer has lately reminded us that in some places they are led out to pasture where the flowers are most abundant. ‘Columella tells us,’ says he, ‘that the inhabitants of Arabia sent their hives into Attica to benefit by the later-blowing flowers.’ Annually are the hives, in immense pyramids, carried up the Nile in boats, and suffered to float slowly down the stream by night, resting by day, as the flowers put forth along the banks; and they determine the richness of any locality, and so the profitableness of delay, by the sinking of the boat in the water. We are told, by the same reviewer, of a man in Germany, whose bees yielded more honey than those of his neighbors, with no apparent advantage; but at length he informed them, that he had turned his hives one degree more to the east, and so his bees, having two hours the start in the morning, got the first sip of honey. True, there is treachery and selfishness behind all this, but these things suggest to the poetic mind what might be done.”
…
Consider a recipe from The American Frugal Housewife.
A task to divest oneself then from worldly gods.
On election day, eat election bread.
…
During the Q&A portion with experts on Lydia Maria Child, an audience member tries to sell one of the speakers a $125 library licensed video on Lydia Maria Child, and as though I could be a community college professor for the rest of my life, long long past retirement age, a minor tangle begins up in me, that I must understand as a certain dying of youthful ambition—the sentiment I could write anything, not gone but going.
…
The Child’s didn’t have any children, were abolitionists.
They were poor, sugar beet farmers for a time.
He took up the last dollars on a ship ticket to France to learn how to raise sugar beets in central Massachusetts. She remained to raise the sugar beets in central Massachusetts.
The abolitionist movement had come this far: beets not cane then in the North.
…
Later in a barroom the kingship is abandoned.
…
Today now all this time passes.
…
Today now as ever.
…
The sum of exiles, greater than Christ and the meek—the mind making Emily Dickinson of the Old Testament.
…
Not wanting to leave myself behind on any worried walk inward, I decide to step outside of myself for a few days.
I read six poems in the New York Times, six poems to mark the end of day-light savings.
What the Pulitzer Prize winners have to say.
The couch in the basement.
Beekeeping and Hearth-cooking
Consider what Thoreau proposes:
“There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance, is a very slight interference. It is like directing the sunbeams. All nations, from the remotest antiquity, have thus fingered nature. There are Hymettus and Hybla, and how many bee-renowned spots beside! There is nothing gross in the idea of these little herds—their hum like the faintest low of kine in the meads. A pleasant reviewer has lately reminded us that in some places they are led out to pasture where the flowers are most abundant. ‘Columella tells us,’ says he, ‘that the inhabitants of Arabia sent their hives into Attica to benefit by the later-blowing flowers.’ Annually are the hives, in immense pyramids, carried up the Nile in boats, and suffered to float slowly down the stream by night, resting by day, as the flowers put forth along the banks; and they determine the richness of any locality, and so the profitableness of delay, by the sinking of the boat in the water. We are told, by the same reviewer, of a man in Germany, whose bees yielded more honey than those of his neighbors, with no apparent advantage; but at length he informed them, that he had turned his hives one degree more to the east, and so his bees, having two hours the start in the morning, got the first sip of honey. True, there is treachery and selfishness behind all this, but these things suggest to the poetic mind what might be done.”
…
Consider a recipe from The American Frugal Housewife.
A task to divest oneself then from worldly gods.
On election day, eat election bread.
…
During the Q&A portion with experts on Lydia Maria Child, an audience member tries to sell one of the speakers a $125 library licensed video on Lydia Maria Child, and as though I could be a community college professor for the rest of my life, long long past retirement age, a minor tangle begins up in me, that I must understand as a certain dying of youthful ambition—the sentiment I could write anything, not gone but going.
…
The Child’s didn’t have any children, were abolitionists.
They were poor, sugar beet farmers for a time.
He took up the last dollars on a ship ticket to France to learn how to raise sugar beets in central Massachusetts. She remained to raise the sugar beets in central Massachusetts.
The abolitionist movement had come this far: beets not cane then in the North.
…
Later in a barroom the kingship is abandoned.
…
Today now all this time passes.
…
Today now as ever.
…
The sum of exiles, greater than Christ and the meek—the mind making Emily Dickinson of the Old Testament.
…
Not wanting to leave myself behind on any worried walk inward, I decide to step outside of myself for a few days.
I read six poems in the New York Times, six poems to mark the end of day-light savings.
What the Pulitzer Prize winners have to say.
The couch in the basement.
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