Poems

How things work

Every time I try to write one
Some Thing waits with a cup
And I pour words into that cup
Words that are about that cup
And only for that cup and
Are the only ones who can make up that cup
fill it. the cup is a bubble waiting to be blown
It can only be as how you make it. A Process with tools like
Eyes that will take in,
Mouth sweat, words are my mind’s mouth sweat
Skin gets hair and tight then
pushing out words
until you find your moment Then.


Bus Rides

Tilt wrists, for fingers, to touch my shoulder but they can’t quite touch
my shoulder
Your arm is around me, hand loose, elbow on my shoulder head
On my other shoulder.
Your fingers still come at me.
Me, giggling cause your fingers cannot reach.
But please don’t stop trying.

Poetry Manifesto

is: nothing special
is: political
is: images
is: not better than you
is: not your forefather’s loose knit sweater of signifiers
is: is:
is: isn’t
is: a discussion
is: straight out of your mouth
is: wikipedia:
is: “loosely defined as a fundamental creative act using language.”
is: hip-hop out loud
is: without measure
is: cats and dogs, gerbils, but not rabbits
is: personal, radical
is: a house of memory
is: space
is: cause
is: equals
is: time
is: a mulberry tree with acid leaves
is: about your mamma
is: your face in the mirror
is: building words
is: a is: a is: a is: a
is: waiting for you on the corner
is: praying at the river for you
is: to reclaim your space
is: how to wait for your body when you know its gonna break one day
is: plastic
is: practice and back n’ forth
is: the letters but mostly not Z
is: like leather and lace
is: telling it like it is and like it ain’t
is: nine times out of ten fail
is: all about
is: the pleasure principle in order
is: a feminist epic
is: catering to your needs
is: like feeding a baby
is: when you need it you make it
is: is not just for you
is: more than words
is: combining the truth with imagination
is: too safe

Allpoets.com

Walt Whitman

Born:May 31, 1819 in West Hills Town of Huntington, Long Island
Died: March 26, 1892 in Camden New Jersey

Years Active:
1850 60s 70 80 90

Genre/ Movement
Transcendentalism and Realism
Realism was a movement that sought to portray the world in an objective and concept that became prevalent as the use of photography spread. The goal of Realism in art was to present the subject in an everyday manner, without interpretation or beatification, which can be seen as a direct opposition to the Romantic genre of the 18th and 19th century.

Transcendentalism
Was a concept that emerged in New England during the 19th century that has its roots in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Transcendentalists believed that the spiritual state of man transcends the physical and can only be realized by one's on intuition, that man is created good, with a an emphasis on individuality, nature, self reliance and the rejection of authority.

Example: "I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a
single object, and that no man ever can,
Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to
dart upon me and sting me, Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all...I mean tenderly by you and all,
I gather for myself and for this phantom looking down
Where we lead, and following me and mine."
Whitman in the this example from As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life pays tributes to the role of nature in Whitman's spirituality- his own personal understanding of what the divine is, as he examines the role of the sea as apart of his personal identity. Concluding in the beginning of the poem that his individual perception, like that of any one else's cannot be objective, Whitman fuses the ideals of Transcendentalism and Realism by admitting his perception and awareness of what around his due to his own interpretation, a realistic approach to the unknown, while still seeking his own truth.

Moods:
Spiritual:From all the standards hitherto publish'd, from the pleasures, profits, conformities,
Which too long I was offering to feed my soul,
Clear to me now standards not yet publish'd, clear to me that my soul,
That the soul of the man I speak for rejoices in comrades.

Intimate: "Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest."

Organic:"Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-
dazzling,
Give me juicy autumnal fruit ripe and read from the orchard,
Give me a field where the unmow'd grass grows..."

Reflective: "Me imperturbe, stand at ease in Nature,
Master of all or mistress of all, aplomb in the midst of irrational things...Me wherever my life is lived, O to be self-balanced for the con-
tingencies,
To confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do."

Yearning: " As Adam early in the morning,
Walking forth from the bower refresh'd with sleep,
Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,
Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,
Be not afraid of my body.

Similar Artists:
Henry David Thoreau *
Emily Dickinson*

Emily Dickinson, like Whitman wrote often about spirituality and nature, though her approaches were quite more literal and fixed on Christianity, gardens and death. Both Authors wrote in Free Verse and were deeply influenced by Emerson. Even though both poets wrote about similar subjects the role of their social lives, Whitman a traveler, Dickinson a recluse, led them to very different moods in their poetics.

Henry David Thoreau is another pupil of Emerson, Thoreau spent two years on Emerson's land writing Walden and Civil Disobedience. Although Thoreau wrote mostly prose both authors stressed the importance of being close to nature, the equality of men and questioning authority.

Influences:
Ralph Waldo Emerson*
George Sand*
Anne Gilchrist
George Sand, also known as Amandine Lucile Dudevant was a French Romantic author, who often wrote about sexuality and 'gender destinies" in her fiction. Dudevant who was also a baroness wrote under the pseudonym of George Sand. Dudevant dressed according to comfort, choosing men's clothes over her own and smoking despite public disapproval, a presentation that Whitman admired and later emulated. Whitman often referenced Dudevant's Conseulo as having a great effect on the way he wrote and viewed the world, an outlook that may of lead to Whitman's view of equality for both sexes. Additionally it has been said that the image of the carpenter poet from Leaves of Grass was taken directly from the Consuelo text.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an writer, philosopher and leader of the Transcendental movement. Whitman and Emerson often corresponded and exchanged their published work. Most notable was their correspondence about Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Emerson's enthusiasm help the popularity of his work and also pushed Whitman to publish another edition.

Followers:
Pablo Neruda*
William Carlos Williams
Bram Stoker
Allen Ginsberg
Jack Kerouac

Pablo Neruda, was a Chilean poet from the late 20th century. Neruda has famously said that Walt Whitman was his greatest poetic inspiration, even dedicating several poems to Whitman in his collection of Odes. Neruda, who is also known for his intensely emotional and powerful poems connived a sense truth and the nature of things. Parallel in its effect to Whitman's Work.


Biography:
Early in his career Whitman started out as a typist working for several publications and eventually began volunteer at a local hospital to care for injured soldiers during the American Civil War.
Whitman published his first work Leaves of Grass in 1855 with his own money. Leaves of Grass circulated a lot of controversy because of his discussion of sexuality and equality which was deemed overtly sexual and obscene. Despite this Whitman went on to gain much notoriety as a poet of the people, because of his ties to transcendentalism and realism, genres of writing that became some of the most influential schools of thought in American literature. Leaves of Grass was written by Whitman as an epic that explored urbanization of American that focused on a common American as opposed to a hero archetype.
Many scholars believed that Whitman may have been gay or bisexual, because some of his poems but it is unknown if it had any sexual relations with men. In addition to sexuality, Whitman also got a lot of flack because of his favor towards prohibition and his defense of all religions, in addition to gender equality.


Discography:
Leaves of Grass American Editions (1855), (1856), (1860), (1867), (1871-72), (1881-82), (1891-92)

Post humanously: November Boughs (1888)Democratic Vistas (1871)
Memoranda During the War (1875)
Specimen Days and Collect (1881)
Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose 1996


Works Consulted:
Walt Whitman an Enyclopedia By J. R. LeMaster, Donald D. Kummings, Wikipedia.com, pbs.org, poets.org, whitmanarchive.org, Leaves of Grass, Selected Poems of Walt Whitman

Allpoets.com

Alice Notley
Born:
November 8, 1945 in Bisbee, Arizona

Years Active:
1970 80 90 2000

Genre/Movement:
The New York School, was an Avant Garde artistic movement that took place in Lower East Side 1960s through the late 80s. Influenced by surrealism, modernism and abstract art (the poets) often used their poems as vehicles to explore the serious side of everyday life, often with a good dose of irony and sarcasim.

Example: "I'd said that the way my brother had died
made everything seem worthless; I'd shouted
at you that your essays on war were self-gratifying.
Oh yes, history. You said that I
should have seen his life as a speck of loss in the struggle,
immense and longterm, of an Asian nation,
a spark to balance against 20 Asian sparks –
how fucking comforting!
Perhaps you could die too, to help make enough
counter-balancing sparks?"

Notley in the example above, writes about a conversation that took place, the lines are fixed in a rhythm that is similar to dialogue, which tends to become abstract as the speaker begins to list the conversation. She also continuously uses sarcasms in this stanza to express her anger at the subject of the poem.

Moods:
confrontational:
"...I'm telling the truth. I'm going to tell it
anyone's: that never being what anyone thought
I never cared what anyone thought
as long as I could go home, and resume my work--am I
back in the door?"

cynical:“is it fate that women have been in such a fix for thousands of years?” “no, men did that.”“the sky has been selected it belongs to men who say what it is.”

epic:“she made a form” “in her mind” “an imaginary” “form” “to
settle” “in her arms where” “the baby” “had been” “We saw
her fi ery arms” “cradle air” “She cradled air” (“They take your
children” “away” “if you’re on fire”)

“In the air that” “she cradled” “it seemed to us there” “floated”
“a flower-like” “a red flower” “its petals” “curling flames”
“She cradled” “seemed to cradle” “the burning flower of”
“herself gone”
“her life” (“She saw” “whatever she saw, but what we saw”
“was that flower”)

rebellious:
...I may be making erotic art near the red telephone
that connects Ted to his mother dying of cancer
I cut out photos of nude women and place them on food signs
Chicken Pot Pie. Why--because I want to save
the women in the photos, so make them humor-filled or
truly connected to the fountainhead of sex as I imagine it...The women don't
approve the men do I ignore them but this is minor I want
to be there to describe the harmony between the fact
that I make these collages and write "Waltzing Matilda"
that and the red phone to Peg..."

realist:Is there a right and wrong poetry, one might
still ask as I patronize,
retrospectively, the Iowa style,
characterized, as I remember,
by the assumption of desperation
boredom behind two-story houses
divorce, incomes field, pigs,
getting into pants, well not really....

Influences:
Dorothy Miller Richardson
Dada
French surrealism
Edwin Denby
William Carlos Williams*
Faulkner
Robert Creely
Gertrude Stein*

* Both Poets, Gertude Stein and W.C.W. wrote to express their own voices by experimenting with free verse.

Like Stein, Notley writes from a feminist perspective and also employs a tactic called by Gertude Stein "‘repetition with difference’: which is the use of repeated phrases that evolve, through a series of minimalist alterations, away from sameness into difference," which is used throughout The Descent of Alette, Notley's First Feminist Epic. Additionally both poets have written about their experimentation with punctuation and grammar, in their work. Stein in Poetry and Grammar and Notley in the Poetics of Disobedience.

W.C.W. was apart of the modernist literary movement who wanted to create a new American form that used American speech and idioms that focused on common people and everyday occurrences. Although his influence can be seen in many of Notley's poems as well as other NYS, W.C.W. enjoyed form and the use of interplay within it, unlike Notley who is adamant in her distaste for rules and structure.

Similar Artists:
Anne Waldman
Barbara Guest
Frank O'Hara*
James Schuyler
Phillip Whalen
John Ashbery
Kenneth Koch
Ron Padgett
Ted Berrigan*
Bernadette Mayer

Alice married Ted Berrigan in 1972, living and working with him until his death in 1983, they worked together in the Poetry Project. Alice has also been quoted saying that they spent their time writing together in their home and raising their two children. Both poets wrote according to the NYS approach, using speech based language to describe the world around them.

Frank O' Hara was another contemporary of Alice's from the NYS, that she often referenced in her own poems, such as when she imagines that she borrows, O'Hara's seer sucker jacket that he borrowed from "Joe." In addition to referencing her friend, Notley writes in a manner that O'Hara's suggest in his Personism- tongue and cheek manifesto-to "just go with your nerve." Both artists seemed to have take pleasure in throwing out the rules of academia in favor for their own personal voices to shine through.

Followers:

Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles, studied under Notley in the Poetry Project Workshop at St. Mark's Church and often visited her and Ted at their house in Lower East Side, later becoming the artistic Director of The Poetry Project in the 80s. Although she is considered apart of the NYS second generation, Myles is more widely known as apart of the punk and art scene of Manhattans East Village. Again, Myles is also a poet who writes in speech based lines and stanzas, but chooses to write about the struggles of working class lesbians, engaging her readers with the the private through a style, like Notley that constantly changes but remains true to her subject.

Biography:

Alice Notley was born in November of 1945, in Bisbee Arizona. In 1967 she received her B.A. from Barnard College and in 1969 recovered her M.F.A. from the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. From the 1970s and into the early 90s Notley was a significant fixture of the second generation of the New York School, running workshops for The Poetry Project as a mentor and publishing 18 books of poetry. After the death of her first husband Ted Berrigan another New York School poet, Notley moved to Paris with her two children and later married British poet Douglas Oliver.
Like many of the poets from the New York School’s second generation Notley favored a quotidian approach to poetics, a style deeply influenced by Williams Carlos Williams, in which she structured her stanzas to mimic speech patterns as a way to emphasize the “epic in the everyday”.
Although Notley has always emphasized speech-oriented poetics, she distanced herself from the everyday epic of the NYS when she moved to Paris. She then began experimenting writing long feminist epics that explore female sexuality while trying to build the works of male literary artists to recognize a female voice in poetry. By writing about things such as the pregnant body, babies and other parts of daily her daily life that was never written by male voices. Notley in her own words continues to Disobey established writing practices, through juxtaposition, such as placing dialogue next to surrealistic images in the same line, and refusing to cater to her readership as she continues to explore new styles of writing that suites the subject of her poems.

Discography:

* 165 Meeting House Lane (1971)
* Phoebe Light (1973)
* Incidentals in the Day World (1973)
* For Frank O'Hara's Birthday (1976)
* Alice Ordered to Be Made (1976)
* A Diamond Necklace (1977)
* Songs for the Unborn Second Baby (1979)

1980's

* Dr. Williams' Heiresses (1980)
* When I Was Alive (1980)
* How Spring Comes (1980)
* Waltzing Matilda (1981)
* Tell Me Again (1982)
* Sorrento (1984)
* Margaret & Dusty (1985)
* Parts of a Wedding (1986)
* At Night the States (1988)
* From a Work in Progress (1988)

1990's

* Homer's Art (1990)
* To Say You (1993)
* Selected Poems of Alice Notley (1993)
* Close to Me and Closer...(The Language of Heaven) and Desamere (1995)
* The Descent of Alette (1996)
* Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) (winner of the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry)

2000's

* Disobedience (2001) (winner of the 2002 International Griffin Poetry Prize)
* From the Beginning (2004)
* Coming After (2005)
* Alma, or the Dead Women (2006)
* Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005 (2006) (winner of the 2007 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize)
* In the Pines (2007)

Works Consulted:

Wikepedia, poets.org,allmusic.com, poetryfondation.org, poetrysociety.org, thenation.com, Women, the New York School, And Other Abstractions by Maggie Nelson, Disobedience Speech by Alice Notley, Poetry and Grammar 1935 by Gertrude Stein, The American Poetry Review, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies-" An Especially Peculiar Undertaking': Alice Notley's Epic

sat poem

Unraveling

We found each other
in rhythm:
steadied faces resolve
neatly undressing desire
behind heavy lids
salacious things float–
Belly up, wet and ready.

Reverberations
catch up
with each other &
from then on
in to distance
I’ve decided
my wrists are yours to lean on
(& you can have whatever you like)
things float in around and between
Belly up, wet, ready.
I let the living come in.