A Saint, A Sinner, & A Psychopomp

Where the moon rises in the daytime

And the sun shines at night.

Where the breeze can whisper secrets

& You can hopscotch across the sea,

Where you can find a quiet place to write,

Here, on the little Island of Me.

Here is a world that is standing on its head &

Laughing with its logic perched on a razor’s edge.

Here I find the characters

That turn the wheels of thought;

One is a saint,

One a sinner,

& One a psychopomp.

One is not a liar.

One always speaks the truth.

One knows there’s more to life,

Unlike the other two.

One bickers with another

& One bickers with none,

Because some days the one is three

& Some days the three is… I,

As in the Island of Me.

So some days I’m a blowtorch

Some days a wildfire;

Some days I burn myself

& It just makes me all the wiser.

Some days I’m feeling radiant.

Some days I’m feeling hollow.

Some days I get bent

While I’m waiting for tomorrow

Because I know some days are different

But some days are all the same

And I find this very funny yet also slightly strange

Because I never was a psychopomp, a sinner, or a saint

There was never such a bunch

& One was never three

I was always I

On the Island of Me

            

Response 3

The man with the Blue Guitar

Despite its incredible length, the man with the blue guitar was one of my favorite poems. It had an interesting narrative accompanied by a Picasso painting both of which I found inviting.  I also found structure in the repetition of “things as they are” and “blue guitar.” The length asks a lot to be invested of the reader and makes me wonder about the significance of having 33 verses. It’s almost like an epic yet song like as well. That being said I cant see the necessity for so many verses. Once some of the language begins to get confusing, such a long length seems daunting. However the poem does invite you to complete it with its aura of insight. It’s written in such a way that implies a lesson or metaphor awaits you in the end.

The Man with the Hoe

The Man with the Hoe seems to be written in a similar fashion to the man with the blue guitar, in, for example, the sense that it is lengthy and seeming insightful. However what I found to be a fatal difference is this: a man with a gardening tool is not nearly as alluring as a man with an instrument of notable coloring. Like two adjacent paintings in a gallery I view these two pieces in relation to each other because of their proximity and similarities. The language in this one also seems older or at least there seems to be a time difference between the two. I feel as though this piece is very descriptive but at times I can’t figure out what exactly is being described.

Cezanne’s Ports

Allen Ginsberg’s “Cezanne’s Ports” was definitely one of the most well done of the visual poems he writes about and directly described the painting but he used his words to call the viewer and the reader to look at both in a new way. It is also probably one of the shortest pieces that speaks directly about the painting. The image and insight are succinctly packaged within the language making it easily digestible. Without the painting, the poem seems to rely on insight but because the painting has such an importance, I see that the poem is actually a seamless blend of image insight and imagination. A literal image incites the imagination, which generates the insight about the metaphorical image implied by the literal one.

The Red Studio

The lines that finally grabbed me in The red studio poem were ”his own room drank him. /What else could generate this Terra cotta raging through the floor and walls” By describing it in this way, it removed the environment from the range of events I would deem normal or expected. As the poem goes on it speaks about the paintings flatness which on one of the elements of 20^th century painting. The language deliberately describes the physical space as alternative to everyday life. It talks about passing through the space and things not being real which is a visual effect resulting from flatness. The “real” objects in the room described are the ones that have been modeled to be more three dimensional, adhering more to rules of linear and atmospheric perspective; two structural elements of renaissance illusions of space.

American Gothic

The American Gothic poem was like an interesting little stream of consciousness. The tone and diction were of someone speculating about all the things possibly in the situation, but not depicted visually in the painting. The poem even starts with the phrase “Just outside the frame.” However, personally I’m really not into this particular painting; so the poem is interesting because it’s like I’m peering into the rambling mind of someone else looking at this painting who is perhaps also not so into it. The poem ends on a note that is darkly comic and in my own mind I imagine the ending of a little ditty that would’ve gone along with it to emphasize the morbid humor.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Because Thirteen ways of looking at a black bird is in so many parts I am remind of the man with the blue guitar. However this poem is much shorter in the length of its stanzas as well as the number of parts it is in, making it easier to read through. The stanzas are however non sequential which sets it apart from man with the blue guitar and frees it from having a plot structure influence its length. This liberty was utilized by using such a symbolic number as a limitation. The visuals seemed arbitrary to the point where I would have overlooked them if their arbitrariness didn’t catch me. I wish the visuals interpreted the title in some metaphorical or engaging way as in thirteen ways of “looking”. Otherwise why have the pictures if they aren’t adding to or informing the text.

A Red Figured Cup of the Onesimos Painter

I almost wish he just didn’t if the text hadn’t added so much to the piece by limiting the interpretation to the point of being intentional.  The imagery is vivid almost too vivid. The imagination is addressed in its lack there of. It addresses a stark and taboo realism that act as a sort of historical allusion creating insight for the viewer and reader into an actualized situation. The language is almost grotesque but I can’t overlook the fact that the blend is well done.

Starlight

I wish

I were made of starlight

Barreling across the cosmos

I would graze the surface of earth

Like a flesh wound and

All the people in their big

Cities and fancy cars

Would finally move

Slowly like glacial fragments

Complimenting their

Arctic personalities and I would

Walk amongst them with a

Spectral presence like a shard of the sun

Refracted by the gaze of a few

Warm enough to notice me like

Déjà vu appearing twice

Within the same nanosecond

Before moving on.

Of Rained on Reason & Cloudy Eyes

Buildings wear fog

Like hats on their heads &

Each breath floats like
Ghosts in the cold

Crumpled expressions

On people who pass

That these street lamps
Unmask with their glow

Waterlogged traffic

Whines as it creeps

Along the sleek ribbon road &

The air has been steeped in

The grayest of grays; but

My, what a beautiful day.

Softly the dragging

On sagging eye lids

Edgeless and easy

The weightless mind is

Simple and sated and

Full and inflated with

Bliss

Blue Grass

The grass isn’t greener 

On the 

Other 

Side. 

It’s bluer 

Because 

You aren’t 

There 

Yet. 

Figurative Food

Once upon a time

My mind became a mashed potato

And I fell asleep in peanut butter

Only to dream of bacon bits

(The non-artificial kind)

And my greasy fingers failed to grasp

The passing powdered donut

That rolled on in a rather relaxed manner

Only to disappear behind the oxtail soup,

Which wafted the delicious odor of onions

Through the

Abnormally arbitrary airspace

Where adverbs and adjectives

Had use and meaning

and relevance and reason.

So I found myself using words
Like volant and volubly

Until the overproduction

Of thoughts

Distilled a decadent mental vodka

Which I poured out of my
eye sockets
into shot glasses for myself

and the powdered donut which

I had intended to find and befriend

For further adventures in this

Autonomous airspace

Poetry response dump 2

Unfortunately I feel the same way about X.J. Kennedy’s piece as I do about Hirsch’s. Except this time its worse. The piece is much shorter but also much more convoluted. The words are so roundabout that the image offers a restful alternative. And unlike the previous poem, there is no obvious insight about the painter and his relation. It is purely imagistic which almost seems like a redundancy when there is an actual image not two inches from the words. The immediate context is too much a competitor for the poem because after reading it a second time while covering the image, I find it quite nice. The title alone is enough to provide the context.

My favorite part about Robert Kelly’s Love Songs was the way he expressed a penchant for the ordinary. I find the counterintuitive nature of it to be appealing. The ordinary is overlooked, but Kelly calls us to revisit and even rediscover that which we take for granted. I could have done without the first two lines though. Not knowing at first what grunions are, I read on to find the poem open to interpretation. However after looking this word up the poem dulled ever so slightly and I moved on to “Love Song 2.” I didn’t like it as much as the first sans the grunions, but it was the same idea expressed in a more familiar way; more easily identifiable.

I’m at a loss for Wallace Stevens’ poem. I have no idea what its about and find nothing particularly interesting about it save the tigers and baboons. The accompanying video, although I do not like supplemental stimuli in addition to poetry, does shed some light on it, suggesting the piece is about dreaming. However this is only a suggestion and a slight one at that. Because even if this were the case that would lead me to assume that the title is implying disappointment that people are all the same in their dreams and only this one old drunk guy has interesting dreams or ideas about his head. I don’t feel like them poem stands on its own.

I feel like I should apologize to Mr. Williams, as I lost interest after the first line. His poem offered nothing the painting did not already have. It seemed more like a literary exercise for himself than an actual poem. I wish he had given his own parable of the blind for us readers to take something new from. The poem directly references the painting more so that the other poems and without the painting there you don’t know what he’s talking about but tragically with the painting there, you have no use for the poem. All his words have already been composed into brush strokes. I would normally expect words to overpower an image but this case is the opposite.

The thing that struck me first about “Ghost in the Land of Skeletons” was that it had structure like prose yet was wholly poetic. Although its imagery was not too enticing, the insight and train of thought were beautiful. I am immediately grabbed by the description in the first phrase; “flesh’s pretty paint.” It lends itself to the other ideas in the poem making it seem as if bones are what make us human and the skin is like a vinyl decal. Through the middle of the poem, we stroll through the poet’s thoughts as he leads us to a conclusion that is truly like a punch line. Not so much in that it’s almost like a dark joke but more in the sense that it really has an impact and leaves an impression