[New-Poetry] Dark Horses

[Judy Prince]

Thanks, James, for the invitation and the poem.  I'll see about getting the
book you recommend.
Last week at last I received Break Blow Burn by Camille Paglia oh ever eager
to be transported sublime, having read only the Arion article in which she
thoroly, reasonably dissected her non-picks for the book.  To be fair to
her, I confess that my own picks of contemporary poetry would look weak
beside The Greats.  Her newer picks [poets born after 1900] fell far short
of what I'd've chosen.  They include the usually revered Plath, Lowell,
Roethke, and one of my favourites, Langston Hughes.  One of the post-1900
born poets, Ralph Pomeroy, had a power akin to Yeats, but without the music
and elegance.  I rather liked his poem, Corner, which I'll type in below.

Best,  Judy

Corner   by Ralph Pomeroy

The cop slumps alertly on his motorcycle,
Supported by one leg like a leather stork.
His glance accuses me of loitering.
I can see his eyes moving like a fish
In the green depths of his green goggles.

His ease is fake.  I can tell.
My ease is fake.  And he can tell.
The fingers armored by his gloves
Splay and clench, itching to change something.
As if he were my enemy or my death,
I just standing there watching.

I spit out my gum which has gone stale.
I knock out a new cigarette---
Which is my bravery.
It is all imperceptible:
The way I shift my weight,
The way he creaks in his saddle.

The traffic is specific though constant.
The sun surrounds me, divides the street between us.
His crash helmet is whiter in the shade.
It is like a bull ring as they say it is just before the fighting.
I cannot back down.  I am there.

Everything holds me back.
I am in danger of disappearing into the sunny dust.
My levis bake and my T shirt sweats.

My cigarette makes my eyes burn.
But I don't dare drop it.

Who made him my enemy?
Prince of coolness.  King of fear.
Why do I lean here waiting?
Why does he lounge there watching?

I am becoming sunlight.
My hair is on fire.  My boots run like tar.
I am hung-up by the bright air.

Something breaks through all of a sudden,
And he blasts off, quick as a craver,
Smug in his power; watching me watch.

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



2008/12/6 <JforJames at aol.com>

>  It's that time of year when some of us like to post the titles of books
> we've enjoyed during the year.
> (Consider that an invitation.)
>
> A few weeks ago we were talking about Paglia's *Break, Blow, Burn*, and
> her claim to have
> sought out poems off the beaten track of traditional anthology's tables of
> contents. Well
> here's a book that really does that: *Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked
> Poems*. It's an eclectic
> collection and the editors certainly tried to cover the aesthetic
> waterfront (there is even a poem,
> for Bob G, by Man Ray, that is certainly conceptual and can only be
> experienced visually).
> Unlike the aforementioned Paglia anthology, no one person picked the poems.
> 75 contemporary
> American poets each got to pick a single poem. But like Paglia's anthology
> each poem is 'praised
> or defended' with a brief essay about the poem and why it's important or
> what makes
> it special to the person who selected it. For a taste, I'll post one that
> C. K. Williams ecstatically
> praised....
>
>
>
> The Ruiner of Lives
>
>
> Who knows how things end up,
> spliced together in the mind.
>
> Last night the car was lugging
> up the long hill toward home
> when a fox came sleepwalking
>
> out of the alders onto the road.
> Something was wrong with it.
> It listed a little to one side
>
> and moved without fox-quickness,
> not sniffing, not scared,
> but calm, almost formal,
>
> with a yellow opacity in its eyes
>
> as if it had recently
> been dreaming of being blind.
>
> It stood staring down the double barrel
> of the headlights till I stopped the car.
>
> Who knows why, but at that moment
> five words came awake in my mind:
>
> *God the ruiner of lives—*
>
> A line of graffiti I once saw
> sprayed on a pink wall in the tropics.
> Now five sharp stars in a northern night,
> shaken out of their sleep.
>
> I was only August, but already
> the uppermost leaves of the stricken maples
> were ragged and red,
>
> and the small curled leaves
> of the barren apples
> scuttled across the road.
>
> The fox and I—who was our ruiner?
>
> I with the sin of despair
> for the world my species has spoiled,
>
> the fox for its hunger,
> its rabies, its dirty coat
> slung over a frail skeleton.
>
> A fox of the future
> digging in the underbrush
> for our remains will find
>
> more trash than bones.
>
> I laid my hand over my heart
> to put out the fire lit by this idea,
> and stroked and stroked as if it were
>
> a terrorist I could cure of its rage
> with kindness and animal calm.
>
> The yellow eyes went on dreaming
> the car, the road curved into the dark.
>
> Poor fox, poor mystic,
> attracted to a light it can't explain.
>
> A light that drives away
> and leaves us both,
> here under the cold,
>
> crumbling trees of heaven.
>
>
> —Chase Twichell, reprinted in the anthology *Dark Horses: Poets on
> Overlooked Poems,*
> edited by Joy Katz and Kevin Prufer (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2007)
>
>
>
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