I liked all of these, Fred. You tell interesting stories, & get inside
some strange heads.
(Even your own, & not everyone feels that continuing to write only
love poems is the way to go...)
Doug
On 7-Aug-08, at 11:16 AM, Frederick Pollack wrote:
> Dark Knight
>
>
> Over breakfast, a bagel,
> in the Family Room,
> the boy starts with cartoons.
> It’s a kind of self-pacing. Later
> he’ll watch saved programs, vetted
> for violence (and sex, but primarily violence)
> by his mother. His one aim
> is to see the new *Batman, but she
> won’t let him because it’s too violent.
> She stands at the door of the Family Room,
> negotiating. She wants him
> to turn the television down,
> but soon she’ll want him to *read
> for half an hour, as he promised
> to do each day this summer, as she’ll
> remind him. Many concessions
> (concerning unwholesome
> friends, the clothes on his floor)
> were exchanged for this concession
> of his, and he knows
> he must negotiate carefully
> to have any hope of seeing *Batman.
> But her bright, strained, ever-
> reassuring, ever-censorious
> voice is as boring
> as reading, and, with
> a sort of grunted whine, he tries
> to become pure watching.
> If he did, he’d be free.
> Who succeeds in seeing *Batman is Batman.
>
>
>
> Notes from a Train
>
>
> Condo and corporate towers, greater
> and lesser malls, apartment houses sprayed
> with charm give way to ruined factories,
> and pincered magnets sorting hills of scrap.
> Then boarded windows, fire-scars,
> a steppe of brick, some package-store
> oases, and, ten slow miles later,
> the last brown duplexes,
> bordered by empty warehouses.
> You pretend there’s no more energy,
> so far from wealth and property,
> for the manic pride and endless war
> of those who know they have and are
> nothing, and will never have or be.
> That they stand in lines, waiting
> for the State in its self-congratulatory,
> reluctant mercy to hand them
> some sort of pill that gives them
> the illusion of being healthy, fed, and free.
> Then, walking home, they speak
> as eloquently as they can
> of beauty, love, and truth, which mean
> among these weeds that church:
> a black mole on a lined and stubbled cheek.
>
>
>
>
> Lips and Eyes
>
>
> I wish I could write love-poems.
> Some people write only love-poems.
> Instead my poems philosophize.
> (Badly – allusions, hand-waving
> of the sort Hollywood uses
> to portray serious thinking.
> At least they *suggest philosophy.)
> I think the appeal of love-poems,
> love aside, is to show you’ve arrived.
> That you’re not merely feeling, yearning, wanking,
> but *doing. Some poets, guys even,
> keep it up long into marriage –
> they escape crib and kitchen
> to write poems about their wives.
> Well I love my wife but keep quiet
> so as not to tempt the Demiurge,
> who loves to deprive us of happiness
> and can’t be philosophized.
> If I wrote, however, of old girl-friends
> my wife would look at me cross-eyed –
> unless, perhaps, I did so
> with no trace of eroticism.
> Described the ones who left me
> for lack of financial, genetic,
> or entertainment potential.
> Or the ones *I left, hysterical
> because I hate to hurt women
> and thereby hurting them more.
> It’s always possible to learn
> something new, however cold
> and shriveled, in the cracks
> of what you learned earlier.
Douglas Barbour
[log in to unmask]
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest books:
Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
Wednesdays'
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
Poetry always was, and always
should be, pre-eminently that:
significant sound.
D.G. Bridson
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