Wallace Stevens

The Idea of Order at Key West

Oh!  Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

(excerpt)

Anselm Berrigan

(

Zero Star Hotel [At the Smith and Jones]

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• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

At the Smith and Jones Factory I get my Gear, don't smoke Don't vote, dry off With Madonna towel It's a field night For the roachies Smoked too many Crumbs, too much Genre manipulation

looks like nothing ever happened except everything's wet, singed cork rubbeth face, pay concierge/owner in red-checked pjs for Ross' 8 nights decapitate writer head and sacrifice to gods of buried vocals

 

Carl Phillips

Radiance versus Ordinary Light 

Meanwhile the sea moves uneasily, like a man who

suspects what the room reels with as he rises into it

is violation—his own: he touches the bruises at each

shoulder and, on his chest,

                                                  the larger bruise, star-shaped,

a flawed star, or hand, though he remembers no hands,

has tried—can't remember . . .

                                                        That kind of rhythm to it,

even to the roughest surf there's a rhythm findable,

which is why we keep coming here, to find it, or that's

what we say. We dive in and, as usual,

                                                                      the swimming

feels like that swimming the mind does in the wake

of transgression, how the instinct to panic at first

slackens that much more quickly, if you don't

look back. Regret,

                                 like pity, changes nothing really, we

say to ourselves and, less often, to each other, each time

swimming a bit farther,

                                           leaving the shore the way

the water—in its own watered, of course, version

of semaphore–keeps leaving the subject out, flashing

Why should it matter now and Why,

                                                                  why shouldn 't it,

as the waves beat harder, hard against us, until that's

how we like it, I'll break your heart, break mine. 

ruth weiss

 

layer by layer

she peels the onion she is

and laughs with her tears

Joan Rettalack

 

from

A I D /I/ S A P P E A R A N C E 

for Stefan Fitterman

B H J C E R T
fo fn Fmn
1. n on w mn of onnuy n uomy pon
2. of nu nvly of qunum of on qu n nl
3. lmn of onnuy plly ppn oug uon of
4. nu of lg o o yng n lug ll ly
5. l  uy of nu moon wx un o o wn wn
6. o ung lp o wn ngng on ng mkng n ng
7. pp n no pl o n on n ngly w gl
 

F G  K Q U
o n mn
1. no n w m no on ny no my pon
2. o n nvly o nm o on n nl
3. lm no onny plly pp no on o
4. no l o o yn nl ll ly
5. l y o n  moon wx no own wn
6. o n l pow n n no n n mn n n
7. pp n no pl o no n n nly w l
 

ruth weiss

 

historian of the Beats Jerry Cimino to Sam Whiting. More:

Weiss’ performance art usually happened in spontaneous fashion. It would be late at night at the Black Cat on Montgomery or the Cellar on Green Street. A combo might be honking Bebop or improv when out of the smoke would come Weiss, 5 feet tall, her hair cut short and dyed teal, after the war-orphan hero in the 1948 film “The Boy with Green Hair.”

One of her most popular poems was “Ten Ten,” describing her arrival in San Francisco, where she found a $10 room at 1010 Montgomery, later home to Ginsberg. Jack Kerouac would come by after midnight and they’d go up on the roof with a bottle of cheap red wine. Weiss drank only beer, and always took a bottle with her onto the stage, along with a lit cigarette.

Once up front, her poetry moved along like a locomotive, and the musicians would encourage it along.

“When you see it with the drama and the force of the music, it brings (the poetry) to life,” said Cimino. It was a style of cadenced riffing that Kerouac later took to New York City and took when he read from his novel “On the Road,” accompanied by Steve Allen on piano, during a famous episode of the “Steve Allen Show.”

“Kerouac got all the credit,” said Cimino. “But the accepted understanding in San Francisco is that Ruth was performing her words to music even before  Jack was doing it.”

Carl Rakosi

 

excerpt from Ginger

He was poking

                     into the underbush now

and reached across my head

                                        for the small spiny twigs.

At that the phase

                           changed

and a sensuous trembling

                                     hung in the air,

as when a bee is about

                                  to descend

on blossoming clover,

                                 and I

felt myself being pulled

                                     as by a line

from the invisible

                            other side

to enter goathood,

                            deeper than sight.

Philip Whalen

 

FURTHER NOTICE

I can’t live in this world
And I refuse to kill myself
Or let you kill me

The dill plant lives, the airplane
My alarm clock, this ink
I won’t go away

I shall be myself—
Free, a genius, an embarrassment
Like the Indian, the buffalo

Like Yellowstone National Park.

Carl Rakosi

 

Associations with a View from the House

What can be compared to

                                    the living eye?

Its East

             is flowering

honeysuckle

                  and its North

dogwood bushes.

What can be compared

                               to light

in which leaves darken

                                  after rain,

fierce green?

                     like Rousseau’s jungle:

any minute

                the tiger head

will poke through

                           the foliage

peering

            at experience.

Who is like man

                        sitting in the cell

of referents,

                     whose eye

has never seen

                      a jungle,

yet looks in?

It is the great eye,

                               source of security.

Praised be thou,

                         as the Jews say,

who have engraved

                           clarity

and delivered us

                         to the mind

where you must reign

                               severe

as quiddity of bone

                              forever

and ever without

                         bias or mercy,

attrition or mystery.