Uche’s posthaven

Love poetry?  Hate poetry?  Just don't get what it's about?  Come join the discussion, "Poetry for the Nervous, Vol 1."

Beside the Stanley Kunitz and Lenrie Peters pieces I lead with in the original post, there have been numerous others listed, discussed and quoted in the comments. Just in the first couple of days we have Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, Kipling, Edward Lear, Stevie Smith, Lewis Carroll, Plath, Pound, Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Marianne Moore, G.M. Hopkins, Louis MacNeice, W.D. Snodgrass, Auden, Opie & Opie, C. Day Lewis, Spender, Leopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Christopher Okigbo, James Reeves, Yeats, Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Whitman, Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, Mallarmé, Symons, Hulme, H.D., Aldington, cummings, Meera Bai, Tony Hoagland, Philip Levine, John Clare, Sydney, Shelley, Donne, Hass, Bukowski, Siegfried Sassoon, Vera Pavlova and Geoff Kagan Trenchard.

Also, mentions of personalities connected to poetry such as Artistotle, Peter Levi, Marjorie Perloff and Garrison Keillor, a shot out to New Zealand poets Allen Curnow, Bill Manhire, Janet Frame and James K. Baxter, and even musicians including Bob Dylan and Jefferson Airplane, Talib Kweli and M.F. Doom.

I'm always tickled by the near-May-Day snows we get here in the Boulder area, and in 2005 I even wrote a poem (a bagatelle, really) "May Day Flakes" when we got a good 8 inches at the end of April. This morning we got a dusting, making it the latest in the year I've seen snow in the backyard. Early last week we got a few inches.

Our winters are generally so mild (though this past one was rougher than most) that my Nigerian blood doesn't curdle over at such oddities. In fact, we always get so much sun that all the snow is usually gone by afternoon of the day. Pico-season. Peek-a-boo season.

For Valentines day, a poem I wrote for Lori in 1995.  I don't usually write sonnets, because the history of their use and abuse makes it hard to avoid tyranny of the form over the sense.  In this case, it really did come to me naturally that way, and though I't's not for me to judge, I don't think imposes itself to be read as a sonnet.

If you want something else to read this Valentines day, try "Asunder", a marvelous love story by Nnedi Okorafor, in her own inimitable style.

Yes, yer non-mirror readers. That's "The Crowning Privilege", by Robert Graves. I read it every decade or so. Graves is a complete lunatic, but I do so ❤ his book.

Quoth Eliot in Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching (p 87):

I think Poe's quite good, actually. The whole casual horror thing. Like someone next to you and screaming their head off and you asking them what the fuck and them stopping for a moment to say 'Oh you know, I'm just afraid of Death' and then they keep on with the screaming.

Very apt.  Now consider for a moment the reaction in much high culture to Death's inevitability.  Take, for example, Maugham's light touch upon his re-telling of "Appointment in Samarra". Puts into piebald terms Poe as an uncultured hack.

I finished WifW yesterday (UK cover above. Mine was the much less striking US ed).  I loved Icarus Girl, but in her latter two, Oyeyemi's style of approaching you with her story, then pulling coyly away, is infuriating.  But while with The Opposite House I felt put upon for the whole book, in WifW I didn't succumb to irritated restlessness until near the end.  The problem with her approach is that it interferes with good old-fashioned pity and terror; probably just my not having caught up to modernity in the sort of satisfaction I crave from a novel.  There is something about Oyeyemi, though, that compensates for my unslaked dramatic thirst.  I know exactly what it is.  It's her language.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Nnnedi Okorafor tell stories that leave me fat, full and grateful (I'm now two stories into The Thing Around Your Neck).  I look hungrily for pretty much anything they write.  My overall regard for Oyeyemi might be cooler, but boy does she ever make me write.  As I read her, words spin in my head and expand into ideas, blue-shifting into my own ideas, from which I distill my own words.  My usual bookmark for an Oyeyemi book is a sheet of paper with a poem or set of apothegms for which she provided instant inspiration.  I do enjoy her more as a poet than as a novelist, which suits me just fine.

And really, considering my appreciation for subtlety as revealed in my attitude towards Poe, I heartily recommend WifW (as well as The Icarus Girl) for the sort of writing that reveals true terrors without deafening you with artless shrieking.

I wrote a little while back about how I found Karl Shapiro's "The Tongue" a rather flaccid piece (I reproduced it in that posting). It immediately set me to thinking how I might write about cunnilingus in that approximate style. It fell upon me to give it a go today. With Shapiro's anapests in my head I couldn't help the occasional echo, but for the most part I kept it to iamb and trochee, which feel to me a better fit for the luxury of the act.
 
The Tongue
 
As the head dropping on chocolate of tape—
Magnetic terrain of rhythm and rut—
Pinch roller fingers knead eager approach
Swelling to music is progress to what.

My tongue to the who in the arc of your voice,
To the hand caressing and guiding my ear,
Loops left wet behind my ascent
Anticipate pearly syrup of where.

Song and its caesure, vox humana,
Thigh, tongue, hand in tumescent blend
As the mouth creeps upon the open petals
Nectar and fragrance annihilate when.

—Uche
18 July 2009
Superior

In my poetical wandering over the weekend I ran across Karl Shapiro's "The Tongue". He starts by getting the conceit all wrong, and even though it bears the execution of a fine craft piece, the result comes off a bit of a mess.
 

 
As a slug on the flat of the sun-heated clay, 
With the spit of its track left behind it like glass, 
Imperceptibly voyages, licking its way 
In the sinuous slime of itself to the grass, 
 
So my tongue on the white-heated wall of your thigh 
Licks its belly across, and the path of my slime 
Lies in ribbons of passion, the wet and the dry 
Overlapping to mount to the leaf of its climb. 
 
And the mouth and the mouth and the tongue and the tongue 
And the fishes that feed in the joy of our oil 
And the slug of our wetness finds green food among 
The hair-forests of longing where serpents uncoil. 

 
You can see how the cleverness dampens the sense, something I often struggle with myself. This is a large part of the reason why Shapiro, despite his technical skill, has never been as celebrated as he should be. He tries to use a sprinkling of words ("passion", "longing") to mend the detachment of the conceit of the slug, which could never hope to transport the idea of a tongue inching towards cunnilingus.
 
The piece pretty much cries out for a rival metaphysical poet's response.  And it should serve as a lesson to me.