Travel from one place to another so that a day is old
and French words for sleep are cheerful and festive.
I worry that all the fun will kill me
like a good playing card, a dance card,
a dramatic card, a race card,
a baseball card, and a chairman's
grab at my linen underclothes.
For an intense lamp is not the sun.
A church, go there. Here is where faith lives.
A temple. Here is where devotion washes.
A sand dune is two bodies.
Made for the kitchen, made for drink,
made for the reader, made for life,
topological, having no outside, I fear
or inside, a province of smallness,
and how I cling to your end.
Here by a wreck of a road.
--Prageeta Sharma, from Fence, Volume 10
Uploaded on March 22, 2006
by Curt Lam : aIYAAaAH!
Uploaded on May 9, 2007
by Elif Sanem Karakoc
"Because she arrives,
vibrant,
over and over
again; we
are at the beginning
of a new history,
or rather a process
of becoming
in which several
histories
intersect with
one another.
As a subject for
history, woman
always occurs
simultaneously
in several places.
(In woman,
personal history
blends together
with the history
of all women,
as well as national
and world history.)"
--Helene Cixous, quoted in Bhanu Kapil's
The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers
]]>
In a few days this is where I will be: Seaside, Florida
with my honey. And I'll sing to him:
A little dust never stopped me none, you like my shoes I'll keep them on.
Sometimes I can hold my tongue, sometimes not,
When you just skip-to-loo, my darlin',
And you know what you're doin' so don't even...
Uploaded on August 23, 2007
by robynne faye
WORLD'S BLISS
Alice Notley
The men & women sang & played
they sleep by singing, what
shall I say of the most
poignant on earth the most glamorous
loneliest sought after people
those poets wholly beautiful
desolate aureate, death is a
powerful instinctive emotion--
but who would be released from
a silver skeleton? gems
& drinking cups--This
skull is Helen--who would not
be released from the
Book of Knowledge? Why
should a maiden lie on a moor
for seven nights & a day? And
he is a maiden, he is & she
on the grass the flower the spray
where they lie eating primroses
grown crazy with sorrow & all
the beauties of old--oh each poet's a
beautiful human girl who must die.
]]>"There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it."
(1948 essay, "To Be Continued, Unnoticed".)
]]>
During Naropa University's Summer Writing Program of 2001, I had the great opportunity to study with Joanne Kyger. Her workshop—INVESTIGATIVE POETICS—introduced such fellow writers as Ed Sanders, Jack Spicer, Ed Dorn and Alice Notley. We read from Ed Sanders’ 1968: A History in Verse, The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, Ed Dorn’s epic poem “Gunslinger,” and Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses. Joanne repeated Spicer’s notion that poetry is a form of magic, most potent when spoken aloud. Joanne also told us about Spicer’s Poetry As Magic workshop that included Robert Duncan. She would probably approve of this statement made by Spicer in 1949 :
Live poetry is a kind of singing.
It differs from prose, as song does,
in its complexity of stress and intonation.
Poetry demands a human voice to sing it
and demands an audience to hear it.
Without these it is naked, pure,
and incompletely - a bore.*[1]
Joanne Kyger was born in 1934 & attended Santa Barbara College. One day in January 1957 she drove up to San Francisco with [her] Siamese cat. She arrived at the height of the Howl obscenity trial, and a friend introduced her to The Place, the bar that was headquarters for Jack Spicer and other poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. She attended the Sunday Meetings lead by Spicer and Robert Duncan and gave her first reading at the Bread and Wine Mission in 1959 before moving to Japan with Gary Snyder. Joanne and Gary married in Japan, living there & also travelling to India (with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlofsky), events that are chronicled in Kyger's Japan and India Journals 1960-64. Kyger returned to San Francisco and published her first book The Tapestry and The Web. She moved to Bolinas in 1968 where she continues to reside, writing poetry, editing the local newspaper, and teaching at Naropa University and The New School in San Francisco.
Joanne Kyger’s writings include:
Phenomenological
Some Sketches from the Life of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
All This Everyday
Mexico Blonde
The Japan and India Journals
As Ever
Just Space: Poems 1979-1989
Again: Poems 1989-2000
About Now: Collected Poems
In her essay "Joanne Kyger's Poetry" in Coming After: Essays on Poetry, Alice Notley states: Kyger's influence on my own practice--and on many other women's--has been considerable; she's one of the women who's shown me how to speak as myself, to be intelligent in the way I wish and am, rather than suiting the requirements of established intellectuality. Universities are frightfully conservative because they love their traditions and especially their language; idiomatic truth can't get born there, or anything that has to be new, not just wants to be.
*
Yuppy Wittgensteins Arise!
She writes
and drinks
coffee
and writes:
"I want to point out that I am not up tight"
"You believe this stash of writing is 'scholarly'?"
"Oh Man is the highest type of animal existing..."
and
I
love
her dailiness, which is to say her everyday manner of setting down
her life, one day at a time. Visiting Gary's [Snyder] house last night... I was
no longer in waiting as this world I called my own opened out.
She is full of personality and pizzazz, she is witty: It was suggested
by Robert Duncan that we all write/ Cock Poems for the next class. Splendid!
Like Anne Waldman, I wish she was my neighbor. As she is still alive, and as
I took a class with her, I have a mind to write to her. I once
sent her a beautiful wave painting that my friend Robin made and
I like to think it is on her window ledge in her writing shed where sit:
Tiny light grey moth
New Delhi bronze rabbit
Roy de Forest dog
Kwan Yin
Joanne Kyger once wrote "The Life of Naropa for Ted Berrigan," in which
she told about the sentient blissful brilliant light that was Naropa. (Ken
gave me her Collected Poems for my birthday, but also, I have the limited edition
Just Space, printed in Ann Arbor, which she signed:
Write in your journal
every day!
And Joanne wrote It's terrible what's happening in this war
atmosphere when 'your' government lies to you and neglects the people...and:
"The expression of my thoughts
in music as natural
and easy as breathing
my greatest consolation
to this day."
Here is Joanne Kyger reading at UC Berkeley in April of 2007:
In honor of Joanne Kyger,
may her work flourish.
Above photo by Allen Ginsberg, 1963
EPC page on Joanne: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/kyger/
for Iris
When
the
ice
breaks in the Seine
and the Jardins des Tuileries grow
tulip-beautiful
the palefacedgirl walks
the streets of Montparnasse
lightly singing with the singing
ouiseaux
Her hair a portrait of
deshambillement
Her fingers nimbly fingering a crocus from a
crocus-coming
-up
and
she (Iris) walks backtothethird arrondissement to
write a Parisian vignette
for meganandrenee
for herloversten
and the Jardins des Tuileries grow
tulip-beautiful
before spring snow
]]>