5 posts tagged “joanne kyger”

Yabyum

                                                                    A superabundance
                                                                                     
                                                                                  May it shower down
                                                                                                      
                                                                                                     upon us
                                                                    like
                                                                           baby
                                                                                  peony
                                                                                           petals.

I am brave
I tell him the truth. 
I need:

Replacement Buddhas...
The secret of the spoon...

which although they do not exist in reality
seem to do so.

                            --I thought I could be his nurse
                              & heart & soul
                              and I see he is the leader
                              I look at him emotionally
                              sexually...

                             Deer Lady
       is dressed in human clothes
Someone wants to make love to her.
She kisses him
                                   In the dark
the spotlight shows the passionate couple
in a yabyum embrace.  She is the rustle of
the top most branches and the sigh of
new green grasses.
                     His eyes they are the same
he has been here for three
thousand years.

                     "I see the unicorn before me"     
                      thinks she

an excitement
from the position of his body

he is poised as if to make
          balance
in          the       universe.

       
       
           For how long we sit
                                      in quiet
                                               no speech
                                    creates a
                                                tie
                                 between us
                                                for I am young & yet
                I know what I am doing.

(His            world          is slippery to hold on to)

Heaven
explodes the walls
against the pattern of fleur-de
-lis and marigolds

And seasons spring
and fall.

                               Soft as
           a throw of silk
           she said, perhaps
           I dreamed it all.

           the length & breadth
           of all that chasing
                     &
           how Homer dislikes Paris
           sneaking through his home
           He has              little rival
           and lets no one know.

                                              
The real earth
                    moves and falls away into pieces
                                                                   in the north.

            I am mortal.

                                                      You dream of me
               
                  a deeper forest I came from         

running for
               
                      the center where           you look too.
                                                                        

                      A jeweled tree       poet's tree

I look around at the                                         shimmering
                                      energy
         
                                                  from things that seem as symbols.
I am curious
                
                      for what you can bring
                                                          from the tree.

You called to the words
and the waters went up in mist
then the soft earth came to sight.
We shall circle here
singing for the evening star.

*

"O what can a poor boy do"

BE AS FIRM AND RESOLUTE
IN ACTION AS ABLE.

The action by which s/he sustains creation
is the same as that by which s/he originally created.

Tho
one cannot so well learn a thing
when it has been learned from others
as when one has discovered it himself.

*

                Time is moving out from under us

                          Who are we
                          Who are we
                
                 violet of memory's flat plain

                           we embrace, swallow the sea

                 walk, past centuries into poetry

                            form pleasant contemplation of innocence

                 in lucid suspension sing.

*

Monkey man is leading me by the hand
             past lovers so entwined
I levitated
in the most elevated
                                 State of the  Union.

And back to the body
where I was born:

                        pink tips that are fingers
                        eyes sparkling
                        heart-shaped bottom...

            I love her
            and him.
                         I invoke the moon;
                         it's the best I can find.

              Can you see you're it
                      Oh Moon

              he makes love to you
              a life time.              Plays
              to as many people as he can...

*

              Who am, was, I?
              All of it, all of it.

              I am here at 3
              now it seems I lead.

              A lady in white
              bathed by my own silver light.

*

              FATHER TIME
              & MOTHER EARTH

thought about all of you last night
and a great blue heron came up
and the other animals came close
all gods in the human breast.

               O don't let me swoon

You intercepted my vibes.
that's fine.
Now you have a sweet tone.
tree holes.
boobies.
smooth countenance mind transmission.

*

                  I am a writer.
                  I will not dwell
                  on the question
                  of why.

                                                  
Psyche is not a personal
                  but a world experience.

                  I am in a bed in a hotel
                  having a talk with consciousness.
                  OK, I am actually in bed with _____.

                  I exist outside time &
                  this world I called my own
                  opens out.

Sometimes I lay in the bathtub chanting OM

                    I know I don't suffer more than anyone

I read Cixous, Jung

                    The feminine spirit infuses these words.

*

I sing:
          You showed me the meadow
          and milkwood and silkwood
          and you would if I would
          because threads that are golden
          don't break easily.

Joanne sings:
                      Me is memory
                                          take me out
                     
                      May your flowery face
                                                      bow
                     
                      In the teeny
                                       trembling world.

*

I am that which god wants
brilliant quince in bloom
we meet once again, friend.

*

                    
                     Electric enlightenment
                                 is in
                     your   sexy   heaven

                     which I am inventing

                     O My Big One

                     (we make it up as we go along)

(& aren't you glad I don't write Cock Poems?
as suggested
by Robert Duncan)

                         Come back!

           Your presence is an aphrodisiac.

*

I know this is a detective story
of passions, blood stuff
around which our lives crank
in a friendly sinuous manner
sultry as a New York poetry trip
where we danced all night under
electric candlelight.  Worthy
to uncover the hidden home
of the Dakini, wash, bathe, lay
papers with meaning aside.
Not yet tho.  The
rare jewel, the rare jewel
caught in the net invisible.
I must be transplanting thoughtforms,
like transplanting poppies,
I am noting your strong ripply
vibration aura
and making you a new flower
from my inner  world.

--Ann Arbor to Pennsylvania
May 11, 2008

Uploaded on January 10, 2007
by conceptvessel

*

"Oh Man is the highest type of animal existing
  or known to have existed
but differs from other animals
    more in his extraordinary mental
 development than in anatomical
structure . . ."
Well when I think of men
I think of then in a sexual manner
Otherwise, I don't notice the difference, you know

being absorbed as being  one just thinks 'people'
and not 'male' and 'female' so much as someone
to talk to. And how men are all

the same being born from Man and Woman and out
   of a woman's body commonly known as 'Mother.'

"And God said let us make MAN in our own image,
  after our likeness and let them have dominion."

And "Nature may stand up
   and say to all the world,
  'This was a MAN!'"

And then "I pronounce you MAN
   and wife."

Daddy you is dandy

when you're here. Shrill and soft old Autumnal

wind blow     and we are tucked below

the shallow soil where seeds spring
   up and wither quickly
flirting madly.

   I've got him now,

   the beautiful one for my part

of the year here in my dark
 and expensive underground
  all mine before he is shared

and killed again by the fearless boar
he is hunting and torn apart
and his blood runs out and red roses and anemones

bloom    and it is spring    and
    he is gone again

That man about town gone again . . .

              ~Joanne Kyger

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/  

Bio Notes & Publications

                 "You left

      your heart behind, over there, back there

Sleepy slow Buddha, you catch up to me, ok?"

                              ~Joanne Kyger

                 While I

         am easily thrilled

by a strand of bright red ribbon

    marking my place

                     in my book.

O fresh day in February

         Come along

with me under pine whose new cones

                  make flowers.  In a mellow mood

             let's take anything

     and you're better

in the peaceful flowing

in the beach

in the bird who flys up

      out of coyote bush,

      bob cat who crosses the road

      For who could think I could see

the grace of other souls born, and reborn

         before in crab shells

         snail shells, the head of a grebe

       moleskin, new onions up.  Drawn by

your clever sleigh of tortoise

                I listen for the melody

                to sing along.

                                        ~Joanne Kyger

Illustration by Arthur Okamura