Original Poem

I am tribal
beating blood
like a drum on
the wooded ground
and I dance in
dotted paint around
sparkling flames around
patterned creatures like me
all dancing spirits we play to the beat
we live, we bleed to the beat.

Original Poem- Liquid Life

an unhealthy woman markets cookies and pizza
for a pint of my life energy.

It would be drained into a plastic bag and preserved in a freezer
they way we keep cheap frozen foods at the grocery store
Organized by type in long isles with signs that all match.

I imagine the flow would increase
with my heartbeat in a visual rhythm, also audible
in the contact of the blood with the bag.

The strength of blood is not so easily seen
on the side of a camper van

Original Poem

Drink from the bottle made from toxic plastics

From a factory where people die.

Drink the volcanic molasses

Magma gases burn my nose, eyes water.

The refreshment that shines my pennies,

This is the nectar of power.

The power of humanity

The power to make humanity diabetic.

When mixed with Mentos, the power

To make seagulls explode.

The power of happiness

Goddamn marketing.

I will not nurse my baby on your battery acid soda pop

I will not collect your salt shakers and napkin holders,

while I reminisce about housewives with microwaves

and manual kitchen appliances and

White picket fences the same as the neighbors’

A driveway the same as the neighbors’

The lawn is a little patchy but we can get some fertilizer

And make it look like the neighbors’

And we can all sit in the green back yard

Cooking burgers made from cows who never saw sun

And drink coca cola in our naïve khaki shorts.



Revision 1:

The Power of Happiness

The refreshment that shines my pennies,

This is the nectar of power.

The power of humanity

The power to make humanity diabetic.

When mixed with Mentos, the power

To make seagulls explode.

We drink the battery acid soda pop bliss
from an uneducated bottle made of plastic elation.
Magma gases burn my nose, eyes water
from the volcanic molasses advertising.

I will not collect your salt shakers and napkin holders,

while I reminisce about housewives with microwaves

and manual kitchen appliances and

White picket fences the same as the neighbors’

A driveway the same as the neighbors’

The lawn is a little patchy but we can get some fertilizer

And make it look like the neighbors’

And we can all sit in the green back yard

Cooking burgers made from cows who never saw sun

And drink coca cola in our naïve khaki shorts.


Revision 2: 

Popular Culture

We drink the battery acid soda pop bliss
from an uneducated bottle made of plastic elation.
Magma gases burn my nose, eyes water
from the volcanic molasses advertising.

We will not collect your salt shakers and napkin holders,

while we reminisce about housewives with
microwaves and manual kitchen appliances and

White picket fences the same as the neighbors’

A driveway the same as the neighbors’

The lawn is a little patchy but we can get some fertilizer

And make it look like the neighbors’

And we can all sit in the green back yard

Cooking burgers made from cows who never saw sun

And drink coca cola in our naive khaki shorts.

Response to Matisse: "The Red Studio" by W. D. Snodgrass

Henri Matisse, The Red Studio (1911)

There is no one here.
But the objects: they are real. It is not
As if he had stepped out or moved away;
There is no other room and no
Returning. Your foot or finger would pass
Through, as into unreflecting water
Red with clay, or into fire.
Still, the objects: they are real. It is
As if he had stood
Still in the bare center of this floor,
His mind turned in in concentrated fury,
Till he sank
Like a great beast sinking into sands
Slowly, and did not look up.
His own room drank him.
What else could generate this
Terra cotta raging through the floor and walls,
Through chests, chairs, the table and the clock,
Till all environments of living are
Transformed to energy--
Crude, definitive and gay.
And so gave birth to objects that are real.
How slowly they took shape, his children, here, Grew solid and remain:
The crayons; these statues; the clear brandybowl;
The ashtray where a girl sleeps, curling among flowers;
This flask of tall glass, green, where a vine begins
Whose bines circle the other girl brown as a cypress knee.
Then, pictures, emerging on the walls:
Bathers; a landscape; a still life with a vase;
To the left, a golden blonde, lain in magentas with flowers scattering like stars;
Opposite, top right, these terra cotta women, living, in their world of living's colors;
Between, but yearning toward them, the sailor on his red cafe chair, dark blue, self-absorbed.

Response: I like this poem because of its imagination and specific descriptions. Though they do relate directly to the poem, narrating it, there is still room to ponder in the statements. I found myself reading a line and then trying to find the reference in the painting. Most of them i thought were clever descriptions that gave moving life to still objects like "The ashtray where a girl sleeps, curling among flowers; / This flask of tall glass, green, where a vine begins". The poem speaks as if the room is being created and formed in tandem with the description; it keeps me engaged as one by one the elements emerge. I think references like terra cotta and fire to describe the redness of the painting are a bit random and unoriginal though.

Response to Cezanne's Ports by Allen Ginsberg

Paul Cezanne, L'Estaque (1883-85)

In the foreground we see time and life
swept in a race
toward the left hand side of the picture
where shore meets shore.
But that meeting place
isn't represented;
it doesn't occur on the canvas.
For the other side of the bay
is Heaven and Eternity,
with a bleak white haze over its mountains.
And the immense water of L'Estaque is a go-between
for minute rowboats.

Response: When I look at the painting I see a beautiful image of a foreign shore, healthy, happy, quiet. A harmony of water and land is serene, like there are no problems; the painting feels content in stillness.
I think this is where the image disconnects from the poem. Ginsberg uses phrases like "swept in a race" which feels to fast, but applies if I imagine the brushstrokes used in the creation of the piece. I like the poem as it tells the story of the life on these lands in fantasy, saying it is just on the edge of heaven, a transport land for the boats to heaven.

Response to The Man with the Hoe by Edwin Markham

Jean Millet, The Man with the Hoe

God made man in His own image
In the image of God He made him.--Genesis
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And markt their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the caverns of Hell to their last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this--
More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed--
More filled with signs and portents for the soul--
More packt with danger to the universe.
What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rife of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Powers that made the world,
A protest that is also prophecy.
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quencht?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidlous wrongs, Immedicable woes?
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?

Response: I like this poem. I asks many questions with a passionate tone that keeps me engaged. I think the poem is talking about the hard work of farming in fields in the old days and how farm workers were treated so unfairly. It speaks of God many times, maybe not really asking God these questions, but asking the owner of the fields to consider the treatment of his workers. The tone wants action to be taken against the injustices, as the field worker is the speaker, questioning whether this is all there is to his life.

Response to The Man With the Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens

Picasso Blue Guitar

I
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."
II
I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.
I sing a hero's head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,
Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.
If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
III
Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,
To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,
To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,
To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,
To bang it from a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings...
IV
So that's life, then: things are they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.
A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing,
And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?
And that's life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.
V
Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,
Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,
Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.
The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows. Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,
Ourselves in poetry must take their place,
Even in the chattering of your guitar.
VI
A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;
Ourselves in the tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place
Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them, on the blue guitar,
Placed so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;
For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar
Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.
VII
It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
When shall I come to say of the sun,
It is a sea; it shares nothing;
The sun no longer shares our works
And the earth is alive with creeping men,
Mechanical beetles never quite warm?
And shall I then stand in the sun, as now
I stand in the moon, and call it good,
The immaculate, the merciful good,
Detached from us, from things as they are?
Not to be part of the sun? To stand
Remote and call it merciful?
The strings are cold on the blue guitar.
VIII
The vivid, florid, turgid sky,
The drenching thunder rolling by,
The morning deluged still by night,
The clouds tumultuously bright
And the feeling heavy in cold chords
Struggling toward impassioned choirs,
Crying among the clouds, enraged
By gold antagonists in air--
I know my lazy, leaden twang
Is like the reason in a storm;
And yet it brings the storm to bear.
I twang it out and leave it there.
IX
And the color, the overcast blue
Of the air, in which the blue guitar
Is a form, described but difficult,
And I am merely a shadow hunched
Above the arrowy, still string,
The maker of a thing yet to be made;
The color like a thought that grows
Out of a mood, the tragic robe
Of the actor, half his gesture, half
His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk
Sodden with his melancholy words,
The weather of his stage, himself.
X
Raise reddest columns. Toll a bell
And clap the hollows full of tin.
Throw papers in the streets, the wills
Of the dead, majestic in their seals.
And the beautiful trombones -- behold
The approach of him whom none believes,
Whom all believe that all believe,
A pagan in a varnished car.
Roll a drum upon the blue guitar.
Lean from the steeple. Cry aloud,
"Here am I, my adversary, that
Confront you, hoo-ing the slick trombones,
Yet with a petty misery
At heart, a petty misery,
Ever the prelude to your end,
The touch that topples men and rock."
XI
Slowly the ivy on the stones
Becomes the stones. Women become
The cities, children become the fields
And men in waves become the sea.
It is the chord that falsifies.
The sea returns upon the men,
The fields entrap the children, brick
Is a weed and all the flies are caught,
Wingless and withered, but living alive.
The discord merely magnified.
Deeper within the belly's dark
Of time, time grows upon the rock.
XII
Tom-tom, c'est moi. The blue guitar
And I are one. The orchestra
Fills the high hall with shuffling men
High as the hall. The whirling noise
Of a multitude dwindles, all said,
To his breath that lies awake at night.
I know that timid breathing. Where
Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentously declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.
XIII
The pale intrusions into blue
Are corrupting pallors...ay di mi,
Blue buds of pitchy blooms. Be content --
Expansions, diffusions -- content to be
The unspotted imbecile revery,
The heraldic center of the world
Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins,
The amorist Adjective aflame...
XIV
First one beam, then another, then
A thousand are radiant in the sky.
Each is both star and orb; and day
Is the riches of their atmosphere.
The sea appends its tattery hues.
The shores are banks of muffling mist.
One says a German chandelier --
A candle is enough to light the world.
It makes it clear. Even at noon
It glistens in essential dark.
At night, it lights the fruit and wine,
The book and bread, things as they are,
In a chiaroscuro where
One sits and plays the blue guitar.
XV
Is this picture of Picasso's, this "hoard
Of destructions," a picture of ourselves,
Now, an image of our society?
Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg,
Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon,
Without seeing the harvest or the moon?
Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead
At a table on which the food is cold?
Is my thought a memory, not alive?
Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?
XVI
The earth is not earth but a stone,
Not the mother that held men as they fell
But stone, but like a stone, no: not
The mother, but an oppressor, but like
An oppressor that grudges them their death,
As it grudges the living that they live.
To live in war, to live at war,
To chop the sullen psaltery,
To improve the sewers in Jerusalem,
To electrify the nimbuses--
Place honey on the altars and die,
You lovers that are bitter at heart.
XVII
The person has a mould. But not
Its animal. The angelic ones
Speak of the soul, the mind. It is
An animal. The blue guitar--
On that its claws propound, its fangs
Articulate its desert days.
The blue guitar a mould? That shell?
Well, after all, the north wind blows
A horn, on which its victory
Is a worm composing on a straw.
XVIII
A dream (to call it a dream) in which
I can believe, in face of the object,
A dream no longer a dream, a thing,
Of things as they are, as the blue guitar
After long strumming on certain nights
Gives the touch of the senses, not of the hand,
But the very senses as they touch
The wind-gloss. Or as daylight comes,
Like light in a mirroring of cliffs,
Rising upward from a sea of ex.
XIX
That I may reduce the monster to
Myself, and then may be myself
In face of the monster, be more than part
Of it, more than the monstrous player of
One of its monstrous lutes, not be
Alone, but reduce the monster and be,
Two things, the two together as one,
And play of the monster and of myself,
Or better not of myself at all,
But of that as its intelligence,
Being the lion in the lute
Before the lion locked in stone.
XX
What is there in life except one's ideas.
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Is it ideas that I believe?
Good air, my only friend, believe,
Believe would be a brother full
Of love, believe would be a friend
Friendlier than my only friend,
Good air. Poor pale, poor pale guitar...
XXI
A substitute for all the gods:
This self, not that gold self aloft,
Alone, one's shadow magnified,
Lord of the body, looking down,
As now and called most high,
The shadow of Chocorua
In an immenser heaven, aloft,
Alone, lord of the land and lord
Of the men that live in the land, high lord.
One's self and the mountains of one's land,
Without shadows, without magnificence,
The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone.
XXII
Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and
To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is
An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.
But are these separate? Is it
An absence for the poem, which acquires
Its true appearances there, sun's green,
Cloud's red, earth feeling, sky that thinks?
From these it takes. Perhaps it gives,
In the universal intercourse.
XXIII
A few final solutions, like a duet
With the undertaker: a voice in the clouds,
Another on earth, the one a voice
Of ether, the other smelling of drink.
The voice of ether prevailing, the swell
Of the undertaker's song in the snow
Apostrophizing wreaths, the voice
In the clouds serene and final, next
The grunted breath serene and final,
The imagined and the real, thought
And the truth, Dichtung und Wahrheit, all
Confusion solved, as in a refrain
One keeps on playing year by year,
Concerning the nature of things as they are.
XXIV
A poem like a missal found
In the mud, a missal for that young man,
That scholar hungriest for that book,
The very book, or, less, a page
Or, at the least, a phrase, that phrase,
A hawk of life, that latined phrase:
To know; a missal for brooding-sight.
To meet that hawk's eye and to flinch
Not a the eye but at the joy of it.
I play. But this is what I think.
XXV
He held the world upon his nose
And this-a-way he gave a fling.
His robes and symbols, ai-yi-yi --
And that-a-way he twirled the thing.
Sombre as fir-trees, liquid cats
Moved in the grass without a sound.
They did not know the grass went round.
The cats had cats and the grass turned gray
And the world had worlds, ai, this-a-way:
The grass turned green and the grass turned gray.
And the nose is eternal, that-a-way.
Things as they were, things as they are,
Things as they will be by and by...
A fat thumb beats out ai-yi-yi.
XXVI
The world washed in his imagination,
The world was a shore, whether sound or form
Or light, the relic of farewells,
Rock, of valedictory echoings,
To which his imagination returned,
From which it sped, a bar in space,
Sand heaped in the clouds, giant that fought
Against the murderous alphabet:
The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams
Of inaccessible Utopia.
A mountainous music always seemed
To be falling and to be passing away.
XXVII
It is the sea that whitens the roof.
The sea drifts through the winter air.
It is the sea that the north wind makes.
The sea is in the falling snow.
This gloom is the darkness of the sea.
Geographers and philosophers,
Regard. But for that salty cup,
But for the icicles on the eaves --
The sea is a form of ridicule.
The iceberg settings satirize
The demon that cannot be himself,
That tours to shift the shifting scene.
XXVIII
I am a native in this world
And think in it as a native thinks,
Gesu, not native of a mind
Thinking the thoughts I call my own,
Native, a native in the world
And like a native think in it.
It could not be a mind, the wave
In which the watery grasses flow
And yet are fixed as a photograph,
The wind in which the dead leaves blow.
Here I inhale profounder strength
And as I am, I speak and move
And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar.
XXIX
In the cathedral, I sat there, and read,
Alone, a lean Review and said,
"These degustations in the vaults
Oppose the past and the festival.
What is beyond the cathedral, outside,
Balances with nuptial song.
So it is to sit and to balance things
To and to and to the point of still,
To say of one mask it is like,
To say of another it is like,
To know that the balance does not quite rest,
That the mask is strange, however like."
The shapes are wrong and the sounds are false.
The bells are the bellowing of bulls.
Yet Franciscan don was never more
Himself than in this fertile glass.
XXX
From this I shall evolve a man.
This is his essence: the old fantoche
Hanging his shawl upon the wind,
Like something on the stage, puffed out,
His strutting studied through centuries.
At last, in spite of his manner, his eye
A-cock at the cross-piece on a pole
Supporting heavy cables, slung
Through Oxidia, banal suburb,
One-half of all its installments paid.
Dew-dapper clapper-traps, blazing
From crusty stacks above machines.
Ecce, Oxidia is the seed
Dropped out of this amber-ember pod,
Oxidia is the soot of fire,
Oxidia is Olympia.
XXXI
How long and late the pheasant sleeps...
The employer and employee contend,
Combat, compose their droll affair.
The bubbling sun will bubble up,
Spring sparkle and the cock-bird shriek.
The employer and employee will hear
And continue their affair. The shriek
Will rack the thickets. There is no place,
Here, for the lark fixed in the mind,
In the museum of the sky. The cock
Will claw sleep. Mourning is not sun,
It is this posture of the nerves,
As if a blunted player clutched
The nuances of the blue guitar.
It must be this rhapsody or none,
The rhapsody of things as they are.
XXXII
Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.
How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,
Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand
Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.
You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.
XXXIII
That generation's dream, aviled
In the mud, in Monday's dirty light,
That's it, the only dream they knew,
Time in its final block, not time
To come, a wrangling of two dreams.
Here is the bread of time to come,
Here is its actual stone. The bread
Will be our bread, the stone will be
Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except
The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

Response: This poem made me realize that I don't like long poems. I lost attention many times throughout reading it, and i think the 2 line stanzas have something to do with that as well.  Short simple thoughts inside one large thought did not work for me, especially since most of the lines were not very ponderous, and so I moved right over them. I like that the poem is an imaginative interpretation of Picasso's painting, and that is is not simply a description like I have seen before. The poem is speaking about much more than a man playing a guitar; I think it speaks of universal questions.