sub-entry: no slime

if Dolores had to hang those sheets upon a sunny breeze
far on below, tracing treacherous steps to a lawn so green
your soles could find no slime deep enough to match

that patch of green where I'd sit
with my pipe blowing out clouds serene
for the sky to make friends with
and face that roar of waves
on the ocean my soul has dipped into
so many times..

st64, 28 April 2014

Anne Stevenson (b. 1933)
http://www.anne-stevenson.co.uk



Born in Cambridge, England, Anne Stevenson moved between the United States and the United Kingdom numerous times during the first half of her life.
While she considers herself an American, Stevenson qualifies her status: “I belong to an America which no longer really exists.”
Since 1962 she has lived mainly in the U.K., including Cambridge, Scotland, Oxford, and, most recently, North Wales and Durham.

Intersections and borders are common emblems in Stevenson’s work, though the land on which they are drawn is often mutable or shrouded in mist.
She is as comfortable in strict form as she is in free verse, and her poetry, according to poet George Szirtes, is “humane, intelligent and sane, composed of both natural and rational elements, and amply furnished with patches of wit and fury.”

Initially a student of music, Stevenson earned her undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Michigan, where she studied with Donald Hall, who encouraged her to pursue poetry.
Resistant to connections with any particular school of contemporary poetry, Stevenson has honed her art apart from many of her peers but within the larger conversation of the form.
As she says, “If I couldn’t overhear the rhythms and sounds established by the long, varied tradition of English poetry—say by Donne, Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Whitman, Frost—I would not be able to hear what I myself have to say. Poems that arise only from a shallow layer of adulterated, contemporary language are rootless. They taste to me like the mass-produced vegetables grown in chemicals for supermarkets.”

Stevenson slowly lost her hearing years ago, though her poetry continues to come first from sound.
In a 2007 essay, Stevenson wrote, “Although I rarely write in set forms now, poems still come to me as tunes in the head. Words fall into rhythms before they make sense. It often happens that I discover what a poem is about through a process of listening to what its rhythms are telling me.”

“Ever since I can remember, I have been aware of living at what E.M. Forster called ‘a slight angle’ to the universe,” she says.
“I have always had to create my own angular environment or perish. But that’s the whole point about borders. It’s the best place from which to be able to see both sides.”

Jorge Luis Borges (24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine writer who is considered one of the foremost literary figures of the 20th century.
Most famous in the English speaking world for his short stories and fictive essays, Borges was also a poet, critic, translator and man of letters.



Words by Jorge Luis Borges

1.
"All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art." ----- J.L. Borges


2.
"Doubt is one of the names of intelligence."


3.
"May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.
Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated,
but let there be one instant, one creature,
wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification."

4.
"Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
(Statement to the Argentine Society of Letters, c.1946)

5.
I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature.
The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.
(A Universal History of Iniquity, preface to the 1954 edition)

6.
Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen?
Look at the moon.
Do you want to hear what ears have never heard?
Listen to the bird's cry.
Do you want to touch what hands have never touched?
Touch the earth.
Verily I say that God is about to create the world.
(The Theologians)


7.
Years of solitude had taught him that, in one's memory, all days tend to be the same, but that there is not a day, not even in jail or in the hospital, which does not bring surprises, which is not a translucent network of minimal surprises.
(The Waiting)



8.
Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
(The Threatened)


9.
Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation.
Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.
(The Divine Comedy) (1977)

10.
Time carries him as the river carries
A leaf in the downstream water.
No matter. The enchanted one insists
And shapes God with delicate geometry.
Since his illness, since his birth,
He goes on constructing God with the word.
The mightiest love was granted him
Love that does not expect to be loved.
(Baruch Spinoza)

In the mid-1950s, literary iconoclast and beat icon Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922–October 21, 1969) became intensely interested in Buddhism, which began permeating his writing.

Charles Baudelaire
(1821–1867)


Charles Baudelaire is one of the most compelling poets of the nineteenth century. While Baudelaire's contemporary Victor Hugo is generally—and sometimes regretfully—acknowledged as the greatest of nineteenth-century French poets, Baudelaire excels in his unprecedented expression of a complex sensibility and of modern themes within structures of classical rigor and technical artistry.

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997)


One of the most respected Beat writers and acclaimed American poets of his generation, Allen Ginsberg enjoys a prominent place in post-World War II American culture.
He was born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in nearby Paterson. The son of an English teacher and Russian expatriate, Ginsberg’s early life was marked by his mother’s psychological troubles, including a series of nervous breakdowns.
In 1943, while studying at Columbia University, Ginsberg befriended William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and the trio later established themselves as pivotal figures in the Beat Movement. Known for their unconventional views, and frequently rambunctious behavior, Ginsberg and his friends also experimented with drugs.

On one occasion, Ginsberg used his college dorm room to store stolen goods acquired by an acquaintance. Faced with prosecution, Ginsberg decided to plead insanity and subsequently spent several months in a mental institution. After graduating from Columbia, Ginsberg remained in New York City and worked various jobs.

Ginsberg first came to public attention in 1956 with the publication of Howl and Other Poems.
“Howl,” a long-lined poem in the tradition of Walt Whitman, is an outcry of rage and despair against a destructive, abusive society.
Kevin O'Sullivan, writing in Newsmakers, deemed “Howl” “an angry, sexually explicit poem”, considered by many to be a revolutionary event in American poetry.
The poem's raw, honest language and its “Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath,” as Ginsberg called it, stunned many traditional critics.

Richard Eberhart, for example, called “Howl” “a powerful work, cutting through to dynamic meaning…It is a howl against everything in our mechanistic civilization which kills the spirit…Its positive force and energy come from a redemptive quality of love.”
Appraising the impact of “Howl,” Paul Zweig noted that it “almost singlehandedly dislocated the traditionalist poetry of the 1950s.”
In addition to stunning critics, Howl stunned the San Francisco Police Department. Because of the graphic ****** language of the poem, they declared the book obscene and arrested the publisher, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Ginsberg's political activities were called strongly libertarian in nature, echoing his poetic preference for individual expression over traditional structure.
In the mid-1960s he was closely associated with the counterculture and antiwar movements. He created and advocated “flower power,” a strategy in which antiwar demonstrators would promote positive values like peace and love to dramatize their opposition to the death and destruction caused by the Vietnam War. The use of flowers, bells, smiles, and mantras (sacred chants) became common among demonstrators.

Sometimes Ginsberg's politics prompted reaction from law-enforcement authorities. He was arrested at an antiwar demonstration in New York City in 1967 and tear-gassed at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968.
In 1972 he was jailed for demonstrating against then-President Richard Nixon at the Republican National Convention in Miami.
In 1978 he and long-time companion Peter Orlovsky were arrested for sitting on train tracks in order to stop a trainload of radioactive waste coming from the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant in Colorado.
Ginsberg's political activities caused him problems in other countries as well.

Another continuing concern reflected in Ginsberg's poetry was a focus on the spiritual and visionary. His interest in these matters was inspired by a series of visions he had while reading William Blake's poetry, and he recalled hearing “a very deep earthen grave voice in the room, which I immediately assumed, I didn't think twice, was Blake's voice.”
He added that “the peculiar quality of the voice was something unforgettable because it was like God had a human voice, with all the infinite tenderness and anciency and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.”
Such visions prompted an interest in mysticism that led Ginsberg to experiment, for a time, with various drugs.
After a journey to India in 1962, however, during which he was introduced to meditation and yoga, Ginsberg changed his attitude towards drugs. He became convinced that meditation and yoga were far superior in raising one's consciousness, while still maintaining that psychedelics could prove helpful in writing poetry.

Ginsberg's study of Eastern religions was spurred on by his discovery of mantras, rhythmic chants used for spiritual effects.
During poetry readings he often began by chanting a mantra in order to set the proper mood.
In 1972 Ginsberg took the Refuge and Boddhisattva vows, formally committing himself to the Buddhist faith.

In 1974 Ginsberg and fellow-poet Anne Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics as a branch of Trungpa's Naropa Institute.
“The ultimate idea is to found a permanent arts college,” Ginsberg said of the school, “sort of like they have in Tibetan tradition where you have teachers and students living together in a permanent building which would go on for hundreds of years.”

Ginsberg lived a kind of literary “rags to riches”—from his early days as the feared, criticized, and “*****” poet to his later position within what Richard Kostelanetz called “the pantheon of American literature.”
He was one of the most influential poets of his generation and, in the words of James F. Mersmann, “a great figure in the history of poetry.”
Because of his rise to influence and his staying power as a figure in American art and culture, Ginsberg's work was the object of much scholarly attention throughout his lifetime.

In the spring of 1997, while already plagued with diabetes and chronic hepatitis, Ginsberg was diagnosed with liver cancer.
After learning of this illness, Ginsberg promptly produced twelve brief poems. The next day he suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma. Two days later, he died.

How would Ginsberg have liked to be remembered?
“As someone in the tradition of the oldtime American transcendentalist individualism,” he said, “from that old gnostic tradition…Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman…just carrying it on into the 20th century.”
Ginsberg once explained that among human faults he was most tolerant of anger; in his friends he most appreciated tranquility and ****** tenderness; his ideal occupation would be “articulating feelings in company.”
“Like it or not, no voice better echoes his times than Mr. Ginsberg's,” concluded a reviewer in the Economist.
“He was a bridge between the literary avant-garde and pop culture.”