more edwin morgan

another (darker, totally different) version


and, here is a link to the four poems commissioned for display in the Glasgow Underground, but rejected, among other reasons, because there are no piranhas in the underground.

please click the link marked "[3]" and read the one about the giraffe. or click "[4]" and read about the piranha.

The Loch Ness Monster's Song

THE LOCH NESS MONSTER'S SONG
--Edwin Morgan

Sssnnnwhuffffll?
Hnwhuffl hhnnwfl hnfl hfl?
Gdroblboblhobngbl gbl gl g g g g glbgl.
Drublhaflablhaflubhafgabhaflhafl fl fl -
gm grawwwww grf grawf awfgm graw gm.
Hovoplodok - doplodovok - plovodokot - doplodokosh?
Splgraw fok fok splgrafhatchgabrlgabrl fok splfok!
Zgra kra gka fok!
Grof grawff gahf?
Gombl mbl bl -
blm plm,
blm plm,
blm plm,
blp


I'm just sitting here listening to the audio version of this poem (available here), and it's just so nice.

(Does 'just' mean the same thing in those two sentences?)

blm plm,
blp

For My First Wife, While Married to My Second

It has been a long time since we sat down
to green bean casserole. I hope Richard
has recovered. Emily and I have finally settled
meaning I'm tired now and safe
but mostly, in trouble. It's not that I wish
differently. It's not that I miss the money.
It's just that—the children have started
their sledding, the snow has gotten them out
of the house and yesterday, I spotted you
at the super market touching the nectarines,
looking like you couldn't put your mind
on something you needed. If we never speak again,
that would be fine—honestly, I have nothing to say.
But maybe you do. And maybe I could sit with my arms
unfolded, kind-of closing my eyes. I mean,
I'd like to hear you without hearing myself.
I mean, if you needed butter to borrow,
if you came up short, maybe, I would have it,
That's all, that's all I want to say.

Copyright © 2006 Christopher Goodrich All rights reserved
from 5AM
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission

The poem in this subway car

I am talking to you about poetry
and you say
when do we eat.
The worst of it is
I'm hungry too.
--alicia partnoy

Reading this pulls me strongly into the head of the speaker--i imagine the situation and the conversation very vividly--but I can't envision the next moment. How is the speaker responding? Does she stop talking to eat? Is she abandoning her work? Or is this an escape from her mind into world?

--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

Parade, Tony Hoagland

Peter says if you're going to talk about suffering
you have to mention pleasure too.

Like the way, on the day of the parade, on Forbes Avenue,
one hundred parking tickets flutter
under the windshield wipers of one hundred parked cars.

The accordian band will be along soon,
and the famous Flying Pittsburgettes,
and it's summer and the sun is shining on the inevitable flags--

Something weird to admire this week on TV:
the handsome face of the white supremacist on trial.
How he looks right back at the lawyers, day after day
--never objecting, never making an apology.

I look at his calm, untroubled face
and think, That motherfucker is going to die white and right,
disappointing everyone like me
who thinks that punishment should be a kind of education.

My attitude is like what God says in the Bible:
Love your brother, or be destroyed.
Then Moses or somebody says back to God,
If I love you,
will you destroy my enemies?
and God says--this is in translation--, No Problemo.

Here, everyone is talking about the price of freedom,
and about how we as a people are united in our down payment,
about how we will fight to the very bottom of our bank account.

And the sky is so blue it looks like it may last forever
and the skinny tuba player goes oompahpah,
and everybody cheers.

In the big store window of the travel agency downtown,
a ten-foot sign says, WE WILL NEVER FORGET.

The letters have been cut with scissors out of blue construction paper
and pasted carefully to the sign by someone's hand.

What I want to know is, who will issue the ticket
for improper use of the collective pronoun?
What I want to know is, who will find and punish the maker
of these impossible promises?

Tony Hoagland keeps blowing my mind

From “When Dean Young Talks About Wine”

When a beast is hurt it roars in incomprehension.

When a bird is hurt it huddles in its nest.

But when a man is hurt,

he makes himself an expert.

Then he stands there with a glass in his hand

staring into nothing

as if he was forming an opinion.

I Need To Build Something

Things change quickly. A week ago, I felt like I was accomplishing things. Nothing of importance, really, but life felt cumulative: each book I read contributed to my total amount of knowledge; each project to my competence and resourcefulness and ability to achieve my goals; each grocery bought or towel folded or walk taken or conversation had seemed to move me along in my motions towards something. A successful life. A good day. A high score, or something. I don't really know more than that I felt like I was always knowing more.

Now, on the other hand, nothing amounts to anything. Nothing aggregates into anything bigger. Life doesn't sum. What I thought of as setbacks a week ago are now failures, inadequacies. I keep turning my failures into self-critiques.

The other night I worried that I was the kind of person who doesn't brush his teeth enough.

It's because I'm not making anything. There's no story of my life that I can tell, even to me: I've worn the narrative of Matthew-goes-to-grad-school into inarticulate hopes. I want, a little, to Peace Corps myself to Zambia or Benin or Honduras, but I want to send the resourceful intelligent me, rather than this one.

There's a Mallarmé quote that's something like "Alas, my flesh is sad and I have read all the books." Cara would know exactly what it is. But it sure feels like I have, and the grand projects of three weeks ago are preposterous.

Cindy says happiness isn't something you chase after. It's probably not, but what I had said before that was that I felt like I could see my vision of happiness receding over the horizon, and I do think like happiness is something you shouldn't lose sight of.

C.S. Lewis thinks all desires are partial, fragmentary desires for whatever is True, and that all earthly desires when satisfied turn into disappointment. This rings true with me, a little, although I don't think I buy his next step. Mag says that happiness is in itself a state of transition, before the serotonnin can be absorbed by the nerve. This rings true, too, but I can't believe that the next 40 years of my life are going to alternate between elation and this sort of minuscule despair.

Despairillo.

I don't particularly want joy. I don't need elation or ecstasy. I'd like to feel like I'm moving.

Sometimes, when I was most lonely in Memphis, after my parents moved, I would just get in a car and drive in big circles, around town or out the interstate, and listen to loud depressing music. And sometimes, I wouldn't be able to do that. It'd feel pointless, like it'd remind me that all there was for me was big empty circular motions leaving off just before they began.

I'm terrified of that kind of paralysis.



--
Hofstadter, in Godel, Escher, Bach talks about a particular sort of wasp, that will sting a cricket, to paralyze it, then drag it back to its cave, where it lays its eggs in the bug's midsection and then reseals the front of the cave with mud. The young hatch and eat the living but paralyzed cricket and then bust out of the cave.

The amazing thing about this wasp, for Hofstadter, is that before it drags the cricket into its cave, it goes into the cave and checks to make sure that there aren't any harmful critters in there. This seems, he points out, to show an astounding amount of foresight on the part of the wasp.

But, then scientists tried a simple experiment on the wasp. While it was inside they'd move the cricket about an inch. The wasp would come out, fly over to the cricket, drag it an inch back to the cave and go back inside to check for harmful critters. The scientist would drag the cricket an inch over again. The wasp would come out, drag the cricket again, and go back in to check again. No matter how many times it had checked before, it had to check again whenever it got back to its nest.

I feel worse for the wasp than I do for the cricket.

--
(a Robert Creeley poem, stolen from Mag.)


I KNOW A MAN

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

One of Bruce Snider's Poems

"A Drag Queen Is Like a Poem"

in the same way that a drag
queen is like a woman
except of course that the woman
has real breasts while the drag queen
unbuttons her blouse
to reveal the realistic breast form
for cross dressers she's ordered
like alligator shoes from the Gucci catalog.
But then it's not so much shoes
that matter when talking
about poetry as it is the hair
and jewelry and the way
the lipstick has been applied.
Any teenage girl can tell you
that a good poem needs
to wear a short skirt if she
wants the boys to notice,
and that eye shadow can say
just as much as the subtle shadings
of anything Keats or Eliot
ever wrote. The truth is
it's all about truth
and beauty, or what passes for it,
and so there will always be someone
to argue it doesn't matter
what sprouts between
your legs like so much moss
between the paving stones. You can
always just pad or shave
or powder. You can strap
on foam tits and a ruber ass
to remind yourself that the language
of the body can always
be rewritten, that ultimately poem
is to the poet as drag
is to the queen, each word
fitting together like male
and female, like an infant
and his mother, two bodies,
two hearts, but one
coming out of the other.



Bruce taught me poetry for a summer. This isn't my favorite of his, but it struck me as I was looking at his book again.

Up in three and a half hours to head to Canada. Wish me luck!