“After Sappho” by Hoa Nguyen, from her upcoming book, As Long as Trees Last

“I also came to grotesque language in the patriarchal culture under the dictatorship. The body that was broken into pieces is a sick body. I put the disease of this world and my sick body together. The grotesque in my poems is the motion I use to put myself and the grotesque world together. So the miserable images I use in my poems are the same as the letters I send into the miserable world.”

(One of my favorite poets, Kim Hyesoon, in interview with Ruth Williams: http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/williams_kim_1_1_12/)

For autumn sounds, you must go to Hsiang-Hu’s alleys

For plum trees, to the West Lake hermit’s house

If you don’t feel like it, don’t go at all

Can a dry heart dream of bathing in the Heavenly River?

Can the hundred poems on plum blossoms hold one flowers’ beauty?

I grow old, impatient with my idle singing

Yet the poems burst out like these chrysanthemums

I have forgetten myself and the world and everything

I sit here too long, my bed must be cold

In the mountains, there is no calendar to mark the late season

But I know it’s the Double Ninth : chrysanthemums are blooming

Dew-spattered faces to the sun, they bloom every year

Laughing at those who don’t see the miracle of flowers

I put chrysanthemums in my hair and go to bed

—from A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry translated by Ngọc Bích Nguŷẽn, Burton Raffel, and W. S. Merwin

When I was a girl, I stole this book. It was talismanic and important and I would read it aloud to special souls. I’ve since lost it from my book collection, but thanks to Walter Tragart (who transcribed the above and held onto it for 20 years) I have this poem again.

Good night.

The Soul has Bandaged moments —
When too appalled to stir —
She feels some ghastly Fright come up 
And step to look at her —

Salute her — with long fingers —
Caress her freezing hair —
Sip, Goblin, from the very lips 
The Lover — hovered — o’er —
Unworthy, that a thought so mean 
Accost a Theme — so — fair —

The soul has moments of Escape —
When bursting all the doors —
She dances like a Bomb, abroad, 
And swings upon the Hours, 

As do the Bee — delirious borne —
Long Dungeoned from his Rose —
Touch Liberty — then know no more, 
But Noon, and Paradise —

The Soul’s retaken moments —
When, Felon led along, 
With shackles on the plumed feet, 
And staples, in the Song, 

The Horror welcomes her, again, 
These, are not brayed of Tongue —

—Emily Dickinson

Image from Jen Bervin’s Dickinson Fascicles

What to enjoy at the Comet Cafe before visiting Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s amazing bookstore and literary organization Woodland Patterns.

Move with a spring & vegetable swiftness,
seed-case & burr & tremulous grasses, a grove…vocal in the wind…

—Ronald Johnson, from The Book of the Green Man

[The poet] can only obey the apparently alien impulse within him and follow where it leads, sensing that his work is greater than himself, and wields a power which is not his and which he cannot command. Here the artist is not identical with the process of creation; he is aware that he is subordinate to his work or stands outside it, as though he were - a second person; or as though a person other than himself had fallen within the magic circle of an alien will. 

 

—Carl Jung from On The Relation Of Analytical Psychology To Poetry 

“people died like flies. couldn’t get caskets to”

Remains of a disappearing book by Stacy Blint.