(Ed Coletti's) NO MONEY IN POETRY

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Review of Koneazny Book/Bauman Photo/Beckman Sonnet/Coletti Paintings/



Review of Paula Koneazny's Installation

 by Ed Coletti  



Noticing well and over the years how people have different ideas about what poetry is, I wonder how the vast majority of occasional poetry readers and even traditional poetry lovers might feel about the exquisite experimental work in Paula Koneazny’s little combined poetry/photography book, Installation (Tarpaulin Sky Press 2012).  I suspect that many, not discovering an easy answer to “What does it mean?” would reject it outright.  However, were they to express their “reason” to me, I would respond in accordance with the title of my first mentor John Ciardi whose text was titled HowDoes A Poem Mean?

As might be expected here from the assistant editor of the concrete and experimental Volt Magazine, Koneazny’s “meaning” begins and ends in studiedly tangible photographic images which may defy immediate prosaic description but which serve as poetic installations.

The poet spends quite a bit of her writing minimizing the essentiality of words or their ultimate value.  However, she is a poet and, by definition, requires words.  But she uses them in much the same manner as she uses photography, to create or build her image as in “Stele 1” which ends,

we can
w/ frontal cast
iron / clad
& back slash
separate (in other words
sideways)
suture

Lest I leave the totally false impression that MS Koneazny is at war with words, I’ll point out right here that she looks into their use and their usage as few do. 

Prepositions are sometimes added to verbs to say that something is true now:

She jots down the molecular structure of anxiety.
“You morsel, you,” he scribbles in.

William Carlos Williams’ immortal “No ideas but in things” is wonderfully rampant here in Koneazny’s “Field Guide To A Girl,”

neighbors push their backyards together
leave her the crack between/ gaping hole
where appliances were once electrified

This also makes me mindful of “Seven Songs & Song Pictures,” (the English translation by Jerome Rothenberg from Ojibwa by Frances Densmore,


Song Picture no. 54

in the middle of the sea
long room of the sea
in which I’m sitting

Each song picture is combined with a primitive drawing, a most concrete image.  How like Paula Koneazny’s use of photography. 

And from “In a declarative sentence much can come in between:”

He had no formal training; aluminum and copper gave him a shudder.
Then one day he stumbled into some driftwood.  The next thing he knew he
owned 3 pianos. No longer having to illuminate anything, he experienced
a sense of freedom. He said, “Movement in the exhaust pipes created
this...”

There remains so much to be said!  Don’t take it from me.  Prose cannot describe Installation.  Get a copy for yourself, now!

Installation can be purchased from Tarpaulin Sky Press

Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

(Photo by Martin Bauman)


Breath
 by David Beckman

Beware this new import from the East -- yoga. Suspect celestial and/or bizarre influences coming into play and inducing never-ending hibernation
                                                -- attribution tk (circa 1863)




On the inhale see atoms cascade from
Mercury’s moons. Attain full backward
arch to flower the heart. On downward
dog feel sunspots kiss and planets spin.

In raised palms cup the heat that firms
cell walls, warms dark matter and
loosens galaxies. In sun salutation reach
for Ursa Minor, prompting the spine

erect. Come lunging twist, hear knees
speak in tongues and watch the floor
recede, a damask carpet seeking orbit. In
lotus pose open birth canal lilywide

stretching you a body length past your
birth and one exhale from your demise.


Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.


View More of Ed Coletti's Paintings at Flicker 


Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

Saturday, April 06, 2013

Proust Questionnaire Redux/Breakfast/Ed Coletti Radio Broadcast/Emily's "Funeral"/3 Poems by Ed Coletti (Triolets)




Do The Interactive Proust Questionnaire click here/now!

Answer questions about your favorite historical figure, your hero, your greatest fear, etc, etc.  Then you can compare yourself with other respondents!  I came out closest to Jane Goodall!  Go figure!

click here/now!










Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.
Ed Coletti On KRCB Word Temple Show Reading of February 20, 2013. Click Here to listen

(Photo of Ed Coletti and Charles Wolski in NYC Dec. 2013)






Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

Example of a Spontaneous Emily Dickinson "Big Read" Event

During early March, Poet Larry Robinson circulated the Emily Dickinson poem "I felt a Funeral in my Brain," and I, in turn asked Larry a question about it.  The following enlightening email conversation ensued among Larry Robinson, Ed Coletti, David Beckman, and Katherine 
Hastings.  I hope that you find it as interesting, fun, and joy-provoking as we did.



I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum -
Kept beating - beating - till I thought
My mind was going numb -

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space - began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here -

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then -

 - Emily Dickinson


Thanks, Larry.  I'd forgotten - what a remarkably great poem!  I have some difficulty at the line "-till it seemed that Sense was breaking through-"
What do you make of it?  I'd never really studied the poem much.  I'll also pass this along to Beckman, Hastings, and Joyce.

Ed


I share your struggle with that line; it's like a koan, isn't it?

Larry


Yes, great poem. Thanks for the query, Ed. A quick check yields many meanings for “sense,” including “apprehension” and “discernment.” I suspect Dickinson had one of these, or another, such meaning in mind (It’d be fun to see which meaning was most current in her time).

I don’t use my OED a lot these days (micrographic, and getting really heard to read even with the provided magnifying glass).
I used to subscribe to it online...does anyone? It would probably give good answers.

David


This poem isn't addressing the funeral of a person, it is addressing the decreasing mental capacity in the speaker's brain — a mental breakdown, a descent into madness.  That's why reason, or "Sense was breaking through".  Re-read the poem with this in mind and all the metaphors start clicking.  

Thanks for sending Emily out, Larry!

k

Yes, indeed that works for me!

This has been fun!

Thanks,

Ed


Yep, ditto. Nice insight, Katherine.

D.


Thanks for sending the question around, Ed.  It's always good to take a deeper look at deeper, more complex poetry!  ;-)

k
 
Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

3 More Ed Coletti Triolets


Triolet On Stockton

The bankrupted City of Stockton, “C” “A”
Lies dying in San Joaquin’s Delta.
Each Fat City house turned empty crate
The bankrupted City of Stockton, “C” “A”
Where mortgages domino day by day
No one benefits as all the wealth of
The bankrupted City of Stockton, “C” “A”
Lies dying in San Joaquin’s Delta.


Triolet On a Partial Line
From “Norwegian Wood”
By The Beatles


Or should I say “she once had me”?
Possession is nine-tenths of law.
Almost nothing accrues for free.
Or should I say “she once had me”?
Today, tomorrow, yesterday,
Continuum both once and yore.
Or should I say “she once had me?”
Possession is nine-tenths of law.


Triolet From a Line Within “Ohio” By
   Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young


Should have been done long ago,
Delay proves always fatal.
No excuse for status quo,
Should have been done long ago.
Vain war impacts Ohio.
Kids now scarce years post natal.
Should have been done long ago,
Delay proves always fatal. 


Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

Also, take a look at my 5 New Jazz Poems at the valuable Jerry Jazz Musician site.  Once you find the poems, please comment on the poems at the site












  
 

Thursday, January 03, 2013

Why Books?/Coletti "Coltrane, Dig?" and "Bodies" a Painting/Amy Trussell & Krista Brown/


Happy New Year 2012 from Ed Coletti at No Money in Poetry 



The unadmitted reason why traditional readers 
are hostile to e-books is that we still hold the

superstitious idea that a book is like a soul, and

that every soul should have its own body.

Adam Kirsch in Poetry November 2012


I like and respect Kirsch's quotation with the

              possible exception of the word "superstitious." -ejc


Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

Painting "Bodies" (Acrylic December 2012) also by Ed Coletti (more images of coletti paintings)


Coltrane, Dig?




I suppose what it is with trane and me is
he takes all the time he wants to take
even outside of time, sidereal time,
stardust time, bessie blue time,
through-and-through-him time,
trancey groove time, even arranged time.

The duke laying down stevie blocks,
trane ain’t gonna be no mortar here
he gonna weave a kinda mesh  
round duke’s work, trane lacing
duke’s solidity with blue spirit,
blues spirit.  duke hears it, stays
near it, layin’ stevie blocks
now playing trane blocks, the duke
in-spired, layin’ down trane blocks.

Then comes slo-trane’s pleasing
molasses blue invention and
no one makes new like coltrane,
the original organic cat and not such
a stranger-in-a-not-so-strange-land,
he resonates—that’s it—we get trane,
that why trane — is — trane.
you hear a bass soloing, wherever
that bass is echoing, whoever
that bass, he echoing trane
that what jazz all about.

If the drum set belong to tootie heath or to
philly joe jones, it don’t matter. they both
coltrane without his horn, c’est la vie, man,
trane be something else, something like
                        deity ethereal night, man. I mean you take
nancy, you give her a lavender face
so she be nancy with the laughing face.
what you got be only coltrane stirring
something delicious in his pot,
coltrane doing nancy, no need explaining
her gleeful countenance,  you dig?
trane, hey, he got no need to wreck the show.



- ed coletti

 Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.


                                                                      

Qatari poet Mohamed Ibn Al Ajami’s crime consisted of reciting a poem extolling the courage and values of the popular uprisings in Tunisia. For that he's been sentenced to life in prison.

Please join with a remarkable list of prominent poets from around the world and urge the court in Qatar to reconsider.



POETS MUST HELP POETS! ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT FREE SPEECH ACTIONS ORGANIZED BY POETS IN MANY YEARS!
Please join Alice Walker, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Marcia Lynx Qualey, Sam Hamill, Philip Levine, Naomi Shihab Nye, Carolyn Forché, Martin Espada, Chris Abani, Jerome Rothenberg, Pina Piccolo, Pilar Rodriguez Aranda, Nana Nestoros, Jack Hirschman, Patricia Smith, Paul Polansky, Ron Silliman, Menka Shivdasani, Karam Youssef, PEN America Center, Michael Rothenberg and Terri Carrion, co-founders of 100 Thousand Poets for Change, Rootsaction.org, Code Pink and Split This Rock, and many more of our friends in this global campaign to free the Qatari poet Mohamed Ibn Al Ajami, sentenced to life imprisonment for reciting a poem! Sign this petition and send a letter the Qatar Embassy! We can do this!

http://act.rootsaction.org/o/6503/t/0/blastContent.jsp?email_blast_KEY=136398


 
 "Poetry Moonspell" by Krista Brown

Moonspell

There seems to be little territory to stand on
anymore, only several inches of water
running through the canal streets
of this nearly abandoned heart
housed in the city that was almost
sucked down as the next Atlantis,
drenched in toxicity,
blue gas flames shooting from
the top of the water.
We were hip deep in despair
but the temple priestess said
the ocean goddess has given us a gift.
So I looked in the palette and saw
the woman of the tide pool and starfish
that are open wherever they end up
in this earth and sky running with river,
oceans, blood, oil paint.
Go to the blood bank and let them
tap my heart, feeling back to the time
of my own transfusion,
how light I felt the next day
standing next to the sea of the outpost,
moon in the sky like a tugboat.
Some liquid part flowing through me
was once filtered through another’s center.
Look at the fishes’ perseverance
and intelligence as it whips upstream
to find its pool of re-creation,
the flesh medicine for our sad restless brains.
And there are the elephants
who sensed a tsunami before it came,
and bowed down to lift people
and carry them back up into the jungle.
Scientists say we are not that different
in our chromosomes from eels and butterflies
so maybe there is hope for us.
Fluttering in the chest as my offspring plays guitar.
A coastguard or fireman rushes into the
double doors on the news
carrying a perfect baby to safety
and the moon card turns over in endless sky.
Trust instinct, trust the inner pull
toward illuminated mystery
even in times of shipwreck.

-Amy Trussell



Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.



Saturday, August 18, 2012

Review of Katherine Hastings' Cloud Fire/ 3 More Coletti Poems/James Joyce Reading "Finnegan's Wake"/

 Katherine Hastings' Cloud Fire (reviewed by Ed Coletti)

Katherine Hastings’  curiously named publisher, Spuyten Duyvil in New York City, actually provides me an apt leaping off point for her incredible achievement Cloud Fire.
 
“Spuyten Duyvil” derives from the New York Dutch and their “spewing devil” where “spui” and “spuit” involve the gushing forth of water.  However, while we have so much of water here, it is the fog-shrouded California Pacific, much better painted by a gentle sorcerer stirring rather than a fearsome devil spewing—less gushing, more being.  

Still, lest I forget, the book’s title contains both clouds and fire,

My city whose hair is a cloud fire

This theme of “hair” continues into the poem “Lonadier Rampant.  A poet “too near the bridge,” does jump, and Hastings, after painting Lynn Lonadier  crash from a cliff into the sea, then has her beloved San Francisco sing a final lullaby,

Lonadier  Your hair/Will be the last of you/To hit the sea/The city that saved you again and again/Rising swiftly/To still you/To sleep.

It is the City-By-The-Bay, shrouded and elevated by fog that provides Katherine Hastings (also the painter of her book’s cover) her magical palette.  She becomes the Whitman of clouds, singing of clouds

Fog-mantle on the breast of meadow/where voices from the emerald womb—feathered throats and bud bloom—sing through

I don’t employ the word “masterpiece” frequently, and never casually.  However, in the case of Hastings long opening poem, “Clouds,” I have no choice.  In it, I feel the spirit and depth of Hart Crane’s “Bridge”

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest/The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,/Shedding white rings of tumult, building high/Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

And  Hastings on “flight,”

We do this like children or angels living/on the ledges of waves and lips, downy/wings so white they hum every color./Bees rolling in a white rose.

Cloud Fire works best read in one sweeping panorama from front to back.  Hastings begins in clouds, opens into complex life experiences and wraps up in a final poem also title “Clouds”  where, “In fog you are everywhere/and nowhere.”  Amidst the clouds and between them, the book exposes both the grime and glimmer of earth below as in this from “ O’Sidhe of Greenwich Street,”

...With one hand she catches a dove,/breathes it back to flight, with the other/turns the sizzling knob.

Were I to give you my reader only one bit of advice today, it would be to buy this book now.  Then take it home and read it through from beginning to end, and over and over.  It’s that good!


Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

3 More Ed Coletti Poems

A Trio of Triolets (tree-oh-lays)

Figuring that probably 95% of serious poets writing today eschew traditional poetic forms for free verse, I surmise that the poets who do at least occasionally try formal verse paradoxically could be termed today's "rebels."

I liken the "restriction" of such forms to swaddling a baby. The resulting security is a benefit.  "Restricting" myself to a poetic vessel seems to free the soul to pour its contents into the container in a way that is different from an uncontained beginning.  I've chosen the triolet which issues from 13th century France, is similar to the rondeau, was briefly popularized by Robert Bridges at the turn of the 20th century, and which can lend itself nicely to humor.


Triolet On Time

"For boys add to their woe by sitting still"
Was the best line of my youthful poem.
Now age and illness ask again why will
Such boys add to their woe by sitting still?
You’d think of this they’d had their awful fill
And, dreaming dreams of life they’d finally sow them.
"For boys add to their woe by sitting still"
Was the best line of my youthful poem.


Published at The New Formalist  September 2012

Triolet Of The Critical Loser

“Stick to painting, I don’t like your poems,”
Averred Cowboy Bob who I’d beaten in chess.
Perhaps he feared lofty emotions,
“Stick to painting, I don’t like your poems,”
More difficult work beyond his knowing.
Give him Kipling, McKuen, Edgar Guest,
“Stick to painting, I don’t like your poems,”
Averred Cowboy Bob who I’d beaten in chess.

Triolet From A Line By Eric Clapton

My darling you look wonderful tonight.
Your short silver hair, shining opal eyes,
When I see you smiling everything feels right.
My darling you look wonderful tonight.
Thought of your passing’s a terrible fright,
Loss of part of me, joy and wisdom dies.
My darling you look wonderful tonight.
Your short silver hair, shining opal eyes.

Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

James Joyce Reading Anna Livia Plurabelle Section from Finnegan's Wake

Tuesday, July 03, 2012

2 Ed Coletti Poems/Of Podiums/Norman Ball "Being Difficult"/Tribute to Lilliput Review/Norman Ball Being Difficult/

Poets. How often do you feel this way?










2 Ed Coletti Poems


The Oblong Root
for Adelaide O’Connor Ehret

Going deaf, neither she
nor her hearing daughter
recognize the assertive
unconscious voice
exchanging “Pablo Neruda”
for “oblong root” or perhaps
for the  medulla oblongata
center of so much involuntary
assertiveness, her very breathing,
the beating of her great heart,
that fountain enabling her daughter,
these words that must mean
something greater than their sounds.

When it comes to shapes oblong,
poets prefer oval over rhomboid.
Because both lampreys and hagfish
possess a fully developed medulla
oblongata, half a billion years of
evolution formed this mother-wisdom
this connection between a great poet
and that most essential ancient
ancestor of her own brain
eventually bestowing the gift
of words on her daughter
who told mother that she’d won 
a prize now confused with an oblong root.

This sound the mother hazily heard
might have been the swishing of
a weed growing in dry rocky
pasture land outside Stoneham
near the marble quarry
or vibration off a German yellow sugar beet.
The very pith of plants also referred to
as their “medulla”  Yet mathematicians       
know the oblong root as an algebraic square.
All such fugues episodically
musically create all richness
all story all myth all family.
Even entire geographies as they exist
for midwestern endodontists who
in 2012 AD estimated
the typical cost of a root canal
in Oblong, Illinois to be
nineteen hundred-thirty-four dollars.

But, in terms of preference,
when it comes to oblong  contours
almost all poets and loving mothers
choosing the egg-shape over rhombus,
realize how one thing always leads to another,
even and perhaps especially,                    this.


loosening its hold on the clowns

yes it’s gone gone gone
gone gone away.
— Allen Ginsberg

such presentation as clowns make
ejecting from their tiny cars
like so many spermatazoan pilots
beating each other with
styrofoam clubs,
punches and judies
posed ponderous
play at love and pain
yesterday and today
lament their passing
enjoy their farcical pageantry
relate to Emmett Kelly’s tears
open hearts to take a whack
at each decade each life,
and it was as it happened
but memory’s perspective
gives moments their due
in such a big top’s
insanely frightful review.

(Published in Spillway June 2012)

  
Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.


"Being Difficult" Selections from the Essay on Poetic Obscurity and Other Good Stuff by Norman Ball (see biography by pressing the "full article" link just below.


 These selections are from the full article which previously appeared in Rattle.

"The message to poets is, beware the kindness of strangers.  Those who would rescue a poem from 'incomprehensibility' may actually be advancing death-by explication.  Poetic logic is its own animal existing outside the bounds of relatable (i.e. conversational) understanding.  I'm guilty of offering dubious assistance in some of your prior efforts.  But I find myself developing a comfort level with your opacity...For me, part of the fascination of your poetry lies in  its willful inaccessiblity.  I'm convinced you've constructed more here than a good game of hide-and seek..."

"For too many readers, difficulty is a tiresome abomination, a code to be cracked.  They want their literary merit fed to them in bite-sized morsels."

"The Internet, for all its salutary effects on artistic collaboration and community, beckons with an immediacy that can be the undoing of careful composition.  In the penchant for immediacy, difficulty suffers...the technology itself tempts at rushing a poem out there before its time." 


" 'The Wasteland' gives up nothing over bagels and coffee.  Lovers rarely discuss it in bed.  Yet it feels like a poem, filling us with the overwhelming sense we are experiencing something.  There is no paragraphed synopsis to render this experience.  This is as it should be."


Now, enjoy the full article
 

Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.
 

Just 3 Reasons Why I Love  Lilliput Review and 
Why Everyone Should Subscribe

standing ovation
for the penniless poet:
a short walk to their cars


Mike Dillon
Indianola, WA 


While you were onstage reading another poem

A man carrying a garbage bag in the rain
performed the stations of the cross
and moved his lips in silent prayer.



Kyle Vaughn
Dallas, TX


Advice to the Aspiring Artist

Maintain a
distance.


Maintain a
great distance.


Run for
the hills.



John Bennett
Ellensburg, WA


Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.




  

 

Saturday, June 02, 2012

Serfs of Psychiatry/Who To Impress/Vera Pavlova/


Review:  Serfs of Psychiatry (Finishing Line Press 2012) by Gil Fagiani

Of course, Gil Fagiani’s chapbook Serfs of Psychiatry (Finishing Line Press 2012) reminds me of Vilma Ginzberg’s Snake Pit which I published over my Round Barn Press imprint during 2010.  Each covers the terrors abundant in mental asylums.  Both institutions are located in the State of New York.  Each lays out the horrific scene.  However, Ginzberg is more therapeutic in her approach.  Fagiani simply puts the Inferno right in your face, as in the vernacular of simply “making it real.” 

The differences are those of time and place.  Vilma came 20 years before Gil. Conditions, back then, while certainly horrendous enough, pale in comparison to what they’ve become.  Ginzberg’s institution may be viewed as a harbinger of Fagiani’s.  As to place, she was “upstate” in Rockland State Hospital while he labored down the City in Bronx State Hospital.

When, 10 years after he’d worked there, Fagiani visited “the asylum” he found in “The Geometry of Misery,”  that “All the people were the same.//There was the dwarf/with the non-stop laugh/who drank coffee all day/and raced around/who is without legs now/and sits slumped in a wheelchair.”

In a powerful prose poem he recalls “Marty” who “...had big breasts and/bitty balls and would pop his cork by laying on his belly/and kicking himself in the butt with the back of his feet.” and who would say “ ‘sweet juice’ and smile sometimes after  he/washed down his meds with an extra cup of cherry/Kool-Aid.  Otherwise the only sound that would come/out of his mouth was something that sounded like/ ‘ah-coo-cha-la’ which one nurse said was shim talk for/ ‘I’ll cut your head off.’  ‘Ah-coo-cha-la’ was Marty’s/ war cry...”

Fagiani also pays deep attention to staff members working and retired like Miss Hunter, found dead, "her stroke-stiffened head/purple as an eggplant."  The story of her life is discovered in her possessions, evidence plenty enough to inspire a novelist  and tenderly cataloged  by the poet include "a framed certificate of appreciation/signed by the governor,/a large print bible/an electric broiler/two auburn hair extensions,/a wig cleaning kit,/a chrome cocktail shaker,/two packs of Gypsy Good Time/playing cards,/and a book on how to interpret dreams/for love and money."

This is gritty and nicely-crafted work culminates in a complex poem about paranoia and suicidal ideations ironically titled "My Wife Accused Me of Having Another Woman."  Throughout Serfs of Psychiatry, Gil Fagiani never goes out of his way to spare himself.  Highly recommended. Go to Finishing Line Press to order.

Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

Ultimately,
the person who
you most need to impress
with the quality of your work
is yourself. 

                        — Ed Coletti 

Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

15 Aphorisms from Vera Pavlova's  
Heaven Is Not Verbose: A Notebook
(for full text, go to Poetry (April 2012)

  • Inspiration: when I have confidence in myself.
  • Pick a piece of wood floating in the river and follow it down the current with your glance, keeping the eyes constantly on it, without getting ahead of the current.  This is the way poetry should be read: at the pace of a line. 
  • How do I feel about people who do not understand my poetry?  I understand them.
  • Being well-known means knowing almost nothing as to who knows you and what they might know about you.
  • Poetry begins when not only the reader but also the author starts wondering whether it is poetry.
  • I write to equalize the pressure from without and from within, to prevent being squashed (by misery) or being blown apart ( by happiness).
  • - Do you understand that understanding is impossible?                                                              - I do. 
  • By giving my books as presents, I mark my territory.
  • Stravinsky: "I like writing music more than I like music."
  • A fisherman told me: "Writing poetry must be like digging for earthworms: you grab the critter by the end and pull.  Pull too hard, and it'll break/ not hard enough, it'll get away."
  • From a letter of a young poet: "I write when I feel bad. When I feel fine, I don't write."  With me, it's the opposite: when I write, I feel fine. I feel bad when I do not write.
  • An ideal poem: every line of it can serve as a title for a book.
  • Reader: Do you want me to recognize my everyday world in your poems?                            Poet: No, I want your world to seem unfamiliar to you, once you take your eyes off the text.
  • When a true poet dies, we realize that all his poems were about death.
  • Reader: Yevtushenko claims that in Russia a poet is something more than just a poet.  Is that true?                                                                                                                                 Poet: No, nothing can be more than a poet.                                                                                  
    Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, log in under "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.