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)

  
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"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.




  

 

Rare Footage of Jack Micheline Reading/A.D. Winans/Photos from Festival of The Long Poem/ Coletti Works/ Etc.

Jack Micheline and Al Winans (right to left in this cool painting by Jason Hardung) click for  Jack Micheline Reading A. D. Winans Remembers...