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.
