Perhaps knowing that Joseph Zaccardi is a poet of great
heart, I first searched out the heart poems in his new brilliant collection A Wolf Stands Alone in Water: Word Tech CW Books (October 23, 2015)
only to immediately also recall how taken I have been by the strength of his
mind and his philosophical belief systems. These qualities work beautifully
together as in the poem “Speaking in Tongues” where the poet beholds his
stepfather dying of cancer, “I promise to be there when it happens,/to kneel in
silence. The doctors have given him/a time, and my stepfather holds that time
out/at arms length, feels it shrink and expand.”
This entire volume pulses with that intelligent beat of life
both expanding and diminishing. Such is
the heart’s unalloyed truth.
Each of Zaccardi’s collections also embody a type of mindful
spirituality more of the Eastern sort without in-your-face theology. The book is divided into five sections
preceded by this prologue,
A Kind of Surrender
This morning the last bloom
on the wisteria fell away.
Why is it I close my eyes to music
and open them when there’s a storm?
The section titles Pain Outside The Body; The Scale That
Measures Our Lives; A Map Of Questions; Pain About Damage; and The Wheat Field present somewhat of an enigma calling out to
me to find a common denominator.
Yielding to the challenge, I immediately go to “pain,” but this
collection, while it explores pain exquisitely, also checks into the realm of
the metaphysical better denoted by the words “measures” and “map.” And “the wheat field,” at least those words,
beckons to me as from a peaceful place of meditation. This surmise at least in part is borne out in
the thought-provoking poem “Home Front” where
“She tries to not think; tries the mind trick of writing/the problem on paper,
then locking it away in a drawer.”
However, she also must wrestle with her active brain,
“Arrogant muscle, she says out loud.”
When a friend suggests that “…she make up a color/that doesn’t exist,”
metaphysical notions come to bear with,
“…What doesn’t exist? Who can avoid/hearing the news about those killed in
action?” Suddenly, we’ve found ourselves
watching warfare on PBS. She turns off
the sound, but “…She can’t help
thinking. Turning back/is a defeat, she’s told. That could be said of friendly
fire./What does exist? A question.”
The poem “The Hand” is a most wise one. It goes far in understanding that earlier
jarring section of the book, A Map Of
Questions which seems to delve deeply into the issues of great violence.
The Hand
The hand can embrace and crush,
can mold and caress, can be held
or be like the clouds.
The hand is vain
and corrupt, is kind and forgiving,
can draw on a canvas
something vast and beautiful,
can clear-cut a forest, strip a mountain.
Can hold a lie as stiffly as a rod
or truth as loosely as a string.
The aforementioned themes of pain, love (heart), and metaphysical mystery come together most
tellingly in “Infantryman (No Dog Tags).”
This poem, originally published in Spillway,
was my introduction to Joseph Zaccardi’s work.
Later, I learned that he had served in Vietnam as a naval air rescue
corpsman attempting to save wounded marines in battle. The poem begins with the graphic lines “I
once put my mouth to another man’s mouth/because he could not breathe on his
own.” After failing in his resuscitation
attempt, the speaker concludes with the wondrously ambiguous lines, “…I turned
onto my back, lying/exhausted next to him. And held his hand/as his body
cooled. The heat from the sun felt
good,/but not the hunger not the shame.”
Joseph Zaccardi is also a very brave poet.
Towards the end of the book and in the midst of The Wheat Field, the poem “Tourniquet” couples another
sanguinary image with the metaphysical ocean,
“There is immensity. The sea with its own language/held together and not
held together. And the heart/inside the body. Each keeps saying don’t stop.” Again that great Zaccardi heart that keeps
beating along with his language of the tides.
On this theme, I will conclude with several lines from
“Loss.”
“…The flower obeys the laws/of nature, whether opening in
full season/or the wilting in abandonment.”
All is there for the poet.
Beauty, love, loss, pain, and wonder.
A meditation. Wonderful
achievement from a great poet.
Joseph
Zaccardi -
Born in Newark, New Jersey, poetry came late to Joseph
Zaccardi at the age of thirteen. His publications include Vents
(Pancake Press 2005), Render (Poetic Matrix Press 2009), and The Nine
Gradations of Light (Bark for Me Publications 2013). In 2003 he received an
Individual Artist Grant from the Marin Arts Council. He was editor of the Marin
Poetry Center Anthology from 2010 thru 2012, has participated in the ROAR
program, started by outgoing poet laureate CB Follett, reading poetry to
residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. He was appointed Poet Laureate of Marin
County, CA in 2013 for a two-year term
Ed
Coletti
is a poet, painter, fiction writer, and chess player who studied under Robert
Creeley in San Francisco (1970-71). Ed recently has had work
in The Brooklyn Rail, North American Review, Big Bridge, Hawai’i
Pacific Review, Spillway, Lilliput Review, and So It
Goes – The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.
Internet presence includes his popular blog “No Money In Poetry.”
Coletti’s book, When Hearts Outlive Minds, was released June 2011.
Germs, Viruses, and Catechisms was published by Civil Defense
Publications (San Francisco) during Winter 2013. The Problem
With Breathing from Edwin E. Smith Publications (Little Rock) was
published during June 2015. Apollo Blue’s Harp (and the
gods of song) also will be published by Edwin E. Smith in 2016
4 Ed Coletti Poems
In Meat For Tea: The Valley Review
tea leaf mountain
high up over
rain river gorge
tea
women
floating
fingers
pluck
fragrant
baby loden
tea leaves before
the
sun leaves
another
work day
in
arrears in
the
tea-darkness.
Two Words
These two had arrived vaguely
from within a nap
on a couch in New York
where winter wind blustered
outside in late December
But the two distinct words
“Swedish Acorn” themselves
having nothing to do with the wind
emerged from that doze as though
from a stillness in the womb
“Swedish Acorn”
seed of Scandinavian oak
sense of a future progeny
shifting in Sweden’s soil
waiting for proper conditions
Amour and the Bushman
Hans Taiibosch the Bushman
died-to-life in A Mantis Carol,
by Laurens van der Post,
the very day we lived and died
the film “Amour” and learned
why the word and the principle
dancing inhabits present spirit
as well as absent if ever
absence has anything to do with
dying, the pavanne of it, the
dignity
extant in earth’s least dignified
moldering
moment from which we sense he, —
with only his ubiquitous arrows,
his painting sticks, his dancing
life,
dances as death must be
danced, in his “Dance of the Great
Hunger,”
dances, palms up, neck extended,
eyes upward — Hans, seeks beginning.
His
Motivation
Tolstoy’s embrace of peasant life
Where bread tastes sweet as
honey making to the bees
Where indefinable love lives
poetic
Where music dances and where
dances muse
Where sounds are chimes and birds
signify
When he enters such a pregnant
glade
the poet Tolstoy in reverie is
blessed enough to freely share his
surplus.
Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, then log in by checking "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.
NEW YORK
Bill Murray has turned up everywhere from bachelor parties to
baseball games, but his latest surprise has a more literary side: He
shares some favorite poems in the April issue of O, The Oprah Magazine,
which comes out Friday.
The actor is featured on a page dedicated to National Poetry Month, offering brief asides on works by Galway Kinnell, Lucille Clifton, Thomas Lux and Naomi Shihab Nye. For Clifton's inspirational "what the mirror said," Murray comments, "everybody needs an 'Attagirl!' now and then." Murray also includes Kinnell's "Oatmeal," with its reference to sharing a meal with the late John Keats.
"Alas, Kinnell, too, is now available for breakfast," Murray adds, noting that the poet died in 2014.
The magazine's books editor, Leigh Haber, had reason to believe Murray might agree to the project. He's a longtime supporter of Poets House, a literary center based in Manhattan, and one year read works there by Emily Dickinson and others to a gathering of construction workers. Haber told The Associated Press during a recent interview that she contacted Murray through a mutual friend. Two months went by without a response. On deadline day, he called the magazine's office and told Haber that he was in town and had some poems in mind. Because he didn't use emails or fax machines, he suggested a meeting at his room in the Carlyle Hotel. Haber and an assistant headed right over.
"It was so funny," Haber said. "He had scraps of paper on which he'd scribbled notes and Xeroxes of poems. His love of poetry was obvious from how much pleasure he took in reading the poems aloud to us."
With business out of the way, Murray rolled out a glass cart and served martinis.
"An act of poetry all its own," Haber calls it.
Murray's other picks include Lux's romantic ode "I Love You Sweatheart," of which he said, "This poem vibrates the insides of my ribs, where the meat is most tender." He also felt a personal connection to Nye's "Famous" and its lines "I want to be famous in the way/ a pulley is famous/ or a buttonhole, not because it did/ anything spectacular/ but because it never forgot/what it could do."
Murray's take: "It's not the dream of being big. It's the dream of being real. That's what stands out to me."
---
The actor is featured on a page dedicated to National Poetry Month, offering brief asides on works by Galway Kinnell, Lucille Clifton, Thomas Lux and Naomi Shihab Nye. For Clifton's inspirational "what the mirror said," Murray comments, "everybody needs an 'Attagirl!' now and then." Murray also includes Kinnell's "Oatmeal," with its reference to sharing a meal with the late John Keats.
"Alas, Kinnell, too, is now available for breakfast," Murray adds, noting that the poet died in 2014.
The magazine's books editor, Leigh Haber, had reason to believe Murray might agree to the project. He's a longtime supporter of Poets House, a literary center based in Manhattan, and one year read works there by Emily Dickinson and others to a gathering of construction workers. Haber told The Associated Press during a recent interview that she contacted Murray through a mutual friend. Two months went by without a response. On deadline day, he called the magazine's office and told Haber that he was in town and had some poems in mind. Because he didn't use emails or fax machines, he suggested a meeting at his room in the Carlyle Hotel. Haber and an assistant headed right over.
"It was so funny," Haber said. "He had scraps of paper on which he'd scribbled notes and Xeroxes of poems. His love of poetry was obvious from how much pleasure he took in reading the poems aloud to us."
With business out of the way, Murray rolled out a glass cart and served martinis.
"An act of poetry all its own," Haber calls it.
Murray's other picks include Lux's romantic ode "I Love You Sweatheart," of which he said, "This poem vibrates the insides of my ribs, where the meat is most tender." He also felt a personal connection to Nye's "Famous" and its lines "I want to be famous in the way/ a pulley is famous/ or a buttonhole, not because it did/ anything spectacular/ but because it never forgot/what it could do."
Murray's take: "It's not the dream of being big. It's the dream of being real. That's what stands out to me."
---
Comment or Read Comments Here on
any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, then log in by checking "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.
This From Pat Nolan at Parole
Delete Punctuation
To: The Membership and Interested PartiesFrom: Chinee, Grand Poobah, NBBPS
Subject: The Birth Of Modern Poetry
One hundred years ago poetry got modern, and all because of the laziness of one poet. Alcools, a title that is usually translated as Alcohol,
but with a meaning closer to “distillation” or “essence.” And lazy may
not be an accurate description of one of the greatest French poets of
the early 20th Century. Looking over the proof pages
provided by the printer, Apollinaire realized that the typesetter had
got the punctuation horribly balled up (to put it mildly). To extricate
his poems from this mélange of arbitrarily arranged graphical signposts
was going to be time consuming and costly. His only other choice was
the nuclear option. Handing the proofs back to the printer, he scrawled
“delete punctuation” on the fly leaf. And thus modern poetry was born.t modern, and all because of the laziness of one poet. That happened when Guillaume Apollinaire picked up the proofs for his book of poems,
This familiar anecdote may be apocryphal, but it is also instructive: innovations can come from seemingly inconsequential decisions. And soon enough there was an orgy of unpunctuated poetry. Likely this could be one of the origins of the term “free verse”. Certainly it encouraged a poetry free from the constraints of periods, semicolons, colons, commas, dashes, and exclamation points, and captured the imagination of young poets bent on overthrowing the established order.
(Read the entire fascinating article here)
