Review of Joseph Zaccardi Book/4 Ed Coletti Poems/Delete Punctuation/Bill Murray On Poetry/

 

Review of Joseph Zaccardi’s A Wolf Stands Alone in Water

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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

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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.

 

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Surprising Interest In and Taste For Poetry By Comedian Bill Murray For 

By HILLEL ITALIE AP National Writer

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."
---

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Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/celebrities/article67952312.html#storylink=cpy

 Delete Punctuation

This From Pat Nolan at Parole

 

 

Delete Punctuation

Posted on July 24, 2015 by Nuallain House, Publishers

To: The Membership and Interested Parties
From: 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 20^th 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)

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