Poetry Corner

[Pazooki]

Re: Poetry Corner

The wind was blue
when Sero yelled kew-kew-kachoo

[ara87]

Re: Poetry Corner

There once was boy named Ara
who came from a land of A-far-a
When whiteys passed by
they shouted and cried ("TERRORIST!!!" "MEXICUHN!!!")
and shipped his @ss to the Sahara

[jgk3]

Re: Poetry Corner

Changing so often,
We think we know it...

And we do
But not the way we remember.
Memory's answers strike as though obvious
To us who cannot grasp the present

[MrHyeSev]

Re: Poetry Corner

Insomniacs

We try to sleep
But we cant
We try to close our eyes
But we open them up instead
So if everything else fails my little insomniacs
Read a book, pass out & go to bed

[Inthemood]

Re: Poetry Corner

My latest chef d’oeuvre:

Library of Congress
I digress
I confess
That she is a mess
But to stress
That I am not in duress
Intellectual caress
Mind I say that it's a knee press?

[freakyfreaky]

Re: Poetry Corner

Intersting artice about Czeslaw Milosz planning his death.

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca-czeslaw-milosz5-2008oct05,0,4971712.story

RETROSPECTIVE
Poet Czeslaw Milosz's last days
People who knew him describe how the poet made his preparations for death in Krakow
By Cynthia Haven, Special to The Times
October 5, 2008
KRAKóW, POLAND -- DURING A late night in Kraków, nonagenarian Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz was tipping back the vodka with Jerzy Illg, editor in chief at his Polish publishing house, Znak. Late in the evening, a touchy topic dropped on the table: Where would Milosz like to be buried?

Should his final resting place be with his mother, in a city near Gda{nacutel}sk? Illg dismissed the notion outright. "Who will light a candle for you there?" he asked.

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Should he be buried instead in his beloved homeland, Lithuania -- perhaps in Vilnius, the city of his youth?

Illg proposed the famous cemetery in the Salwator district of Kraków. Many poets and critics were buried on the hilltop graveyard. It would provide "good company and a good view."

When, sometime later, Illg told Bronislaw Maj about this conversation, the younger poet chided him. Milosz had been fishing for the obvious answer, the mollifying answer: Wawel, the ancient castle/cathedral complex at the very heart of Kraków. Poland's leading poets are honored there -- Norwid, Slowacki and, of course, the nation's ur-poet, Adam Mickiewicz, another Polish-speaking Lithuanian. "Of course it was a joke," Illg recalls, "but it has a deep truth."

This "deep truth" embraces the ambiguities left after the 2004 death of Milosz, who had one of the most contentious burials in recent memory. Demonstrations were preempted only by a personal message from Pope John Paul II. What a contrast with the poet's quiet decades in Berkeley as a professor. He had said, after receiving the 1980 Nobel Prize for literature, "I want to return to my quiet ways." Then why, 20 years later, did he move to Kraków, where he was treated like a rock star? The answer is many-stranded: Kraków was the culmination of a journey that was spiritual as well as geographical.

Kraków, as Illg's anecdote reminds us, was not Milosz's city. But according to Agnieszka Kosi{nacutel}ska, the poet's assistant for eight years, "The most important thing is that Kraków resembles Vilnius very much." Milosz was drawn to architecture, atmosphere and old friends. "These are the people with whom he had a thousand discussions, a thousand literary evenings," says Kosi{nacutel}ska.

Moreover, in 1993, he was given honorary citizenship in Kraków, with an apartment on Boguslawskiego, one block from Planty, the park that circles the city where the medieval walls used to stand.

On the surface, the dingy gray brick building where Milosz spent his final years doesn't seem like a great swap. His cottage on Grizzly Peak in Berkeley had abundant flowers, privacy, a stunning view and California weather.

But this was the home of his mother tongue. He wrote tirelessly, adhering to a rigorous schedule into his 90s. "Milosz is the only poet, as far as I know, who wrote all the time, continuously, for 80 years," says Joanna Zach, assistant professor at Jagiellonian University and author of "Milosz's Search for Self." Zach helped Milosz and his American wife, Carol, resettle. Carol remodeled the apartment so it had the homey feel of Grizzly Peak -- complete with an old TV, Milosz's Powerbook and the magnifying glass that accommodated his deteriorating eyesight.

Milosz returned to America only once. In the summer of 2002, he flew to San Francisco, where Carol was being treated for bone marrow cancer. "The real catastrophe was her sudden death," explains Aleksander Fiut, interlocutor for "Conversations With Czeslaw Milosz." "He was extremely depressed after her death. Before, he was able to laugh. After, sometimes he smiled."

When Znak published Milosz's final collection, "Druga Przestrze{nacutel}" ("Second Space") in 2002, the poet inscribed Illg's copy: "To the ferryman who takes Carol to the other shore."

Charon is a characteristically pagan nuance. Milosz found the Catholic Church's nationalistic trends repugnant, although he regularly attended St. Idzi's, an 11th century church at the foot of Wawel. According to Kosi{nacutel}ska, the last few years demonstrated his ars moriendi.

"He prepared himself as much as he could," she says. "Czeslaw really wanted to die. He prepared for the moment. He finished his eternal business."

Milosz's journey led him to a young Dominican priest named Father Zbigniew Krysiewicz, who describes their relationship this way: "We have met on a quite inexplicable ground which was his own way back to God. Somehow by accident, it was me who had accompanied him till the very end. . . . It is hard to say why."

One reason is self-evident: He was the priest at St. Idzi's, where English Masses were offered, and Carol preferred Mass in a language she could understand.

"This longing for God -- he had that quite strongly," says Krysiewicz. He was invited to the apartment on Boguslawskiego, where the poet grilled him provocatively, for Milosz was as famous for his doubts as for his certainties. Their conversations became a fixture: two or three hours once a week, sometimes once a month. What did they discuss? "Let's say you had an experience with a great fire once -- you have a vague memory of it," Krysiewicz recalls. "You have spent a lot of years trying to describe it, and read a lot of books describing it. What you remember is an echo of it. You search and look for someone who can testify about this fire -- that it is real -- who can testify beyond words, because we know that words are too weak."

Krysiewicz speaks reluctantly, haltingly; he was Milosz's confessor, after all, and performed last rites. "My position was to be in the shade, and remain in the shade," he says. "He went reconciled, certainly. But there are some things I can't tell you." He pauses. "He was a mystic, his poetry is mystical and metaphysical."

In 2006, Znak published a posthumous volume of Milosz's work, "Wiersze Ostatnie" ("Last Poems"). But other poems were in the making, even on his deathbed.

During his final bedridden months, Zach read Milosz's poems back to him; he was depressed and wanted inspiration -- the inspiration to write more poems. Andrzej Franaszek, cultural editor of the Polish weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, also read to him. Both recall the intensity of his intellectual life, even then.

Franaszek says that Milosz often reviewed his life, his conscience and his choices -- about his defection from Communist Poland in 1951, or his relationships with his first wife, Janina, and his two sons. "Maybe," he reflected, "I wasn't able to give them closeness, love."

Zach recalls one of her last meetings with Milosz in the hospital, the morning after a blood transfusion. "He felt he had experienced a revelation," she says. "He said, 'I know what I'm going to write about when I go home from the hospital.' And that day he started to dictate to me a poem. He never finished that poem. It was a poem about his experience in the hospital -- of compassion and how he experienced his body, and his contact with other people who were lying next to him -- touching to the very core of humanity."

Ultimately, Milosz was buried in neither Salwator or Wawel, but at Na Skalce (the church "on the rock"), final resting place of many distinguished Poles. Illg prophesies a posthumous relocation; it would not be unprecedented, he says.

Milosz's death has left a hole in Polish letters. But it's left, perhaps, a larger hole in the lives of those he knew.

"It sounds strange," says Franaszek, "but it was hard to imagine he was able to die. It seemed just natural that he is. He lives and lives and lives."

Illg echoed the same sentiments in a poem last year, "A Letter to Czeslaw Milosz":

For even after your phone remained silent

I would think, driving Dietla, that if I took a right turn

Into Sebastiana, then Boguslawskiego,

And rang the doorbell, I'd hear the tapping of your stick

And a question booming at the opening of the door:

So, Jerzy, what shall we drink tonight?

Cynthia Haven's research in Poland was sponsored by a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellowship from Vienna's Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen. Her "Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz" is forthcoming.

[freakyfreaky]

Re: Poetry Corner

Book of Bukowski's unreleased essays and stories released 14 years after his death in 1994.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2008/10/bukowski-writin.html

[MrHyeSev]

Re: Poetry Corner

Life

Be happy with what you have
Because money & fancy cars wont last
When you die they will go away
But your soul will stay up or go astray
Don't be happy with simple things in life
Be focused on the soul of afterlife
So when you thing you cant take life anymore
Dont tell God I cant take it any more
Step back focus on who gave you life
Shine your light to everyone any say goodnight

[freakyfreaky]

Re: Poetry Corner

60 yard pass

60 yard pass
most people don't do very well and I get discouraged with
their existence, it's such a waste: all those
bodies, all those lives
malfunctioning: lousy quarterbacks, bad waitresses, in-
competent carwash boys and presidents, cowardly
goal keepers
inept
garage mechanics
bumbling tax accountants and
so forth
yet

now and then

I see a single performer doing something with a
natural excellence

it

can be
a waitress in some cheap cafe or a 3rd string
quarterback
coming off the bench with 24 seconds on the clock
and completing that winning
60 yard pass.

which lets me believe that
the possibility of the miracle is here with us
almost every day

and I'm glad that now and then
some 3rd string quarterback
shows me the truth of that belief
whether it be in science, art, philosophy,
medicine, politics and / or etc.

else I'd shoot all the lights out of
this xxxxing city
right now.

Bukowski, Charles. War All The Time (Poems 1981-1984), p.64.

[freakyfreaky]

Re: Poetry Corner

Hadda Been Playing On the Jukebox (aka J.F.K.).

http://www.musicfanclubs.org/rage/hadda.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zK306yBOyE&feature=related

Written by Allen Ginsberg in 1975, performed by Rage Against the Machine.

It had to be flashin' like the daily double
It had to be playin' on TV
It had to be loud mouthed on the comedy hour
It had to be announced over loud speakers

The CIA and the Mafia are in cahoots

It had to be said in old ladies' language
It had to be said in American headlines
Kennedy stretched and smiled and got double crossed by lowlife goons and agents
Rich bankers with criminal connections
Dope pushers in CIA working with dope pushers from Cuba working with a
big time syndicate from Tampa, Florida
And it had to be said with a big mouth

It had to be moaned over factory foghorns
It had to be chattered on car radio news broadcasts
It had to be screamed in the kitchen
It had to be yelled in the basement where uncles were fighting

It had to be howled on the streets by newsboys to bus conductors
It had to be foghorned into New York harbor
It had to echo onto hard hats
It had to turn up the volume in university ballrooms

It had to be written in library books, footnoted
It had to be in the headlines of the Times and Le Monde
It had to be barked on TV
It had to be heard in alleys through ballroom doors

It had to be played on wire services
It had to be bells ringing
Comedians stopped dead in the middle of a joke in Las Vegas

It had to be FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and Frank Costello syndicate
mouthpiece meeting in Central Park, New York weekends,
reported Time magazine

It had to be the Mafia and the CIA together starting war on Cuba,
Bay of Pigs and poison assassination headlines

It had to be dope cops in the Mafia
Who sold all their heroin in America

It had to be the FBI and organized crime working together
in cahoots against the commies

It had to be ringing on multinational cash registers
A world-wide laundry for organized criminal money

It had to be the CIA and the Mafia and the FBI together
They were bigger than Nixon
And they were bigger than war

It had to be a large room full of murder
It had to be a mounted ass- a solid mass of rage
A red hot pen
A scream in the back of the throat

It had to be a kid that can breathe
It had to be in Rockefellers' mouth
It had to be central intelligence, the family, allofthis, the agency Mafia
It had to be organized crime

One big set of gangs working together in cahoots

Hitmen
Murderers everywhere

The secret
The drunk
The brutal
The dirty rich

On top of a slag heap of prisons
Industrial cancer
Plutonium smog
Garbage cities

Grandmas' bed soft from fathers' resentment

It had to be the rulers
They wanted law and order
And they got rich on wanting protection for the status quo

They wanted junkies
They wanted Attica
They wanted Kent State
They wanted war in Indochina

It had to be the CIA and the Mafia and the FBI

Multinational capitalists
Strong armed squads
Private detective agencies for the rich
And their armies and navies and their air force bombing planes

It had to be capitalism
The vortex of this rage
This competition
Man to man

The horses head in a capitalists' bed
The Cuban turf
It rumbles in hitmen
And gang wars across oceans

Bombing Cambodia settled the score when Soviet pilots
manned Egyptian fighter planes

Chiles' red democracy
Bumped off with White House pots and pans

A warning to Mediterranean governments

The secret police have been embraced for decades

The NKPD and CIA keep each other's secrets
The OGBU and DIA never hit their own
The KGB and the FBI are one mind

Brute force and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money

It had to be rich and it had to be powerful
They had to murder in Indonesia 500000
They had to murder in Indochina 2000000
They had to murder in Czechoslovakia
They had to murder in Chile
They had to murder in Russia

And they had to murder in America