Water Melons Green Budhas On the fruit stand We eat the smile And spit out the teeth. What’s your response, profoundly complex, profoundly simple, absurd, childlike, whatever, it’s one of the Poetry Videos of poet Charles Simic we feature here at Artvilla.
The title, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks. refers a book of literary criticism and theory together with his own poetry works. In part of it he discusses the relationship of time, space and form in the context of the written word. Perhaps a little dated by today’s standard of cosmological enquirey, as broadly, it seems to me, to refer to conventional Externalism. It comes however highly recommended by this much acclaimed Yugoslavian poet resident in the USA since 1953.
Here at Artvilla, you can find, Poetry Videos of his works in their originals as well as translations, together with personal appearances, readings by himself and other readers, appearances at different venues such as the Robert Lowell Lectures introduced by Robert Pinsky, or reading in English together with Spanish speaking poets Kadri Vaquero and Edgardo Nunez Cabellero. So please enjoy. Editor Artvilla. Robin Ouzman Hislop
Chintz
Tambourine clash
Smash (music)
A piping wail
Hoots
Day of the Cars
A graze of grass sheep
Hedgerow making a hegemonic skyline
Wires cutting clouds
Wonky dyke drive in
Nettle Eureka
Stacks without smoke
Wrought iron window -
Blurs a face in pastel blue.
Day of the Crane
Rocks the hill
Lateral this time
Just cross over
Chevron bypass
The high street's as empty as the daytime
Every where's empty even out back
The sky, the trees with no leaves
Noticeable about the playground
The sand
Following the big black glass
At the transport station – I walk into you.
The skull in the bramble's
Picked clean by scavengers
Old before your time.
A selfie on the road
Skull time is skull time
Smashed in a white torrent rolls
A giant shining black trunk
Cactus wave, nod, interested observers.
Now's for the winding
Next, you'll dry up
But now the lagoon is – action.
You're so pretty squatting amongst the rocks
Which keep their own rites
Remember how clean you look in the forest
Nobody's like you.
Look down, i'll look up.
Back again, every where's deserted
Kinda eerie
There's a fence between me, the rest.
Dense foliage. Smoke on the horizon
The enclosures are the worst
Because they look like the best then get you.
Blow sky
Don't diminish more
I can scarcely keep you in.
A high nest on the lowlands
Here come the Imaginals.
Watch my stick.
Into the mouth of the cave's roar
A flood freeze
Does time freeze, flood or fall?
Nosey Chico.
Perspectives unfold
Nice profile
Chewed up most of that.
Day of the Crane
Rock cleaver. Leveller.
Beauty keep your eyes shut
Where's it gone
Oh shit
Rotate baby
Suspicious, wandering abroad without visible
Means of support.
A white cathedral
In a city through the trees with leaves
Who could ask for anything more
Skip along
Moonlight through the pines
Hogey. Cakes. Nifty. Hooded.
Get the picture!
There's something about moss
Life's tough
Short cuts are stressful, as well
Out in, in out
That's landscape cheating in the original!
Repetition is not completion.
Say panter not panther
I'm in saliva
Wrangle, tangle
I bear witness to your fall
Helpless before your might
It's your deal.
Coming back, it's still deserted
Day of the Crane.
Day of the Car
Hood into the snow
Much time spent waiting
Come over here sweetheart.
After the bath
Night lights. Skyline a selfie. Scarfed.
We come in peace – so what!
Grotesque obelisks – endure us
It's just days for you!
A portrait will do
On the street, no one meets
first one, last one, beggar man, thief
Fame as we all know is an illusion,
What's upstream?
Day of the Imaginals.
Share, share alike
who's pulling who?
Deserted again
Framed.
A solitary mister
On the look out in the lowlands
Halfway bridge, cross both ways
Under the arches
Just a step, careful -
Upstream, downstream, in the stream, where!
That's it, stand in the middle.
Rain drops, bird shit
Fractals in summertime
Who's lost?
In the circumference, on the periphery
Roll,
Primroses wild in a meadow sweet straw hat
Arms akimbo
She, he munching the same cud.
Moving on is a must
The great, the small huddle
Stone, - paper in the solarium.
Day of the Crazy Carnival,
Flags, crucifixes
Pattern soliloquy with a dazzle
but the antennae steal the show
in an odds on – hurrah!
Lotus versus lilies, splatter the pane
As magic appears again, in a sliced frame.
A saloon's interior – plus furnishings
A dilapidated roof where the green abounds
Weather matters in the symmetry.
Footpath. Wind generator. Harvested field
Fern
On the way she pirouettes on air, there
To the Pond
Fish, fishermen
An hour ago
Temporary emergency
Closure
3 ways to nowhere
Pay Here
Go green at the Pond
Day of the Pond.
White mannequins in high window
A getting wed celebration
Shot on location, city in a window
According to law.
Story of a dog, what follows on
High rise, she poses in a garden of roses
Frog at Pool Farm
Do not touch
Danger overhead. Loose dogs on patrole.
Pick your own here, at a price.
It's an unnatural dead end
A National Trust cul de sac
Back at the farm – a fine day
To grow, property.
Leftover tractor's out
a world war relic
an outlaw, unwanted in every land.
A 30 foot the wind generator
Heralds the patchwork downs
Behind the field the battery foreclosure
Non-giving slopes, scrub
A fine day for what, unrelenting power!
Everybody knows reflection deceives
Water lilies, moor-hens
Sunken branches in their shadows
Are all in their boundaries
Layers of surfaces where we drown in shine
across on the peripheral horizon
In attendant regard they stay in non committal
stares on the edges of muddy banks.
So expensive – Monumentals
Shoppers in displays. Christmas trees
Identifiable by their electric coronas.
Streets are ghosts
Mew in the park
Stay, forever stray.
Coffee table bird time
Perch which-a-way
You peek that-a-way
I'll peek this-a-way
Look straight up.
More monuments
Inside crinkly colours
Embalmed in sweets
Outside more ghosts
Even with the ladder
You carry to climb out from
Where the shadows carry you.
Clipped in a mirror on a silver stair
A sectional action recorded
In a space time bloc
Whose being had!
Tombstone blues on the pavements
Bull fights – Bull shit
Make my day.
Paper floats as air boats
Hanging besides the stair
Clock on the wall
Locked door
Glass walls
Sit in the New Gardens
Paper refreshments, art décor
All the world's a collage
On your doorstep
On the polished wooden bench
Where you mustn't die
On this occasion in the Arcade.
Lest we forget
Time branches in the mist
A mix of entropies.
Artifice in perspective
From a high window watch the queue
In the rain paying to go in.
I'll watch you walk out
Follow your backs
Against the back of the day
A day's visit down river, bank bikes
Cathedral caught in a glimpse
Between trees
Instanced in a stacked stance
The barges being for the other.
Under the bridge again
Cat on the roof, (Black)
There was a plague
A multitude in pastiche
Heads up everywhere
Old Masters eternally retouched
Ghosts forever young, where we fade.
Offices to let
Sitting out history on the lawn
Where no birds sing, a few pigeons
Alms at the Workhouse, hard times
Every tower aspiring sweetly like a flower.
Sheer in carved stone it looms before its minions
Inside the double white non parking line
We stand around between pickets
In the name of tyranny.
To see or not to see, mere mereness of distortion
As if the far side were the other side. As if
One step were an inexorable impossible reach
Not to its impossibility but to serve only ruins.
Daytime is a sham of inverted symmetry.
Beyond the blur
It glows down the strand
Hidden in foreclosure
A gem gleams.
On crowded sunny days
Heroic kudos to their statues
On a deserted place by night
A glittering cone of light
A winter festal. Emptiness.
A grey bell tower chimes the hour
Adds a person in less than a minute.
Bubbles beneath the surface
Amazing amber in golden silt
The hazes are in flight
Bridle the day
Growth, overgrowth is not so lush
Wreckage of our spoil
A poisoned banquet for all
But for a day.
We must peer down
There's room in the street for us
The ultimate consummation
Hunger is a cause
Try it side on – both
The wood's laid out in plan
Round another magic bend
Behold, Day of the Plague.
Access to the land is denied
Use your wristwatch after arrival
Don't look now - it's behind you
At last form, lilac on the hill
Time to pose.
Lets try it in reverse
Turn twice, above us only bell
How picturesque, the large
By the wayside, which side are you on?
A relic of yore, want to play?
No exit from the bus stop
Is this an argument for sufficient reason?
Almost spot on
Suddenly it's lilac again
Whose playing anyway?
Another time
Close up you fall but shouldn't
Close close the water waits
Waits more still, the whichaway sign
Advances the retreat.
A garden of your own
Tooth in claw after all
No where’s safe.
What's that
A workhouse turned theatre
Burlesque in a cartoon charade
Civilisation is never far away
Just round the corner in fact
Follow the path you can't get lost
Names name names.
It will have to do
It's choice after all, isn't it.
Either the sky or us
Take your pick
Is it a UFO or the government.
Only the downs sing on
Caught up pointing nowhere
A place from before
On the crown of its own desolation.
Meanwhile on a broken wing
Clouds tangle with the moon's moment
A sufficient distortion of fact.
Robin Ouzman Hislop was an Editor at the 12 year running on line monthly poetry journal Poetry Life & Times, now at Artvilla.com, as its Editor. He has made many appearances over the last years in the quarterly journals Canadian Zen Haiku, including In the Spotlight Winter 2010 & Sonnetto Poesia. Previously published in international magazines, his recent publications include Voices without Borders Volume 1 (USA), Cold Mountain Review, Appalachian University N Carolina,The Poetic Bond Series, available at The Poetic Bond and Phoenix Rising from the Ashes an Anthology of Sonnets. He has recently completed a volume of poetry, All the Babble of the Souk , publication now available. He is currently resident in Spain engaged in poetry translation projects.
Janet Kuypers
(bonus poem from the “Periodic Table of Poetry” series)
based on the original name (before Natrium) for Sodium, #11, Na
started 1/16/15, edited and completed 1/29/15
I’ve been studying elements
in the Periodic Table, and when
I heard the word “Nitrium,”
it made me laugh
(thinking of Nitrous Oxide).
So I looked it up online…
The only thing I could find
was from the Memory Alpha
in Star Trek Wikia,
and they could only guess
that Nitrium was either an alloy
or a metallic element.
But the history buff in me
remembered that Nitrium
is a variant of natrium,
and it was the original name
for the element Sodium.
(I mean, doctors even call
low sodium levels in the blood
hyponatremia…)
So as I read up
at my Star Trek Wikia —
I suddenly realized how
essential this Nitrium really was:
If you remember basic chemistry,
sodium reacts violently with water,
disintegrating, or even exploding (no no no, you’re thinking of salt,
that’s not straight sodium,
that’s why it mixes with water…)
And as I read, Nitrium
(which was the first name
for Sodium)
was prevalent in asteroids
and it was used
in so many places
in the construction
of Federation starships.
Now, when it comes to our own bodies,
Sodium (or should I say Nitrium)
controls blood pressure
and blood volume —
it’s essential in our bodies
to keep them running smoothly.
So it makes total sense
that Galaxy-glass vessels
used Nitrium in their ships,
from computers, to engines
to their life support systems.
Nitrium was so crucial
to the Cost of Living —
you see, I expanded my research
from Star Trek Wikia
to straight-up Wikipedia
and discovered that parasites
were eating the Nitrium
all over the Enterprise,
jeopardizing the ship’s integrity.
Because as I’ve learned,
with every Periodic Table
element out there
there’s a good side
and a bad side:
if Nitrium is used
all over the Enterprise,
something could easily come along
to destroy it as well.
I mean, think of it
in our own bodies:
when Sodium (or Nitrium)
reacts with water
and forms Sodium Hydroxide,
but this reaction
gets the Hydrogen so hot
that it burns.
And if Nitrium
was the original name for Sodium,
that probably explains why
you never see
a Galaxy-class starship
entering a planet’s atmosphere,
where there’s water in the air.
Because really,
the people at Star Trek learned
that even just a little water in the air
would be enough
to make their starship
disintegrate
around them.
…Really, whenever the Enterprise
actually goed to a planet,
they never land on the planet
with their big Galaxy-class starship,
they send a shuttle,
or they beam someone down,
because in this case,
the water in the air
that’s embedded in the atmosphere,
that water could react
with the Sodium —
oops, I mean,
that water could react
with the Nitrium —
and it might actually
do the Enterprise in.
As I said,
with all the elements
I’ve studied,
there’s a good side
and a bad side to them.
We might desperately need them,
but they also may somehow
do us in
if they’re mixed
in the just the right way.
Because if you sit in a lab
in the twenty-first century,
you can watch this element
react with water in a beaker —
and if you’re going
where no one has gone before
in the twenty-fourth century,
you might have to be sure
your Nitrium-rich ship
finds no water in space,
and finds no parasites
that may eat you
out of your only way home.
I am not an expert on the works of the late Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. He is regarded by some as one of the greatest Latin American Romantic poets of the 20th Century. An insightful commentary can be found in Forest Gander, whose critically acclaimed translations of the Chilean Nobel Laureate appear in The Essential Neruda. Selected Poems. 2004.
My own view is that a great deal of myth mongering surrounding his name due to his political beliefs and sudden death just after the Pinochet coup, may contribute considerably to his present fame.
Certain writings from the late Julieta Gomez Paz, an emiminent Argentinean eassayist, feminist critic and poet in her own right, argue that in much of Neruda’s love poems, the female role is depicted more as an object than a personality. In other words an archaic machisimo attitude is very much present in his works. An opinion that i am not altogether unsympathetic towards.(Robin Ouzman Hislop)
