Jorie Graham - Manteau Three

In the fairy tale the sky
makes of itself a coat
because it needs you
to put it
on. How can it do this?
It collects its motes. It condenses its sound-
track, all the pyrric escapes, the pilgrimages
still unconsummated,
the turreted thoughts of sky it slightly liquefies
and droops, the hum of the yellowest day alive,

office-holders in their books, their corridors,
resplendent memories of royal rooms now filtered up — by smoke, by

must — it tangles up into a weave,
tied up with votive offerings — laws, electricity —
what the speakers let loose from their tiny eternity,
what the empty streets held up as offering
when only a bit of wind
litigated in the sycamores,

oh and the flapping drafts unfinished thoughts
raked out of air,
and the leaves clawing their way after deep sleep set in,
and all formations — assonant, muscular,
chatty hurries of swarm (peoples, debris before the storm) —
things that grew loud when the street grew empty,
and breaths that let themselves be breathed
to freight a human argument,
and sidelong glances in the midst of things, and voice — yellowest
day alive — as it took place
above the telegram,
above the hand cleaving the open-air to cut its thought,
hand flung

towards open doorways into houses where
den-couch and silver tray
itch with inaction — what is there left now
to believe — the coat? — it tangles up a good tight weave,
windy yet sturdy,
a coat for the ages —
one layer a movie of bluest blue,
one layer the war-room mappers and their friends
in trenches
also blue,
one layer market-closings and one
hydrangeas turning blue
just as I say so,
and so on,
so that it flows in the sky to the letter,
you still sitting in the den below
not knowing perhaps that now is as the fairy tale
exactly, (as in the movie), foretold,
had one been on the right channel,
(although you can feel it alongside, in the house, in the food, the umbrellas,
the bicycles),
(even the leg muscles of this one grown quite remarkable),

the fairy tale beginning to hover above — onscreen fangs, at the desk
one of the older ones paying bills —
the coat in the sky above the house not unlike celestial fabric,
a snap of wind and plot to it,
are we waiting for the kinds to go to sleep?
when is it time to go outside and look?
I would like to place myself in the position
of the one suddenly looking up
to where the coat descends and presents itself,
not like the red shoes in the other story,
red from all we had stepped in,
no, this the coat all warm curves and grassy specificities,
intellectuals also there, but still indoors,
standing up smokily to mastermind,
theory emerging like a flowery hat,
there, above the head,
descending,


while outside, outside, this coat —
which I desire, which I, in the tale,
desire — as it touches the dream of reason
which I carry inevitably in my shoulders, in my very carriage, forgive me,
begins to shred like this, as you see it do, now,
as if I were too much in focus making the film shred,
it growing very hot (as in giving birth) though really
it being just evening, the movie back on the reel,
the sky one step further down into the world but only one step,
me trying to pull it down, onto this frame,
for which it seems so fitting,
for which the whole apparatus of attention had seemed to prepare us,
and then the shredding beginning
which sounds at first like the lovely hum
where sun fills the day to its fringe of stillness
but then continues, too far, too hard,
and we have to open our hands again and let it go, let it rise up
above us,

incomprehensible,
clicker still in my right hand,
the teller of the story and the shy bride,
to whom he was showing us off a little perhaps,
leaning back into their gossamer ripeness,
him touching her storm, the petticoat,
the shredded coat left mid-air, just above us,
the coat in which the teller's plot
entered this atmosphere, this rosy sphere of hope and lack,

this windiness of middle evening,
so green, oh what difference could it have made
had the teller needed to persuade her
further — so green
this torn hem in the first miles — or is it inches? — of our night,
so full of hollowness, so wild with rhetoric .... 



    

William Carlos Williams - Apres le Bain

I gotta
buy me a new
girdle.
(I'll buy
you one) O.K.
(I wish

you'd wig-
gle that way
for me,

I'd be
a happy man)
I GOTTA

wig-
gle for this.
(You pig)      


The title means "After the Bath." It's in French as an allusion to scenes typical of French Impressionist paintings of women towelling off or dressing after bathing -- paintings by perhaps Renoir or Degas, with that title.
Which one of the couple speaks the last line? In post-1960s slang, "pig" (short for "male chauvinist pig") has a meaning that many readers might think the male speaker here well deserves, but consider the rhythms and pauses -- the period after this -- as well as the visual cues furnished by the way parentheses are used. How would you describe the tone of the conversation? Of the last line?

Jorie Graham - Spoken From The Hedgerows

To bring back a time and place. A feeling. As in "we are all in this together." Or "the United States and her allies fought for Freedom." To bring back. The experience of killing and getting killed. Get missed. Get hit. Sun—is it with us. Holiday, are you with us on this beach today. Hemisphere of one, my soul, paratrooper, greatness I house in my body, deepset, my hands on these triggers—who once could outrun his brother—consumed with fellow-feeling like a madness that does not must not, lower its pitch—going to the meeting place, the spire of the church in Vierville, seen on aerial maps, visible from eighteen miles out, if it weren't for fog, and smoke, and groundmist, the meeting place, the appointed time surging in me, needing to be pierced—but not me—not me— only those to the left and right of me— permit me to let you see me— Me. Driven half mad but still in biography. By the shared misery of. Hatred. Training. Trust. Fear. Listening to the chatter each night of those who survived the day. There is no other human relationship like it. At its heart comradeship is an ecstasy. You will die for an other. You will not consider it a personal loss. Private Kurt Gabel, 513 Parachute Infantry Regiment— "The three of us Jake, Joe and I became an entity. An entity—never to be relinquished, never to be repeated. An entity is where a man literally insists on going hungry for another. A man insists on dying for an other. Protect. Bail out. No regard to consequence. A mystical concoction." A last piece of bread. And gladly. You must understand what is meant by gladly. All armies throughout history have tried to create this bond among their men. Few succeeded as well as the paratroop infantry of the U.S. Army, Rifle Company E, 506th. Fussell: It can't happen to me. It can happen to me. It is going to happen to me. Nothing is going to prevent it. Webster (to his parents): I am living on borrowed time— I do not think I shall live through the next jump. If I don't come back, try not to take it too hard. I wish I could persuade you to regard death as casually as we do over here. In the heat of it you expect it, you are expecting it, you are not surprised by anything anymore, not surprised when your friend is machine-gunned in the face. It's not like your life, at home, where death is so unexpected. (And to mother): would you prefer for someone else's son to die in the mud? And there is no way out short of the end of war or the loss of limb. Any other wound is patched up and you're sent back to the front. This wound which almost killed him healed up as well and he went back. He never volunteered. One cannot volunteer. If death comes, friend, let it come quick. And don't play the hero, there is no past or future. Don't play the hero. Ok. Let's go. Move out. Say goodbye. This poem was part of a series of poems named "Operation Overlord."It  was the code-name given to the Normandy landings. At this book's centre of gravity, therefore, are poems filled with filmic detail of conflict and death: "one shot taken by a / knee, bullets up through our feet, explosion of Jack's face, more sudden openings / in backs, shoulders, one in a neck, throat opens . . . " ("Spoken from the Hedgerows 2"). Graham shows us, with the collage "Hedgerows 1", that the voice of the unknown soldier or airman is also a tragic chorus. The "lost" are both anonymous and charged with the authority of witness: here, they tell of sacrifice of human life. Graham's characteristic, rhythmically urgent diction questions not what makes a "just war"; but what war, holding up mirrors of death and culpability, tells us about being human.

Jorie Graham - Salmon

I watched them once, at dusk, on television, run,
in our motel room half-way through
Nebraska, quick, glittering, past beauty, past
the importance of beauty.,
archaic,
not even hungry, not even endangered, driving deeper and deeper
into less. They leapt up falls, ladders,
and rock, tearing and leaping, a gold river,
and a blue river traveling
in opposite directions.
They would not stop, resolution of will
and helplessness, as the eye
is helpless
when the image forms itself, upside-down, backward,
driving up into
the mind, and the world
unfastens itself
from the deep ocean of the given. . .Justice, aspen
leaves, mother attempting
suicide, the white night-flying moth
the ants dismantled bit by bit and carried in
right through the crack
in my wall. . . .How helpless
the still pool is,
upstream,
awaiting the gold blade
of their hurry. Once, indoors, a child,
I watched, at noon, through slatted wooden blinds,
a man and woman, naked, eyes closed,
climb onto each other,
on the terrace floor,
and ride--two gold currents
wrapping round and round each other, fastening,
unfastening. I hardly knew
what I saw. Whatever shadow there was in that world
it was the one each cast
onto the other,
the thin black seam
they seemed to be trying to work away
between them. I held my breath.
as far as I could tell, the work they did
with sweat and light
was good. I'd say
they traveled far in opposite
directions. What is the light
at the end of the day, deep, reddish-gold, bathing the walls,
the corridors, light that is no longer light, no longer clarifies,
illuminates, antique, freed from the body of
that air that carries it. What is it
for the space of time
where it is useless, merely
beautiful? When they were done, they made a distance
one from the other
and slept, outstretched,
on the warm tile
of the terrace floor,
smiling, faces pressed against the stone.      


"Salmon," from Erosion, begins with "I watched them once, at dusk, on television, run." Through a series of shifts, the adult narrator watching television transforms into a child watching lovers from the other side of a shuttered window. This final scene allows for a truly cathartic reckoning.
Such a gesture is reminiscent of the "sliding / beneath a big black wave" in Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room" -- the moment when observation turns metaphysical. However, Graham's poem further questions the girding, both physical and philosophical, of the psyche, and the disjunctive logic of "Salmon" seems more a natural process than the heightened questioning of Bishop's poem.

Graham goes much further with a formal complexity that seems to embrace disjunction as well as a structure relative to itself. When one considers the body of her work, it is a grand experiment of form she continually makes good on

William Carlos Williams - Smell

Oh strong-ridged and deeply hollowed
nose of mine! what will you not be smelling?
What tactless asses we are, you and I, boney nose,
always indiscriminate, always unashamed,
and now it is the souring flowers of the bedraggled
poplars: a festering pulp on the wet earth
beneath them. With what deep thirst
we quicken our desires
to that rank odor of a passing springtime!
Can you not be decent? Can you not reserve your ardors
for something less unlovely? What girl will care
for us, do you think, if we continue in these ways?
Must you taste everything? Must you know everything?
Must you have a part in everything


Traditionally, the world knows of five senses: Sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. Throughout time we have learned that each of the 5 senses consists of organs with specialized cells that have receptors for specific stimuli. These cells have links to the nervous system and thus to the brain. All of these senses are vital to human life, the top two are sight and hearing. In the world today, we hear about those who have no sight, and even those who have no hearing, but have you ever heard of those who have no smell!?
When I first read William Carlos Williams` poem, Smell! I was like what is he talking about!? I know poet’s are supposed to be crazy and all but really was this guy writing a poem about his nose? How odd, but then when I read it a few more times, I realized that he is not only writing about his nose but he is talking to his nose. He first begins by explaining what his nose is like, and then he goes on to ask it a question. He continues throughout the poem in this way, talking to his nose about all the different things it helps him to smell, the souring flowers, to the rank oder of a passing springtime, but then at the end I think he reaches his main message he is blaming his nose for continroulsy smelling everything. His nose is always in the way and must have a wiff of everything that is out there. I think this implys the famous phrase, keep you nose out of others busniess. At the very end the last two lines of the poem, he says

WCW - Spring Storm

The sky has given over its bitterness. Out of the dark change all day long rain falls and falls as if it would never end. Still the snow keeps its hold on the ground. But water, water from a thousand runnels! It collects swiftly, dappled with black cuts a way for itself through green ice in the gutters. Drop after drop it falls from the withered grass-stems of the overhanging embankment.

 

 

 

This is just a description of a spring thunderstorm, written in language as plain and direct as William Carlos Williams could manage.
William Carlos Williams thought that most poetry up until his time (the 1930's and later) was over-written. He thought that the words had got out of control, poets were just talking - instead of looking at things and telling precisely what they saw.
Williams set out to write a poem of plain description: making his language as ordinary, but also as precise, as a scientist would.
Often William Carlos Williams writes poems of dazzling clarity with his revolutionary technique.
Sometimes - as here - the clarity is there, but it does not dazzle.
It is a description of a storm, in as plain a language as the poet was able to find.