Yvor Winters

I was sitting here, listening to the hum of my electric baseboard heater, watching the smoke imprint the frozen air outside-- the down feather factory still processes its feathers in full oily brooklyn glory. I wrote a poem ('smokestack')! I can just see the edge of the smoke, the bottom, its "source", wispy blown. The strange thing-- the MINUTE I finished the poem, the smoke stopped (as if it had never been there). Its going again now, but I think it is different smoke. My room is the only warm one in the house. I hear distant music and traffic. I feel the cold from outside. I am safe and warm with smoke-view, lamp-view, book-view.

I started taking notes on a poem I want to write tomorrow-- to keep the incoporated themes of glass (filament, spun, sugar, wire, bent hair) and add to it glass-pane transparency, also filament fiber-opticks, sea-creatures... Also I was pleased with the use of words like webbed, fringed, edged, laced.... and thinking about them.

I stated reading Yvor Winters (1900-1968). (Sam and I found some records of him reading his poetry aloud, this was one of our christmas presents to ourselves). As I was reading I began to wonder which deserts Winters had spent time in, he mentions a blue lake, a "canyon, among the mountains," might this be Taos? I was just about to start researching this when I read his next poem:

'The Solitude of Glass' (!!!!!!!)

No ferns, but
Fringed rock (!!!!!)
Spreads on hills
To cover us.

On stone of pollen
At the bend of sight
Stiff rocks
Cast violet eyes

Like rays of shadow,
Roam
Impenetrable
In a cold of glass--

The sun, a lichen
Spreading on the sky
For days
Behind the cold;

The burros,
Like iron-filings
Gathered to
The adamant.

(............................................)

smokestack

the steam is rising in nets
like caul.

upward thrust of matrix-turned-sideways
expanding from a cone-shaped base
concentrically (blown).

upwards net like spun glass
edges laced with frilled foam
filament clusters caught.

edges smoke
blistered back-to-itself

seep of rising foam in ice-cold air
fringed with crystals
and webbed crispness grown.



(elizabeth griswold 1.15.2009 brooklyn.)

Exmoor

by Amy Clampitt (from 'The Kingfisher')

Lost aboard the roll of Kodac-
olor that was to have super-
seded all need to remember
Somerset were: a large flock

of winter-bedcover-thick-
pelted sheep up on the moor;
a stile, a church spire,
and an excess, at Porlock,

of tenderly barbarous antique
thatch in tandem with flower-
beds, relentlessly pictur-
esque, along every sidewalk;

a millwheel; and a millbrook
running down brown as beer.
Exempt from the disaster,
however, as either too quick

or too subtle to put on rec-
ord, were these: the flutter
of, beside that brown water,
with a butterfly-like flick

of fan-wings, a bright black-
and-yellow wagtail; at Dulver-
ton on the moor, the flavor
of the hot toasted teacake

drowning in melted butter
we had along with a bus-tour-
load of old people; the driver

's way of smothering every r
in the wool of a West Countr-
y diphthong, and as a Somer-

set man, the warmth he had for
the high, wild, heather-
dank wold he drove us over.

walt whitman

Cowslip and shad-blow, flaked like tethered foam
Around bared teeth of stallions, bloomed that spring
When I first read the lines, rife as the loam
Of prairies, yet like breakers cliffward leaping!
....My hand
in yours,
(Hart Crane, 'The Bridge')



Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten,
Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide,
Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves, the other side of me,
Paumanok there and then I thought the old thought of likenesses,
These you presented to me you fish-shaped island...
('Sea Drift')

winter

In between the warm pages of cooking magazines, and holiday catalogs, i sit for a minute and breathe into a part of this poem......

'black buttercups'

"in march, the farmer's month
for packing up and moving on, the rutted
mud potholed with glare, the verb 'to move'
connoted nothing natural, such as the shifting
of the course of streams or of the sun's
position, sap moving up, or even,
couples dancing. What the stripped root, exhumed
above the mudhole's brittle skin, discerned
was exile"....

(amy clampitt, from 'what the light was like')

the other sharp and brittle things i am reading in this suddenly cold of cold winters is john berger 'pig earth'--stories and poems from 4 years of living with his family in an alpine peasant village in france-- stories that get at the wisp/heart of oral history, in the shapeshiftng of steam and hearth fire against the country dark. blood is close in these stories, the struggles of animal life and human dependence on these animals for food and warmth. the things i like best are descriptions of the wind at night.....

i have also just devoured the first part of anne carson's 'glass, irony, and god'. looking out at a cold country english moor from warm kitchen.. the sharp edge of love loss.....holes in the earth caked with ice, spiralling downward.

i think it is time for hayden carruth's 'longer poems', maybe some seamus heaney (irish sea salt floured frozen earth). i am in the mood for lists, for obscure strung collections of specific things, plants, bits of flower or stone. i am warm in my brooklyn apartment room, warm from sherry and hard strung chains of words, clicked bone, and shell.

i want to write about leaf mold, moldering, in piles during the wintertime. i want to write about rainbow puddles of dark oil under a van on a dark silver night street. i want to write about mountain winter, and breath, and other powdered things. i want to write about metallic things that are cold, that shine dully, with burnished grey light. i want to write about powdered breath, and moors.

i am warm, but surrounded by strange things. i need simplicity, i am warm, cedar, sherry, sea salt, coastal, and springtime cold. i am winter frost, smoke from the stacks, and heat hum. i am calm st the center of it all, and grateful for the outlines of these things pressed against the soft contours of my body.

i am cold, and quiet, and hopeful, annoyed, and hunched. i am ready for the specificity of my own life, i will remember the details of each plant i see-- yesterday sam and i walked around roosevelt island. i couldn't take my eyes from the tree trunks along the water-- warm copper colored almost violet burnished trunks-- ribbons thick around their base, strung and corded around themselves, but shiny metal underneath the brushstrokes of thin tree fiber. I loved that color, against the cold grey of the city and the dark water... this copper was alight from within, smudged in just the right places, and tarnished just enough to show a soft glow, to throw this burnished glow on us as we walked below. the seagulls fell off of their stoops one by one as we walked by.