November's antics

Don't fiddle with the gadgets in the pantry; 
Go scrape the ice from birdbaths and tree-houses. 
In the town of Marblehead, denizens are spry -- 
The water-works, the mine-shaft, what else gives? 
Woods were foliate, back when, with veined nouvelles 
At seven-three-thirty, at fourteen-five-point-six. 
Night practices her scales, the lissome singer, 
When insular starlight glozes our dismay. 
The repertoire's impertinent: loose change, 
Moon over Winnipeg, astral patty-cake. 
Is this production feeling its oats? We need perchance 
Full recompense for all those graceful oafs 
And two-bit, three-bit players -- they gave us much: 
Bright colors and a cheerful mise-en-scène. 

An echo of a celibate shibboleth, 
Eerie and wan, sneaks in beneath the harsh 
Snarl of neighbors bickering over snowbanks, 
Drifts of the white stuff blocking the Johnsons' driveway 
Through which a snazzy Merc Cyclone is wont to roll. 
The argument makes a crumpled, dusky din; 
Trees overlook the ringing ... Time out! Zut! We need 
A respite from rambunctious hoi polloi, 
Drawn-out retreats at abbeys 'mid whose groves 
Howl wolves, wail owls; every now and then 
Wafts the lyric plaint of Philomel, alias Biffo Bailey, 
On a leafless bough, alas, or winging high above 
The wounded earth, with its parties and its rhetoric, 
Breeze of a charlatan, jocular, sublime. 

Dante Alighieri

If you must write prose and poems, the words you use should be your own ...

I invite you, dear reader, to compare this (posted in 2010) to this (posted in 2002).

The might of one fair face

Cavatina

by David Gascoyne (1916-2001)


Now we must bear the final real
Convulsion of the breast, for the sublime 
Relief of the catharsis; and the cruel
Clear grief; the dear redemption from the crime, 
The sublimation of the evil dream.

Beneath, all is confused, dense and impure; 
Extraordinary shiftings of a nameless mass 
From plane to plane, then some obscure 
Catastrophe:
The shattered Cross
High on its storm-lit hill, the searchlight eyes 
Whose lines divide the black dome of the skies,
Are implicated; and the Universe of Death --
Gold, excrement and flesh, the spirit’s malady, 
A secret animal’s hot breath ...

Yet through disaster a faint melody
Insists; and the interior suffering like a silver wire 
Enduring and resplendent, strongly plied 
By genius’ hands into the searching fire 
At last emerges and is purified.

Its force like violins in pure lament 
Persists, sending ascending stairs 
Across the far wastes of the firmament
To carry starwards all our weight of tears.

From the archives

A poem that I wrote when I was sixteen and revised a little when I was twice that age: Bennington Street Cemetery.

Mount Pleasant Cemetery

Red leaves on a limp branch

A burst of colour dimmed somewhat by fog

Nature's carefully anarchic arrangement

Late October, epitomised

Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris

time is a tree(this life one leaf)

Cummings

luminous tendril of celestial wish

(whying diminutive bright deathlessness
to these my not themselves believing eyes
adventuring, enormous nowhere from)

querying affirmation;virginal

immediacy of precision:more
and perfectly more most ethereal
silence through twilight's mystery made flesh--

dreamslender exquisite white firstful flame

--new moon!as(by the miracle of your
sweet innocence refuted)clumsy some
dull cowardice called a world vanishes,

teach disappearing also me the keen
illimitable secret of begin

A couple of couplets

1.

First thought, best thought? Not always, I would claim.
Sometimes, our waking paces can be lame.

2.

Said Yvor Winters to the late Hart Crane,
"How did those strange lines pop into your brain?"

Choose a Sentiment

 "Choose a Sentiment," collage, 2012, by Thomas D.

Sweetie Dear

"Sweetie Dear" (1906). Lyrics by Will Marion Cook (1869-1944), music by Joe Jordan (1882-1971).

Performed (in our own day!) by Rhiannon Giddens of Carolina Chocolate Drops.

Stanzas for Practice

The radio plays GaGa’s “Bad Romance”
As I sit in the Stopped Clock watching television
And daydream of writing enduring Literature
On the spiffy laptop, in the scuffed notebook,
As evening slowly lapses into night
And a gibbous moon rises over Arlington.

I pinch myself. I’m living in Arlington!
Each morning thrills the heart--a new romance!--
And gratitude fills the sleepy soul each night.
Undistracted by internet or by television,
I write, recumbent with an old notebook,
Hoping to make Immortal Literature.

My love, your eyes are full of Literature!
Come with me, walk the streets of Arlington!
You can write songs in your spiral-bound notebook,
Recording each detail of our blithe romance!
It’s not like anything you’d see on television
Which gets more vile with every passing night.

Let’s wake up in the middle of the night,
Drink black coffee, work on our Literature.
Let’s prophesy, haruspicate, tell our vision
To the silent trees of sleepy Arlington—
Let’s read Dante in the language of Romance
And copy Italian sonnets into our notebook.

I need to buy a five-by-seven notebook;
I used the last page of my old one last night,
Writing another maudlin ode to Romance,
Offending the Muses with slipshod literature.
As starlight graces the skies of Arlington,
I read Ted Roethke, shun the television.

Tell me what to think, O television!
Reporters, scrawl your truth in a thick notebook!
O bloggers from Anaheim to Arlington,
Publish your urgencies fifteen times a night!
O makers of official literature,
Give me propaganda! Assassinate Romance!

Readers of romance, watchers of television,
Put Literature's secrets in a notebook
As an old man says good night in Arlington.

Robbins Library and Vicinity

In Evening Air

From the archives: the very first post here at Dark Speech (when the blog was called Tenebrae): the poem "In Evening Air" by the late great Theodore Roethke.

This blog began ten years ago Monday -- on 8th October 2002.  And mostly, I've enjoyed it.  I hope you have, too.