Emily Dickinson
They say that “Time assuages”-
Time never did assuage-
An actual suffering strengthens
As Sinews do, with age-
Time is a Test of Trouble-
But not a Remedy-
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no Malady
wow, found this poem this evening. Didn’t know this one, and it really speaks to me right now. Time is a test of trouble….
from “Proverbs and Songs”
Dedicated to Jose Ortega y Gasset
Antonio Machado
IV
But look in your mirror for the other one,
the other one who walks by your side.
V
Between living and dreaming
there is a third thing.
Guess it.
XV
Look for your other half
who walks always next to you
and tends to be what you aren’t.
XVII
In my solitude
I have seen things very clearly
that were not true.
XVIII
Water is good, so is thirst;
shadow is good, so is sun;
the honey from the rosemarys
and the honey of the bare fields.
XXI
Form your letters slowly and well:
making things well
is more important than making them.
XXIV
Wake up, you poets:
let echoes end,
and voices begin.
XXV
But don’t hunt for dissonance;
because, in the end, there is no dissonance.
When the sound is heard people dance.
XXVI
What the poet is searching for
is not the fundamental I
but the deep you.
XXVIII
Beyond living and dreaming
there is something more important:
waking up.
XXXIV
If a poem becomes common,
passed around, hand to hand, it’s OK:
gold is chosen for coins.
XL
But art?
It is pure and intense play,
so it is like pure and intense life,
so it is like pure and intense fire.
You’ll see the coal burning.
from a statement by Richard Silverstein and Jeremiah Haber:
We affirm the rights of both Israeli and the Palestinian peoples to self-determination and self-defense, as we affirm the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
This, friends, is indeed the central point. It is not a question of “one state, or two states, or no states, or blue states.” Not a question of federation or union, and certainly not subordination or transfer. Not the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, or, for that matter, the right of the Palestinians to a state of their own. All these political frameworks are means to an end, but the end is as [Daniel] Barenboim or we say it: equal rights and dignity to both peoples, without any privileging of the other side.
Once the end is accepted, the question then – and only then – will be what is the best political framework to achieve this end. A two-state solution in which one side dominates and controls the other is no better than a one state solution in which one side dominates and controls the other.
Until people of good faith can agree on this bottom line, and get a significant segment of the both the Israeli or Palestinian peoples to buy in, then all the wearying talk of a peace process will be doomed.
There are preconditions to successful outcomes – and the principle underlying both our statements is one of the preconditions for this one.
from “Adah Isaacs Menken” by Enid Dame in Confessions
You see, most people
stun themselves through life
convinced a half-dead state
is all that they can bear.
I always wanted more:
to mount the world and ride it
through the farthest galaxies,
to feel that power flow
between my legs.
inside gertrude stein
by Lynn Emanuel
Right now as I am talking to you and as you are being talked
to, without letup, it is becoming clear that gertrude stein has
hijacked me and that this feeling that you are having now as
you read this, that this is what it feels like to be inside
gertrude stein. This is what it feels like to be a huge type–
writer in a dress. Yes, I feel we have gotten inside gertrude
stein, and of course it is dark inside the enormous gertrude, it
is like being locked up in a refrigerator lit only by a smiling
rind of cheese. Being inside gertrude is like being inside a
monument made of a cloud which is always moving across
the sky which is also always moving. Gertrude is a huge gal-
leon of cloud anchored to the ground by one small tether, yes,
I see it down there, do you see that tiny snail glued to the
tackboard of the landscape? That is alice. So, I am inside
gertrude; we belong to each other, she and I, and it is so won-
derful because I have always been a thin woman inside of
whom a big woman is screaming to get out, and she’s out
now and if a river could type this is how it would sound, pure
and complicated and enormous. Now we are lilting across the
countryside, and we are talking, and if the wind could type it
would sound like this, ongoing and repetitious, abstracting
and stylizing everything, like our famous haircut painted by
Picasso. Because when you are inside our haircut you under-
stand that all the flotsam and jetsam of hairdo have been
cleared away (like the forests from the New World) so that the
skull can show through grinning and feasting on the alarm it
has created. I am now, alarmingly, inside gertrude’s head and I
am thinking that I may only be a thought she has had when
she imagined that she and alice were dead and gone and
someone had to carry on the work of being gertrude stein, and
so I am receiving, from beyond the grave, radioactive isotopes
of her genius saying, take up my work, become gertrude stein.
Because someone must be gertrude stein, someone must save
us from the literalists and realists, and narratives of the
beginning and end, someone must be a river that can type.
And why not I? Gertrude is insisting on the fact that while I
am a subgenius, weighing one hundred five pounds, and living
in a small town with an enormous furry male husband who is
always in his Cadillac Eldorado driving off to sell something
to people who do not deserve the bad luck of this mer-
chandise in their lives–that these facts would not be a prob-
lem for gertrude stein. Gertrude and I feel that, for instance, in
Patriarchal Poetry when (like an avalanche that can type) she is
burying the patriarchy, still there persists a sense of con-
descending affection. So, while I’m a thin, heterosexual sub-
genius, nevertheless gertrude has chosen me as her tool, just
as she chose the patriarchy as a tool for ending the patriarchy.
And because I have become her tool, now, in a sense, gertrude
is inside me. It’s tough. Having gertrude inside me is like
having swallowed an ocean liner that can type, and, while I
feel like a very small coat closet with a bear in it, gertrude and
I feel that I must tell you that gertrude does not care. She is
using me to get her message across, to say, I am lost, I am
beset by literalists and narratives of the beginning and middle
and end, help me. And so, yes, I say, yes, I am here, gertrude,
because we feel, gertrude and I, that there is real urgency in
our voice (like a sob that can type) and that things are very
bad for her because she is lost, beset by the literalists and
realists, her own enormousness crushing her and we must
find her and take her into ourselves, even though I am the
least likely of saviors and have been chosen perhaps as a last
resort, yes, definitely, gertrude is saying to me, you are the
least likely of saviors, you are my last choice and my last
resort.
______________________________________________________________
Lynn Emanuel was born in Mt. Kisco, New York, in 1949. She is the author of three books of poetry: Then, Suddenly— (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), which was awarded the Eric Matthieu King Award from The Academy of American Poets; The Dig (1992), which was selected by Gerald Stern for the National Poetry Series; and Hotel Fiesta (1984).
Her work has been featured in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Poetry numerous times and is included in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She has been a judge for the National Book Awards and has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Emanuel has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Warren Wilson Program in Creative Writing, and the Vermont College Creative Writing Program. She is currently a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.
For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend
by Pat Parker
The first thing you must do is to forget that i’m Black.
Second, you must never forget that i’m Black.
You should be able to dig Aretha,
but don’t play her every time i come over.
And if you decide to play Beethoven–don’t tell me
his life story. They make us take music appreciation too.
Eat soul food if you like it, but don’t expect me
to locate your restaurants
of cook it for you.
And if some Black person insults you,
mugs you, rapes your sister, rapes you,
rips your house up or is just being an ass–
please do not apologize to me
for wanting to do them bodily harm.
It makes me wonder if you’re foolish.
And even if you really believe Blacks are better lovers than
whites–don’t tell me. I start thinking of charging stud fees.
In other words–if you really want to be my friend–don’t
make a labor of it. I’m lazy. Remember.
-from Making Face, Make Soul
edited by Gloria Anzaldua
San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation Books, 1990.
for popping up this song around 7:15:
and I’m thrilled this earth is beauty
and there’s no past tense for easy
Ferron, “My, my”
which reminded me to open the shade and look out.
from our afternoon lecture by Anne Marie Macari
-language is hypothesis and experiment
-poetic language expands our boundaries
-metaphor is instinctual groping
Dickinson’s definition of “redemption” is those things that force us into immediate experience, to the embodied, physical realm
Dickinson would improvise for hours on the keyboard, and was a singer with perfect pitch — no surprise that her poems are strong musical compositions, with lines of harmony and dissonance, and cannot be understood aside from this. The rhythm, the pacing — you have to pay attention to these, for they can change and shape the “surface” meaning of the words.
In many of Dickinson’s poems, she casts herself as a rival to God as a creator (Surprised? That whole “lonely spinister of Amhearst” crap has so limited how most of us understand Emily)
The male critics who spend all their time searching for men in Dickinson’s life, limited by their assumption that some man somewhere has to be connected to such creative brilliance, have “Dickinson Envy,” Anne Marie says.
Dickinson has, in the words of one biographer exploring gender politics, “a power disembodied from its user.” Dickinson claims so much power in her poetic voice, challenging religion, god, men, but at the same time is distant from that power. No surprise, given when she lived. Rich’s essay on this in On Lies, Secrets and Silences comments that, in a masculine-assumptive world, “active willing and creation in women are forms of aggression.”
Anne Marie talked about the often astounding endings of Dickinson’s poems, lines that turn the poem, and often social order, inside out. She described these as “guillotine endings” — the poem has its head chopped off. Martin Espada, in a workshop, talked about creating poems where the last line automatically makes the eye bounce back to the beginning to start over. That made total sense to me, but the endings that crack open the world also appeal to me – such different ideas, such different poems.
A Dickinson poem I didn’t know:
#301
I reason, Earth is short-
and Anguish- absolute-
And many hurt,
But, what of that?
I reason, we could die-
The best Vitality
Cannot excel Decay,
But, what of that?
I reason, that in Heaven-
Somehow, it will be even-
Some new Equation, given-
But, what of that?
Anne Marie Macari
This Frenzy 