consonantsandvowels's Open Salon Blog

dragons on the map

Wed, 16 May 2012 01:05:57 -0400

u-turns no boundaries

here be

barbed wire burnt bridges

saying what can't be said

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:04:14 -0400

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.
- Alan Watts

The Language for Loss

What is inarticulable remains so.

Now I am told things differently
and everything speaks of you.
I have learned a new tongue
and tell you grief.

Yes, everything speaks of you,
but not for you -
sanctimonious Sunday gossip,
it is not to be trusted.

But under my own breath, hidden
and bereft of formal insult,
a mean colloquial pain
hisses at me.

Unmediated experience

Bob Hicock

In Tennessee I Found a Firefly

Mary Szybist

possessing nothing

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:04:31 -0400

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

_{- John Cage}

I call dibs. Who else wants

the blank page, the black hole.

Lost horizon? I own it.

Mine the numinous emptiness

without icons

or furniture.

(Mine the dust motes

that dance on my breath

in the stale air.)

I zero in on nothing.

Keats's Phrase

Albert Goldbarth

sitting in the graveyard

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 23:04:19 -0400

I think one of poetry’s functions is not to give us what we want… [T]he poet isn’t always of use to the tribe. The tribe thrives on the consensual. The tribe is pulling together to face the intruder who threatens it. Meanwhile, the poet is sitting by himself in the graveyard talking to a skull.

- Heather McHugh

Spring Cleaning

The neighbors’ dogs concert the night -
one bays mournful, the others bark rebuke
like this domestic topography of dust
and clutter, piles of unread periodicals,
library books the only things renewed
though the dark hours of dawn rise
again and again into a pink promise.

What doesn’t say we’re here and held
in the heart of the only mystery:

isn’t the swarm of tiny bees in the grasszzzzzz
an electric message, P waves zig zagging
ups    and    downs    all    of    it
honey      honey      honey
so sweet
even black holes pulling us inexorably into nothing
means belonging.

Flow (Go)

by Christopher Phelps

asking a shadow to dance

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 12:04:06 -0400

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
_{- Carl Sandburg}

Tourists

Rounding a crumbled corner
we half expect a giant pair of mouse ears
but the small world, after all,
gets smaller from a distance.

Instead there’s a brothel ruin,
bereft of desirous flesh -
the still tittering ancient graffiti
isn’t about fire and ash.

Winding down the hill we stop midway
where the cameo factory carves pale profiles
from empty shells. Vesuvius
looms twitchy on our horizon.

"...logos is the shadow of what happens." :

Arguing with Something Plato Said

by Jack Collom