Take the poet out
of the landscape
no names remain.
Busy the freemason
beavers build a lodge
while the poet sleeps.
Under water
up a creek
in a stretch of words.
Category: Poetry
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The Poet in the Landscape
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Poetry Post
The poetry post was taken down over night spirits the rules of cultural worm tongues relevance ad hoc heresy. Kicked to the ground old fashioned paper pages bestrew the weeds of diction and grammar. Who put up the poetry post unknown nor who kicked the post down still cadence broke at the base cracked where it entered the yard near the sidewalk free for passersby to read not the news and certainly nothing about a poetry post pushed over in the night nor who picked up the pieces and raked clean any evidence Who put up the poetry post unknown nor who punched the post's still cadence broke at the base cracked where it entered the yard near the sidewalk free for passersby to read not the news and anyway nothing about a poetry post pushed away in the night broken where entered the ground empty the post head where displayed a page a day now empty abandoned unfulfilled leaning fallen pushedfall -
pure poetry, 2000
Readers who like unlikeable characters will love Binnie Kirshenbaum’s Lila Moscowitz. Lila is stubborn, spoiled, angry, bitter, promiscuously self-destructive. And, frosting on the cake, she’s a poet. That’s not to say she’s without redeemable qualities. She’s funny, hilarious, in fact, a natural wit, and as honest as a person can be without losing all of one’s family and friends and readers. Her humor is laced with sarcasm and irony. She’s quick, street smart and intelligent, independent. Experienced readers will recognize that Lila is not Binnie, that the narrator of a novel should not be confused with the author. This narrative truth is emphasized toward the end of the book when Lila takes some questions after a poetry reading:
“‘Did you really dance topless at the Baby Doll Lounge?’ Another one of the college girls is contemplating a career move, no doubt.
I smile as if I’ve got a secret, and I say, ‘I refuse to answer on the grounds that it could incriminate me.’”Lila may be a poet, but she’s not stupid:
“That I never danced topless at the Baby Doll Lounge or anyplace else either is not what they want to hear.”
Does she “write every day,” another student asks, and Lila pretends for the audience that she does write every day. She’s then asked “how much money do poets make?” Here she tells the truth (192-193).
But while the perspicacious reader knows Lila is not Binnie, we all know that poetry does not sell, so why not only does Binnie put “poetry” in her title but structures her book with poetic devices, informing each chapter with epigraphs, definitions of poetic conventions? Didn’t she want her book to sell? The answer has to do with wheels within wheels, or how to turn a stand up routine into literature:
“Many of the poems I write are about sex. I have a gift for the subject. The ins and outs of it. My poems lean toward the sordid side of the bed, the stuff of soiled sheets” (21).
We don’t get to hear those poems, but they apparently are full of the tension created by want harbored in inhibitions freed in seduction, romp enclosed in forms, procedures, praxis, which express mores without which somehow sex is not nearly as much fun. The fun is enclosed in a box of gravure etchings. The notion of form as enclosure is conservative. The poet might want out, not in. Lila’s own explanation might solve both Binnie and the reader’s questions:
“There is freedom within the confines of form the way a barrier protects you from the elements of disaster. The way there is love in the bonds of marriage. ‘Without boundaries, you can be only adrift,’ I say. ‘Lost. Without lines drawn on the map, you are nowhere. It is better to be a prisoner of war than to be without a nation, a place, a people’” (194).
Jesus may have said the opposite – Come, follow me, and leave all that nonsense behind. Of course, most of his followers wound up wanting it both ways.
“Maybe they should stay in their cages and sing their hearts out. Unbridled passion…results from being tied to the bedpost” (194).
Which is to make of Lila a dynamic character, one who’s changed over the course of the work. She finds love only by losing love. She’s human, fallen, having slipped on her own banana peel, but she gets back up, and writes a book that stirs and calms the forms.
Pure Poetry, by Binnie Kirshenbaum, a novel, Simon & Schuster, 2000, 203 pages.
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Eve Angle
Drop by drip
prid by prod
she had me know
time to go.No worries
I agreed
good rides
in mind.Now is new
mew has won
morning sun
night moon.This drizzling
evening slow
calm bottoms up
buttoned-down. -
Hard On Hearing
What do we hear
when we are hard
on hearingsounds far and near
sharp metallic birds
hummingly trillthe sorrow of the song
sparrow’s syllables
feed meand chick-a-dee-dee
quaver and buzz
flute whistlesnautical vibrations
ding dongs
and foggy tootswarnings and come-ons
calls for help
turn-ons and turn-offs. -
Its Opposite
The ubiquitous it is at it
wait for it or go for it
again and again opposite its
clarity its antecedent it’s in
other words everywhere else
but here we will hide it
for good like its dark matter
doppelganger antithesis
it blankets, lids, sheaths
and sheets while we sleep
while we pretend to be
privy to it its fugitive identity. -
Night Words
Those words that come at night wash
swim the room like pieces of litter
flowing down a gutter in rainfall
cooling the street and gloom.Then come the slow-moving
two-wheeled wheelbarrows
pulled by a pair of worker
words pulling like tugsthe barges of raw sense:
to to wit
to to whom
to to why
to to reason
of of love
in in fear
two by two
far and near.
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In the Sober Reality of Celestial Shade
Day ends with a walk to sleep,
ends again in the sober reality
of celestial shade, one awakes
in the dark and quiet, too early
to get out of bed, too late
to start some new episode
on the television or telephone,
and this is when one turns
to paper and words seep
out shy and uncertain fearful
like little furry animals searching
the brambles for food and drink
day’s fire now cool ashen,
and while certainly somewhere
in the city of night madness
drones on, an asocial tinnitus,
here in the paper we find
we can hear the pencil’s breeze
and feel the bluish-gray lead lighten. -
Agony’s Dry Spell
the Word wears
nose and mouth
meaning maskless it spread
or breathe in
woe’s poisonatmosphere
once there was
full of tearsall dried out
sand aura
current sensedates from the
great drought age
when one stoppeddrinking and
puttin’ on
the old styleno agony
approaches
nor reproaches. -
Spelunking
What’s written by candle in yr cave
won’t be read for eons by anyone,
no views, no visitors, no likes, no
comments, until erelong perchance
some fair spelunker crawling
horizontally across the buried
rocks of yr commas, not too deep,
discovers yr degraded predicament,
etiolated undertaking to connect
images in the dark of creatures
now extinct, spellings archaic,
broken syntax of yr past, and finds
yr crushed crumpet of a skull
buried like a period at the end
of yr tunnel up against a wall,
a scurvy potation spilled betwixt. -
Dichotomy of Falling
If you fall into a round bottle,
it’s hard to climb back out.Some fall from windows, heli-
copters, or love, uncappedand uncorked, go with the flow.
Others fall into formation,couplets on the go and make
do with whom or whatthey find out or in line
falling in or falling out.
The Coming of the Toads 