Jordan Stempleman (Iowa, USA): Four Poems

GIVENS

I accept, combinations of unlikely
to unanswered, I accept the darkness
of triumph as apart, I accept the numinous
risings gone once convinced, and the collapsing
recline of a cold, lost balloon.

I accept, the lowly surgeon who’s taken
with the worker’s old work, I accept a second matter
that stares long after the first, I accept
the untimely hero bored before ruin, and the son
asked to cut his father’s last hair.

I accept, what is and what weakens to reprove,
I accept all the rooms filled with gods
obsessed and alone, I accept the nearest to fire
or the closeness of hope, and the plan to end
saying, I will say it once more.

OLD PARTS

There is now one good ear left.
The last one to go, was too heavy
on the cotton and not the common
sense. There is no longer any dis-
illusionment about what will give
up next. The mugs are now filled
with boiling white tea. The stapler
is used while squinting towards the
light. Gloves, although lined with
rabbit, weigh down these hands, so
they often rest there, long overdue,
dangling and down by my side

PIQUANTE

And I’ve fallen off a stool
which means, I wasn’t meant to reach
so far out first thing in the morning.
To be sitting there. To have a very important center
that regrows each day with minimal
water, minimal outings. What a difference it is
to be between the unwritten and the unsaid.
There’s a cookbook I’m skeptical about
so I’ve left it in the drawer for months
now, where I know it keeps on serving
the same dish, day after day, without pictures
to account for all it’s done, without an organism
to break down starch, and sugar, and taste.

WE WERE BROUGHT INTO A STRAINING SHAPE

there are little runts
and blunted
comments, middle names

for everyone, the slightest
impression embossed
on a handkerchief

squeals for one better
truth to try and imagine
one better truth,

exhibitions in the sense
they pour, nervous
as donors are we all

© Jordan Stempleman 2007

Raymond Bianchi (Chicago, USA): Seven Poems

SPLENDID PHOTOGRAPHS

splendid photographs by Leni Riefenstahl, the most ravishing book of photographs published anywhere. Leni is a nice looking woman and did not let anyone get in her way.

Winners are winners and losers are losers that is reality.

Deep in the mountains of the southern Bolivia about eight thousand aloof godlike Inka emblems of physical perfection with large, well‑shaped, polleras, expressive faces, and muscular bodies are wrenched walking in broken rocks blood mixed with dust.

Their hands are bent with imperishable beauty.

Donald Rumsfeld is more metallic and healthier‑looking with a side salad. il forte vento bracing with salt and broken bones.

deceit in America
allow people to sit in their
own urine and die of asphyxiation.

Galileo Galilei will do more to increase our strength;

Crusades “Deus Lo Volt “
Le piogge sono frequenti soprattutto
the engines of creation digging

the foundation for your pool and your tennis court oath.

PERVERTED

“Costly Cult of cloves” Dante’s inferno, Canto XXiX

Extras include an interview with Polanski, a Beer Garden the oddest examples of a celebrity interview I have ever seen. In between his off color comments

Polanski swings a baseball bat and swings for the fences.

Saddam Hussein was too valued a target to be caught in a mere bolthole and too rare a beast to be holed up with rats. General Ricardo Sanchez announced Saddam's capture to the world reporters learnt the deposed Iraqi dictator had been sprung from a sinister-sounding "spider hole". An online unofficial US Marine Corps dictionary defines spider hole as "an enemy fighting hole” always the sinister is well hidden,"
Some say we are alive in form to become more loving and to grow spiritually, to achieve Nirvana in the here and now. I agree. I looked at what the reductionists had produced, it saw that nothing uniquely artistic had survived. Collectively, the leading members of the art world had decided that art has no content, that it has no special media or techniques, and that the artist has no crucial role in the process. Art became a statement of nothingness. The summary conclusion was announced, infamously, by Marcel Duchamp. Asked to submit something for display in 1917, Duchamp sent a urinal. Duchamp of course knew the history of art.
Boots rotted in the trenches

COMMERCIAL

commercial enterprise with formal institutions.

Compare and contrast two dominant domains in contemporary society: commerce and government which are governed by what are called economics and morality.
The artist takes significant experiences and thoughts as raw material and creates a physical embodiment for them. Each artist makes independent judgments about which of his experiences and thoughts are significant. He has awesome power to exalt the senses, the intellects, and the passions of those who experience it. Those individuals who over the centuries accept art's calling developed it into a vehicle that called upon the highest insights of the human creative vision and painted nudes and large breasts on cave ceilings.
The names that evoke in us a sense of greatness - Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Rembrandt, Vermeer. Their achievements created the status of the artist as not merely a visionary or a craftsman, but as a special individual in whom both vision and craft are integrated and heightened. The art world's symptoms of decline part of the intellectual world's slipping into a sense that progress, beauty, optimism,
A sense of decline increasing naturalism of the century led, to a feeling of being alone without guidance in an, empty room. The spread of liberalism and free markets caused their opponents on the political left, members of the artistic avant garde, to see political developments as a series of deep disappointments. And the technological revolutions spurred by the combination of science and capitalism led many to project a future in which mankind would be dehumanized or destroyed by the very machines that were supposed to improve their lives.

VACANT

An intellectual’s world is a sense of disquiet a anxiety. Artists respond, exploring in their works the implications of a world in which reason, order, certainty, dignity, and optimism seemed to have disappeared. The works that are the iconic pieces of twentieth century art express the minds of the great names that created them. Modern art is Pablo Picasso's fractured world populated by vacant-eyed, disjointed beings. Edward Hopper's “nighthawks” and women in bland, worn settings. It is the death dance of Jackson Pollock. It is Salvador Dali's soft world in which the distinction between subjective dream states and objective reality is obliterated. It is Andy Warhol's smirking trivialization and mechanical reproductions. It is a reality that is captured presciently in Edvard Munch's The Scream, the horror of being a cipher in a world of hideously swirling near-formless forms. The twentieth-century world was the story of fresh packaging and garbage, tons of garage.
Postmodern world is filled with numbness, Stepford wives, beeping of digital things, smells that are akin to Pine Sol and avoidance of pain.

Horror is not allowed.

SIGNIFICANT

Advances incorporate planning processes- elimination of error
basic to all life. the planned advance small dominant
new knowledge required errors must advance is large
research and invention, the elimination of
justifiable public utilization of more deceit to increase our strength.
Deceit clowns in technology ancient confusion magic and science.
communications laymen Magic depends on progress.

ELLIPTICAL
For Johannes Kepler

The "educated" public and the media have not adequately understood this profound difference between magic and science. This important failure in our educational system is one source of the lack of general appreciation of the power of deceit as a source of strength. A more general understanding of the power of science would bolster our faith that open societies continue to be fittest to survive.
Deceit is necessary for the processes of trial and the elimination of error,
Johannes Kepler’s beautiful description of the mechanism of progress in science. Try to understand what happens to each of these secret processes a project we can shed some light on how the peacetime military was able to justly acquire its reputation for resistance to novelty.
Kepler’s language means receptivity to the unexpected conjecture.
There is the tradition of the young outsider challenging conventional wisdom. Such a victory is almost impossible in a hierarchical structure like the Catholic Church or the American corporation how else do you explain the growth of the internet or Protestantism.
The usual way a new idea can be heard is for it to be sold first outside the hierarchy but usually prophets are burned alive as much today as in the 12th century.
Impediments to the elimination of errors will determine the pace of progress in science as they do in many other matters. Many are comfortable with the Gestapo or the Cheka as long as they are not going
to the gulag,
ignorance is comfortable.

JUNGLE

“se quella con ch’io parlo non si secca”
Dante Inferno, Canto XXXII verse 135


Fitness to survive and to reproduce is the law of the international jungle. The strength of the weapon of deceit has been tested and proven in battle and in imitation.

Technology developed most vigorously in the industrial revolution, and those places, Western Europe and America, where the greatest deceit existed. Lies, Lies, Lies.

Peter the Great brought lies to Russia.

Clowns and surprise are clearly essential weapons of business and that even countries like the U.S have made frequent efforts to use deceit as a weapon.

This poem is concerned with the impact of deceit culture, rewards are dependent on superiors. Reward through love has been remarkably successful in stimulating independent thinking.

However, in assessing deceit a clown policy those who "get ahead" in the culture of clowns understand its uses for personal advancement. Knowledge is power, and for many insiders access to classified information is the chief source of their power. It is not surprising that clowns see the publication of technological information as endangering national security.

© Raymond Bianchi 2007

Ann Bogle (Minnesota, USA): Two Poems

GET ME TO THE CHURCH ON TIME

I was hoping for a language-free moment,
a moment to discourage the word.

I was, as you know, a prisoner
to my tongue, could bite it.

In my upper room, a sermon
was playing about sundry. I hid

on the stairs, listening, talking back
to it, but it couldn't hear me

because it was talking. I let it.
What choice did I have?

It was a good one, what to do with old guns:
bury them in the cellar, one by one.

I grew attached to my upper air, slept
with a pillow near the ground, it was no

basement, anymore; they'd blasted the bottom
half of her, left me to untie my shoes

from a distance of seventy feet –
that was because I have a cut. Sorry,

I said, meaning it, but it was nothing
to make up for. Next time try taking it.

8/22/91(rev. Feb. 2006)

POEM FOR SPRING

As soon as it is over
the beginning can begin
on the road out of Texas
hitched to me and other things
I want to keep forever
including a look at him
but my wallet is empty.

We are not as we have been.
Therapy leaves me friendless.
I post a note to strangers
who sell me a new kidney.
My blood sticks like dead women
to my sheets and hands. Burdens
to ease his smaller burden.

I close nice bank accounts.
I thank him for leaving me
flatter, tits the size of ribs.
His threats are good for nothing.
I ask him to finish me,
to put me out. He started it.
He offers to box
then stifles my talk.

© Ann Bogle 2007

Tom Orange (D.C., USA): from A Day in Switzerland

from A Day in Switzerland

8:48 am

To defend oneself
from the images
one cannot love—
memory's false
undertow


*


7:45 am

Faced with existence
I take off my pants
and proceed with
a somnambulist's clarity


*

4:32 am

I want to believe
the same eyes as mine


*

8:56 pm

People willing the familiar thirst
for infinite novelties of personality


*


7:30 am

Like the magician's
eye it opens
your sex in my hand


*

3:39 am

You have found
no stupidity
that others have
not already discovered


*

2:51 pm

I'm afraid
I smoke the
indulgent
passions of
the brain
perhaps
without
first searching
for the fires
of inexperience


*

6:39 am

To what extent
do we begin to
present knowledge
without understanding?


*

9:09 am

The Buddha goes
to smoke hashish
in the church
of amorous ideas


*

9:24 am

Gently the eternal
subconscious excites
my desire to lose
the changing line
of memory's furrows


*

10:10 pm

Why I do not
believe in the
particularly
good taste
of people
too long


*

12:31 am

The more
beautiful
you are

to look
would break
my heart


*
1:24 am

Now take
a walk
with me
and see
what is
happening


*

2:16 am

A well-organized heart
knows how to
fall asleep on
good footing


*

5:09 pm

The dangerous seduction
of philosophy is a
vampire empiricism
which proceeds to
consolidate wisdom
on the horizon
of its desire


*

1:26 am

I proceed to paint
an explanation of
existence as if
the character of
curiosity existed
beyond our reason


*

12:53 am

I seek the astonishment
of all the illusions that
bind reason to its
depository of dreaming


*


2:34 am

Man tries
to escape
labyrinths
of doubt
through
the light
of stars
that are
dead phantoms
of certainty


*

6:10 am

I
admire
your
eyes

Will
you
help
me


© Tom Orange 2007



Steve Halle (Chicago, USA): "variations on two phrases from Othello", "Elegy/Eulogia"

VARIATIONS ON TWO PHRASES FROM OTHELLO

If I had a cap to tip,
a cup, or a ewe to tup,
to sit on my lap,
I'd toss her a tip
as she strips to trap
my lust, while my eyes
feast, and I'm tempted
again by the two-backed beast.


ELEGY / EULOGIA
For Lee Halle, 1928-2006

it’s a slow
steady, steady…
live, they
say. a slow
steady, steady
wind breathes
life into clay.

it’s too whip-
fast, Pallas, to Spring
whole from a head,
and after, this marathon
of whip-fast footfalls
run year-round your
ragged dead.


© Steve Halle 2007
check out this poet's blog-journal at http://www.sevencornerspoetry.blogspot.com 

Lars Palm (Sweden): Four Poems from notes for an airport

1 – (beginnings)

two un
attended black
bags in the
corner by the
entrance

who brought the
flies & why
don’t
they board
the 3
o’clock?

trying to re
member who
made the
film i stole the
title of


2 – (language)

"please do
not leave
baggage
unattended”

what is new?
what does not change?
what just dried
oh shite i forgot

guns aren’t
allowed in the
hand
(or)
baggage

"other than in
specifically
designated areas”
o the beauty of
airport language

"please do
not sleep
baggage un
attended”

good morning
"for farther
information”

just jot
down what
ever thought
or
phrase you
can catch



3 – (silly man)

does tom
wait? yes tom
waits

always when
writing these small
ones i think
of old corman
& maybe phil
whalen hides
some
where in these
shadows as well

that graph of the
mind moving
is dancing

toothpaste is (as
we all know) a
very dangerous
explosive

look an
ambulance
maybe some
one happened

going from
lorca & pérez
estrada to
ekelöf &
lindegren
across tarkos

lift elevator
carefully put
down shop



4 – (ending)

"in this air
port” in this
body in this
brand new
bag or
cadillac

& wiener
schnitzel
& a hairy
schnauzer to
you too


© Lars Palm 2007

Check out this poet's blog-journal @ http://www.skicka.blogspot.com
and blog-blog @ http://www.mischievoice.blogspot.com

Aaron Belz (Missouri, USA): "Andy's Mom's Velveeta..."

ANDY'S MOM'S VELVEETA LOG-SHAPED TUPPERWARE CONTAINER

i.

One day
Andy's mom's Velveeta log-shaped Tupperware container
spoke to Andy's mom in hushed silence.
"Andy's mom. What is up with you?
You are hot."

Andy's mom checked to make sure the telephone
was firmly in its cradle. It was not,
but the only sound it was making was
a small, vague screaming sound.
Andy's mom found the screaming sound
oddly comforting in light of what
had just recently transpired with
the Velveeta log-shaped Tupperware container.

Andy's mom called the police
in to investigate.


ii.

One day
Andy's mom made the mistake
of calling the police in to stop
a Velveeta log-shaped Tupperware container
from talking to her.

The Velveeta log-shaped Tupperware container
had been flirting with her,
which is perhaps what bothered her most.

"Andy's mom, now that we have cuffed
the Velveeta log-shaped Tupperware container
to the toaster oven,
we are heading back to the station.
There is nothing further
for us to do here. Move along, Andy's mom.
There is nothing for you to see here."

And the policemen strung a yellow tape
around Andy's mom's house to make her feel better
about the whole situation. The words on the tape said,
"Caution! Velveeta log-shaped Tupperware container!"
And after the word "container!" one of the policemen had written
in sharpie marker the word "flirtatious" in parentheses
followed by "Andy's mom is crazy," also in parentheses.
Then "too much Velveeta on the brain," also in parenthesis,
but this time followed by exclamation points interspersed
with question marks. He found this very funny
and sniggered to himself melodically
as he pointed it out to his partner policeman,
who also sniggered, though a bit less melodically.


iii.

One day
after sniggering policemen
abandoned Andy's mom at her house
with a cuffed intruder,
Andy's mom's Velveeta log-shaped Tupperware container
spoke to Andy's mom in hushed silence.

"Andy's mom. You see now that I am cuffed
now that you have called the polices on me
I am cuffed to a toaster oven in fact
and wish to be release this instant
Andy's mom release me this instant
or I shall summon other Tupperwares
yes and some not as gentle spirited
as I to speak to you in hushed silence
regarding their innermost thoughts
about you and also about numerous other subjects
related to your house and your pretty friends
your pretty pretty friends who visit your house
they shall all speak so release me this instant
for I am in bondage to a toaster oven."

© Aaron Belz 2007