Concupiscent Diem

 "Concupiscent curds" said more specifically as, "con-cue-piss-senT curds" stuck in my head like a catchy Justin Beiber song. Something about the way that girl in the You-Tube video said those two words had them ringing in my head. On my walk home, walking to the beat of the music on my iPod, humming "concupiscent curds", I wondered why it was so stuck in my head this time, rather than the hundreds of times before that I read the poem or heard it. I wondered if it was because it was so latently sprinkled with sex (I feel odd saying that considering the child who was reciting the poem...), or if there was something underlying that the poem needed me to discover. So I went back to it.
Oh, how I had merely read it before.
If there was a subtitle to this poem, it would be "Carpe Diem". This poem is centered around a wake for woman who worked hard all her life (horny, callused feet), not sparing time to enjoy it. This wake wasn't focused on the woman, however. This was an excuse to mingle with "muscular men" and "wenches", a reason to engage in "concupiscent" indulgences. Ice cream takes on major symbolism as being sweet and pleasurable, but melting quickly; seize the moment, embrace life's pleasures before time slips away.
"Her horny feet protrude, they come/to show how cold she is; how dumb". She is dead now, mute, no longer able to give her disapproval of the goings on around her, but also, dumb for not engaging life while she had the chance. The lamp shines a beam, a spotlight, on the living not the dead. Carpe Diem.
Although that girl was boarder-line obnoxious, and her annunciation was misplaced at times, the way she sprinkled the poem with sensuality was quite spot on. Upon first hearing her recitation, I found her eroticism of certain words uber excessive, but now, I can see how appropriate it really is. The Emperor of Ice Cream isn't what I would call an erotic poem, by any means, but definitely a poem that encourages human sensuality and indulgences, as it so vividly shows that life is short. One works hard all their life and ends up dead. Well, we are all ending up dead eventually, so why lead such a dry, undiscovered life?
I can agree with the Emperor on this one: Carpe Diem because we're all gonna be dead soon, anyway.

Cuisine Bourgeoise

Today, I opened the bible to Cuisine Bourgeoise, though I have read this poem and passed by it many, many times, today it pleaded with me to really read it.
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This is a beautiful poem warning us to be aware of our actions, and to be aware of what we can become. It shines a light on how the world was before man's greed and evil, and what is becoming of our world now. "We feast on human heads, brought in on leaves....This bitter meat sustains us"  If we keep our greed up, we will have regressed to primal behavior, until eventually we self destruct "Are they men eating reflections of themselves?".

I feel like this is an appropriate poem for this elections season.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction: It Must Change, V

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction: It Must Change, V

I was sweetly surprised when I read this canteau. The imagery was so bright and pronounced, yet vague all at the same time. I felt like I understood what Steven's was saying, but by the last line, I found myself second guessing. The colors paint a beautiful Caribbean portrait, but what lies beneath the colors is sending me for a loop. The poem begins with calming blue, then moves into orange, green, turquoise, orange and green, again. These colors are pretty serene, with the exception of orange, that can be taken as vitality and endurance  The poem goes into description about a great banana tree "Which pierces the clouds and bends on half the world." When I first read this line, the tree of life instantly came to mind. The next lines talk about how he (the man of the island) often thinks about where he came from. About how most people see the world as a melon pink (an easy-going, loving color), but how they really should see it is red (a very passionate, intensive color, a color that shouldn't be overlooked). The last lines really got me. "Sighing that he should leave the banjo's twang" has left me utterly confused. I am really trying to think metaphorically, but I can't quite see the connection. This poem jumped right out at me, for what reasons? I do not know.

The Poem That Caused Me To Lose My Mind

I let my book fall open to the poem, "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour", on page 444, and waited to discover something...anything. What I found awarded me a brand new perspective.

Two lovers sit, bundled together waiting for the first light of evening. They sit and embrace the simplicity of the twilight's early light, and ponder to themselves if this world that they live in, if the beauty they see in this moment, as the sun is dying below the hills, is as good as it is going to get.

Placing all differences aside and collecting themselves among the gurgling mass of humanity, they contemplate the charring questions that conjoin every human being. Is this moment really as as good as it is going to get or does the only thing better than this exist inside the imagination? What if the only God there is belongs to our imagination, therefore God and the imagination are but figments that exist solely within our minds? While harboring these deep thoughts of eternity and existence, they realize that no matter what is and what isn't, they have each other, and that is all they really need.

I've been sitting on this blog since Monday; I find myself more and more tangled up, the more I try to unravel it. The more I look at this poem, the more I discover and the more I re-think, so I am just going to submit this before I lose my mind.

Music Like Alf: Within Us All?

In class today, my heart shattered upon hearing that Lace could not hear music for the longest time, merely hearing a drone of instruments and lyrics, thus not fully understanding the concept behind poetry as music. This upset me so much because music has been my saving grace. I have been blessed with the gift of music; there isn't a day I don't hum something or pick up my guitar. Everything I hear, taste, see and smell is music. So, when Sexson made the connection between poetry and music, nothing made more sense to me. When I was a girl, I would write poetry and stow it away under my bed in a shoe box, until the rare occasion when I would clean my room and find them, like lost artifacts of an ancient ruin. I would put a tune to my rediscoveries, scratching on sketch book paper my own version of notes on a "scale". I remember the hours I spent contently pouncing on the keyboard in my bedroom until my mom called for dinner. But, hope was replenished, thanks to James, yet again, when he addressed how, despite her inability to hear music, her blogs contained such a beautiful rhythm. And it made me wonder: Music can't just be something one hears; is it within all of us? Is it something certain people are more in tune to than others, but is still a subliminal feature within us all that causes movement, friction, life? What if music was the vibrations not only in all of us, but at the core of the universe? (String theory anyone?). Beethoven didn't seem to need to hear music to feel it, to know it.
Late night tangent.
Anyway, thinking of this whole poetry-music thing, I couldn't help but recall last semester's oral traditions class, and I let my mind wondered to when my mom would sing my brother and I Psalms when we were little. I remember sitting on her gigantic bed as a little girl, next to my brother, who was either half asleep or conguring up some sort of bodily noise in order to gain a giggle. She would sing all sorts of different Pslams, and we would sing along... I had forgotten that memory until a couple of weeks ago, when I was moving out of my old apartment, I noticed the beginning of my mom's favorite Psalm-song, Psalm 51:10, written in pink lipstick on my old roommates bedroom mirror. Instantly, Psalms came spilling out of my mouth in song, like Alf, the sacred river (The other one I remember specifically is Psalm 34:7....and now its stuck in my head...). And that was when I thought about the oral traditions. I'm not exactly sure if Psalms are considered poetry (I guess I would give them credit for their vague passages, and go-to life lessons), but I do know that they were sung back in their day. I am wondering now, though, if they were sung for songs sake, or for the sake of memory? In most Christian denominations, churches will sing from hymnals, where most of their hymns are passages from the Bible, in particular, Psalms.
Maybe I should put a tune to some of Steven's poems...

A Postcard From the Volcano: Backstory

 A Postcard From the Volcano: Backstory

 The wind whispers silent remedies through the night as I recline in my old oak rocker. The years have possessed my youthful color and crept into the crevices of my face. I watch the moon and wait for the hour it claims my withered soul. She's gone now, and this large, once bright mansion, has died along with her. I have kept the house the way she left it, the rusty kettle on the stove, the flowers she picked, flaking and black on the counter top. I subsist without her. I have seen the grass grow and fade, felt the sun burn hotter and move farther away, but the moon never fails to gloat upon me with a gleaming eye. By now, dust and cob webs have organized themselves atop things that used to hold importance to me. When I could still hold her hand, before she took all the color with her, children giggled boisterously as they passed by on their way to school. Now I listen to them whisper tales of the "haunted house with the white shudders", as they cross to the other side of the street. In time, these children will discover their own stories, but never know how similar theirs is to the one hiding within these walls.
 She is but bones now, marked by a thick, earthy stone, reduced to no more than a name, a beginning and an end date; they will never know how we felt in between.

She and I were so lost in love. We raced through life like it we owed it nothing, and took as we pleased; ignorance was our breath and passion was our bread. I didn't own much, because the only thing I needed was her hand in mine, likewise, that was all she needed. I remember vividly, the day she turned 17, the brilliant light that danced on her freckles and bounced off her amber hair, as she cooed her love in my ear. We shared a sleeping bag in the basement of an old run down motel, until her belly grew big. We quickly opened our eyes to new necessities, but never left our passion behind. We moved into a large, bright mansion inherited from my grandfather. We watched our children play in the tree tops, and graduate from school, all the while I held her hand. Her hair became silver, and her fair skin became fragile and spotted, but she was more beautiful than she had ever been to me. When the darkness bloomed below her eyes, and her cough colored her handkerchief foreign shades of red, I knew life was coming to claim what we owed it from so long ago. I held her hand until the hour it turned to ice.
 Decades have passed since our souls have separated, although it wasn't more than a few months after she had gone that I had left my wrinkled worldly body. But, she has departed without me, so I wait her for her to come back, to remember. I wait for her in the mansion where our love blossomed, where I can still feel her. I wait between the walls and in the creeks of the floor boards. I move with the paintings in the kitchen and rock with the shutters late at night. I am in the attic, reclining beneath the moonlight, in my old oak rocker, waiting to hold her hand once more.

Earthly Anectedot....

"Earthly Anectedoct" has thrown me for a loop. The first time I sat down with this poem, I was tempted to throw my "Bible" through the wall, but decided to keep my composure, due to ethics and what is known as common courtesy. So, I ventured, through this poem, red in the face and reluctant. After what felt like hours of attempting to make sense of the poem, I finally left, defeated and jittery from all the coffee, prepared to take another look in the morning with fresh eyes. The next day, I reopened this poem and took a deep breath, only to exhale one big "WTF"... But didn't feel that I was too far in left field, as this is the usual interpretation of most poetry, and especially, Wallace Steven's poetry. It wasn't until class the next day when James the Rat insinuated that Steven's poem was chalked full of metaphors and the like. And then, like a very florescent, and honestly, quite irritating little light of mine had miraculously shone in the metaphorical darkness of my literal mind, (and I was about to let it shine) I discovered that I needed to start reading between and inside the lines; I was about to embark on the path of poetic discovery. The literal was to be left outside of class from now on.

As the frustration lingers on, I have decided not to think too hard, and go with how it feels. My favorite aspect of art is how open it is to interpretation. The artist passes his masterpiece along, allowing the recipient to discover their own story within it; millions of stories can come from one work of art. With that approach, I am going to attack Stevens' poetry.

In this poem, I the most pronounced symbolism I see is the conflict of life and death: the buck contributing as life, and the firecat "bristling" as death. With life's constant aversion to death, death never stops to rest until it has achieved what it came for: "Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes/And slept". And that was my epic mind blowing interpretation of the poem.

I thought I was on the right track and then I read: "Stevens himself wrote, 'There is no symbolism in "'"Earthly Anectedot"'" ". *

*thiqaruni.org/arab/426/(6).doc