Monday, June 30, 2014

JOHN MALCOLM BRINNIN
(l916- 1998)

academic yet
  in a free lease
 of nature
you taught my uncle
and I well
Eliot , Larkin, Auden
became higher than flesh
than merely modern
played by a lyre
their weight above
     a human search
  for the spiritual awe
  and desire to love
sought by the physical
with a metaphysical conceit
         leading our English
classroom into grace
of a Spenser and Milton
as a young tutor
 with a new trace
in his thesis and dissertation
wishing for an Odysseus
 to discover Bloom
  from his metamorphosis
  who became a Beat
WITTGENSTEIN

language games
the system
assuaging the life
of mind altering
philosophical expression
of memory
like string theory
in a quotidian art
at an early stage
of a persona of genius
in speech rites
of a long dictation
from a visionary
of the future.



Dear readers,
Thank you for making the World of BZ Niditch an internationally recognized blog.
Feel free to make comments here or to me at bzniditch@gmail.com. I appreciate you. Enjoy my poetry which tries to sum up my age as I live and imagine it.I also
include my plays, maxims and fiction at times.
BZ Niditch

Sunday, June 29, 2014

CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN

A Nonsense poet
with his own esoteric
suspension of an old language
for the ease and essence
of his new hieroglyphic
in a dexterity
of a solely mystical invention
he bared his own age
for the few,
reaching for boundaries
beyond convention
in poetry' s outer spaces
and inner time zones
for our own utility.


SEFERIS

Serene
as Medea
in her enchanted way
helping Jason
obtain the Golden Fleece
you in an epic journey
out of Forbes-Burney
along the Mediterranean
and Aegean seas
offer us in your poetry
a subterranean myth
and motif.


DINO  COMPANA

As fragment sent out
in the Orphic realm
only language he pleases
is the indices at the helm
of metaphorical and lyrical
metamorphoses,

Saturday, June 28, 2014

JORGE GUILLEN

You know a poem
by its sound
appealing like bells
in contemplative peace
as pure creation
as a first act of love
reacts as incarnation
sending out a fleece
for an inner destiny
and jells as plenitude
as more than intimation,
or mere imitation
of an attitude
no subtle intimidation
as smells of disorder
his lines rest in harmony
on the ground at our border
at the garden's repose
only the rose may pardon,
he reaches each succeeding
generation in an attainable
pledge of his love affair
with musical words
he will emerge like airy birds
from death to teach us
with critical knowledge
as the lyrical heir
in our poetic breath.



CORBIERE


Unknown
but with great
influence
yet for his dog
finding a supper's bone
macabre,deluded
yet agonized in perception
and surprised refrain
as a painter in conception
to sustain images
what words of languages
self realized again
from the inception
of your childhood
you were disguised
in your own neighborhood
as a yellow rose colored
marker in your book
for the outcasts
thrown out to the sea
orphans by land
or in your native Brittany
no one can match
your misery
in fiddling
inside your poverty rooms
or playing hurdy gurdy
for unconsummated grooms
an exile like a Jewish bride
or Catholic in a pew to hide
from his own sin
wanting a rhapsody
for any of the oppressed
the few who hear
your surreal voice within
are blessed.


SABA

Harassed
for being a poet
of myth
and truth
divided
by his origin
yet recovered as stress
in a sardonic world
for an awareness
in grief, fatigue
and bitterness.

BOBROWSKI

Another fate
full of despair
of his post-war calling
yet even as a conscript
to remember his days
of sleepless atonement
to lament the tragedy
of Jewish memory
in his own German language
of life in death spirits
by hunters of hawks
on polluted rivers of fish
from a time
of silent whispers.



HOFMANNSTHAL

Schnapps
for the theater guy
as mythologies
make you curious
with such Sophoclean
end up days
in a sickly dawn
trying not to accept
your own stuck up way
left this poet denuded
and feeling deluded
being with a door keeper
who unfastens your past
discovering more than
a street wise Berlin junkie
who wants another beer
despite your nobility
you share yourself
with him
by anonymous shoulders
of a double destiny
in your imbroglio of a life,
now at your writing desk
with a new play.






ANHAVA

Picking
 up leaves
    outside Helsinki
wanting to journey
  to the Aland Islands
to find shells and stones
 even a philosopher's one
poetry in motion
makes us rational near
   a body of water
    and language raises
waves rushing by
when even nature's tone
can create mischief
on the summer's first day,
    watching a boatload
        of Swedish tourists
carrying yellow kayaks
   plunging into the ocean
  thy're open mouthed
in heroism and enthusiasm
 with outspread breath
    under the solstice sun
in the raucous anonymity
  of the elbowing breeze






LUCIO PICCOLO

Like me
you played the baroque
from your violin
listened to Wagner's
Tristan and Isolde,
loved the mystics
like Juan de la Cruz
and St. Teresa,
and the philosophy
in an existential mad swirl
of influential Husserl,
studied the classics
read Latin and Greek
corresponded with
your cousin Lampedusa
whom you inspired
who wrote The Leopard
which we admired
and found posthumously
by Giorgio Bassani
and conspired
with great poets
like the Irish bard Yeats
you had your own force
in the occultic source
of middle aged sorcery
in an energy of tangibility
which took you on high
unlike St. Teresa
whom God levitated
you relied on Lucifer
to follow her
and your own shadow
weighing you down below
and dying like Proserpina
in the underworld and rising
on your favorite balcony
in beautiful Messina.

BAUDELAIRE

The days fall behind
as the dusk weighs
on my ebony shadows
from Jeanne Duval
transfixed by my body
into melody anguish
and melancholy speech
in the language of attraction
as an almost sculpted sun
upsets us over Paris
for no reason
yet our lower intestine burns
us out of mutual starvation
except from dead ends
of perpetual second guessing
where to get a cheap meal
in the Latin Quarter
with no satisfaction
into the perpetual loneliness
of the black cat
from the window sill
full of dying flowers
and lost hours of distraction.
ECO

Running for a tram
in the snow
carrying a novel
by Umberto Eco
meet another soul
on the train
also shared
my enthusiasm
as we go to the city
for my reading
in the rain
we become friends
and meet again.
A DIFFERENT TIME

A state of mind shift
in the clock
when Groucho
was more popular
than Karl
or Paul Lennon
was more a rock star
than Vladimir,
finally the mass media
could take a comedian
on
or a song
from the counter culture
when history
had obviously
gone wrong.

Friday, June 27, 2014

OSCAR WILDE

A wit and satirist
for a critic not uptight
who goes way beyond
what a play write
could express,
to have such insight
when you had in comedy
a great stage success
even as new art
forms in your age
may expect a part
from such a witness
yet you are indicted
merely for forbidden love
for being on another side
of the bed
with the same gender
hidden in your plays
which challenge reality
as mind benders of chance
against society's banality,
for your sex ventures
were for a constituency
only embraced as romance
by a keen minority
of the culture,
others had a conspiracy
of manners against you
solely as a theater queen
in such gay romances
of what could have been,
for to take Wilde's part
calls for persecution
more than pleasure
you were so fond of,
three acts once directed
in leisure
in your great comedies,
now without immunity
a genius is sent to gaol
because of nameless sex,
shame on such a community
put on the index
for a blameless position
of censorship and inquisition.



STELLA

You take art
and culture seriously
at your fine lectures
at Harvard
like your painting
"Auschwitz"
or the sculpture
related to Melville's
"Moby Dick,"
and chose
one fine critic
Barbara Rose
for a companion.
THEY CALLED ME SHAKESPEARE

Since the fourth grade
in the Garrison School
they called me
Shakespeare,
I would sit under
my Aunt Kate's
apple tree
and write plays,
my characters
were Phillip Sonata
and Phyllis Concerto,
the other kids
told me "Come play
in the playground
on Brookledge St.
of the Garrison school"
in Boston
next door to Aunt Kate
but I wrote my plays
with all knowledge
of my skill
until I founded
the Original theater
to sum up my age
as it be your Will.


THE ICE CREAM MAN

Bells sound
on the truck
bicycles park
and a large poodle
named Bogart
becomes excited
as the kids
on Sandy Beach
run to get
a hot fudge sundae
with marshmallows,
the town dentist
is late for his appointment
with Ada, a fortune teller
but just makes it
for his orange popsickle
in a sugar cone.

WHO IS LISTENING IN

Is the NSA
on the telephone
every week day,
who is listening in,
is it the NSA?
and who is in the sky
is it a drone
as I hang up
the telephone.

RUPERT BROOKE

Wanting
in adolescence to be
an aesthete
I complete your poems
and felt your soul
in a washing of feet,
your loss repeated
by a war
across the seas
buried in Skyros.
CRUSOE

Crusoe alienated
as he travels
on an island
with a Darwinian fate
in a novel by Defoe
he waited for survival
in a sad life
to go through.
FRIENDS

Friends of this poet
are open ends
by his signed collections
others make inflections
with stress
or confess their amends.
MINIMALISM

In the Sixties
of Reich and Glass
some critics
took a lyrical pass
and were put on ice,
but minimalism
had a musical device
which changed our notes,
now everything
they compose is in quotes.

SCHUBERT

Few people
like to acknowledge
an outsider
even in reign
of the Kaiser
take Schubert
in his body of music
from his Winterreise
any reich may disdain,
for they say in life
to be in the army
is great for Germany
but a gay is to be hurt
and to be despised.

MENDELSSOHN

It took years
for a Mendelssohn
to bring out in a chorus
the Passions'
of Mathew and John
for it was not the fashion
though common knowledge
to acknowledge in review
Jesus is a Jew.





HANDEL

Handel had desires
was not always a given
here at Poet's Corner
the Messiah has forgiven
what was apparent
without a hint of scandal
in his day
he had a dint of supporters
Anglican to a man
in his musical court
and choir
who were lyrically gay.

HAPPENINGS, 1960

What evenings
of artistic clamor
when Happenings
occur in free art rooms
by Hansen, Oldenburg
Dine and Red Grooms,
Whitman, Kaprow
campy theater resumes,
what revolutionary glamor!
TURNER EXHIBITION 1966

How great
to think in reaction
to Turner
as an action painter
the drip dry's
grow a shade fainter.



Thursday, June 26, 2014

SPACE TRAVEL

For ten thousand
dollars out to Mars
in a space of time
rockets to the stars.

BETJEMAN


You edit what
you want to see
to get credit
and royalties
for your poetry
and all the while
you smile,not frown
for your loyalties
to the Crown
are put on trial
by many literary critics
disarmed and filed away
as if in arbitrary exile.

BUREAUCRACY

Bureaucracy
drives us crazy
and to state
what the state
is to control
yet consoles us
with Aesopian language
pretending not to be
partisan or sectarian
and all the while
prosecute and persecute
is the crime for our file.
DICKEY

In the front
of your book
like the back
is a language
to blunt an age
in bric a brac.
VASCO POPA

Bathing in emerging
waters of embarrassment
is a language verging
in waves of discernment.
ROETHKE

A river of words
speaks volumes
cadences, chances
of language illumines.
GIOIA

a conservative in bent
you are allowed in verse
to invent an alternative
of how to live in our universe.
HAROLD BLOOM

You dismiss Eliot
in a religious prejudice
but curiously adore
a unitarian Emerson
makes you a partisan
yet you accept Milton
a Puritan into your cannon.
DENIS DONOGHUE

a critic of insight
the art of verse and fiction
with no Western breach
for armed with diction
to analyze within reach
of a catholic universe.
HENRI COLE

Words supplant
and bend in the wind
as if Adam is in Eden
and Eve never sinned.

MAY SWENSON

Nature matures
in front of a trellis
a rose is luminous
from you mind's eye.
CAMILLE PAGLIA

you understood
than most
a century
of language's
political correctness
and exposed
with aplomb
the scandal
of the wise guy.

PSYCHIATRIST

He analyzes you
as you analyze him
for it is a two way
know it all session
a no name intended ego
you hide your unconscious
to find out what makes
your curiosity take notice
challenge your shared
power and authority
from childhood trauma
a first sexual encounter
mothering life in feelings
fathering death as a figure
portending and pretending
what past,present and future
rationale makes yourself sick
in your expression,
repression, confession
and your current depression.



NEWSPAPERS

The Daily Planet
is gone
so is every paper
which does
not go along
with the politically
correct
so new wars
will be declared
new laws
for climate change
and for pedestrians
to protect
those on wheels.

YOUR MOUTH

Your mouth's words
to God's ears
with your cold fingers
on body counts
taking us down.
DIVINE

Divine,
the John Waters
character
is a favorite
in Baltimore
at Halloween
one of them came to
my aunt's house
hungry for jelly beans
and cotton candy
and stayed until
thanksgiving.



NIGHT MUSIC

The three teen musicians
who were hired
by my neighbor
for a shot gun wedding
sneak around the yard
at midnight
watching my Bunuel
movie Viridiana
through my window
now want my popcorn.
MY KAYAK ON SHORE

I'm in fetal position
recovering in my cocoon
after learning
my orange kayak
I built myself has sunk
after several jumbled
northeasters in 2014
hitting the sink hole area
once a fountain of youth
now filled with ditch waters.                                                  


































                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              



VIDEO GAMES

After school
being held back
four years
for laziness,
the twenty plus
sits there
transformed to a karate
killer as you whet
your crack appetite
or wet your pants
today undaunted
with millions who die
from torture chambers
and electric chairs
by your own hand
AMICHAI

Peace like a curtain

scrolling on ancient

echoes of the call

to a spirit of love
ANTONIONI

Red Desert

as beautiful Monica Vitti

is blue

by the toxicity (death

on every breath)

in industrial alienation

from electrical power plants

an apocalypse in color

from Italy's film poet.


APPOLINAIRE

Wishing for an age
when words and paintings
took off in telegrams
or ideograms
for the cool paradox
we call art
revisiting Paris,
Marseilles and Monmartre.


PICABIA

Balance of pleats
and light photographed
in colorful nonchalance
on a triangular canvas.
DRONES

Under bridges
and heart shaped
swimming pools
with a Hockney
scene of nudity
in the water
ten centimeters deep
while overhead
drones in a semi circle
sky of a painting
fly out for hours.
ON MIAMI BEACH

When I was a teenager
grandmothers would
ask me in their chairs
facing the ocean
to translate their letters
being a language major
my horizon enlarged
its curiosity
and I wrote a new wave
novel.

LAUNDRY

After the laundry
empties the two gossips
out of the basement
for another week,
kisses rise from an aging
politically incorrect
musician from Rhode Island
named "Rickie"
from the rock group "Bolt"
who returned on Monday
with a walking stick
and mountain bike
after falling over
the dance floor
at his Vermont honeymoon,
the kiss lands on the wind
way over the grey 'stache
of a cool yet hot Roman
Vinnie,the skipper
of the boat
in the home harbor,
as Lana the Broadway star
and former lap dancer
who teaches us Esperanto
receives the friendly kiss
of a lifetime
we all have lunch
of afrodisiac asparagus
in the perilous sun
on deck of the ocean.


BULLETINS

Kite festival
outside my window
to the sea
orange, green and red
balloon colors rising
toward the ominous sky
lands on the evergreen
over toward a Japanese yew
and the local news junkie
whom I call St. Mathew 24
this good neighbor becoming
manic and obsessive
with war
and rumors of war and peace
telling him to read Tolstoy.
MOVING OUT

After you married
and your word
traveled only so far
and the harbor child
will not stop crying
you escape
to the green mountains
with your warm sweater,
poetry demands to be
on flex hours
yet to feel that you notice
the fauna, the rocks,trees
less these city days
you badly need a break
in the grey clouds
to transform yourself
out of time
and plant yourself
somewhere out of place
before your existence
is frozen on your watch
among familiar landscapes
or you will become
a couch potato
with foreign films
going non stop
in the living room.

JAPANESE TOURISTS

Leaflets
and posters speak
about my play
a weary priest
walks by
on the lower east side
offers a pater noster
and says he will
by faith, be there
at the theater,
six Japanese tourists
eager not to kill time
in Times Square
promise me to be early
after I give away
a couple of complimentary
tickets for first night
raising my expectation
about this new play
on displaced persons
after the war
which gets a good review.
MISSING THE TRAIN

In a miasma
knowing my play
will be on tonight
in its premier production
off off Broadway
hiding from myself
and hoping the critics
die before the flowers
are given out
knowing the chairs
of the empty theater
are in their place
after a long applause
in my imagination,
approaching the metro
with a stationary smile.
REVERDY

Color of the page

yellow marked

by gold leafed margins

every phrase turns me on

Thursday night

when the trees are denuded

and snow falls on the Seine

sleeping with a stranger

who shows you the way.

BULLYING

the kid
with the Chinatown
scarf on
in the corner
hounded
by a bulldog
of a bully
every school day
though anticeptic rooms
of the nurses aid
where the sun comes in
saying you are
handsome and nice
and offers a hug,
until the gym instructor
gives you weights
and gives you a male
gesture of hope,
the bully seeks you out
sneaks up on you
attempts to steal
your sneakers,
finally after watching
Taxi driver in film class
you confront him
and he without explanation
bows to you.

STRAD

In the cab
or on the subway
exhausted from searching
like a gnome
it's eleven o' clock
your life is going to pieces
weary on winding streets
you trace your steps
to your last violin lesson
emotions tremble
and you have a recital
tonight,
the Strad, a survivor
of fascism
with the newspaper headline
of the Times
making you shiver
remembering the day
when the Strad in case
with foreign markings
was delivered
to your basement trap- door
it was from cousin Michael
believed to be an angel
who was tortured
and has no hand
to speak of
in returning memory
from an instrument of love
never leaving your sight
now with twenty questions
between two worlds
of your interrogation
in the cold police station
when word arrives
by telephone
that in a coat check room
of a tiny restaurant
in the west side
serving goulash
where you played
Brahms Hungarian dances
the missing object
has been found
and the reward offered.

WORLD CUP

To fix even your boxers
with rituals
of your two balls
in perfect arrangement
from bottom to top
I hear continuous prayers
by that rosary gal in Brazil
she says she is a target
of an ancient mother
lode of being made fun
of by the Devil,
after all,her son John
has prepped to behave
himself for this world cup
prepared for this event
by running and eating well,
even leaving the favela
you call home
to practice every day
in a sweat by the alleys
feeling like Spartacus
if you knew of him
on shore as a galley slave.

FAITH HEALED

it didn't take God long
for figuring out
your story
as you longed to be healed
what was revealed
was your story
in the context of impassioned
love from a proxy doctor
greater than
any medicine man
in any prayer line
filled with the psychosomatic
sickness of your time
despair,wanting no glory
but your condition being real
with the issue of blood
in a foreign body
you were faith healed
no matter what anyone said
about knowledge
of your former husbands
you were ready
on your bed
to tell your story
on a clean slate and sheet
prepared even to rise
from the dead.




DRIVE INS

a sanguine phenomenon
of the post war era
is the drive- in
with a worship
of cars and girls ritual
waiting to greet
the grade b film noir
taking a statin or serotonin
given the stimuli status
of today's physical culture
on a a muscled tattoo arm
of desire on a quick date
not far from home
with appropriate prophylaxis
in the glove dept.
to keep love from
getting out of hand.


Wednesday, June 25, 2014

THEME PARKS

They go up, for miles
of what the human eye sees
with these huge tents
over greensward
sink holes
an engineer is cleared
of all wrong doing
in his sexy field glasses
satisfying the masses
eager for games in the ring
and rigorous sport
in chit chat rigmarole
of physical chance to begin
and show off their bodies
taking off their shoes
to show off an armed wrestled
series of post war tattoos
and afterwards their toddies,
as accidents happen
without repentence.
SEIDEL

Is comic diameter
dismissed out of hand
of a writing life
like a voice of lieder
in an age of big bands.

KEES

Sailing by pastimes
fame well intended
yet terribly forgotten
through American jazz
psychiatry, history,
critic, friend
of expressionists
though self made
art masters language
yet left alone
with his own pain
not knowing even
how you passed
in conjecture
with our culture.



DONALD JUSTICE

Days begun
without regret
in a dandy's assurance
of melancholy loveliness
in your departure.
PIERRE MARTORY

Cutting down

a tree of life

outside Paris

noisy as spring thunder
QUENEAU

A Cartesian

puzzle in your mind

you keep going on

the record

of Bach


LARBAUD

Violin sonata notes

by Debussy in your  spirit

outside a blue blanket sky

near the Seine


ROGER GILBERT-LECOMTE


Greenish paint

in lines of a poem

shaped like a pear

composed while

composing

a night time dinner

poem
GUILLEVIC


Castaway
      words
of the wind
in the dusty
mediocrity
you flee

PLATH

In Cambridge,
both Boston and England
searching out
for the write phrase
to save a cathartic need
advancing about a clamor
of merciless abuse
in a sequestered night
foaming from a terrorist
who was her poet husband.



Tuesday, June 24, 2014

BARBARA HOLLAND


yes, Rachael

weeps in ramah

like a violin chord

on the bridge

played by one

of Chagall's angels
RON PADGETT

so you havn't forgotten

max jacob,

so many have left

his body

and body of work

in the fascist flame,

even the famous

left him,

not Christ.
LEC

words
   of sci fi

invisibility

on the snow

a fallen star
EPSTEIN

In stone

and attainable

for a genius

alone
Zukovsky


"A" i read

on a park bench

bought it for a song,

what conversation

over your experimentation

even Pound rendered

a verdict of pardon on you
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD


Berlin stories grab you

in prewar Weimar

followed by a guru star

and the boys

destined to die

in Stalingrad
TED ESLIN


In a seeing eye

from ballads of journey poets

who sing for a living

like a troubador

wanted for treason

on the back roads

seeking knowledge

more than priviledge

making you a contemporary

of knights and gentle ladies

when the beats meet

dante in purgatory

saved by Donne's bell

from endless hades and hell
PAUL BLACKBURN

Making reality

poems

from ancient cloth

challenging reactionary

vandals

and visgoths

DIANNE DI PRIMA

In anthology

with me

no ideology

need apply

you have the goddess gift

of a new poetry
DIANNE WAKOSI


reading you

in black sparrow press

along the Boston waterfront

you live to compose

and overthrow

outdated language
DAVID IGNATOW

Bought

your rare poems

in a book fair

on Cape Cod

for a saw buck

then share,

wtf


JOHN WEINERS

saw you running

on beacon hill

cruising

like catullus,

in your face

is raw sex

you have your needs

under the underwear

your worry beads


WILL INMAN

You skillfully

translated my poems

into Spanish,

your words move on

then vanish

SUSAN SHERMAN

What's a nice

Jewish girl doing

fighting off professional

anti semites,

could it be,

a poetry lesson

in survival
WALTER LOWENFELS


For you, social justice

came first

fascism the worst

you tried to understand

gays and others you admit

they have feelings too

though you do try

to understand

life is profiled in history

and DNA

a personal view

of who are outed

by McCarthy

in the Fifties

take the fifth

like the hollywood ten,

Walter, Stalin betrayed you

with his gulag pen and crimes

and you not hiding the Daily Worker

in the NY Times

where no language poems

ever existed for such a bard

all are searching too

in the avant garde




ROBERT KELLY

no safety net

for a lexicon's bet

in a con artist century

  history shifts

its dialectic and frees  us

with your fine poems

not jaded

nor has ever faded

by Robert Kelly

in Black Sparrow press

by your experimentation

always impressed



EDWIN DENBY


as a ballet dance
 choreographer,

   self declaring Agon
as a great achievement

catches this critic by chance
on the dance floor
who adores Stravinsky

like me,

life is printing out a program
 at the symphony,

as the Zen press corps

has gone from the bar

as all poet citizens
HENRY MATHEWS

Unmatched

in savvy prose

when beauty rises

in art of your verse

catching divinity

discloses modernity

worth the time
RON PADGETT

jazz
 enthusiasm
  sawed off

unhinged poems

in a love blanket
KENNETH KOCH

    60'S loneliness

 deep inside
   your own

consciousness

of unconditional language
TED BERRIGAN

 Saw a priest
   in an anti war

rally
at the microphone

with hip

 poetry

   confesses in
 prayer lines

out of his hip pocket
TOM CLARK

   like your poems

 like in black sparrow press

 like you have taken away

 fear

 out of language
CLARK COOLIDGE

meta thursday

writing on napkins

riding the mta


the train was late

and your date

amazing
FRANK O'HARA

Under the Cedar Bar code

of nonconfomity
 
poets and expressionists,

       Frank being inter racial
  drinks
 with a black  guy

a sanguine waiter
at Sardi's,
  he met on the elevator

Frank suddenly praises Pasternak

in conversation

to his unfamiliar new friend

he does not know your Russian love

brings the guy home

after a drink

for a one night stand

some around the bar think,

but frankly do not understand.
MARIANNE MOORE

With
     the fine art

of language' s beauty

as the double concerto

   of Bach airs

in your poet vocation's

 more a pleasure

than     duty


EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

admitting love
to a wonderful translation
    of Baudelaire
you remain
        a voice of romanticism
H.D.
(Hilda Doolittle)


Fusion
ready to sound out

half-forgotten dream
 worlds    in word
language skills

as a new born
   Freudian
   woman of letters
WAJDA

I sat alone in the matinee
as a stunned adolescent
watching
Ashes and Diamonds
telling me one's
history is everything.

KIESLOWSKI

Reconnected Poland
to history's film reality
in red white blue
hinting at political mortality.


PIOTR SOMMER

Rumors of grief and patience
in baskets of flowers
a brief snack sense of poems
then put in a casket for hours.
MILOSZ
(in memory)

In salient poetry
and jaw bone prose
between Brown, Red
is Czeslaw Milosz
really dead


WAT

A long suffering poet
ancestors of rabbis
experimental,wise
exiled ,yet with grace            
deserves an ovation.
 
SANDOR RAKOS

You are composing for us
in Roman times
with the breath of Catullus
mourning for a forum's crimes.
DEZSO TANDORI

Your hand summons
a thousand skeptical pens
as paper sheets open
your poems as children.


JANOS PILINSZKY

Luminous darkness
in a prisoner scarf
fascism appears as madness
in a victory over wrath.

Monday, June 23, 2014

SANDOR CSOORI

A time of fascism
clothes the earth
the sky must clear
first light breaking
through a new birth
RUTH PITTER

I will raise
the intellect of rhyme
and praise the Maker
as a psalm of our time.
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS


Doctor to protect
lives as a poem rises
from selected midwives.

IRVING FELDMAN

Praising nature
in marshes by the sea
a flight of birds
in memory.
C S LEWIS

No apologist
for the hollow one
who wants to cut
the wrist
of one who believes
and follows sublime love.


CHARLES WILLIAMS

The horror
of Satan's plan
in a novel on the eve
makes you want to believe.
LOUIS SIMPSON

Conscious of your age
in gravity of death
when one wrong syllable
gestures death.
RICHARD WILBUR

In the leaves
of memory on the snow
life ransoms words
in a veiled light shadow.
RICHARD HOWARD'S OUVRE

With a gay sensibility
you enter into the body
of Proust and others,
aged friends at the Louvre
listen to your lecture
in a welter of biography
inspecting another's culture
from your language's ability.


DAVID WAGONER

In pilot lights
by Seattle
scattered fishing boats
now appear
as if floating as seaweed
by islands away
after the storm.
OLSON

Fisher kings are discussed
off an Cape Ann retreat
in an afternoon of mythology
at a July poetry seminar
before a literary luncheon
when in the second watch
I catch a salmon
from my orange kayak
with a camera
we spy a white whale
on the high waves
though not wanting to lift
my violin fingers
after I played a Bach concert
solo this grey afternoon
then reading Heraclitus
on the hammock
after a bullet ridden T.V. film
by John Ford followed,
have a filet of sole dinner
with a visiting editor
from Greater Boston
who interviews me
for the Left Lit Review
and compares
my prolific responses
to Herman Melville's.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  DAVID WAGONER

Flouting convention
floating over
the sea and woodland
of pilot's far shore lights
in dream worlds
as burnt waves
of revelation.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
RANSOM

Your essay and poetry
collection at the library
Professor Ramsom,
seem to have inspired
respect and a healthy
literary intellect of inquiry
from the often
arbitrary students
some of whom
offered to me
in a doctoral term paper
a handsome confession.

KINNEL

It takes time
to establish a reputation
like a two way conversation.

TATE

Circling the badlands
as an ice sky diver
and I thought, son
you were a mad
race car driver.
MARK STRAND


Two sparrows
leap like Semiramis
at my open windows
the rain is a near miss.
SNODGRASS

Night
when shots
of vodka go down easy
reading about
nature's convergence
on my ship's balcony
music of Bartok
even Snodgrass listens in,
the equator rain merges
its a time for being human
studying on the open deck
our ocean's environment
in the harshest sun.

ROBIN ROBERTSON

Scotland has given us gift
in you, Robin Robertson
to make everyone homesick
for an ex camera moment
your lines are visibly quick
and transparent
to my resonant ear
and red eye
with fairly generous rhythm
I'm reading you
while playing solo jazz riffs
outside my family home
as a songbird lifts herself
on a fir branch
up to the blue hills
your words are intimate
here under the sky sun
in a horizon so ubiquitous.


JOHN BURT

Enjoy your narratives
making poetry declarative
in my solitude
to live in your sentence
without a dismissive mood
but in involvement.
PAUL HOOVER

chose
   the new york school

not to be trapped
   in darkness
 
experimental
  decades of yes

no old baseball cards
   like water sports

fade like bards
   you are subversive
 in the shade
VADIM MESYATA

Sister Siberia
cannot but love you
but life migrates
you to the States
with your wit
in verse and prose
I chose only your collection
from the bookstore rows.

STANLEY PLUMLY

This solstice hour
speaks for us all
among petals that dream
as June's pink tulips caress
the flowering Judas,
music from a picnic
rolls through heavy metal
and rocking Metallica
on the B.B.C.
on your walk in the country,
the compass says 
time is short
solstice life today impresses
in soccer sports
June arrives to settle
when we are out of sorts,
in need of sunny weather
as you picture
on the tall grass the art 
of Whistler.

RICHARD MATHEWS


Words cannot undermine
you in civilized pleasure
even when faced
with a comma's pressure
on such days
when confounded
in pressing for a phrase
you stick it to grammar
nailing proverbs
in good measure
at Richard Mathews ways
by stamping your lines
with an understood hammer.

GARY MIRANDA

Your rights
read in your stance
you took off
to distance yourself
on the distaff side
ambivalent in pride
to laugh away
what resembles
a slumberous cry
between nights
when you may have died.
CONRAD AIKEN

In your era
the Georgians
were discredited
and T.S. Eliot
was to be chief editor
at Faber and Faber
got to influence you
in voice, nuance and labor.

JOHN FULLER

Poet of unspaced reality
that knew by faith
there is not a single
sparrow that falls
to the ground
that is not known
or comforted
as every hair on our head
or dog bone fed
there is no wrong
that cannot be created right
from this morning or night,
no one is lost
if we are risen from the dead,
that there is no song
without Godly sorrow
when joy returns
on the tree of life
for tomorrow
you are not without a prayer
in affirmation on your back
and the weight of mourning
in a stony heart of stone
of its own conceit
which minds its own heart
and refuses to wash
your neighbor's feet,
we realize that every painting
is divinely designed
across canvas and cross
in many scattered colors
as art and the Word in kind
remember to atone your loss.


RIKA LESSER

Your reflected live poems
in a lovely body of work
stored as ancient concubines
greater than your last words
now dominated by the prince
of the air waves
in a naked power grab
by those hip hopped and high
with the crippled gift of gab
or those going to a poetry slam
not even thanking you,
sir or ma'am
sponsored by the Soaps
and red eye valley
of the dolls and girls
in a new age as confessor
without any sense of language
on graffiti walls connecting
the past to history
but you Rika Lesser
with an old world sensibility
translate Ekelof and Sonavi
to the delight of BZ.

DONALD HALL

Private company
on public archives
what politically correct
files on their lives
where non compliant verse
was once set on
only bedroom wives,
verse was in correspondences
to incense the Karma of Shiva
or from false gods of Baudelaire
now complaints do not
air in Parvarti tea rooms,
only a handful of poets
will challenge the foothold
once thoughtful critics
of the Sun ,Globe and Times
now accosted because
the liberty lobby
is closed indefinitely
for repair
yet now and forever
with the clever sign 1984
on the iron steel door
with an eternal prosecutor
waiting to be next governor
and a charges d'affaire officer
with Nixonian political crimes
delivering blue laws
in carbon copy
for our own days.



ROLFE JACOBSON

an ex
exploring
your books
the breeze flaps,
phantoms of spiders
on your green tea
rumors and stones
at your fingertips.
ROBERT BLY


A shortened version
makes for negation
why not
get her dying red flowers
and take her to the station.

TOMAS TRANSTROMMER


The window won't close
snow on the sill
bread left for the cat
who apparently does'nt care
to share as the sun
from two bodies
one with a waistcoat
request the film"Anna"
by Bergmann,
followed by a coffee.


ANNA AKHMATOVA

A reflected twined
puddle of pine leaves
iced by a snowstorm
"Get in the bed
with a British cigarette,
we saw the back of Berlin
followed by a car
of Scotland Yard
a nude echo of the kgb."



Sunday, June 22, 2014

ELIZABETH BISHOP

Lost in departures
of a companion sun
from Cambridge Common
yet leaving for the daylight
for an affable Brazil
as any four seasoned exile
searching for signs
which pull in the spirit
sprinkled by love sightings
at ease in vulnerable visions
following dawn's bird song
wherever the rain recalls you.

HART CRANE

You do not want
to shed
your identity
behind the bushes
a new sailor buddy
gone A.W.O.L.
senses your whisper
in the solitude of night
you feel stressed
getting undressed
feeling like Daphne
in Central Park
by a row of naked trees.
KARL SHAPIRO

Down streets
mouthing Browning
averse to the collages
in your mind's red eye
feeling in your tweed suit
secure as any
bourgeois George
not lost to vocation
but like your ancestors
of poets, priests and kings
a sense of achievement
yet not lost to history
after the last war
expecting a day of peace
yet there is a commotion
in the public park,
a dachshund is lost
the gardener is watering
a lonely geranium
some busy politician
takes the flower
for his button hole
now securing votes
from his constituency
in the darkness
by a child's swing.
ALLEN GINSBERG

You take Moloch
seriously like Blake
with a guru's vision
visiting in a vision
an alcoholic Irish wake
like Joyce in Gaelic
you hear the words
of Kaddish
and drink up for a Kiddish
with a Sabbath blessing
in your Jungian past
dressing in your nehru jacket
within a magical world
of Wichita Vortex Sutra
yet you cannot hack it,
with a sickly grandma
who speaks in a socialist
sectarian Yiddish
as your proletarian mother
has brought you up
and down with a utopian wish
straight from the asylum
tries to assuage Allen
her son, to be calm
yet they both eat from
a psychedelic dish
then your mama
makes you eat Gefilte fish,
as you head for Naropa
to visit your master Trungpa
turning to Buddha
away from Judaism
and Christian Europa
there is always Moloch
along the hallways
as you bring your sitar
and sing chants
with the Beats,
I once asked you
if you want to be messiah
and kiss David Cassidy's feet
whom Sal Mineo had a crush on
but could not score,
but life is as a sweet cheat
gone into a whoring madness
that is defiantly fowl,
your sensitive father
had a poet's daring originality
above all with a rabbis's soul
and your mother is political
is sadly with gall,
mostly out of it,
you weep for Aunt Rose too
caught in the Red Scare
as you compose "Howl."



ROBERT LOWELL

Your graven funeral
on my hands
at the Church
of the Advent
on Beacon Hill,
Boston, 1977
was an event
for your wives, fans
and friend of friends
well known critics
your biographers,
official ones
and non official,
those from the Big Apple
South End and the Fens
were there in the rain,
this poet in the back pew
wishing to hear again
the lectures and readings
my mind starts to review,
as we were with you
among the Arlington dead
marching to the Pentagon
for an end to war
with a feeling of Armageddon,
here not believing
you are gone
and still translated.














































































































































































































of Armageddon
at Boston U.
shaking off the sweat
from your high brow,
here were unrecorded
new poets alive now,
knowing Lowell is dead,
but not his confessional
historical verse
which gives meaning
to our universe,
as you are translated.
JAMES WRIGHT

Beacons of first light
of the seraphim sky
encountering the Fourth
of bonfire July.
W.S. MERWIN

Translated into
your incomparable
islands of the sea
amazes and astonishes
voyages overflowing
in mouth to mouth
verse in proverbial
festivities.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

JACK BEECHING

a neon butterfly
lights on
the palm branch
in desert sands
you were always
a nature lover
who broke bread
with Samaritans.
HARRY GUEST

Thanks
for the Dusty Springfield
all those rumors and lies
in the Sun about her
like about Achilles
and Hector.
MATHEW MEAD

Cursing
is rarely practical
or metaphysical
it is a fluid nurse
without much skill.
EDWARD BRATHWAITE

Opening your first
acceptance letter
in the spring rain
as a flood is reported
on the BBC,
this missive
sent from a fine arts
and dance magazine
on the West End,
soon you will run out
of secret ideas
under a yellow umbrella
the streets are flooded
you try on a perfect boot
like Cinderella.
ALAN BOLD

Dull and void
in not expected tears
an offer at the pawnbroker's
for a Strad in 1947
saved from the burning fire
of crystal night
bought by the owner's
sister in the East End
of London.

ALAN BROWNJOHN


He buckled
at an unspeakable
obituary column
he wrote on the balcony
as a somnambulist-
columnist
as the woman in question
came up out
of the city morgue
sued the newspaper
and he was fired.
WILLIAM WANTLING

A suspended
sentence away
from a conviction
in a critic's review,
now judgment falls
on him
for the publisher
is the novelist's
best seller sister.
JEFF NUTTALL
 
Love pours
downhill in shadows
up goes the lover
now rejected
in the rain cover.

ALAN JACKSON

At a black tie affair
the chandelier fell
near an open door
at the pawn broker's
we spied the chandelier
as the door closed.
PETER REDGROVE

The tennis court
breathes its spring air
even on Sunday
there is an industrial breath
but no one gives a care
forget the score
as the church bell chimes
when everyone
has someone or something
the classics or Bible
on their arms or minds.
D.M.BLACK

A hundred days
of not sleeping
can you relate,
D .M. Black,
to a garden variety
milk and a bit of honey
insomniac.
BRIAN PATTEN

Does it all matter
all this chatter
in the concert hall
when notes
scatter
the critics may want
my head on a platter
I'm playing Mozart
in a quartet
with clammy hands.


ROGER McGOUGH

life remains here
for those to survive
in a round hole
is a playful rabbit
not caught but alive.
ADRIAN HENRI

Forgetting your wicket
in the thicket
a deer overruns
your space
with hinds feet
you take a picture
and begin to praise.

EDWIN BROCK

In the woods
they are hunting
for the outsider.
NATHANIEL TARN

What we have
in common we examine
tumbling out
upon a world in need
of more
than war or mammon.
JON SILKIN

What survives
in a chikld's memory
is not the last snow
but a visit to the museum
to see Constable, Turner
and Gainsborough.
JACK CLEMO

Screw convention
with a hammer or nail
in the end
life is invention
why not pretend
it is betrayal
and the third rail.
EDWARD LUCIE-SMITH

Not having a map
or having a nap
being intuitive
go out to the sea
meet a guy
wanting to take pictures
of me
two days later
am interviewed
about my recollected poetry
on the t.v.
GEORGE MacBETH

Mourning morning
sensing a storm
at the warm airport
afraid of heights
holding onto you verse
as an adolescent in flight.
DAVID GASCOYNE

I was persuaded
by the book seller
to buy a slightly damaged
copy of your verse
feeling as a pacifist
wrestling and boxing
in an infighting universe.
TONY HARRISON

Family is
as fame
fascination
or an anti fascism rally
depending on
a friendly face
in the territory.
DOUGLAS DUNN

August dog days
on a long distant
flight to give a reading
to a small college crowd
why do I consent
to visit this red brick
academic place
it's fun but boring
as the wine and cheese
but an indulgent guy
on a gaping high
who adores my poetry
made my young day
worth the night.
MICHAEL LONGLEY

I got a free ticket
to sit in the orchestra pit
to hear the Passion
I met a priest from Brazil
named Adrian
of the Carmelites
who was writing a bio
on Juan de la Cruz
told me he was Jewish
he sent the bio to me
read and reviewed it
as a mystic Sephardic
I could feel his prayers
in a Cabbalistic way
from tongues
down in Recife.
JAMES FENTON

The grass
needs to be mowed
the kid next door
has a swagger
as I offer him a job
he smokes grass.
TOM PAULIN

Enjoyed your Minotaur
after my violin recital
in a summer arts series
life can be orphaned
and feeling wiped out
reading you
gave me courage
on the stage to on
as my teachers
my uncle and his wife
hand me a Cabernet
as I have to play
in all my positions
in Thais by Massenet
who quickly takes away
all my prohibitions.


ANDREW MOTION

I met you
outside a bookstall
near the pier
of many suicides
and with my last coin
took you home
to share with my friend
who loved first readings
and second opinions.

HUGO WILLIAMS

Sitting in the park
the name
emerges in silence
as Big Ben sounds
to love in life
is not always
to love life.
PETER SCUPHAM

The ice drips
over the threshold
when on the other side
of the recital hall
shivering in a scarf
on a frozen neck
thinking of swans.
CAROL RUMENS

Con artists
and forgers
make even
the British museum
feel unsafe
by modernist myopic
spaces by Bacon
paintings being repaired.
sorry,
will be back on Tuesday.
DAVID SWEETMAN

A phantasmagoric city
by the Seine
listening to Debussy
on the metro
soon a mesh of first light
and a foolproof poem
will appear on my lap
maybe even an adventure
of meeting the right one
in the first flakes of snow.
W.N. HERBERT

A large concert pianist
with a larger hat
sat down to play Bartok,
there was silence
hardly a move
from watch or clock
with sanguine hands
a choleric face
in a melancholy disposition
with a phlegmatic glance
yet with humorous grace
the sonata went well,
even the Gaelic critics
waited for their drinks
to write their surprised review,
for them mesmerized
by a new unrecognized genius
at the midnight bell.
RICHARD HUG0
1923-1982)
(in memory)



On the Pacific Northwest
I'm the dock
of the sea port
he/she the local doctor
you, our Richard Hugo
are the poster poet
for preserving our wilderness
a protector of animals
and fauna
a world without boundaries
for meeting a natural world
in the name of language
embracing landscapes
of sad poor failed towns
everyone wanted to escape
impoverished of spirit,
with its cry of loneliness
boredom and rage
a poet emerges for our age.

Friday, June 20, 2014

ROCKWELL KENT

The appeasers hated you
and your star
painting
for your Russian-American
friendship
against fascism,
you were too much a gent
so the Un Americans
called you a Soviet agent
for a foreign government
like Brecht and so many others
you were smeared for peace
and for your naivete
now a rearmed Germany
with deranged neo Nazis,
out of their bunker,
has the Junker mentality
of revanchist reality changed?





GLYN MAXWELL

Coats of my colors
take over
as an English muffin
is thrown on the fiery
grill like the three
Hebrew boys
mishach,shadrach
and abendigo,
they try to throw
you a soccer ball
out of reach
of your goal
in your free society
into the wellspring
of towering Babel
in baby babylon,
Glyn, preserve
the language
above all,
the heritage
of a poet's Byronic freedom
for the speechless
and the ironic theater
in company with Wilde
Shakespeare ,Jonson,Dryden
for those who like the classics
and the good audiences
of Royal fans.


O.NIMIGEAN

Soccer shots
in a goal
on track
for a Romanian
pastrami
lunch for victory
over Germany!

EVA RUNEFELT

The waves sought her
in a lost love letter
under the shivering oil spill,
those who were willing
to die for whom you fell
into the spiraling water.
STEPHAN HERMLIN


Each hour at Buchenwald
with mortar and bricks
building pyramids
for the German Pharaohs
a Gestapo of lies
which history hid
in the reeds
of their so called
miracle recovery
yet the old armament
industrial makers
are back
so is the army,
when the Allies vowed
the opposite
it happened, we can tell
with an UnAmerican committee's
hatred for anything Soviet,
as Stalin and Hitler in Hell
are still laughing at it.





DANIEL BANULESCU

Love is more
than aged adolescence
or a crush
transpired as a crush,
we encounter
to rush for the past
yet we realize
when it happens
it is a surprise
which like a poet's
popularity may last.
BERNARDO ATXAGA

Bernardo, brother poet
accept me
like Joseph
as a long lost brother.


My mother's family
named Mendes expelled
from Toledo
by burning flames
of the Inquisition
now citizenship
has been offered to us
after all these years,
they were physicians
poets and musicians
there is hardly
a Spaniard without
Jewish blood
in every position
whether Juan de la Cruz
or St. Teresa of Avila
even Franco knew it,
now we are again
successful in all we do
even out of persecution
God even as Jesus Himself
who as a Jew blesses the Jew.



VISAR ZHITI

taking away the keys
the language
the country
the words
the poets
SYLVIANE DUPUIS

Lines
at the supermarket
or at the movies
in a Mondrian drawing
in my last poem
in the Paris marathon
and bicycle race
makes all of us
out of breath

Thursday, June 19, 2014

ZALI GUREVITCH


My grandmother
Gurevitch
came to America
in 1908
after a pogrom
devastated a village
in her heart
she learnt English
from the first day
yet read Yiddish as well
she left her sister
in the Russian pale
sent Care packages
to her until 1952
until Stalin stopped them
I tried in to find her in Israel
or any remnant of her family
did they survive Hitler
or the Gulag
for instance,
but there were so many
Gureviches listed
in so many files
I adopted you, Zaki
the poet who spoke to me
in the Jerusalem night
as an angora cat walks by me
on Ben Yehuda Street
wanting like any of our people
only to be loved.

DALIA RAVIKOVITCH

A Jerusalem prayer
walks you
along a straight path
on an alleyway
crippled with the poor
your step moves along
with a verse forming
inside a safe haven
LEAH GOLDBERG

How the sky
will be your canopy
an olive tree
your pantry
DAVID VOGEL

You listen in
for the still rain
by the window sill
of Jerusalem
with an invisible angel
who whispers to you
GABRIEL PRIEL

So much wisdom
in your dream verse
you are welcomed
in a lexicon of the sun
driving your burning soul
always somewhere new
ZELDA

Sleepless on a boat
as an outcast on the sea
wanting to to be careless
yet to be free like a butterfly
up to a point
of dodging all responsibility
preparing this Sabbath day
to be utterly changed
without cleaning or laundry
as we caress the large book
containing love's wisdom
psalms, poetry
and our history for study,
the sun never fails us
nor life begrudge or judge us
even when wishing
for an unlettered purity
when embracing a vacation day
here in Safed's art colony
being leeward rowing along
in a pleasure cruise
as we wake up alone
along Lake Galilee
to have a bite of St.Peter's fish
at one's noon hour of leisure.
RACHEL

Love is nearsighted
yet fades
when our blindness
to reality redirects us
and we begin to get to know
our own half awake
sorry sightings

ABRAHAM SHLONSKY


A blessing
to pass over
in the knowledge
of the ages.
URI ZVI GREENBERG

A dawn
when Jerusalem
opens her ark
on the whole world.
JOSEH TSARFATI

Time for the nature
of wisdom
casting off prayers
as tehilim of love
on the deep waters
we cast off our sins
a Torah cloth
over our world forever.
JACOB STEINBERG

Eagles over the Negev
water ripples in a newly
discovered well.
NATHAN ALTERMAN


Six candles
burn forever
as flames for freedom
SEYHAN EROZCELIK

Tourists from far off
think they own
every country in the world
floored by the armed cops
with shootings back home
he carries mace
and poets in his pocket.
SERHIY ZHADAN

a cemetary
in the Ukraine
between blood
in massacre and pogrom
from Stalin's hands as well
grandmother never
planted the harvest
or got up from her day bed.
JACKIE KAY

A student now poet BZ
refuses to take
exams and is
cross -examined
in its place,
tell me, briefly,BZ
the vegetative imagery
in Milton 's Paradise Lost,
and from Shakespeare
name every character in King Lear
first lines from Keats ode
Yeats,Blake and Larkin, Kay
as I complied and knew
each answer by heart
"How do you account for
your knowledge before college"
the professor asked me,
and I answered with affection,
"My Uncle Alfred tutored me
in all the English classics,"
the professor said,
"No further exams,for you,BZ
and you will student teach
from this day".


MILJENKO JERGOVIC


The brown shirts
in their blitzgrieg
of mass murder
then listen to Grieg.


YAAK KARSUNKE

Glass doors
no air
death shot
doctors in 1943
experiment like alchemists
on the body politic
in dark rooms.
CHRISTINE BUSTA

The air
seems fascistic today
no one breathes in
perfume only gas
chamber music
is composed by musicians
from all of Europe
here in the death camps.
JACQUELINE RISSET

Transports
to death houses
on French trains
my being is still
damaged
yet between death
awaiting from these trains
in another diabolical
fear of Jewish suffering
yet here after the war
in a Paris bookstore
I read your working
verses and then fast.
VOLKER BRAUN

we hoped the GDR
with Brecht back
from the Un Americans,
its theater reopens
under currents
of social justice
in spite of the wall
the stasi,
at Checkpoint Charlie
or when you walk down
karl marx stadt
or out him here
thinking is this the socialism
he had in mind for mankind
yet being German and content
regimental and sentimental
there are reasons for being down
when the wall came down.

WILLIAM CLIFF

Bruges of wild rose
thorn bushes
by the broken car
a mossy curse
on my busted ass
a poet is trying to fix
his peoples' car
alone at lunch
with no euros
in his hip pockets
CLAUDE ROYET-JOURNOUD

in a diction direction
of new wave
novel and prose poem,
a film like Breathless
we watch over and over
in unmixed convention
from pieces of experimentation
photographs in memory
and voices of long suffering
we, like roses in vases
in falling mineral water
want to have our thirst
assuaged
for the new wave
and to have human insight
in tongues of dialogue
to relate to our consciences.

YVAN GOLL

After De Gaulle
wounded from
the betrayal of the Left
so many contexts
of german appeasement
and raprochement
with the new neo nazis
and its armaments policies
poetry is in reaction,
you return to a new love
for Yvan Goll
who wrote in French
and German
to bring a touch of love
we both have for both peoples.
JACQUES ROUBARD

Watching
the Japanese post war
films with their idiomatic options
in their dialogue
and our adoption of them
we watch all night,
as poetry rocks the clubs
and hits the fan in Tokyo
wild over American Beats,
as straight short story telling
their intellectual ouvres
are abandoned.
JOSEPH GUGLIELMI


enamored of american
poetry, the Beat
of chances are
recovering the love
rock and flower generation
of slim long haired guys
in the metro sounds
of our inheritance.

PEGUY

Peguy,where are you
Enough of hatred
in post war France
the encounters
of counter-revolution
and the final solution
clouds the smoky air vents
of a polluted Paris,
now its pre historical bunk
of the 19th century
all this lying Vichyite
Petain propaganda floods in
replete with politicians
by the statue of St. Joan
of father and daughter
who ignore the slaughter
in the death ovens
who wish openly
for even more.
MICHAEL DEGUY

Up yours,
Vichy Royal ass
in my deepest recesses
your kind always returns
to torment the other:
the Roma, the Jew,
from out of nothing
thinks of planting a bomb
in public gardens
then escapes in running
shoes for the soccer games
where he rants
unhindered by public opinion.

BOZIDAR TIMOTIJEVIC

Sheets of death rains down
in Belgrade at the end
of the twentieth century 
the AC D.C. ruling class
taking on another
civilization
when they have none
but like kids in a playground
getting away from home
with new equipment
it says in fine print on 
i e d's label "may be lethal"
and cause side effects
like borderline nausea or death,
but the new amerika
is after pleasing the neo nazis
laughing in their people cars
and mercedes all night,
in the prosperous "New Germany"
with Orwellian,half Albright
Clintonian charm school speeches
now about forgotten but within
Bush's verboten new world order.

DANIEL FALB

Going on my bicycle
to a chamber music concert
at the Gardiner museum
after soccer and lemon sole
changing my mind
by jogging
along the Boston waterfront
to view the new home harbor's
seashore business development
and here by the Fine Arts
to enjoy the Jewish remnants
of the few last Rembrandts
of the Dutch ghetto left
and to enjoy
the only Vermeer around,
then it happens
in every civilization,
they're back
the vandals quickly take over
with the higher ups
of an inside job cooperation
just as in the Netherlands
during the occupation
the Gestapo enjoyed the most
searching for any art
they didn't appreciate
yet they would get a reward
as in Anne Frank's attic,
so they could boast
and toast to fascist pride,
these eternal thieves.


ADILLA LOPES

At Boston university
sat in classes
of Anne Sextant
who mocked degrees
who was hired
to teach poetry
an impossible task
even for an oral freak
like Homer
much easier
than teaching my kid
how to do potty
an impossible task
insisting on the body
of work output
the put out guys
attempted after practice
would not amount
to a Boston hill of baked beans
and always after class
had her unique laughter
of poking fun
but no one
knew whom she was after,
even imitating Sylvia Plath
in the clumsy way
of her suburban suicidal death
from her own classy driveway
rather than the historical
German oven Sylvia
prepared mankind for,
not even giving a call to
Maxine Kumin up in Vermont
with a hint of school preparation
who would have an accident
on her equestrian horse ride
galloping for her own reputation,
Anne could not be an original
from any incident ,antecedent
or as a descendant like Lowell
nor yet a dependent addict
in the twelve step
bound for her own Hell.



HAYDAR ERGULEN


After lunch
a Turkish sweat bath
soccer practice
the drug of the week
a repast of making love
then charades
about comedians
and honeymooners
who visit from America
exhausted and too busy
themselves to learn
the customary ways
of local execution.
MIRELA IVANOVA


A caress
leads to a kiss
around the neck,
to bed for a little cursing
or marking up
in the body's hunchback
and then cursing
and quenching
the consequence
of rejecting a newborn.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

SASA JELENKOVIC

Carrying fruit
from the market
on her way to work
bombs explode
in the 1990's
on the skin of a model
showing off
her evening gown
before the art director
arrives with her script
based on Hiroshima's day.

SAMI BAYDAR

Scoffing at the parakeet
wanting to escape
the boy in goggles
from the Bosporus
in 1978
nearly drowns,
the old man hides
a beer
a friend asks a professor
of linguistics
if madness is unavoidable
in this age
and he is silent
as a formality
in the English language.
MARTIN ENCKELL


The uncertain
by the Aland islands
in late summer
learning English
from the tapes
and the young stud
of a work out guy
the Swedish tutor
and film buff
who loves Rene Clair
who falls for poetry.

ZVONKO KARANOVIC

Serbs as partisans
in a voice not handicapped
for justice
but as watchmen
for news
of victory over fascism,
there will be better days.
MILAN DORDEVIC

Chosen to mourn
the living
among the trees
in suffering
as the wind
is in the yardstick
to shelter the Allies
who drop like blackbirds
on  the Serbian border.
TUA FORSSTROM

After dinner
and the kiss of death
soccer practice
and a viola lesson
after the the last visit
from the false prophet
you play a Russian 
Rasputin,
listening to radio Moscow
with Statislav Richter
play modern sonatas.
ADAM WIEDEMANN

The country fiddler
like the crazed riddler
in Bavaria goes crazy
for only the poet
see the man on the horse
the hit man up close
gangsters in Chicago
in profile at the jail
the Hitler in one's heart
smashing the crystal glasses
of the synagogue
wanting a headline
and deadline
to kiss one cheek
of the lumpen proletariat
named Mr. Judas Iscariot.

DRAGAN JOVANOVIC DANILOV

After you fought fascism
on the allies side
the so called allies
want to bomb you
for Nato and Germany
in the Nineties
to bring you to your knees
I stood with my friends
in the rain for peace
may the truth
about the Serbian nation
like the Jewish long suffering
be told for a new generation
for fascism wears a new coat
where even when we vote
it hardly does matter
we are not at ease
when the truth scatters
and poetry cannot sing.



SIMON ARMITAGE

You knew the riddler
and the artful joker
to lull Great Britain
away from letters
you were not cheated
or have your poems
repeated by your betters
for an angel stood by your
right arm
among the living
or the dead.
DREW MILNE

The channel discovers
the underground
in World War II
while u boat submarines
in an oceanic media
try to destroy
an island called England
which saved the lives
of civilization
from the fascists
who will never have
the realization of the rule
of liberty and law.
SAVIANA STANESCU

crickets out of the country
you rock with the radio melody
inventing new phrases
as the black cat's foot
needs to bee treated
GWYNETH LEWIS

French and German poetry
reflect the cinema
in a romanticism
of memory
today the sky's sunshine
has its language blueprints
for an unlimited vista,
you circle markers
in your diary's notebook
for tongues of free verse
with refracted moments
of enlightenment
for a lexicon's eternity
KURT DRAWERT

Waning sun
you read on the porch,
dreaming to go back
to the arrival
of sleep and snow


MARK FORD

A naked branch
full of snow
you hear crows
playing on
electric wires
DON PATERSON

No Loch Ness
under the sea
the monster
is in a territorial
sensibility
the boundary of id
W.N. HERBERT

Free and sanguine
in breathing out
as a night wind


ROBERT  CRAWFORD


Turn over on the sea
the dawn is way off
on the warm wave
and swim in the mouth
of the home harbor



JOHN BURNSIDE


Scotland on my stamp
in unlinked verse
through caves and castles
of independent affection
MEDBH  MCGUCKIAN

The home harbor lights
by rocks and mollusc
where is home, harbor,
lights, rocks and mollusc
CIARAN CARSON

Ripe fruit found
below green mountains
civilizations, layer upon layer
word upon word 
DANILA DAVYDOV

Thinking back to childhood
the first haircut, movie screen
love,death,ashes,prejudice
man juice , poem,and womb


MIKHAIL AIZENBERG

Not treading on any path
where birdsong entwine
a flower leaves
nearby trees
ARTHUR SZLOSAREK

Agape will destroy
the false trophies
and trope in the Devil's
alchemy dark room
and poetry flowers again
BASHO


The oyster
from the sea
wants to tell all
GYORGY PETRI

Night abducts
all fears
every side of mirrors
of time
WOLE SOYINKA


Nigerian travel passes
to stop the advance
of those who are winnowed
by greed and intolerance
SERGEI GANDLEVSKY

Remembering the sacrifice
of the snow's sovereignty
to defeat the brownshirts

ANDREJ KHADANOVICH


Out of breath
out of doors
out of keys
outrage
NACHOEM M.WIJNBERG

In the Lord's navel
from a genesis and numbers
of creative confession
into an exodus of love

GEORGIA O'KEEFE

Flowers are purple and huge
personally embossed
petals rippled only for us
in a fifth glance on canvas
MAURIZIO CUCCHI

Blessing the dawn
to be alive
after the bicycle race
crash in Milan
RAPHAEL URWEIDER

a diary found
on another music lover
at the gazebo
as imagination dreams
of Kafka's insect

CLAIRE GENOUX

The judge heard
the plea of the killer
remember his leaving
the courtroom for a movie
of the American Western
playing for a month
in Basle

CHRISTIAN UETZ

The Sorbonne student
visiting Geneva
attempts to read Faulkner
in French
he, the most like French
novelists, say the American
critics at the academy

KURT AEBLI

a baby carriage
at noon in the city
reminds the film student
of Potemkin
ELIZABETH WANDELER-DECK

The trial you follow
in the newspaper
makes the man
holding onto the third rail
guilty
FABIO PUSTERLA

Among the  betrayed
on the boulevard
in a veiled dawn
is the lover in red
SYLVIANE DUPUIS

You space your time
like a mute jogger
out of wind and winter
JEAN PORTANTE

What dust by the Seine
summons a somnambulist poet
in the sleepless breath
of creation
ANISE KOLTZ

Statues of Mary in tunnel vision
so your religious education
will fly by like the rain
at Lent every year
CHRISTOPHE LAMIOT ENOS

The woman you cannot
remember named Antoinette
recalls your move on her
JEAN BAPTISTE PARA

Silence in the photo
of a girl in the camera shop
demands negatives and doubles
FRANCK ANDRE JAMME

Roses in a vase as heavy metal music goes off as a farewell obituary in a small
town in France as you put morning together with a chocolate croissant and
a latte.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

ANDRE VELTER

Entertaining angels
to gaze on your words
as matches of nostalgia
PIOTR SOMMER

Where war
in Warsaw
is never over
from mass slaughter
JOHN CAGE

Augmented
and diminished as light
on a blinking piano
LIGETI

enchantment masks
on modernist strings
for a new music
BOULEZ

exciting data
of invention pales
against convention
NONO

Winds breathe
unresolved theory
listening in watermark
scales of revelation
SHOENBERG


Like new music
in a clef
boundary of notes
in a secondary tone
BRAQUE

Expecting
experimentation
no imitation,
X.
DUCHAMP

Returning to no
u turn in art
of denuded Nude.
YANNIS RITSOS

The fascist colonels
put on their top hats
to have grape leaves,
a soccer time
made up of the workers
you are in exile
on the islands

EMILIAN GALAICU-PAUN

A cross splinters
by firing squads
by the light of God
ATILLA JOSZEF

The poor hear you
wanting to share
his bread and poems
ROBERT GAL

Posters of elections
put away
for a day of cinema
JOZEF URBAN

Roses face down
in 1999
at your grave face
GABRIELLE ATHEN

A day to survive
when poetry is mute
until the stars are out
ANDRAS PETOCZ


By the Hungarian lake
you read an obituary
there is a surprise
you are alive