At one time a line of words

 

March 5, 2006  (I was 61)

 

At one time a line of words

would come to my attention

in a tone of potential importance

and I would immediately write it raw

record it where I would encounter it again

or as often examine it then

listening to it

to think of what it might say next

or of what was said before

and to consider how those sounds sounded

Now after many a line of words

potential importance seems to be relative

Words that would not save the world

are relegated to the memory file

where they are easily forgotten or obscured

or absorbed by resounding sounds

and it is the consideration that is lost

the expressive struggle to say what it was

in such a way that another might believe it

or might offer an irresistible revision

How did grammatical aspects come to be

 

February 23, 2018  (I was 73)

 

How did grammatical aspects come to be

so long and effectively unbeknownst to me

Perfective verbs express completion of action

and of course the imperfective verbs…

express the incompletion of an action

or the completion of an inaction

In iterative I reiterate the repetitive

continuous action signified by the single act

Frequentatives are habitual actions I inhabit

Desiring to be desiderative

one verb derives from another

indicating my wish to perform the action

expressed in the original verb

which I so often do

Roethke wrote

 

From this week in February 2012  (I was 67) 

 

Roethke wrote

  great first lines

    but like a fiddle

      he put it in the middle

    good place for that sound

  if first can be found

 

First lines I intend to steal as he is not looking:  

-I know it’s an owl.  He’s making it darker.

-A sneeze can’t sleep

-scratched the wind with a stick / the leaves liked it

-when you plant, spit in the pot 

-A pick likes to hit ice

-who stands in a hole never spills

 

Every decision to read something

 

from this week in February 2008  (I was 63)

 

Every decision to read something

is a decision not to read something else

It is what makes books a wonder

or such a waste of time

what makes short stories or essays

economical investments

and some poems polished stones

 

Some readers are sprinters

words and phrases no more than cinders underfoot

ideas finish tapes to be broken through

records smashed into generalization

They think the author’s nuance

is their own deduction

Elementary my dear Watson a veritable primer

Some words sound better than they mean:

 

from this week in February 2018  (I was 73)

 

Some words sound better than they mean:

 

Disdain is sworn to scorn but falls gentle as rain

Rebuff merely needs a hyphen to provide a slight polish

The music of odium too lovely to be malevolent

Taking umbrage might be carrying too much luggage

Antipathy a balletic step backward in courtesy

Maniacal a Broadway hit with dancing mannequins 

There is a melody in the background

 

January 17, 2014  (I was 69)

 

There is a melody in the background

a melody you may not hear

but the xylophone notes that float

in thought sound clear

 

There is a tune I hang the word upon

and the word is carried along a drift

from the tones of the vibraphone

serenading the cerebellum

 

It hums a song of balance and dance

It is a presence a pose and a posture

The inspired movements of romance

an equilibrium in which you’re lost

 

There is a consonance of concordant harmony

the incidental music of the mind

we find synchronized and euphonious

waiting for your expression

 

Some words hide in books

 

January 7, 1998   (I was 53) 

 

Some words hide in books

that hide themselves on less accessible shelves

in the darker parts of the library

Some words arranged in difficult combinations

seem never intended to find their way out of the dark

Beads of nearly foreign dna

rosaries of dead religions

non-sequential twists of syllables

Snakes of obscurity whose lairs are unknown

to even the chronic habitue of the stacks

and never once re-shelved by the oldest librarian

(whose only hobby is to make rice paper rubbings

from the tombstones of the unknowns

on her visits to small town cemeteries)

Risking the disrespect of their dead authors

I speak of their existence

Gee Theodore Roethke

 

December 28, 2019 I was 75

 

Gee Theodore Roethke

I wish I coulda met thee

Even if just my Prof

probably woulda been enough

 

I'd laugh at your wit and your dance

give a shit if given half a chance

light side or dark side outsider inside

I'd listen to your stuff and know when's enough

Back in the day

 

9/30/17   (I was 72)

 

Back in the day

when I’d write late at night

I thought it would awaken insight

to the noire side its atmosphere and feeling

melancholic melodies played solo

depressive cigarettes and whiskey

to capture an uncertain mood

encountering more than doubt

maelstroms of swirling discontent

with light at a table a roof overhead

and a bed to sleep it off 

It was an imagined venture

back when I knew I’d awaken young

energized by the unreality of it all

Acquainted With The Night

 

September 11, 2003  (I was 58)

 

Acquainted With The Night

Note from Jay Parini,

Robert Frost: A Life, Henry Holt 1999, p. 246

 

Acquainted With The Night:   “The poem was, Frost later

suggested, ‘written for the tune.’  Although a sonnet by

form, with a closing couplet, the poem has the fluid

repetitive aspect of a villanelle with the three line stanzas

mimicking the terza rima of Danté –appropriate for a

poem about the descent into darkness.”

 

I always read the poem to students mimicking the voice

of Bela Lugosi in Dracula.  It puts an appropriate spin to

the narration.  The movie and the poem are of a common

era.  The poem is circa 1927 and the film was released in

the U.S. on Jan. 1, 1930.  When I discovered the voice for

my interpretation, I wished the poem came after themovie,

hoping Frost too, had heard the voice and realized how

well it fit.

 

(Hear my reading of the poem at JohnKalllio.com)

Acquainted With The Night

 

Acquainted With The Night

Note from Jay Parini,

Robert Frost: A Life, Henry Holt 1999, p. 246

 

Acquainted With The Night:   “The poem was, Frost later

suggested, ‘written for the tune.’  Although a sonnet by

form, with a closing couplet, the poem has the fluid

repetitive aspect of a villanelle with the three line stanzas

mimicking the terza rima of Danté –appropriate for a

poem about the descent into darkness.”

 

I always read the poem to students mimicking the voice

of Bela Lugosi in Dracula.  It puts an appropriate spin to

the narration.  The movie and the poem are of a common

era.  The poem is circa 1927 and the film was released in

the U.S. on Jan. 1, 1930.  When I discovered the voice for

my interpretation, I wished the poem came after themovie,

hoping Frost too, had heard the voice and realized how

well it fit.

 

(Hear my reading of the poem at JohnKalllio.com)

contour writing

 

from this week in July, 2012  (I was 67)

 

   contour writing

The controls give the pilot

something to fiddle with as the

computer flies the plane  They

are connected directly to the

pilot’s assumptions  Pull back on the stick

the plane seems to ascend

Push right and you can bank on it

The computer reads your mind

and convinces you you’ve done

exactly the right thing when

you do nothing at all  Multi

tasking you call it

Turn of the phrase is not done on a lathe

 

July 1, 2011 (I was 66)

 

Turn of the phrase is not done on a lathe

not wheeled and peeled into curls

not furrowed and beveled and burnished

always a bit smaller than first uttered

 

More like the looped string game

I grasp the line within your fingers

stretch and expand what you hand me

to another contortion supported geometrically

Interrogative

 

from this week in June, 2016  (I was 71)

 

                 Interrogative

I think but have not researched the thought

that the question mark is far less used now than in the past

(and the same for auto turn signals) 

It is the implied admission of ignorance

that is so difficult to admit

in this time of adamant declaration 

despite our common condition of uncertainty

regarding the fundamental concerns

(Every turn is a speculation)

Electronic access to preconceived argument

and reply rebuttal or riposte

reduces thought to a duel instead of a construct 

No need for inquiry

(I think I know where I am going)

Be True To Your School

 

from this week in June, 2012  (I was 67)

 

                           Be True To Your School

         I’ve been re-reading Bob Greene’s Be True To Your School,

a journal of his 1964 senior year in high school and his absorption

with the Beatles and hormones.  (Beatle mania was a much better

term than I thought at the time).  The book is as evocative for its

blind spots as for the nostalgic images. There is a class separation

in these Columbus, Ohio schools more apparent than in the ones I

knew in small towns on Minnesota’s Iron Range.  Greene is

unconscious of it, but he and his friends blithely drive Impala

convertibles and T-Birds, both new ’64 and classic ’56 models. 

They belong to fraternities and sororities. (In high school?) 

         There is no mention of the sense of national loss in direction

or loss of momentum caused by the JFK assassination, nor the turmoil

of the fomenting civil rights movement.  There is no anxiety over the

cold war, atomic weapons or our beginning involvement in Viet Nam. 

Still it is a touching and even historic memoir.  If you have since

followed his columns or books, you know Bob Greene was to learn

much in his next ten years of becoming a newsman.

 

from this week in May, 1985  (I was 40)

 

Practice writing exercise #4a. 30 min.

from John Gardner, The Art of Fiction

         Nine o’clock and not even the borrowed hour of

daylight saving time could hold the day.  These were

her own hands looking knobby on the back posts of the

oak rocker.  It swung easy now, it swung light.  Beyond

the chair and the porch the oaks reached one by one

across the field to the dry hills.  The peaks had obscured

the sun an hour ago. The shadows had taken all the

reflective colors.  The purple remains of leaves and

branches played as optical illusion with dark sky.

Branch became sky and sky became branch.   

         She broke the spell by shifting her head, and she

sat in the chair and rocked.  Beneath the roof line the

breeze brought the cool scents of the forest.  Old smells,

moss, rotting bark on enduring trunk.  She watched the

trees fade into hills already indistinguishable from sky.

She listened to the crickets and timed her slight rock in

tune.  The wooden arc on the wood floor chirping and

pleasing, not so heavy as to mar the grain. 

Nowadays I sit to write

 

May 11, 1998  (I was 53)

 

Nowadays I sit to write

with whatever purpose for initial motivation

knowing that it is only a game

to get me in proximity to paper

with a pen in hand

and that whatever will be written

has little to do with any thought

preceding the writing

It is a comfortable talent

something akin to navigation

by the seat of the pants

an aptly cynical metaphor

for an activity whose source

is conventionally considered to be

anchored in intellect

Punctuphobia

 

May 10, 2013  (I was 68)

 

Punctuphobia

Fear of being punctuated,

reduced to an appositive,

a parenthetical dashed off as an afterthought,

one of a commonality indistinguishable in series,

misquoted if quoted at all,

colonized (fully or semi-)

abbreviated, listed, compounded and diminished,

bracketed and appostrocized;

taken in exclamation, held breathless

or simply ended, period.

reading some poems and other poems

 

April 16, 1973  (I was 28)

 

reading some poems and other poems

         Some poems proceed outward

from an essence like the controlled

progression of ripples from a dropped stone-

even as they diminish they intimate

existence of further ripples.

The unseen ripple becomes discernible.

         Other poems stab in any direction

lines like refracted and reflected rays of sun.

The effect is often blinding;

the eyes do not adjust until

one rocketing shaft pierces the balloon of darkness

to dispatch a map of illuminations.

not stolen from Roethke

 

from this week in 2012  (I was 67)

 

  not stolen from Roethke

I know it’s an owl

he’s making it darker

You didn’t know

he could do it

 

I hear it hoot black

his yellow eyes pierce far

Any mouse that moves

moves silent wings to it.