“Oh to be seventeen years old
Once again,” sang the red-haired man, “and not know that poetry
Is ruled with the scepter of the dumb, the deaf, and the creepy!”

-Kenneth Koch, Excerpt from “Fresh Air”

My Trip to the Book Annex: Adventures in Dialogue

“What are you looking for?”
“Oh, something I can’t live without. Lately I’ve been looking for Charles Olson.”
“You like the guys.”
“Uh, I like the guys and girls,” matching the informality of guys with girls, which still doesn’t match. I pull out a 1967 Poetry Anthology. “In this they only have Dickinson and Marianne Moore,” as if noting this disgrace shows I’m not lost, but she goes on to provide me with direction.
“Adrienne Rich is great. Plath and Sexton too, though depressing.”

“Thanks.”

The Lamp

Since I haven't written in awhile I give you a poem, that I love, by Charles Olson.


The Lamp

you can hurry the pictures toward you but
there is that point that the whole thing itself
may be a passage, and that your own ability
may be a factor in time, in fact that
only if there is a coincidence of yourself
& the universe is there then in fact
an event. Otherwise—and surely here the cinema
is large—the auditorium can be showing
all the time. But the question is
how you yourself are doing, if you in fact
are equal, in the sense that as a like power
you also are there when the lights
go on. This wld seem to be a
matter of creation, not simply
the obvious matter, creation
itself. Who in fact is any of us
to be there at all? That’s what
swings in the matter, also—
the beam hanging from

Fireworks

Fireworks
Originally uploaded by cherword.

Back from Brooklyn...