Sunday Scribbling #168: Vision
jammin’ the gods
tear me down that
there bulletin on
the rise of dada,
the shirking minister,
the nimble craftsman at
his wheel. i would
a fierce innuendo
but who would see
the point if i tried? years
ago i stood on valerie’s
levee, counted the ships
in the shadow of van and john lee:
the waterfront covered, the natchez
lay stretched, deaf to my
blind eyes, blind to my deaf ears.
ophtha the following monday sez
contacts or surgery, smirks
at my sheepish plea for glasses—
who wants movie star when you can
do professor? oliver peoples, i be
jammin’, but in these days of
the austere gods, i prowl the
dollars general & borrow from
my immortal son, shades of
my dubious grey.
tear me down that
there bulletin on
the rise of dada,
the shirking minister,
the nimble craftsman at
his wheel. i would
a fierce innuendo
but who would see
the point if i tried? years
ago i stood on valerie’s
levee, counted the ships
in the shadow of van and john lee:
the waterfront covered, the natchez
lay stretched, deaf to my
blind eyes, blind to my deaf ears.
ophtha the following monday sez
contacts or surgery, smirks
at my sheepish plea for glasses—
who wants movie star when you can
do professor? oliver peoples, i be
jammin’, but in these days of
the austere gods, i prowl the
dollars general & borrow from
my immortal son, shades of
my dubious grey.
Labels: shades of grey
posted by murat11 at 1:03 PM
53 Comments:
need cataract surgery?
Lilibeth: More likely, aqueducts.
Who would want movie star when you can do professor? I heartily agree.
Love the line: shades of my dubious grey.
Great poem, Murat.
Thanks, Teresa. In my foolish youngers, I probably would have gone for movie star. A friend several years back had a line in a poem in which she calls herself a major motion picture. I've stolen the line several times...
Imitation is the highest form of flattery...
whaoooo great prompt attempt!
Happy SS
Click Here For My Scribbling
Teresa: Isn't theft one of the middle management forms of felony?
AD: Thank you for that rodeo whoop.
great post on vision! I liked reading it very much :)
peace
Tanya: Thank you for your words, and thank you for dropping by.
love the voice in this poem and 'rise of dada'!
A fierce innuendo, those are the words I'm pocketing today, the seed of every poem, the first nudge to any story.
With a poem this sharp, you think you're getting sympathy for those shades of dubious grey?
Thank you, Floreta: it all rumbled out pretty quickly, after seeing what the SS girls had cooked up for us...and, of course, you can't miss with Dada.
Anno: Pocket 'em, use 'em, steal 'em. What good is a fierce innuendo, if you can't get one under the counter?
Maybe not sympathy, but certainly double-takes.
I believe that in middle management they are taking company money and property, definitely theft.
In art you are sharing in an inspiration and building upon it, thus synergistically enhancing human culture, so it's flattery, not theft (unless you copy every word and pass it off as your own--i do draw the line there).
Teresa: Agreed. Lines, words, images get in our bones as we read, and the body needs to write - to extend, to praise, and to discover, channel, create...
i have those glasses. i love them.
liked the poem, too.
QB: I got me Peoples in your home town, out in Fat City. A whiff of NOLA in the poem, too.
damn, i hate not getting this. too many allusions flying right by me. who are the minister, the craftsman, and valerie? why don't i know? your son has good taste in covers, but i see you in ray bans - although i can't see you at all. happy dada day.
I keep thinking what a great riff..."i prowl the
dollars general & borrow from my immortal son" should be the "sermon in a nutshell" to an as yet unwritten sermon someday.
Richard: That makes two of us. Of course, that's the lazy answer: truth is, I'm not always, I'm often not, after sense in these little jazz riffs. Think Sun Ra, not Billy Eckstine. Rhythms, free association, sound - and maybe a little sense thrown in. Dada is almost a broadcast here, albeit unintended. Breton and his gang hover. I open these portals, these words start pouring, and I'm not grabbing for sense, though I'm perfectly happy for sense to emerge. Past folks have said, "your poems make me nervous." I get it: they're looking for sense. As I mentioned to Chris a while back, if you've seen Pollock in the process of his action paintings - that's a good correlative for this kind of poem. Certainly not everyone's cuppa tea.
So, minister and craftsman fly in from who knows where: objects of play: make of them what you will: another curve of thigh, perhaps: your reverie. There was a Valerie, years gone, a whirling dervish, but this Valerie conjures up Valerie Martin, novelist who trafficked for a while in New Orleans (her levee - the very levee where I first realized I could not see clearly - make of that statement what you will, whatever the level).
The collaboration between poet and reader can be a search for meaning, can be a dance to rhythms, can be a whooshing bath of sounds, can be whatever. And often, wonderfully, I am given back the poem in ways I could never imagine - much less, ever intended. I was once accused of writing an elegy to Princess Di, just about the last person on earth I would ever write about (the worship of whom I did not get at all), and yet, when I was lured back by enough Di-ists, I could see the possibility of the snail's gossamer trail...
Dada back at ya, hermano.
jsd: Write that sermon, girl. It's waiting for you.
paschal you challenge me every time. I'm glad Richard had the guts to do something I have not - to be able to say he didn't get some of the allusions. I read your stuff and google trying to understand but by the time I comment the fun is gone from it. This time I'm just letting it wash over me like a piece of music I could no more play than jump to the moon - doesn't matter, I got ears.
Ms Dee: Thank you for the true confessions. Googling these ditties is probably a dangerous proposition: it just makes the search engine an unknowing accomplice; googling your own associations (or lack of them) can make plenty ado with the allusions. Without a "true" (or pinned down) reference point, they become your allusions. My aims are largely subversive - to subvert sense as a way of going deeper: to deeper experience, not necessarily deeper sense. You assuredly have the ears, girl, so sit yourself right down at the piano. We typically classify surrealism as the "not quite" or "less than" reality. I read somewhere way back where a surrealist called it the "more than" real. As crazy as this sounds, this has always made sense to me.
Thank you for your visits. They are much appreciated.
Thanfully for me, I stopped trying to get it at all and I'm just enjoying the rhythm and the words I don't know and wonder if they exist at all or if you're just teasing me ;)
Tease you, my devilish friend? You're an old pro at this nonsense of mine.
From your jammin’ store I’m takin’ ever’thin’ from "i prowl" to "dubious grey," slippin’ it under ma coat, an’ makin’ fo’ de do’. Trouble is, when I was making my way around to the back of your place to check the dumpster, too, amidst the empty boxes and candy wrappers I found such things as "The collaboration between poet and reader can be...a dance to rhythms...a whooshing bath of sounds," and everything from "...can make plenty ado with the allusions" to "a surrealist called it the ‘more than’ real," and I can’t imagine who would have tossed them there. So I took them, too ;-)
Duchess: Chica, you are welcome to all the recycling, but yo: hush hush on the candy wrappers. The brother's supposedly in training. Otherwise, I'll never keep up with you on the morning runs. As if.
Who wants movie star or athlete when you can do professor??? Really, now Paschal, don’t you hear Harvard calling your name? Or Yale? Brown? Princeton? Penn? Cornell? Dartmouth? Any of those? Columbia? Surely you hear Columbia! OK, UTSA, then! Do you hear UTSA calling your name?
Duchess: I hears 'em all, cher, but the one whats got my heart is UC Santa Cruz - gotta love them Banana Slugs. I hear the Roadrunners, sure, but where's the adventure in that?
Wait. Are you tryin’ to tell me there’s no adventure in runnin’ wi’ da big dawgs?
A lot easier to outrun a slug, chica. Banana one at that.
Well, now it’s true the slugs don’t rate so high up there, but I think you should go for it anyway, if you can’t see your way to Trinity there in SA, that is. ‘Cause ever’body know big dawgs need a lotta room to run. You cain’t jess keep ‘em tied up un’er the porch or down in da basement, no sa. It’s a wasta cerebral muscle.
Chica, it's clear to me that this ain't just about me runnin' the dawgs, and furthermore, that you're not the least bit interested in a run in the 'hood. So, here it is: lace up your New Balances, the electric blue ones: we're racing with the biggest of the bigs: Dogues de Bordeaux, and we're gonna lace up our electric blue NBs and run like greased lightning through the Sorbonne and talk nasty Brooklynesed French like Henry Miller and tell Lawrence Durrell to stop genuflecting to himself, and make chocolate chip cookies with Gertrude and Alice, with or without Alice's special ingredients. We'll translate Tender Buttons into Croatian (for Ms Anno), and then go slumming across the channel, still in our blue feet, on the River Cam, and read that Croatian hoopla to all the stuffed shirts and basted egos. Laissez les bons temps rouler, cher.
Mais non, Monsieur! I am a toy poodle interested in barking and not biting and when a big dawg even hints at growling I must make a hasty retreat! Au revoir pour ce soir!
Duchesse: The bigs are nothing but lap dogs. All froth and no bite. Believe me: I've lived with them...
We arrive at the Gare du Nord just in time for breakfast.
oh my gosh, your comment sessions are as wonderful as your writings! Are you amazed or did you know that a person must loosen their insights, mind and more to get a sense of who you are and what you offer?!
my favorite part: borrow from
my immortal son, shades of
my dubious grey.
Miz Lee, glad to have your visit. I'm not quite sure what to say to your always generous, loving words. What I do know is that my writing is certainly not everyone's cup of tea, but that's one of the great things about this blogworld: you eventually find readers who get you, whether you are making sense or not: people who are willing to explore what you have to say, people willing to explore and run with your own brand of "poetics." It's fun to write it all, but as that wild Nueva York filly likes to say, it's awfully fun running with the dogs, too.
Peace and love to you.
Yes blogland is great for all the connections that get us, sometimes inspire us and sometimes become friends.
with warmth
Heavens, I must be blind to have not read this sooner then now! Thine eyes hath been lased these 10 plus years. Professor no more, I've lost my Mary Ann. But without prosthesis, I can imbibe in The Movie Star! And with these Bolle's I can play her Bono all the way down the red carpet....
Nice chops, Pascual!
Miguel: Oh, that perfesser! Cracked me up: I knew I shoulda gone movie star: could have had my cake and eaten it, too. Tu eres un diablo!
Them specs say Atticus Finch. Or Johnny Depp. If they wasn't shades that is.
San: The shades atop the post were just for decoration. The OPs were/are (like not a few of our cohort, I shun them: either my vision's better, or my delusions are sharper) specs. Atticus Depp/Johnny Finch, probably.
Did someone say 42, now 43 comments for this post? Modest numbers for the transglobal likes of San and Montana's Miz Lee, but not too shabby for those of us in Muravia. I'll have to develop the formula from this prototype.
Nostalgia + Fashion + Blindness = f(C)
44. That's the Grecian Formula. I'm off to google for Cracker Jack. But that's another post...
45. Put them specs back on, Atticus. I looked up the offical site of Cracker Jack. And on the home page they have a pouch not a box. SAD.
46. I misspelled official.
47. But can I keep the prize?
47.5 And where the hell's your Moonwalk youtube?
San: I loved being 44, the age at which Mr. Walden planned his Earth-landing. 45 when he sprung full blown.
San: I'm messin' with the numbers. That must have been a very old box...I know the girl loves them, but post-expiration?
What a lovely way to hit 50. Like rebounding your own miss and going in for the dunk...
All the prizes, cher.
San: Apropos the KOP, I thought long and hard, and passed - for the moment, anyway. It's funny, because in recent months I sifted out my horror at the ghastliness/ghoulishness and simply went back to the marvel of his Off the Wall and Thriller marvelousness. I may post the "Remember the Time" vid I stumbled over a few months back, putting that and "Human Nature" on my playlist.
May he rest in sweetness...
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