Straw into gold

Can you spin

straw into gold,

straw into gold, a boast

becomes a lie, a lie

becomes a request,

becomes a promise,

becomes an agony

the tales we spin

golden

the straw we spin

golden, or not

watching as he spins

madly, the wheel turning,

a game of roulette played

and forgotten until

the croupier demands his due

unless the name is forthcoming

unless the name is known and spoken

speaking the name dispels enchantment

naming the one breaks the hold

just a name, spinning fool’s gold

back to straw

TweetspeakPoetry this week has a poetry prompt: take a fairy tale, and write a poem from the perspective of one of the characters. If you know this story, can you guess which character’s perspective I used?

Illustration of Rumpelstiltskin by Walter Crane for the 1886 edition of Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm.

Poets and Poems: Louise Gluck and “Faithful and Virtuous Night”

It is late afternoon. You enter the movie theater. You walk through the lobby to the auditorium. There, the late afternoon becomes night. You find a good seat. You see the previews of coming attractions, and the command to silence your mobile device. You wait. The movie begins. It is French. Black-and-white images flicker. A story unfolds across the screen.

Reading Louise Gluck’s Faithful and Virtuous Night is like that movie experience. Each poem is a film, or a film script for the eye. Consider “the Past,” one of the shorter of the 24 poems occupying 81 pages:

The Past

 

Small light in the sky appearing

suddenly between

two pine boughs, their fine needles

now etched onto the radiant surface

and above this

high, feathery heaven—

Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine,

most intense when the wind blows through it

and the sound it makes equally strange,

like the sound of the wind in a movie—

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by Cristie Guevara via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

September Beats: Denise Levertov

In Beat Poets, published by Everyman’s Library, editor Carmela Ciuraru observes that “the Beats…were mostly men, and the work they produced was almost entirely male-focused…Beat writings were often ridiculously misogynistic.” She’s right.

But then there’s Denise Levertov (1923-1997).

I’m almost reluctant to include her in a discussion (and this series) on Beat poets. Her career in poetry transcended the Beat Generation, but then, so did Allen Ginsberg’s. She’s invariably included in collections of Beat poetry (as she is in Beat Poets), but her poetry is more controlled, more designed in a way, less the spontaneous stream of outbursts we associate with the male Beat poets.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

September Beats: Allen Ginsberg

They say all publicity is good. For poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), the publicity he received for the publication of Howl and Other Poems permanently defined his career.

It is 1955. Ginsberg has written a long poem he’s entitles “Howl” that is about capitalism and “the system.” In fact, the poem is a long “howl” about the system. It’s filled with vivid imagery, including sexual imagery, quite graphic sexual imagery.

Poet Louis Ferlinghetti, who owns the City Light Books bookstore in San Francisco, publishes the poem in a relatively small collection. William Carlos Williams writes the introduction. Ginsberg reads the poem publicly in late 1955. City Lights Books arranges the printing in London. The printed volumes arrive, and are promptly seized by customs officials.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

September Beat: The Beat Poets

My first introduction to the “Beats” was a caricature. Long before I had heard of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, Denise Levertov, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara and Neil Cassaday, as a child I watched a weekly sitcom called The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, set on a small-town college campus. Dobie (Dwayne Hickman) was the hero, chased by the dowdy Zelda and not by the girls he wanted to be chased by. His best friend was Maynard G. Krebs, played by Bob Denver, who went one to greater fame as the lead character in Gilligan’s Island.

Maynard G. Krebs had a goatee in the error when all men shaved. He wore a beret. He acted kind of goofy. He used slang that accentuated the goofiness. Maynard was a beatnik, but a lovable beatnik. We loved to laugh at Maynard G. Krebs. Denver played the character with innocence and often naiveté; Maynard was the child in all of us.

The caricature, safely homogenized for television audiences, including berets, smoke-filled coffee houses, and poetry. Coffeehouse denizens listening to Beat poets didn’t applaud; they nodded and snapped their fingers.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Jack Kerouac.

I Almost Didn’t Read Faulkner

My introduction to the writing of William Faulkner was indirect. It began in college and almost didn’t survive college.

Way back when, sophomores at LSU were required to take two semesters of English – American or English. The vast majority took English 55 and 56, American literature. English majors were required to take English 51 and 52, English literature, instead. I wasn’t an English major, but I opted for 51 and 52 (likely influenced by what I learned with my high school English teachers). We had small, rather serious classes, compared to the auditoriums overflowing with students taking 55 and 56.

At some point, early in my sophomore year, I became the unofficial English tutor for my fraternity. That meant helping pledges (and actives) prepare for tests, helping explain assignments, and reading papers.

Every sophomore at LSU who took English 56 had to write a paper on “Barn Burning” by William Faulkner. At the fraternity, that meant anywhere from 30 to 40 papers.

I came to hate that story. I came to hate reading about it, and reading a lot of really bad papers about it. One of the worst experiences I had was to see yet another fraternity member standing at the door of my room, paper in hand, smiling hopefully.

I didn’t look at anything with Faulkner’s name on it for more than a decade after college.

In 1983, I enrolled in a master’s program at Washington University in St. Louis, managing to balance one course per semester with work and family. Early on, I took a course called “the Nature of Story.” The required reading list included Faulkner.

I initially clutched, still haunted by reading those papers. Fortunately, the work wasn’t “Barn Burning.” It was The Sound and the Fury. I decided to plow through it, expecting to be gritting my teeth.

It was difficult, confusing, and a work that had to be read slowly and carefully. We had exactly one week to read it, and I think I used the entire week.

I loved it.

“Barn Burning” burnout was over.

I began to read other works by Faulkner. I took about master’s course on the Latin American novel, and discovered the authors that Faulkner had had a powerful influence on – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes (Faulkner is the patron saint of “magic realism”).

I read almost everything written by those authors, and continued to read Faulkner. Last month, I was in New Orleans, and visited the Faulkner Book House in the French Quarter, the building where Faulkner lived for six months in 1925. And there I learned that before he wrote novels, Faulkner considered himself primarily a poet, and had actually published a book of poetry shortly before he moved to New Orleans.

I just finished reading the one novel of his that I had never read before, Soldier’s Pay, his first novel and the one he wrote during those six months in New Orleans. More on that next week, but I can say that it is both a first novel and a definite foreshadowing of what was to come with the novels that transformed American (and world) literature.

This week, I wrote about the Faulkner Book House for Tweetspeak Poetry. Go take a look. If you leave a comment, your name is in the hat for a giveaway of Faulkner’s New Orleans Sketches. 

And, no, the sketches do not include “Barn Burning.” If you want to read it, and I still don’t, you can find it here. (Or you can get hold of the movie “The Long Hot Summer” with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; “Barn Burning” is condensed into one mercifully short scene.)

Literary Tour: Faulkner House Books, New Orleans

In 1925 New Orleans, it was called Orleans Alley, more a broad walkway from Chartres Street and Jackson Square to Royal Street. On the east side of the alley was St. Louis Cathderal. On the west side was the Cabildo and then a group of three-story townhouses built on what had been part of the Cabildo’s jail yard. The Cabildo was the government building from which the Spanish (1767-1803) administered the territory of Louisiana (what would later be known as the Louisiana Purchase).

Today, it walkway is known as Pirate’s Alley, renamed not because pirates haunted the area but more because this was the place where pirates, including Jean Lafitte, were often jailed (Cabildo tours include the jail area, but it’s much changed from the original).

It was in one of those townhouses, 624 Pirates Alley, that a young writer from Mississippi lived for six months in 1925. He lived in the first-floor apartment; upstairs was an artist named William Spratling who did work for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The writer lived there only six months, but it was sufficient to launch his literary career.

The writer was William Faulkner; during those six months of 1925, he wrote character sketches for the Times-Picayune; likely some poetry; and the draft of his first novel, Soldier’s Pay.

To Continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Interior of Faulkner House Books, New Orleans.