In The Poetry

Man in the Street

He claps a hand
across the gaping hole –

or else the sight might
well inside to

melt the mind (if any
thinking spoke

were in the wheel,
or any real

fright-fragments broke
out of the gorge to

soak the breast, the meaning
might incite a stroke – best

press against it, close
the clawhole, stand

in stupor, petrified. The dream
be damned, the deeps defied.

The [...]

Su Tung P’o is a figure who moves me deeply. In a few more years he’ll be a thousand years old. A great Chinese poet – he was a designer of gardens in Imperial China. Now the great thing about Su Tung P’o is he not only wrote these pastoral poems and loved to design [...]

I owe these two poems to human voices I heard at different times on NPR (National Public Radio). I tried to catch the flavour and in some cases the parlances of what they said. The first one was a woman whose language I didn’t know – her English was pretty fractured and it was immediately [...]

What He Thought

We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for ourselves,
our sense of being
Poets from America, we went
from Rome to Fano, met the mayor,
posed for the photographers and served
on panels (“What does it mean, ‘flat drink’?” asked someone.
“What does it mean, ‘cheap date’?”.)
Among Italian literati

we could [...]

Man in the Street

He claps a hand
across the gaping hole –

or else the sight might
well inside to

melt the mind (if any
thinking spoke

were in the wheel,
or any real

fright-fragments broke
out of the gorge to

soak the breast, the meaning
might incite a stroke – best

press against it, close
the clawhole, stand

in stupor, petrified. The dream
be damned, the deeps defied.

The [...]

Every religion has its fanatics and every religion has its wise voices but they’re not as frequently or as loudly heard. It’s the Talmud that says “Ambition destroys the heart it lives in”, it was Mohammed who said “The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr” and it’s my [...]