lexicaledifice

A podcast of the XVth annual Newer Poets LA reading that I participated in has been made available for download here:

http://events.lapl.org/podcasts/PodcastView.aspx?pid=382


It's a big file (about 78 MB) and contains a recording of the entire event.

My introduction and reading runs from 48:30 to 1:00:30, but there was much good poetry read that evening, so I encourage you to listen to as much of it as you can bear. :-)

I hope you enjoy it!

xoxo to you all...

- David

It's been a long time since I revisited this piece, and though I spent a good couple hours this evening doing some weeding, I feel like it's pretty disjointed.

P.s., how is everybody?

( Gen. AlmonteCollapse )

From The Wikipedia:

[Charles] Babbage [The founder of computer science] once contacted the poet Alfred Tennyson in response to his poem "The Vision of Sin". Babbage wrote, "In your otherwise beautiful poem, one verse reads,

Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.

... If this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest [that the next version of your poem should read]:

Every moment dies a man,
Every moment 1 1/16 is born.

Strictly speaking, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry."

get back in the kitchen!

Women live once: girls 100 times.
she who survives without childhood will go gaunt;
drinkers get jolly with age –
suddenly sour:
formed from a clay rib,
God scoffed!
such an insult to label these wanderings
he’d crafted of whim and wit!

Mouths go bad first you’ll notice,
from the constant motion:
they crumple away like dried flowers,
and fold in gently with the wind.

( poems two and three beneathCollapse )

PART 1



PART 2



PART 3



PART 4



PART 5

I am looking for some feedback on this poem; let me know your thoughts! And while I have your attention, happy holidays and all my best for 2009 to all of you!

Cane Season
for G. C.

Nothing was ever better than sugarcane season.
Every November brought the mountain
winds to set us going. We’d untarp the Victor mill,
hitch our mule to the long wooden sweep,
and wait.

Our fields could be squeezed in a day,
but from as far as Los Dolores, neighbors
came to grandpa’s juicing machine.
Carts limped in, two or three a day,
‘til Señor Cabrera’s ’58 Chevy Apache,
stalks humped high in its bed, finally coughed
through clouds of children to our yard.

Loaded with clumsy armfuls of batons,
my brothers and I dodged the constant mule,
for father to feed to the toothy rollers. Spent,
the used bagasse piled up around us like corpses.
Tío Luis would grab buckets of green juice, and hurry
them to where the women laughed and fussed,
boiling the juice down to what mattered, what would last.

The day done, men slumped into their cigarettes,
splashed some syrup in their rum. We darted around them
like flies, as Mr. Cabrera roared about land and politics, to steal
sips of the chokingly sweet syrup when they were done.
From the cortijo kitchen, electric light and goat smoke
spilled across the fields. The mule, half-loosed,
quietly chewed what was left.

- David Eadington

Kay Ryan




Turtle


Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
she can ill afford the chances she must take
in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
a packing-case places, and almost any slope
defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
she's often stuck up to the axle on her way
to something edible. With everything optimal,
she skirts the ditch which would convert
her shell into a serving dish. She lives
below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
the sport of truly chastened things.




Kay Ryan

Has anyone read Jennifer Chang's book The History of Anonymity? I practically devoured it. And it was good.

Here's a poem from it, though not my favorite poem from it:
http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v5n1/poetry/chang_j/slept.htm

I would type something out but lots of them have crazy spacing and I think I would mess it up.

Anybody know her? I've recently picked up Ballast poems & I'm not sure whether I'm enjoying the works or not. I'd love to hear some opinions.
If you haven't read it, here's one for argument's sake.

( a longish poem behind the cutCollapse )