TWO POEMS: JOHN ROCHE

Further

(closing thoughts after Cloudburst Council)

--John Roche

Further is a bus

driven by Merry Dionysians

bus comes from omnibus

transport for all

Mahayana the Greater Vehicle

a quite Whitmanian notion

sometimes a great nation

no gloom at Seneca Emergence Place

but Cloudburst Express needs to be a Soul Train

needs to be a Freedom Train too

not there yet.

The founding convention of Cloudburst Council is gaveled closed

no closure for poetry…

Jimi sings, "Castles made of sand drift into the sea eventually"

maybe not a bad thing to build your castles on sand

Tibetan or Navaho sand paintings complete their magic only when

the image is erased.

John Roche at Cloudburst Council May 2012                    photo by machine

Sally Forth

--John Roche

The purpose of a Citadel

is to give protection

not to keep you bottled up.

A strong Citadel means

you can safely

sally forth.

In fact, the safety of the Citadel

depends on

scouts, traders, knights

willing to bravely sally forth

gather information, exchange trade goods,

scatter skirmishers, demolish siege engines.

Without this, the noose of besiegement tightens.

Without Sallying Forth, we feed on ourselves, first the dogs,

then the dead, next the children.

So much depends upon a white chicken smuggled

across the lines so much depends on those willing to tunnel

swim creeks ride horses enjamb the perimeter use subterfuge

ride invisible taxis 

establish parataxis between inside/outside/both sides of the moat

leave breadcrumbs for others' mnemotaxis.

So much depends on friends not content to stay by the hearth fire

yet so much depends on those reading by that hearthside

with minds unbridled.

So much depends

on those who tarry there by the sally gardens

taking love easy, "Easy Baby," Magic Sam sang.

The best Citadel is the one you carry in your breast as you sally forth.

John Roche at Cloudburst 2012  photo by David Landrey

Steve Tills: So, HA!, that’s another “Pure,” and they both exist, of course, HA!

Alan Casline:
I wanted to meet on Sunday April 15th. I was indifferent to where we met. Although e-mail works fine, I find more can be accomplished face-to-face ( large percentage of total communication being unspoken and the word play which cannot be duplicated otherways) John Roche told me about this Phelps Poetry Reading: {Sunday April 15, 2012 at 2 PM: Poetry Afternoon at Phelps Arts Center, 15 Church Street, Phelps, featuring Steve Tills, Sally Bittner Bonn, Lori Nolasco, and Patricia Roth Schwartz, free, refreshments.] It looked good and as it turned out was perfect as lead-in to the meeting of myself, John, Stephen Lewandowski and Ken Warren held after the reading to discuss all things Cloudburst.  In a scene I expect to repeat a few times on the way to the Naples gathering I got to meet Pat Schwartz for the first time and thus we could both say how we had heard so much about each other. I had met Steve Tills a few times but it was a great expansion to hear his poems read and Patrica Roth Schwartz also had poetic subject matter beyond the guessed at. The part about it being a great lead-in was because both Pat and Steven are coming to Cloudburst and are co-founders of a a venture, Literary Guild of the Finger Lakes, which is using the Phelps Arts Center as one of their nestings spots and sponsored the reading. 

                                   

                                            Steve Tills    April 15, 2012  at Phelps Art Center

                                    Patricia Roth Schwartz    April 15,2012  at Phelps Arts Center


Steve hung with us after the reading but had to leave after a while. We started a conversation about poetry on the page and poetry read to others, The conversation continued the next day via e-mail, Seems to be relevant and as everyone gave me permission ( and with a little editing) here is a recounting...

Steve Tills:   e-mail 4/16/2012 
Thank you so much, you guys, coming to the reading yesterday ( Alan Casline, John Roche, Ken Warren). It was a great pleasure to get that kind of opportunity to have you three “hear” what those “objects on a Page” “sound like” from “this person,” in this case “the writer of them,” as opposed to “the Pure experience” of “taking them in SOLELY ‘from the Page,’” where I always believe they are SUPPOSED TO BE, FIRST, FOREMOST, and perhaps even, ideally, SOLELY – and yet, there’s the alternative “Pure,” which is that it’s good to hear how the pomer, himself (in this case, me), means for that page experience to be read, needs “live Readings” to give a bit more cue as to how the rhythms and inflections and such “should go.”  So, HA!, that’s another “Pure,” and they both exist, of course, HA!

 All part of my ongoing obsession with “addressing” and rock solid belief that a given poetry should neither need its author’s VOICE, GOOD LOOKS (who would a listener most trust, fellow in blue jeans and old t-shirt, slick looking corporate guy with three-piece suit, professorial fellow with tweed jacket and rumpled clothes, suggesting he stays up late at night and composed his poetry from old-fashioned library-study with on old-fashioned typewriter; gorgeous female in string bikini, frumpy old woman in frumpy old clothes, spiked haired Goth girl with multiple face spikes/piercings, right-wing woman in church clothes?), BODY GESTURES, REPUTATION, or ANYTHING ELSE, nor WANT those kinds of things in fact “interfering” with “a pure interaction” with the page by a private reader in solitary surrounds.  AND, of course, there are all kinds of contradictions to these Concerns, and we’ll be discussing the pros and cons of these issues (some of which are NOT even NECESSARILY contradictions at all) for years…  (Personally, and perhaps obviously, I am always of the persuasion that “a given poming” should never require “extra-textural” accompaniment, hence “resides” on the page, blah blah blah, ad infinitum…)

John Roche     e-mail 4/16/2012
You're most welcome, Steve. Really enjoyed your stuff. Of course, we disagree on the "SOLELY 'from the page" thing--too New Critical for my taste. Everything's inextricably wrapped up with the voice and gesture and what Walt called "Personalism" of the poet, even when it gives the fish 'n' chips a bit of the smell of yesterday's news that stays news. But the nose knows, hopefully, what's fit to eat, and your homefried pomings are delish!

John

PS Diner was closed so we ended up at old hotel in center of Phelps. Walked out cause the menu was a bit dear, but maitre 'd ran out to tell us of 2 for 10 specials (what Alan calls the "locals' menu"). Pretty decent food, and a touch of class for planning our classless society.

Steve Tills    e-mail 4/16/2012

You’re right.  It DOES smack very much of “New Critical” and it’s part of long, ongoing “debate,” too, I suspect/suppose or just plain kind of know.

I think that we’ll be discussing it the rest of our lives.  In ways, I think it’s probably ALSO a false dichotomy, but then even as “that” endlessly useful, since, where it (or anything else that) leads one to write things is really the bottom line.  What gets on to the page, by whatever means.

But some of these things are so very BASIC, too: What is written should not ever NEED a person there to substitute extra-textural “emotion” or “decoration” or various other outside distractions to sell its MEANING.  If the words and/or other machinery of items, including page space and scoring of same on the page do NOT deliver EVERYTHING that is necessary and self-sufficient, then the object there, and THERE TO BE REGARDED, is another kind of object altogether, and to varying degree, maybe even “fails,” for it depends on all kinds of things that apparently “the poems” do not or cannot equal or constitute.  Nothing wrong with that, it’s just a different kind of writing, a writing that is a part of something else.

But also the more obvious problems: If we get the Stones and the Beatles as back up band, the “what’s on the page” has VERY LITTLE it actually needs to DO, as the back up band will imbue it with all the appeal and meaning and it (“lacks” on its own?) to “transfer energy,” to actualize the object’s being. (I know that that sounds strange and high-falutin, but it’s not meant to be – it’s just, again, my way of arguing FOR a kind of “actualization of (meaning?) poetic object that, in this case, desires FULL separation from ALL extra-textual sub-particles, including (in Purest form, and here’s where I get really onto the edge of what I may someday find is complete nothingness, something that doesn’t even exist) unconscious, as well as deliberate “allusion” to other texts, poets, poming, etc.

There’s WAY TOO MUCH on this subject to talk about here, though, AND, frankly, I am fully aware that these are long-existing OBSESSIONS  of my own that may not have anything to do with ANYBODY’s stuff, HA, just blah blah and all…

You’ll probably have to listen to me obsess about it all for many years, anyhow, though.  And then in between, we’ll all just “do poems” and all-inclusive “actualizations” of “poetry” anyways, fool ourselves about WHAT has value and meaning and worth and grooviness, forever, anyways…

Alan Casline   e-mail  4/16/2012

 This subject has been well debated at the Poets' Corner although the conversation often comes around to then the debate about audience and who validates your work. I am in the middle in that I think both presentations (oral and on the page) are important. I never get miffed at those who claim the printed poem is primary and I do get irritated at the other view when taken to the extreme as in 'Only the Spoken Word is Poetry" I think a lot of my poetry is better when you can see it on the page but I have also taken advise and tried to improve my reading of poetry to an audience.. For any of my poems done in projected verse when reading I try to use the spaces in the field as cues as to pausing, speeding-up and otherwise spacing out my vocalization  I consider all my poems to be one breath to one line, which I consider almost a standard way of going from the written line to spoken.  I hear the poem in my head and do not at all understand those poets who say, "I have to read the poem out loud to judge the poem's success" and also "If I stumble in reading then that shows a place where the poem should be rewritten." When I am reading another poet's poem I will ask, "Is it one breath to one line?" if they say "no", then I ask "Does the poem follow the punctuation like stop at a period, etc."  The vast majority of the time the answer to that is also "no". Which leaves the poem just there to be read any which-way. What I then will do is read their poem more-or-less as the ideas appeal to me. Other times I try and read the whole poem in one long breath. Which is fun and sometimes I will even forgo my own line breaks and do the same with one of my poems. The problem I have with one breath to one line is I can easily read a longer line than the page allows. To be true to this and not be constrained by page width I should be writing with the page turned so one line can be 11 inches long not just 8.5 inches. It would look just too odd and be hard to publish and so I have never made that switch.

Steve Tills     e-mail   4/19/2012

And especially, as ANY KIND of “prescription” like “one line for one breath” COMPLETELY LIMITS what can be accessed/actualized that would then be any given writer’s actualization of the given poetic object(s).  I mean, heck, it’s as preposterous as believing that only iambic pentameter can be employed.  At least, for me, I see it as such an obvious limit.  And I will never believe an abstraction like “only what originates from the breath” gets to, or comes from, “the heart,” “the soul,” “the body,” the full body/mind” or anything of the sort. 

Hey, Olson and others may indeed have succeeded in “freeing” “the poem” from the New Critical EXTREME that had, say, robbed poetry of its vitality and such, but surely they then “also” “may” have locked it in to other EXTREMES.  Or not…  It’s all up to endless debate and discussion, of course. And there are endless “contradictions” and “splits” and dichotomies (some “false” and some “real” and ALL merely, as well as magically, just “words” and other items that the singular “Human” “Unconscious” infinitely provides and endlessly creates) that anybody and her four sisters can “take off from” to endlessly explore the human condition and “what is Meaningful” in any given moment, era, split second, wink-of-an-eye, period, century, or geologic epoch.  IMO…  Blah blah, ad infinitum…

Personally, I am usually (but not always) inclined to use the page, and especially “line-breaking,” to “torque” meaning(s) and possibilities as they occur in the “process” of “theenking” (or otherwise “play it by ear”), and, at the same time, I know THAT, too, can and will “naturally” become “a limit” (and in fact I ALSO make stuff that “actively resists and declines ALL torquing and the use of line-breaking, sometimes, as well) if it gives over to some idea that it is THE ONLY THING that I might like to do, in writing.  (I.e., there can be “too much” “torquing,” when such a compulsion may become a fetish and get in the way of writing “something” that doesn’t/wouldn’t “happen” because I might be WAY TOO INVESTED in “following THAT muse’s ‘habituated’ compulsions” (or that “bitch’s confused indulgences” or *******s), but, let’s face it, there won’t be time enough in life to DO EVERYTHING, so best, I guess, CHOOSE a few things that one likes to do, that one does well, and that one gets some fulfillment from, and, really, we’ll all just do the best we can, regardless that Shakespeare, Olson, Homer, Gomer, Emily, Gertrude, Ezra, Wallace, Frank, Hilda, Milton, Sappho, and the rest of the old pros may chew us out for when we get up or down there to Pomer Heaven (if, of course, they aren’t too busy chewing each other out from their respective neighborhoods in the Collective Unconscious that they’ve so bravely staked out for themselves and us before we get there).

Alan Casline   email  4/19/2012

And one can have a love of limitation as per this poem from my 64 Changes & heart and hand are in there too

LIMITATION

It is necessary to set limits

even upon limitation.

Discriminations are the backbone of reality.

What good is the plowed earth

without the hand to set out seed?

What good is the house

without the heart to establish rest?

Tending life requires care

and measured energy.

                                   5/14/1980

John Roche     email  4/19/2012

Yes, agree with Steve-Tills-His-Garden: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!

But do I have to weed between every damn one?

MORE POETS CHECK IN

                                               KENNETH WARREN

                       Kenneth Warren at  Charles Olson Centenary Conference June 2010
 

Born in New York City in 1953, Kenneth Warren is a civic journalist,

editor, independent scholar, public librarian, and poet. He obtained a
BA and MLS from SUNY Buffalo  He is the founder and editor of House
Organ, a letter of poetry and prose. He is a founding member of The
Lakewood Observer, a newspaper experiment in civic journalism. He was
an associate editor for Contact II, a poetry review, and Alternative
Press, a music magazine. He introduced and edited with Fred Whitehead
The Whole Song: Selected Poems by Vincent Ferrini (University of
Illinois Press, 2004). His two collections of poetry are Rock/the
Boat: Book One (Oasis Press, 1998) and The Wandering Boy (Flo Press,
1979). Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch: A Guide to the Homeric Punkhole,
1980 – 2012, a collection of essays, will be published in 2012. He
lives in Ransomville, New York.

Here are a few poems found in the FROM BUFFALO OUT  bundle:

from: Rock/The Boat

Batman Theme

 

Going by the Mayan calendar,

I Batman is a root mantra.

Limbo Rock

I tied

By rhyme and reason

A funereal rock

To the umbilicus of limbo;

Then I crinkled,

Enchained within

The checkered past

Of every boy and girl.

Mr. Lonely

Dingus Day

Dark is night

Surfin’ Bird

The Trashmen so perfectly beheld

The bird in the finger tree

Anyone in Arizona could lift it

To defy the sacred line in thin air

JOHN ROCHE

                         John Roche at Kenhome neighborhood in Elsmere, New York

John Roche is an Associate Professor of English at Rochester Institute of Technology, and also the current President of the Just Poets organization. He earned his PhD from SUNY Buffalo, studying with Robert Creeley and John C. Clarke. His full-length poetry collections, Topicalities (2008) and On Conesus (2005) are available from Foothills Publishing (Kanona, NY). His poems have appeared in magazines like Yellow Medicine Review, Flurb, House Organ, Rootdrinker, Big Bridge, Jack Magazine, Interim, Intent, Woodstock Journal, Burning World, and in several anthologies. He edited the collection Uncensored Songs for Sam Abrams (Spuyten Duyvil, 2008), co-edited Doing Time to Cleanse My Mind (FootHills, 2009), and edited Martha Rittenhouse Treichler’s Black Mountain to Crooked Lake: Poems 1948-2010, with a Memoir of Black Mountain College (FootHills 2010). His latest book of poems, Road Ghosts, published by theenk Books (Palmyra, NY), is available from Small Press Distribution  < www.spdbooks.org

 and is also featured in Big Bridge # 15 at www.bigbridge.org. Recent readings include Talking Leaves Books, Buffalo, Caffé Lena, Saratoga Springs; Little Theatre Café, Rochester; Different Path Gallery, Brockport, NY; Greenwood Books, Rochester; Writers & Books, Rochester; Harvest Café, Montour Falls, NY; Olean Public Library; the Grey Hair Series, Buffalo; and Acequia Book Sellers, East of Edith series, and Fixed and Free series, Albuquerque. A chapbook titled the joe poems is scheduled to appear later this year from FootHills Publishing.

Here is a video of John Roche at RIT's Innovation Center II  backed by the Handmade Orchestra

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE01SvLLeZY&feature=BFa&list=PL9A5EC8B6838829D9

STEPHEN LEWANDOWSKI

                                                     Stephen Lewandowski at Voorheesville Public Library

Stephen Lewandowski has worked as an environmental educator and consultant in the western Finger Lakes for  thirty years. He is a founder of the Coalition for Hemlock and Candise Lakes and the Canandaigua Lake Watershed Task Force and worked on the development of watershed management plans for many of the Finger Lakes and Lake Ontario.

A member of Rootdrinker Institute, Lewandowski is co-editing issue 18 of Rootdrinker Magazine with magazine founder Alan Casline of Delmar, N.Y. Healso released a small book of poems, Digging Wild Soils,  published in 2009 by Delmar’s Benevolent Bird Press and in 2010 a book 

O LUCKY ONE, his tenth's small book of poems since 1974, published by FootHills Publishing. http://foothillspublishing.com/2010/id57.htm

          

 

ASLEEP IN THE BUDDHA

When I visit

she puts me in the spare room

with a bed, a desk, her books,

two meditation pillows and a brass Buddha.

The room is warm—I need only a light blanket—

and its walls are white.

Over the bed hangs a mandala.

Siamese cats visit me in the night.

Waking up, floor boards under my feet,

Gotama greets, one hand raised.

Bronze of the bell hanging beside his shrine

holds a long, singing note.

Dieffenbachia roots in a glass, blind

white rootlets, leaf arches over the Buddha.

A woodcut shows a gigantic man

smiling and directing a tiny traveler.

He is a traveler because his things

are done up in a bum’s knotted handkerchief.

He is tiny because the giant is pointing

to a distant mountain.

I’ve come with Snyder’s Fudo

and a beefsteak begonia to give away.

That done, I feel myself becoming tinier yet;

o white walls, white ceiling

brass Buddha setting on wood,

that mountain is huge

and so far away;

can’t I stay here with you?

Stephen Lewandowski

WHEN YOU SEE

Our friend Craig around town

right away you’d notice

his short arms. He was a short

guy anyway but his arms

were really short. Bustling

down the street, he’d always

carry a pack of tickets

in his breast pocket--

to get you into the Trooper’s Club,

a chance at the Rotary 50-50, or

the Hatch Hose Lucky Number.

He’d stop to talk, “Hey, how’s it going?”

and you’d be looking away

from those tickets, but couldn’t--

I’d try to figure out what great luck

and chance of a lifetime had just

passed me by, but I’d never ask.

“See you later,” you see

once you asked, he had you.

Now that Craig is gone, I wonder,

Did he think I was kind of a stiff?

       Stephen Lewandowski

WILL NIXON

                                             Will Nixon at Stewards in Voorheesville, New York

Will Nixon keeps Hudson Valley and beyond informed and amused at willnixon.com (Hudson Valley Poetry Blog) and through heads-up e-mails such as the sample below:

The city in my Love in the City of Grudges is Hoboken. I indulged in a Hoboken Week on my blog, posting pieces about Hoboken poets Joel Lewis and Jack Wiler (also an exterminator), plus the greatest, but least likely Hoboken writer of all, Edward Abbey, who wrote Desert Solitaire while stuck in town and frequenting Nelson's Marine Bar. Also, an On the Waterfront story. And a lonely night at Maxwells with the Suicide Commandos.

Michael Perkins, my good friend and co-author of Walking Woodstock, was a book critic for 30 years. He keeps introducing me to important books which, sad to say, I hadn't know of before. Two writers whom I'm now eager to read are William Bronk and Howard McCord. Plus, an interview with Janice King, who graced us for years at the Golden Notebook.

If you're a Hudson Valley hiker, try Beacon Mountain. I hadn't been to the fire tower since the 1980s. Now I've been back three times since the fall. Like Beacon, the mountain has gentrified, except when it hasn't. (You'll see when you get to the end

Will Nixon grew up in the Connecticut suburbs, spent his young adulthood in Hoboken and Manhattan, then moved to a Catskills log cabin in 1996 complete with a wood stove and mice. For years, he wrote environmental journalism, then turned to poetry and personal essays. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and listed in Best American Essays 2004. He now lives in Woodstock, NY with a wall thermostat for heat, but still can't get rid of the mice.

Mad Chemist

In the basement I fought World War One in dirt trenches

spread by trowel on the pool table. My mental soldiers

survived firecrackers catapulted by spoons, dive bomb

hand attacks by my little brother, earthquakes from our knees

drumming under the table. My father stopped the war

when Rex the cat began pooping in the dirt: “Your mother

doesn’t want you playing in bacteria.”

So I played mad chemist. I’d invent acid for burning

open safes; freezing fluids for ants, worms, and girls toes.

From brown bottles racked in my chemistry set, I mixed

bad odors and slow fizzles, but nothing burned from matches

dropped down blackened tubes. After my brother ratted,

my father locked the set in his closet: “Your mother

wants you to become a doctor, not a bomb maker.

Think about eating breakfast with no fingers.”

I picked his closet with a paper clip and took my chemistry set

to swamp with a bottle of Mountain Dew to mix my brother

a surprise. This formula would turn his hair blue, soften his teeth

like rubber. I drank my half of the Mountain Dew, then his half,

and held the bottle under slimy water, making it gurgle, until

a mucky head rose, a snapping turtle hooked like a claw.

My brother found the chemistry set in the swamp snow

rusty as an old can with spilled bottles of smelly ice.

My father punished me with no television for polluting

a wetland. He didn’t know the secret of the snapping turtle:

sipping chemicals, glowing green, breathing fire.

                                                              — Will Nixon

Reprinted with permission from My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse