Tag astrology

* in the trees with John Ashbery & new work

José Angel Araguz 4 Comments

After many walks in the snow the body learns a new rhythm. At least that’s what it’s felt like these past few weeks. I’ve got myself a mean snow trudge.

What I admire about John Ashbery is the way he can keep his line close to the shifts of not his mind but the mind of the poem. In the poem below, whose rhyming couplets have a music that sneaks up on you rather than chimes on in, I feel a recognition of what is termed “puzzling light.”

Not the kind of light that leaves you puzzled (past tense) but a sense of light as vision, where you look at something and keep seeing new things in it, puzzling out what there is.

Like steps in deep snow: each a different mark and feel.

* and miles to go and all that *

* and miles to go and all that *

Some Trees – John Ashbery

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

***

Happy accenting!

Jose

p.s. I am happy to announce that I have 3 poems in the latest issue of the Inflectionist Review. Check them out here. Special thanks to John Sibley Williams and A. Molotkov for giving these poems a home.

* fitting in with Edward Arlington Robinson

José Angel Araguz 1 Comment

Octave XI – Edward Arlington Robinson

STILL through the dusk of dead, blank-legended,
And unremunerative years we search
To get where life begins, and still we groan
Because we do not find the living spark
Where no spark ever was; and thus we die,
Still searching, like poor old astronomers
Who totter off to bed and go to sleep,
To dream of untriangulated stars.

* I hate being that guy *

* I hate being that guy *

I’ve been dipping my head into the work of E. A. Robinson again.  He was a contemporary (and at times considered a rival of) Robert Frost.  He led a pretty bleak life: in his twenties, drinking and money problems had him kinda lost.

He eventually found a patron/friend/savior in the form of President Theodore Roosevelt, who, after becoming aware of his work, set him up with steady work hoping to keep him writing.  And it did.

I love this story because of what it says about not fitting in.  After reading him long enough, I’ve become convinced that some part of him was aware of not fitting in, and put it to work in his poems.

What I love about the octave above is the use (a successful use) of the words “unremunerative” and “untriangulated” – how the long words draw attention to themselves, almost seem not to fit in.  But they do, both in rhythm and sense: triangulated stars are those close enough to be measured.  The phrase “untriangulated stars” refers to those stars too distant to be measured.

That, to me, is the beauty of not fitting in: sometimes it comes in a way that is moving and encouraging.

Happy (not) fitting in!

Jose