If you're in the Portland (Oregon) area please join us on Sunday, September 28th at Powell's on Hawthorne. We'll be hosting poet Stanley Plumly as the jewel in our Week of the Odes celebration. The acclaimed poet and Keats scholar will draw you wonderfully into the truths and beauties about the afterlife of the Romantic poet, John Keats. Find out what makes poetry truly poetry.
Plumly's acclaimed new book, Posthumous Keats, is the result of 20 years of reflection on the enduring poetry of one of England's greatest Romanticists. Incisive in its observations and beautifully written, this work is an ode to the man who saw his mortality as fatal to his poetry. This event is free. Bring a friend or two.
Click here to read about Stanley Plumly
Praise for Posthumous Keats
The New Yorker / The New York Times
The Washington Post / The Los Angeles Times
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The Power of Julia
A few years ago I wrote
a poem of admiration for a fellow poet
that brought people whooping to their feet.
I sat down, flushed and gleeful.
“If you’re going to write a tribute poem,”
barked Julia, “At least write a good one.”
I was, in fact, in the middle of composing
a poem about Julia herself.
Ever since, however, I’ve been too afraid
to write a single word about her.
And that, ladies and gentlemen,
is the only reason you’re not hearing
an ode to Julia from me today.
(For Julia Vinograd
by Jan Steckel, 2008
www.jansteckel.com)
V for Vonnegut: Ode to Kurt Vonnegut
(1923 – 2007)
By Mark Lysgaard
God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut
as you emerged from the Monkey House.
The Player Piano struck hollow tunes,
but you gave us Kilgore Trout.
We skated through Cat’s Cradle
on Ice Nine’s chain reactions.
We heard the Sirens of Titan
and Rumfoord’s quantum actions.
We saw Billy Pilgrim’s Slaughterhouse
and trips to Tralfamadore.
We felt his life in four dimensions,
but we always wanted more.
We woke to Breakfast of Champions
And Dwayne Hoover’s used car lot;
going mad with self absorption.
and neurosis stirred in plot.
Thank you also for Slapstick
and to feel “Lonesome no more,”
And our artificial aunts and uncles
on the planet Tralfamadore.
Thank you also for Jailbird
and Dead Eye Dick’s Rudy Waltz;
becoming a neuter for the neutron bomb
Made us question, who’s at fault?
So thank you Kurt for the humor you gave
and your books of whimsy and panache,
and all the words you spoke below
That satirical and rye mustache.
ODES
no ise
splendooruende
spyder hangs on spyder’s silk
to the well there solid in dirty
half white moon shoring
up earth whose cast
iron grate lain across
the top where bolts secure
wind
plays them like instrument sky
blue-ish & sound
a city half
engineering keeps
you from larger
thing from falling
in yr embraces against it so
that if we all go long enough so
familiar, cat, appear, reaching
in claws around at moths our
window telling us it’s time
to do something wears a ladder
three painted rungs
deep, should one need to escape
to grate scored face slip what
won’t get out yr
decorative rock
bottom we accent yr vista
has stacked up my day’s took
unusable candles brooms
& several small potted
plants permissive stars
face above
arbitrary, dew, spun
(for no one, by Jared Schickling)
While Listening to the Professor Emeritus
Explicate Ode on a Grecian Urn
I imagine Johnny Keats taking a pot
he found at a yard sale in Liverpool
to the Antiques Roadshow. He looks askance
at the tv camera and explains to
the Sotheby expert that other bargain
hunters went for the Toby jugs and
overlooked the divine proportions of
this Hellenic antiquity, for which
he paid the equivalent of a pint
of ale. Unfortunately, the expert
replies, that’s about all it’s worth. But our
romantic poet won’t give up easily--
What about the happy pipers, the leafy
boughs, the peaceful town, the lovers about
to kiss, the Greek inscription. Yes, the expert
smiles and motions for security. Yes,
Mr. Keats, you are quite observant in
your way, but be a good chap and take your pot,
a mass-produced mishmash of motifs and
styles some enterprising hack pieced together
for the tourist trade, and run along, all right?
This was stolen from the Elgin marbles,
this from the Parthenon frieze, this from the
Portland vase, this from a Wedgwood jasper.
Get the picture, Mr. Keats? The truth can be
ugly but sometimes ugliness is all we have.
Find a nice spot for it in your flat
And enjoy your pot, Mr. Keats.
Have you tried unloading it on eBay?
Ode on a Grecian Formula
You never age, my frozen father-time,
And I, the youngest child of elder sires
Watched as the years marched—slid—decayed
A grinning sailor, suave stock broker, you
Wrapped in a shroud of ash, sewn into silence
Not immortal after all. Every daughter knows,
Even when you swerved your station wagon
Home from darkened bars and alibis.
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
Which suburban nightmare chased you up the curb?
Rude awakenings, pallid offices, dental bills,
Loud laughter of ungrateful offspring
Offended your hungover ear, did not endear
Us to any answer but your leather belt.
Six children, a half-dozen too many
For one so neat, a shiner of shoes, a lover of
Silence, a violence of temper at disarray.
Each day you fought your demons but they
Tantalized with highballs and high life,
Also known as TV, remote, recliner, sleep.
Happy actors, talking fast in black and white
Frozen forever in grey flannel youth:
Jimmy Stewart stuttering joyfully,
Forever Atticus, a gleaming Gregory Peck.
The flickering dreams, where black hair
Sweeps forever back, reflecting light,
Rejecting white, protecting them from
Human frailty. Unlike you. Your temples
Clouded, and you fought with tonic
The telltale signs of age, of fate, of time.
Would anyone notice the comb of mystery?
Reagan got away with dyeing, but he died
Unmourned by you, a thief, and Nixon too.
To me, they all looked just like you.
The pinstriped three-piece dilemma, baby-blue shirt
The white collar, the wide seventies tie,
How hard was it to get up every day,
And see your promise daily slide into
A quiet desperate covering of the gray?
A formula for fantasies. You have to try.
Oh august parent with the stained undershirt
A god, I thought, until your thunderbolts
Struck to close to the heart of our matter,
And you fell, a mortal, foolish, and finally
Graying, gracefully, before the darkness came.
When old age shall my generation waste,
You shall remain, though photos do not show,
Your true self, your remains for us to know.
Brows are furrowed, memories are burned
Your beauty was not bought, but urned.
the assignment was to write an ode....
Ode To Fear
Fear of falling
Fear of failing
Flailing flapping
Never napping, fear.
Paralyzing, sterilizing dark prince,
guard against danger, anger, bad impression.
Nemesis of fire, cliffs,
snakes rattling in the grass.
In your debt
for searing images of broken bodies
wretched pain
worse yet, death,
I slow and think my steps.
When I am brave, more sweet
the blackberry,deep inside its thorny briar,
but it is fear, my companion at the bridge
where I might fling my soul to glorious eternity.
Oh shifting tool of survival
Experienced and useful guide,
we two are tied from birth,
necessary partners, our worth,
the sum of what we save from harm.
Earnest Ode
When the sailors are sick of seal fat and salt,
the captain leaves his men like urchins, sails
with a carpenter to South Georgia Island
to climb a mountain in Wellingtons.
Boots suited to plant hydrangeas in the spring
mud of London. He crawls up a glacier of rock,
ice hinged on the South pole. Spring never arrives here with signs of dirt. It unbuckles
from the island of ice the captain staggered over with twenty-seven men and the cook’s cat,
Mrs. Chippy, the only one left for dead.
Another hunches over his typewriter, thumbs
his beard and tries to write from a spit of marsh
land in Florida. His night sweats smell of hotel
sheets in Cuba, where he never writes or sleeps.
So he returns to the Keys, stales the day
with his six-toed cat, Diego. Sure, there’s gazelle
heads, the tiger from Bengal, but he doesn’t like to look at cats. He likes to say the word nada,
Our nada who art in nada and sees his father
as an old man on a bridge, somewhere with snow.
And yet, it’s the puppet that gets us.
More monster than man, muppets live together
on one street, where all animals speak.
Unlike Mt. Olympus, muppets don’t travel
much. They teach us to share, like the one
who lives with his partner in a small apartment.
He ruffles Bert’s hair, buys him pajamas,
and writes him songs he sings in the bath,
keeps the door open enough, so Bert will hear
Yes, I'd like to visit the moon
But I don't think I'd like to live there
Though I'd like to look down at the earth from above I would miss all the places and people
I love.
Elegiac Ode to Thanksgiving Turkey
Icon of the harvest, you once stood,
queen of living flesh and whistling bone, both
earth mother and earth eagle of the northern wood
you fed on hidden wisdom, seeds of growth
and offered your sacred soul to the fair
who’s battles with the first people, over land to claim
challenged ancient feminine wisdom. Wear
feathers of together. Commit to nests of the same;
where your sisters lie, you lay
eggs, oblivious to the black
rage of ownership. Thanks to the giving on this day.
Lessons of native totems. Go back.
Return to the shared blessings.
Praise the bounty of the bird.
-Wendy Thompson
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