Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Shamsan

Kali

CEO

of

Desire
dead

Phun-KAY
mama
of
Mortuaries
Funerals
finality

you sexay thang

with 50 severed heads
on yr matronly hips
Kali Mama
of night,
astride your lover's corpse,
your ass
shimmies
and tidal waves roll

when the waves came across the Bay of Bengal
when the islands were submerged
when the islands rose again from glassy-again oceans
when the shore came over the peoples' heads
when the sure heads of peoples came in waves on the land
where was Kali?
did Kali dance a powerful, smiling, many-armed dance
across the wave-wrath waterlogged devastation
across the many-named realities of polytheistic heritage—
did Kali nurse a wretched, homeless, gutter-and-landfill mama's pain
across the teardrop waterlogged devastation
across the paths of hell she's used to walking in slums in West Bengal?

Desire
dead.

This is a powerful and well-crafted poem, Joel. Thanks for posting it.


--NM

when buddha suggested that
we contemplate decay and death
CNN news hadn't been invented

now we have wall to wall
death and rape and depravity
shiva jacking off with all hands

The initial scrawl, mr. joel, was not meant to suggest any particular religious viewpoint; indeed, quite the opposite (tho' Kali as metaphor does sizzle rather effectively). That said, I enjoyed your response, and I suspect that piece required quite a few more nanoseconds than my own (u too can be a beat poet in less than 2 weeks! send now for phreeeee information).

Worse than any Hindu fear or superstition, however, were the fundie xtians who, after the tsunami had killed 300 grand or more, went into their chapels (or cathedrals, mosques, temples, etc) and gave thanks to Gott, and more or less said He works in mysterious ways. As with Voltaire's descriptions of the Lisbon quake in Candide, the wave should serve as a reminder to any monotheists of the absurdity of their faith: if their Gott exists, he is some Tamerlane-like being (Stalin, Hitler, etc) many times over.

u too can be a beat poet in less than 2 weeks! send now for phreeeee information

I find Joel's work to be more in keeping with a classic sonnet writer.

I've known him for 8 years (? maybe more) and I don't think I've read one piece of his that sounded "beat" or strived for that genre.

He likes (and is very adept at) more formal, metered, structured verse.



(I'm sure he will correct me if my assessment is in error)

I loved his response! Very well written poetry.

Perhaps. The beat poet ad wasn't for him. But I tend to agree with Ezra Pound who thought sonnets were like over pretty much with Shakespeare; and most of the poesy Pound (and Eliot, really) praised--say Herrick or Marvell--was generally not sonnet form or even iambic--; that is except for say Alex Pope, who nearly always writes in iambic pent.; not that I worship the men Pound worshipped (for one I think PB Shelley was a greater poet than Pound thought (tho' I think Pound respected PBS)---and PBS did not generally write in sonnets--tho' Ozymandias is I guess (Petrarchan methinks)). Pound rarely used the form; nor does say WC Williams. But poet at least in classic sense I am not anyhoo, but prose writer, and filosophe. (Pound thought classical verse was over like sometime after Verdun). That said, I agree that his verse response was cool. Ave, Mr. Joel! -----Perhaps this could be the beginning of the Tsunami Cantos

Tsunami cantos....!!! you´re crazy, but I like it!!

T. CANTO XII

Swollen, wine-dark surge,
O Palinurus, time's own helmsman, knew ye:
whether ycleped
Indian or balmier
Atlantic, glassy abode
of Oceania, to your infinities
assorted rogues and royals sink in
perfidy, invidious as the
bleak-eyed beasts who
prowl thine bloody chasms.

Gravity knows no human strictures,
and fiery orbs, no comforts proffer--
spun from obscure vectors solaric,
liquid tombs of spinnakers and galleons
to spectral heights arise, gather
translucent, to hurl with blinding spasms
o'er steaming, shark-swirled bays,
towards the humaned shores
and with few scant moments
of aqueous terror to mortuaries
and mere chaos the temples,
fair ports and sundry dwellings
of mortals convert.........

Continplate on Percy Bysshe Shelley's funeral pyre
While I play my lyre
Shall we sing for the poetry of desire


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Yeah that was a pyre of desire, Dtd. Po' Percay Byatch. Went down with the ship, supposedly clutching his Sophocles in greek (Italians found a corpse, his face eaten, with the nice English schoolboy clothes and sophocles in greek in his pockets). Laird Byron promptly seized the corpse, built his mutha-f-n classical pyre on the shore, and he and Trelawny I believe partied as the boy's corpse burnt, at one time snatching his heart out of the blaze. Poesy.

My own sense is that Shelley was one of a very few authentic English bards---with a greater--and more philosophical and scientific mind than Schackspeare hisself--- and quite a few steps higher on Mt Parnassus than say Tt boy Eliot. But he was put in the "romantic" box, and so most in consumer land don't really understand what he was about; Thanatoids---even hip ones who like smoke reefer and have their favorite Kerouac gap ad on VHS along with a Jenna Jameson trailer--don't know F. about Percay Byatch.

But what of Keats???? Same "box" or out in a field of his own???? Seems like the best way to take it all in is to simply detach and get lost in the "woods". Will the consumers find their way out or be as one with "nature of nurture"????
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Honda XR series

Keats produced some exquisite writing, perhaps, but I do not think he possessed the great philosophic vision that Shelley--or Coleridge did. Keats is more Mozartian, decorative; Shelley, Chopin, somber, tragic. (And that said, I tend to rank composers (and real philosophers--say Russell) quite above poets and ahhhtists anyways. Viva Chopin!). But read Shelley's blank verse vision Alastor closely (required for all hepcats in Beatnik 101): whoa. Sort of EA Poe times 10. Oh EA Poe another authentic writer pretty much forgotten--- or commodified--by Thanatopia. Poesy and fiction now seems sort of like a soft-porn industry--some ho will write page after page of Dear Diary---how sweet the snatch!!-----and death never makes an appearance, war never makes an appearance, economics never makes an appearance, tragedy never makes an appearance.

Thanatopia???? There are some dairies out there that hit the nail on the head and some that are a waste of a tree and time. I've got this one dairy that I found one time. I call it "Dairy By An Unknown Hand". Written by someone who after I read it is kind of messed up. But it's interesting never the less. Love Chopin!!!! But I love Beethoven the most!!!! He's Austrian and so I'm I!!!! Some of those hepkats look to Shelly and see the real and those who think they are think they are turn out to be a load of....well you know what the word is after they read him and proclaim themselves as akin to him!!!! Poe on the other hand talk about the real real.
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