The Tongue is an Eye

They Speak of Fruit

2009-11-15T12:54:00.003-05:00

My new chapbook, They Speak of Fruit, is now officially for sale at the Cooper Dillon Books website! I'm extremely honored and proud to be the first title on Cooper Dillon. They're set-up for great things. Support them by snagging a copy of They Speak of Fruit!

Thank you, readers, for your support and time over the years here at The Tongue is an Eye. I've been neglecting the blog lately... perhaps I should start this bad-boy up again. I've certainly been keeping up with all of you via RSS feeds.

Anyway, if you read They Speak of Fruit, lemme know what you think!

2009-09-15T22:18:00.000-04:00

Boo!

F. Daniel Rzicznek

2009-04-06T13:06:00.002-04:00

An incredible and insightful review of my good friend's first collection, Neck of the World, here, by Djelloul Marbrook.

Check it out, yo!

NaPoWriMo

2009-04-02T15:02:00.004-04:00

So I'm going to attempt NaPoWriMo at least in part. April, aside from December, is the busiest month of the year for me, but this will be a good exercise in many ways, even if I only get 10-15 poems in the next 30 days, that's 10-15 more poems than I'd normally write in April. And it'll propel me to really finish this project I'm working on by the end of the summer months.

Check me out over at from Viewings.

And be sure to check out and support all the other crazy, dedicated poets participating in this annual tradition of National Poetry Month, too.

Good luck, everyone!

I predict a penultimate (second-to-last?) finish...

2009-03-28T18:49:00.003-04:00

Young Teeth (my 2009 Fantasy Baseball team)

C -- Mike Napoli (LAA)
1B -- Ryan Howard (PHI)
2B -- Jose Lopez (SEA)
SS -- Michael Young (TEX)
3B -- Aramis Ramirez (CHC)
OF -- Manny Ramirez (LAD)
OF -- Ryan Ludwick (STL)
OF -- Adam Dunn (WAS)
UTIL -- Milton Bradley (CHC)
UTIL -- Jim Thome (CWS)
BN -- Mark Reynolds (ARI)
BN -- Jose Guillen (KC)
BN -- Jack Cust (OAK)
BN -- Ty Wigginton (BAL)

SP -- Carlos Zambrano (CHC)
SP -- Ryan Dempster (CHC)
SP -- Ben Sheets (MIL)
RP -- Kerry Wood (CLE)
RP -- Billy Wagner (NYM)
P -- Derek Lowe (LAD)
P -- Erik Bedard (SEA)
P -- Jered Weaver (LAA)
BN -- Kevin Gregg (CHC)
BN -- John Smoltz (BOS)

Good news...

2009-03-17T17:15:00.002-04:00

Some good news came across the wire today: a poem from my first manuscript (poem title: "A Miscarriage Scare at Bronson Methodist") is forthcoming in an issue of Boxcar Poetry Review.

Also, BOOM.

More on that later.

Oh Jean

2009-03-14T11:55:00.002-04:00

I love this song ("Oh Jean"). I love this band (The Proclaimers). I'm not ashamed. This isn't the best recording/video of the song, but it's all I could find. Below are the lyrics (without repetition, etc). Hope everyone's well out there.

Oh Jean

I'd never been lucky with girls I confess
Don't know who to blame for my lack of success
Cause even with ones up the back of a bus
There was always the risk of a slap in the puss

But Jean, Oh Jean You let me got lucky with you

The first time I met you it did cross my mind
The next time I saw you there wasn't the time
The third time I saw you I thought that I could
The fourth time I met you I knew that I would

But Jean, you get let me get lucky with you

I love her

I want you forever I want you for good
So I'm gonna treat you the way that I should
For your soul and body my heart'ss gonna pound
Even after the day that I'm laid in the ground

Cause Jean, Oh Jean you let me get lucky with you

Love her I love her.

I'm way behind here...

2009-03-05T15:31:00.004-05:00

F. Daniel Rzicznek reading at Columbia College at AWP 2009, Chicago.

These four photos (though the top two are the same piece) are from the Art Institute of Chicago from my trip to AWP last month. They are, in order, by and titled: "A Vision," 1925, oil on canvas, by Joseph Stella; "Red and Pink Rocks and Teeth," 1938, oil on canvas, by Georgia O'Keeffe; "Woman (Elevation)," 1927, bronze, by Gaston Lachaise.

I'm currently, as we speak, writing a triptych that involves these pieces. Word. More later, I hope.

from Howard Nemerov's essay, "On Poetry and Painting, with a Thought on Music"

2009-02-06T12:30:00.004-05:00

"Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within; maybe even more from within than by daylight, for many of their works in times now past had not the object of being viewed in daylight but went to do their magic in caves, in tombs, among the dead, and maybe as a substitute for daylight."

Oh holy shit that's beautiful.

They did what now?!?

2009-02-03T16:23:00.001-05:00

From the what-the-hell aisle of news stories:

"In what is being heralded as a "first-ever procedure," surgeons removed a healthy kidney through a donor's vagina, the Johns Hopkins Medical Center has announced."

-- from CNN.com

Quietly, I worship Charles Wright

2009-02-02T14:39:00.004-05:00

AFTER READING TU FU, I GO OUTSIDE TO THE DWARF ORCHARD

East of me, west of me, full summer.
How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.
Birds fly back and forth across the lawn
                                                       looking for home
As night drifts up like a little boat.

Day after day, I become of less use to myself.
Like this mockingbird,
                             I flit from one thing to the next.
What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?
Tomorrow is dark.
                      Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.

The sky dogs are whimpering.
Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening
                                             up from the damp grass.
Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day,
Go quietly, quietly.

Superbowl Recap...

2009-02-02T12:23:00.003-05:00

That was a great game. But this picture of Auden watching the pre-game (he went to bed right after kick-off) is even better.

More to come later, should time allow.

2009-01-30T19:49:00.001-05:00

Auden watching me while I make random noises with my lips.

Rilke sleeping with one eye open, guarding her toy.

Daddy, I tired.

I'm drooling, but I'm happy!

We're bad parents... thing is though, he never woke up! And he only stayed like that for 10 seconds, tops. Haha!

holy wow

2009-01-30T19:47:00.000-05:00

The Prayer for Pigs

O God, my swineherd God,
send me two pigs please

to swallow my two demons;
drive them like nails into

the poor pigs’ brains—better
make it three, three pigs.

Maurice Manning from Free Verse

ekphrastic poems?

2009-01-30T10:27:00.002-05:00

Hey all! So I just completed a draft of an ekphrastic sequence based on Eric Fischl's "The Bed, the Chair" series of paintings. I sent the poem to a friend, a trusted, smart, critical reader. He mentioned that I was focusing too much on the theme, the subject of the paintings rather than the methodology, the brush stroke, the framing, etc of the art itself. This got me thinking that what I'd really like to do in this mode is straddle the line between the two extremes. I want to be invested in the theme/subject AND the brush stroke/creation of the art. This leads me to my question.

What are some great (contemporary or late modern... I know the classics, I think) ekphrastic poems that I might look at as examples and models?

Help me out here, folks!

Larry Levis

2009-01-29T14:43:00.000-05:00

Those Graves in Rome

There are places where the eye can starve,
But not here. Here, for example, is
The Piazza Navona, & here is his narrow room
Overlooking the Steps & the crowds of sunbathing
Tourists. And here is the Protestant Cemetery
Where Keats & Joseph Severn join hands
Forever under a little shawl of grass
And where Keats' name isn't even on
His gravestone, because it is on Severn's,
And Joseph Severn's infant son is buried
Two modest, grassy steps behind them both.
But you'd have to know the story--how bedridden
Keats wanted the inscription to be
Simple, & unbearable: "Here lies one
Whose name is writ in water." On a warm day,
I stood here with my two oldest friends.
I thought, then, that the three of us would be
Indissoluble at the end, & also that
We would all die, of course. And not die.
And maybe we should have joined hands at that
Moment. We didn't. All we did was follow
A lame man in a rumpled suit who climbed
A slight incline of graves blurring into
The passing marble of other graves to visit
The vacant home of whatever is not left
Of Shelley & Trelawney. That walk uphill must
Be hard if you can't walk. At the top, the man
Wheezed for breath; sweat beaded his face,
And his wife wore a look of concern so
Habitual it seemed more like the way
Our bodies, someday, will have to wear stone.
Later that night, the three of us strolled,
Our arms around each other, through the Via
Del Corso & toward the Piazza di Espagna
As each street grew quieter until
Finally we heard nothing at the end
Except the occasional scrape of our own steps,
And so we said good-bye. Among such friends,
Who never allowed anything, still alive,
To die, I'd almost forgotten that what
Most people leave behind them disappears.
Three days later, staying alone in a cheap
Hotel in Naples, I noticed a child's smeared
Fingerprints on a bannister. It
Had been indifferently preserved beneath
A patina of varnish applied, I guessed, after
The last war. It seemed I could almost hear
His shout, years later, on that street. But this
Is speculation, & no doubt the simplest fact
Could shame me. Perhaps the child was from
Calabria, & went back to it with
A mother who failed to find work, & perhaps
The child died there, twenty years ago,
Of malaria. It was so common then--
The children crying to the doctors for quinine.
It was so common you did not expect an aria,
And not much on a gravestone, either--although
His name is on it, & weathered stone still wears
His name--not the way a girl might wear
The too large, faded blue workshirt of
A lover as she walks thoughtfully through
The Via Fratelli to buy bread, shrimp,
And wine for the evening meal with candles &
The laughter of her friends, & later the sweet
Enkindling of desire; but something else, something
Cut simply in stone by hand & meant to last
Because of the way a name, any name,
Is empty. And not empty. And almost enough.

F. Daniel Rzicznek

2009-01-27T15:04:00.002-05:00

A poem from my friend, my co-editor, and one of my favorite young poets. This one's from AGNI online.

Narrows

You slumber through the afternoon,
turning under the waves like weather,
and now, after dinner, after rosé,

my knuckles smack of charred cedar:
the plank we soaked to grill

the white-pink heaps of walleye.
Smoke of continuance
strung across me now, straight blade
of radio through the gut-low trees
yielding halfway to the stone fence.
(Your bronzed clouds, lobster sun,
and the rain clinging to itself just as the idea of rain clings
to itself-refuses sky, refuses to stay.)

obsessed...

2009-01-26T12:55:00.003-05:00

I am obsessed with Eric Fischl's series of paintings titled, "The Bed, the Chair...." In fact, I'm writing a series of poems loosely based on the paintings. I've been previously obsessed with Fischl's work. I wrote, and published in Copper Nickel, a poem titled, "Tumbling Woman" which came out of Fischl's sculpture of the same name.

The above painting is titled, "The Bed, the Chair, Changing."

"Fire" and "Narrow Flame"

2009-01-25T10:32:00.004-05:00

I love this poem, too. Thanks for posting it Mathias!

Oh how I adore Linda Gregerson's work:

Narrow Flame

Dark still. Twelve degrees below freezing.
              Tremor along
       the elegant, injured right front

leg of the gelding on the cross-ties. Kneeling
              girl.
       The undersong of waters as she bathes

the leg in yet more cold. [tongue is broken]
              [god to me]
       Her hair the color of winter wheat.

While Reading Neruda's Elemental Odes, I Keep Remembering This Poem Instead

2009-01-24T13:46:00.002-05:00

The Song of Despair

by Pablo Neruda, translated by W.S. Merwin

The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.

Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!

Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.

In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the song birds rose.

You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!

It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.

Pilot’s dread, fury of a blind diver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!

In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!

I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.

Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.

Like a jar you housed the infinite tenderness,
and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.

There was the black solitude of the islands,
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.

There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle.

Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me
in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!

How terrible and brief was my desire of you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.

Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.

Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.

Oh the mad coupling of hope and force
in which we merged and despaired.

And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.
And the word scarcely begun on the lips.

This was my destiny and in it was the voyage of my longing,
and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!

Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you,
what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned!

From billow to billow you still called and sang.
Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel.

You still flowered in songs, you still broke in currents.
Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well.

Pale blind diver, luckless slinger,
lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
which the night fastens to all the timetables.

The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.

Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Only the tremulous shadow twists in my hands.

Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.

It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one.

I Wordled my Manuscript and this Happened

2009-01-24T12:56:00.002-05:00

Check it out and do it yourself here.

Adam Clay from Fou, No. 2

2009-01-22T14:03:00.003-05:00

http://www.foumagazine.net/

And Snow Is What Snow Has Always Been

Of course a quilt is a house—

And of course you can become so enamored
with an image that you become it:

like the snow all over town
and like the snow
all over town you become it.

You have far-reaching talent for
mass appeal and for sending a few thousand birds
a few thousands miles south. And when it is March
you might even melt a bit but you are last
to tuck us in at night
and last to think a thought we wish we had:

what we croon is what we have a deed to, and the deed
is some thing we think we thought we always had.

now that's poetry...

2009-01-21T16:45:00.002-05:00

Text of the benediction by Rev. Joseph Lowery during President Barack Obama's inauguration, as transcribed by CQ Transcriptions:

–––

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou, who has brought us thus far along the way, thou, who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee, lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee.

Shadowed beneath thy hand, may we forever stand true to thee, oh God, and true to our native land.

We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we've shared this day.

We pray now, oh Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant Barack Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his administration.

He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national, and indeed the global, fiscal climate. But because we know you got the whole world in your hands, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations.

Our faith does not shrink though pressed by the flood of mortal ills.

For we know that, Lord, you are able and you're willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds, and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor, of the least of these, and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.

We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president, to inspire our nation to believe that yes we can work together to achieve a more perfect union.

And while we have sown the seeds of greed – the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.

And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.

And as we leave this mountain top, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.

Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little angelic Sasha and Malia.

We go now to walk together as children, pledging that we won't get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone.

With your hands of power and your heart of love, help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nations shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid, when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around ... when yellow will be mellow ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.

"Ill Lit" by Franz Wright

2009-01-20T15:12:00.002-05:00

I've been ignoring the blog, I think, out of fear. I don't want this space to turn into a diary, a selfish log of my personal highlights and lowlights. There's nothing wrong with that type of blog; in fact, I love reading blogs of that nature. That said, I just want to get away from that for awhile. Instead, though I'll still post the occasional good news or pictures of Auden, I think I'll focus on posting some poems and whatnot for awhile. Think of it as a space for sharing what turns me on, in the poetic sense of course. Hope all of you are well.

Ill Lit

Leaves stir overhead;
I write what I'm given to write.

The extension cord to the black house.

gone for two months, and now a favor

2009-01-15T15:49:00.002-05:00

I know, I've been gone for two months and I return with a question that begs for answering... but here I am anyway. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Main Street Rag's Poetry Book Contest. What do you know about it? Reputable? I've seen a couple of their books... they are very well done... but do they consistently publish good poets? This is perhaps an unfair question, but I ask it anyway. Looking forward to any and all of your thoughts.