Tag: Poets

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Totem Press, Yugen – Imamu Amiri Baraka — 1960s: Days of Rage

Charles Olson, Projective Verse (1959). Cover by Matsumi Kanemitsu. “On the same small offset press, and as an arm of his magazine Yugen, LeRoi Jones’s Totem Press imprint published thirteen pamphlets, beginning with Diane di Prima’s This Kind of Bird Flies Backward in 1958. The press also published work by Ron Loewinsohn (Watermelons, 1959), Michael […]

Totem Press, Yugen – Imamu Amiri Baraka — 1960s: Days of Rage
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E.E. Cummings — The Vale of Soul-Making

into the strenuous briefness
Life:
handorgans and April
darkness,friends
 
i charge laughing.
Into the hair-thin tints
of yellow dawn,
into the women-coloured twilight
 
i smilingly
glide.  I
into the big vermilion departure
swim,sayingly;
 
(Do you think?)the
i do,world
is probably made
of roses & hello:
 
(of solongs and,ashes)

— E.E. Cummings, ” [into the strenuous briefness],” 100 Selected Poems (Grove Press January 10, 1994) Originally published 1954.

E.E. Cummings — The Vale of Soul-Making

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William Ernest Henley

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley (1875) Published 1888.

William Ernest Henley — The Vale of Soul-Making

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The Bard Of Hollywood – Charles Bukowski

The Bard of Hollywood

By Marcus D. Niski

He was a tough motherfucker
at least he’d like to have
us think that he was.

Everyday he’d get up
And start drinking and writing
Writing and drinking.

Yet under that
beer barrel chest
lay the heart of a lion,
a heart of gold

He gave us his best stuff
Fresh from the suburbs, the factories
the pool halls, the wastelands, the racetracks, the detritus
of urban life.

He never gave up
and never
gave in until
he gave his last
which as good as his best

He never understood
the human condition
because he was always striving.

‘He didn’t think much of them’
The Humans that is.

One of the most acute observers,
He laid his soul bare

And he told of the blood, the puss
the stink, the shit, the beauty, the horror
and the mundanity of life.

He lived life
To its fullest
despite his own queer
deviations.

Bukowski
was a one-shot deal
An original even if it’s a clique
To suggest it.

His writing lives on
In eternity
To grace us with its realness,
Its sorrows

And its beauty.

[MN] 15 January 2020

Dedicated to Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) – one of my great literary heroes.

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The Picture is The Title – by wallyRe

wallyRe is an Austrian sound artist, poet and photographer. This poem – the third part of a triptych – pays homage to the works of the Dada and Surrealist poets as well as the technique of chance operations as articulated by artists such as John Cage. More about wally Re can be found at her website: wallyre.net  

Image & Poem Text © wallyRe 2021