Bournemouth, England

[Bernie01]

(new final verses---)


Winter
slick as a dinner knife;
ducks stare, zinc eyes,
bottoms brown
as tobacco leaf;

December speaks
Turkish or slow
Japanese
I cannot translate.

Watched you sail,
alone, bare headed;
shouting to skeins
of green waves;

Sea caps destined
to reach shore,
children return home
older than we recall.

At pier's end,
a light fluctuates
as if drunk.

Grains of dust
touch my shoulders.
My watch misplaced,
the left shoe scuffed.
Shop windows
shine back an old man.

I suddenly begin to cry.
The effect a man's face
wet in the rain waiting
for for a taxi
no longer running.


new last verse

The rain picks up.
I suddenly begin to cry,
my face wet like a man
waiting for a taxi
no longer running.



0RIGINAL

Winter
slick as a dinner knife;
ducks stare, zinc eyes,
bottoms brown
as tobacco leaf;

December speaks
Turkish or slow
Japanese
I cannot translate.

Watched you sail,
alone, bare headed;
shouting to skeins
of green waves;

Sea caps destined
to reach shore,
children return home
older than we recall.

At pier's end a light
fluctuates as if drunk.

England dark
at 4 o’clock;
short days open
like a dance fan,
sea side orchestra.
Ja Da.






https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUMuDWDVd20

[BobBradshaw]

This reads like a lovely postcard. I especially like the images, the winter cold 'slick as a dinner knife', the children returning older, and that exclamation point of Ja Da at the end...

However, the poem would work better if the next to last stanza was stronger, setting us up for that remarkable closing.

[FranktheFrank]

Yes, dark at four p.m.
it's always been like that.
Cut the Ja Da? does little for me.
Very good poem.

[Bernie01]

(new final verses---)


Winter
slick as a dinner knife;
ducks stare, zinc eyes,
bottoms brown
as tobacco leaf;

December speaks
Turkish or slow
Japanese
I cannot translate.

Watched you sail,
alone, bare headed;
shouting to skeins
of green waves;

Sea caps destined
to reach shore,
children return home
older than we recall.

At pier's end,
a light fluctuates
as if drunk.

Grains of dust
touch my shoulders.
My watch misplaced,
the left shoe scuffed.

The shop windows
shine back an old man.

Walking,
I suddenly begin to cry.
The effect
is a man's face
wet by rain while waiting
for a taxi stopped running./b]

[Bernie01]

thanks guys.


Bob, a new final verse....verses...


Frank----it kills me, but i killed that Ja Da business.


bernie

[FranktheFrank]

Ha,
you'll be a better poet for it.
We all find we have to drop our favourites
at times.

[BobBradshaw]

Maybe change the ending to

I suddenly begin to cry,
the rain picking up—
an old man standing
in soggy shoes,
late at night, the taxis
no longer running

[Bernie01]

Bob:

great suggestion. you got me unstuck from a writing block....just couldn't seem to get that rain/crying/taxi sequence right.

i wanted the taxi for the pathos, this man at a winter beach---the rain masking his sudden, unexpected tears.

I admire Kees---as so many poets do---here from the internet:

On July 19, 1955, Kees’ car was found in a bank of fog by the Golden Gate Bridge, keys in the ignition. When his mother was told he’d jumped off the bridge, she protested, “But he was never the athletic type!”

Born in Nebraska in 1914, the missing poet is most certainly dead by now, no matter what happened in 1955. But what’s almost more fascinating than the mystery of Kees’ fate is the divide between artists and scholars over the writer’s legacy on American poetry. “My interest in Kees has nothing to do with his suicide,” says California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia. “I simply think his work is spectacularly powerful.” Gioia says that for most scholars, Kees is a mere footnote, dismissed as a minor poet when compared with Robert Lowell or Elizabeth Bishop. The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry doesn’t even mention Kees, and the only biography of him, Vanished Act, was written by a poet, rather than an academic.

But for poets themselves, including Gioia, it’s another story. Gioia finds Kees’ body of work staggering, modern, finely tuned to an age of media and cynicism. Kees even inspired a book of essays and poems, Aspects of Robinson, by dozens of poets who have been been influenced by him. Despite his near absence from scholarly lists of important poets and not being taught in college, Kees has “grabbed dozens of poets by the throat and changed their work,” Gioia says.

And he wasn’t just a poet either. Kees was “a one-man avant-garde,” Gioia says. He wrote a novel in the early 1940s that remained unpublished because Knopf deemed it too unpatriotic in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor; he also made experimental films, was a modestly successful painter, wrote jazz ballads and scored a film. Kees was married for a while, but his alcoholic wife had a psychotic breakdown that led to their divorce, and he maintained a barbiturate habit that exacerbated his bipolar disorder. He ran in the same circles as Pauline Kael, William Carlos Williams and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and he had a cat whom he called Lonesome.

It’s Kees’ poetry that is the most revered of his creative work, particularly four poems published in The New Yorker that tell the story of a Prufrock-esque everyman named Robinson. “Kees is always departing,” says James Reidel, author of Vanished Act. “He doesn’t write a book of Robinson poems, doesn’t exploit his creation.” Reidel notes how Kees’ moving from one art to another was a struggle against the “existential rigidity” of committing to just one thing. Some have insinuated that he never became famous because he couldn’t commit to being a poet, but the fact remains that while his paintings and films are decent, his poems powerfully chronicle a low-key apocalypse. Kees’ work is so evocative that many have been tempted to seek clues to his personality in his most famous character, Robinson. And for clues to his fate? Robinson is “afraid, drunk, sobbing,” but he never launches himself off a bridge, runs away to Mexico or has all-night conversations with a young Pete Hamill.

So what really happened to Kees? Reidel believes he jumped, and Gioia says he’s “almost certain” that Kees, who was obsessed with the Golden Gate, met his end there. If he’d fled to Mexico, Reidel reckons, Kees’ creative drive would have led to new notoriety, rather than sipping tequila on a beach until the end of his days. “It would have been impossible,” Gioia says, “for him to disappear quietly.”

bernie

[Bernie01]

Frank---


here is the root of that JA DA phrase that haunts me.....in this poem the two names mentioned are american movie stars---not known today.

notice how the poet repeats the first line at the conclusion. for me, it is a moody statement, meditative.

1926

BY WELDON KEES

The porchlight coming on again,
Early November, the dead leaves
Raked in piles, the wicker swing
Creaking. Across the lots
A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.

An orange moon. I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.

I did not know them then.
My airedale scratches at the door.
And I am back from seeing Milton Sills
And Doris Kenyon. Twelve years old.
The porchlight coming on again.


bernie

[FranktheFrank]

If you like that Da Ja, if you feel its
important, or just has to be there then please
reinstate it Bernie. Sometimes we have to go
what we prefer.

That porchlight is interesting, it comes and goes in poems
when I first used it i thought it new, refreshing, but I see
you use it and I see from your references above that it
may even be overused, but if it feels right, why not.

I mea one day we are going to run out of words run out of metaphor
and similies, and then we have to usee them.

I drove to see her late that night
unexpectedly, without notice. I raced
up the path, the porch light was on,
she was in, but she wasn't in, she'd gone.

Despair closed in like a fog, life
has never been the same.
Always that dream, the lightouse
shining, the foghorn calling
out of the mist, the waves lapping,
my life ebbs away.

[Bernie01]

imagery.....



a favorite poem is "Red and Black Lake", in which a straightforward storm on the water ends with a superb image:

"Then the rain breaks loose in long curtains / that tuck themselves up from the asphalt in the glare of the headlights."






do you have a favorite?

[FranktheFrank]

B.
Not really.

[Bernie01]

F---


it makes sense.

and as a former Waters poet, Sara Jane Sloat, says:

Evening lowers its blue wing.



and:

Excuse me while I wring this long swim out of my hair



sometimes listening to an empty headed speaker, blah blah blah.....i would just silently say to myself this line from Sara.



bernie

[SivaRamanathan]

B

Thanks for the coaching.
I always share what you say in my group.
My grandmother used to say,'It rains in blankets.' The rain pricks us like needles. My daughter when she was very small smail,'his Adam's apple moves like marble in a soda bottle' And I, I steal these phrase.

S

[BobBradshaw]

Bernie, glad to help. I like how you have tweaked it....the closing works