Dear Alan Sondheim, I really like this poem of yours. Because of this I am replying with a poem of mine I intended to add to this listserv today, anyway. It may have little to do with the poem of yours and more to do with the poem to which you responded but I'm attaching it to yours as a signal of my approval of your poem.
Essay or Not: Call It What You Will
I feel a wonderful surge of energy tonight!
Having just read the final 170 pages of Milan Kundera's superb
Novel about a poet called "Life is Elsewhere"
And witnessed the death of an immature, young poet
After he betrayed the brother of the woman he loved,
I feel this amazing energy surge where and when
I would usually feel tired and ready for sleep.
Perhaps it is as much spring as Jaromil's fate.
The Stalinist regime on which this book is based
Is long gone. Yet I've often enough seen and heard
Poets "betray" and intimidate one another in New York City
That I cannot dismiss Kundera's picture as completely dated
And belonging to a particular, remote-feeling
Although not so really long time ago.
Something about all this compels me to write this
Poem which looks and sounds more like an essay
Certainly than any lyric verse about a book
Which you, dear reader-writer may not have read.
Anyway, I recommend it to you for any season's reading
And urge you not to dismiss it too lightly
As being merely a picture of another place and time.
Tom Savage
5/31/05
Whitman's Birthday
Alan Sondheim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Alan Sondheim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The caves are infinite, the twisty passages long.
On our subways, the children of a thousand nations.
In our air, chemicals from a thousand bitter factories.
There is no misery, the economy of books is free.
Culture seeps through trees full of flocks of robins.
A lone heron graced the botanical gardens.
Like monk parakeets we fly above the rooftops.
Ouroboros sustains us, persephone among us.
Who can say we are not Han Shan?
Even Han Shan cannot say he is Han Shan.
On Mon, 30 May 2005, mIEKAL aND wrote:
> THE CAVE CHILDREN OF NEW YORK ARE NEVER FREE
>
> A dime is no longer than the air of misery the day of yearning forgot.
> Who twisted when mounting all ages of wobbling. Hurry border. Hurray
> fits sat. Avenue child anagram. Who alerted taxi is the criminal of
> media of fight of knife a document. ! Sense tense, cent tense.
>
>
> On May 30, 2005, at 11:01 PM, Lanny Quarles wrote:
>
>> Never been to New York.
>
>
>>
>> You two sound like two New York
>
>
( URLs/DVDs/CDroms/books/etc. see http://www.asondheim.org/advert.txt )
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