The Wey of the Dog Star

13.0.0.0.0

When the Milky Way bisects the sunrise

And it's the first day of winter,

The Holocene ends with a shudder,
A great precessional age begins afresh.

Geologists named it an era for catastrophe---
A scientific upstage of Olmec lore
That looked up instead of down.


The Mesoamerican saints proclaimed
What only modern science can figure
Based on the stars and earthly wobbles;
Human beginnings of Gaean demise,
From secrets written in the galactic spiral.

Modern seers say, “it's the heat.” Nay,
Another Anthropocene layer, Brother,
Can you dig this stratigraphic rap
Conjured up by some forensic don
Tassel askew and mind so cool
Even global warming can't stop that!
Who knew? It could be a sign,
Of a time we won't remember.

I would advise reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann for a start.

About seven thousand years elapsed between the dawn of th Middle Eastern Neolithic and the establishment of Sumer. The Indians navigated the same path in somewhat less time. ... Pride of place must go to the Olmec, the first technologically complex culture in the hemisphere.

They invented dozens of systems of writing, established widespread trade networks, tracked the obits of the planets, created a 365 calendar (more accurate than its contemporaries in Europe), and recorded their histories in accordion-folded books of fig tree bark paper.

Couple notes on the numbers. Stanza is Fibonacci Series and total number of lines =20 which is reflective of the vigesimal number system , i.e. base 20, used by the Mayans.

Stop, Look & Listen

Changlish

Linguistic inertia bends
Knewton’s law with e-motion,
Puts the em-PHA-sis on the wong

syl-LAH-bull when
Mandarin music makes more money.

Write the China syndrome
Whole planet language orbituaray.

Fate dictates sound discoveries,
New East mates dictionate

Online. Translation speak,
Where the rubber meets the toad
Pwincing the kisser.

Fourth of July Sound

The first giraffe In France arrived In Paris on June 30, 1827. Gosh, I wonder what that was like. And, I wonder what is like that. (sic.)

diminished fifth

broken
sounds foreign as
giraffes in Paris haunt
dead syllables mouthed in muted
voices

from wikipedia, "The tritone (tri- or three and tone) is a musical interval that spans three whole tones. The tritone is the same as an augmented fourth, which in 12-tone equal temperament is enharmonic to a diminished fifth. It is often used as the main interval of dissonance in Western harmony,..."


and, in my other voice on New Verse News

Advante Guarde Times, June 2008

One of my poems, Road Sign Redux, appears in the Poetry & Literary Works section of the June 2008 issue of Avant Guarde Times. In true blog logic, Go to the bottom of the page and read it first. After reading the other works, click on the title of this post to see a great "sign" graphic.

This poem originally appear on this blog on December 19, 2007 in response to a prompt on Totally Optional Prompts.

Dr. Charles Fredrickson had seen the poem on my blog after a dialog between fellow New Verse News Poets and asked to include it in the June Issue of AVT. Thanks Charles, now I see what you mean about having just the right graphic.

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Poetry Workshop Participants and friends, please sign our guestbook, leave your email, a short bio would be nice, and a link to some of your poems.

btw, any other information you would like to share would be great.
Don't worry I will protect your privacy.

Thanks, ab

Meditation

Desensitized

Below the harsh mower rumble
I strain to hear the grass answer the blue bird song
Before me,
Boats pass over a deeper source of life
One I can only analyze.
A gnat attack jerks my eyes to a blur
As if the taste of grass numbed me
For a moment I am deaf
I touch myself just to make certain.

[The following section is
optional if you prefer a dramatic ending.]

This immediately set off a cranium war
The cerebellum said no way, not my fault
Hey I been thinking, said the left frontal lobe
“Don’t blame me,” the right frontal lobe mused.
The hippocampus faked memory loss
Finally the amygdala got the blame, for

Nothing left to fear.

The propmpt: Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota by James Wright

and don't forget " A Moment" by Ruth Stone

Pittsburgh Poet Terrance Hayes

is the Northwoods Poetry Workshop leader where I will be next week.

Stop in and Listen Online NewsHour: Report | Pittsburgh Poet Terrance Hayes | April 24, 2008 | PBS

and some links that will make sense to someone
Bothell Poets et al.: A poem by Dean Young


My Father's Love Letters by Yusef Komunyakaa

Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden

Banking on By Golly

Click on the poem and see the big picture.

More than meets the eye or ear

It takes an interactive partner to animate this scene.

Click Away !

Thinking Inside the Box

“Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present." Friedrich Nietzsche or maybe it was something else he said.



Chance encounter

btw, here a link to the other poem I wrote today.


[^j^]

Playing the bottom card too soon

The Untold Story


It was an average morning
Sometime in February
Unremarkable sunrise
Certainly not the kind of thing that would call out amateur photographers
The poets were still hung over
So only the factory workers were missing it
A body floating above the horizon
Purple and slowly desiccating

Was it only a mirage
A reflection of a life just ending
A curiously well formed cloud
Whose alligator skin flaked into the contrail of a fast moving exhaust from the future
He couldn’t quite tell
Every time he raised the glasses
Thoughts got in the way
His oatmeal was burning

The phone rang
It was his mother
Nothing interesting
Then the sun broke through pierced his retina with a concentrated photon blast
Knocked him to the floor
So this was what it was like
He was between breaths
The next never came

He was the only eye witness
No one to tell it to
Unreported news
It took only 27 lines in a the C section of a newspaper he never read
God’s beta son gone
His underwear still in the washer
Ready to be put on
A modest world

New Years 2008

One of my favorite places to publish: Relevant and many excellent poets contribute-- My poem was the New Years 2008 Day choice

The New Verse News: Not Too Late for Commutation

...
regenerates the beat of life
Children who have not watched the news
breathe deeply to propel the perpetual wind of change

The editior, James Penha,

Road Sign Redux

Help! I'm stuck in the box. Click me out, please!


I started the one below--but I could not finish it

KEEP RIGHT
EXCEPT TO PASS


Did you ever wonder,
"Except to Pass" where there are no cars?

Somewhere on that forgotten road
The smell of death lingers

She was this baby's breath flower

The future could not fathom
her gilded gaze nor her septic curse

So fate decided the shock value
Would awaken the almost dead
Long enough to read the signs

Placed there like broken fragments
of Broken dreams and broken hearts
Left to swelter at noon day
While the desert heat does its work

... Carries the eagle ever higher
Brings the scavengers from nowhere

Launched by a hormone quest
Her innocent flippancy
was
Spent too hastily on a pickup seat


To damn many things happening this week--the OLPC G1G1 order arrived Tuesday.

Circumpolar Satellite Telephony Mine

Birds, Bonds & CA

In a mythical word jumbled world
St. Louis becomes heaven
The middle kingdom of MLB
Where the ruler of Blanco hell dare not go
So far from California
Pelicans cannot see the coast
Finnish is a difficult language to master
Encoded on the sports page
Where San Diego Gulls confuse pucks with goals

Givers and takers, Quakers and Shakers
Induced ecstasy drug trips from reality
Scan the sky with disembodied eyes
Fan belts of believers
Break, lose their timing, dim the lights
Safety is a high school dream of
Overhead Camden yards
Overflowing with American League birds

Newfoundland oysters drive
Fords on moonlit neap tide rides
Dreaming of Pontiac Firebirds
A leap of faith
Resurrects Evel ... and all is well
You can read it on the Internet
Verizon: you make the call

Back a couple of weeks I got tagged by this girl with the task of explaining to others how to become a better poet or something to that effect. Well I am certainly no expert on poetry, but I do know that creating is about contemplating the world around you. So I guess it would make sense to be an interesting person and don’t forget to look for all kinds of different perspectives on the ordinary. Ask questions, especially the dumb and naive ones, even if only to yourself. It is good practice for when you go public. & Explore ambiguity.

I can also can give some hints about how I work. For example this poem grew out of my fascination with the dada desire to recapture humanity from technology. When I read the prompt for this week I thought of being up in the sky looking down. I mean way up at the level of the low orbit satellites that play such a large role in human communication networks. These satellites are in circumpolar orbits and the earth turns below, for example the Landsat satellites only fly over the same path every 17 days even though they make an orbit every 90 minutes or so. Sometimes the view is obstructed by clouds.

In addition, signals “bounced” off the communication “birds” are sent in packets that may or may not have a continuous stream of intelligible content. What if at any one instant you could look down on the world, in this case North America, talk? At least where the view was unobstructed from your point of view. How would it sound? Would it make any sense? Could you make any sense out of it? How?

For additional reading I would suggest Crossings, v5 "Reappraising the Disappearing Body and the Disembodied Eye through Multisensory Art to get an idea of how a multisensory artist thinks.

ab

CALLING THE WRONG NUMBER

One of my favorite places to publish: Relevant and many excellent poets contribute

The New Verse News: CALLING THE WRONG NUMBER

A note from the editior, James Penha, "We always appreciate your good work."


Dec 7, 1941 "A day that will live in infamy"
Listen to the speech by FDR,

In the begining was the word maker

Poets

Poets

There is a full scale model of the poem, click it up to scale if you must, but that is not where the secret is, you have to play and experiment with the this thing. It is not for reading per se, the words just happen to be the dimensional lumber in an architecture that builds a literacy. In other words the post window is but a snapshot on a growing and developing structure designed to alter the way we see the world.


created and posted by AB

Departing on the Good Ship Integer

Count me<-_^>0ut

So ewe been to the party,
Met some voices and styles
Mixed in texture and crunch.
Some cream cheese
Red tomatoes
Bits of bacon and spice
All very nice.
Like a church recipe book
Everyone contributes,

& dissolves into the broth.
Tastes bud satiated?
Is it time to go
(Look around
Grab a cookie or two)
For the big X ?
Break the link, it’s
Not as hard as you think.

■ The hillocks have eroded
■ Paths a bit dusty
■ Surprises have dwindled
Like dew at mid morning,
Gone.
Hardly noticed.
Lost without any words.

It is past midnight,
Overtime,
One moon cycle complete.
The yin yang mirror faces
Bid farewell.
{No prompt needed !}

My thanks to the numbers in this poem ... 29, 24, 9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1,0
Come along on the good ship Integer and see what lies below.


Other voyages of discovery on Today's date

1869
The Suez Canal is opened to navigation in Egypt after more than 10 years of construction. The canal links the Mediterranean and the Red seas.

1913
The first vessels pass through the Panama Canal.

1970
The Russian Luna 17 spacecraft lands an eight-wheeled lunar vehicle on the moon.


A beginning on the back story: Are we missing a dimension of time?

According to Bars, the familiar four dimensional world we see around us is merely a "shadow" of the six-dimensional reality, just as a hand makes many different shadows on a wall when lit from different angles.

Although we cannot experience the extra time dimension directly, we can effectively notice it through the different perspectives of the different "shadows".

Only the names and "Sense of Place" changes

(click the title to see the poster)

Rereading God Signs One More Time
3 x 4 x 5

Suppose you were the king
A confessor king with no sons,
only imitation nephews
An illiterate group with grave responsibilities:
Protecting island domains from Vikings.

Charged with creating a language for Shakespeare
Whom you cannot imagine
and no one has ever talked about.
(English teachers being only a sci-fi improbability
in a genre that does not exist as yet.)

The town crier is not interested in history
Greek is the language of antiquity
Your imitation nephew is Harold the Earl
You have no Odysseus myth to emulate
Only priests that fear the almighty God.

The damn fool Harold goes off to Normandy
Gets captured by some left over Scythian thugs
So he pulled an Esau maneuver and lost his birthright
to this Norman (read French) Duke
Before you can make a decision, that might kill you,

William being of fertile mind and idyll dreams
Decides it is time to save Macbeth for the French
Remember Harold can’t read
The Vikings are still on this Odin kick
Your island is on their list in place of Denmark

William bought a priest of his own
Created a new myth about how you are his uncle
I mean, who could be serious about a guy named Harold
anyway, unless you’re Norwegian? William is
the Jacob type with a David sense of conquest to satisfy.

Which is to say, he had knights but no real enemies
And the now king dies just when this story gets going
The trouble with Normandy is, it’s okay for dairy cows
But you can only cut so much cheese,
the wool market is in the dumps, and a whole Bayeaux

full of needle workers are looking for part-time.
What was needed was something to promote tourism
Your advisors suggest war as a good theme
A comet, later known as Halley’s Comet appears,
In a flush of genius, Williams decides:

“I am going to England to claim my uncles’s crown.”
The same crown that Harold had been given by his priests
(Priests came cheap in those days.
Every bloody warrior could afford his own
since the Pope hadn’t invented indulgences yet.)

I mean what was a poor clerical sap to do, pray?
Well yeah, and how do you live on that?
“Sell out to the government, it’s a religious tradition!
That’s what we need, more kings with money to spend!”
So William decides to build a fleet of boats,

That gets everyone excited,
Gave the restless knights something to dream about,
And it made it easier to get to England.
Crossing the channel to do battle at Hastings
In a year when Halley’s comet appears in the sky.

Sounds like a best seller to me.
Didn’t Mark Twain have an encounter with Halley’s comet?
No I think it was Ronald Reagan and a UFO.
I am not very good at details but the story is familiar,
Every time God gets involved, something bad happens.

A Noun like Alice

Totally Optional Discourse

Squinting into an open window,
cup of Sumatran at about half
(somewhere between empty and full
wrt dependency ratios
sexual orientation dynamics
& anticipation index theatrics),

the IM alert flashes yellow
(an i2c)i.e., “invitation to chat”
one finger at a time—

absurd words translate thoughts
images metaphorm
phonemes
animate the stage

Let synthetic speech make your day

press stop to discontinue

The absurd word that won’t be heard

Hey dingle diddle this cat needs to fiddle
No! Says my date with the swollen prostate
I’m finger liken’ good and chokin the chicken
comes easy for a cheesy whatchama McGreasy.

Perverse? Poet is almost a 4 letter word now-a-days
Sort of like bike that used to be quiet-tude
Now rude dude crude is all we ever hear
from those Roar and smoke joke folks anyways

Some luckless suck-sess dream machine
Poetry scream slam jam Cando band
cutting 180 ticks up into staccato battle prattle
gets a hand for The lucidity stupidity grandstand

Some pathetic academic miscreant ascetic
In a dissertation dispensation sensation
blows it out his ass and Turns trash into cash
Proving art is never Art until your world falls apart.

So I pant and rant like a wasted miscreant
Send my letter to a jet Setter who’ll get no better
Pray for love from the dude up above, & say
OK, okay have it your way. Make my day.

You may scroll down now to read more, now.


The Empty House by Marjorie Agosín evokes an out-of-control feeling, one in which the mind cannot quite cope with the madness of memories. There are some elements of projects from the past remixed with things done this past week in this presentation. All the technologies used are available free on the internet thus part and parcel of every e-poet's tool kit.

Finding the words for work

When I think about work I am reminded of Phillip Levine’s poem, “What Work Is,” about how it gives a typical I B Singer answer to a topic that eludes classification. Besides, the quote from Clarence Darrow reminded me of the play, Inherit the Wind.

Double checked

Levine standing on the hands of Singer
tried to explain the Nobel prize
to his brother. Not Singer’s brother
someone else’s he mistook for him
standing in the rain
misunderstanding the holocaust
that would not leave his mind,

waiting for work to divert his mind
thinking all along that the truth
revealed in Tennessee
saved the fools who knew better
from another day of chess in the park.

But this bit of doggerel probably comes closer to the gist of the prompt:

Leadership at Work

Don’t worry about the climate
Were running out of oil
That’s okay we’re short on water
Which is twice as bad

And the newly crowned queen mocked:
“Let them smoke dope!
We’ll put the well drillers in jail
for... Blowing smoke up our pipes!”

Political decisions are not so hot
You might say slippery solutions
Made by folks who are all wet.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.