It seems to me that it’s in the poetry of language, what we call the prose style, and also finding the poetry of an individual character in his or her personality that brings on this sense of uniqueness.
Let the juices of watermelons sparkle, be candles
Near the shore. Yesterday’s rind is today’s
Twenty-four year old nostalgia. Listen–
Save the black seeds, and please laugh at your face.
The sea comes into my left ear on a visit, turns pink
Then goes away. I drop the seashell, return gingerly
Listen to Roland Flint’s 1994 reading with Garrison Keillor at the Poetry Center of Chicago:
Roland Flint begins at 21:50 minutes.
Any day’s writing may be the last,
He’s reminded at 2 in the morning,
Making this year’s last Italian
Notes, before readying his machine
And self to get aboard the bigger
Machine and fly, Dio Volente, home.
The late poet Roland Flint speaks with Linda Pastan during his 1999 service as Maryland Poet Laureate. A former professor at Georgetown University and author of seven books of poetry, Flint talks of his last collection, Easy, with the poet Pastan. They discuss the irony and “reverberation” of the title poem after Flint reads it.
Friday, April 4 1986
Thursday, October 17, 2002
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Wednesday, August 13, 2003
Sunday, June 26 2006
Thursday, October 2, 2014
The dove-white gulls
on the wet lawn in Washington Square
in the early morning fog
each a little ghost in the gloaming
Audio recording of the Poetry Center Reading Series featuring Billy Collins, Andrei Codrescu, Ron Padgett, Lucille Clifton, Mark Perlberg, Li-Young Lee, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Anne Waldman, Yusuf Komunyakaa, Lisel Mueller, Ted Kooser, Paul Carroll, Jorie Graham, and Paul Hoover.
Vintage poster of Clayton Eshleman’s reading, Homage to Cesar Vallejo, at the Poetry Center of Chicago.
Patters, paters, Apollo globes, sound
breaking up with silence, coals
I can still hear, entanglement of sense pools,
the way a cave might leak perfume–
Vintage poster of Poetry in Motion: a film by Ron Mann with Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, John Cage, Robert Creeley, Diane Di Prima, Kenward Elmslie, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Ed Sanders, Gary Snyder, Tom Waits, Anne Waldman at the Poetry Center of Chicago.
Watch a clip of Kenward Elmslie in Ron Mann’s documentary, “Poetry in Motion:”
a clip from Ron Mann’s documentary, Poetry in Motion (1981)
How to tell fringe people from yourself, himself, us, you, her?
They hunt for clean central beds full of lovers to deceive.
When they enter rooms, the most valuable still-life shatters.
They scream “Trap!”, deliberately trip (won’t get up, ever leave).
Friday, May 14, 1976
with Charles Simic
The Poetry Center at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat his
sweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;
or the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping
her shadow off a wall….
Out of the golden West, out of the leaden East, into the iron South, and to the silver North… Oh metals metals everywhere, forks and knives, belt buckles and hooks… When you are beaten you sing. You do not give anyone a chance…