Texas Pages

I'm on a cloud floating by and I've gone mad but madness flows away in a tall shining work of Art and I'm standing in front of a fountain and the world's ringing down through me and there are no fields of migrants mixing hair and bone into concrete.

This line originally appeared in The DMQ Review. Rauan will be tonight's featured reader at the Dallas Poets Community open mic at 7 p.m. at Half Price Books on Northwest Highway.

The last, the very last, so richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow. Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing against a white stone.

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

She had eyes like two turntables mix(h)er in between my dreams and reality blend in ancient themes the bas(e)is of isis cross-faded to ankh the beat drops like a cliff overlooking my heart.

From The Associated Press:

Gary Snyder, a poet known for his verse about nature and spirituality and a former member of the beat movement along with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, has won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, awarded annually by the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation.
"Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself," Christian Wiman, chair of the selection committee, said in a statement Tuesday.
Mr. Snyder, who turns 78 in May, has published such collections as Regarding Wave, No Nature and Turtle Island, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975.

The weight of this sad time we must obey/Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

*This line was suggested by Dallas poet M.A.M. Redmond. Please share your favorite lines of poetry by submitting a comment or e-mailing me.

The season turned like the page of a glossy fashion magazine.

Hoagland will be at the Round Top poetry festival this weekend.

Before poetry month slips away, here's a brief tribute to a couple of gifted women.

The first is the author of one of my favorite poems, Ann Darr. She wrote "Before Dawn," wherein she talks of the nasty things she will do to a bird that has awakened her. The last lines are:

I shall debird him. Hold.
On what do I sharpen my cry?

Ms. Darr, it turns out, trained in Sweetwater, Texas during WWII, as one of the pioneering WASP pilots. She died late last year.

His father lifted him, tucking his arms under the shoulders and knees of a son lighter than origami, pieta flowering as he carried the boy.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

According to Academy of American Poets, this is the 3rd most popular poem clicked on by Texas readers.

I know that many of you have been enjoying Michael Grabell's "Morning Verse" selections.

So be sure to catch him, along with Jack Myers, Tammy Gomez and Charlot Nace at The Writer's Garret's National Poetry Month Reading 7 p.m. Friday at Paperbacks Plus 6115 La Vista Dr.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

According to the Academy of American Poets, this is the 2nd most popular poem clicked on by Texas readers.

Here is a line of poetry to celebrate Earth Day:

And when the sun goes down, her voice among the aisles incites the timid prayer of the minutest cricket.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, rage, rage against the dying of the light.

According to the Academy of American Poets, this is the most popular poem clicked on by Texas readers.

Last night marked the end of Dallas' poetrifecta with three former poet laureates (Billy Collins, Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass) reading in the Dallas area in just 50 days. Hass, who earlier this month won the Pulitzer, read at Arts & Letters Live at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Describing Dallas as a "dazzling city," Hass said that after attending the museum's J.M.W. Turner exhibit, he walked through downtown, marveling at the mixture of skyscrapers and older merchant buildings. "Every perspective was amazing because of the architecture downtown," he said. The older buildings, "looked like something out of Edward Hopper."

It was fitting for a night that featured poetry, art and poetry inspired by art. Hass began by reading several poems he had translated from Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz reflecting on various artworks. He then read a poem that tried to mimic the squeegeed blur of artist Gerhard Richter's works and another poem that featured Vermeer's "Milkmaid." The night ended with a series of spoken word poems by Dallas teenagers inspired by works in the museum.

The introducers spoke highly of Hass' humility. Indeed, the first four poems he read were "Envy of Other People's Poetry," "The Problem with Describing Colors," "The Problem with Describing Trees" and "Time and Materials," which starts and stops as the speaker says, "The object of this poem is ..."

In my love's body it is Sunday.

-M.A.M. Redmond, "In Praise of His Hands"

Joan Hunter Dunn, who inspired John Betjeman's classic poem "A Subaltern's Love Song," has died at 92.

Today is Poem in Your Pocket Day, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. (aside: This could be the start of some really bad jokes.)

Here's a line from the one I'm carrying:

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.

David Taylor sends along this link to the presentation made by Robert Michael Pyle, keynote speaker at last Friday's conference. (It opens with RealPlayer.)

David himself has a new book of poetry, Praying Up the Sun. He'll be giving a reading 7 p.m. Saturday at Salon Mijangos, 1906 S. Flores in San Antonio.

I do not know which to prefer, the beauty of inflections or the beauty of innuendos, the blackbird whistling or just after.

White dew on the jade stairs;
In the long night it has wet her silk stockings.
Now she lowers the crystal screen
And watches through the beads an autumn moon.

I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed.

-Robert Hass, "Meditations at Lagunitas"

Robert Hass, this year's Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry, reads Friday night at Arts & Letters Live.

I'm not saying life won't continue
with its cups and its keys and rivers to cross
but sorrow will always buzz, iridescent
on black-veined wings...

Howells, a longtime member of the Dallas Poets Community and managing editor of its journal, Ilya's Honey, recently published a new chapbook, Black Crow in Flight.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
...
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

Junot Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction Monday for "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao."
Daniel Walker Howe won for history for "What Hath God Wrought: the Transformation of America, 1815-1848."
John Matteson won for biography for "Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father."
Saul Friedlander won the general nonfiction award for "The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945."
Two prizes were awarded for poetry: Robert Hass for "Time and Materials" and Philip Schultz for "Failure."
-- The Associated Press

Green Buddhas on the fruit stand. We eat the smile and spit out the teeth.

Water pouring into a plastic bucket sounds like fingers on a drum.

Many small hands issuing from a waterfall means silence mothered me.

Lee will read tomorrow night at the Beall Poetry Festival at Baylor University in Waco.

Glory be to God for dappled things--for skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Pied Beauty"

To celebrate National Poetry Month, I'll be posting a new line of poetry every morning on Texas Pages for a little feature called "Morning Verse." The lines will span from ancient haiku to slam poetry and include a variety of voices from Shakespeare to Allen Ginsberg to Lucille Clifton. Every Friday, we'll feature lines from our very own poets in the Dal