My friend sent this, and for the first 4 lines I thought I was going to hate it. From the New Yorker. Enjoy.
If a Clown
by Stephen Dunn
If a clown came out of the woods,
a standard-looking clown with oversized
polka-dot clothes, floppy shoes,
a red, bulbous nose, and you saw him
on the edge of your property, (more…)
I had no idea that artist Dali and poet Lorca were friends and lovers, or that Lorca was murdered at 38 by Spanish nationalists during the Spanish Civil War and dumped in an unmarked grave. Here’s Lorca’s profile from the Academy of American Poets. This movie, Little Ashes, is apparently already out. Anyone seen it? How did I miss it? Looks gorgeous. It’s playing at Living Room Theaters, where movies are $5 on Mon and Tues. Who wants to go? Tuesday, let’s say? 7:45.
(Seen Twilight? Me neither. The actor who plays Dali is apparently head vampire in it.)
I have to admit, Dali just doesn’t hit me hard. The one thing that I saw and immediately felt was the Lobster Telephone at the Tate a few years ago. It’s one of Dali’s sillier works (I dislike his gore) of a black rotary telephone with a plastic lobster glued across the handset. It’s hilarious. I think about it all the time when new techy gadgets are released.
But I had no idea about La Generacion del 27, the name for the surrealist group of Spanish artists that included Dali, Lorca, and a filmaker named Bunuel in addition to other poets.
This poem appeared in the New Yorker’s May 18th, 2009 issue. I can’t stop reading it and I’m going to be a little bad and put the entire thing here, apologies to Dean Young. Buy his books.
Read it aloud.
Delphiniums in a Window Box
Every sunrise, even strangers’ eyes.
Not necessarily swans, even crows,
even the evening fusillade of bats.
That place where the creek goes underground,
how many weeks before I see you again?
Stacks of books, every page, characters’
rages and poets’ strange contraptions
of syntax and song, every song
even when there isn’t one.
Every thistle, splinter, butterfly
over the drainage ditches. Every stray.
Did you see the meteor shower?
Did it feel like something swallowed?
Every question, conversation
even with almost nothing, cricket, cloud,
because of you I’m talking to crickets, clouds,
confiding in a cat. Everyone says,
Come to your senses, and I do, of you.
Every touch electric, every taste you,
every smell, even burning sugar, every
cry and laugh. Toothpicked samples
at the farmers’ market, every melon,
plum, I come undone, undone.
*sigh* Oh how I want to go to Iowa for a MFA in poetry. The month I spent there studying with James Galvin was catatonically beautiful.
Take a gander at my portfolio.
