Spiderspace is set up to accomodate short bits of information sent often--to wit, e-mail. Long e-mails are annoying (long paper letters=good.) And so it is with these posts: short is better. But they must come often, or the totality of the work is considered stale.
I worry what this will do to the brain, accustomed to the flash modality of the music video and the channel surf.
But I'll stick to my guns here by posting something long that I hadn't seen before. It's a piece of writing by James Wright--a prose poem? Not sure where it comes from. I found it in an anthology and it struck me, hard.
Wright is my favorite poet, possessing that combination of erudition and foolish drunkenness, which, to speak stereotypically, are masculine traits (men get sentimental when they are drunk, which drives women crazy.) It's a style that woman can't write in, to do so would be false. So the style is denied us, off-limits, however maddening that is to think.

The Flying Eagles of Troop 62

Ralph Neal was the Scoutmaster. He was still and young man. He liked us.
I have no doubt he knew perfectly well we were each of us masturbating unhappily in secret caves and shores.
The soul of patience, he waited while we smirked behind each other's backs, mocking and parodying the Scout Law, trying to imitate the oratorical rotundities of Winston Churchill as a Southern Ohio accent:
"Ay scout is trusswortha, loll, hailpful, frenly, curtchuss, kand, abaydent, chairful, thrifta, dapraved, clane, and lethcherass."
Ralph Neal knew all about the pain of the aching stones in our twlve-year-old groins, the lava swollen halfway between our peckers and our nuts that were still green and sour as half-ripe apples two full months before the football season began.
Socrates loved his friend the traitor Alcibiades for his beauty and for what he might become.
I think Ralph Neal loved us for our scrawniness, our acne, our fear; but mostly for his knowledge of what would probably become of us. He was not a fool. He knew he would never himself get out of that slime hole of a river valley, and maybe he didn't want to. The Vedantas illustrate the most sublime of ethical ideals of describing a saint who, having endured through a thousand lives every half-assed mistake and unendurable suffering possible to humanity from birth to death, refused at the last minute to enter Nirvana becaused he realized that his scruffy dog, suppurating at the nostrils and half mad with rabies, could not accompany him into perfect peace...
When I think of Ralph Neal's name, I feel some kind of ice breaking open in me. I feel a garfish escaping into a hill spring where the crawdads burrow down to the pure bottom in hot weather to get cool. I feel a rush of long fondness for that good man Ralph Neal, that good man who knew us dreadful and utterly vulnerable little bastards better than we knew ourselves, and who loved us, I reckon, because he knew damned well what would become of most of us, and it sure did, and he knew it, and he loved us anyway. The very name of America often makes me sick, and yet Ralph Neal was an American. The country is often enough to drive you crazy.

Somebody left the comment that I should make the blogness of the blog more bloggy, but it's not really a blog, I don't check in as I should. Plus there is the problem of being populist--writers are supposed to be iconoclastic, not populist, populism taints. However...

I have been thinking about poetry's purpose, having offered brainless nonthoughts about this in the past. Now it seems to me that poetry in fact has many purposes. Here's one, #7, the populist purpose: it is our civic glue. Well, at least for those who want to be glued. Certain poems mark our cultural rites of passage, but: do we still have poems that operate in this manner, the way "Howl" did? Where/what are our public poems now?

There was also Philip Levine's "They Feed They Lion," holding its mirror to the race riots of the 60's.

They Feed They Lion

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.
Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,
They Lion grow.
Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
"Come home, Come home!" From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.
From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.
From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.
___________
I never understood the poem well until I heard Levine explain how he had a job in his youth, doing something like unpacking ball bearings, and one of his black co-workers held up one of the burlap sacks they were using, noting that it was from the zoo. "They feed they lion from they sack." A co-opting of dialect? Yeah, maybe, sure. But probably the most enduring exposition of those times.

Need to work on the first six reasons.