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[with 4 poems by Lou Lipsitz]
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Blackberry Authority
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When I first came out to the country
+++ I knew nothing. I watched
as people planted, harvested, picked
+++ the berries, explained
the weather, tended the ducks and horses.
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When I first came out to the country
+++ my mind emptied and I
liked it that way. My mind was like a sky
+++ without clouds, a summer sky
with several birds flapping across a field
+++ on the eastern horizon.
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I like the slowness of things, the empty
+++ town, the lake stillness,
the man I met who seemed contented, who
+++ sat and talked in the dusk
about why he had chosen this long ago.
.
I did better dreaming then, the colors
+++ were clear. I found something
important in myself: capacity for renewal.
+++ And at night, the sky so intense.
Clear incredible stars! Almost another earth.
.
But now I see there are judgements here.
+++ This way of planting or that.
The arguments about fertilizers and organics:
+++ problems of time, figuring how
to allocate what we have. So many matters
+++ to fasten on and dissect.
.
That’s the way it is with revelations.
+++ If you live it out, your start
thinking, examining. The mind cries out
+++ for materials to play with.
Right now, in fact, I’m excited about
+++ several new vines and waiting
for the blackberry authorities to arrive.
.
Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook: New and Selected Poems, Signal Books, Chapel Hill NC; © 1997
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This green chasm, engulfing trees and vines – this is four lane 421 west of Winston-Salem, not the Appalachian Trail. Last summer was all orange barrels, lane closures, men in trucks extending long booms with wicked whirling steel teeth. Dragon-necked cretaceous devourers, no gentle arborist in sight, slashing open the Yadkin Valley bar sinister for twenty miles.
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Then winter, splintered, broken and bare. Grey horizontal walls sixty feet high along the roadway. Conquered, blasted, subdued.
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Until spring. Sunlight, warming earth, the gathering retaliation of cambium and rising sap. This May impenetrable green fills every chink, lines the cowering freeway, and reaches into the light. Untouched leafy crowns look down on us as we speed past. The canopy crowds the sky. Every shade of jade, kelly, forest fills our periphery through the windshield . If our machines and our hubris withdrew for a year or two, would Kingdom Plantae march in and obliterate all traces of our presence?
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I feel the King’s green pressure leaning in.
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Evening
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The poet’s test
is to write a poem
called “evening”
beginning in the small street
near the bay
where they are selling clams.
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There must be a woman
he is pursuing
in his own distracted way
– someone he has sought
for years
and can almost catch.
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There must be a fire
somewhere
in the darkening sun for example
or in a room
where logs are flaming
and the poet
must hold back and wait
until he knows
exactly what not to say.
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Then, when he opens his lips,
the moon will
come out of his mouth.
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Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook: New and Selected Poems, Signal Books, Chapel Hill NC; © 1997
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❦ ❦ ❦
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In the book store, across the room, before the poetry reading begins, I glimpse a man I haven’t seen in twenty years. It was at another poetry meeting. We spoke for just a few minutes and I bought his book. I know exactly where that book is today, in one of the piles on my desk, waiting for me to open it and let it speak to me again. When I get home I will.
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A poem may capture a moment or span a lifetime. It may tell a story or simply evoke a gut response. Perhaps the poem is historical, explicitly tethered to a date and place. Or perhaps, as Lou Lipsitz writes in Evening, the poet / must hold back and wait / until he knows / exactly what not to say.
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Read Walt Whitman, writing 150 years ago – the distance in time and space is no real impediment to you lying with him in a field of grass. The lines weave into you and wrap you into their reality, becoming your reality, remaining theirs. But now read poems written 30 years ago by a man pictured in his 40’s on the book jacket whom you’ve just seen in the flesh in his 70’s. Reality is more complicated. The longing and conflict in those lines, do they still reside in that person who wrote them? Is it even fair to ask? Does it matter at all in the moment of reading, in the reflection afterwards?
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Lou Lipsitz’s Seeking the Hook is deeply personal, painful and contemplative, self-accusatory and redeeming. Reading the poems then and reading the poems now jars me to ask how I myself have changed in those twenty or thirty years. I share those accusations; I seek the same redemption. The reality I discover in these poems touches me in new ways, perhaps more confusing but perhaps also more familiar. Personal. I want to tell Lou this, but when the reading has concluded I turn and he is gone.
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Song of the Divorced Father
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“. . . I realized that it’s inevitable; wounds are part
of what parent give their children.”
++++++++++++++ Michael Meade
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There was a woman poet from Chile who
wrote “sleep close to me” to her small son.
Reading that, I think of you, children, no
so long and substantial, no beyond
my picking up and carrying to bed, now
beyond the reach almost of my arms and my soul.
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I remember the night silence and my father-ear
listening for your breathing; the cries and
choking sound that pulled me from sleep.
I remember the early mornings of sentimental
thoughts as I watched your faces utterly
asleep, and then strange dreams you told
of wolves and weddings and curious caves
full of treasure.
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Now I want you to sleep near me, to be
in the house with me, so we can sing together
sometimes, so I can relearn your new voices.
So we can carry the wounds together,
pulling them from the sea, an old boat
we used to fish in –
+++ turn it upsidedown and let the flaking
+++ paint dry in the sun – then when night comes
+++ we can howl and weep – you can hammer me
+++ with you small fists of long ago and we can
+++ hack the boat apart and burn it;
+++ it will burn all night, the stars wheeling above us
+++ as we lie there, separate, exhausted.
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Then in the morning, the boat will be intact,
awaiting us, the blue paint fresh. I will say:
“let’s get some fish in the marshes.” And you
will steer, knowing the way all over again.
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Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook: New and Selected Poems, Signal Books, Chapel Hill NC; © 1997
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A Task
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+++ — reply to Auden & the intellectuals
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Potatoes. I will hunt potatoes
in the fashion of my grandmother
who fed us all.
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Potatoes. Like the tough hearts of young men.
The core of dark joy in sexual love.
The world that trembles and changes.
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In the fashion of my grandmother
I will abandon all exotic things
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and hunt a language
of odd, true shapes the were nurtured in the old earth
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Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook: New and Selected Poems, Signal Books, Chapel Hill NC; © 1997
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Biography and other works by Lou Lipsitz HERE
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Selected poems by Lou Lipsitz in THE SUN
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Many thanks, Judd. Watch for a personal email with instructions. ---B