Sandra Alcosser

As I read Sandra Alcosser I had a difficult time enjoying her graphically hatred poetry. It is evident throughout that she has some form of built up anger towards men and their presence. I am going to take a leap here, but after talking to Melanie maybe I am not far off, but I think at one point she was raped as a child. Maybe by Artie…I am not exactly sure but the reference to her lover’s body “like water snakes, his sweat the odor of crawfish, boiled” (Pole Boat at Honey Island). She also makes reference to a farmer demonstrating how worms make love or in all reality was it two people?

Some days he’d rub two pegs together
Until they made a greasy hum
like rain, the sound of moles
gnawing the dirt’s grain, the song
soils sing before a quake,
and the red bodies would hang
above the ground in a kind of confusion
or ecstasy. They would writhe.

Her sexual reference is apparent throughout all of her poems. At times, in a disturbing way which leads me to believe that something detrimental happened to her. Possibly by the white-toothed Artie…although, why would she make it so obvious, we all no that is not the “way” of a poet. What is your interpretation of Artie? Am I the only corrupt mind in the room?

Artie
Among the claw-foot sofas, under the looming
mahogany of my grandparents’ living room,
the hoodlum and I played with flames-

while Grandmother slept under chicken feathers
and Grandfather snore in his separate bedroom
above my head. Strop, strop

Grandpa’s razor would bite its black strap.
His bumping hammer could flatten fenders.
Thank god he was deaf and drunk.

Smart ass punk, that’s what people called Artie,
weasel trash, this gypsy who rubbed against me
grating his pink lips into my braces.

Mrs. Molenda’s grandson came from the West Side
to clean her pigeon cages, and he became the rebel boy
of Dixie Highway for girls whose daddies owned

the gas station, the Dairy Queen, the bait and tackle.
Artie had the whites teeth and his dark Hungarian skin sheened
where I reached to stroke behind his waist and earlobes.

I was fourteen and months later found myself on hands and knees
scrubbing linoleum for the first time above a tavern on the West Side
hanging limp café curtains with hopeful rickrack snowballs,

for my friend Laurie, a shy, cracked-tooth towhead
who had the body of a boy, and for Artie and their baby-
who’d curl on their beaten mohair sofa cooing just like us.

This poem makes me think that her virginity was taken by this boy at the age of fourteen. It seems like the stereotypical teenage thing…boy comes to town sleeps with one girl and runs off with her best-friend. Huh?
Anyways, I could go on and on about her sexual reference but truly what is the point, it doesn’t help me to make sense of her poems.

One poem that I did like was “In the Jittering World” (20). I chose a short stanza to share with you. It doesn’t get much better than this…

In a world jittering with possibility,
how did I come to this sour basement
in a Southern city to grade rhetoric,
water dripping all day down drainpipes,
and at night for recreation,
to nurse a lizard? I love his sticky toe pads,
the way he rests
between death and life, leaf-veined, reflective.
Carefully he picks across the blue carpet, as if
it were a globe laid flat.
Perhaps we both are lost in our landscape,
woman and chameleon always changing to save our skin.

The Knowledge of a Child

Everyone Can Learn from My Daughter

Patience

It is a Sunday morning, not out of the ordinary, and my daughter Emma has decided that she would like to help me clean. Our house is very warm, so she wears only her panties and a loose camisole. I envy her for her cleaning attire. We begin the cleaning process in her bathroom. As I begin to spray the shower with cleaning product she insists that “I do self.” So, I let her even though I know I will have to add more cleaning product.
Our attention is then shifted to the bathroom sink that is covered in dried soap suds from the previous hand wash. Once again she sprays cleaning product and begins to wipe the inside of the sink with her wadded up piece of paper towel. I try to help her but she insists that “I do self.” So, I let her even though I know I will have to re-clean the sink.
She then heads to the toilet. I watch as she dumps toilet bowl cleaner into the bowl and all over the seat. At this point I become insistent on helping her. Once again she insists that “I do self.” I take a deep breath and with a stern voice I ask to help her. She lightly rubs my arm and says “mama, it’s ok, I do self.”


Forgiveness

It seems like some days I spend the majority of my time chasing after Emma. Unfortunately, it is not in a playful way and it ends with a few swats on the bottom or multiple times in the time-out chair. It usually comes from her doing things that I repeatedly ask her not to do. But sometimes it just comes from my lack of patience with her constant need to make a mess or get into things.
Sometimes I wonder what I must sound like to a two-year old. “Emma, don’t do that,” or “Emma, why are you making a mess.” I know I am interrupting multiple moments of growth and exploration as I stand over her and point my finger at all of the things that I think she is doing wrong.
Today, like the past five days, I attempted to stop her from climbing out of the rungs in the fence. “Emma if you climb through that fence one more time, you are spending the rest of the day inside.” She stretched her leg and contorted her body in order to fit through the rungs. She turned and looked at me knowing and understanding exactly what was going to happen.
I grabbed her by the arm and swatted her butt as I marched her to time-out. Her big blue eyes filled with tears as she pushed her red hair out of her view. She reached for my hand and pulled me down to her level. Her tiny arms wrapped around my neck as she whispered between sobs, “mama, hugs.”

It’s OK to Cry
Emma is almost two and a half, which is quite different from two and very different from three, and she cries daily. She cries when she gets hurt, when she is sad, tired, frustrated, doesn’t get her way, and sometimes just because she feels like it. I appreciate the fact that she can just let loose at the drop of a dime. It really doesn’t matter the occasion, where we may happen to be, or who we are presently around- if she feels like crying she does just that.
She has taken to the liking of self expression. She now realizes that there are many different forms of crying and each will bring a different reaction from the poor patron who must encounter the yelp. There is the loud cry of agony when she drops the book on her big toe or the soft whimper when her head is ready to hit the pillow. We must not forget the scream intermingled with the word “no” when she is not getting her way or the sniffling as she tugs at my pant leg wanting to be held. There is also the one that drops her to her knees as she pounds her fists into the ground in pure distress releasing the day’s bottled up energy.
Although all of these cries have become our daily rituals, the cry I truly appreciate the most is the one she does just because she can. It is amazing that at two and a half she understands how to manipulate her emotions in such a way that she can produce tears just because she feels like it. Nothing physically, or emotionally that I am aware of, has to occur for big crocodile tears to stream down her cheeks as she lets out a repetitious grunt from deep in her chest. It is a dramatic combination of a yelp and a whimper and usually lasts less than thirty seconds. But for as long as it does last, it demonstrates her power to control the emotions that we all yearn to release as adults.

The Dark Side of The Moon

Driving down the road
I notice a bump.
Is it a boulder?
Or a pot hole?
Or did I run over the next door neighbors orange tabby cat?
Or does it matter?
I have four-wheel drive and mud tires.
Bump.
I smell manure.
Did you step in it?
Or is it coming from your mouth?
You stinky slob.


Button down shirt
made of flannel
covers the bleeding heart
that is healing from last night’s wound.
You twisted and turned
until blood shot you in the eye and
forced you to regurgitate all the words
you had just said.
Poor,
Stupid,
You.



I sip the merlot
and smile,
as if I give a shit
about all of these people
who peruse my house.
They gorge themselves,
in chocolate, wine, and cheese
rubbing their stomachs.
What a disgusting breed.

Valentine's Day

As I search for information on cupid, I am enlightened with tidbits on Valentine's Day...

The holiday probably derives from the ancient Roman feast of Lupercalis (February 15), also called the Lupercalia. In an annual rite of fertility, eligible young men and women would be paired as couples through a town lottery. Briefly clad or naked men would then run through the town carrying the skins of newly sacrificed goats dipped in blood. The women of the town would present themselves to be gently slapped by the strips and marked by the blood to improve their chances of conceiving in the coming year.

"Valentine’s Day," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2007http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

There is Nothing Quite Like It.

Melanie, I think you are on to something here...

Sparagmos refers to an ancient Dionysian ritual in which a living animal--or sometimes even a human being--would be sacrificed by being dismembered, by the tearing apart of limbs from ones body. Sparagmos was frequently followed by omophagia (the eating of the raw flesh of the one dismembered).

Regurgitation is the controlled flow of stomach contents back into the esophagus and mouth.
Regurgitation is used by a number of species to feed their young. This is typically in circumstances where the young is at a fixed location and a parent must forage or hunt for food, especially under circumstances where the carriage of small prey would be subject to robbing by other predators or the whole prey is larger than can be carried to a den or nest. Some birds species also occasionally regurgitate pellets of indigestible matter such as bones and feathers.

In my understanding it appears that both are a form of feeding; they both are very ritualistic and feed the soul and mind its necessary "nutrients". That's all I got.

One of Many Attempts to Understand

In his magnum opus, Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman writes of "soul":

"By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment -- and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.
It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate -- an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence -- that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot identify soul with anything else, I also can never grasp it apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable gives on the sense of having or being soul. However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.
In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggest that the word refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern. These four qualifications I had already put forth some years ago. I had begun to use the term freely, usually interchangeably with psyche (from Greek) and anima (from Latin). Now I am adding three necessary modifications. First, soul refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance of soul makes possible, whether in love or in religious concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy -- that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical."

What's Going on in Their Head, These Surrealist Poets...

It’s been awhile since I’ve ridden a bike.
When men are idle they’ll hold a hand to their face.

Although I can honestly say I can only remotely grasp short phrases, or sometimes only words, within surrealist poetry it’s these few words that leave me questioning and wording. What the hell is going on??? Is it truly “normal” to refer to a bike, a beaver, and REO Speedwagon within 3 lines of a poem? Probably not, to the ordinary eye, but to the surrealist it seems the “odder” the poem or art piece the better. So as a reader, what do we do with Craig and other surrealist poets?
The part that gets me the most is the awkward twists that occur just about the time I am sucked into an idea. For instance in the poem April:
A scraping sound,
Like someone writing his name
in big letters
in the gravel with a Wiffle bat.

It’s the sound of my shoes
skidding over the ground
as I’m dragged by my armpits
in short bursts
from the Buick into the woods.

It all makes me think of
the shadow of a waterfall,
a description of a church,
the absence of metaphor.

These are my last thoughts
is what I’m thinking,
my cardigan ruined,
the Buick almost out of view.

This first section creates an image in my head of a mother dragging her naughty little boy out of church. He is dragging his heals because he knows what will come when he gets home. The mom bypasses the car and heads straight to the forest. Here we go---let the ride begin. In a few words, a vivid image is created of a shadow in a waterfall. Then Craig throws in a little twist with the absence of metaphor. So if metaphor is absence what does this do to the poem? Is everything he is saying literal? Is the character truly being dragged by his armpits into the woods? What does this all mean? Since the boy thinks these are his last thoughts, does he think he is being dragged to his death? Now that I am actually talking about the poem it appears to be the stereo-typical death or kidnapping of a child. At least, the portions that you hear on the news. As the poem continues…
She had said she wanted to hitch-hike
across the country wearing
a pair of cut-offs and a taco hat.

She had cupped my neck with her hand
and whispered this into my ear.

Now it appears to be an older character that is with his lover. What leads me to believe this is the way she cupped his neck with her hands and whispered in his ear. This seems to be very sensual. Although, I may be wrong. It just seems the way she wanted to hitch-hike in her cut-off shorts reminds me of a young couple going on an adventure across the country. Huh…
So why the shift and uncertainty? Of course it is intentional but it makes me crazy. I just want to understand.

Surrealist Poetry

I crave your mouth... by Pablo Neruda
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

Call and Answer by Robert Bly
Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days
And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed
The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?

I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense
Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!
See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!”

We will have to call especially loud to reach
Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.

Have we agreed to so many wars that we can’t
Escape from silence? If we don’t lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.

How come we’ve listened to the great criers—Neruda,
Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass—and now
We’re silent as sparrows in the little bushes?

Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.

Surrealism[1] is a cultural, social and political movement asserting that liberation of the human mind, and subsequent liberation of the individual and society, can be achieved by exercising the imaginative faculties of the "unconscious mind" to the attainment of a dream-like state different from, or ultimately "truer" than, everyday reality. Surrealists believe that this more truthful reality can bring about personal, cultural, and social revolution, and a life of freedom, poetry, and uninhibited sexuality.

-Wikipedia

" Dreams – A microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul."
- Erich Fromm

What Might You Find in the Shed of a Gardener?

Why--you may ask when you look at the plethora of tools,
hanging on individual hooks lining the wall,
many unused, never to be used by the muddy hands of the gardener.

Some have been gifts, or others I picked up—
maybe at the garage sale down the street, or a fellow gardener
was willing to part. Perhaps I found it in the garden I claimed to be mine.

Others came with meaning. The rusty blades of a hard used tool
that came with sweat stained handles. My grandfather’s hands—
so many memories, I find it odd why I was so lucky to be holding his tools.

My hand fit the grooves that had long since been empty. I rubbed
the handles that lined the wall of the gardening shed and realized—
although, some handles had never been used and others were worn

a story could be told and would be told-
in the shed of a gardener.


I Must Admit, I Wanted To Be Sandy

and have Danny
boy from the beach,
all to myself

love at first sight,
for the secret bird
never expected to meet again
the man with the smooth skin
and letter-man’s sweater
soft voice
and gentle kiss

blessed with virginity
wholesome and pure
gone bad
a member of the ladies
Pink to be exact

tough
untouchable
and bad
the man from Rydell High

snap of his finger
sly dimpled smile
the tilt of his head
in my direction:
Come on Sandy, let’s dance.

The Cupid

During the last class, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the idea of the innocent baby and the cupid, or Valentine’s Day. The connections between romantic imagery or the analogy of innocence and the Amor and Psyche story or the cupid seem to provide a very fruitful paper topic. I am looking forward to “diving” into this idea. Any suggestions are welcome.

Death Upon Me

It all began with my husband (Brent) and me planning a camping trip with friends. (For the sake of this dream, I am going to consider them as friends seeing we carried on conversations as if we knew each other from way back, even though I could not place the faces.) We were gathering all of the necessary supplies in our dark basement. I distinctly remember the shag brown and green carpet and the dust smell that lingered in the air. The basement contained no windows so the only light was a fluorescent bulb that made an obnoxious buzz. The smoke was so thick that we had to push our hands to create a pathway through the basement to the stairs. We had an abundance of bags; it seemed, to go on a one-night camping trip to a cabin.
Shift in location…
There was a group of people sitting around the camp fire on the same shag carpet that was in the basement of the house. I couldn’t make out the faces of the people and it almost seemed as if we were being guarded. I can remember the large man that played the bongo drum in the corner of the circle. Some people were dancing and others were talking in a hushed voice. (Which at the time seemed odd seeing the drum was very difficult to block out). I was an outsider looking on. My husband was no longer present.
Time passed…
With no warning a man went into convulsions on the ground. The drumming got louder and the intensity of the scene made my stomach hurt. I was crying for help but few people even noticed what was happening. I was holding the man’s head as he began to pass out or die. I am not sure what was really going on.
Shift in location…
Now I am lying quietly underneath a cedar deck peering through the cracks at the men I previously though were guarding the group. They were talking about the pills that I slipped into everyone’s drinks. They planned to do worse then simply kill me, when they located me. The men paced the deck planning my torture, until I woke up.

FRAGMENT 88
(quoted in pseudo-Plutarch, Consolation to Apollo )

"As a single, unified thing there exists in us both life and death, waking and sleeping, youth and old age, because the former things having changed are now the latter, and when those latter things change, they become the former." Heraclitus

It is better to hide ignorance, but it is hard to do this when we relax over wine.
Heraclitus, On the Universe

"If the leviathan is death, and the hero has to enter the body of death, the hero has to die, and if his quest is completed the final stage of it is, cyclically, rebirth, and, dialectically, resurrection" (Frye 192).

Painful Smoke

Why am I dreaming about death? It's exhausting and almost as bad as dreaming about typing on my blog. Last night I dreamt that I was holding my grandmother's hand as she faded in and out of "death state". My stomach and chest burned almost as if I had the cancer. Maybe I did. Her cigarette burned on her bedside table. A cloud of thick, intoxicating smoke filled the room. Although she was not "alive" she continually pressed her morphine drip button. She was not in pain. I was the one suffering, crying uncontrollably, as I held the hand of my dying grandmother.

Poem from Valparaiso Poetry Review

SMALL GIRL IN A GIFT SHOP
The nested boxes fascinate her most,
Each with an elephant carved on its curved lid.
She stacks them in a teetering pyramid
A time or two, but soon becomes engrossed
In putting the scattered pieces as they were:
A puzzle whose solution seems to mean
Not everything that matters can be seen.

Her mother calls, and like a conjuror
She turns and rises, flourishing with pleasure
The finished puzzle, cunningly compact,
In whose dark center, shapely as a fact,
There might or might not lie some tiny treasure.

© by Catherine Tufariello

Cheers to Death

Why is it that dreams contain a key into the past that your waking life has some how forgotten? I choose to "forget" certain parts of my life so that I can move on and make peace with my current situations. These are the events that have a tendencay to creep back into my life when I least expect it. Why is this? Now that you have a precurser here it goes... Death takes on an odd role in my dreams. I am always greatly impacted by the death of someone close while the rest of the world continues to go on leaving me crying a silent tear.
Basically, I was hanging out with my friend Marli and Paula in a living room with brown shag carpet and dark wood panelling on the wall. The phone rang and I picked it up with out thinking. "Kacie, it was an accident," was the reply on the other end of the phone. "He's dead, his grandmother ran a red light in downtown Denver." I fell to the floor and sobbed in such a way that my stomach hurt. I looked around and noticed that my friends were still chatting and continuing pouring themselves lava flows. Did they not see me on the ground rolling around sobbing? I continued this behavior for what seemed like a great deal of time. As if nothing happened, I jumped up and toasted Marli and took a long sweet sip of a lava flow and began to laugh.

A man with a story

As I glance across
the oblong table,
I know
you have something,
something to tell.

Will it be a story about the many miles you hiked?
Or about the absurd job the president is doing.
Will you tell me about the time you met your beloved?
Or when you left home to be a hero.

I can see it,
it’s in your tender eyes.
There is little doubt of where you have been.

The creases under your eyes
tell of family,
and the dirt under your nails,
tells of hard work.
The laughter in your voice
tells of happiness,
and the gentleness in your touch
tells of love.

You are a man of many,
a bearer of substance,
a man of wonder,
filling the space that otherwise would remain empty.

Don’t worry.

Don’t think your stories
will go untold.
Today is my turn,
woman with a story.

Mama, where's the moon?

You ask,
in your persistent voice,
never missing a beat.

The questions
of when,
why,
and where

or perhaps,
how come.
What it must be like.

You aren’t entirely sure,
what it all means.
Or does it really matter?

Maybe through questioning,
or searching,
you will find reason
and begin to understand.
Or not.

You trail off
in tune,
humming the beat
to the infamous song on the radio

The song will continue to fill the air
until
you get bored.

You glance in my direction,
with knowing eyes
and ask
Mama, where’s the moon?

Before I can answer,
you let me know
it is hiding
and it will be back tomorrow.