Years ago I would read a poem a day and write about it, sometimes I would publish it on my blog. Right now as I seem to be going through a long dark night of the soul I am thinking about those practices that used to sustain me – like reading poetry every day.

My lover, a poet as it turns out, was reading the City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology – and when I made my bed this morning and saw it -it felt like the perfect poetry collection to start up my practice with. So here it goes…

The first poem is #21 from Pictures of a Gone World by Lawerence Ferlinghetti. How do I talk about this poem? Do I say what it is about? Do I say how it makes me feel? I am so unpracticed!

My first notes on this poem combined this poem with the 2 others after it – all part of the same book Pictures of a Gone World. The poems felt connected by formatting and language but when I looked for specific threads that carried through I realized that these were all different poems.

#21 is a nice short one page poem.

This is a funny poem. There is something perverse about listening to someone someone read their poetry at a poetry reading – maybe that is part of the fun of it. Heaven – what is that 7 minutes in heaven. Why only half as far, is that half the page – the length of the lines in this poem before they break off to the next line. A poetry recital sounds a bit stuffy, like my childs piano recital where he layed his head down at the piano and did some sort of John Cage esque non-playing. Burnt Phrases like burnt norton – worn out phases like in that song by the Mamas and the Papas – did they take the line from this.

What is a burnt phase – to me it looks like letters with rust and black and breaks off on your tongue maybe it burns – it does not taste good whatever it is. And its carcenogenic.

Breaking out is a “rhyming erection” and then the rest of the poem rhymes and is vaguely about sex and eros.

“back-row lovers”

In college there were front row sitters – my good friend and flat mate Naomi was a front row sitter and when we took a Civilization class together I sat with her in the front row – which was hard because class was after lunch and I sometimes fell asleep.

Twice a year some poets get together and we exchange poems every day for a month. This poem reminds me of those poems that we send to each other. Irreverent, funny, a little dirty, and a pulling from different directions / split down the middle :).