A Higher Larry

[5th column]

Hey, Larry

All of these carry weight. There’s a melancholy feel that’s all too recognizable in these difficult times. The meter of Beatrice is impressive and somehow propels the poem in a way that feels like it fits the subject matter.

[Sorella]

Larry,
Your latest, Self-Portait, proceeds with measured pace and assuredness: an original metaphor, concrete details, the ending so stunning.

I will be back! To read and eat food for thought.

Sorella

[Cameron Clark]

Your Dante poems make his voice alive. But Self-Portrait, unfinished is a definite keeper. What brilliant descriptions. Keep this, keeping working.

[Blythe]

There is so much to commend here, Larry. I feel like you're doing late-life reflections way better than Eliot did haha.
This turn made me stop and focus, I think you've got a lot going on in general but this in particular is striking:

Jung’s wave of blood has come and gone,
left its tall mound of bodies,
and no one recalls
what tomorrow used to mean.

Thanks for the hard work here.

[larryrap]

Hey Neil, I really enjoy and benefit from your support.
Sorella, it's so pleasing and energizing to read that, thanks.
Cameron, lovely complements, I try not to enjoy it so much but I do.
Blyth, you're very welcome, and my thanks to you.

I'll be visiting you guys more on the weekend hopefully.

[larryrap]

7th - Rebuilding the Wall

..........“The city was wide and large, but the people within it were few
..........and no houses had been built.” - Nehemiah 7:4

it was perfect in my mind,
the city lifted from sorrow:
the fountains, the promenades,
the bemused wisdom of the old,
and peace in the eyes of each child –

but there’s a heavy tax on action:
critics and mockers,
their allies within,
the rabble with their cartloads of grievance,
the lords with their kiss-hungry hands.

I never gave ground, matched each setback
with a maniac’s insistence and guile.
Soon my neighbors were building beside me –
too many names to hold in one heart,
their love sunk in mortar and stone.

And then it was over. Our God
had revealed his inscrutable mind,
but to whom? The markets were empty,
windows were shuttered,
and echoes tapped like mice through the walls.

And yet, for this
we were summoned:
to cash a dream in for its likeness –
to live our days out in its shadow
more naked than ever before.

[Scrow]

Hi,


I like ghazals, and yours is particularly moving. Your bringing yourself into the final sher is done so well - it moves the poem from the universal to the immediate in a blink of an instant - both exist simultaneously and powerfully.


‘Late Dante’ is lovely, the way it turns the tables, and I love the picture of the elderly poet jogging, Beatrice laying in wait. The form is so tricky, and yet nothing glares out here, none of those strange ‘thuds’ of rhyme you so often get with terza rima. The revision is good, I think - it’s more biting on a word-level, less gentle.


I read ‘self-portrait’ as referencing bits of Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’ and (of course) Wilde’s ‘Dorian Gray’. The world in stasis, lagooned, waiting for some kind of eventual and unavoidable fall.


I love some of the phrasing and images in ‘rebuilding the wall’ - the ‘kiss-hungry hands’, the ‘echoes tapped like mice through the walls’. The end is stunning, too - the sense of being stripped bare, vulnerable and open - a prize and a price.


Sarah

[larryrap]

Thank you Sarah, your deep look at these is very flattering to me.

[larryrap]

8th - Napoleon Hill

Every city has a story like this:
seeking a high place to manage the siege,
Napoleon commanded each man in his army

to pour a bucket of earth. Two-hundred years later,
level with neighboring roofs, the hill stands –
its steep side surrendered to wild-grown cacti,

its summer brush criss-crossed with bicycle paths,
a patch of overgrown archeological trenches
fenced off by barbed wire and rusted warning signs.

The poet climbs down the hill. The poem isn’t tired
but he is. It’s time to rest these ghosts,
the image of hours with his children,

glimpses of himself as a child among weeds.
Leave them all safe underneath, purged of daylight:
the goblets, the amulets, the daggers and scarabs.

Does the soul leave a trace –
a thumb-pattern on the rim of nowhere,
or a lingering tincture of vanilla and wine?


Link

[Cameron Clark]

Larry,
Is Napoleon's hill a hunk of earth or a chunk of soul?
Delivered with your usual talent for imagery, arresting and strange. Just as poetry should be.

[Janelo]

Larry there is just so much here to be wowed by. And quieted by.

There’s a grappling with almost painful levels of self-consciousness in these last few.

I mean poor flippin Dante. Seriously, I’m feelin for the guy here. This is not how this reunion was supposed to go!

Your selections of the epigraphs on 6 and 7 make the bible sound like good journalism. Self portrait is anxious and intense and strikes hard, it’s a brutal series of images but where you land at the end. Oof. Made me think how the shape of a scissors is equal in negative and positive space, just as this portrait is half done and half undone.

But then in Rebuilding there is encouragement, even triumph in taking a stand and standing together. The poem contains the adrenaline of courage. And I needed a dose of that, thank you.

And then with Napoleon these last two strophes:

And then it was over. Our God
had revealed his inscrutable mind,
but to whom? The markets were empty,
windows were shuttered,
and echoes tapped like mice through the walls.

And yet, for this
we were summoned:
to cash a dream in for its likeness –
to live our days out in its shadow
more naked than ever before.

The echoes tapped like mice through walls. I mean holy crap. I am there.

I’m stunned and struck and obliterated by the stories you are telling. Please keep going.

Jane

[SP Singer]

Rebuilding The Wall--i could return to this poem many times! Tired now so can't do better than to say i love it.
Thank You,
SP

[billdozer]

Larry,
Self portrait, The scissors recall Escher's hands drawing themselves. For me it resonates with the lost tomorrow in the previous strophe, as no one in a painting has a moment beyond the last brush stroke. But it's unfinished and there's a victory in that. It's all very rich.
In Rebuilding the Wall, these words: to cash a dream in for its likeness –/to live our days out in its shadow is a fantastic epigram. You are making literature, sir.

[Donner]

Hi, Larry,

"Napoleon Hill" - Not this Napoleon Hill, I take it? But I digress. "wild-grown cacti" caught me by surprise, but it shouldn't have as cactus grows where I live in western WA. The historical and personal, the past and present are mixed in just the right ratio, and I found the poet's battle to conquer the hill more compelling than Napoleon's. The details make this musing about if we leave a trace of who we are behind thought-provoking.

Donna

[larryrap]

I'm totally grateful by being given such fine support and attention. Thanks you Cameron, Jane, Bill and Donna so much!