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  • The Red-Headed Kid Part 1
  • The Red-Headed Kid Part 2
  • Whither Willie Wicked?
  • Sex and God
  • Ewing Reviewing 2020
  • Ewing Reviewing 2018/19
  • Others' Words
  • Photo Spread
  • Buy Books
  • More
    • Home
    • Ewing Reviewing 2021
    • Ivan VI
    • Pup's Writing
    • Ewing Reviewing
    • Pride Literature
    • Sample PDFs
    • Jan Ewing aka Boss
    • William Cataldi aka pup
    • The Red-Headed Kid Part 1
    • The Red-Headed Kid Part 2
    • Whither Willie Wicked?
    • Sex and God
    • Ewing Reviewing 2020
    • Ewing Reviewing 2018/19
    • Others' Words
    • Photo Spread
    • Buy Books
  • Home
  • Ewing Reviewing 2021
  • Ivan VI
  • Pup's Writing
  • Ewing Reviewing
  • Pride Literature
  • Sample PDFs
  • Jan Ewing aka Boss
  • William Cataldi aka pup
  • The Red-Headed Kid Part 1
  • The Red-Headed Kid Part 2
  • Whither Willie Wicked?
  • Sex and God
  • Ewing Reviewing 2020
  • Ewing Reviewing 2018/19
  • Others' Words
  • Photo Spread
  • Buy Books

Others' Words

Charles Bukowski on Poverty

pup has long searched for the right words for his belief that poverty rocks. It's a hard argument, because poverty can destroy hearts and minds. But Bukowski's words capture the idea perfectly. They were attributed to him on the Charles Bukowski facebook page. pup believes it.


"It was wintertime. I was starving to death trying to be a writer in New York. I hadn't eaten for three or four days. So, I finally said, "I'm gonna have a big bag of popcorn." And God, I hadn't tasted food for so long, it was so good. Each kernel, you know, each one was like a steak! I chewed and it would just drop into my poor stomach. My stomach would say, "THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!" I was in heaven, just walking along, and two guys happened by, and one said to the other, "Jesus Christ!" The other one said, "What was it?" "Did you see that guy eating popcorn? God, it was awful!" And so I couldn't enjoy the rest of the popcorn. I thought; what do you mean, "it was awful?" I'm in heaven here. I guess I was kinda dirty. They can always tell a fucked-up guy."

Richard Siken, The Museum from War of the Foxes

Richard Siken is a brilliant poet who pup can't recommend enough. Original line breaks.


Two lovers went to the museum and wandered the

rooms. He saw a painting and stood in front of it

for too long. It was a few minutes before she

realized he had gotten stuck. He was stuck looking

at a painting. She stood next to him, looking at his

face and then the face in the painting. What do you

see? she asked. I don’t know, he said. He didn’t

know. She was disappointed, then bored. He was

looking at a face and she was looking at her watch.

This is where everything changed. There was now

a distance between them. He was looking at a face

but it might as well have been a cabbage or a

sugar beet. Perhaps it was something about yellow

near pink. He didn’t know how to say it. Years later

he still didn’t know how to say it, and she was gone. 

Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning

This is possibly the greatest poem written in the last two thousand years.


       I   


Complacencies of the peignoir, and late 

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,  

And the green freedom of a cockatoo  

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate  

The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.  

She dreams a little, and she feels the dark  

Encroachment of that old catastrophe,  

As a calm darkens among water-lights.  

The pungent oranges and bright, green wings  

Seem things in some procession of the dead,  

Winding across wide water, without sound.  

The day is like wide water, without sound,  

Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet  

Over the seas, to silent Palestine,  

Dominion of the blood and sepulchre. 

   

       II   


Why should she give her bounty to the dead?  

What is divinity if it can come  

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?  

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,  

In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

In any balm or beauty of the earth,  

Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?  

Divinity must live within herself:  

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;  

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued  

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty  

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;  

All pleasures and all pains, remembering  

The bough of summer and the winter branch. 

These are the measures destined for her soul.


       III   


Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.  

No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave  

Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.  

He moved among us, as a muttering king,  

Magnificent, would move among his hinds,  

Until our blood, commingling, virginal,  

With heaven, brought such requital to desire  

The very hinds discerned it, in a star.  

Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be  

The blood of paradise? And shall the earth  

Seem all of paradise that we shall know?  

The sky will be much friendlier then than now,  

A part of labor and a part of pain,  

And next in glory to enduring love,  

Not this dividing and indifferent blue.   


        IV   


She says, “I am content when wakened birds,  

Before they fly, test the reality  

Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;  

But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields  

Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”  

There is not any haunt of prophecy,  

Nor any old chimera of the grave,  

Neither the golden underground, nor isle  

Melodious, where spirits gat them home,  

Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm  

Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured  

As April’s green endures; or will endure  

Like her remembrance of awakened birds,  

Or her desire for June and evening, tipped  

By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.    

    

        V   


She says, “But in contentment I still feel  

The need of some imperishable bliss.”  

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,  

Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams  

And our desires. Although she strews the leaves  

Of sure obliteration on our paths,  

The path sick sorrow took, the many paths  

Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love  

Whispered a little out of tenderness,  

She makes the willow shiver in the sun  

For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze  

Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.  

She causes boys to pile new plums and pears  

On disregarded plate. The maidens taste  

And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.   


        VI   


Is there no change of death in paradise?  

Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs  

Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,  

Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,  

With rivers like our own that seek for seas  

They never find, the same receding shores  

That never touch with inarticulate pang?  

Why set the pear upon those river-banks  

Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?  

Alas, that they should wear our colors there,  

The silken weavings of our afternoons,  

And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!  

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,  

Within whose burning bosom we devise  

Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.     


      VII   


Supple and turbulent, a ring of men  

Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn  

Their boisterous devotion to the sun,  

Not as a god, but as a god might be,  

Naked among them, like a savage source.  

Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,  

Out of their blood, returning to the sky;  

And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,  

The windy lake wherein their lord delights,  

The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,  

That choir among themselves long afterward.  

They shall know well the heavenly fellowship  

Of men that perish and of summer morn.  

And whence they came and whither they shall go  

The dew upon their feet shall manifest.    


       VIII   


She hears, upon that water without sound,  

A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine  

Is not the porch of spirits lingering.  

It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”  

We live in an old chaos of the sun,  

Or old dependency of day and night,  

Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,  

Of that wide water, inescapable.  

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail  

Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;  

Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;  

And, in the isolation of the sky,  

At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make  

Ambiguous undulations as they sink,  

Downward to darkness, on extended wings.  


Source: The Collected Poems (1954)  

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