New Poem by Tamar Yoseloff

Good news. Eyewear has a new poem today from Tamar Yoseloff's forthcoming fourth collection, The City with Horns, published by Salt in May 2011.

Yoseloff is also the author of Marks, with the artist Linda Karshan (Pratt Contemporary Art, 2007) and the editor of A Room to Live In: A Kettle's Yard Anthology (Salt, 2007). She lives in London where she teaches for the Poetry School.

The poem below is from a sequence about the American painter Jackson Pollock.

Connected

I wanted people to sit still

for one goddamn minute but they

flash through your life –

portraits are for the dead.

Trees construct themselves into a solid mass

as the horse picks up speed

see, everything's knotted

together

the way notes on a staff spell music, a factory

churns out things, each thing

itself, but also a component.

How easy it is when density

unlaces, and you find holes you can

crawl through –

light, a parting:

Navajo bucks round

a campfire, dancing

if I half-close my eyes, I can make them

leap straight in.

poem by Tamar Yoseloff; published online with permission of the author

Comments

Dennis Tomlinson said…

I like this. Yoseloff successfully relates Pollock's work to the physical world, whereas I normally find his paintings very hard to understand.

Wed Jan 19, 05:06:00 pm 2011

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Search This Blog