Love in 500 Years

From poets.org: “TO BE READ IN 500 YEARS is poet Albert Goldbarth’s time capsule for a future that none of us can now imagine—a world without mailboxes, without sexual reproduction, without oil or tillable soil, without the capacity to understand music or poetry or “love love love love crazy love.” Goldbarth’s smart and nostalgic collection of poems, spoken from that future’s distant past, reminds us of everything we have to lose.”

How Simile Works
by Albert Goldbarth

The drizzle-slicked cobblestone alleys
of some city;
and the brickwork back
of the lumbering Galapagos tortoise
they’d set me astride, at the “petting zoo”….

The taste of our squabble still in my mouth
the next day;
and the brackish puddles sectioning
the street one morning after a storm….

So poetry configures its comparisons.

My wife and I have been arguing; now
I’m telling her a childhood reminiscence,
stroking her back, her naked back that was
the particles in the heart of a star and will be
again, and is hers, and is like nothing
else, and is like the components of everything.

***

Current poem I’m in love with.  This book is on my wishlist.

***

Speaking of futuristic love, last Wednesday, I attended a Janelle Monae concert at Royce Hall at UCLA for FREE, thanks to Joan Rose!  I’d listened to her album quite often last year, but this was my first time seeing her live.   I admire her consistency in persona as Cindy Mayweather, a “cybergirl without a face, a heart or a mind.”  From her unblinking robotic gaze to her stage-dive into the audience, she’s captured this character, without revealing the strings or the puppetmaster (her “real” human self).  I hear she always stage-dives, wears the same 50s’ inspired outfit: black bowtie, bouffanted hair, white jacket, flings said jacket into the audience and plays the same songs from her most recent album, which really shows her commitment to that persona, the representation of the robotic, especially shown through performance.  But how does a robot make me feel so ALIVE?  Watching her live resonated with me, as I continue to write persona poems in the aswang.  Some questions I ask myself: How far can I go with the aswang’s voice?  How commited am I to her experience, and well-being?

Wild

I’m memorizing the following poem for my “Complete Poet: Vulnerability, Sexuality and Sense of Humor” Poetry workshop with Suzanne Lummis.

25
By Emily Dickinson

Wild Nights – Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile – the winds –
To a heart in port –
Done with the compass –
Done with the chart!

Rowing in Eden –
Ah, the sea!
Might I moor – Tonight –
In thee!

It’s short, but it certainly hits the second category for the “Complete Poet.”

An interesting quote from Colonel Higginson, the co-editor of Dickinson’s 1891 collection, before it was printed:

One poem only I dread a little to print–that wonderful ‘Wild Nights,’–lest the malignant read into it more than that virgin recluse ever dreamed of putting there. Has Miss Lavinia [Emily Dickinson’s sister] any shrinking about it? You will understand & pardon my solicitude. Yet what a loss to omit it! Indeed it is not to be omitted.