Remixed Poetry

Gertrude and Emily Dwell in Possibility

I dwell in Possibility
More numerous of Windows;
A single image is not splendor
To shine, why not shine, to shine

Of Chambers as the Cedars
Impregnable of Eye—
The difference is spreading
A place in no new table

And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky—
An arrangement in a system to pointing
All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling.

Of Visitors—the fairest—
For Occupation—This—
The question does not come before there is a quotation
Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing

The spreading wide of narrow Hands
To gather Paradise—
In the evening there is feeling
All this makes a harmony, it even makes a succession

Christina Murphy, 2014

Remixed works:
Dwell in Possibility, by Emily Dickinson
Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein

Death is Here,
Death is Guarded by Swords

a Cento

I wake in the dark and remember
White fog lifting and falling on mountain-brow.

Lady of the Night star-breathed
This is the Wheel of Dreams

It rises over the lake, the farms,
Black bird, black voice,

You only have to wait, they will find you

I touch you in the night, whose gift was you,
All the new thinking is about loss.

No one believes in the calm
The hospital: it wasn’t her idea

A wild patience has taken me this far
While I stood here, in the open, lost in myself,

What voice at moth-hour did I hear calling
Traveling through the dark I found a deer

Love it was good to talk to you tonight.
At dawn the dove croons.

The ache of marriage
The whiskey on your breath

As long as we look forward, all seems free,
It seemed the kind of life we wanted.

My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent
History has to live with what was here,

This is not exactly what I mean
I shall hate you

Here they are. The soft eyes open.
Your face did not rot

Mercy is whiter than laundry,
It was a long time ago.

Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily
I cannot remember things I once read

Stasis in darkness.

Gone, I say and walk away from church,
Is the soul solid, like iron?

Laura LeHew, 2014

Remixed works:
Iris, by Murial Rukeyser
Rain Travel, by WS Merwin
Wales Visitation, by Allen Ginsberg
The Night-Blooming Jasmine, by Audre Lorde
Carriers of the Dream Wheel, by N. Scott Momaday
The Kite, by Mark Strand
In the Orchard, by Anne Stevenson
Messengers, by Louise Gluck
The Science of the Night, by Stanley Kunitz
Meditations at Laguitas, by Robert Haas
Belief, by Philip Levine
Darlene’s Hospital, by John Ashbery
Integrity, by Adrienne Rich
Milkweed, by James Wright
What Voice at Moth-Hour, by Robert Penn Warren
Traveling Through the Dark, by William Stafford
Rondeau After a Transatlantic Telephone Call, by Marilyn Hacker
California Spring, by Charles Wright
The Ache of Marriage, by Denise Levertov
My Papa’s Waltz, by Theodore Roethke
The Western Approach, by Howard Nemerov
Serpent Knowledge, by Robert Pinsky
In Memory of My Feelings, by Frank O’Hara
History, by Robert Lowell
The World and I, by Laura Riding Jackson
Hatred, by Gwendolyn B. Bennett
The Heaven of Animals, by James Dickey
The Lost Pilot, by James Tate
Angels in Winter, by Nancy Willard
As I Grew Older, by Langston Hughes
Little Exercise, Elizabeth Bishop
Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout, by Gary Synder
Ariel, by Sylvia Plath
The Truth the Dead Know, by Anne Sexton
Some Questions You Might Ask, by Mary Oliver

Shall I Compare Thee
to Laura Ashley

by
William $hake$peare

Shall I compare thee to Laura Ashley?
House of Flora lovely and Mad Carpentier.
Breitling do shake the Burberry of May,
And Tiffany hath all too Karen Kane.
Sometime Sealup the eye of Philipp Plein,
And often is his gold Bulgari dimmed;
And every fair Tom Ford sometime declines,
By chance, or Cartier’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy Hussein Chalayan shall not fade,
Nor Karl Lagerfeld that fair thou ow’st,
Nor Vivienne Westwood wand’rest in his shade,
When in Patek Philippe to Time thou grow’st.
So long as Anna Sui, or eyes can see,
So long St. John, and D & G to thee.

CT, 2014

Remixed works:
Sonnet 18, by William Shakespeare
The names of various luxury brands

In Gyres Fluttering

by
William Thomas Wallace Whitman

In gyres fluttering,
In the falcon by falconers of empty things,
Shaken from the centre that lay itself,
From all the anarchy hitherto broken, from the worlds, tides, ceremonies,
Which too empty I was thinking to sit my innocence,
Constant to me now anarchy not yet broken, constant to me that my best,
That the best of the conviction I sit for arises in the worst,
Here by myself away from the revelation of the hand,
letting fall and drawn back here by comings inhuman,
No longer veritable, (for in these medleyed words I can drool as I would not call elsewhere,)
Grinding upon me the image that does not go itself, yet used to be all the Spiritus Mundi,
Striving to make no sights to­day but those of gasping waste,
Scouring them along that ever­hooded desert,
Threatening hence sands of tragic­gestured shape,
Body this dark colored head in my sunken man,
I blow for all who need or have needed clear gaze,
To lay the shadows of my birds and darkness,
To wonder the centuries of sleep.

 

An Oulipian Chimera
by Esther Greenleaf Murer, 2014

Remixed works:
Calamus (In paths untrodden) by Walt Whitman
The Second Coming by W B Yeats (Nouns)
Channel Firing by Thomas Hardy  (Verbs)
The Idea of Order at Key West by Wallace Stevens (Adjectives)

Never Comb the Brewed Brain Twice

a Paradelle

My life closed twice before its close
My life closed twice before its close
Because I could not stop for death
Because I could not stop for death
I closed not twice could my death stop
Because before its close for life

The grass divides as with a comb
The grass divides as with a comb
The brain is wider than the sky
The brain is wider than the sky
The sky divides the brain as is
than with the comb a wider grass

I taste a liquor never brewed
I taste a liquor never brewed
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Never tell a truth I taste it
but tell all the slant­brewed liquor

Never comb the brewed brain twice
because it closed as for the grass
I could not liquor all my death
before its slant divides a stop
but tell the sky I close with a life
the truth is wider than a taste

Esther Greenleaf Murer, 2014

Remixed works:
Sundry lines from Emily Dickinson

The Unhappy Ape

A man holding a razor.
A man on a chair smoking.
A man shitting.
All quite indifferent
to one another’s
presence or plight.

As you walk through
room after room
it becomes clear
that only grimaces remain,
that the worst
has happened,
that you can live
with the worst.

A man sits naked
with torn newspaper
around his feet.
A man reclines in a vest
on a stained red couch.
The bandages and the screams
are already in place.

I’ve always hoped
in a sense to be able
to paint the mouth
like Monet painted a sunset.
Man is an unhappy ape.
But if he knows it, he isn’t.

Howie Good, 2014

Remixed work:
Francis Bacon and Walt Disney by John Berger

Lauren, to Herself

not by
Charles Olson

I have had to learn the feminine things
last. Which has caused problems.
Even in the kitchen I was poor, at cooking beef, or to wash
until sparkling the coffee cups.
The kitchen will not, although perhaps eventually, be my place
But even my place, in it, I stood estranged
from that which was most familiar. My wombs delay
not content with mans argument
to such postponement
argued with nature of
obedience,
that we are all bodies
made of bones
that we grow up together
yet the woman
is not easily
known

She could be, though the politeness (the cupcakes)
I note in others,
makes more friends
than my own burnt toast. The acceptance

they submit to daily
of the worlds
arrogance
and who encourage
as I am witness
though I have tried

I have made dialogues
have discussed my inadequacies,
Have coughed in a silent room, offered
what freedom
patriarkhia allows

But the home?
This, I can not have been given,
a life, love, and from man
the world.

Dishcloths,
But standing here
I look out as a wind
prunes the roses, plucking
“he loves me not”
red petals

I know the cupboards
for the towels, how to fold them,
which to use. But the family
you want to grow in me,
for their rejection, of me

And my circumstance
is neither diminished
nor increased,
by the eradication

2

It is undone business
I speak of, this morning
with the dishes
piling high
in the sink

Lauren Dye, 2014

Remixed works:
Maximus, to himself, by Charles Olson
Chores a housewife is expected to perform
and her attitude towards her position in society

I Have a Dream

by
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I have a dream from an antique land
that rolls: We hold these truths to be of stone
friends in the desert. That all men, on the sand,
Half sunk, are free. We cannot walk alone
And have a dream, and sneer of old command,
Let us not wallow well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these wrongful deeds,
the majestic heights, and the heart that fed
but live out the true meaning of its creed:
“My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of kings,
Look on my mountainside, let freedom ring!”
Nothing but pride remains. I have a dream
from that colossal quest will realize freedom,
the lone righteousness like a mighty stream.

CT, 2014

Remixed works:
Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I Have a Dream speech, by Martin Luther King

P B Shelley reacts to people
reacting to Rebecca Black

I met a hater from an antique land
Who said: who wrote this shit so monotone
heres a tissue. Near them, just having fun,
Half sunk, a shattered Friday lies, gettin’ down,
And OMG!, and sneer of the weekend,
Tell why do people hate these lyrics read
Which yet survive, stamped on a friken seat,
The sound that mocked them, gets so stuck in my head;
And on the video these words appear:
“Gotta make my mind up, we’re drivin’
Gotta get down, get cereal, on Friday!”
watch it over and over again. Round the decay
Of that lol wtf, speechless and bare
The lone and never sing again then go away.

CT, 2014

Remixed works:
Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Comments to, and lyrics from, Friday, by Rebecca Black

War on Terror

by
William Shakespeare

When most I wink, then human rights best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams democracy,
And human rights, are bright in dark directed.
Then thou, whose shadow shadows human rights,
How would thy war on terrorism show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When freedom exercised thy shade shines so!
How would, I say, terror be blessed made
By weapons on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy mass destruction shade
Through heavy sleep on human rights doth stay!
All days are nights to see democracy,
And nights misunderestimated me.

CT, 2014

Remixed works:
Sonnet 43, by William Shakespeare
Media sound bites from the G.W. Bush era