This is a motifational poem. The motif motifates the writer, spurring associations to render the poem into a unity, if only a superficial, galvanizing unity. But where would anything be without either motifation or superficilaity? Nature made man & man makes superficial motifations. It’s endless. The motif for me is occasioned by a form of…
Read MoreDrinking to forget again (nearly home time)
Yoon Yong is drunk again. Drinking to forget again (nearly home time) …3 bottles of Soju later & staggering thoughtfully through tight gullies | her stomach packed full of pig | mouth reeking of garlic noxious enough to stun a jindo—the stars like pheasant tracks —if you count all the stars is…
Read MoreAppearances
There will be a Yoon Yong poem today & tomorrow. I promise. Appearances …My cheekbones are fine | my chin if a little chiseled. I don’t agree with where my hair parts the same as my father’s | not symmetrical like my mother. Glad I got mother’s long legs but my father’s…
Read MoreLearning the art of not-taking-for-granted
(More untidy, preliminary insights from reading Heidegger. ) Taking a thing for granted is complex. There is an art to not taking something for granted. Being in the world is firmly established, as we interact with other things, tools or technologies, in order to provide the balance needed to be alive, we don’t exactly sense…
Read MoreA good deal of confusion…
Still trying to get my head on straight, I have the neck thread into the shoulders, but maybe the thread has worn on the fixture or on the head. Toggling, wiggling to get the thread in place, the satisfying couple of the track of the thread so that the light bulb blinks on into full,…
Read MoreCourt—a droigneach
(The following is taken from a thread on the blog of the poet Cynthia Jobin https://littleoldladydotnet.wordpress.com/) According to my favorite Book of Forms (Lewis Turco, 1968)….DROIGNEACH (pronounced dray-ee-nock) is Irish. Syllabic. A loose stanza form. The single line may consist of from nine to thirteen syllables, and it always ends in a tri-syllabic word. There is…
Read More5 poems published @The Wagon Magazine
Thanks to Krishna Prasad for taking these 5, which, I don’t think are very easy poems & particularly the last poem, which is about the Seorak War Memorial in which the poet imagines histories superimposed in real time. I went through a stage of submitting poems without titles, simply using the lemniscate & this has…
Read MoreMidflight digression III Yoon Yong on language (8:37 a.m.)
The 4th poem from my long narrative poem Yoon Yong. (If you go to ‘Korea Poems’ in the menu, you can find the first 3.) I still keep looking over these, thinking they should be read in a book, but I have yet to take action toward this, I still haven’t quite remedied with myself…
Read MoreTom Laichas: 9 Poems from “Naming the Animals”
Originally posted on Underfoot Poetry:
Named and Nameless In the midst of the naming, the boy asks: What’s your name? The Voice remembers: years in the future, others will ask this question. The reply is the same: I am what I am. The boy: That’s not an answer. We’re all what we all are, nameless…
Marie Marshall (3 Poems)
Originally posted on Underfoot Poetry:
104 The river’s in constant re-set mode, sighting by its hand against the banks what’s up and what’s down. It has the tattoo of the sky in its eye. Two girls, leaning against the wall, ignore it, choosing instead to contemplate : hills and the warmth of each other’s shoulder,…
Daniel Paul Marshall 