A Way of Being in a Place Called America

A Poem.
I saw Paterson (2016) last night, and I woke up this morning dreaming in poetry.
I used to write everything in poetry, then I decided to switch to prose in order to try to say the things I needed to say.
Now that I'm older, I find the things I need to say are too complex for the prose I have the ability to write.
Perhaps it's time to go back to poetry.

Michael Holloway       
April 7, 2017        

Paterson is about a bus driver named Paterson who works for the Public Transit Authority of Paterson, New Jersey - the place about which the American poet William Carlos Williams wrote his modernist epic, "Paterson"¹; and where the Beat Poet (and my poetry paragon) Allen Ginsberg grew up and spent some time writing.

The film is an art film; something America doesn't do very much. Something the film's maker Jim Jarmusch, has been trying to change throughout his career in film.

The movie talks about identity; how, if we are happy with the identity we have built for ourselves, it can shape the world we chose to understand that we live in.

In Paterson's America, the world is about love.

It is not about a hundred other things that it could be about - those things that appear in the landscape of Paterson's days - it is them, but they are not important, they just inform the other thing.

Paterson tries to reset the conversation in America, and there are strong, deep currents which lend to that.

Perhaps America is too old now for prose. America was once younger than that now.

Perhaps America's dissonance so visible in it's Twitter threads, should be stanzas now instead?

---

¹ Wikipedia | Paterson - by William Carlos Williams | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paterson_(poem)



mh

Clarifying just one thing...

http://www.rheostaticslive.com/




That is all.



mh

A Short Poem

Watched The Night of the Iguana (1964) from a play by Tennessee Williams, Directed by John Huston, Starring Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Grayson Hall, Deborah Kerr and Sue Lyon.

As soon as the Olive Branch poem was finished, this poem popped into my head, it's quite neat, so I wrote it down:

The coin of life,
One side's death,
One side's birth.
We try to understand it,
For all we're worth.

Michael Holloway 12/09/2009

And,

By Tennessee Williams

How calmly does the olive branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer
With no betrayal of despair

Some time while light obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever
And from thence
A second history will commence

A chronicle no longer gold
A bargaining with mist and mold
And finally the broken stem
The plummeting to earth, and then

And intercourse not well designed
For beings of a golden kind
Whose native green must arch above
The earth's obscene corrupting love

And still the ripe fruit and the branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer
With no betrayal of despair

Oh courage! Could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me

Text of the poem courtesy:
Linda Sue Grimes
Classic Poetry Aide



mh

Waiting

Like we're collectively waiting for a bus.
What will it look like?
Will it look like war?

Ever since the day the media showed the degree of their culpability
more and more distant from the truth,
waiting for a bus.

The surreal world,
Obama drowning in thickening patronage
seems now,
waiting for a bus.

Soldiers from our past
and their mothers waiting as they do,
waiting for a bus.

Waiting for a bus
We know is not for us,
but waiting for the bus.

M Holloway
11/11/2009



mh