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AUTUMN CLOUDS, NYC (contest)

Clouds over the skyscraped sky,
Their bodies emerge on the wind- O Gloria!
Shapes in stampede illusions, shapes
With hues of the October sun, sun
Which rips in leaps from wall to tower.

I attach myself to the fast clouds,
To the mythos of angelic, angelic,
As I attach myself to the autumnal wind, loud
Are the fugues of sound, proud
Geometries of steel and mirrored glare,
The sky, sky fills with fleeing dragons!

Last few words: 
A poem in the mix of the imagists, and Wallace Stevens, written about 45 years ago. Beats me what it means, but I still feel something when I read it, and hope the poem resonates its secrets to you.
Editing stage: 

Comments

We all need different things from what we read While I read incessantly I almost never read a novel
Perhaps the impatience of the impertinent or the restlessness or short attention span. Its the long description's, the character building. I always feel like I'm waiting for something to happen and then even if it does it often falls short of my hopes like 300 hundred pages later.
My wife has read a book a week for 35 years and we have a friend ( computer scientist ) who reads a book a day of carpet baggers and 3rd rate romance novels with pirates who abscond with the beautiful woman who succumbs to rape and discovers happiness being used and falls in love, how Ironic.
I read for language and an emotional kick, the unexpected, like food that is very spicy or with a twist. Having said that of course I respond to depth and beautiful writing even if lengthy.

I say this to frame the context for my following remarks so you can consider the source, of yours truly, nor are these comments about any particular poem but the bit of your body of work I have read.

You have achieved competence or a completeness, your work to me seems well integrated like pumice-polished feet My issue with it is that I see mostly surface and I look for your innerness (inner compulsive force) where things get more complicated, perhaps asymmetrical, the epiphany of truth through disillusionment, or danger, dread, ambiguity, in other words the lunar treasure troves of the subconscious where anything goes.

Julian Schnabel (Painter) once said that the only way he knows how to make a painting is to dig a big hole for himself, jump in and try to climb his way out, implying desperation. Perhaps you know his work.
For me his work has a scattered rangy, monumentality They are not beautiful but they are unforgettable because thy have the brilliance of freedom

So hell I'm an idiosyncratic nobody, just an neophyte and maybe you have every good reason to think so. Maybe I don't even know how to write right, but I want poems that burn, that break the heart or tangle me up. I want to see the center of a writers soul. A blazing suns core, I see this in Bukowski and the beat poets especially in Ginsburg and William Burroughs and I see it in the TAO and I want to see you take that immaculate craft, and exploit it passed gentility. Poetry may commit crimes, lose control, open the door to another dimension.
"Poetry does not respect a preordained stereotype of the world.
No, poetry can be convulsive! It’s bound up in the earth’s tremors! It denounces appearances; it pierces lies and conventions with its sword."

Best Z

firstly I do like Schnabel, most of his work has some representation...I've just grown out of total abstract art and sculpture lately, as I have for "abstract Poetry" (that being most of what Poetry Magazine publishes, in which if asked I don't have a clue what the hell the poem is about)
I do hear you, and understand the rawness in art that grips you and inspires you. I could say there is a mellowing process in our aging, that just may be the way of things for me. I'm getting more reflective. The beasts within me take frequent naps. I like re-reading 4 Quartets as much as early Delmore Schwartz or Miloz. Lately, I've been writing with a backdrop of nostalgia...I drive my car in cruise control.

But as a poet I do understand what you're saying. I don't think I'm writing elevator music, but it's not Shostakovich either. I try to treat each poem as an exercise in self-learning, because I usually know what I'm trying to say while trying to apply all I know about the craft of poetry. I thank you for the kick in the butt to try and reach to gut level, I do, but in the end all I can do try to find the muse in the mirror and realize, for whatever it's worth, we are one and the same.

Eumolpus
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
ee cummings

author comment

This is a poem best read in pieces because trying to consider it in its entirety gives me a headache lol

it is a very short poem...it was a poem written so long ago when poets were playing with motion and sound in words. It perhaps is in the surrealist tradition as well.
I don't write like that anymore, obviously, painters don't paint cubist paintings anymore... All our poetry, our styles change. To me, it has a charm of the past, and as such, lives, like cubist paintings which are still seen in many living rooms. It's dated, but it once fit right into the fashion.

It is the type of poem to be read as a whole- abstract, a collage of images and sound...and it's about fall, or as the contest suggests, "Autumn fun"

Eumolpus
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
ee cummings

author comment

am saying this is a poem best read carefully instead of in haste due to the many ways a lot of the lines can be interpreted

In Canada
I have observed clouds like at no other place--- around the world and
these few days reading your interactions with Z
I feel as if I have always lived in a Zoo*
(totally
IGNORANT in Caps
I never use)

*except of how what animals do
is similar to human ..
both of you may I say young men enlighten
Loved-ly

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