Duane Locke
three poems
**
Renata's Poem: the Birth of the Author #71
Her clos est Est Est Est
The cleric wrote Her clos
Est friend no end no sin
The cleric wrote Est Est
Oui The cleric wrote Ja
Ja Ja her closest non-
Cashbook friend not
Next nexus of kin
Her closest chum Her
Clos est pal clos est
Well wisher well pusher
Ja ja ja her closest friend
Cleopatra's clos est friend
Ja ja ja pulled pull ed
The rings gold off
Cleopatra's dis interred
Hands The rings once
Warm now cold but
Still gold pulled off
Cleopatra's dead hands
By Cleopatra's clos est
Living friend Rings pull
Ed off at five in afternoon
Est Est Est ja ja ja*
*This poem is classified by literary historians
As being the first poem of Renata's barefoot period.
It was handed in as a classroom assignment
To her advanced creative writing professor
Who wrote these comments in the margin:
You are becoming a master of the materiality
Of the signifier. Your phonemes have a semantic
Expansion and construct a discrete
Ideational quanta. Your verbalization
Is a semiotic model of resistance
To the power structure of late capitalism.
You have constructed phonemes
That are a complete dissimilarity
From all other phonemes, and thus
Your construction is in contradistinction
To Saussurean linguistics. Perhaps,
You appropriated Jakobson. Your sonic
Texture has a new amazement. You
Are advancing towards a poetry
With a pre-lexical universe of possible meaning.
Last year, in your first year of creative writing
Your poetry was tainted and corrupted
By an influence of the two non-poets, the two aspirant
Poets that Jeb Rasula has designated as
The two greatest quacks of twentieth poetry,
Charles Bukowski and Robert Bly. This poem
Shows recovery from the quackery of the
Two opportunists who fooled so many people
Into thinking them poets.
Keep up the good work and save poetry from the quacks.
**
Al Fresco Café Poem #263
I have waited 263 days for Renata.
PICNIC
The dog's black arabesques float
On a green luminescence slab,
The trees are the tossed bowling balls
Of a loud voiced juggler.
A green coat, a Spring green, wonders
What deceit
Caused it to neatly folded
Between bottles with golden liquid
On a pale blue table cloth.
A scarlet tanager in a chinaberry
Dropped from his plumage a red feather
On plums in a blue bowl.
His lover could not decipher
The white silk monogram
Of an unknown person
Embroidered on his black shirt pocket.
Playfully, she mentioned
That Tristan Tzara wore a monocle.
He turned up the volume of the portable radio.
**
Al Fresco Café Poem #265
265 days I've waited for Renata
The stained car snarls
As it passes polluting
The steeple and pedestrians
This stained lame tame impresario that impugns
Never goes away always omnipresent
Mobile at slow speed
This car never goes away
Omnipresent decasyllabic debouching
An arm sticks out its pulled down window
Fist pounds on the car door
Pounds and pounds
The noise will not stop
The noise will form the foundation
Of stage props bullets candlelight-propositions
The noise expresses itself by
Obedience to immaculately born power structure
Conventional and traditional syntax
Speech is a disturbance of a silent atmosphere with sounds
That are masked and are often scarecrows or mummies
Their skeletons
Are buried in pyramids cathedral basements state mausoleums
Their cenotaphs are centered in bank lobbies
No one can say anything they understand
Understanding comes from other sounds than those spoken
The basic language spoken in our time
Is the pounding on a fist on a car door
While sitting imprisoned and proud inside the car
I so oppositional
But am surround by these sounds
These sounds hold my coat and snicker
These sounds come and go
Speaking of burnt toast green dwarfs football fields
So I go
Behind the closed door
On the rug decorated with acanthus leaves
The fragments of a broken vase
It could not have fell
It could not have fell
Because I placed the cherished vase
Flat down on the floor
When I opened the door and left the room
It was a tough vase
Advertised and believed by almost everyone to be unbreakable
But it was broken into many pieces
Scattered all over the acanthus leaves on the rug
I had placed the vase flat down on the rug
It could not have fell
**
return to sawbuck 1.2
**
**
Renata's Poem: the Birth of the Author #71
Her clos est Est Est Est
The cleric wrote Her clos
Est friend no end no sin
The cleric wrote Est Est
Oui The cleric wrote Ja
Ja Ja her closest non-
Cashbook friend not
Next nexus of kin
Her closest chum Her
Clos est pal clos est
Well wisher well pusher
Ja ja ja her closest friend
Cleopatra's clos est friend
Ja ja ja pulled pull ed
The rings gold off
Cleopatra's dis interred
Hands The rings once
Warm now cold but
Still gold pulled off
Cleopatra's dead hands
By Cleopatra's clos est
Living friend Rings pull
Ed off at five in afternoon
Est Est Est ja ja ja*
*This poem is classified by literary historians
As being the first poem of Renata's barefoot period.
It was handed in as a classroom assignment
To her advanced creative writing professor
Who wrote these comments in the margin:
You are becoming a master of the materiality
Of the signifier. Your phonemes have a semantic
Expansion and construct a discrete
Ideational quanta. Your verbalization
Is a semiotic model of resistance
To the power structure of late capitalism.
You have constructed phonemes
That are a complete dissimilarity
From all other phonemes, and thus
Your construction is in contradistinction
To Saussurean linguistics. Perhaps,
You appropriated Jakobson. Your sonic
Texture has a new amazement. You
Are advancing towards a poetry
With a pre-lexical universe of possible meaning.
Last year, in your first year of creative writing
Your poetry was tainted and corrupted
By an influence of the two non-poets, the two aspirant
Poets that Jeb Rasula has designated as
The two greatest quacks of twentieth poetry,
Charles Bukowski and Robert Bly. This poem
Shows recovery from the quackery of the
Two opportunists who fooled so many people
Into thinking them poets.
Keep up the good work and save poetry from the quacks.
**
Al Fresco Café Poem #263
I have waited 263 days for Renata.
PICNIC
The dog's black arabesques float
On a green luminescence slab,
The trees are the tossed bowling balls
Of a loud voiced juggler.
A green coat, a Spring green, wonders
What deceit
Caused it to neatly folded
Between bottles with golden liquid
On a pale blue table cloth.
A scarlet tanager in a chinaberry
Dropped from his plumage a red feather
On plums in a blue bowl.
His lover could not decipher
The white silk monogram
Of an unknown person
Embroidered on his black shirt pocket.
Playfully, she mentioned
That Tristan Tzara wore a monocle.
He turned up the volume of the portable radio.
**
Al Fresco Café Poem #265
265 days I've waited for Renata
The stained car snarls
As it passes polluting
The steeple and pedestrians
This stained lame tame impresario that impugns
Never goes away always omnipresent
Mobile at slow speed
This car never goes away
Omnipresent decasyllabic debouching
An arm sticks out its pulled down window
Fist pounds on the car door
Pounds and pounds
The noise will not stop
The noise will form the foundation
Of stage props bullets candlelight-propositions
The noise expresses itself by
Obedience to immaculately born power structure
Conventional and traditional syntax
Speech is a disturbance of a silent atmosphere with sounds
That are masked and are often scarecrows or mummies
Their skeletons
Are buried in pyramids cathedral basements state mausoleums
Their cenotaphs are centered in bank lobbies
No one can say anything they understand
Understanding comes from other sounds than those spoken
The basic language spoken in our time
Is the pounding on a fist on a car door
While sitting imprisoned and proud inside the car
I so oppositional
But am surround by these sounds
These sounds hold my coat and snicker
These sounds come and go
Speaking of burnt toast green dwarfs football fields
So I go
Behind the closed door
On the rug decorated with acanthus leaves
The fragments of a broken vase
It could not have fell
It could not have fell
Because I placed the cherished vase
Flat down on the floor
When I opened the door and left the room
It was a tough vase
Advertised and believed by almost everyone to be unbreakable
But it was broken into many pieces
Scattered all over the acanthus leaves on the rug
I had placed the vase flat down on the rug
It could not have fell
**
return to sawbuck 1.2
**
Duane Locke, Doctor of Philosophy, English Renaissance literature, Professor Emeritus of the Humanities, was Poet in Residence at the University of Tampa for over 20 years. For more information on Duane Locke, click on Duane Locke on Google: there are about a half-million entries under his name. On MSN, only 60,000 entries.
