Home learning LA lesson 2

Choose a poet by going online to a couple of the internet sites such as Poets.org (Academy of American Poets website) or American Poetry Online. Blog on your favourite poet. Your entry should be approximately 400 words

Carol Muske-Dukes was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1945. She received her M.S. in 1970 from the State University of California at San Francisco. She has taught in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of Virginia. She is the founding director of the PhD Program in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California.



An Octave Above Thunder
She began as we huddled, six of us,
in the cellar, raising her voice above
those towering syllables...
Never mind she cried when storm candles
flickered, glass shattered upstairs.
Reciting as if on horseback,
she whipped the meter,
trampling rhyme, reining in the rein
of the air with her left hand as she
stood, the washing machine behind her
stunned on its haunches, not spinning.
She spun the lines around each other,
her gaze fixed. I knew she'd silenced
a cacophony of distractions in her head,
to summon what she owned, rote-bright:
Of man's first disobedience,
and the fruit...
of the flower in a crannied wall
and one clear call...
for the child who'd risen before school assemblies:
eerie Dakota rumble that rolled yet never brought
rain breaking over the podium. Her voice rose,
an octave above thunder:
When I consider how my light is spent--
I thought of her light, poured willy-nilly.
in this dark world and wide: half-blind, blind,
a widening distraction Getting and spending
we lay waste our powers...Different poem, a trick!
Her eyes singled me out as the wind slowed.
Then, reflective, I'd rather be / a Pagan
sucked in a creed outworn / than a dullard
with nothing by heart.
It was midsummer, Minnesota. In the sky,
the Blind Poet blew sideways, his cape spilling
rain. They also serve! she sang, hailing closure
as I stopped hearing her. I did not want to
stand and wait. I loathed nothing so much
as the forbearance now in her voice,
insisting that Beauty was at hand,
but not credible. I considered
how we twisted into ourselves to live.
When the storm stopped, I sat still, listening.
Here were the words of the Blind Poet--
crumpled like wash for the line, to be
dried, pressed flat. Upstairs, someone called
my name. What sense would it ever
make to them, the unread world, the getters and spenders,
if they could not hear what I heard, not feel what I felt
nothing ruined poetry, a voice revived it, extremity.


Like This
Maybe it's not the city you thought
it was. Maybe its flaws, like cracks
in freeway pylons, got bigger, caught
your eye, like swastikas on concrete stacks.
Maybe lately the dull astrologies of End,
Millennium-edge rant about world death
make sense. Look. Messages the dead send
take time to arrive. When the parched breath
of the Owens River Valley guttered out,
real voices bled through the black & white.
The newspaper ad cried, We who are about
to die salute you. Unarmed, uncontrite.
Gladiators: a band of farmers, entrenched.
And how many on the Empire's side recognized
the bitter history of that Bow? Greed drenches
itself in a single element, unsurprised.
Like strippers, spotlit. Tits and asses
flash red-gold, while jets shriek above.
Rim-shot. History, like a shadow, passes
over a city impervious as a bouncer's shove
to dreams. Images tell you what's imaginable.
Here comes another ton. We bathe in
what's re-routed from the source: a fable
of endless water in a dipper made of tin.


http://www.poemhunter.com
http://poets.org