Carolyn Forche

Recently i stole many books of poem from a library (Name of the library????)
I enjoy Stealing books because it gives me more pleasure when i learn that there is so manythings one can learn from a stolen book.

One of the book i stole was "the country between us" by Carolyn Forche.
The book was published as THE LAMONT POETRY SELECTION FOR 1981
Since the day i read her poem i have been wondering how come i have not heard of her before. I am loving her right now very much.

Carolyn was born in Detroit in 1950. Her poems break the boundaries between personal and politics.

Wikipedia says:
Forché is sometimes described as a political poet, she considers herself a poet who is politically engaged. After first acquiring both fame and notoriety for her second volume of poems, The Country Between Us, she pointed out that this reputation rested on a limited number of poems describing what she personally had experienced in El Salvador during the Salvadoran Civil War. Her aesthetic is more one of rendered experience and at times of mysticism rather than one of ideology or agitprop. Forché is particularly interested in the effect of political trauma on the poet's use of language. The anthology Against Forgetting was intended to collect the work of poets who had endured the impress of extremity during the twentieth century, whether through their engagements or force of circumstance. These experiences included warfare, military occupation, imprisonment, torture, forced exile, censorship, and house arrest. The anthology, composed of the work of one hundred and forty-five poets writing in English and translated from over thirty languages, begins with the Armenian Genocide and ends with the uprising of the pro-Democracy movement at Tiananmen Square. Although she was not guided in her selections by the political or ideological persuasions of the poets, Forché believes the sharing of painful experience to be radicalizing, returning the poet to an emphasis on community rather than the individual ego. In this she was strongly influenced by Terrence des Pres.

Poem For Maya by Carolyn Forche

Dipping our bread in oil tins
we talked of morning peeling
open our rooms to a moment
of almonds, olives and wind
when we did not yet know what we were.
The days in Mallorca were alike:
footprints down goat-paths
from the beds we had left,
at night the stars locked to darkness.
At that time we were learning
to dance, take our clothes
in our fingers and open
ourselves to their hands.
The veranera was with us.
For a month the almond trees bloomed,
their droppings the delicate silks
we removed when each time a touch
took us closer to the window where
we whispered yes, there on the intricate
balconies of breath, overlooking
the rest of our lives
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America- Ginsberg

Someday I will recite it remembering by heart :)....

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Stark Electric Jesus- Malay Roychoudhury

This is the best Indian Poem I ever read, to me poetry has no barrier no boundaries, it must fall like a looser, it must cut someone like broken glasses, it must bleed, it must have sex, it must have everything if the poet wants it that way....

Oh I'll die I'll die I'll die
My skin is in blazing furore
I do not know what I'll do where I'll go oh I am sick
I'll kick all Arts in the back and go away Shubha
Shubha let me go and live in your cloaked melon
In the unfastened shadow of dark destroyed saffron curtain
The last anchor is leaving me after I got the other anchors lifted
I can't resist anymore, a million glasspanes are breaking in my cortex
I know, Shubha, spread out your matrix, give me peace
Each vein is carrying a stream of tears up to the heart
Brain's contagious flints are decomposing out of eternal sickness
Mother why didn't you give me birth in the form of a skeleton
I'd have gone two billion light years and kissed God's arse
But nothing pleases me nothing sounds well
I feel nauseated with more than a single kiss
I've forgotten women during copulation and returned to the Muse
Into the sun-coloured bladder
I do not know what these happenings are occurring within me
I'll destroy and shatter everything
Draw and elevate Shubha into my hunger
Shubha will have to be given
Oh Malay
Kolkata seems to be a procession of wet and slippery organs today
But I do not know what I'll do now with my own self
My power of recollection is withering away
Let me ascend alone toward death
I haven't had to learn copulation and dying
I haven't had to learn the responsibility of shedding the last drops
after urination
Haven't had to learn to go and lie beside Shubha in the darkness
Have not had to learn the usage of french-leather while lying
on Nandita's bosom
Though I wanted the healthy spirit of Aleya's fresh chinarose matrix
yet I submitted to the refuge of my brain's cataclysm
I am failing to understand why I still want to live
I am thinking of my debauched Sabarna Choudhury ancestors
I'll have to do something different and new

Let me sleep for the last time on a bed soft as the skin of
Shubha's bosom
I remember now the sharp-edged radiance of the moment I was born
I want to see my own death before passing away
The world had nothing to do with Malay Roychoudhury
Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your violent silvery uterus
Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace
Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream
Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm
Would I have been like this if I had different parents?
Was Malay alias me possible from an absolutely different sperm?
Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my father?
Would I have made professional gentleman of me like my dead brother
without Shubha?
Oh, answer, let somebody answer these
Shubha, ah Shubha
Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen
Come back on the green mattress again
As cathode rays are sucked up with the warmth of a magnet's brilliance
I remember the letter of the final decision of 1956
The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished with coon
at that time
Fine rib-smashing roots were descending into your bosom
Stupid relationship inflated in the bypass of senseless neglect
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
I do not know whether I am going to die
Squandering was roaring within heart's exhaustive impatience
I'll disrupt and destroy
I'll split all into pieces for the sake of art
There isn't any other way out for Poetry except suicide
Shubha
Let me enter into the immemorial incontinence of your labia majora
Into the absurdity of woeless effort
In the golden chlorophyll of the drunken heart
Why wasn't I lost in my mother's urethra
Why wasn't I driven away in my father's urine after his self-coition
Why wasn't I mixed in the ovum-flux or in the phlegm
With her eyes shut supine beneath me
I felt terribly distressed when I saw comfort seize Shubha
Women could be treacherous even after unfolding a helpless appearance
Today it seems there is nothing so treacherous as Woman & Art
Now my ferocious heart is running towards an impossible death
Vertigoes of water are coming up to my neck from the pierced earth
I will die
Oh what are these happenins within me
I am failing to fetchout my hand and my palm
From the dried sperms on my trousers spreading wings
300000 children gliding toward the district of Shubha's bosom
Millions of needles are now running from my blood into poetry
Now the smuggling of my obstinate leg is trying to plunge
Into the death-killer sex-wig entangled in the hypnotic kingdom
of words
Fitting violent mirrors on each wall of the room I am observing
After letting loose a few naked Malay, his unestablished scramblings.

(Stark Electric Jesus is a much mythified poem, included in several poetry anthologies, most notably Poems for the Millenium, Vol. 1 ed. by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (1995), first published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in City Lights, later by Howard McCord (several editions). Stark Electric Jesus is a transcomposition made from the original Bengali poem titled "prachanda boidyutik chhutaar". The publication of this poem brought charges of obscenity against Malay Roy Choudhury and the Hungryalist Movement in 1964. Calcutta Police raided his house and confiscated 21 items including his typewriter. Malay and other Hungry generation poets/authors were arrested. For the next several gruelling months the famous Hungry Generation court case followed. A whole generation of American writers supported Malay and the Hungry Generation Movement by voicing their protest against the Indian Government and legal authorities. Howard McCord, Carol Berge and others published a chapbook with the same title, several readings at St. Marks by young American poets followed aiming to collect small funds that were sent to Malay to help him fight the court case. Although the initial ruling went against Malay and other Hungry writers, they eventually took it to the Indian High Court to win it.)
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Source::: http://kaurab.tripod.com/english/bengali_poetry/malay.html

Ginsberg in nineteen sixties

I dont know how many times i have watched the documentary film "No Direction Home" by Martin Scorsese which is on Dylan. The film focus on Dylan's youthful days. Dylan arrived in New York, and met many folk artists. Dave Van Ronk was one of the singers who already had a fame during thsoe days in Newyork, but he was not a folk artist, he was more into Blues and Jazz. Dylan learned his way of finger pluck guitar playing style from Dave (from dylan's book). the film briefly tells how dylan earned fame by writing and singing topical song. it also highlighted dylan as an opportunist. Dylan turned away from being a rebel after he got fame. the movie somehow showed that it was happening unconsciously to Dylan. He never considered himself to be a protest or topical song writer.

To me the most exciting part in the film is when Allen Ginsberg recite "America"
the film showed a short interview of Ginsberg in which he said Dylan is the follower of beat.
Dylan's song " A hard rain gonna fall" was a beat song to Allen's ear. Allen believed Beat has been passed off to a newer generation.

In the interview, Allen also talked about how he had been deported from CUBA for talking about Castro's treatment against Homosexual people. Interestingly i found out that before going to Cuba he was writing to Mayal Roy Choudhury, a Hungryalist poet who has been prosecuted for his publication of the poem "Stark Electric Jesus" in 1965 (his typewriter was seized by Calcutta Police).

With these three sources 1) No Direction home, 2)http://letterstomalay.blogspot.com/ (a collection of letter to Malay Roy Choudhury), 3) A blue Hand- Deborah Baker
i could trace where had allen been roaming and doing.

Recently I found out that Ginsberg even recorded an album with "The Clash"
Yet i haven't found the track. Still searching!!!

for further serious write up, please wait.

Overdosed of Ibopishak

The more i read Thangjam Ibopishak, i got addicted to him. His words are like opium to me.
the more i read his first book of poem "Apaiba thawai" i am surprised because he wrote these poems during his class tenth to twelfth.

As i started writing manipuri poems, i realized that unconsciously i have been influenced by his poems. the more i talked of death the more i sound like him.