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ZIMBLE ZAMBLE ZUMBLE
I read, when I am reading poetry, Stevens and Sarki, and understand neither one more than the other, nor either hardly at all.Gordon Lish
108 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2002
43 people want to read
About the author
M. Sarki
20 books238 followersFor the last several years M Sarki has maintained a literary blog called The Rogue Literary Society. Sarki can now be found more liberally on Substack https://substack.com/@msarki where he publishes his critical views on subjects and books read, photographs and nude art collaborations with his wife, as well as periodical attempts at creating poetic artifacts. Since 2000 Sarki has produced four collections of poetry and four books of prose.
M Sarki has also written, directed, and produced four short art films titled Gnoman's Bois de Rose, Biscuits and Striola, The Tools of Migrant Hunters, My Father's Kitchen, and he is the author of the feature film screenplay, Alphonso Bow.
--
m sarki
mewlhouse@gmail.com
M Sarki has also written, directed, and produced four short art films titled Gnoman's Bois de Rose, Biscuits and Striola, The Tools of Migrant Hunters, My Father's Kitchen, and he is the author of the feature film screenplay, Alphonso Bow.
--
m sarki
mewlhouse@gmail.com
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 20, 2015
http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/1085399...
These two old guys drove twelve miles into the city to attend a special poetry reading, hoping to eventually read publicly a few of their own poems in the ordered process of each signing into the listed queue holding court on the official table of the local coffee house. These two gray-haired gentlemen suffered through the chief poet, the headliner, the star, who had earlier sashayed into the coffee house wearing his poet's garb, looking like the great poet he claimed to his university students to be because he had published books and because, in the course of things, his peers themselves also said he was a great poet. He was there to be seen as the great poet he believed he was and to premiere new poems about his cat. On and on he droned in verse so boring it was hard to tell anymore what the old men had come to partake in and where they thought they might be headed to if they knew. And then, like that, the poet was done. Finished. And off he went, this handsome poet in his great coat and hat, out the same door he came in, not stopping to listen to any of the waiting novice or amateur readers to come, some of them surely his current students, but the important poet had other more pressing matters to attend to. The eager readers then shuffled up to the same podium one after another until finally, seemingly hours later, the old friends cried uncle and put their own poems away.
I hate poetry simply because of all the poor poetry that stands with others of their ilk as good poetry when in fact it is not. And all the bad poets praise each other's work and more bad work is propagated because of it. Some of the propagators are teachers, or become teachers, and on and on it goes. When the teacher gets to a kid like me (of course that was many years ago) and tells me how great something being taught is that I inherently already know isn't, it makes a kid like me not trust adults beginning at a very early age. It is sort of like religion being taught to an atheist as something real and factual. But when one comes upon a great poem read correctly you know it in every fiber of your being, teacher or not. The body knows. Something happens to you physically. Sometimes that type of reading has to be taught. You have to be taught how to read a poem. But you can't teach a bad poem to anyone but a poor reader or a terribly bad listener. All you can do is teach your morals, politics, or gender issues and hope for some sentimental support for what you are saying. Why not instead have an experience unexampled in its feeling? Something novel, new, fascinating, and even a bit disruptive.
*From Genesis West, number one. Interview With Jack Gilbert, conducted by Gordon Lish
Poetry Is The Art Of Prejudice, page 86
Jack Gilbert- ...But usually my poems are caused by an impulse to communicate some part of my life rather than to please. I don't want the reader to finish the poem and say how lovely it was. I want him to be disturbed. Even miserable.
Gordon Lish- Do you think people who are involved in poetry to further their careers or who make mild poems out of trivial material are dangerous to the reader?
Jack Gilbert- Mostly in being dangerous to themselves and other poets --- in that they reduce poetry to something toilet-trained and comfortable...
"...Poetry is almost the only way we can escape from the vicious constipation of moral relativism. Because poetry is the art of prejudice. If prejudice is the inability to discuss a conviction calmly, then poetry is prejudice...(Poetry) doesn't argue, it demonstrates...Poetry isn't fair...Poetry is one-sided, and being one-sided, it can say what truth is."
I think it is pathetic, searching here and there, through the endless articles about poetry and the writing of it, and have to sift through the drivel most of us call good. But I am not in the crowd of "most of us". They are simply bad. And the conversations about them are bad. It seems to me to always be a community of like-minded citizens who like crappy poetry and the crappy writing of it. Well I don't. I am insulted by the work and I think it adds more to the general claim that maintains poetry is boring and even stupid.
*From 19 New American Poets Of The Golden Gate (on believing a poem) page 6
...A lot of Elytus and the others feels like lazy language-mongering. A pretend-surrealism with no need behind it. The mediterranean delight in the dance of the mind over a subject without trying to get anywhere. The subject being merely an occasion for the performance. Like poets giving birth without getting pregnant.
(on less being more) page 7
...One of the special pleasures in poetry for me is accomplishing a lot with the least means possible...and a pleasure in the scantness of means...the use of a few words with utmost effect.
We have far too many learning institutions from which to spread more bad poetry and the writing of it. Teachers throughout history have taught the same old stuff, boring the hell out of most young minds, and sealing the fate of a vast majority of students never to have seen or heard a very good poem. I know I didn't. Of course, there are Shakespeare's words available to us all to use as he did, but with no teacher capable of explaining anything meaningful about his work the typical student could not gain much of anything from his poems except perhaps a headache. Perhaps there is the random teacher who cares so much for the words that the teaching is meaningful. But I never met one until much later in life.
Poetry was ruined for me from a very early age. I did like nursery rhymes my mother read to me as a young child, but these were later dismissed in school as poetry for younger children and they were not used to teach us how poetry can work. Then we had Dr. Seuss who was also dismissed by most as some eccentric fellow writing silly stuff for young kids. The Doctor actually wrote some very brilliant poems that tend to stretch reality into something unmanageable and therefore unsavory to most palettes.
*From Wikipedia:
Though Seuss made a point of not beginning the writing of his stories with a moral in mind, stating that "kids can see a moral coming a mile off", he was not against writing about issues; he said "there's an inherent moral in any story" and remarked that he was "subversive as hell".
"Yertle the Turtle" has variously been described as "autocratic rule overturned" …”a reaction against the fascism of World War II”… and "subversive of authoritarian rule".
The last lines of "Yertle the Turtle" read: "And turtles, of course ... all the turtles are free / As turtles, and maybe, all creatures should be.”… When questioned about why he wrote "maybe" rather than "surely", Seuss replied that he didn't want to sound "didactic or like a preacher on a platform", and that he wanted the reader "to say 'surely' in their minds instead of my having to say it."
A fantastic review of ZZZ by Catherine Moran can be found here:
http://cooprenner.com/essays/Moran/Re...
Excellent words regarding ZZZ can be found here:
http://www.elimae.com/books/sarki/pra...
These two old guys drove twelve miles into the city to attend a special poetry reading, hoping to eventually read publicly a few of their own poems in the ordered process of each signing into the listed queue holding court on the official table of the local coffee house. These two gray-haired gentlemen suffered through the chief poet, the headliner, the star, who had earlier sashayed into the coffee house wearing his poet's garb, looking like the great poet he claimed to his university students to be because he had published books and because, in the course of things, his peers themselves also said he was a great poet. He was there to be seen as the great poet he believed he was and to premiere new poems about his cat. On and on he droned in verse so boring it was hard to tell anymore what the old men had come to partake in and where they thought they might be headed to if they knew. And then, like that, the poet was done. Finished. And off he went, this handsome poet in his great coat and hat, out the same door he came in, not stopping to listen to any of the waiting novice or amateur readers to come, some of them surely his current students, but the important poet had other more pressing matters to attend to. The eager readers then shuffled up to the same podium one after another until finally, seemingly hours later, the old friends cried uncle and put their own poems away.
I hate poetry simply because of all the poor poetry that stands with others of their ilk as good poetry when in fact it is not. And all the bad poets praise each other's work and more bad work is propagated because of it. Some of the propagators are teachers, or become teachers, and on and on it goes. When the teacher gets to a kid like me (of course that was many years ago) and tells me how great something being taught is that I inherently already know isn't, it makes a kid like me not trust adults beginning at a very early age. It is sort of like religion being taught to an atheist as something real and factual. But when one comes upon a great poem read correctly you know it in every fiber of your being, teacher or not. The body knows. Something happens to you physically. Sometimes that type of reading has to be taught. You have to be taught how to read a poem. But you can't teach a bad poem to anyone but a poor reader or a terribly bad listener. All you can do is teach your morals, politics, or gender issues and hope for some sentimental support for what you are saying. Why not instead have an experience unexampled in its feeling? Something novel, new, fascinating, and even a bit disruptive.
*From Genesis West, number one. Interview With Jack Gilbert, conducted by Gordon Lish
Poetry Is The Art Of Prejudice, page 86
Jack Gilbert- ...But usually my poems are caused by an impulse to communicate some part of my life rather than to please. I don't want the reader to finish the poem and say how lovely it was. I want him to be disturbed. Even miserable.
Gordon Lish- Do you think people who are involved in poetry to further their careers or who make mild poems out of trivial material are dangerous to the reader?
Jack Gilbert- Mostly in being dangerous to themselves and other poets --- in that they reduce poetry to something toilet-trained and comfortable...
"...Poetry is almost the only way we can escape from the vicious constipation of moral relativism. Because poetry is the art of prejudice. If prejudice is the inability to discuss a conviction calmly, then poetry is prejudice...(Poetry) doesn't argue, it demonstrates...Poetry isn't fair...Poetry is one-sided, and being one-sided, it can say what truth is."
I think it is pathetic, searching here and there, through the endless articles about poetry and the writing of it, and have to sift through the drivel most of us call good. But I am not in the crowd of "most of us". They are simply bad. And the conversations about them are bad. It seems to me to always be a community of like-minded citizens who like crappy poetry and the crappy writing of it. Well I don't. I am insulted by the work and I think it adds more to the general claim that maintains poetry is boring and even stupid.
*From 19 New American Poets Of The Golden Gate (on believing a poem) page 6
...A lot of Elytus and the others feels like lazy language-mongering. A pretend-surrealism with no need behind it. The mediterranean delight in the dance of the mind over a subject without trying to get anywhere. The subject being merely an occasion for the performance. Like poets giving birth without getting pregnant.
(on less being more) page 7
...One of the special pleasures in poetry for me is accomplishing a lot with the least means possible...and a pleasure in the scantness of means...the use of a few words with utmost effect.
We have far too many learning institutions from which to spread more bad poetry and the writing of it. Teachers throughout history have taught the same old stuff, boring the hell out of most young minds, and sealing the fate of a vast majority of students never to have seen or heard a very good poem. I know I didn't. Of course, there are Shakespeare's words available to us all to use as he did, but with no teacher capable of explaining anything meaningful about his work the typical student could not gain much of anything from his poems except perhaps a headache. Perhaps there is the random teacher who cares so much for the words that the teaching is meaningful. But I never met one until much later in life.
Poetry was ruined for me from a very early age. I did like nursery rhymes my mother read to me as a young child, but these were later dismissed in school as poetry for younger children and they were not used to teach us how poetry can work. Then we had Dr. Seuss who was also dismissed by most as some eccentric fellow writing silly stuff for young kids. The Doctor actually wrote some very brilliant poems that tend to stretch reality into something unmanageable and therefore unsavory to most palettes.
*From Wikipedia:
Though Seuss made a point of not beginning the writing of his stories with a moral in mind, stating that "kids can see a moral coming a mile off", he was not against writing about issues; he said "there's an inherent moral in any story" and remarked that he was "subversive as hell".
"Yertle the Turtle" has variously been described as "autocratic rule overturned" …”a reaction against the fascism of World War II”… and "subversive of authoritarian rule".
The last lines of "Yertle the Turtle" read: "And turtles, of course ... all the turtles are free / As turtles, and maybe, all creatures should be.”… When questioned about why he wrote "maybe" rather than "surely", Seuss replied that he didn't want to sound "didactic or like a preacher on a platform", and that he wanted the reader "to say 'surely' in their minds instead of my having to say it."
A fantastic review of ZZZ by Catherine Moran can be found here:
http://cooprenner.com/essays/Moran/Re...
Excellent words regarding ZZZ can be found here:
http://www.elimae.com/books/sarki/pra...
September 30, 2014
Even hard poetry should not be hard. It should be fun, but still hard, in that you do not know what it means but you still know, and you want to keep reading. This is poetry. You want it, and it wants you, too. It is a web of wants that gives. But the gift is not a given. As a dance is a dance that is not a series of steps. It is a dance made up of steps that vanish with each step, as the dance remains. A frictionless spin. This is poetry. I cannot tell you what it is, and I won’t listen to you tell me. I will burrow on into light, into petals, into weird word sex. A spinning pinpoint germinating. Get it down and go on up. Up up. No, go down. Down down. See the spin? Stick it in your ear and keep on hearing the Sarki sad dance of delight loving all your mothers.
Three of many favorites:
Calories
Beyond each yellow
sweet of morning
lies a sullen drink
of baby in the glass
Embryo
He shoulders
toward the sun in
all his circumstance.
Her widowed salt, the
shade, the shape
of Mother’s
tilting
sea.
Muted Orange
The yellow will taste
like sponge.
Or peach.
A swatch
from last winter’s
circumference.
Pure apricot pulp.
Of her weighted cloth.
And tree.
But don’t take my word for it! lend M Sarki and yourself a hand and pick a Zimble Zamble Zumble up, and listen up, and burn like a flower up into the bee that binds.
Three of many favorites:
Calories
Beyond each yellow
sweet of morning
lies a sullen drink
of baby in the glass
Embryo
He shoulders
toward the sun in
all his circumstance.
Her widowed salt, the
shade, the shape
of Mother’s
tilting
sea.
Muted Orange
The yellow will taste
like sponge.
Or peach.
A swatch
from last winter’s
circumference.
Pure apricot pulp.
Of her weighted cloth.
And tree.
But don’t take my word for it! lend M Sarki and yourself a hand and pick a Zimble Zamble Zumble up, and listen up, and burn like a flower up into the bee that binds.
Read
January 18, 2016of Mother’s
tilting
sea.
A swatch
from last winter’s circumference.
of her moon,
the mirror
of apostrophe,
still hovering,
unimportant,
apostrophe.
Putting them away.
In bags. Leaving
through the cellar’s brume.
Gnomon’s Bois de Rose
New York’s Ninety-Sixth and Teacher
Gregori’s Theater of Belief
Sitting on the Arm of Robert’s Mouth
We do have shelves,
don’t we? Are there not cupboards?
tilting
sea.
A swatch
from last winter’s circumference.
of her moon,
the mirror
of apostrophe,
still hovering,
unimportant,
apostrophe.
Putting them away.
In bags. Leaving
through the cellar’s brume.
Gnomon’s Bois de Rose
New York’s Ninety-Sixth and Teacher
Gregori’s Theater of Belief
Sitting on the Arm of Robert’s Mouth
We do have shelves,
don’t we? Are there not cupboards?
October 9, 2012
I was given an advanced reading copy and absolutely loved this!
The verses and poetry spoke to me and it was just amazing. My friend took the book from me and read it all then gave it back and went out to buy her own. I recommend this book to anyone who loves poetry!
The verses and poetry spoke to me and it was just amazing. My friend took the book from me and read it all then gave it back and went out to buy her own. I recommend this book to anyone who loves poetry!
September 4, 2016
Beginning Friday through Sunday I am offering my first book of poetry for free to anyone who wants it. Happy Holidays!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N...
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews