4th Draft of Poem

Draft of a POEM
My friend Anny Ballardini asked me to send her a poem about autumn for her Fierlingue anthology. So here's the poem I've been revising. I hardly ever write poems. This is relatively unflowerly for me.... hope you like it and critique it, if you wish! Miles to go, usually ....


A woman in a white hat



A woman in a white hat was walking toward the end of summer.

A woman barely armed in a white dress walked through the eye of the needle of summer, removed
her white hat
and hummed a floral song.

A goat belched the last moments of summer into the woman’s ears and bleated an udderly ridiculous joke
the woman did not hear. (Animal sense is stronger than ours.)

High on the mountain, looking off as though at a parade of difficult seasons before her, dreaming of soft teal lagoons, the woman wandered
inside herself, selecting warm memories, hot flashes of love.
“I am too insubstantial for Fall and Winter.”

Someone would always appear to contradict the woman. Naturally. She recognized. Clung to herself.

High and hot with bliss at the end of summer,
the woman barely noticed the first breath of autumn.

The voice of forthcoming cool was invisible and susceptible,
a color she could not name.
She returned her white hat to her red head
too thin and the sky was a black shade of blue.
The voice was dangerous.
Well, she saw suddenly there were black dandelions on the roads.

It was an election year.

Someone on a loudspeaker said the summer had come and gone
when the woman was gazing behind her. She saw the man she wanted disappearing
in degrees
descending.

The woman shuddered.
Maybe the voice on the loudspeaker was lying.
She tried to hope.

Noting the crushed flowers on the paths, the woman sensed the end of herself
at the end of the Fall, any Fall,
felt the painful transience of adoration.
Sadness and joy were nothing she could count on: simply Samsara.
Nothing she could count on.
Nothing she could close to off.

The woman tried not to look down on the roads.
She couldn’t help bowing her head hard,
hurried home to their end to prepare for the worst,
to ward off the inevitable, wrap herself in folds of sheep.

The woman tossed her white hat into the sky and found her black hat and cape.
She flew through the mirror of herself, attempting to look carefree
to herself, freed.

I looked through the mirror and found a woman.
Saw her in many hats, many heads floating across the oceans
of my astigmatic vision.

Saw asymmetrical me dissolving inside you
disintegrating, ceasing, reforming, and rejuvenating.

Saw me inside my self dissolving, disintegrating, ceasing, reforming,
and rejuvenating.

A lovely review of my cd

May I take a brief break from the election, friends? And may I stop thinking about the pathetic, hypocritical attempts by all of those greedy bastards (Repugs and Dems) to put band-aids on the trick knees of the global economy? A bit of very pleasant news of a ridiculously personal nature (really, who am I in the scheme of things? Just another self-promoting writer in a sea of drowning colleagues and not. (Oy Veh Ishmael!)

So the gifted poet Larissa Shlaimo, who reads brilliantly btw, and has TWO cds out (that's obscene, Larissa), offered to review my CD Inventions II: Fictions, Fusions, and Poems. I can only quote the beginning of the review, if anyone wants to read it, as Larissa will be submitting it to journals and such. Hey ... if you want to BUY it (support a baby bomber who can't get a paying job), it's here! Okay, I've advertised it here before, but it's not on the best seller list. If you want it cheaper, find me. I'm real easy to find!

Here's the beginning of the review (copyright Larissa Shmailo):

"Imagination’s Form: Carol Novack’s Inventions II: Fictions, Fusions, & Poems

Carol Novack is a conundrum to literary editors whose ideas of poetry and fiction as forms are rigid. To such editors, Novack might say, as one of the personae on her CD does, “Your imagination has closed walls.” The best term for Novack’s literary form— flash fiction qua prose poem qua fusion—is Novack’s own, invention. The eloquent inventions of this CD are witty, lyrical, and new, even as they reinvent the themes of family, myth, art, and self.

The introductory piece on the CD is “Destination,” invoking ideas of perception, longing, and individual reality.

On the hill, there is an easel holding a painting of a town. You are always traveling to the town, but whenever you think you've arrived, there is nothing but stones, statutes and indigestible bread. You return to the painting. You wonder if there’s a detail you’ve missed, a clue that will help you find the town. You let your eyes be deceived. They are connected to your heart with its longing to nest; you are possessed with owning. You lose your perspective again and again, wanting perspective, you are cursed.
.
In this elusive world, as in ours, the homeless are arrested when they stay still. (“In those towns they lock up the homeless when they remain in one spot and throw stones at Gypsies.”) The town of the painting, a longed for destination and artifice both, has a claim on both reality and alternate realities.

The crux of Novack’s art is her imaginative power to bring alternate realities to vibrant life. To this end, Novack’s language is richly inventive. The inventions are replete with alliteration, vivid figures, and witty word play...."

INVENTIONS II is available for sale at CD Baby!

Carol Novack with Don C. Meyer & Benjamin Rush Miller
Inventions II: Fictions, Fusions, & Poems

© 2008 Carol Novack (634479812743) (format: CD-R)
CD price: $12.50

CD IN STOCK. ORDER NOW. Will ship immediately.

SPECIAL: 30% discount if you buy more than one copy of it today!
Lyrical, rhythm and image-focused spoken word album of writings recited by author Carol Novack, publisher of Mad Hatters' Review, with most tracks accompanied by custom-made music and sound affects composed by Benjamin Rush Miller and Donald C. Meyer.
tracks

1 Destination
2 Minnows
3 What to Do With the Babies
4 A Without Q With/Out Self (AKA Interview With Self)
5 Same As
6 Demonica
7 Fish Triptych
8 Blah Blah
9 Four Variations
10 Once in a Field




This CD contains (in order of tracks) writings published in Diagram, American Letters & Commentary, Web Del Sol, Notre Dame Review, Action Yes, Big Bridge, Otoliths, LIT, Tears in the Fence, and Segue. The original version INVENTIONS 1 is identical to this CD, but with fewer tracks accompanied by music. Cicily Janus wrote a REVIEW of INVENTIONS 1 in Eclectica Magazine:


"When are words not enough to place an uncomplicated description in the mind of a human? Right about now. The CD, Inventions I: Fictions, Fusions and Poems written and recited by Carol Novack, is a collection of works spanning the idioms of experimental poetry and prose.

Each piece is read with a steadfast voice and throughout the collection are enough ideas to stir the tower of deliberation within one's own mind. A fluidity of words from start to finish flow at once through your ideology of what prose is, was, and is not. Novack, who is also the founder and editor of Mad Hatters' Review (one of the Internet's best sites for multi-media presentations of literature, art, and music) entrances the listener with a fluting tone of voice rivaling a daze of accents lost and found amid the audiology of our overt-technological-sound-filled society."


PLEASE PROCEED TO THE CD BABY PAGE LINK TO READ BIO'S, HEAR 2 MINUTE CLIPS, ORDER, OR REVIEW. REVIEWS MOST WELCOME!