S.S.E.B.

poetry

MY BLOG IS MOVING!

hey friends, 

so some of you may or may not know the story of “bus stop bunnies” but to save you the grief I won’t tell it. just know that I am moving S.S.E.B. to be my MAIN blog and because tumblr won’t let me do this without deleting my original main blog and transferring everything i am needing to transfer YOU as well so

if you are still interested in following me please go to:

sarahburgoyne.tumblr.com and follow me!!!! 

thanks for your patience!

(in attempt to get your attention I am posting this picture of a real live unicorn!)

a real live unicorn!

We are lonely for where we are. Poetry helps us cope. Poetry is where we go when we want to know the world as lover. You read a poem or write one, guessing at the difficult, oblique interiority of something, but the undertaking ultimately seems incomplete, ersatz. The inevitable disappointment all poems bring motions towards the hard work of standing in helpless awe before things. “The praise of the psalms is a lament,” the old men and women of the desert used to say. Poetry in its incompleteness awakens a mourning over the easy union with a world that seems lost. Poetry is a knowing to this extent: it brings us to this apposite discomfiting.

—Tim Lilburn

Living in Princeton

Living in an area surrounded by ranch land (and often on a property which hosts the neighbouring cattle) I was reminded of a moving and darkly humorous poem by Don Mckay:

SONG FOR BEEF CATTLE

To be whimless, o monks of melancholy,
to be continents completely
colonized, to stand
humped and immune, digesting,
redigesting our domestication, to be too too
solid flesh making its slow
progress toward fast food.
To feel our heavy heads becoming knock-knock jokes, / who’s there,
kabonk, Big Mac, to know our knees
are filled-in ampersands, things to fall on,
not run with.
To put all this to music - a bellow
which extinguishes the wolf, the long arc of its howl
reduced to gravity and spread,
ghostless, flatulent,
over the overgrazed acres.  

Poets are supremely interested in what language can’t do; in order to gesture outside, they use language in a way that flirts with its destruction. Language wears tree ears and a false moustache for the moment. For whom? For the moment.

—Don McKay, Vis à Vis