Writers on Writers

Dorothy Parker on the Algonquin Round Table
(1919-1929)

You can lead a horticulture
but you can’t make her think.

So quick with the wit
I wrote little poems
satirizing rich matrons
their banalities, bigotries
and Vogue published me
and hired me
editorial assistant
then staff writer
at Vanity Fair
a magazine
of no opinions
while I
had plenty.

I was a tough critic
a real New York wag
like one of the boys
at the big round table
at the Algonquin Hotel
in the speakeasy days
cracking lines about booze
and dries who didn’t drink
from our flasks we jousted
with our pointed repartee
our competition cutthroat.

Brevity is the soul of lingerie.

The word got around
about the wonks at the Gonk
in the Rose Room for hours
our antics soon fodder
for newspaper columnists
in our little group that grew
and grew larger
sometimes fifteen,
sixteen hangers-on
all woozy afternoon.

We dubbed ourselves
the Vicious Circle
during the terrible days
of wisecracks, cuts
deeper, more bloody
we went for the jugular
for public attention
however we could grab it
Tallulah, Harpo Marx
New York Times writers
New Yorker founders
cynics, comics, all of us
sophisticated, cruel.

Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses

I lived on the second floor
came down to join in
raising hell every day
nothing else mattered
but jazz clubs and brothels
Haig & Haig and bathtub
gin under the table
pharmacies floating
on a sea of booze.

A hangover is
the wrath of grapes.

Lured away we fled west
stampeding the studios
to work on the talkies
the roaring twenties dying
with a whimper, not a bang.

Carson McCullers

I was born a man

Lula Carson Smith
in the silent crazy jungle
floral lush greenery
a middle class family
jeweler father slouchy
devoted mother, siblings
in a textile town with mills
a base, soldiers, Jim Crow
suffering, loneliness, poverty.

Repairing watches and clocks
popular in the Depression
Father bought us a house
camellias, tall holly
outside the window where
I practiced piano
music the foundation
until I abandoned it
turned to the typewriter
stories the new medium
of self-expression, art.

I was born a man

so changed my name
to match my real self
a lanky colt with
a Peter Pan quality
wild ideas and energy
until illness hit
when I was 15
and again, and again
the trickery and terror of time

as I later learned
rheumatic heart disease
damaged my poor heart.

Elizabeth Bishop on Her “Friends”

My life was one
of words and whiskey
deep contemplation
keen observation
of nature, people
farmers and factory workers
fishermen, fish, the Amazon
jungle, the beach
lovers, birds, moose
all around me life—
difficult, full of joy.

I was born to wealth
New England bluenose
world of privilege

until my father died
I was 8 months old
my mother unraveling
chronic psychosis, unfit
left me with her parents
in a Nova Scotia village
where I grew up happy
running around barefoot
taking the cow to pasture
past gabled wood houses
low hills, tall elms, leaning
willows and kind villagers
we all sang hymns
at the church picnics

until my father’s parents
horrified by my wildness
took me back to Mass
to their cold city manse
where Uncle Jack teased
where I coughed and coughed
until they sent me
to breathe ocean air
with dear Aunt Maud
and I read and read
in my little sickbed
and I fell in love
with the Victorian poets.

Maud’s husband a sadist
abused us, hit, groped
at an early age
I learned about men
who would hurt you
if you let them—
after that
I never did.

I played the piano
swam and sailed
in the long summers
I visited Nova Scotia
until boarding school
Vassar and a life
of whiskey and words

and women lovers
I always called “friends.”

Elizabeth Bishop on Her Thirst

I was a baby in a crib
on the bay at Marblehead Neck
when the Great Salem Fire
brought in the boats
frightened survivors
a red sky, intense heat.

Awake, alone, afraid
I cried out for mother
thirsty and scared
but she did not come
I could see out the window
she stood in the front yard
white dress rosy from fire
billowing in the heat
serving coffee and food
to thousands left homeless
one thousand were dead.

Alone, awake, afraid
all night I called out
thirsty and scared
but nobody came.

I grew up without her
drinking and drinking
whiskey straight to oblivion
for the rest of my life
I drank and I drank
it was never enough
still thirsty, afraid
and alone.

INHERITANTS

It was Adam’s first sunset.

Clothed fully in nakedness

he watched blush balance blackness

and studied how the ruby

became coal-dull and sooty.

He was the man of duty;

thus Moses would brand Adam;

Paul would call him the pattern.

We are cuttings from his garden.

Eve’s limbs sprawled cloudward. She lay

there like an uprooted tree.

“Bury us, we are the seeds.”

We still pray for redemption,

never for reconstruction.

So, when all is said and done,

immortal Adam and Eve,

our pools carry your dead leaves

and we echo you always.

IN YOUR WAY

We’re all an archeologist digging through our holy waste.
We’re all an archeologist in urgent search of one high missing piece.

Now you’re uncovered under my spotlight;

I maneuver each little potsherd, trying to put your life complete.

So why do you still resist?

Bring me into your days,

oh bring me into your ways,

your arms, your dreams, your thoughts, your schemes.

Bring me, oh bring me deep into your crotch.

After such tender words as these, how can you still resist?

Any poet’s a privileged beast, main course at the culture feast.
Every poet’s a privileged beast, society’s sacrificial priest.

And I’m your private cosmic messenger, and — every word like legal tender –

I’m poetry’s last big spender!

You cease, but yet I persist.

Bring me into your days, oh bring me into your ways, your arms,

your dreams, your thoughts, your schemes.
Bring me, oh bring me deep into your crotch.

And oh, such tender words as these! How oh how you do resist.

UNKNOTTED

Far off we see those bright quasars

captured by their own black holes,

their old buds dying inside,

hopes fettered to fears,

guards shackled to their convicts.

We’re soft diamonds under iron skies.

Lovers of the youth earth’s noises,

but raised in cold and shady nations

where light is unknotted from the sun,

we end here in ancient silence.

AND, DO YOU STILL GO BY BEATICE?

So, you want to be immortal, is that what you say?

You’ve searched and you’ve lurched down that old Tao way?
But you won’t need that potion, and you don’t need to pray:
Just sublimate some poet to put you in his lay.

He’ll sonnet/sanit/ize you, fix you in his line to stay.
Your locks of jet: they’ll turn to gray, 
your bones metastasize into clay–
but you’ll still be fresh and vital a million years away.

Just convince a versifier your name’s good for a lay.

NEO-GNOSTICS

The Church of Christ Geographer

fixes its axes

between Bethlehem and Gethsemane,

charts its coordinates at Patmos and at Tarsus.

Heretics infidels schismatics iconoclasts

occupy our incredulous post-pagan planet.

There are those who claim

the universe is actually a Freemasons conspiracy,

and those who maintain

that’s absurd – obviously, it’s the Rosicrucians.

No, no, some insist

the Universe Machine does exist

but it’s a self-construct.

This is in contrast

to those who preach

the universe as a divine wet dream

or, more likely, a component

of a cosmic plan to accomplish

an unfathomable end.

“It’s inscrutable!” “It’s immutable!” “Oh, it’s beautiful!”

(and don’t we all admit

the future is finite,

while dreams and gods

are limitless?)

Cosmologists define chaos

as order not yet perceived.

An artist believes

in the mathematical function of the mind:

A poem is a formula.

And every past

is an artifact of imagination;

art, and not religion,

is our only interface

with eternity, with reality.

To those who posit the passing

phenomenologically,

as the present swallowing

some possible tomorrows

to appease the past,

and to those who

pile past upon past

with no diminishment of futures

(though I myself feel yesterdays

lengthen and futures growing short),

the upholders of omnipresence

counter that God is timeless —

God does not believe in Wednesdays —

and the demarcated God

does not admit of territory.

The Church of Christ Geographer

proselytizes its atlas

among us mapless navigators

lacking compass and astrolabe.

(Collage of pasted illustrations of insects, birds, people walking, and plants)

I’M GOING TO BECOME A MILLIONAIRE

A certain Marla Burla

Writes me an email telling me

She is writing to me on behalf of

“Skoll Funfation”

An American Foundation

Whose vision is to live in a sustainable world

Of peace and prosperity for all

Catalyzing transformative social change.

When she writes to me:

“When you receive this email

Be very happy

Because you have been selected

To receive 3,500,000 dollars.

Send me a postal address

And a savings account, or bank

So I can send it to you.”

I am not excited about this luck

Because I know it is a scam

Like any other

And that it is not the one who goes down

That goes down

But the one who falls.

I have answered her with these words:

-Prove that you are telling the truth

Send me, first, a courtesy gift

And I will give you the address

Of my bank account and a kiss.

After fifteen days

More or less

I received a package via Amazon

From Palo Alto, California

(That’s what the address said)

Containing a kilo of bottle caps

Of Tropical Torpedo beers

Dirty Bastard, Blackwoods, California

Anchor, Bud Light and Flying Dog

Which made me laugh a lot

Because I will have the photo of the players

From the Burgos Football Club

And those from the Huesca Sports Society

So that my grandchildren can have

A championship between them

And play in Gamonal, Rio Vena

And Barriada San Juan Bautista.

-Daniel de Culla

War

Smile not exist

Happiness is stopped

Hungry stomach

Hungry soul

Enough

Tired from the bodies

That are afraid of their shadows

I would like to have a man who speaks truth

Who act

Who believes

In power of love

Words

Silence is not the answer

When Sun rise

Moon is a light that

Give birth

To our dreams

Action

We can only trust

When the reality

appears

We don’t need

so small minds

We are here

to believe

In our thoughts

And in our principles

When the miracle

is happening

Only Flour

Can give the solution

To a hungry mouth

Eva Petropoulou Lianou 

Poet, prose writer and official candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Guilty Pleasure



He’s watching

The latest season

Of “Selling Sunset”

On Netflix,

One of 

His many

Guilty pleasures.




Taylor Dibbert is a writer, journalist, and poet in Washington, DC. “Rescue Dog,” his fifth book, was published in May.