Copia

I woke to a shout: 'I am Alpha and Omega!'
Rocks and a few trees trembled
Deep in their own country.
I ran and an absence bounded beside me.

The dog's god is a scrap dropped from the table,
The mouse's savior is a ripe wheat grain—
Hearing the messiah cry
My mouth widens in adoration.

How far are the mosses!
They cushion themselves on the silence.
The dust, too, is replete.
The air wants for nothing.

What was my error? My skull has sealed it out.
My great bones are massed in me.
They beat on the earth, my song excites them.
I do not look at the rocks and trees, I am frightened of what they see.

I listen to the song jarring my mouth
Where the skull-rooted teeth are in possession.
I am massive on earth. My feetbones beat on the earth
Over the sound of motherly weeping....

Afterwards, I drink at a pool quietly,
The horizons bear the rocks and trees away into twilight.
I lie down, I become darkness—
Darkness that all night sings and circles stamping.

"Gog" refers to the biblical prophecy (Ezekiel, chapter xxviii) of a hostile power that will arise in the world immediately before the Last Judgment, and inflict untold destruction.

The season turned like the page of a glossy fashion magazine.
In the park the daffodils came up
and in the parking lot, the new car models were on parade.

Sometimes I think that nothing really changes -

The young girls show the latest crop of tummies,
and the new president proves that he's a dummy.

Came upon this poem like a doctor's dropsy poster.
In the streets the hot pants glittered
and on the corner pimps color-flagged that ass parade.

Sometimes I dress inane in the outrageous.

Those young girls call in robbers on their dummies
and when I need a rhyme I turn to mummy.

After the extraordinary productivity I enjoyed participating in Heather Fowler's poem-a-day project last June, I decided to pay attention to National Poetry Month this year, to the extent of joining the National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) tradition.  I considered following prompts, but I couldn't find a prompter of Heather's quality, so I decided to just keep it old school.  Read a lot of poems every day and thus shore up inspiration to write.  The kick-off, of course, is April Fool's Day, so I re-read a few favorite comic poems and parodies, including Lewis Carroll's "The White Knight's Song" (or "Haddock's Eyes" or "The Aged Aged Man" or "Ways and Means" or "A-Sitting On A Gate").

He said "I look for butterflies 
That sleep among the wheat; 
I make them into mutton-pies, 
And sell them in the street. 
I sell them unto men," he said, 
"Who sail on stormy seas; 
And that's the way I get my bread -- 
A trifle, if you please." 

But I was thinking of a plan 
To dye one's whiskers green, 
And always use so large a fan 
That it could not be seen. 
So, having no reply to give 
To what the old man said, 
I cried, "Come, tell me how you live!" 
And thumped him on the head. 

and because that cracker
had a fucking Les Paul and a bottle of Jack,
not giving a damn

strumming those wires like he was Andrew Jackson
putting the Sioux crew on the trail of tears
all like "this land is MY land, bitch!"

Now and then manifest destiny
asks you to lean in and check whether
it's got something on its teeth
and you could just stretch a bit
and box its epiglottis

and I know squat about chess
but that day felt like "Uno, pardners!"

This is the most offensive poem I have ever read. With respect, TS Eliot's anti-semitism has nothing on the bigotry expressed in this poem.

From Keter unto Malkhut.
    The seventh day of rest.
The naming of Creation.
    No, this is not a test.

The rustling wind in forests.
    The stars just out of reach.
Crude scribbles in a cavern.
    The rudiments of speech.

After the sun’s eclipse
The brighter angel and the spear which drew
A bridal outcry from her open lips,
She could not prove it true,
Nor think at first of any means to test
By what she had been wedded or possessed.

Not all cries were the same;
There was an island in mythology
Called by the very vowels of her name
Where vagrants of the sea,
Changed by a word, were made to squeal and cry
As heavy captives in a witch’s sty.

The proof came soon and plain:
Visions were true which quickened her to run
God’s barefoot errands in the rocks of Spain
Beneath its beating sun,
And lock the O of ecstasy within
The tempered consonants of discipline.

The paradox of St. Theresa lies in how ecstatic manifestations in her flesh were revered as signs of divinity.  Even in religions that encourage monasticism the lure of the orgasm is an irresistible magnetism, so what a great windfall for them to have found a lady in whom they could package both parOxysm and temperance.  What a great lesson for the church to seize upon in its quest to put the Malkhut genie back into the Keter bottle, though doctrine, through dogma, through the rod of discipline.  Wilbur expresses the ambivalence of St. Theresa by connecting it to Eëa, Circe's island, throwing in a Kabbalistic touch of his own by seizing on the vowels (which represent the very nature of mystery) distilled from "Theresa" into "Eëa".  Odysseus famously lingered a full year on the island where he, as Ezra Pound put it:

Observed the elegance of Circe's hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.

—from "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" by Ezra Pound

Those mottoes of course connecting back to our scribblings in quest for divinity—the lexical power of Alpha and Omega.  But Odysseus was drawn from discipline by the immediate tangling of man and woman, the elegance of Circe's hair.

The cosmology of the Igbo has a much less schizophrenic attitude towards divinity and the realized elements of nature, including flesh.  In the Weblog Odinani: The Sacred Science of the Igbo People, you can find many explorations of such characteristics of Igbo cosmology, set in contrast to Western systems of thought.  Among the Igbo, life itself blends ecstasy and measure in utter braid, and discipline is decreed by connectedness to nature, rather than by institutions seeking removal from nature.  To quote Odinani, "We once understood the oneness of the Source/Creator (Chineke) with Creation and our relationship with Nature (Ani)."

One of my own missions in poetry is to work with the traditions that better reflect this continuum, seeking excitement in the tensions between my Igbo traditions and the foreign philosophies that have colored so much of my life.  I'm wrestling right now with a poem, "Nchefu Road," that I first wrote as a teenager and seem to return to and refine every decade or so as knowledge and experience within my own life expand its bounds.  To quote a key passage:

So how fitting that here in Port harcourt

Where the river shunts to infinity,

I found the bald temerity to pose

Questions of the cosmos, to shun humility

Decreed by Lao-tze; whose "Chi"

Spelled cosmos as mine spells my soul,

So I should need less Brahmin casuistry

To venerate my slice of godly role.

But the river knows that Gao law

Sparks market riots in Igbo land

And that deadly poison in Bamako

Is sweetmeat in the Samarkand.

So Nchefu Road will lead me clear

From splendent-robed enlightenment

To wisdom of its opposite science

To naked bath in firmament.

To a Niger poet's rock of

Hippopotamus contentment.

Strangely I'm only today realizing that for the most part I'm following the four-beats accentual pattern of Pound's Mauberley.  No surprise, of course, as Pound is a long-standing influence of mine.  I suppose I'm always looking for that discipline of measure to express rather than to suppress the constant ecstasy of my own complex mind and experience.

Glory be to hooch for painted things—
For bleach-blonde strippers, collagen-plumped lips;
For pink acrylic nails and spike-heeled shoes;
Bright thong bikinis; belly-button rings;
Wet T-shirts; tan lines; liposuctioned hips;
Mascara; lip gloss; butterfly tattoos

—from "Dyed Beauty" by James Wilk in Shoulders, Fibs, and Lies (Pudding House Press, 2007) 

So I finally made the trip to Innisfree on the Hill, a new Boulder bookstore stocking only poetry.  I pretty much just went the first night their community events coincided with my spare time, but it turned out to be good timing, as they were featuring the work of Dr. James Wilk.  I arrived just before the reading and the small (but well appointed) space was rather full.  I enjoyed the reading and the craft and humor of the poet's work, including the poem from which I quote above.  It's another "Pied Beauty' parody, of course; earlier on Copia I mentioned "Carnal Beauty," Kate Bernadette Benedict's own play on the poem that came out in The Flea in January.  That was back when I first discovered that great journal, and since then I'm proud to say they've accepted a couple of my poems for publication later this year.

Speaking of my own poems, I should mention my own poem, "Dream Residue", which appeared in The Nervous Breakdown today (I am an editor and regular contributor there, so that's less of a feat).

Can't believe I stayed asleep to give 
Honey slope après ski GPS, 
Real life need-to-piss bringing the cock-block; 
Her black greek letter accent fading fast 
With harem eyes under bright bluebird skies 
To duller daybreak wink of bluing chalk… 
Damn! I planned to smash that like Thor's hammer. 
The ferry over cream slides cruel to dock.

—from "Dream Residue" by Uche Ogbuji in The Nervous Breakdown

But back to the Wilk reading.  I made a few neat discoveries on the night as well.  Wilk mentioned Eaven Boland's poem Anorexic, which apparently is rather a phenomenon in the circles, though it was new to me, the rather elliptical.

Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.

Yes I am torching
her curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self denials.

How she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers

till I renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.

I vomited
her hungers.
Now the bitch is burning.

—from Anorexic by Eaven Boland

Rather packs a punch, doesn't it?  Wilk also mentioned Turner Cassity, and in particular "Meaner than a Junkyard Dog." Both are poems to which he had responded with his own.

I'll surely be back to Innisfree for more poetry and company.  Who can resist that quiet cabin on the lake, especially when the lake is constantly whispering what is best received in the heart's core.

I’ve been using Amara to address my high throughput needs for Extract Transform Load (ETL), querying, and processing of large amounts of RDF. In one particular part of the larger process, I needed to be able to stream very large XML documents in a particular dialect into RDF/XML. I sent an email to the akara google group describing the challenges and my thoughts behind wanting to use a streaming XML paradigm rather than XSLT.

I basically want to leverage Amara’s pushtree and its use of coroutines as a minimal-overhead pipeline for dispatching events triggered by elements in the source XML, where the source XML is a GRDDL source document and the pushtree coroutine is the transformation property. That task is still a work in progress, in the interest of expedience I went forward and used XSLT but need to try out some of what Uche suggested in the end.

The other part where I have made much more progress is in streaming results to SPARQL queries (against a SPARQL service) into a CSV file via command-line and with minimal overhead (also using Amara, pushtree, and coroutines). A recent set of changes to layercake-python modified the sparqler command-line to add an —endpoint option which takes a SPARQL service URL. Other changes were made to the remote SPARQL service store to support this.

Also added, was a new sparqlcsv script:

$ sparqlcsv --help
Usage: sparqlcsv [options] [SPARQLXMLFilePath]
Options:
 -h, --help            show this help message and exit
 -q QUOTECHAR, --quoteChar=QUOTECHAR
                       The quote character to use
 -c, --count           Just count the results, do not serialize to CSV
 -d DELIMITER, --delimiter=DELIMITER
                       The delimiter to use
 -o FILEPATH, --output=FILEPATH
                       The path where to write the resulting CSV file

This script takes a SPARQL XML file either from the file indicated as the first argument or from STDIN if none is specified and writes out a CSV file to STDOUT or to a file. The general architectural idea is to build a bash pipeline from the SPARQL service to a CSV file (and eventually into a relational database for more sophisticated analysis) or to STDOUT for subsequent processing along the pipeline.

So, now I can run a query against Virtuoso and stream the CSV results into a file (with minimal processing overhead):

$ sparqler --owl=..OWL file.. --ns=..prefix..=..URL.. \
           --endpoint=..SPARQL service URL.. \
"SELECT ... { ... }" | sparqlcsv | .. subsequent processong ..

Where the namespaces in the OWL/RDF file (provided by the —owl option) and those given explicitly via the —ns option are added as namespace prefix definitions at the top of the SPARQL query that is dispatched to the remote SPARQL service located via the URL provided to the —endpoint option. Alternatively, the -o option can be used to specify a filename where the CSV content is written to.

The sparqlcsv script uses a pushtree coroutine to stream XML content into a CSV file in this way:

def produce_csv(doc,csvWriter,justCount):
   cnt=Counter()
   @coroutine
   def receive_nodes(cnt):
       while True:
           node = yield
           if justCount:
               cnt.counter+=1
           else:
               rt=[]
               badChars = False
               for binding in node.binding:
                   try:
                       rt.append(U(binding).encode('ascii'))
                   except UnicodeEncodeError:
                       rt.append(U(binding).encode('ascii', 'ignore'))
                       badChars = True
                       print >> sys.stderr, "Skipping character", U(binding)
               if badChars:
                   cnt.skipCounter += 1
               csvWriter.writerow(rt)
       return
   target = receive_nodes(cnt)
   pushtree(doc, u'result', target.send, entity_factory=entity_base)
   target.close()
   return cnt

Where doc is an XML document (as a string), csvWriter is an instance of the Writer Object, and the last parameter indicates whether or not only the size of the solution sequence is returned rather than the resulting CSV.

First wonder if the love you celebrate
will prove sustainable.  Will it endure,
renewed, a life-time guaranteed amour,
or does it have an expiration date?

I'm a sucker for the unromantic, a sucker for the impertinent, and of course the two often go hand in hand.  Kotzin's sonnet is some shelter from the endless mist of moony swoony one finds in so much of today's poetry.  Yesterday I mentioned my moderated opinion of Houellebecq's provocations.  Every age needs its attempted addenda to L'Œuvre du marquis de Sade:

O what is that sound which so thrills the ear
Down in the valley drumming, drumming?
Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,
The soldiers coming.

O where are you going? Stay with me here!
Were the vows you swore deceiving, deceiving?
No, I promised to love you, dear,
But I must be leaving.

Aujourd'hui aura lieu. La surface invisible
Délimitant dans l'air nos êtres de souffrance
Se forme et se durcit à une vitesse terrible ;
Le corps, le corps pourtant, est une appartenance.

—from "Le jour monte et grandit, retombe sur la ville" by Michel Houellebecq in Unsplendid 3.2

Today will happen. Invisible surfaces
Separate our suffering selves in the air
Then form and harden at a terrible pace;
But the body, still our pact with the body.

Il y a toujours une ville, des traces de poètes
Qui ont croisé leur destinée entre ses murs
L’eau coule un peu partout, la mémoire murmure
Des noms de villes, des noms de gens, trous dans la tête.

There’s always a city, and traces of poets
Who have met their destiny within its walls,
Water is leaking, and memory whispers
Names of cities, people, holes in your head.

(Picture credit: "Without a Face, a portrait of the Soul" by Sergeant Pablo Piedra)

One two three four
Is OK, but you need more:

Un deux trois quat’
If you want a welcome mat

En to tre fire
With the krone getting dearer,

Bir iki uç dirt
Selling off your jeans or shirt

—from "Roughing It in Europe" by Robin Helweg-Larsen in Unsplendid 3.2

This is the bark which used to be
A functioning face. You see the stream?
A nymphet breathing. Things who seem
Alive are, mostly, differently.
What if your hand were once a rock,
Your friends narcissi, your heart a clock?

Thus Epstein launches what starts off seeming like a neat philosophical exercise, the personal and impersonal randomly intertransformed, and then winds through a sudden volta to a contemplation of the death of a loved one, as I hint in the title of this note.  It's a good specimen of what I look for most keenly in poetry.  Skill in the service of emotion.  Epstein's craft drew forth my interest, taking me to the acrid yet ambiguous conclusion.