=
FROM THE EMAIL 23rd June 2010
Karl,
Sounds great to me....
Let me send some poems along (some taken from THE COLLECTED POETRY OF HUGH FOX published by World Audience in 2008, others from the individual books themselves).
http://www.worldaudience.org/pubs_bks/HughPoetry.html
THE COLLECTED POETRY is 540 pages long...and that's only part of the story.....At the very end I'll send some I wrote last month in Brazil, in Portuguese, translated into English when I got back here.....
plus a few other recent ones.
Best,
Hugh
From 40 POEMS (Colecciõn Nuestro Tiempo, 1966):
Isdom
is
Accepting the inevitability of Moles and Paunches
Pressing the buttons that say
sun,
Avoiding the buttons that say
Bang.
Isdom is
Hating
The right kind of Spiders,
Knowing which alleys are for urinating
And which for love,
And where they
Sell the best
Chow Mein.
from EYE INTO NOW, Ediciones de la Frontera, L.A., 1967.
VEDANTA AND THE ERDGEIST
God un-God (matter)
Contentment Dissatisfaction
Spirituality Materiality
Unholy,
Finite,
Not liking, wanting, accepting
Now,
The Me, the Mine, the Me-Word.
Change,
Thrash about,
This is the path of perfection,
Into the room
the corer,
the closet,
the basement,
the cold, the cramped, hurt,
then
Explode ito duck ponds at dusk,
A row of eucalyptus
Sea, the channel birds,
The come and go of tides.
SOUL CATCHER SONGS
(Ediciones de la Frontera, 1967) --
Fog opaques the screams
and invisible snakes and ravens
become visible.
I paint snakes on my eye wall
and worship them.
Radioactivity deradioactivates
and the time-fugue precipitates out the
colloids of pollution.
Buriel frames circles the earth,
North Star descends
and South Star assumes
dominion.
Apocalypses have shuttered the moon
but plastic time-eyes
begin to circle in our veins,
our us-stuff energizes, and
we become the trajectory
of our beginnings.
Multiple acceleration breakthroughs
burn dichotomies of timewheels
and our outmost soundings
crack the crusts of eye-swirl expansions.
The nebulae of IS touch time-triggers
and our conjurings fulfill our
total activations, and still expand,
I am Coyote, Bear,
and all the metamorphoses of
TO BE.
THE HEADLESS CENTAURS: THEIR VOYAGE AND CONQUEST (Wormwood Review, 1968).
Quetzalcoatl-Tiki-Viracocha
sallies forth on the sunplain,
brandishing his war-axe
and God the Father,
lightning streaming from his palms,
raises his hands
and Qetzalcoatl-Tici-Viracocha
is stunned, stumbles to the
cloud edges and falls,
down,
in midfall extends his ars
which flower plumes
and arising he claps his wings
as the Spiritu Sanctus, black-bat winged,
its beak stained with blood,
swoomps down to meet him,
and when they touch the skies explode,
the clouds burn like dry grass and
Christ the Musketmaker takes aim,
but as Tepeyolohtli roars, the musket shatters
and Christ, raising up his punctured hands,
downs the world in his blood.
Santiago, patron of Cannons
orare pro obis
Arbitrator of Arquebuses,
orare pro nobis,
Master of the Crossbow,
orare pro nobis,
Forger of swords,
pickaxes and iron bars,
orare pro nobis,
Why pursue this war?
I am sorry to
have destroyed your cities
orare
and burned
pro
your people
nobis.
But I cannot, will not, leave; and even if I leave, or even if you
kill me, I will be replaced and the conquest will be accomplished,
because the destiny of the world is that
geometry shall destroy magic.
APOTHEOSIS OF OLDE TOWNE, Fat Frog Press, 1968.
Al Capone sitting in the first row crying
over Sierra's THE KINGDOM OF GOD
with autographed ($10,000 an autograph)
portraits of Washington, Lincoln and
William Hale Thompson in his wallet,
hears a twig crack in the sixth row and
drops to the floor as Old (Odd) Al Parson
starts throwing dynamite around like roses.
The Haymaket explodes,
and the four hanged innocents (November 12, 1887)
arise and sing the Cantata to the Gods of Oats, Rye,
Barley and Corn, written by Clarence Darrow in 1899, the
year he faked them out in court on the Thomas Crosby
trial, then the Union Stockyards explode ad out of the
blazing eyes of the stampeding cattle the Chicago auditorium
flowers into being and Mary Garde moves into the final pelvic
affirmations of the Dance of Seven Veils....
OLDETOWNE IS VAPORIZED
the geometrical inflexibility of the too wide,
too carefully attended-to profit-margin
boundary gone,
rigidity softens, bends,
and all planned straightness swells
splits flowers spreads...
ORGANIC
INORGANIC FUSION WILL
GEOMETRIC FORM
ENERGY-CAPSULE
LIBERATING WILL SEED-GERM
AND THE APOTHEOSIS BEGINS.
We begin with UNITY GREEN SPACE GREEN EYE GREEN MIND,
PLAZA, PIAZZA, PLACE, PAVILION....
THE STOCK EXCHANGE BUILDING,,
expanded
exaggerated
brought to its limit
then passed
new limits created
then passed, past them again
limits after limits, afterlimits ...
I'm warning you,
push ERA/Ego Reorientation Activation
and the whole unit
hushes to a surf of green wilk chiffon
King (shaggy) Kong....
I need you blind and burnt
orbis mundi
and the f(l)ight
across the blue world had
(prairies to hills, humps to mountains, drop down to
sand, to waves, to water, waiting)
begun.
ALMAZORA 42, Laughing Bear Press, 1982.
St. Martin
I buy a green Loden (Austrian) coat
in Madrid for 2,000 Pesetas
(half price), bring my 10 year old
raincoat with zip-in (and out)
fake fur lining back to Valencia with me
to give to this legless beggar on
the pedestrian bridge close to
my place, who I give a little money to
every day,
only wen I bring the coat over for him,
he's not there,
and it's not just one day
he's not there,
it's weeks, and there's no one else
around to ask what's
happened to him.
SONG OF CHRISTOPHER ,Clock Radio, 1987.
Writing these poems
becomes self-flagellation,
at the same time peoples
the vacuum with sparks of
his presence, please, God,
give him back to me for
just a handful of years
and I will give you a witness,
like Peter, Paul, Augustine,
Aquinas, Luther, Loyola, Wesley,
give him to me and I will give him
back to you shining with yourself,
not for me but for HIM,
to unfold the folded in the light of
Your being, so he can become what for all
eternity (in the madness of your pans)
he always was...and let me in my own
last years, move at last from JOB to
REVELATION.
TIME AND OTHER POEMS, Presa:S:Press, 2005.
BACK
Going back, back, back to the clouds and the
cypresses and smoke, trees, mouldering twigs
and edge-of-dusk bats, skunk-smells, wild turkeys,
everything wild, primal, before guns, torahs,
mosques, in the beginning was the sky and you
and I
evolving into the pre-buddhistic-
buddhistic
everything
NOW.
GESANGVOLL/SONGFUL , Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2010.
WISHING
Wishing none of us had ever left
the little Chi-town village called Chatham,
weddings, newborns, going to the same
sacred school asour newborns, every
Sunday Howyadoin? Mass and all the
high/low holidays, a little coffee-time,
arks, job-talk, politics-talk, stint and
prostate/uterine cancer-talks, clothes,
films, funeral asses, cemetery flowers,
the next generation(s) moving into the
same (spruced-up) Chatham village.
THE HAIR
The hair that never greys and breasts,
eyes, lavia, legs that never autumn, that
snow that spring melts every day, the word-hands
every day (byting) new found lands of daily
revelation that Homer, Tchekov, Verlaine it from
a forever deathlessness.
===============
The recent Brazil poems
DEPOIS
Depois de anos asexuais a primeira vez que a vejo
nua, oi corpo inteiro cheio de veias enormes, ela
parece cento vinte em vez de 64, mas não importa,
eu duzentos, já 92.4% morto, mas ambos ainda
temos Nutella, Nescafé, mamão, um banheiro, coca,
as caras dos netos/netas, as noticias sobre o ódio
voando atraves do mundo, em todos lugares menos
(vento, uns momentos de cuva, nossa Senhora de
Fátima acordando na televisão)
aqui.
AFTER
After years of asexuality the first time I see her
nude, her entire body full of enormous veins,
she seems more like a hundred and twenty instead
of 64, but what’s the difference, I’m two hundred
already, 82.4% dead, but we both still have Nutella,
Nescafé, papaya, a bathroom, coca, the faces of
the grandsons and granddaughters, the news about
the hate flying across the world everywhere except
(wind, a few moments of rain, Our Lady of Fatima
waking up on the television)
here.
=
IGUATEMI
Um senhor que não conhecemos aparece, nós
tomando cafe e casadinho (chocolate e leite
doce solido) em frente de Ponto Frio (lojia de
televisão) e Cavalira (ropa masculina fina, fina,
fina) ele para, “Tudo bem?,” “ Tudo bem,”
“Voce é...?,” “Jesus Criso,” olhando a suas
mãos, nada de cicatrizes, “Nada de cicarizes
nas mãos?,” “Tudo curado fazem milhares de
anos...e o tempo nas não conta!,” “E para nós?,”
a voz muda para mim todo o shopping “Meu
pai, eu e o meu irmão fizemos tudo, mais voces
melhoram tudo tanto , nunca vi tanto luxo, eu o
Jardim de Eden ao lado de seu mundo computorizado,
nem su, meu pai ou irmão fizemos nada tão
milagroso, e a comida daqui e, possivilene, é
tempo de casar-me com uma mulher dessas com
pernas de espadas, tetas devacas, olhos de buracos
pretos entre as estrelas...començar não de novo mas
tudo construido sobre a realidade daqui...,” de
repente nos manda um beijo e desaparece, um
momento na tela da televisão (Sansung) na janela
de Ponto Frio
e
A Deus
IGUATEMI
A man who we don’t know appears, we’re
having coffee and casadinhos (chocolate with
solid sweet milk), in front of Ponto Frio (a
TV store) and Cavalira (fine, fine, fine men's
clothes), he stops “Everything OK? “Everything
OK,” “You are?” “Jesus Christ,” looking at his
hands, no scars, “No scars on the hands?,” “everything
healed thousands of years ago...and time doesn’t
count for me!,” “And for us?,” “The mute voice
fills the whole mall, “My father, me and my brother
created everything, but you people improved everything
so much, I never saw such luxury, me and the Garden
of Eden next to your computerized world, neither I
or my father or my phantom brother ever made anything
so miraculous, and the food here, I’m going to
reincarnate myself in order to eat the sweets here, and
its positively time to marry a woman with those sword
legs, cow breasts, eyes of black holes among the stars...
begin again but everything based on the reality here..,”
and suddenly he throws us a kiss and disappears, a
moment on the TV screen (Sansung) in the window
of Ponto Frio
and
God bye
=
AMAR
Amar as caras na televisão, os computadores,
drogas, onibuses, as igrejas, aviões, carros,
as jóias, os orgasmos, cafe, cerveja, os tambores
e guitarras, cantando-gritando, os radios a noite
toda, o dia todo, o céu combustivel-electrico,
os morros, o mar, todos as florestas já invisíveis,
inaudíveis.
TO LOVE
To love the faces on the TV, computers, drugs,
buses, the churches, planes, cars, jewelry, orgasms,
coffee, beer, drums and guitars, singing-screaming,
radios all night long, the whole day, the electric-
furnace sky, the hills, the sea, all the forests already
invisible, inaudible....
=
PROCURAR
Gritar-cantar
Policia lutando contra as drogas
O êxtase sexual
As drogas mesmas
Pistolas & Motocicletas
TO GET
Scream-sing
Cops fighting against drugs
Sexual ecstasy
The drugs themselves
Guns and motorcycles
=
EVITAR
O silêncio
Passarinhos
A solidão --a natureza natural
Furtos de veículos
Unindo-se com o divino amanhecer
TO AVOID
Silence
Birds
Solitude -- natural nature
Car thefts
Merging into the divine dawn
=
OS DOIS DEUSES LUTANDO
O quase silencio total de Cheia de Graça, o Espirito
Santo, uma neblina que quase anula tudo
e si mesmo, o filho agora voando atraves
universos inteiros meditando “Devo começar
tudo de novo” versus “Os leões divinos carnivalescos
samba-rugindo,devorando ttodas as plantas/sementes
divinas andinas que abrem as portas do universo
rugindo, contraçao versus expansão, quem
ganha aqui, os centros nucleares de terminar tudo
amanhã...”
THE TWO GODS FIGHTING
The almost total silence of Full of Grace, the Holy
Spirit, a mist that almost wipes out everything and
himself, the son now flying across entire universes
thinking “Must I begin everything again” versus
“The divine carnival lions samba-bellowing,
devouring all the divine Andean plants and seeds
that open the doors of the bellowing universe itself,
contraction versus expansion, who wins here, the
nuclear centers terminating everything tomorrow.”
=
FINALMENTE
Finalmente ao lado do mar eterno, os morros atras
de nós cheios de verdejancia florestal, o ar cheio de
urubus rodeando a gente tomando, comendo,
falando, eu falo com um, “Eu sou um agente astral
de uma planeta ao lado de Venus, A Deusa de Amor...
e as vozes celestais me falaram dizendo ‘E tempo de casar-se
e começar uma família..,’” ele toca a barriga de sua esposa
“Ela já esta gravida, uma filha...de onde vem voce?,”
“Da Universidade de Michigan State,” “Interesante, passei
um ano lá no departmento de Portugues...sou poeta....,”
lhe cumprimento, depois le dou o meu e-mail, ele me da o
seu...vamos ver onde vai isso, com certeza não existe mais
nenhum senhor poeta aqui que conhece
East Lansing, Michigan,
de tudos os lugares do mundo.
FINALLY
Finally next to he eternal sea, the hills behind us
full of crazy green forest, the air full of vultures
flying around the people drinking, eating, talking,
I talk to one of them, “I’m an astral agent from a planet
next to Venus, the Goddess of Love...and sometimes
celestial voices talk to me saying ‘It’s time to get married
and begin a family...,” he touches his wife’s stomach
“She’s already pregnant with a daughter...where are
you from?,” “Michigan State University,” “Interesting,
I spent one year there in the Portuguese department...I’m
a poet..,” we shake hands , I give him my e-mail, he gives
me his...let’s see where this goes, for sure there’s no other
poet around here who knows East Lansing, Michigan
of all the places in the world.
=
Não
Não quero nunca voltar ao meu planeta natal
mas queroi submerge-me no mar de camarões e
tubarões aqui, voltar a ser mar mesmo, liquido
infinito que escuta e evita o munto terrenal inteir
I don’t want to ever go back to the planet where I
was born, but want to submerge myself in the sea
of shrimps and sharks here, become the sea itself,
eternal liquid that listens to and avoids the whole
earthly earth.
=
TUDO MUNDO
Todo mundo com sua cocaina e crack, eu com Nutella,
mais e mis a lingua volvendo a ser penis, a colher
de paraiso achocolatado, a vagina fresca da Virgem
Maria (Costa), minha esposa caindo juntos através do céu
chocolate, boca a boca, o resto do mundo/os corpois
eterno vazio.
EVERYBODY
Everyone with their cocaine and crack, me with Nutella,
my tongue more and more becoming a penis, the spoon
chocolatized paradise the fresh vagina of Virgina Maria
(Costa), my wife, falling together through the chocolate
heavens, mouth to mouth, the rest of the world/bodies
eternal emptiness.
=
CADA DIA
Milhares de orgasmos cada dia, nas praias, nas
igrejas, nas vaginas miando felinamente, “Agora
o universo inteiro so tem mais uma hora, podemos
mudar-nos para oi presente divinamente cada dez minutos,
subir as montanhas de areia de minhas pernas
siliconizadas, as tetas são picos onde oi sensualismo
espera os fieis e depois os olhos, o cabelo, as caras
selváticas pristinas.
EVERY DAY
Thousands of orgasms every day, on the beaches,
in the churches, in the vaginas that are felinely
meowing, “Now the entire universe only has one
hour left, we can move divinely into the present
every ten minutes, climb the sand mountains of
my siliconized legs, the tits are peaks where
sensuality awaits the faiful, and afterwards the
eyes, the hair, the pristine jungle faces.
=
VISITANDO
Eu fiz tudo isso? Arvores com folhas flamejantes
sem chamas, Hibisco, agora lembro mais ossos em chamas,
morros, quais são os seres que se atrevem a construir
casinhas pequenasde madeira le, vemk a chuva e tudo pode
cair, as árvores, milhares de tipos diferentes, e
vem e vão as chuvas, outras lugares (não aqui) tudo
deserto, e a gente preta, branca, crianças por todos
lado, e esqueço o que é “fazer amor,” “fazer
criancas,” “fazer dormir...matar...morrer...,” bem --
o que se tornar a ser -- o que? Preciso de um dicionário
universal, os animais falndo tambem, mas o que dizem?
Bombas nucleares, porque criar radioatividade?
Possivelmenteé tempo de començar de novo, dar aos
angos corpos, criar um sol novo, nada de Eden, filhos
crucificados, doi principio ate o fim só beatitude, e
vamos esquecer o assunto de UM FIM
I made all this? Trees with flaming leaves without
flames, Hibiscus, now I remember more flaming bones,
hills, who are the beings that dare construct little wood
houses there, the rain comes and everything can fall
down, trees, thousands of different types, rain comes
and goes, other places (not here) totally desert, and blacks,
whites and children all over the place, I forget what it
means to “make love,” “make children,” “to sleep, kill,
die..,” OK, and to become what? I need a universal
dictionary, the animals talking too, but what do they say?
Nuclear bombs, why create radioactivity? Maybe it’s
time to start over, give the angels bodies, create a new
sun, no more Edens or crucified sons, from the beginning
to the end only beautitude, and let’s forget the business of
AN END.
=
TUDO
Tudo “normal” aqui, laranjas, goiabas,
os cheiros, chiqueiros, folhas, passarinhos,
a chuva, os morros, desenho, desenho, desenho,
cada folha diferente, com cada tronco, cada galho
diferente, tanto desejo de ampliar, embelezar a
vida, porque incluir morte?
EVERYTHING
Everything “normal” here, oranges, guava, the
smells, pigstys, leaves, birds, rain, the hills, design,
design, design, every leaf different, with every trunk,
every twig different, so much desire to amplify
and beautify life, why include death?
= = =
Recent Others
FAMILY
What I need most,
in the midst of Torah
scrolls, blessed wine, onegs,
mystic candles, remembering
the dead, strolling into ancient
sanity,
the sense, anywhere, anytime
meeting one of us and the
immediate sense not just
of family, but the world as
erratic, at the same time,
ordered brotherhood,
sisterhood, fatherhood,
motherhood
fun-ness.
SOMETIMES
Sometimes, wandering around in Chicago,
Brooklyn, Detroit, Gary, L.A., Lansing, I wonder if
the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves
ever happened, my cousins in Chicago telling
me “Don’t go to the south side where you used
to live, man....you’ll be a deadman fast, man...,”
OK, and then I come into class and if I close my
eyes I can’t tell the difference between blacks
and whites, the accent-jargon gone, future and
past surrounding me like time-travel on a daily
basis depending on big WHERES and HOWS.
Day- instead of Noct-urne
Slavic blonde, watch out for those
shoulders getting burnt, cutting the
dead peonies from their stalks,
two backyard grammar schooler
girls fooling around with a basketball
and a fancy backyard hoop attached
to the garage, a skinny law-school type
sitting on his front steps, a laptop on
his lap, talking on a cell phone,
my old Lebanese pal out watering the
roses, front yard half a block away from
my hospital, up to mid-seventies after
an upper sixties rain-week, not a cloud
in the sky, and you’re gonna tell me
that all the bird-claws, fingernails, brains,
tongues, seeds and eggs, bowels and
bones are all just “by chance,” a sense
of eternality in the air, as if everything
around me would be around here just
as is,
forever.
TIME TRAVEL
Time travel drifting over remote farm country,
not one house, barn, silo less than a hundred
and twenty years old, thinking about Civil,
Revolutionary, World War, Atomic War whats
as the winter wheat turns harvestable and the
corn is up to my ankles, deer here and there,
grouse, a couple of redbirds, turkeys, even one
peacock, wanting to throw down an anchor from
my balloon and stay, stay, stay…
= = =
HUGH FOX
ALIEN
Czech potato pancake grandma in
a jak se mas world, school-surrounded
Irisher nuns with solid stone brogues,
violin beginning age 6, P. Marinus Paulson,
also a composer (educated in England)
who would teach me “Let’s look at chords,
the key of C, the key of....let’s play around
with b-flat, left-hand chords, right-hand
melody, let the keyboard talk to you...,”
Latin Mass, Italian pastor at San Francisco
de Paulo church, concerts every week,
immersions in Bach, Beethoven, Vaughan
Williams, and then German, French, Italian,
marrying a Peruvian, months in the Peruvian,
Bolivian, Chilean Andes, a year in Valencia,
Spain, another studying Latin American literature
at the University of Buenos Aires, learning
Quechua, the language of the Incas, then
Maya, the Art Institute in Chicago, galleries
in Paris, Florence, Rome, learning some
Romanian, writing a book on French film
after ten years of immersion every night,
even relating to grandfather homesteaders
out in Montana, ten years in L.A., two years
in Caracas....married thirty years to a Brazilian,
two trips a year to the island of Santa Catarina
in southern Brazil. O que posso fazer?
= = =
Bibliography:
If I was to include Fox's biblio here it would literally be a seventy page word doc.
A good idea would be to Google his name.
But a better idea would be to get hold of his book:
THE COLLECTED POETRY OF HUGH FOX published by World Audience in 2008
http://www.worldaudience.org/publications.html
= = = 
