Horace
By Norman Dubie
Along the borders of the Sabine farm,
Runners of strychnine and lime,
A bearded man stands in a wheelbarrow
Singing. And why not? Give him
The vegetables he wants.
Or knock his brains out with the loose
Curbstone from the well. The Goths
Have been defeated, and Maecenas was his friend.
We meet eye to eye. He will braid the silk
On the husks. This man is drunk.
The cloudburst sends you running for the trees
And one woman reaches the house. He is still
Standing in the wheelbarrow, soaked and loud.
The poor canvas theatre in the provincial town
Drove him out. Here in the hills
Caesar is a spectacle of dead trout
Washed with smashed mint and lemons.
What have I kept back?
Only this: there is no way to leave him.
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I’m completely dismayed with the Bush administration and all the complicated ways in which the lives of real people are being ruined now and clearly, deep into the future. . . . God save us, he may get four more years, but I fear that terribly. If they get four more years, I think they’ll try to reverse Roe v. Wade, and then all of our daughters are going to [take to] the streets. And all of a sudden, all those ungodly provisions of the Patriot Act are going to be used on our own children.
Norman Dubie (2004)
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A poem by Norman Dubie (RIP)
Of Politics & Art
Here, on the farthest point of the peninsula
The winter storm
Off the Atlantic shook the schoolhouse.
Mrs. Whitimore, dying
Of tuberculosis, said it would be after dark
Before the snowplow and bus would reach us.
She read to us from Melville.
How in an almost calamitous moment
Of sea hunting
Some men in an open boat suddenly found themselves
At the still and protected center
Of a great herd of whales
Where all the females floated on their sides
While their young nursed there. The cold frightened whalers
Just stared into what they allowed
Was the ecstatic lapidary pond of a nursing cow's
One visible eyeball.
And they were at peace with themselves.
Today I listened to a woman say
That Melville might
Be taught in the next decade. Another woman asked, "And why not?"
The first responded, "Because there are
No women in his one novel."
And Mrs. Whitimore was now reading from the Psalms.
Coughing into her handkerchief. Snow above the windows.
There was a blue light on her face, breasts, and arms.
Sometimes a whole civilization can be dying
Peacefully in one young woman, in a small heated room
With thirty children
Rapt, confident and listening to the pure
God-rendering voice of a storm.
Norman Dubie
Norman Dubie died this week. RIP
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happy nice ask week! i saw that you like poetry, what types of poetry do you like and do you have a favorite poet?
Happy nice ask week to you! I do indeed like poetry 😍 My preference is for modern poetry - 20th century to current day. I think we're in a fantastic time for poetry right now. I need to start keeping better track of new poets popping up doing amazing things.
I have many favourite poets! Off the top of my head, I love: Carrie Etter, Ruth Padel, Angel Nafis, Mary Karr, Rodney Jones, Norman Dubie, Claudia Rankine, Kim Addonizio, Terrance Hayes, Tim Liardet, Mark Doty, DA Powell, Catie Rosemurgy, Anne Carson (for The Glass Essay! Goodness me!), Ted Kooser, Eileen Myles, Sheenagh Pugh... And there are more, always more!
Squishes for you!
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Norman Dubie, my MFA thesis chair and mentor to many generations of poets passed away this morning. He was a poet of immense imagination and one of the most important lessons he taught me was that a poem was full of so many possibilities. Thank you, teacher. https://www.instagram.com/p/Co5ZHwev-Hi/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
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A beautiful celebration of Norman Dubie's memory by the unmatched Francine J. Harris </3
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Alredered Remembers , poet Norman Dubie, on his birthday.
She giggles. A front tooth is loose.
With the river bottom clear as the night air,
The bargeman sings through the hungry vapors
Rising now like white snakes behind him.
You told his wife that Lord Buddha made wasps
From yellow stalks of tobacco with a dark spit.
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what should i do to calm down because i’m currently sitting in bed with stress levels of animal maybe not being hunted but like. an animal who has too many assignments and problems to deal with perchance
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Who knows what I would've learned from him if I had been in a more mindful state of being in the early 2000s. I took four courses with him and learned so much and found my voice, but I really missed out when I dropped out of grad school. I'm just glad he left us his poetry to study, to embrace.
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Of Politics, & Art
Norman Dubie, 1945
—for Allen
Here, on the farthest point of the peninsula
The winter storm
Off the Atlantic shook the schoolhouse.
Mrs. Whitimore, dying
Of tuberculosis, said it would be after dark
Before the snowplow and bus would reach us.
She read to us from Melville.
How in an almost calamitous moment
Of sea hunting
Some men in an open boat suddenly found themselves
At the still and protected center
Of a great herd of whales
Where all the females floated on their sides
While their young nursed there.The cold frightened whalers
Just stared into what they allowed
Was the ecstatic lapidary pond of a nursing cow's
One visible eyeball.
And they were at peace with themselves.
Today I listened to a woman say
That Melville might Be taught in the next decade. Another woman asked, "And why not?"
The first responded, "Because there are
No women in his one novel."
And Mrs. Whitimore was now reading from the Psalms.
Coughing into her handkerchief. Snow above the windows.
There was a blue light on her face, breasts and arms.
Sometimes a whole civilization can be dying
Peacefully in one young woman, in a small heated room
With thirty children
Rapt, confident and listening to the pure
God rendering voice of a storm.
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Today’s Poem
The Composer’s Winter Dream
--Norman Dubie
for my father
Vivid and heavy, he strolls through dark brick kitchens
Within the great house of Esterhazy:
A deaf servant’s candle
Is tipped toward bakers who are quarreling about
The green kindling! The wassail is
Being made by pouring beer and sherry from dusty bottles
Over thirty baked apples in a large bowl: into
The wassail, young girls empty their aprons of
Cinnamon, ground mace, and allspice berries. A cook adds
Egg whites and brandy. The giant glass snifters
On a silver tray are taken from the kitchen by two maids.
The anxious pianist eats the edges of a fig
Stuffed with Devonshire cream. In the sinks the gallbladders
Of geese are soaking in cold salted water.
Walking in the storm, this evening, he passed
Children in rags, singing carols; they were roped together
In the drifting snow outside the palace gate.
He knew he would remember those boys’ faces. . .
There’s a procession into the kitchens: larger boys, each
With a heavy shoe of coal. The pianist sits and looks
Hard at a long black sausage. He will not eat
Before playing the new sonata. Beside him
The table sags with hams, kidney pies, and two shoulders
Of lamb. A hand rings a bell in the parlor!
No longer able to hide, he walks
Straight into the large room that blinds him with light.
He sits before the piano still thinking of hulled berries. . .
The simple sonata which
He is playing has little
To do with what he’s feeling: something larger
Where a viola builds, in air, an infinite staircase.
An oboe joins the viola, they struggle
For a more florid harmony.
But the silent violins now emerge
And, like the big wing of a bird, smother everything
In a darkness from which only a single horn escapes—
That feels effaced by the composer’s dream. . .
But he is not dreaming,
The composer is finishing two performances simultaneously!
He is back in the dark kitchens, sulking and counting
His few florins—they have paid him
With a snuffbox that was pressed
With two diamonds, in Holland!
This century discovers quinine.
And the sketchbooks of a mad, sad musician
Who threw a lantern at his landlord who was standing beside
A critic. He screamed: Here, take the snuffbox, I’ve filled
It with the dander of dragons! He apologizes
The next morning, instructing the landlord to take
This stuff (Da Ist Der Wisch) to a publisher,
And sell it! You'll have your velvet garters, Pig!
The composer is deaf, loud, and feverish. . . he went
To the countryside in a wet sedan chair.
He said to himself: for the piper, seventy ducats! He’d curse
While running his fingers through his tousled hair, he made
The poor viola climb the stairs.
He desired loquats, loquats with small pears!
Ludwig, there are Spring bears under the pepper trees!
The picnic by the stone house. . . the minnows
Could have been sunlight striking fissures
In the stream; Ludwig, where your feet are
In the cold stream
Everything is horizontal like the land and living.
The stream saying, “In the beginning was the word
And without the word
Was not anything made that was made. . .
But let us believe in the word, Ludwig,
For it is like the sea grasses
Off which with giant snails eat, at twilight!” But then
The dream turns to autumn; the tinctures he
Swallows are doing nothing for him, and he shows
The physicians his spoon which has dissolved
In the mixtures the chemist has given him!
After the sonata was heard: the standing for applause
Over, he walked out where it was snowing.
It had been dark early that evening. It’s here that the
Dream becomes shocking: he sees a doctor
In white sleeves
Who is sawing at the temporal bones of his ears. There is
A bag of dampened plaster for the death mask. And
Though he is dead, a pool of urine runs to the
Middle of the sickroom. A brass urinal is on the floor, it is
The shape of his ears rusting on gauze. The doctors
Drink stale wassail. They frown over the dead Beethoven. Outside,
The same March storm that swept through Vienna an hour before
Has turned in its tracks like the black, caged panther
On exhibit in the Esterhazys’ candlelit ballroom. The storm crosses
Over Vienna once more: lightning strikes the Opera House, its eaves
And awnings filled with hailstones,
Flames leaping to the adjacent stables! Someone had known,
As thunder dropped flower boxes off windowsills,
Someone must have known
That, at this moment, the violins would emerge
In a struggle with the loud, combatant horns.
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On the first day of Lent / Two children took their own lives: / Their bodies / Were sewn into goatskins / And were dragged by the hangman’s horse / The three miles down to the sea. / They were given a simple grave in the sand.
Norman Dubie, “An Annual of the Dark Physics”
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A poem by Norman Dubie
The Funeral
It felt like the zero in brook ice.
She was my youngest aunt, the summer before
We had stood naked
While she stiffened and giggled, letting the minnows
Nibble at her toes. I was almost four—
That evening she took me
To the springhouse where on the scoured planks
There were rows of butter in small bricks, a mold
Like ermine on the cheese,
And cut onions to rinse the air
Of the black, sickly-sweet meats of rotting pecans.
She said butter was colored with marigolds
Plucked down by the marsh
With its tall grass and miner’s-candles.
We once carried the offal’s pail beyond the barn
To where the fox could be caught in meditation.
Her bed linen smelled of camphor. We went
In late March for her burial. I heard the men talk.
I saw the minnows nibble at her toe.
And Uncle Peter, in a low voice, said
The cancer ate her like horse piss eats deep snow.
Norman Dubie
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“Where, in the midst of beings / Who were weeping, we laughed and swam / Not quite like the undoubted trout”
Norman Dubie
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LUMEN DE LUMINE
We are very excited to offer this fascinating collection of Norman Dubie’s aphorisms, dubbed a fragment and prequel to The Clouds of Magellan, this book is designed to be a talisman, a hermetic and alchemical notebook of verse and wisdom, spanning time, literature, consciousness, nothing less than cosmic.
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Danse Macabre by Norman Dubie
The broken oarshaft was stuck in the hill
In the middle of chicory,
Puke-flowers, the farmers called them, sturdy
Little evangels that the white deer drift through...
Nobody on the hill before
Had heard of a horse
Breaking its leg in a rowboat.
But the mare
Leapt the fence, passed
The tar-paper henhouse,
And then crumpled at the shore.
It was April and bees were floating
In the cold evening barn; from the loft
We heard them shoot the poor horse.
We tasted gunpowder and looked
While your cousin, the sick
Little bastard, giggled and got
So excited he started to dance
Like the slow sweeping passes
Of a drawing compass—
Its cruel nail to its true pencil.
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