The World's Gone Cold, No-One Cares About Love Anymore.

I like collecting random books of poems. Sometimes you have to take a chance, just pick something up without even cracking the spine and see what comes out of it. This is usually easier to do when the books are cheap.

Here's one probably from a library book sale or a forgotten corner of a Goodwill. It's by Ned O'Gorman who apparently is not as obscure as I thought. And by that I mean he has a Wikipedia entry, which is about the minimum requirement for 15 minutes of Warhol fame.

Here's something from The Night of the Hammer, his first collection.

To My Father

Ned O'Corman

O thou sweet dumb-bell

deceiver of my christmases,

plaything, tricker of tricksters,

genitor, speller, grace of the kitchen,

feller of trees, gallant, delineator,

simpleton, follower of girls,

renown of manner, dominus and calamitatum,

I come to you careless and bright from games

with thy paternity.

O thou beauty, brightness,

bearer of horses and flaring pennants,

I've followed you among

dark terraces and lawns, where dragged

in speculation I read you out

and busy with gesture and kiss I sang

of filial increase. I come to you

clamoring and quick, your oracle

and fragment.

O fisher, pillager,

I ask that you receive me

after years of silence among

the wars of parents and their love

fraught with stratagem, where boyhood dark

as a cove bruited with light. Study me

with tape and rule, fix yourself along

this alphabet and learn, my father,

my face.

I love the ambiguity and vivid images, one spilling into another quickly with hardly a break. Supplications to a father have always struck me as prayers to a stern and remote god. Or is my religion and/or lineage showing?


I give you another example from the back catalog of my obsessions.