Sunday, February 22, 2009

"Eerie eyes" (Nora May French, Poet; with poem and commentary)

“Eerie eyes”
(Nora May French)


In 1906, Nora May French, being drawn into an impassioned romance she moved from Los Angels, to San Francisco shortly after the 1906 earthquake. She played cards with Jack London, was friends with George Sterling, hung out in Oakland and became a known poet of some renowned in her day.
Her heart turned over like the steering wheel of a race car in placing her imagery inside her poetry, and, for the first time in her life, her casual whim gave a new direction to her life, in poetry and writing per se, all taking place in San Francisco for the most part.
It began like that, and continued with varying shades of intensity. She, like George Sterling, carried with her, around her neck, a cyanide capsule, both knowing, like many within their group, it may come in handy someday: actually they both were expected to use it someday, call it a pack or agreement, they both had between themselves. Nora in 1907, at Midnight on November 13, took the capsule, and Sterling, in 1926, after he published the poem, “Strange Waters,” did the same.
Nora would die as a guest in Carmel, living with George and his wife Carrie. She had surrendered a part of herself to this dismay, to her unprincipled personality, in which she had, and with those she had come in contact.
IN her poetry, she went after it with the full pressure of her eerie eyes, and premeditation of effects, she simply made men and whomever read her poetry conscious to the highest degree of her exquisite excitability within it, making them compelled to reread her poems, in a different light.
She, like many true poets, started writing in her teens, with deep and spontaneous writer habits, sharpened by her realization that there was to be a future engagement for her; perhaps born in the wrong time zone, in the wrong place, New York City, she couldn’t find what she was looking for.
One of her most delightful poems to me is “The Gardens of Dolores,” she has that George Sterling imagery in it, but it is her’s because she also has that Jeffers theme and plot, and spiritual insight: in essence, it has a road, where Sterling’s poetry doesn’t necessarily have a direction other than, to hang images on a Christmas tree, so it looked pretty, and more often than not, it lights up.
In her poem, “Growth,” she says “The plant must grow…” and repeats it, three times, and what if it doesn’t grow, it is what she doesn’t say, as in those eerie eyes, one must look to find the answers if indeed one cares to.





And here is my poem to her:

The Gardens of Nora May French

She was a poetess beyond her time,
one who sought love, and loved
all she saw and sought, waited for
love, and without it, without the
measure she needed to have to survive,
she simply took cyanide and died.

No: 2568 2-23-2009

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Thursday, February 19, 2009

The Door to Tuol Sleng Prison (a poem)

The Door to Tuol Sleng Prison


How many have walked through those steel doors
How many have walked on those wooden floors
Shackled like a butchered boar
How many, how many more:
Where put into those stifling, stone cells scared
How many, how many more:
Tasted brutality, worse than hell or war
Died on the brick of hunger,
Died slowly on the brick of psychosis
In Tuol Sleng Prison (Cambodia) forgotten!
How many, how many more:
Died with crushed bones, and skulls
How many grass eaters, vomited their guts
In Tuol Sleng Prison (Cambodia) forgotten!
How many died by the Khmer Rouge regime
How many died by Pol Pot and Kaing Guek Eav


1-17- 2009/ No: 2567 Dedicated to the Survivors

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