Morning Open Thread: Words Came Halting Forth – Poets In Opposition

This author, who is on Pacific Coast Time, may sometimes show up later than when the post is published. That is a feature, not a bug. Other than that, site rulz rule.

So grab your cuppa, and join in.

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Today’s poets were both born on November 30, but they are separated by about 400 years, so their points of view are of their times and genders.

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Sir Philip Sidney (November 30, 1554- October 17, 1586), English courtier, scholar,  poet, and sometime soldier. He was the eldest son of Sir Henry Sidney and Lady Mary Dudley. None of his writings were published before his death. His best-known works are the sonnet collection Astrophel and Stella;The Defence of Poesy (also known as An Apology for Poetry), a work of literary criticism; and a long prose pastoral romance, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, dedicated to his sister Mary, who was the Countess of Pembroke by marriage, and a poet and translator in her own right.

I confess I am not much of a fan of Sir Philip Sidney – as a deep lover of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Sidney’s writing to me is that of a promising amateur who spent more time on other things, and died before he matured. He dabbled in Elizabethan politics, but was passionate about the expansion of Protestantism. Sidney was wounded in the Battle of Zutphen, fighting for the Protestant cause against the Spanish, and died of gangrene at the age of 31. Because of his sad early death, he was lauded as the flower of English manhood in Edmund Spenser's Astrophel, a notable English Renaissance elegy.

All of the Sidney quotes used here are taken from Astrophil and Stella, which wasfirst published in 1591, but a more accurate version, corrected and supervised by his sister, wasn’t published until 1598.

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Celia Lisset Alvarez (November 30, ?) was born in Madrid, Spain, of Cuban parents en route to the U.S. after the Castro revolution, but has lived in Miami, Florida, almost all her life. She teaches composition, creative, and scientific writing at St. Thomas University in Miami. Alvarez has two collections of poetry, Shapeshifting, winner of the 2005 Spire Press Poetry Award, and The Stones. Her work has most recently appeared in Blood Lotus, Fringe, and Fifth Wednesday Journal.“What It Takes to Be Lois Lane” appears in the anthology Letters to the World, a collection of poems from the University of Southern Maine’s Women’s Poetry List. She is the editor of Prospectus: A Literary Offering, and has a blog for beginning writers, writingwithcelia.blogspot.com.

Many of her poems are very topical, and I don’t know how well they will wear over time. But her observational skills are keen, and she has an eye and ear for the telling detail.

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How then? even thus: in Stella's face I read
What love and beauty be; then all my deed
But copying is, what in her Nature writes.

– Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 23

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Malibu Barbie Moves to Mars

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by Celia Lisset Alvarez

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Why? Overpopulation. Too many
Barbies to one Ken, Joe on some macho
trip involving videogames. As one
of the eldest and most rugged, I felt
it was my duty to lead the way. Here,
I have some weight. There’s so much space. A girl
can have twenty walk-in closets if she
wants them, although what’s the point? There’s no one
watching. Doesn’t matter if you have two
hundred outfits, one for every million
miles connecting us, as if you could mount a
catwalk between planets. Walk that plank. No,
all you need is the one suit to protect
you from the toxic atmosphere. Here, I
don’t have to be all things to all people,
just one thing to myself. The red dust’s charged
with minerals unknown, and the strange plants
I’ve grown feed me—they feed me. Here, I can
look straight at the sun and let it burn. When
I see all the damage in the mirror,
all the wrinkles and the spots, my eyes fixed
on this vast, empty loneliness, at least
here, there is an explanation for it.

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“Malibu Barbie Moves to Mars” from How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens, (2015 anthology) – Upper Rubber Boots Books

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Come Sleep! O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,
Th' indifferent judge between the high and low.

– Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 39

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Twilight

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by Celia Lisset Alvarez

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  All the vampires walking through the valley
  move west down Ventura Boulevard,
  and all the bad boys are standing in the shadows,
  all the good girls are home with broken hearts.
  — Tom Petty

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They walk the mall in packs. Last year it was
covens—groups of girls or boys—
never mixed. In their minds they are walking
slower than the others. They do not go
into any stores. They have no money.
They never speak to each other,
arrive after dark, leave before nine.
The boys go home and touch themselves. The girls

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read their book, repeating scenes like spells.
By morning, most discard their capes,
wait at bus stops in their usual uniforms—
jeans, T-shirts, sneakers their parents
might have worn, hand-me-down backpacks full
of textbooks underlined or highlighted
by brothers and sisters graduated
last year, or the year before that. A few

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wear their blacks to school, don’t wash their hair, smell
of cloves. Last night one of them climbed a tree
outside the window, a girl, an oak. She
stayed there till dawn, scanning the street.
When she was sure there were no vampires, she climbed
back through her window and went to sleep.
She missed the school bus that morning. All day
she stayed in bed, pretending to be sick.

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“Twilight” was published in the May 2010 issue of the online literary magazine qarrtsiluni

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Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay:
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows

– Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 1

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Restrictions

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by Celia Lisset Alvarez

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The lawn is lemon-yellow, a knee of the house,
not scraped but sunburnt, tight. No words can
recall its Florida winter, those choices between
cold and wet. I don’t care if I get fined, my
mother says, and puts her finger to the mouth of
the hose to fan the hot water over her collection
of spider plants.

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At night I can hear the crickets watching me,
posed weightless on the leaves. They do not
breathe, nor do I, nor do we sleep. The back yard
holds its breath, silent, not hot, but dark.

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The brass rim of the hose burns my thigh, leaves
a pink welt, like a kiss. I want to hold it over my
head and let it flow down my neck, down my
shirt, but I am afraid. I feel the hose stiffen. With
just one squeeze from my hand, it would burst.

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The umbrella tree loses its leaves first, the yard
is littered with its beached canoes. Then the
palms. My mother pulls the oranged fronds from
the crowded trunk, her brown shoulders growing
large and square. I don’t know how much longer
I can take this, she says, drinking from the hose,
which she’s left running all morning, the water
pooling around her ankles.

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“Restrictions” was published in the June 2008 issue of the online literary magazine qarrtsiluni

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When Nature made her chief work, Stella's eyes,
In colour black why wrapt she beams so bright?
Would she in beamy black, like painter wise,
Frame daintiest lustre, mix'd of shades and light?

– Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 7

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Going to See Dali

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by Celia Lisset Alvarez

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Driving around St. Pete
wind and rain blurring the neon signs
narrow back street
tiny bump of a hill, curve of the city's thigh,
sending us reeling into space, daredevils
maps and brochures defying their folds
faces gaping at the Hallucinogenic Toreador,
our giant pancake breakfast;
we ran with the bulls up the beach
until all the clocks had melted,
and we flared our red umbrella,
victorious over the summer.

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“Going to See Dali” was published in  January, 2008, in Issue 16 of Alba, a Journal of Short Poetry

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O Moon, tell me,
Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
Do they above love to be lov'd, and yet
Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?
Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?

– Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 31

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What It Takes to Be Lois Lane

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by Celia Lisset Alvarez

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At twenty-one she graduated magna cum laude
with a degree in English. Her first apartment
had a leaky faucet that kept her up nights
and a view of the bridge to Metropolis.
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Her shoes pinched as she walked
handing over typed carbon copies of her resume
explaining once again that she was not interested
in the secretary position, although she was
good at steno and really appreciated
that comment about her legs.
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Late nights with the stray cat
who got in through the fire escape
(she called him Elroy), she looked
out the window and dreamed of uncovering
corruption in the city government.
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Her first week at the Daily Planet
they made her get coffee for the fellas,
and assigned her a story on the Junior League.
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Writing back to Sam and Ella, she asked
about the weather in Pittsdale, said hello to Lucy,
and could you please send a little money,
although I’m doing just fine.
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When those naked pictures Jimmy Olsen took
somehow wound up in Playboy, she went missing
for three days. Some say they saw her with Lex Luthor
in Detroit, sipping screwdrivers and go-go dancing
around the Metro area in white cowboy boots.
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At work in her ruffled collar and solid pumps
she looked only at her typewriter. Promptly at five,
she walked into the phonebooth, closed the door,
and screamed for fifteen minutes. Nights with Elroy
and the faucet, she meditated on her chakras, placing
the green crystal Lex gave her on her flat,
grumbling navel.

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“What It Takes to Be Lois Lane" from The Stones,© 2005 by Celia Lisset Alvarez – Finishing Line Press

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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

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