JOHN G FELLER, YOUNG CITIZEN AND VET

JOHN G FELLER, YOUNG CITIZEN AND VET

by

Richard Baldwin Cook

John G Feller, young citizen and vet

Of 1812, then his homestead he'd fix, 

In Shenandoah, but John G'd not get

A land grant like the vets of '76.

Not social, yet a joiner was John G, 

In iron works, scattered in the Valley round.

Formed wood molds for hot iron poured carefully.

Such toil for food and shelter, John G found.

G after John may not a lone G be.

Gefeller got quick shortened by the clerk.

No matter how recalled in history.

John recalled down his line for clever work.

Drawn South, German colonials in PA,

They're found in Shenandoah to this day. 

Ripped Messiah

Ripped Messiah

Easter reminds us we will stand again

Anastasia - dance card of the young

We wrinkled can’t relate or recall when

with brawn we pulled up from the bottom rung

Enough we don’t fall down. Now take your pills.

Live it all again? No fond desire.

What if the crucified on Calvary’s Hill

An old dude, carpenter ‘fore gospel fire

Made him shake his cane at those righteous swells

they killed him, leaving grandma, sad grandkids

weeping at his cross. Would sedate church bells

salute codger-messiah on the skids?

The Savior of the World he best be ripped

with tats, tall mohawk, ring in those big lips.

Copyright 2014 / Richard Baldwin Cook

Source:

DAD WAS TAKEN TO WATCH A LYNCHING

Occasional Poems

by

Richard Baldwin Cook

(Nativa, LLC, 2014)

Available at lulu.com

and elsewhere

An Easter poem by the Master

Sunday Morning

by 

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

1

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,

And the green freedom of a cockatoo

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate

The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

[ . . . ]

The day is like wide water, without sound,

Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet

Over the seas, to silent Palestine,

Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

2

[ . . . ]

What is divinity if it can come

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

[ . . . ]

Divinity must live within herself:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

All pleasures and all pains, remembering

The bough of summer and the winter branch.

These are the measure destined for her soul.

[ . . . ]

6

Is there no change of death in paradise?

Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs

Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,

Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,

With rivers like our own that seek for seas

They never find, the same receding shores

That never touch with inarticulate pang?

[ . . . ]

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,

Within whose burning bosom we devise

Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

The  complete poem:

http://m.poemhunter.com/poem/sunday-morning/

Poetry - "a bridge between separated souls"

April 17 - birthday of Irish poet Brendan Kennelly (1936) who said:

"Poetry is, above all, a singing art of natural and magical connection because, though it is born out of one's person's solitude, it has the ability to reach out and touch in a humane and warmly illuminating way the solitude, even the loneliness, of others. That is why, to me, poetry is one of the most vital treasures that humanity possesses; it is a bridge between separated souls."

SOURCE:

Writer's Almanac, April 17, 2013

Emerson said of Shakespeare, no, of us: " . . . each reader is incredulous of the perception of other readers."

What Emerson said (in Representative Man) about Shakespeare:

"Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain, and think from thence, but not into Shakespeare's. We are still out of doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique. No man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual self,--the subtilest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent humanity coordinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents a story to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has certain observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental prominence, and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part, and starves that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his fitness and strength. But Shakespeare has no peculiarity, no importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities; no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small, subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other readers."

Source for the Quote:

"They have the numbers; we, the heights" Harold Bloom, in the Boston Review

Photo Credit: 

Woodpie blog

"I'm two eyes looking out of a suit of armor." May Swenson

May 28 - Birthday of May Swenson (1913)

The daughter of Mormon converts and Swedish immigrants to the US, May was a lesbian and, at age 13, questioned the faith of her parents.

May wrote:

"I'm two eyes looking out of a suit of armor. I write because I can't talk."

and

"Not to need illusion—to dare to see and say how things really are, is the emancipation I would like to attain."

Poemhunter.com - May Swenson (May 28, 1913 – December 4, 1989 / Utah)

"The Cry of the Horse-drawn Carts" - "El Llanto de las Carretas" - by Miguel Ángel Espino

On April 21, 2013 en San Salvador, I discovered the work of Miguel Ángel Espino. Wow! Here is a bit from a typically short essay, "The Cry of the Horse-drawn Carts" - which you will get if you read it aloud:

- The horse-drawn carts are coming. Along the distant dust- and moon-filled path, getting closer, sounding a complaint, the endless cry of these carts.

- The cry of the carts is a sweet ‘ E ’ held long. An ‘ E ’ cried out lovingly. A single ‘ E ’

***************

La semana pasada en San Salvador, me encontré por primera vez la obra de Miguel Ángel Espino. 

Wow! Aqui un pedacito de un ensayo, típicamente breve, "El Llanto de las Carretas" - que te pega cuando lo leyas en voz alta:

“Ya vienen las carretas. Más allá del sendero lleno de polvo y luna se va acercando como una queja el llanto interminable de las carretas.

“El llanto de la carreta es una i dulce y larga. Una i llorada con amor. Una i.”

‘A lawyer and not a thief - Something that astonished people'

Former Chief Justice Pascal Cologero Jr. of Louisiana is to be honored on February 22, 2013, for his many years of contributions to the high standards of the legal profession. Permit me to join in the blandishments and toss one further accolade onto the bier.

Former Chief Judge Cologero ought to be acknowledged for having helped to protect the public and the legal profession - from me.

It was on his watch that the disciplinary counsel of Louisiana initiated the destruction of my professional reputation and my career in the law.

I had to go. I am gone.

My suspension is a disbarment as I cannot apologize to the Justices of the Louisiana Supreme Court.  I had told them truths, which they elected to disregard.

Furthermore, I don’t want to pay them any more money. $3,000 for one mandatory hearing is enough. Further outgo would be on top of the $15,000 in fines which I was compelled to pay into the court of the judge about whom I complained - confidentially - without any other judge ever investigating my “allegations.” Ever.

But I do have a couple questions, which ought to be answered as people shower encomiums on a champion of the law as it is practiced in Louisiana, and Hawaii and Maryland - where I once held licenses to practice.

Why did none of the Fifth Circuit judges and state court justices who decided I needed a public humiliation not have the care and concern to tell the whole truth?

When I complained about my judge’s multiple instances of serious misconduct, why was I never accused of making a false statement? I assume this oversight is no oversight; a formal charge that I had lied, would require a look at the “allegations.” No formal charge = no formal investigation.

Why are disciplinary counsel not required to see to an investigation into the facts before bringing a prosecution? I begged disciplinary counsel first in Louisiana, and in Hawaii and in Maryland - to investigate my “allegations” about the judge, or forward them to an office that could. Each and every prosecutor to whom I wrote in the three jurisdictions simply ignored these requests.

First the conduct of my judge was never examined by supervising judges. Then, I was placed in a vortex of rules, which forbade the investigation of a judge. Why?

When I complained that my judge’s former law firm had benefitted from the judge’s improper, highly unusual ruling in another matter - worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to the judge’s pals - why does the public record made by the Justices of the Louisiana Supreme Court neglect to advise the public: this complaint I made was never investigated and the only lawyer to be prosecuted was myself, who blew the whistle?

The professional rules of ethics mandate that a lawyer “shall” notify supervising judges of misconduct on the bench. Why does the decision that destroyed my reputation as a lawyer, nowhere state that I was acting within mandatory reporting rules? In the first federal lawsuit I ever filed I got into career-ending trouble because I took seriously the rules of professional ethics, which I had sworn to uphold.

My judge declined to transfer to another judge, a motion of recusal I filed in his court that complained of his personal financial dealings with lawyers. A referral is required on these grounds by the federal judicial rules of ethics. Why was this detail of judicial misconduct keep out of the order tossing aside my career as a lawyer?

When I complained about an attorney organization gifting a judge with overseas travel, why not let the public in on the fact that the lawyer who presided at my hearing and who recommended my destruction was a member of the lawyers’ group that sent the judge on an overseas junket?

When I complained about my judge’s behavior, why not mention that the lawyer who chaired the committee that destroyed me, was affiliated with a firm with an active practice before that very judge?

My judge fined me a total of $15,000. I have never seen such a large fine imposed - not after begging supervising judges for protection from a monster on the bench. Has there ever before been such a huge fine imposed by a judge - levied upon his judicial complainant?

Payment of these fines bankrupted my solo practice and was enough by itself to shutter my law business - which is exactly what occurred. I was finished after my one case in federal court.

The order which separated me from my law license makes much of the fact of my apology to the judge. But left out is the fact that my judge ordered me to apologize to him on threat of further fines. Why not tell the public this?

The decision which lifted my law license from me states that I resigned from the case but there is no mention of the fact that my judge first ordered my to resign from the case - thus forcing me to abandon my clients - dozens of incarcerated women, who had complained of being subjected to sexual and other physical abuse as well as threats of jail-house punishment for speaking to a lawyer (me) and for participating in a lawsuit (the one I filed for them). Why is none of this worth a mention in the decision that destroyed my career?

Everyone of my be-robed prosecutors - those who have bothered to review the files - know that I did what this monster ordered me to do - I paid all the fines, apologized to him, resigned from the case. What I could not do was trigger an investigation of him and his financial ties to lawyers in his courtroom. Only the judges permit themselves to enter this area - and then they don’t. I tried, was sanctioned by the Monster for making the effort and then disbarred.

But I do ‘fess up to making a serious mistake that is all my own.

I notified the judiciaries of Louisiana, Hawaii and Maryland about my complaints of judicial misconduct and what had happened as a result. This led to my prosecution years later - first in Louisiana, then daisy-chained everywhere else, for my “contumacious” behavior.

I had thought the oath I took to practice law with integrity would be upheld by the judges in whose courts I was licensed to appear. This was a foolish assumption.

In the past few years, I have recomposed the shards of my public life. I am a volunteer in a hospice program, commending folks into that Mystery, which awaits us all. For some of the dying , the highest arc of their meandering is entirely interior and private; others follow the philosophy of the judiciary: encountered earthly misery and malice is cosmic purpose, from which you may seek release or solace through a community of prayer but do not expect the well placed, right here, to notice you.

I have cultivated a distaste for “the law” which like many prostitutes, is made victim of scurrilous abuse foisted by the powerful, but yet, “the law” is a strangely complicit victim and therefore repellent to me. I write poetry as a re-balancing forrey into the unbalanced world that I occupy.

His Honor’s honor soared, then went to ground

His stony gaze on court officers smooth

His Honor had me easily broke down

His mutterings finding deference miss the truth

Let me join with other Loyola Law alumni, on February 22nd, and lift a glass to our former Chief.

Let us all salute Saint Ives, patron saint of both lawyers (not myself any longer) and the abandoned (that’s me);

- to good Saint Ives, the Improbable, who insisted that cases be proven before they are decided and whose tomb was inscribed, as the legend goes:

Advocatus et non latro

Res miranda populo

‘A lawyer and not a thief

Something that astonished people'

_____

SUPREME COURT OF LOUISIANA NO. 06-B-0426 IN RE: RICHARD B. COOK ATTORNEY DISCIPLINARY PROCEEDINGS

May It Please the Court by Richard Baldwin Cook (Google eBook)

Photo credit: LSBA Photo

. . . . . Walter Never Spoke

PASTORAL BANDWIDTH

Walter never spoke
Never moved from his bed
A stretched out farmer
Dying in an 1820’s farmhouse

Was it a stroke? 
Was he tired down to the ground?
Did he believe his dying room held already
the words that would fit?

91, In Hospice

91, In Hospice

Awake, she ate with unexpected haste

Hands flying over the tray spilling nothing

Coffee is stone cold, she said to the room

Ignoring the gloved hand, caressing her hair

Source: 

91, In Hospice,

That's What I'm Talking About, Collected Essays and Reviews (Nativa, LLC, 2008) p. 44 - Available at Amazon.com and elsewhere

The Lightening Bug is not the Beacon

A poetic sensibility ought not be mistaken for a lens through which life may be understood. 

The insight of the poet is akin to the light of the firefly, seen across the lawn. Beautiful, fleeting, personally and therefore irrationally reassuring, a sound poem provides this flash, this arresting but momentary and faint illumination. 

But you are likely to trip over the lawn furniture if you guide yourself by the light of the firefly.

Thoughts which occur on the second and third reading of Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox. 

Berlin identifies Tolstoy's "deeply skeptical and pessimistic view of the strength of the non-rational in human behavior, which at once dominate human beings and deceive them about themselves." 

Tolstoy harbored a deep suspicion of the romantic notion that "true knowledge cannot be obtained by the use of reason but only by a kind of imaginative self-identification with the central principle of the universe - the soul of the world - such as do artists and thinkers in moments of divine inspiration."

For David Urias - Murdered in El Salvador June 29 2012

El dió con senderos conocidos

Mostraba confianza su paso

Ilusiones real no presumidos

Varonil su aspecto leve acaso

Dió David con camino familiar

Bajaba en parada habitual

Jamás piensa en sangre bautizar

Ir a hogar humilde y natal

Proyectos bien de paz y comunal

Guardaba en su mente inocente 

Camina alegre pero el Mal

lo rodea atrás y en el frente

Lastimaron al muchacho sin perdón

Y también sin razón a perdonar

Libre de actos malos, fue el don

a todos; pues su reta fue amar

David! Quitarte todo! Bien feo!

al comienzo de tu mero apogeo

*************   translation   **************

He followed well worn paths
His foot fall confident
His dreams modest not presumptuous
His a masculine essence yet gentle

David chose the familiar route
Getting off at the usual bus stop
Never imagining a baptism in blood
Headed for his mother’s humble home

Full of notions of communal harmony
Were his innocent ideas
He walked joyfully but Evil
fully had surrounded him

Mercilessly they wounded this boy
a child needing no show of mercy
Free of evil in himself, he was a gift
to all - his striving: learn to love

Oh David! They took everything from you!
Just as you had begun your ascent

IS FREE VERSE TRUE VERSE FOR BEING FREE? CASE IN POINT

A snippet from William Carlos Williams'  "It Is a Small Plant"

It is a small plant
delicately branched and
tapering conically
to a point, each branch
and the peak a wire for
green pods, blind lanterns
starting upward from
the stalk each way to
a pair of prickly edged blue
flowerets: it is her regard,
a little plant without leaves,
a finished thing guarding
its secret.

My question, raised before, why is this a poem and not simply a well done paragraph, broken up so as to fly the flag of verse?

Here is the same "sentence" but laid out without line breaks. What is lost and what is gained by breaking up the sentence into arbitrary (?) bits, as Williams did?

It is a small plant delicately branched and tapering conically to a point, each branch and the peak a wire for green pods, blind lanterns starting upward from the stalk each way to a pair of prickly edged blue flowerets: it is her regard, a little plant without leaves, a finished thing guarding its secret.


Source & Background:


Poets.org - Happy Birthday June 10, 2012

On the "Imagist Movement" you can visit:

Poets.org A Brief Guide to Imagism

JUNE 5 - POEMS HAVE BEEN RECOVERED, HIS BODY? NO . . .

JUNE 5 - Birthday of Federico Garcia Lorca (1898), poet, dramatist and artist, who was murdered on Aug 19, 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. His works were banned in Franco's Spain. G L's body has never been recovered. His poetry and plays have been. Here's a cutting from the poem, with my translation following:

Arbolé, arbolé,
seco y verdí.

La niña del bello rostro
está cogiendo aceituna.
el viento, galán de torres,
la prende por la cintura.
Pasaron cuatro jinetes
sobre jacas andaluzas,
con trajes de azul y verde,
con largas capas oscuras.
'Vente a Córdoba, muchacha.'
La niña no los escucha.
[. . .]

Stemma O Stemma
both dry and green

A lovely girl
out picking olives.
The wind, rigid lover,
grabs at her waist.
As four riders passed
on Andalusian ponies,
wearing outfits of blue and green
and long dark capes,
they said 'Come to Cordoba, little lady.'
She paid no attention to them.
[. . .]







(Translation by RBC)

The Restless Simulacra

The restless simulacra in my mind,
The piquant and horrific mix and meet.
Kaleidoscopic images unwind,
Make loves of losses, victories defeat.

With slight adjustments, just the merest twist,

My brain creates the past I would review.

The sum of spent events comes down to this:

What’s said and done I constantly renew.

Kaleidoscopic colors can enchant,

The reds, the greens, the yellows do enthrall.

More somber hues, though true, I can recant,

Since truth is true if willingly recalled.

The present from the past - a common view.

Our memories we invent - more likely true.

______

This poem was first published on-line in Syndic #6, where a reading by the writer may also be found:

Three by RBC

Remorse by Siegfried Sassoon

Now here is a poem with legs, not necessarily the best by Siegfried Sassoon, but a poem with limitations - pace, meter, rhyme - something of the essential features that mark out a poem from a paragraph.


Sasson was one of the famous WWI British poets, who fought, was wounded, sent home to recover, then back to fight some more and yet survive:

Remorse *
by Siegfried Sassoon

Lost in the swamp and welter of the pit,
He flounders off the duck-boards; only he knows
Each flash and spouting crash,--each instant lit
When gloom reveals the streaming rain. He goes
Heavily, blindly on. And, while he blunders,
"Could anything be worse than this?"--he wonders,
Remembering how he saw those Germans run,
Screaming for mercy among the stumps of trees:
Green-faced, they dodged and darted: there was one
Livid with terror, clutching at his knees. . .
Our chaps were sticking 'em like pigs . . . "O hell!"
He thought--"there's things in war one dare not tell
Poor father sitting safe at home, who reads
Of dying heroes and their deathless deeds."

* Counter-Attack and Other Poems, by Siegfried Sassoon (Dutton and Co. 1918, p. 54) 

What's the Diff Xween Free Verse & a Pungent Paragraph or Two?

This excellent poem by Marie Howe has been floating around on the web for a couple of years. (See Sources below)


Does it answer the question:  What's the difference beween free verse and a pungent paragraph or two?

PRACTICING

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,
a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:
That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each others’ mouths

how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and
one was the boy, and we paired off – maybe six or eight girls – and turned out

the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our
nightgowns or let the straps drop, and Now you be the boy.

Concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.
Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,
plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats. 

We sucked each others’ breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs
outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was

practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost
in someone’s hair … and we grew up and hardly mentioned who

the first kiss really was — a girl like us, still sticky with the moisturizer we’d
shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song 

for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire
just before we made ourselves stop.

SOURCES, MORE FROM THIS POET:

LGBT Poets: Kissing and Telling
http://thenewgay.net/2009/04/kissing-and-telling.html

Marie Howe

http://www.mariehowe.com/

Marie Howe On What the Living Do After Loss

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/20/141502211/poet-marie-howe-on-what-the-living-do-after-loss

Marie Howe

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/marie-howe

One of the killed young British poets of WW I.

March 18 Birthday of Wilfred Owen (1893 - Nov 4, 1918), one of the young, British, killed poets of WW I.

. . .
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,---
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Three bright and lovely children is enough

Three bright and lovely children is enough

for effacing and unassuming me

well nearly since life can be quite rough

be nice to have a bit of sound money

a big house too couple of friendly dogs

a yard and garden two cars on the street

or better a garage don't think us hogs

bad weather makes them rust under your feet

plazma telly three compu’s a great room

not grand just great so we can all enjoy

view of the woods land quiet as a tomb

essential as we read on download toys

three children lovely completed life I boast

that other stuff? no - ’xcuse off to the Coast