Swollen golden bell rimmed
Poetry
Robert Pinsky
“To Television”
Not a "window on the world"
But as we call you,
A box a tube
Terrarium of dreams and wonders.
Coffer of shades, ordained
Cotillion of phosphors
Or liquid crystal
Homey miracle, tub
Of acquiescence, vein of defiance.
Your patron in the pantheon would be Hermes
Raster dance,
Quick one, little thief, escort
Of the dying and comfort of the sick,
In a blue glow my father and little sister sat
Snuggled in one chair watching you
Their wife and mother was sick in the head
I scorned you and them as I scorned so much
Now I like you best in a hotel room,
Maybe minutes
Before I have to face an audience: behind
The doors of the armoire, box
Within a box--Tom & Jerry, or also brilliant
And reassuring, Oprah Winfrey.
Thank you, for I watched, I watched
Sid Caesar speaking French and Japanese not
Through knowledge but imagination,
His quickness, and Thank You, I watched live
Jackie Robinson stealing
Home, the image--O strung shell--enduring
Fleeter than light like these words we
Remember in, they too winged
At the helmet and ankles.
“Ginza Samba”
A monosyllabic European called Sax
Invents a horn, walla whirledy wah, a kind of
twisted
Brazen clarinet, but with its column of vibrating
Air shaped not in a cylinder but in a cone
Widening ever outward and bawaah spouting
Infinitely upward through an upturned
Like a gloxinia flowering
In Sax's Belgian imagination
And in the unfathomable matrix
Of mothers and fathers as a genius graven
Humming into the cells of the body
Or cupped in the resonating grail
Of memory changed and exchanged
As in the trading of brasses,
Pearls and ivory, calicos and slaves,
Laborers and girls, two
Cousins in a royal family
Of Niger known as the Birds or Hawks.
In Christendom one cousin's child
Becomes a "favorite negro" ennobled
By decree of the Czar and founds
A great family, a line of generals,
Dandies and courtiers including the poet
Pushkin, killed in a duel concerning
His wife's honor, while the other cousin sails
In the belly of a slaveship to the port
Of Baltimore where she is raped
And dies in childbirth, but the infant
Will marry a Seminole and in the next
Chorus of time their child fathers
A great Hawk or Bird, with many followers
Among them this great-grandchild of the Jewish
Manager of a Pushkin estate, blowing
His American breath out into the wiggly
Tune uncurling its triplets and sixteenths--the
Ginza
Samba of breath and brass, the reed
Vibrating as a valve, the aether, the unimaginable
Wires and circuits of an ingenious box
Here in my room in this house built
A hundred years ago while I was elsewhere:
It is like falling in love, the atavistic
Imperative of some one
Voice or face--the skill, the copper filament,
The golden bellful of notes twirling through
Their invisible element from
Rio to Tokyo and back again gathering
Speed in the variations as they tunnel
The twin haunted labyrinths of stirrup
And anvil echoing here in the hearkening
Instrument of my skull.
Other poets to research:
E. E. Cummings
Emily Dickinson
Robert Frost
T. S. Eliot
Langston Hughes
Walt Whitman

The Beatles
“Fool On The Hill”
Day after day, alone on the hill,
The man with the foolish grin is keeping
perfectly still.
But nobody wants to know him,
They can see that he's just a fool.
And he never gives an answer .....

But the fool on the hill,

Sees the sun going down.
And the eyes in his head,
See the world spinning around.

Well on his way, his head in a cloud,

The man of a thousand voices, talking
perfectly loud.
But nobody ever hears him,
Or the sound he appears to make.
And he never seems to notice .....

But the fool on the hill,

Sees the sun going down.
And the eyes in his head,
See the world spinning around.

And nobody seems to like him,

They can tell what he wants to do.
And he never shows his feelings,

But the fool on the hill,

Sees the sun going down.
And the eyes in his head,
See the world spinning around.

For a soundtrack, use “Hard Day’s

Night”
A Short Bibliography: Pinsky from
http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/
Others from
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets.
htm
Beatles from http://www.thebeatles.com/
Animal House Transcript from
http://www.script-o-
rama.com/movie_scripts/a/animal-
house-script-transcript-belushi.html
Skits from http://snltranscripts.jt.org/

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/79/79awhatthe
hell.phtml