‘Spontaneous Overflow’
In honor of National Poetry Month, UCSB celebrates its own creators of verse
By Andrea Estrada for The Current
In the preface to his “Lyrical Ballads,” William Wordsworth described all good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling.” April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate this auspicious literary occasion The Current is highlighting some of the campus’s resident wordsmiths.
Throughout the month, we are publishing pieces by faculty and staff poets whose work has been recognized nationally and internationally.
We continue today with a poem by Robert Krut, a lecturer in the Writing Program.
Here are the poets we’ve already highlighted: John Ridland, Stephanie Batiste and Teddy Macker
Divinity
Virus-blind, you stumble to an alley,
under a lentil rainstorm, a preacher
waves rudder arms to the thunder,
makes lightning scatter until five canaries
escape his sleeves, singing condolences,
a misdirection from the transistor radio
around his neck, beneath his vestments,
its zealous torque fusing electrodes
to your breath, turning thoughts to words,
your face a cannon, and the realization
that he was merely a collection of discarded
nightclub flyers lifted by wind
between graffitied walls.
— Robert Krut,
To the Brave Generation
Who have been fired on, and march now for their lives
Those who should lead this land of the free and the brave,
Who should have led you, must now themselves be led
By you who learned too early what it is to give
A life, or rather, to have it taken away
For no good reason except that it was there
For the gun and the shooter who could shoot anywhere,
Who had no image of what it means to live,
Moved by a spirit angry as it was dead.
You learned how easily night can shadow day
By pulling a switch, a trigger. You survive,
You have been tested by fire, and chosen to save
Our nation from itself: you'll be The Brave
Generation, and the Free, who can keep us alive.
— John Ridland, professor emeritus of English
Fray
Loops remain.
Remnant of the tangled thread
Memory restored to the past,
the present
threads forth across the knot
Restored towards prismatic being.
Losing One
Losing one’s mother
is like losing your root.
being unattached
to the world
to history
yesterday now and the day before are doubtful
perhaps not having been at all
tomorrow
a wall of static
beyond it
a tear that might swallow
and you wonder
perhaps
is it possible
no longer to belong
to this planet.
Is it even still
spinning...
— Stephanie Leigh Batiste, associate professor of Black studies and of English
The Otter and the Seaweed
This is what you need to know:
you need to know that otters wrap themselves
in seaweed so they won’t,
while sleeping at night, float out to sea…
Are you imagining this?
Can you see the otters actually doing this?
Does it break your heart a little?
Does it seduce you just a bit
into loving more
this odd hard world?
Oh otters, wrap yourselves tight! And sleep,
exactly like you do, floating but seaweed-held
in our salty living waters! Oh otters,
wrap yourselves tight! And you,
the one who doesn’t, the one who doesn’t
tether himself down right,
we are with you as you float away,
we are with you as you sleep
and lose yourself in the night.
On This Earth
after a line by Mahmoud Darwish
We have on this earth what makes life worth living:
the perfume of a sleeping child, the four rain-colored wings
of the dragonfly, the hourglass on the black widow’s belly
pouring blood into blood. We have the mineral green innards
of cucumber, rain-pocked snow, the plastic crucifix
on the sick whore’s wall, sincerer than any cathedral.
We have an alley of poplar trees and road-darkened feet,
bats sipping clear water from a dwindling creek,
we have slices of black bread at a blue table by the sea.
We have on this earth what makes life worth living,
what makes it so queer and lovely and painful,
moon on the snake in the dying rosemary,
and the young couple upstairs in bed
undressing each other regardless.
— Teddy Macker, lecturer, College of Creative Studies
Contact Info:
Andrea Estrada
(805) 893-4620
andrea.estrada@ucsb.edu