Saturday – January 7th – 2017
Poetry
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Juicy Quote
“I think, as an artist, you have to have experienced some deep turmoil,
some kind of pain, because that’s what connects you with the world.
That’s what makes it juicy.”
Pablo Neruda
A Lemon
Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love’s
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree’s yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree’s planetariumDelicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it-
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation’s
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.
loosed
on the moonlight, love’s
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree’s yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree’s planetariumDelicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it-
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation’s
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.
Eve Brandstein
Between Jacob and Benjamin
In the kitchen in the middle of the night
between two bedrooms
my son sleeps in one, my father in the other
while my concern moves between
his limp & his lunch
his repetitions & his why
his criticism & his acceptance
his love & his love.
These two men eighty years apart
& me in the middle
between answers still asking questions
wanting to be understood & getting told what to do
telling my son its time to go & being told I shouldn’t by my father.
In the middle of the night in the kitchen
I peel an apple
watching 4 AM traffic 21 floors below Queens Boulevard
so far away from my home in California
& my birth in Eastern Europe
the end of his story
the beginning of his
worried awake by some haunting
or something I haven’t done
being in the middle of everything
the night
the passage
the place between these two men.
I eat the apple bit by bit
without a sound the traffic slips
into the middle of summer
I hear him stir & him snore
& watch the morning amber press against the cobalt
finally feeling the sleep I need
ready for surrender
I leave the last of skin and seeds
on the table in the kitchen
between parent & child.
Fruit for Thought…
Photo by L.K. Thayer
“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”
― Helen Bevington
Fruit For Thought…
Rich Ferguson
Photo by Cat Gwynn
“With my last dying breath, I will let out a sound; a seed of a love song growing under the tongue, sprouting into a howl, rising from my lips and into night, to halo the wild forever moon.”
Happy Holla Daze! from L.K. Thayer & The Juice Bar!
From me & my boys “Chet Baker (cat) & “Curtis Mayfield” (dog)
“I have a gut full of gratitude…” – L.K. Thayer
Thank you for squeezing The Juice Bar! 🙂
Bob’s Espresso Bar – Poetry Reading – Sunday Oct. 27th 2:00PM!
Bob’s Espresso Bar
5251 Lankershim Bl.
No. Hollywood, CA 91601
which is located between Magnolia and Weddington on Lank. right across the street from the NoHo 7 movie theatre. Bob is an actor-singer-songwriter who owns the coffee house, and it’s a really warm vibe in this little place.
Third, I am inviting you to come and see me read! The event will be hosted by my poet friends Radomir Luza and Jessica Wilson, both excellent writers, as well as mainstays in the writer open mike scene here in Los Angeles. this will take place Sunday, October 27th, from 2-4 in the afternoon.
Four, this is an Open Mike venue, a great opportunity for Jack grapes students to read your writing to the public! It’s a creative crowd that comes into this place, will give you a chance to meet an audience and woo them!(Woo….wooo, waaah….yaha, yaha ) it’s easy, see you stand in place, relax, and say what ya gotta say, baby!
So come on down! It’d be great to see everybody, and a chance for us all to catch up! See you there and
Lotsa Love, Joe
Also Reading:
L.K. Thayer
Alexis Fancher
Joe Kennedy
Liz Netto
Angela Cohan
The Juice Bar 