Mad Dogs of Trieste: New and Selected Poems

by Janine Pommy-Vega

In Mad Dogs of Trieste , mythic figures glide past like giants over the landscape, showing the reader Janine Pommy Vega’s passionate response to the death of her father, mother, friends and former times. Other poems repeat the call to get up, leave everything, go where one has never been.
Ms. Vega’s writings are intensely autobiographical, following closely in the footsteps of her life-journey: they are the poetic record of her experience-hungry travels through the world and her spiritual retreats into herself; her work with public school children and delinquent youth, and with the inmates and staff of the New York State prison system; her friendships and her love affairs, her farewells and her lingering memories. For this major retrospective volume, she has selected the best lyrics, protests, portraits, and elegies from her first twenty-five years of writing.

Genres: Poetry

272 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2000

About the author

Janine Pommy Vega (February 5, 1942 – December 23, 2010) was an American poet associated with the Beats.

Reviews

[Steven Godin]

My mother came up for Mother's Day
and it snowed
hailed rained and bloomed again
it gave her four seasons in a week
a month later she was dead.

Her legacy of anger
unrelenting unforgiving
that I exert again and again
against myself, the world, a partner
is no accident

I gathered this anger on my own
and she was the perfect vehicle
of instruction: ancient woman
of the earth who comes up
howling, red, her hands running with lava

Catalyst for my own voice
privately infuriated
with pots and pans, with handbags
any single object not exactly
in its place

That woman appears before me
stark, beating the earth
with her fists
I can't disown her
every shred of her dress is mine

She comes because I call her
into the light, her white
hot anger gathered through lifetimes
will set us both on fire
or set us free

— — —

You red dress in the coffin
your dead lips sewn together
I'm wailing out in the parking lot,
you would not approve

I look at our friendship
how you served me as loyal back-up
to my vagaries — the confidante,
the faceless friend across the table

how I served you as visiting sister
bringing you eager news from
the outside, bringing you
someone to talk to

We have known each other before.
Only in the working out of fixed
roles, mother and daughter,
did we fail
I serve the life you would not
in yourself

— — —

Goodbye.
I won't come back waving
at your window, or visit your house
the rooms, end to end, empty
the door ajar

I know as well as you
what I go to find
I carry inside
I am not blind to the uselessness
of travel

A dead board sits
where my heart should be
if you knock on it now
it echoes
I am going away

You're right
I should have been an actress
chosen a roll with all the passionate
intensity that returns the day, obliterates
the past, brings the house down

Snip snip snip the scrape of
garden shears out the window
cutting the sky in half
and we can never go back
to where we were

I am leaving in a black night
rigid heart and smog
covering my exit
you will not be at the table
when I return

[Dov Zeller]

I put this on hold at the library thinking it was a book about Trieste and instead what I got was a book of poems by a poet I hadn't heard of. I often love these accidental library books, and this one I am particularly enjoying as 1) I've been wanting to read a bit more poetry these days 2) she writes a lot about river, sea, sky, land, island, birds and our daily human free-fall into mythology. I appreciate her movement from small moments to vast landscapes and back again.

Here are a few I particularly enjoyed.

Plaza De Armas

I make my way
a rocking boat down the pavement
penicillin poisoned
swollen joints
my neck stiff with anchors

I am slowly circling, waiting
for the moon
waiting for the face of Huascaran
waiting for an homage of flowers
to sit in, and watch
the sunset

Huascaran wears
pink
on the last skirt of glacier
There are two ways to do it:
one is to sit and love and watch,
the other is to climb

The Geminids

I can see it in the set of furniture
the curve of ornaments against the wall
a stepping off place from what is
known to what is not
and the body there in its water
swimming
picks up the threads
ferries the mind home listening
for meteors
as though a chord were struck
and one saw it, green
some vast piano.



Himalayan Air In The City

Odd this night to have risen
to have lost a glove, to have
sunk into mountains, into forests
and the forest's edge

People luminous over thin streets,
quaking bodies, ecstatic hands
two visions of the Tree of Life
from the bat tribe

Show me the bat who is crucified
to his wings
and I recognize
acorn, serpent, seed in the furrow

In back alleys of the mountain town
we sat crosslegged, calling
the stars by name, the radiant
entities conjoined in a figure eight

and not an eight
and not conjoined. A cup
with a golden rim.
See? You forgot.

Let me along with ten thousand
deities bless the depths of the forest
lose my gloves in a thicket
peer into the well

see no reflection.


Islands of the Sun

When horizons are blurred
and you cannot see where
shore and sky meet

you could be on any island
off the Irish coast,
in the Aegean Sea

a line of sailboats
leaves the port
in a stiff wind from the north

and all enclosures
seem like a waste
of time

they round the lighthouse
at the tip of the lizard's tail
and fan out

there will be fish
in all the kitchens
tomorrow.

[Brendan]

A lot of poetry here - 256 pages of it.

Pieces on nature, animals, people she's known, and the prison system; written in Peru, New York / New Jersey, and Europe, between 1975 and 1999.

I selected a few poems worth mentioning here:

"Musician" - From News of a River Somewhere Else
"In Place of Bones" - About Paris, though written in Amsterdam. From Drunk on a Glacier, Talking to Flies.
"Human Prayer" - Sing Sing. From Drunk on a Glacier, Talking to Flies.
To a lesser extent: "The Politics of Insomnia" (Drum Song), "The Ancient Waltz" (Drunk on a Glacier, Talking to Flies), and "Mad Dogs of Trieste" (American Walls).

imagination
drained of flight
like so many dead lawns, silent - "Catskill Drought"