Sunday, October 25, 2009

Tribute to a Lost Writer & Friend - Patrick Schnoor (III)



My late friend the poet Patrick Schnoor and I were profoundly influenced by the example of Robert Grenier in our undergraduate years at UC Berkeley, where Grenier had come to teach writing in the late 1960's. We--both of us--were classicists at heart, but Grenier easily swept aside our notions of the fixity of traditional formal patterns, in favor of a practical, down-to-earth and close-to-the-skin poetics based on a keen sensitivity to words, and an honesty about the facts of our lives. These were aspects of living-as-writing that you weren't taught by traditional teachers.  

Patrick was a better writer than I was, or ever would be. Here is a sequence of "minimalist" works he did towards the end of our second term in Grenier's poetry writing class at Berkeley. I published them in my little magazine during the early 1970's, and I believe they're the last of Patrick's publications. (He may have been submitting work to other periodicals, but I'm not aware of any, then, or now.) 

 

when she comes

 
1

she comes 
through, and
when

she comes
through
she comes

through
over, the
rainbow


2

when
she comes through
she comes

and when
she comes through
she comes

over the rainbow


3

she, her over
comes through
the

she, her over
the comes through
and she

her over
the rainbow


 
Preludes: Tulare Lake

Basin, California
  
 
1

air wavers
sheets
like a skillet

2

back water
soothes back
the range

brush

creased hills
west
to comfort

3

hot reflexive crows
eye you

in the corn
dry yellow

afternoon

4

delta bugs
and the dust tinted dusk
of sunset

dry up

the fetid bottom
where the lake'd

been

5

birds
lost

open
in air

6

a canal
slick with fish

and the mauve

accomplishments
of frogs

7

the distressed
chirp

of a trapped
cricket

8

the dispersed pierce
of sun noise

sharp

in the cloud
toured sky

9

where
as

an
unwavering

gazette
of that

heat

10

some 
single

locus
locust

zones
those grainy

fields


 
Preludes: Afternoon

 
1

the 

tall

bell

tells

all

2

the

stream

streams

slowly

through

the pages

3

I cross

a cross


across

the street

4

walk the lines

of the squares


played upon

the plaza

5

there is no lack

here


beer

6

I praise

the hymns


of glory
 
  
 
Preludes After A Thing (Painting)

 
1

more
than blue

it 
frights

2

stop it
river

3

the sky
is
in the/river

am
in the/tree

4

stars
make triangles

and the river

5

hide and seek

show and tell

the 'tree'
is worry

6

field
tree

river
sky

the north
star


 
Preludes: The Poem and the Sun
  
 
1

let us attend then
to the unintended meaning
of the sunset

for instance

as to what
the poem could refer
If not itself

2

it elicits
me

like a ghost

3

why must
the sun

set west

4

the rays of that
same light

swallow me

5

that sun
sets

in my mind

6

that sun
alone

is enough

7

that sun
going down

in the dust






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