Aturdido Tableau

In the brilliance of the noonday sun,

with the many-colored flags  over the shops
waving it on,

the crowd looked as if it had closed ranks around itself,

and could never admit another soul.

[--Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties (1965), p. 79

Trouble in Paradise

Again the sun was hot upon the cacaos,

and the lorikeets were wild in protest

over some  imagined slight.

-- James Michener, Tales of the South Pacific (1946)

Docked Monost--

Found in a bottle, floating in the South Pacific.

Probably written ca. 1943:

    all night, in the  hot  quonset --

Here the fragment breaks off.

[From: James Michener, Tales of the South Pacific (1946)]

A Chrestomathy of Monostichs

Thomas Wolfe’s writings are so consistently lyrical, that it might seem needless to seek out and cull small samples of “found poetry”.  But readers and critics have repeatedly complained of a too-muchness in Wolfe’s unending foaming flow.  So there is some value in presenting just a few appetizer-sized samples, tastefully arranged on a plate.

In similar fashion, G.K.Chesterton’s polemical writings, especially the lesser efforts like Sidelights (1932), can be cloying if read straight through all at once;  yet they all contain individual epigrammatic gems.

The following are all excerpted from Wolfe’s posthumous novel You Can’t Go Home Again (1940).

The vine, rich-weighted with its golden fruit

~

Each spring, in that one tree,  he found all April  and the earth.

~

Ten thousand points of light  prick out the cities.

~

the golden nimbus of other lights, fog-flowered

~

at night, the whistles wailing northward  toward the world

.

Solar Wrath

the sun was furious   above drenched orchids

[--Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920)]