A Louvre of Verse

By Martin Mohammad Forouzani, Barbara Bamberger Scott and BARRY BECKHAM

For Martin Foroz, this volume reflects on the gallery of classic American and English poets whose voices have inspired him to develop a new voice of his own. Poe, Thomas, Pound, Eliot, Shelley, Yeats, Whitman, Ginsberg, Gray, Emerson...they have expanded his perceptions and concepts now that he is in his 50s.

He has lived the narratives and the verse dramas arranged here in two parts. But for him, it does not matter whether he is depicting true life stories or has plotted the characters and events. It's more important, he argues, that the reader recreates the multiple meanings in every piece of the Louvre.

He invites the reader to participate in meaning making rather than looking for a clear or cliché message.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Jul 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9780980238013

Book preview

A Louvre of Verse

Copyright (c) 2020, Martin Foroz (Mohammad Forouzani)

All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Published in the United States by

Beckham Publications Co.

Silver Spring, MD 20904

ISBN: 978-0-9802380-1-3

A Louvre of Verse

Poems

Martin Foroz

(Mohammad Forouzani)

Foreword by Barbara Bamberger Scott

Silver Spring

Also by Martin Foroz

Inside Out

Out Inside

An Illustrative Dictionary of Semantics (ILLUDS)

Contents

Foreword

To my reader

BOOK ONE Homage to legends

The Faded Manifestation*

The Hindrance*

The Inhabitant*

The Solid Kind*

The Upcoming!*

To A Girl*

Turbulent Footing*

Usual Separation*

Inside In*

The Confessing Song of Mr. Head*

The Fourth Character*

Mystic Melody

BOOK TWO Poems of the now

A Rare Species

His Nobility

The Conflict

The Land

There & Then

Perching

A Dark Journey

Abnormal

Red Wine

The Rhyming Part

Sensation

The Victim*

My Poetry

Cubism*

Lost

The Tree

Newfangled Deconstruction

A Party of Oxymorons

A Special Limerick

A Not-Construct

The Dancer

Desperate

The Void

The Change

We

Sonnet 135

Omni-

The Strange Couple

Commoner

The Lost Girl

The Nonsense

In a Somber Room

A Broken Promise

Transformation

Caterpillar

Fall

Natural Nature

Two-year-old*

Neither L’Allegro Nor Il Penseroso

Senses*

The Hole*

Just There!

The Distance

Bridge

NO TITLE

The Dark

A fleeting thought

Remorse

Marks

Gone with Night

A Nightmare

Memory

Dichotomy

In the midst of Murkiness

Unlockable

How It Happened

Foreword

A poet is a master of many professions, as Martin Foroz amply proves in A Louvre of Verse.

I first became acquainted with Foroz’s writing when asked by US Review of Books to read and review his recently published Illustrated Dictionary of Semantics. I wrote then that, The terminology cited … is underpinned by examples and shadings that are often practical, related to actual usage. Some of these are charming and would attract readers outside the linguistic field. Even the word ‘mean’ itself has multiple meanings, as the author points out. Learning that Foroz was a published poet, my curiosity was piqued: how might the disciplined academic study of word usage link to the often romantic, cloud-fluffed realms of poetry? I came to realize that a poet has more than one profession, and to see in A Louvre of Verse that Foroz lives them all.

The poet may be an explorer, following dark forgotten caverns to discover new gems to be gathered for a new age. Or a weaver, as when Foroz takes the remnants of a once beautiful carpet and restores them thread by thread to create a portrait, a self-portrait, a landscape of our dreams or a pointillistic myriad of tiny beams resolving into a single absorbing vision. Foroz is an historian, digging in dusty stacks among ancient annals for pieces of the poetic past that can be transmuted to soothe—or provoke—current sensibilities. A vintner, he plunders the cellar for the well-aged vintage promising the most soul-satisfying sips.

Foroz goes even further, for besides all these, he is an inventor who has welded the old to the new to develop unexpected correlations. He unearths and incorporates respected phrases obscured by time and puts them in the mouths of his actors. This he does not merely by allusion, but by utilizing precise words and phrases, bringing etheric concepts into visual alignment. He seeks out the ideals of an earlier era that have captivated some of the greatest of his fellow poets and brings them into a personal, passionate present.

Oh, yes, and poet Foroz is also a juggler—tossing, balancing, jolting yet always controlling a multitude of flying objects, forcing us to surrender the need to see what is there at any given moment in any specific space, in favor of simply enjoying the whistle of air and the flashing trail of bits and pieces moving to unexpected destinations.

Even Foroz’s title reference, A Louvre of Verse, is layered with lore. It might imply a collection of classics—reserved for the examination of elites, aesthetes. But innovator Foroz pulls the records out of their time-worn covers and makes them sing to the modern Everyman. Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven in Foroz’s visionary The Faded Manifestation is a place whose midnight dreary is an intruding noon and whose foreboding bird becomes a mysterious Black Rose. T. S. Eliot’s Hollow Men are morphed by Foroz into The Solid Kind, men of strong brains who see not the shadow falling on their aspirations, but light, the sun, lucency, in this paean to the spirit of Persians in exile. Further Persian imagery permeates The Upcoming, drawing on Eliot’s Journey of the Magi; here Foroz further elucidates the exile’s sensibilities: missing our Prophet, our Kings, Queens and our slain religion!

Another implication of Louvre is that of a slatted door or window. Illumination invades in carefully arrayed openings of breath and wind. Foroz has added such order to his verse. In The Inhabitant, an exploration of Ezra Pound’s The Seafarer, he contrasts the earlier artist’s assertion that, He on dried land loveliest liveth with the somber but more realistic proposition that, We already know where our home is: the earth on which we kill each other.

A bold foray in Book One of A Louvre of Verse is the peeling and paring of two of T. S. Eliot’s greatest works. In The Confessing Song of Mr. Head Foroz enlists The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock as a device to depict the poignant companionship of a man and woman losing one another to the fog of Alzheimer’s, providing the repeated sad refrain, This is a new word she has recently learned and she likes to repeat it. Conversations alternate with memories and brief jumps into the present while shared readings of Prufrock provide temporary focus. The Fourth Character is a tribute to Four Quartets, the Louvre’s longest work. It puts Eliot’s time-honored phrases into the mouths and consciousness of new characters brought to the spotlight to star in a vivid stage production giving further breadth to concepts of time and change through the four fascinating personae that Foroz has brilliantly constructed.

In Book Two we find Foroz unfettered, freely versing. In Cubism he hears colors, sees noises, touches taste, speaks nothingness. The Tree assumes the shape of its subject. A love lost invokes the need for Red Wine. In The Art he celebrates Vermeer, while On a Beach, in a Museum contrasts the open Tahitian beaches made famous by Gaugin with the Musée d'Orsay where his works are sequestered. There is a woman wandering through Foroz’s poems—one, many, or every—with whom he exchanges glances and touches, once voicing a universal lover’s plaint, I don’t know if I was in, unable to lock the door, or she was out unable to open it.

The poet is the best one to describe himself, so I leave you with his thoughts as you begin your journey into the many professions of Martin Foroz:

Abnormal

The habitual standards and the regularity in life

were the things he didn’t like at all…

The worst was the installed common sense in his mind

which was reinstated whenever it was lost

He was a man of abnormality—  

hating anything representing banality,

any concept including finality

or any sort of mortality

He was a poet, 

a creator of vitality,

and his poems manifested in non-ephemerality

—Barbara Bamberger Scott, Book Reviewer, Editor, Author—

www.awomanswrite.com

To my reader

Breathing is a simple gift

till life decides to achieve

a deep 'n timeless sleep

Martin Foroz, 2018

Senses in one’s 50s function way differently than in one’s 20s. Understanding, interpretation, judgment, reactions to advice, and making decisions take decades to mature. And so does writing.  What I’ve found in the fifth decade of enjoying that simple gift is a Martin that hears and reads Poe, Thomas, Pound, Eliot, Shelley, Yeats, Whitman, Ginsberg, Gray, Emerson and others in a much different way than he did in his 20s. 

A Louvre of Verse took me ages back to the gallery of American and English poets whose voices inspired me to have a new voice of my own. The Louvre is intended to suggest the reader to reflect on the classics of Literature now that the Zeitgeist more values contemporary art and write. Faded manifestation, for example requires the reader to recall Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven to better appreciate the themes and tones of the two poems and realize how they are related.   

Poems in Book One were written either in reply to or as a tribute to some of the American and English poets from the 18th to the 20th century. The longest works in Book One are the two verse dramas The Confessing Song of Mr. Head and The Fourth Character in which T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Four Quartets are fully recited by the main characters in each text. I had no predetermined plans for the verse dramas. Strange to say, the plot, the characters, and the flow of events found their way through and forced the words onto the screen. I had no idea what would happen to the characters in the stories… I was a viewer who transcribed the frames of thoughts onto the computer screen. In these verse dramas, Eliot’s poems appear at intervals wherever they are thematically related to or support the characters’ state of mind.

The last work in Book One, Mystic Melody, is versified with a look at Whitman’s Song of Myself on a different theme. The Prelude to the poem briefs the reader into the content of this 50-section poem.  That said, the we and they in Mystic Melody remain a mystery until the pronouns’ referents are disclosed toward the middle of the poem. 

Book Two, presents short poems and narrative verses a few of which have been made into video poems available on my YouTube page.  The themes in Book Two invite the reader to participate in meaning making rather than look for a clear or cliché message. Some of the poems are accounts of the ongoing events in the world at the time of writing- events such as wars, terrorist attacks, power/child/women abuse, political tensions and, last but not least, the challenges of expatriate life in all sense of the word.

I have lived the narratives and the verse dramas; it does not matter whether I depicted true life stories or plotted the characters and events. What matters is my Reader’s recreation of the multiple meanings that would come to life in every piece of the Louvre. 

Martin Foroz, summer of 2019

https://martinforoz.com

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJczsLzht9lJUhw1RFfkf3g

BOOK ONE

Homage to legends

The Faded Manifestation*

*Quoted words and lines are from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven

It was noon, middle of noon, the sun was not shining—

it was behind a puff of thin film, floating fleetingly.

It was a summer midday, noontide, and the prime Meridian

was glancing at Greenwich during my reading indignantly

The Raven, probably the dark raven darkening clearly

my daytime withal wildly.

I could now see her in the darkish light of my cramped capacity.

She was moving around me like a phantom or a Real One—

sometimes laughing perilously, some other times crying quietly

while, of course, I was coldly quivering in the absence of the sun.

It’s for a long time that from her I had to fearfully run

though with her I was de facto done.

It was March 21, Persian Norouz, their very youthful time.

When it’s New Year everything is green and fresh

but not my memories which matured momentarily.

Though it was day, it was drab and dreary and I was in a mesh.

I continued reading while she was still there not in the flesh,

and for sure I wasn’t in my desh.

The room with the curtains drawn and sun behind the thick cloud

was serving her to spring in, stay for a spell and then swiftly soar.

Spring in my place was in a far space representing just a season—

and not freshness, newfangledness and novelty, no, not anymore.

Semantically, this season had a diverse sense in my old lore—

It was Spring but not at my door.

And she was now peeking at me in the proximity of my presence,

and I was submitting the essence of my existence to her permanence,

when she abruptly chattered, not for long, and then sang some old song.

After that, while I was just soundless, she addressed me as ‘your eminence’.

While I stared into the mirror that cast her violent turbulence,

I responded to her with a sunk silence.

At that time, my consciousness became rockier in my cognition.

While fearing the Faded Manifestation, I asked her what she wanted!

She scrutinized me and smiled, displaying her ivory ivories.

Then she asked Is this room one of your usual haunts?

And I was not able to properly give her a relevant response.

So, she fled in an air of non-nonchalance.

Afraid of even my reading, now I recalled a name—

A name from the old days, familiar in a queer way,

known to me, who loved her, but appeared alien for a dame.

She was named cynically a ‘Black Rose’ of the May,

when for Misfortune, she was modestly a pleasant prey,

when Scylla had its ear-rending neigh.

It was not a dream; no one can dream such a subjective certainty!

Black Rose was there again, looking at my book in the pale light.

She asked me why I was reading Poe in this somber surrounding,

and I replied with a shuddering gape like an unnerved knight.

Merely this and nothing more, from The Raven I was going to cite—

But I had been silent since last night.

Back to my book, I read some melodies from the upsetting verse—

Who cares about the reader when the verse flows like a sea or stream!

I was more blanched, not by Black Rose this time but by The Raven—

while I could hear an owl hooting at noon; strange enough as a theme

for a person who is puzzled by the poem, the ambience, and the dim beam,

and singularly by her appearing in the ghastly gleam.

To nowhere Black Rose retreated again, for some minutes, only some,

when from nowhere she loomed anon, grinned, and then nothing—

only me, her, and obscurity at noon and absurdity in the shadow of the moon.

Once we had a great trip together while we were rushing—

to a desolate destiny which led to the calamity and the car crashing.

For me and for Black Rose, it was surly crushing!

I drew back the curtains. Damn it, it was the total eclipse of the sun.

I was feeling numb, with Black Rose covering calmly all her face.

I asked her why? Why did she front her face like a flat facade?

The antiphon was none. Nothing, but a non-nude nod, stating her case!

I had known her since she was not so much grown-up with no trace

of her growing up if I could chase.

I remembered the saintly days of yore, but no adulthood any more.

Standing at my door, you looked like not before, but someone unknown—

someone inscrutable, curiously cryptic, like a text from the scriptures,

with no interpretation shown, you were enigmatically esoterically alone.

Alas, you were not like the child I knew. You looked like a clone.

And I had a desire to atone!

For a long time, I was blamed for the accident in which you died.

And I was full of remorse for what? I didn’t see the source.

In there stepped a stately Raven. Bloody Black Rose read it

while I was dismayed by her divine but victimized voice.

It was terrifying but somehow in some way sweet, of course.

And I had once more my remorse!

The Faded Manifestation was freshly reflecting through the penumbra.

She was crying quietly, condemning me with mien of a real lady.

Perched upon a bust of Pallas, Black Rose read it from The Raven.

Oh, Pallas, the goddess of wisdom, called also Athena, surely.

I was about to ask why she read this line when suddenly

I noticed she wasn’t there physically.

This time she was beside my bookshelf, as if she was protecting me

from me and my boring books, like a child guarding her old dad.

This reminded me of a kid who did the same in the past.

I gave her a mesmerizing smile though it revived my sad fancy!

But she was astonishingly grieved by my grin and not glad.

And I deemed that she assumed me mad.

She stood still with her head hanging over my book reading loudly

on the Night's Plutonian shore!, and then she stayed silent.

Oh, the Greek god Pluto, who rules the Underworld! Was it a hint?

Why did she play with me in such a way that looked violent?

She repeated it but this time with a voice that sounded strident—

she was stabbing into my heart her trident.

Black Rose wasn’t as black as her clothes but she sounded sore!

She was now opening and closing and closing and opening my door—

implying that she wanted to leave and stay and at the same time not to BE.

She was idly there but not a Being though she resembled not a bore.

I asked her if she could be someone I knew like before!

She responded: Nevermore!

Not much I marveled the meaning of her word nevermore though

I could now better infer the articulation of few of her content words—

if not the function words or the god-damn grammatical group—

the closed class not the open one. I always hated linguistic nerds,

but it sounds that my job deals with humans and not birds—

I deal with nouns, adjectives, adverbs and VERBS.

Verbs aren’t just words. They are actions as evidenced by certain practice.

They constitute the second vast constituent called verb phrase—

second branch after a noun phrase, directly connected to the node ‘S’.

Some believe that learning content words is the first phase

and I doubt if she learned all since at her age it was a maze,

though I was now in an alcoholic haze.

Black Rose took my glass away and told me something strange:

‘I don’t remember your being addicted to alcohol or any drug!’

My mind was a little addled and I was well woozy by the booze.

She came close as if she wanted to put her arms around me and hug,

but I was scared of her since she sounded like a tough thug

and she was not, I was feeling too snug.

Then I asked her again if she could be the same person she was before.

Nevermore, she replied more rudely than at any time before,

And I was feeling tipsy and at tippy top of my ecstasy.

Maybe, I was liquored up but she made me feel I’d committed a crime.

I moved my hand and then she performed a mighty comic mime

but her pretentious style seemed sublime.

Though the word nevermore was not her only stock and store,

it sounded more outspoken than any other words that had record—

in my mind, my memory, my reminiscence, and my consciousness.

Did I have consciousness after all? No one knew but the Lord—

Whose Lord, mine or hers? The one who seemed not to be bored—

the one who’s praised nevermore.

But the word confronts my comfort zone combatively and nothing more.

So, I was looking for her again to know her a little more and to make sure

I was not hallucinating an imaginary person or someone unknown.

She materialized once more and immediately said bonjour.

I gravely vaulted over my rocker and resolved to take the tour

but then I felt I couldn’t endure.  

Nevermore, Nevermore, what a desperate word! Not anymore.

It’s a nasty word; I needed her to be the one I knew long ago.

but how? I didn’t know, nor did she know anything more.

We were in prison of our own and it was not like Poe’s crow—

to repeat just certain words, like nevermore, bye or hello.

We were waiting indeed for Godot!

Then I had intellectual guessing with nothing actually expressing

how I was sensing, furious for suspecting, supposing and surmising.

I was overfed by her fiery eyes that now burned to the depth of my heart.

And there was silence again for some time and then she started advising—

telling me that I had been always only a man of talking

and not a man of well-doing or acting!

True, I remembered that I didn’t remember what I should have remembered—

I didn’t remember controlling my car while having the god-damn trip.

I didn’t remember being a member of careful sensible human kind.

I didn’t remember carefully curbing the catastrophes and not to slip.

I didn’t remember how I was able to remember to essentially split

between life and death not just a bit!

Then, me thought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer!

I read it from Poe while I had a sensation of senselessness in all my senses,

and I didn’t fancy Seraphim swinging that censer and I couldn’t hear

their walking on my tapestry but still I was sensing intensely tense.

The breath of a cursed angel was in the air and it was very dense.

It was whence Satan had its celestial offense.

I was a poor wicked specimen but not wretch in the true sense of the word—

as I didn’t need drugs, to forget the faded manifestation, the Black Rose.

And I didn’t need to quaff nepenthe or to get help from any god

to obliterate her offensive optics though I laboriously chose

to be drunk in order to have her next to me or very close

because I love her and no one knows.

But who could be my prophet or a thing of evil if the raven is Poe’s?

I couldn’t call the specter as either the Tempter or the devil spirit though

Lucifer was with me in the exploration of the ex-one existing in my existence,

and I lost my god in Paradise Lost when Adam changed into a foe.

Probably it was when Eve saw Milton go blind a long