Poetry III: A Poet Can Survive Everything But A Misprint

As the previous thread was almost 300 posts long here's a new one.

Simon Armitage is the be the new Poet Laureate - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-48228837
The questions we all want to ask though are not about the poetry but the 600 bottles of sherry. I would like a poet not only to dedicate themself to poetry but also finishing off the sherry. Over the ten year period this could be done by steadily drinking a bottle a week plus extra ones on holidays and toasting the Queen. The alternatives would be to turn up at every social event with a bottle of sherry although this could lose you invitation for dinner with friends or open a pop-up bar - Poetry & Port (I know sherry isn't port but it sounds better, and who goes to The Qeeen's Head expecting to see the Queen's Head).

POEM
And if it snowed and snow covered the drive
he took a spade and tossed it to one side.
And always tucked his daughter up at night
And slippered her the one time that she lied.
And every week he tipped up half his wage.
And what he didn't spend each week he saved.
And praised his wife for every meal she made.
And once, for laughing, punched her in the face.

And for his mum he hired a private nurse.
And every Sunday taxied her to church.
And he blubbed when she went from bad to worse.
And twice he lifted ten quid from her purse.

Here's how they rated him when they looked back:
sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that.

PITY THE NATION
(After Khalil Gibran)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerers
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture
Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own
Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
San Francisco, January, 2006

New poem from Charles Simic's latest collection:

https://lithub.com/something-evil-is-out-there-a-poem-by-charles-simic

Celebrating Apollo 11-- compilation of poems about the moon:

https://poets.org/poems-about-moon

>4 CliffBurns:

The late James Tate has something to say about that...

===========================

Fuck the Astronauts

Eventually we must combine nightmares
an angel smoking a cigarette on the steps
of the last national bank, said to me.
I put her out with my thumb. I don’t need that
cheap talk I’ve got my own problems.
It was sad, exciting, and horrible.
It was exciting, horrible, and sad.
It was horrible, sad, and exciting.
It was inviting, mad, and deplorable.
It was adorable, glad, and enticing.
Eventually we must smoke a thumb
cheap talk I’ve got my own angel
on the steps of the problems the bank
said to me I don’t need that.
I will take this one window
with its sooty maps and scratches
so that my dreams will remember
one another and so that my eyes will not
become blinded by the new world.

II

The flames don’t dance or slither.
They have painted the room green.
Beautiful and naked, the wives
are sleeping before the fire.
Now it is out. The men have
returned to the shacks,
slaved creatures from the forest
floor across their white
stationwagons. That just about
does it, says the other,
dumping her bucket
over her head. Well, I guess
we got everything, says one,
feeling around in the mud,
as if for a child.
Now they remember they want
that mud, who can’t remember
what they got up for.
They parcel it out: when
they are drunk enough
they go into town with
a bucket of mud, saying
we can slice it up into
windmills like a bloated cow.
Later, they paint the insides
of the shack black,
and sit sucking eggs all night,
they want something real, useful,
but there isn’t anything.

III

I will engineer the sunrise
they have disassembled our shadows
our echoes are erased from the walls
your nipples are the skeletons of olives
your nipples are an oriental delight
your nipples blow away like cigarette papers
your nipples are the mouths of mutes
so I am not here any longer
skein of lightning
memory’s dark ink in your last smile
where the stars have swallowed their train schedule
where the stars have drowned in their dark petticoats
like a sock of hamburger
receiving the lightning
into his clitoris
red on red the prisoner
confesses his waltz
through the corkscrew lightning
nevermind the lightning
in your teeth let’s waltz
I am the hashish pinball machine
that rapes a piano.

========================

I miss Tate, who died in 2015. His 'last poems' has just come out: The Government Lake.

"feeling around in the mud,
as if for a child."

THAT is an amazing line.

Thanks for posting that poem--it's a pisser.

Billy Collins, reading "Marginalia":

https://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/billy-collins-reads-marginalia

Beyond the Bend in the Road
Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa)

Beyond the bend in the road
There may be a well, and there may be a castle,
And there may be just more road.
I don’t know and don’t ask.
As long as I’m on the road that’s before the bend
I look only at the road before the bend,
Because the road before the bend is all I can see.
It would do me no good to look anywhere else
Or at what I can’t see.
Let’s pay attention only to where we are.
There’s only enough beauty in being here and not somewhere else.
If there are people beyond the bend in the road,
Let them worry about what’s beyond the bend in the road.
That, for them, is the road.
If we’re to arrive there, when we arrive there we’ll know.
For now we know only that we’re not there.
Here there’s just the road before the bend, and before the bend
There’s the road without any bend.

tr. Richard Zenith

Timely:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52955/the-end-and-the-beginning

The Dead
Pedro Salinas

The first thing I forgot was your voice.
Now if you were to
speak here at my side
I would ask, "Who is that?"

After that I forgot your footstep.
If a shadow were to gutter
in the wind of flesh
I would not be sure it was you.

One by one all your leaves fell
before a winter: the smile,
the glance, the color of your clothes, the size
of your shoes.

Even then your leaves went on falling:
your flesh fell from you, your body.
I was left with your name, seven letters of you.
And you living,
desperately dying
in them, body and soul.
Your skeleton, its shape,
your voice, your laugh, seven letters, those letters.
And repeating them was your only life, your body.
I forgot your name.
The seven letters move about, unconnected,
unknown to each other.
They form advertisements in streetcars; letters
burn at night in colors,
they travel in envelopes shaping
other names.
There, everywhere, you go too,
all in pieces by now, dismantled, impossible.
There goes your name everywhere, which was you,
risen
toward various stupid heavens
in an abstract alphabetical glory.

tr. W.S. Merwin

The Monument
Joseph Brodsky

Let us set up a monument
in the city, at the end of the long avenue,
or at the center of the big square,
a monument
that will stand out against any background
because it will be
quite well built and very realistic.
Let us set up a monument
that will not disturb anybody.

We will plant flowers
around the pedestal
and with the permission of the city fathers
we will lay out a little garden
where our children
will blink
at the great orange sun
and take the figure perched above them
for a well-known thinker
a composer
or a general.
I guarantee that flowers will appear
every morning
on the pedestal.
Let us set up a monument
that will not disturb anybody.
Even taxi drivers
will admire its majestic silhouette.
The garden will be a place
for rendezvous.
Let us set up a monument,
we will pass under it
hurrying on our way to work,
foreigners will have their pictures taken
standing under it,
we will splash it at night with the glare
of floodlights.

Let us set up a monument to The Lie.

tr. W.S. Merwin

The Infinite
Giacomo Leopardi

I always loved this hill by itself
and this line of bushes that hides
so much of the farthest horizon from sight.
But sitting looking out I imagine spaces
beyond this one, each without end,
and silences more than human, and a stillness
under it all, until my heart is drawn
to the edge of fear. And when the wind
rustles through the undergrowth near me
endlessly I compare its voice
with the infinite silence. I remember eternity
and the ages dead, and the present,
alive, and the sound of it. So in this
immensity my thinking drowns,
and sinking is sweet to me in this sea.

tr. W.S. Merwin

You're really selling me on that book of Merwin translations.

You evil person.

I'm just starting the second section. The first section was a mixed bag. It had stretches of "meh" poems but it also had some I really really like. Always interesting choices.

The Poet Tells of His Fame
Jorge Luis Borges

The rim of the sky is the measure of my glory,
The libraries of the East fight to own my verses,
The rulers seek me out to fill my mouth with gold,
The angels already know my last couplet by heart.
The tools of my art are humiliation and anguish.
Oh, if only I had been born dead!

From the Diván de Abulcasimel Hadramí
(12th century)

tr. W. S. Merwin

Putting on My Straw Hat and Sandals for a Journey
Yosa Buson

Since Basho left
not a single year
has lived up to its promise.

tr. W.S. Merwin

On Nelly Sachs
Lars Noren

Toward the end
her eyes grew
younger and younger
as though they had been watching
what can be understood but not said
They weighed almost nothing
and must have been like the rabbit's
breath in winter after it has been shot

tr. W.S. Merwin

I think this one has been posted before, but not for awhile.

(We writers are such petty people.)

*************************

THE BOOK OF MY ENEMY HAS BEEN REMAINDERED
Clive James

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered.
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-praised effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book –
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys,
The sinkers, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of movable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the glare of the brightly jacketed Hitler’s War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed in by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretence,
Is;there with Pertwee’s Promenades and Pierrots –
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor’s Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
‘My boobs will give everyone hours of fun.’

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error –
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

>18 CliffBurns: Was there any particular reason for this choice, Cliff, or just blind chance?

Ha, very good, Robert.

I'll bet many writers feel the same when they see ______________ just signed a big contract or is having their book adapted for the big screen, etc.

A naturally querulous, jealous lot, writers.

Yeah, there are quite a few scribblers who have earned, in my view, more attention and readers than they're worth.

Sometimes there's just no accounting for luck or taste.

And, in my view, the number of serious readers who enjoy challenging, literary efforts is an aging (and rapidly diminishing) demographic.

The long and short of it is, I'm screwed.

On the Transitory
Hugo von Hofmannsthal

My cheeks still feel their breath: how can it be
That these most recent days, these days just past,
Are gone, forever gone, gone totally.

Here is a thing no one can wholly grasp,
Too terrible for tears or for complaint:
That all goes by, that all goes flowing past,

And that this Self of mine, all unconstrained,
Came gliding straight to me from a small child,
Came like a dog uncanny mute and strange,

And: that a hundred years ago, I was,
And my ancestors in their death-shrouds are
As close to me as my own hair is close,

As much a part of me as my own hair.

tr. Naomi Replansky

At the Desk
Theodore Storm

I spent the entire day in official details;
And it almost pulled me down like the others:
I felt that tiny insane voluptuousness,
Getting this done, finally finishing that.

tr. Robert Bly

At Vshchizh
Fyodor Tyutchev

After the tumult and the blood
Had died, had dried
Silence unmade its history:
A group of mounds; on them
A group of oaks. They spread
Their broad unmindful glories
Over the unheard rumour of those dead
And rustle there, rooted in ruin.
All nature's knowledge
Is to stay unknowing-
Ours, to confess confusion:
Dreamt-out by her,
Our years are apparitions in their coming-going.
Her random seed
Spread to their fruitless feat, she then
Regathers them
Into that peace all history must feed.

tr. Charles Tomlinson

The Past
Fyodor Tyutchev

Place has its undertone. Not all
Is sun and surface.
There, where across the calm
Gold roofs stream in,
The lake detains the image:
Presence of past,
Breath of the celebrated dead.
Beneath the sun-gold
Lake currents glint . . .
Past power, dreaming this trance of consummation,
Its sleep unbroken by
Voices of swans in passing agitation.

tr. Charles Tomlinson

The Call of the Soul
Anonymous (Laos)

Come swiftly, soul
By forgotten footpath,
and unswept track
Out of trackless
Wild or salt waste
Return to us

Do not delay on the road
Nor hesitate overlong
In the cobra’s nest
Or the tiger’s thicket

Do not let riverflood
Dissuade you nor
Any other voice
Persuade you but

Come swiftly back
To these well-wrought
Timbers hooked eaves
Open eyes and mouth
Of your own house

Tr. Ronald Perry

The Net
Edith Sodergran

I have the net into which all fishes go.
Blissfully the fisherwoman's quiet breast heaves
when she draws the silver load to herself.
I lift up the riches of the earth on my shoulders.
I bear you. I bear you to a fairy-tale pond.
Upon the shore stands a fisherman with golden fishing rods.
There are gods somewhere behind the densest forests,
we wandering human children want to go nowhere but there.
Up to seek the burning sun of the future beyond the forest.

Tr. David McDuff

My Childhood Trees
Edith Sodergran

My childhood trees stand tall in the grass
And shake their heads: what has become of you?
Rows of pillars stand like reproaches: you’re unworthy to walk beneath us!
You’re a child and should know everything,
So why are you fettered by your illness?
You have become a human, alien and hateful.
As a child, you talked with us for hours,
Your eyes were wise.
Now we would like to tell you the secret of your life:
The key to all secrets lies in the grass by the raspberry patch.
We want to shake you up, you sleeper,
We want to wake you, dead one, from your sleep.

Tr. Stina Katchadourian

Black Postcards
Tomas Tranströmer

The calendar is full, future unknown.
The cable hums the folk song from no country.
Falling snow on the lead-still sea. Shadows
wrestle on the dock.

In the middle of life it happens that death comes
and takes your measurements. This visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit is
sewn in silence.

tr. Joanna Bankier

Homewards
Tomas Tranströmer

A telephone call ran out in the night and glittered over the countryside
and in the suburbs.
Afterwards I slept uneasily in the hotel bed.
I was like the needle in a compass carried through the forest by an orienteer
with a thumping heart.

tr. Robin Fulton

On the friendship/rivalry that existed between Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton:

https://lithub.com/on-the-friendship-and-rivalry-of-sylvia-plath-and-anne-sexton...

Rhetoric
Francis Ponge

I assume that we are talking about saving a few young men from suicide and a few others from becoming cops or firemen. I have in mind those who commit suicide out of disgust, because they find that others own too large a share of them.

To them one should say: at least let the minority within you have the right to speak. Be poets. They will answer: but it is especially there, it is always there that I feel others within me; when I try to express myself, I am unable to do so. Words are ready-made and express themselves: they do not express me. Once again I find myself suffocating.

At that moment, teaching the art of resisting words becomes useful, the art of saying only what one wants to say, the art of doing them violence, of forcing them to submit. In short it is a matter of public safety to found a rhetoric, or rather, to teach everyone the art of founding his own rhetoric.

This saves those few, those rare individuals who must be saved: those who are aware, and who are troubled and disgusted by the others within them.

Those individuals who make the mind progress, and who are, strictly speaking, capable of changing the reality of things.

tr. Serge Gavronsky

Blessed Are They That Sow
Avraham Ben Yitzhak

Blessed are they that sow and shall not reap
For they wander far.

Blessed are they that freely give all that they have,
The glory of their youth has made the sunlight richer
And they threw away their medals at the crossroads.

Blessed are they whose pride brims over their banks
And becomes white and humble
When the rainbow raises its arch in the clouds.

Blessed are they that know their hearts cry out in the wilderness,
Silence flowers on their lips.

Blessed, blessed are they, they shall be gathered to the heart of the world,
Warm in the coat of forgetfulness,
Eternal silence their offering
And their reward.

tr. Robert Mezey

An Invisible Tree
Ryuichi Tamura

I found footmarks in the snow
When I saw them
I witnessed, for the first time,
a world ruled by
small animals, little birds and beasts of the woods
Take the squirrel, for example –
his clawmarks came down the old elm tree
crossed the footpath
and disappeared into a grove of fir trees
I saw in them
not a moment of hesitation, unease, or smart question marks
Take the fox, too –
his footprints went on and on,
straight, down the path along the valley
on the north side of a village
The hunger I know
would never trace a line that straight
My mind never possessed the nimble, blind, affirmative
rhythms of those footmarks
Take, for example, the single bird –
her footprints cleaner than her voice,
her nail marks more defined than her life
her wings carved against the snowy slope
The fear I know
would never manifest itself in such a simple pattern
My mind never moved to such sensual, heathen, and affirmative
rhythms as her wings

All of a sudden a gigantic sunset reaches the top of Mt. Asama
Some presence
shapes the forest,
pushes open the valley’s mouth,
and rips apart the cold air
I return to a shack
I start a fire in a stove
I am
an invisible tree
an invisible bird
an invisible small animal
I think only of invisible rhythms

tr: Takako Lento

Danse Russe
William Carlos Williams

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?