Another poetry thread / I thought the last one was dead / along with my aching head / from Nantucket

Den här diskussionen fortsatte här: Poetry III: A Poet Can Survive Everything But A Misprint

DiskuteraLiterary Snobs

Bara medlemmar i LibraryThing kan skriva.

Another poetry thread / I thought the last one was dead / along with my aching head / from Nantucket

Denna diskussion är för närvarande "vilande"—det sista inlägget är mer än 90 dagar gammalt. Du kan återstarta det genom att svara på inlägget.

2CliffBurns
Redigerat: jun 3, 2010, 10:49 pm

Rilke, anyone?

"All will come again into its strength:
the fields undivided, the waters undammed,
the trees towering and the walls built low.
And in the valleys, people as strong and varied as the land.

And no churches where God
is imprisoned and lamented
like a trapped and wounded animal.
The houses welcoming all who knock
and a sense of boundless offering
in all relations, and in you and me.

No yearning for an afterlife, no looking beyond,
no belittling of death,
but only longing for what belongs to us
and serving earth, lest we remain unused."

~ Ranier Maria Rilke ~


(Rilke’s Book of Hours:Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

3CliffBurns
jun 3, 2010, 11:20 pm

More Rilke:

"The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense."

4bobmcconnaughey
jun 6, 2010, 12:33 pm

Rilke comes close to justifying German romanticism by himself.

Issac Rosenberg, Eng. WWI soldier/poet

A worm fed on the heart of Corinth,
Babylon and Rome:
Not Paris raped tall Helen,
But this incestuous worm,
Who lured her vivid beauty
To his amorphous sleep.
England! Famous as Helen
Is thy betrothal sung
To him the shadowless,
More amorous than Solomon.

Louse Hunting

Nudes -- stark and glistening,
Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces
And raging limbs
Whirl over the floor one fire.
For a shirt verminously busy
Yon soldier tore from his throat, with oaths
Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice.
And soon the shirt was aflare
Over the candle he'd lit while we lay.

Then we all sprang up and stript
To hunt the verminous brood.
Soon like a demons' pantomine
The place was raging.
See the silhouettes agape,
See the glibbering shadows
Mixed with the battled arms on the wall.
See gargantuan hooked fingers
Pluck in supreme flesh
To smutch supreme littleness.
See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling
Because some wizard vermin
Charmed from the quiet this revel
When our ears were half lulled
By the dark music
Blown from Sleep's trumpet.

5CliffBurns
jun 6, 2010, 3:39 pm

I have a soft spot for soldiers and war poems. Thanks, Bob.

7CliffBurns
jul 21, 2010, 9:28 pm

Good short article. Crane has been a "writer of interest" for some time.

8mejix
Redigerat: aug 5, 2010, 12:56 am

from The Last Bus
by Nazim Hikmet

The great dark is closing in.
Now neither the seer's pride nor the scribe's claptrap.
I'm pouring bowls of light over my head,
I can look at the sun and not be blinded.
An perhaps- what a pity-
the most beautiful lie
will no longer seduce me.
Words can't make me drunk anymore,
neither mine nor anyone else's.
That's how it goes, my rose.
Death now is awfully close.
The world is more beautiful than ever.
The world that was my suit of clothes,
I started undressing.
I was at the window of a train,
now I'm at the station.
I was inside the house,
now I'm at the door- it's open.
I love the guests twice as much.
And the heat is blonder than ever,
the snow is whiter than ever.

9CliffBurns
aug 5, 2010, 12:21 pm

Liked that one very much--can you tell us anything about the poet?

10mejix
Redigerat: aug 5, 2010, 3:16 pm

very brief bio & samples: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/285

glad you liked it. the poet is relatively new to me too. i came across his name while reading an essay by john berger less than a month ago. i think i may have seen his name eons ago in neruda's autobiography, but i could be wrong. the translations i am reading are by randy blasing and mutlu konuk and think they are excellent. the collection was getting a bit repetitive but the last sequence of poems i read are brilliant, plus the collection does include some of the best poems i've read in years. if you visit the link be sure to read "things i didn't know i loved."

11Sutpen
aug 5, 2010, 2:27 pm

From Seamus Heaney's "Station Island," part XII. Here, Heaney is visited by what readers have generally assumed is a vision or a ghost of Joyce...

Then I knew him in the flesh
out there on the tarmac among the cars,
wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.

His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers
came back to me, though he did not speak yet,
a voice like a prosecutor’s or a singer’s,

cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite
as a steel nib’s downstroke, quick and clean,
and suddenly he hit a litter basket

with his stick, saying, ‘your obligation
is not discharged by any common rite.
What you do you must do on your own.

The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night

dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,

so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’

12josephinesped
aug 6, 2010, 4:15 pm

I love that last line of Rilke's poem, and the first half of the middle stanza.
I write poetry that has been published. I learn a lot as I write a poem.

13CliffBurns
aug 6, 2010, 7:03 pm

"You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note."

That line gave me goosebumps.

14Sutpen
aug 7, 2010, 10:13 pm

Yeah, sometimes when I'm reading Heaney's stuff, I think to myself "why did this guy win a Nobel Prize again?" And then I hit a passage like that and I go "Oh, right..."

15CliffBurns
aug 7, 2010, 10:32 pm

I loved his translation of BEOWULF too. Must get my own copy...

16beardo
Redigerat: aug 9, 2010, 11:49 am

In a recent obituary post regarding Tony Judt, I referred to L.E. Sissman and his poetry on impending death.

I hope you'll all forgive me the following links - they're a good introduction to Sissman.

http://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/2008/12/nowhere-is-all-around-us.html

http://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/2008/12/eash-breath-you-take-is-breathtaki...

ETA - I'm not the author of this.

17bobmcconnaughey
aug 23, 2010, 12:31 am

every now and again, either in conversation or overheard, you'll hear some phrase that shocks you into a different point of view...
yesterday walking back from the co-op, passing the local laundromat around the corner from our house, i overheard a lady talking into her cell phone, and she spat into the airwaves a classic line, but one i've never heard spoken before: "she's gone - and she ain't NEVER coming back." the ur-blues line.

Which threw me back 35+ years when i was living in the Fan area of Richmond (Va). Back then the fan was still in the very, very first stages of gentrification... I lived in a brownstone closet...5x10" - a mattress. stereo, about 1000 lps. A hooker had one of the downstairs rooms, another waitress another, a couple of VCU students in others. Single, albeit often extended families still lived in about half the houses on the block; the rest already broken up into single room rentals. An older neighbor, (probably about 60...she seemed ancient to me @ 24) and i would talk by her little garden a couple of houses down. One day she said that one of her sons had moved off to work in the shipyards @ Norfolk (80-90 miles away?,), the other was in the service. Then the wonderful line:

"And I guess there just ain't no good wonder in this world anymore"

It could've come from a song, they way it scanned, but it wasn't one i've ever come across. Anyway, just a beautiful and sad moment in a neighborhood in transition.

18CliffBurns
aug 23, 2010, 10:50 am

Thanks for that, Bob.

You lyin', cheatin' no good man, you...

19CliffBurns
okt 7, 2010, 9:17 pm

Recordings of Brit and Yank poets from BBC archives:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11489147

20CliffBurns
okt 12, 2010, 3:55 pm

A poem my son Sam wrote last year (Grade 9; 14 years old):

"Perfect World"

Shopping carts packed
with 'necessities'
Dragging you down the aisles

Flowing hair
Sparkling smiles
Plastic cheekbones
Penciled brows
A click here, a click there
Will erase your imperfections.

So you dive into
Your purses
Spending money
You don't have
You can solve
All your problems
You can fix
Everything
Just walk like him
Just talk like her
Just do everything they say.

And so we sit
In our places
Row by row
Growing faceless
Needing this
Needing that
Throwing money
Here and there
Men in suits
Scrabbling for their share
Their laughs piercing
The toxic air.

21bobmcconnaughey
Redigerat: okt 14, 2010, 12:52 pm

I guess quotes from poets can go here? anyway from Donald Hall's interview w/ Pound:

in response to questions about his WWII broadcasts from Italy urging the US to stay out of the war - Pound ends up talking about language and political systems:

"There is the problem of benevolence, the point at which benevolence has ceased to be operative. Eliot says that they spend their time trying to imagine systems so perfect that nobody will have to be good"

Q: can an instrument which is orderly be used to create disorder? Suppose good language is used to forward bad government? Doesn't bad government make bad language?

Pound: yes, but bad language is bound to make in addition bad government, where as good language is not bound to make bad government... The means of communication to expand, and that of course is what we are suffering now. We suffer from the use of language to conceal thought and to withhold all vital and direct answers. (he was talking about the use of advertising language and techniques in all areas of discourse)

22CliffBurns
okt 14, 2010, 1:43 pm

"We suffer from the use of language to conceal thought and to withhold all vital and direct answers."

Ol' Ezra still had SOME of his wits about him, it seems...

23anna_in_pdx
okt 14, 2010, 1:50 pm

Orwell had this figured out and managed to be on the right side, as well.

24bobmcconnaughey
okt 14, 2010, 5:19 pm

It's not that it's an astounding thought, per se, it's interesting in the context of the interview - coming at a point in his life where Pound was clearly suffering from a multiplicity of ailments and recognized that his mind was failing along with his body. But there was a latent acuity that emerged, kind of surprisingly - after this interview Pound pretty much totally retreated into himself and away from the world.

Even better than Orwell's analysis is that of an obscure Swiss philosopher/theologian just after the end of WWII, Max Picard in the world of silence. Umm...that's not right, not better, certainly not as powerfully written, rather a more in depth analysis of what the loss of silence and the barrage of words/noise (he was appalled by Hitler's effective use of radio speeches) fostered vis a vis destroying individuality:

"For example, if the surrounding world is Nazi, then Nazi ideas are conveyed by the noise, and this takes place without man's having decided for Nazism by a special act of his own conscience. Man is so much a part of the verbal noise going on all around him that he does not notice what is being conveyed to him.. The noise is main thing: man is a the place occupied by the noise, the space for the noise to fill.... Radio has occupied the space of silence. Even when the radio is turned off the radio noise seems to go on inaudibly.. radio noise is so amorphous that seems to have no beginning and no end. And the type of man formed by the constant influence of this noise is the same: formless, undecided inwardly and externally, with no definite limits and standards."

25CliffBurns
okt 14, 2010, 5:44 pm

When you take Picard's statement and factor in the internet, video games...our interiors are "formless", all right; and superficial and vapid as well.

26anna_in_pdx
okt 14, 2010, 5:49 pm

At least all these things still have OFF switches.

27CliffBurns
okt 14, 2010, 5:56 pm

True...and I think we should all take frequent "off the grid" days to walk, enjoy nature, visit with family and unplug from all the ceaseless, inane CHATTER.

28bobmcconnaughey
okt 14, 2010, 6:12 pm

And i think this actually can come neatly back around to poetry - since the poetic word, especially, needs to come out of and into a receptive silence.

Picard's book, unfortunately, while back in print in English, is a bit steep for a paperback. I was wiling to pay a bit over $20.00 for a new copy - having thought i'd lost my original which had gone missing for several years - which then, of course, insured finding the old copy..which had been $7.95. Oh well. That was before i'd started using AbeBooks in a semi-massive way.

29geneg
okt 14, 2010, 11:20 pm

When I read that quote by Pound about good language and bad, I thought he was talking about the Republicans, or FOXNews.

31CliffBurns
dec 5, 2010, 11:35 am

Available for only the next six days, a BBC Radio documentary on Philip Larkin:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00w6q44

32kswolff
jan 18, 2011, 10:02 am

An ode to Neville Chamberlain:

http://oddbooks.co.uk/unpoetry/rt-hon-neville-chamberlain

The Vogons don't have anything on this awfulness.

33ladymacbeth
jan 18, 2011, 10:17 am

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Always enjoyed that William Carlos Williams. Actually feeling under the weather today and that just managed to cheer me up.

and Seamus Heaney's Beowulf translation is definitely the one to get, in my opinion.

34CliffBurns
feb 21, 2011, 9:20 pm

61 years of National Book Award poetry winners:

http://nbapoetryblog.squarespace.com/

35anna_in_pdx
feb 24, 2011, 3:47 pm

33:

Kenneth Koch - Variations on a Theme by WCW

1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the
next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

36CliffBurns
feb 24, 2011, 3:52 pm

I like it! Nasty...

37mejix
mar 14, 2011, 10:35 pm

The Man in the Tree
by Mark Strand

I sat in the cold limbs of a tree.
I wore no clothes and the wind was blowing.
You stood below in a heavy coat,
the coat you are wearing.

And when you opened it, baring your chest,
white moths flew out, and whatever you said
at that moment fell quietly onto the ground,
the ground at your feet.

Snow floated down from the clouds into my ears.
The moths from your coat flew into the snow.
And the wind as it moved under my arms, under my chin,
whined like a child.

I shall never know why
our lives took a turn for the worse, nor will you.
Clouds sank into my arms and my arms rose.
They are rising now.

I sway in the white air of winter
and the starling’s cry lies down on my skin.
A field of ferns covers my glasses; I wipe them away
in order to see you.

I turn and the tree turns with me.
Things are not only themselves in this light.
You close your eyes and your coat
falls from your shoulders,

the tree withdraws like a hand,
the wind fits into my breath, yet nothing is certain.
The poem that has stolen these words from my mouth
may not be this poem.

38CliffBurns
mar 15, 2011, 12:36 am

Let's hear it for Mr. Strand--huzzah! huzzah!

39mejix
mar 15, 2011, 9:19 am

A capital fellow indeed.

40Rise
mar 15, 2011, 2:25 pm

41kswolff
mar 15, 2011, 3:08 pm

I dreamt that Earth was finished. And the only
human being to contemplate the end was Franz
Kafka. In heaven, the Titans were fighting to the
death. From a wrought-iron seat in Central Park,
Kafka was watching the world burn


Sounds like a prescient assessment of what is happening in Japan. Against the force of Nature, Man doesn't stand a chance.

42geneg
mar 16, 2011, 2:08 pm

Nature burps and man shits himself.

43anna_in_pdx
mar 16, 2011, 2:29 pm

Let's celebrate Canada (even more than we were doing on the publishing thread) with this, um, poem.

Oxford Cheese Ode

The ancient poets ne'er did dream
That Canada was land of cream,
They ne'er imagined it could flow
In this cold land of ice and snow,
Where everything did solid freeze,
They ne'er hoped or looked for cheese.

A few years since our Oxford farms
Were nearly robbed of all their charms,
O'er cropped the weary land grew poor
And nearly barren as a moor,
But now the owners live at ease
Rejoicing in their crop of cheese.

And since they justly treat the soil,
Are well rewarded for their toil,
The land enriched by goodly cows,
Yie'ds plenty now to fill their mows,
Both wheat and barley, oats and peas
But still their greatest boast is cheese.

And you must careful fill your mows
With good provender for your cows,
And in the winter keep them warm,
Protect them safe all time from harm,
For cows do dearly love their ease,
Which doth insure best grade of cheese.

To us it is a glorious theme
To sing of milk and curds and cream,
Were it collected it could float
On its bosom, small steam boat,
Cows numerous as swarm of bees
Are milked in Oxford to make cheese.

James McIntyre (1828-1906 / Canada)

(Source: Poemhunter)

44CliffBurns
mar 16, 2011, 2:33 pm

I...I...I'm speechless...

45kswolff
mar 20, 2011, 4:19 pm

"Leslie, the Mean Animal Trainer" by Percy Dovetonsils, Poet Laureate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he3s9gQ134Y

46geneg
mar 20, 2011, 4:32 pm

When I was a wee bairn I lived in Philadelphia for a few years. The year I was in the first grade and the year before there was a local performer who had a morning teevee show that came on right after The Today Show with Dave Garroway, Jack Lescoulie, et al. The local performers name? Ernie Kovacs. He was hilarious and he also showed us how he did his special effects. Remember, there was nothing but live teevee at the time. He was very imaginative. Ah, yes. I remember Percy Dovetonsils quite well. He and Reginald Van Gleason III.

47kswolff
mar 20, 2011, 5:38 pm

It is amazing how prescient Kovacs was with the medium. The sight gags and parodies play like earlier versions of Zucker Bros movies and SNL/Mad TV. The musical numbers (with their zany visuals) will eventually become MTV -- before the network devolved into a Kardashian-slurry of Road Rules/Real World contests. The hilarious/disturbing monkey puppets are predecessors of The Muppets, albeit from a place closer to the Uncanny Valley

While TV was populated with hosts who got their start in vaudeville, Kovacs came from the opposite direction, experimenting with the medium itself.

48CliffBurns
mar 20, 2011, 6:29 pm

Good analysis, Karl.

49kswolff
apr 1, 2011, 4:03 pm

In honor of April, the cruellest month:

APRIL is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der heimat zu
Mein Irisch kind,
Wo weilest du?

"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;"
"They called me the hyacinth girl."
--Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer.

50kswolff
apr 4, 2011, 11:17 pm

The Grant Poem by Adrian Hitt

Ever wanted to read the biographical minutiae of Ulysses S. Grant ... in verse? Well, here ya go?

http://books.google.com/books?id=cQsXAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=the...

51CliffBurns
apr 4, 2011, 11:23 pm

(Shudder)

52CliffBurns
apr 13, 2011, 10:36 am

April is "National Poetry Month" here in Canada--be sure to pop into the library for a volume or two of verse or, better yet, BUY some books of poetry, support starving artists.

Ken Babstock is a name that gets bandied about up here in the Northland as one of our finest poets. So here's a peek at some of Ken's work:

http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/see-and-hear-poetry/a-g/ken-babstock/

53CliffBurns
apr 18, 2011, 3:40 pm

Some verse by Robert Pinsky. Remember, it's "National Poetry Month":

http://www.scribd.com/doc/52444418/Selected-Poems-by-Robert-Pinsky-Excerpts?in_c...

54mark_lawrence
apr 18, 2011, 4:44 pm

#2 wonderful poem - I shall have to seek out some more of Rilke's work.

55kswolff
apr 18, 2011, 5:10 pm

Duino Elegies by Rilke. Like the first line of Gravity's Rainbow, "hearing a screaming come across the sky ..."

The First Elegy



Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic

Orders? And even if one were to suddenly

take me to its heart, I would vanish into its

stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but

the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,

and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains

to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.

And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry

of a darkened sobbing. Ah, who then can

we make use of? Not Angels: not men,

and the resourceful creatures see clearly

that we are not really at home

in the interpreted world. Perhaps there remains

some tree on a slope, that we can see

again each day: there remains to us yesterday’s street,

and the thinned-out loyalty of a habit

that liked us, and so stayed, and never departed.

Oh, and the night, the night, when the wind full of space

wears out our faces – whom would she not stay for,

the longed-for, gentle, disappointing one, whom the solitary heart

with difficulty stands before. Is she less heavy for lovers?

Ah, they only hide their fate between themselves.

Do you not know yet? Throw the emptiness out of your arms

to add to the spaces we breathe; maybe the birds

will feel the expansion of air, in more intimate flight.



Yes, the Spring-times needed you deeply. Many a star

must have been there for you so you might feel it. A wave

lifted towards you out of the past, or, as you walked

past an open window, a violin

gave of itself. All this was their mission.

But could you handle it? Were you not always,

still, distracted by expectation, as if all you experienced,

like a Beloved, came near to you? (Where could you contain her,

with all the vast strange thoughts in you

going in and out, and often staying the night.)

But if you are yearning, then sing the lovers: for long

their notorious feelings have not been immortal enough.

Those, you almost envied them, the forsaken, that you

found as loving as those who were satisfied. Begin,

always as new, the unattainable praising:

think: the hero prolongs himself, even his falling

was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.

But lovers are taken back by exhausted Nature

into herself, as if there were not the power

to make them again. Have you remembered

Gastara Stampa sufficiently yet, that any girl,

whose lover has gone, might feel from that

intenser example of love: ‘Could I only become like her?’

Should not these ancient sufferings be finally

fruitful for us? Isn’t it time that, loving,

we freed ourselves from the beloved, and, trembling, endured

as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be, in its flight,

something more than itself? For staying is nowhere.



Voices, voices. Hear then, my heart, as only

saints have heard: so that the mighty call

raised them from the earth: they, though, knelt on

impossibly and paid no attention:

such was their listening. Not that you could withstand

God’s voice: far from it. But listen to the breath,

the unbroken message that creates itself from the silence.

It rushes towards you now, from those youthfully dead.

Whenever you entered, didn’t their fate speak to you,

quietly, in churches in Naples or Rome?

Or else an inscription exaltedly impressed itself on you,

as lately the tablet in Santa Maria Formosa.

What do they will of me? That I should gently remove

the semblance of injustice, that slightly, at times,

hinders their spirits from a pure moving-on.



It is truly strange to no longer inhabit the earth,

to no longer practice customs barely acquired,

not to give a meaning of human futurity

to roses, and other expressly promising things:

no longer to be what one was in endlessly anxious hands,

and to set aside even one’s own

proper name like a broken plaything.

Strange: not to go on wishing one’s wishes. Strange

to see all that was once in place, floating

so loosely in space. And it’s hard being dead,

and full of retrieval, before one gradually feels

a little eternity. Though the living

all make the error of drawing too sharp a distinction.

Angels (they say) would often not know whether

they moved among living or dead. The eternal current

sweeps all the ages, within it, through both the spheres,

forever, and resounds above them in both.



Finally they have no more need of us, the early-departed,

weaned gently from earthly things, as one outgrows

the mother’s mild breast. But we, needing

such great secrets, for whom sadness is often

the source of a blessed progress, could we exist without them?

Is it a meaningless story how once, in the grieving for Linos,

first music ventured to penetrate arid rigidity,

so that, in startled space, which an almost godlike youth

suddenly left forever, the emptiness first felt

the quivering that now enraptures us, and comforts, and helps.

56CliffBurns
apr 18, 2011, 5:44 pm

Rilke gives me shivers.

58CliffBurns
maj 9, 2011, 9:25 am

Thanks for that--Pessoa has been a WOI (writer-of-interest) to me for some time.

59mejix
Redigerat: jun 13, 2011, 5:34 pm

A prose poem that was quoted last night at the Tonys.

Walking Through a Wall
by Louis Jenkins

Unlike flying or astral projection, walking through walls is a totally earth-related craft, but a lot more interesting than pot making or driftwood lamps. I got started at a picnic up in Bowstring in the northern part of the state. A fellow walked through a brick wall right there in the park. I said, 'Say, I want to try that.' Stone walls are best, then brick and wood. Wooden walls with fiberglass insulation and steel doors aren't so good. They won't hurt you. If your wall walking is done properly, both you and the wall are left intact. It is just that they aren't pleasant somehow. The worst things are wire fences, maybe it's the molecular structure of the alloy or just the amount of give in a fence, I don't know, but I've torn my jacket and lost my hat in a lot of fences. The best approach to a wall is, first, two hands placed flat against the surface; it's a matter of concentration and just the right pressure. You will feel the dry, cool inner wall with your fingers, then there is a moment of total darkness before you step through on the other side.

60mejix
jun 13, 2011, 5:44 pm

Another Jenkins poem that was quoted at the Tonys, this one in 2008.

The Back Country
by Louis Jenkins

When you are in town, wearing some kind of uniform is helpful, policeman, priest, etc..

Driving a tank is very impressive, or a car with official lettering on the side.

If that isn't to your taste you could join the revolution, wear an armband, carry a homemade flag tied to a broom handle, or a placard bearing an incendiary slogan.

At the very least you should wear a suit and carry a briefcase and a cell phone, or wear a team jacket and a baseball cap and carry a cell phone.

If you go into the woods, the back country, someplace past all human habitation, it is a good idea to wear orange and carry a gun, or, depending on the season, carry a fishing pole, or a camera with a big lens.

Otherwise it might appear that you have no idea what you are doing, that you are merely wandering the earth, no particular reason for being here, no particular place to go.

61anna_in_pdx
jun 13, 2011, 5:56 pm

60: That reminds me of a blog post. It is more prose than poetry, but then again...

http://chasemeladies.blogspot.com/2004/06/my-ipod-is-glorified-herd-of-cows.html

"MY IPOD IS A GLORIFIED HERD OF COWS

I bought an iPod recently, but I never listen to it. Music is a substitute for action: deeds are my music. The only reason I have it is that otherwise people would think I couldn’t afford one, when in fact I am so rich I could afford three iPods. It just hangs from my belt like a second dick, a badge of status like cattle to an African tribe. Me big chief.

Since I bought it last month I have had more than 800 women."

62mejix
aug 14, 2011, 10:39 pm

from Salt and Oil
by Philipe Levine

There is smoke and grease, there is
the wrist's exhaustion, there is laughter,
there is the letter seized in the clock
and the apple's tang, the river
sliding along its banks, darker
now than the sky descending
a last time to scatter its diamonds
in these black waters that contain
the day that passed, the night to come.

63CliffBurns
aug 15, 2011, 9:35 am

Glad to see folks aren't letting this thread go dormant.

We ALL need a little verse in our lives...

64mejix
aug 27, 2011, 2:53 pm

The Choice
by W.B. Yeats

The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.

65bookstopshere
aug 27, 2011, 3:03 pm

Housman

When the bells justle in the tower
The hollow night amid,
Then on my tongue the taste is sour
Of all I ever did.

66CliffBurns
aug 27, 2011, 3:44 pm

Reading them back to back, they're sort of companion pieces, aren't they?

67kswolff
Redigerat: sep 4, 2011, 9:34 pm

"Walking Out Alone in Dead of Winter"
by Galway Kinnell

Under the snow the secret
Muscles of the underearth
Grow taut
In the pain, the torn love
Of labor. The strange
Dazzled world yearning dumbly
To be born.

Clive James on poetry:

http://www.clivejames.com/poetry-notebook/1

68mejix
sep 5, 2011, 2:22 am

Triple Time
Philip Larkin

This empty street, this sky to blandness scoured,
This air, a little indistinct with autumn
Like a reflection, constitute the present --
A time traditionally soured,
A time unrecommended by event.

But equally they make up something else:
This is the furthest future childhood saw
Between long houses, under travelling skies,
Heard in contending bells --
An air lambent with adult enterprise,

And on another day will be the past,
A valley cropped by fat neglected chances
That we insensately forbore to fleece.
On this we blame our last
Threadbare perspectives, seasonal decrease.

69CliffBurns
sep 5, 2011, 10:08 am

I love Larkin. Another author who might not pass muster as a nice human being, but who could compose verse that leaves long nail scratches in your heart.

70KayEluned
sep 5, 2011, 10:26 am

A poet who I probably wouldn't have got on with (though a good person to have a drink with in the pub I'm sure) is Dylan Thomas, a hero of mine for his poetry. I heard a story about him that he was homeless and a friend said he could stay at his house whilst he was away. when he got back Thomas, having run out of money completely, had started selling his friend's rare book collection! I really do not think we would have got on! Nevertheless this poem always moves me every time I read it, I have never read a better evocation of the timeless joy of childhood and how it feels to reach adulthood and realise your life is finite.

Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

71CliffBurns
sep 5, 2011, 11:01 am

The Welshman could write, couldn't he? A drunk, a scoundrel...a genius.

72kswolff
sep 5, 2011, 11:37 am

69: I love Larkin. Another author who might not pass muster as a nice human being, but who could compose verse that leaves long nail scratches in your heart.

Larkin did own a massive porn stash and had the decency not to have kids. That always helps. Then again, being a nice person isn't a prerequisite to becoming a poet. See Pound, Ezra.

Here's some more Galway Kinnell:

The Bear

1

In late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-colored
and put down my nose
and know
the chilly, enduring odor of bear.

2

I take a wolf's rib and whittle
it sharp at both ends
and coil it up
and freeze it in blubber and place it out
on the fairway of the bears.

And when it has vanished
I move out on the bear tracks,
roaming in circles
until I come to the first, tentative, dark
splash on the earth.

And I set out
running, following the splashes
of blood wandering over the world.
At the cut, gashed resting places
I stop and rest,
at the crawl-marks
where he lay out on his belly
to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice
I lie out
dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.

3

On the third day I begin to starve,
at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would
at a turd sopped in blood,
and hesitate, and pick it up,
and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down,
and rise
and go on running.

4

On the seventh day,
living by now on bear blood alone,
I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled,
steamy hulk,
the heavy fur riffling in the wind.

I come up to him
and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes,
the dismayed
face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils
flared, catching
perhaps the first taint of me as he
died.

I hack
a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,
and tear him down his whole length
and open him and climb in
and close him up after me, against the wind,
and sleep.

5

And dream
of lumbering flatfooted
over the tundra,
stabbed twice from within,
splattering a trail behind me,
splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,
no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,
which dance of solitude I attempt,
which gravity-clutched leap,
which trudge, which groan.

6

Until one day I totter and fall—
fall on this
stomach that has tried so hard to keep up,
to digest the blood as it leaked in,
to break up
and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze
blows over me, blows off
the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood
and rotted stomach
and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear,

blows across
my sore, lolled tongue a song
or screech, until I think I must rise up
and dance. And I lie still.

7

I awaken I think. Marshlights
reappear, geese
come trailing again up the flyway.
In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur
and drizzly eyes into shapes
with her tongue. And one
hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
the next groaned out,
the next,
the next,
the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

From A New Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell, published by Houghton Mifflin. © 2000 by Galway Kinnell. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

73CliffBurns
sep 5, 2011, 1:15 pm

Don't know Kinnell. Thanks, lad.

74anna_in_pdx
sep 5, 2011, 2:56 pm

The bear is justly one of Kinnell's best known, and i hadn't read it in years. Thanks! I actually loved that short one about winter you posted yesterday.

And thanks for the great Dylan Thomas poem as well, 70.

75kswolff
sep 5, 2011, 4:48 pm

As far as Kinnell goes, he has two major books: The Book of Nightmares and The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World -- a mouthful, but a gem if you can find it. The winter poem was from "Avenue." Despite his extremely Irish-sounding name, he was born in New England. Go fig?

76mejix
Redigerat: sep 10, 2011, 12:32 pm

Strange Type
Malcolm Lowry

I wrote: in the dark cavern of our birth.
The printer had it tavern, which seems better:
But herein lies the subject of our mirth,
Since on the next page death appears as dearth.
So it may be that God's word was distraction,
Which to our strange type appears destruction,
Which is bitter.

77mejix
sep 10, 2011, 12:31 pm

Image
T.E. Hulme

Old houses were scaffolding once
and workmen whistling.

78CliffBurns
sep 10, 2011, 12:38 pm

I live in a house that turned 100 this year. Hulme's little snippet is lovely.

79mejix
sep 10, 2011, 12:57 pm

Glad you liked. Found it a couple of days ago while browsing The New Penguin Book of English Verse.

80CliffBurns
sep 10, 2011, 3:12 pm

I love good poetry anthologies. We have a couple of Nortons and it's easy just to sit down, crack them open to a page at random and plunge into tuneful, superior verse.

81KayEluned
sep 10, 2011, 7:23 pm

I live in a house that is 130, it could do with a few more whistling workmen to be honest....

82CliffBurns
sep 10, 2011, 11:47 pm

Same here--new roof shingles desperately needed. God help us...

83kswolff
sep 11, 2011, 11:23 am

77: One can see why Pound admired him.

"In A Station Of The Metro"

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

85CliffBurns
sep 21, 2011, 10:20 am

I agree. It's easy to look like a dunce. I think you did well though...

86kswolff
sep 21, 2011, 12:21 pm

Thanks for the uplift. In poetry criticism it's easy to come off as an ignoramus or an equally pretentious asshat. Suffice to say, it is a challenge to keep up with and keep straight the myriad micro-movements that make up contemporary poetry. (Its academic, incestuous nature doesn't help either -- a subculture as tight-knit and catty as the fashion community.) That said, Notes from Irrelevance was highly enjoyable. Just a challenge to say something beyond, "What the hell did I just read?"

87mejix
sep 22, 2011, 4:04 pm

Musical Instrument
by Luis Cernuda
translated by Stephen Kessler

If the Arab musician
Plucks the lute strings
With an eagle quill
To awaken the notes,

What hand plucks
With what bird's quill
The wound in you
That awakens the word?

88CliffBurns
sep 22, 2011, 9:57 pm

Yes.

89mejix
Redigerat: sep 24, 2011, 6:38 pm

Glad you liked. Getting the Cernuda out.

90mejix
sep 23, 2011, 11:47 am

James Joyce
Jorge Luis Borges

In a man’s single day are all the days
of time from that unimaginable
first day, when a terrible God marked out
the days and agonies, to that other,
when the ubiquitous flow of earthly
time goes back to its source, Eternity,
and flickers out in the present, the past,
and the future—what now belongs to me.
Between dawn and dark lies the history
of the world. From the vault of night I see
at my feet the wanderings of the Jew,
Carthage put to the sword, Heaven and Hell.
Grant me, O Lord, the courage and the joy
to ascend to the summit of this day.

91anna_in_pdx
sep 29, 2011, 12:10 pm

Joyce poem is wonderful wonderful wonderful. Borges was so incredible, it seems he was not a human like the rest of us.

92CliffBurns
sep 29, 2011, 12:57 pm

Well put.

93nymith
sep 29, 2011, 7:01 pm

When Michael McClure restrained himself, his poetry could be quite extraordinary. Such a pity the Beats were all for excess.

"Watching the Stolen Rose"

THE ROSE IS A PINK-YELLOW
UNIVERSE UNFOLDING

layer upon
luminous layer

petal to petal
spreading

unsteady yet
perfectly balanced

as the curling
of smoke

from a mind
on fire.

94CliffBurns
sep 29, 2011, 7:14 pm

Yeah, that's pretty darn good for a Beat guy.

95mejix
okt 6, 2011, 11:34 am

Track
by Tomas Transtromer

2 A.M. moonlight. The train has stopped
out in a field. Far off sparks of light from a town,
flickering coldly on the horizon.

As when a man goes so deep into his dream
he will never remember he was there
when he returns again to his view.

Or when a person goes so deep into a sickness
that his days all become some flickering sparks, a swarm,
feeble and cold on the horizon.

The train is entirely motionless.
2 o’clock: strong moonlight, few stars.

96anna_in_pdx
okt 6, 2011, 11:37 am

95: Hm.. I kind of like it, but I can't get over that it probably sounded much better in the original language.

Who was the translator? Robert Bly like in the other thread?

97nymith
okt 6, 2011, 11:48 am

Reading poetry in translation is the only thing that makes me want to learn other languages. I always feel like I'm missing half of it. For some reason, prose never strikes me that way.

98mejix
Redigerat: okt 6, 2011, 12:04 pm

>96 anna_in_pdx: It probably is better in the original language, yes. I kind of enjoy that image though. I didn't see any credit for the translation but I first came across this poem in a Robert Bly anthology (was it The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart?) so chances are that the translation is his.

99mejix
okt 6, 2011, 3:03 pm

Ambulances
Philip Larkin

Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.

Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and stowed,

And sense the solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
The fastened doors recede. Poor soul,
They whisper at their own distress;

For borne away in deadened air
May go the sudden shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and fashions, there

At last begin to loosen. Far
From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable inside a room
The traffic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.

100CliffBurns
okt 6, 2011, 6:24 pm

Love that Larkin fella.

101mejix
Redigerat: okt 6, 2011, 11:42 pm

Every time I'm about to give up on that Collected Poems book I find a poem like this one.

102mejix
okt 20, 2011, 3:04 am

Some of these video interpretations are silly, some are very interesting:

http://movingpoems.com/

103CliffBurns
okt 20, 2011, 7:11 pm

TIME DOES NOT BRING RELIEF

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go - so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, 'There is no memory of him here!'
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

--- Edna St Vincent Millay (1892 -1950)

104mejix
Redigerat: okt 21, 2011, 4:30 pm

Autumn Day
Rilke

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone.,
will sit, read, write long letters through the
evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

105mejix
Redigerat: okt 21, 2011, 4:20 pm

Det här meddelandet har tagits bort av dess författare.

106mejix
nov 12, 2011, 12:34 am

from Proverbs and Tiny Songs
Antonio Machado translated by Robert Bly

6
You walking, your footprints are
the road, and nothing else;
there is no road, walker,
you make the road by walking.
By walking you make the road,
and when you look backward,
you see the path that you
never will step on again.
Walker, there is no road,
only wind-trails in the sea.

107TJH1966
nov 13, 2011, 4:13 am

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry

108anna_in_pdx
nov 14, 2011, 9:04 pm

107: That was beautiful, thanks!

109TJH1966
nov 14, 2011, 10:12 pm

108: You're welcome.

110mejix
nov 20, 2011, 3:01 am

Who Says Words With My Mouth?
Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry, I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

111CliffBurns
nov 20, 2011, 9:31 am

"My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there."

Lovely.

112mejix
nov 20, 2011, 1:37 pm

Isn't it? I've been browsing The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy recently. Lots of Rumi there.

113kswolff
nov 20, 2011, 6:10 pm

"That Moment"
by Ted Hughes

When the pistol muzzle oozing blue vapour
Was lifted away
Like a cigarette from an ashtray

And the only face left in the world
Lay broken
Between hands that relaxed, being too late

And the trees closed forever
And the streets closed forever

And the body lay on the gravel
Of the abandoned world
Among abandoned cities
Exposed to infinity forever

Crow had to start searching for something to eat.

114nymith
dec 14, 2011, 11:01 am

FACE

Hair-
silver-gray,
like streams of stars,
Brows-
recurved canoes
quivered by the ripples blown by pain,
Her eyes-
mist of tears
condensing on the flesh below
And her channeled muscles
are cluster grapes of sorrow
purple in the evening sun
nearly ripe for worms.

Jean Toomer

115CliffBurns
dec 14, 2011, 1:05 pm

Chilling.

116mejix
jan 6, 2012, 2:00 am

The Mysteries Remain
HD

The mysteries remain,
I keep the same
cycle of seed-time
and of sun and rain;
Demeter in the grass,
I multiply,
renew and bless
Bacchus in the vine;
I hold the law,
I keep the mysteries true,
the first of these
to name the living, dead;
I am the wine and bread.
I keep the law,
I hold the mysteries true,
I am the vine,
the branches, you
and you.

117Lcanon
jan 6, 2012, 4:18 pm

Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drown'd in a Tub of Gold Fishes
Thomas Gray

Twas on a lofty vase's side,
Where China's gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.

Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw: and purred applause.

Still had she gazed; but 'midst the tide
Two angel forms were seen to glide,
The Genii of the stream;
Their scaly armour's Tyrian hue
Thro' richest purple to the view
Betrayed a golden gleam.

The hapless nymph with wonder saw:
A whisker first and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretched in vain to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
What cat's averse to fish?

Presumptuous maid! with looks intent
Again she stretched, again she bent,
Nor knew the gulf between.
(Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled)
The slippery verge her feet beguiled,
She tumbled headlong in.

Eight times emerging from the flood
She mewed to every watery god,
Some speedy aid to send.
No Dolphin came, no Nereid stirred;
Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard.
A favorite has no friend!
From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,
Know, one false step is ne'er retrieved,
And be with caution bold.

Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts is lawful prize,
Nor all, that glisters, gold.


I can't picture a goldfish bowl big enough for a full-grown cat to drown in, though.

118nymith
jan 7, 2012, 1:22 pm

I get a weird glint of satire from that poem. Who turns a cat, a "tub" and two goldfish into a moral lesson? It's a beautiful piece, though I do love cats...

119Lcanon
jan 9, 2012, 12:59 pm

Yes, lines like "her conscious tail her joy declared"...you can really almost SEE the cat. Apparently it was written to memorialize a cat that belonged to Horace Walpole.

120kswolff
jan 13, 2012, 11:15 am

121CliffBurns
jan 14, 2012, 10:12 am

Not many good writers in that Lovecraft circle...including Lovecraft himself. Woof!

122kswolff
jan 14, 2012, 10:22 am

121: I've had my eye on his "Miscellany," which includes his sonnet cycle. It is hard to transcend the "turgid and overwritten" when attempting to break through the stylistic monotony of modern speculative fiction. I'll take Lovecraft's turgidity over Heinlein's invisible "beige prose" any day. But that's just me. I loves me some Huysmans and Lautreamont Not everyone's cup of tea, that's for sure.

123nymith
Redigerat: apr 11, 2012, 6:16 pm

Conversation with an American Writer

"You have courage,"
they tell me.

It's not true.
I was never courageous.
I simply felt it unbecoming
to stoop to the cowardice of my colleagues.

I've shaken no foundations.
I simply mocked at pretense
and inflation.
Wrote articles.
Scribbled no denunciations.
And tried to speak all
on my mind.
Yes,
I defended men of talent,
branding the hacks,
the would-be writers.
But this, in general, we should always do;
and yet they keep stressing my courage.
Oh, our descendants will burn with bitter shame
to remember, when punishing vile acts,
that most peculiar
time,
when
plain honesty
was labeled "courage"...

New York 1961
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Translated by George Reavey.

124kswolff
apr 11, 2012, 10:09 pm

"Hurt Hawks"
By Robinson Jeffers 1887–1962

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.
He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.
He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.
You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

II

I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bones too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.
We had fed him for six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed,
Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

125mejix
Redigerat: apr 24, 2012, 5:24 pm

This is a fado I have known for years. I hadn't read the lyrics until I looked up a link for another group:

Strange Way of Life
Amalia Rodrigues

It was by God's will
that I live in this anxiety
that all woes are mine,
that grief is all mine.
It was God's will.

What a strange way of life
this heart of mine has:
To live your life lost.
Who would give you such gift?
What a strange way of life.

Independent heart
heart I do not command:
you live lost among people,
stubbornly bleeding,
independent heart.

I'll go with you no more:
halt, stop beating.
If you do not know where you are going
why do you insist in running?
I'll go with you no more.

If you do not know where you are going:
halt, stop beating,
I'll go with you no more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFgctURyGp4

126CliffBurns
apr 26, 2012, 9:27 pm

Wow, that's a powerful performance; her voice caught me completely off guard.

127mejix
apr 26, 2012, 11:46 pm

Wasn't she amazing? I always thought that the song had to do with leaving her husband or something like that.

128mejix
maj 14, 2012, 11:06 pm

Why the Classics
by Zbigniew Herbert

1
in the fourth book of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides tells among other things
the story of his unsuccessful expedition

among long speeches of chiefs
battles sieges plague
dense net of intrigues of diplomatic endeavours
the episode is like a pin
in a forest

the Greek colony Amphipolis
fell into the hands of Brasidos
because Thucydides was late with relief

for this he paid his native city
with lifelong exile

exiles of all times
know what price that is

2
generals of the most recent wars
if a similar affair happens to them
whine on their knees before posterity
praise their heroism and innocence

they accuse their subordinates
envious collegues
unfavourable winds

Thucydides says only
that he had seven ships
it was winter
and he sailed quickly

3
if art for its subject
will have a broken jar
a small broken soul
with a great self-pity

what will remain after us
will it be lovers' weeping
in a small dirty hotel
when wall-paper dawns

129CliffBurns
maj 15, 2012, 12:50 am

I was just looking at a collection of Herbert's work last month. His prose poems are lovely too.

130mejix
maj 16, 2012, 12:37 pm

Yes they are. I learned about his work in The Poetry of Survival. One of my all time favorite poetry anthologies.

131anna_in_pdx
maj 16, 2012, 2:20 pm

That is a beautiful poem. Thanks!

132mejix
Redigerat: maj 26, 2012, 10:13 am

Glad you liked. Here's another of my faves:

Episode in the Library by Zbigniew Herbert

A blonde girl is bent over a poem. With a pencil as sharp as a lancet she transfers the words to a blank page and changes them into strokes, accents, caesuras. The lament of a fallen poet now looks like a salamander eaten away by ants.

When we carried him away from machine- gun fire, I believed that his still warm body would be resurrected in the word. Now as I watch the death of the words, I know there is no limit to decay. All that will be left after us in the black earth will be scattered syllables. Accents over nothingness and dust.

133CliffBurns
maj 18, 2012, 9:57 am

Wow. The fellow has some talent, doesn't he?

I LOVE prose poems.

134kswolff
maj 28, 2012, 10:36 pm

The Panther

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

Rainer Maria Rilke

135CliffBurns
maj 29, 2012, 9:28 am

Can't get enough Rilke.

136kswolff
maj 29, 2012, 11:53 pm

135: Rilke ebbs and flows for me. I need to take him in small doses. I liken his poetry to a thermite plasma grenade. Burning brightly, quickly, and ruthlessly.

But also a good poet to know and understand, especially for the Pynchon reader, since he wrote the Duino Elegies while staying with a princess from the Thurn und Taxis postage stamp dynasty ... since postage stamps play an important role in Crying of Lot 49 and the German dynasty is part of the larger storyline involving Nazis in Gravity's Rainbow And so on and so forth, until one wraps oneself in a paranoid conspiracy that may actually be true.

137CliffBurns
jun 4, 2012, 12:06 pm

I had a tough weekend, lots of introspection and self doubt, so my wife (wise woman that she is) sent me this lovely poem by Rumi. It did the trick:

In my hallucination
I saw my beloved's flower garden
In my vertigo, in my dizziness
In my drunken haze
Whirling and dancing like a spinning wheel

I saw myself as the source of existence
I was there in the beginning
And I was the spirit of love
Now I am sober
There is only the hangover
And the memory of love
And only the sorrow

I yearn for happiness
I ask for help
I want mercy
And my love says:

Look at me and hear me
Because I am here
Just for that

I am your moon and your moonlight too
I am your flower garden and your water too
I have come all this way, eager for you
Without shoes or shawl

I want you to laugh
To kill all your worries
To love you
To nourish you

Oh sweet bitterness
I will soothe you and heal you
I will bring you roses
I, too, have been covered with thorns.

138anna_in_pdx
jun 4, 2012, 1:11 pm

Is that a Barks translation? Beautiful.

139CliffBurns
jun 4, 2012, 1:36 pm

Beats me, Sherron sent it on. But during a tough time, it managed to convey so much. And it nicely sums up our relationship, the critical role she plays.

140mejix
Redigerat: jun 21, 2012, 2:04 am

Music of Spheres
Jean Follain

He was walking a frozen road
in his pocket iron keys were jingling
and with his pointed shoe absent-mindedly
he kicked the cylinder
of an old can
which for a few seconds rolled its cold emptiness
wobbled for a while and stopped
under a sky studded with stars.

141mejix
jun 21, 2012, 2:04 am

Man and Camel
Mark Strand

On the eve of my fortieth birthday
I sat on the porch having a smoke
when out of the blue a man and a camel
happened by. Neither uttered a sound
at first, but as they drifted up the street
and out of town the two of them began to sing.
Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me—
the words were indistinct and the tune
too ornamental to recall. Into the desert
they went and as they went their voices
rose as one above the sifting sound
of windblown sand. The wonder of their singing,
its elusive blend of man and camel, seemed
an ideal image for all uncommon couples.
Was this the night that I had waited for
so long? I wanted to believe it was,
but just as they were vanishing, the man
and camel ceased to sing, and galloped
back to town. They stood before my porch,
staring up at me with beady eyes, and said:
"You ruined it. You ruined it forever."

142CliffBurns
jun 21, 2012, 10:33 am

Yeah, I enjoy Mr. Strand.

143kswolff
jun 21, 2012, 9:10 pm

The Artist's Duty

So it is the duty of the artist to discourage all traces of shame
To extend all boundaries
To fog them in right over the plate
To kill only what is ridiculous
To establish problem
To ignore solutions
To listen to no one
To omit nothing
To contradict everything
To generate the free brain
To bear no cross
To take part in no crucifixion
To tinkle a warning when mankind strays
To explode upon all parties
To wound deeper than the soldier
To heal this poor obstinate monkey once and for all

To verify the irrational
To exaggerate all things
To inhibit everyone
To lubricate each proportion
To experience only experience

To set a flame in the high air
To exclaim at the commonplace alone
To cause the unseen eyes to open

To admire only the absurd
To be concerned with every profession save his own
To raise a fortuitous stink on the boulevards of truth and beauty
To desire an electrifiable intercourse with a female alligator
To lift the flesh above the suffering
To forgive the beautiful its disconsolate deceit

To flash his vengeful badge at every abyss

To HAPPEN

It is the artist’s duty to be alive
To drag people into glittering occupations

To blush perpetually in gaping innocence
To drift happily through the ruined race-intelligence
To burrow beneath the subconscious
To defend the unreal at the cost of his reason
To obey each outrageous impulse
To commit his company to all enchantments.

Kenneth Patchen

144CliffBurns
jun 21, 2012, 9:29 pm

Terrific. To be read back-to-back with Ferlinghetti's "Populist Manifesto":

http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/lawrence-ferlinghetti/populist-manifesto-no...

145mejix
jun 27, 2012, 4:29 pm

One instant is eternity;
eternity is the now.
When you see through this one instant,
you see through the one who sees.

-Wu Men

146CliffBurns
jun 27, 2012, 5:44 pm

My brain just got twisted into a sheepshank.

147mejix
Redigerat: jun 27, 2012, 6:14 pm


I've been reading The Enlightened Heart an anthology edited by Stephen Mitchell. Some really amazing poems there. Every other page there is a poem or a line that is really a mind twister. Or maybe I'm just in a good mood.

148CliffBurns
jun 27, 2012, 7:55 pm

I have a couple of Mr. Mitchell's books and like them very much.

149kswolff
jul 23, 2012, 10:28 pm

“Naked Except for the Jewelry”

“And,” she said, “you must talk no more
about ecstasy. It is a loneliness.”
The woman wandered about picking up
her shoes and silks. “You said you loved me,”
the man said. “We tell lies,” she said,
brushing her wonderful hair, naked except
for the jewelry. “We try to believe.”
“You were helpless with joy,” he said,
“moaning and weeping.” “In the dream,” she said,
“we pretend to ourselves that we are touching.
The heart lies to itself because it must.”

Jack Gilbert

Take that! Fifty Shades of Grey can't hold a candle to this little poem.

150KayEluned
Redigerat: jul 24, 2012, 6:59 am

Very good, beautiful but quite brutal as well, I have never read any Jack Gilbert before I will look him up.

If we are posting alternatives to Fifty Shades of Shit then can I add:

Forest by Carol Ann Duffy

'There were flowers at the edge of the forest, cupping
the last of the light in their upturned petals. I followed you in,
under the sighing, restless trees and my whole life vanished.

The moon tossed down its shimmering cloth. We undressed,
then dressed again in the gowns of the moon. We knelt in the leaves,
kissed, kissed; new words rustling nearby and we swooned.

Didn't we? And didn't I see you rise again and go deeper
into the woods and follow you still, till even my childhood shrank
to a glow-worm of light where those flowers darkened and closed.

Thorns on my breasts, rain in my mouth, loam on my bare feet, rough
bark grazing my back, I moaned for them all. You stood, waist deep,
in a stream, pulling me in, so I swam. You were the water, the wind

in the branches wringing their hands, the heavy, wet perfume of the soil.
I am there now, lost in the forest, dwarfed by the giant trees. Find me.

151CliffBurns
jul 24, 2012, 10:00 am

Time for a cold shower, everyone.

152mejix
jul 26, 2012, 7:45 pm

In our souls everything
moves guided by a mysterious hand.
We know nothing of our own souls
that are ununderstandable and say nothing

The deepest words
of the wise man teach us
the same as the whistle of the wind when it blows
or the sound of the water when it is flowing.

~Antonio Machado

153mejix
jul 28, 2012, 1:24 am

The Vegetables
Hafiz

Today

The vegetables would like to be cut

By someone who is singing God’s Name.

How could Hafiz know

Such top secret information?

Because

Once we were all tomatoes,

Potatoes, onions or

Zucchini.

154CliffBurns
jul 28, 2012, 11:33 am

Thanks for those.

155mejix
Redigerat: jul 28, 2012, 9:37 pm

Sure. Enjoy!

156OkayJacob
jul 29, 2012, 9:59 pm

: )

157kswolff
aug 4, 2012, 10:25 pm

OK, this one is rather long. Enjoy!

Library

This book saved my life.
This book takes place on one of the two small tagalong moons of Mars.
This book requests its author's absolution, centuries after his death.
This book required two of the sultan's largest royal elephants to bear it;
this other book fit in a gourd.
This book reveals The Secret Name of God, and so its author is on a death
list.
This is the book I lifted high over my head, intending to smash a roach in
my girlfriend's bedroom; instead, my back unsprung, and I toppled
painfully into her bed, where I stayed motionless for eight days.
This is a "book." That is, an audio cassette. This other "book" is a screen
and a microchip. This other "book," the sky.
In chapter three of this book, a woman tries explaining her husband's
tragically humiliating death to their daughter: reading it is like walking
through a wall of setting cement.
This book taught me everything about sex.
This book is plagiarized.
This book is transparent; this book is a codex in Aztec; this book, written
by a prisoner, in dung; the wind is turning the leaves of this book: a
hill-top olive as thick as a Russian novel.
This book is a vivisected frog, and ova its text.
This book was dictated by Al-Méllikah, the Planetary Spirit of the Seventh
Realm, to his intermediary on Earth (the Nineteenth Realm), who
published it, first in mimeograph, and many editions later in gold-
stamped leather.
This book taught me everything wrong about sex.
This book poured its colors into my childhood so strongly, they remain a
dye in my imagination today.
This book is by a poet who makes me sick.
This is the first book in the world.
This is a photograph from Viet Nam, titled "Buddhist nuns copying
scholarly Buddhist texts in the pagoda."
This book smells like salami.
This book is continued in volume two.
He was driving — evidently by some elusive, interior radar, since he was
busy reading a book propped on the steering wheel.
This book picks on men.
This is the split Red Sea: two heavy pages.
In this book I underlined deimos, cabochon, pelagic, hegira. I wanted to use
them.
This book poured its bile into my childhood.
This book defames women.
This book was smuggled into the country one page at a time, in tiny pill
containers, in hatbands, in the cracks of asses; sixty people risked their
lives repeatedly over this one book.
This book is nuts!!!
This book cost more than a seven-story chalet in the Tall Oaks subdivision.
This book — I don't remember.
This book is a hoax, and a damnable lie.
This chapbook was set in type and printed by hand, by Larry Levis's then-
wife, the poet Marcia Southwick, in 1975. It's 1997 now and Larry's
dead — too early, way too early — and this elliptical, heartbreaking poem
(which is, in part, exactly about too early death) keeps speaking to me
from its teal-green cover: the way they say the nails and the hair
continue to grow in the grave.
This book is two wings and a thorax the size of a sunflower seed.
This book gave me a hard-on.
This book is somewhere under those other books way over there.
This book deflected a bullet.
This book provided a vow I took.
If they knew you owned this book, they'd come and get you; it wouldn't
be pretty.
This book is a mask: its author isn't anything like it.
This book is by William Matthews, a wonderful poet, who died today, age
55. Now Larry Levis has someone he can talk to.
This book is an "airplane book" (but not about airplanes; mean to be read on
an airplane; also, available every three steps in the airport). What does it
mean, to "bust" a "block"?
This is the book I pretended to read one day in the Perry-Castañeda Library
browsing room, but really I was rapt in covert appreciation of someone
in a slinky skirt that clung like kitchen plasticwrap. She squiggled near,
and pointed to the book. "It's upside-down," she said.
For the rest of the afternoon I was so flustered, that when I finally left the
library... this is the book, with its strip of magnetic-code tape, that I
absentmindedly walked with through the security arch on the first day of
its installation, becoming the first (though unintentional) lightfingered
lifter of books to trigger the Perry-Castañeda alarm, which hadn't been
fine-tuned as yet, and sounded even louder than the sirens I remember
from grade school air raid drills, when the principal had us duck beneath
our desks and cover our heads — as if gabled — with a book.
The chemical formulae for photosynthesis: this book taught me that.
And this book taught me what a "merkin" is.
The cover of this book is fashioned from the tanned skin of a favorite slave.
This book is inside a computer now.
This "book" is made of knotted string; and this, of stone; and this, the gut
of a sheep.
This book existed in a dream of mine, and only there.
This book is a talk-show paperback with shiny gold raised lettering on the
cover. (Needless to say, not one by me.)
This is a book of prohibitions; this other, a book of rowdy license. They
serve equally to focus the prevalent chaos of our lives.
This book is guarded around the clock by men in navy serge and golden
braiding, carrying very capable guns.
This is the book that destroyed a marriage. Take it, burn it, before it costs
us more.
This book is an intercom for God.
This book I slammed against a wall.
My niece wrote this book in crayon and glitter.
This is the book (in a later paperback version) by which they recognized
the sea-bleached, battered, and otherwise-unidentifiable body of Shelley.
Shit: I forgot to send in the card, and now the Book Club has billed me
twice for Synopses of 400 Little-Known Operas.
This book is filled with sheep and rabbits, calmly promenading in their
tartan vests and bowties, with their clay pipes, in their Easter Sunday
salad-like hats. The hills are gently rounded. The sun is a clear firm
yolk. The world will never be this sweetly welcoming again.
This book is studded with gems that have the liquid depth of aperitifs.
This book, 1,000 Wild Nights, is actually wired to give an electr/ YOWCH!
This book I stole from Cornell University's Olin Library in the spring of
1976. Presumably, its meter's still running. Presumably, it still longs for
its Dewey'd place in the dim-lit stacks.
This book has a bookplate reminding me, in Latin, to use my scant time well.
It's the last day of the semester. My students are waiting to sell their
textbooks back to the campus store, like crazed racehorses barely
restrained at the starting gate.
This book caused a howl / a stir / a ruckus / an uproar.
This book became a movie; they quickly raised the cover price.
This book is the Key to the Mysteries.
This book has a bookplate: a man and a woman have pretzeled themselves into one lubricious shape.
This book came apart in my hands.
This book is austere; it's like holding a block of dry ice.
This Bible is in Swahili.
This book contains seemingly endless pages of calculus — it may as well be
in Swahili.
This is the book I pretended to read while Ellen's lushly naked body
darkened into sleep beside me. And this is the book I pretended to read
in a waiting room, once, as a cardiac specialist razored into my father's
chest. And THIS book I pretended having read once, when I
interviewed for a teaching position: "Oh yes," I said, "of course," and
spewed a stream of my justly famous golden bullshit into the conference
room.
This book was signed by the author fifteen minutes before she died.
This is Erhard Ratdolf's edition of Johann Regiomontanus's astronomical
and astrological calendar (1476) — it contains "the first true title-page."
She snatched this book from a garbage can, just as Time was about to
swallow it out of the visible world irrevocably. To this day, her
grandchildren read it.
This book: braille. This one: handmade paper, with threads of the poet's
own bathrobe as part of the book's rag content. This one: the cover is
hollowed glass, with a goldfish swimming around the title.
This is my MFA thesis. Its title is Goldbarth's MFA Thesis.
This is the cookbook used by Madame Curie. It still faintly glows, seven
decades later.
This book is the shame of an entire nation.
This book is one of fourteen matching volumes, like a dress parade.
This is the book I'm writing now. It's my best! (But where should I send
it?)
This book doesn't do anyth / oh wow, check THIS out!
This is the book I bought for my nephew, 101 Small Physics Experiments.
Later he exchanged it for The Book of Twerps and Other Pukey Things, and
who could blame him?
This book is completely marred by the handiwork of the Druckfehlerteufel —
"the imp who supplies the misprints."
This book has a kind of aurora-like glory radiating from it. There should be
versions of uranium detectors that register glory-units from books.
We argued over this book in the days of the divorce. I kept it, she kept the
stained glass window from Mike and Mimi.
Yes, he was supposed to be on the 7:05 to Amsterdam. But he stayed at
home, to finish this whodunit. And so he didn't crash.
This book has a browned corsage pressed in it. I picked up both for a dime
at the Goodwill.
"A diet of berries, vinegar, and goat's milk" will eventually not only cure
your cancer, but will allow a man to become impregnated (diagrams
explain this) — also, there's serious philosophy about Jews who control
"the World Order," in this book.
This book reads from right to left. This book comes with a small wooden
top attached by a saffron ribbon. This book makes the sound of a lion, a
train, or a cuckoo clock, depending on where you press its cover.
I've always admired this title from 1481: The Myrrour of the Worlde.
This book is from the 1950s; the jacket says it's "a doozie."
This book is by me. I found it squealing piteously, poor piglet, in the back
of a remainders bin. I took it home and nursed it.
This book let me adventure with the Interplanetary Police.
I threw myself, an aspirant, against the difficult theories this book
propounded, until my spirit was bruised. I wasn't any smarter — just
bruised.
This book is magic. There's more inside it than outside.
This is the copy of the Iliad that Alexander the Great took with him,
always, on his expeditions — "in," Thoreau says, "a precious casket."
Help! (thump) I've been stuck in this book all week and I don't know how
to get out! (thump)
This is the book of poetry I read from at my wedding to Morgan. We were
divorced. The book (Fred Chappell's River) is still on my shelf, like an
admonishment.
This book is stapled (they're rusted by now); this book, bound in buttery
leather; this book's pages are chemically-treated leaves; this book, the
size of a peanut, is still complete with indicia and an illustrated colophon
page.
So tell me: out of what grim institution for the taste-deprived and the
sensibility-challenged do they find the cover artists for these books?
This book I tried to carry balanced on my head with seven others.
This book I actually licked.
This book — remember? I carved a large hole in its pages, a "how-to
magazine for boys" said this would be a foolproof place to hide my
secret treasures. Then I remembered I didn't have any secret treasures
worth hiding. Plus, I was down one book.
This book is nothing but jackal crap; unfortunately, its royalties have paid
for two Rolls-Royces and a mansion in the south of France.
This book is said to have floated off the altar of the church, across the
village square, and into the hut of a peasant woman in painful labor.
This is what he was reading when he died. The jacket copy says it's "a real
page-turner — you can't put it down!" I'm going to assume he's in
another world now, completing the story.
This book hangs by a string in an outhouse, and every day it gets thinner.
This book teaches you how to knit a carrying case for your rosary; this one,
how to build a small but lethal incendiary device.
This book has pop-up pages with moveable parts, intended to look like the
factory room where pop-up books with moveable parts are made.
If you don't return that book I loaned you, I'm going to smash your face.
This book says the famously saintly woman was really a ringtailed trash-
mouth dirty-down bitch queen. Everyone's reading it!
There are stains in this book that carry a narrative greater than its text.
The Case of _______. How to _______. Books books books.
I know great petulant stormy swatches and peaceful lulls of this book by
heart.
I was so excited, so jazzed up! — but shortly thereafter they found me
asleep, over pages six and seven of this soporific book. (I won't say by
who.)
And on her way back to her seat, she fell (the multiple sclerosis) and
refused all offered assistance. Instead, she used her book she'd been
reading from, as a prop, and worked herself pridefully back up to a
standing position.
They gave me this book for free at the airport. Its cover features an Indian
god with the massive head of an elephant, as brightly blue as a druid,
flinging flowers into the air and looking unsurpassably wise.
My parents found this book in my bottom drawer, and spanked the living
hell into my butt.
This book of yours, you tell me, was optioned by Hollywood for eighty-
five impossibajillion dollars? Oh. Congratulations.
They lowered the esteemed and highly-published professor into his grave.
A lot of silent weeping. A lot of elegiac rhetoric. And one man shaking
his head in the chill December wind dumbfoundedly, who said, "And he
perished anyway."
Although my 8th grade English teacher, Mrs. Hurd, always said "Whenever
you open a book, remember: that author lives again."
After this book, there was no turning back.
Around 1000 A.D., when the Magyars were being converted over to
Christianity, Magyar children were forced to attend school for the first
time in their cultural history: "therefore the Magyar word konyv means
tears as well as book."
This book, from when I was five, its fuzzy ducklings, and my mother's
voice in the living room of the second-story apartment over the butcher
shop on Division Street.... I'm fifty now. I've sought out, and I own
now, one near-mint and two loose, yellowing copies that mean to me as
much as the decorated gold masks and the torsos of marble meant to the
excavators of Troy.
This book is done.
This book gave me a paper cut.
This book set its mouth on my heart, and sucked a mottled tangle of blood
to the surface.
I open this book and smoke pours out, I open this book and a bad sleet
slices my face, I open this book: brass knuckles, I open this book: the
spiky scent of curry, I open this book and hands grab forcefully onto my
hair as if in violent sex, I open this book: the wingbeat of a seraph, I
open this book: the edgy cat-pain wailing of the damned thrusts up in a
column as sturdy around as a giant redwood, I open this book: the travel
of light, I open this book and it's as damp as a wound, I open this book
and I fall inside it farther than any physics, stickier than the jelly we
scrape from cracked bones, cleaner than what we tell our children in the
dark when they're afraid to close their eyes at night.
And this book can't be written yet: its author isn't born yet.
This book is going to save the world.

Albert Goldbarth
Saving Lives
Ohio State University Press
Originally published in
The Iowa Review
Volume 29, Number 1
Spring 1999

158KayEluned
aug 6, 2012, 5:45 am

That. Was. Brilliant.

159nymith
aug 6, 2012, 8:33 pm

Agreed.

160mejix
Redigerat: sep 24, 2012, 11:07 pm

The Sea And The Man
Anna Swir

You will not tame this sea
either by humility or rapture.
But you can laugh
in its face.

Laughter
was invented by those
who live briefly
as a burst of laughter.

The eternal sea
will never learn to laugh.

161mejix
sep 24, 2012, 10:55 pm

I don't typically like to listen to poetry read out loud but I enjoyed Philip Levine reading What Work Is here:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audioitem/2312

162augustusgump
Redigerat: sep 24, 2012, 11:24 pm

161: I almost only like to listen to poetry read out loud. Even if I'm reading it on the page, I have to say it out loud to feel the sound of the thing.

163CliffBurns
sep 25, 2012, 1:59 am

Absolutely.

164Lcanon
sep 29, 2012, 10:42 pm

Two by Georg Trakl (1887-1914):

Childhood

Full of fruit the elderbrush; childhood dwelt calmly
In a blue cavern. Above the path of old,
Where now the wild grass brownly hisses,
Silver branches muse; the rustle of foliage

As well, where blue water thunders on the rocks.
Gentle is the lament of the blackbird. A shepherd
Speechlessly follows the sun, which rolls from the autumn hill.

A blue instant is only more soul.
At the forest's edge, a timid prey appears, and peacefully
The old bells and gloomy hamlets rest in the hollow.

More devoutly you learn the sense of dark years,
Coolness and autumn in lonely chambers;
And radiant footsteps ring out in the holy blue.

Faintly an open window clatters; the sight
Of a neglected hillside graveyard moves to tears,
A memory of recounted legends; yet at times the soul grows brighter,
When it thinks of joyful people, the dark golden days of spring.

De Profundis

It is a stubblefield in which a black rain falls.
It is a brown tree, which stands there alone.
It is a hissing wind, which circles empty huts.
How sorrowful this evening.

Skirting the hamlet
The gentle orphan still gleans scanty grain.
Her eyes feed wide and golden in the twilight
And her womb awaits the heavenly bridegroom.

Returning home,
The shepherds found the sweet corpse
Rotting in a thornbush.

I am a shadow far from darkened villages,
I drank
God's silence from the fountain in the grove.

Cold metal stands upon my brow;
Spiders seek my heart,
It is a light, which goes out in my mouth.

At night I found myself upon a heath,
Stiff with filth and stardust.
In the hazelbush
Crystal angels rang again.

Translated by Robert Firmage, from Song of the Departed.
Trakl was an Austrian decadent poet, an alcoholic and drug addict most of his life. In 1914 he was sent as a soldier to the Polish front and had a breakdown. While awaiting a mental examination he died of an overdose of cocaine.

165CliffBurns
sep 30, 2012, 2:41 am

I have a volume of Trakl's poems; they're wonderful. Georg Heym might be an author of interest to you as well:

http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/05/weirdfictionreview-coms-101-weird-writers-...

166Lcanon
sep 30, 2012, 9:55 pm

You know, I realized when I checked the book out that I had Trakl and Heym mixed up. There was a particular poem of Heym's, "White Moths, why do you follow me?" that I had remembered for years after reading it in an anthology. Kind of disappointed not to find it but Trakl was a nice discovery.
Heym had kind of a bizarre death too -- fell through the ice while trying to rescue a friend from drowning.

167CliffBurns
okt 1, 2012, 12:16 am

And he had a premonition that he would die by drowning. Weirder yet.

168mejix
dec 5, 2012, 8:47 pm

What Mr. Cogito Thinks About Hell
Zbigniew Herbert

The lowest circle of hell. Contrary to prevailing local opinion it is inhabited neither by despots nor matricides, nor even by those who go after the bodies of others. It is the refuge of artists, full of mirrors, musical instruments, and pictures. At first glance this is the most luxurious infernal department, without tar, or physical tortures.

Throughout the year competitions, festivals, and concerts are held here. There is no climax in the season. The climax is permanent and almost absolute. Every few months new trends come into being and nothing, it appears, is capable of stopping the triumphant march of the avant-garde.

Beelzebub loves art. He boasts that already his choruses, his poets, and his painters are nearly superior to those of heaven. He who has better art has better government--that's clear. Soon they will be able to measure their strength against one another at the Festival of the Two Worlds. And then we will see what remains of Dante, Fra Angelico, and Bach.

Beelzebub supports the arts. He provides his artists with calm, good board, and absolute isolation from hellish life.

169CliffBurns
dec 5, 2012, 9:14 pm

LOVE that Herbert fella.

170mejix
dec 6, 2012, 12:48 am

he's da man

171kswolff
dec 11, 2012, 11:57 am

Conrad wrote in intricate rhythm,
Hemingway worked with shrapnel in him,
Lewis was deeper than most people think.
Bennett Cerf is a Fink.

Scott Fitzgerald is overrated,
Kerouac is addlepated,
All of the Lardners were given to drink.
Bennett Cerf is a Fink.

John Galsworthy was elephantine,
F. Sagan was only sixteen,
James Jones may be missing link.
Bennett Cerf is a Fink.

From How to Drink Like a Mad Man by Ralph Maloney

172kswolff
jan 13, 2013, 11:29 pm

"Exhausting"

Putrefaction of dream-created paradises

Blows around this mourning-filled, tired heart,

That drank only disgust out of all sweetness,

And bleeds to death in vulgar pain.

Now it beats after the rhythm of faded dances

To the cloudy melodies of despair,

Meanwhile the star-crowns of old hope

Wither on the long ago godless altar.

From the drunkenness of fragrances and wines

An extreme awake feeling of shame remained with you -

Yesterday in distorted reflection -

And everyday's gray grief crushes you.

Georg Trakl

173CliffBurns
jan 14, 2013, 8:35 am

Whatta last line--"everyday's gray grief".

Topping.

174anna_in_pdx
jan 14, 2013, 11:50 am

Wow, that's ... relevant for the day the radio this a.m. told me is officially "the worst day of the year"

175anna_in_pdx
Redigerat: jan 14, 2013, 11:53 am

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action --
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Bengali text: চিত্ত যেথা ভয়শূন্য, উচ্চ যেথা শির,
জ্ঞান যেথা মুক্ত, যেথা গৃহের প্রাচীর
আপন প্রাঙ্গণতলে দিবসশর্বরী
বসুধারে রাখে নাই খণ্ড ক্ষুদ্র করি,
যেথা বাক্য হৃদয়ের উত্‍‌সমুখ হতে
উচ্ছ্বসিয়া উঠে, যেথা নির্বারিত স্রোতে
দেশে দেশে দিশে দিশে কর্মধারা ধায়
অজস্র সহস্রবিধ চরিতার্থতায়,
যেথা তুচ্ছ আচারের মরুবালুরাশি
বিচারের স্রোতঃপথ ফেলে নাই গ্রাসি---
পৌরুষেরে করে নি শতধা, নিত্য যেথা
তুমি সর্ব কর্ম চিন্তা আনন্দের নেতা,
নিজ হস্তে নির্দয় আঘাত করি, পিতঃ,
ভারতেরে সেই স্বর্গে করো জাগরিত॥

- Rabindranath Tagore - written in around 1900 to call for Indian independence. This poem is currently being used by the Delhi Stop Gang Rape movement as a lodestone for their cause.

176CliffBurns
jan 14, 2013, 12:52 pm

Thanks, Anna. Tagore is a gem.

177kswolff
jan 24, 2013, 11:11 am

178mejix
feb 22, 2013, 11:37 am

Oldie but goodie

The spiritual athlete often changes the color of his clothes
Kabir

The spiritual athlete often changes the color of his clothes,
and his mind remains gray and loveless.

He sits inside a shrine room all day,
so that the Guest has to go outdoors and praise the rocks.

Or he drills holes in his ears, his hair grows
enormous and matted,
people mistake him for a goat...
He goes out into wilderness areas, strangles his impulses,
and makes himself neither male nor female...

He shaves his skull, puts his robe in an orange vat,
reads the Bhagavad-Gita, and becomes a terrific talker.

Kabir says: Actually you are going in a hearse
to the country of death,
bound hand and foot!

179CliffBurns
feb 22, 2013, 8:35 pm

THE THREE ODDEST WORDS

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no non-being can hold.


- Wislawa Szymborska

180mejix
feb 22, 2013, 10:18 pm

Nice. Wasn't familiar with that one.

181CliffBurns
feb 22, 2013, 11:30 pm

Just as I was unfamiliar with Kabir!

Love this thread.

182kswolff
feb 23, 2013, 6:34 pm

"Ezra Pound's Proposition"

Beauty is sexuality, and sexuality

is the fertility of the earth and the fertility

Of the earth is economics. Though he is no recommendation

For poets on the subject of finance,

I thought of him in the thick heat

Of the Bangkok night. Not more than fourteen, she saunters up to you

Outside the Shangri-la Hotel

And says, in plausible English,

"How about a party, big guy?"



Here is more or less how it works:

The World Bank arranges the credit and the dam

Floods three hundred villages, and the villagers find their way

To the city where their daughters melt into the teeming streets,

And the dam’s great turbine, beautifully tooled

In Lund or Dresden or Detroit, financed

by Lazard Freres in Paris or the Morgan Bank in New York,

enabled by judicious gifts from Bechtel of San Fransisco

or Halliburton in Houston to the local political elite,

Spun by the force of rushing water,

Have become hives of shimmering silver

And, down river, they throw that bluish throb of light

Across her cheekbones and her lovely skin.

-- Robert Hass

183kswolff
mar 3, 2013, 10:02 am

Destiny
Hermann Hesse

In our fury and muddle
We act like children, cut off,
Fled from ourselves,
Bound by silly shame.

The years clump past
In their agony, waiting.
Not a single path leads back
To the garden of our youth.

(1911)

184nymith
mar 8, 2013, 7:31 pm

“Fire and Ice”

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

-Robert Frost-

185mejix
mar 24, 2013, 1:26 pm

Honey
by Robert Morgan

Only calmness will reassure
the bees to let you rob their hoard.
Any sweat of fear provokes them.
Approach with confidence, and from
the side, not shading their entrance.
And hush smoke gently from the spout
of the pot of rags, for sparks will
anger them. If you go near bees
every day they will know you.
And never jerk or turn so quick
you excite them. If weeds are trimmed
around the hive they have access
and feel free. When they taste your smoke
they fill themselves with honey and
are laden and lazy as you
lift the lid to let in daylight.
No bee full of sweetness wants to
sting. Resist greed. With the top off
you touch the fat gold frames, each cell
a hex perfect as a snowflake,
a sealed relic of sun and time
and roots of many acres fixed
in crystal-tight arrays, in rows
and lattices of sweeter latin
from scattered prose of meadow, woods.

186mejix
apr 5, 2013, 4:49 pm

Recalling the Past at T'ung Pass
Chang Yang-Hao

As if gathered together,
the peaks of the ranges.
As if raging,
the waves on these banks.
Winding along
these mountains & rivers,
the road to the T'ung Pass.
I look west
& hesitant I lament
here where
opposing armies passed through.
Palaces
of countless rulers
now but dust.
Empires rise:
people suffer.
Empires fall:
people suffer.

187CliffBurns
apr 5, 2013, 5:14 pm

Love this thread.

188mejix
apr 5, 2013, 6:41 pm

Today is Chan Yang Hao Discovery Day at the Mejix household. Found that one on A Book of Luminous Things. Looked him up at Sunflower Splendor and found this one:

Tartar Tune of Eighteen Beats

While still young,
I didn't know I was aging.
To my mind the past
Seems only yesterday.
Good time passes relentlessly by, like flowing water.
Better get drunk
And sleep--
Let the sun stage the rise and fall of an empire;
I just pretend I know nothing about it.

189CliffBurns
apr 5, 2013, 7:15 pm

#186 This one has an "Ozymandias"-like feel to it.

190mejix
apr 6, 2013, 2:53 pm

Definitely. The second one has a whiff of Verlaine's Melancholy.

191mejix
apr 19, 2013, 1:49 pm

The Heart of Herakles
Kenneth Rexroth

Lying under the stars,
In the summer night,
Late, while the autumn
Constellations climb the sky,
As the Cluster of Hercules
Falls down the west
I put the telescope by
And watch Deneb
My body is asleep. Only
My eyes and brain are awake.
Like gold eyes. I can no longer
Tell where I begin and leave off.
The faint breeze in the dark pines,
And the invisible grass,
The tipping earth, the swarming stars
Have an eye that sees itself.

192mejix
maj 9, 2013, 6:49 pm

Teaching the Ape to Write Poems
James Tate

They didn't have much trouble
teaching the ape to write poems:
first they strapped him into the chair,
then tied the pencil around his hand
(the paper had already been nailed down).
Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
and whispered into his ear:
"You look like a god sitting there.
Why don't you try writing something?"

193CliffBurns
maj 9, 2013, 9:54 pm

Love-ly.

194mejix
Redigerat: maj 10, 2013, 10:28 pm

yeah and kind of mean too.

195nymith
jun 25, 2013, 9:14 am

This thread's gone too far down the list. Jean Toomer:

There, on the clothes-line
Still as she pinned them,
Pieces now the wind may wear.

196CliffBurns
jun 25, 2013, 9:21 am

Beautiful.

Love those short-shorts.

197kswolff
jun 25, 2013, 6:17 pm

Don't forget the People's Poet, Rik:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnZnnkJxoC8

198zenomax
jun 26, 2013, 7:27 am

I've posted this elsewhere, but not here....

Timeless Writing

The earth, the volcano & the hum-
ming of the bee.

Migrating birds.

The vibration of ants.

- Ernst Herbeck.

199RobertDay
jun 27, 2013, 5:54 pm

> 197:

"I've written a poem about the evil Thatcherite junta, and it's called 'Thatcher'. It goes:

"THATCHER!!"

I haven't finished it yet."

200mejix
jul 25, 2013, 11:46 pm

Complete Poem
Paul Valery

The sky is bare. The smoke floats. The wall shines.
Oh! How I should like to think clearly!

201mejix
jul 25, 2013, 11:47 pm

In the Sun
Paul Valery

In the sun on my bed after swimming-
In the sun and in the vast reflection of the sun on the sea
Under my window
And in the reflections and the reflections of the reflections
Of the sun and the suns on the sea
In the mirrors,
After the swim, the coffee, the ideas,
Naked in the sun on my light-flooded bed
Naked-alone-mad-
Me!

202kswolff
jul 26, 2013, 7:58 pm

"Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists." -- Ezra Pound

An odd statement for someone who kowtowed to the bullet-headed many of Fascist Italy. Oh well, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

203nymith
aug 16, 2013, 9:07 pm

"At Sea"

Once I saw large waves
Crested with white-caps;
A driving wind
Transformed the caps
Into scudding spray -
"Swift souls," I addressed them -
They turned towards me
Startled
Sea-descending faces;
But I, not they,
Felt the pang of transience.

Another from The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer.

204D.Sahner.Santa.Cruz
Redigerat: sep 3, 2013, 12:59 am

Thanks for posting Jean Toomer's poem, which, as you know, hews to the "gather ye rosebuds" thematic tradition. Laments for the transience of existence - never dull when well done. Unlike Herrick's poem, it does not contain a carpe diem admonition. Perhaps more like this purely plaintive quatrain by Samuel Menasche:

"Pity us/ Beside the sea/ On the sands/ So briefly."

205mejix
aug 30, 2013, 10:17 am

Personal Helicon
Seamus Heaney

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

206augustusgump
aug 30, 2013, 12:19 pm

205: I enjoyed that from the late Mr Heaney. Have to say that his statement in the second last line, "I rhyme" is a bit of a stretch, though! "bucket - in it" "top - rope" ditch - mulch."
It's so unusual to encounter rhyme when you read poetry these days that I initially missed the fact that was any!

207mejix
aug 30, 2013, 12:54 pm

Glad you liked! This is one of my faves. Heaney will be missed indeed.

209CliffBurns
okt 1, 2013, 11:29 am

Are there any good annual anthologies of contemporary poems out there?

A "Year's Best" of verse?

Titles? Anyone?

210kswolff
okt 1, 2013, 12:13 pm

Like One: Poems for Boston is a great anthology, although its theme is not year-based. Although I'm sure they have to exist.

I found this using the Google people keep talking about:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Best-American-Poetry-2013/dp/1476708134

211CliffBurns
okt 1, 2013, 12:21 pm

Any John Wain fans in these parts? A big chunk o' his work, available from Another Sky Press (superb l'il outfit):

http://www.willwain.com/documents/JohnWain.pdf

212CliffBurns
nov 28, 2013, 10:21 am

Amazing looking audio archive for poetry. Lots to listen to:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/27ocGX/:19TuKzHNz:Ev+hFr.e/hcl.harvard.edu/poetryr...

213mejix
jan 7, 2014, 10:06 pm

Selecting a Reader
Ted Kooser

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.

214CliffBurns
jan 8, 2014, 12:04 am

Lovely.

215mejix
jan 8, 2014, 12:37 am

Isn't it? Works on several levels too, I think.

216anna_in_pdx
Redigerat: jan 8, 2014, 11:09 am

Oh that is lovely. It sounds like a Collins poem, a bit.

218mejix
Redigerat: jan 8, 2014, 12:28 pm

Thanks for the links. Funny because last Monday I was checking the books my boss was giving away, and came across Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems. Kooser sounded familiar. That poem was on the very first page. A good first impression.

219CliffBurns
jan 8, 2014, 12:37 pm

Ted Kooser, interviewed after receiving the Pulitzer Prize for his volume DELIGHTS AND SHADOWS.

You can read the transcript, stream the video or listen to the audio version:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june05/kooser_4-04.html

220mejix
Redigerat: jan 10, 2014, 12:42 am

I love that he tested his poems with his secretary.

221augustusgump
jan 11, 2014, 8:45 pm

I like that poem very much. I might take a closer look at Kooser.

It might be fun for those of us who write to think about who our favourite reader would be. An alternative way to pass the time on my upcoming flight if I find my self unable to face finishing The Piano Teacher.

222MarianV
Redigerat: jan 17, 2014, 8:28 pm

August

Mary Oliver

When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the branches
nobody owns, I spend

All day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking

of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among

the black bells, the leaves, there is
this happy tongue

223CliffBurns
jan 20, 2014, 9:32 pm

"The bigger the window, the more it trembles."

-Ted Kooser

"O thou lord of life, send my roots rain."

-Gerard Manley Hopkins

(The latter is a brilliant prayer for inspiration, don't you think?)

224mejix
feb 5, 2014, 10:46 pm

Proofs
Tadeus Rozewicz

Death will not correct
a single line of verse
she is no proof-reader
she is no sympathetic
lady editor

a bad metaphor is immortal

a shoddy poet who has died
is a shoddy dead poet

a bore bores after death
a fool keeps up his foolish chatter
from beyond the grave

225CliffBurns
feb 28, 2014, 11:12 am

A NOTE TO MY STATE-APPOINTED JOB COUNSELLOR

I'm a lousy escapist.
Troubles of the world roll off my back.
I lose my hearing
During job interviews.
I walk around in a daze
And pretend to know something.
The only talent I have
Is to be able to smell each new season
Before it comes
In the hair of women.

-Tom Hennen
(from DARKNESS STICKS TO EVERYTHING: COLLECTED AND NEW POEMS)

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

More on the author:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/books/darkness-sticks-to-everything-surveys-to...

226mejix
feb 28, 2014, 9:04 pm

Nice.

Love the title of the book too.

227mejix
apr 3, 2014, 7:03 pm

Water Lily
Rainer M. Rilke

My whole life is mine, but whoever says so
will deprive me, for it is infinite.
The ripple of water, the shade of the sky
are mine; it is still the same, my life.

No desire opens me: I am full,
I never close myself with refusal-
in the rhythm of my daily soul
I do not desire-I am moved;

by being moved I exert my empire,
making the dreams of night real:
into my body at the bottom of the water
I attract the beyonds of mirrors…

228CliffBurns
apr 26, 2014, 12:01 pm

A good one from Gord, Charles Simic describing a writing conference in 1968 that quickly got out of hand. Who says poets are boring old farts?

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/apr/23/great-poets-brawl-68/?insrc=wbl...

229CliffBurns
maj 5, 2014, 11:06 am

GRANDFATHER

Driving the team, he came up over
the hill and looked down. In the white bowl
of the snow-covered valley, his house
was aflame like a wick, drawing up
into itself all that he'd worked for.

Once, forty years later, we passed.
It was October. The cellar
was filled by a flame of young trees.
I got out, but he sat in the back
and stared straight ahead, this old, old man,
still tight on the reins of his years.

-Ted Kooser

230augustusgump
maj 7, 2014, 11:06 am

229: Nice poem.

Poetry like this makes me think I might start a movement in favour of recognition of the poetic paragraph as an art form. Compare the above with this...

Driving the team, he came up over the hill and looked down. In the white bowl of the snow-covered valley, his house was aflame like a wick, drawing up into itself all that he'd worked for.

Once, forty years later, we passed. It was October. The cellar was filled by a flame of young trees. I got out, but he sat in the back and stared straight ahead, this old, old man, still tight on the reins of his years.

To me it reads better, more naturally, more movingly. It doesn't gain anything by
being broken up
unnaturally into lines which
impart no
rhythm.

231CliffBurns
Redigerat: maj 15, 2014, 12:56 pm

Clive James, writing about poetry:

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1410176.ece

(From our friend, Gord)

232anna_in_pdx
maj 15, 2014, 1:12 pm

231: Wow, life is very strange. On another LT group someone has just introducd me to Hone Tuwhare, and here is Clive James quoting him. I understand all those weird synchronous coincidences are more an effect of our brain being tuned to this new name we have just heard, and if I had not heard of him I would have glossed over his name in the article and thought nothing of it, but it still seems quasi-miraculous.

A great article, a good example of what a fine writer James is (she said grudgingly, still not forgiving him for his politics).

233CliffBurns
maj 26, 2014, 11:35 am

"Perhaps you are being kept here
Only so that somewhere else the peculiar light of someone's
Purpose can blaze unexpectedly in the acute
Angles of the rooms..."

-John Ashberry, "Clepsydra"

"But there is time
To change, to utterly destroy
That too-familiar image
Lurking in the glass
Each morning, at the edge of the mirror..."

-Ashberry, "The Skaters"

"...they are already gone, gone far into the future--the night of time..."

-Ashberry, "For John Clare"

234CliffBurns
maj 31, 2014, 10:10 am

Is it possible to be a millionaire and a good poet?

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27621529

I'd love to find out for myself some day...

236CliffBurns
jun 30, 2014, 1:02 pm

"And no one will enquire
Into a species
Eagerly bent
On self-extinction."

Last lines of "Psalm" by Peter Huchel (Trans. Michael Hamburger)

237mejix
Redigerat: jul 4, 2014, 8:59 pm

I love this animation of "The Man with the Beautiful Eyes" by Bukoswki. Very well read too.

http://vimeo.com/19909066

238mejix
aug 30, 2014, 4:38 pm

You are the notes, and we are the flute,
We are the mountain, you are the sounds coming down.
We are the pawns and kings and rooks
you set out on a board: we win or we lose.
We are lions rolling and unrolling on flags.
Your invisible wind carries us through the world.

Rumi

239CliffBurns
aug 30, 2014, 10:09 pm

Ah, Rumi...

(Nuff said.)

Who was the translator?

240mejix
aug 30, 2014, 10:23 pm

This is a Robert Bly translation that Stephen Mitchell included in The Enlightened Heart. I love that last image.

241CliffBurns
Redigerat: sep 26, 2014, 3:12 am

"Your invisible wind carries us through the world."

Oh, yes.

I'll say it again: Ah, Rumi...

242CliffBurns
sep 25, 2014, 12:25 pm

EPITAPH

Nothing can still or staunch
Throw earth into my mouth
and I'll sing you grass.

-Christine Busta

(Michael Hamburger, translation)

243CliffBurns
sep 25, 2014, 12:26 pm

SLEEP

Sleep, retreat
into dark corridors

till suddenly out
of dream's mirror you run
into yourself

and the collision wakes you

-Hans Werner Cohn

(Michael Hamburger, translation)

244mejix
sep 25, 2014, 7:01 pm

Very nice both.

245tjh66
sep 26, 2014, 10:10 pm

I love Bridges' London Snow:

When men were all asleep the snow came flying,
In large white flakes falling on the city brown,
Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying,
Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town;
Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing;
Lazily and incessantly floating down and down:
Silently sifting and veiling road, roof and railing;
Hiding difference, making unevenness even,
Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing.
All night it fell, and when full inches seven
It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness,
The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven;
And all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness
Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare:
The eye marvelled—marvelled at the dazzling whiteness;
The ear hearkened to the stillness of the solemn air;
No sound of wheel rumbling nor of foot falling,
And the busy morning cries came thin and spare.
Then boys I heard, as they went to school, calling,
They gathered up the crystal manna to freeze
Their tongues with tasting, their hands with snowballing;
Or rioted in a drift, plunging up to the knees;
Or peering up from under the white-mossed wonder,
‘O look at the trees!’ they cried, ‘O look at the trees!’
With lessened load a few carts creak and blunder,
Following along the white deserted way,
A country company long dispersed asunder:
When now already the sun, in pale display
Standing by Paul’s high dome, spread forth below
His sparkling beams, and awoke the stir of the day.
For now doors open, and war is waged with the snow;
And trains of sombre men, past tale of number,
Tread long brown paths, as toward their toil they go:
But even for them awhile no cares encumber
Their minds diverted; the daily word is unspoken,
The daily thoughts of labour and sorrow slumber
At the sight of the beauty that greets them, for the charm they have broken.

246augustusgump
sep 26, 2014, 11:00 pm

245: Hooray, a real poem!

247mejix
okt 20, 2014, 10:01 pm

The Coming of Light
Mark Strand

Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.

248anna_in_pdx
okt 21, 2014, 6:49 pm

247: That's beautiful!

249mejix
okt 21, 2014, 9:12 pm

>248 anna_in_pdx:

Isn't Strand great? I love that last line.

250mejix
feb 8, 2015, 4:28 am

Old Man Leaves Party
by Mark Strand

It was clear when I left the party
That though I was over eighty I still had
A beautiful body. The moon shone down as it will
On moments of deep introspection. The wind held its breath.
And look, somebody left a mirror leaning against a tree.
Making sure that I was alone, I took off my shirt.
The flowers of bear grass nodded their moonwashed heads.
I took off my pants and the magpies circled the redwoods.
Down in the valley the creaking river was flowing once more.
How strange that I should stand in the wilds alone with my body.
I know what you are thinking. I was like you once. But now
With so much before me, so many emerald trees, and
Weed-whitened fields, mountains and lakes, how could I not
Be only myself, this dream of flesh, from moment to moment?

251CliffBurns
Redigerat: feb 27, 2015, 9:56 am

DIVORCING

One garland
of flowers, leaves, thorns
was twined round our two necks.
Drawn tight, it could choke us,
yet we loved its scratchy grace,
our fragrant yoke.

We were Siamese twins.
Our blood's not sure
if it can circulate,
now we are cut apart.
Something in each of us is waiting
to see if we can survive,
severed.

-Denise Levertov, SELECTED POEMS (New Directions Press)

(This one just about broke my heart when I read it the other day.)

252mejix
Redigerat: mar 19, 2015, 7:03 pm

from The Art of Writing by Lu Ji

2. Meditation

At first I close my eyes. I hear nothing.
In interior space I search everywhere.
My spirit gallops to the earth's eight borders
and wings to the top of the sky.
Soon, misty and brightening like the sun about to dawn,
ideas coalesce and images ignite images.
When I drink the wine of words
and chew flowers from the Six Books,
I swim freely in the celestial river
and dive into the sea's abyss.
Sometimes words come hard, they resist me
till I pluck them from deep water like hooked fish;
sometimes they are birds soaring out of a cloud
that fall right into place, shot from arrows,
and I harvest lines neglected for a hundred generations,
rhymes unheard for a thousand years.
I won't touch a flower already in morning bloom
but quicken the unopened evening buds,
in a blink I see today and the past,
put out my hands and touch all the seas.

3. Process

Search for the words and sphere of thought,
then seek the proper order;
release their shinning forms
and tap images to hear how they sing.
Now leaves grow along a branching thought.
Now trace a current to its source.
Bring the hidden into light
or form the complex from simplicity.
Animals shake at the tiger's changing pattern
and birds ripple off when a dragon is seen;
some words belong together
and others don't join, like jagged teeth,
but when you're clear and calm
your spirit finds true words.
With heaven and earth contained in your head
nothing escapes the pen in your hand.
It's hard to get started at first,
painful like talking with cracked lips,
but words will flow with ink in the end.
Essence holds content as the trunk lifts the tree;
language is patterned into branches, leaves, and fruit.
Now words and content match
like your mood and face-
smile when you're happy
or sigh when your heart hurts.
Sometimes you can improvise easily.
Sometimes you only bite the brush and think.

253mejix
jun 22, 2015, 11:36 pm

Sending Old Poems To Yuan Zhen
Xue Tao

Everyone writes poems in their own manner
but only I know delicacy of wind and light.
When writing of flowers in moonlight, I lean toward the dark.
Of a willow in rainy dawn I write how twigs hang down.
They say green jade should stay hidden deep,
but I write candidly on red-lined paper.
I'm old now but can't stop writing,
so I open myself to you as if I were a good man.

254CliffBurns
nov 8, 2015, 12:50 pm

SURVIVORMAN

Here’s a fact: Some people want to live more
Than others do. Some can withstand any horror

While others will easily surrender
To thirst, hunger, and extremes of weather.

In Utah, one man carried another
Man on his back like a conjoined brother

And crossed twenty-five miles of desert
To safety. Can you imagine the hurt?

Do you think you could be that good and strong?
Yes, yes, you think, but you’re probably wrong.

-Sherman Alexie

255mejix
jan 30, 2016, 3:36 am

Deer Camp
Wang Wei

Empty mountains:
no one to be seen.

Yet - hear -
human sounds and echoes.

Returning sunlight
enters the dark woods;

Again shining
on the green moss, above.

(Translated by Gary Snyder)

256CliffBurns
apr 30, 2016, 12:22 pm

Two poets whose work was not familiar to me, eulogized in 2014 by the great Charles Simic:

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/28/poets-distance-edson-knott

257CliffBurns
apr 30, 2016, 12:46 pm

A good piece on Russell Edson (see #256) recently published in THE BELIEVER:

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200403/?read=article_manguso

258mejix
jun 25, 2016, 12:17 pm

Torso of Air
Ocean Vuong

Suppose you do change your life.
& the body is more than

a portion of night — sealed
with bruises. Suppose you woke

& found your shadow replaced
by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful

& gone. So you take the knife to the wall
instead. You carve & carve

until a coin of light appears
& you get to look in, at last,

on happiness. The eye
staring back from the other side —

waiting.

259CliffBurns
sep 7, 2016, 3:38 pm

260anna_in_pdx
sep 8, 2016, 12:25 pm

>259 CliffBurns: Yes, congrats to Sharon Olds. And I somehow missed the beautiful poem at >258 mejix:, thanks Mejix, it was wonderful!

One question re: the Olds article, in the paragraph about Natasha Trethewey, what's an "ex-Pulitzer winner"? Does that mean she rejected the Pulitzer, or it was withdrawn for some reason?

"Ex-Pulitzer winner and former US poet laureate Natasha Trethewey was awarded $25,000 (£18,700) and a fellowship."

261mejix
sep 9, 2016, 12:51 am

>260 anna_in_pdx: Glad you liked. First poem I read by Ocean Vuong. Looking forward to reading more of his work.

262CliffBurns
sep 18, 2016, 3:25 pm

THE WHISTLER

All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden
I mean that for more than thirty years she had not
whistled. It was thrilling. At first I wondered, who was
in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and
she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild and
cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds war-
bled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.

Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she
said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can
still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled
through the house, whistling.

I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and an-
kle. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too.
And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin
to know each other? Who is this I’ve been living with
for thirty years?

This clear, dark, lovely whistler?

-Mary Oliver
(writing of the last days of her longtime partner, Molly Malone Cook)

263mejix
dec 23, 2016, 3:06 am

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think... and think... while you are alive.
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time
before death.

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will rejoin with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten--
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the
City of Death.

If you make love with the divine now, in the next
life you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that
does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.

(Kabir, translated by Robert Bly)

264CliffBurns
dec 23, 2016, 10:34 am

Lovely poetry, great approach to theology.

Thanks.

265mejix
dec 23, 2016, 12:13 pm

It's been in my mind the last couple of days. Glad you liked.

266mejix
jan 1, 2017, 12:57 pm

Forever – is composed of Nows
Emily Dickinson

Forever – is composed of Nows –
‘Tis not a different time –
Except for Infiniteness –
And Latitude of Home –

From this – experienced Here –
Remove the Dates – to These –
Let Months dissolve in further Months –
And Years – exhale in Years –

Without Debate – or Pause –
Or Celebrated Days –
No different Our Years would be
From Anno Dominies –

267mejix
mar 30, 2017, 2:51 pm

Too Late
Scythinus (c. 100 B.C.)

And now you're ready who while she was here
Hung like a flag in calm. Friend, though you stand
Erect and eager, in your eye a tear,
I will not pity you, nor lend a hand.

(J.V. Cunningham, translator)

268CliffBurns
mar 30, 2017, 6:28 pm

Is that as naughty as it reads?

269mejix
mar 31, 2017, 12:39 am

Probably.
Will remove if anyone is offended.
Made me chuckle though.

270varielle
mar 31, 2017, 9:17 pm

Well, duh. Went right over my head the first time I read it.

271CliffBurns
apr 8, 2017, 3:02 pm

Okay, kids, prepare to lose bladder control. This one is a howler:

https://rottingpost.com/2016/03/25/stopping-by-the-woods-on-a-snowy-evening-by-d...

(From Gord, who else?)

272mejix
Redigerat: apr 28, 2017, 1:55 pm

A Lover Who Wants His Lovers Near
Rabia of Basra

He is
sweet that way,
trying to coax the world to dance.

Look how the wind holds the trees in its hands
helping them to
sway.

Look how the sky takes the fields and the oceans
and our bodies in its arms, and moves
all beings toward
His lips.

God must get hungry for us; why is He not also
a lover who wants His lovers
near?

Beauty
is my teacher
helping me to know He
cares for
me.

(tr. Daniel Ladinsky)

273bluepiano
apr 28, 2017, 5:42 pm

meejix, enjoyed reading those three poems (begging w. post 163) with the same theme. Thank you.

I don't know whether the double entendre of the Scythinus was absent in the original, though I doubt it was, but doesn't 'hung like a thread in calm' show up a plodding 'erectile dysfunction' altogether?

274mejix
apr 29, 2017, 1:13 am

>273 bluepiano: That's how I read it too! Intimacy problems in antiquity. :)

Glad you like the poems!

275mejix
jan 25, 2018, 3:39 pm

Piano Solo
Nicanor Parra

Since man's life is nothing but a bit of action at a distance,
A bit of foam shining inside a glass;
Since trees are nothing but moving trees;
Nothing but chairs and tables in perpetual motion;
Since we ourselves are nothing but beings
(As the godhead itself is nothing but God);
Now that we do not speak solely to be heard
But so that others may speak
And the echo precede the voice that produces it;
Since we do not even have the consolation of a chaos
In the garden that yawns and fills with air,
A puzzle that we must solve before our death
So that we may nonchalantly resuscitate later on
When we have led woman to excess;
Since there is also a heaven in hell,
Permit me to propose a few things:

I wish to make a noise with my feet
I want my soul to find its proper body.

(tr. William Carlos Williams)

276mejix
Redigerat: jan 25, 2018, 3:43 pm

I Take Back Everything I've Said
Nicanor Parra

Before I go
I’m supposed to get a last wish:
Generous reader
burn this book
It’s not at all what I wanted to say
Though it was written in blood
It’s not what I wanted to say.

No lot could be sadder than mine
I was defeated by my own shadow:
My words took vengeance on me.

Forgive me, reader, good reader
If I cannot leave you
With a warm embrace, I leave you
With a forced and sad smile.

Maybe that’s all I am
But listen to my last word:
I take back everything I’ve said.
With the greatest bitterness in the world
I take back everything I’ve said.

(tr. Miller Williams)

277CliffBurns
jan 25, 2018, 6:55 pm

#276--Gorgeous, i love it.

278mejix
jan 25, 2018, 10:11 pm

>277 CliffBurns:
He was pretty awesome.

279mejix
mar 1, 2018, 12:23 am

From the Gahakoso

Deer standing
alone
doe from a distance
watching with such
longing
that the hunter hiding
in the leaves remembered
the wife he loved
and let the bow fall

(tr. W.S. Merwin)

280mejix
mar 1, 2018, 12:27 am

From the Natyasastra

Gazing at
in bloom
with varying groves
forest of great echoing odors
wanders
one bee woman
in joy

(tr. W.S. Merwin)

281mejix
Redigerat: mar 1, 2018, 12:37 am

From the Subhasitavali

To go
if you have really decided
then you will go
why hurry
two or three oh little while stay
while I look at
your face
living we are water running from
a bucket
who knows whether I will see you
and you will see
me again

(tr. W.S. Merwin)

282mejix
mar 28, 2018, 12:17 am

I know the truth — give up all other truths!
by Marina Tsvetaeva

I know the truth — give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look — it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?

The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.

(tr. Elaine Feinstein)

283mejix
mar 28, 2018, 12:21 am

Rain & the Tyrants
Jules Supervielle

I stand and watch the rain
Falling in pools which make
Our grave old planet shine;
The clear rain falling, just the same
As that which fell in Homer's time
And that which dropped in Villon's day
Falling on mother and on child
As on the passive backs of sheep;
Rain saying all it has to say
Again and yet again, and yet
Without the power to make less hard
The wooden heads of tyrants or
To soften their stone hearts,
And powerless to make them feel
Amazement as they ought;
A drizzling rain which falls
Across all Europe's map,
Wrapping all men alive
In the same moist envelope;
Despite the soldiers loading arms,
Despite the newspapers' alarms,
Despite all this, all that,
A shower of drizzling rain
Making the flags hang wet.

(tr. David Gascoyne)

284mejix
jan 3, 2019, 8:28 pm

LOSING A LANGUAGE
W.S. Merwin

A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back
yet the old still remember something that they could say

but they know now that such things are no longer believed
and the young have fewer words

many of the things the words were about
no longer exist

the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree
the verb for I

the children will not repeat
the phrases their parents speak

somebody has persuaded them
that it is better to say everything differently

so that they can be admired somewhere
farther and farther away

where nothing that is here is known
we have little to say to each other

we are wrong and dark
in the eyes of the new owners

the radio is incomprehensible
the day is glass

when there is a voice at the door it is foreign
everywhere instead of a name there is a lie

nobody has seen it happening
nobody remembers

this is what the words were made
to prophesy

here are the extinct feathers
here is the rain we saw

285mejix
jan 17, 2019, 1:34 pm

The Summer Day
Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

286CliffBurns
jan 17, 2019, 2:48 pm

Bless you, Mary Oliver.

287mejix
feb 18, 2019, 10:37 pm

The Five Enemies
Chuang Tzu

With the wood from a hundred-year-old tree
They make sacrificial vessels,
Covered with green and yellow designs.
The wood that was cut away
Lies unused in the ditch.
If we compare the sacrificial vessels with the wood in the ditch
We find them to differ in appearance:
One is more beautiful than the other
Yet they are equal in this: both have lost their original nature.
So if you compare the robber and the respectable citizen
You find that one is, indeed, more respectable than the other:
Yet they agree in this: they have both lost
The original simplicity of man.

How did they lose it? Here are the five ways:
Love of colors bewilders the eye
And it fails to see right.
Love of harmonies bewitches the ear
And it loses its true hearing.
Love of perfumes
Fills the head with dizziness.
Love of flavors
Ruins the taste.
Desires unsettle the heart
Until the original nature runs amok.

These five are enemies of true life.
Yet these are what "men of discernment" claim to live for.
They are not what I live for:
If this is life, then pigeons in a cage
Have found happiness!

(tr. Thomas Merton)

288mejix
mar 26, 2019, 8:39 pm

My Country Weeps
Andreas Gryphius

We are finished, yet still
they have not finished with us.
Brazen troops of nations,
crazed trumpets,
blood-slick sword
and the big howitzer
have devoured everything that sweat
and diligence laid away.
Towers flicker, the cathedral
lies roof through floor,
city hall sits in terror,
our forces smashed,
girls defiled,
and wherever we turn
flames, plague, and mortality
pierce heart and spirit.
Trench and street are constantly
refreshed conduits of blood,
For eighteen years now
our rivers have
brimmed with corpses, slowly
pushing themselves clear.
Yet still I have said nothing
of what vexes like death
and dips a lashing beak deeper
than hunger, pest, and holocaust:
that so much treasure has been
plundered from our souls.

(tr. John Peck)

289CliffBurns
mar 26, 2019, 9:31 pm

Am not familiar with Gryphius--powerful, powerful verse.

290mejix
mar 26, 2019, 9:45 pm

Me neither, until last night. Found a few of poems in an anthology, all of them good, I think.

291mejix
Redigerat: mar 26, 2019, 11:09 pm

Here's a couple more:

Not Mine The Years Time Took Away

Not mine the years time took away,
not mine the years that might yet be.
Time’s wink is mine, and if I tend it, then
the maker of years and eternity is mine.

(tr. John Peck)

Epitaph For Mariana Gryphius, His Brother Paul's Little Daughter

Born on the run, ambushed by sword and flame,
suckled by smoke, my mother's bitter bargain,
my father's midnight fear, I swam to light
just as the fire's jaws devoured my country.
I took one look at this world and said goodbye.
I knew in a flash all that it had to offer.
If you count my days, I vanished when I was young.
But I was old if you add the things I suffered.

(tr. Christopher Benfey)

292CliffBurns
mar 27, 2019, 1:30 am

Thanks, much appreciated.

293Cecrow
mar 27, 2019, 9:17 am

I recently became aware that my grandfather's cousin Clare Shipman was a published author, and I've found a sample of her work called "Seven Stars & Other Poems" on Forgottenbooks.com My (deceased) grandfather talked them up quite a bit, but I can't see much in them myself. Published in 1918, female writer, perforce they're pretty tame run-of-the-mill love poems etc. Granted, I haven't an ear for poetry.

O MOST beloved, how is it possible
The heart of me should feel that I have lived
Ever one hour without you,
Into whose life my life was woven at first
As but a tiny leaf in a design!
How could the woof remain with warp withdrawn!
You have not gone!
You have not gone, since I would cease to be.
You, you and I were threaded firm and close,
Into the fabric Life!

Back in the dawn of days your face was there,
One with the sunrise!
One with soft coverlids in the cool dark.
The last sound of the day some trailing note
Of your low- singing voice in the white sails
Of drifting sleep.
Unchanging love has not forgotten how
The fine, white sinew of yourself you wove
Into the little buttonholes, and edge
Of sheer and misty garments that I wore,
And how you smoothed and folded them away
Under the lamplight of the ended day.

etc., etc. I guess exclamation marks were a big thing then.

294RobertDay
mar 27, 2019, 10:10 am

>293 Cecrow: You assume that these are all love poems. But given that I'm assuming that your grandfather's generation was extant in the first quarter of the Twentieth Century - if not earlier - then I read that poem as being about the loss of a loved one through death.

We forget how prevalent premature death was in earlier times. Certainly, this was brought home to me when I read Jerome K. Jerome's Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, which comes over now as quaint light humour, but which from time to time dropped some reference to premature death - of a child, a family member or a colleague - seamlessly into the text in a way which was shockingly jarring to me, as a modern reader, but which a contemporary would have accepted as the way of things and so ordinary as not to be out of place in light-hearted observations on everyday life.

295CliffBurns
mar 27, 2019, 1:57 pm

I think of Queen Anne, in the movie "The Favorite".

She had something like 19 miscarriages and still births.

The attrition rate, especially for children, was very high and, yes, you're right, Robert, families had to learn to cope with and accept loss.

296Cecrow
mar 27, 2019, 2:56 pm

1918 coinciding with the Spanish Flu epidemic, you definitely might be on to something. Never read it that way, funny.

297CliffBurns
apr 27, 2019, 11:35 am

Den här diskussionen fortsatte här: Poetry III: A Poet Can Survive Everything But A Misprint