The Poetry Thread

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This is for cutting and pasting lines from any poem, anything between 1 and 10 lines, no more please. The idea, as i see it, is nevermind that things will be out of context, you can enjoy/appreciate any excerpt, well-used language will always have some sort of an effect. Comment, if you want, or let the excerpt do the work. If it's all short extracts we can dip in and out.
If anyone wants to use it to discuss the selections/the author's output, feel free.

pete s, Wednesday, 31 December 2003 06:25 (twenty-one years ago) link

This verse be thine, my friend, nor thou refuse
This, from no venal or ungrateful Muse.

To Mr Jervas
A. Pope

pete s, Wednesday, 31 December 2003 06:28 (twenty-one years ago) link

But if this be not happiness,-who knows?
Some day I shall think this a happy day,
And this mood by the name of melancholy
Shall no more blackened and obscured be.

October
Edward Thomas

pete s, Friday, 2 January 2004 00:33 (twenty-one years ago) link

...In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures.

Philip Larkin "Faith Healing"

jed (jed_e_3), Friday, 2 January 2004 00:37 (twenty-one years ago) link

how much do you like larkin, colin?

cozen¡ (Cozen), Friday, 2 January 2004 02:52 (twenty-one years ago) link

[...]

We went there for the dance: a ritual
of touch and distance, webs of courtesy
and guesswork; shifts
from sunlight into shade;
and when the patients came downstairs
to join us, smiling, utterly polite,
in new-pressed clothes, like cousins twice-removed,
they had the look of people glimpsed in mirrors,
subtle as ghosts, yet real, with the vague
good-humour of the lost.

[...]

'The Asylum Dance', John Burnside.

cozen¡ (Cozen), Friday, 2 January 2004 02:58 (twenty-one years ago) link

oh, love, why do we argue like this?
i am tired of all your pious talk.
also, i am tired of all the dead.
they refuse to listen,
so leave them alone.
take your foot out of the graveyard,
they are busy being dead.

a curse against elegies - anne sexton

lauren (laurenp), Friday, 2 January 2004 05:40 (twenty-one years ago) link

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

At the Fishhouses - Elizabeth Bishop

bnw (bnw), Friday, 2 January 2004 06:30 (twenty-one years ago) link

I think with Alexander that the act
Of eating, with another act or two,
Makes us feel our mortality in fact
Redoubled. When a roast and a ragout
And fish and soup, by some side dishes backed,
Can give us either pain or pleasure, who
Would pique himself on intellects, whose use
Depends so much upon the gastric juice?

Don Juan
Byron

pete s, Friday, 2 January 2004 14:53 (twenty-one years ago) link

He holds her as tightly
as he can, she buries herself in his body.
Morning, maybe it is evening, light
is flowing through the room. Outside,
the day is slowly succeeded by night,
succeeded by day. The process wobbles wildly
and accelerates: weeks, months, years. The light in the room
does not change, so it is plain what is happening.
They are trying to become one creature,
and something will not have it.

Misery and Splendor - Robert Hass

byronnw (bnw), Sunday, 4 January 2004 08:19 (twenty-one years ago) link

Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.

Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damn you sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,
So 'gainst the winter's balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm,
Sing Goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

Ancient Music
Ezra Pound

pete s, Tuesday, 6 January 2004 00:51 (twenty-one years ago) link

(Apologies for breaking the ten line rule--just this once--but i had to print the whole of this poem cos i think it encapsulates all our experiences..at this time of the season..)

pete s, Tuesday, 6 January 2004 00:54 (twenty-one years ago) link

i'm not sure how much i like him David. Im not sure how much i like any poetry other than Elliot.

jed_ (jed), Tuesday, 6 January 2004 01:00 (twenty-one years ago) link

I don't know nearly enough about poetry; thank you Pete and everyone for the thread!

Ann Sterzinger (Ann Sterzinger), Tuesday, 6 January 2004 04:38 (twenty-one years ago) link

I am Henri, mouth full of soda crackers.
I live in Toulouse, which is a piece of cardboard.
Summers the mayors paint it blue, we fish in it.
Winters we skate on it. Children are always
drowing or falling through the cracks. Parents are distraught
but get over it. It's easy to replace a child.
Like my parents' child, Henri.

---
Mark Levine, "Work Song"

M.

Matthew K (mtk), Tuesday, 6 January 2004 18:35 (twenty-one years ago) link

oh jed :(

i love larkin so much.

and elliot not so much.

and john burnside a whole whack more.

and don paterson the most.

in fact, i'm going to break the 10 line rule too ('cos i think it is a stupid, if sensible, rule):

'Addenda' by Don Paterson

(i)

1            The Gellyburn is six feet under;
2            they sunk a pipe between its banks,
3            tricked it in and turfed it over.
4            We heard it rush from stank to stank,
5            Ardler Wood to the Caird Estate.

6            Scott said when you crossed the river
7            you saw sparks; if you ran at it
8        something snagged on the line of water.

(ii)

1            It was Scott who found the one loose knot
2            from the thousand dead eyes in the fence,
3            and inside, the tiny silver lochan
4            with lilies, green rushes, and four swans.
5            A true artist, he set his pitch:

6            uncorking the little show for tuppence
7            he'd count a minute on his watch
8            while a boy set his eye to the light.

(iii)

1            One week he was early, and turned up
2            at the Foot Clinic in Kemback Street
3            to see a little girl parade
4            before the Indian doctor, stripped
5            down to just her underthings.

6            Now he dreams about her every night
7            working through his stretches: The Mermaid;
8            The Swan; The Tightrope-Walker; Wings
.

(iv)

1            They leave the party, arm in arm
2            to a smore so thick, her voice comes
3            to him as if from a small room;
4            their footprints in the creaking snow
5            the love-pact they affirm and reaffirm.

6            Open for fags, the blazing kiosk
7            crowns old Jock in asterisks.
8            He is a saint, and Scott tells him so.

(sorry)

david. (Cozen), Tuesday, 6 January 2004 21:07 (twenty-one years ago) link

i like "smore"

go to the front of the class!

jed_ (jed), Tuesday, 6 January 2004 21:16 (twenty-one years ago) link

i'm gunna start another thread and just post the whole of paterson's 'nil nil', i swear. instead of clogging this one up.

david. (Cozen), Tuesday, 6 January 2004 21:19 (twenty-one years ago) link

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

("The Snow Man" - Wallace Stevens)

David R. (popshots75`), Wednesday, 7 January 2004 02:45 (twenty-one years ago) link

He held radical light
as music in his skull: music
turned, as
over ridges immanences of evening light
rise, turned
back over the furrows of his brain
into the dark, shuddered,
shot out again
in long swaying swirls of sound:

("He Held Radical Light" [1st stanza] - A. R. Ammons)

David R. (popshots75`), Wednesday, 7 January 2004 02:48 (twenty-one years ago) link

I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals....
they are so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied....not one is demented with the
mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived
thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.

("Leaves of Grass" - Walt Whitman)

o. nate (onate), Wednesday, 7 January 2004 03:54 (twenty-one years ago) link

(Ammons!)
(That Hass segement I posted should be heard in it's entirety.)
--

Early germ
warfare. The dead
hurled this way look like wheels
in the sky. Look: there goes
Larry the Shoemaker, barefoot, over the wall,
and Mary Sausage Stuffer, see how she flies,
and the Hatter twins, both at once, soar
over the parapet, little Tommy's elbow bent
as if in a salute,
and his sister, Mathilde, she follows him,
arms outstretched, through the air,
just as she did
on earth.

Plague Victims Catapulted Over Walls Into Besieged City - Thomas Lux

bnw (bnw), Wednesday, 7 January 2004 05:39 (twenty-one years ago) link

At night, sometimes, when I cannot sleep
I go to the atelier door
And smell the earth of the garden.

It exhales softly,
Especially now, approaching springtime,
When tendrils of green are plaited

Across the humus, desperately frail
In their passage against
The dark, unredeemed parcels of earth.

A Chosen Light
John Montague

pete s, Friday, 9 January 2004 11:24 (twenty-one years ago) link

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

The Windhover
Gerard Manley Hopkins

(sallying), Friday, 9 January 2004 23:05 (twenty-one years ago) link

The livid lightnings flashed in the clouds;
The leaden thunders crashed.
A worshipper raised his arm.
"Hearken! hearken! The voice of God!"

"Not so," said a man.
"The voice of God whispers in the heart
So softly
That the soul pauses,
Making no noise,
And strives for these melodies,
Distant, sighing, like faintest breath,
And all the being is still to hear."

( Stephen Crane )

scott seward (scott seward), Monday, 12 January 2004 17:23 (twenty-one years ago) link

one month passes...
(this was on poetry daily recently)

The Merman

For Nico


The ripples on your wall:
fake sea-lights the soft sunlight makes.

You sleep under water.
Learn to love the counterfeit

and in the mess of shalts and shoulds and musts
find what you want.

Don't forget: I once stood loving
what was not here.

J. T. Barbarese

bnw (bnw), Saturday, 14 February 2004 00:14 (twenty-one years ago) link

one month passes...
ideally should be read in conjunction with the rest of her phenomenal (-ly sad, frightening, beautiful) book "bunny" - this is by selima hill:

Egg

And when the lodger, on the second day,
asks her if she knows the word cock

she looks ahead and simply starts walking,
steadying the word like an egg.

cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, 17 March 2004 19:48 (twenty years ago) link

X, viii

Paula wants to marry me
but I gave her the cold shoulder:
she's way too old. I'd have given
it a thought if she were older.


Martial (trans. William Matthews)

Donald, Wednesday, 17 March 2004 21:31 (twenty years ago) link

I just had to say this: this is a fantastic thread. I am searching the shelves of memory for something worthy of it.

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Wednesday, 17 March 2004 23:06 (twenty years ago) link

I can't stop reading that selima hill poem.

'steadying'!

'like an egg'!

cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, 17 March 2004 23:42 (twenty years ago) link

Killing Time

Fine.

But stop driving it around
in a van. Stop biting
your nails and sweating,
and for God's sake stop
saying not to be afraid.

Just get it over with.

—Ron Koertge

Come on poetrylovers step up with some more lines

donald, Thursday, 18 March 2004 22:48 (twenty years ago) link

Today I bought me a brand new Larkin collected - after decades of getting by with shabby second hand copies, mostly as a result of this thread - (I am enjoying - if that's the word- it very much). I will post a brain-bending bit of poetry to this thread tomorrow, and that's a promise (threat).

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Thursday, 18 March 2004 23:03 (twenty years ago) link

have you read that selima hill collection, jerry?

also: what about: i. oswald's 'dart' ii. stevens' 'harmonium' and iii. molloy's 'hare soup'? anyone?

cozen (Cozen), Thursday, 18 March 2004 23:31 (twenty years ago) link

Because finally the personal
is all that matters,
we spend years describing stones,
chairs, abandoned farmhouses—
until we're ready. Always
it's a matter of precision,
what it feels like
to kiss someone or to walk
out the door. How good it was
to practice on stones
which were things we could love
without weeping over.

excerpt of 'Essay On The Personal'
Stephen Dunn

bnw (bnw), Friday, 19 March 2004 00:28 (twenty years ago) link

Edwin Morgan, "The Death of Marilyn Monroe"

1          What innocence? Whose guilt? What eyes? Whose breast?
2          Crumpled orphan, nembutal bed,
3          white hearse, Los Angeles,
4          OiMaggio! Los Angeles! Miller! Los Angeles! America!
5          That Death should seem the only protector---
6          That all arms should have faded, and the great cameras and lights
7             become an inquisition and a torment---
8          That the many acquaintances, the autograph-hunters, the
9             inflexible directors, the drive-in admirers should become
10           a blur of incomprehension and pain---
11        That lonely Uncertainty should limp up, grinning, with
12           bewildering barbiturates, and watch her undress and lie
13           down and in her anguish
14        call for him! call for him to strengthen her with what could
15        only dissolve her! A method
16        of dying, we are shaken, we see it. Strasberg!
17        Los Angeles! Olivier! Los Angeles! Others die
18        and yet by this death we are a little shaken, we feel it,
19        America.
20        Let no one say communication is a cantword.
21        They had to lift her hand from the bedside telephone.
22        But what she had not been able to say
23        Perhaps she had said. 'All I had was my life.
24        I have no regrets, because if I made
25        any mistakes, I was responsible.
26        There is now---and there is the future.
27        What has happened is behind. So
28        it follows you around? So what?'---This
29        to a friend, ten days before.
30        And so she was responsible.
31        And if she was not responsible, not wholly responsible, Los Angeles?
32           Los Angeles? Will it follow you around? Will the slow
33           white hearse of the child of America follow you around?

cozen (Cozen), Friday, 19 March 2004 00:33 (twenty years ago) link

Michael Longley, "Terezín"

No room has ever been as silent as the room
Where hundreds of violins are hung in unison.

cozen (Cozen), Friday, 19 March 2004 01:08 (twenty years ago) link

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

from "The Wasteland", T.S. Eliot

weather1ngda1eson (Brian), Friday, 19 March 2004 10:44 (twenty years ago) link

Y'all sent me looking for my Larkin. It's snowing as I type this:

Coming

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon --
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

donald, Friday, 19 March 2004 14:08 (twenty years ago) link

Yay for spring!

Maria D., Friday, 19 March 2004 14:38 (twenty years ago) link

ILB mindmeld - I read that very poem over my omelette yesterday lunchtime, Don!

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Friday, 19 March 2004 14:56 (twenty years ago) link

Someone should have shown you - little jester,
Little teaser, blue-veined charm-
er, laughing-eyed, lionised, sylvan-princessly
Sinner - to what point you would come:
How, the three hundredth in a queue,
You'd stand at the prison gate
And with your hot tears
Burn through the New-Year ice.
How many lives are ending there! Yet it's
Mute, even the prison-poplar's
Tongue's in its cheek as it's swaying.

-Anna Akhmatova
from "Requiem" (1957)

marisa (marisa), Friday, 19 March 2004 15:40 (twenty years ago) link

Our lives are Swiss,—
So still, so cool,
  Till, some odd afternoon,
The Alps neglect their curtains,
  And we look farther on.

Italy stands the other side,
  While, like a guard between,
The solemn Alps,
The siren Alps,
  Forever intervene!

[Emily Dickinson]

Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 20 March 2004 00:58 (twenty years ago) link

W.B. Yeats
"When You Are Old"

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

I'm Passing Open Windows (Ms Laura), Saturday, 20 March 2004 07:56 (twenty years ago) link

II. The Pretty Lady

She hated bleak and wintry things alone.
All that was warm and quick, she loved too well-
A light, a flame, a heart against her own;
It is forever bitter cold, in Hell.


Vl. The Actress

Her name, cut clear upon this marble cross,
Shines, as it shone when she was still on earth;
While tenderly the mild, agreeable moss
Obscures the figures of her date of birth.


from "Tombstones in the Starlight" by Dorothy Parker

weather1ngda1eson (Brian), Saturday, 20 March 2004 10:05 (twenty years ago) link

The Shampoo

The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you've been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical:
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
--Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.

[Elizabeth Bishop. I shamelessly nicked the last verse of this for a song of mine a few years ago. I will be paying you royalties in eternity, Liz.]

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Saturday, 20 March 2004 11:34 (twenty years ago) link

that hass poem upthread is phenomenal. I downloaded a whole bunch of his collections from lion and goin to spend the day gorging.

cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 20 March 2004 11:46 (twenty years ago) link

I woke up this morning with 'TOO NICE' scrawled in inch-high letters on the back of my right hand and on my left hand is written "trousers at half mast" & "ice-cream vans, outside schools". I think the left hand is the beginning of my determination to become a peot and I think the right is just strange.

cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 20 March 2004 12:00 (twenty years ago) link

another word, discovered in the shower, scrawled on the underside of my left forearm: "massé".

I am in love with the LION poetry database.

cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 20 March 2004 14:40 (twenty years ago) link

Is the LION just for librarians? Of which I am not. And where is the hass upthread? Robert hass will be answering questions posed to him online on Monday at http://www.smartishpace.com/home/ Loved the Dickenson, Bishop and Dunn. And Lux!

donald, Saturday, 20 March 2004 18:30 (twenty years ago) link

I'm just a student, donald, so I guess that answers you're first question.

bnw quoted an excerpt of hass' 'misery and splendor' upthread and provided a link to a realplayer file of hass reading the poem.

cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 20 March 2004 19:17 (twenty years ago) link

Coz. thoughtfully sent me a clutch of Hass this afternoon; this was the snatch that lept out at me, late Saturday nite, red winy:

Hass, Robert:Churchyard [from Human Wishes (1989), Ecco Press]

[1]  Somerset Maugham said a professional was someone who could do his
best work when he didn't particularly feel like it. There was a picture of
him in the paper, a face lined deeply and morally like Auden's, an old
embittered tortoise, the corners of the mouth turned down resolutely to
express the idea that everything in life is small change. And what he
said when he died: I'm all through, the clever young men don't write
essays about me. In the fleshly world, the red tulip in the garden
sunlight is almost touched by shadow and begins to close up. Someone
asked me yesterday: are deer monogamous? I thought of something I had
read. When deer in the British Isles were forced to live in the open
because of heavy foresting, it stunted them. The red deer who lived in
the Scottish highlands a thousand years ago were a third larger than the
present animal. This morning, walking into the village to pick up the
car, I thought of a roof where I have slept in the summer in New York,
pigeons in the early morning sailing up Fifth Avenue and silence in
which you imagine the empty canyons the light hasn't reached yet. I was
standing on the high street in Shelford, outside the fussy little teashop,
and I thought a poem with the quick, lice-ridden pigeons in it might
end: this is a dawn song in Manhattan. I hurried home to write it and, as
I passed the churchyard, school was letting out. Luke was walking
toward me smiling. He thought I had come to meet him. That was when I
remembered the car, when he was walking toward me through the spring
flowers and the eighteenth-century gravestones, his arms full of school
drawings he hoped not to drop in the mud.

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Saturday, 20 March 2004 23:04 (twenty years ago) link

Pretty much my favourite lines ever are from Larkin - the ones in 'For Sidney Bechet' that go:

Oh, play that thing! Mute glorious Storyvilles
Others may license, grouping around their chairs
Sporting-house girls like circus tigers (priced

Far above rubies) to pretend their fads,
While scholars manques nod around unnoticed
Wrapped up in personnels like old plaids.

On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.

I mean, the ending's the payload, and that, but the tigers are the bit I really love, 'cos when Larkin lets the piss and misery go and starts throwin' around the Big Transcendental Culture-packed Signifieds he is hotter than gosh. Which might also explain why I like this so much, from a German laydee called Sarah Kirsch, and bought unopened for two pounds:

This unforgettable green
A faded glow
Veils the earth I walk
Through the marshes my soft throat
Juts out into another life.

On the river the Brontes are floating
With hats like iron pots
On the bank someone has mowed the grass someone
Primes the pump in the
Crumbling house.

(I realise this is everythat awful abt modern poetry, but even so...)

Gregory Henry (Gregory Henry), Sunday, 21 March 2004 03:52 (twenty years ago) link

I saw Hass read a couple weeks ago -- melted me to my seat. Everyone seems to be shattering the 10 line rule...

Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents' summer home,
Bruce's college girlfriend asked him
to improve his expertise at oral sex,
and offered him some technical advice:

Use nothing but his tonguetip
to flick the light switch in his room
on and off a hundred times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances
of force and latitude.

Imagine him at practice every evening,
more inspired than he ever was at algebra,
beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,
thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye,
the quadratic equation of her climax
yield to the logic
of his simple math.

Maybe he unscrewed
the bulb from his apartment ceiling
so that passersby would not believe
a giant firefly was pulsing
its electric abdomen in 13 B.

Maybe, as he stood
two inches from the wall,
in darkness, fogging the old plaster
with his breath, he visualized the future
as a mansion standing on the shore
that he was rowing to
with his tongue's exhausted oar.

Self Improvement - Tony Hoagland

bnw (bnw), Sunday, 21 March 2004 06:23 (twenty years ago) link

Haha - I emailed that Hoagland poem to a friend in the States a coupla years ago!

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Sunday, 21 March 2004 11:52 (twenty years ago) link

For The Dead - Adrienne Rich

I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer

The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself

I have always wondered about the leftover
energy, water rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting there long after midnight.

aimurchie, Sunday, 21 March 2004 14:49 (twenty years ago) link

(sorry for starting the rot re: the 10 line rule.)

cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 21 March 2004 15:09 (twenty years ago) link

my god, that hoagland poem is good! it's world poetry day today, btw.

cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 21 March 2004 15:11 (twenty years ago) link

So many of my favorites are here! What a lovely way to spend a few minutes on a Sunday morning with my coffee... My contribution (via Plagarist.com - which you all know about):

From:

anyone lived in a pretty how town...
E.E. Cummings

...someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)...


yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Sunday, 21 March 2004 16:19 (twenty years ago) link

Troy, now by Ron Henry.

Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 21 March 2004 16:57 (twenty years ago) link

This is so great! I have been inspired all morning - now afternoon. I have "Poet's Choice - Poems for Everday Life" edited by Robert Hass. it was a gift from a women I cleaned house and cared for. She was a real piece of work, but this gift resonates.(perhaps an answer to the "what would you do for a book" thread. help someone urinate.)

here is a short excerpt from the last page of the "Winter" section.

A prayer that asks

where in the hour's dark moil is mercy?

Ain't no ladders tumbling down from heaven
for what heaven we had we made. An embassy

of ashes & dust. Where was safety? Home?

Lynda Hull

aimurchie, Sunday, 21 March 2004 19:11 (twenty years ago) link

I drag a boat over the ocean

with a solid rope

Will God hear?

Will he take me all the way?

Like water in goblets of unbaked clay

I drip out slowly,

and dry.

My soul whirs. Dizzy. Let me

discover my home.

- Lal Ded

cheeesoo (cheeesoo), Sunday, 21 March 2004 20:45 (twenty years ago) link

The dead might speak, but they're ignored,
as if mouthing behind sound-proof glass.
We often think they're watching us
disgusted, but who do they report to?
They have the night at their backs,
no vast repository of small disgraces,
no hard disk or black box
full of stars marking the places
we were spectacular disappointments
to them. The dead were as bad as us,
if they begrudge us anything
it's weakness -
a body to be embarrassed by,
the living's lack of privacy.

[Jacob Polley - who is sickeningly young, talented and good looking, and also reading at the South Bank in London tonight.)

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 22 March 2004 12:26 (twenty years ago) link

[I lie - he is actually reading on Tuesday 30 March, with the wonderful Matthew Welton. I may even go along myself!)

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 22 March 2004 12:42 (twenty years ago) link

can you tell us anything more about polley, JtN? what's that poem called and where's it from?

cozen (Cozen), Monday, 22 March 2004 15:57 (twenty years ago) link

April Song

Withdrawing from the present,
wandering a past that is alive
in books only.In love
with women, outlasted
by their smiles; the richness
of their apparel puts
the poor in perspective.
The brush dipped in blood
and the knife in art
have preserved their value.
Smouldering times: sacked
cities,incinerable hearts

and the fledgling God
tipped out of his high
nest into the virgin's lap
by the incorrigible cuckoo.

R.S Thomas

aimurchie (aimurchie), Monday, 22 March 2004 16:12 (twenty years ago) link

Gregory, I feel about Hardy the way you describe Larkin (re: Arundel Tomb): they were both true-blue Romantics disguised as bitter old coots. Here's my fave:

Transformations

Portion of this yew
Is a man my grandsire knew,
Bosomed here at its foot:
This branch may be his wife,
A ruddy human life
Now turned to a green shoot.

These grasses must be made
Of her who often prayed,
Last century, for repose;
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose.

So, they are not underground,
But as nerves and veins abound
In the growths of upper air,
An they feel the sun and rain,
And the energy again
That made them what they were!

donald, Monday, 22 March 2004 16:37 (twenty years ago) link

Posted for a friend of mine, who's not doing so well...

E E Cummings again:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Monday, 22 March 2004 21:06 (twenty years ago) link

(realplayer interview with jacob polley here.)

cozen (Cozen), Tuesday, 23 March 2004 02:46 (twenty years ago) link

Nice thread! I want to read Selima Hill again... not to mention Don Paterson, who I saw read recently (AMAZING!) but couldn't afford to buy the last book :(

My favourite Larkin poem (only 12 lines so it's not too much of a cheat):

Water

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My litany would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 23 March 2004 10:55 (twenty years ago) link

And a bit of Thomas Lux:

[...]
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.
[...]

Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 23 March 2004 11:22 (twenty years ago) link

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Mark Strand - "Keeping Things Whole"

bnw (bnw), Wednesday, 24 March 2004 00:35 (twenty years ago) link

O tower of light, sad beauty
that magnified necklaces and statues in the sea,
calcareous eye, insignia of the vast waters, cry
of the mourning petrel, tooth of the sea, wife
of the Oceanian wind, O separate rose
from the long stem of the trampled bush
that the depths, converted into archipelago,
O natural star, green diadem,
alone in your lonesome dynasty,
still unattainable, elusive, desolate
like one drop, like one grape, like the sea.

"Tower of Light"
~Pablo Neruda

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Wednesday, 24 March 2004 19:11 (twenty years ago) link

archel - have you read that 'paterson' collection 'the eyes'? (translations of a. machado's work, I think.)

cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, 24 March 2004 19:20 (twenty years ago) link

WISTFUL THINKING

The ice-cream van waits, outside the school,
for the pupil's recovered memory of unanswered
notes to question his hunger when, for dancing's sake,
he'll giggle across the playground for cones and sherbet.
A joy-rider on the front page ("only FIVE years"),
he thinks through P.E.'s politics of dodge-ball,
magic tricks, Louise Alison, and girls
when a woman's voice breaks the cabin's dark, half human
half nothing-at-all, travelling from somewhere
behind something, unnamed. Its edges talk of his dad,
who has long moved on, hungover and drinking,
from report cards to bills, his criminal record and catalogues
of memory - drawn, with the drunk's anaesthetic ardour,
by hurting his wife and child. Trouser's at half-mast he'll act
the fool dropped on his attention-span as a child and ignore
this seriousness, again giggling and swearing, as he orders.

But if we should cut here, stop
to stalk left across Scotland,
our imagination animating along
Maginot Lines of dissolution
to the ruined hamlet
of Wester Sallochy
none of this is going on
but the poetry. Oh dear

cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, 24 March 2004 23:02 (twenty years ago) link

I have read The Eyes yes... though it was lent to me by a friend I subsequently rowed mightily with, so I didn't look at it again for ages.


Educated in the Humanities,
they headed for the City, their beliefs
implicit in the eyes and arteries
of each, and their sincerity displayed
in notes, in smiles, in sheaves
of decimal etcetera.
[...]

- Glyn Maxwell (The High Achievers)

Archel (Archel), Thursday, 25 March 2004 09:23 (twenty years ago) link

have you read '101 sonnets' edited by paterson, archel? heh I don't know why I keep asking you and you alone, has anyone else read it? I was thinking about starting a sonnet thread where people could post sonnets and tell me (and you!) what they like about them, how the sonnet works, what's special about it. to be honest, I never really rated the sonnet till I read paterson's introduction to that book which made me think 'wow, there's a lot going on in these things' (his essay made me realise this for the rest of poetry too, which I previously thought was just mostly guesswork and chance. ho ho, only joking.) like you could say something silly like this about a sonnet which would help me, (cos I'm trying to learn all these rules for writing poetry that I never appreciated existed in such exquisite detail before - and I thought I'd solicit the help of ILB poetry headz, looking at you bnw, JtN, archel, etc.) aye you could say this, pompous as it sounds: 'nice sonnet, 3 quatrains and a couplet, typically english though unrhymed till the last two stanzas which run like a mortal kombat style fatality ABCADA [editor's note: I was reading a three stanza unrhymed quintain burnside poem earlier which explodes into its ending with this rhyme scheme, the A laced through behind the the two stilted unrhymed and reiterated like a bomb dropped on your hand in the last line] etc etc'. I dunno how much ask there is for that sort of nonsense though, and really would be quite self-indulgent on my behalf because I need to learn this stuff even if I don't want to talk about it.

cozen (Cozen), Friday, 26 March 2004 19:26 (twenty years ago) link

I'm not sure about the italics in that last sentence.

the burnside poem was characteristically brilliant, obv., to round off my 'editor's note' above.

cozen (Cozen), Friday, 26 March 2004 19:34 (twenty years ago) link

haha I wish ILB moved faster!

cozen (Cozen), Friday, 26 March 2004 20:50 (twenty years ago) link

I'm somewhat embarrassingly lacking when it comes to knowledge about poetic forms. (Anthony E. might know something. does he post here?) But if you can end a sonnet with a 'flawless victory', I will be infinitely impressed.

bnw (bnw), Friday, 26 March 2004 22:21 (twenty years ago) link

The sonnet is, you know, 14 lines long, and is generally able to be broken down into a part A and a part B, though the part B can be anywhere from 2 to 6 lines long, right? So if it were prose it would be a healthy paragraph, and it has a decisicive "ending" feeling built into it. This makes it a good form for positing an argument (with a bang-up conclusion) or for telling a brief story (with either a big bang-up ending or a moral tagged on at the end).

Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 27 March 2004 05:38 (twenty years ago) link

PRELUDE

"You can't go home again." Thomas Wolfe
"That's shit." Bill Holm


Who sed that?
Did somebody say that
or was it in one of them darn books you read?

It doesn't matter
if it's a pile of crap
I go home ever day
don't matter where I am
I'm the prodigal son coming back
I don't even need a Greyhound bus
I can go to my town right now
right here talking to you
because this
is everywhere
I've ever been

--David Lee MY TOWN


Poetry is home to me. I am more comfortable here than anywhere. It's everywhere I've ever been. I don't even need a Greyhound bus.

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Saturday, 27 March 2004 07:32 (twenty years ago) link

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

for all you formalists and uninformalists

I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (Ozymandias)

donald, Sunday, 28 March 2004 03:47 (twenty years ago) link

sonnets are hard. The good ones might have all already been written

donald, Sunday, 28 March 2004 03:57 (twenty years ago) link

Nothing is life-or-death in this slow drive
to Vermont on back roads--lunch, a quick look
at antiques--though he does bring up his grave
and wanting a stone.  The road curves;  we joke
about the quickest way to ship ashes
to England, and whether he ought to have
himself stuffed, instead, like a bird.  He flashes
me a glance that says it's ok, we can laugh
at this death that won't arrive for a while.  We pull
over.  He's not actually sick yet, he reminds me,
reaching for the next pill.  His bag's full
of plastic medicine bottles, his body
of side effects, as he stoops to look at a low
table whose thin, perfect legs perch on snow.

Joan Larkin (my former teacher) - "Sonnet Positive"

bnw (bnw), Sunday, 28 March 2004 04:25 (twenty years ago) link

There was a young man from the city,
Who considered his life to be shitty,
He lived out the farce,
With his head up his arse,
And he died very young — what a pity!

What? That's poetry, that is!

SRH (Skrik), Sunday, 28 March 2004 13:50 (twenty years ago) link

I think Ozymandias may well be the best sonnet ever written, but then I know relatively few modern ones. I have only ever written two myself, and neither of them are good. It's still probably my favourite form though, just for its tautness and economy, when done well.

I would contribute to a sonnet thread if you start one I expect david... I haven't read 101 Sonnets though so there's a chance I have 101 fewer things to say than those who have :)

Archel (Archel), Monday, 29 March 2004 08:42 (twenty years ago) link

: )

cozen (Cozen), Monday, 29 March 2004 09:18 (twenty years ago) link

Magnetic Words

(for Anna)

She brought me a box of magnetic words,
and now the kitchen has become a poem
that writes itself, unpredictably, at night.
Under our fingers sudden meanings form,
these phrases stick like burrs.
We are all accidental poets,
wild and free
raw
sculpt ing.
The room is loaded, layered
with chance collisions,
broken language.

These days we feed off words.
We can't make a sandwich
without making
a point.
Breakfast produces gloomy sentiments,
a morning smear
cigarette pain.
Lunchtimes become journeys
which begin, and end, at the fridge door
in an unfinished sentence,
break out of

When the house is empty
I find messages with the frozen food
like cries for help.
Who wrote i like him dead this morning?
she suffered ?
Graffiti artists of white goods,
we are all anonymous.
Like children we scatter words;
random and ominous,
they cling.
Who wrote we don't make sense
as if it made sense?

Soon the box runs out; we all get bored.
The fridge buzzes, inscrutably,
and I go hungry
for magnetic words.

[by Rachel Playforth]

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 29 March 2004 09:39 (twenty years ago) link

I messed up the html - sorry :( You can find it properly formatted over here: http://www.buzzwords.ndo.co.uk/

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 29 March 2004 09:39 (twenty years ago) link

Arrrggghh! That is old and rubbish!

Archel (Archel), Monday, 29 March 2004 11:13 (twenty years ago) link

: (

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 29 March 2004 12:09 (twenty years ago) link

I was looking for the Horse Cock Poem but I couldn't find it.

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 29 March 2004 12:10 (twenty years ago) link

:)
The Horse Cock Poem

Archel (Archel), Monday, 29 March 2004 12:18 (twenty years ago) link

: )

here's a little something poem I wrote mainly just as a formal exercise in trying out rhyme and syllable strength, I'm not sure I like it either, a little too mean but why not - it doesn't even have a name:

You inhale and hold,
weighing the smoke,
a thought knuckles in
and then I choke:

"It's you, it's not me;
sorry to say -
now pack up your bag,
go on your way."

cozen (Cozen), Monday, 29 March 2004 13:10 (twenty years ago) link

haha too limericky!

cozen (Cozen), Monday, 29 March 2004 13:13 (twenty years ago) link

Maybe. I think it's the rhymes on smoke/choke and say/way that are the problem.

Archel (Archel), Monday, 29 March 2004 13:16 (twenty years ago) link

haha yeah, as I say I was just toying with how rhyme gives a sense to a poem, not to turn this thread into the writer's workshop or anything but yeah - . I don't normally write like that haha which sounds a bit 'my other car is a ferrari'.

cozen (Cozen), Monday, 29 March 2004 14:01 (twenty years ago) link

(sorry, I'm ruining the flow of this lovely thread.)

cozen (Cozen), Monday, 29 March 2004 14:03 (twenty years ago) link

No I cd tell it was an experiment. Ha, that sounds horrible!

It is interesting the way rhyme pushes you towards thinking that the poem is 'about' the rhymed words, when in this case I want it to be about 'a thought knuckles in' which I think is a great line.

Archel (Archel), Monday, 29 March 2004 14:24 (twenty years ago) link

I have come back round to poesie.

As usual, the Nipper is partly to blame.

the pinefox, Monday, 29 March 2004 14:45 (twenty years ago) link

haha it's cool, archel! it's just nice to have people to talk about all this with. sorry, I do go on. : )

who are you reading, the pinefox? and why did you have to be wheeled back round?

I picked up robin robertson's second collection today ('slow air'; I was poised so close to buying 'the pleasure of the text' and jacob polley's first; mmm money money) after reading his first earlier in the week and being underwhelmed in proportion to the praise in its jacket quotes ('its honesty, insight and sheer lyrical power'; 'the best new poet in britain.') too much fluff not enough oomph for me to be honest (except a few stand-out poems like 'the flaying of marsyas' which is... phenomenal.) but this new one is a bit special so far, if extremely maudlin in its lyricism, here's a sample:

"Art Lesson"

She stood at his
burnt windows
until she saw herself
answered in their dark,
the way glass gets
blacked at night
in a lighted room.
She went home,
pulled the curtains;
drew a red bath.

cozen (Cozen), Monday, 29 March 2004 18:05 (twenty years ago) link

Cozen, your excitement is really adorable.

Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 30 March 2004 00:54 (twenty years ago) link

Wheeled maybe cos it's out of the mainstream of reading sometimes. But I have not been wholly away from it. I know Yeats and Heaney better, or worse, than you might think. So does the Nipper, in a way, in a different way or two.

What I have been reading: Larkin and Muldoon.

I have been half-thinking of trying to write a poem about You (Cozen!). But do I really know how to write poems? I half-wish that I could have a lesson from Archel.

the pinefox, Tuesday, 30 March 2004 15:26 (twenty years ago) link

Don't be silly.

Actually I might have to give a workshop for a bunch of e2e kids soon and I have no idea what to do :/

Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 30 March 2004 15:49 (twenty years ago) link

moy sand and gravel?

cozen (Cozen), Tuesday, 30 March 2004 16:14 (twenty years ago) link

"So when my days of impotence approach,
And I'm by pox and wine's unlucky chance,
Driven from the pleasing billows of debauch,
On the dull shore of lazy temperance,

My pains at last some respite shall afford,
Whilst I behold the battles you maintain,
When fleets of glasses sail about the board,
From whose broadsides volleys of wit shall rain."

The Disable Debauchee
~John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester


yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Tuesday, 30 March 2004 18:52 (twenty years ago) link

Always liked this one, mainly because me da used to sing it.... still, the first verse is great.

Raglan Road - Patrick Kavanagh
On Raglan Road on an Autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue,
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day

On Grafton street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passions pledge
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay -
O I loved too much and by such by such is hapiness thrown away

I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that's known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay
when the angel woos the clay he'd lose his wings at the dawn of day

or the classic:

Stony Grey Soil
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
the laugh from my love you thieved;
you took the gay child o fmy passion
and gave me your clod-conceived.

you clogged the feet of my boyhood
and I believed that my stumble
had the poise and stride of Apollo
and his voice my thick-tongued mumble

[...]

you flung a ditch on my vision
o fbeauty, love and truth
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
you burgled my bank of youth!

[...]

Mark Lennox, Tuesday, 30 March 2004 23:12 (twenty years ago) link

Hey, Cozen - I wrote the poem about you.

the pinefox, Wednesday, 31 March 2004 14:18 (twenty years ago) link

I must compliment everyone here on their fabulous choices! I've never read so many beautiful words in my life. Here's my meagre addition to the collection; some Cummings:

this is the garden:colours come and go

this is the garden:colours come and go,
frail azures fluttering from night's outer wing
strong silent greens silently lingering,
absolute lights like baths of golden snow.
This is the garden:pursed lips do blow upon cool flutes within wide glooms,and sing (of harps celestial to the quivering string) invisible faces hauntingly and slow.

This is the garden. Time shall surely reap and on Death's blade lie many a flower curled, in other lands where other songs be sung; yet stand They here enraptured,as among the slow deep trees perpetual of sleep some silver-fingered fountain steals the world.

Camellia, Wednesday, 31 March 2004 14:44 (twenty years ago) link

can I read it?! if I can, e-mail me.

cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, 31 March 2004 15:33 (twenty years ago) link

Cozen, oh Cozen,
Your fingers are frozen
You've got toes by the doezen
And a poesy shelf.

Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 1 April 2004 05:14 (twenty years ago) link

Having finally read Landing Light I've remembered that Don Paterson can't half turn out a good sonnet himself:

Whatever the difference is, it all began
the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers
and his four-day-old smile dawned on him again,
possessed him, till it would not fall or waver;
and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin
but his own smile, or one I'd rediscovered.
Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the true path was as lost to me as ever
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran.
See how the true gift never leaves the giver:
returned and redelivered, it rolled on
until the smile poured through us like a river.
How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men!
I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.


Archel (Archel), Thursday, 1 April 2004 09:45 (twenty years ago) link

the pinefox, e-mail me before you read again.

cozen (Cozen), Thursday, 1 April 2004 22:55 (twenty years ago) link

About what?

Was that written AFTER we talked about the pome that is not by D Paterson?

the pinefox, Friday, 2 April 2004 14:00 (twenty years ago) link

Ye White Antarctic Birds

Ye white antarctic birds of upper 57th street,
you gallery of white antarctic birds, you street
with white antarctic birds and cabs and white
antarctic birds you street, ye and you the
street and birds I walk upon the galleries of
streets and birds and longings, you the birds
antarctic of the conversations and the bank
machines, you the atm of longing, the longing
for the atm machines, you the lover of the
banks and me and birds and others too and
cabs, and you the cabs and you the subtle
longing birds and me, and you the
conversations yet antarctic, and soup and
teeming white antarctic birds and you the
books and phones and atms the bank
machines antarctic, and you the banks and
cabs, and him the one I love, and those who
love me not, and all antarctic longings, and all
the birds and cabs and also on the street
antarctic of this longing.

-- Lisa Jarnot

Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 2 April 2004 20:37 (twenty years ago) link

This is for cutting and pasting lines from any poem, anything between 1 and 10 lines, no more please. The idea, as i see it, is nevermind that things will be out of context, you can enjoy/appreciate any excerpt, well-used language will always have some sort of an effect. Comment, if you want, or let the excerpt do the work. If it's all short extracts we can dip in and out.
If anyone wants to use it to discuss the selections/the author's output, feel free.

aimurchie (aimurchie), Sunday, 4 April 2004 02:43 (twenty years ago) link

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter - bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

This is by Stephen Crane.

Ingolfur Gislason (kreator), Monday, 5 April 2004 15:16 (twenty years ago) link

Cozen, that Robertson poem is astonishing!

Gregory Henry (Gregory Henry), Tuesday, 6 April 2004 02:20 (twenty years ago) link

I was looking for the Horse Cock Poem but I couldn't find it.

I was thinkin' about posting 'Thirteen' here, but I ws worried ppl might consider it all sycophantic and stuff! I actually sent Archel's page to two friends of mine who are big into the idea of being poetesses only the other week...

Gregory Henry (Gregory Henry), Tuesday, 6 April 2004 02:31 (twenty years ago) link

Thirteen


That birthday
would not slip past like all the others.
She felt her eyes widening
as it stuck in her throat,
that sickly pink-white icing.
She blew out the candles
and started wishing.
Her flesh dripped off like wax.

(Rachel Playforth)

Gregory Henry (Gregory Henry), Tuesday, 6 April 2004 02:33 (twenty years ago) link

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

James Wright - "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota"

bnw (bnw), Tuesday, 6 April 2004 04:35 (twenty years ago) link

You're a sweetheart G. However please stop using the word 'poetess' or I will have to kill you :)

Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 6 April 2004 08:31 (twenty years ago) link


Archaic Torso Of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Rainer Maria Rilke


donald, Thursday, 8 April 2004 00:55 (twenty years ago) link

I was looking at Archel's poems.

I think I still need to read them more slowly.

The whole meaning of the one about the horse has not reached me, yet.

But it will!

the pinefox, Thursday, 8 April 2004 08:31 (twenty years ago) link

good call on that rilke poem after the wright one.

bnw (bnw), Thursday, 8 April 2004 12:37 (twenty years ago) link

gregory: I know!

I have been reading sean o'brien's essays on contemporary british poetry the deregulated muse and can report that it is very good.

cozen (Cozen), Thursday, 8 April 2004 13:06 (twenty years ago) link

Really?

Do you like the poem, 'The Park By The Railway'?

the bluefox, Thursday, 8 April 2004 13:46 (twenty years ago) link

(oh, in response to your qn. upthread, pf, yes I that was written AFTER but I think I was still giddy with the excesses of drink.)

he says a few things I don't agree with in his essays and his aesthetic is more politically guided than my own; he doesn't manage to reach and talk about a few of my favourite poets in any depth but he has managed to open my eyes to a few people I had once glancingly dismissed (hughes [I read the birthday letters and got upset in the same way as I did with the lock-and-key cartography of pale fire]; and even, miraculously, motion.)

I have his collection ghost train (??) out at the moment, but it's resting in glasgow. I'm not sure I've read the poem you mention.

I have also taken out, in your honour, muldoon's why brownlee left.

cozen (Cozen), Thursday, 8 April 2004 16:32 (twenty years ago) link

Octavio Paz, 'Between Going and Staying'

Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

[...]

cozen (Cozen), Thursday, 8 April 2004 17:00 (twenty years ago) link

Fantastic Voyage (1966, Richard Fleischer, dir.)

the atrium of the heart beckons with pendulous lips
any seaman would point his submarine inside: sirens sing
an eye flutters. strewn with carrion: the cliffs

pilot: could I go deep into the plasma of the sea
pull myself from the wreckage. red tide, white squid
refractile bodies caught in this prismatic stream

surely salvation bilges. suffers our immersion
as a macrocyte absorbs a viral fret. into this deep
the whorl of shell and wave flash brilliant consecration

how the anvil beats within the limpet ear. we drift
[...]

D. A. Powell - [the atrium of the heart beckons with pendulous lips]

bnw (bnw), Friday, 9 April 2004 14:20 (twenty years ago) link

"Ireland", Paul Muldoon

The Volkswagen parked in the gap,
But gently ticking over.
You wonder if it's lovers
And not men hurrying back
Across two fields and a river.

cozen (Cozen), Friday, 9 April 2004 18:25 (twenty years ago) link

Some Auden for the weekend.

...in bed. (Chris Piuma), Saturday, 10 April 2004 02:37 (twenty years ago) link

That's the most honour I've ever had, round here.

the finefox, Saturday, 10 April 2004 08:01 (twenty years ago) link

A funny thing about The Deregulated Muse is this:

last night I found an old issue of Poetry Review what was designed by Jerry the Nipper, who was also writin' in it. And it also contained reviews of Sean O'Brien's anthology The Firebox, along with the Armitage / Crawford collection, AND Ian Sansom on The Deregulated Muse!

Meanwhile, I read something like 90pp of SO'B's pomes earlier in the day so for once I knew a little of what I was talking about, I mean, reading about.

I am not wholly sold on his... subtlety? intelligence?

But I guess what's thrown me most is the wee sketch of bristling him next to Sansom's review.

Should I blame the Nipper?

the pomefox, Saturday, 10 April 2004 08:04 (twenty years ago) link

It's funny looking at things you have written a long (or even a short) time ago. I am doing that now.

Most of it is real; crap.

Ally C (Ally C), Saturday, 10 April 2004 11:44 (twenty years ago) link

"To the Western World", L. Simpson

[...]

And grave by grave we civilize the ground.

[...]

cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 10 April 2004 11:53 (twenty years ago) link

It is worth saying, here, how good Poetry Review was during the Nipper's tenure. Perhaps I (have?) never appreciated it enough.
That issue with JtN, Sansom (I), Burt on Heaney, et al, really ain't shallow nor weak. I could read a lot more of this stuff.

the spellfox, Saturday, 10 April 2004 12:26 (twenty years ago) link

what are issue numbers, I'll seek them out post-haste!

(is there any nipper writing in them?)

JtN: you were otm re: 'Skid'. my copy arrived this morning; I'm enthralled.

cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 10 April 2004 16:11 (twenty years ago) link

Read THE NIPPER'S REVIEW OF PAUL FARLEY in an issue from c.1998 or, no, 1999?

If the Nipper was in, the country, he could tell us, naturally, or artificially.

I think that JtN provided some of the best moments in the guid magazine, but I am [fill in word: you decide].

the spellfox, Saturday, 10 April 2004 16:58 (twenty years ago) link

References.

Summer 1998, vol 88, #2: JtN on Farley: pp.88-89

Winter 1998, vol 88, #4: JtN on Pessoa: pp.13-14.

The second piece (there) quotes Paterson and Rimbaud, and mentions FO'B and a tad obliquely JJ's tenners.

The first piece (above) mentions the Dandy Warhols, Thomas Pynchon and... Don Paterson.

How long can you hold out?

the pomefox, Saturday, 10 April 2004 17:05 (twenty years ago) link

"If the world of modern male letters is increasingly an area defined by the pub, the record shop and the football terraces, a kind of literary Bermuda triangle where talented writers lose themselves in blokish enthusiasms, then Farley would appear to have all the right credentials."

cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 10 April 2004 18:19 (twenty years ago) link

The Truth of Masks.

cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 10 April 2004 18:22 (twenty years ago) link

Is the Farley one online too?

Odd... premonition of Ewing.

the pinefox, Saturday, 10 April 2004 22:30 (twenty years ago) link

Five words can say only.

(from Bob Perelman's "Chronic Meanings".)

...in bed. (Chris Piuma), Sunday, 11 April 2004 09:03 (twenty years ago) link

Do we think that JtN put that article (of his) on line him self?

the pomefox, Sunday, 11 April 2004 09:54 (twenty years ago) link

It is certainly a possibility. He is the master self-aggrandizer of our time. I'm joking.

I have been re-reading things. Some of it is perhaps not crap.

Ally C (Ally C), Sunday, 11 April 2004 10:31 (twenty years ago) link

Do you mean, your things?

the bellefox, Sunday, 11 April 2004 13:39 (twenty years ago) link

Sometimes.

Ally C (Ally C), Monday, 12 April 2004 09:45 (twenty years ago) link

People! This is for cutting and pasting lines from any poem...

My Little Utopia

Why the high, wrought-iron fence
With sharp spikes
And four padlocks and a chain
Over the heavy gate?

I drop by in late afternoon.
Make sure it's locked,
And peek through the bars
At the rows of sunny flowers.

The tree-lined winding path
Already streaked with shadow
Masking a couple kissing
As they mosey away from me.

Charles Simic

donald, Monday, 12 April 2004 12:12 (twenty years ago) link

13 I win you a ring at the rifle range
14 For the twentieth time, but you've chosen
15 A yellow, implausible fish in a bag
16 That you hold to one side when I kiss you.
17 Sitting in the waiting-room in darkness
18 Beside the empty cast-iron fireplace,
19 In the last of the heat the brick gives off,
20 Not quite convinced there will be no more trains,
21 At the end of a summer that never began
22 Till we lost it

From Sean O'Brien, 'The Park By The Railway'

(this one might be quite good, I think)

the pomefox, Tuesday, 13 April 2004 07:58 (twenty years ago) link

Haha.

Ally C (Ally C), Tuesday, 13 April 2004 11:53 (twenty years ago) link

Where should we meet but in this shabby park
2 Where the railings are missing and the branches black?
3 Industrial pastoral, our circuit
4 Of grass under ash, long-standing water
5 And unimportant sunsets flaring up
6 Above the half-dismantled fair. Our place
7 Of in-betweens, abandoned viaducts
8 And modern flowers, dock and willowherb,
9 Lost mongrels, birdsong scratching at the soot
10 Of the last century. Where should we be
11 But here, my industrial girl? Where else
12 But this city beyond conservation?

It's all good.

the pomefox, Wednesday, 14 April 2004 17:37 (twenty years ago) link

Let's look at the face of tragedy. Let's see it's creases,
its aquiline profile, its masculine jawbone. Let's hear it's thesis,
contralto with its diabolic rises:
the aria of effect beats cause's wheezes.
How are you, tragedy? We haven't seen you lately.
Hello, the medal's flip side gone lazy.
Let's examine your aspect, lady.

the first lines of Portrait of Tragedy - Joseph brodsky

aimurchie (aimurchie), Friday, 16 April 2004 04:24 (twenty years ago) link

Let's put our fingers into her mouth that gnashes
scurvy-eaten keyboards inflamed by wolfram flashes
showing her spit- rich palate with blizzards of kinfolk's ashes
Let's yank her hem, see if she blushes.
Well, tragedy, if you want, surprise us.
Show us a body betrayed or its demise, devices
for lost innocence, inner crisis.

third stanza Portrait of Tragedy - Joseph Brodsky

aimurchie (aimurchie), Friday, 16 April 2004 04:34 (twenty years ago) link

The next rung up from extra and dogsbody
and all the clichés are true – days waiting for
enough light, learning card games, penny-ante,
while fog rolls off the sea, a camera
gets moisture in its gate, and Roman Polanski
curses the day he chose Snowdonia.

He picked you for your hair to play this role:
a look had reached Bootle from Altamont
that year. You wouldn’t say you sold your soul
but learned your line inside a beating tent

(From 'Keith Chegwin as Fleance' - Paul Farley)

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Friday, 16 April 2004 12:04 (twenty years ago) link

boom. You have to care more. For us the dreamer is
a quincunx of trees in a gale of ink with a grace
as of owls that are not mere birds. For further guidelines
send nine dollars. If you are a churl, do not submit,
but do subscribe. We stay up late, and morning finds us
crusted with homage to fickle dancers whose hair is frizzy.
If you wish your poems returned, check the alley out back.
Know this, know this, we are not just "doing our thing",
we are not just "another eccentric mag". Things have gone
way, way past that. Life whispered "spring" and we sprang.
Do not take us for granted at Whang.

(From 'Whang Editorial Policy' by Mark Halliday. Full text here: http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/review/pr88-4/halliday.htm)

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Friday, 16 April 2004 12:07 (twenty years ago) link

[...]
Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,
Me breathing booze at her,
She leaning out of her pot toward the window.
Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me -
And that was scary -
So when that snuffling cretin of a maid
Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,
I said nothing.

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,
I was that lonely.

(from 'The Geranium' By Theodore Roethke)

Archel (Archel), Friday, 16 April 2004 13:20 (twenty years ago) link

[...]
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

(the end of 'Frost At Midnight' by ST Coleridge obv. I have always loved that last line quite unreasonably much.)

Archel (Archel), Friday, 16 April 2004 13:25 (twenty years ago) link

"silent icicles" is great, also.

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Friday, 16 April 2004 13:47 (twenty years ago) link

Thread back to proper usage?
It's fanciful.

Ally C (Ally C), Friday, 16 April 2004 15:42 (twenty years ago) link

My Life At Home During Banking Hours

For a solid month I tried
to think of something new to say about rivers
I called the newspaper to find out
how many horses were left on earth,
and numbly watched mosquitos swarm
over a pile of high-heeled shoes
while my colleagues hunted in the corners.

At least I was not in the line of work
that had me spending most of my day
avoiding God. My desk held painfully
complicated sufaces filled with shadow cassettes,
black bear theory and drinking water.

There was the sadness in a name like Jesse Winchester
and the wind howling
on the answering machine when I returned home
from daydreaming in a margarita shop.

All the blessings and counter-blessings
that move my mind like FM waves
from a butter churn, and granted me the sight
of parallel collies standing on a hilltop

And the rain falling on the United States
while it wonders
'What is the United States?'

I used to sing a song that went
'No more Springs, no more Summers, no more Falls'
I believed I was nearing the morning when
nettles would pour from the shower head.
When I would be ripped out of the world for re-casting
of blues and plastic.

I believed that I would finally break
where I had been bent,
that I would lose the game inside the game
But that has not happened,
And now I don't expect it ever will.

(David Berman)

Ally C (Ally C), Friday, 16 April 2004 16:05 (twenty years ago) link

I have only ever heard this pome and never seen it, so some of the words are almost certainly wrong and I have made up the formatting.

But I love it so.

Ally C (Ally C), Friday, 16 April 2004 16:06 (twenty years ago) link

the full text, for interested parties, of the keith chegwin as fléance poem is hidden somewhere on ile.

cozen (Cozen), Friday, 16 April 2004 16:39 (twenty years ago) link

Poetry is only for wimps and wankers. Fortunately everybody is somtimes. Now, what are the differences between American and European poetry today?
Oops I am in the wrong thread. Ok. Let´s have a poem:

The Pope's Penis

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat - and at night,
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.

----- Sharon Olds

Finally: “Asked what distinguished him, as a poet, from an ordinary man, Wallace Stevens replied, Inability to see much point to the life of an ordinary man.”

Ingolfur Gislason (kreator), Sunday, 18 April 2004 22:05 (twenty years ago) link

Okay, it's official. The Pope's Penis is now my favorite poem of all time.

scott seward (scott seward), Sunday, 18 April 2004 22:10 (twenty years ago) link

Wallace Stevens wuz wrong.

Archel (Archel), Monday, 19 April 2004 08:23 (twenty years ago) link

I think he means "ordinary man" as unexamined life, fwiw.

bnw (bnw), Monday, 19 April 2004 19:43 (twenty years ago) link

bnw, will you post an extract of your own poesie some time? False modesty be damned.

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 19 April 2004 20:04 (twenty years ago) link

Well you tell me: what's the point in being ordinary. Seem's a pretty low aim somehow. Everybody should try for more. Of course, on closer inspection, most people are a bit out of the ordinary. Go ahead, name one person which is totally ordinary. This post may have been beside the point though.

Ingolfur Gislason (kreator), Monday, 19 April 2004 20:28 (twenty years ago) link

Sumer is icumen in - loudly sing cuckoo!

aimurchie (aimurchie), Tuesday, 20 April 2004 01:34 (twenty years ago) link

yikes... now i will be editing something to post for the next 5 hours

bnw (bnw), Tuesday, 20 April 2004 02:06 (twenty years ago) link

okay, this one's a few years old, (so I am fairly safely detached from it.)

--
After An Argument Over Global Warming

You feign sleep and face the wall
because you believe in ice shelves
cleaving under the weight of their water.

Your birthmark melts down in the dark.
The lack of pigment sapped into a lack of light.

We stood in the kitchen with the faucet running.
You at the sink washing the same plate over and over, me
propped up on the counter top. I spoke of the shoreline

creeping upward in inches over centuries.
The gradual spread of seashore
and drift of continents.

You saw the bayou sucked into the Gulf.
Desert droughts blooming in the countryside.
Monsoons washing out the soil.

And when I said "Beauty is slow," you dropped the plate
like a shard of ice and bolted into the bedroom.
The faucet running.

bnw (bnw), Tuesday, 20 April 2004 03:08 (twenty years ago) link

okay, since I can't bear that my self-indulgence killed the thread...

...
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

Death of a Naturalist - Seamus Heaney
(i used this as a freaky trigger focus group response but i don't think it ever ran.)

bnw (bnw), Thursday, 22 April 2004 17:11 (twenty years ago) link

I think "After An Argument..." is gorgeous.

last stanza of "Lost in Translation" by James Merrill

Lost, is it, buried? One more missing piece?

But nothing's lost. Or else: all is translation
And every bit of us is lost in it
(Or found-I wander through the ruin of S
Now and then, wondering at the peacefulness)
And in that loss a self effacing tree,
Color of context, imperceptibly
Rustling with its angel, turns the waste
To shade and fiber, milk and memory.

aimurchie (aimurchie), Saturday, 24 April 2004 23:40 (twenty years ago) link

Sunday morning. My post the last post. I need some poetry, friends. If someone else doesn't post something immediately I will transcribe the entire Norton Anthology. Donald, post that poem I love, the one from the Dionis Coffin workshop.

aimurchie, Sunday, 25 April 2004 12:19 (twenty years ago) link

The wonderment of fundement

Early in spring the weather hasn't changed.
The concert-room is peppishness unhinged.

Tonight the lady pianist who plays
con fuoco hardly hears her own applause.

*

A Mr Macaroni stops his Ford
two streets away and lets the engine flood,

the radio just loud enough to hear,
one crate of pippin-apples, one of beer.

*

She makes her music, loosening her hands.
The moment holds. But if the evening ends,

[...]

Matthew Welton

cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 25 April 2004 12:34 (twenty years ago) link

Meanwhile, it is a beautiful day, and I just (successfully) used a hammer to open a window - and nothing broke! I think I spelled successfully wrong, but in the dictionary success is spelled success and is surrounded by succedaneum and succession.Please put an end to this ridiculous (ridgy - riding) minutia (minuteman - Minyades)and post something (somersault - somite). Else I will transcribe (transcontinental - transcrystalline) the entire dictionary (dicrotic - Dictynna).

aimurchie, Sunday, 25 April 2004 12:35 (twenty years ago) link

ROOM

For another bone in the stock,
mug of water in the soup,
more of the plate,
more fresh air baked into the cake:
for a better look at the bread
through the butter, at the knee
through the trouser leg;
for a longer washing line,
for the bar of grime
to be raised a little higher up the side of the shared brown bath;
for a wider photograph,
extra drawer –
another face,
but it’s full of yours.

Jacob Polley

cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 25 April 2004 12:36 (twenty years ago) link

In memory of Friday's weather, here in the Midwest:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginably You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

-E. E. Cummings

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Sunday, 25 April 2004 12:37 (twenty years ago) link

Before You Cut Loose,

1                               put dogs on the list
2          of difficult things to lose. Those dogs ditched
3          on the North York Moors or the Sussex Downs
4          or hurled like bags of sand from rented cars
5          have followed their noses to market towns
6          and bounced like balls into their owners' arms.
7          I heard one story of a dog that swam
8          to the English coast from the Isle of Man,
9          and a dog that carried eggs and bacon
10        and a morning paper from the village
11        surfaced umpteen leagues and two years later,
12        bacon eaten but the eggs unbroken,
13        newsprint dry as tinder, to the letter.
14        A dog might wander the width of the map
15        to bury its head in its owner's lap,
16        crawl the last mile to dab a bleeding paw
17        against its own front door. To die at home,
18        a dog might walk its four legs to the bone.
19        You can take off the tag and the collar
20        but a dog wears one coat and one colour.
21        A dog got rid of---that's a dog for life.
22        No dog howls like a dog kicked out at night.
23        Try looking a dog like that in the eye.

Simon Armitage

cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 25 April 2004 12:39 (twenty years ago) link

Good Friday, Driving Westward

1          The rain. Rain that will not end.
2          The daily errands. Daily bread.
3          No letting up. No pause
4          as I steer blindly, circling
5          the great city. City of tears and blood.
6          I woke this morning to the ringing phone.
7          To the last days of the twentieth century.
8          Hello. Hello. But the line was dead.
9          The phone in my hand heavy.
10        My mind whirling. Numb. Taken

[...]

Elizabeth Spires

cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 25 April 2004 15:15 (twenty years ago) link

Cozen: odd, that title reminds me of one of Muldoon's very early ones.

the pomefox, Monday, 26 April 2004 14:28 (twenty years ago) link

First, anybody gives gold cushions or seems to do so
while doing something under the conditions of competition,
after which anybody boils delicate things,
being in flight,
doing something consciously,
& keeping up a process.

Next, anybody gets an orange from a hat, takes it, & keeps it;
then anybody goes under
while doing something under the conditions of competition
& ends by putting in languages other than English.

--Jackson Mac Low, "19th Dance - Going Under - 1 March 1964"

Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 26 April 2004 17:45 (twenty years ago) link

Her Old Man, made of grit not protein,
still visits my Austrian several

with His old detachment, and the old warnings
still have power to scare me: Hybris comes to
an ugly finish, Irreverence
is a greater oaf than Superstition.

Our apparatniks will continue making
the usual squalid mess called History:
all we can pray for is that artists,
chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.

[Auden - "Moon Landing']

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 26 April 2004 19:05 (twenty years ago) link

Remember the night we did
    it in your house,
      Joe?
   (Me and Anne, that is)
        *
    It was Nice
        *
I guess I'd fuck anyone
    who thinks I'm
            terrific!
    Tho you never can
       tell.
    --------
"All I really want to do is
    have my back
        rubbed."
     --Anne Waldman

-- Ted Berrigan, from "Train Ride"

(I hope the formatting worked out OK...)

Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 26 April 2004 20:42 (twenty years ago) link

I stand...peering in, as through time,at a little window
at the oilcloth table,
at my mother, my father, at myself
a child of five, reading a primer,
mouthing the letters.

It snows, obscuring the lamp until, in a Great Plains blizzard,
I find myself in a self-constructed Eskimo igloo
waiting with the family lantern in the yard,
for father to come up the path from work,
lift me and take me inside the house
to the warm flickering wicks
before a harsh electric glare had replaced them.
I remember sitting in the snowhouse waiting.
...

Father, mother take me back even though life was harsh
in the small kitchen.
Who would have dreamed
the universe so large?

...

Can there not be miniature time? Some place where one stays
forever at the kitchen table,
on the same page of one's book,
with one's parents looking on,
an old photograph perhaps
but that would have faded.
We would not truly be there.
...

I do not recognize this alien grown up body.
I will not recognize it ever.
I am there, there, in the yellow light in the kitchen,
reading on the stained oilcloth
We are all there. I did not grow up.
...

I have rushed like a moth through time
toward the light in the kitchen.
I am safe now. I never grew up.
I am no longer lost in the mist on the mountain.

(Loren Eiseley, The Innocent Assassins)

No relation.



pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Monday, 26 April 2004 23:04 (twenty years ago) link

"Tancred" to "tantalite" for "I"

A tree trunk is something "pressed together" and so
is money, weighed. Both produce softly graded shadows
by repeated small touches (resembling freckles), or
use "for" to become appendages capable of passing implements
through substances with circular movements.

Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 28 April 2004 17:07 (twenty years ago) link

pepek, thanks for that poem... my god, it's wonderful.

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Wednesday, 28 April 2004 17:38 (twenty years ago) link

I second that emotion, yesa...

aimurchie, Wednesday, 28 April 2004 18:19 (twenty years ago) link

Oh, I forgot to attribute my last poem, but of course it's Tina Darragh, from "on the corner" to "off the corner".

Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 29 April 2004 00:06 (twenty years ago) link

Thanks. Loren Eiseley is wonderful.

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Friday, 30 April 2004 03:40 (twenty years ago) link

Don't want to take up much more space but for comparison, try this from Dylan Thomas:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
...Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes...

...In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means...

And nothing cared I...that time allows...
so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace...

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.

(Fern Hill, of course. Which I think is the greatest poem in the English language.)

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Friday, 30 April 2004 03:53 (twenty years ago) link

young easy apple boughs
lilting house happy grass green
time hail climb
golden heydays eyes

sun young
time play
golden mercy means

cared time allows
morning songs
children green golden
follow grace

young easy mercy means
time held green dying
sang chains sea

Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 30 April 2004 04:05 (twenty years ago) link

allows apple boughs cared chains children climb dying easy easy eyes follow golden golden golden grace grass green green green hail happy held heydays house lilting means means mercy mercy morning play sang sea songs sun time time time time young young young

Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 30 April 2004 04:13 (twenty years ago) link

Let's compare with the Eisley:

alien blizzard body book child come dreamed electric eskimo faded family father father father find five flickering glare great grew grow grown harsh harsh house igloo kitchen kitchen kitchen kitchen lamp lantern large letters life lift light light little looking lost miniature mist moth mother mother mountain mouthing myself myself obscuring oilcloth oilcloth old page parents path peering photograph place plains primer reading reading recognize recognize remember replaced rushed safe same self-constructed sitting small snowhouse snows stained stays table table take take time time time truly universe waiting waiting warm wicks window work yard yellow

Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 30 April 2004 04:19 (twenty years ago) link

(Sorry, Eiseley.)

Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 30 April 2004 04:22 (twenty years ago) link

Wait, sorry, let's try this with the Eiseley:

time; little window; oilcloth table; mother; father; child; primer; letters;
lamp; Great Plains blizzard; self-constructed Eskimo igloo; family lantern; yard; path; work; house; warm flickering wicks; harsh electric glare; snowhouse;
father; mother; life (harsh) ; small kitchen; universe (large);
miniature time; place; kitchen table; same page; book; old photograph (faded);
alien grown up body; yellow light; kitchen; stained oilcloth;
moth; time; light; kitchen; [I (safe, no longer lost)]; mist; mountain

Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 30 April 2004 08:01 (twenty years ago) link

No poem to post. I just want to say that this thread IS my morning coffee. And shapes my day, And is often the last thing I read before sleep.

aimurchie, Friday, 30 April 2004 10:10 (twenty years ago) link

You can be anything. Zenobia of Palmyra
startled awake in childhood by a bird
in her father's palace almost floats into the courtyard.
The cook whose boyfriend's been hauled to prison
for killing her mother writes letters never delivered
because the landlord wants to control her life, waits in the hall
to assault her when she comes back from shopping. The bourgeois wife
sleeps with her husband's banker and having given birth
to a foundling who grows up to be a semiliterate stick-up artist
must finally recognize it's her own child who's stabbed her

(''For a Diva' by Geoffrey O'Brien, whose brilliant book about pop I am relishing at the moment.

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Friday, 30 April 2004 10:33 (twenty years ago) link

MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.

The Flea, John Donne

Cathryn (Cathryn), Friday, 30 April 2004 11:38 (twenty years ago) link

Should we publish the ILB anthology yet?

Archel (Archel), Friday, 30 April 2004 12:54 (twenty years ago) link

...
And when it chanced
That pauses of deep silence mock'd his skill,
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprize
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents, or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, receiv'd
Into the bosom of steady lake.
...

- William Wordsworth, 'There was a boy...'

Archel (Archel), Friday, 30 April 2004 12:58 (twenty years ago) link

oooh, ILB anthology, Archel.... that's making me quiver :D

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Friday, 30 April 2004 13:05 (twenty years ago) link

Passport

To cross the border
Between the sunflower
And the moonflower
Between the alphabet
Of handwritten
And printed events.

To be friend of all atoms
Which form the light
That sings with the atoms
For the atoms that die
To enter into all the days of one's life
No matter
whether they fall on one side or the other
Of the word
'Earth'.

This passport
Is written in my bones
On my skull, femur, phalanges and spine
All arranged in a way
To make clear
My right to be human.

Marin Sorescu

bnw (bnw), Friday, 30 April 2004 13:15 (twenty years ago) link

read poisonous snake not snack read heavy aspirated lips pronounced as
in (insert ex. postal punctured loons falls dark fell on one side only to
read bodies errottom the whats and organs all too evident fr corol prop pt
9 and that philia to which it has in past referred p.26 1st line last para:
Huxley, one of oldest figs in Eng Lit, should read oddest

(from Errata 5uite by Joan Retallack)

Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 30 April 2004 17:38 (twenty years ago) link

Hurrah! (Not my last) -- To be friend of all atoms...Of the word "Earth" is FINE.

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Friday, 30 April 2004 19:13 (twenty years ago) link

PS I liked THe Pope's Penis" too, but I didn't try to make my husband read it. Sharon Olds is also fine.

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Friday, 30 April 2004 19:15 (twenty years ago) link

PS I liked THe Pope's Penis" too, but I didn't try to make my husband read it. Sharon Olds is also fine:

Then I understood--if it had been
half a generation later
you would have been lovers, you would have married
and it seems to me I might be dead by now,
dead long since, not married, or married
badly, never had children or written any
words. I'd have died on West 12th Street, that time,
making a bomb--badly--they would have
identified me by my little finger, my
mother sitting at the precinct, holding
my cocked pinky.

To My Husband

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Friday, 30 April 2004 19:28 (twenty years ago) link

Sorry about the repetition.

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Friday, 30 April 2004 19:32 (twenty years ago) link

:) :) :) :) :)

I think I love you, all.

cozen (Cozen), Friday, 30 April 2004 20:23 (twenty years ago) link

One mountain juts out on the west, one mountain on the east, Clearly inscribing the character "eight" right on thewater's suface. Coming and going, past and present -how much suffering? The travelers' sadness is entirely contained in these "eyebrow" peaks.

A Nairn (moretap), Saturday, 1 May 2004 00:20 (twenty years ago) link

pepe - I have had to read "To My Husband" several times. The pinky finger....it is entirely too beautiful. My beloved, who is responsible for the broken finger, just says "Go back to ILB. You know you're going to do it anyway."

aimurchie, Saturday, 1 May 2004 03:01 (twenty years ago) link

Cuttings

Sticks-in-a-drowse drop over sugary loam,
Their intricate stem-fur dries;
But still the delicate slip keeps coaxing up water;
The small cells bulge.

One nub of growth
Nudges a sand-crumb loose,
Pokes through a musty sheath
Its pale tendrilous horn.

Theodore Roethke

aimurchie, Saturday, 1 May 2004 03:13 (twenty years ago) link

aimurchie, yes I thought of you yes and your broken pinky finger yes and of To My Husband yes when I sent that poem yes and yes and yes

I love Roethke even more than Sharon Olds. Yes.

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Saturday, 1 May 2004 04:47 (twenty years ago) link

Some Japanese poetry for the morning:

As for the hibiscus
by the roadside,
my horse ate it.
-Basho

Napped half the day -
no one
punished me.
-Issa

aimurchie, Saturday, 1 May 2004 11:31 (twenty years ago) link

oh, aim & pepek, like cozen, I've developed a crush, I think... ;) What lovely, delicious posts!

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Saturday, 1 May 2004 12:11 (twenty years ago) link

Two of my favorite haiku authors, aim... Here's another (female) I enjoy too:

The memories of long love
gather like drifting snow,
poignant as the mandarin ducks
who float side by side in sleep.

MURASAKI SHIKIBU

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Saturday, 1 May 2004 12:17 (twenty years ago) link

Archel suggested an ILB anthology... I've not been able to shake that thought all week. If y'all would like, I'd be delighted to gather these together and send them as a Word/WP document...

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Saturday, 1 May 2004 12:20 (twenty years ago) link

:D Why not?

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Saturday, 1 May 2004 16:01 (twenty years ago) link

All gone, the snow: grass throngs back to the fields,
and trees grow out new hair;
earth follows her changes, and subsiding streams
jostle within their banks.

The three graces and the greenwood nymphs,
naked, dare to dance.
You won't live always, warn the year and the hour,
seizing the honeyed day.
...

Who knows how many tomorrows the gods will add
to day's small sum?
Whatever you spend in pleasures now, you won't
leave in your heir's moist grip.

--excerpt from IV. 7 Ode by Horace. tran. Rosanna Warren

donald, Saturday, 1 May 2004 16:13 (twenty years ago) link

Abandoned unborn by my begetters
I was still dead a few spring days ago:
no beat in the breast, no breath in me.

A kinswoman covered me in the clothes she wore,
no kind but kind indeed. I was coddled & swaddled
as close as I had been a baby of her own,
until, as had been shaped, so shielded, though no kin,
the unguessed guest grew great with life.

She fended for me, fostered me, she fed me up,
till I was of a size to set my bounds
further afield. She had fewer dear
sons and daughters because she did so.

[Riddle No. 9 from the Exeter Book, translated from the Anglo-Saxon by Michael Alexander.]

Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 1 May 2004 16:33 (twenty years ago) link

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
" 'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door;
Only this, and nothing more."
Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow, sorrow for the lost Lenore,.
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore,
Nameless here forevermore

Nelly Mc Causland (Geborwyn), Saturday, 1 May 2004 18:43 (twenty years ago) link

Among Our Great Cermonies

A serious love touches the universe,
the two and one of it contributing to the sum of what's real.
Not that planets or even hydrogen atoms
begin falling toward you,yet something intensifies
where you are. The different light
shed by double stars. No consensus why they form,
or how they'll dim or dazzle, perishing.

Laura Fargas ( do I love this poem? I think so. She's an attorney. I forgive her.)

aimurchie, Saturday, 1 May 2004 20:00 (twenty years ago) link

I love this! (Two of my sons are attorneys, and a third will be. Attorneys are OK. One loves to SMELL books--my first contact with ILB) Early one morning, when I was little, maybe 7 years old, I crawled into bed with my mother and we memorized this together from a poet called Saadi (I think):

If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft,
and of thy slender store
two loaves alone to thee are left--
sell one, and with the dole
buy hyacinths to feed thy soul

...one of the best memories I have of her. For some reason, Among Our Great Ceremonies reminded me of this.

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Saturday, 1 May 2004 20:19 (twenty years ago) link

Stop spawning lawyers! (kidding) Yours reminds me of this beauty, posted not so long ago:

The memories of long love
gather like drifting snow,
poignant as the mandarin ducks
who float side by side in sleep.

aimurchie, Saturday, 1 May 2004 22:56 (twenty years ago) link

may I add that "Once Upon a Midnight Dreary" with the tap tap tapping had particular significance today when the Jehovah's Witnesses came tap,tap, tapping on my door. I was barely dressed...and I was on the phone ...but they are always very polite. AND as I told them I wasn't in the mood for a chat, they asked about the pinky finger!
They were both pretty darned handsome as well - I'm sure they were equally impressed with my braless tank top and long johns as couture. And hairy armpits.

aimurchie, Sunday, 2 May 2004 01:39 (twenty years ago) link

:D! I have long since stopped spawning. One more (poem). Just one for a Sunday morning and I'll stop: From Nancy Willard's Among Angels.

PRAYER

Angel of lost spectacles
and hen's teeth

angel of snow's breath
and the insomnia

of cats, angel
of snapshots fading

to infinity,
don't drop me--

shoeless,
wingless.

Defender of Burrows,
carry me--

carry me
in your pocket of light.

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Sunday, 2 May 2004 02:36 (twenty years ago) link

Good enough, pepek, if you and I are the only ones to want such an ILB Anthology for our personal use - I'm fine with it. I'll use May 31 as the cut off for posts here and gather them up and email them to you. *ahem* And anyone else interested can let me know ;)

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Sunday, 2 May 2004 12:53 (twenty years ago) link

Since I have a outre fascination with the story of the "Frog Prince"...

From the Journals of the Frog Prince
-Susan Mitchell ©1983

In March I dreamed of mud,
sheets of mud over the ballroom chairs and table,
rainbow slicks of mud under the throne.
In April I saw mud of clouds and mud of sun.
Now in May I find excuses to linger in the kitchen
for wafts of silt and ale,
cinnamon and river bottom,
tender scallion and sour underlog.

At night I cannot sleep.
I am listening for the dribble of mud
climbing the stairs to our bedroom
as if a child in a wet bathing suit ran
up them in the dark.

Last night I said, "Face it, you’re bored.
How many times can you live over
with the same excitment
that moment when the princess leans
into the well, her face a petal
falling to the surface of the water
as you rise like a bubble to her lips,
the golden ball bursting from your mouth?"
Remember how she hurled you against the wall,
your body cracking open,
skin shriveling to the bone,
the green pod of your heart splitting in two,
and her face imprinted with every moment
of your transformation?

I no longer tremble.

Night after night I lie beside her.
"Why is your forehead so cool and damp?" she asks.
Her breasts are soft and dry as flour.
The hand that brushes my head is feverish.
At her touch I long for wet leaves,
the slap of water against rocks.

"What are you thinking of?" she asks.
How can I tell her
I am thinking of the green skin
shoved like wet pants behind the Directoire desk?
Or tell her I am mortgaged to the hilt
of my sword, to the leek-green tip of my soul?
Someday I will drag her by her hair
to the river--and what? Drown her?
Show her the green flame of my self rising at her feet?
But there’s no more violence in her
than in a fence or a gate.

"What are you thinking of?" she whispers.
I am staring into the garden.
I am watching the moon
wind its trail of golden slime around the oak,
over the stone basin of the fountain.
How can I tell her
I am thinking that transformations are not forever?

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Sunday, 2 May 2004 17:09 (twenty years ago) link

This sounds a lot like Anne Sexton.... don't you think? Egad, I have developed such an ADDICTION to this! It calls out to me when I watch TV, when I fix lunch, when I am in the shower! When I read to a grandchild! I can hear its voice calling over the voice of Garrison Keillor in A Prarie Home Companion! ...log on, log on, log on....

By the way, I really love this last poem.

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Sunday, 2 May 2004 19:23 (twenty years ago) link

(My band has a song based on the frog prince, not that we've released it yet or anything.)

Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 2 May 2004 19:25 (twenty years ago) link

"Aleksander Wat's Tie"

That tie, knitted, with a thick knot
that matched perfectly a dark-colored shirt
and a tweed jacket, ravished me.

This was a really elegant fellow,
with his short-sropped black mustache.

We were introduced on Mazowiecka Street, a few steps
from Ziemianska restaurant and Mortkowicz's bookstore
(the only place in Warsaw that carried my Three Winters,
Published in an edition of 300 copies).

Whoever believes in Providence must see an Eye:
A rider from the Pamir Mountains gallops, all in rose and purple.
Then Benvenue Street in Berkeley and Wat on the couch.
His astonishment as he tries to grasp his fate.
And I, a young provincial with a tape recorder
who, it seems, was destined to bear witness.

It is true we lived together
through that horrible New Year's Supper of 1950.

Poor Wat,
he suffered enough in Kazakhstan and Tajikstan.

A beautiful tie was of no avail,
nor the street of phantoms, Mazowiecka, in Warsaw.

-Czeslaw Milosz


Jocelyn (Jocelyn), Monday, 3 May 2004 16:56 (twenty years ago) link

Casuistry, so does Peter Gabriel... Got lyrics you can post?

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Monday, 3 May 2004 17:06 (twenty years ago) link

Against my better judgment (lyrics are meant to be heard and not read), here they are:

Tattoo

The mark on my arm makes it perfectly clear
that I was once a prince among frogs.
My father made it perfectly clear
that someday, I would rule the swamp.

If you ask me, you can't make cheap enough whiskey.
If you ask me, you can't make it cheap enough.
If you ask me, you can't make cheap enough whiskey.
If you ask me, you can't make it cheap enough.

This tattoo no longer reminds me of me
though my shoes are still covered in muck.
And there are flies, more of them every day
though none of them will be eaten up.

Cause without them, who else would be listening?
And without them who else would be near me?
Without them who else would be listening?
And without them who else would kiss me?

Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 3 May 2004 17:43 (twenty years ago) link

I really like those lyrics Chris!

Ah, this thread has nearly warmed through my cold little wage slave heart this morning.

And YES I would like an anthology please :)

Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 4 May 2004 08:33 (twenty years ago) link

I picked up a. r. ammons' 'garbage today' (I heard byron's 'ammons!!!' as my eyes drifted over the spine in the bookshop) along with seamus heaney's 'beowulf'. I turned down a clutch of 'poetry book society recommended' bloodaxe and carcanet collections and left on the shelf alice oswald's 'dart', simon armitage's 'zoom', and t.s. eliot's 'four quartets'. O to have more money &c.

cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 17:00 (twenty years ago) link

sp: 'garbage'.

should I go back for those three stragglers at £3, £2, and £3 apiece?

also, I found a copy of don paterson's 'the landing light' (in the hardback edn. no less) in fopp union street for £5. just a few weeks after I shelled out £9 for the paper back. grr &c.

cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 17:02 (twenty years ago) link

garbage can be a battle to get through. I recommend The Really Short Poems of AR Ammons or Brink Road as starting points for those averse to long poems, like me.

bnw (bnw), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 18:20 (twenty years ago) link

I never got far in "Garbage" but "Tape for the Turn of the Year" was great. The short poems are pretty nice too. £3 seems like a lot for "Four Quartets" since I'm pretty sure you could find it online easily.

Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 18:48 (twenty years ago) link

re: eliot - ahh, I like it in my hands though.

re:'garbage' - I've never seen, nor will ever see, any a. r. ammons on general sale (i.e. without having to special request it) in any british bookshops plus it was chopped down to only £2. I couldn't resist.

cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, 5 May 2004 22:10 (twenty years ago) link

No appropriate thread to post this on - but my author copies of 'Three Voices' just arrived on my desk! Which is exciting! The cover is unexpectedly pink and green, but it works. Post-free copies available soon from The Frogmore Press or, I guess, me, at £3.95.

:) :)

Archel (Archel), Thursday, 6 May 2004 09:19 (twenty years ago) link

The Answer by Bill Knott

Leaving the house,
the house will be
left completely,
from cellar to
attic my absence
entire.

Do I enter the world
the same,
my presence felt
from cloud
to ditch?

Only in departure whole.
Arrival
is always partial.

j c (j c), Thursday, 6 May 2004 11:26 (twenty years ago) link

Apologies, this is breaking the rules but as you'll see it wouldn't really work except in its entirety:

The Back Seat Of My Mother's Car

We left before I had time
to comfort you, to tell you that we nearly touched
hands in that vacuous half-dark. I wanted
to stem the burning waters running over me like tiny
rivers down my face and legs, but at the same time I was reaching out
for the slit in the window where the sky streamed in,
cold as ether, and I could see your fat mole-fingers grasping
the dusty August air. I pressed my face to the glass;
I was calling to you - Daddy! - as we screeched away into
the distance, my own hand tingling like an amputation.
You were mouthing something I still remember, the noiseless words,
piercing me like that catgut shriek that flew up, furious as a sunset
pouring itself out against the sky. The ensuing silence
was the one clear thing I could decipher -
the roar of the engine drowning your voice,
with the cool slick glass between us.

With the cool slick glass between us,
the roar of the engine drowning, your voice
was the one clear thing I could decipher -
pouring itself out against the sky, the ensuing silence
piercing me like that catgut shriek that flew up, furious as a sunset.
You were mouthing something: I still remember the noiseless words,
the distance, my own hand tingling like an amputation.
I was calling to you, Daddy, as we screeched away into
the dusty August air. I pressed my face to the glass,
cold as ether, and I could see your fat mole-fingers grasping
for the slit in the window where the sky streamed in
rivers down my face and legs, but at the same time I was reaching out
to stem the burning waters running over me like tiny
hands in that vacuous half-dark. I wanted
to comfort you, to tell you that we nearly touched.
We left before I had time.

- Julia Copus

Archel (Archel), Thursday, 6 May 2004 11:35 (twenty years ago) link

That was one of the most restrained Knott poems I've ever read. It sounds a lot like that Mark Strand poem I think I already posted "Keeping Things Whole."

bnw (bnw), Thursday, 6 May 2004 12:15 (twenty years ago) link

Nine Syllables Label Sylvia

Poet Sylvia Plath is pregnant.
Sylvia's pregnant with her poem.
Pregnancy is only nine letters.
Syllable, a metaphor for month?
Sylvia's nine pregnant syllables!
Pregnant: creative and inventive.
Poet and her poem, both pregnant.
Pregnant means filled and charged with meaning.
Sylvia is a pregnant poem.

[Harryette Mullen]

(Congrats, Archel!)

Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 6 May 2004 15:04 (twenty years ago) link

Cozen, you are so well-read that sometimes I am really surprised at what you have not read -- Four Quartets, for instance.

I think about that late TSE these days and reckon: I am no longer sure that TSE and EP are good models for a poet.

I don't claim that they would care either way, or reckon that their being models was the most important thing about them.

the bluefox, Thursday, 6 May 2004 15:06 (twenty years ago) link

PS, Cozen, I have been reading Muldoon again - Why Brownlee left - we should maybe have a whole thread on Muldoon some time?

the finefox, Thursday, 6 May 2004 15:07 (twenty years ago) link

You should start a thread about whether EP and TSE are good models for a poet, and if not them then who?

Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 6 May 2004 15:24 (twenty years ago) link

Nobody?

Oddly, this just reminded me of the open mic horror last night: the first 'act' was a man clutching a book of Goons scripts, which he proceeded to read from, DOING ALL THE VOICES. For about TEN MINUTES.

Archel (Archel), Thursday, 6 May 2004 15:30 (twenty years ago) link

Poetic Models

the pomefox, Thursday, 6 May 2004 15:33 (twenty years ago) link

I'm not sure how much I like muldoon. an armitage thread could be interesting; I've started reading him. I picked up o'brien's latest ('downriver') today: hmmm.

I've not read much eliot, to be honest, and have read so little pound as to be able to say I haven't read pound at all.

cozen (Cozen), Thursday, 6 May 2004 16:33 (twenty years ago) link

M'amour, m'amour
          what do I love and
             where are you?
That I lost my center
           fighting the world.
The dreams clash
           and are shattered --
and that I tried to make a paradiso
                   terrestre

[Ezra Pound, a fragment of a very late Canto that was never finished]

Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 7 May 2004 06:49 (twenty years ago) link

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them
For an old bitch gone in the teeth
For a botched civilization,

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

[Ezra Pound, the last section of "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley", about WWI]

Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 7 May 2004 06:55 (twenty years ago) link

Thank you, Chris.

I have read the 'Four Quartets' now. Wow. I think you were onto something when you said his poetry is a worldweary sigh. But what a sigh!

cozen (Cozen), Friday, 7 May 2004 13:11 (twenty years ago) link

Casuistry - great lyrics, really, mind if they go into the ILB Anthology I'll be gathering up?

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Friday, 7 May 2004 14:06 (twenty years ago) link

Since it's for internal use only, so to speak, sure. I realized I got the words wrong, though! The last lines of the stanza should end "near me / listening / near me / kiss me", instead of what's there. Oops.

Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 7 May 2004 15:18 (twenty years ago) link

In a Station of the Metro

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

--Ezra Pound

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Friday, 7 May 2004 23:43 (twenty years ago) link

And from TS Eliot:

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;...

And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase....

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Friday, 7 May 2004 23:52 (twenty years ago) link

I just went through the whole thread again. Geez there's some wonderful stuff here! Thanks, everybody!

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Sunday, 9 May 2004 16:40 (twenty years ago) link

favourites?

cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 9 May 2004 16:54 (twenty years ago) link

Santiago: Five Men in the Street: Number Two

In the back of a garbage truck parked on a side street,
five garbage collectors gobble a chocolate cake,
the gift of a lady each would like to squeeze a lot.

Sprawled in the gutter a black dog licks his dick
like there is no tomorrow, and no tomorrow either
for the five men eating with grubby fingers, smearing

the hand-cut slabs of thick black cake onto cheeks,
chins, noses and sometimes their mouths. That frosting
dribbles sweetness like a cut wrist drips blood

and they suck it from their fingernails and gulp down
the last crumbs. How disgusting! squawks a passing
matron to her friend. Had they fathomed the fullness

of the world's filth they would never have trusted
their pristine garbage to these galoots. One puffs out
his cheeks to make a poot-poot noise like a fart,

and the matrons scuttle off to eat sweet creams and read
their lady poems. What a dreadful world! The immortal
verse of Keats versus a dog's red dick on the concrete.

Such contradictions make us rich. The black dog whacks
his tail against the sidewalk. These garbage guys
are his heroes and the dog reckons that if he's polite

all five will let him lick their fingers clean. The hot
sun baking his belly, his fleas idle for a change,
the prospect of sweet things in his mouth. Why, if he

could talk, he'd make a speech against the intellect,
art and math. What's so precious about what's not there?
Into the trash with Einstein and his furious sums!

Stephen Dobyns

scott seward (scott seward), Sunday, 9 May 2004 16:56 (twenty years ago) link

Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

scott seward (scott seward), Sunday, 9 May 2004 17:11 (twenty years ago) link


Tomatoes

A woman travels to Brazil for plastic
surgery and a face-lift. She is sixty
and has the usual desire to stay pretty.
Once she is healed she takes her new face
out on the streets of Rio. A young man
with a gun wants her money. Bang, she's dead.
The body is shipped back to New York,
but in the morgue there is a mix-up. The son
is sent for. He is told that his mother
is one of these ten different women.
Each has been shot. Such is modern life.
He studies them all but can't find her.
With her new face, she has become a stranger.
Maybe it's this one, maybe it's that one.
He looks at their breasts. Which ones nursed him?
He presses their hands to his cheek.
Which ones consoled him? He even tries
climbing into their laps to see which
feels more familiar but the coroner stops him.
Well, says the coroner, which is your mother?
They all are, says the young man, let me
take them as a package. The coroner hesitates,
then agrees. Actually it solves a lot of problems.
The young man has the ten women shipped home,
then cremates them all together. You've seen
how some people have a little urn on the mantle?
This man has a huge silver garbage can.
In the spring, he drags the garbage can
out to the garden and begins working the teeth,
the ash, the bits of bone into the soil.
Then he plants tomatoes. His mother loved tomatoes.
They grow straight from seed, so fast and big
that the young man is amazed. He takes the first
ten into the kitchen. In their roundness,
he sees his mother's breasts. In their smoothness,
he finds the consoling touch of her hands.
Mother, mother, he cries, and flings himself
on the tomatoes. Forget about the knife, the fork,
the pinch of salt. Try to imagine the filial
starvation, think of his ravenous kisses.

Stephen Dobyns

scott seward (scott seward), Sunday, 9 May 2004 17:23 (twenty years ago) link

Good mother's day poem, scott

from Louise Gluck's "October"

Snow had fallen. I remember
music from an open window.

Come to me, said the world.
This is not to say
it spoke in exact setences
but that I perceived beauty in this manner.

Sunrise. A film of moisture
on each living thing. Pools of cold light
formed in the gutters.

I stood
at the doorway,
ridiculous as it now seems.

What others found in art,
I found in nature. What others found
in human love, I found in nature.
Very simple. But there was no voice there.

Winter was over. In the thawed dirt,
bits of green were showing.

Come to me, said the world. I was standing
in my woolcoat at a kind of bright portal--
I can finally say
long ago; it give me considerable pleasure. Beauty

the healer, the teacher--

death cannot harm me
more than you have harmed me,
my beloved life.

Donald, Sunday, 9 May 2004 17:56 (twenty years ago) link

[...]
And the piano comes in,
like an extra heartbeat, dangerous
and lovely. Slower now, less like
the leaves, more like the rain which
almost isn't rain, more like thawed-
out hail. All this beauty in the
mess of this small apartment on
West 20th in Chelsea, New York.
Slowly the notes pour out, slowly,
more slowly still, fat rain falls.

{James Schuyler 'Faure's Second Piano Quartet': in honour of the new Mark Ford-edited New York school anthology}

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Sunday, 9 May 2004 21:23 (twenty years ago) link

Somewhere at the side of the rough shape
your life makes in your town,
         you cross a line,
         perhaps

in a dusty shop you pause in, or a bar
you never tried, and a smell
         will do as well;
         then you're

suddenly very far from what you know.
You found it as a child,
         when the next field
         to you

was the world's end, a breeze of being gone.
Now it begins to give,
         a single nerve,
         low down:

it sags, as if it felt the gravity
at long last.
[...]

The Nerve - Glynn Maxwell

bnw (bnw), Sunday, 9 May 2004 22:50 (twenty years ago) link

Lightly forsaking
The spring mist as it rises,
The wild geese are setting off.
Have they learned to live
In a flowerless country?

IZUMI SHIKIBU


(Now if I could only find a haiku about writing haiku... then my artist friend could paint that on my body instead of just ideograms...)

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Monday, 10 May 2004 12:52 (twenty years ago) link

(I'm doing this from memory...)


First: Five syllables.
Second: Seven syllables.
Third: Five syllables.

("Haiku" by Ron Padgett.)

Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 10 May 2004 22:17 (twenty years ago) link

but you were strange when you were dancing,
and the room turned all yellow
and the glass i was holding
spilled burgundy wine.
i got out by the side door
and i leaned on a box,
and i saw you at the end
of every street,
and in the flame inn
i watched the men shooting
eight-ball and mule-kicking
the jukebox til it worked.

denis johnson - you

lauren (laurenp), Monday, 10 May 2004 22:46 (twenty years ago) link

(I'm doing this from memory...)

First: Five syllables.
Second: Seven syllables.
Third: Five syllables.

("Haiku" by Ron Padgett.)

-- Casuistry (chri...), May 10th, 2004
* * * *
Darlin', not only do you warrant special mention in my blog for this, but I'll be sure to credit you when the photo of my fleshy calligraphy project is posted (and I'll send you the link!)

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Tuesday, 11 May 2004 13:19 (twenty years ago) link

(Thanks. The only mistake I made in the poem: There are no periods at the ends of the lines.)

Today's poem comes from Robert Grenier, who is one of my favorites, although I think perhaps his poems work better if you read, like, thirty of them rather than just one. But here's one:


IT'S NOT SO MUCH THAT SHE'S TAKING A LONG TIME

it's probably more that she has to stand in a long line

Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 12 May 2004 18:29 (twenty years ago) link

"Where was it one first heard of the truth?"

On a day like any other day,
like "yesterday or centuries before,"
in a town with the one remembered street,
shaded by the buckeye and the sycamore--
the street long and true as a theorem,
the day like yesterday or the day before,
the street you walked down centuries before--
the story the same as the others flooding in
from the cardinal points is
turning to take a good look at you.
Every creature, intelligent or not, has disappeared--
the humans, phosphorescent,
the duplicating pets, the guppies and spaniels,
the Woolworth's turtle that cost forty-nine cents
(with the soiled price tag half-peeled on its shell)--
but, from the look of things, it only just happened.
The wheels of the upside-down tricycle are spinning.
The swings are empty but swinging.
And the shadow is still there, and there
is the object that made it,
riding the proximate atmosphere,
oblong and illustrious above
the dispeopled bedroom community,
venting the memories of those it took
[...]

The Disappearances - Vijay Seshadri

bnw (bnw), Thursday, 13 May 2004 02:10 (twenty years ago) link

I like the Nipper's and Lauren's extracts.

the pomefox, Thursday, 13 May 2004 13:05 (twenty years ago) link

I am SEEKING a poem - "Letter To A Friend" by Stallworthy? It is in the Norton Anthology, which I obviously do not have. For some reason I cannot sleep until I have this poem which I cannot find on the web, and I refuse to leave my house (good bookstores are many miles away)until I have it. So there. please help.

aimurchie, Friday, 14 May 2004 10:18 (twenty years ago) link

'Letter to a Friend', Jon Stallworthy

1          You blame me that I do not write
2          with the accent of the age:
3          the eunuch voice of scholarship,
4          or the reformer's rage
5          (blurred by a fag-end in the twisted lip).
6          You blame me that I do not call
7          truculent nations to unite.
8          I answer that my poems all
9          are woven out of love's loose ends;
10        for myself and for my friends.

11        You blame me that I do not face
12        the banner-headline fact
13        of rape and death in bungalows,
14        cities and workmen sacked.
15        Tomorrow's time enough to rant of those,
16        when the whirlpool sucks us in.
17        Turn away from the bitter farce,
18        or have you now forgotten
19        that cloud, star, leaf, and water's dance
20        are facts of life, and worth your glance?

21        You blame me that I do not look
22        at cities, swivelled, from
23        the eye of the crazy gunman, or
24        the man who drops the bomb.
25        Twenty years watching from an ivory tower
26        taller than your chimney-stack,
27        I have seen fields beyond the smoke:
28        and think it better that I make
29        in the sloganed wall the people pass,
30        a window---not a looking-glass.

cozen (Cozen), Friday, 14 May 2004 13:40 (twenty years ago) link

Thank you, Cozen, thank you thank you! I can now go to sleep.

aimurchie, Friday, 14 May 2004 15:16 (twenty years ago) link

Oft in the stilly night
Ere slumber's chain has bound me,
Fond mem'ry brings the light
Of other days around me:
The smiles, the tears of boyhood years,
The words of love then spoken;
The eyes that shone,
Now dimm'd and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken!
Thus in the stilly night
Ere slumber's chain has bound me,
Sad mem'ry brings the light
Of other days around me.

Fred (Fred), Saturday, 15 May 2004 09:59 (twenty years ago) link

There will be time, there will be time...
for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time for yet a hundred indicisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before taking toast and tea.
...
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
...
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
...
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
...
And this, and so much more?--

(TSE, of course. Some poetry to celebrate my birthday! Among some talk --and time for-- you and me.!)

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Saturday, 15 May 2004 18:04 (twenty years ago) link

(And happy birthday, especially if your name is "Nick".)

Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 15 May 2004 18:26 (twenty years ago) link

I just re-read Lauren's and, for the second time, felt the screen swaying. It's possible I may be Getting Into Poetry.

Gregory Henry (Gregory Henry), Saturday, 15 May 2004 18:59 (twenty years ago) link

gregory!

cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 15 May 2004 20:12 (twenty years ago) link

Breakin' the rules in re: 10 lines but you all need to feel this mad science from Eugene Field, corny but important, un-celebrated Western U.S. poet who occasionally dropped the shtick for gems like these:

"The Truth About Horace."

It is very aggravating
To hear the solemn prating
Of the fossils who are stating
That old Horace was a prude;
When we know that with the ladies
He was always raising Hades
And with many an escapade his
Best productions are imbued.

There's really not much harm in a
Large number of his carmina
But these people find alarm in a
Few records of his acts;
So they'd squelch the muse caloric,
And to students sophomoric
They'd present as metaphoric
What old Horace meant for facts.

We have always thought 'em lazy;
Now we adjudge 'em crazy!
Why, Horace was a daisy
That was very much alive!
And the wisest of us know him
As his Lydia verses show him,--
Go, read that virile poem,--
It is No. 25.

He was a very owl, sir,
And starting out to prowl, sir,
You bet he made Rome howl, sir,
Until he filled his date;
With a massic-laden ditty
And a classic maiden pretty
He painted up the city,
And Maecenas paid the freight!

Begs2Differ (Begs2Differ), Sunday, 16 May 2004 13:26 (twenty years ago) link

1627

The pedigree of Honey
Does not concern the Bee,
Nor lineage of Ecstasy
Delay the Butterfly
On spangle journeys to the peak
Of some perceiveless thing—
The right of way to Tripoli
A more essential thing.

--

The Pedigree of Honey
Does not concern the Bee—
A Clover, any time, to him,
Is Aristocracy—

~Emily Dickinson

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Sunday, 16 May 2004 13:35 (twenty years ago) link

Bought a neat little anthology today entitled "The Poet Dreaming in the Artist's House: Contemporary Poems about the Visual Arts"

[...]
Here I am, floating through the sky
with my head on wrong
so that my hair tickles my neck
and my chin sticks up,
and the lovers kissing in the garden
look comical, their feet straining
to touch the ground.
It's been a long time since someone
kissed me in the garden.
My mouth's up too high.
[...]

Rene Wenger - "After Chagall"

bnw (bnw), Monday, 17 May 2004 01:42 (twenty years ago) link

(My reading went well, by the way, and Catherine Daly was a great person. This has been a weekend filled with poetry and talk about poetry and I am exhausted and happy.)

Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 17 May 2004 05:03 (twenty years ago) link

yay chris good for you,
poetry is a good thing,
glad you kicked some azz

Begs2Differ (Begs2Differ), Monday, 17 May 2004 13:12 (twenty years ago) link

I do not want to be reflective any more
Envying and despising unreflective things
Finding pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting
And young girls doing their hair and all the castles of sand
Flushed by the children's bedtime, level with the shore.

The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not want
To be always stressing either its flux or its permanence,
I do not want to be a tragic or philosophic chorus
But to keep my eye only on the nearer future
And after that let the sea flow over us.

Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,
Join hands and make believe that joined
Hands will keep away the wolves of water
Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed
That no one hears them among the talk and laughter.

['Wolves' - Louis Macneice]

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 17 May 2004 13:58 (twenty years ago) link

Brilliant.

Archel (Archel), Monday, 17 May 2004 14:31 (twenty years ago) link

THE ELECTRIC BRAE [from Nil Nil (1993), Faber and Faber]

1 For three days and three nights, he has listened
2 to the pounding of a terrible jug band
3 now reduced to a wheezy concertina
4 and the disinterested thump of a tea-chest bass.
5 It seems safe to look: wires trail on the pillowcase,
6 a drip swings overhead; then the clear tent
7 becomes his father's clapped-out Morris Minor,
8 rattling towards home. The windscreen presents
9 the unshattered myth of a Scottish spring;
10 with discreet complicity, the road
11 swerves to avoid the solitary cloud.
12 On an easy slope, his father lets the engine
13 cough into silence. Everything is still.
14 He frees the brake: the car surges uphill.

- Don Paterson

cozen (Cozen), Monday, 17 May 2004 17:56 (twenty years ago) link

My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars,
to beg Christ the Lord
to give back the soul I had
of old, when I was a child,
ripened with legends,
with a feathered cap
and a wooden sword.

- Federico Garcia Lorca

cozen (Cozen), Monday, 17 May 2004 18:06 (twenty years ago) link

these ways of feeling
won't do. neither the eyes nor the fingers.
nor those warmed-up leftovers, memories,
nor kindness, like an evil little parakeet.
take the inductive reasonings and the racks
where the washed and ironed words are hanging.
ransack the whole house, everything out,
leave me like a hole or a stump.

lauren (laurenp), Monday, 17 May 2004 18:56 (twenty years ago) link

clearcut - julio cortazar

lauren (laurenp), Monday, 17 May 2004 18:57 (twenty years ago) link

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim'rous beastie,
O, what panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!
I'm truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave 'S a sma' request:
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' wast,
An' weary Winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee-bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald.
To thole the Winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

aimurchie, Tuesday, 18 May 2004 03:55 (twenty years ago) link

Milton, right? ;-)

Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 18 May 2004 07:13 (twenty years ago) link

Not Milton...me. I wrote it after several cocktails, thus the weird spelling thing.

aimurchie, Tuesday, 18 May 2004 10:06 (twenty years ago) link

you're very good.

cozen (Cozen), Tuesday, 18 May 2004 10:07 (twenty years ago) link

I had forgotten that the "mice and men" phrase was from Burns. it seems appropriate just now.

aimurchie, Tuesday, 18 May 2004 11:01 (twenty years ago) link

The dream went like a rake of sliced bamboo,
slats of the dust distracted by downdraw;
I woke and knew I held a cigarette;
I looked, there was none, could have been none;
I slept the years and I woke again,
palming the floor, shaking the sheets. I found
nothing smoking. I am awake, I see
the cigarette burn safely in my fingers. . . .
They come this path, old friends, old buffs of death.
Tonight it's Randall, the spark of fire though humbled,
his gnawed wrist cradled like his Kitten. 'What kept you so long,
racing your cooling grindstone to ambition?
Surely this life was fast enough. . . . But tell me,
Cal, why did we live? Why do we die?'

Scott & Anya (thoia), Tuesday, 18 May 2004 13:37 (twenty years ago) link

Lowell, Notebook, School, 2 Randall Jarrell

Scott & Anya (thoia), Tuesday, 18 May 2004 13:38 (twenty years ago) link

Al patro, kvin klaftojn profunde,
la ostoj igxis koralo,
du perloj okulas subfrunte,
kaj lin ne trafos disfalo,
sed mara metamofozo
en ricxo kaj kuriozo.
Marnimfoy lin sonorilas ofte.
(Ding-dong.)
Awd'! Sonorilo. Ding-dong. Softe.


(translated by K. Kalocsay)

Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 18 May 2004 17:22 (twenty years ago) link

i like that Lowell piece, esp that winding first sentence.

what language is that translated to/from, chris?

bnw (bnw), Tuesday, 18 May 2004 17:34 (twenty years ago) link

To me, that man is like a god -
more than a god, if I can say it -
who, sitting opposite you, again and again,
sees and hears

you sweetly laughing, when all my
senses have been torn from me: for, Lesbia,
as soon as I see you I've nothing left
[...]

but my tongue is choked, my limbs
shiver aflame, my ears
echo with their own ringing, my eyes
shroud in night.

Leisure, Catullus, is bad for you:
at leisure you luxuriate and lust too much.
before now, leisure has ruined kings
and great cities.


Catullus 51, translated by me (with much (poetic) licence. pls to forgive).


Casuistry, is that in Esperanto, or?

cis (cis), Tuesday, 18 May 2004 17:45 (twenty years ago) link

That is Esperanto, yes. (If you're trying to sound it out, pronounce "j" as "y", "gx" as a soft "g", and "cx" as "ch", "aw" as "au", and always stress the penultimate syllable.)

It's translated from English, but now I'm going to get all coy.

Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 18 May 2004 19:03 (twenty years ago) link

light spreads darkly downwards from the high
clusters of lights over empty chairs
that face each other, coloured differently.
through open doors, the dining-room declares
a larger loneliness of knives and glass
and silence laid like carpet. a porter reads
an unsold evening paper. hours pass,
and all the salesmen have gone back to leeds,
leaving full ashtrays in the conference room.

in shoeless corridors, the lights burn. how
isolated, like a fort, it is -
the headed paper, made for writing home
(if home existed) letters of exile: now
night comes on. waves fold behind villages.

philip larkin - friday night in the royal station hotel

lauren (laurenp), Tuesday, 18 May 2004 21:02 (twenty years ago) link

Casuistry - Is it from a full esperanto trans of the Tempest, or just on its own? (actually, a production in which Ariel's songs alone are in Esperanto could be really neat.)

cis (cis), Tuesday, 18 May 2004 21:25 (twenty years ago) link

It's from a full translation.

Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 18 May 2004 22:09 (twenty years ago) link

...
Or the occasional pear on the dashboard
of the unreliable Austin Cambridge
waiting after school when he was on mornings
that my father brought me,
breiefly suspended between un- and over-ripe,
between being and non-being,
like the arc of a dive a series of instants
but indivisible, leaving only ripples,
perfume.

(from Ghost of a Pear by Ayala Kingsley)

Archel (Archel), Friday, 21 May 2004 08:51 (twenty years ago) link

I love how much that one extra word gives, so that it doesn't end on it's metaphorical other "the dive", but manages to bring us back closer to the object "the pear". It's put together well, I think.

bnw (bnw), Friday, 21 May 2004 12:28 (twenty years ago) link

Exactly.

Archel (Archel), Friday, 21 May 2004 13:10 (twenty years ago) link

"After I'm Dead"

Tell them
I was a persimmon eater
who liked haiku

--Masaoka Shiki, the fourth "great master" of haiku (the other three are Basho, Buson, and Issa)

Begs2Differ (Begs2Differ), Saturday, 22 May 2004 00:07 (twenty years ago) link

That's a pretty good one, there.


Amatory Epigram
(to Aristotle or Ignatius Loyola)

I'd have to be drunk to fuck around with you
And sober to live
Therefore I am dying

[Bernadette Mayer]

Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 22 May 2004 05:27 (twenty years ago) link

"Feast"

I drank at every vine.
The last was like the first.
I came upon no wine
As wonderful as thirst.

I gnawed at every root.
I ate of every plant.
I came upon no fruit
So wonderful as want.

Feed the grape and bean
To the vintner and monger;
I will lie down lean
With my thirst and my hunger.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

Begs2Differ (Begs2Differ), Saturday, 22 May 2004 12:08 (twenty years ago) link

[...]
You were supposed to tell them

what they'd missed; they'd read your
logics, your letters. So little space

between your letters, the words couldn't
easily air themselves. Remember going back

and forth between the rooms? Blue,
green; the wings had been adjusted.

You were meant to take black
netting off a face or two. Take

something. Passion brought you
here; passion will save you.

"Air For Mercury" - Brenda Hillman

bnw (bnw), Saturday, 22 May 2004 15:13 (twenty years ago) link

sorry but it's only 14 lines: "Ants on the Melon"

Once when our blacktop city
was still a topsoil town
we carried to Formicopolis
a cantaloupe rind to share
and stooped to plop it down
in their populous Times Square
at the subway of the ants

and saw that hemisphere
blacken and rise and dance
with antmen out of hand
wild for their melon toddies
just like our world next year
no place to step or stand
except on bodies.

Virginia Hamilton Adair

Begs2Differ (Begs2Differ), Saturday, 22 May 2004 15:23 (twenty years ago) link

Lean out of the window,
Goldenhair,
I hear you singing
A merry air.

My book was closed,
I read no more,
Watching the fire dance
On the floor.

I have left my book,
I have left my room,
For I heard you singing
Through the gloom.

Singing and singing
A merry air,
Lean out of the window,
Goldenhair.

-James Joyce, Chamber Music

Fred (Fred), Saturday, 22 May 2004 15:53 (twenty years ago) link

"The Dance"

In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies, (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.

--William Carlos Mofo Williams

Begs2Differ (Begs2Differ), Sunday, 23 May 2004 12:35 (twenty years ago) link

Thank you, B2D, this was marvelous to read this morning :)

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Sunday, 23 May 2004 13:24 (twenty years ago) link

Luing

When the day comes, as the day surely must,
when it is asked of you, and you refuse
to take that lover's wound again, that cup
of emptiness that is our one completion,

I'd say go here, maybe, to our unsung
innermost isle: Kilda's antithesis,
yet still with it own tiny stubborn anthem,
its yellow milkwort and its stunted kye.

Leaving the motherland by a two-car raft,
the littlest of the fleet, you cross the minch
to find yourself, if anything, now deeper
in her arms than ever - sharing her breath,

watching the red vans sliding silently
between her hills. In such intimate exile,
who'd believe the burn behind the house
the straitened ocean written on the map?

Here, beside the fordable Atlantic,
reborn into a secret candidacy,
the fontanelles reopen one by one
in the palms, then the breastbone and the brow,

aching at the shearwater's wail, the rowan
that falls beyond all seasons. One morning
you hover on the threshold, knowing for certain
the first touch of the light will finish you.

- Don Paterson.

cozen (Cozen), Monday, 24 May 2004 18:20 (twenty years ago) link

I think that poem would be even better without the first and last stanzas.

Today's poem, by Aram Saroyan:


priit

Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 24 May 2004 23:00 (twenty years ago) link

"I Tell With Severity, I Think What I Feel"

I tell with severity, I think what I feel.
Words are ideas.
The purling river passes, and not its sound,
Which is ours, not the river's.
So I wanted my verse: mine and not-mine,
To be read by me.

--Ricardo Reis

Begs2Differ (Begs2Differ), Tuesday, 25 May 2004 00:04 (twenty years ago) link

Now that we've come to the end
I've been trying to piece it together,
Not that distance makes anything clearer.
It began in the half-light
While we walked through the dawn chorus
After a party that lasted all night,
With the blackbird, the wood-pigeon,
The song-thrush taking a bludgeon
To a snail, our taking each other's hand
As if the whole world lay before us.

[Paul Muldoon, 'The Avenue']

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Tuesday, 25 May 2004 07:02 (twenty years ago) link

I'm not sure we need all the vowels either.

cozen (Cozen), Tuesday, 25 May 2004 10:43 (twenty years ago) link

'A Life-Exam'

[...]

12. Have you broken the following Ten
Commandments? Answer each just yes or no.

[...]

24. With a view to bioengineering suggest at
least six names for new animals...

[...]

36. Describe the onset of your first period. OR
Avoid this subject entirely.

[...]

- Robert Crawford

cozen (Cozen), Tuesday, 25 May 2004 10:45 (twenty years ago) link

Is there a link for the complete text of that last one?

Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 25 May 2004 19:42 (twenty years ago) link

[I once did a found poem out of the MMPI-2 (Minnesota Multi-phasic Personality Inventory.) One of my worksop classmates returned it with the True/False answers all filled out.]

bnw (bnw), Tuesday, 25 May 2004 22:51 (twenty years ago) link

"Seducer"

One strokes the leg of a chair
Until the chair moves
And gives him a sweet sign with its leg

Another kisses a keyhole
Kisses it O how he kisses it
Until the keyhole returns his kiss

A third stands aside
Stares at the other two
Shakes shakes his head

Until it falls off

--Vasko Popa

Begs2Differ (Begs2Differ), Wednesday, 26 May 2004 00:04 (twenty years ago) link

I wish, Chris.

I was browsing the poem in the bookshop and it's tremendously funny / hurtful (which is rare for Crawford - he usually writes opaque, 'interesting' poems, or not very good ones.)

If I find it anywhere online (I doubt it), I'll post up the link.

cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, 26 May 2004 09:54 (twenty years ago) link

The Rain Comes Down As Tears

Or does it? Is nature exactly aligned with grief?
Is the window, washed in rain, an echo of sadness and despair?
I should mourn the hands that built it, long gone,
and the faces that have pressed against it,
and then ask, and then compare.

Breath leaves its imprint, the sure symbol of blood
being pumped, a soft and malleable canvas born
from the first and last action our
bodies will ever perform.
I could use my finger to write this onto the glass:
Save me, I am here, God is coming.
And then breathe once more
and watch it all disappear.

Something has been lost, I know
that much. I would like to feel a shiver of response at least.
A wind through orange and purple and countless leaves or
for everything to fall down at once.
I would like to know how to rustle, how to bend,
how to sway. How to grow crooked and survive.
How to give and die as if it were
the most natural thing.

A riot of color is fragmented in cracked wood.
The slow descent of rain from
purged clouds sounding upon fogged
glass and my own breath upon it,
like everyone before.

I would like to know that I did it,
that I completed the task,
that I did say I love you one last time.
That breath can be on breath
Long after the last is taken.

Now the window is to my left.
The storm has progressed
and rumbling comes over the roof and in.
One real second resuscitates the view.
Breathing at all is a small matter
as this illumination occurs. An instant
when all seems both right and wrong
with the world.

aimurchie, Friday, 28 May 2004 01:06 (twenty years ago) link

i will post a better poem next time - now stop your stunned silence.

aimurchie, Friday, 28 May 2004 15:43 (twenty years ago) link

You didn't even say whose poem it was.

Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 29 May 2004 05:31 (twenty years ago) link

Striking to see JJ on a poetry thread.

I know the Nipper's Muldoon pome quite well. I suppose I am not keen on it really because it reminds me of Muldoon's sexually-fuelled arrogance.

But it makes me think that it may be time for me to start my long-delayed Muldoon thread.

the pomefox, Saturday, 29 May 2004 12:57 (twenty years ago) link

Oh, my. Thanks for the Popa, B2D...

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Sunday, 30 May 2004 16:38 (twenty years ago) link

and your muldoon thread?

cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 30 May 2004 17:55 (twenty years ago) link

I am in the midst of moving, and I keep on finding things...I had a few editor positions with upstart zines that made me respond emotionally to the offered poems. here isone found for me poem, that I think translate to the greater art:

"At a bit of a loss...
my good friend and budding genius
joined the Hare krishna following.
I hope he finds god and all that
because I don't expect to ever find him again.
Swallowed up
by the machine of religion,
his orb controlled by diet.
They say his last words were:
"I don't know, these people are real nice..."
Goodbye, Eric.
I'm sorry we weren't as nice as rice."

LMcMamara


aimurchie, Monday, 31 May 2004 02:03 (twenty years ago) link

Not only did I not say my last sentence right, but it is LMcNamara. Sneezing, drinking, moving old stuff around. Because i'm moving, I am beginning to HATE books. I will start a thread.

aimurchie, Monday, 31 May 2004 02:12 (twenty years ago) link

'I am packing my library. I am.'

cozen (Cozen), Monday, 31 May 2004 10:50 (twenty years ago) link

untitled poem by Alberto Caiero, written on 7 May 1914

I see a butterfly go by
And for the first time in the universe I notice
That butterflies do not have color or movement,
Even as flowers do not have scent or color.
Color is what has color in the butterfly's wings,
Movement is what moves in the butterfly's movement,
Scent is what has scent in the flower's scent.
The butterfly is just a butterfly
And the flower just a flower.

Begs2Differ (Begs2Differ), Monday, 31 May 2004 17:14 (twenty years ago) link

Yes, the springtimes needed you. Stars now and then
craved your attention. A wave rose
in the remembered past; or as you came by the open window
a violin was singing its soul out. All this
was a given task. But were you capacious
enough to receive it? Weren’t you always
distracted with expectation, imagining
these hints the heralds of a human love?

Duino Elegies - R.M. Rilke, trans by John Waterfield

bnw (bnw), Monday, 31 May 2004 19:29 (twenty years ago) link

.... Terrible
Are the blasphemous wars and savageries I
Have lived through, animal cruelty
Loose like a flame through the whole world;
Yet here on Flower Sunday, in a soiled

Acre of graves, I lay down my gasping roses
And lilies pale as ice as one who knows
Nothing is certain, nothing; unless it is
My own small place and people, agony and sacrifice.

--Leslie Norris, THE DEAD (after the Welsh of Gwenallt, 1899-1969)

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Monday, 31 May 2004 23:19 (twenty years ago) link

One more for the road:

A READING IN SEATTLE

....
In the evening I thought
Of Dylan, how he had read
in Seattle. "The little slob,"
My friend said, marvelling,
"He read Eliot so beautifully,
Jesus, I cried." I did not answer.
In the city now the bars are
Empty of his stories
And only the downtown Indians
Are drunk as his memory.

I read in a hall full
Of friends, students, serious
Listeners. The great dead had
Had spoken there, Auden,
Roethke, Watkins, many others.
There was room for a plump ghost.
I thought I heard his voice
Everywhere, after twenty years
Of famous death. The party over,
I walked home, saw on peaks
The coldest snow, white as bone.

--Leslie Norris (again)

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Monday, 31 May 2004 23:31 (twenty years ago) link

Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women
Anne Sexton

(from a song)

Perhaps I was born kneeling,
born coughing on the long winter,
born expecting the kiss of mercy,
born with a passion for quickness
and yet, as things progressed,
I learned early about the stockade
or taken out, the fume of the enema.
By two or three I learned not to kneel,
not to expect, to plant my fires underground
where none but the dolls, perfect and awful,
could be whispered to or laid down to die.

Now that I have written many words,
and let out so many loves, for so many,
and been altogether what I always was—
a woman of excess, of zeal and greed,
I find the effort useless.
Do I not look in the mirror,
these days,
and see a drunken rat avert her eyes?
Do I not feel the hunger so acutely
that I would rather die than look
into its face?
I kneel once more,
in case mercy should come
in the nick of time.

* * *

Also, a note to let anyone who's interested know that I'm now working on this thread's "anthology" through May 31st. If you're wanting a copy for personal use, send me a note.

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Tuesday, 1 June 2004 15:38 (twenty years ago) link

is t.s. eliot c or d?

cozen (Cozen), Tuesday, 1 June 2004 19:13 (twenty years ago) link

Didn't we do that already, Coz? He's more "S/D" than "C/D".

Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 2 June 2004 02:41 (twenty years ago) link

i know what i have given you.
i do not know what you have received.

from "voices" - antonio porchia

lauren (laurenp), Wednesday, 2 June 2004 16:39 (twenty years ago) link

Can we do it again? I've been reading.

cozen (Cozen), Thursday, 3 June 2004 13:28 (twenty years ago) link

should we start a new thread as this one is really amassing weight...

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Thursday, 3 June 2004 18:19 (twenty years ago) link

Click on "settings" and then "Display only the last 50 answers".

Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 4 June 2004 17:24 (twenty years ago) link

'Anthology'?

Cozen: we had a good crack at TSE on ILE. I will revive it, for you.

I had serious intentions of starting the Muldoon thread to go seriously at Muldoon. But other things came along, I drifted from Muldoon more quickly than I expected to. But we should still have the thread - when we are ready.

the pomefox, Sunday, 6 June 2004 14:04 (twenty years ago) link

I almost bought Poems 1968-98 of Muldoon's.

cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 6 June 2004 14:27 (twenty years ago) link

It may be necessary, eventually.

(My copy cost £3! Only a couple of months after it came out!)

the pomefox, Sunday, 6 June 2004 15:17 (twenty years ago) link

Aha! You know Vaska Popa! Who else knows Vaska Popa? What d'you think? An editor once wrote me: You are acquainted with Vaska Popa...well, I'd never heard of VP, but I went straight to the library to see if he had plagerized anything I had written. +grin+ just kidding.

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Sunday, 6 June 2004 15:49 (twenty years ago) link

My copy almost cost £16.

cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 6 June 2004 16:06 (twenty years ago) link

'Bumped' into this Frost poem the other day...

In going from room to room in the dark,
I reached out blindly to save my face,
But neglected, however lightly, to lace
My fingers and close my arms in an arc.
A slim door got in past my guard,
And hit me a blow in the head so hard
I had my native simile jarred.
So people and things don't pair any more
With what they used to pair with before.

Robert Frost - The Door in the Dark

bnw (bnw), Monday, 7 June 2004 20:00 (twenty years ago) link

take for instance this night, my love,
that every single couple puts together
with a joint overturning, beneath, above,
the abundant two on sponge and feather,
kneeling and pushing, head to head.
at night, alone,i marry the bed.

from the ballad of the lonely masturbator - anne sexton


lauren (laurenp), Monday, 7 June 2004 20:39 (twenty years ago) link

are you quoting these from memory, lauren?!

cozen (Cozen), Monday, 7 June 2004 20:47 (twenty years ago) link

nope. i have books!

lauren (laurenp), Monday, 7 June 2004 20:58 (twenty years ago) link

I don't love you as much as I did a minute ago, but still - .

cozen (Cozen), Monday, 7 June 2004 21:08 (twenty years ago) link

shit.

lauren (laurenp), Monday, 7 June 2004 21:10 (twenty years ago) link

chicks with books are hott, dude. (and i hear you know who is stacked!)

bnw (bnw), Monday, 7 June 2004 22:56 (twenty years ago) link

The librarian?

Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 7 June 2004 23:31 (twenty years ago) link

Back to poetry! Going thru some boxes today I found this, from a Persian mystic called Rumi:

God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open.

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Tuesday, 8 June 2004 03:12 (twenty years ago) link

yet far beyond the spent seed-pods,
and the blackened stalks of mint,
the poplar is bright on the hill,
the poplar spreads out,
deep-rooted among trees.

O poplar, you are great
among the hill-stones,
while I perish on the path
among the crevices of the rocks.

-H.D.

Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 8 June 2004 15:24 (twenty years ago) link

'Dart'

Who's this moving alive over the moor?

An old man seeking and finding a difficulty.

Has he remembered his compass his spare socks
does he fully intend going in over his knees off the military track from Okehampton?

keeping his course through the swamp spaces
and pulling the distance around his shoulders

the source of the Dart - Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor,
seven miles from the nearest road
and if it rains, if it thunders suddenly
where will he shelter looking round
and all that lies to hand is his own bones?

[...]

- Alice Oswald.

cozen (Cozen), Tuesday, 8 June 2004 19:04 (twenty years ago) link

EARNEST, earthless, equal, attuneable, ' vaulty, voluminous, … stupendous
Evening strains to be tíme’s vást, ' womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.
Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ' her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height
Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, ' stárs principal, overbend us,
Fíre-féaturing heaven. For earth ' her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, as- 5
tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; ' self ín self steedèd and páshed—qúite
Disremembering, dísmémbering ' áll now. Heart, you round me right
With: Óur évening is over us; óur night ' whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.
Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ' damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,
Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! ' Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind 10
Off hér once skéined stained véined variety ' upon, áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck
Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds—black, white; ' right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ' twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack
Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ' thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.

[Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves]

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 08:26 (twenty years ago) link

under her dark veil she wrung her hands.
"why are you so pale today?"
"because i made him drink of stinging grief
until he got drunk on it.
how can I forget? he staggered out,
his mouth twisted in agony.
i ran down not touching the bannister
and caught up with him at the gate.
i cried: 'a joke!
that's all it was. if you leave, i'll die.'
he smiled calmly and grimly
and told me: 'don't stand here in the wind.' "

under her dark veil - anna akhmatova

lauren (laurenp), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 15:28 (twenty years ago) link

'The Invalid's Echo'

[...]

I think his family is so ancient,
His heart must still be over on the right,
Though I have searched for it before
In full swing until it shrank to nothing,
Merging with my name, that comes
From nowhere, and is ownerless,
Like all we can see of the stars.

Now, like them, I lie with my back
To him, his chance neighbour,
Watching the entrance to the house,
But not the house. The long autumn
Has scattered its poisonous seeds,
So I will have no October child.

[...]

- Medbh McGuckian

cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 15:41 (twenty years ago) link

in honor if sexy librarians everywhere... (i hope i didn't already post this 500 posts ago...)

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.
[...]

Library -- Albert Goldbarth

bnw (bnw), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 16:33 (twenty years ago) link

Ooh I read an absolutely fantastic essay by Goldbarth (which also mentions fleas in his girlfriend's bedroom) in the D'Agata anthology a while back and meant to ask ILB if his poetry was any good. Cheers bnw!

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 17:28 (twenty years ago) link

He's kind of one of my idols for his sheer braininess and how he uses scientific jargon in poems, which I have a big soft spot for. But his stuff can be very unwieldly and somethimes more opaque then any christgau review slobbered over on ILM.

What is D'Agata? Is that a lit mag?

bnw (bnw), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 17:58 (twenty years ago) link

june has thus far been a wonderful segment of the thread.

lauren (laurenp), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 18:14 (twenty years ago) link

The D'Agata is The next American essay - a book of lyrical/speculative non-fiction/prosepoetry. The whole book is great, but the Goldbarth in particular may be the only thing I've read this year that has really knocked me for six.

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 19:04 (twenty years ago) link

'Poor Moth'

Reasons run out and we are
ready to play backgammon
once again. Come on, I say.
I know when I am being
watched. Even in the washroom
here's a window left unlatched
and various small monsters
have nipped softly in to take
up key positions amongst
sunny patches on the walls.
Look at the little angels.
Chits of demons. Fools and spies.
Look at the conclusive way
in which their detail lies. One
touch would be catastrophe
or a whisper to the wise.

[...]

- R. F. Langley

cozen (Cozen), Thursday, 10 June 2004 10:53 (twenty years ago) link

it's quite cruel to end that there, actually. :/

cozen (Cozen), Thursday, 10 June 2004 10:54 (twenty years ago) link

More poems about backgammon pls!

Btw cozen, you asked somewhere else about getting hold of my book. The website for ordering it is broken, but if you send me your address I will post you a free copy - you can send me something of your choice in return if you like :)

rp30@sussex.ac.uk

Archel (Archel), Thursday, 10 June 2004 11:16 (twenty years ago) link

bnw, I'd send you fresh cut flowers for that post about Goldbarth! It reminds me of "Prospero's Books" by Peter Greenaway. Thank you for the smile...

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Thursday, 10 June 2004 15:40 (twenty years ago) link

I have no idea why I was struck with the urge to post this, as it's midsummer rather than midwinter. Still:

...Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?
...

- from Little Gidding

Archel (Archel), Friday, 11 June 2004 11:48 (twenty years ago) link

This isn't a poem but I can't think of what other thread to post this on (except one at ILE but you know how it is...).

So I had another reading tonight. I read the first 20 minutes of my 4-hour piece as part of this experimental dance/music/poetry deal. So here's the cool part: there were all these kids unexpectedly in the audience. About 7 of them, 8-12 years old. And, it turns out, they really enjoyed my piece. They were all very polite and came up to me to tell me how much they liked it and they said some smart things about the piece (and the other pieces as well). It was great!

Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 13 June 2004 05:44 (twenty years ago) link

CHW Pirates

CJD I was plundered by a pirate
CJF Describe the pirate
CJN She is armed
CJP How is she armed?
CJS She has long guns
CJW I have no long guns
BLD I am a complete wreck


[Hannah Weiner, from her book "Code Poems", "from the International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations"]

Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 15 June 2004 08:24 (twenty years ago) link

Those are real codes??

Btw congrats on the reading and the response :)

Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 15 June 2004 08:44 (twenty years ago) link

Shockingly, some traditional rhyming verse:

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

-- GK Chesterton

Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 15 June 2004 11:39 (twenty years ago) link

Pirates! Aaargh! I once had a small friend who was having a Pirate party for his fourth birthday. I told him I was going to cut off my leg and wear a peg leg for authenticity (reminder: never allow me around your children). He said:" And I,I ,I'm gonna cut off my arm and then I can be Captain Hanger!" Captain Hanger. get it? he congused the round top of a hanger with Captain Hook. Captain Hanger to thread.

aimurchie, Tuesday, 15 June 2004 12:25 (twenty years ago) link

i understand the boredom of the clerks
fatigue shifting like dunes within their eyes
a frightful nausea gumming up the works
that once was thought aggression in disguise.
do you remember? then how lightly dead
seemed the moon when over factories
it languid slid like a barrage of lead
above the heart, the fierce inventories
of desire.

from city winter - frank o'hara

lauren (laurenp), Tuesday, 15 June 2004 16:33 (twenty years ago) link

Hooray!

I brought Selected O'Hara to Dublin!

the finefox, Tuesday, 15 June 2004 20:04 (twenty years ago) link

a good companion. i wanted to put in the whole poem, but i'm trying to respect the length restrictions. here's the very last bit, which might contain my favorite line:

the snow drifts low
and yet neglects to cover me, and i
dance just ahead to keep my heart in sight.
how like a queen, to seek with jealous eye
the face that flees you, hidden city, white
swan. there's no art to free me, blinded so.

lauren (laurenp), Tuesday, 15 June 2004 21:42 (twenty years ago) link

more frank, from my heart:

i want my feet to be bare,
i want my face to be shaven, and my heart -
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

lauren (laurenp), Tuesday, 15 June 2004 21:47 (twenty years ago) link

lauren, I never got these beautiful lines before - so thank you.

aimurchie, Wednesday, 16 June 2004 01:05 (twenty years ago) link

thanks archel!! I got home today and yr book was waiting. I'll look out something for you now.

cozen (Cozen), Thursday, 17 June 2004 18:40 (twenty years ago) link

I love 'awake'.

:)

cozen (Cozen), Thursday, 17 June 2004 19:23 (twenty years ago) link

the other day in the cinema i got "The sedge has withered from the lake / and no birds sing." stuck in my head, more or less out of nowhere, which is odd because i'm pretty sure i wouldn't have read that poem since my english GCSE, three and a bit years ago..

tom west (thomp), Thursday, 17 June 2004 23:28 (twenty years ago) link

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.

tom west (thomp), Thursday, 17 June 2004 23:30 (twenty years ago) link

My mum always used to accuse me of being 'alone and palely loitering' whenever I was in a bit of a sulk :) Bless her.

cozen: yay!

Archel (Archel), Friday, 18 June 2004 07:30 (twenty years ago) link

'Notice in Heaven'

You can
SING
here

'Notice in Hell'

HALT
'COMMIT ADULTERY

- Edwin Morgan

cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 19 June 2004 09:42 (twenty years ago) link

'On the Matter of Thermal Packing'

[...]

Or maybe think so; the eloquence of melt
is however upon me, the path become a
stream, and I lay that down
trusting the ice to withstand the heat;

[...]

- J. H. Prynne (for mark s)

cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 20 June 2004 13:48 (twenty years ago) link

the eloquence of melt

that's an amazing phrase.

lauren (laurenp), Sunday, 20 June 2004 17:53 (twenty years ago) link

'On Keeping The Hot Side Hot And The Cold Side Cold'

[...]

Maybe yes, maybe no; the pattiness of melt
is however upon me, the cheese dripping
in a stream, and I scream that
no lettuce is cold enough to salve;

[...]

Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 21 June 2004 21:13 (twenty years ago) link

Heh. I was thinking earlier how poetry for me is looking at big things in a small way. Of course, it can also be looking at small things in a big way ;)

Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 22 June 2004 07:06 (twenty years ago) link

Explaining Relativity

Forget the clatter of ballistics,
The monologue of falling stones,
The sharp vectors
And the stiff numbered grids.

It's so much more a thing of pliancy, persuasion,
Where space might cup itself around a planet
Like your palm around a stone,

Where you, yourself the planet,
Caught up in some geodesic dream,
Might wake to feel it enfold your weight
And know there is, in fact, no falling.

It is this, and the existence of limits.

- Rebecca Elson

Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 22 June 2004 07:16 (twenty years ago) link

If anything I'd say that poetry for me is about looking at small things, period. But I'm don't think that is how I would frame "what poetry is about for me".

Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 05:08 (twenty years ago) link

"The Science Of the Seasons"

We stitched and sutured Ill-fated futures,
Amassed the past in archaic computers
Come join the ranks in our data banks,
It's a life without thanks

Remember that night I drank and you cried?
And on your bed all night's where we lied
I stayed awake, you fell asleep
On tear soaked sheets

And we're so new and young like science
Full of ideas and naive defiance
We'll lose it all with each passing fall
As our wake up call

We'll stare straight up and wonder why the
Sky is blue; it reflects the sea
We'll all be sayin' "Science explained
Our lives again"

And we're always sayin'
Science explained
Our lives again
That's the science of the seasons

We stitched and sutured Ill-fated futures,
Amassed the past in archaic computers
Come join the ranks in our data banks,
It's a life without thanks

We'll travel countries and sit beneath palm trees
And feel the heat in a warm pastel breeze
Let's take a trip; let's go to Spain
By all night train

Or across the sea in Ocean Liners
To opium dens in Asia Minor
We'll spend our days wasting our pay on
Wasting away

We'll stare straight up and wonder why the
Sky is blue; it reflects the sea
We'll all be sayin' "science explained
Our lives again"

And we're always sayin'
Science explained
Our lives again
That's the science of the seasons.

- M. A. Hart (mp3 here.)

cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 07:50 (twenty years ago) link

cheating, maybe, but that really is beautiful.

cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 07:56 (twenty years ago) link

And an excerpt from the canon:

'Museé des Beaux Arts'

[...]

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure, the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

- W. H. Auden

cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 08:01 (twenty years ago) link

that's one of my favorites. i like the image, earlier in the poem, of the executioner's horse scratching its innocent behind on a tree.

lauren (laurenp), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 14:36 (twenty years ago) link

(and you're right - the previous one is gorgeous.)

lauren (laurenp), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 14:38 (twenty years ago) link

More Prynne (from mark's link but people might not have seen it etc).

Under her brow the snowy wing-case
delivers truly the surprise
of days which slide under sunlight
past loose glass in the door
into the reflection of honour spread
through the incomplete, the trusted. So
darkly the stain skips as a livery
of your pause like an apple pip,
the baltic loved one who sleeps.
[...]

I mean, wow.

Gregory Henry (Gregory Henry), Thursday, 24 June 2004 02:38 (twenty years ago) link

Under her brow the snowy wing-case
of days which slide under sunlight
into the reflection of honour spread
darkly the stain skips as a livery
the baltic loved one who sleeps.
[...]

Just as good, and half as long!

Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 24 June 2004 05:15 (twenty years ago) link

(just over the line limit, but so lovely I couldn't bear to curtail it.)

As white is she
And to my touch as choice and briefly satisfactory
As whitebeam leaves that the wind whips aloft,
That tell to the eye their texture soft:
Sweet message sent
To fingertips, and sweetness quickly spent.

Where she goes
Sliding curtains of the rain on rods of sun her ways enclose,
River-whirling gulls her gay sky recieves,
Road, their hostile posters furled,
Bless with arching eaves;
She my love by London gentled as by space the spinning world.

- Anne Ridler, Young Man's Song

cis (cis), Thursday, 24 June 2004 09:15 (twenty years ago) link

Chris, how can you cut the apple pip line? But, yes, point, whatever.

Gregory Henry (Gregory Henry), Thursday, 24 June 2004 18:44 (twenty years ago) link

Granted that the phrase "an apple pip" is good. And "baltic" is nice coming out of that, but then it falls apart immediately after "baltic".

Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 24 June 2004 21:09 (twenty years ago) link

how so?

cozen (Cozen), Thursday, 24 June 2004 21:19 (twenty years ago) link

Because then it resorts to a bunch of words that come pre-loaded with "poetic" signification. The following words in that poem are somewhat poetically "cheap" in that way, since of course they're poetic: "snowy", "slide" (as a verb), "sunlight", "past", "glass", "reflection", "honour", "spread", "darkly", "stain", "pause", "loved", "sleeps", and to a lesser extent "brow", "incomplete", & "trusted".

Now, not that there's anything wrong with the poem for using those words -- they do slide into one another nicely, and it's well crafted enough and it doesn't seem to be trying to hit you over the head with some obvious meaning -- but where the poem gets interesting (for me) is where it leaves the obviously poetic words behind and finds poetry someplace I haven't seen before, such as the phrase "an apple pip". "Pip" and "slide" are both great onomatopoetic [sp?] words, but "slide" has been in a jillion poems and "pip" hasn't.

And "baltic" is such a nice change after "apple pip" -- /b/ being so similar to /p/, the /aw/ and /i/ in "baltic" so similar to the /a/ and /i/ in "apple pip", with the "tic" really lauching you off into new sonic territory -- but then it just goes back to more obviously poetic terms again.

Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 24 June 2004 21:31 (twenty years ago) link

I meant 'how come?', 'how so?' sounds rude. thanks, chris. I'll read that.

cozen (Cozen), Thursday, 24 June 2004 21:36 (twenty years ago) link

(pst archel, I've found what I'm going send you, inscribed it and now will get an envelope and stamps tomorrow, thus post it.)

cozen (Cozen), Friday, 25 June 2004 16:03 (twenty years ago) link

In the naked bed, in Plato's cave,
Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall,
Carpenters hammered under the shaded window,
Wind troubled the window curtains all night long,
A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding,
Their freights covered, as usual.
The ceiling lightened again, the slanting diagram
Slid slowly forth.
[...]
delmore schwartz

tom cleveland (tom cleveland), Friday, 25 June 2004 19:30 (twenty years ago) link

One of my few books that isn't packed is the Emily Dickinson. So here goes. Maybe I can find a poem of hers with "slide" or "slid" in it?

Well, the index doesn't list any but it does have an entry for "sled":


Glass was the Street -- in tinsel Peril
Tree and Traveller stood --
Filled was the Air with merry venture
Hearty with Boys the Road --

Shot the lithe Sleds like shod vibrations
Emphasized and gone
It is the Past's supreme italic
Makes this present mean --

[1498, c. 1880.]

[Hm, it came out a sort of Christmas-in-July offering.]

Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 25 June 2004 20:23 (twenty years ago) link

'Amnesia'

I was, as they later confirmed, a very sick boy.
The star performer at the meeting-house,
my eyes rolled back to show the whites, my arms
outstretched in catatonic supplication
while I gibbered impeccably in the gorgeous tongues
of the aerial orders. On Tuesday nights, before
I hit the Mission, I'd nurse my little secret:
Blind Annie Spall, the dead evangelist
I'd found still dying in creditable squalor
above the fishmonger's in Rankine Street.
The room was ripe with gurry and old sweat;
from her socket in the greasy mattress, Annie
belted through hoarse chorus after chorus
while I prayed loudly, absently enlarging
the crater that I'd gouged in the soft plaster.
Her eyes had been put out before the war,
just in time to never see the daughter
with the hare-lip and the kilt of dirty dishtowels
who ran the brothel from the upstairs flat
and who'd chap to let me know my time was up,
then lead me down the dark hall, its zoo-smell,
her slippers peeling off the sticky lino.
At the door, I'd shush her quiet, pressing
my bus-fare earnestly into her hand.

Four years later. Picture me: drenched in patchouli,
strafed with hash-burns, casually arranged
on Susie's bed. Smouldering frangipani;
Dali's The Persistence of Memory;
pink silk loosely knotted round the lamp
to soften the light; a sheaf of Penguin Classics,
their spines all carefully broken in the middle;
a John Martyn album mumbling through the speakers.
One hand was jacked up her skirt, the other trailing
over the cool wall behind the headboard
where I found the hole in the plaster again.
The room stopped like a lift; Sue went on talking.
It was a nightmare, Don. We had to gut the place.

cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 26 June 2004 21:58 (twenty years ago) link

'gorgeous tongues'; 'still dying'; 'ripe with gurry and old sweat'; 'absently enlarging'; 'the kilt...'; the bus-fare.

I think this is definitely a 'working class poem' despite his protestations, to the contrary, that he's written only one of those ('an elliptical stylus'). again, this, like that, challenges the reader's (or writer's) impulse towards indentification and is actually more emetic than angering, I think. the first 7 lines of the second stanza are quite flat I think, clichéd almost ('strafed', 'mumbling', the careful breaking), perhaps it's intent made apparent. you can almost feel the rhythm of the poem stop, with its lift, as if your body, your thoughts have ceased to progress but yet your eyes, drawn in by the poem, on rails now, your eyes read on and, on surface, take in what the rest of you doesn't take in. that shift into italics, a shift into another person's voice heard rather than spoken. god, what a poem.

what does it mean? thread?

cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 26 June 2004 22:05 (twenty years ago) link

I shouldn't talk about poetry.

cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 26 June 2004 22:08 (twenty years ago) link

I three-quarteers agree with Chris about that Pyrne, he's pretty convincing. I'm not sure I share his total hatin' on "poetic" words, though, I think the "loved one who sleeps" bit really works, the whole fairytale princess thing (snowy, baltic, livery, loose glass, reflection) sets off the apple pip beautifully, it's a really good conclusion to the stanza, for me. I'd like to cut lines six and seven, though.

Cozen, you should! I don't know what yours means either, but I'd love to hear what people thought, it's pretty extraordinary.

Gregory Henry (Gregory Henry), Saturday, 26 June 2004 23:44 (twenty years ago) link

Re: Amnesia

I wish I had written that. *sigh*


From Cardigan Bay (by Leslie Norris)

For those who live here
After our daylight, I
Could wish us to look
Out of the darkness
We have become, teaching
Them happiness, a true love.

What more could we (or anyone) wish for on a Sunday morning than happiness, a true love?

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Sunday, 27 June 2004 16:19 (twenty years ago) link

I'd rather have a good cup of coffee and a good crossword puzzle.

Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 27 June 2004 23:38 (twenty years ago) link

love would be alright though, right?

cozen (Cozen), Monday, 28 June 2004 08:44 (twenty years ago) link

I spent the weekend revelling (finally) in that 101 Sonnets book. Excerpts to follow when I have it to hand again, I'm sure...

Archel (Archel), Monday, 28 June 2004 09:10 (twenty years ago) link

the introductory essay is wonderful. as are the glosses at the back.

cozen (Cozen), Monday, 28 June 2004 09:27 (twenty years ago) link

Yes. I'd never thought about sonnets in relation to the golden ratio etc before but wow! (Or is it 'hmmmm'?)

Archel (Archel), Monday, 28 June 2004 09:35 (twenty years ago) link

Cozen should, or should not, talk about poetry.

I am going to read Don Paterson's sonnets anthology, myself. I have it, here.

the pomefox, Monday, 28 June 2004 12:55 (twenty years ago) link

I must say my innocent (?) little eyes did boggle a bit at the Craig Raine contribution, not to say it wasn't good...

And Edwin Morgan's take on Cage is great, the pure form of that pleasing squareness of sonnets than DP talks about in the intro.

Archel (Archel), Monday, 28 June 2004 13:21 (twenty years ago) link

Love is fine, yes. I'm not entirely sure what "love" means but it makes more sense than "happiness".

Archel, I have written a few sonnets where I have tried to make the break between A and B be at the golden mean point in the sonnet -- towards the end of the 9th line.

Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 28 June 2004 17:53 (twenty years ago) link

William Faulkner said, "Joy is a liquid. Happiness is a solid." Do you think he's right? You're not entirely sure what "love" is. So, what is happiness, a cup of coffee and a crossword puzzle? Writing a sonnet? Finding a $10 bill inside a used book?

A golden mean point in a sonnet is an interesting idea. I'm trying to imagine how that works.

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Monday, 28 June 2004 19:03 (twenty years ago) link

approximately.

cozen (Cozen), Monday, 28 June 2004 19:05 (twenty years ago) link

No, I have absolutely no idea what "happiness" means and I don't trust it as a concept. I can't imagine describing how I feel as "happy", except in a very sloppy way to mean "content" or perhaps "amused". I can picture "giddy" or "thrilled" but neither of those seems like "happy", exactly. A cup of coffee and a crossword puzzle is contentment, stimulation, well-being. Writing a sonnet is, at best, a sense of completion, the orgasmic feeling of release. Though that's pretty rare.

The proportion of a sonnet's 14 lines that divides it up along the golden mean is approximately 8.75:5.25. So three-quarters of the way through eighth line, you can introduce the second part. Most sonnets are divided 8:6, which is fairly close, and allows for your traditional ABBACDDCEFFEFE type rhyme scheme.

Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 28 June 2004 20:07 (twenty years ago) link

a 13-line sonnet divides 8:5.

cozen (Cozen), Monday, 28 June 2004 21:26 (twenty years ago) link

Well, 8 lines and a letter, anyways.

Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 29 June 2004 06:10 (twenty years ago) link

Maybe in these less superstitious (?) days of ours we should start to campaign for the 13-line sonnet.

Here's a topping 14-line one though:

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

- RS Thomas

Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 29 June 2004 11:42 (twenty years ago) link

May I abuse the thread momentarily with a little light self-promotion? I may? Thank you.

I have added a batch of new stuff to the webzine/ongoing collection of writing that I edit, and I think some of it's rather good:
http://www.buzzwords.ndo.co.uk

And if any writing ILBers want to contribute, that would be nice :)

Archel (Archel), Thursday, 1 July 2004 08:06 (twenty years ago) link

Oh frettled gruntbuggly thy micturations are to me,
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
Groop I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes.
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon,
See if I don't!

Fred (Fred), Thursday, 1 July 2004 20:48 (twenty years ago) link

I will miss my regular doses of poetry over the next two weeks :(

Please come and post here instead!
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wordshare/

Archel (Archel), Friday, 2 July 2004 09:23 (twenty years ago) link

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Friday, 2 July 2004 10:50 (twenty years ago) link

two weeks pass...
Red plum blossoms.
A ball of air
Leaves a box.
~ Koi Nagata

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Saturday, 17 July 2004 18:17 (twenty years ago) link

I need my regular dose of The Second Coming, thanks belatedly JtN :)

I have read and written a fair bit of poetry lately. Not having Ilx obviously agrees with me.


Jist ti Let Yi No

(from the American of Carlos Williams)

ahv drank
thi speshlz
that wurrin
thi frij

n thit
yiwurr probbli
hodn back
furthi pahrti

awright
they wur great
thaht stroang
thaht cawld

---Tom Leonard

Archel (Archel), Monday, 19 July 2004 11:46 (twenty years ago) link

A stanza for PF:

I do not want to be reflective any more
Envying and despising unreflective things
Finding pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting
And young girls doing their hair and all the castles of sand
Flushed by the children's bedtime, level with the shore.
[...]

(when I say for PF I mean because he mentioned Macneice, not because the particular poem is somehow relevant to him. Though it may be. It is to me.)

Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 20 July 2004 11:29 (twenty years ago) link

I asked no other thing,
No other was denied.
I offered Being for it;
The mighty merchant smiled.

Brazil? He twirled a button,
Without a glance my way:
"But, madam, is there nothing else
That we can show to-day?"

Fred (Fred), Tuesday, 20 July 2004 14:15 (twenty years ago) link

Archel, thanks for the RS Thomas.

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Friday, 23 July 2004 15:58 (twenty years ago) link

THE SUMMER DAY

...
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?

--Mary Oliver

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Saturday, 24 July 2004 14:07 (twenty years ago) link

I lost my voice in some words,
I lost my mind in some lines,
I lost my soul in some pages,
I lost myself in a book,
I lost a book, a book of time, a book of life--
--And now I realize that book was mine.

-Freya

Fred (Fred), Saturday, 24 July 2004 19:29 (twenty years ago) link

I'm reading tonight in L.A. You'd think I'd have some idea what I should read. But no.

Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 25 July 2004 15:32 (twenty years ago) link

Gee, this is spooky, kinda like walking around in a house where nobody's home.... Chris is in LA. Where is everybody else???? I can hear my footsteps echoing, and somewhere far off, a dog is barking....

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Saturday, 31 July 2004 15:40 (twenty years ago) link

No, I'm back. The reading went OK but it was in a weird venue and not many people showed up. But it was still nice.

Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 31 July 2004 16:03 (twenty years ago) link

But since you asked!

--

If You Had Two Husbands


If you had two husbands.
If you had two husbands.
Well, not exactly.
If you had two husbands would you be willing to take everything and be satisfied to live in a large house with love and a view and plenty of flowers and friends at table and the young ones and cousins who said nothing.
This is what happened.

She expressed everything.
She is worthy of signing a will.
And mentioning what she wished.
She was brought up by her mother or her father. She had meaning and she was careful in reading. She read marvelously. She moved.
She was pleased. She was thirty-four. She was flavored by reason of much memory and recollection.

[...]

[Michael Coffey, from "Sweet Suite: Gertrude Stein"]

Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 31 July 2004 18:49 (twenty years ago) link

Wonderful! So glad you're home! I too am pleased. But not thirty-four. I am pleased by reason of much memory and recollection. And flavored by careful reading. Moreso than at thirty-four. Or five. Or even six. Well, not exactly. But I move, not quite worthy to sign a will. Yet. I still move. Although carefully. And not exactly.

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Saturday, 31 July 2004 19:40 (twenty years ago) link

And you have two husbands, don't forget that.

Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 1 August 2004 03:14 (twenty years ago) link

It was good of Archel, to post something for me.

I am not certain about that pome - what MacNeice is saying; whether he is being more original and searching than he looks.

Cozen, when are we going to discuss Don Paterson?

the pomefox, Sunday, 1 August 2004 10:56 (twenty years ago) link

When isn't Cozen discussing Don Paterson?

Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 1 August 2004 16:56 (twenty years ago) link

always.

cºzen (Cozen), Sunday, 1 August 2004 18:10 (twenty years ago) link

to answer you both.

cºzen (Cozen), Sunday, 1 August 2004 18:10 (twenty years ago) link

You're always not discussing him?

Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 1 August 2004 21:44 (twenty years ago) link

[...]
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
[...]

Robert Frost - Directive

bnw (bnw), Monday, 2 August 2004 03:15 (twenty years ago) link

[...]
Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

(Tennyson - Ulysses)

Mog, Monday, 2 August 2004 12:35 (twenty years ago) link

Hell yeah bring on the happy isles...

Archel (Archel), Monday, 2 August 2004 12:38 (twenty years ago) link

[...] Sir, 't was not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say "Her mantle laps
Over my lady's wrist too much" or "Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat:" such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart - how shall I say? - too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed: she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
[...]

(from 'My Last Duchess' by Robert Browning)

Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 3 August 2004 12:45 (twenty years ago) link

The Pink Frock

"O my pretty pink frock,
I sha'n't be able to wear it!
Why is he dying just now?
I hardly can bear it!

"He might have contrived to live on;
But they say there's no hope whatever:
And must I shut myself up,
And go out never?

"O my pretty pink frock,
Puff-sleeved and accordion-pleated!
He might have passed in July,
And not so cheated!"

-T.H.

Fred (Fred), Wednesday, 4 August 2004 20:48 (twenty years ago) link

Infantry Columns

We're foot-slog-slog-slog-sloggin' over Africa -
Foot-foot-foot-foot-sloggin' over Africa -
(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up an' down again!)
There's no discharge in the war!

Seven-six-eleven-five-nine-an'-twenty mile to-day -
Four-eleven-seventeen-thirty-two the day before -
(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up an' down again!)
There's no discharge in the war!

Don't-don't-don't-don't-look at what's in front of you.
(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up an' down again)
Men-men-men-men-men go mad with watchin' em,
An' there's no discharge in the war!

Try-try-try-try-to think o' something different -
Oh-my-God-keep-me from goin' lunatic!
(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up an' down again!)
There's no discharge in the war!
[...]

-Rudyard Kipling

Fred (Fred), Wednesday, 4 August 2004 20:50 (twenty years ago) link

I'm just going to point out here that I am going to be attending poetry readings on Sunday, Monday, and Thursday (that one in Seattle!) which makes me feel all, I dunno, into poetry and stuff.

Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 5 August 2004 01:11 (twenty years ago) link

...

Meanwhile
let us cast one shadow
in air or water

our mouths wide as saucers
our tongues at work in their tunnels
our shut eyes unimportant as freckles.

Let us turn to, until
the giant flashlight
comes down on us

and we are rammed home on the corkscrew gig
one at a time
and lugged off belly to belly.

TURNING TO, Maxine Kumin

(Whatever your particular political persuasions may be, watch out for those giant flashlights, corkscrew gigs, and keep your shut eyes open....)

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Thursday, 5 August 2004 14:42 (twenty years ago) link

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life!

cºzen (Cozen), Thursday, 5 August 2004 20:19 (twenty years ago) link

nice, isn't it? so... did you get the book? don't be coy with me - it may work with the pomefox but i won't stand for it.

lauren (laurenp), Thursday, 5 August 2004 23:14 (twenty years ago) link

:)

cºzen (Cozen), Friday, 6 August 2004 08:02 (twenty years ago) link

I haven't started reading it yet though.

cºzen (Cozen), Friday, 6 August 2004 08:29 (twenty years ago) link

yay! after all this, i hope you enjoy it.

lauren (laurenp), Friday, 6 August 2004 11:05 (twenty years ago) link

i'm going to buy poetry, even though i should be saving $ for a big project. i'm weak! but in a good way, i think.

lauren (laurenp), Friday, 6 August 2004 15:36 (twenty years ago) link

tell us what you buy!

cºzen (Cozen), Friday, 6 August 2004 15:56 (twenty years ago) link

"Madam and Her Madam," Langston Hughes.

I worked for a woman,
She wasn't mean--
But she had a twelve-room
House to clean.

Had to get breakfast,
Dinner, and Supper, too--
Then take care of her children
When I got through.

Wash, iron, and scrub,
Walk the dog around--
It was too much,
Nearly broke me down.

I said, Madam,
Can it be
You trying to make a
Pack-horse out of me?

She opened her mouth.
She cried, Oh, no!
You know, Alberta,
I love you so!

I said, Madam,
That may be true--
But I'll be dogged
If I love you!

Begs2Differ (Begs2Differ), Friday, 6 August 2004 17:37 (twenty years ago) link

damn st. mark's books. i never thought i'd say that, but damn them. i bought postcards, but no poetry.

lauren (laurenp), Friday, 6 August 2004 19:39 (twenty years ago) link

Why damn them? They never had quite the selection I wanted, but.

Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 6 August 2004 21:11 (twenty years ago) link

i love st.mark's, but i was all excited to go shopping and get a big bag of books and spread them out on the floor tonight and just admire them and i was totally thwarted by inadequately re-stocked poetry section. ARGH.

lauren (laurenp), Friday, 6 August 2004 22:51 (twenty years ago) link

http://www.spdbooks.org will send you fun presents in the mail if you ask nicely (and pay for them).

Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 7 August 2004 00:28 (twenty years ago) link

Also: http://poetshouse.org/library.htm Although you can't buy anything unless you catch 'em during book sale time.

bnw (bnw), Saturday, 7 August 2004 03:17 (twenty years ago) link

Oh yeah. I hit that once. It was all right.

Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 7 August 2004 20:13 (twenty years ago) link

two weeks pass...
I just found this poem again recently. The last time I heard it was when Jane Draycott was my tutor on a residential in Portugal. V good memories and a great poem.

Prince Rupert's Drop

It's brilliant. It's a tear you can stand a car
on, the hard eye of a chandelier
ready to break down and cry like a baby, a rare
birth, cooled before its time. It's an ear
of glass accidentally sown in the coldest of water,
that sheer drop, rock solid except for the tail
or neck which will snap like sugar, kick like a mortar
under the surefire touch of your fingernail.

It's the pearl in a will-o'-the-wisp, the lantern asleep
in the ice, the light of St Elmo's fire in your eyes.
It's the roulette burst of a necklace, the snap
of bones in an icicle's finger, the snip of your pliers
at the neck of my heart, the fingertip working the spot
which says 'you are here' until you are suddenly not.

Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 24 August 2004 09:35 (twenty years ago) link

No Poem

I knew the words
to this poem once.

I wrote them down.

I looked up at the sun
and I looked down.

The words formed a sun
in their own fragile sky.

I wrote it down.

I was blinded twice
back into sight.

I was blinded twice
back into sight.

Fred (Fred), Wednesday, 25 August 2004 16:45 (twenty years ago) link

YES, I WRITE VERSE

Yes, I write verse now and then,
But blunt and flaccid is my pen,
No longer talked of by young men
As rather clever.

In the last quarter are my eyes,
You see it by their form and size;
Is it not time then to be wise?
Or now or never.

-- Walter Landor

I hope y'all are out there writing wonderful stuff, since you're not here. Now or never?

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Tuesday, 31 August 2004 15:09 (twenty years ago) link

[...]
I have come late but I have come before
Later with slaked steps from stone to stone
To hope to find you listening for the door.

I stand in the ticking room. My dear, I take
A moth kiss from your breath. The shore gulls cry.
I leave this at your ear for when you wake.

- WS Graham

Archel (Archel), Wednesday, 1 September 2004 13:21 (twenty years ago) link

*sigh*

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Wednesday, 1 September 2004 18:16 (twenty years ago) link

Bid adieu, adieu, adieu,
Bid adieu to girlish days,
Happy Love is come to woo
Thee and woo thy girlish ways--
The zone that doth become thee fair,
The snood upon thy yellow hair.

When thou hast heard his name upon
The bugles of the cherubim
Begin thou softly to unzone
Thy girlish bosom unto him
And softly to undo the snood
That is the sign of maidenhood.

-joyce

tom cleveland (tom cleveland), Wednesday, 1 September 2004 18:40 (twenty years ago) link

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust Descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer and--sans End!

-Rubaiyat- Omar Khayyam

Fred (Fred), Wednesday, 1 September 2004 21:16 (twenty years ago) link

A distinctly autumnal feel is descending on the poetry thread, no?

Archel (Archel), Thursday, 2 September 2004 07:10 (twenty years ago) link

Spectrum

Brown from the sun's mid-afternoon caress,
And where not brown, white as a bridal dress,
And where not white, pink as an opened plum.

And where not pink, darkly mysterious,
And when observed, openly furious,
And then obscured, while the red blushes come.

--William Dickey

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Thursday, 2 September 2004 18:25 (twenty years ago) link

Once more:

...
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sunlight
And the legends of green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

...
POEM IN OCTOBER--Dylan Thomas

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Thursday, 2 September 2004 18:32 (twenty years ago) link

pepek, dear, you rule - this is one of my fav Thomas poems...

yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Thursday, 2 September 2004 20:02 (twenty years ago) link

I like this thread a lot and must participate (slightly more than 10 lines).

(...)
So we must be careful, those of us who were
born with
the wrong number of fingers or the gift
of loving; we must do our best to behave
like normal members of society and not make
nuisances
of ourselves; otherwise it could go hard
with us.
It is better to bite back your tears,
swallow your laughter,
and learn to fake the mildly self-depreciating
titter
favoured by the bourgeoisie
than to be left entirely alone, as you will be,
if your disconformity embarrasses
your neighbours; I wish I didn't keep forgetting
that.

- Alden Nowlan, from "He Attempts to Love His Neighbours"

rrrobyn (rrrobyn), Thursday, 9 September 2004 05:23 (twenty years ago) link

Tao
(For F.R.Scott)

Things that are blown or carried by a stream
seem to be living - not in that they oppose the wind
or oppose the water, but in that they move
lightly blown,
lightly flowing, like things that move

We who are actually living do best when we do not resist,
do not insist, when winds and waters blow,
but go gently with them, being of their kind,
in the secret of wind and water, the thought of flow

Louis Dudek

equinox, Thursday, 9 September 2004 13:15 (twenty years ago) link

rrobyn thx

57 7th (calstars), Thursday, 9 September 2004 13:26 (twenty years ago) link

(rrobyn a friend and I were just talking about this same feeling, but this poem captures it much better than we could. thanks.)

jocelyn (Jocelyn), Thursday, 9 September 2004 13:36 (twenty years ago) link

So glad to see this one movin' again!

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Thursday, 9 September 2004 14:51 (twenty years ago) link

[...]
I will walk up the road behind the house
& think of a young boy running in & out
through the doors of darkness, calling his
friends by name; his friends call back, leaping
into the tall grass to meet him.

I return to the house. From a window, a woman
shouts for the boy to come in.

I feel sorry for her
like the fool that I am,
like the man I will never be.

-Pier Giorgio Di Cicco

Fred (Fred), Thursday, 9 September 2004 20:02 (twenty years ago) link

Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

[...]

-To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough

Fred (Fred), Saturday, 11 September 2004 12:34 (twenty years ago) link

Woo, I bought Alice Oswald's Dart and Sarah Wardle's Fields Away for £2.94 yesterday :)

I have poems to be writin' after my camping trip (head is full of sheep mainly) but in the meantime:

We, too, had known golden hours
When body and soul were in tune,
Had danced with our true loves
By the light of a full moon,
And sat with the wise and good
As tongues grew witty and gay
Over some noble dish
Out of Escoffier;
Had felt the intrusive glory
Which tears reserve apart,
And would in the old grand manner
Have sung from a resonant heart.

Archel (Archel), Monday, 13 September 2004 11:46 (twenty years ago) link

In the jangle and smecksheck of the social
I do the decent do-si-do, I say Hello,
How's it going? Not too bad, yourself?
I mingle and pay my dues.
I crinkle and share my views.
In the jangle and smecksheck of the social
I walk strafed by the flak of smiles
and the dart-smart of glances,
nodding and lauding and helping to weave
the enclosing tapestryification
that butters the toast of the social.

{The first lines of a new Mark Halliday poem.

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 13 September 2004 13:30 (twenty years ago) link

Nice. 'I crinkle'!

Archel (Archel), Monday, 13 September 2004 14:10 (twenty years ago) link

i'm so poetry-free these days. what should i be reading?

lauren (laurenp), Monday, 13 September 2004 14:41 (twenty years ago) link

Cereal boxes.

Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 13 September 2004 15:09 (twenty years ago) link

Touris, white man, wipin his face,
Met me in Golden Grove market place.
He looked at m'ol' clothes brown wid stain ,
An soaked right through wid de Portlan rain,
He cas his eye, turn up his nose,
He says, 'You're a beggar man, I suppose?'
He says, 'Boy, get some occupation,
Be of some value to your nation.'
I said, 'By God and dis big right han
You mus recognize a banana man.
[...]

-Evan Jones

Fred (Fred), Tuesday, 14 September 2004 15:53 (twenty years ago) link

(Incidentally, although this is probably not the right thread for it, I got my first review for Three Voices - only one sentence, of which most was taken up by a quote from one of the poems - but still! I am 'laconic' apparently.)

Archel (Archel), Wednesday, 15 September 2004 09:38 (twenty years ago) link

The night started cold -
Too cold, and it got colder:
A night for murder.

Fred (Fred), Wednesday, 15 September 2004 18:29 (twenty years ago) link

"Snatch of Sliphorn Jazz"

Are you happy? It's the only
way to be, kid.
Yes, be happy, it's a good nice
way to be.
But not happy-happy, kid, don't
be too doubled-up doggone happy.
It's the doubled-up doggone happy-
happy people... bust hard... they
do bust hard... when they bust.
Be happy, kid, go to it, but not too
doggone happy.

-Carl Sandburg

j c (j c), Sunday, 19 September 2004 20:39 (twenty years ago) link

two weeks pass...
I often see flowers from a passing car
That are gone before I can tell what they are.

I want to get out of the train and go back
To see what they were beside the track.

I name all the flowers I am sure they weren't;
Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt--

Not bluebells gracing a tunnel mouth--
Not lupine living on sand and drouth.

Was something brushed across my mind
That no one on earth will ever find?

Heaven gives its glimpses only to those
Not in position to look too close.

-Robert Frost

Fred (Fred), Thursday, 7 October 2004 11:00 (twenty years ago) link

I still believe in it.

cºzen (Cozen), Saturday, 9 October 2004 21:37 (twenty years ago) link

This thread is fantastic.

Jordan (Jordan), Monday, 11 October 2004 19:56 (twenty years ago) link

I'll contribute a poem that an English professor made us memorize during my sophomore year of college:

Westren wind when wilt thou blow
The small rain down can rain
Christ that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again

Jordan (Jordan), Monday, 11 October 2004 20:33 (twenty years ago) link

(Anonymous)

Jordan (Jordan), Monday, 11 October 2004 20:33 (twenty years ago) link

To Live By

Work from the original toward
the beautiful,
unless the latter comes first
in which case
reverse your efforts to find
a model worthy of such
inane desire.


Even the mouth's being
divided into two lips is
not enough to make words
equal themselves.


Eavesdroppers fear
the hermit's soliloquy.


Wake up, wound, the knife said.

--Bill Knott

bnw (bnw), Saturday, 23 October 2004 04:39 (twenty years ago) link

"My own prejudice is in favour of poets whose worlds are not too esoteric. I would have a poet, able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions." (Louis MacNiece)

cºzen (Cozen), Monday, 25 October 2004 17:46 (twenty years ago) link

i really like that bill knott poem, bnw. thanks.

j c (j c), Monday, 25 October 2004 22:22 (twenty years ago) link

"So fuck you, Larry Eigner." (Louis MacNiece)

Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 06:50 (twenty years ago) link

"You too, Emily Dickinson." (Louis MacNiece)

Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 06:50 (twenty years ago) link

I have been using macniece's obiter in interviews recently, inverting poet into lawyer and dropping the able-bodied as unnecessary.

cºzen (Cozen), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 09:47 (twenty years ago) link

This Is A Photograph Of Me
Margaret Atwood

It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;

then, as you scan
it, you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.

In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.

(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.

I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)

Fred (Fred), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 11:51 (twenty years ago) link

And is 'appreciative of women' necessary?

xpost

Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 11:53 (twenty years ago) link

oh yeah, that bit too I have changed, to 'people'.

cºzen (Cozen), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 13:46 (twenty years ago) link

no-one has offered me a job.

cºzen (Cozen), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 13:47 (twenty years ago) link

that margaret atwood poem is one I love and it is strange to see it again, here of all places. it is a poem that I love from a time when I was falling in love and it was part of the big, unco-ordinated apparatus of desire that too hold of me, a long while ago now. I didn't know its name nor author, it's queer to read it again, three years later, out of love now, but still falling.

cºzen (Cozen), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 13:50 (twenty years ago) link

Long walks at night--
that's what good for the soul:
peeking into windows
watching tired housewives
trying to fight off
their beer-maddened husbands.

-Charles Bukowski

Fred (Fred), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 16:52 (twenty years ago) link

If you stare at the poem long enough, you will see your love, etc.

Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 17:37 (twenty years ago) link

yes

Fred (Fred), Tuesday, 26 October 2004 20:15 (twenty years ago) link

The Gateway

Now the heart sings with all its thousand voices
To hear this city of cells, my body, sing.
The tree through the stiff clay at long last forces
Its thin strong roots and taps the secret spring.

And the sweet waters without intermission
Climb to the tips of its green tenement;
The breasts have borne the grace of their possession,
The lips have felt the pressure of content.

Here I come home: in this expected country
They know my name and speak it with delight.
I am the dream and you my gates of entry,
The means by which I waken into light.

--- AD Hope

Archel (Archel), Monday, 1 November 2004 14:04 (twenty years ago) link

Actually I meant to post this, more seasonal, one, but I like the above too.

Winter Love

Let us have winter loving that the heart
May be in peace and ready to partake
Of the slow pleasure spring would wish to hurry
Or that in summer harshly would awake,
And let us fall apart, O gladly weary,
The white skin shaken like a white snowflake.

-Elizabeth Jennings

Archel (Archel), Monday, 1 November 2004 14:07 (twenty years ago) link

Does anybody care for this "verse w/ line breaks" movement that has taken over much of contemporary poetry (American, at least)? I have to say when I see something that looks like this, I am instantly repelled. I read the first couple stanzas, liked them, and then could feel the poem wandering off. That feeling + the length + the fact I can see names of characters and dialogue makes me not want to read it AT ALL. Am I just lazy?

bnw (bnw), Monday, 1 November 2004 17:23 (twenty years ago) link

Do you mean *prose* with line breaks?

Archel (Archel), Monday, 1 November 2004 17:31 (twenty years ago) link

If yes, then no I don't much like it - the words should be CHOSEN and should do some WORK, dammit - but then there is some poetry which appears to be prosey in that way but on closer reading isn't at all.

If no, then I'm not sure I understand the question.

Archel (Archel), Monday, 1 November 2004 17:35 (twenty years ago) link

Er i meant prose with line breaks, obv. Too much coffee. There was a really vicious article on webdelsol a couple years ago condemning a lot of contemporary poetry for this offense. Pretty much every tool of poetry is cast aside: rhyme, meter, fragments, etc. And the only thing making these "poems" is that they have line breaks, and not even those are really utilized to any effect. I guess I don't really understand the aesthetics of this approach.

(interesting tidbit/bragging: I talked to Dorraine Laux a bit about that article when I met her.)

bnw (bnw), Monday, 1 November 2004 18:08 (twenty years ago) link

(hate to stall out this thread on my negativity so...)


Public Address (excerpt)

[...]
The screen goes blank, all that was

etched there in light--a flashbulb's
thumbprint in the back of the skull.
Sometimes we only die, sometimes
champagne corks fly from our wounds.

The coldest day of the year and still
there's flowering. The lovers' bodies,
once long grass, strike and strike each other.
How else control fire but to make your own? A dye

must be squeezed from the poisonous berries,
the sand melted translucent. each work
an evasion, secret, clue, the subject always
missing just as the dream is never

inside the sleeper but rises above like
a sweet scum above boiling milk, the body
like a dead body but warm, inviting,
arousable. Who has not looked down the throat

of an orchid into color that can't be seen
like the cosmic black humming behind
noon blue? We want only to be admitted.
We want only to be left out.

Dean Young

bnw (bnw), Tuesday, 2 November 2004 04:39 (twenty years ago) link

The poetry journal doodah that I edit had a fairly strict policy for years of no poems with any sort of linebreaks. That policy got softened at one point but I somewhat regret that. Anyway, I don't understand why have the poems on this thread have line breaks -- many of them I think would be better without. (There's only one line break in that last poem that I think adds anything by having a line break.) (Although of course that poem has much more interesting rhythm than the poem you linked to.)

Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 2 November 2004 05:03 (twenty years ago) link

I think there's definitely a place for line breaks - why have a page at all if you can't make use of its space around the poem - but they need at least as much thinking about as everything else.

When I've got my editor hat on, nothing sets the alarm bells off so quickly as randomly placed line breaks, put in just because the 'poet' is dimly convinced that poetry has line breaks.

(Then again, with some of the dodgy things that email can do to formatting, it's often anyone's guess where the line breaks are intended to be, if anywhere.)

Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 2 November 2004 10:00 (twenty years ago) link

Incidentally (I still feel like an arse mentioning it on this thread, but where else?) my book has got some reviews lately and I was particularly pleased with this impenetrable comment: 'writes mainly on the explosions and uncertainties when edging in and through and out of intimacies'. Nice-sounding gibberish always a good sign in reviews, I think.

Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 2 November 2004 17:22 (twenty years ago) link

Well done, Archel.

That sentence sounds not wholly grammatical, yet still sufficiently suggestive.

the bluefox, Tuesday, 2 November 2004 17:44 (twenty years ago) link

Anyway, I don't understand why have the poems on this thread have line breaks -- many of them I think would be better without.

I think what I'm talking about are those "prose w/ line breaks" pieces that seem to use breaks in such a way that disregard them as being a pause or an emphasis on the line's effect as an independent part of a larger whole.

I'd agee that ultra-conventional breaks are probably nothing to pat yourself on the back for either. They're worth experimenting with.

bnw (bnw), Tuesday, 2 November 2004 18:54 (twenty years ago) link

Did I really write "have the poems"? I meant "half". Dear God.

Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 2 November 2004 23:48 (twenty years ago) link

Apologies for exceeding the ten-lines rule, but I couldn't decide which bits of this to quote.

CLAIRE BATEMAN
MONOGRAPH

It would later be said of our era
that even the boring parts were interesting,
& vice versa.

Without the least trace of irony,
officials christened space shuttles
after doomed & sunken
cities of yore.

Nearly all of us
constructed dashboard altars
upon which we lavished
particular & minute devotions
as we cruised past scenes
that seemed to represent disaster’s aftermath
but almost always resolved
into simple sequences of yard sales—
derelict undergarments & mattresses
exposed on sullenly tilting lawns—
each just another item on the ever-growing
list of events not to be taken
personally.

For their arcane significance,
we pondered signs such as these:

IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU'D BE HOME RIGHT NOW!

&

GOD SEES EVERYTHING, EVEN YOU READING THIS SIGN!

Though the varieties of available lip-gloss shades
& the total number of famous people in history
were exponentially increasing
so that it became ever more difficult
to distinguish plum from maroon
or the living from the dead,
it still took approximately
the same six years
for a single exhaled breath
to become evenly mixed with the atmosphere.

For none of us was it ever clear
whether that rumbling sound we kept hearing
was static or heartfelt applause.

Everyone was professionally lonely,
yet we ceased not our shining.

Many aspired to but did not actually achieve
the office of Notary Public.

This was not considered a tragedy.

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Saturday, 6 November 2004 20:46 (twenty years ago) link

one from poetery daily today, I like the 8th line especially.

Seen

In your field of vision, there is a place where no image is fixed,
where injury carved its cave of nothing,
gathered blackness around a splinter's wooden slip.
One eye, you say, scans the world.
The other examines the self's invisible wanting.
In that equation, I believe myself to be
the point connecting one destination to another,
somewhere you paused to draw lines to the next warm station.
I emit no light, no heat
but gather, in cupped hands, what fell to the ground
when limbs were shaken by your grasping wind.

Mark Wunderlich

bnw (bnw), Sunday, 7 November 2004 16:43 (twenty years ago) link

So I'm introducing some poets tonight at a reading. Does anyone have any suggestions as for how I should introduce them?

Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 7 November 2004 18:00 (twenty years ago) link

chris
acrostics
sometimes
usher
in
simple
truths
random
yearnings

bnw (bnw), Sunday, 7 November 2004 19:04 (twenty years ago) link

whoops i spelled your name wrong, 'twas a noble attempt

bnw (bnw), Sunday, 7 November 2004 19:05 (twenty years ago) link

It looks right to me. But I think I've already done acrostics. I've also done anagrams.

Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 7 November 2004 19:56 (twenty years ago) link

Because the days are getting shorter (and my tutor set an essay on him, due tomorrow morning!)...

From too much hope of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.


-- A. C. Swinburne

sceefy, Tuesday, 9 November 2004 22:26 (twenty years ago) link

No sun - no moon!
No morn - no noon -
No dawn - no dusk - no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member -
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! -
November!

--- Thomas Hood

Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 16 November 2004 10:15 (twenty years ago) link

So he heard about the election results, eh?

Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 16 November 2004 22:04 (twenty years ago) link

A scholar named Wang
Laughed at my poems.
The accents are wrong,
He said,
Too many beats;
The meter is poor,
The wording impulsive.

I laugh at his poems,
As he laughs at mine.
They read like
The words of a blind man
Describing the sun.

Fred (Fred), Saturday, 20 November 2004 22:25 (twenty years ago) link

one month passes...
Is it time to revive this thread?

I wanted to add Sean O'Brien to it, last night, but I don't know how to make the lines all go together.

the pomefox, Thursday, 23 December 2004 11:10 (twenty years ago) link

BBC2 viewers may like to know that there is a poetry programme, Essential Poems for Christmas on tonight at 7.30.

(Excuse the repitition, I am providing a public service.)

Puddin'Head Miller (PJ Miller), Thursday, 23 December 2004 12:04 (twenty years ago) link

Never think nobody cares

For that thundery corridor

Painting its Forth into Scotland and back,

For the drizzly grind of the coal-train

Or even the Metro, that amateur transport,

Sparking and chattering every verse-end.

from Sean O'Brien, 'The Eavesdroppers'

the pomefox, Thursday, 23 December 2004 13:53 (twenty years ago) link

one month passes...
We have a new baby in the family-- one week old. His name is Keenan, which, I understand means "little ancient one." For him this bit from W.S. Merwin:

...
Where darkness is
Once there was a mirror
And I therein was King.
...

Where is everyone?

pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Saturday, 29 January 2005 17:29 (twenty years ago) link

They're over here: Poetry Thread, part two: A Game Of Chess

Happy baby!

Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 29 January 2005 19:14 (twenty years ago) link

nine months pass...
Some people live all their lives without knowing which path is right.

They are buffeted by this wind and that,
never really knowing where they are going.

They think they have no choice over their destiny,
but we know the path and we follow it without question.

Remember, there is sacrifice involved in any kind of life,
even those that choose the safe way must sacrifice the thrill.

The point is if you know what you want,
you must be prepared to sacrifice everything to get it.

Those that realise this are the fortunate ones.

- Thomas Schumacher ‘The Fortunate Ones’

c7n (Cozen), Saturday, 29 October 2005 11:11 (nineteen years ago) link

OpTiMo HoGmAnAy MiX 2oo1

c7n (Cozen), Saturday, 29 October 2005 11:12 (nineteen years ago) link

Should I lock this thread and link to the other? Or what?

Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 1 November 2005 03:38 (nineteen years ago) link

The angst of the moderator.

Jaq (Jaq), Tuesday, 1 November 2005 03:51 (nineteen years ago) link

That would probably be for the best.

Matt (Matt), Tuesday, 1 November 2005 11:22 (nineteen years ago) link

I think you should, to practice your thread-locking technique. Then you can Poxy Fule things up with the best of them.

Jaq (Jaq), Tuesday, 1 November 2005 13:22 (nineteen years ago) link

OK. Poetry Thread, part two: A Game Of Chess

Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 1 November 2005 18:06 (nineteen years ago) link

four years pass...

"she my love by london gentled as by space the spinning world"

i read this poem this morning and thought: how startling, how beautiful, and then I discovered that the only google result for it is... me, on this thread.

lords of hyrule (c sharp major), Sunday, 21 March 2010 10:08 (fourteen years ago) link

Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry
by Howard Nemerov

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

INSUFFICIENT FUN (bernard snowy), Tuesday, 23 March 2010 20:31 (fourteen years ago) link

five months pass...

While out today I bought a book of poems from a charity store because it was a book of Kenneth Rexroth translations out of the Chinese, and Rexroth has previously torn my brain to giddy shreds

I had heard Rexroth was a polyglot and a skilled translator, but I did not know I'd be reduced to tears on the train home

His first 35 translations are of Tu Fu's work, an 8th-century poet whom he claims is alongside Catullus and Baudelaire as the greatest non-epic and non-dramatic poet in history

One of the poems, just one, was too long for a single page. I did not know this and upon the end of the page thought the poem done - it had reached a moment of such wisdom that I shudderingly re-read the tract and felt something settle over me

There turned out to be nine more lines.


TO WEI PA, A RETIRED SCHOLAR

The lives of many men are
Shorter than the years since we have
Seen each other. Aldebaran
And Antares move as we have.
And now, what night is this? We sit
Here together in the candle
Light. How much longer will our prime
Last? Our temples are already
Grey. I visit my old friends.
Half of them have become ghosts.
Fear and sorrow choke me and burn
My bowels. I never dreamed I would
Come this way, after twenty years,
A wayfarer to your parlor.
When we parted years ago,
You were unmarried. Now you have
A row of boys and girls, who smile
And ask me about my travels.
How have I reached this time and place?
Before I can come to the end
Of an endless tale, the children
Have brought out the wine. We go
Out in the night and cut young
Onions in the rainy darkness.
We eat them with hot, steaming,
Yellow millet. You say, "It is
Sad, meeting each other again."

acoleuthic, Friday, 17 September 2010 20:16 (fourteen years ago) link

We drink ten toasts rapidly from
The rhinoceros horn cups.
Ten cups, and still we are not drunk.
We still love each other as
We did when we were schoolboys.
Tomorrow morning mountain peaks
Will come between us, and with them
The endless, oblivious
Business of the world.


Tu Fu

acoleuthic, Friday, 17 September 2010 20:16 (fourteen years ago) link

three years pass...

This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then why
When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.—
Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

- GMH

BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, 25 July 2014 21:54 (ten years ago) link

six years pass...

Simon Armitage writes a poem on the occasion of the death of the Duke of Edinburgh.

The Patriarchs – An Elegy

The weather in the window this morning
is snow, unseasonal singular flakes,
a slow winter’s final shiver. On such an occasion
to presume to eulogise one man is to pipe up
for a whole generation – that crew whose survival
was always the stuff of minor miracle,
who came ashore in orange-crate coracles,
fought ingenious wars, finagled triumphs at sea
with flaming decoy boats, and side-stepped torpedoes.

Husbands to duty, they unrolled their plans
across billiard tables and vehicle bonnets,
regrouped at breakfast. What their secrets were
was everyone’s guess and nobody’s business.
Great-grandfathers from birth, in time they became
both inner core and outer case
in a family heirloom of nesting dolls.
Like evidence of early man their boot-prints stand
in the hardened earth of rose-beds and borders.

They were sons of a zodiac out of sync
with the solar year, but turned their minds
to the day’s big science and heavy questions.
To study their hands at rest was to picture maps
showing hachured valleys and indigo streams, schemes
of old campaigns and reconnaissance missions.
Last of the great avuncular magicians
they kept their best tricks for the grand finale:
Disproving Immortality and Disappearing Entirely.

The major oaks in the wood start tuning up
and skies to come will deliver their tributes.
But for now, a cold April’s closing moments
parachute slowly home, so by mid-afternoon
snow is recast as seed heads and thistledown.

the pinefox, Saturday, 17 April 2021 10:53 (three years ago) link

I think there's a rather uncertain mix of the specific and the general here. If this is for the Duke, then why is it so general and generational? But if it's so general, why include the line about 'a zodiac out of sync', apparently specifically referring to his Greek origins and not applicable to other patriarchs?

This:

On such an occasion
to presume to eulogise one man is to pipe up
for a whole generation

-- seems to pick up the tone of parts of the FOUR QUARTETS, and of Auden who was contemporary with them. I'm unsure that 'pipe up' fits well here, even though Armitage is probably trying to imply a hint of a bagpiper playing in tribute.

the pinefox, Saturday, 17 April 2021 10:56 (three years ago) link

Trash poem for a trash human

it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Thursday, 22 April 2021 01:06 (three years ago) link

instead of trying to eulogize Philip, he wisely chose to skate away immediately into generalities about WWII. for me the poem never really rises above the imagery of wartime propaganda films or lends vitality to the people or events it purports to capture. ceremonial poems are hard.

sharpening the contraindications (Aimless), Thursday, 22 April 2021 02:01 (three years ago) link

I don't actually think so! I think it's hard to write a ceremonial poem about a person who was a malevolent racist with a noted passion for younger women.

It's simply tiresome how these old British hack poets refuse to deal with actual history, instead writing again and again about "the genius" of a generation and the trauma of the bombing of London. Give me a break.

I've read and witnessed any number of poems written for ceremonial occasions that were excellent. Hell, I read one by a student the other day that was written for a funeral of a cat that was more interesting than this crap.

it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Thursday, 22 April 2021 12:07 (three years ago) link

I am sure it was an excellent cat and an even better public figurehead

imago, Thursday, 22 April 2021 12:12 (three years ago) link

seven months pass...

Amber Sparks
@ambernoelle
·
17h
Hi Covid here
I have eaten
the years
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for other shit
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so full of days

dow, Saturday, 18 December 2021 20:26 (three years ago) link

one month passes...

Good interview here with Louise Gluck, where she talks a bit about Ashbery:

SH: How did you know (your book) was done? The book is quite short, but that brevity feels important to the effect of it.

LG: Well, for a long time it wasn’t; it was just skimpy and a little mannered. But during this period, I finally came to understand the poetry of John Ashbery, whose work had eluded me the whole of my life, though I was moved by him as a person. He was a radiant presence, kind of angelic, but the poems just exhausted me. They seemed interminable—in fact, some of them still do—but those that don’t were like nothing I’d ever read. What changed him for me was Karin Roffman’s book [The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life]. It made Ashbery available to me, but it was also in itself remarkable. Did I tell you the story about reading the book and writing her a letter?

SH: No, I just remember talking to you when you were in the middle of reading it, I think a few years ago. It sounded like it fixed something for you at the time.

LG: It did. So I wrote her a letter of ardent appreciation. And then I thought, “I have to write Ashbery.” But when you’re writing to someone you revere, you want to commend yourself to the person; your ego gets involved. Also, I couldn’t say, you know, “I never liked your work, but now I really see how extraordinary it is, though I certainly came to it a little late.” In any case, the letter was hard to write. It was the beginning of the semester at Yale; it was my first night in New Haven for that year. And I thought, “I absolutely have to write this letter. I have to do it. I have to do it this week. As soon as I get home, I have to.” And then I had an e-mail in the very early morning from Frank (Bidart), who said Ashbery had died. And I never wrote my letter. I mean, I’m sure he had other things on his mind. But I would have liked… I would have liked to put some flowers at his feet. I think his work showed me something. But the book I was trying to write came in the most tortured little drips—I thought of it as rusty water coming out of the tap. And then Covid happened, and I thought, “Well, that’s it for writing,” you know.

deep luminous trombone (Eazy), Wednesday, 19 January 2022 01:47 (three years ago) link

Gluck is quite literally one of the worst poets alive.

we need outrage! we need dicks!! (the table is the table), Wednesday, 19 January 2022 14:38 (three years ago) link

three years pass...

I'm looking for good poetry about fascism. Any recommendations?

Heez, Wednesday, 29 January 2025 21:11 (three weeks ago) link

Gluck is quite literally one of the worst poets alive.


As a human being or … ?

sarahell, Wednesday, 29 January 2025 21:21 (three weeks ago) link

Well she’s dead now, so.

I meant her poems.

Poetry about fascism doesn’t tend ti be ‘about’ fascism in the way you might want it to be, but:

Brecht is good.
Sarajevo Blues by Semezdin Mehmedinovic
In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy by Daniel Borzutsky

a lot of this also depends on what you consider to be fascism. I would consider many Palestinian writers to be writing under and about fascism, but…

butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Thursday, 30 January 2025 12:39 (three weeks ago) link

thank you table. i don't know what i'm actually looking for here but that seems like a good start

Heez, Thursday, 30 January 2025 13:28 (three weeks ago) link

Borzutsky also a translator, his translation of Raúl Zurita’s ‘Country of Planks’ is great. (Zurita’s book is about living and dying under Pinochet, so… relevant!)

butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Thursday, 30 January 2025 13:35 (three weeks ago) link

THESEUS
O mankind so deluded! so pointlessly deluded!
why investigate, study, devise ten thousand technologies
yet you do not know this one thing and cannot grasp it:
how to teach a mindless man to think.

HIPPOLYTOS
That would be quite a genius
who could make fools think.
but this is no time for philosophy, father,
i fear your sorrows make your tongue go wild.

THESEUS
PHUE!
what human beings need is some clear index
of who is a friend and who is not-
a diagnostic of soul-
and every man should have two voices,
one righteous and the other however it happens to be,
so that the righteous voice could refute the unrighteous
and we would not be duped.

HIPPOLYTOS
Has someone slandered me to you?
But I've committed no crime!
your words fill me with dread,
slipping, strange words.

THESEUS
PHEU! the human mind! to what lengths will it
not go?
where will its reckless impudence end?

Heez, Sunday, 2 February 2025 19:59 (three weeks ago) link

that's from Anne Carson's translation of Hippolytos

Heez, Sunday, 2 February 2025 20:01 (three weeks ago) link


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