Genral Poetry Thread

Sucker for the Romantics, always will be. Louise Glück is a favorite among more recent writers, and Nikki Giovanni's come up with some winners.

Hm, I share some of Josh K's views. Is that surprising? I tried to read the Cantos, didn't get so far. Hang it all, Robert Frost.

I have been rereading Leavis on Eliot a lot lately. The total assurance that Eliot was the great modern poet. (But then the veerings away from him too.) I don't particularly share Josh's doubts re. TSE. When he's good, he's great. Most TSE up to 1925 is readable.

I only like O'Hara cos Stevie T told me to. But - he was right.

Yeats!!

1) Cattulus

Because he is clever and bitter and love sick and tragiclly falible
2) Sharon Olds

Because she finds the cosmic in the banal .
3) Sappho

Because she is so simple . She can break your heart and hear your longing in 15 words
4) Gerald Manley Hopkins

The most beutiful . The words fit so well, it becomes a perfect joy.
5) Pound

The Fractured Homer for our chaotic age. A mad visionary who found clarity and sorrow as he aged. 6) Ocatvio Paz

Because falling in love with God and in lust with a woman is often the same thing .
7) John Donne

Because G-d needs to be debauched
8) Frank O'Hara

Because he wrote like he wore "workshirts to the Opera"
9) John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

Sex becomes a symbol of our hyprocrosies
10) Edmund Spenser

His sonnets are self contained machines that work like clocks
11) Robert Herrick

Angry and Worldy , Saintly and hermetic . Life grows with friction
12) Martial

Nasty, bitter and accurate, nothing has changed
13) Willam Blake

Holy
14) William Stafford

This one is so diffucult to express , he slips through your fingers , his writing is so intangibly tragic.
15) Coleridge

Gory and Sexy and so well written, it is like Jazz, the structure visible underneath a pure blitzkreig of words
16) HD

The earth and heart rend in 6 lines , the world is made right in a 1000
17) Whitman

The Wild Yawp ! So earnest with his diction
18) Yeats

The mystery is about tangibles
19) Elizabeth Bishop

So subtle about loss it takes you years to apprecaite the tragedy
20) Seamus Heaney

Removes the bodies from the barn and the ghosts from the bogs
21) Lady Kasa

Better then Basho because she has two extra lines
22) Anne Sexton

The myths we were taught at the cradle hang us in adulthood
23) Randall Jarrell
24) WCW

No word out of place he captures the quiet moments where we can think

25) ee cummings

Under the innovations he writes the most lovely and lonley erotic poems
He writes about politics as a matter of everyday
He writes about fecundity and his writing is eqaully fecund.

This ignores alot of the anon. stuff i love . ( Tamil love lyrics. ,Childe Ballads, The Song of Songs etc )

lou reed, ginsberg etc

Ponge, Raymond Carver, Aimee Cesaire, Rilke, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Appolinaire and Mallarme. Robert Browning and Appolinaire.

(apologies for omitted accents. I'm a chucklehead.)

(Oh, we're not writing poetry here? Never mind...)

"I! I! I I I! Ichabod is itchy and SO AM I!!"

Oh and the other one, what's he called, Wallace Stevens...

Most of these poets appear in anthologies, so I have contributed nothing.

Piano

SOFTLY, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;  
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see  
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings  
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.  
  
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song         
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong  
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside  
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.  
  
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour  
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour   
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast  
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

D.H. Lawrence

Houdini died
not

of what
he

couldn't get
out

of but
couldn't

get out
of

him.

A.R. Ammons

"I Have Just Bought a House"

DEAR GEORGE -- George, I have just bought a house,
an eighty-seven room house. Also,
a twenty-one room house. And many
little houses. And eighteen trailers,
and nineteen cars (six with beds in them);
and wives for all the rooms, the trailers
the little houses, and the six cars
with beds in them,
...and they all love me,
all my wives love me. They do, George. They
write to me. Every day. They write
to me. And they are perfect, concise
and beautiful letters. They say--
Yes, and they say it eighty-seven times.
And then sign their names. I taught them how,
George,
myself. How to read and write. How to --
in houses. How to love, and how to
write perfect, concise and beautiful
letters. Yes, and how never to die.
How to live forever, for me, for
me, even though I will die. And how
to make me feel as if I won't, even
though I will, will feel as if I will.
And they are very good at it.
Anyway,
they are all pregnant, George,
all my wives
are pregnant. Even the parakeets.
Because some of them are parakeets.
And some are goldfish,
silverfish, ants
rats, goats, skunks...
and all have borne me children,
parakeet, silverfish, ant, rat
goldfish
children.
And I'm happy, George. I like
marriage, really like it. Wives,
bedbugs
and getting mail every day.
And I feel I have a place to go.
It feels good.
The only trouble is
I don't have any money, or even
any silverfish or rats or bedsheets
a newspaper, or a place to go.
I mean, why don't I, George?
I live alone
in an old upright typewriter,
with but
one dog and two cats to work
to cook, to drink beer with me.
It's sad, George. We cry ourselves
to sleep. We are so alone.
Now and then Dog sings to us --

Woof, woof.
Pale cats, pale man
you shall have houses,
you shall have wives;
night falls

Woof, woof.
Beer for you, milk for you,
sleep for you, dreams for you.

Sleep my children,
sleep my children,
sleep. Woof, woof.

It is a lovely song, George,
and Dog sings it well.
We sleep.

Witches,
nightmares big as houses, wives
warts, mushrooms,
they are all there is.
Night-things. Things --
pressing all the keys
around us. Wanting what? To kill us,
to put us into jail.

Dog,
Dog barks, he barks songs at them.
They type Death onto his back,
onto his tail, his ears, his tongue.
Fleas and lice!
We dance to avoid
the keys. We do not dance well.
We are typed into dreams, into wives.
Into mansions and swans.
Old bedsheets, Death-sheets,
bedbugs
pushcarts and poems.

-Robert Sward

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf
So Eden sank to grief.
So dawn goes down to day
And nothing gold can stay.

Emily D., I think

'The Cremation of Sam McGee'

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he'd often say in his homely way that he'd "sooner live in hell".

On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.
Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see;
It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.

And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow,
And the dogs were fed, and the stars o'erhead were dancing heel and toe,
He turned to me, and "Cap," says he, "I'll cash in this trip, I guess;
And if I do, I'm asking that you won't refuse my last request."

Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no; then he says with a sort of moan:
"It's the cursed cold, and it's got right hold till I'm chilled clean
through to the bone.
Yet 'tain't being dead -- it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains;
So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains."

A pal's last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail;
And we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale.
He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee;
And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee.

There wasn't a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,
With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid, because of a promise given;
It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: "You may tax your brawn and brains,
But you promised true, and it's up to you to cremate those last remains."

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load.
In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring,
Howled out their woes to the homeless snows -- O God! how I loathed the thing.

And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;
And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;
The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in;
And I'd often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin.

Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay;
It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the "Alice May".
And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;
Then "Here", said I, with a sudden cry, "is my cre-ma-tor-ium."

Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire;
Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher;
The flames just soared, and the furnace roared -- such a blaze you seldom see;
And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee.

Then I made a hike, for I didn't like to hear him sizzle so;
And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to
blow.
It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don't know why;
And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky.

I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear;
But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near;
I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: "I'll just take a peep inside.
I guess he's cooked, and it's time I looked";. . . then the door I opened wide.

And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: "Please close that door.
It's fine in here, but I greatly fear you'll let in the cold and storm --
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

-- Robert Service

Some stuff by Carl Sandburg, W.H. Auden, Steven Jesse Bernstein, Charles Bukowski, Pablo Neruda, Borges, Gary Snyder, Edgar Allen Poe, Shelley, Robert Creely.

More recent (and obscure) favorites include "Ark," by Laird Hunt, "Appalachia" by Keith Flynn, and a few others.

Emily D., I think

-- I'm Passing Open Windows (mslaur...), March 3rd, 2003.
---------

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" is by Robert Frost.

What I like to unleash upon an unsuspecting group of hearers:

THE WINDHOVER

To Christ our Lord

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

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.

(Sorry I seem to be filling the board with ant-literature thread revivals. It's just a phase.)

I used to imitate this sort of thing myself:

the new
fluorescent
lights
sing
a din
above
the dim

And the poem was printed in a book and so who cares how you'd read it aloud? Read it aloud however you want; I can't hear you from here. It's a poem, not a score.

(The irony is: I think I used to like to read poetry partly because the fact that it was broken into lines made it easier to feel that I was zipping through it.)

Those short line-breaks lose their effect after I've seen them in Williams, Creeley, Zukofsky, Corman, McClure, etc.

And while yes some poets do use line breaks that way, it doesn't mean everyone does.

But there are lots of current poets who focus on sound sensuality -- I mean, consider sound poets! -- and a lot who focus on all sorts of other things. Poetry is as vast as music and there are as many things to focus on.

(And: If your head is trained to read line breaks properly for one poet, you might have to retrain it to appreciate them properly for another poet.)

(Sound poetry tends to be boring, to me anyway, in the direction of giving up too much on semantic content, though I can enjoy some of it more or less the way I'd enjoy music.)

And, of course, what writers do with poetry and what poetry is are (thankfully) two different things.

If the line-breaks don't matter, where's the formal element in the poem?

You seem to want the "read aloud" version of the poem to have the last word but that just doesn't seem to be the way it works for many poets (who rarely have opportunities to read aloud and who are primarily communicating through the page).

(BTW, my answer was just 'hm...')

But if the line-breaks don't imply anything about what the rhythm of the poem should be, then I don't see where you even know what the poem's form is, to begin with (unlike a song).

(Keep arguing with me though, because I hadn't thought of it in those terms before and maybe I will even change my mind about something.)

Unless you're it's Olson who has written explicit manifestos about how a line is to be treated (as a breath) or you're Hopkins and you obsessively mark the rhythm out on the page and as if that weren't enough you use such compact and bouncy words that there is little room for uncertainty -- then there will always be some room for interpreation and line breaks are just one tool in figuring out the rhythm and music of a poem (if, of course, rhythm and music is what the poem is after) -- and line breaks are probably not the most important tool, at that.

But it's 3:30am and my brain is perhaps not entirely clear right now.

(Olson is actually pretty vague about all that breath stuff, as far as I'm concerned.) My brain is fried from having stayed up so late.

Seriously: is talk of metrics and technicality, measures and feet, pentameters and spondees any use? Or is it arbitrary, a grand illusion? Or is it non-arbitrary, but still useless?

Traditional metrics (iambs spondees, trochees and so on) originated in the poetics of ancient Greek and Latin. They were first grafted onto English poetry during the Renaissance. English-speaking poets have tried from time to time to describe a new poetics that applies better to the qualities of a positional language (as opposed to an inflected language), but we always come back to the traditional system, because it kinds sorta works and the new poetics always seem to be weird and too idiosyncratic to the poet who made it up.

A good antidote to a too-heavy a reliance on traditional metrics is to read Chaucer, Skelton, medieval English lyrics, nursery rhymes and ballads. Shakespeare's often good for this, too. The trick in English poetry has always been the ability to skirt the metre when needed, but leave enough of it intact to suggest an invariant structure.

Metre merits adherence because every good poem has an argument and deft use of metre reinforces that argument. Metre is both regular and irrational - like music. You can do without it, but you'd be a fool to think that improves your poetry. My opinion.

Think of a spellbinding speaker. Chances are damn good that such a speaker uses innate rhythms to reinforce emphasis.

What about poetry as a visual medium? I sometimes use structures designed to support the feel of a poem that works by reading the words - not hearing them. I like to think ee cummings is a good example of this, and *points upthread* I love that Ammons poem because I read it as being visually "strung out" so the "joke" catches one more by suprise (ie, if you read it all as one line you'd be a little more deflated by it. Perhaps?)

While hearing a great speaker read poetry is wonderful, visual structure is just as great to my mind. I've had people say I should read my stuff aloud and I am reluctant to, because that was never it's intent. I just don't think in such terms when writing verse.

It's OK when I have the page in front of me to look at, but it's just too hard to cram it all in my head when I close the book. ee cummings was ace at it, but that doesn't coax me into liking his stuff. My admiration in his direction is far more distant and theoretical than warm and real.

OTOH, metrical poetry wants to make the jump from the page into my memory. It burrows in and makes a new home, sometimes even against my will.

i just somewhat randomly discovered inger christensen, and then found out she'd died a few weeks earlier. all i have is alphabet (the english translation, obv.), which i like a lot. scandinavian structural precision -- if that's not too much of a cliche -- but with humanist bent and a generous imagination.