the poetry thread, a new beginning

this is where you post your "perfect accounts of your secret experience of the world"

what do ppl make of this?

how to write poetry

http://img.skitch.com/20080922-diwkgc2cnjq9eq6bhckg61i3sg.jpg

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

GMH is one of the greats. His "Spelt From Sibyl's Leaves" is quite possibly my favourite poem written by an Englishman.

ive been sort of obsessing over this villanelle by paul muldoon called "monarch and milkweed"

As he knelt by the grave of his mother and father
the taste of dill, or tarragon-
he could barely tell one from the other-

filled his mouth. It seemed as if he might smother.
Why should he be stricken
with grief, not for his mother and father,

but a woman slinking from the fur of a sea-otter
In Portland, Maine, or, yes, Portland, Oregon-
he could barely tell one from the other-

and why should he now savour
the tang of her, her little pickled gherkin,
as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father?

*

He looked about. He remembered her palaver
on how both earth and sky would darken-
'You could barely tell one from the other'-

while the Monarch butterflies passed over
in their milkweed-hunger: 'A wing-beat, some reckon,
may trigger off the mother and father

of all storms, striking your Irish Cliffs of Moher
with the force of a hurricane.'
Then: 'Milkweed and Monarch 'invented' each other.'

*

He looked about. Cow's-parsley in a samovar.
He'd mistaken his mother's name, 'Regan, ' for Anger';
as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father
he could barely tell one from the other.

If the first article in that 'how to write poetry' is any guide to the rest, then it struck me as good, but tepid, advice, aimed at an audience of beginners. It is certainly well-meant.

I imagine the thinking process behind that series might be along these lines: poetry is much neglected and overlooked these days, but maybe a series of simplistic how-to articles about the subject will increase the number of poets and readers of poetry, by boosting beginners from the stage of writing egregiously awful poetry to the next stage of competence, where they write mediocre poetry.

It seems like a long shot to me, but - hey - it can't hurt. Which leads me to this digressive observation.

My local newspaper has a weekly poetry column in the artsy section of the Sunday newspaper. This column usually prints some short poem or poetic fragment by a 'legitimate' modern poet and then discusses it in a general sort of way, aimed at readers who barely read poetry, if ever. This, again, seems harmless enough, but it isn't going to raise anyone's enthusiasm for poetry by so much as a half degree.

What I'd really like to see is a daily feature on the comics page, down next to the jumble, or up beside the crossword, that prints unapologetic doggerel verse, complete with bad puns or stupid jokes, but always clever enough that it is fun to read. imo, this would do more to push poetry along as a popular art form than any thousand mildly-worded, helpful articles trying to raise up the conciousness of the ruck of humanity to appreciate poetry as a high art form.

Someone needs to revive the art of writing good lowbrow doggerel verse.

Calvin Trillin?

Morning

Do not awaken the academic scholars,
Tradition's hairy god last night departed.
This morn the huge iconoclastic rollers
Blot out the roads where long the Spirit carted
The prayerful dream, the scientific load,
The cobwebbed preacher-stuff of Portobello.
To-day will find a new straw-bodied god
Much brighter than the other morbid fellow.

And when they wake - the scholars - they will be
Tootheless, unvoiced and maybe half-way gone,
With nothing but a clouded memory
To lead them to the hieroglyphic stone
On which old Scholarship had proudly scratched
A list of doors that Truth had left unlatched.

-- Patrick Kavanagh -- (circa 1934)

My highlights of Browning's 'Waring'. This poem makes we weep salt tears of pleasure. Obviously the poem in its entirety is the cake you need to eat, rather than these crumbs, but with any luck they'll whet the appetite.

I

What's become of Waring
Since he gave us all the slip,
Chose land-travel or seafaring,
Boots and chest or staff and scrip,
Rather than pace up and down
Any longer London town?

II

II.

Who'd have guessed it from his lip
Or his brow's accustomed bearing,
On the night he thus took ship
Or started landward?---little caring
For us, it seems, who supped together
(Friends of his too, I remember)
And walked home thro' the merry weather,
The snowiest in all December.
I left his arm that night myself
For what's-his-name's, the new prose-poet
Who wrote the book there, on the shelf---
How, forsooth, was I to know it
If Waring meant to glide away
Like a ghost at break of day?
Never looked he half so gay!

IV.

Meantime, how much I loved him,
I find out now I've lost him.
I who cared not if I moved him,
Who could so carelessly accost him,
Henceforth never shall get free
Of his ghostly company,

VI.

Ichabod, Ichabod,
The glory is departed!
Travels Waring East away?
Who, of knowledge, by hearsay,
Reports a man upstarted
Somewhere as a god,
Hordes grown European-hearted,
Millions of the wild made tame
On a sudden at his fame?
In Vishnu-land what Avatar?

II.

I.

``When I last saw Waring... ''
(How all turned to him who spoke!
You saw Waring? Truth or joke?
In land-travel or sea-faring?)

Kavanagh and Browning, a nice way to start reading ILX this morning!

I loved this poem, reading it in the new ish of Poetry mag, on the Thameslink to Streatham this evening:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=182395

On the same train this evening, I also spied this poetry of a kind, projected on on the dome of St Pauls cathedral:

http://www.stpauls.co.uk/page.aspx?theLang=001lngdef&pointerid=38016yCM3bwXc2hWGqMEbqDPDc8atzzi

Christ above, I saw this in one of the free sheets the other day and had to turn aside to have a little bit of sick in my hand.

I'm going to make this Martin Firrell sit down with a copy of Chesterton's The Ball and the Cross, which makes a great deal of play out of St Paul's and its dome - Satan crashes a spaceship into it fairly early on - and then he can go and have a long hard think about what he's done.

ok, someone asked me to share, but since it is nearly impossible to pick out any section...i shall just link to the Google Books version of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's 'Dictee.'

http://books.google.com/books?id=HED-HubsNe8C&dq=theresa+hak+kyung+cha+dictee&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=T0raSaPjJo6UswPhzPijCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#PPP1,M1

I was browsing in my poetry books last night, read this, and decided to share it:

Fable of the Ant and the Word

Ink-black, but moving independently
across the black and white parquet of print,
the ant cancels the author out. The page,
translated to itself, bears hair-like legs
disturbing the fine hairs of its fiber.
These are the feet of summer, pillaging meaning,
destroying Alexandria. Sunlight is silence
laying waste all languages, until, thinly,
the fictional dialogue begins again:
the page goes on telling another story.

-- Mary Barnard --

ah dang, I was hoping you had posted a poem of yr own — other thread seems to have died despite my efforts — maybe we can use this one for general poetry discussion tho if people want that?

(oh uh I like this poem though, I didn't mean to sound so disappointed!)

(also, recalled a famous (I think?) description somewhere of an ant walking across a page of Hegel (or some other philosopher?), making a hash of his entire system — can't remember who wrote it where, though — does anyone know what I'm talking about?)

other thread has not died :)

have written v little poetry of late - my creative energy is going into my job atm and what I have written has been love-poetry for my gf - but I will go on there and criticise all of yr and hoos' poems at some point :)

u old softie

good poem I recently discovered:

When the Sun Went Down

To have been loved once by someone—surely
There is a permanent good in that,
Even if we don't know all the circumstances
Or it happened too long ago to make any difference.
Like almost too much sunlight or an abundance of sweet-sticky,
Caramelized things—who can tell you it's wrong?
Which of the others on your team could darken the passive
Melody that runs on, that has been running since the world began?

Yet, to be strapped to one's mindset, which seems
As enormous as a plain, to have to be told
That its horizons are comically confining,
And all the sorrow wells from there, like the slanting
Plume of a waterspout: doesn't it supplant knowledge
Of the different forms of love, reducing them
To a white indifferent prism, a roofless love standing open
To the elements? And some see in this a paradigm of how it rises
Slowly to the different heavens, al that pale glamour?

The refain is desultory as birdsong; it seeps unrecognizably
Into the familiar structures that lead out from here
To the still familiar peripheries and less sure notions:
It already had its way. In time for evening relaxation.
There are times when music steals a march on us,
Is suddenly perplexingly nearer, flowing in my wrist;
Is the true and dirty words you whisper nightly
As the book closes like a collapsing sheet, a blur
Of all kinds of connotations ripped from the hour and tossed
Like jewels down a well; the answer, also,
To the question that was on my mind but that I've forgotten,
Except in the way certain things, certain nights, come together.

— John Ashbery