American Author Challenge: Poetry Part 2

-urban poetry from Yes Yes Press

Okay, back by popular demand. Who knew this one was going to take off like it did? I sure didn't. I had read, maybe 2 volumes of poetry in my life, prior to April. Now, I have read a couple of dozen. I am still learning though, still working it out. Baby steps but what joyful steps.

Thanks everyone for keeping it alive and sharing such wonderful poems and poets. We have four more months. Let's do this.

Thanks Mark, I was just thinking a new thread might be good. Are we sticking mostly to American poets, or just lobbing inspired poems from anywhere?

Maybe we could do a new geographic region each month? As well as new discoveries generally?

>4 Caroline_McElwee: You are welcome, Charlotte and I appreciate your help keeping this afloat.

Since we are starting anew, how about we share whatever we want? No rules. No fuss.

thanks so much for keeping this going, Mark. you are as a star in my LT firmament.

>2 msf59: wow.

>4 Caroline_McElwee: lobbing poems. :-) i do like the idea of representing different geographical regions, however defined. what if we just did it as the inspiration strikes?

and speaking of lobbing and geographical regions, HEDZUP.

from Ireland. i know i've posted it somewhere before but i'm posting it again because it is arguably my favorite poem. well, at least right now.

A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford

Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels
Seferis, Mythistorema

(for J. G. Farrell)

Even now there are places where a thought might grow –
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation,
An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter
Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft,
Indian compounds where the wind dances
And a door bangs with diminished confidence,
Lime crevices behind rippling rainbarrels,
Dog corners for bone burials;
And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford,

Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire?
So many days beyond the rhododendrons
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
They have learnt patience and silence
Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.

They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
Of the expropriated mycologist.
He never came back, and light since then
Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.
Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew
And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something –
A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue
Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.

There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking
Into the earth that nourished it;
And nightmares, born of these and the grim
Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.
Those nearest the door grow strong –
“Elbow room! Elbow room!”
The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
Utensils and broken flower-pots, groaning
For their deliverance, have been so long
Expectant that there is left only the posture.

A half century, without visitors, in the dark –

Poor preparation for the cracking lock
And creak of hinges. Magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flash-bulb firing squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
“Save us, save us”, they seem to say,
“Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!”

© 1978, Derek Mahon
From: Collected Poems
Publisher: The Gallery Press, Oldcastle, 1999
ISBN: 978 1 85235 255

here is a beautiful reading of the poem. i can't recommend it enough.

this poem has cause me, amongst many other things, to consider why "naive labours," even as distinct from "innocent labors." but why? i'm finding my own ideas.

oh, and FYI "as·pho·del
ˈasfəˌdel/
noun
noun: asphodel; plural noun: asphodels

1. a Eurasian plant of the lily family, typically having long slender leaves and flowers borne on a spike.
>>> 2. literary an immortal flower said to grow in the Elysian fields.

"To My Father / To My Unborn Son"

There was a door & then a door
surrounded by a forest.
Look, my eyes are not
your eyes.
You move through me like rain heard
from another country.
Yes, you have a country.
Someday, they will find it
while searching for lost ships . . .
Once, I fell in love
during a slow-motion car crash.
We looked so peaceful, the cigarette floating from his lips
as our heads whip-lashed back
into the dream & all
was forgiven.
Because what you heard, or will hear, is true: I wrote
a better world onto the page
& watched the fire take it back.
Something was always burning.
Do you understand? I closed my mouth
but could still taste the ash
because my eyes were open.
From men, I learned to praise the thickness of walls.
From women,
I learned to praise.
If you are given my body, put it down.
If you are given anything
be sure to leave no tracks in the snow.
Know that I never chose
which way the seasons turned. That it was always October
in my throat.
& you: every leaf
refusing to rust.
Quick. Can you see the red dark shifting?
This means I am touching you. This means
you are not alone—even
as you are not.
If you get there before me, if you think
of nothing
& my face appears rippling
like a torn flag—turn back.
Turn back & find the book
I left us, filled
with all the colors of the sky
forgotten by gravediggers.
Use it. Use it to prove how the stars
were always what we believed
they were: the exit-wounds
of every
misfired word.

-Ocean Vuong

I just finished Night Sky with Exit Wounds By Ocean Vuong

Potent stuff. Dark, cutting and beautiful.

Here is a quote from a review: "Exit Wounds is a book of disquieting intensity. These poems don’t grapple with the universal uncertainties of the living and the dead so much as they lie with them and become one. This is language that has been indelibly lived."

I think I will have to buy this one for the "keeper" shelves.

Thanks for starting the new thread, Mark!

>6 mirrordrum: Nice one, Ellie, and from a poet new to me.

I can see how good it is, but why, if you don't mind my asking, is it your favorite?

>7 msf59: Great pick, Mark. Love this one.

I second Mark's endorsement of Night Sky with Exit Wounds and exceptional newcomer Ocean Vuong. New Yorker article on him here: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-a-poet-named-ocean-means-to-fix-t...

Thanks for starting a new thread, Mark.

I have been reading some Robert Pinsky today and I reckon you ought to go and look him up. This is his Samurai Song

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

>10 PaulCranswick: "Like". Such a good one, Paul, thanks. OK, now I can't resist posting his "From the Childhood of Jesus". Hope I don't offend anyone.

“From the Childhood of Jesus”

One Saturday morning he went to the river to play.
He molded twelve sparrows out of the river clay

And scooped a clear pond, with a dam of twigs and mud.
Around the pond he set the birds he had made,

Evenly as the hours. Jesus was five. He smiled,
As a child would who had made a little world

Of clear still water and clay beside a river.
But a certain Jew came by, a friend of his father,

And he scolded the child and ran at once to Joseph,
Saying, “Come see how your child has profaned the Sabbath,

Making images at the river on the Day of Rest.”
So Joseph came to the place and took his wrist

And told him, “Child, you have offended the Word.”
Then Jesus freed the hand that Joseph held

And clapped his hands and shouted to the birds
To go away. They raised their beaks at his words

And breathed and stirred their feathers and flew away.
The people were frightened. Meanwhile, another boy,

The son of Annas the scribe, had idly taken
A branch of driftwood and leaning against it had broken

The dam and muddied the little pond and scattered
The twigs and stones. Then Jesus was angry and shouted,

“Unrighteous, impious, ignorant, what did the water
Do to harm you? Now you are going to wither

The way a tree does, you shall bear no fruit
And no leaves, you shall wither down to the root.”

At once, the boy was all withered. His parents moaned,
The Jews gasped, Jesus began to leave, then turned

And prophesied, his child’s face wet with tears:
“Twelve times twelve times twelve thousands of years

Before these heavens and this earth were made,
The Creator set a jewel in the throne of God

With Hell on the left and Heaven to the right,
The Sanctuary in front, and behind, an endless night

Endlessly fleeing a Torah written in flame.
And on that jewel in the throne, God wrote my name.”

Then Jesus left and went into Joseph’s house.
The family of the withered one also left the place,

Carrying him home. The Sabbath was nearly over.
By dusk, the Jews were all gone from the river.

Small creatures came from the undergrowth to drink
And foraged in the shadows along the bank.

Alone in his cot in Joseph’s house, the Son
Of Man was crying himself to sleep. The moon

Rose higher, the Jews put out their lights and slept,
And all was calm and as it had been, except

In the agitated household of the scribe Annas,
And high in the dark, where unknown even to Jesus

The twelve new sparrows flew aimlessly through the night,
Not blinking or resting, as if never to alight.

Robert Pinsky
from The Want Bone (1990)
and reprinted in The Figured Wheel (1996)

>9 jnwelch: >6 mirrordrum: not ignoring you, Joe. i'm considering my favorite poems and why they are favorites. it's a lovely, yet taxing, question. i like it.

>10 PaulCranswick: such a good one, Paul.

>11 jnwelch: oh carp! i'm offended b/c i can't understand it. i hate being ignorant. i can experience it, if that's the word. it rather gives me a stomach ache because of the immensity and tremendous grief. how terrible to be five and have that power, that weight and, really, no control over prophesy. if you know the future, then you can speak it or not but in any event, you have that unbearable foreknowledge. but why the rage? is it a child's rage fraught with the burden of universal power?

and the 12 sparrows. the disciples? the Biblical importance in the old testament of the number 12? i had to look that up. i'm foundering again.

"Annas appears in the Gospels and Passion plays as a high priest before whom Jesus is brought for judgment, prior to being brought before Pontius Pilate." hmmmmm.

>12 mirrordrum: Somehow it's right up my alley - something I've wondered about with Jesus. If you accept the story, he hit his stride in his 30s. Why not before? Did he learn things prior to that? Here, at age 5, he doesn't understand the consequences. Huge overreaction to the little boy (cruel, really, which kids can be), and he never thought about how he was sending the sparrows off to fly endlessly, mindlessly. When he gets to 33 (is that the right age?), as we know, he understands the consequences better than anyone. So the rage in the poem is the rage of a child. Compare his tearing up the moneylender booths on the steps of the church when he's older - rage under control, making a point, no cruel harm.

I love the idea of comparing the 12 sparrows to the disciples! If the disciples were to mindlessly go forward, nothing would be accomplished. He had to thoughtfully teach them, and "bring them to life".

I know, I want to find out more about Annas.

>12 mirrordrum: P.S. He's filled with childish pride, too, isn't he? The whole jewel in the throne biz over these minor incidents? Really?

>13 jnwelch: oh thank you, thank you. but wasn't he in the temple confounding his elders when he was very young? asking questions the elders couldn't answer or something like that? i thought of his anger at the money lenders in the temple but couldn't make it fit. i like your reading that he doesn't understand consequences and just acts like a 5-year-old but he could never be *just* a 5-year-old. that's sort of the tragic point of Christ i think. i'm not sure it was so much god forsaking him on the cross but feeling forsaken in the whole bloody damn burden. the son of man but god had him marked down and what the hell is that all about. Jesus wept. horrid thing to do to a child. i've never liked the Christian god very much. this helps. perhaps i'm not quite as far out in left field as i thought. just don't trust my reading of things.

>15 mirrordrum: Right-ee-o. I'm in favor of trusting your reading of poems - just like paintings. You're interacting with it.

Good thought about questions and the elders. I can't remember that part of his story well enough, so I'll look for it.

One thing that sticks out for me is the contrast with Buddha. Buddha was a man, not a deity, who accomplished something that anyone can - not that it's easy. So we know the when and why - he had a lot of lessons to learn, and experiments (e.g. ascetism) that would fail. With Jesus, he's a miracle, so we can't have that. So what was he doing all those years? Was he wise and complete at age 5? I love Pinsky's poetic imagination on this.

>16 jnwelch: bugger my eyes! well, and Buddha worked to become a Bodhisattva for years until finally he defeated, uh, Mara? and called on the earth to witness it and then he attained Boddhi and then he could teach. but he wasn't all caught up in ego. he was a prince and very spoiled and he had to reject all that--think of Christ in the desert being shown his potential dominion by Satan and rejecting it.

i'd say not wise and complete according to Pinsky hence the outrage you pointed out, the petulance of a child. but when this child gets petulant, he stamps his foot and rocks the world and a boy shrivels. does Christ as redeemer later heal him?

you people are opening new worlds for me and if that isn't a gift, i really don't know what is.

>7 msf59: jeez, Mark, i missed this one. stunning. again.

>17 mirrordrum: Aces. There are so many flavors of Buddhism. Mara=delusion, from my POV. Personally, I think the story got juiced up a bit by those who came after.

Some time we can try to figure out one that always gets me. As you know, in Buddhism there is no individual "soul". (Maybe there is in some flavor of it, but not one I know of). We're flow, and neither mind nor no-mind. Given that, what the heck is reincarnation? Or more to the point, what is reincarnated? It's discussed as if the individual is reincarnated, but how can that be? Is the "flow" reincarnated?

On top of that, what kind of reward is it to no longer return to this world? I happen to like this world (despite the despicable election year we're having in the U.S.), and returning sounds pretty darn good to me. So the incentive seems to go the wrong way.

This is the Religion Challenge thread, isn't it? Or did I end up on the wrong one?

>18 jnwelch: yeah, Mara is delusion and can also be suffering i think, which is, after all, a form of delusion. there is no suffering and no freedom from suffering yadda yadda yadda makes me crazy. heart sutta, maybe? too lazy to look.

look at these gorgeous Japanese Buddhist death poems. they don't copy and paste properly but i highly recommend a visit.

>14 jnwelch: "childish pride" . . . "the whole jewel in the throne thing." pride do you think? my sense is that he goes from angry boy, stomping his foot, tho he does have quite a vocabulary, to a conduit? vessel? channel? for the prophesy and the 'whole jewel in the throne" b/c he Pinsky writes that he "prophesied, his child’s face wet with tears" and then he cries himself to sleep. as a man, he supposedly weeps over the death of Lazarus and as a divinity, he raises him from the dead. now that's a bit i've always had trouble with: if you raise somebody from the dead after 3 days, you've basically got a stinking mess on your hands, kind of like the Monkey's Paw. and he's just going to have to die all over again.

this poem makes me think of Paradise Lost, which i find tremendously irritating for all its extraordinary imagery. but i like "and hand-in-hand, they, through Eden, took their solitary way." or something like that.

Nice little dialogue going on over here, Ellie & Joe. Good to see.

>19 mirrordrum: Ha! It can scramble the brain cells, all right, Ellie. If you

think too much about it
you'll be tethered like
an ass to a stake
forever

Those Japanese Buddhist Death Poems are most excellent.

>20 mirrordrum: To me, he's rashly reacted to being told not do something he feels he has perfect right to do, and to the boy having broken the dam and muddied the water, etc. So then he goes on to (figuratively) stamp his foot and say, you should realize who I am and fear me (jewel in the throne). That's what I mean with the childish pride. Then he cries himself to sleep. He behaves just like a five year old, except he's the Son of Man with these world-breaking powers.

Isn't this a great poem?!

I don't know what to make of Lazarus - maybe he got spiffed up at the same time he was raised. For all of us facing eventual death, it sure is the miracle of miracles to bring him back. (Loved that creepy Monkey's Paw story!)

I'm not a fan of Paradise Lost either. Give me Dante any day.

>21 msf59: Ha! I saw that one, Mark. You know where it falls down for me (not to be too wet a blanket)? "You hit like a girl" is too far behind the times. We've got women's Olympic boxing, for goodness' sake. Come up with something better than that, cartoonist.

>22 msf59: Ain't it great?

>21 msf59: i like that one Mark. Joe's just being a wet weekend. ;-) and truth to tell, we are not out of the woods on the "run like a girl," guy Joe, but the presence of enthusiastic men and boys at WNBA games is encouraging.

hope you'll feel moved to make the dialogue a conversation, Mark, if so moved. i've no doubt you could bring thoughts aplenty although i realize what with power washing and that you've not much time.

>23 jnwelch: "ass to a stake" ka-ching. spot on, isn't it? i liked that one tho not my fave.

Joe, somewhere above you linked to an article on Vuong. most excellent. he's too damn smart. it's most wonderful to know his back story and very sad that he had to go to Vietnam to realize that here were people who looked like him.

Pablo Neruda

The Old Women Of The Ocean

To the solemn sea the old women come
With their shawls knotted around their necks
With their fragile feet cracking.

They sit down alone on the shore
Without moving their eyes or their hands
Without changing the clouds or the silence.

The obscene sea breaks and claws
Rushes downhill trumpeting
Shakes its bull's beard.

The gentle old ladies seated
As if in a transparent boat
They look at the terrorist waves.

Where will they go and where have they been?
They come from every corner
They come from our own lives.

Now they have the ocean
The cold and burning emptiness
The solitude full of flames.

They come from all the pasts
From houses which were fragrant
From burnt-up evenings.

They look, or don't look, at the sea
With their walking sticks they draw signs in the sand
And the sea erases their calligraphy.

The old women get up and go away
With their fragile bird feet
While the waves flood in
Traveling naked in the wind.

translated by Jodey Bateman

lurking

>25 mirrordrum: Which was your fave, Ellie?

Did you catch that Vuong was uncomfortable being surrounded by people like himself? Fascinating guy.

You know I'm another one of those WNBA fans. That was great fun to watch the unselfish Olympic team.

>26 mirrordrum: I was just thinking we need a Neruda poem or two. Such a good one, thanks.

Here's one of Neruda's love poems.

Don't Go Far Off, Not Even for a Day

Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.
Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.
Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,
because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

i'm trying to find my book of Stephen Spender's selected poems and haven't thus far so i'm going by shreds of memory. nice to find him again. he was a favorite of mine when i was young and The double shame was my most-liked as it seemed to echo the way i felt all the time. oh, the egocentricity of youth.

Three poems by Stephen Spender

The Double Shame

You must live through the time when everything hurts
When the space of the ripe, loaded afternoon
Expands to a landscape of white heat frozen
And trees are weighed down with hearts of stone
And green stares back where you stare alone,
And the walking eyes throw flinty comments,
And the words which carry most knives are the blind
Phrases searching to be kind.

Solid and usual objects are ghosts
The furniture carries cargoes of memory,
The staircase has corners which remember
As fire blows reddest in gusty embers,
And each empty dress cuts out an image
In fur and evening and summer and spring
Of her who was different in each.

Pull down the blind and lie on the bed
And clasp the hour in the glass of one room
Against your mouth like a crystal doom.
Take up the book and stare at the letters
Hieroglyphs on sand and as meaningless
Here birds crossed once and a foot once trod
In a mist where sight and sound are blurred.

The story of others who made their mistakes
And of one whose happiness pierced like a star
Eludes and evades between sentences
And the letters break into eyes which read
The story life writes now in your head
As though the characters sought for some clue
To their being transcendently living and dead
In your history, worse than theirs, but true.

Set in the mind of their poet, they compare
Their tragic sublime with your tawdry despair
And they have fingers which accuse
You of the double way of shame.
At first you did not love enough
And afterwards you loved too much
And you lacked the confidence to choose
And you have only yourself to blame.

An elementary school classroom in a slum

Far far from gusty waves these children's faces.
Like rootless weeds, the hair torn around their pallor.
The tall girl with her weighed-down head. The paper-
seeming boy, with rat's eyes. The stunted, unlucky heir
Of twisted bones, reciting a father's gnarled disease,
His lesson from his desk. At back of the dim class
One unnoted, sweet and young. His eyes live in a dream,
Of squirrel's game, in the tree room, other than this.

On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare's head,
Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities.
Belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map
Awarding the world its world. And yet, for these
Children, these windows, not this world, are world,
Where all their future's painted with a fog,
A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky,
Far far from rivers, capes and stars of words.

Surely, Shakespeare is wicked and the map a bad example
With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal--
For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes
From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children
Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel
With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones.
All of their time and space are foggy slum.
So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.

Unless, governor, teacher, inspector, visitor,
This map becomes their window and these windows
That shut upon their lives like catacombs,
Break O break open 'till they break the town
And show the children green fields and make their world
Run azure on gold sands and let their tongues
Run naked into books, the white and green leaves open
History is theirs whose language is the sun.

----------
The Truly Great

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

>29 jnwelch: wow, no pressure there. it makes me feel a bit claustrophobic, beautiful though it is.

What fantastic discussion going on here! I've had to skim some of it (RL is being a nuisance just now), but I will be back to take more in. Carry on!

>31 mirrordrum: He's a passionate one, isn't he, Ellie? I loved his Heights of Macchu Picchu, among others, but it's so long . . .

>30 mirrordrum: Beauts, they are. Powerful and hard-edged in that final stanza of Double Shame.

Great Guardian article, "Very Quiet Foreign Girls Poetry Group", posted by Charlotte on her thread: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/14/very-quiet-foreign-girls-poetry-...

>34 jnwelch: thanks for the link, Joe.

>35 mirrordrum: A pleasure, Ellie.

>26 mirrordrum: >29 jnwelch: Nice! I think I might like Mr. Neruda. Thanks, Ellie & Joe.

>30 mirrordrum: I like the Spender too, Ellie. Obviously I have not heard of these poets, but I have now.

Sorry, for being AWOL over here. I just forget to stop by. I am reading poetry. Not as much as I would like at times, but I usually have a volume going.

Thanks to both of you again, for keeping this one alive.

Assault

"I had forgotten how the frogs must sound
After a year of silence, else I think
I should not so have ventured forth alone
At dusk upon this unfrequented road.

I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?
Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass,
That am a timid woman, on her way
From one house to another!"

Edna St. Vincent Millay

^I just finished Selected Poems. It took me awhile but I got through it. Not one of my favorites but I am sure it is my amateurish approach, that impedes me. I think I will have to learn the rhythms and nuances of older poetry. I will work on it.

Thanks Ellie for turning me onto to Millay.

A Close Call

"Dusk and the sea is thus and so. The cat
from two fields away crosses through the grapes.
It is so quiet I can hear the light air
in the canebrake. The fair wheat darkens.
The glaze is gone from the bay and the heat lets go.
They have not lit the lamp at the other farm yet
and all at once I feel lonely. What a surprise.
But the air stills, the heat comes back
and I think I am all right again."

-Jack Gilbert

^I just started his collection Refusing Heaven. I like it. Anyone else a fan?

>38 msf59: i'd not ever read that one, Mark. "Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?" hits home for me. i love this one. i know about reading poets who use language differently than we do now. i like it, but then i've been reading poetry in an uninformed way for much of my life and have written tons of abject doggerel.

i don't see why it should be an "amateurish approach" that prevents you from swooning over Millay. you like dark and edgy and yet you're willing to read a book of her work. good grief, man, what more could one ask?

>39 msf59: oh, Mark. what a stunner! i'd never heard of him. such a gift. of Refusing Heaven, poetry.org says, "Gilbert’s fourth book, Refusing Heaven (2005), contains, as poet Dan Albergotti describes, “poems about love, loss, and grief that defy all expectations of sentimentality. All of them are part of the larger poem, the poem that is the life of the poet, perhaps the most profound and moving piece of work to come out of American literature in generations.” (italics mine) sounds like a winner. italicized bit is also something i would say of Marlon James.

it's excellent that each of us brings different preferences. you and Joe are widening the poetry pond i swim in. heh!

Stephen Spender was much taken up with the Bloomsbury Group, if that helps you with what he writes. he would have been in the company of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Siegfried Sassoon and other "luminaries." i didn't know that until doing a bit of reading about him after getting the poems above.

maybe sadly, maybe not, during his Oxford days when he was romantically involved with young men, Spender wrote, "Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have a boy, a railway fare, or a revolution." then he changed his mind and became involved with women and in a later published work altered this to, "Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have an affair, a railway fare, or a revolution." a lot of gay writers are distressed by this. i just figure his tastes may have changed as he grew older. *shrug* it happens. sad if it was social pressure but nothing to be upset about if not.

thanks for helping keep the thread going. i feel like i'm steppin' in high cotton here. and thanks for the intro to Gilbert!

p.s. i have a lot of questions about Close call but too tired to frame them.

>40 mirrordrum: I am just walking carefully in my "new" shoes, Ellie. Just because something isn't connecting with me, I would rather put blame on me, than the acclaimed poet. Right now, I seem to be connecting with newer or more modern poetry but I am still reaching back too and will continue to do so.

If you have a Neruda collection for me to try, please send it my way.

>41 mirrordrum: I hope you come back with your thoughts on the Gilbert poem.

>38 msf59: Savage Beauty is the title of Nancy Milford's biography of Millay, which I read parts of several years ago. This poem is one of my favorites.

>43 laytonwoman3rd: Linda, i tried Savage Beauty 3 times in audio and i couldn't get far enough into it to get caught up in it. i finally sent it back to NLS. the competition was just too strong. thanks for making the connection between the poem and the book. completely escaped me.

Mark, i'm working on some dark, decidedly edgy older poems for you (1960s, 70s). also Neruda. i do have a favorite book. you'll love the title: Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon: Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda.

Full woman, fleshly apple, hot moon,
thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light,
what obscure brilliance opens between your columns?
What ancient night does a man touch with his senses?

Loving is a journey with water and with stars,
with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour:
loving is a clash of lightning-bolts
and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey.

have i caught your attention?

and now for something dark and edgy. i had a bit of a fling with Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath in my 20's. i read Sexton's Live or die many times. It won the Pulitzer in 1969. Plath won the Pulitzer posthumously in 1982 for Collected Poems. Plath committed suicide in 1963, Sexton in 1974.

Anne Sexton

PAIN FOR A DAUGHTER

Blind with love, my daughter
has cried nightly for horses,
those long-necked marchers and churners
that she has mastered, any and all,
reigning them in like a circus hand --
the excitable muscles and the ripe neck;
tending this summer, a pony and a foal.
She who is too squeamish to pull
a thorn from the dog’s paw,
watched her pony blossom with distemper,
the underside of the jaw swelling
like an enormous grape.
Gritting her teeth with love,
she drained the boil and scoured it
with hydrogen peroxide until pus
ran like milk on the barn floor

Blind with loss all winter,
in dungarees, a ski jacket and a hard hat,
she visits the neighbors’ stable,
our acreage not zoned for barns;
they who own the flaming horses
and the swan-whipped thoroughbred
that she tugs at and cajoles,
thinking it will burn like a furnace
under her small-hipped English seat.

Blind with pain she limps home
the thoroughbred has stood on her foot.
He rested there like a building.
He grew into her foot until they were one.
The marks of the horseshoe printed
into her flesh, the tips of her toes
ripped off like pieces of leather,
three toenails swirled like shells
and left to float in blood in her riding boot.

Blind with fear, she sits on the toilet,
her foot balanced over the washbasin,
her father, hydrogen peroxide in hand,
performing the rites of the cleansing.
She bites on a towel, sucked in breath,
sucked in and arched against the pain,
her eyes glancing off me where
I stand at the door, eyes locked
on the ceiling, eyes of a stranger,
and then she cries...
Oh my God, help me!
Where a child would have cried Mama!
Where a child would have believed Mama!
she bit the towel and called on God
and I saw her life stretch out...
I saw her torn in childbirth,
and I saw her, at that moment,
in her own death and I knew that she
knew.

Sylvia Plath

Lady Lazarus

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it--

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?--

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot--
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart--
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash--
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

23-29 October 1962

whew!

i encourage you to listen to Ondaatje reading this. the audio thingy is on the left there at the top. just a "play this" arrow. this is definitely a poem for the male voice!

The Cinnamon Peeler

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers . . .

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.

>44 mirrordrum: Thanks, Ellie! I will request the Neruda collection. Love that title and it sounds great.

>45 mirrordrum: >46 mirrordrum: Wow! I enjoyed both the Sexton and Plath. Dark, indeed. Thanks for sharing.

>47 mirrordrum: I did not realize Michael Ondaatje wrote poetry. That is a very good selection. Have you read a complete collection by him?

Refusing Heaven

"The old women in black at early Mass in winter
are a problem for him. He could tell by their eyes
they have seen Christ. They make the kernel
of his being and the clarity around it
seem meager, as though he needs girders
to hold up his unusable soul. But he chooses
against the Lord. He will not abandon his life.
Not his childhood, not the ninety-two bridges
across the two rivers of his youth. Nor the mills
along the banks where he became a young man
as he worked. The mills are eaten away, and eaten
again by the sun and its rusting. He needs them
even though they are gone, to measure against.
The silver is worn down to the brass underneath
and is the better for it. He will gauge
by the smell of concrete sidewalks after night rain.
He is like an old ferry dragged on to the shore,
a home in its smashed grandeur, with the giant beams
and joists. Like a wooden ocean out of control.
A beached heart. A cauldron of cooling melt.”

-Jack Gilbert

I finished this excellent collection, Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert. I will be reading more of this man's work.

oh wow, Mark. i read this t'other day and then forgot i'd read it. i've got to see if i can find more on-line to read. it's a Joe sort of poem. i mean, one i think Joe will like. thanks for posting!

i found this poem following up on a partial quote by a character in Patrick O'Brian's H.M.S. Surprise. probably my favorite. i rather liked the poem, it's different, so i'm posting it. :-)
descriptions of some of the gods are at the bottom.

The Secular Masque

By John Dryden

Enter JANUS

JANUS
Chronos, Chronos, mend thy pace,
An hundred times the rolling sun
Around the radiant belt has run
In his revolving race.
Behold, behold, the goal in sight,
Spread thy fans, and wing thy flight.

Enter CHRONOS, with a scythe in his hand, and a great globe on his back, which he sets down at his entrance
CHRONOS
Weary, weary of my weight,
Let me, let me drop my freight,
And leave the world behind.
I could not bear
Another year
The load of human-kind.

Enter MOMUS Laughing
MOMUS
Ha! ha! ha! Ha! ha! ha! well hast thou done,
To lay down thy pack,
And lighten thy back.
The world was a fool, e'er since it begun,
And since neither Janus, nor Chronos, nor I,
Can hinder the crimes,
Or mend the bad times,
'Tis better to laugh than to cry.

CHORUS OF ALL THREE
'Tis better to laugh than to cry

JANUS
Since Momus comes to laugh below,
Old Time begin the show,
That he may see, in every scene,
What changes in this age have been,

CHRONOS
Then Goddess of the silver bow begin.

Horns, or hunting-music within
DIANA
With horns and with hounds I waken the day,
And hie to my woodland walks away;
I tuck up my robe, and am buskin'd soon,
And tie to my forehead a waxing moon.
I course the fleet stag, unkennel the fox,
And chase the wild goats o'er summits of rocks,
With shouting and hooting we pierce thro' the sky;
And Echo turns hunter, and doubles the cry.

CHORUS OF ALL
With shouting and hooting, we pierce through the sky,
And Echo turns hunter, and doubles the cry.

JANUS
Then our age was in its prime,

CHRONOS
Free from rage,

DIANA
—And free from crime.

MOMUS
A very merry, dancing, drinking,
Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking time.

CHORUS OF ALL
Then our age was in its prime,
Free from rage, and free from crime,
A very merry, dancing, drinking,
Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking time.

Dance of Diana's attendants
MARS
Inspire the vocal brass, inspire;
The world is past its infant age:
Arms and honour,
Arms and honour,
Set the martial mind on fire,
And kindle manly rage.
Mars has look'd the sky to red;
And peace, the lazy good, is fled.
Plenty, peace, and pleasure fly;
The sprightly green
In woodland-walks, no more is seen;
The sprightly green, has drunk the Tyrian dye.

CHORUS OF ALL
Plenty, peace, |&|c.

MARS
Sound the trumpet, beat the drum,
Through all the world around;
Sound a reveille, sound, sound,
The warrior god is come.

CHORUS OF ALL
Sound the trumpet, |&|c.

MOMUS
Thy sword within the scabbard keep,
And let mankind agree;
Better the world were fast asleep,
Than kept awake by thee.
The fools are only thinner,
With all our cost and care;
But neither side a winner,
For things are as they were.

CHORUS OF ALL
The fools are only, |&|c.

Enter VENUS
VENUS
Calms appear, when storms are past;
Love will have his hour at last:
Nature is my kindly care;
Mars destroys, and I repair;
Take me, take me, while you may,
Venus comes not ev'ry day.

CHORUS OF ALL
Take her, take her, |&|c.

CHRONOS
The world was then so light,
I scarcely felt the weight;
Joy rul'd the day, and love the night.
But since the Queen of Pleasure left the ground,
I faint, I lag,
And feebly drag
The pond'rous Orb around.
All, all of a piece throughout;

pointing {}} to Diana {}}
MOMUS,
Thy chase had a beast in view;

to Mars
Thy wars brought nothing about;

to Venus
Thy lovers were all untrue.

JANUS
'Tis well an old age is out,
And time to begin a new.

CHORUS OF ALL
All, all of a piece throughout;
Thy chase had a beast in view;
Thy wars brought nothing about;
Thy lovers were all untrue.
'Tis well an old age is out,
And time to begin a new.

-----------------------
Momus was the god of satire, mockery, and poets in Greek mythology; as well as a spirit of evil-spirited blame and unfair criticism. His name meant 'blame' or 'censure' and he was depicted as lifting a mask from his face. He was the son of the Titan goddess Nyx (night).

Janus (two-faced, sometimes 4-faced) god of doorways and therefore possibly of beginnings, endings, transitions. he's one of my favorites. liminal.

Chronos: god of time, father of Titans

Strange Celestial Roads

"There’s a father sleeping it off in every master bedroom
of the cul-de-sac the morning after, so Saturday
morning is a snooze. The moon is still out, eyeballing
the quiet street like Sun Ra did his Arkestra. Somebody
has to be a father figure for all of those musical notes.
No school busses to huff after, no mothers yelling
their children onward. The only weekend noise is us,
kicking rocks—so bored we can’t even hear each other—
on a celestial swirl of asphalt that will be a playground
one day. We stand, right feet extended in unison like foos
men, rock after rock arcing at sorry angles toward
the open bar that hopes to dangle four swings. Some
rocks go through, some miss as we balance on concrete
meant to backstop hop scotch & echo knock knock jokes.
Not somebody’s father, finally up & at ‘em, yelling,
You got to be kidding me, after he opens the property tax
bill. Maybe these bars were placed here for some other,
future kids to be dragged away from by big ears
or red necks toward the unavoidable arguments, fist-to-face
noises & the bleating saxophones that come after."

-Adrian Matejka

>51 mirrordrum: Thanks for sharing, Ellie. Dryden may not be my cuppa but I admire that ambition.

Deer at Twilight

Darkness wounds the barley,
etching it with denser clouds. A herd sends its
envoy out to nose the garbage at
road’s edge before creeping into the expanse.
And the rest follow with cheap hunger—
ten at once through the swaying curtain, heads
tipped, disappearing in the dim.
Wrong to think of them as vessels
in which your feelings live, leaping across emptiness.
Light a candle. Entertain pity all evening.
It isn’t the deer’s work to hold you. That isn’t you
growing full in the field. Paint them, your
heaviest brush lavish with creams and blacks,
trembling, timid, before the canvas.

-Paula Bohince

"I cross the sea back into air
& return to the traffic of the streets I know.

I am marked by the dead, your sea-letters
of salt & weeping

now I am ready to lay my self down
on the earth, to listen to the instructions

for how to talk of love & land, to sing
of home in the horrible years, & to fill

my language, like the stars do,
with the light, anyway, of a future tense."

-excerpt from The Black Maria. I did not finish the collection but there were flashes of brilliance in Aracelis Girmay's prose, so I wanted to share something. Has anyone read her?

Jeez, this is a fun thread to catch up on. You guys have been busy!

>45 mirrordrum: Back when dinosaurs plowed the toll roads, I saw Anne Sexton perform a number of her poems in Cambridge (MA). She was surprisingly glamorous and comfortable in the spotlight. That's a good 'un of hers.

>46 mirrordrum: This one knocks me on my keister. Discomfiting, too, to have Sylvia Plath talking about nine lives, and saying,

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

There's too much here to comment on everything, but I like that Jack Gilbert poem (he's not entirely new to me, but I haven't read much) and the one by Adrian Matejka that mentions Sun Ra and the Arkestra, who is entirely new to me. BTW, back in those same dinosaur days I saw Sun Ra and His Arkestra perform (I'm pretty sure it was in Ann Arbor), and what he was trying to do was beyond my ken. Interesting, though. "Space is the Place." OK, then.

I haven't read Aracelis Girmay (what a lovely name), but I like that excerpt.

Looking forward to more of this. When we get re-settled, I'll try to bring something by. Right now I'm reading Mick Imlah at Paul C's recommendation. I'm enjoying his Lost Leader. His poems tend to be lengthy, but maybe I can find a good excerpt.

P.S. "Space is the Place" - this is 21 min's long, but just listening to the beginning will give you an idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dokLwszdUgY

>57 jnwelch: I am so glad you stopped by over here, Joe. It has been very quiet, since you were gone. I have been meaning to share a couple of things too. Hope to start the Sharon Olds very soon.

I think you would really like Jack Gilbert.

The Lost Woods as Elegy for Black Childhood


There used to be no one here,
where cypresses and oaks play
shadow puppets on sawgrass.

You heard the music before
I did: tambourines, pan pipes.
Remember how I woke clean

to meet you each morning?
The dew and the dust?
Remember how you’d catch me

as I fell from trees? Someone
heard and hurt us. I’m Black-Eyed
Pea. You’re just Skull Kid.

We wanted our genius to last.
We never wanted chalkboards
or snow. We never came home

before the streetlights buzzed.
All we do is dance in leaves.
Cackle and Dreaming, we call it.

Our mothers call it grief.

-Derrick Austin



^From Poem of the Day

Bellow

"Tell the range and all that's howling,
the flickers of life beyond the weeds,
the vulture's furrowed brow of flight,
the blasted sticky Canadian lawn thistle;
tell the clowned-out clouds and the rain,
and all that makes you go quiet again,
tell them that you didn't come here
to make a fuss, or break, or growl, or
scream; tell them-crazy sky and stars
between-tell them you didn't come
to disturb the night air and throw a fit,
then get down in the dark and do it."

-Bright Dead Things

Some excerpts from this collection:

"Sometimes, there seems to be a halfway point
between where you've been and everywhere
else, and we were there. All the trees were dead,
and the hills looked flat like in real bad landscape
paintings in some nowhere gallery off an interstate
but still, it looked kind of pretty..."

"If we could light up the room with pain,
we’d be such a glorious fire.”

"...this life is a fist
of fast wishes caught by nothing
but the fishhook of tomorrow's tug."

^My God, I loved this collection.

Obviously, I am still learning the nuances of poetry but boy, when I read something special, it really resonates and clambers around in my skull, like a bat loose in the house. This collection, Bright Dead Things is filled with moments like this and I can not recommend it higher. Please try it for yourself and I am going to seek out her earlier work.

Here is a lovely interview with Limon, from the 2016 AWP Conference:

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Ada+Limon-+interview&&view=detail&am...

>60 msf59:, >61 msf59: "Like". Adding this to the WL. I'll have to circle back for the interview . . .

I've just put Bright Dead Things on hold at the library. :-)

super good stuff, Mark. i'm rather overwhelmed. in a good way. thanks for what you make accessible to me.

>63 EBT1002: I think you will love her work, Ellen. I just requested her last collection. Amazing stuff.

>64 mirrordrum: I keep stumbling on more and more gems, Ellie. Stay tuned, my friend.

"take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it."

-excerpt from I Go Back To May 1937

"I am doing something I learned early to do, I am

paying attention to small beauties,

whatever I have—as if it were our duty to

find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world."

-excerpt from Little Things. It's all about life's small beauties, isn't it?

"Suddenly I remember the exact look of your body, but
better than the bright corners of your eyes, or the
puppy-fat of your thighs, or the slick
chino of your pants bright in the corners of my eyes, I
remember your extraordinary act of courage in
loving me, something no one but the
blind and halt had done before."

-excerpt from Cambridge Elegy

^These are all from Strike Sparks, by Sharon Olds. I am really enjoying this collection and have a lot more to go. Once again, thanks to Joe, for steering me in this direction.

Nikky Finney, winner 2011 Nat'l Book Award for poetry



The Aureole
By Nikky Finney

(for E)

I stop my hand midair.

If I touch her there everything about me will be true.
The New World discovered without pick or ax.

I will be what Brenda Jones was stoned for in 1969.
I saw it as a girl but didn’t know I was taking in myself.

My hand remembers, treading the watery room,
just behind the rose-veiled eyes of memory.

Alone in the yard tucked beneath the hood of her car,
lucky clover all about her feet, green tea-sweet necklace
for her mud-pie crusty work boots.

She fends off their spit & words with silent two-handed
twists & turns of her socket wrench. A hurl of sticks &
stones and only me to whisper for her, from sidewalk far,

break my bones. A grown woman in grease-pocket overalls
inside her own sexy transmission despite the crowding of
hurled red hots. Beneath the hood of her candy-apple Camaro:

souped, shiny, low to the ground.

The stars over the Atlantic are dangling
salt crystals. The room at the Seashell Inn is
$20 a night; special winter off-season rate.
No one else here but us and the night clerk,
five floors below, alone with his cherished
stack of Spiderman. My lips are red snails
in a primal search for every constellation
hiding in the sky of your body. My hand
waits for permission, for my life to agree
to be changed, forever. Can Captain Night
Clerk hear my fingers tambourining you
there on the moon? Won’t he soon climb
the stairs and bam! on the hood of this car?
You are a woman with film reels for eyes.
Years of long talking have brought us to the
land of the body. Our skin is one endless
prayer bead of brown. If my hand ever lands,
I will fly past dreaming Australian Aborigines.
The old claw hammer and monkey wrench
that flew at Brenda Jones will fly across the
yard of ocean at me. A grease rag will be
thrust into my painter’s pants against my
will. I will never be able to wash or peel
any of this away. Before the night is over
someone I do not know will want the keys
to my ’55 silver Thunderbird. He will chase
me down the street. A gaggle of spooked
hens will fly up in my grandmother’s yard,
never to lay another egg, just as I am jump-
ed, kneed, pulled finally to the high ground
of sweet clover.

Source: Head Off & Split (Northwestern University Press, 2011)

NB: this will not post w/ correct spacing but you will find it correctly spaced here along with an audio reading by the author. she reads it beautifully.

this one really needs to be heard to be fully appreciated. imho.

cutting greens

By Lucille Clifton

curling them around
i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship.
collards and kale
strain against each strange other
away from my kissmaking hand and
the iron bedpot.
the pot is black,
the cutting board is black,
my hand,
and just for a minute
the greens roll black under the knife,
and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
and I taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.

and one more by Derek Mahon

Leaves

The prisoners of infinite choice
Have built their house
In a field below the wood
And are at peace.

It is autumn, and dead leaves
On their way to the river
Scratch like birds at the windows
Or tick on the road.

Somewhere there is an afterlife
Of dead leaves,
A stadium filled with an infinite
Rustling and sighing.

Somewhere in the heaven
Of lost futures
The lives we might have lived
Have found their own fulfillment.

Derek Mahon, Selected Poems (The Gallery Press/Viking 1991).

Hooray! Mr. Collins has a new collection out, The Rain in Portugal. It was released on Oct 4th.

>67 mirrordrum: "The New World discovered without pick or ax." This is a lovely poem, Ellie. I will have to request this one. Have you read the whole collection? Thanks.

I am just popping in to say that I am catching up after the crazy month of moving. I am reading The Dream Keeper and Other Poems by Langston Hughes. It's short and I'll be done soon. *grin* It's been on my list for a while. I've read one here and there, but never the whole thing.

>68 mirrordrum: Oh my. So evocative.

Happy to see the {Sharon Olds' excerpts, and nice picks, Ellie, in >67 mirrordrum:, >68 mirrordrum:, >69 mirrordrum:. Nikky Finney's choice to change the ending to a long, dense, prose-like paragraph in >67 mirrordrum: is intriguing. That's my favorite of the three; longing and danger beautifully conveyed.

>70 msf59: Thanks for the heads-up! WL'd. That hardcover is pricey, darn it. I suppose that reflects his popularity.

Adrienne Rich has had a lot of impact on me. Here's one of hers called "From a Survivor".

From a Survivor

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact
of men & women in those days

I don't know who we thought we were
that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race

Lucky or unlucky, we didn't know
the race had failures of that order
and that we were going to share them

Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special

Your body is as vivid to me
as it ever was: even more

since my feeling for it is clearer:
I know what it could and could not do

it is no longer
the body of a god
or anything with power over my life

Next year it would have been 20 years
and you are wastefully dead
who might have made the leap
we talked, too late, of making

which I live now
not as a leap
but a succession of brief, amazing movements

each one making possible the next

I was wondering 'what's happened to poerty?' It somehow fell off my horizon. Will take a bit of time to catch up. I've just started reading Autumn: A Folio Anthology. >>> it's by various, Kathleen Jamie provides the Foreword.

Back later.

>71 msf59: isn't that a great line, Mark? wish i could still read collections, but poetry is frequently printed in such small serif font that it's inaccessible to me. so, i rejoice in what i can find online, which is a good way to meet new poets and learn stuff. endless riches.

finding that one poem by Nikky Finney was a tremendous gift because, although she's younger, she writes a part of my life in a way no one else ever has.

>73 jnwelch: >68 mirrordrum: mirrordrum:, >69 mirrordrum: mirrordrum:. "Nikky Finney's choice to change the ending to a long, dense, prose-like paragraph in >67 mirrordrum: mirrordrum: is intriguing. That's my favorite of the three; longing and danger beautifully conveyed." see, Joe, i hadn't even picked that up. yep. and dangerous it was and i'm a generation older.

>74 jnwelch: i had forgotten that poem. it's exceptional. one of my favorites is For Julia in Nebraska below.

for some reason, this won't show the complete poem. i've had to finish it in a second post. weird.

For Julia in Nebraska

Here on the divide between the Republican and the Little Blue lived some of
the most courageous people of the frontier. Their fortunes and their loves live
again in the writings of Willa Cather, daughter of the plains and interpreter of
man’s growth in these fields and in the valleys beyond.

On this beautiful, ever-changing land, man fought to establish a home. In
her vision of the plow against the sun, symbol of the beauty and importance of
work, Willa Cather caught the eternal blending of earth and sky. . . .

In the Midwest of Willa Cather
the railroad looks like a braid of hair
a grandmother’s strong hands plaited
straight down a grand-daughter’s back.
Out there last autumn the streets
dreamed copper-lustre, the fields
of winter wheat whispered long snows yet to fall
we were talking of matrices

and now it’s spring again already.
This stormy Sunday lashed with rain
I call you in Nebraska
hear you’re planting your garden
sanding and oiling a burl of wood
hear in your voice the intention to
survive the long war between mind and body
and we make a promise to talk
this year, about growing older

and I think: we’re making a pledge.
Though not much in books of ritual
is useful between women
we still can make vows together
long distance, in electrical code:
Today you were promising me
to live, and I took your word,
Julia, as if it were my own:
we’ll live to grow old and talk about it too.

I’ve listened to your words
seen you stand by the caldron’s glare
rendering grammar by the heat
of your womanly wrath.
Brave linguist, bearing your double axe and shield
painfully honed and polished,
no word lies cool on your tongue
bent on restoring meaning to
our lesbian names, in quiet fury
weaving the chronicle so violently torn.

On this beautiful, ever-changing land
— the historical marker says —
man fought to establish a home
(fought whom? the marker is mute.)
They named this Catherland, for Willa Cather,
lesbian — the marker is mute,
the marker white men set on a soil
of broken treaties, Indian blood,
women wiped out in childbirth, massacres —
for Willa Cather, lesbian,
whose letters were burnt in shame.

Dear Julia, Willa knew at her death
that the very air was changing
that her Archbishop’s skies
would hardly survive his life
she knew as well that history
is neither your script nor mine
it is the pictograph
from which the young must learn
like Tom Outland, from people
discredited or dead
that it needs a telling as plain
as the prairie, as the tale
of a young girl or an old woman
told by tongues that loved them

And Willa who could not tell
her own story as it was
left us her stern and delicate
respect for the lives she loved —
How are we going to do better?
for that’s the question that lies
beyond our excavations,
the question I ask of you
and myself, when our maps diverge,
when we miss signals, fail —

And if I’ve written in passion,
Live, Julia! what was I writing
but my own pledge to myself
where the love of women is rooted?
And what was I invoking
but the matrices we weave
web upon web, delicate rafters
flung in audacity to the prairie skies
nets of telepathy contrived
to outlast the iron road
laid out in blood across the land they called virgin —
nets, strands, a braid of hair
a grandmother’s strong hands plaited
straight down a grand-daughter’s back.

Adrienne Rich

For Julia in Nebraska contd

And Willa who could not tell
her own story as it was
left us her stern and delicate
respect for the lives she loved —
How are we going to do better?
for that’s the question that lies
beyond our excavations,
the question I ask of you
and myself, when our maps diverge,
when we miss signals, fail —

And if I’ve written in passion,
Live, Julia! what was I writing
but my own pledge to myself
where the love of women is rooted?
And what was I invoking
but the matrices we weave
web upon web, delicate rafters
flung in audacity to the prairie skies
nets of telepathy contrived
to outlast the iron road
laid out in blood across the land they called virgin —
nets, strands, a braid of hair
a grandmother’s strong hands plaited
straight down a grand-daughter’s back.

Adrienne Rich

thanks for mentioning Langston Hughes, Laurie. i had just run across something that mentioned this poem and you inspired me to go find it. :-)

The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Langston Hughes, 1902 - 1967

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

>79 mirrordrum: Oh...one of my favorites.

I finished The Dream Keeper and Other Poems. I really enjoyed it. My mother read many of them to my brothers and I when we were little, so there is some nostalgia involved. My favorite this time through was Aunt Sue's Stories. It's poignant and sweet, and reminds the reader of the value of learning from those real-life experiences. I know when my mom and dad or grandparents told us stories from their own lives, we were entranced.

Aunt Sue's Stories

And the dark-faced child, listening,
Knows that Aunt Sue's stories are real stories,
He knows that Aunt Sue
Never got her stories out of any book at all,
But that they came
Right out of her own life.

And the dark-faced child is quiet
Of a summer night
Listening to Aunt Sue's stories.

>79 mirrordrum: Love that one too.

>79 mirrordrum: Jenn, my apologies for calling you "Laurie." i was overcome by dumb.

>81 nittnut: lord, that's wonderful. i'm afraid that in the US, at least in younger generations, we've lost the delight and wonder of storytelling by elders. i think that's partly because the kinds of stories i heard from my father and he from his just don't happen anymore. children, and adults, are grabbed up so quickly into the world of cartoon "stories" that are addicting, and sell products, and then by social media where "stories" comprise 140 characters and are also addicting. having known wonderful storytellers in my life, i'm heartily sorry for it.

i wonder to what extent slam poetry and similar things may help fill that void.

"The morning time
mother earth
is cool.
The air
is like a river
which shakes
the silence.
It smells of rosemary,
of space
and roots.
Overhead,
a crazy song.
It's a bird.
How
out of its throat
smaller than a finger
can there fall the waters
of its song?"

-exerpt from Ode To Bird Watching

I started Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon, a collection by Pablo Neruda and I really like it. Once again, thanks to Ellie for the rec.

Wow, lots of good ones!

>77 mirrordrum:, >78 mirrordrum: Wow, that's a powerful one, Ellie. I don't know how in the world I'd forgotten it, although it's been a while since I read her. I'm a Willa Cather fan, too, and appreciated the references to the Archbishop and Tom Outland.

>79 mirrordrum: A knockout. Great to see Langston Hughes getting posted these days. What a journey through time and into the depths in a few short lines.

>81 nittnut: Lovely, Jenn. >83 mirrordrum: As you know, Ellie, we're active in the poetry slam and storytelling communities here, so I get a skewed view. The storytelling scene here is called "Live Lit", and there are multiple performances going on every week. You'd love it. Wife Debbi performs again this Friday at "Cabaret by the Lake".

I sure hope the storytelling traditions are staying alive. I used to make up stories for our kids when they were growing up, and our daughter and I still make jokes about "Mr. Elephant and Mr. Giraffe", both of whom wore dapper hats.

>84 msf59: Lovely Neruda poem, Mark. You're soaking in a lot of the greats in a short amount of time!

His "lost poems" were recently found and published: https://www.amazon.com/Then-Come-Back-Lost-Neruda/dp/1556594941

I haven't read them yet.

Since we seem to be doing okay with longer poems, here's the first Adrienne Rich poem that knocked me over.

Diving Into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
abroad the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it's a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or week

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
and I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
Obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Adrienne Rich

Great quote from Year of the French, posted by sibyx/Lucy in her review of the book:

"Moonlight glancing from stone or metal washed across his mind, faded. That was the worst of it with poems. The meaning was right there, in the image itself, and you had no idea what it meant, but the image knew. The image was wiser than the poet. It disclosed itself when it was good and ready, casually, totally."

>86 jnwelch: Thanks for sharing the Rich poem, Joe. Another gem.

>87 jnwelch: Good quote too!

^I want to thank everyone for keeping this thread going. It means a lot and it will help me keep on target with my poetry reading.

I definitely will include this again in the AAC next year. In the April spot. How could I not?

Book of Statues

Because I am a boy, the untouchability of beauty
is my subject already, the book of statues
open in my lap, the middle of October, leaves
foiling the wet ground
in soft copper. “A statue
must be beautiful
from all sides,” Cellini wrote in 1558.
When I close the book,
the bodies touch. In the west,
they are tying a boy to a fence and leaving him to die,
his face unrecognizable behind a mask
of blood. His body, icon
of loss, growing meaningful
against his will.

Richie Hofmann

Thoughts from the poet:

“I was eleven years old when Matthew Shepard was murdered in 1998; he died on the twelfth of October. Around the same time, I was working on a school project on Italian Renaissance sculptures, so many of which depict male nudes. These two events are linked in my mind, as I think it was the first time I began to glimpse the costs of being a body that desires.”



-Matthew Shepard

>90 msf59: oh dear God. thank you, Mark.

>90 msf59:, >91 mirrordrum: Ditto, Mark. Woo. Gut punch.

>89 msf59: Great to hear this will be back next year in the AAC.

>90 msf59: extraordinary. Sad.

"Well then,
invisible
birds
of the forest, of the woods,
of the pure bower,
birds of the acacia
and of the oak,
crazy, amorous,
astonishing birds,
conceited
soloists,
migratory musicians,
one last
word
before
I go back..."

-another excerpt from "Ode to Bird-Watching"

Migratory Musicians? How lovely is that? I am absolutely crazy about this Neruda collection, Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon and I owe Ellie a big hug for a great recommendation.

Impulse

Evening after evening
I collect all the available chairs
in the neighbourhood
and read them poems.

Chairs are most receptive
to poetry,
if the seating order is right.

In the process
I become excited
and tell them
for hours
how beautifully my soul
communed
that day.

Usually our meetings
are matter-of-fact,
free of sentimental
wallowing.

In any case
you can say
that each of us
has done his duty,
and we can make
a new start.

By Marin Sorescu, trans Michael Hamburger

I liked this by Sharon Olds, about her mother, from the poem "Why My Mother Made Me":

I feel her looking down into me the way
the maker of a sword gazes at his face
in the steel of the blade.

>95 Caroline_McElwee: Love this one! Do you supposed he noticed that no one was sitting in the chairs?

Paul C. rec'd that I read Mick Imlah, a Scottish poet who died young, and in particular, The Lost Leader. In this one, Imlah writes a lot about battles, soldiers, football, rugby, and older poets like Tennyson and James Thompson B.V. (In some, the Scottish content was heavy going for a USA-ian). But here's one that's a "pocket anecdote":

Railway Children

After the branch line went to Ochiltree -
I would have been fifteen - two men were shut
In the waiting room, and one of them
Brought out his pocket anecdote of me:

'The boy's a splurger! - hey, when Danny Craig
Passed him a flask on the train the other day,
He gulped it, just for the sake of showing off.
And he's a coward too, for all his face.
For after he'd taken the drink, he noised about,
And Dan, to clip his wings, made up a threat
To hang him out o' the window by his heels -
You know Dan didn't mean it, but the boy
Grew white at the very idea o't - shook
Like a dug in the wet - "Oh!", he cried, and "Oh! -
But how would tha ground go flying past your eyes;
How quick tha wheel beside your face would buzz -
Would blind you by quickness - how tha grey slag
Would flash below ye!" - Those were his actual words;
He seemed to see it all as if for real,
And flinched, and stopped, and stared, like a body in fits,
Till Dan was drawn to give him another drink;
"You'd spew with dizziness," he said, shut
His eyes where he sat, and actually bocked himself.'

*"actually bocked himself" = threw up on himself

The TS Eliot Prize shortlist

http://tseliot.com/foundation/prize/2016-shortlist/

I've only read work by Alice Oswald and Denise Riley before.

“your art
is not about how many people
like your work
your art
is about
if your heart likes your work
if your soul likes your work
it's about how honest
you are with yourself
and you
must never
trade honesty
for relatability”

"our backs
tell stories
no books have
the spine to
carry”

"this is the journey of
surviving through poetry
this is the blood sweat tears
of twenty-one years
this is my heart
in your hands
this is
the hurting
the loving
the breaking
the healing."

^All quotes from Milk and Honey, Rupi Kaur

^"Milk and Honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. It is about the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity. It is split into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose, deals with a different pain, heals a different heartache. "

This is both hard-hitting and beautiful. Highly recommended.

Native Memory


"River was my first word
after mama.
I grew up with the names of rivers
on my tongue: the Coosa,
the Tallapoosa, the Black Warrior;
the sound of their names
as native to me as my own.

I walked barefoot along the brow of Lookout Mountain
with my father, where the Little River
carves its name through the canyons
of sandstone and shale
above Shinbone Valley;
where the Cherokee
stood on these same stones
and cast their voices into the canyon below.

You are here, a red arrow
on the atlas tells me
at the edge of the bluff
where young fools have carved their initials
into giant oaks
and spray painted their names and dates
on the canyon rocks,
where human history is no more
than a layer of stardust, thin
as the fingernail of god.

What the canyon holds in its hands:
an old language spoken into the pines
and carried downstream
on wind and time, vanishing
like footprints in ash.
The mountain holds their sorrow
in the marrow of its bones.
The body remembers
the scars of massacres,
how the hawk ached to see
family after family
dragged by the roots
from the land of their fathers.

Someone survived to remember
beyond the weight of wagons and their thousands
of feet cutting a deep trail of grief.
Someone survived to tell the story of this
sorrow and where they left their homes
and how the trees wept to see them go
and where they crossed the river
and where they whispered a prayer into their grandmother’s eyes
before she died
and where it was along the road they buried her
and where the oak stood whose roots
grew around her bones
and where it was that the wild persimmons grow
and what it was she last said to her children
and which child was to keep her memory alive
and which child was to keep the language alive
and weave the stories of this journey into song
and when were the seasons of singing
and what were the stories that go with the seasons
that tell how to work and when to pray
that tell when to dance and who made the day.

You are here
where bloodlines and rivers
are woven together.
I followed the river until I forgot my name
and came here to the mouth of the canyon
to swim in the rain and remember
this, the most indigenous joy I know:
to wade into the river naked
among the moss and stones,
to drink water from my hands
and be alive in the river, the river saying,
You are here,
a daughter of stardust and time."

-Ansel Elkins

This was a Poem-of-the-Day. I thought I would share it, since the North Dakota pipeline protest has been in the news.

>100 msf59: >102 msf59: two stunning pieces there Mark, I want to read more by both these carvers of language.

"Our backs
tell stories
no books have
the spine to
carry"

riches beyond wealth. oh thank you all.

>95 Caroline_McElwee: Caroline, that's wondrous. i'm so visual that immediately i can see the street, sometimes the poet, late afternoon, a suburban neighborhood, the chairs, some patient, some eager, some lost in window seat thoughts just waiting to be dismissed.

also, thanks for >99 Caroline_McElwee:.

Mark, you just hit grand slam after grand slam. and >102 msf59: i thought immediately of #noDAP and the shunting of the line away from Bismark b/c of fear of water pollution onto the lands of the Dakota and Lakota where, you know, it doesn't so much matter. do you know that "deep trail of grief" probably refers, at least in part, to the Cherokee Trail of Tears? a small part of the Cherokee nation remains in western NC still, largely in poverty but perhaps doing better as they now have a casino.

>98 jnwelch: that poem is, to me, a "Joe" poem. "pocket anecdote." :-)

>103 Caroline_McElwee: yep, Caroline. me too.

i finally got up 3 versions of a poem by the US Poet Laureate in 2015, Juan Felipe Herrera. here's the original, largely in Spanish. here's the almost entirely English version. finally, here's the performance from the Library of Congress that simply must be experienced. in it he mixes the two previous versions and turns it into a performance piece where he sort of translates the Spanish into English and makes that process the poetry. it was just too much to put here, imo, so i just thought i'd offer the links. on the video i got as close as i could to the start of the poem itself, i think it starts about 20 seconds early.

i do hope you'll enjoy it and thank you President Obama for finally giving us our first Hispanic/Latino Poet Laureate!

Big Bend National Park Says No to All Walls


Big Bend has been here, been here. Shouldn’t it have a say?
Call the mountains a wall if you must, (the river has never been a wall),
leavened air soaking equally into all, could this be the home
we ache for? Silent light bathing cliff faces, dunes altering
in darkness, stones speaking low to one another, border secrets,
notes so rooted you may never be lonely the same ways again.
Big bend in thinking—why did you dream you needed so much?
Water, one small pack. Once I lay on my back on a concrete table
the whole day and read a book. A whole book, and it was long.
The day I continue to feast on.
Stones sifting a gospel of patience and dust,
no one exalted beyond a perfect parched cliff,
no one waiting for anything you do or don’t do.
Santa Elena, South Rim, once a woman knew what everything here
was named for, Hallie Stillwell brimming with stories,
her hat still snaps in the wind. You will not find
a prime minister in Big Bend, a president, or even a candidate,
beyond the lion, the javelina, the eagle lighting on its nest.

-Naomi Shihab Nye

^This was from the Poem-A-Day, from a few weeks ago. I thought it fit well for this current political fiasco.

>105 mirrordrum: Thanks for supplying this, Ellie. I am going to request the collection Notes on the Assemblage. It looks like it is his latest. Have you read it?

>106 msf59: wow. you find some amazing work, amigo mio.

>107 msf59: nope. can't read books anymore except very small bits. i have an autoimmune thingy that, amongst other delights, makes my vision poor and using my eyes quite uncomfortable and poetry books tend to have exceptionally small print. tarsome. can still use 'puter though. :-)

>106 msf59: Good one from Naomi Shihab Nye, Mark. She's become a favorite of mine.

Once I lay on my back on a concrete table
the whole day and read a book. A whole book, and it was long.
The day I continue to feast on.

That speaks to an LTer's heart, doesn't it?

I need to check out the linked Herrera poem from Ellie.

Here's one from the Goodreads newsletter that I liked, by a poet I don't know:

Unwritten Things

by M. Flynn Ragland

But she had loved unwritten things instead,
I pondered as night's windows filled with gray
and all the things the rain had left unsaid.

To live not of the heart but of the head
has been my curse, each memo to its tray,
but she had loved unwritten things instead.

That such unlikes, by wry chance, should be wed!
What, in this voiceless autumn's disarray,
of all the things the rain has left unsaid,

but walks that road, kneels in the flashing red,
as if she would awaken where she lay,
for she had loved unwritten things instead.

Who knows where noon's flecked sidewalks might have led
had I let schedules look the other way?
And all the things the rain has left unsaid

might have voice still, the A string that was dead,
the improvised sonatas she would play,
for she had loved unwritten things instead,
and all the things the rain has left unsaid.

>110 jnwelch: "What, in this voiceless autumn's disarray,
of all the things the rain has left unsaid,"

Very nice, Joe! Thanks for sharing. Can you recommend a Naomi Shihab Nye collection?

I am just not clicking with my John Clare collection. I have a hard time connecting with the old school stuff. One thing, I have learned about poetry, (still in a novice state) it either works for you or it doesn't. Much more room in literature.

Duh!! I completely forgot about Words Under the Words. I really liked that collection.

>110 jnwelch: what a heart breaker, Joe. "kneels in the flashing red." Jesus.

I posted this on my own thread but wanted to share here, as well.
From Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón

OUTSIDE OKLAHOMA, WE SEE BOSTON

Big blue horizon wakes me
from a car catnap and the boys
tell me about Boston, the bombs.
Soft edges of sleep turn sharp
and point inward to the terrified
heart. Out the window, ancient
horses and trees bent over
like the wisest crones. Under
the overpass a flittering swarm
of mud swallows have built
careful nests with prairie clay.
How do they do it? Demand the
sweet continuance of birth and flight
in a place so utterly reckless? How
masterful and mad is hope.

>114 EBT1002: mmmmm. thanks, Ellen.

>114 EBT1002: I love it! I am such a fan of this collection, Ellen! I hope everyone has a chance to enjoy it.

It Comes in Every Storm
Olga Orozco

translated by Mary Crow

"And don’t you feel also, perhaps, a stormy sorrow on the skin of time,
like a scar that opens again
there where the sky was uprooted?
And don’t you feel sometimes how that night gathers its tatters into an ominous bird,
that there’s a beating of wings against the roof
like a clash among immense spring leaves struggling
or of hands clapping to summon you to death?
And don’t you feel afterwards someone exiled is crying,
that there’s an ember of a fallen angel on the threshold,
brought suddenly like a beggar by an alien gust of wind?
And don’t you feel, like me, that a house rolling toward the abyss
runs over you with a crash of crockery shattered
by lightning,
with two empty shells embracing each other for an endless journey,
with a screech of axles suddenly fractured like love’s broken promises?
And don’t you feel then your bed sinking like the nave of a cathedral crushed by the fall of heaven,
and that a thick, heavy water runs over your face till the final judgment?

Again it’s the slime.
Again your heart thrown into the depth of the pool,
prisoner once more among the waves closing a dream.

Lie down as I do in this miserable eternity of one day.
It’s useless to howl.
From these waters the beasts of oblivion don’t drink."

Olga Orozco

translated by Mary Crow

**I think I felt this way, last Wednesday morning.

Prayers to the Birds

"Mockingbird, tanager, thrush—you liltwings,
you hopscotch-skippers—forgive us our calling,

noun-bound to be proper, to freight
your pinions with what yokes our weight

to gravity, law, numbers, other fables.
Forgive us our starry quills, our parables—

rook, raven, crow, canary, dove—
our willful migration from love

to symbol. Wind-sickles, forgive us the sins
visited on Icarus, his fathers and sons:

our conceit in zeppelin and satellite, the feast
of false hawks, false eagles. Forgive us as priests

in slums and picket lines forgive the church:
in vigilance, mining the breach—

that sky—for something that will not be owned.
Cardinal, finch—forgive us our lone

hiding behind bushes, spying you out
when we should be flying at your side, not

from pride but from humility: that soaring
force that finds its power in adoring."

-Melissa Range

^^I love those last lines.



-scarlet tanager. I saw one of these beauties, on my route, a few years ago. Would love to see one again.

All Nature Has A Feeling

"All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks
Are life eternal: and in silence they
Speak happiness beyond the reach of books;
There's nothing mortal in them; their decay
Is the green life of change; to pass away
And come again in blooms revivified.
Its birth was heaven, eternal it its stay,
And with the sun and moon shall still abide
Beneath their day and night and heaven wide. "

-John Clare

^Honestly, my Clare collection, part of the Faber Nature Poets series, is not really clicking for me. The old-school poets seem to leave me a bit cold. I do not connect with the "Thees and thous", I guess. I do like this little poem though.

>118 msf59: the colour of that bird. Thanks Mark.

Mood can affect what clicks I think. We can be tripped up by the different rhythms of older poetry, but sometimes the crack of the open door can let us squeeze in. I tend to have to read some writers for a bit before I get into their style.

>120 Caroline_McElwee: Glad you like the tanager, Caroline! I will continue to give the old poets a try. Maybe a door will open, or at least a window.

Feel free to share a poem, maybe something you recently enjoyed.

The Ancient World
by Mark Doty

Today the Masons are auctioning
their discarded pomp: a trunk of turbans,
gemmed and ostrich-plumed, and operetta costumes
labeled inside the collar "Potentate"
and "Vizier." Here their chairs, blazoned
with the Masons' sign, huddled
like convalescents, lean against one another

on the grass. In a casket are rhinestoned poles
the hierophants carried in parades;
here's a splendid golden staff some ranking officer waved,
topped with a golden pyramid and a tiny,
inquisitive sphinx. No one's worn this stuff
for years, and it doesn't seem worth buying;
where would we put it? Still,

I want that staff. I used to love
to go to the library -- the smalltown brick refuge
of those with nothing to do, really,
'Carnegie' chiseled on the pediment
above columns that dwarfed an inconsequential street.
Embarrassed to carry the same book past
the water fountain's plaster centaurs

up to the desk again, I'd take
The Wonders of the World to the Reading Room
where Art and Industry met in the mural
on the dome. The room smelled like two decades
before I was born, when the name
carved over the door meant something.
I never read the second section,

"Wonders of the Modern World";
I loved the promise of my father's blueprints,
the unfulfilled turquoise schemes,
but in the real structures
you could hardly imagine a future.
I wanted the density of history,
which I confused with the smell of the book:

Babylon's ziggurat tropical with ferns,
engraved watercourses rippling;
the Colossus of Rhodes balanced
over the harbormouth on his immense ankles.
Athena filled one end of the Parthenon,
in an "artist's reconstruction",
like an adult in a dollhouse.

At Halicarnassus, Mausolus remembered himself
immensely, though in the book
there wasn't even a sketch,
only a picture of huge fragments.
In the pyramid's deep clockworks,
did the narrow tunnels mount toward
the eye of God? That was the year

photos were beamed back from space;
falling asleep I used to repeat a new word
to myself, telemetry, liking the way
it seemed to allude to something storied.
The earth was whorled marble,
at that distance. Even the stuck-on porticoes
and collonades downtown were narrative,

somehow, but the buildings my father engineered
were without stories. All I wanted
was something larger than our ordinary sadness --
greater not in scale but in context,
memorable, true to a proportioned,
subtle form. Last year I knew a student,
a half mad boy who finally opened his arms

with a razor, not because he wanted to die
but because he wanted to design something grand
on his own body. Once he said, When a child
realizes his parents aren't enough,
he turns to architecture.
I think I know what he meant.
Imagine the Masons parading,

one of them, in his splendid get-up,
striding forward with the golden staff,
above his head Cheops' beautiful shape --
a form we cannot separate
from the stories about the form,
even if we hardly know them,
even if it no longer signifies, if it only shines.

>111 msf59: A good Naomi Shihab Nye collection: 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East It's really good, and is the one that started me on her.

>113 mirrordrum: Right, Ellie? Oh my.

>114 EBT1002: I love this one.

>117 msf59: Very dramatic! Makes me think of the broad gestures of Neruda.

>118 msf59: I love those last lines, too.

>119 msf59: Good pick from John Clare. He generally doesn't click for me either.

>122 Caroline_McElwee: Mark Doty! I haven't read him in a good while. Nice one - I love the combination of detailed, exalted imagery and informality - e.g. No one's worn this stuff//for years, and it doesn't seem worth buying;//where would we put it?

and All I wanted//was something larger than our ordinary sadness --

I've started reading the Stephen Mitchell translation of The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Here's one of them that I liked.

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.

>124 jnwelch: Lovely. I read a lot of Rilke in the late 80s and early 90s. Must pull him off the shelf again. He was a friend of Rodin, and I think of him when visiting the Rodin Museum in Paris, which I do almost every visit.

>122 Caroline_McElwee: The Doty poem is interesting, Caroline! Thanks for sharing. I will have to read it a couple more teams, to get a better feel. Which collection of his, would you recommend?

>123 jnwelch: I will have to add 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East to the list, Joe!

>124 jnwelch: Thanks for sharing the Rilke poem, Joe. I will have to read it a couple more times, to get a better feel. My Rilke collection showed up today. Yah!!

Song as Abridged Thesis of George Perkin Marsh’s Man and Nature

(Poem on the Occasion of the Centenary of the National Park Service)

"The pendulous branches of the Norway spruce slowly move
as though approving our gentle walk in Woodstock,
and the oak leaves yellowing this early morning
fall in the parking lot of Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller.
We hear beneath our feet their susurrus
as the churning of wonder, found, too, in the eyes of a child
who has just sprinted toward a paddock of Jersey cows.
The fate of the land is the fate of man.

Some have never fallen in love with a river of grass
or rested in the dignity of the Great Blue Heron
standing alone, saint-like, in a marshland nor envied
the painted turtle sunning on a log, nor thanked as I have,
the bobcat for modeling how to navigate dynasties of snow,
for he survives in both forests and imaginations
away from the dark hands of developers and myths of profits.
The fate of the land is the fate of man.

Some are called to praise as holy, hillocks, ponds, and brooks,
to renew the sacred contract of live things everywhere,
the cold pensive roamings of clouds above Mount Tom,
to extol silkworm and barn owls, gorges and vales,
the killdeer, egret, tern, and loon; some must rest
at the sandbanks, in deep wilderness, by a lagoon,
estuaries or floodplain, standing in the way of the human storm:
the fate of the land is the fate of man."

-Major Jackson

**From Poem-A-Day

>127 msf59: Love it. Thanks, Mark. Poems on An Occasion often land with a thud, but this one is just right for the National Park Service.

can't read everything but wanted to add a Rilke that nearly kills me. Joe, is this the Mitchell translation? i think not, but still.

The Panther

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

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

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

Rainer Maria Rilke

>129 mirrordrum: I like the Rilke, Ellie. Good choice. I bought a copy of Ahead of All the Parting, the Mitchell translation. I have not cracked it yet. you know, this Rilke thing started with you, right? My Poetry Seer!

>129 mirrordrum: I've haven't gotten to Mitchell's translation of "The Panther" yet, Ellie, but that's awfully good. It'll be fun to see whether he did it differently when I get there.

How about some Seamus Heaney?

>132 jnwelch: "Digging" is the very first poem in the very first collection of Seamus Heaney, Joe. Released in my birth year of 1966 and doesn't that last little verse speak volumes about what he went on to do?

>133 PaulCranswick: It's a great poem, Paul, and he went on to an illustrious career, didn't he.

>129 mirrordrum: and >132 jnwelch: you have both chosen favourite poems of mine, clapping.

>135 Caroline_McElwee: :-)

>129 mirrordrum: That is the Mitchell translation. Here's another Rilke poem translated by him.

Autumn Day

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

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

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

>135 Caroline_McElwee: >139 Caroline_McElwee: >132 jnwelch: we happy three. ;-)

>136 jnwelch: he was very keen on autumnal-sounding poems and the first and last stanzas are favorites. the last is really beautiful auf Deutsch and i'm not really a great fan of the way German sounds.

there's a poem, i think i've posted it before maybe. auf Deutsch, it's Erinnerung and in English, Memory. i believe it's in your collection. it's very autumnal in my mind. at least that's the season when this grips my heart so strongly and brings anguish.

Memory

And you wait, awaiting
the one to make your small life grow:
the mighty, the uncommon,
the awakening of stone,
the depths to be opened below.

Now duskily in the bookshelf
gleam the volumes in brown and gold;
you remember the lands you have wandered through,
the pictures and the garments of women lost of old.

And you suddenly know: It was here!
You pull yourself together, and there
stands an irrevocable year
of anguish and vision and prayer.

Mitchell does something there that nobody else does: he's not afraid to say repetitively, "and you wait, awaiting" and it's so powerful, that heightening of the passive, the tension between the waiting and that "one" that will bring all to extraordinary fruition; a waiting that doesn't imply patience but rather an inability (as we see in the last stanza) to be either "here" where life is happening or "there" when life was happening. until finally you do see and it is too late. i was absolutely smitten by this poem in my 20s and still am.

Under the Tree

Under an orange-tree –
not one especial singular
orange-tree, but one among

the dark multitude.
Recline there, with a stone winejar

and the sense
of another dream
concentration would capture –
but it doesn’t matter –

and the sense
of dust on the grass, of infinitesimal
flowers, of
cracks in the earth

and urgent life
passing there, ants and transparent
winged beings in their intensity
traveling from blade to blade,

under a modest orange-tree
neither lower nor taller
neither darker-leaved nor aglow
more beneficently

than the dark multitude
glowing in numberless lanes
the orange-farmer counts, but
not you – recline

and drink wine – the stone
will keep it cold – with the sense
of life yet to be lived – rest, rest,
the grass is growing –

let the orange
ripen, ripen above you,
you are living too, one
among the dark multitude –

Denise Levertov from
With eyes at the back of our heads

Lovely, thanks Mark. It's a while since I read Levertov.

>139 Caroline_McElwee: glad you like it, Caroline. my pb copy is terribly battered.

Thanks

"Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is."


W. S. Merwin

From Poem-A-Day. Fits perfectly. Any fans of Merwin? I have not heard of him.

>138 mirrordrum: Under the Tree is beautiful, Ellie. Thanks for sharing. I have added that collection to my T.R. list.

lucid and undecipherable tasks

"& I leaned
against rock it was the storm
i lay there opened
upon the stones and ferns against the leaves that spoke
and held my flesh the trees
the red-shouldered hawk it was the eagle
it caressed my face held it up to the lightning beaks of night
the infinite the eye the void
lucid and undecipherable tasks all things

become one it was my breath upon you
breath alone and full free and still
revealed by the moon and the moon the wild sickle swan
and I ascended
through the fire."

-Juan Filipe Herrera

This poem is from Notes on the Assemblage, a collection Ellie recommended. I did not connect with a lot of it, finding it mostly impenetrable, including this one, but I did recognize the beauty there and wanted to share it.

>141 msf59: thanks, Mark. i read that a while ago several times then lost it. i thought it was Mary Oliver. i'm delighted to have it brought back to me. thanks so much!

Rhonda posted this fun one on her thread:

“Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?"

Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave
your house or apartment. Go out into the world.

It's all right to carry a notebook but a cheap
one is best, with pages the color of weak tea
and on the front a kitten or a space ship.

Avoid any enclosed space where more than
three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware
any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks
across the muffled tennis courts.

Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.
And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle
where a child a year or two old is playing as his
mother browses the ranks of the dead.

Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.
The title, the author's name, the brooding photo
on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray
book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher
it gets, the wider he grins.

You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower
falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody
in the world frowns and says, "Shhhh."

Then start again.

—Ron Koertge

Accepting Heaven at Great Basin


"When you doubt the world
look at the undivided darkness

look at Wheeler Peak
cliffs like suspended prayers

contemplate the cerulean
the gleaming limestone

the frozen shades
the wildflowers

look at the bristlecone pine
a labyrinth to winding wonders

listen to the caves
sing silently

remember the smell of sagebrush
after a thunderstorm

that Lexington Arch
is a bridge of questions

in the solitude of dreams
that here

distances disturb desire
to deliver a collision of breaths

the desert echoes
in this dark night sky

stars reveal the way
a heart can light a world."

-Nathalie Handal

This is from Poem-A-Day.

>145 jnwelch: "mother browses the ranks of the dead." I really like that poem. Thanks for sharing, Joe & Rhonda.

>146 msf59: "Like"

>147 msf59: You're welcome. It's so full of good advice, isn't it, like,

"Avoid any enclosed space where more than
three people are wearing turtlenecks."

:-)

>145 jnwelch: >146 msf59: enjoyed both poems, thanks.

"...The Dixiecrat senator has not worn his
sandy seersucker fedora to the vows.
The top of Strom Thurmond's bald head
reveals a birthmark tattooed in contrapposto
pose: Segregation Forever.

All my life he has been the face of hatred;
the blue eyes of the Confederate flag,
the pasty bald of white men pulling wooly
heads up into the dark skirts of trees,
the sharp, slobbering, amber teeth of
German shepherds, still clenched inside
the tissue-thin, (still marching), band-leader
legs of Black schoolteachers, the single-
minded pupae growing between the legs of
white boys crossing the tracks, ready to
force Black girls into fifth-grade positions,
Palmetto state-sanctioned sex 101.

I didn't want to dance with him..."

-Excerpt from Dancing with Strom

The whole poem, (it is lengthy) can be found here: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/dancing-with-strom/

This is from the collection Head off & Split by Nikky Finney. I think most of this collection is a bit too "deep" for me but there is no question, of this poet's talent. It might really resonate with more "seasoned" poetry readers.

>150 msf59: Strong one, Mark. What a blight that guy (Strom) was.

>151 jnwelch: This is the collection I mentioned last night, Joe. Some of it is very strong and evocative and most it sailed right over my head.

I am enjoying the Levine collection.

Immortal Birds

"There’s a battered scrub jay lives
in the lemon tree in my back yard,
has a voice like tin snips dragged
across a steel file. He must think
he’s a choral director; the mockers
join in to become an oratorio
of teamsters punching out.
I thought when I left Detroit
to head west I would find groves
of orange trees, a vast land tilting
slowly toward the severe peaks
of the Sierra Nevada, I thought
I’d left the corrugated world
behind in Flint and Wyandotte.
Where are the fabled birds we
read about? Miguel Hernandez
climbed a tree in the Atocha Park
so that Neruda might hear the song
of the nightingale. My jay jabs
his thick beak into a lemon, gargles,
and croaks out the anthems of Ecorse."

-from Last Shift:Poems by Philip Levine.

Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón (5 stars), library paperback, poetry - recommended by Ellen, who picked it up after Mark warbled about it

"Every time I'm in an airport,
I think I should drastically change my life....

Then, I think of you, home with the dog, the field full
of purple pop-ups - - we're small and
flawed, but I want to be
who I am, going where
I'm going, all over again."

I checked this out from the library after reading Ellen's review of it on her thread. She gave it five stars. and so did I. It's that good. It's exquisite, actually. Thoughtful and insightful and intelligent. I like the way that Ada Limón thinks about things. This collection is divided into four sections, and each section deals with life and choices and heartbreak and hope - it's like reading her internal dialogue with her heart. The fourth section, especially, spoke to me. I just cannot recommend this highly enough. Here's one of my favorites:

Oh Please Let it be Lighting

We were crossing the headwaters of
the Susquehanna River in our new car
we didn't quite have the money for
but it was slick and silver and we named it
after the local strip club next to the car wash:
The Spearmint Rhino, and this wasn't long
after your mother said she wasn't sure
if one of your ancestors died in childbirth
or was struck by lightning, there just wasn't
anyone left to set the story straight, and we
started to feel old. And it snowed. The ice
and salt and mud on the car made it look
like how we felt on the inside. The dog
was asleep on my lap. We had seven more hours
before our bed in the bluegrass would greet us
like some southern cousin we forgot we had.
Sometimes, you have to look around
at the life you've made and sort of nod at it,
like someone moving their head up and down
to a tune they like. New York City seemed years
away and all the radio stations had unfamiliar
call letters and talked about God, the one
that starts his name with a capital and wants
you not to get so naked all the time.
Sometimes, there seems to be a halfway point
between where you've been and everywhere
else, and we were there. All the trees were dead,
and the hills looked flat like in real bad landscape
paintings in some nowhere gallery off an interstate
but still, it looked kind of pretty. Not because
of the snow, but because you somehow found
a decent song on the dial and there you were,
with your marvelous mouth, singing full-lunged,
driving full-speed into the gloomy thunderhead,
glittery and blazing and alive. And it didn't matter
what was beyond us, or what came before us,
or what town we lived in, or where the money came from,
or what new night might leave us hungry and reeling,
we were simply going forward, riotous and windswept,
and all too willing to be struck by something shining
and mad, and so furiously hot it could kill us.

Okay, one more. Because I can:

Outside Oklahoma, We See Boston

Big blue horizon wakes me
from a car catnap and the boys
tell me about Boston, the bombs.
Soft edges of sleep turn sharp
and point inward to the terrified
heart. Out the window, ancient
horses and trees bent over
like the wisest crones. Under
the overpass a flittering swarm
of mud swallows have built
careful nests with prairie clay.
How do they do it? Demand the
sweet continuance of birth and flight
in a place so utterly reckless? How
masterful and mad is hope.

"we were simply going forward, riotous and windswept,
and all too willing to be struck by something shining
and mad, and so furiously hot it could kill us."

>154 Crazymamie: Thanks for sharing this, Mamie! Bright Dead Things is such an amazing collection. I must have warbled about it, on the last poetry thread.

How much poetry reading do you do?

I have been reading a lot more poetry since the April AAC, to be honest, so thanks for that. I loved poetry in high school and college, but I had gotten away from reading it much or seeking it out. Abby really loves it, so it has been fun swapping reads with her and sharing our favorites. Bright Dead Things is such a great collection, but I don't think I would have found it on my own. I'm thankful that your warbling got Ellen to pick it up, and her warbling got me to pick it up, and now I have handed it off to Abby. Look at us sharing the love!!

>157 Crazymamie: I hope we can keep this poetry love & sharing alive through '17 and beyond, Mamie!

A Home Away

"The dawn is slow in coming. Instead light
leaks from the streetlamps, the few parked cars
take shape, here a house, there a tree’s in sight.

The upholsterer from Shangri-la sleeps in.
Saturday settles on the city of man
as it seldom does (the odds are six to one).

He dreams of home, the fabled city
he returns to only in darkness, for only
in darkness is he a boy again, agile and happy.

If he had a wife her name would be Hilda,
if he had a son, the son would be seven or younger,
for like him he would never grow older

so far from home, so far from the life
he was meant for, the life waiting patiently
in that far-off city with Hilda for wife.

On tiptoe she enters his room without a sound
to strangle the silence as a wife should.
If the clock watches it says not a word.

Everything is silent, the houses drop their eyes,
cars hold their breath, the trees freeze,
a man dreams, and no birds sing as they please"

-Philip Levine

**That last stanza slays me. I really enjoyed The Last Shift: Poems and I look forward to reading much more of his work.

>159 msf59: Terrific one, Mark.

I don't know whether this one is in that collection, but it's another of his that slays me.

What Work Is

By Philip Levine

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.

>160 jnwelch: I don't think that was in The Last Shift but I really like it. This is the first poet I have come across, that writes about blue-collar guys, the working stiffs. Like if, Donald Ray Pollock wrote poetry.

>161 msf59: Ha! Nicely put. Glad you liked it. It may be his most famous one.

I'll give it some more thought, but two poets who write about the working stiff that come to mind are Robert Frost (but not like Levine), and Charles Bukowski, who isn't everyone's flavor (including me).

Why do I think of John Berryman? I don't know, but I love his Dreamsongs.

>159 msf59: >160 jnwelch: great poems, I'm not familiar with this writer.

I'd add Ray Carver to the writers who write about blue collar life.

"the poet turns the world to glass and shows all things in their right series and procession." this is from Danticat's Create dangerously and i found its original appearance in an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson entitled The Poet. looks wonderful but it'll take me an age to read so i thought i'd pass it on fwiw.

Lunar Eclipse

Mt. Rainier National Park

"We are standing on the access road to Paradise.
Seven miles from the gates. We are standing
on the centerline, the moon on our faces, the mountain
at our backs. Were it less than full, we might see,
in its northwest sector, the Land of Snow
and the Ocean of Storms. Because it is full, we can see,
just over our shoulders, how the Ramparts climb up
toward the glaciers. We might see near the Sea
of Showers, the dark-floored crater of Plato.
How the glaciers, just over our shoulders—
Pyramid, Kautz, Nisqually—shine. How the spreading
bedrock shines. As if we are starting again,
we have placed—there—on the moon’s widening shadow
Kepler, Copernicus, Archimedes, Aristoteles.
And opened a Sea of Fertility. A Sea of Nectar.
As if we imagine a harvest.
No sound it seems, on the slopes, in the firs.
Nothing hoots. Nothing calves. Although
through Nisqually’s steep moraine, rocks
must be shifting, grasses cinching their eternal grip.
Look, in the blackness, how the moon’s rim glows,
like a ring from an ancient astrolabe.
We are standing in the roadway. There is nothing
on our faces but the glow of refracted dust.
At our backs, the mountain is shifting, aligning itself
with the passing hours. First ice. Then stone.
Then the ice-green grasses. We are standing
on the centerline aligning ourselves with the earth.
We are standing on the access road as if we imagine
an eternal grip. Look—they are rotating on, now.
Already a pale crescent spreads
past the Known Sea and the Muir Snowfields—
as if we are starting… —past
the Trail of Shadows, the ice-green grasses,
the seas of nectar, the craters of rest,
the gardens of nothing but passing hours."

-Linda Bierds

^^The poet wrote this after witnessing a lunar eclipse on Rainier.

>163 Caroline_McElwee: I hope to read more Carver for the AAC next year. I have sadly neglected him. Very Bad Mark!

>165 msf59: Nice one!

I'm still thinking about Sharon Olds. Here's another one of hers.

The Clasp

She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds,
we had been in the apartment two weeks straight,
I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his
face, again, and when I had her wrist
in my grasp I compressed it, fiercely, for a couple
of seconds, to make an impression on her,
to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even almost
savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing,
the expression, into her, of my anger,
"Never, never, again," the righteous
chant accompanying the clasp.
It happened very
fast-grab, crush, crush,
crush, release-and at the first extra
force, she swung her head, as if checking
who this was, and looked at me,
and saw me-yes, this was her mom,
her mom was doing this.
Her dark,
deeply open eyes took me
in, she knew me, in the shock of the moment
she learned me.
This was her mother, one of the
two whom she most loved, the two
who loved her most, near the source of love
was this.

seemed appropriate to the season. bits have been spinning in my mind for days and then i realized i could put it here. the lines
but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? have always bothered me. probably 50 years of bother. why the repetition?

T. S. Eliot

Journey of the Magi

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet below the snow line, smelling of vegetation,
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the dark-
Ness,
And three trees on the low sky.
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a log time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our palaces, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Winter Trees

"All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold."

William Carlos Williams

^From Poem-A-Day

**Any fans of Williams out there?

>168 jnwelch: That is a strong one from Olds, Joe. Thanks for sharing.

>169 mirrordrum: Thanks, Ellie! Very appropriate. I have not read Eliot yet. I will get there.

>170 msf59: Yes!

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

William Carlos Williams

17

I bid the sky good day.

There is no land. It slipped away

from the boat yesterday and last night.

Chile’s been left behind, just

a few wild birds

follow us drifting and raising up

the dark cold name of my homeland.

Accustomed as I am to goodbyes

I didn’t strain my eyes: where

are my tears bottled up?

Blood rises from my feet

and roves the galleries

of my body painting its flame.

But how do you stanch the moaning?

When it comes, heartache tags along.

But I was talking about something else.

I stood up and beyond the boat

saw nothing but sky and more sky,

blue ensnared in

a web of tranquil clouds

innocent as oblivion.

The boat is a cloud on the sea

and I’ve lost track of my destination,

I’ve forgotten prow and moon,

I don’t remember where the waves go

or where the boat carries me.

There’s no room in the day for earth or sea.

From the book: Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems
by: Pablo Neruda

spacing is from the original

>170 msf59: oh my! that's extraordinary. i've read little of WCW. i'm learning so much from you and your tremendous hunger, your questing mind, your fire. thank you, Mark. you've been a gift to me this year in so many ways.

>172 laytonwoman3rd: ahhh, Linda. it's rather zen in a wonderful way. it made me think of the way cats walk. i was watching one of our cats the other day: the hind feet, especially when stalking or maneuvering, are placed exactly in the spot just abandoned by the same-side forefoot.

>168 jnwelch: almost missed this one, Joe. gut-punch. thought-provoking. we don't know what the daughter actually felt. narrator presumes betrayal, but does the child feel betrayal or does this tell us more about the mother.

>174 mirrordrum: Thank you, Ellie! I owe you and Joe, a large debt, for opening my eyes and my mind, to some fine poetry. Not everything speaks to me, but I can tell I am getting a better understanding, the more I explore. I hope to spend 2017, opening more doors.

"I strike, then from the moment when the matchstick
conjures up its light, to when the brightness moves
beyond its means, and dies, I say the story
of my life -

dates and places, torches I carried,
a cast of names and faces, those
who showed me love, or came close,
the changes I made, the lessons I learnt -

then somehow still find time to stall and blush
before I'm bitten by the flame, and burnt.

A warning, though, to anyone nursing
an ounce of sadness, anyone alone:
don't try this on your own; it's dangerous,
madness."

-Simon Armitage

This is an excerpt from Book of Matches. It is also included in Paper Aeroplane: Poems 1989–2014, which I read for the BAC.
Not everything, in this collection, worked for me but it had it's moments.

it's late and i'm so behind in this thread. before the next year arrives, i wanted to thank everyone who's contributed by posting or writing or reading for making this a special thread for 2016. what a ride. :-)

i was rereading The clasp and thinking, at the end, "after the first death, there is no other." i realized for me, that fits what i get, part of it, from Olds's poem but it isn't what Thomas meant when he used it in this one:

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
Dylan Thomas, 1914 - 1953

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

^I thought we could use the poetry thread, set up on the 75, (Thanks, Jim!) for posting poems and various warblings, for 2017. I hope we can get some contributors. I would like to see this continue. I could always use more recommendations. I have opened a door and now I want to throw open every window.

Here is the link. See you over there:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/243801