just a poetry thread??

not necessarily snobby or anything..Just poems that we like and hope that maybe others might too? I mean selections COULD be snobby and no problem w/ that, and be lovely to have comments, pro/con/even technical should one feel esp. pedantic. I'll start off w/ a modern poet - i hope i haven't put this poem out before. Not-cynical, not-snarky - in her day gig she used to be (still is?) an environmentally active lawyer.

Kuan Yin (Laura Fargas)

Of the many buddhas I love best the girl
who will not leave the cycle of pain before anyone else.
It is not the captain declining to be saved
on the sinking ship, who may just want to ride his shame
out of sight. She is at the brink of never being hurt again

but pauses to say, All of us. Every blade of grass.
She chooses to live in the tumble of souls through time.
Perhaps she sees spring in every country,
talks quietly with farm women while helping to lay seed.
Our hearts are a storm she trembles at. I picture her
leaning on a tree or humming or joining a volleyball game
on Santa Monica beach. Her skin shines with sweat.
The others may not know how to notice what she does to them.
She is not a fish or a bee; it is not pity or thirst;
she could go, but here she is.

Excellent idea, Bob, and you've started the thread off with a doozie. Thanks, bro...

Nice. And I'm not a fan of modern poetry. In fact, I think my appreciation of poetry is stuck back in the 1930s and 1940s (not, I hasten to add, that I was ever in the 1930s or 1940s). Given that, here's a couple from New Verse, a 1939 anthology edited by Geoffrey Grigson:

Cruel Clever Cat, Geoffrey Taylor
Sally, having swallowed cheese,
Directs down holes the scented breeze,
Enticing thus with baited breath
Nice mice to an untimely death.

And the first three verses (of ten) from:

Dover, WH Auden
Steep roads, a tunnel through the downs, are the approaches;
A ruined pharos overlooks the constructed bay;
The sea-front is almost elegant; all this show
Has, somewhere inland, a vague and dirty root:
Nothing is made in this town.

No, the dominant Norman castle floodlit at night
And the trains that fume in the station built on the sea
Testify to the interests of its regular life.
Here live the experts on what the soldiers want,
And who the travellers are,

Whom the ships carry in and out between the light-houses
That guard for ever the made privacy of this bay
Like twin stone dogs opposed on a gentleman's gate.
Within these breakwaters English is spoken; without
is the immense improbable atlas.

Ian - maybe i'll work my way back in time...how bout Jon Silkin, a Brit poet from the 50s?

Caring for Animals /Jon Silkin 1954

I ask sometimes why these small animals
With bitter eyes, why we should care for them.

I question the sky, the serene blue water,
But it cannot say. It gives no answer.

And no answer releases in my head
A procession of grey shades patching and whimpering;

Dogs with clipped ears, wheezing cart horses,
A fly without shadow and without thought.

Is it with these menaces to our vision
With this procession led by a man carrying wood

We must be concerned? The holy land, the rearing
Green island should be kindlier than this.

Yet the animals, our ghosts, need tending to.
Take in the whipped cat and the blinded owl;

Take up the man-trapped squirrel upon your shoulder.
Attend to the unnecessary beasts.

From growing mercy and a moderate love
Great love for the human animal occurs.

And your love grows. Your great love grows and grows.

It was doing so well... and then that last line. I read that and immediately started thinking of this.

I read good poetry and I want to snap all my pens and take an ax to my gorgeous old desk. The precision of language, that's what gets me. So if you guys are trying to destroy my confidence this morning, you're doing a great job.

I LIKE that last line. The repetition works for me.

Who the hell were "Edison Lighthouse"?

One hit wonders from the 1970s in the UK. That song is a bona fide 1970s pop classic.

I figure people can either take or leave a poem every other day or so...This is by a relatively modern Chinese poet, Gu Cheng

A Headstrong Boy

I guess my mother spoiled me-
I'm a headstrong boy. I want every instant
to be as lovely as crayons.

I'd like to draw- on chaste white paper-
a clumsy freedom, eyes that never wept,
a piece of sky, a feather, a leaf,
a pale green evening, and an apple.

I'd like to draw dawn, the smile dew sees,
the earliest, tenderest love- an imaginary love
who's never seen a mournful cloud,
whose eyes the color of sky will gaze at me
forever, and never turn away.
I'd like to draw distance, a bright horizon,
carefree, rippling rivers, hills sheathed in green furze.
I want the lovers to stand together in silence,
I want each breathless moment to beget a flower.

I want to draw a future that I've never seen-
nor ever can- though I'm sure she'll be beautiful.
I'll draw her an autumn coat the color of candle flame,
and maple leaves, and all the hearts that ever loved her.
I'll draw her a wedding, an early morning garden party,
swathed in candy-wrappers decked with winter scenes.

I'm a headstrong boy. I want to paint out every sorrow,
to cover the world with colored windows,
let all the eyes accustomed to darkness
be accustomed to light. I want to draw wind,
mountains, each one bigger then the last.
I want to draw the stream of the East,
a fathomless sea, a joyful voice.

Finally, I'd like to draw myself in one corner-
a panda, huddled in a dark Victorian forest,
hunkering in the quiet branches, homeless, lost,
not even a heart left behind me, far away,
only teeming dreams of berries
and great, wide eyes.

This pining's pointless.
I haven't any crayons,
any breathless moments.
All I have are fingers and pain.

I think I'll tear the paper to bits
and let them drift away,
hunting for butterflies.

-Gu Cheng

There was a group of young Chinese poets in the late 70s-80s called the "misty" poets who were attempting to evade/avoid state approved "socialist realism." There's a lovely book called "The Splintered Mirror" in which this poem is anthologized.

It's also obvious that i have a deep sentimental streak.

#9 - that sounds astonishingly mellow for R. S. Thomas. No incest? No chapels? No mad cackling sons at the kitchen table?

Nice though.

Certain lines by good poets just seize you by the throat:

"litter of children's voices"
"lovely as crayons"

My God...

The Litany of Satan, by Charles Baudelaire

O you, the wisest and fairest of the Angels,
God betrayed by destiny and deprived of praise,

O Satan, take pity on my long misery!

O Prince of Exile, you who have been wronged
And who vanquished always rise up again more strong,

O Satan, take pity on my long misery!

You who know all, great king of hidden things,
The familiar healer of human sufferings,

O Satan, take pity on my long misery!

You who teach through love the taste for Heaven
To the cursed pariah, even to the leper,

O Satan, take pity on my long misery!

You who of Death, your mistress old and strong,
Have begotten Hope, — a charming madcap!

O Satan, take pity on my long misery!

You who give the outlaw that calm and haughty look
That damns the whole multitude around his scaffold.

O Satan, take pity on my long misery!

You who know in what nooks of the miserly earth
A jealous God has hidden precious stones,

O Satan, take pity on my long misery!

You whose clear eye sees the deep arsenals
Where the tribe of metals sleeps in its tomb,

O Satan, take pity on my long misery!

You whose broad hand conceals the precipice
From the sleep-walker wandering on the building's ledge,

O Satan, take pity on my long misery!

You who soften magically the old bones
Of belated drunkards trampled by the horses,

O Satan, take pity on my long misery!

You who to console frail mankind in its sufferings
Taught us to mix sulphur and saltpeter,

O Satan, take pity on my long misery!

You who put your mark, O subtle accomplice,
Upon the brow of Croesus, base and pitiless,

O Satan, take pity on my long misery!

You who put in the eyes and hearts of prostitutes
The cult of sores and the love of rags and tatters,

O Satan, take pity on my long misery!

Staff of those in exile, lamp of the inventor,
Confessor of the hanged and of conspirators,

O Satan, take pity on my long misery!

Adopted father of those whom in black rage
— God the Father drove from the earthly paradise,

O Satan, take pity on my long misery!

On The Farm


There was Dai Puw. He was no good.
They put him in the fields to dock swedes,
And took the knife from him, when he came home
At late evening with a grin
Like the slash of a knife on his face.

There was Llew Puw, and he was no good.
Every evening after the ploughing
With the big tractor he would sit in his chair,
And stare into the tangled fire garden,
Opening his slow lips like a snail.

There was Huw Puw, too. What shall I say?
I have heard him whistling in the hedges
On and on, as though winter
Would never again leave those fields,
And all the trees were deformed.

And lastly there was the girl:
Beauty under some spell of the beast.
Her pale face was the lantern
By which they read in life's dark book
The shrill sentence: God is love.

lots of talented Thomas boys, not least Gwyn Thomas.

Baudelaire.

(Sigh)

One of the great ones. He once said something along the lines that the proper critique/response to a painting was a poem. I couldn't agree more...

A short poem from Jules Supervielle.

If there were no trees at my window
To come and peer into the depths of me
This heart given over to its ardent laws
Would long ago have ceased to be.

In that long willow or dark cypress
That knows me and pities me being in the world,
Is my posthumous self who stares at me,
Comprehending poorly why I stay and stay...

Very nice, Harry...

Here's another Thomas boy.

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;
Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof
Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest
Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,
Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.
All of the night was quite barred out except
An owl's cry, a most melancholy cry

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,
No merry note, nor cause of merriment,
But one telling me plain what I escaped
And others could not, that night, as in I went.

And salted was my food, and my repose,
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

Right, I'm off to read about Jules Supervielle. Most educational, this.

Thanks, as always, David...

Jules Supervielle. I found this, which seems to be rather good ...

Quand les chevaux du temps s'arrêtent à ma porte.
J'hésite un peu toujours à les regarder boire
Puisque c'est de mon sang qu'ils étanchent leur soif.
Ils tournent vers ma face un oeil reconnaissant
Pendant que leurs long traits m'emplissent de faiblesse
Et me laissent si las, si seul et décevant
Qu'une nuit passagère envahit mes paupières
Et qu'il me faut soudain refaire en moi des forces
Pour qu'un jour où viendrait l'attelage assoiffé
Je puisse encore vivre et les désaltérer.

Does anybody have a decent translation of it?

An excellent account of Pound's Fascist Cantos (72 and 73):

http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/kmko/03/ka_mate03_ross.asp

Includes important information on the gap between the "Adams Cantos" and "The Pisan Cantos".

Yeatsie! One of his best. A very good choice, p. Here's another.

WOULD I could cast a sail on the water
Where many a king has gone
And many a king's daughter,
And alight at the comely trees and the lawn,
The playing upon pipes and the dancing,
And learn that the best thing is
To change my loves while dancing
And pay but a kiss for a kiss.

I would find by the edge of that water
The collar-bone of a hare
Worn thin by the lapping of water,
And pierce it through with a gimlet, and stare
At the old bitter world where they marry in churches,
And laugh over the untroubled water
At all who marry in churches,
Through the thin white bone of a hare.

From "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" by Ezra Pound

IV

These fought in any case,
and some believing,
pro domo, in any case . . .

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, pro patria,
non "dulce" non "et decor" . . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.


V

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

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

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

Run Before Dawn
by William Stafford

Most mornings I get away, slip out
the door before light, set forth on the dim, gray
road, letting my feet find a cadence
that softly carries me on. Nobody
is up--all alone my journey begins.

Some days it's escape: the city is burning
behind me, cars have stalled in their tracks,
and everybody is fleeing like me but some other direction.
My stride is for life, a far place.

Other days it is hunting: maybe some game will cross
my path and my stride will follow for hours, matching
all turns. My breathing has caught the right beat
for endurance; familiar trancelike scenes glide by.

And sometimes it's a dream of motion, streetlights coming near,
passing, shadows that lean before me, lengthened
then fading, and a sound from a tree: a soul, or an owl.

These journeys are quiet. They mark my days with adventure
too precious for anyone else to share, little gems
of darkness, the world going by, and my breath, and the road.

as fond as i am of Murakami - this is a lot better than what i talk about when i talk about running which i actually liked. Until my tendon in my right foot disintegrated, i ran very regularly for ~ 25 yrs.

All I can do as I read these offerings is smile and nod approvingly.

Except when it comes to YOU, Dave. I have enough trouble mastering English, now you expect me to translate with my awful fucking Grade 3 level French?

La plume de ma tante.

Putaine le merde.

Or something. I only know German and Latin. I might post some randy Catullus

"I only know Latin and German."

Comments like that make me realize my snob quotient is very, very low. Thank God I'm pompous, otherwise I'd never fit in with this mob...

Snob 1: If it merits attention, it will be translated.
Snob 2: I refuse to buy translated poetry unless the book is bilingual.

Robert

PS There are some championship bilingual books of French poetry. Yale and Penguin both, I think, I have anthologies worth the attention insofar as "O, lac..." is worth any attention.

R

the line is:
Nor is he overjoyed when they lie low,

i must type out these lines. i find that i learn, or i think that i learn more about poetry this way.
the 4th line again is:
NOR IS HE OVERJOYED WHEN THEY LIE LOW,

A Bedouin's Tale
John Fowles

searching we came to a place
and found ourselves alone
utterly lost in wilderness
in meaningless blank stone

and the words had gone like water
under a desert sun
our mouths had lacked all discipline
and let the goatskins run

no hope in the wordless waste
no camel-pools to aid
no poems thoughts or apophthegms
to give a little shade

no faith could be stated
no certain worth assigned
too many tricks often played
had calcified the mind

Yachts on the Nile
Bernard Spencer

Like air on skin, coolness of yachts at mooring,
a white, flung handful;
fresh as a girl at her rendezvous, and wearing
frou-frou names, Suzy, Yvette or Gaby,
lipped by the current, uttering
the gay conversation of their keels.

Lovely will be their hesitant leaving of
the shore for the full stream,
fingering the breeze down out of the sky; then leaning
as a player leans his cheek to the violin
- that strange repose of power -
and the race will hold them like a legend.

Terrible in their perfection: and theirs I saw
like clouds covering the Solent
when I was a boy: and all those sails that dip
ages back in the hardly waking mind;
white visitors of islands,
runners on the turf of rivers.

What these ask with their conquering look and speed
written in their bodies like birds,
is our ecstasy, our tasting as if a dish,
magnificence of hazard, cunning of the tiller-hand,
a freedom: and it is by something
contrary in being human.

That I look for a distant river, a distant woman,
and how she carried her head:
the great release of the race interns me here...
and it may be, too, we are born with some nostalgia
to make the migration of sails
and wings a crying matter.

Great verse to start my week. Thanks, folks...

Oh okay, re Jules Supervielle, here's my own inadequate stab at a translation ...

When the horses of time stop at my door
I hesitate slightly while watching them drink
since it's with my blood that they're quenching their thirst.
They turn a grateful eye toward me
while their long gulps fill me with weakness
and leave me so weary, so lonely, so disappointing
that a brief night invades my eyelids
and I have to restore within myself the forces
for a day when the thirsty team will come
and I can still live and assuage their thirst.

Not a great translation, but hopefully it at least suggests that there's something there worth translating.

I'm particularly puzzled by that "disappointing" (décevant), but it seems to be right. Doesn't feel right, though.

Well, all you have to do is quote Joyce and I'm grinning.

Here's a question: what would Joyce have done after FINNEGAN'S WAKE if he'd survived and lived on? Only in his late 50's when he died--would he have come back full circle to the naturalism of the early stories or switched to poetry?

I read Ellmann's biography but don't remember if he had any views of the subject. But, then, I'd rather hear YOURS.

Anybody?

He might be like Bobbie Seale and write a damn fine cook book.

http://www.bobbyqueseale.com/

I'm sure Dubya will write a nice volumes of memoirs that also functions as a coloring book ;)

Dick Cheney will go back to sucking blood from Iraqi orphans.

The James Joyce Cookbook:

"Take two pints of Jameson's Irish Whiskey and add...NOTHING!"

Seems the University of Reading is having a centenary conference on "The Poetry and Life of Bernard Spencer (1909-1963)" - Saturday 31 October-Sunday 1 November 2009.

I'll meet ya there, Ian.

Just to get people annoyed, I'll be the one wearing the t-shirt that says:

"Who the f*** is Bernard Spencer?"

I'll be wearing the one that says, "I'm with this f*cking Philistine"

Lament (O how all things are far removed)

O how all things are far removed
and long have passed away.
I do believe the star,
whose light my face reflects,
is dead and has been so
for many thousand years.

I had a vision of a passing boat
and heard some voices saying disquieting things.
I heard a clock strike in some distant house...
but in which house?...

I long to quiet my anxious heart
and stand beneath the sky's immensity.
I long to pray...
And one of all the stars
must still exist.
I do believe that I would know
which one alone
endured,
and which like a white city stands
at the ray's end shining in the heavens.

-Rilke

(Cliff: cackling like a crow)

Once again, Sales: I'll GET you for that.

Sean: thanks for the Rilke. Sadly, not even the stars endure...and even their death throes travel at the speed of light...

Old Fool Anna Swir

She is sixty. She lives
the greatest love of her life.

She walks arm-in-arm with her dear one,
her hair streams in the wind.
Her dear one says:
"You have hair like pearls."

Her children say:
"Old fool."
--------
I Am Running on the Beach
Anna Swir

I am running on the beach.
People puzzled.
- a grey haired hag and she runs.

I am running on the beach
with an insolent look.
People laught.
-Grey-haired and insolent.
They like that.

both are from a favorite collection of mine, talking to my body, all are translated from Polish by Czeslaw Milosz/ Leonard Nathan.

LOVE Milosz--his collected poems volume is on my list...

Rilke is my favorite - that's just one of a dozen that I really appreciate. I'm also a big fan of Yeats, Wordsworth, Lorca and the earthiness of Frost. I suppose that's why I took every poetry course my college had to offer at the time...

Robert Haas translated Milosz's poems and is also an accomplished poet himself.

Little Orphan Annie by James Whitcomb Riley

Little Orphan Annie's come to our house to stay,
And wash the cups and saucers up, and brush the crumbs away,
And shoo the chickens off the porch and dust the hearth and sweep,
And make the fire, and bake the bread, and earn her board and keep;
And all us other children, when the supper things is done,
We set around the kitchen fire and has the mostest fun
A-listenin' to the witch tales that Annie tells about,
And the Gobble-uns that gits you if you don't watch out!

Once they was a little boy who wouldn't say his prayers--
And when he went to bed at night, away upstairs,
His mammy heard him holler and his daddy heard him bawl,
And when they turned the kivvers down, he wasn't there at all!
And they seeked him in the rafter room, and cubby hole and press,
And seeked him up the chimney flue, and everywheres, I guess;
But all they ever found was just his pants and round about!
And the Gobble-uns'll git you if you don't watch out!

And one time a little girl would always laugh and grin,
And make fun of everyone, and all her blood and kin;
And once when they was company and old folks was there,
She mocked them and shocked them and said she didn't care!
And just as she kicked her heels, and turnt to run and hide,
They was two great big Black Things a-standin'by her side,
And they snatched her through the ceiling
'fore she knowed what she's about!
And the Gobble-uns'll git you if you don't watch out!

And little Orphan Annie says, when the blaze is blue,
And the lampwick sputters, and the wind goes woo-oo!
And you hear the crickets quit and the moon is gray,
And the lightning bugs in dew is all squenched away--
You better mind your parents, and your teachers fond and dear,
And cherish them that loves you, and dry the orphan's tear,
And help the poor and needy one that cluster all about,
Or the Gobble-uns'll git you if you don't watch out!

Did anyone besides me that saw the inauguration yesterday think the "poem" was lacking a certain poetry?

The benediction had far more poetry to it than the official inauguration poem.

I did find it rather tasteless when Rick Warren had a gay man publicly killed right in front of him. A little sensational, given the gravity of the occasion.

Whoo-hoo! Karl, has someone been peeing in your corn flakes again?

Yeah, but Rick Warren said it was part of a Purpose Driven Life. I think he's exploiting the fact I refuse to read his stupid book.

Since we're on the topic, here's a little ditty from John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester:

We have a pretty witty king,
Whose word no man relies on;
He never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.

(It was about King Charles II, but could have easily been about Shrub. I'd like to carve that in stone in the entrance way to Dubya's Preznidentshal Liberry.)

And have this on the exit:

For Wits are treated just like Common Whores;
First they're enjoy'd, and then kickt out of Doors.

Never mind Wilmot. Above all, do not upset Ben Jonson.

At court I met it, in clothes brave enough,
To be a courtier ; and looks grave enough,
To seem a statesman : as I near it came,
It made me a great face ; I ask'd the name.
A Lord, it cried, buried in flesh, and blood,
And such from whom let no man hope least good,
For I will do none ; and as little ill,
For I will dare none : Good Lord, walk dead still.

an apolitical poem...
Lizard

The beginning of a lizard
almost always becomes: Lizard.

The lizard rather easily reaches
the result: Lizard.

The beginning of the lizard
almost never becomes a sparrow.

In this way most beings become
their own sort of lizard from the beginning.
Once when I was a human being
quick as lightning I saw a lizard.

Bundgard Povlsen (dk, tr Poul Borum)

>66 bobmcconnaughey: - not sure that poem is apolitical, reads like a tract based on the work of David Icke, former Coventry City goalkeeper and BBC sports presenter, self-proclaimed messiah who believes that many powerful people (George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, Kris Kristofferson, and Boxcar Willie, for example) are actually giant reptilian humanoids.

damn those sneaky Danes.! - how about harsh NewEnglanders.

the best of Frost is very bleak and very well fashioned. Even "popular" Frost can be trickier than one thinks. He's no Carl Sandburg, thank goodness.
Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth --
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth --
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

old fashioned, stark and brilliant. And evidently a real bastard.

Frost revises Blake for the 20th C and does in the ID* shites in one short sonnet.
*intelligent design.

Frost is the HP Lovecraft of American poetry, except much scarier because he doesn't go over the top. Hell...even:
"the woods are lovely, dark and deep" is creepy. (comma maybe misplaced)

Still David Icke's theories sound a lot more credible than anything from George Tenet or Dick Cheney. Lizard people, Iraq having WMDs, and Bat Boy, all sound like headlines from Weekly World News.

Speaking of institutional lunacy, here's the Wall Street Journal on Atlas Shrugged:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123146363567166677.html

Here's the website TV Tropes on the same:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AtlasShrugged

If I look at those sites, my eye sockets will bleed and my bowels turn to swamp water.

My solicitors will be in touch...

How about "Fountainhead Earth"?

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Fountainhead_Earth

I think L. Ron Hubbard and Ayn Rand are the same person.

Or maybe "Dianetics Shrugged"?

"The Maldive Shark" by Herman Melville

ABOUT the Shark, phlegmatical one,
Pale sot of the Maldive sea,
The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,
How alert in attendance be.
From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw,
They have nothing of harm to dread,
But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank
Or before his Gorgonian head;
Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth
In white triple tiers of glittering gates,
And there find a haven when peril's abroad,
An asylum in jaws of the Fates!
They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey,
Yet never partake of the treat--
Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull,
Pale ravener of horrible meat.

Whales, sharks...this guy's the fucking Peter Benchley of the 19th century...

again - "don't join any religion founded by a white person in America."* - (specifically about "momontology")

arvid nelson.

Jesus wept.

And somewhere out in the Oort Cloud, a complicated game of billiards propels a nickel-iridium plated snowball our way...

Red Dwarf reference?

Ace Rimmer, what a guy!

Poetry Lesson

Let the sense peter out of it
like a skipped rock, and for God’s sake
steer clear of religion. For starters sit
by a window and watch a small bird make
tracks up a tree. We’re talking vertical strutters,
blown out nuthatches who see fat bugs
in the bark, free for the taking. They’re your betters
when it comes to pecking for purposes. Drugs
get some folks there, but they, more often than not,
forget why they came, then, too late, comprehend
they missed their turn. So learn the fox trot
but don’t go out dancing. If you do, pretend
you never learned. That’s for today.
Tomorrow we’ll deconstruct how dolphins play.

~~~~from “Epiphany at Goofy’s Gas” by Greg Keeler

i like Poetry Lesson a lot. And a new poet to look for - the name is vaguely familiar, but that's about it. Thanks Esta!

Wildpeace

not that of a cease-fire,
let alone the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather as in the heart after a great excitement: you can only
talk about the weariness.
I know that I know how
to kill: that's why I am an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into plowshares,
without words, without
the heavy sent of the rubber stamp: I want it
gentle over us, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds-
who speaks of healing?
(And the orphans' outcry is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
and the baton never falls.)

I wanted to come like wildflowers, suddenly, because the field
needs it: wildpeace.

Yehuda Amichi

Yeah!

by the way Cliff - i dictated that w/ DNS. mistakes were "piece" for "peace" and "overuns" for "over us" and the poet's last name.

Hmm...thanks for that info, Bob.

I still have dreams of getting similar software...but first gotta get a new computer. Waiting for my ship to come in...or a rowboat...or a dinghy...

Here's today's Rumi moment - in a very literal and very unpoetic translation. Why is it so hard to translate Persian well? The poetic translations are very far from the original, while the literal ones are, well, clunky to say the least...

Violence is not the means of avoiding calamity:
the means is good will, tolerance, and kindness.
The Prophet said, "Alms is a means of averting calamity:
cure your diseased ones by giving alms, O youth."

` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `

Chareh-ye daf`-e balâ na-bud setam
châreh ehsân bâshad o `afv o karam
Goft "al-Sadaqah maradd lil-balâ
dâwi mardâka bi-sadaqah yâ fatâ"

-- Mathnawi VI:2590-2591
Version by Camille and Kabir Helminski
"Rumi: Jewels of Remembrance"
Threshold Books, 1996
(Persian transliteration courtesy of Yahyá Monastra

In honor of Bush leaving office, Auden's "Epitaph for a Tyrant"

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

(Or Saddam Hussein, they're about equal in body counts, use of torture, and both have cults of personality. Although I'm sure equating Saddam and Dubya is not what conservatives had in mind with the Fairness Doctrine.)

"The Bear" by Galway Kinnell

1

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

2

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

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

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

3

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

4

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

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

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

5

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

6

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

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

7

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

Wow. That was disturbing! Off to my mom's shelves to steal some G. Kinnell!

A shout out to Clive James for pointing him out.

http://www.clivejames.com/poetry-notebook/1
(It's far down into the article.)

That was James in a good mood... Just reading a few paragraphs makes me feel smarter.

Hidden
Naomi Shihab Nye

If you place a fern
under a stone
the next day it will be
nearly invisible
as if the stone has
swallowed it.

If you tuck the name of a loved one
under your tongue too long
without speaking it
it becomes blood
sigh
the little sucked-in breath of air
hiding everywhere
beneath your words.

No one sees
the fuel that feeds you.

Bob! Just read the Nye poem to my wife and oldest son who came down to breakfast.

That one gets a big WOW! Who's Nye? What's her background?

Hey, Poorious, who wrote yours?

"Pillared dark"--that's really fine.

And, Anna, I didn't mention it previously but thanks for the Rumi. He's very, very special...

Naomi Nye is terrific - she's a Palistinian/American poet who's been living/working in Texas for years. words under the words and fuel are two collections of selected poems. She also edited my favorite anthology of world poetry for "young adults" though there's nothing in them that would keep them from being "adult" appropriate, this same sky. She's also written a couple of good YA novels (tho they'd be more "girl" oriented, in general).
Here's another: Famous.

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and is not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

i need to scan her photo in - i asked her if it'd be ok if i put one of the photos of her from a book cover up, since, last time i checked she didn't have an image up on LT.

"Famous" is great--I'll print that one up too, add it to my Book of Commonplace. Great job, Bob.

SEPULCHRE, by George Herbert (From "The Temple")

O BLESSED bodie ! Whither art thou thrown ?
No lodging for thee, but a cold hard stone ?
So many hearts on earth, and yet not one
Receive thee ?

Sure there is room within our hearts good store ;
For they can lodge transgressions by the score :
Thousands of toyes dwell there, yet out of doore
They leave thee.

But that which shews them large, shews them unfit.
What ever sinne did this pure rock commit,
Which holds thee now ? Who hath indited it
Of murder ?

Where our hard hearts have took up stones to braine thee,
And missing this, most falsely did arraigne thee ;
Onely these stones in quiet entertain thee,
And order.

And as of old, the law by heav’nly art,
Was writ in stone ; so thou, which also art
The letter of the word, find’st no fit heart
To hold thee.

Yet do we still persist as we began,
And so should perish, but that nothing can,
Though it be cold, hard, foul, from loving man
Withhold thee.

Science Fiction
Terence Tiller

Death is by burning, on this planet; burning
alive before it is too late; and birth
is common, towards the end - there is no mourning,
for there is no cold interval: first breath
and last, being ardent and vermilion,
flowering and falling in voluntary ash,
are like an heirloom, like the heirloom sun:
he is Their god; They eat his fiery flesh.

But he is not my sun - a different colour,
and vast and bad. And shall such things be done
where Liberty brings Progress and The Dollar?
I shout, and reach for my atomic gun.
Besides, They have too odd a shape to live;
a complex language; no respect. And creatures
who look at everything we want to give,
and look away, must have disloyal natures.

They have no passions: full freshwater seas,
and mauve and orange fields, caverns and woods
upon the spiring mountains - among these
Their meetings are angelic solitudes,
Their only food the wisdom and the fire;
dead-petalled light Their shelter and Their clothing.
The wisdom is the fire: star-Eden where
infinite apples burn on boughs of Nothing.

Why do my fingers freeze upon the blaster
as if (not I, for I am loyal) they
rebelled by wonder? May we not die faster,
dying by dark and cold, than those we slay?
But I am still a man: They have no rockets,
no private counterprise; They think and need
nothing that comes in small transparent packets:
kill Them, kill all Their foul inhuman breed!

one more by Laura Fargas
At Poplar Pond

There are angels right there between those trees.
Don't be frightened, I'm not seeing things.
The spaces we call empty are full of--
not tree, not sky, but us. We station our angels
aloft to mark our place in the holy ordinariness.
So these simples—chalky water, poplar,
moth-flown light—are that blind, sacred flesh.

Laura Fargas

Is that by Ms. Fargas too?

George Herbert is great.

The only Fargas I know is from Touch of Evil

We were talking about Robert Frost (who read at JFK's inauguration, come to think of it) on another thread and here's the poem I was trying to remember:

"Out, Out - "
by: Robert Frost

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behing the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them "Supper." At the word, the saw,
As if it meant to prove saws know what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap -
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all -
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man's work, though a child at heart -
He saw all was spoiled. "Don't let him cut my hand off -
The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!"
So. The hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then - the watcher at his pulse took a fright.
No one believed. They listened to his heart.
Little - less - nothing! - and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

From "Complete Poems of Robert Frost", 1916

Got my first review copy of a book of poetry. I'm reading it right now and will review it on my blog.

The New Lace Sleeves poem reminds me of that short poem about the hook and eye, which I just looked up and discovered was by Margaret Atwood. I must have known that at some point but had completely forgotten it.

I love Frost's bleak poems. Design is one of my favorite poems of all time. The one that Cliff posted I had not seen before, but it is wonderful, thanks!

Others that make me tear up:

Nothing Gold can Stay
Never again would birds' song be the same

I used to have a book of Naomi Shihab Nye. Her poems are powerful and beautiful.

Thanks to everyone for these, keep them coming.

i had a defn. crush on Naomi Nye many years ago when i discovered her for the first time via hugging the jukebox in the Pittsboro library. I'd checked it out repeatedly and was good friends w/ the librarian so we'd worked out a deal where i'd donate a bunch of books and get "hugging the jukebox" in return. That week someone stole the copy out of the library. (This is WAY too much like the YA or Fantasy threads..."what character do you have a crush on", so i'm tacky). As far as we knew, i was the only person to have checked the book out till that point! I have several books of Nye's - but no copy of Jukebox.
back to your regularly scheduled posting.

HUGGING comes up pretty pricey on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keyw...

You might wanna look on abebook.com or alibris.

I get obsessed when I want to find a book or movie. Won't stop until I search the ends of the earth. Brain chemistry is a mysterious thing. I'm STILL pissed about a copy of THE BOOK OF PHILIP K. DICK I loaned to someone years ago and never got back. Think that one had an intro by John Brunner. Even though I have all the stories from that collection in other volumes, it burns me arse to this day...

Give it up for Billy Y., everyone...

Another Czeck poet, Mirolsav Holub
A Boy's Head

In it there is a spaceship
and a project
for doing away with piano lessons.

And there is
Noah's ark,
which shall be first.

And there is
an entirely new bird,
and entirely new hare,
an entirely new bumble-bee.

There is a river
that flows upwards.

There is a multiplication table.

There is anti-matter.

And it just cannot be trimmed.
I believe that only what cannot be trimmed
is a head.

There is much promise in the circumstance that so many people have heads.

tr. Ian Milner

And, a poem about one of my favorite birds, crows, by a poet NOT named Ted Hughes. Also, young kid friendly.

Crows / David McCord

I like to walk
And hear the black crows talk.
I like to lie
And watch crows sail the sky.
I like the crow
that wants the wind to blow.
I like the one
That thinks the wind is fun.
I like to see
Crows spilling from a tree.
And try to find
the top crow left behind.
I like to hear
Crows caw that spring is near.
I like the great
Wild clamor of crow hate.
Thee farms away
When owls are out by day,
I like the slow
Tired homeward-flying crow;

I like the sight
Of crows for my goodnight.

It's all a bit... doggerel-ish. Sorry. But "I like to see / Crows spilling from a tree"?

Great verse to start my morning--thanks Bob, Poorious...

I've mentioned it another context, but over the door of my home office are two lines from an Edwin Arlington Robinson poem:

"The shame I win for singing is all mine
The gold I miss for dreaming is all yours."

If there's a single defining message to the way I approach my writing and my life, that's it.

it IS doggerelish, came out of a book of kids poetry.
Even if you were wrong, no need to apologize, but you're right! We just have large mobs of crows in our yard and sometimes large flocks of vultures flying above. They haven't tumbled to the closing of the poultry plant in Pittsboro, years ago.

Moving Shiloh from "challenging" to "poetry"
so you've seen this before:

an American 19th C. author who's not usually thought of as a "poet" wrote some heartrending lines:

Shiloh - a requiem

Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
The swallows fly low
Over the field in clouded days,
The forest-field of Shiloh--
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain
Through the pause of night
That followed the Sunday fight
Around the church of Shiloh--
The church so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
And natural prayer
Of dying foemen mingled there--
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve--
Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
And all is hushed at Shiloh.

That was Herman Melville.
(for non-Americans who didn't have to take US civil war history (or history of "the war between the states" - depending upon where you lived), Shiloh, rel. early on, came close to either losing the war for the North or winning it for the South ~ 1862 in Tennessee; though reinforcements for the Union ended up saving the proverbial day)

I seem to recall there was a corn field at Shiloh, the fusillade of bullets mowing the stalks down, the image of that fixed in my mind.

I've watched Ken Burns' "Civil War" series several times and it just blows me a way. Sent a copy of my father in law (a history buff) for Christmas and he and his wife have been loving it too.

if anyone comes across an early James Tate poem from Absences about scientists exctracting a gram of darkness from the brain of a rat would you mind posting it?
But in the meanwhile, a zennish sort of poem by my favorite AR Ammons.

Pet Panther

My attention is a wild
animal: it will idle
make trouble where there
was no harm: it will

sniff and scratch at the
breath’s sills:
it will wind itself tight
around the pulse

or, undistracted by
verbal toys, pommel the
heart frantic: it will
pounce on a stalled riddle

and wrestle the mind numb:
attention, fierce animal
I cry, as it coughs in my
face, dislodges boulders

in my belly, lie down, be
still, have mercy, here
is song, coils of song, play
it out, run with it.

From Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

"Why do they call him William the Bloody?"
"Because his poetry is so bloody awful."

Remember the poem and use of the word "effulgent"?

Finding out Spike was a Victorian poetaster made my day.

A Tragedy
Theophilus Marzials

Death!
Plop.
The barges down in the river flop.
Flop, plop.
Above, beneath.
From the slimy branches the grey drips drop,
As they scraggle black on the thin grey sky,
Where the black cloud rack-hackles drizzle and fly
To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop
On the black scrag piles, where the loose cords plop,
As the raw wind whines in the thin tree-top.
Plop, plop.
And scudding by
The boatmen call out hoy! and hey!
All is running water and sky,
And my head shrieks -- "Stop,"
And my heart shrieks -- "Die."

* * * * *
My thought is running out of my head;
My love is running out of my heart,
My soul runs after, and leaves me as dead,
For my life runs after to catch them -- and fled
They all are every one! -- and I stand, and start,
At the water that oozes up, plop and plop,
On the barges that flop
And dizzy me dead.
I might reel and drop.
Plop.
Dead.
And the shrill wind whines in the thin tree-top
Flop, plop.
* * * * *
A curse on him.
Ugh! yet I knew -- I knew --
If a woman is false can a friend be true?
It was only a lie from beginning to end --
My Devil -- My "Friend"
I had trusted the whole of my living to!
Ugh; and I knew!
Ugh!
So what do I care,
And my head is empty as air --
I can do,
I can dare,
(Plop, plop
The barges flop
Drip drop.)
I can dare! I can dare!
And let myself all run away with my head
And stop.
Drop.
Dead.
Plop, flop.
Plop.

Here's Spike's poem:

"For Cecily"

My soul is wrapped in harsh repose
Midnight descends in raven-colored clothes
But soft -- behold! -- a sunlight beam
Cutting a swath of glimmering gleam
My heart expands -- 'tis grown a bulge in it
Inspired by your beauty ... effulgent.

Take that Bulwer Lytton!

Just a palate cleanser from all the wonderful poetry posted.

I have never liked political poetry, even when I agree with its sentiment (as usually happens in my case, most of the political poetry I've seen is pretty left-wing, just like I am). I used to have a book of poetry by Neruda that had a title about Nixon, but honestly I did not like it.

Do any of you know of a truly good, memorable and beautiful poem that is about politics?

Here is one that was posted on another list today, that I think illustrates my point:

'Time Out'
- by Ian Reed
-(on Bush's departure from the White House)

No censure, shackling, sitting in the stocks,
no pillory to serve as bitter pill;
neither impeachment nor imprisonment,
and to the end they paid him deference still.

It was mere Time, the mere passage of Time,
unseated Bush from his exalted place.
Meantime we lost what could have been betimes
while Time etched horrors in the prisoner's face.

None smashed to shards the narrow-necked hourglass
that miserly parsed out each lazy grain.
Deaf to the victim's pleas, Time trickled down,
while new atrocities deepened Time's stain.

At times, Time heals, but oftentimes decays:
Time rots, Time rusts, Time crumbles and corrodes.
Time steals, Time kills, Time tarnishes, corrupts.
As death-tolls mount, Time putrefies, erodes.

Honoring precedent, Time shakes foul hands,
pays honeyed homage with stirring oration,
revises truth to serve posterity
and thanks his forebear's "service to the nation."

Time's dust lies heaped on ancient lies
and History cares not to check its facts.
Leaders "look forward" to forget the past
so Time renews the tyrant's bloody acts.

Time sweeps atrocity beneath the rug;
it makes excuses, obfuscates, and stalls,
dodges the question and "cannot recall,"
demurs, distracts, prevaricates, stonewalls.

Time blights, breaks down; Time wearies, withers, wastes;
as hunger heightens, uses and depletes;
saps energy, exhausts, softens resolve.
Its ticking war-drum beats to self defeat.

... Only the bitter winds refused that dayto suffer Bush red carpet for his feet,1
so, walking harshly into that bad night,
oblivion beckoned and infernal heat.

Fitting, perhaps, that Cheney was wheeled out,
Who, moving boxes, injured his own back.
Small recompense indeed for such a man
who tortured innocents upon the rack!

What could I have attempted, if but brave,
to hasten these departures overdue?
My words splashed harmless on brute hearts of stone
while in the Capitol new monsters grew.

The White House re-inhabited, swept clean,
where will the demons go now, seeking rest?
To wander arid ways? Or to return
with worse-yet legions to a squalid nest?2

O retrospect, O hindsight, let me ask:
what might have been, if I had been more true?
Time's luxury's to say "I told you so!"
Time gives pause to reflect, regret and rue.

Now Time sweeps in -- with faultless, frothy phrase -
-the forty-fourth to frame the fiefdom power.
Nothing to say. But flawless execution!
How long ago elapsed the appointed hour?
Jan. 20, 2009

1 After the ceremony inaugurating President Obama, Bush flew to Texas. A red carpet laid out for him to board his flight was removed after heavy wind kept dislodging it, forcing Bush to walk on the bare tarmac.
2 Matthew 12:43-45

The poetry of Carolyn Forsche is political, personal...and brilliant. I read her work back in the early-mid-eighties and the verse inspired by the shenanigans in Central and South America were particularly powerful and disturbing.

The Colonel

What you have heard is true. I was in his house.
His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His
daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the
night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol
on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on
its black cord over the house. On the television
was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles
were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his
hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings
like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of
lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes,
salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed
the country. There was a brief commercial in
Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk of how difficult it had become to govern.
The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel
told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the
table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to
bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on
the table. They were like dried peach halves. There
is no other way to say this. He took one of them in
his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a
water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of
fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone,
tell your people they can go f--- themselves. He
swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held
the last of his wine in the air. Something for your
poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor
caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on
the floor were pressed to the ground.

May 1978

Carolyn Forché

Augh! That is a very powerful poem.

Maybe it helps that she does not try to use Shakespearean iambic pentameter, which sounds forced when used to speak of current events...

I promise to find a good one to post next time!

Very nice...

Portland has this program where they put excerpts from poems on posters in the buses, called "Poetry in Motion" - here's one:

Thirst
Paulann Petersen

Your eyes must stay open
to the color of flowers.
Wherever their bright flash
catches your gaze, water flows.

You see rain
days after it stopped raining.
In your breath, you taste
the river running underground.

And another that I really thought was touching:

Separation
W.S. Merwin

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

I think I'd enjoy hanging with the folks in the Pacific Northwest. They seem like my kinda people...

And just for you, Cliff:

There was a Caroline Forché one in 2007!

On Earth
Carolyn Forché(excerpt)
between here and here
between hidden points in the soul
between hidden points in the soul born from nothing
between saying and said
beyond what one has oneself done

I always wanted to read the rest of that one. Seemed to sort of be hanging out there, that excerpt.

"America" by Allen Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January
17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I
need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not
the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back
it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical
joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday
somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid
I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses
in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle
Max after he came over from Russia.
I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by
Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner
candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Business-
men are serious. Movie producers are serious.
Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of
marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable
private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour
and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of
underprivileged who live in my flowerpots
under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers
is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that
I'm a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly
mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as
individual as his automobiles more so they're
all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500
down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Com-
munist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a
handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and
sentimental about the workers it was all so sin-
cere you have no idea what a good thing the
party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand
old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me
cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody
must have been a spy.
America you don't really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen.
And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power
mad. She wants to take our cars from out our
garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers'
Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia.
Him big bureaucracy running our fillingsta-
tions.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read.
Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us
all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in
the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes
in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and
psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

- Berkeley, January 17, 1956

Anna, thanks for the Forche--even in truncated form she is SOMETHING, ain't she?

I met her once at a writing conference--she was in fragile health (later seriously invalided, I understand) but she was gorgeous and had the stage presence of a rock star. Some of the other poets were walking around mumbling under their breath because she "seduced" her audience. What a bunch of jealous arseholes...

piss on me, but love old Hopkins!

Hey, I LIKE the stuff by Hopkins I've read. He may have looked like the stuffy old churchman that he was but he heard the music and that's the important thing...

i think Hopkins looked rather like a starving churchmouse when he wrote the "wreck of the deutschland"*
*spelling

Anyone read Burgess's Enderby novels? Remember where Enderby becomes the screenwriter for a porn movie based on Hopkins's "Wreck of the Deutschland"? Now that's comedy. Way better than "Two and a Half Men" and "Becker."

131, 132 and 133: Both my parents did their Masters' Theses on GMH. That's another thing I lost in Egypt that I would have wanted to rescue from a burning building: His complete poetry, letters, etc. in six hardbound volumes, complete with pencil markings from both my parents' research.

OK, I thought you guys might find this interesting.

I subscribe to a daily Rumi mailing list on Yahoogroups. It is made up of serious Rumi scholars including really well-known, published ones like Ibrahim Gamard. The accompanying discussion list, "Ruminations" (cutesy, no?) often involves really strong opinions on the validity of various translations.

Sometimes, the Rumi poem e-mail contains a bunch of different versions one after the other of the same poem or excerpt. I love these, because they give you different ways of looking at the same original text, and because they contain different poetic visions that showcase the translators' personalities and souls rather well (particularly the "versioners" who don't even pretend that their translations are really accurate but rather are their own poetic thoughts inspired by Rumi - such as Coleman Barks).

Here's a typical one. Which version do you prefer?

(Note on Sunlight practices: When comparative presentations are offered, versions and translations are placed in what the the Sunlight editors generally consider to be the ascending order of reliability and accuracy. Versions interpretations of previously
existing translations done by others are placed first, and, when possible, the translations from which the versions were derived are placed last.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Someone says, Sanai is dead.
No small thing to say.

He was not bits of husk,
or a puddle that freezes overnight,
or a comb that cracks when you use it,
or a pod crushed open on the ground.

He was fine powder in a rough clay dish.
He knew what both worlds were worth:
A grain of barley.

One he slung down, the other up.

The inner soul, that presence of which most know nothing,
about which poets are so ambiguous,
he married that one to the beloved.

His pure gold wine pours on the thick wine dregs.
They mix and rise and separate again
to meet down the road. Dear friend from Marghaz,
who lived in Rayy, in Rum, Kurd from the mountains,
each of us returns home.

Silk must not be compared with striped canvas.

Be quiet and clear now
like the final touchpoints of calligraphy.

Your name has been erased
from the roaring volume of speech.

-- Poetic version by Coleman Barks
(From a translation by A.J. Arberry)
"The Essential Rumi"
Castle Books, 1997

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Someone said, "Master San'ai is dead."

The death of such a master is no small thing.
He was not chaff blown about by the wind,
Nor a puddle frozen over in winter.
He was not a comb broken in the hair,
Nor a seed crushed on the ground.

He was a piece of gold in a pile of dust.
The value he put on both worlds
was equal to one barleycorn.

He let his body fall back into the earth
and bore the witness of his soul to heaven.
But there is a second soul
of which common men are not aware.
I tell you before God,
That one merged straight with the Beloved!

What was once mixed is now separate:
The pure wine rose to the top,
The dregs settled to the bottom.

During their travels, everyone walks together -
people from Marv and Rayy, the Kurds and Romans.
But soon each returns to his homeland.
How can fine silk stay bound to rough wool?

He has reached the final stage.
The King has erased his name
from the book of words . . . .
O Master, now that you're gone from this world,
How can we reach you
but in silence?

-- Translation by Jonathan Star
"Rumi - In the Arms of the Beloved"
Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, New York 1997

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Said someone: "Look! Master Sana'i is
dead!"
Ah, such a man's death is no small affair!
He was no straw that is gone with the
wind,
He was no water that froze in the cold,
He was no comb that broke in the hair,
He was no grain that was crushed by the
earth,
He was a golden treasure in the dust
As he considered both the worlds a grain.
He cast the dust form back into the dust,
He carried heavenward both soul and mind.
The dregs were mixed here with the purest
wine;
The wine then rose; the dregs were settling
down.
The second soul, which people do not
know -
By God! he gave it to the Friend, to God!
They all meet during travel, O my friend -
From Marw and Rayy, and Kurds, and
Byzantine,
But ev'ryone returns to his own home -
Why should fine silk become a friend of
wool?
Be quiet, quiet! For the King of Speech
Erased your name now from the book of
speech!

-- Translation by Annemarie Schimmel
"Look! This is Love - Poems of Rumi"
Shambhala, 1991

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Someone said, "Master Sana'i is dead." The death of such a master is no small thing.
He was not chaff which flew on the wind, he was not water which froze in the cold;
He was not a comb that split on a hair, he was not a seed crushed by the earth.
He was a treasure of gold in this dust bowl, for he reckoned both worlds as one barleycorn.
The earthly mould he flung to the earth, the soul of reason he carried to the heavens.
The second soul of which men know nothing - we talk ambiguously - he committed to the Beloved.
The pure wine mingled with the wine-dregs, rose to the top of the vat and separated from the dregs.
They meet together on the journey, dear friend, native of Marghaz, of Rayy, of Rum, Kurd;
Each one returns to his own home - how should silk be compared with striped cloth?
Be silent, like (a letter's) points, inasmuch as the King has erased your name from the volume of speech.

-- Translation by A.J. Arberry
"Mystical Poems of Rumi 1"
The University of Chicago Press, 1968

I think it's the Barks translation I have but what a fascinating exercise. More than anything else, it proves what an art form translation is. Seeing the various versions printed, doing a line by line analysis and comparison.

Fantastic brain exercise...

Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated.. 19 different translations of one brief, 1200 yr old classic Chinese poem is fascinating too. I'm not a major Snyder or Rexroth fan, but it's v. interesting to see poets tackle the task as opposed to a language scholar. I don't read Spanish, but, reportedly the translation by Octavio Paz is the best - he DOES have a 6 page discussion of the hows/whys of his approach.

Stars at Night/Iku Tanenaka

There are stars above Japan.
there are stars that smell of gasoline.
There are stars that have heavy accents.
There are stars that sound like Ford automobiles.
There are stars that are CocaCola colored.
There are stars that have the humming of electric refrigerators.
There are stars that contain the rattling of cans.

Cleaned out with gauze and pincers
there are stars disinfected with formalin.
There are stars that hold radioactivity.
Among the stars are some too quick to catch with the eyes.
Stars that run along unexpected orbits.
Deeply, Deeply,
stars are seen too that thrust into the gorge-bottom of the universe

There are stars up above Japan.
They, on a winter's night,
each night, each night,
are seen linked like heavy chains.

tr. E.Shiffert & Y. Sawa

or.. "the universe is permeated w/ the odor of kerosene" which starts a song i've always loved by Gonn, called "The Blackout of Gretley" which i associate (unfairly) with this poem.

"the gorge-bottom of the universe"

That one sticks with me.

Glad we have this thread, I don't read enough poetry. And for a writer who often pats himself on the back for the precision of language I employ, I need to see how it's REALLY done.

Be careful, Cliff, don't twist that arm off!

There's also some terrific poetry for young kids, and parents of young kids:

William Blake's Inn
for Innocent and Experienced Travellers

- The Tiger asks Blake for a Bedtime Story

William, William writing late
byh the chill and sooty grate,
what immortal story can
make your tiger roar again?

Whein I was sent to fetch our meat
I confess that i did eat.
half the roast and all the bread.
He will never know I said.

When i was sent to fetch your drink,
I confess that I did think
you would never miss the three
lumps of sugar by our tea.

Soon I saw my health decline
and i knew the fault was mine.
Only Wllliam Blake can tell
tales to make a tiger well.

Now I lay me down to sleep
with bear and rabbit, bird and sheep.
If I should dream before I wake,
may i dream of William Blake.

Nancy Willard

each of the poems follows the pattern of one of the poems from innocence or experience.

Great way to start my day...

A poem along those same lines:

'The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered'

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book --
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seeminly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyart with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots--
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun".

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error--
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

Clive James

Read 'em back to back, there is resonance (oddly enough)...

Egypt
Keith Douglas

Aniseed has a sinful taste:
at your elbow a woman's voice
like, I imagine, the voice of ghosts,
demanding food. She has no grace

but, diseased and blind of an eye
and heavy with habitual dolour,
listlessly finds you and I
and the table are the same colour.

The music, the harsh talk, the fine
clash of the drinkseller's tray,
are the same to her, as her own whine;
she knows no variety.

And in fifteen years of living
found nothing different from death
but the difference of moving
and the nuisance of breath.

A disguise of ordure can't hide
her beauty, succumbing in a cloud
of disease, disease, apathy. My God,
the king of this country must be proud.

To England

by Alfred Austin, a famous poetaster

(Written in Mid-Channel.)

Now upon English soil I soon shall stand,
Homeward from climes that fancy deems more fair;
And well I know that there will greet me there
No soft foam fawning upon smiling strand,
No scent of orange-groves, no zephyrs bland;
But Amazonian March, with breast half bare
And sleety arrows whistling through the air,
Will be my welcome from that burly land.
Yet he who boasts his birth-place yonder lies
Owns in his heart a mood akin to scorn
For sensuous slopes that bask 'neath Southern skies,
Teeming with wine and prodigal of corn,
And, gazing through the mist with misty eyes,
Blesses the brave bleak land where he was born.

That certainly cleanses the palate, doesn't it? Now on to some quality poems.

Oy! There's nothing burly about this country!

Here is another Rumi poem, one of my favorites, because it is specifically addressed to people like us:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Whenever a feeling of aversion comes into the heart of a good soul,
it's not without significance.
Consider that intuitive wisdom to be a Divine attribute,
not a vain suspicion:
the light of the heart has apprehended
intuitively from the Universal Tablet.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

See, when you throw a book across the room in disgust, that is God talking to you.... Listen!

Universal Tablet? What, like a metaphysical aspirin? Or would it be a placebo?

Insult my boy Rumi, Sales, and see what happens...

Anna, what if God wrote it? I've done that a couple times with the Old Testament and the Koran.

If it's the Quran, you need a different translation.

Unless you read it in Arabic, it is not written by God and you're allowed to throw it. :)

Not sure the translation is the problem:

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/Quran/index.htm

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/index.htm

OK, more doggerel. I promise a beautiful poem to keep up to the standards of this thread - later...

B stands for Bear.
When Bears are seen
Approaching in the distance,
Make up your mind at once between
Retreat and Armed Resistance
A Gentleman remained to fight --
With what result for him?
The Bear, with ill-concealed delight,
Devoured him, Limb by Limb.
Another Person turned and ran;
He ran extremely hard:
The Bear was faster than the Man,
And beat him by a yard.
MORAL.
Decisive action in the hour of need
Denotes the Hero, but does not succeed.
- Hilaire Beloc

Made me smile, it did...

In the Kitchen
Jean Joubert

The fire crackles in the kitchen range, and big
disheveled clouds of steam stick their faces up
against the window panes.

At the table, the child is writing. Leaning over him,
the father guides his wobbling hand."Try!" He says.
"That's better-- that's good." Then," it's late."

The child writes, child, and is amazed that this word
there on the page, like a friendly animal that soon,
when the ink has dried, he'll be able to stroke with his finger.

In his best copperplate hand, the father writes mirror,
the curves and uprights elegantly curlicued between
the lines (he's a copy clerk at the factory).

Mirror, the child copies; and then sighs,"I'm so sleepy."
"It's snowing," the father says.

The child writes, "It's snowing," and, in his black
red bordered pinafore, falls peacefully asleep.

Translated Denise Levertov

One of the GREAT translators. Good choice, Bob.

I recently read A.E. Housman's Collected Poems:

II

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my three score years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

XL

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

LIV

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.

Love the Housman.

2 for childhood and 2 for old age, today. We need one for middle age.

sometime ago i posted "to his coy mistress" which is kindof middle aged.

OK, I have always thought of this as a middle aged poem.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo
Questa fiamma staria sensa piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero
Sensa tema d’infamia ti rispondo.


Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

. . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head grown slightly bald brought in upon a platter
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.’

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
‘That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant at all.’

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Housman and Eliot...a good night for poetry...

ok...one more from Laura Fargas

"The Battle for Peace has Begun"

for Star Trek Vi

Accretion, not force. Not the waterfall,
but way upriver the trickled source.
People who mill grain, compile herbals,
have time to grind van Leewenhoek's lens.
Who'll find the red dye in the onion skins.
I spent all day doing nothing, othdoors.
Don't call that my war.

From An animal of the sixth day

and a middle aged poem..many of us are "orphans" now - our parents/aunts/uncles have died. If we're lucky, they lived a decent and long life.

ALPHABET
Naomi Shihab Nye

One by one
the old people
of our neighborhood
are going up
into the air

their yards
still wear
small white narcissus
sweetening winter

their stones
glisten under the sun
but one by one
we are losing
their housecoats
their formal phrasings
their cupcakes

When i string their names
on the long cord

when i think how
there is almost no one left
who remembers
what stood in that
brushy spot
ninety years ago

when I pass their yards
and the bare peach tree
bends a little

when I see their rusted chairs
sitting in the same spots

what will be forgotten falls over me
like the sky over our whole neighborhood

or the time my plane
circled high above our street
the roof of our house
dotting the tiniest
"i".

from fuel

Glad to see appreciators of Frost's bleak stuff. I waffle between two of his poems when trying to pick a favorite. The first is "Directive" (http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/984/), but lately I've found myself convinced that these are the best lines he ever wrote:

"To Earthward"

Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air

That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of -- was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Down hill at dusk?

I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they're gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.

I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.

Now no joy but lacks salt
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain

Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.

When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,

The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.

Big WOW on those, people.

Bob, I'm definitely going to nab a volume of either Collected/Selected verse by Naomi Nye, she's become a big fave thanks to you...

well, i never cared for the 50-70s "confessional" style at all; but i DO like poets writing about their perceptions of their lives and that of others. On the other end, i really like the few poets who try to work w/ "ideas."

Hence my favorites...Nye (i don't have any problems w/ sentiment if it's expressed carefully), Swir, Fargas who combines the personal w/ the world around her, as does William Stafford and AR Ammons who can take ideas one never thought of as "poetic" and keep extending his frames of reference till you end up someplace you never expected.
I also appreciate Nye, esp. because she works very hard to get poetry into schools. Probably the best anthology of world poetry intended for older kids, but certainly suitable for adults is this same sky which she edited. That's where i pulled the Levertov tr. of Joubert.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Shihab_Nye
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/174
sometime i'll bite the bullet and buy a copy of hugging the jukebox. But i'd recommend Fuel, a relatively recent collection (well, 10yrs old now) but it DOES have selections from most/all? her prior collections.

I don't find the sentiment in Nye's work forced or contrived, it's not used as a crass device for effect. I like her simplicity of language, the universality of what she expresses.

177--

Yeah, the Confessional style can get sort of whiny. It's also led to an unpleasant stereotype of the kind of people poets are (conspicuously self-absorbed, self-pitying, etc). With that said, though, John Berryman is one of my absolute favorites. His style is distinctive and fascinating.

"Dream Song 14"
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no
Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

"Dream Song 29"
There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry's ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

Interesting that Berryman was a suicide. I wonder if it was a sense of boredom or ennui that did him in...

Well, it wasn't thinking up titles for his poems that did it...

It's the hangover, right? You're bitchy, can't find the fucking Tums, looking to make nasty.

Tsk, tsk...

The peace of wild things by Wendell Berry

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

"forethought(s) of grief"

This dude has them all the time and, yup, they have kept me awake many, many nights...

Robinson Jeffers - Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the
mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and deca-
dence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stub-
bornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thick-
ening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there
are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught--they say--
God, when he walked on earth.

Ooh, more Berryman:

The Ball Poem

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,
What, what is he to do? I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily over—there it is in the water!
No use to say 'O there are other balls':
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy
As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down
All his young days into the harbour where
His ball went. I would not intrude on him,
A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now
He senses first responsibility
In a world of possessions. People will take balls,
Balls will be lost always, little boy,
And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.
He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
Knowing what every man must one day know
And most know many days, how to stand up
And gradually light returns to the street
A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight,
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
Or whistling, I am not a little boy.

Love the Robinson Jeffers, decadent and austere at the same time, like some bastard stepchild of Algernon Swinburne and Walt Whitman.

December

by Zsuzsa Rakovszky
translated from the Hungarian by Alan Dixon

Why should I care to take possession
of barren weather, this dark time? The afternoon
shakes itself dankly through electric glimmer.
Whose senses, reaching the trough of the year,
would not feel portents in a time of waiting
like this transition? The street between one unknown square
and another... The march across a dried-up river-bed.
Over the shops, entwining between branches of fir,
the light of naked bulbs shines in the fog,
which shows no centre, no resistant shore.
My feelings also burn, turned to the lowest
flame. Why should I wish
to set this dismal winter-time ablaze
now dusk pervades? Elusive time, how could it guess
the yearning of the heart, joy of the mind, bliss
of the soul? Scattered into the wind
--that medium which gives them no resistance--
my actions disappear. On the bridge, over the black water,
diminishing the fog, the yellow candelabra
make a body of the wind to set on fire. The man who steps
into our time, as into a flood, will
in this dark current, the wind, the water smell,
feel his own presence for the first time. As yet
desire has found no object. Let us wait...

Began the Pisan Cantos today.

Found an audio cassette of the play "Yeats in Love" at a library sale yesterday (they're dispensing with that format and unloading everything). A CBC production, produced in tandem with the Stratford, Ontario drama festival. Looking forward to listening to it. I figured out how to hook my portable MP3 player (bought dirt cheap at an auction) up to my office stereo so I can listen to more spoken word stuff upstairs, after a hard day of scribbling. That'll be fun...

Proem -
Miyazawa Kenji - from the collection "A Future of Ice"
written January 20, 1924.

The phenomenon called "I"
is a blue illumination
of the hypothesized, organic alternating current lamp
(a compound of all transparent ghosts)
a blue illumination
of the karmic alternating current lamp
which flickers busily, busily
with landscapes, with everyone
yet remains lit with such assuredness
(the light persists, the lamp lost.)
.....
all these propositions are asserted
in a four dimensional extension
as the attributes of imagination and time.

This was published as a kid's book and has gorgeous chalk(?) illustrations on each facing page of each pair of lines. Esp. as patty and i are both geographers, we found this an esp. appropriate an lovely book to read to adam when he was v. young. And it works, i think, for any age. But if you have a child say, between 2-5, it's wonderful and something of a pantheistic prayer to the universe. The union of word and pictures are breathtaking.

............
School of Names/ MB Goffstein.

I want to go to the School of Names

to know every star in the sky I can see at night, and later learn those
imagined
and proved to be there.

I want to know what's in the ocean,
every school of fish, every watery motion
by name.

I want to know every stone and rock,
crystal, shale, granite, chalk,
every kind by name.

Names of the continents,
names of the seas,

names of the islands,
names of the lakes,

names of the mountains,
names of the shores,

names of deserts, names of rivers,

and the grasses, flowers, trees, and bushes
growing on this earth.

How are the winds called?
What are the names
of clouds?

I want to go
to the School of Names

to know everybody
with me on this globe,
every mammal, reptile,
insect, bird, fish, and worm.

I would like
to recognize and greet
everyone by name.

For all the years
I may live,
no place but the earth is my home

I LIKE it...

Robert Pinsky on sonnets:

http://www.slate.com/id/2211066/

In honor of Valentine's Day, a little Neruda:

Full woman, flesh-apple, hot moon,
thick smell of seaweed, mud and light in masquerade,
what secret clarity opens through your columns?
What ancient night does a man touch with his senses?

Oh, love is a journey with water and stars,
with drowning air and storms of flour;
love is a clash of lightnings,
two bodies subdued by one honey.

Kiss by kiss I travel your little infinity,
your borders, your rivers, your tiny villages;
and a genital fire -- transformed, delicious --

slips through the narrow roadways of the blood
till it pours itself, quick, light a night carnation, till it is:
and is nothing, in shadow, and a flimmer of light.

Sorry, I have to run off and take a cold shower after that one...

There's a poem from the Victorian erotica collection, "The Pearl," called "The Joy of Coming Together." Yes, it's exactly what you're thinking of.

Adult - Linda Gregg

I've come back to the country where i was happy
changed. Passion puts no terrible strain on me now,
I wonder what will take the place of desire.
I could be the ghost of my own life returning
to the places I lived best. Walking here and there,
nodding when I see something I cared for deeply.
Now I'm in my house listening to the owls calling
and wondering if slowly I will take on flesh again.

There isn't an awful lot of really decent political poetry - but here's one from a Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska, who won the Nobel for lit in '96

Children of our Era

We are children of our era;
our era is political.

All affairs, day and night,
yours, ours, theirs,
are political affairs.

Like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin a political cast,
your eyes a political aspect.

What you say has a resonance;
what you are silent about is telling.
Either way, it's political.

Even when you head for the hills
you're taking political steps
on political ground.

Even apolitical poems are political,
and above us shines the moon,
by now no longer lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
Question? What question? Dear, here's a suggestion:
a political question.

You don't even have to be a human being
to gain political significance.
Crude oil will do,
or concentrated feed, or any raw material.

Or even a conference table whose shape
was disputed for months:
should we negotiate life and death
at a round table or a square one?

Meanwhile people were dying,
animals perishing,
houses burning,
and fields growing wild,
just as in times most remote
and less political.

Reminds me of that Dylan song:

"We live in a political world..."

Here's a counterpoint to 208:
A Poet Is Not a Jukebox

A poet is not a jukebox, so don't tell me what to write.
I read a dear friend a poem about love, and she said,
"You're in to that bag now, for whatever it's worth,
But why don't you write about the riot in Miami?"

I didn't write about Miami because I didn't know about Miami.
I've been so busy working for the Census, and listening to music all night,
and making new poems
That I've broken my habit of watching TV and reading newspapers.
So it wasn't absence of Black Pride that caused me not to write about Miami,
But simple ignorance.

Telling a Black poet what he ought to write
Is like some Commissar of Culture in Russia telling a poet
He'd better write about the new steel furnaces in the Novobigorsk region,
Or the heroic feats of Soviet labor in digging the trans-Caucausus Canal,
Or the unprecedented achievement of workers in the sugar beet industry
who exceeded their quota by 400 percent (it was later discovered to
be a typist's error).

Maybe the Russian poet is watching his mother die of cancer,
Or is bleeding from an unhappy love affair,
Or is bursting with happiness and wants to sing of wine, roses, and nightingales.

I'll bet that in a hundred years the poems the Russian people will read, sing and love
Will be the poems about his mother's death, his unfaithful mistress, or his
wine, roses and nightingales,
Not the poems about steel furnaces, the trans-Caucasus Canal, or the sugar
beet industry.
A poet writes about what he feels, what agitates his heart and sets his pen in motion.
Not what some apparatchnik dictates, to promote his own career or theories.

Yeah, maybe I'll write about Miami, as I wrote about Birmingham,
But it'll be because I want to write about Miami, not because somebody
says I ought to.

Yeah, I write about love. What's wrong with love?
If we had more loving, we'd have more Black babies to become Black brothers and
sisters and build the Black family.

When people love, they bathe with sweet-smelling soap, splash their bodies
with perfume or cologne,
Shave, and comb their hair, and put on gleaming silken garments,
Speak softly and kindly and study their beloved to anticipate and satisfy her
every desire.
After loving they're relaxed and happy and friends with all the world.
What's wrong with love, beauty, joy and peace?

If Josephine had given Napoleon more loving, he wouldn't have sown the
meadows of Europe with skulls.
If Hitler had been happy in love, he wouldn't have baked people in ovens.
So don't tell me it's trivial and a cop-out to write about love and not about
Miami.

A poet is not a jukebok.
A poet is not a jukebox.
I repeat, A poet is not a jukebox for someone to shove a quarter in his ear
and get the tune they want to hear,
Or to pat on the head and call "a good little Revolutionary,"
Or to give a Kuumba Liberation Award.

A poet is not a jukebox.
A poet is not a jukebox.
A poet is not a jukebox.

So don't tell me what to write.

Written by Dudley Randall (1914-2000)

Now that one made me smile...

...and for you Zimmerman fans:

POLITICAL WORLD (by St. Bob of Dylan)

We live in a political world
Where love don't have any place
We're living in times where men commit crimes
And crime don't have a face

We live in a political world
Icicles hangin' down
Wedding bells ring and angels sing
And clouds cover up the ground

We live in a political world
Wisdom is thrown into jail
It rots in a cell misguided as hell
Leaving no one to pick up the trail

We live in a political world
Where mercy walks the plank
Life is in mirrors, death disappears
Up the steps into the nearest bank

We live in a political world
Courage is a thing of the past
Houses are haunted, children aren't wanted
Your next day could be your last

We live in a political world
The one we can see and feel
But there's no one to check, it's all a stacked deck
We all know for sure that it's real

We live in a political world
The cities are a lonesome fear
Little by little, you turn in the middle
You're never sure why you're here

We live in a political world
Under the microscope
You could travel anywhere and hang yourself there
You've always got more than enough rope

We live in a political world
Turning and a-thrashing about
As soon as you're awake you're trained to take
What looks like the easy way out

We live in a political world
Where peace is not welcome at all
It's turned away from the door to wander some more
Or put up against the wall

We live in a political world
Everything's hers and his
Climb into the flame and shout god's name
But you're not even sure what it is

WTF - i've possibly written 1 poem in my 58 yrs and it's kindof science based...so a vanity press post...

Gravity Waves (after a phrase attr. to Einstein)

Gravitation
Gravitation can not
Gravitation can not be held
Gravitation can not be held responsible
Gravitation can not be held responsible for people
Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling
Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love.
Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling
Gravitation can not be held responsible for people
Gravitation can not be held responsible
Gravitation can not be held
Gravitation can not
Gravitation
Gravity
Grave
Gave
Ave
Al
in
L
o
v
e

apologies in advance..i don't write, just read, as a rule.
This was modeled, roughly, after a statistical function.

Bob, you devil! A closet poet, eh?

Well, I liked it. Calling "Gravity Waves" clever would be unkind (clever equates with contrived to me, when it comes to verse). I think this is a neat little concept, well-executed. Write on, pardner...

not a closet poet - i happened to have one idea one time for a concrete poem that seemed to work out rather nicely. While i have NO idea what a gravity wave might look like, i do know what a bunch of the curves defined by statistical functions look like, so i modeled the form after a generic function that trails off into the high end but gets truncated at the lower.
And because i was able to modify w/ a little fudging, the guote into "Al in Love" at the tail end of the curve and poem.

this could go in the "what are you reading thread" as well..but.
started reading the throne of Labdacus - modern American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg. In some sense this is a work of meta-poetry. Her theme is the Oedipus myth but multiple viewpoints are constantly intersecting throughout the poem. She treats with Oedipus himself, Theban and Greek society at the time, Sophocles' play, as well as Apollo in his guise as the God of poetry. So it's a poem about all of the above, while also being a poem about poetry/art. The whole of the 93 page poem is comprised of very niftily constructed two line stanzas. The poet plays freely and unexpectedly with rhyme and meter.

For instance, early on, informing the reader of the formidable antiquity of the story involved, she describes the weightiness of the Ur-tablets of the story in the language of the gods as follows:

"Tablets homely, sunken, heavy,
Lightless, pockmarked,

like peace is broken from the moon
above the citadel of Thebes."
---
later on describing the possibilities invoked by his history and that of all Thebes and the gods falling towards the beggar Oedipus her lines reflect Hopkins:

"Swift waves --
and a human hand reaching above --

Swift, swift, wing-swiftness so swift,
even the gods were caught up

Though whether they saw it as the work
of a single moment, day, or life;

Whether they saw it as the work of generations
hanging persecuted among the world cycles,

or as if all that happened only once,
to one man alone; or as what happened to them all --

Even the god of poetry can't tell.
Things done blindly, things, things ,

.......
though the housefly stalks across the gold-leaf
Eyelashes of the gods, they do not blink;

They sit enraptured in their shining chairs,
gazing at Thebes."
---------------------------
thankfully the book is broken up into 10 shorter sections, otherwise I'd find it impossible to to keep track of what was going on I think.

My son the future math major loved your poem, 213!

going outside and reading a little about Schnackenberg, she's one of a group categorized as "the new formalists." Eg, i suspect (beyond Gertrud, they're generally happy/pleased to incorporate allusions to classical myth; add endnotes; recover rhyme and a degree of poetic diction.

I took several courses from Frederick Turner at UTD a few years back. I think he is considered a New Formalist. Were I to be a poet I suspect I would fall into a shifting formalist category, moving between new and old formalisms.

Poetry began (it may have been how we communicated at the dawn of language) as a means of speech designed to communicate on a less conscious level than what we think of as normal human speech. It was the language of the rhapsode, the teller of tales, the keeper of the legends. Poetry facilitated keeping the stories straight. As a result they were very formal in tone, structure, and use of figures of speech. Rhyme, meter, and so forth were aids to the memory. How many songs from thirty or forty years ago can you sing along to without missing a word or phrase or verse? (Okay, no ageist jokes, if you weren't around for both the Four Preps and Elvis, live and learn).

Prose, language without poetic structure and devices, that calls itself poetry (Everything depends on a little red wheelbarrow in the rain) may contain lots of wisdom and so forth, but for my money, it ain't poetry. I can't tell you the last time I read a new poem. Rap and hip-hop have more poetry in them than ninety-eight percent of the little "poems" one finds as filler in "The New Yorker" today.

Give me some doggerel or a good limerick and that's poetry. Prose, on the other hand? Well, it's just prose.

out of curiosity gene - did you like those lines from Labdicus?
One reason i'm enjoying this particular poem so much is that there is a lot of structure and form, BUT you're not hit over the head with it, so i kindof reread and go..yeah..that was cool.

Totally agree about New Yorker "poetry" (and fiction, mostly). i love the cartoons and the long reportage articles.

Boy, Gene, you're really ON today.

Keep it coming, boy...

that's what happens when you take a sick day. ;-)

"kitty". sixteen, 5' 11", white, prostitute
by e. e. cummings.

"kitty". sixteen, 5' 11", white, prostitute.

ducking always the touch of must and shall,
whose slippery body is Death's littlest pal,

skilled in quick softness. Unspontaneous. cute.

the signal perfume of whose unrepute
focusses in the sweet slow animal
bottomless eyes importantly banal,

Kitty. a whore. Sixteen
you corking brute
amused from time to time by clever drolls
fearsomely who do keep their sunday flower.
The babybreasted broad "kitty" twice eight

--beer nothing, the lady'll have a whiskey-sour--

whose least amazing smile is the most great
common divisor of unequal souls.