**What Are You Reading Now - Poetry

A brief conversation with bobmcconnaughey inspired this thread - a place for those of us who regularly read poetry to post and communicate.

The poetry collection I read most recently is A Pilgrim's Guide to the Heartland by Jessica Goodfellow. This is a small chapbook of poetry on a variety of topics. What I found so unexpected is her inclusion or integration of mathematics and physics in some of the poetry. I finished them very late in December and want to read through it again before I comment further. This is a person I met through exchanging some poetry through BookMooch (she lives in Japan currently). Will post some excerpts when I do reread*.

On the immediate TBR pile is What Sounds Does It Make by Erin Malone, another chapbook and by friend of Ms. Goodfellow above and All Blacks' Kitchen Gardens by this NZ poet and author by the name of Tim Jones. Name sounds familiar, doesn't it?

*I believe posting excerpts are allowable and do not break any copyright laws, yes?

**btw, I have prefaced the thread title with two asterisks so as to be able to easily find it among individual reader threads.

While in my town library weekend before last, I spotted a newish (1994 I think) Collected Poems by e.e. cummings, and checked it out. I haven't been reading it, exactly, but flipping back and forth. I'm not particularly a cummings fan, but read the usual standards in school, and once attended a wedding of friends where the groom read "somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience" as part of the ceremony.

I was wondering what else cummings might have written besides those standards. There are some worthwhile ones. More erotic poems than our teachers saw fit to show us in the 1960s. His punctuation artistry gets a bit tiresome in large doses. I don't think I want my own copy of this - we have an earlier collection around here, and the later poems aren't that interesting, to me anyway.

Three Percent, "A resource for international literature at the University of Rochester", has selected 10 poetry finalistsfor the Best Translated Book of 2008:

Essential Poems and Writings by Robert Desnos, translated from the French by Mary Ann Caws, Terry Hale, Bill Zavatsky, Martin Sorrell, Jonathan Eburne, Katherine Connelly, Patricia Terry, and Paul Auster (Black Widow)

You Are the Business by Caroline Dubois, translated from the French by Cole Swensen (Burning Deck)

As It Turned Out by Dmitry Golynko, translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky, Rebecca Bella, and Simona Schneider (Ugly Duckling)

For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide, translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu (New Directions)

Poems of A.O. Barnabooth by Valery Larbaud, translated from the French by Ron Padgett and Bill Zavatsky (Black Widow)

Night Wraps the Sky by Vladimir Mayakovsky, translated from the Russian by Katya Apekina, Val Vinokur, and Matvei Yankelevich, and edited by Michael Almereyda (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

A Different Practice by Fredrik Nyberg, translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida (Ugly Duckling)

EyeSeas by Raymond Queneau, translated from the French by Daniela Hurezanu and Stephen Kessler (Black Widow)

Peregrinary by Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston (Zephyr)

Eternal Enemies by Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

I'll read Dear Darkness, the new book of poems by Kevin Young, starting today. He is one of my favorite poets, and is a professor of English and curator of the poetry library at Emory University here in Atlanta.

I just received an e-mail from the Emory Libraries, which mentioned that Elizabeth Alexander, who wrote and read the Inaugural Poem for President Obama last week, will be givng a free reading at Emory on Wed Feb 11 at 6 pm. I don't think that there are (m)any other Atlantans in this group, but I thought I'd pass on this info anyway.

I am not at all sure this is appropriate and whether the intention is that poems will be shared here, and if not, I will be appropriately chastised, no doubt :-) .

After I asked Mary to share a list of women poets with us, I started thinking about poems I particularly like which might not be familiar to some poetry readers. One is below.

Land in Sight

All day the sky
whispered into the sea and the sails
would not fill. On the pier,
dogs drank the air dry
with searching tongues.
We were seared wherever clothes
revealed us. Down the boulevard,
shutters clapped loud against the sun.
Children slipped messages through the slats,
flecks of paper drifted into the street.

All through the city love looked for us, through
the crooked Altenstrasse, under Lenin's balcony,
past the terrace where Goethe drank his coffee.
Into cafes where coolness turns its key
in a shadow. All day love followed us
as we climbed, from fountain to bridge.
A gull hovered as if
broken. All day love drew its finger
across my belly, ascended my damp spine.
I kept turning my face
from its breath.

The city woke. Dogs unfolded their legs
and stood. One by one, shutters parted,
glimpses of voices
pressed the air.

The same loneliness that closes us
opens us again.

Like hair loosened by the sea,
slowly the darkness opens into darkness.

Anne Michaels, in Skin Divers

Yes I like Skin Divers I hadn't thought about it for a while and its a nice surprise to be more familar than I realised with that poem.

I'm rereading V by Tony Harrison - or have reread the poem and am now reading the edition that I have that includes the press coverage of the (Daily Mail and tory MP) outrage at and the artistic defence of the screening of him reading the poem in the mid 80's. Its brought a lot back from that time.

Also started reading The prelude after enjoying Lyrical Ballads so much last week - started with the 1799 version, 'was it for this' - bliss.

Also dipping into various others including Keats (partly prompted by tomcat).

Anyone else dabble with the pen themselves? (wholly amateurishly in my case.)

#6: Beautiful! Thanks, polutropos! Skin Divers is now on my wish list.

#6: the Anne Michaels poem is lovely!

I have the books in my recent Poetry Nudge pile (see http://www.librarything.com/topic/53869) to read, but as I've been reading about Ada Lovelace and Lord Byron recently, I also intend to dip into the generous selection of Byron's poetry in Volume 2 of the Oxford Anthology of English Literature.

In that spirit, here is "Enchantress of Numbers", a poem about Ada Lovelace by New Zealand poet Helen Rickerby from her new collection My Iron Spine:

http://wingedink.blogspot.com/2008/04/enchantress-of-numbers.html

(The poem comes after a few paragraphs of introduction.)

>6 polutropos: I may have to look into the Anne Michaels volume. After reading her new novel, which is very lyrical and has great gobs of prose poetry (imo) in the text, I am curious about her poetry.

I clearly think she is worth reading and you cannot go wrong with either Skin Divers or Weight of Oranges.

RABBIT HUNTING

After the war
we had to start over.
Get a gun
learn to listen to footsteps outside
train our dogs
keep them leashed to make them mean.

We don't want trouble
but can't bear
any more losses.

They cleaned out our barn
ravaged our house
during the war
while we were locked in barbed wire cages
laid waste the apple orchard
withered the fields that grew kale, cabbage and tomatoes.

"Not again," was all he said.

He hunts rabbits
and when he traps one, very young,
she stops and trembles.

He was born in Denver,
his parents locked up in Tule Lake Camp.
He served in the U.S. Army
as a messcook and a Japanese language translator.
They called him a yellow jap
and made him taste the food before they'd eat.

Makes him so mad, these rabbits
that stop in fear
trembling.

He shoots off their heads.

From Love Works (San Francisco Poet Laureate Series) by Janice Mirikitani, published by City Lights Foundation, San Francisco, Copyright © 2001

#12

YES!

Just finished Tess Gallagher's Portable Kisses, which was a little disappointing - Gallagher just seemed to be trying too hard.

Also finished Duncan Glen Selected New Poems 1987-1996 - a collection mainly made up of poems Glen wrote after returning to Edinburgh after 30 years away. Enjoyable enough - I wasn't expecting Shakespeare. What gave the poems an extra layer was that some of the places he mentions have already gone.

Halfway through Robert Crawford's 'Full Volume'; still reading through Wallace Stevens' 'Collected Poems'.

This one is dedicated to Mary, the rose and poetry lover:

Sketching Roses

How many petals
do you draw
before you start skimming
the page with your black ink,
a blackbird flying
away on
Sunday morning?

Diane Wakoski in Argonaut Rose

As she's relatively little known, and no longer living, i'll mention the terrific Polish poet, Anna Swir who has been translated into English by Leonard Nathan/C. Milosz in Talking to my body.
She's v. plainspoken, straightforward and earthy - these are a couple of short poems taken from e-mails on bdays and the like- so her more sensual poems aren't included (the book's at home).

Happy as a Dog's Tail/ Anna Swir (Poland)

Happy as something unimportant
And free as a thing unimportant.
As something no one prizes
And which does not prize itself.
As something mocked by all
And which mocks at their mockery.
As laughter without serious reason.
As a yell able to out yell itself.
Happy as no matter what, as any no matter what.
Happy
As a dog's tail.
------
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.
------
For some current San Franscisan(?) poetry, i liked Toni Mirosevich's Queer Street. I gave "my" copy back to its owner, so no quotes - but again, very matter of fact descriptions of the day to day.

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 Coca Cola 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

(there's a garagepunk song from the 60s that begins "the universe is permeated w/ the odor of kerosene" which i've alwasy loved by Gonn, called "The Blackout of Gretley" which i associate (unfairly) with this poem.

William Blake's Inn
for Innocent and Experienced Travellers

- The Tiger asks Blake for a Bedtime Story

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

When 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 tger 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 follows the pattern from a poem either from innocence or experience
*for elementaldragon in particular, but anyone is welcome.

if there are any heavens my mother

if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be(deep like a rose
tall like a rose)

standing near my

(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my

(suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

& the whole garden will bow)

e e cummings

www.poets.org In April the Academy of American Poets sends out a poem a day.
http://poems.com/ Poetry Daily. If you get on their mailing list, they feature a poet a day.

I been introduced to new poets through both of these sites/mailings. Are there any corresponding UK sites like this? Other poetry sources you find useful?

While I don't mind the occasional posting of poetry (alas, I feel we do infringe on copyright by posting these in their entirety without permission), but I was hoping to hear what collections or anthologies people are reading or what you have to say about the poetry or poets or why you were drawn to that particular collection/poet (I was hoping for something different than the Poetry Fool group, you know?).

>21 avaland: - the copyright aspects of all the poetry on LT has always bothered me: most of the postings appear to be blatant infringements. On the other hand, if a posting leads to a book selling another copy, then the poet may well be pleased.

The big organisation in the UK is The Poetry Society but they don't really make much poetry available - they are set up for subscriptions.

The best Scottish site is the Scottish Poetry Library, which posts the best Scottish poems of the year (2003-8 are archived).
Further to a conversation on another thread - they also have a feature on New Zealand poets on the site at present.

Knopf also does a poem a day in April. The list from last year (and the sign-up?) is here.

#21 - the couple of times i asked a living poet - and got a response - they were fine w/ it (actually nice because i got to find out who their favorite poets were). I started out w/ a relatively lengthy discussion of 4 poets whom i esp. like but that seemed to be a thread killer (or maybe it's me) so i ended up deleting it as i felt it could be perceived as being too much about "me" rather than the poems. But, thinking about it, despite being one of the obvious abusers, i'm in sympathy with what you'd rather see. But i don't think i want to write a critical essay on each poem or poet either. I do suspect poets in the US are generally pleased to get ANY notice, as a form, poetry has become almost vestigial in relation to the rest of modern lit (outside of college classrooms). I do like the prospect of championing/advocating for specific poets who might not be otherwise known to most readers, even folks who are very widely read in many genres.

Finding poetry in a small public library isn't easy - we get Poetry magazine and i pass the copies on to our library and that's about it for modern poetry in a very good little public library.

I actually think most living poets, particularly the lesser known, would probably not object for the reason jargoneer noted - they do want to sell their collections, become better known...etc. Still, I'm a little uncomfortable with it (of course, it is hard to post just an excerpt from a three-line poem, eh?)

Bob, I hadn't noticed you had deleted your earlier post. Fie! I actually did a little research on Anna Swir after you mentioned her and made a mental note to keep an eye out for her work. With regards to the idea that it was a thread-killer, I can only speak personally. I was waiting to post again when I got around to reading some more poetry or came across something that might be of interest to the poetry readers in this group.

I have little translated poetry in my library. I'm sure translation can convey ideas and images but what about the music and rhythms? The music in languages sound so very different. I suppose I fear that there is something else, something just out of reach in a translated poem.

>25 avaland:: The sticking point of reposting is whether it affects the sale rights of the writers' work. Some publishers now consider posting online as being prior publication. I guess this is not much of a problem when posting already-published work, but it may be for unpublished work, or work which has previously appeared only in print form and has not previously appeared online. So I would advise caution when reposting the work of living authors without their approval.

I think the best sort of translated poetry books are those which have the original on one page and the translation on the other. You don't have to have a good knowledge of the source language to get something out of the way the original compares to the translation (although I guess you do need to know the script the source language uses).

I won't buy poetry books unless I've either been to a reading, had someone send me a poem, or run across it online. Poetry is expensive relative to the quantity. Therefore, I insist on quality. My tastes in poetry are fairly quirky, so I seldom rely on recommendation alone. The recommender has to be extremely good and extremely in sync with my tastes. I think we actually provide free advertising for publishers. I do not think they have reason to complain.

i asked a poet friend about this - her ad hoc reply is as follows:
"-I know the women poets' list has
written about this a lot and I can go back and see what they have said. Most publishers are going to happy for the exposure, I'm guessing & no one is in poetry for the money. Your group is not selling anything--I'd lean in favor of "fair use" myself"
Laura will get back w/ more info, i think she was gonna poll her listmates.

i think what i'd do is provide a more complete bibliographic reference for a copyright poem so it would be easier for an interested potential purchaser to track down.

#s 27, 28: To clarify what I said, it's authors rather than publishers who might have objections. For myself, I'm happy for individual published poems to be posted online in such a group, but I wouldn't post an unpublished poem in an online forum. I can't speak for others, which is, in a sense, my point.

#29 - i wouldn't put up an unpublished poem sans permission either - unless i was a poet, which i'm not!
But it did make me think about the need for more complete references to make finding the volume a poem came from as easy as possible. Part of my rationale as i awkwardly phrased it to Laura was (after talking up LT):

"it seems important to me to be able to pull in a short poem or two or, if the poem is book length, at least 20-30 lines. Unlike reviewing a novel or non-fiction if a new reader gets to read a bit of the real thing as opposed to a tepid description/paraphrase, there's a much better chance of the reader (if positively impressed) might actually go out and purchase a chapbook. Getting a sense of how the poet uses his/her tools/language/diction requires reading (or hearing) some poetry. Having a reviewer compare/contrast one poet's style w/ another, can only take a new reader so far in making decisions about purchasing." ..Back when i lived near campus, i was lucky in the the UNC student bookstore had a quite wonderful selection of poetry - old and new. And i could happily kill 2 or 3 hours leafing through collections that looked promising and make relatively informed decisions (in the sense that i'd have read enough to have a pretty good idea as to whether i'd like to own the book or not). Losing easy access has made buying poetry, esp. new poetry much harder. Now i try to get a new anthology every now and again and find someone who seizes my attention - but that's a more limited exposure than sitting down w/ a half dozen books for a good while!"..
we're probably a little unusual - a home of 2 non-poets who subscribe to "Poetry" which DOES have well known and lesser well known poets & reviews."
rationalize, rationalize rationalize
----
#25
despite being - to put it gently, "linguistically challanged" ("bobbee, you speak like an Arab" Mm(sic) Papin would often say after i'd been called upon (i'm sure she meant Algerian~1965) I gave up and took Latin in college, since the Pope wasn't around to criticize, however sweetly, my accent), I have a fondness for translated poetry - though i know i have to be missing both broad and subtle details. Except for a couple of Polish and Russian poets, most non-English poetry i own is either Japanese or Chinese. Perhaps because i'm a geographer who hates to leave home. i dunno. But my only traveling is via books and i do like reading and advocating for poetry, esp. living poets!

Tim, that is an interesting note about posting online being considered previous publication.

#31: It certainly doesn't happen in all or even most cases, but I have seen publishers' guidelines that state that only original submissions will be accepted, and that this precludes previous online publication. Whether a forum such as this constitutes "publication", I'm not sure.

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.
__________________

Kenji was an agricultural extension agent in rural Japan in the early part of the 20th century. A devout Buddhist, he more or less abandoned his life as the scion of a relatively wealthy family and lived a relatively anonymous life trying to bring modern agricultural techniques to the peasantry. This is a fragment from a much longer poem and is more explicitly Buddhist in its subject matter than most of his verse. Since he worked as a cultural extension agent, weather featured prominently in his day-to-day concerns. Much of his poetry features detailed observations of meteorological data - he probably wrote more poetry about clouds than any other poet extant; certainly cloud poems that were based on knowledge of the formation of clouds themselves. Almost all his poetry has a keen scientific detachment in his description of his immediate world, both personal and physical (in a geographic sense). And he was acutely aware and makes their reader aware of how the natural world embraces the day-to-day existence of the farmers and villagers he was working with.

(I am trying to get used to dictating, rather than typing, coherent paragraphs using voice recognition software; it's still an awkward process for me.)

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.

Fellow poetry lovers:

Our good friend TomCatMurr claims he has never even heard of Gary Snyder. While I have read and liked some Snyder, and have posted one poem for Murr on his thread, I am wondering if someone with a better knowledge of Snyder could recommend some collections to Murr on his thread.

shouldn't be me. I think Snyder's a really good person but not such a good poet. That is i am all for his environmental actions/promotions etc and deeply respect his willingness to immerse himself seriously in Zen (unlike many of the beats (and folks since)). Do you think TomCat might be ... umm one hates to suggest such a thing..but putting one on a bit? It IS hard to imagine not being aware of Gary Snyder if one has payed any attention to American poetry since the end of 2nd world war.

I've not been a particularly big Snyder fan, Andrew, so you're on your own here:-)

While I've not been reading any poetry lately, I have been accumulating some. I picked up a collection of Grace Schulman's called The Broken String. It looked interesting. It seems to be all music-inspired with everything from church bells to "Thelonius Himself" and the Itzhak Pearlman performance referred to in the title of the collection.

I also picked up a slim remainder book which profiles the life and work of four New England poets: Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, Stanley Kunitz, and Richard Wilbur.

the great pianist, Alfred Brendel, has an interesting vol of poetry, one finger too many. The poetry ranges greatly in quality - but a lot, not surprisingly, a lot about music and playing.

#36 for casting such vile aspersions on my good name, you get a scratch.

Really, I have never heard of Gary Snyder. As a former Brit living in Taiwan for 11 years, it's possible such ....parochial talent... has slipped under my radar.

I must try to get the Brendel volume. His essays on music are also excellent, and of course his playing of Schubert is....

Thanks, Bob, of reminding me of Brendel. I used to have a number of his LPs, and I am sure some cassette tapes as well, and my car system does play tapes, so I must go rummage through a closet.

(And now back to poetry :-) )

>34 bobmcconnaughey: Bob, The throne of Labdacus sounds wonderful. I am adding it to my wishlist.

a little Brendel - most of his poems are about a page or so; one of the shortest and a section from a longer one. In some sense they're not so much poems as much as a series of very wry comments on the world of music and beyond. None have titles. The other book of poetry devoted to music i have is Discography by Sean Singer - more jazzy. Won the Yale younger poets competition a few years back, fwiw. Singer's the better poet; Brendel the more fun.

"When Brahms*
bit his own finger
it was Billroth
Professor Billroth
who told him sternly
Nice people
don't bite themselves Johannes
whereupon Brahms
stuck the bleeding finger
into his beard."/

"There was a pianist
who developed
a third index finger
not to play the piano with
though it did intervene
discreetly
in tricky passages
put to point things out
when both hands were busy...
..
In Complicated fugues you saw it rise to its full height
from under his shirt collar
indicating the theme in retrograde."

*nb. unneeded, no doubt, but Brahms sported one of the fuller beards in musical history.

hahahaha. Love it.

re #1 -- avaland, as you mentioned being interested by Jessica Goodfellow's use of mathematics in her poetry, I felt like mentioning a novel by one of my recent favorites. It's called Defiance. The author, Carole Maso (who, last I knew, teaches at Brown) tried to integrate higher maths into a bizarre but strangely lovely literary murder mystery of sorts. Parts are very poetic, so I figured I'd mention it here.

And polutropos, re # 20, I was reminded somehow of another 'mother' poem I like. It's called "The Field" by a wonderful poet from New Zealand named Kapka Kassabova:

---

The Field

Your mother brings the strangest plants
she gives them to you, though she knows
you have no special interest in plants
then she waters them for you.
You don't understand but you're resigned to her
knowing what's important. You're used
to her taking care of the plants.

Sometimes you wait in the big house
behind closed curtains because you're secretly afraid
(she'll never know how much you wait for her)
You touch a door-knob
it comes off
You stroke a loaf of bread
it feels like a broken spine
You turn on the heater
a carpet burns to ashes
You water the plants
they die instantly
(Your mother brings the strangest plants)

Meanwhile your mother lies in a furrow
somewhere in the white fields of light
facing a sky so dark nobody can see it

---

>44 Fullmoonblue: I'm actually fairly math-challenged, so it's not something I usually seek out. I did read a mystery by an Argentine author that involved mathematics - I'm was underwhelmed by it. I think it was The Oxford Murders.

My brilliant daughter, she who was spouting Prufrock in kindergarten to the puzzlement of her teacher, also has a wonderful coarse streak a mile wide. So reading the Brendel poem above I immediately thought how she would modify it:

When Brahms*
bit his own finger
it was Billroth
Professor Billroth
who told him sternly
Nice people
don't bite themselves Johannes
whereupon Brahms
stuck the bleeding finger
up his ahms.

Sorry. LOL.

I heard this piece on Monday's Writer's Almanac. I found it quite amusing.

What She Was Wearing

by Denver Butson

this is my suicide dress
she told him
I only wear it on days
when I'm afraid
I might kill myself
if I don't wear it

you've been wearing it
every day since we met
he said

and these are my arson gloves

so you don't set fire to something?
he asked

exactly

and this is my terrorism lipstick
my assault and battery eyeliner
my armed robbery boots

I'd like to undress you he said
but would that make me an accomplice?

and today she said I'm wearing
my infidelity underwear
so don't get any ideas

and she put on her nervous breakdown hat
and walked out the door

"What She Was Wearing" by Denver Butson from Illegible Address. © Luquer Street Press, 2004. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Bob, I like it. Who wrote it?

#46 just as long as that wasn't her response in kindergarten!~
#49 a family friend.

#49: "What She Was Wearing" by Denver Butson from Illegible Address. © Luquer Street Press, 2004

Both of those last two poems remind me of Stevie Smith, whom I have been reading this week.

This is my favourite Stevie Smith poem:

Thoughts on the person from Porlock.

Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He might have hid in the house.

It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong
(But often we all do wrong)
As the truth is I think, he was already stuck
With Kubla Khan.

He was weeping and crying, I am finished, finished
I shall never write another word of it,
When along comes the Person from Porlock
And takes the blame for it.

It was not right it was wrong,
But often we all do wrong.

*

May we inquire the name of the Person from Porlock?
Why Porson, didn't you know?
He lived at the bottom of Porlock Hill
So had a long way to go.

He wasn't much in the social sense
Though his grandmother was a Warlock
One of the Rutlandshire ones I fancy
And nothing to do with Porlock.

But he lived at the bottom of a hill as I said
And had a cat named Flo
And had a cat named Flo.

*

I long for the Person from Porlock
To bring my thoughts to an end
I am becoming impatient to see him
I think of him as a friend

Often I look out of the window
Often I run to the gate
I think, He will come this evening
I think it is rather late.

I am hungry to be interrupted
For ever and ever amen
O Person from Porlock come quickly
And bring my thoughts to an end.

*

I felicitate the people who have a Person from Porlock
To break up everything and throw it away
Because then there will be nothing to keep them
And they need not stay.

*

Oh this Person from Porlock is a great interrupter
He interrupts us for ever
People say he is a dreadful fellow
But really he is desirable.

Why should they grumble so much?
He comes like benison
They should be glad he has not forgotten them
They might have had to go on.

*

These thoughts are depressing, I know. They are depressing.
I wish I was more cheerful it is more pleasant
Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting
To the purpose of One Above who is experimenting

With various mixtures of human character which goes best
All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us.
There I go again. Smile smile and get some work to do
Then you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.

in my edition, the poem is accompanied by a line drawing of the Person from Porlock, executed by the poet.

Today's edition of The Writer's Almanac has a lovely poem by Ellen Bass:

Sleeping Next to the Man on the Plane

by Ellen Bass

I'm not well. Neither is he.
Periodically he pulls out a handkerchief
and blows his nose. I worry
about germs, but appreciate how he shares
the armrest—especially
considering his size—too large
to lay the tray over his lap.
His seatbelt barely buckles. At least
he doesn't have to ask for an extender
for which I imagine him grateful. Our upper arms
press against each other, like apricots growing
from the same node. My arm is warm
where his touches it. I close my eyes.
In the chilly, oxygen-poor air, I am glad
to be close to his breathing mass.
We want our own species. We want
to lie down next to our own kind.
Even here in this metal encumbrance, hurtling
improbably 30,000 feet above the earth,
with all this civilization—down
to the chicken-or-lasagna in their
environmentally-incorrect packets,
even as the woman behind me is swiping
her credit card on the phone embedded
in my headrest and the folks in first
are watching their individual movies
on personal screens, I lean
into this stranger, seeking primitive comfort—
heat, touch, breath—as we slip
into the ancient vulnerability of sleep.

"Sleeping Next to the Man on the Plane" by Ellen Bass from Mules of Love. © BOA Editions, 2002. Reprinted with permission.

bits from the end of Labdicus:

A moon comes and goes above Delphi,
Blue tinted, scarred, a blind plague-face

Beneath which the god and the shepherd hear the faint, Distant voices of children playing at

Lame Man, taking rurns stumping forward with a stick
Near the abandoned palace: You be Antigone.
.....
That underlay the oracle:
Lauius, don't have a child;
''''
At the sight of the infant's gaze,
I was riveted, chosen, beguiled.

I knew what the oracle said.
And i rescued the child.
......

...
Oedipus' words come and go Ishould have died,
Generations veer, Collide.

i dunno, but for my money it's the best poem i've read written in the new century. My voice recognition program is being flaky, so i need to futz with it; but i'll include a few stanzas from the 10th section asap.

There is just so much going on..whether w/ ideas, references of prior poetry *Eliot esp, and playful yet serious handling of snippets of all sorts of poetic techniques.

One more, last one, i promise, by Schnackernberg. From her previous book, of the same title.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Supernatural Love

My father at the dictionary-stand
Touches the page to fully understand
The lamplit answer, tilting in his hand

His slowly scanning magnifying lens,
A blurry, glistening circle he suspends
Above the word "Carnation." Then he bends

So near his eyes are magnified and blurred,
One finger on the miniature word,
As if he touched a single key and heard

A distant, plucked, infinitesimal string,
"The obligation due to every thing
That's smaller than the universe." I bring

My sewing meedle close enough that I
Can watch my father through the needle's eye,
As through a lens ground for a butterfly

Who peers down flower-hallways toward a room
Shadowed and fathomed as this study's gloom
Where, as a scholar bends above a tomb

To read what's buried there, he bends to pore
Over the Latin blossom. I am four,
I spill my pins and needles on the floor

Trying to stitch "Beloved" X by X.
My dangerous, bright needle's point connects
Myself illiterate to this perfect text

I cannot read. My father puzzles why
It is my habit to identify
Carnations as "Christ's flowers," knowing I

Can give no explanation but "Because."
Word-roots blossom in speechless messages
The way the thread behind my sampler does

Where following each X I awkward move
My needle through the word whose root is love.
He reads, "A pink variety of Clove,

Carnatio, the Latin, meaning flesh."
As if the bud's essential oils brush
Christ's fragrance through the room, the iron-fresh

Odor carnations have floats up to me,
A drifted, secret, bitter ecstacy,
The stems squeak in my scissors, Child, it's me,

He turns the page to "Clove" and reads aloud:
"The clove, a spice, dried from a flower-bud."
Then twice, as if he hasn't understood,

He reads, "From the French, for clou, meaning a nail."
He gazes, motionless. "Meaning a nail."
The incarnation blossoms, flesh and nail,

I twist my threads like stems into a knot
And smooth "Beloved," but my needle caught
Withing the threads, Thy blood so dearly bought,

The needle strikes my finger to the bone.
I lift my hand, it is myself I've sewn,
The flesh laid bare, the threads of blood my own,

I lift my hand in startled agony
And call upon his name, "Daddy daddy"--
My father's hand touches the injury

As lightly as he toughed the page before,
Where incarnation bloomed from roots that bore
The flowers I called Christ's when I was four.
******
I prefer the throne of labdacus a bit more, but i really respect her technical skills and ability to pull off "tricks" w/ ease, and there's no doubt in my mind that this, too, is a first rate modern poem.
--------------
unrelated...but does Plath still carry the cachet she did when i was an undergrad? i disliked her "me me me" then and dislike it now. But. except for a little Robt Lowell, the whole confessional movement did v. little for me. I liked her ex husband (cad though he was) poems about Crow, a LOT more.

ok, well, that's definitely going on the wishlist at Amazon.

Thanks Bob for introducing me to this. I'm bowled over by it. The excerpts you have posted remind me somewhat of Geoffrey Hill or Christopher Logue, both of whose work I admire enormously. I like the personal element in the excerpts posted, something which is often lacking in the two men's work.

Bob, thanks for posting those. I, too, am bowled over and must read more.

As far as your question about Plath is concerned, my daughter is studying very seriously with heavy hitter professors at the University of Toronto. Poetry, and especially poetry by women is the concentration of a number of her profs. The current reaction to Plath among people like that is to dismiss her as very minor and pretty irrrelevant. Hughes, yes, Plath as a poet, no. Bell Jar reasonably interesting period piece, highlight of her output. I am fairly sure I am reporting that accurately.

#59 Plath vs Hughes: that was pretty much what I hoped the consensus was, but really had no idea. Thanks! I always thought Sara Teasdale had it all over Plath for some of the same virtues that Plath's poetry supposedly had. I know Teasdale is pretty minor, but a lot of her stuff is v. lovely and bleak.

And, of course ST got there way earlier (not to mention Emily Dickinson who was tougher minded by far than just about any 19th C poet).

My goodness, Bob, you have good taste :-)

I LOVE Emily Dickinson. I had Caesar Blake (one of the editors of the Norton Anthology) as prof who taught me Dickinson and I remember some of his lines about her 30 years later. Plath is not even in the same universe as Dickinson.

removed for an excessive degree of pomposity.

Bob - Schnackenberg has been added to my wishlist. Thanks so much for the excerpts.

As for Plath, well, I would rather read Elizabeth Bishop any day. Or just about anyone else, for that matter. BTW - I was in grad school in the early 90's, and even then Plath was considered a minor poet.

How interesting. I voiced the same opinion on my thread, and I was shot down in flames over the sea. I'm glad that readers on this thread are more discerning and less blinded by the Plath myth.

I always feel reading her that she needs a jolly good slap.

Murr,

I brought home an Auden collection from the library. Direct me, please.

which edition P? I need to know what's in it.

I have Which Side Am I Supposed to Be On?, O Where Are You Going, Something Is Bound to Happen, Petition, In Father's Footsteps, Look, Stranger, Paysage Moralise, Now the Leaves Are Falling, Who's Who, The Climbers, O Who Can Ever Gaze, In Time of War, Law Like Love, Lay Your Sleeping Head, Musee des Beaux Arts, Crisis, As I Walked Out One Evening, Let Me Tell You, Unknown Citizen, In Memory of Yeats, For the Time Being.

Well, I recommend you read them all, of course, but start with:
Paysage Moralise. It's a sestina, an old Italian verse form, in which the last words of each line are repeated (in different orders) throughout the poem. It's a hugely difficult form to do successfully in English, as it can get very repetitive. Written in 1933, quite early in Auden's career, I think it shows Auden at his most characteristic: moral, mordant, technically ambitious and successful, it has many of his chief concerns and images, especially the kind of doom-filled landscape and obsession with archaic or foreign verse forms.

Auden's favourite put-down was: "Oh go away and write a sestina."

Read Erin Belieu's collection One Above & One Below this evening - and will reread a couple more times. I found her voice very engaging; she's both stylistically and thematically willing to go all over the map. But she concentrates on place (the great plains) and family. She can be very funny in one poem and then the next be an sombre elegy for a long dead brother. My favorites (mostly) are poems that combine landscape with family history. For instance "Plainsong"

He lived in a sod house,
a formal nest of grass
that wove green thread
around his soul, a bed
of mud and cellulose.

And she was small. She
never grew; the empty
wind that blew and reared
had bent her to the plains she cared
so little for. But he,

he didn't seem to mind
her size, he'd found
a shape to love there;
and she was spare where
he was generous as sand, the kind

of man who drifted
like the yellow hills that lifted
their sloping shoulders to the bad
lands. For her his mud
heart tumbled like the tufted

weeds the wheel along the plains,
that sea of mammoth bones,
that state all made of sky-
they married in July,
Her thin bouquet of corn

flowers remains the brightest thing
he'd ever see. I have her ring
now, a silver band so little
it won't budge over the knuckle
on my pinky. How long

ago, a man gave his grass
soul to her in her brown dress-
and she was always stern,
too small, and learned
to keep inside a sod house.
----
but then, in an invocation to the poetic muse who could refuse to be invoked at the poet's will:
...
She's like the gorgeous dykes
who rule my health-club locker room,
who own their skin like landlords,
with bodies beautiful as doom.

Her bare tolerance is palpable
and patcholui-scented. ...

from "Timing is Everything."

Oh you people are so distracting. How am I supposed to get any work done?

well...i plan to go back to sleep. don't need to wake up to watch the tar heels not play.

lol.

Hey, what happened to that villanelle? I wanted to read it!

Let's do a villanelle thang. I was always under the impression that it was a rather rare form. I only know of 3 'modern' ones:
Dylan Thomas's
Elizabeth Bishop's

(I won't post these coz I know you all know 'em) and this one from Auden. It's from The Sea and the Mirror, his verse commentary on The Tempest, in which all the characters in the drama have their own poem in which the poetic form of the poem reflects something about the character. Each character speaks in their own voice. Miranda's poem is this villanelle:

My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely
as the poor and sad are real to the good king
and the high green hill sits always by the sea.

Up jumped the black man behind the elder tree
turned a somersault and ran away waving
my dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely.

The witch gave a squawk, her venomous body
melted into air as water leaves a spring
And the high green hill sits always by the sea.

By his crossroads too, the ancient prayed for me
Down his wasted cheeks tears of joy were running
my dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely.

He kissed me awake and noone was sorry:
The sun shone on sails, eyes, pebbles anything
And the high green hill sits always by the sea.

So to remember our changing garden
we are linked as children in a circle dancing
my dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely
And the high green hill sits always by the sea.

Leonard Cohen on the album Dear Heather set a poem called 'Villanelle for our Time' by F. R. Scott to music - another modern villanelle and well worth a look (and a listen).

Here's one I found online by that very minor poet Sylvia Plath

Mad Girl's Love Song

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary darkness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said.
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

and last night I suddenly remembered this one, also by Auden:

Time will say nothing but I told you so
Time only knows the price we have to pay
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show
if we should stumble when musicians play,
Time wil say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although
because I love you more than I can say
If I could tell you I would let you know

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow
there must be reasons why the leaves decay
time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow
the vision seriously intends to stay
If I could tell you I would let you know

Suppose the lions all get up and go
And all the brooks and soldiers run away:
Will time say nothing but I told you so?
IF I could tell you I would let you know.

that's my favourite. wow.

And here's the Scott one Tone mentioned:

From bitter searching of the heart,
Quickened with passion and with pain
We rise to play a greater part.

This is the faith from which we start:
Men shall know commonwealth again
From bitter searching of the heart.

We loved the easy and the smart,
But now, with keener hand and brain,
We rise to play a greater part.

The lesser loyalties depart,
And neither race nor creed remain
From bitter searching of the heart.

Not steering by the venal chart
That tricked the mass for private gain,
We rise to play a greater part.

Reshaping narrow law and art
Whose symbols are the millions slain,
From bitter searching of the heart
We rise to play a greater part.

Well...we've mentioned Kannon, Guan Yin, aka Kuan Yin. Another of my favorite modern poets is Laura Fargas. Her poems are both elegant and plain and often focus on close observation of nature and/or of "science." After i wrote to her, asking for permission to scan and put her photo up on LT author page, she mentioned that- "PS Anna Swir is fabulous! My favorite living poets are Linda Gregg, Jack Gilbert, and Bob Hass." . This poem is from a terrific collection An Animal of the Sixth Day, a book i've given to several friends.

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.

-----
i hope i haven't posted this poem earlier..i didn't see it scanning this thread.
(i've described myself as the world's least competent buddhist - but, all the same, my favorite "explanation" of the (Tibetan) buddhist world view is Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. ).

Bob, I hate to say this , especially as lots of Laura Fargas has been posted and mentioned in glowing terms, but it does nothing for me at all.

what am I missing?

i doubt you're missing anything. She IS sentimental and i am a sucker for sentiment as long as it's not "sugary" and she's not big on formal style. But, all the same, i find her calm, observational style very appealing. There's a set of American poets : Fargas, Stafford, Nye, whom i (obviously) like very much who share both similarity in style and subject matter. If, like Frost (and it was a shrewd observation on his part,though one my mother never tired of repeating to us kids) one sees free verse as the poetic equivalent of tennis w/out a net, then i doubt these folk's material would work. I left out AR Ammons in the trio above, who shares a lot of characteristics with them - he's the only one for whom i think one (i) could make a case for being a "great" poet - and that's largely because of his layered usages of metaphor/simile in attempts to create, for lack of a better work, "philosophical" body poetry of ideas. But wtf, i like all four a lot. And Ammons is the only one who really often requires effort, so it's much easier to share Fargas or Stafford than Ammons or Auden, esp. with friends who read very little poetry at all. Or even Shakespeare who (at least for me) requires multiple rereadings - but who produced the best sonnets in English in my never esp. humble opinion.

Just out of curiosity- my sense is that Will was a more consistently "great" poet than playwright? do others share that bias of mine? Maybe i should set up a poll. Shakespeare: poet/playwright (his best plays ARE among the best, but, at least from a lay perspective, he could turn out a few (comparatively speaking) clunkers. Albeit clunkers that are still somewhere in the upper echelons of English lit. In any event he's TOTALLY relevant today.

i'm pretty eclectic in my poetic likes and dislikes. Well, that's not altogether true - i dislike just about all beat poetry except for some of Ginsberg; but that's the closest to a school/genre of poetry and, really, "literature" that i pretty much blow off in toto. Opps.. the whole genre of confessional poetry of the 50s-60s leaves me cold. Hmmm. I'm not as open minded in my dislikes as i might like to think i am. But, in general, at least insofar as English language poetry goes, i pretty much both like and dislike poets w/in just about every major style/school/genre whathaveyou.

Where i'm woefully ignorant, in large part because of my ineptitude w/ foreign languages, are non-English language poets. There are a bunch i like a lot (Swir, Milocz, Szymborska, a bunch of Chinese poets, a fewer number of Japanese and Korean poets, Rilke (though he's about it for German poets for me,), I'm not wild about the French surrealists but again how much is problems in translations and my dislike of English language poets who attempted to emulate them, i can't say.) but i KNOW i'm missing something since i assume even the best translations can't catch everything.

(has anyone else posted Fargas here? i've mentioned her in several posts but i think this is the first poem of hers i've seen on this thread???)

I'll try another - from an American 19th C. author who's not usually thought of as a "poet."

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. I wish he'd written more poetry and less about whaling. He and Whitman produced brilliant poetry out of the detritus of the civil way.

(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)

two great posts, Bob. I enjoyed the Melville very much. (perhaps it was in another thread that I read some Fargas... I seem to be reading about her at every turn.)

Re Shax's sonnets, I agree to a certain extent, but I also think Keats is a strong contender for the best sonnets in English: The sonnet to sleep and When I have fears to be.... Other Elizabethan sonneteers who are also masters of the form include Sir Phillip Sydney and Michael Drayton:
Here is Drayton:

An evil spirit, your beauty haunts me still
Wherewith I have been long possessed
Which ceaseth not to tempt me to each ill
Nor leaves me once but one poor minutes rest.
In me it speaks whether I sleep or wake,
And when by means to drive it out I try,
To greater torments then it me doth take
and tortures me in most extremity.
Before my face it lays down my despairs
and hastes me on unto a sudden death
now temtping me to drown myself in tears,
now in sighing to give up my breath.
Thus am I still provoked to every evil
by this good wicked spirit, sweet angel devil.

I think it's hard to say about Shakespeare in performance: the best play can be turned into a nightmare by a bad production, and even the most marginal of his plays can be turned into something gripping by a good production.

Here's a cute poem from today's edition of The Writer's Almanac:

Teaching Poetry to 3rd Graders

by Gary Short

At recess a boy ran to me
with a pink rubber ball and asked
if I would kick it to him. He handed me the ball,
then turned and ran
and ran and ran, not turning back
until he was far out in the field.
I wasn't sure I could kick the ball
that far. But I tried,
launching a perfect and lucky kick.
The ball sailed in a beautiful arc
about eight stories high,
landed within a few feet of the 3rd grader
and took a big bounce off the hard playground dirt.
Pleased, I turned to enter the school building.
And then (I don't know where they came from
so quickly) I heard a rumbling behind me
full tilt. They were carrying pink balls and yellow balls
of different sizes, black and white checkered
soccer balls. They wanted me to kick for them.
And now this is a ritual—this is how we spend recess.
They stand in line, hand me the ball and run.
The balls rise like planets
and the 3rd graders
circle dizzily beneath the falling sky,
their arms outstretched.

"Teaching Poetry to 3rd Graders" by Gary Short, from 10 Moons and 13 Horses. © University of Nevada Press, 2004.

Oh, I love that. Thanks.

Five ways to celebrate National Poetry Month

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/afterword/archive/2009/03/31/five-ways-...

Patty generally prints off and puts up on the outside face of her office door a new poem every 2/3 days during April. I already have mine covered w/ maps.

#55: Does anybody read poetry anymore?

I'm happy to rethink my hatred of modern poetry if somebody can point me to a poet who:

--Is NOT simply writing free-verse confessionals
--Avoids excessively obscure or idiosyncratic references
--Does not do hokey things with typography (like e.e. cummings and his damn lower case)
--Fulfills the traditional role of poet or bard by trying to reflect the universal in the particular
flag abuse Post a message
read Yesterday, 12:06pm (top)Message 58: tomcatMurr

#55
'Hatred' of modern poetry? I say, I say old chap, you dreadful heathen!
Give me a definition of what you mean by modern please.

I am ferreting away here to come up with a list of poets for you who easily fulfil all your criteria. Are you thinking of English language poets only, or does your comment include poetry in translation?

You are about to be inundated my friend.

Aux Arms Les Amants de la Poesie!!!!
flag abuse Post a message
read Yesterday, 12:41pm (top)Message 59: polutropos
I will take up the call to arms.

I suspect Murr will inundate us with poets writing in English. I will then begin with four major poets who wrote in languages other than English and also, I believe, fulfill the criteria given above. I could go on at length about each of them, but I believe this is not the right place. The four are

Pablo Neruda
Octavio Paz
Czeslaw Milosz
Jaroslav Seifert

If this discussion proves of interest to people, we could begin a new thread for it.
flag abuse Post a message
read Yesterday, 4:46pm (top)Message 60: nohrt4me
Modern poetry? Let's say anything after Donne.

English only, please.

No "tortured souls" whose oeuvre consists mostly of working out personal addictions, sexual ambiguities and repressions, or depressions, in verse, please.

And no Little Mary Sunshines, either. Those dancing daffodils start to cloy.

tomcatMurr, let your ferreting begin. I'm eager to see what you come up with.

FWIW, I am old, but not a chappie, for which I thank my Maker each and every day.
flag abuse Post a message
read Yesterday, 8:00pm (top)Message 61: Talbin
>60 bobmcconnaughey: "Let's say anything after Donne."

Really??? Okay then, off the top of my head and very quickly. This won't include Shakespeare since he was a contemporary of Donne, and no 20th century poets. (Well, Yeats goes into the 20th century, I suppose, but he's a bit of a bridge poet.)

John Milton
Andrew Marvell
George Herbert
Alexander Pope
Christopher Smart
Samuel Coleridge
William Wordsworth
William Blake
John Keats
Robert Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Emily Dickinson
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Henry Longfellow
William Butler Yeats
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Since they're all pre-20th century, none of these are doing anything particularly confessional, most work in meter, some with rhyme. Most wrote pieces of varying lengths, from short sonnets to longer pieces (and Milton's Paradise Lost is an epic - and there's nothing "daffodil-y" about him, that's for sure).
Message edited by its author, Yesterday, 8:01pm.

flag abuse Post a message
read Today, 3:19am (top)Message 62: tomcatMurr

Good Talbin and Andrushka!,

here is a list of 20 century English poets that fulfill your criteria norht4me, more heavily weighted to British poets, as that's what I know best.

Auden
Joseph Brodsky
Derek Walcott
Douglas Dunn
Wendy Cope
Phillip Larkin
Dylan Thomas
Louis MacNiece
Stephen Spender
Cecil Day Lewis
John Betjeman
Stevie Smith
Geoffrey Hill
Christopher Logue
DH Lawrence ( a bit free verse this but still)
Edward Thomas
Edmund Blunden
Ted Hughes
Tony Harrison
Adrian Mitchell
Seamus Heaney
Grace Nichols
Elizabeth Bishop
Norman Cameron
Norman Douglas
BAsil Bunting
David Gascoygne
William Empson...

Golly, I could go on for ever... but I shall stop there. Can someone do contemporary American poets?

Most of the poets above have at least three of your criteria, many have them all. Obscurity is in the mind of the beholder anyway.
flag abuse Post a message
read Today, 7:28am (top)Message 63: dukedom_enough
by the late Tom Disch:

A Centenary Observation

I was young once – so were you.
Youth is when we think we’ll do
Wonders someday. That day comes
With remainders more than sums.
You were young once – so was I.
That can make me want to cry
For all we’ve lost. But that’s okay:
While the sun shined we made hay.
He was young once – weren’t we all?
Now it’s his centennial,
And every word he wrote is Writ,
His very postcards English Lit.
The moral of this? That life is brief,
The laurel a most belated leaf,
And youth a wine that doesn’t keep.
Before it sours, lads, drink deep.

Warning, PDF catalog at link. Thought it OK to quote, since people might not know Disch, and it's quoted in the catalog. A bit uncharacteristic of him. Published in the mid-1990s, which lets you guess whose centennial this is about.
flag abuse Post a message
read Today, 8:21am (top)Message 64: nohrt4me
OK, let's be clear:

#63, I read poetry after Donne, including all the folks in your list, most of whom leave me cold, especially Milton. As a papist, I'm obliged to despise his theology, though I'll grant he had a way with words.

I don't like the Romantics for the most part (though "Intimations of Immortality" is possibly one of the best things I've ever read, hands down).

I like Browning's monologue poems ("My Last Duchess" and "Fra Lippo LIppi").

Emily Dickinson is tolerable in small doses, though she was somewhat ruined for me when Garrison Keillor observed that "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" could be sung to "Ghost Riders in the Sky." Not her fault, of course.

#62, now we're getting somewhere with some poets I might be willing to try, having scratched Dylan Thomas, D.H. Lawrence and Ted Hughes right from the git-go as either too lugubrious or too horny.

I like the War Poets, and would add Wilfrid Owen, whom I taught to freshman English students with some success.

I like Seamus Heaney's poem about St. Kevin, but I am not ready to forgive him for the ruffles and flourishes he added to the "Beowulf" translation, I don't care what the critics said.

#63, thanks for that. A sense of humor in a poet is always nice: "His very postcards English Lit." Though it's not a terribly deep observation, is it.

When you find a good poem, it does something to your brain. It seems to focus your concentration, force you into a whole other consciousness. I don't want to get too airy-fairy about that, but I admit I sometimes miss reading at that level.
flag abuse Post a message
read Today, 9:01am (top)Message 65: bobmcconnaughey
OK - this assumes a little patience, a little knowledge of the history of WWI and REALLY belongs in what are you reading now:
1. from the first yr of the year, Rupert Brooke: Read by Dean Ing @ the first major memorial during the war in 1915, when "honor..and the war's ending, both seemed plausible.

(Brooke & Owen and Sassoon)were both "upper crust" and officers - The first sees the Great War in terms of empire - no matter where one dies - England's there, as the sun never sets, etc. Honor and other themes apply.

The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
----
2nd - Wilfred Owen (for space i'll pass over Sassoon).
Futility

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved,—still warm,—too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

delicately bitter and - umm-- a hell of a sonnet.
_______________________________
Issac Rosenberg - written 1918. He came from Russian immigrant parents to London, lived in the Jewish "ghetto" of East London, enlisted & served as a private, refused promotion (pretty much on political/class grounds), died in combat (as did Brooke & Owen..tho not Sassoon).

BREAK OF DAY IN THE TRENCHES by ISAAC ROSENBERG

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old Druid Time as ever.
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems, odd thing, you grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurl'd through still heavens?
What quaver---what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping,
But mine in my ear is safe---
Just a little white with the dust.

(reminds me of the Beatles "A day in the life")
---------------------------------
It's all observed - irony, futility, even beauty. Rosenberg was physically unsuited - sickly, tiny but insisted on enlisting and died in bayonet combat just a few months before the war ended.
The passing of time/expectations/glory and (esp. w/ Owen & Rosenberg) brilliantly bitter - not just or even disillusionment, but - the pointlessness and Futility of the war which ended up in the trenches w/ incredibly high casualty rate to gain a yard or two of ground can all be found - more elegantly and concisely than in any history text. Compare/contrast w/ The Charge of the Light Brigade about an episode in the Crimean War

For further consideration Brooke (Yeats called him the "handsomest man in England), Sassoon and Owen were all gay. Don't ask/don't tell/just serve.
There's also Robt Graves - though a lot of his poems aren't specifically WWI poems.

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collecti...
For a very modern poem that works w/ multiple forms brilliantly - looks at the excerpt from the "Thone of Labdacus" in the what are you reading now..poetry thread. For a v. moving examination of the American civil war by a major US author - see "Shiloh" by Melville in the same thread.

Modern verse isn't limited to the whining of the confessional school - though i'll have to reread Ariel before being so dismissive. For intellectual rigour, it's hard to touch AR Ammons. Supernatural Love - also by Schnackenberg - is also outstanding.

And some poetry is really "declamatory" - "Howl" lies half-dead on the page - hearing/watching it read by Ginsberg brings it totally alive (the only beat poet or novelist who's stood my test of time).
(i thought of this particular seq. last night but was too tired to post it..so didn't look to see the prior post. I'll go w/ American WWII poets (james tate) next..no, don't worry, i'll pass)
Message edited by its author, Today, 9:11am.

flag abuse Post a message
unread Today, 9:11am (top)Message 66: Talbin
>64 tomcatMurr: "I read poetry after Donne, including all the folks in your list, most of whom leave me cold, especially Milton.

Given your previous posts, especially since you clearly stated "anything after Donne", there was no way for me to know this. I feel a bit foolish now - I've obviously stated the obvious - so please forgive me if I bow out of the discussion.
flag abuse Post a message
unread Today, 9:18am (top)Message 67: avaland
>might I suggest moving this conversation over to either 1. nohrt's thread 2. the poetry thread OR... 3. the "new" virtual book gifting thread which will leave this thread clear to continue with its original purpose (but the latter requires specific titles...).
flag abuse Post a message
unread Today, 9:26am (top)Message 68: nohrt4me
What treasures above, some old favorites, but had not heard of Rosenberg: "just a little white with dust."

My great-uncle served in an ambulance corps during WWI. He was old (in his 30s) when he volunteered, and ended up working in a makeshift mortuary in a monastery in Belgium.

Soldiers were sent to him for R&R (if you can imagine). He said the first thing he did was give them a pocketful of money and send them into town to get blind drunk.

Once they'd sobered up somewhat, he kept them in a kind of controlled state of tipsiness until they could deal with the reality of the work they were doing.

He was very proud that in his unit none of the corpses were robbed. He said that men went to war carrying keepsakes from home--rings, lockets, etc.--and that when men were paid, they had nowhere to spend the money, so they often had big wads of cash.

These were all wrapped and boxed carefully and sealed and sent home with the bodies.

My grandfather and several uncles also served in WWI and saw action in the trenches. I think now we'd say they all lived with vestiges of PTSD. None of them could or would talk about what they saw.

Agree that "Howl" is a thing of the ear; I think NPR has a recording of Ginsberg reading this in its archive. I'll check and edit if I can find the link.

Yup, here it is; link to the reading is under the story proper.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story...

Reminds me I always sorta liked Ferlinghetti. I think he wrote "Tyrannus Nix" about Nixon, but memory may be fuzzy there.
Message edited by its author, Today, 9:39am.

flag abuse Post a message

how could I have forgotten the war poets. Isaac Rosenburg is my favourite of the bunch, often overshadowed by Owen et al.

That's an amazing story, nohrt4me. That generation have all but disappeared now, alas.

this is VERY tangential...but PTSD sometimes doesn't manifest until old age. A good friend's uncle, who served w/ the marines in the Pacific during wwII, had pretty much put it all behind him. Until he got over 80+ when both his mind stopped working as well and his dreams - and then some of his waking hours - were filled w/ battle scenes from the island jungles. Evidently the same is true of elderly holocaust survivors - they end up in a rest home and become convinced they are back in Auschwitz. I've often wondered how the guys in the band i was in ~ 1973-75 - all of whom but I were Vietnam grunt vets - have handled getting older. The only "end point" i know was that guitarist immolated himself after i'd quit and gone back to school - rather in the fashion of the protesting Vietnamese monks ~ 76.

>89 tomcatMurr: I think we lost nohrt. Sigh. And such an interesting conversation.

>90 bobmcconnaughey: Don't you think that dementia oftentimes releases inhibitions? I would say that is/was true of my mother (who is 90).

I'm really looking forward to getting back into this thread in a few days when my project is turned in.

i don't think there's any question about dementia releasing inhibitions. I don't know any neurologists - but i'm sure there are specific areas in the brain that control self-control - and if those get damaged then the person is liable to blurt out whatever's on their mind sans prior thought.

Our son's living @ and working in a half-way house where 8 guys who've suffered severe brain trauma are living (a former convent!) and Adam's commented on some of those in his purview behaving/talking w/out any self-censoring. After living/working there for ~1.5 yrs, 3 "rules" became obvious:1. Don't ride motorcycles;2. if you RIDE a motorcycle wear a helmet; and 3. if you attempt suicide - make sure you succeed.

At the moment, i'm merely at the point where i can't remember items/words that I KNOW i know - and sometime in the next 24-48 hrs the correct word will pop up long after i wanted it.

I am confused. Is there a missing message? Murr's long rant didn't entirely make sense. To whom are you responding? Help.

Urania, do not panic, # 88 is an anthology of posts from various people which I copied from another thread and moved here...

Ancient history, as in the meantime, for some unexplained reason, we lost norht4me.

btw..esp. if one has youngish kids, i'll recommend a couple of Randall Jarrell's books, Fly By Night and The bat poet. Both are stories infused w/ poetry. (and, in the Bat poet, w/ criticism by a snarky mockingbird). Both books have terrific illustrations by Sendak.

A shadow is floating through the moonlight
Its wings don't make a sound.
Its claws are long, its beak is bright.
Its eyes try all the corners of the night.

It calls and calls: all the air swells and heaves
And washes up and down like water.
The ear that listens to the owl believes
In death. The bat beneath the eaves,

The mouse beside the stone are still as death-
The owl's air washes them lite water.
The owl goes back and forth inside the night.
And the night holds its breath

I just came across this:

Thy soul shall find itself alone
'Mid dark thoughts of the grey tomb-stone;
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy.

Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness- for then
The spirits of the dead, who stood
In life before thee, are again
In death around thee, and their will
Shall overshadow thee; be still.

I think I have to ponder it.

#95 - We read some fairly grim poetry to Adam when he was very young - "the ear that listens to the owl believes/ in death" (the bat poet ALSO has much good humor in it as well). No harm done (as best we can tell).

>96 polutropos: Andrushka,

The author?

#96, 98

Edgar Allan Poe

A new Library of America title which might appeal to some:

Poems from the Women's Movement

I Shall not Care; Sara Teasdale

When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Tho' you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.

I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough,
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now

As we're on something of a classic(al) death trip. I liked the Poe a good deal.
first my dad read this to us as kids and then Tom Rapp/Pearls before Swine set it to a lovely melody - so i do have this one memorized. Melody helps!@ As does brevity.

Is anyone familiar with/appreciative of Carol Ann Duffy? She sounds potentially interesting but at the moment is of course sold out everywhere. Presumably a major republishing is just around the corner. Her World's Wife has an intriguing review: These inventive, metaphorically precise poems offer much more, however, than just a recovery of the historical voice of her (supposedly) silenced indoors. Duffy dexterously rewrites Judao-Christian and classical mythologies, subverts fairytale and zestfully reinterprets the more modern myths of Darwin and Freud. Humour is the abundant keynote of this accessible collection.

This is the title poem from Deborah Digges book Trapeze
Trapeze

See how the first dark takes the city in its arms
and carries it into what yesterday we called the future.

O, the dying are such acrobats.
Here you must take a boat from one day to the next,

or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand.
But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening,

diving, recovering, balancing the air,
Who can tell at this hour sea birds from starlings,

wind from revolving doors or currents off the river.
Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher.

Don't call them back, don't call them in for supper.
See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky.

Deborah Digges

I've been bemused and engaged by a slim volume of poems(?) written by the American writer Catherine Sasanov, mostly in the 90s it seems and mostly set in Brazil (where she lived for a good while) and Mexico. A very sharp and cutting Christianity informs her often sharply political works. I'm not even sure if these are poetry - they're more like keenly honed koans - but i do find the lines attractive. Most of her poems in traditions of bread and violence are brief, page long, short lined, lyrics(?). A few bits of poems, themselves short, display her slant, which i find so appealing, whatever they "are":

From Exvotos: El Senor de los Milagros Church

"Each cured infirmity's / a charm pinned/ to Christs's sacred heart.

But what prayers reach heaven/ in a sky filled/ with satellites? each wish

deflected from God/breaks simultaneously/onto every TV.

From "News" (from Brazil)
"This confused country/ is no postcard. Its cities scatter
At the feet/of censors, location/ razor-bladed out of/
letter after letter_/sad confetti without context/waiting to ticker tape a war's end.

Who can we trust?/ Each night in America,/ the man paid to announce/
Our sorrow/ is a man who obliterates/his birthplace from his voice.

lastly,from "Among the Descending Angels"

angles scattering like
a flock of birds,
shadowing our every move.
Guardian, where do you

fit intothis scene?
Crawling over the rubble of heaven,
two women
haul their God off the dead.

The heart of Jesus
softened by blood
breaks in a hundred pieces --

mortal, mortal love.

Every stone turned over
bears a fragment of saint, wing,
cloud,sky

Heaven embedded in flesh.
Heaven leaving each body

Unrecognizable.

a good elf over on the facebook William Stafford group posted one of his poems that i'd been looking for for ages now - ever since i lost the anthology that included it many years ago. Couldn't find it in my 3 collections of Stafford's verse.
---------------

One Time

When evening had flowed between houses
and paused on the schoolground, I met
Hilary's blind little sister following
the grey smooth railing still warm from the sun
with her hand; and she stood by the edge
holding her face upward waiting
while the last light found her check
and her hair, and then on over the trees.

You could hear the great sprinkler arm
of water find and then leave the pavement,
and pigeons telling each other their dreams
or the dreams they would have. We were
deep in the well of shadow by then, and I
held out my hand, saying, "Tina , it's me --
Hilary says I should tell you it's dark,
and, oh, Tina, it is. Together now--"

And I reached, our hands touched,
and we found our way home.

William Stafford
The Way It Is

Soliloquy in the Waves

Yes, but here I am alone.
A wave
builds up,
perhaps it says its name, I don't understand,
it mutters, humps in its load
of movement and foam
and withdraws. Who
can I ask what it said to me?
Who among the waves
can I name?
And I wait.
Once again the clearness approached,
the soft numbers
rose in foam
and I didn't know what to call them.
So they whispered away,
seeped into the mouth of the sand.
Time obliterated all lips
with the patience
of shadow and
the orange kiss
of summer.
I stayed alone,
unable to respond to what the world
was obviously offering me,
listening to
that richness spreading itself,
the mysterious grapes
of salt, love unknown,
and in the fading day
only a rumor remained,
further away each time,
until everything that was able to
changed itself into silence.

Pablo Neruda

NPR has just put out their recommendations for summer reading. One of the books suggested sounds great. Has anyone come across it?

Sonata Mulattica, by Rita Dove. Hardcover, 224 pages, Norton. List Price: $24.95

And brava, too, for former Poet Laureate Rita Dove's Sonata Mulattica, a book-length group of poems about the life of George Polgreen Bridgetower, an African-European who played violin with Beethoven and then had a falling out with the great man over a woman. Dove tries to get under the skin of this unique and compelling character in a series of smart — sometimes even smart-aleck — musical verses.

>104 bobmcconnaughey: don't like that at all. Why are Christians so obsessed with Christ's blood? It's quite frankly repulsive.

P, thanks for the Dove recommendation. I have never heard of this character, and he sounds fascinating.

#107: I saw this in the poetry section at City Lights Books, but I didn't pick it up then...

#108

The poems in #104 reflect the culture of Mexico & Latin America. Their tradition is different from "Western" tradition, though the beliefs are the same, they have different ways of expressing them.

Sure, but I still find it repulsive.

actually i think it's more of a Catholic thing - Protestants have been working hard for centuries in an effort to make Christianity more...ummm tidy and clean. To the point where many American evangelicals evidently have daily chats w/ Jesus who reassures them that it's quite alright to bomb infidels, gays, abortion clinics etc. (rhetorical excess noted).

Esp. in Latin America, Catholic missionaries ended up creating an even more baroque syncretic (sp) religion than traditional Euro-Catholicism.

Conceptually, it's totally beyond my meager faux buddhist world view - but no more repulsive than material out of, say, Antigone.
..
'booth beat boldly with his big bass drum/
are you washed in the blood of the lamb?"
sorry, couldn't resist a bit of classic American doggerel by way of Vachel Lindsay.

i really don't mean to kill threads when i attempt a mild essay vaguely towards sardonic humor. Apologies. But thank you MarianV - it's another perspective on familiar themes (i hoped)

I was just introduced to the work of Mark Doty. I obviously should have come across him before, because he has won everything under the sun, including the 2008 NBA. Here are some comments on him:

“If it were mine to invent the poet to complete the century of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, I would create Mark Doty just as he is, a maker of big, risky, fearless poems in which ordinary human experience becomes music.” — Philip Levine

“With his clarity of vision and great heart, Doty stands among us an emblematic and shining presence.” —Stanley Kunitz

“A new book of poems—or of anything—by Mark Doty is good news in a dark time. The precision, daring, scope, elegance of his compassion and of the language in which he embodies it are a reassuring pleasure.” —W. S. Merwin

I will post a sample poem later, if I can rip the collection out of my daughter's hands long enough.

i have an older collection of Doty's, Atlantis, that's v. good. circa 1995

The Willow Grove poems by Laurie Sheck

I found this small book at a used book place, & I had never heard of this poet. She writes on familiar themes, Spring, walking, poppies, yet her nature poems do not move me the way Mary Oliver & Ted Kooser's poems do.
However, she does have some good ones about technology & the modern world - here is part of a poem called "Voltage"
" ...So it goes on, this tape or that tape clicking into place,
traffic lights changing on schedule,
A child standing with crumpled petals in her hand.
Someone sings from the bottom of the hill,

Their words too far off to understand.
A child unwraps a lantern from blue paper.
I can dial the weather or the time,
I can ask for numbers I won't call.
Damage is so quiet. The sparrow draqs its crooked wing
and doesn't cry..."

Tiara

by Mark Doty

Peter died in a paper tiara
cut from a book of princess paper dolls;
he loved royalty, sashes

and jewels. I don’t know,
he said, when he woke in the hospice,
I was watching the Bette Davis film festival

on Channel 57 and then—
At the wake, the tension broke
when someone guessed

the casket closed because
he was in there in a big wig
and heels, and someone said,

You know he’s always late,
he probably isn’t here yet—
he’s still fixing his makeup.

And someone said he asked for it.
Asked for it—
when all he did was go down

into the salt tide
of wanting as much as he wanted,
giving himself over so drunk

or stoned it almost didn’t matter who,
though they were beautiful,
stampeding into him in the simple,

ravishing music of their hurry.
I think heaven is perfect stasis
poised over the realms of desire,

where dreaming and waking men lie
on the grass while wet horses
roam among them, huge fragments

of the music we die into
in the body’s paradise.
Sometimes we wake not knowing

how we came to lie here,
or who has crowned us with these temporary,
precious stones. And given

the world’s perfectly turned shoulders,
the deep hollows blued by longing,
given the irreplaceable silk

of horses rippling in orchards,
fruit thundering and chiming down,
given the ordinary marvels of form

and gravity, what could he do,
what could any of us ever do
but ask for it.

That says more than the blurbs, and its good -- god I hate blurbs.

Lovers of poetry might be interested in the Seifert poem newly posted on my thread.

From a collection of WWI poetry i just picked up from Daedalus. (along w/ new books by Donald Hall, Rodney Jones, Jay Parini, and, w/ great hopes, nameless flowers by Gu Cheng, maybe my favorite modern Chinese poet. But back to WWI - just read one by Issac Rosenberg I hadn't read previously.

Returning, We Hear the Larks

Sombre the night is.
And though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lies there.

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp -
On a little safe sleep.

But hark! joy - joy - strange joy.
Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.
Music showering our upturned list’ning faces.

Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song -
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides,
Like a girl’s dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides.
....
and a verse from the POV of young WWI Aussie war widow.

'This is the bitterest wrong the world wide,
That young men on the battlefield should rot,
And I be widowed who was scarce a bride,
While prattling old men sit at ease and plot'

Nina Murdoch, Australia, *not autobiographical
not "great" but moving, nonetheless.

Risks - Rodney Jones

I had not known how dangerous the country was
until he gunned it, downshifted into third,
and split the seam between the station wagon
Going east and the tractor trailer going west....

You son of a bitch Jimmy, stop this thing, let me out--
We were going to college, we would be something,
And nothing like him, married, a dad at seventeen,
Though later when we talked, it would be of him.

(a couple of stanzas from a longer poem. Jones is an American poet from the Southeast, home of, sigh, NASCAR, and not that many poets write about reckless driving.

A Generation - Gu Cheng

the black night gave me black eyes
still I use them to seek the light.
---------------------
Far and Near - Gu Cheng

you
look at me
then look at the clouds

I feel when you look at me you're far away
when you look at the clouds you're near.
--------------------

from Say no more, I'll not Submit.

Though I need freedom
like a blade of grass
needs to move the stone that's on it,
like a sunflower demands its crown,
I need the sky.
a field of breeze-washed blue,
to buoy my poems abroad
like waves
bearing fruit.

Say no more,
I'll not submit. (1980)
--------------
from nameless flowers
tr. Aaron Crippen

Gu Cheng began writing poetry in concert with his father - a well known novelist - who was "re-educated," along w/ his family, during the cultural revolution. One of the first of the "misty" poets, often writing opaquely and allusively, in part perhaps as a means of not being overtly "counter-revolutionary" in the era of the fledgling pro-democracy mvt of the late 70s ending in the Tiananmen Sq protests and crackdown 10 yrs later. Gu Cheng had moved to New Zealand w/ his wife in 1987 - 6 yrs later he nearly killed his wife and killed himself - age 37.

In various anthologies i have some of the same poems translated differently. But have no way of judging which translations are "best." A web site by another of his translators discusses some of the personal and literary "issues" - sorry, couldn't think of a better word just now - that informed his poetry.
----
A translation by Joseph Allen of the first poem:

Even with these dark eyes, a gift of the dark night
I go to seek the shining light

黑夜給了我黑色的眼睛
我卻用它尋找光明

http://www.cipherjournal.com/html/allen_gu_cheng.html

Garrison Keillor's new collection Good Poems for Hard Times
One of the best things about this collection is its variety, Sharon Olds, Robert Frost, Ted
Kooser, Robert Burns, Longfellow...
These are not poems to comfort, but rather" poems that are bracing, bold, clear writing"
Many have aappeared in the Writer's Almanac that features a poem every day.

In yesterday's 2nd hour of the Diane Rehm show, both Billy Collins and Donald Hall agreed that Garrison Keillor has done more to effectively get poetry out into the public than any other single person. They agreed that he's very good at letting the poem speak for itself, rather than trying to impose a "reading." I'll have to check his poem a day gig out - i've not heard him yet.