neglected poets

[quasimodo1]

.........................When we depart and when we return;
When we plant and when we harvest.
Let us bring up our children. It is not
the place of some official to hand to them
their heritage.
If others impart to our children our knowledge
and ideals, they will lose all of us that is
wordless and full of wonder.
Let us build memories in our children,
lest they drag out joyless lives,
lest they allow treasures to be lost because
they have not been given the keys.
We live, not by things, but by the meanings
of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords
from generation to generation.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery {last part of this poem}

[firefangled]

In Nature There Is Neither Right nor Left nor Wrong


Men are what they do, women are what they are.
These erect breasts, like marble coming up for air
Among the cataracts of my breathtaking hair,
Are goods in my bazaar, a door ajar
To the first paradise of whores and mothers.

Men buy their way back into me from the upright
Right-handed puzzle that men fit together
From their deeds, the pieces. Women shoot from
Or dive back into its interstices
As squirrels inhabit geometry.

We women sell ourselves for sleep, for flesh,
To those wide-awake, successful spirits, men —
Who, lying each midnight with their sinister
Beings, their dark companions, women,
Suck childhood, breasthood, from a mother’s breasts.

A fat bald rich man comes home at twilight
And lectures me about my parking tickets; gowned in gold
Lamé, I look at him and think: “You’re old,
I’m old.” Husband, I sleep with you every night
and like it; but each morning when I wake
I’ve dreamed of my first love, the subtle serpent.

[mazHur]

In Nature There Is Neither Right nor Left nor Wrong


Men are what they do, women are what they are.
These erect breasts, like marble coming up for air
Among the cataracts of my breathtaking hair,
Are goods in my bazaar, a door ajar
To the first paradise of whores and mothers.

Men buy their way back into me from the upright
Right-handed puzzle that men fit together
From their deeds, the pieces. Women shoot from
Or dive back into its interstices
As squirrels inhabit geometry.

We women sell ourselves for sleep, for flesh,
To those wide-awake, successful spirits, men —
Who, lying each midnight with their sinister
Beings, their dark companions, women,
Suck childhood, breasthood, from a mother’s breasts.

A fat bald rich man comes home at twilight
And lectures me about my parking tickets; gowned in gold
Lamé, I look at him and think: “You’re old,
I’m old.” Husband, I sleep with you every night
and like it; but each morning when I wake
I’ve dreamed of my first love, the subtle serpent.

Really nice poem but why only blame men?

SANA KHWAN-E-TAQDEES-E-MASHRIQ KAHAN HIEN ?
(Where are the eulogists of the East?)

Infact this is a universal problem everywhere !

[quasimodo1]

Lions and Ants

ONCE a hunter met a lion near the hungry critter's lair, and the way that lion mauled him was decidedly unfair; but the hunter never whimpered when the surgeons, with their thread, sewed up forty-seven gashes in his mutilated head; and he showed the scars in triumph, and they gave him pleasant fame, and he always blessed the lion that had camped upon his frame. Once that hunter, absent minded, sat upon a hill of ants, and about a million bit him, and you should have seen him dance! And he used up lots of language of a deep magenta tint, and aphostrophized the insects in a style unfit to print. And it's thus with worldly troubles; when the big ones come along, we serenely go to meet them, feeling valiant, bold and strong, but the weary little worries with their poisoned stings and smarts, put the lid upon our courage, make us gray, and break our hearts.

by Walt Mason {I'm not sure if this was supposed to be a prose poem, but this is the way it was presented} quasi

[quasimodo1]

THE MAN BORN TO FARMING



The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,

whose hands reach into the ground and sprout

to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death

yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down

in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.

His thought passes along the row ends like a mole. ..........

{from Farming: A Handbook, 1970, excerpt by Wendell Berry}

[firefangled]

I Took Off Petal After Petal

I took off petal after petal, as if you were a rose,
in order to see your soul,
and I didn't see it.

However, everything around -
horizons of fields and oceans -
everything, even what was infinite,
was filled with a perfume,
immense and living.

[quasimodo1]

Self

Through work we define ourselves, and upon our work we leave our image. It is part of who we are, and who we shall become.
One of Juan Ramón's best-known works in progress was his I, his public self. Over the years, in a series of vignettes and aphorisms (like the ones on the following pages), he portrayed himself as god, as nature, as his own disciple and master; in short, as a sufficient, alternate universe.
Like his poetry, that I, that public ego, was in a constant state of revision. In his earliest poses for the photographer, one sees the sad, dark eyes of a self- declared "martyr of Beauty," a "precision instrument for thinking and feeling." The well-trimmed beard and careful, elegant attire suggest a master of perfection: "My kingdom lles in the difficult." His look could be sharp and fastidious, and one or two of the photos might have been inscribed with the aphorism "Let us cultivate, before all else, the art of rejection!" On an imaginary calling card--one of many he handed to posterity--he engraved the words

{since firefangled chose this poet...a bit of backround, quasi}

[firefangled]

Oceans

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing...Silence...Waves...

-Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?


{thanks, quasi. an earlier poem I posted by Lorca was typical of his debt to Jimenez. Many of Lorcas early poems were modeled after Jimenez's style. }

[quasimodo1]

WHERE'S THE POET?
Where's the Poet? show him! show him,
Muses nine! that I may know him.
'Tis the man who with a man
Is an equal, be he King,
Or poorest of the beggar-clan
Or any other wonderous thing
A man may be 'twixt ape and Plato;
'Tis the man who with a bird,
Wren or Eagle, finds his way to
All its instincts; he hath heard
The Lion's roaring, and can tell
What his horny throat expresseth,
And to him the Tiger's yell
Come articulate and presseth
Or his ear like mother-tongue.
{it's a stretch to consider Keats neglected, except maybe by the plethora of colleges for whom a liberal arts major has become an endagered species}

[quasimodo1]

Robert Frost in The Atlantic Monthly January 31, 2006
An Atlantic editor snubs a poet and lives to regret it


The First Three Poems and One That Got Away



Sometime in 1912, before Robert Frost made his famous leap to "live under thatch" in England, where he would become known as a poet, he sent some of his poems to Ellery Sedgwick, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and in due course received a personal reply that read, "We are sorry that we have no place in The Atlantic Monthly for your vigorous verse." Frost's submission included some of his finest early poems — "Reluctance," for example.




Sedgwick's ambiguous snub rankled in Frost's memory. During the two and a half years he lived in England his first two books of poetry, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), were published there, though not yet in the United States. Thanks partly to Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine, Frost's poems were hailed in advance of U.S. publication as representing a new American voice. In February, 1915, North of Boston was published in New York, just as the Frost family set foot back in the United States.
{a poet neglected no longer}

[quasimodo1]

A SENSE OF HUMOR


No man should stand before the moon
To make sweet song thereon,
With dandified importance,
His sense of humor gone.

Nay, let us don the motley cap,
The jester's chastened mien,
If we would woo that looking-glass
And see what should be seen.

O mirror on fair Heaven's wall,
We find there what we bring.
So, let us smile in honest part
And deck our souls and sing.

Yea, by the chastened jest alone
Will ghosts and terrors pass,
And fays, or suchlike friendly things,
Throw kisses through the glass.

by Vachel Lindsay