Favorite contemporary poets?

[metaxy99]

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Unlike some people, I think that there are a lot of incredible poets writing today.

So, I'd like to know who your favorite contemporary poets are - people writing in the last 25 years.

Even though she's not my very favorite, I have a feeling my favorites will all be mentioned sooner or later, so I'll propose Joy Harjo.

This is part of her poem She Had Some Horses (pub.1883):

Night Out

I have seen you in the palms of my hands
late nights in the bar
just before the lights
are about to be turned on. You are powerful horses
by then, not the wrinkled sacks of thin, mewing
spirit,
that lay about the bar early in the day
waiting for minds and bellies.
You are the ones who slapped Anna on the back,
told her to drink up
that it didn’t matter anyway.
You poured Jessie another Coors, and another one
and another.
Your fingers were tight around hers
because she gave herself to you.
Your voice screamed out from somewhere in the
darkness
another shot, anything to celebrate this deadly
thing called living. And Joe John called out to bring
another round, to have another smoke, to dance dance it good
because tomorrow night is another year -



....

[mono]

Difficult to say, and even more difficult to narrow down my favorite poems by my favorite contemporary poets. I would have to list, in no specific order:
William Stafford
Theodore Roethke
Raymond Carver
Maya Angelou
Sharon Olds

[metaxy99]

Thanks mono. Good choices. I really like Sharon Olds. Like Roethke too, though it might be a little bit of a stretch to call him contemporary (d.1963). Saw your selection of Raymond Carver's poems for baddad, and those are very nice.
I always wanted to like William Stafford, but he usually leaves me disappointed. For me, his poems strain too hard at contemplation, and too many of his lines just clank against the ear.

I would say my favorite favorite conemtporay poets are Robert Hass,
Jorie Graham, Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde.
Then I'd say Joy Harjo, Denis Johnson, and Sharon Olds.
Then Luise Gluck, Robert Pinsky, and Denise Levertov.

[Jack_Aubrey]

Jeff Tweedy.

[metaxy99]

of wilco? alright, i'll check that out.

[Jack_Aubrey]

Yeah of Wilco, wow you're a cool dude. Check out A Ghost is Born which is the latest Wilco record. He also has a poetry book called Adult Head that's out.

[Bix12]

Best contemporary poets? I love the Beat Poets...an aquired taste, maybe, nonetheless, some of it is fantastic stuff. I was reading someone slamming Burroughs somewhere in one of these threads. I suppose I can see how one might think that sort of stuff is trash, especially someone brought up with, or educated in, the classics. Fortunately for me, I can appreciate the new, as well as the old.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an outstanding poet. He's also the founder of City Lights, a San Francisco-based arts magazine, and he's also responsible for getting so many new poets published. Here's part of one of my favorite poems by Ferlinghetti:


Constantly Risking Absurdity


Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams


....

defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

[Bix12]

Charles Bukowski lived a very hard life, from the daily beatings his father administered to him as a child, to his life as an adult fighting a losing battle against alchoholism. Although he was loved by more than one "good" woman, he never considered himself worthy of that love, and subsequently felt more at ease in the company of the jaded, and indifferent prostitutes he often frequented. His poetry exhibits a rawness that, at first glance, appears no more than merely cold & harsh...but for me, Bukowski's work holds it's own unique beauty. Here's part of one of my favorites:


THE BLACKBIRDS ARE ROUGH TODAY


lonely as a dry and used orchard
spread over the earth
for use and surrender.

shot down like an ex-pug selling
dailies on the corner.


taken by tears like
an aging chorus girl
who has gotten her last check.

....


don't be ashamed of
anything; I guess God meant it all
like
locks on
doors.


Charles Bukowski

[uranderson]

Here is part of one by Levis, from Winter Stars:

********************
The Poet at Seventeen
by Larry Levis


My youth? I hear it mostly in the long, volleying
Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where
I spent it all, extravagantly, believing
My delicate touch on a cue would last for years.


Outside the vineyards vanished under rain,
And the trees held still or seemed to hold their breath
When the men I worked with, pruning orchards, sang
Their lost songs: Amapola; La Paloma;

....


The trees, wearing their mysterious yellow sullenness
Like party dresses. And parties I didn’t attend.
And then the first ice hung like spider lattices
Or the embroideries of Great Aunt No One,


And then the first dark entering the trees—
And inside, the adults with their cocktails before dinner,
The way they always seemed afraid of something,
And sat so rigidly, although the land was theirs.

***********

This is a good poem, but not one of my favorites, I can't find the text of many online and they're generally too long to type.

He published 5 books I believe (one more came out posthmously), the last three are the best in my opinion. The best way to approach him is to get The Selected Levis and start with the poems of The Widening Spell of the Leaves .

[NickAdams]

Well, I'll tell you a story
Of whiskey and mystics and men,
And about the believers and
How the whole thing began.


....



And if all of the teachers and
Preachers of wealth were arraigned,
We could see quite a future
For me in the literal sands.
And if all the people
Could claime to inspect such regrets,
Well, we'd have no forgiveness,
Forgetfullness, faithful remorse.
So I tell you, I tell you,
I tell you we must send away.
We must try to find a
New answer instead of a way.

[Janine]

From Losing Track
By Denise Levertov

Long after you have swung back
Away from me
I think you are still with me:

You come in close to the shore
On the tide
And nudge me awake the way

A boat adrift nudges the pier:
I am the pier
Half-in half-out of the water?

....


From The Secret
By Denise Levertov

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even


....



and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

From LIVING
By Denise Levertov

The fire in leaf and grass

so green it seems

each summer the last summer

The wind blowing, the leaves

shivering in the sun,

each day the last day.

....

and long tail. I hold

my hand open for him to go.

Each minute the last minute.

[uranderson]

"Losing Track" was my favorite poem of hers when I first started reading her. It's been a long time since I've read it. I used to know it by heart.

[Janine]

"Losing Track" was my favorite poem of hers when I first started reading her. It's been a long time since I've read it. I used to know it by heart.

Hi uranderson, I used to read her poems a lot but there is one in particular I am trying to find. I can't clearly recall the lines to it or even the first line. If I saw it I would know it. I have to think more about it. If I come up with one line maybe could you help me find it online or suggest the first line so I can locate it? I will get back to you later, if I think of it. NO - I am not going senile yet - just 'brain overload!':lol:

[Granny5]

Paul Simon is one of my favorites.

[stlukesguild]

Within the limits of poets writing within the last 25 years there are certainly far too many of real merit to begin to list here. Among those poets still living I find the following (among others) to be quite worth reading:

Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Bella Akhmadulina
Wisława Szymborska
Charles Simic
John Ashberry
Yehuda Amichai
W.S. Merwin
Anne Carson
Geoffrey Hill
Seamus Heaney
Charles Wright

[uranderson]

Hi uranderson, I used to read her poems a lot but there is one in particular I am trying to find. I can't clearly recall the lines to it or even the first line. If I saw it I would know it. I have to think more about it. If I come up with one line maybe could you help me find it online or suggest the first line so I can locate it? I will get back to you later, if I think of it. NO - I am not going senile yet - just 'brain overload!':lol:

I haven't read everything, she's got a LOT of books, but what I have I will remember, maybe. :D

Can you recall what is was about?

[libernaut]

well played on the mention of jeff tweedy and wilco, the new album, SKY BLUE SKY is out, lyrics and music are both beautiful. A ghost is born is a classic.

[quasimodo1]

If there is something to desire, there will be something to regret. If there is something to regret, there will be something to recall. If there is something to recall, there was nothing to regret. If there was nothing to regret, there was nothing to desire. excerpt from "Four Poems" by Vera Pavlova/ the New Yorker, July 30, 2007

[quasimodo1]

(Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein)
There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind. ...First stanza of poem by Shel Silverstein

[Janine]

I haven't read everything, she's got a LOT of books, but what I have I will remember, maybe. :D

Can you recall what is was about?

Thanks uranderson,
Ok, now don't laugh - this is really vague. I just recall it has something to do with a fortress (metaphorically) or camped outside your boundries - reminds me of the song by Sting - 'Fortress around Your Heart' - not even sure those are the right words to the song, but fortress and heart are in the song somewhere....haha -- I can hear you howling now with laughter...talk about losing ones mind...:lol: .


It just came to me that the poem might be in the book "Freeing of the Dust". I used to have that book but somewho lost it.

[Janine]

I can't believe it - I found the poem online:

Ways of Conquest by Denise Levertov

You invaded my country by accident,
not knowing you had crossed the border.
Vines that grew there touched you.
You ran past them,
shaking raindrops off the leaves - you or the wind.
It was toward the hills you ran,
inland -

I invaded your country with all my
'passionate intensity',
pontoons and parachutes of my blindness.
But living now in the suburbs of the capital
incognito,
my will to take the heart of the city
has dwindled. I love
its unsuspecting life,
its adolescents who come to tell me their dreams in the dusty park
among the rocks and benches,
I the stranger who will listen.
I love
the wild herons who return each year to the marshy outskirts.
What I invaded has
invaded me.

By my search, I have no idea why I was directed to this person's blog, but I am so thankful to find the poem at long last. It is one of my all-time favorites! It just speaks to me, especially the very first time I read it, being in certain circumstances.

[quasimodo1]

the children are healthy
the children are rosy . . .
they sleep without crying
they are very smart
each day they grow
you would hardly know them.

The opening poems in the book have the feel of creation myths, retold from woman's point of view, with revisionist metaphors:

A woman invented fire and called it the wheel
Was it because the sun is round
I saw the round sun bleeding to sky
And fire rolls across the field
from forest to treetop
It leaps like a bike with a wild boy riding it.

Grace Paley (1922-2007) writer of prose and poetry (much of her work concerning women) died Wensday, August 22, 2007...the short fragments above from her collected poetry and a lengthy obituary from the NYTimes. A life and work worth looking into.

[quasimodo1]

http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F50E12FF3C550C718CDDA10894DF404482 ......Sorry about this dead link...will re-post another

[AuntShecky]

Do they have to be still alive? If not, and if they're considered contemporary because they're still taught in
schools -- or the good ones anyway, then -- Auden, Roethke, James Merrill, William Carlos Williams, and Langston Hughes. Hughes is deceptively simple; there are layers upon layers of meaning in just a couple of lines.
Among those "contemporary" poets who still walk the earth: Ferlinghetti, Billy Collins, Miller Williams, Donald Justice, Sharon Olds. Miller Williams, by the bye, is the father of the dynamic folksinger, Lucinda Williams. See? Ya learn something new every day.
Auntie

[uranderson]

Hey Janine, glad you found it, I wouldn't have been able to help. I don't remember that one. I read a lot by her, but it's been a while and most I didn't read more than once. I remember going over Evening Train quite a few times though, and the poems of her's in the Naked Poetry anthology were some of the first that I can say I really loved, some I tried to memorize. Weren't you the one who recommended that book in another thread? I read that so much it fell apart, that's where I found Roethke's Meditation at Oyster River, which I've been imitating ever since :p , also Rexroth's translations of those Chinese poets (Tu Fu is one I think) are awesome. Especially Written on the Wall at Cheng's Hermitage, where the guy is living alone, tames the local deer and "needs nothing". Great stuff.

[AuntShecky]

It must've been provincialism in that I forgot to include the contemporary Irish poets, notably Seamus Heaney
and Paul Muldoon.

[quasimodo1]

Usually new Irish poets wouldn't merit a headline in a major newspaper but this woman deserves one. She isn't really new, but has determined to maintain privacy and a low profile, except when she publishes poetry and then all bets are off. I can't think of a more talented poet that transcends more standards then she knows. One of her latest collections is called "On Ballycastle Beach" and I havn't purchased a better collection in years. The legalities prevent me from posting her work, even in part. She can be found here...http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/McGuckian.html ...My sister, who normally never reads poetry went out and bought this book as soon as I sent her a sample. But, I rant on. quasimodo1

[Janine]

Hey Janine, glad you found it, I wouldn't have been able to help. I don't remember that one. I read a lot by her, but it's been a while and most I didn't read more than once. I remember going over Evening Train quite a few times though, and the poems of her's in the Naked Poetry anthology were some of the first that I can say I really loved, some I tried to memorize. Weren't you the one who recommended that book in another thread? I read that so much it fell apart, that's where I found Roethke's Meditation at Oyster River, which I've been imitating ever since :p , also Rexroth's translations of those Chinese poets (Tu Fu is one I think) are awesome. Especially Written on the Wall at Cheng's Hermitage, where the guy is living alone, tames the local deer and "needs nothing". Great stuff.

Hi uranderson, you are back. I was hoping you would resurface and see that I found my poem. It was quite by accident I came across it and luck because what I had written in search is not even in the poem literally. I knew it immediately. I wish I knew which book it came from, just surmissing on my part that it might be in "Freeing of the Dust" - I think I foolishly gave that book to some guy years ago...what we won't do for love! ;)

Yes, I was the one suggesting "Naked Poetry" some posts back; I had it when I went to Philadelphia College of Art in the 70's. It was part of our poetry course and I really liked that book, although I probably did not explore it as extensively as you have. I must have dragged it around with me at college, because my cover has long since fallen off mine, too. I found the book recently in the basement and brought it back upstairs. It is a good collection. One of my professors had a few poems in it - forget his name now - but will recall it if I review the book; so of course, he chose this book for us to study. I will check out the poems you mention here. I bet they are really good ones.

My anthology of Shakespeare volume meet a similiar fate - I dragged that to classes, also. It is the most worn of my entire set of classic novels I inherited from my father. It is in sad condition now so I installed a cover over the real one that is ready to fall off. Well, books are to read, aren't they and a book that is worn shows one gave it loving attention.:)
Did you like the poem I posted? It always struck me in some deep symbolic
way.

How funny, I was cruising around the net and I thought I remembered my professor's name so I put it into search, nothing came up but when I put Berg poetry in it came up with a site and some info on the author/poet. Here is is:

Stephen Berg

Born August 2, 1934, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, poet and educator Stephen Berg attended the University of Pennsylvania, Boston University, and the University of Indiana, prior to receiving a B.A. from the State University of Iowa in 1959. Since 1963 Stephen Berg has served on the faculty of Temple University in Philadelphia, as well as the Philadelphia College of Art.

Berg's poems were first published in Berg-Goodman-Mezey by New Ventures Press in 1957. Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms (1969), Berg's widely acclaimed anthology which he edited with Robert Mezey, includes work by Philip Levine and is discussed in some of the letters in this collection. He has also served as co-editor of the American Poetry Review. New Selected Poems was published by Copper Canyon Press in 1992.

Wow, I guess you can find nearly everything if you just look online!

[uranderson]

Hey Janine, you studied with Stephen Berg? I've only browsed his poems but now I have a reason to look more closely. ;)

That's really cool. He was one of the editors too? It really is one of the finest poetry anthologies in existence in my opinion. Were you in an MFA program or something? I was lucky enough to get a couple courses with Carolyn Forche at George Mason several years ago. Have you read her? She reminds me a lot of Levertov. The Country Between Us is her classic. I can provide links to some of my favorites if you haven't.

I did like that Levertov poem, it's typical of her, multiple layers of meaning (implied in part by line breaks, like the line "I love" which seems almost like a meaningful declarative statement in its own right), and skilled use of metaphor.

Possibly what I like most about her is her turning away from abstractions, analyses, and other forms of codified or rigid thought/behavior and moving toward a more organic, animalistic (in the best sense of the word) way of approaching life, love and art. This major theme in her work is represented well by this poem, I think the second half is in part a statement of that shifting worldview (sorry, it's not the best explanation of what I mean, but it's late and I'm groggy :))

Of course it's not that simple, her best poems are strong enough to resist that kind of simplistic, "A" means "B", explanation, instead suggesting alternate possibilities of meaning with successive readings. Similar to the way life is, I guess.

[quasimodo1]

DIVING INTO THE WRECK
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

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

(excerpt from "Diving into the Wreck")

[Janine]

Hey Janine, you studied with Stephen Berg? I've only browsed his poems but now I have a reason to look more closely. ;)

Hi again uranderson, Yes, truly I did for a year or maybe one semester. He was a really cool guy, very nice and down to earth. I think he was pretty young, since I added up his birthday and mine and he would just be about 16 yrs older than I am, so he would have been about 36 when he taught at PCA, which has since turned into University of the Arts. I learned a lot in his class and appreciated poetry more from the classroom stimulation. It was one of my favorite classes besides art studio classes.


That's really cool. He was one of the editors too? It really is one of the finest poetry anthologies in existence in my opinion. Were you in an MFA program or something? I was lucky enough to get a couple courses with Carolyn Forche at George Mason several years ago. Have you read her? She reminds me a lot of Levertov. The Country Between Us is her classic. I can provide links to some of my favorites if you haven't.

Yes, you know I thought he was one of the editors - thanks for refreshing my memory. I know that book is still popular and used for teaching purposes. It is a great book and even though mine is in tatters I will keep it forever. NO, I was not in an MFA program....never pursued it that far. I received my BFA in Illustration - long story concerning a career in the field. I posted some of my artwork online if you would be interested in seeing it. I do pencil, colored pencil, mixed media with pencil and colored flat grounds and detailed ink (dot pattern style). The English and poetry classes I had were strickly required since my college gave a degree...some art schools do not. I enjoyed Berg's class. I am glad I have not lost my memory that badly and recalled his name. He was a nice guy like I said. Most students liked him a lot. His poetry was good and I wonder what ever happened to him.
Funny, after I found him online I searched for my illustration teachers and came up with two of them. One, my favorite, is dean of the college now or maybe he is assistent dean and dean of another art school. Yikes, these guys must be pretty old by now! Is Stephen Berg still alive? - I certainly hope so. Shamefully, I have not read much of his work, but never too late. I am not at all familiar with Carolyn Forche. I will have to look up some of her work, if she is similar to Levertov. Sure, thanks, send me the links to her work. I love discovering someone new. In college and after I read a lot of Levertov, but I think I only touched minimally on her massive body of work. What I read struck me always as simple, but not simple - as you said layered. I guess I mean 'simple' in that the words were not difficult or of need of constant checking a dictionary for meaning. I liked her simplistic style and her directness and I always read the last line and said to myself - wow. It just struck a cord with me, and her writing seemed to me to seem very natural and never forced.



I did like that Levertov poem, it's typical of her, multiple layers of meaning (implied in part by line breaks, like the line "I love" which seems almost like a meaningful declarative statement in its own right), and skilled use of metaphor.

Yes, I agree completely - this is what seemed to attract me to her writing. Glad you liked the poem. Thrilled I found it at long last. She does command the use of metaphor exquisitely. I like the way in this poem I posted the last stanza directs the reader to a new idea on the though of 'invading'. Some people do 'invade' our very souls and they change us forever. I think when I read this first time, it was the right time for me - someone significant had invaded my being and my soul and left me feeling exactly as the poem states in the last few lines. I have though of this poem for years. Amazing how the essense of it stayed with me. I think, too, it will mean different things or conjure up different images to different people. That is what I liked about it, as well.




Possibly what I like most about her is her turning away from abstractions, analyses, and other forms of codified or rigid thought/behavior and moving toward a more organic, animalistic (in the best sense of the word) way of approaching life, love and art. This major theme in her work is represented well by this poem, I think the second half is in part a statement of that shifting worldview (sorry, it's not the best explanation of what I mean, but it's late and I'm groggy :))

No, even though you are groggy - I know the feeling well - you really make a world of sense to me here. You stated this so well and I commend you. I quite agree with what you say and it gives me some new ideas on her work.


Of course it's not that simple, her best poems are strong enough to resist that kind of simplistic, "A" means "B", explanation, instead suggesting alternate possibilities of meaning with successive readings. Similar to the way life is, I guess.

Definitely and exactly as life is. Can we ever figure it all out? I liked the bit of obscurity and enigma in her writing. I liked to interpret the imagery and the idea to suit my own person feelings, at the time I absorb the words. Her poetry seems to allow for this.

[quasimodo1]

Excerpt from "As You Leave Me".....
You hum along with Mathis--how you love Mathis!
with his burnished hair and quicksilver voice that dances
among the stars and whirls through canyons
like windblown snow, sometimes I think that Mathis
could take you from me if you could be complete
without me. I glance at my watch. It is now time.

You rise,
silently, and to the bedroom and the paint;
on the lips red, on the eyes black,
and I lean in the doorway and smoke, and see you
grow old before my eyes, and smoke, why do you
chatter while you dress? and smile when you grab
your large leather purse? don't you know that when you leave me
I walk to the window and watch you? and light
a reefer as I watch you? and I die as I watch you
disappear in the dark streets
to whistle and smile at the johns
{African-American Poet, from the deep south, military experience in the Korean conflict left him with a drug habit, he went to prison where he started writing poetry and corresponding with other poets. 1931-1991}

[quasimodo1]

"I made hay while the sun shone.
My work sold.
Now if the harvest is over
And the world cold
Give me the bonus of laughter
As I lose hold.” sample of contemporary poet John Betjeman

[Virgil]

How about Robert Bly. Hewe's one.



What Jesus Said
by Robert Bly

The wind blows where it likes: that is what
Everyone is like who is born from the wind.
Oh now it’s getting serious. We are the ones
Born from the wind that blows along the plains
And over the sea where no one has a home.
And that Upsetting Rabbi, didn’t he say:
“Take nothing with you, no blanket, no bread.
When evening comes, sleep wherever you are.
And if the owners say no, shake out the dust
From your sandals; leave the dust on their doorstep.”
Don’t hope for what will never come. Give up hope,
Dear friends, the joists of life are laid on the winds

[Virgil]

Or how about Billy Collins:


from The History Teacher
by Billy Collins

Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
"How far is it from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador's hat?"

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan.

....

[Virgil]

I like this better by Billy Collins, except for the last line:

from On Turning Ten
by Billy Collins

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

....

[quasimodo1]

To Virgil: Love Robert Bly and will give him more attention... "Give up hope,
Dear friends, the joists of life are laid on the winds" excellent visual image. BTW, Do you know if Janine has worked the gliches out of her new hardware? quasi

[Virgil]

Another good contemporary poet is Robert haas.


from Meditations At Lagunitas
by Robert Haas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed.

....

[Virgil]

To Virgil: Love Robert Bly and will give him more attention... "Give up hope,
Dear friends, the joists of life are laid on the winds" excellent visual image. BTW, Do you know if Janine has worked the gliches out of her new hardware? quasi

I haven't heard from her today. that is a great line by Bly. :)

[quasimodo1]

Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
by Billy Collins


I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.

Not in July or any month
have I had the pleasure--if it is a pleasure--
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

I am more likely to be found
in a quiet room like this one--
a painting of a woman on the wall,

a bowl of tangerines on the table--
trying to manufacture the sensation
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

There is little doubt
that others have been fishing
on the Susquehanna,

rowing upstream in a wooden boat,
sliding the oars under the water
then raising them to drip in the light.

(excerpt from the aformentioned poem)

[Virgil]

Even though she passed away now ten years i think, Amy Clampitt is another favorite:


from The Sun Underfoot Among The Sundews
by Amy Clampitt

An ingenuity too astonishing
to be quite fortuitous is
this bog full of sundews, sphagnum-
lines and shaped like a teacup.
A step
down and you're into it; a
wilderness swallows you up:
ankle-, then knee-, then midriff-
to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted
understory, an overhead
spruce-tamarack horizon hinting
you'll never get out of here.
But the sun
among the sundews, down there,
is so bright, an underfoot
webwork of carnivorous rubies,
a star-swarm thick as the gnats
they're set to catch, delectable
double-faced cockleburs, each
hair-tip a sticky mirror
afire with sunlight, a million
of them and again a million,
each mirror a trap set to
unhand believing,
that either
a First Cause said once, "Let there
be sundews,"

....

[quasimodo1]

To Virgil: Give me a bit to digest a new source. Have you noticed how the "Axis" thread has taken on a life of it's own? quasi

[stlukesguild]

I've just recently discovered Yves Bonnefoy. The cover blurb proclaimed him as France's "greatest living poet" which was enough to peak both my interest and my skepticism. Critical commentary found outside seemed to concur as to his status... but then again... "contemporary French literature"... that description alone is enough to raise an eyebrow... more overwrought/over-intellectualized mind games? I am glad to say that I took the chance with Bonnefoy. His poems are quite marvelous... sensuous... with slight elements of surrealism... yet crystalline. Bonnefoy has written numerous poems entitled simply, "A Stone". These certainly allude to tombstones or gravestones and the voice is sometimes that of the deceased... (ala Edgar Lee Masters?) and sometimes that of the stones:

A Stone

We granted each other the gift of innocence;
For years just our two bodies fed its flames.
Our steps wandered bare through trackless grass.
We were the illusion known as memory.

Since fire's born of fire, why should we desire
To gather up its scattered ash.
On the appointed day we surrendered what we were
To a vaster blaze, the evening sun.


A Stone

Those mornings of ours,
I would sweep up the ashes; I would fill
The jug and set it on the flagstones,
So the whole room was awash
With the fathomless smell of mint.

O memory,
Your trees blossom against the sky;
We could almost believe that it's snowing.
But thunder retreats down the path.
The evening wind sheds its excess seeds.


A Stone

The grass granted color to our shadows,
Before us on the path; and once
They rebounded on some stones.

Bird-shadows, too, brushed by them
With a cry, or lingered where our foreheads
Leaned together so we almost touched
Because of words we wanted to share.


from Let This World Endure

I.

I right a broken branch.
The leaves are heavy
With water and shadow
Like this sky now, before

The dawn of day. O earth,
Clashing signs, scattered paths,
But beauty, beauty absolute,
The beauty of a river:

Let this world endure,
In spite of death.
The gray olive
Clings to the branch.

II.

Let this world endure,
Let the perfect leaf
Halo forever
The ripening fruit.

Let the hoopoes, when the sky
Opens at dawn,
Fly forever from under the roof
Of the empty barn,

Then alight over there
In legend;
And all is motionless
An hour more.

III.

Let this world endure,
Let absence and word
Fuse forever
In simple things.

....

Yves Bonnefoy
from The Curved Planks
tr. Hoyt Rogers
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2006

[quasimodo1]

PASSER-BY, THESE ARE THE WORDS
Passer-by, these are words. But instead of reading
I want you to listen: to this frail
Voice like that of letters eaten by grass.

Lend an ear, hear first of all the happy bee
Foraging in our almost rubbed-out names.
It flits between two sprays of leaves,
Carrying the sound of branches that are real
To those that filigree the still unseen.

Then know an even fainter sound, and let it be
The endless murmuring of all our shades.
Their whisper rises from beneath the stones
To fuse into a single heat with that blind
Light you are as yet, who can still gaze.
(first part of this poem) by Yves Bonnefoy{1923-present}

[stlukesguild]

Oh, yes! That is a lovely one as well... also included in the same book: The Curved Planks. You can find a link to the entire poem here:

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/011.html

[stlukesguild]

Link to "Let this World Endure" in its entirety:

http://www.cstone.net/~poems/letthbon.htm

[quasimodo1]

Thanks, Stlukesguild. Let me see. By the way, I meant to comment on your recent post as excellent essay; not that I can write so concisely. quasimodo1

[quasimodo1]

Of a Forgetful Sea



...Desert is only a handful of sand
held by my daughter.

In her palm,
she holds small creatures,
tracks an ant, a flea
moving over each grain.

She brings them to places
she thinks are safe:



.................................................. .excerpts from "of a Forgetful Sea" by Kelli Russell Agodon

[quasimodo1]

SMOKE
Smoke, it is all smoke
in the throat of eternity. . . .
For centuries, the air was full of witches
Whistling up chimneys
on their spiky brooms
cackling or singing more sweetly than Circe,
as they flew over rooftops
blessing & cursing their
kind.

We banished & burned them
making them smoke in the throat of god;
we declared ourselves
"enlightened."
"The dark age of horrors is past,"
said my mother to me in 1952,
seven years after our people went up in smoke,
leaving a few teeth, a pile of bones.


.................................................. ..excerpt from "Smoke" by Erica Jong

[quasimodo1]

BURNING THE DOLL
I am the girl who burned her doll,
who gave her father the doll to burn "
the bride doll I had been given
at six, as a Christmas gift,
by the same great uncle who once introduced me
at my blind second cousin's wedding
to a man who winced, A future Miss
America, I'm sure " while I stood there, sweating
in a prickly flowered dress,
ugly, wanting to cry.

I loved the uncle but I wanted that doll to burn
because I loved my father best
and the doll was a lie.
I hated her white gown stitched with pearls,
her blinking, mocking blue glass eyes
that closed and opened, opened and closed
when I stood her up,
when I laid her down.
Her stiff, hinged body was not like mine,
which was wild and brown,
and there was no groom "
.............first two stanzas..........by Cecilia Woloch

[Virgil]

I posted this in my blog today. Fits in this thread.


White Apples
by Donald Hall

when my father had been dead a week
I woke
with his voice in my ear

I sat up in bed
and held my breath
and stared at the pale closed door

white apples and the taste of stone

if he called again
I would put on my coat and galoshes

[quasimodo1]

MORPHOLOGY
There can be no distance
between you and me
but that created by the steps we chose to take

Like Robbe-Grillet
exploring every possibility
or Picasso re-assembling Reality yet again
we could easily
each be
someone/thing completely else
Skipping like stones
across a panoramic past and future sea
wildly vast and violent and full of
variously slanted eyes Utopian dreams
blind politics and sewer power sludge and greed
and out-stretched bearing arms kaleidoscopic seams
and evolutionary breakthrough scientific ironies
and sweat and tears and way too spilt much blood
we lose momentum on our own cue
to land precisely on the ancient turtle's back

..........................excerpt from this poem

By KittyKitty

[quasimodo1]

Author statement
Why do I write? Out of the helplessness of the human condition - the only kind of control I can muster over the incoherence and apparent senselessness of it. Also to communicate and diagnose and express what cannot otherwise be expressed; to be a voice or give a voice to things that have been oppressed and repressed in my peculiar culture; to find an emotional valve for the deepest joys and sorrows.

http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth02D9P274512627448 ...........an outstanding contemporary poet, sometimes writing in Gaelic.

[quasimodo1]

Sea-black virgin - being in love with you
is a fine space. I will never live
in your searching wash, your grass wallpaper,
your bewildered red gardens.
You desire your wholeness, your virginity,
to be admired by angels only.
Such dry self-knowledge. Such sheer
Englishness - how could I
have mistaken you for my father?

...............poem recited by author at the Durham Literature Festival and the Colpitts Poets............this poem about her father.

[quasimodo1]

RESEED



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Every cricket here has mated.
Hear it in the distant tone and timbre
of a tired, old drone: a chorus
for those who now wear only
white robes over lost bodies—

that chorus which for us rises evenings
in the cancer, neuralgic, and geriatric wards,
where all are far beyond triage.
Each moan, we know, echoes
a voice from that boundless night
preceding the afterlife.

Forget your body. Forget the afterlife.

by Kevin Rabas (excerpt from this poem...source=Atlantic Monthly) This poem is not well served by posting this fragment; reading the entire work is much more powerful.

[quasimodo1]

Two Snapshots for the Inner Eye


1.

Glassed in all day like this I keep towelling the windows dry -
Trying to wipe the fog away that keeps me blind behind glass,
Unable to see the world outside for what it is, the way things
Become shadows and blunted silhouettes of themselves, birds
Only blurs where they shake a branch when they land or leave
Or just dash past, a flash of cloud-particles snatching at crumbs.
As I do each time I get the big window clear again and try
To take in the colours and shapes out there, all the living bits
Of matter that stand in their own ordinary uncanny light until
Blearing begins again and I see it's my own breathing does it.
............contemporary poet, graduate of Vassar, from his recent collection entitled "The Quick of It", Gallery press, 2005 (Part 1 of two)

[quasimodo1]

TAKE THE I OUT



But I love the I, steel I-beam
that my father sold. They poured the pig iron
into the mold, and it fed out slowly,
a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened,
Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he
marketed it, and bought bourbon, and Cream
of Wheat, its curl of butter right
in the middle of its forehead, he paid for our dresses
with his metal sweat, sweet in the morning
and sour in the evening. I love the I,
frail between its flitches, its hard ground
and hard sky, it soars between them
like the soul that rushes, back and forth,
between the mother and father. What if they had loved each other,
how would it have felt to be the strut
joining the floor and roof of the truss?
I have seen, on his shirt-cardboard, years
in her desk, the night they made me, the penciled
slope of her temperature rising, and on
the peak of the hill, first soldier to reach
the crest, the Roman numeral I--

(first part of this poem by contemporary poet, Sharon Olds)

[quasimodo1]

PREFIX: FINDING THE MEASURE



Finding the measure is finding the mantram,
is finding the moon, as index of measure,
is finding the moon's source;

if that source
is Sun, finding the measure is finding
the natural articulation of ideas.

The organism
of the macrocosm, the organism of language,
the organism of I combine in ceaseless naturing
to propagate a fourth,
the poem,
from their trinity.


{beginning of this poem, by Robert Kelly}

[ClickForth]

David Berman is a poet as well as the vocalist/guitarist for Silver Jews



It had been four days of no weather
as if nature had conceded its genius to the indoors.

They'd closed down the Bureau of Sad Endings
and my wife sat on the couch and read the paper out loud.

The evening edition carried the magic death of a child
backlit by a construction site sunrise on its front page.

I kept my back to her and fingered the items on the mantle.

Souvenirs only reminded you of buying them.



I walked out to the hill behind our house
which looks positively Alaskan today
and it would be easier to explain this
if I had a picture to show you
but I was with our young dog
and he was running through the tall grass
like running through the tall grass
is all of life together
until a bird calls or he finds a beer can
and that thing fills all the space in his head.

You see,
his mind can only hold one thought at a time
and when he finally hears me call his name
he looks up and cocks his head
and for a single moment
my voice is everything:

Self-portrait at 28

[quasimodo1]

OMNISCIENT LOVE



He was in knocking range of my secrets.

He had found kelp there,

he nested in the coral beds.

In a past life he was born

to me as a set of twins.

He was applied to me as a topical ointment.



{excerpt from this poem)





Lee Upton (very contemporary poet)

[quasimodo1]

http://www.bucknell.edu/x3705.xml Bucknell U. has created a unique website for poetry, much of it in audio version performed by the author. quasi

[quasimodo1]

MAPS


I leaf over soft uplands
Follow fanning estuaries
Into pale lakes

Imagining tides that chisel isthmuses

Towers of ice

Dark gravelly tongues of glaciers
Moving beside monstered sounds,

Archipelagoes that unfurl into infinity.

Tracking these crenellated coasts
Where the gray blobs are boisterous ports

The broken lines
Shipping routes nosing out into open water
Into latitudes licked by sun,
http://www.valpo.edu/english/vpr/archives.html
{first lines of "Maps" by Robert James Berry}....from an excellent site with many contemporary poets

[quasimodo1]

AHAB'S SON


I hate the way the island goes around,
around, around, always ending up where
it began, at my father's house, my mother
raging in her upstairs room, her laudanum,
whiter than fresh snow in its blue bottle,
the trapdoor to the widow's walk padlocked
shut, the chambered nautilus on her table.
She rummages through trunks looking for
something, kneels down to pray, weeps,
then races downstairs, chattering to herself.
I hate the way the house goes up and down
like Jacob's ladder, rattling doors, the eye
in the bevelled glass in the rainbow mirror,
the pump at the kitchen sink, a single drop
of water suspended from its rusting lip.
Hate the willowware dishes in the china
closet, for company, but company never
comes. Hate the way my thoughts come,
night after night, red-haired demons
from the afterlife.
http://www.valpo.edu/english/vpr/archives.html
...........{first half of this poem by John Gilgun}

[quasimodo1]

LEE PASSARELLA





IMMANENCE


Antibellum Plantation, Stone Mountain Park, Georgia



We leave the one-room schoolhouse
with the double meaning of its woodenness
spelled out in ranks of hair-shirt oaken
benches and plank-top desks without a blemish
of utility. No inkwells, no pencil minders to give
them purpose. It is a place of the truly elementary—
of bone-tired inertia and of rote, and educative homilies
about the patriot saints. On the slatted wall
above the teacher's desk, the Father of His Country
still presides from the unfinished portrait
by Gilbert Stuart. Disembodied head, dead white
on a black ground of rusty satin. It speaks to dark eternity,
bright virtue: the mythic cherry tree; the bitter winter
of faithfulness, Philadelphia locked up like an English gaol;
the patience to stick till the screw turned tight
at Yorktown. Did the hardness or the homilies prepare
those boys of 1850 for Sunday strolls to come,
ranked like Continentals, into the rifle's obliterating jaws?

{first half of "Immanence" by LEE PASSARELLA}

[quasimodo1]

THE APPLICANT First, are you our sort of a person? Do you wear A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch, Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then How can we give you a thing? Stop crying. Open your hand Empty? Empty. Here is a hand To fill it and willing To bring teacups and roll away headaches And do whatever you tell it. Will you marry it? It is guaranteed To thumb shut your eyes at the end And dissolve of sorrow We make new stock from the salt. I notice you are stark naked. How about this suit- Black and stiff, but not a bad fit. Will you marry it? It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof Against fire and bombs through the roof. Believe me, they’ll bury you in it. ………….1962 ………by Sylvia Plath {first half of this poem}

[quasimodo1]

SELF-PORTRAIT AGAINST DREAM



Oh, spare me the glitter
of your dreams, those
pallid rocks pulled
from the lake, losing
all magnificence
after a moment's sun.
They are merely mineral,
no more profound
than your so-precious bones
that time will unlock,
burning away all else
to reveal their muteness.

Too damn easy any morning
receiving cloud-messages—
by noon the whole scenario
will blur like watercolor
or slide home with a thump
into the drawer of Freud's
roll-top desk with the rest
of your sad Victoriana.
You don't need dream's
cartoons—all you need
is the stubborn one-foot,
one-foot plod that you
were born, admit it,
to carry out—a journey,
yes, but best if you don't
inquire too sharply
of reason or destination.



...

{part of this poem by David Graham}....valpo.edu/english/vpr/archives.html

[quasimodo1]

YOU CAN'T HAVE IT ALL



But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands

gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old
finger

on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.

You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look

of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite

every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,

you can have it August and abundantly so.


...............{exceprt from this poem, by Barbara Ras, born 1949 in Bedord, Mass.: Well regarded contemporary poet, winner of many poetry awards including "honors from the National Writer's Union", has lived in Columbia and Costa Rica}

[quasimodo1]

OPEN STAGE

(Horse & Cart Cafe, Charleston SC)



You have walked all day the length of streets,

cataloged anything of importance that has been here

before. Tide at the seawall, the cadence of wind,

poems moving in. The church bells chime.

A car starts. Some stranger remarks the brilliance

of sun. Palmettos bow to the weight of air.






................................


{featured poet for the Adirondack Review, Andrena Zawinski, summer 2001}

[quasimodo1]

PSYCHOANALYSIS: AN ELEGY



What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water. Shedding it
Down empty acres of oak and manzanita
Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana
Driving the hills crazy,
A fast wind with a bit of dust in it
Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.
Or down in the city where the peach trees
Are awkward as young horses,
And there are kites caught on the wires
Up above the street lamps,
And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?


{first part of this poem by Jack Spicer: a very contemporary poet}

[quasimodo1]

LOVE ON THE C TRAIN

baby, i'm a dreamer...
even in spite of the fact
that i don't sleep

maybe you won't weep
if i pass tonight
i'd like to think
that i'd be the crescent
on your lips
ear to ear beaming
like 7am sun fingers
lingering thru the blinds
giving birth to sight



...............

{contemporary poet Marcus Anderson, exceprt from Albany Poets}

[quasimodo1]

Camouflaging The Chimera

Listen
We tied branches to our helmets.
We painted our faces & rifles
with mud from a riverbank,

blades of grass hung from the pockets
of our tiger suits. We wove
ourselves into the terrain,
content to be a hummingbird's target.



..............

{very well thought of contemporary poet...Yusef Komunyakaa, excerpt from this poem}

[quasimodo1]

Vigils: The Night Watch



...........This is what I do not understand: how all this happens
without an answer. Without, even, a question.

The Wissahickon spills endlessly, like the night love poured through me, nearly, I thought,
uncontainable as it rushed from my fingers and out the window into people passing on the street,
over fire hydrants, pigeons, and boom boxes, through police cars, stop signs, and cockroaches,
between two dogs circling in heat. I did not need an answer then.
I would have understood the indifferent delight of the ducks. But I asked,
and my question scattered like mercury, into a million trembling globules
magnetic with yearning.

--{ Deidra Greenleaf Allan, excerpt from this poem }

[quasimodo1]

A BLESSING




Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
.................................................. .................................................. ....{excerpt from this poem by contemporary poet James Wright}

[quasimodo1]

PHENOMENAL WOMAN
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.


........................

{excerpt from contemporary poet Maya Angelou}

[quasimodo1]

DEER DANCER



Nearly everyone had left that bar in the middle of winter except the
hardcore. It was the coldest night of the year, every place shut down, but
not us. Of course we noticed when she came in. We were Indian ruins. She
was the end of beauty. No one knew her, the stranger whose tribe we
recognized, her family related to deer, if that's who she was, a people
accustomed to hearing songs in pine trees, and making them hearts.



....

{Joy Harjo, contemporary poet from New Mexico and enviorons writes about Native American themes (not exclusively), excerpt from this poem}

[quasimodo1]

It's not often that a review is so well done about new collection of poems by a prolific poet. In this NYTimes book review, the critic exhibits both skill and experience with author-subject and contemporary poetry. What follows is excerpt from this review and samples of the poetry which make you want to explore her work further. ........................"A State of Disobedience" (title of the review)




By JOEL BROUWER
Published: October 14, 2007
Over the course of Alice Notley’s long and prolific career — she’s written more than 25 books since 1971 — readers have assigned her any number of identities: native of the American West, Parisian expatriate, feminist, experimentalist, political poet, Language poet, widow of the poets Ted Berrigan and Douglas Oliver, mother of the poets Anselm and Edmund Berrigan and member of the New York School’s second generation, to name a few. Each of these labels sheds a little light on Notley’s work, but it’s the fact of their sheer number that’s most illuminating: this is a poet who persistently exceeds, or eludes, the sum of her associations.



IN THE PINES

By Alice Notley.

131 pp. Penguin Poets. Paper, $18.
“I’ve been trying to train myself for 30 or 40 years not to believe anything anyone tells me,” Notley has written, and anyone coming to her work for the first time would be wise to follow that example, scraping away the barnacles of received wisdom that cling to her poems, and also casting aside any assumptions about where poetry comes from, or what it should sound like, look like and concern itself with. To write vital poems, Notley has said, “it’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against ... everything.” To read such poems requires a similar discipline.

In her new book’s long title sequence, Notley finds that space of perpetual defiance and christens it “the pines.” There, she imagines all conventions of causality and rationality have fallen away, creating an opening for the purely accidental quality of each lived instant, a quality the poet identifies as “love.”

"I am losing my because. In the pines.
In chance, in fortune, in luck, there is no because.
Once I had, and now I don’t.
In love there is no because."


.......................................{copyright New York Times, Sunday Book Review, October 15, 2007)

[quasimodo1]

CAPE BRETON


Out on the high "bird islands," Ciboux and Hertford,
the razorbill auks and the silly-looking puffins all stand
with their backs to the mainland
in solemn, uneven lines along the cliff's brown grass-frayed edge,
while the few sheep pastured there go "Baaa, baaa."
(Sometimes, frightened by aeroplanes, they stampede
and fall over into the sea or onto the rocks.)
The silken water is weaving and weaving,
disappearing under the mist equally in all directions,
lifted and penetrated now and then
by one shag's dripping serpent-neck,
and somewhere the mist incorporates the pulse,
rapid but unurgent, of a motor boat.

The same mist hangs in thin layers
among the valleys and gorges of the mainland
like rotting snow-ice sucked away
almost to spirit; the ghosts of glaciers drift
among those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack--
dull, dead, deep pea-**** colors,
each riser distinguished from the next
by an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge,
alike, but certain as a stereoscopic view.

....

{excerpt from this poem by Elizabeth Bishop, Vassar graduate, friend of Marianne Moore}

[quasimodo1]

SOUTH OF MARS

It's over now. Part of the story
Has disappeared, into the void
Of something that has ended forever:
I know the exact place, behind the house,
A place where waves can be counted,
Seven hard cold waves,
Like the ones in the sea.

Undreamt of blues and marvellous
Greys set up a background,
A flat light and a mask of ocean salt,
For a sea full of inlets, harbours
And ravines, shipwrecks and sudden
Green splendours: green, I want you,
Green, I am half-full of seawater

Though far, far from the sea,
And the smoothest stone
Is a freshwater myth.
A cool oval breeze reaches me
From the sea, birds can fly in it,
And every half-minute comes the smell
Of the sea, newly cleaned, like a loaf of silver.

....

{first part of Medbh McGuckian's poem, great Irish contemporary poet who also writes in Gaelic}

[quasimodo1]

THY PSYCHE.


LIKE a strain of wondrous music rising up in cloister dim,
Through my life's unwritten measures thou dost steal, a glorious hymn!
All the joys of earth and heaven in the singing meet, and flow
Richer, sweeter, for the wailing of an undertone of woe.
How I linger, how I listen for each mellow note that falls,
Clear as chime of angels floating downward o'er the jasper walls!

Every night, when winds are moaning round my chamber by the sea,
Thine's the face that through the darkness latest looks with love at me;
And I dream, ere thou departest, thou dost press thy lips to mine; --
Then I sleep as slept the Immortals after draughts of Hebe's wine!
And I clasp thee, out of slumber when the rosy day is born,
As the soul, with rapture waking, clasps the resurrection morn.

'Twas thy soul-wife, 'twas thy Psyche, one uplifted, radiant day,
Thou didst call me; -- how divinely on thy brow Love's glory lay!
Thou my Cupid, -- not the boy-god whom the Thespians did adore,
But the man, so large, so noble, truer god than Venus bore.
I thy Psyche; -- yet what blackness in this thread of gold is wove!
Thou canst never, never lead me, proud, before the throne of Jove!
All the gods might toil to help thee through the longest summer day; --
Still would watch the fatal Sisters, spinning in the twilight gray;
And their calm and silent faces, changeless looking through the gloom,
From eternity, would answer, "Thou canst ne'er escape thy doom!"
Couldst thou clasp me, couldst thou claim me, 'neath the soft Elysian skies,
Then what music and what odor through their azure depths would rise!
Roses all the Hours would scatter, every god would bring us joy,
So, in perfect loving blended, bliss would never know alloy!

O my heart! the vision changes; fades the soft celestial blue;
Dies away the rapturous music, thrilling all my pulses through!
Lone I sit within my chamber; storms are beating 'gainst the pane,
And my tears are falling faster than the chill December rain; --
Yet, though I am doomed to linger, joyless, on this earthly shore,
Thou art Cupid! -- I am Psyche! -- we are wedded evermore!



--------{from the Anonymous database of poetry: the Atlantic Monthly.........Does anyone hear the similarities to Poe?}

[quasimodo1]

In Germany where the clouds march in single file

Germany is where the clouds
march in single file
where the sun has a permit to shine
where the moon may not stay up as late as she pleases.

Germany looks like Germany in Derrick .
The only difference between Germany and Derrick
is that something happens in every episode of Derrick.
Germany is filmed on location like Derrick,
and is broadcast on televisions
everywhere.
The criminals in Germany dream
of big guns
of America .
The criminals all have
hot water, electricity and medical insurance.
The criminals lead lives of quiet desperation
just like the teachers, butchers and accountants.

Germany is wealthy and fat
but anaemic and unwise.

....



{excerpt from this poem by South African Poet, Danie Marais}

[quasimodo1]

SOJOURNS IN THE PARALLEL WORLD
We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension--though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal--then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free. .......................
{excerpt from this poem by Denise Levertov)

[quasimodo1]

KINDLY


............And, like yours,

their eyes keep roaming
around the waiting room

as if it's not comforting exactly
but more like reassuring

to know others suffer.
You exchange looks.

Yours, you worry, shows concern.
Her kindly nod seems to say

there's no cure for fate.
His pleased, determined smile

suggests he'd just as soon scoff
at any prognosis.




© by William Aarnes {latter part of this poem}

[quasimodo1]

FOR JOHN HAAG, LOGGER, SAILOR, HOUSEPAINTER, POET, PROFESSOR, AND GROWER OF ORCHIDS



--------------------------------------------------------------------------

“I found myself in a dark wood
where the right way was lost”
--Dante, Inferno, Canto 1, 1-2

In our College of Glooms
he sauntered about in leather pants
striding the halls as if they were a deck
from his sailing days in the Merchant Marine
as if he were here on shore leave
and had to make ship in Seattle
tailing trucks through snowy foothills
as flurries veered at his windshield
and brake lights blinked ahead on the turns
as he chanted to himself and the snow
all the poems he ever learned alone
on moon-washed nights when waves were listening:
Dylan Thomas. Wallace Stevens.
"The Astabula Bridge Disaster."
—squinting into the dark and saying poems,
overtaking a truck on the straightaway
driving hard until he hit Puget Sound
where the sea rushed the rocks on the beach
under a fat moon wreathed in fog
and the bellbuoy chimed all night.
{first stanza of this poem by contemporary poet John Balaban}

[quasimodo1]

A GIFT OF MORNING WATER



--------------------------------------------------------------------------


After the long night with a cold wind riffling the scrim of the teepee lit like a lantern in the deserted prairie, a night of chills in the small of the back, aches in crossed legs, after all the hours of chanting from Indians and Anglos, after their drumming on the iron kettle stretched with hide, its water-filled belly bellowing when tipped, after the prayers sung for forgiveness, for guidance from the grandfather peyote on the crescent of sand, after chewing bitter buttons, swallowing dry powder, after the drumming and the singing and the sweet sage thrown on the image-dancing fire, as the embers died and dawn finally rinsed the top of the tent, the Road Chief, an elderly Tiwa who throughout the night had asked "Him" to show us the right road, said: "A woman is coming with morning water. Listen to her. She is your mother." .........{beginning of prose poem by John Balaban}

[quasimodo1]

BASEMENT OCCUPATIONS



--------------------------------------------------------------------------


Charred coffee zipped and sizzled
on the burner as a greasy ungloved hand
removed the pot then sloshed more
fingers of fuming tar into the cup.

A lip smack, indifferent sigh and a single
cloudy bead of sweat dropped straight off
the nose—it could be an interrogation
chamber, raked with hundred-watt bare light.

That array of pungent household poisons—
the chipped and dented cellar cabinets
holding jars of solvents, cans of reeking
pigments, paints, and tubs of cracking glue,

....

{first part of this poem by contemporary poet, Jim Murphy}

[quasimodo1]

APOLOGIA TO MARS AND MOON


Let me be what awaited me yesterday, and let me resist
tomorrow in a fistful of poppies and dust.

—Pablo Neruda




To right, from lone perspective, the moon waxing
one night from full; to left, the red planet
closer than it has been for sixty thousand years,
will be again for a hundred lifetimes. A man
prone on a pallet of wood, hard, but not hardness
of stone, surety, rather of a conversation
of bone and flesh, tree transformed to function.
Let us not discuss nations, ages, intrusions,
nor when this moment will fall and disappoint. ...........

{excerpt from poem by contemporary poet Gaylord Brewer}

[quasimodo1]

THREE VARIATIONS ON THE SUSPENSION OF TIME

1

Roll Call

The evening adjourns: the contrail intersects
the guy-wire; the robins peck the trash to death;
six blocks away, traffic winds the roads like clocks;

on the porch, paint curls into a self-portrait
of Van Gogh who has lost his hat;
the sun terrorizes the brilliant daisies.

So little time remains to ambush the sky
under the lively, silver applause of cottonwoods—
the red clouds and blue wind spiral together alone

against the curve that leaves us all here standing.

....
{first part of this poem by contemporary poet Michael Catherwood}

[jon1jt]

Alessandra Lynch and Deborah Tall

I'll post some of their work later--

[quasimodo1]

THE MUSE AT THE DOOR /wanted a word with the poet whose house this was.
“But he’s not here,” I said.

“Didn’t he send you a change of address?”
The heat panted, like the dog it was, at her heels.

The wind chime said nothing, there being no wind.
She laid an envelope on the poet’s pillow.


.............
{excerpt from this poem by Debora Greger, featured poet in Yale Review}

[quasimodo1]

FINISHING UP THE NOVEL AFTER SOME DELAY



I followed a stream plunging out of the jungle
and spilling around boulders broken loose
from the great shade of the triple canopy
where screw-pines walked on hairy stilts below teak
and towering coffin trees, their blue-green trunks
festooned with yellow orchids. Leaf monkeys
hid in banyans as I went by.

A sandfly cloud seesawed the mudflat
and I turned to go the other way
through thickets splattered in sunshine
where green rollers shrieked and bobbed in bamboo,
the cool palms threshing above my head.
the earth, spongy; the air, damp.

A blue-tailed babbler screeched high up
above the nattering stream. Downriver,
some women waded pools with dip nets
as their kids chased fish in the weirs.
I passed unseen behind the jungle wall. ..............

{excerpt from this poem by John Balaban}

[quasimodo1]

SLEEP POEM

In sleep we reach into our Selves
like hands taking food from ovens.
Our Selves eat our Selves to save our Selves.
In the great kitchen of the night
we are both bread and knife.

In the city of the great kitchen of the night
we are the huge trucks that enter
purposefully as sperm
bringing ripe apricots from California.

...................

{excerpt from this poem by Al Zolynas, from his collection, "the New Physics"}

[quasimodo1]

METAPHOR TO ACTION

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Whether it is a speaker, taut on a platform,
who battles a crowd with the hammers of his words,
whether it is the crash of lips on lips
after absence and wanting : we must close
the circuits of ideas, now generate,
that leap in the body's action or the mind's repose.

Over us is a striking on the walls of the sky,
here are the dynamos, steel-black, harboring flame,
here is the man night-walking who derives
tomorrow's manifestoes from this midnight's meeting ;
here we require the proof in solidarity,
iron on iron, body on body, and the large single beating.

{first two stanzas of "Metaphor to Action" by Muriel Rukeyser}