fragments of contemporary poetry

[quasimodo1]

TEN QUESTIONS FOR MONA

From the Boston Review




I’m sitting at the same table again, in the hopes.
This time I’m sitting where you were.
Like a fragrance you had stayed to rise,
*
having felt just long enough under your hat,
wanting exactly what you want.
Like a fragrance you had strayed.
*
There are masculine and feminine willows
moving about this room.
Just now tiny machines manufacture noises
*
devoting themselves to the removal
and the placing. Tiny machines
manufacture noises producing
*
in me a feeling of productivity.
Just now a shadow
approached from the west door spilling
*
a glance upon me, sorry, I thought
it was you sitting down in the place
where your hands shook as you poured
*
evening’s sweet wine out in photographs.
I watched you grow older in the approach.
Summers are loose and feathery
*
in consequence as a high school, or a time,
or a camp in which Right Now is a time.
You say you think of it in a good way,
*
in the long approach, i.e. laughter
and lightness and etcetera time
of staying too long and leaving too soon,
*
sitting across from you, that absolute
conditional you sitting down in the place
where I had been a glance upon me.
*
Right Now is a time. A child needs
to be moved less fearfully
than thinking of something else.
*
What flower do you bring a flower?
I’d curl up in the wrist, but there’s a cat
already named there for luck and howling. ... {excerpt}
*

[Kafka's Crow]

Do not ask, my love.....

by Faiz Ahmad Faiz

Do not ask, my love, for the love we had before:
You existed, I told myself, so all existence shone,
Grief for me was you; the world’s grief was far.
Spring was ever renewed in your face:
Beyond your eyes, what could the world hold?
Had I won you, Fate’s head would hang, defeated.
Yet all this was not so, I merely wished it so.
The world knows sorrows other than those of love,
Pleasures beyond those of romance:
The dread dark spell of countless centuries
Woven with silk and satin and gold brocade,
Bodies sold everywhere, in streets and markets,
Besmeared with dirt, bathed in blood,
Crawling from infested ovens,
My gaze returns to these: what can I do?
Your beauty still haunts me: what can I do?
The world is burdened by sorrows beyond love,
By pleasures beyond romance,
Do not demand that love which can be no more.

English Translation By Mir Habib

[quasimodo1]

From the Boston Review

RILKE'S ARGUMENT WITH DON GIOVANNI



I never thought
I'd be anything like you . . .
I was drawn up, as in a whirlwind, by their gaze
and wished to live there forever -- a soul around my soul --
astonished, perhaps, to be wanted there at all --

who was Mitzi in the army; the boy fainting by the wall at school.

But then, when the wincing not right
began in my head; when I wanted
so much to be loved in the moment I found my separateness
still there, still real -- I needed
the one who could be told anything, even the thing
that drove her away.

People will say I disliked the body; it's the easiest
explanation, for someone who talked with angels.
But my dear ones will know something different,
how astonished and careful
I could be, like a boy
given something unbelievable,
the pale gold flare at the bottom of the stream.

The men of our time burst into them
like the brusk hussar
at the dressing-room door in Strauss's Ariadne.

I loved their talents
as if they were my own talent,
a surer hand to reach the brush, the page --
transfixed with knowing
how a child shapes itself, willless, in the dark.

And they must have felt something heavy in me, too rich,
too complete in itself. They dreamed
stronger dreams in my presence.
But the weight was what sank, what even I couldn't hold.

I always hoped the right one
would arrive like wind,
that freshly, instantly touching everywhere.
I never remembered
the nature of wind is to pass by. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

FROM LIGHTENINGS: VIII

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.
The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,
A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain. ... {excerpt}

*
From Seeing Things (Faber & Faber, 1991).
*

[quasimodo1]

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/the-most-dangerous-book-of-poetry-ever-written/ Review of "The Book of Counted Sorrows" entitled The Most Dangerous Book of Poetry Ever Written by Gregory Cowles current price, used... 800.00

[quasimodo1]

Waiting

Was distinctly unglamorous.
A wince-making barrenness.
An eighteen-rib mule

Hungry unfed at the empty.
It wasn't an imaginary landscape.
But the morgue man bent

Over the young man asleep on a Lethean slab.
It was the season of quiet:
The quiet of death. The uneasy quiet

After the gasp in the middle
Of the terrible, terrible movie
That someone had made and kept showing... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

"If Ryan's language is spare, her concerns are broad and philosophical. A typical Ryan poem begins with a proposition—'Everything contains some/ silence' or 'It's what we can't/ know that interests/ us." She explores old bromides, wondering what the fabric of life is like ("stretchy") or what it might be like to live on an island where silence is revered. Each poem twists around and back upon its argument like a river retracing its path; they are didactic in spirit, but a bedrock wit supports them. Here's "Green Hills," from The Niagara River, her sixth (and most recent) book:"

Their green flanks
and swells are not
flesh in any sense
matching ours,
we tell ourselves.
Nor their green
breast nor their
green shoulder nor
the langour of their
rolling over.

from http://www.slate.com/id/2196198/pagenum/all/#page_start

[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.
The sound of the sea fits inside
An orange in a wicker basket,
Or your face when it is still wet.
Its fine sand, of which there is very little,
Licks the shell of the sunset without
Waiting to go in, as if I had
A gold coin in my hand and didn't
Know how to let it go.
I'll do the whole thing in one breath,
And soon this house will be happier*
And more logical, without the dark
Corridor, without its quiet humble* plume
Of smoke that was warm blood
Mistaken inside a windowpane.
When you're all in the door of your house
With that sense of Saturday and garden gate,
You'll know there's no place I'd rather live,
To finish out the summer, the last days of August,
And the blessed September,
Above all, waking up,
And finding THAT.
Send me news how the sea is doing,
Wave-like wheat and wheat-like wave.
Remember me when you
Are at the beach, in that yacht
With the name of an island -
I would like the water to grow calm
For you and send blue telegrams.
My back to the frozen field
And just one star, I have the joy
Of thinking very differently than I did
Last summer, the year that the pillow
Was embroidered. Who would have said
That eight years later, I would look
For the timid city on the map
To see the mountain stripped of mist
And NOT look at the sea?
The church tower rock back and forth
Over the pitiable houses? A verbal
And musical ruin. I never understood
The number in your address this past
Season, your passport of smiles
Like a train without wheels*
Or wheels without a track.
Surrounded by corpulent trees
As if the tree had just been invented,
The woman who went to gather kindling
On the beach of day sits down
With all the excitement pruduced by jewels.
But anything is better than to remain
Seated in the window looking*
At the same landscape and its surprises. ... {excerpt}

*

[quasimodo1]

From The Colossus and other Poems

FULL FATHOM FIVE

Old man, you surface seldom.
Then you come in with the tide's
coming
When seas wash cold, foam-

Capped: white hair, white beard,
Far-flung,
A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves
Crest and trough. Miles long

Extend the radial sheaves
Of your spread hair, in which wrin-
Kling skeins
Knotted, caught, survives

The old myth of origins
Unimaginable. You float near
As keeled ice-mountains

Of the north, to be steered clear
Of, not fathomed. All obscurity
Starts with a danger:

Your dangers are many. I
Cannot look much but your form
suffers
Some strange injury

And seems to die: so vapors
Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.
The muddy rumors

Of your burial move me
To half-believe: your reappearance
Proves rumors shallow,

For the archaic trenched lines
Of your grained face shed time in
Runnels:
Ages beat like rains

On the unbeaten channels
Of the ocean. Such sage humor
and
Durance are whirlpools

To make away with the ground-
Work of the earth and the sky's
Ridgepole. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

From The Colossus and Other Poems

THE COLOSSUS

I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It's worse than a barnyard.

Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or
Other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.

Scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails
Of lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull plates and clear
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman
Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are
littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-
Color. ..... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

From The Colossus and Other Poems

THE DISQUIETING MUSES

Mother, mother, what illbred aunt
Or what disfigured and unsightly
Cousin did you so unwisely keep
Unasked to my christening, that she
Sent these ladies in her stead
With heads like darning-eggs to nod
And nod and nod at foot and head
And at the left side of my crib?

Mother, who made to order stories
Of Mixie Blackshort the heroic bear,
Mother, whose witches always, always
Got baked into gingerbread, I wonder
Whether you saw them, whether you said
Words to rid me of those three ladies
Nodding by night around my bed,
Mouthless, eyeless, with stitched bald
head

In the hurricane, when father's twelve
Study windows bellied in
Like bubbles about to break, you fed
My brother and me cookies and Ovaltine
And helped the two of us to choir:
"Thor is angry: boom boom boom!
Thor is angry: we don't care!"
But those ladies broke the panes.

When on tiptoe the schoolgirls danced,
Blinking flashlights like fireflies
And singing the glowworm song, I could
Not lift a foot in the twinkle-dress
But, heavy-footed, stood aside
In the shadow cast by my dismal-headed
Godmothers, and you cried and cried:
And the shadow stretched, the lights
Went out.

Mother, you sent me to piano lessons
And praised my arabesques and trills
Although each teacher found my touch
Oddly wooden in spite of scales
And the hours of practicing, my ear
Tone-deaf and yes, unteachable.
I learned, I learned, I learned elsewhere,
From muses unhired by you, dear
Mother,

I woke one day to see you, mother,
Floating above me in bluest air
On a green balloon bright with a million
Flowers and bluebirds that never were
Never, Never, found anywhere.
But the little planet bobbed away
Like a soap-bubble as you called: Come
Here!
And I faced my traveling companions. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

From The Colossus and other Poems

MUSSEL HUNTER AT ROCK HARBOR

I came before the water-
Colorists came to get the
Good of the Cape light that scours
Sand grit to sided crystal
And buffs and sleeks the blunt hulls
Of the three fishing smacks beached
On the bank of the river's

Backtracking tail. I'd come for
Free fish-bait: the blue mussels
Clumped like bulbs at the grass-
root
Margin of the tidal pools.
Dawn tide stood dead low. I smelt
Mud stench, shell guts, gulls'
Leavings;
Heard a queer crusty scrabble

Cease, and I neared the silenced
Edge of a cratered pool-bed.
The mussels hung dull blue and
Conspicuous, yet it seemed
A sly world's hinges had swung
Shut against me. All held still.
Though I counted scant seconds,

Enough ages lapsed to win
Confidence and safe-conduct
In the wary otherworld
Eyeing me. Grass put forth claws;
Small mud knobs, nudged from
Under,
Displaced their domes as tiny
Knights might doff their casques.
The crabs

Inched from their pygmy burrows
And from the trench-dug mud, all
Camouflaged in mottled mail
Of browns and greens. Each wore
one
claw swollen to a shield large
As itself--no fiddler-s arm
Grown Gargantuan by trade,

But grown grimly, and grimly
Borne, for a use beyond my
Guessing of it. Sibilant
Mass-motived hordes, they sidled
Out in a converging stream
Toward the pool-mouth, perhaps to
Meet the thin and sluggish thread

Of sea retracing its tide-
Way up the river-basin.
Or to avoid me. They moved
Obliquely with a dry-wet
Sound. With a glittery wisp
And trickle. Could they feel mud
Pleasurable under claws

As I could between bare toes?
That question ended it--I
Stood shut out, for once, for all,
Puzzling the passage of their
Absolutely alien
Order as I might puzzle
At the clear tail of Halley's

Comet coolly giving my
Orbit the go-by, made known
By a family name it
Knew nothing of. So the crabs
Went about their business, which
Wasn't fiddling, and I filled
A big handkerchief with blue

Mussels. From what the crabs saw,
If they could see, I was one
Two-legged mussel-picker.
High on the airy thatching
Of the dense grasses I found
The husk of a fiddler-crab,
Intact, strangely strayed above

His world of mud--green color
And innards bleached and blown off
Somewhere be much sun and wind;
There was no telling if he'd
Died recluse or suicide
Or headstrong Columbus crab
The crab-face, etched and set there,

Grimaced as skulls grimace: it
Had an Oriental look,
A samurai death mask done
On a tiger tooth, less for
Art's sake than God's. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

from British contemporary poetry



from Exeunt

I

Drop Serene

He poured the warm, clear guck into the mould
in which he'd already composed, with tweezers,
dead wasps on an everlasting flower
or ants filling over a leaf. When it was cold
he slaved at the surface, softening the camber
till it sat with the row of blebs on his mantelpiece,
each with its sequestered populace
like a hiccup in history, scooped out of amber.

As if it might stall the invisible cursor
drawing a blind down each page of his almanac
or the blank wall of water that always kept pace,
glittering half an inch, half an inch from his back.
He was out in the garden, digging the borders
when it caught him, in a naturalistic pose.



II

Curtains

You stop at the tourist office in Aubeterre,
a columbarium of files and dockets.
She explains, while you flip through the little leaflets
about the chapel and the puppet-theatre,
that everything is boarded up till spring,
including — before you can ask — the only hotel.
A moped purrs through the unbroken drizzle.
You catch yourself checking her hands for rings.

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

FISSION



The real electric lights light upon the full-sized
screen
On which the greater-than-life-size girl appears,
Almost nude on the lawn-- sprinklers on --
Voice-over her mother calling her name out -- loud --
Camera angle giving her lowered lids their full
Expanse -- a desert -- as they rise

Out of the shabby annihilation,
Out of the possibility of never-having-been-seen,
And rise,
Till the glance is let loose into the auditorium,
And the man who has just stopped in his tracks
Looks down
For the first

Time. Tick tock. It's the birth of the mercantile

Dream (he looks down). It's the birth of
The dream called NEW WORLD (looks down). She lies there. A corridor of light
Filled with dust
Flows down from the booth to the screen.
Everyone in here wants to be taken off

Somebody's list, wants to be placed on
Somebody else's list.
Tick. It is 1963. The idea of history is being
Outmaneuvered.
So that as the houselights come on -- midscene --
Not quite killing the picture which keeps flowing beneath,

A man comes running down the aisle
Asking for our attention --

Ladies and Gentlemen
I watch the houselights lap against the other light -- the tunnel
Of image-making dots licking the white sheet awake --
A man, a girl, her desperate mother -- daisies growing in the
Corner --

I watch the light from our real place
Suck the arm of screen-building light into itself
Until the gesture of the magic forearm frays,
And the story up there grays, pales -- them almost lepers now,
Saints, such
White on their flesh in
Patches -- her thighs like receipts slapped down on a
Slim silver tray,

Her eyes as she lowers the heart-shaped shades,
As the glance glides over what used to be the open,
The free,
As the glance moves, pianissimo, over the glint of day,
Over the sprinkler, the mother's voice shrieking like a grappling
Hook,
The grass blades aflame with being-seen, here on the out-
Skirts…..You can almost hear the click at the heart of
The silence

Where the turnstile shuts and he's in -- our hero --
The moment spoked,
Our gaze on her fifteen-foot eyes,
The man hoarse now as he waves his arms,
As he screams to the booth to cut it, cut the sound,
And the sound is cut,
And her sun-barred shoulders are left to turn

Soundless as they accompany
Her neck, her face, the
Looking-up.
Now the theater's skylight is opened and noon slides in.
I watch as it overpowers the electric lights,
Whiting the story out one layer further

Till it's just a smoldering of whites
Where she sits up, and her stretch of flesh
Is just a roiling up of graynesses,
Vague stutterings of
Light with motion in them, bits of moving zeros

In the infinite virtuality of light,
Some LIKENESS in it but not particulate,
A grave of possible shapes called likeness -- see it? -- something
Scrawling up there that could be skin or daylight or even

The expressway now that he's gotten her to leave with him --
(it happened rather fast) (do you recall) --

The man up front screaming the President's been shot, waving
His hat, slamming one hand flat
Over the open
To somehow get
Our attention,

In Dallas, behind him the scorcher -- whites, grays,
Laying themselves across his face --
Him like a beggar in front of us, holding his hat --
I don't recall what I did,
I don't recall what the right thing to do would be,
I wanted someone to love…..

There is a way she lay down on that lawn
To begin with,
In the heart of the sprinklers,
Before the mother's call,
Before the man's shadow laid itself down,

There is a way to not yet be wanted,

There is a way to lie there at twenty-four frames
Per second -- no faster --
Not at the speed of plot,
Not at the speed of desire --

THE ROAD OUT -- EXPRESSWAY -- HOTELS -- MOTELS --
To telling what on earth we'll have to marry marry marry ….

Where the three lights merged:
Where the image licked my small body from the front, the story playing

All over my face my
Forwardness,
Where the electric lights took up the back and sides,
The unwavering houselights,
Seasonless,

Where the long thin arm of day came in from the top
To touch my head
Reaching down along my staring face --
Where they flared up around my body unable to

Merge into each other
over my likeness,
Slamming down one side of me, unquenchable -- here static

There flaming --
Sifting grays into other grays --
Mixing the split second into the long haul --
Flanking me -- undressing something there where my body is
Though not my body --
Where they play on the field of my willingness,

Where they kiss and brood, filtering each other to no avail,
All over my solo
Appearance,
Bits smoldering under the shadows I make --
And aimlessly -- what we call free -- there

The immobilism sets in,
The being-in-place more a love than the being,
My father sobbing beside me, the man on the stage
Screaming, the woman behind us starting to
Pray,
The immobilism, the being-in-place more alive than

The being, .... {excerpt}


(1991)

[quasimodo1]

AFTERIMAGES

*** I
However the image enters
its force remains within
my eyes
rockstrewn caves where dragonfish evolve
wild for life, relentless and acquisitive
learning to survive
where there is no food
my eyes are always hungry
and remembering
however the image enters
its force remains.
A white woman stands bereft and empty
a black boy hacked into a murderous lesson
recalled in me forever
like a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep
etched into my visions
food for dragonfish that learn
to live upon whatever they must eat
fused images beneath my pain.
*** II
The Pearl River floods through the streets of Jackson
A Mississippi summer televised.
Trapped houses kneel like sinners in the rain
a white woman climbs from her roof to a passing boat
her fingers tarry for a moment on the chimney
now awash
tearless and no longer young, she holds
a tattered baby's blanket in her arms.
In a flickering afterimage of the nightmare rain
a microphone
thrust up against her flat bewildered words
********* “we jest come from the bank yestiddy
****************** borrowing money to pay the income tax
****************** now everything's gone. I never knew
****************** it could be so hard.”
Despair weighs down her voice like Pearl River mud
caked around the edges
her pale eyes scanning the camera for help or explanation
unanswered
she shifts her search across the watered street, dry-eyed
****************** “hard, but not this hard.”
Two tow-headed children hurl themselves against her
hanging upon her coat like mirrors
until a man with ham-like hands pulls her aside
snarling “She ain't got nothing more to say!”
and that lie hangs in his mouth
like a shred of rotting meat.
*** III
I inherited Jackson, Mississippi.
For my majority it gave me Emmett Till
his 15 years puffed out like bruises
on plump boy-cheeks
his only Mississippi summer
whistling a 21 gun salute to Dixie
as a white girl passed him in the street
and he was baptized my son forever
in the midnight waters of the Pearl.
His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st year
when I walked through a northern summer
my eyes averted
from each corner's photographies
newspapers protest posters magazines
Police Story, Confidential, True
the avid insistence of detail
pretending insight or information
the length of gash across the dead boy's loins
his grieving mother's lamentation
the severed lips, how many burns
his gouged out eyes
sewed shut upon the screaming covers
louder than life
all over
the veiled warning, the secret relish
of a black child's mutilated body
fingered by street-corner eyes
bruise upon livid bruise
and wherever I looked that summer
I learned to be at home with children's blood
with savored violence
with pictures of black broken flesh
used, crumpled, and discarded
lying amid the sidewalk refuse
like a raped woman's face.
A black boy from Chicago
whistled on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi
testing what he'd been taught was a manly thing to do
his teachers
ripped his eyes out his sex his tongue
and flung him to the Pearl weighted with stone
in the name of white womanhood
they took their aroused honor
back to Jackson
and celebrated in a whorehouse
the double ritual of white manhood
confirmed.
{3 of 4 parts}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/nba-Roethke65.pdf -- Review from August 23, 1964 of the collection: "The Far Field" written a year after Theodore Roethke's untimely death.

[quasimodo1]

THE THIRD HOUR OF THE NIGHT

When the eye

When the edgeless screen receiving
light from the edgeless universe

When the eye first

When the edgeless screen facing
outward as if hypnotized by the edgeless universe

When the eye first saw that it

Hungry for more light
resistlessly began to fold back upon itself TWIST

As if a dog sniffing

Ignorant of origins
familiar with hunger

As if a dog sniffing a dead dog

Before nervous like itself but now
weird inert cold nerveless

Twisting in panic had abruptly sniffed itself

When the eye
first saw that it must die When the eye first

Brooding on our origins you
ask When and I say

Then


wound-dresser let us call the creature
driven again and again to dress with fresh
bandages and a pail of disinfectant
suppurations that cannot
heal for the wound that confers existence is mortal
wound-dresser
what wound is dressed the wound of being


Understand that it can drink till it is
sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied.
It alone knows you. It does not wish you well. {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

VITA NOVA

You saved me, you should remember me.
The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats.
Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.
When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling.
I remember sounds like that from my childhood,
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,
something like that.
Lugano. Tables under the apple trees.
Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags.
And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water;
perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him.
Crucial
sounds or gestures like
a track laid down before the larger themes
and then unused, buried.
Islands in the distance. My mother
holding out a plate of little cakes—
as far as I remember, changed
in no detail, the moment
vivid, intact, having never been
exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age
hungry for life, utterly confident— ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

A WALRUS TUSK FROM ALASKA

Arp might have done a version in white marble,
the model held aloft, in approximate awe:
this tough cross-section oval of tusk,
dense and cool as fossil cranium—
preliminary bloodshed condonable
if Inupiat hunters on King Island may
follow as their fathers did the bark of a husky,
echoes ricocheted from roughed-up eskers
on the glacier, a resonance salt-cured
and stained deep green by Arctic seas, whose tilting floor
mirrors the mainland’s snowcapped amphitheater.
Which of his elders set Mike Saclamana the task
and taught him to decide, in scrimshaw, what was so?
Netted incisions black as an etching
saw a way to scratch in living infinitives
known since the Miocene to have animated
the Bering Strait: one humpback whale, plump,
and bardic; an orca caught on the ascending arc,
salt droplets flung from a flange of soot-black fin ... ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

From The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke

THE GENTLE

Delicate the syllables that release the repression;
Hysteria masks in the studied inane.
Horace the hiker on a dubious mission
Pretends his dead bunion gives exquisite pain.

The son of misfortune long, long has been waiting
The visit of vision, luck years overdue,
His laughter reduced the sing-song of prating,
A hutch by the EXIT his room with a view.
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

TRANSCENDENCE
Beauty and colors so pleasing to the eye,
Stars and planets in the dark sky,
The ratio in the circle denoted by pi,
The surging of the seas and the marvel of the fly

The splendor of the flowers that blossom and die:
All these were there as eons rolled by.
But neither plants nor trees, nor beasts nor birds
Described all these in rhymes or in words.

Nature and her laws were occult in the dark,
Till consciousness came, and lit them with its spark.
How did this happen, for what purpose and whence?
Could the answer for this be in Transcendence?

[quasimodo1]

BLUE MONDAY


Blue of the heaps of beads poured into her breasts
and clacking together in her elbows;
blue of the silk
that covers lily-town at night;
blue of her teeth
that bite cold toast
and shatter on the streets;
blue of the dyed flower petals with gold stamens
hanging like tongues
over the fence of her dress
at the opera/opals clasped under her lips
and the moon breaking over her head a
gush of blood-red lizards.
Blue Monday. Monday at 3:00 and
Monday at 5. Monday at 7:30 and
Monday at 10:00. Monday passed under the rippling
California fountain. Monday alone
a shark in the cold blue waters.
*********************You are dead: wound round like a paisley shawl.
*********************I cannot shake you out of the sheets. Your name
*********************is still wedged in every corner of the sofa.
*********************Monday is the first of the week,
*********************and I think of you all week.
*********************I beg Monday not to come
*********************so that I will not think of you
*********************all week.
You paint my body blue. On the balcony
in the softy muddy night, you paint me
with bat wings and the crystal
the crystal
the crystal
the crystal in your arm cuts away
the night, folds back ebony whale skin
and my face, the blue of new rifles,
and my neck, the blue of Egypt,
and my breasts, the blue of sand,
and my arms, bass-blue,
and my stomach, arsenic;
there is electricity dripping from me like cream;
there is love dripping from me I cannot use—like acacia or
jacaranda—fallen blue and gold flowers, crushed into the street. {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Hermann Hesse



(translated by James Wright)

PAINTER'S JOY

Acres bear corn and cost money.
Meadows are surrounded by barbed wire,
Terrible need and avarice laid side by side
Everything looks wasted and closed in.

But here in my eye another order of things
Goes on living: violet ebbs away
And the purple flows on its throne, and I sing
My innocent song.

Yellow by yellow, and yellow next to red.
Cool blue turns to the color of rose.
Light and color leap from world to world,
Arch and echo away in a surging of love.

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Talking Poetry

Thursday, September 25, 2008
7:14 PM

(title of book from the U. of New Mexico Press, copyright 1987)
(subtitle=Conversations in the Workshop with Contemporary Poets)
(author= Lee Bartlett)

While sifting through some old volumes, this book, TALKING POETRY, got my attention because
The poets who were interviewed were mostly unknown to anyone familiar with the who's who of contemporary poetry of this present period. The authors included in this volume were:

Clark Coolidge
Theodore Enslin
Clayton Eshleman
William Everson
Thom Gunn
Kenneth Irby
Michael Palmer
Tom Raworth
Ishmael Reed
Stephen Rodefer
Nathaniel Tarn
Diane Wakoski
Anne Waldman

In searching these poets online and in library database, the only poets "making the cut" at this time are:

Eshleman, Everson, Gunn, Palmer, Reed, Wakoski, and Waldman.

Of these, in my opinion only three composed poetry passing this very limited test of time.
See posts following for examples.

[quasimodo1]

de Kooning's Woman I

from From Scratch, Black Sparrow Press, 1998.


is the first in a series, probably not
in de Kooning's sense of it primal woman or
first-earliest-woman, but these facets may have been
on his mind, for we have here a series or "ones,"
a sacrificed and dismembered "goddess,"
a kind of North American Coyolxauhqui
whose circular Stone was discovered at the foot of the Great
Temple stairway,
as well as Madonna and Child,
the Child at once just born and maybe four,
he is bald and white, in the Madonna's left shoulder and arm,
staring at Her, perched on what appears to be
Her ruddy left thigh, which
on closer inspection might also be
the rump of a flat-snouted or headless animal
lunging to the right, whose back and legs are Her lap and legs,
lunging into the shredding legs of the figure who uses
the Madonna's right shoulder and arm as his breast and stomach
(which is also a red-gartered, chubby, severed thigh)-
he has long, loosely-tied hair, or is "he" a widwife
with face hair-a pirate? sniffing
or whispering to the Madonna's right temple?
His breast-stomach is also his right arm
swinging under the Madonna's haltered and huge right breast,
and out of his splitting hand
another hand emerges from which
shears protrude cutting the Child's umbilicus?
Or is a castration under way?

All this action is simultaneously
splintered and frozen,
once we see the Child, the animal, and pirate-midwife,
there's not much left of Woman I, or
let's say she's in sacrificial drag,
all but her head and breasts are others
masquerading as her body parts,
she is a crowned tripod of wedge-head and dome-shielded breasts,
dismembered and whole? or have her body parts been stuffed into
new roles?
Over-sized Mesopotamian eyes, hypnotic,
teeth like a porticullisbeaver-set into her face,
the gaze of one who has been blasted,
the left eye straight ahead,
as wide open animal jaws howl at her earless head,
the right eye more inward, averted,
reflecting on what pirate-midwife is hissing-

{excerpt, 2 of 3 stanzas}

[quasimodo1]

FALSE PORTRAIT OF D.B. AS NICCOLO PAGANINI



Those who have lived here since before
time are gone while the ones who must
replace them have not yet arrived.


The streets are wet with a recent
rain yet you continue to count
first minutes and hours then trees


rocks, windows, mailboxes, streetlights
and pictographs refusing to
rest even for the brief span it


would take to dry off, change clothes and
reemerge grotesque yet oddly
attractive like Paganini


whose mother was visited by
a seraph in Genoa not
long before his birth and who is


thought now to have acquired much of
his technical wizardry as
a result of Marfan’s syndrome


a quite common anomaly
of the connective tissues which
may well account for the tall and


angular body, muscular
underdevelopment as well
as the hypermobile joints that


eventuated on the stage
in a peculiar stance, a
spectacular bowing technique


and an awesome mastery of
the fingerboard. He would bring his
left hip forward to support his


body’s weight. His left shoulder, thrust
forward also, would enable
him to rest his left elbow on


his chest, a buttress against the
stress of forceful bowing along
with debilitating muscle


fatigue. The looseness of the right
wrist and shoulder gave pliancy
leading to broad acrobatic


bowing. The ‘spider’ fingers of
his left hand permitted a range
on the fingerboard which many


attributed to black magic
for Paganini was said to
have signed a pact with Lucifer


to acquire virtuosity
as a small child. After his death
perhaps due in part to this tale


in part also to rumours of
gambling and wild debauchery
the Church refused to allow him


burial on hallowed ground. In
consequence his body was moved
furtively from place to place


until after many years and
for reasons still mysterious
the Church finally relented.


A few paradoxes should be
noted as an afterward. Though
accused of charlatanism he


was rewarded for his skill like
no one before him. He loved his
violin above all yet once


he gambled it away at cards.
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Review entitled "The Roustabout" by David Orr 9/26/08 of Clive James' new book: OPAL SUNSET, SELECTED POEMS, 1958-2008 (Norton, 25.95) ... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/books/review/Orr2-t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bua2&oref=slogin

[quasimodo1]

Sarah Lindsay


From Poetry, October, 2008

ELEGY FOR THE QUAGGA

Krakatau split with a blinding noise
And raised from gutted, steaming rock
A pulverized black sky, over water walls
That swiftly fell on Java and Sumatra.
Fifteen days before, in its cage in Amsterdam,
The last known member of Equus quagga,
The southernmost subspecies of zebra, died.
Most of the wild ones, not wild enough,
Grazing near the Cape of Good Hope,
Had been shot and skinned and roasted by white hunters.

When a spider walked on cooling Krakatau's skin,
No quagga walked anywhere. While seeds
Pitched by long winds onto newborn fields
Burst open and rooted, perhaps some thistle
Flourished on the quagga's discarded innards.
The fractured island greened and hummed again;
Handsome zebras tossed their heads
In zoos, on hired safari plains.
Who needs to hear a quagga's voice?
Or see the warm hide twitch away a fly, ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

From Poetry magazine, October 2008

IN THE DRINK

"He would have gone to Hell ageine, and earnest sute did make:
But charon would not suffer him to passe the Stygian lake."
--Ovid, Metamorphoses
(Tr. By Arthur Golding)

Never mind phantom forms, the Keaton--crash
That dumped us in that sea-fed swamp,
The Dutch kill, Latin nihil, thing without
Opposite-- attend instead the transcendent,

The flying, for god's sake, what we saw
The moment before we thwocked overboard:
A heron stutter-flapped and lifted off,
Clumsy as a wind-mauled tarp at first,

But couth beyond sublime once clear
Of cattail punks and saltgrass tips,
The overturned rowboat's rusted hull.
Or the cormorant that plunked and dipped,

Rose flipping fish from beak to tongue
And down its neck, water beading on its head.
But the crown that really pleased the crowd
My maiden voyage was iridescent green,

Brilliantined, a merganser's spiky coxcomb.
He swam right by, chasing red herrings
And crackling so happily I had to pull
A feather from his cap. And so I surfaced

Solo. I tell myself, I only launch the bark,
I never book the seats. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

PILGRIMAGE

We drive home, the valley floor
flooded with darkness, the baby inside you floating
head down, swaying when the car
turns, a sleeper within
a sleeper. A glove

of moonlight on my hand, I remember
the lake in Maine, my friend angry,
challenging me to swim with him across. We vanished

and reappeared in the swells, flailing,
filling and emptying our hands. I found him floating
on his back, his face warm in the sun, the lake
holding him, hiding him. I won't

wake you, a shadowy rush
of farms and meadows the way they streamed past
the train to Barcelona, you and I sleeping uneasily,
the racket of hammering rails in the tunnels, and out,
the ocean beside us, calm in moonlight.
We stopped, jarred awake
in our little berths.

We climbed into the bus where your purse
was picked-it must have been there-crowded into
the aisle, the small boy behind you,
his terrific concentration.

We got off too soon, and walked
block after block of urban housing: blank,
evacuated. What appeared to be a mountain of rubbish

heaving itself in spires and geysers into the sky
was La Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's unfinished nightmare
Temple of the Holy Family, an empty shell

as if bombed out, tilted
treelike columns spiraling upward, parabolic
arches and helicoidal surfaces, an eerie warping,
flutter and undulation of angel and snail, its domes
and cupolas encrusted with broken tiles,
cups, plates, and pieces of glass,
called by the local people
The Cathedral of the Poor. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/books/02masl.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bub3&oref=slogin Review entitled "Tripping To and Fro, Happily Skewering Poetry" by Janet Maslin, 10/1/08 of Billy Collins' new book BALLISTICS

[quasimodo1]

ONE ART

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

From The Colossus and other poems

BLUE MOLES

1. They're out of the dark's ragbag, these two
Moles dead in the pebbled rut,
Shapeless as flung gloves, a few feet apart--
Blue suede a dog or fox has chewed.
One, by himself, seemed pitiable enough,
Little victim unearthed by some large
creature
From his orbit under the elm root.
The second carcass makes a duel of the
Affair:
Blind twins bitten by bad nature.

The sky's far dome is sane and clear.
Leaves, undoing their yellow caves
Between the road and the lake water,
Bare no sinister spaces. Already
The moles look neutral as the stones.
Their corkscrew noses, their white hands
Uplifted, stiffen in a family pose.
Difficult to imagine how fury struck--
Dissolved now, smoke of an old war.

2. Nightly the battle-shouts start up
In the ear of the veteran, and again
I enter the soft pelt of the mole.
Light's death to them: they shrivel in it.
They move through their mute rooms while
I sleep,
Palming the earth aside, grubbers
After the fat children of root and rock.
By day, only the topsoil heaves.
Down there one is alone.
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/26/poetry Interview "Olds' Worlds" by Marianne Macdonald (photograph of Sharon Olds)

[quasimodo1]

From The Face of the Earth

MAKING YOUR OWN ECLIPSE

Making Your Own Eclipse
The word comes from a Greek word
for ‘abandonment’: we catch an untraceable
fire already kindled in another.

When night falls suddenly
for such a short period
in the clearest skies of the day

as a second darkening,
they could not have known
that what they were seeing was the Moon

acting as a screen.
For blue does not mean
its sensation in us, but the power

in it, the behaviour of the aligning
light in the pleasure-journey
of the obedient morning.

Across Ireland the blueness will drop
to temperatures of dusk,
a gentle east wind

will blow birds silent,
and stars along the Path
of Totality will decorate

the late forenoon.
Bleating flocks and fearful herds
will unexpectedly return to their stables

and patterns of light and dark
will tremble over the ground.
We will keep looking

at the fleecy space,
you curled up with your head
on my knee, saying, We

have been cheated, the twenty-
four seconds are passing and it
is much worse than we expected.

Then there will be the subtle
tension as the Moon begins
to creep into your face,

the cool band of air
in her shadow racing
about as close as it can,

to plunge into the gold spot
where the magnified Sun
will sail under the same perfect pearl.

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

From The Oxford Book of American Poetry
(chosen and edited by David Lehman)

MAN LISTENING TO DISC

This is not bad--
Ambling along 44th Street
With Sonny Rollins for company,
His music flowing through the soft calipers
Of these earphones,

As if he were right beside me
On this clear day in March,
The pavement sparkling with sunlight,
Pigeons fluttering off the curb,
Nodding over a profusion of bread crumbs.

In fact, I would say
My delight at being suffused
With phrases from his saxophone--
Some like honey, some like vinegar--
Is surpassed only be my gratitude

To Tommy Potter for taking the time
To join us on this breezy afternoon
With his most unwieldy bass
And to the esteemed Arthur Taylor
Who is somehow managing to navigate

This crowd with his cumbersome drums.
And I bow deeply to Theloniious Monk
For figuring out a way
To motorize-- or whatever -- his huge piano
As he could be with us today.

The music is loud yet so confidential
I cannot help feeling even more
Like the center of the universe
Than usual as I walk along to a rapid
Little version of "The Way You Look Tonight,"

And all I can say to my fellow pedestrians,
To the woman in the white sweater,
The man in the tan raincoat and the heavy glasses,
Who mistake themselves for the center of the universe --
All I can say is watch your step

Because the five of us, instruments and all,
Are about to angle over
To the south side of the street
And then, in our own tightly knit way,
Turn the corner at Sixth Avenue.
{excerpt}

[Psycheinaboat]

Untitled

The landscape crossed out with a pen
reappears here

what I am pointing to is not rhetoric
October over the rhetoric
flight seen everywhere
the scout in the black uniform
gets up, takes hold of the world
and microfilms it into a scream

wealth turns into floodwaters
a flash of light expands
into frozen experience
and just as I seem to be a false witness
sitting in the middle of a field
the snow troops remove their disguises
and turn into language

[quasimodo1]

From The Oxford Book of American Poetry
(chosen and edited by David Lehman)

TO WORLD WAR TWO

Early on you introduced me to young women in bars
You were large, and with a large hand
You presented them in different cities,
Made me in San Luis Obispo, drunk
On French seventy-fives, in Los Angeles, on pousse-cafes.
It was a time of general confusion
Of being a body hurled at a wall.
I didn't do much fighting. I sat, rather I stood, in a foxhole.
I stood while the typhoon splashed us into morning.
It felt unusual
Even if for a good cause
To be part of a destructive force
With my rifle in my hands
And in my head
My serial number
The entire object of my existence
To eliminate Japanese soldiers
By killing them
With a rifle or with a grenade
And then, many years after that,
I could write poetry
Fall in love
And have a daughter
And think
About these things
From a great distance
If I survived
I was "paying by debt
To societry" a paid
Killer. It wasn't
Like anything I'd done
Before, on the paved
Streets of Cincinatti
Or on the ballroom floor
At Mr. Vathe's dancing class
What would Anne Marie Goldsmith
Have thought of mee
If instead of asking her to dance
I had put my BAR* to my shoulder
And shot her in the face
I thought about her in my foxhole--
One, in a foxhole near me, has his throat cut during the night
We take more precautions but it is night and it is you.
The typhoon continues and so do you.
"I can't be killed -- because of my poetry. I have to live on in order to write it."
I thought -- even crazier thought, or just as crazy --
"If I'm killed while thinking of oines, it will be too corny
When it's reported" ( I imagined it would be reported.!)
So I kept thinking lines of poetry. One that came to me on the beach in Leyte
Was :The surf comes in like masochistic lions."
I loved this terrible line. It was keeping by alive. My Uncle Leo wrote to me,
"You won't believe this, but someday you may wish
You were footlosse and twenty on Leyte again." I have never wanted
To be on Leyte again,
With you, whispering into my ear,
"Go on and win me! Tomorrow you may not be alive,
So do it today!" How could anyone ever win you?
How many persons would I have to kill Was older than you were and in camouflage. But for you
Who threw everything together, and had all the systems
Working for you all the time, this was trivial. If you could use me
You'd use me, and then forget. How else
Did I think you'd behave?
I'm glad you ended. I glad I didn't die. Or lose my mind.
As machines make ice
*footnote...Browning Automatic Rifle, high posered assualt rifle used primarily in secnd World War. (excerpt)

[quasimodo1]

http://www.slate.com/id/2197576/pagenum/all/

[quasimodo1]

TO SEE HIM AGAIN
Never, never again?
Not on nights filled with quivering stars,
or during dawn's maiden brightness
or afternoons of sacrifice?

Or at the edge of a pale path
that encircles the farmlands,
or upon the rim of a trembling fountain,
whitened by a shimmering moon?

Or beneath the forest's
luxuriant, raveled tresses
where, calling his name,
I was overtaken by the night?
Not in the grotto that returns
the echo of my cry?

Oh no. To see him again --
it would not matter where --
in heaven's deadwater
or inside the boiling vortex,
under serene moons or in bloodless fright!

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=977de916-1914-47f4-9c92-00e1541fbff3

The New Republic

Sing for Me, Muse, the Mania
by Christopher Benfey
Post Date Wednesday, October 08, 2008





Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

[quasimodo1]

RETRODUCTION TO AMERICAN HISTORY


Cats walk the floor at midnight; that enemy of fog,
The moon, wraps the bedpost in receding stillness; sleep
Collects all weary nothings and lugs away the towers,
The pinnacles of dust that feed the subway.


What stiff unhappy silence waits on sleep
Struts like an officer; tongues next-door bewitch
Themselves with divination; I like a melancholy oaf
Beg the nightly pillow with impossible loves.
And abnegation folds hands, crossed like the knees
Of the complacent tailor, stitches cloaks of mercy
To the backs of obsessions.


Winter like spring no less
Tolerates the air; the wild pheasant meets innocently
The gun; night flouts illumination with meagre impudence.
In such serenity of equal fates, why has Narcissus
Urged the brook with questions? Merged with the element
Speculation suffuses the meadow with drops to tickle
The cow’s gullet; grasshoppers drink the rain.
Antiquity breached mortality with myths.
Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates
A cornice on the Third National Bank. Vocabulary
Becomes confusion, decoration a blight; the Parthenon
In Tennessee stucco, art for the sake of death. Now
(The bedpost receding in stillness) you brush your teeth
“Hitting on all thirty-two;” scholarship pares
The nails of Catullus, sniffs his sheets, restores
His “passionate underwear;” morality disciplines the other
Person; every son-of-a-***** is Christ, at least Rousseau;
Prospero serves humanity in steam-heated universities, three
Thousand dollars a year. Simplicity, Flamineo, is obscene;
Sunlight topples indignant from the hill.
In every railroad station everywhere every lover
Waits for his train. He cannot hear. The smoke
Thickens. Ticket in hand, he pumps his body
Toward lower six, for one more terse ineffable trip,
His very eyeballs fixed in disarticulation. The berth
Is clean; no elephants, vultures, mice or spiders
Distract him from nonentity: his metaphors are dead. ... {half of this poem}

[JBI]

http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=977de916-1914-47f4-9c92-00e1541fbff3

The New Republic

Sing for Me, Muse, the Mania
by Christopher Benfey
Post Date Wednesday, October 08, 2008





Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
For those interested, One Art by Bishop

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/elizabeth_bishop/poems/860

[Jozanny]

RETRODUCTION TO AMERICAN HISTORY


Cats walk the floor at midnight; that enemy of fog,
The moon, wraps the bedpost in receding stillness; sleep
Collects all weary nothings and lugs away the towers,
The pinnacles of dust that feed the subway.


What stiff unhappy silence waits on sleep
Struts like an officer; tongues next-door bewitch
Themselves with divination; I like a melancholy oaf
Beg the nightly pillow with impossible loves.
And abnegation folds hands, crossed like the knees
Of the complacent tailor, stitches cloaks of mercy
To the backs of obsessions.

quasi, I really like this. I hope Tate wins because it seems I can sink my teeth into these motifs with enthusiasm, and I am motivated to read his work purely for myself, so I may just make an Amazon purchase, but I will wait until I know which collection you are going to select.

[quasimodo1]

What a passage. Let me see if I can influence unfairly the vote. "Vocabulary
Becomes confusion, decoration a blight; the Parthenon
In Tennessee stucco, art for the sake of death."

[quasimodo1]

SONNETS OF THE BLOOD



I


What is the flesh and blood compounded of
But a few moments in the life of time?
This prowling of the cells, litigious love,
Wears the long claw of flesh-arguing crime.
Consider the first settlers of our bone,
Observe how busily they sued the dust,
Estopped forever by the last dusted stone.
It is a pity that two brothers must
Perceive a canker of perennial flower
To make them brothers in mortality:
Perfect this treason to the murderous hour
If you would win the hard identity
Of brothers—a long race for men to run
Nor quite achieved when the perfection’s won.
{excerpt}

[Jozanny]

What a passage. Let me see if I can influence unfairly the vote. "Vocabulary
Becomes confusion, decoration a blight; the Parthenon
In Tennessee stucco, art for the sake of death."

Is this one of your humorous moments which always lose me?:p I ordered new The Collected Poems 1919-1976 FGS classics, because as usual, TNR is always right and I'd die happy if I could intern with them just a few short months, but I am only a semi-intelligentsia snark, for a crip.:D

I bought it because this is a keeper, at least for me, whether he wins the vote or not.

Delivery date est is 10/16, but I usually get Amazon purchases in about 3 days.

[quasimodo1]

Yes, another attempt at levity which is my case tends to be Murphyesque, sucking stones, crutches and mews of the southeastern aspect. I am trying to get FGS...have you ever used Library of America...they are moving and having a big sell off. Mostly classic stuff. Please tell me your remark about the TNR is ascerbic.

[quasimodo1]

TIERRA DEL FUEGO



You who see our homes at night
and the frail walls of our conscience,
you who hear our conversations
droning on like sewing machines
—save me, tear me from sleep,
from amnesia.
Why is childhood—oh, tinfoil treasures,
oh, the rustling of lead, lovely and foreboding—
our only origin, our only longing?
Why is manhood, which takes the place of ripeness,
an endless highway,
Sahara yellow?
After all, you know there are days
when even thirst runs dry
and prayer’s lips harden.
Sometimes the sun’s coin dims
and life shrinks so small
that you could tuck it
in the blue gloves of the Gypsy
who predicts the future
for seven generations back
and then in some other little town
in the south a charlatan
decides to destroy you,
me, and himself.
You who see the whites of our eyes,
you who hide like a bullfinch
in the rowans,
like a falcon
in the clouds’ warm stockings
—open the boxes full of song,
open the blood that pulses in aortas
of animals and stones,
light lanterns in black gardens. ... {excerpt}


Translated by Clare Cavanah

[Jozanny]

Yes, another attempt at levity which is my case tends to be Murphyesque, sucking stones, crutches and mews of the southeastern aspect. I am trying to get FGS...have you ever used Library of America...they are moving and having a big sell off. Mostly classic stuff. Please tell me your remark about the TNR is ascerbic.

quasi, your encyclopedic skills tend to astound, which is why as a poet myself I might drown in them if I am not careful to back off now and then:p.

Yes, I enjoy Library of America texts as very finely edited, and have much of James and Faulkner and Paine and Sherman's memoirs, among others, and no, when it comes to The New Republic, to me they represent the dying breed of a true American and (American-Jewish) intelligentsia--with the possible exception of Michelle Cottle. Oddly, I don't like their female opinion writers as much--too much of a b----y streak in tonality, :D

That said though, their editors made me nearly skid mark my underwear by treating me with respect when I applied to work for them. I keep torturing my columns in near tears hoping one day I am satisfied enough to keep trying to crack their ceiling with my byline. The quality of their work and literary depth is the closest thing I have to a religion.

Now I have to go look up this Adam Z who you posted. You can pm me anytime. All is forgiven:lol: (I'm joking).

[quasimodo1]

THE ART OF POETRY


To gaze at a river made of time and water
and remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

{excerpt}

--translated by Anthony Kerrigan

[quasimodo1]

FROM THE DRESSING-ROOM


Left to itself, they say, every foetus
would turn female, staving in, nature
siding then with the enemy that
delicately mixes up genders. This
is an absence I have passionately sought,
brightening nevertheless my poet’s attic
with my steady hands, calling him my blue
lizard till his moans might be heard
at the far end of the garden. For I like
his ways, he’s light on his feet and does
not break anything, puts his entire soul
into bringing me a glass of water,
I can take anything now, even his being
away, for it always seems to me his
writing is for me, as I walk springless
from the dressing-room in a sisterly
length of flesh-coloured silk. .... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.danagioia.net/essays/eryan.htm Article by Dana Gioia

[quasimodo1]

212
by Anna Akhmatova
translated from the Russian by Judith Hemschemeyer

And now you are depressed and despondent,
Renouncing fame and your dreams,
But for me you are irremediably dear,
And the darker you become, the more touching.
You drink wine, your nights are impure,
You don’t know reality from dream,
But your green eyes are tormented —
It’s clear that wine hasn’t brought you peace.
And your heart asks only for a quicker death,
Cursing the sluggishness of fate,
More and more often the west wind carries
Your reproaches and your pleas.
But could I really go back to you?
Under the pale sky of my native land,
I only know how to remember and sing,
But you don’t dare remember me.
So the days go by, and sorrows multiply,
How can I pray to the Lord for you?
You’ve guessed: my love is such
That even you can’t make it die.
July 22, 1917
Slepnyova
*
Anna Akhmatova was born Anna Gorenko into an upper-class family in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1889. Although frequently confronted with official goverment opposition to her work during her lifetime, she was deeply loved and lauded by the Russian people, in part because she did not abandon her country during difficult political times. She died in Leningrad, where she had spent most of her life, in 1966.
Judith Hemschemeyer’s translations of Anna Akhmatova will be brought out by Zephyr Press this spring. (1990)

[quasimodo1]

AENEAS AT WASHINGTON
*
I myself saw furious with blood
Neoptolemus, at his side the black Atridae,
Hecuba and the hundred daughters, Priam
Cut down, his filth drenching the holy fires.
In that extremity I bore me well,
A true gentleman, valorous in arms,
Distinterested and honourable. Then fled
That was a time when civilization
Run by the few fell to the many, and
Crashed to the shout of men, the clang of arms:
Cold victualing I seized, I hoisted up
The old man my father upon my back,
In the smoke made by sea for a new world
Saving little--a mind imperishable
If time is, a love of past things tenuous
As the hesitation of receding love.
(To the reduction of uncitied littorals
We brought chiefly the vigor of prophecy,
Our hunger breeding calculation
And fixed triumphs.)
I saw the thirsty dove
In the glowing fields of Troy, hemp ripening
And tawny corn, the thickening Blue Grass
All lying rich forever in the green sun.
I see all things apart, the towers that men
Contrive I too contrived long, long ago.
Now I demand little. The singular passion
Abides its object and consumes desire
In the circling shadow of its appetite.
{excerpt}
*** 1933

[JBI]

Barbara Klar


Wind is Pine for listen.
Snap means wait.
And the shadow word
dangles from the witch's hair
and fights the old war of deadfall and pours
from the one-toothed gargoyles in the eaves of the forest,

in the gardens of the giants, their woody flowers creaking,
the word leaning west, west, growing vertical
against the wind's disorder, the raven trees planted
by one wingtip and flying.

From Not Speaking for One Week

Quasi, if you could find me more on this poet I would greatly appreciate it, as I can only dig up this little cutting. I know she isn't prolific, but I was very moved by this little snippet (though it is not yet published widely).

Edit, did some digging of my own through her publisher, and came up with these interesting poems:

http://www.openbooktoronto.com/magazine/fall_2008/articles/cypress

Dusk in the narrow country
of the North Plateau. The lodgepoles have been
waiting, villages of the undead with their arms
out, the night clerks of stone hotels
with broken beds and caving basements.

I enter, cambium locking,
and the father of doors knows
I will wake without a body. Choose your tree.

In a country disappearing over cliffs, invisible
bones in the bone trees, mine is the lodgepole
of the hot pasture’s edge, candelabra
in the Church of Pine, a year’s hymns
bundled in the flames that light my death.

*

A low branch opens: back room, needle dust,
hip hollow last lain in before the discovery
of magnetic north. The hound who has been following
circles its sleep and lays down a long bone line.
It has followed for years toward this bearing,
muzzle pointing through the tree
to the north northwest of the afterlight.

I lie down also, kiss the velvet bone, hound skull
spearing its heartbeat, my arm around the great chest
thumping slowly and more slowly,
for a seasons-long minute
not at all. I am alone among
the dead again, a spoon
around the dark spoon of the hound
who will hover in the branches,
someone staring north
from Lodgepole, Montana,
the Hound Star rising.

I will live alone if I must, leave
for the coyotes the gift of flesh and lung,
I will walk downhill abandoned
in the flickering morning.

From Night Tree

[quasimodo1]

MOTHER AND CHILD



We’re all dreamers; we don’t know who we are.
Some machine made us; machine of the world, the constricting family.
Then back to the world, polished by soft whips.
We dream; we don’t remember.
Machine of the family: dark fur, forests of the mother’s body.
Machine of the mother: white city inside her.
And before that: earth and water.
Moss between rocks, pieces of leaves and grass.
And before, cells in a great darkness.
And before that, the veiled world.
This is why you were born: to silence me.
Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn
to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece.
I improvised; I never remembered.
Now it’s your turn to be driven;
you’re the one who demands to know:
Why do I suffer? ... {excerpt}

"Mother and Child" by Louise Glück, from The Seven Ages. Copyright © 2001

[quasimodo1]

From The Collected Poetry of Theodore Roethke

JUDGE NOT

Faces greying faster than loam-crumbs on a harrow;
Children, their bellies swollen like blown-up paper bags,
Their eyes, rich as plums, staring from newsprint,--
These images haunted me noon and midnight.
I imagined the unborn, starving in wombs, curling:
I asked: May the blessings of life, O Lord, descend on the living.

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

MIDSUMMER



On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry,
the boys making up games requiring them to tear off  the girls’ clothes
and the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since last summer
and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones
leaping off  the high rocks — bodies crowding the water.


The nights were humid, still. The stone was cool and wet,
marble for  graveyards, for buildings that we never saw,
buildings in cities far away.


On cloudy nights, you were blind. Those nights the rocks were dangerous,
but in another way it was all dangerous, that was what we were after.
The summer started. Then the boys and girls began to pair off
but always there were a few left at the end — sometimes they’d keep watch,
sometimes they’d pretend to go off  with each other like the rest,
but what could they do there, in the woods? No one wanted to be them.
But they’d show up anyway, as though some night their luck would change,
fate would be a different fate.


At the beginning and at the end, though, we were all together.
After the evening chores, after the smaller children were in bed,
then we were free. Nobody said anything, but we knew the nights we’d meet
and the nights we wouldn’t. Once or twice, at the end of summer,
we could see a baby was going to come out of all that kissing.


And for those two, it was terrible, as terrible as being alone.
The game was over. We’d sit on the rocks smoking cigarettes,
worrying about the ones who weren’t there.


And then finally walk home through the fields,
because there was always work the next day.
And the next day, we were kids again, sitting on the front steps in the morning,
eating a peach.  Just that, but it seemed an honor to have a mouth.
And then going to work, which meant helping out in the fields.
One boy worked for an old lady, building shelves.
The house was very old, maybe built when the mountain was built.


And then the day faded. We were dreaming, waiting for night.
Standing at the front door at twilight, watching the shadows lengthen.
And a voice in the kitchen was always complaining about the heat,
wanting the heat to break.


Then the heat broke, the night was clear.
And you thought of  the boy or girl you’d be meeting later.
And you thought of  walking into the woods and lying down,
practicing all those things you were learning in the water.
And though sometimes you couldn’t see the person you were with,
there was no substitute for that person.


{excerpt} {from Poetry magazine}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.slate.com/id/2196198/pagenum/all -- article in Slate about Kay Ryan

[quasimodo1]

From The Norton Anthology of American Literature
(Baym, Gottesman, Holland, Kalstone, Murphy, Parker, Pritchard)

MAXIE ALLEN

Maxie Allen always taught her
Stipendiiary little daughter
To thank her Lord and lucky star
For eye that let her see so far.
For throat enabling her to eat
Her Quaker Oats and Cream-of-Wheat,
For tongue to tantrum for the penny,
For car to hear the haven't any,
For arm to toss, for leg to chance,
For heart to hanker for romance.

Sweet Annie tried to teach her mother
There was somewhat of something other.
And whether it was veils and God
And whistling ghosts to go unshod
Across the broad and bitter sod,
Or fleet love stopping at her foot
And giving her its never-root
To put into her pocket-book,
Or just a deep and human look,
She did not know; but tried to tell.

Her mother thought at her full well,
In inner voice not like a bell
(Which though not social has a ring
Akin to wrought bedevilling)
But like an oceanic thing:
What do you guess I am?
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/books/review/Kirby-t.html?ref=books

"Cracking Wise" review of poet Brenda Shaughnessy




By DAVID KIRBY
Published: October 24, 2008 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WHY IS THE COLOR OF SNOW?
by Brenda Shaughnessy


Let's ask a poet with no way of knowing.
Someone who can give us an answer,
another duplicity to help double the world.

What kind of poetry is all question, anyway?
Each question leads to an iceburn,
a snownova, a single bed spinning in space.

Poet, Decide! I am lonely with questions.
What is snow? What isn't?
Do you see how it is for me.

Melt yourself to make yourself more clear
for the next observer.
I could barely see you anyway.

A blizzard I understand better,
the secrets of many revealed as one,
becoming another on my only head.

It's true that snow takes on gold from sunset
and red from rearlights. But that's occasional.
What is constant is white,

or is that only sight, a reflection of eyewhites
and light? Because snow reflects only itself,
self upon self upon self,

is a blanket used for smothering, for sleeping.
For not seeing the naked, flawed body.
Concealing it from the lover curious, ever curious!

Who won't stop looking.
White for privacy.
Millions of privacies to bless us with snow.

Don't we melt it?
Aren't we human dark with sugar hot to melt it?
Anyway, the question—

if a dream is a construction then what
is not a construction? If a bank of snow
is an obstruction, then what is not a bank of snow?

A winter vault of valuable crystals
convertible for use only by a zen
sun laughing at us.

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

I have always been uncomfortable describing what already exists. Existing things are just too hot, too self-radiant. My words get soft and gluey if I try to mold them into a facsimile of something. If I were a sculptor, it would be as if I were forced to work with clay that clung to my fingers instead of sticking to my projected dog sculpture.—Kay Ryan

[quasimodo1]

The Chairs That No One Sits In
By Billy Collins

You see them on porches and on lawns
down by the lakeside,
usually arranged in pairs implying a couple
who might sit there and look out
at the water or the big shade trees.
The trouble is you never see anyone
sitting in these forlorn chairs
though at one time it must have seemed
a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.
Sometimes there is a little table
between the chairs where no one
is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.
It might be none of my business,
but it might be a good idea one day
for everyone who placed those vacant chairs
on a veranda or a dock to sit down in them
for the sake of remembering
whatever it was they thought deserved
to be viewed from two chairs
side by side with a table in between. ... {excerpt, from Nov. Poetry}

[quasimodo1]

From November 2008 Poetry magazine

PLAINT IN A MAJOR KEY

Plaint in a Major Key
by Jorge Sánchez
Without even leaving one's door,
One can know the whole world.
—Laozi

The rumble of the night sounds
even in the bright daylight
of morning. Life blooms amid
the Ten Thousand Things, but
does not bloom amid the Ten
Thousand Things. Shrivel-eyed
I wake up and tend to the One
here and now, clamoring to be
let out. Down with the gate,
out with the boy, to the rooms
of life's necessities, first
to void and next to fill.
The Order is only order which
is disorder, the only Disorder
is the disorder that is order.
We usher ourselves, each in our
own way, back down the way
for various brushings, combings,
other groomings. Each in our
own way we urge the other
toward some kind of growth:
one to assume, the other
to renounce; one to grow larger,
the other to grow smaller,
thereby growing larger. Words
do not work, and when they do not,
other words might. This makes
more sense than it seems, works
more often than it doesn't,
except when it really doesn't,
and then that disorder creeps
back in. In five minutes,
a different challenge. In five
hours, a different One. Six
more hours, the One is rubbing
eyes, untangled like a dragon,
shucked and undone like an oyster.
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/books/review/Logan-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin -- Robert Lowell and

Elizabeth Bishop review of "Words in Air"

[quasimodo1]

The Lemons
by Eugenio Montale
translated from the Italian by Millicent Bell

But listen—those famous poets
everyone studied in school—they got stirred up
among plants we don’t know here: box privet or acanthus.
As for me, I love the roads that shrivel
into parched, weed-cluttered
ditches where boys
catch a skinny eel or two in a puddle;
the paths that follow the banks and sidle
down between clumps of cane
and put you down in the lemon groves, among the trees.
{exceprt}

[quasimodo1]

By PETER STEVENSON
Published: November 7, 2008
“In childhood nothing happened.” So Donald Hall writes in his enchanting memoir, and what’s admirable about that

sentence is not just the pleasure in coming across such a cheeky volley in the opening pages of an account of a life

in our post-Freudian age, but the choice Hall made not to insert a comma between “childhood” and “nothing.” A comma —

“In childhood, nothing happened” — would have insisted on a dramatic pause that the reader would be expected to

applaud politely, nodding at the poet’s foreshadowing that clearly something did happen and it must have been simply

stupendous, and here we go. But Hall means what he says, repeating the phrase “Nothing happened” twice, like a chorus

or incantation, on the following page. ...cont.
UNPACKING THE BOXES

A Memoir of a Life in Poetry

By Donald Hall

195 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $24 -- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Stevenson-t.html?ref=books

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Kleinzahler-t.html?ref=books -- Changing Light



By AUGUST KLEINZAHLER
Published: November 7, 2008
The poetry of James Merrill is a good deal closer to a Haydn piano trio or Boccherini quintet than it is to Walt

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp.” Like the 18th-century Galante style in music, Merrill’s work has a high, almost lacquered

finish and prizes the qualities of refinement, intricacy of design and formal containment. It is music for the court,

for the knowledgeable and cultivated listener. At his best — in a handful of poems where he’s most restrained and the

emotional core of the work, however camouflaged or subdued, is most intense — Merrill has few peers, and none among

contemporary *poets working in meter and rhyme. -- SELECTED POEMS

By James Merrill. Edited by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser

298 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. Paper, $16

Related
Compare Several Drafts of 'The Kimono' (randomhouse.com)
An Excerpt From James Merrill's 'Selected Poems' (randomhouse.com)

[quasimodo1]

From Collected Poems 1920-1954
(revised bilingual edition translated
and annotated by Jonathan Galassi)

from Noons and Shadows

HOUSE BY THE SEA

The journey ends here:
in the petty worries that split
the heart that can't cry out anymore.
The minutes now are regular and fixed
like the revolutions of the pump.
One turn: water surfaces, resounds.
Another turn: more water, and some creaking.


{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1749.html -- signandsight -- Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan

[quasimodo1]

from Collected Poems 1920-1954

from The Occasions 1928-1939
[to I.B.]

from Part I

GERTI'S CARNIVAL

If your wheel gets snared in tangled
shooting stars and the stallion
rears in the crowd, if a long
shiver of pale confetti falls like snow
on your hair and hands, or children raise
their plaintive ocarinas* to salute
your passing, and faint echoes
float down from the bridge onto the river;
if the street empties, leading you
to a world blown inside a trembling bubble
of air and light where the sun salutes your grace--
it may be you've found the way,
the route a piece of melted lead
suggested for a moment on that midnight
when a calm year ended without gunfire.


{excerpt}

{from the Rivised and Bilingual Edition,
translated and annotated by Jonathan Galassi} [*ocarinas...n. A small terra-cotta or plastic wind instrument with finger holes, a mouthpiece, and an elongated ovoid shape.

[Italian, from dialectal ucarenna, diminutive of Italian oca, goose (from the fact that its mouthpiece is shaped like a goose's beak), from Vulgar Latin *auca, from *avica, from Latin avis, bird; see awi- in Indo-European roots.]

[quasimodo1]

Book of Isaiah
by Anne Carson


I.


Isaiah awoke angry.


Lapping at Isaiah’s ears black birdsong no it was anger.


God had filled Isaiah’s ears with stingers.


Once God and Isaiah were friends.


God and Isaiah used to converse nightly, Isaiah would rush into the garden.


....

{from one of four parts}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/books/21finkel.html?ref=books -- Donald Finkel, 79, Poet of Free-Ranging Styles,

Is Dead



By MARGALIT FOX
Published: November 20, 2008
Donald Finkel, a noted American poet whose work teemed with curious juxtapositions, which in their unorthodoxy helped

illuminate the function of poetry itself, died on Nov. 15 at his home in St. Louis. He was 79....{cont.}

[quasimodo1]

from Poetry magazine, December 2008

PRAIRIE OCTOPUS, AWAKE

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

Owls swallow vowels in stilled trees. It's not
sleeplessness, it's fear of what the dark will
do if don't keep a close eye on it.
Blue minutes leak from the pricked stars' prisms,
seep into the earth unchecked. Just as well--
I've hardly enough arms to gather them.
{second of two stanzas}

[quasimodo1]

Close your eyes
Unwinding the bitter onion–
Its layers of uncertainty are limited,
Under brown paper its sealed heart sings
To the tune of a hundred lemons. ... {one of two stanzas of CHOPPING}

[JBI]

From Five Songs For Relinquishing the Earth by Jan Zwicky

The rock weeps into its own whiteness.
Sunny meadow slopes, the gentians,
far above.
The sun, too, tumbles down. A symphony
of spruce boughs sinks into the fiery moss.

Jewel-music, the amber roar of the falls.
No one thinks of home.
Waiting in the cool shadows,
we are dappled with hope.







The fascination of water
is the laughter of geometry.
Wind plunges down the hillside:
a longing to embrace.

The mountain drifts in twilight.
When we draw the blinds at dusk
is the moment we most want to open
them again.

[chasestalling]

JBI:

Would you be so good to provide the current pronunciation of Jan Zwicky?

Chasestalling

[JBI]

I don't know - I just call her Zwicky, rhyming with picky. and the Z pronounced as in Zebra.

[JBI]

From Brahms' Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115 by Jan Zwicky

That we shall not forget to honour
brown, its reedy clarities.
...

That the mind's light could be filtered
as: a porch, late afternoon,
a trellised rose,
which is to say
a truth in nostalgia:
if we steel ourselves against regret
we will not grow more graceful,
but less
...

[quasimodo1]

History
**********after Haydn, Op. 64, No. 2, Adagio
It is quiet now.
The nameless officers for State Security
shrug on their overcoats
and head home through pre-dawn streets.
Oiled locks
turn, then turn again.
The general snores.
You will think it cold,
the way it fingers
open eyes, the darkened cheekbones,
the blood between the legs. ...
{excerpt}

Jan Zwicky

Pasted from <http://www.cstone.net/~poems/histozwi.htm>

[quasimodo1]

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

{excerpt from AUBADE, last stanza of this poem}

[quasimodo1]

...Yet her poetry from beginning to end is concerned with prisons,
vaults, cages, bars, curbs, bits, bolts, fetters,
locked windows, narrow frames, aching walls.


“Why all the fuss?” asks one critic.
“She wanted liberty. Well didn’t she have it?
A reasonably satisfactory homelife,


a most satisfactory dreamlife—why all this beating of wings?
What was this cage, invisible to us,
which she felt herself to be confined in?”


Well there are many ways of being held prisoner,
I am thinking as I stride over the moor.
As a rule after lunch mother has a nap


and I go out to walk.
The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April
carve into me with knives of light.


Something inside it reminds me of childhood—
it is the light of the stalled time after lunch
when clocks tick


and hearts shut
and fathers leave to go back to work
and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering


something they never tell.
You remember too much, ... {excerpt from long poem, THE GLASS ESSAY}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazine/0208/comment_181108_print.html

[quasimodo1]

TALKING TO THE MOON
A defeated politician is in circulation
again, as we say of coins,
and his mouth is full of words.
His words have all been handled smooth.
They'd shrink, like lozenges, except
some sweat from everyone who's had them
is on them. He could be you,
why don't you support him?

But some people hoard words.
"The year the lake froze all the way
across . . . ," a sentence might begin
and then nod, sleepy in a hot kitchen.
The words are a spell to make the lake
freeze again. The sentence never ends. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

THE DEFINITION OF GARDENING


....."Horticulture is a groping in the dark
into the obscure and unfamiliar,
kneeling before a disinterested secret,
slapping it, punching it like a Chinese puzzle,
birdbrained, babbling gibberish, dig and
destroy, pull out and apply salt,
hoe and spray, before it spreads, burn roots,
where not desired, with gloved hands, poisonous,
the self-sacrifice of it, the self-love,
into the interior, thunderclap, excruciating,
through the nose, the earsplitting necrology
of it, the withering, shriveling,
the handy hose holder and Persian insect powder
and smut fungi, the enemies of the iris,
wireworms are worse than their parents,
there is no way out, flowers as big as heads,
pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently
at me, the me who so loves to garden
because it prevents the heaving of the ground
and the untimely death of porch furniture,
and dark, murky days in a large city
and the dream home under a permanent storm
is also a factor to keep in mind."

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Outer Space

If you could turn the moon
on a lathe, you would
because you are curious.

And that would explain
why the moon slivers,
but explain it stupidly

by not taking care
to ask how the moon rounds.
And so we go, stupid ideas

for feet. The better to wander
with, retort the feet,
and what can you say,

you who shaved those taut
spirals from the moon,
kinks of tightening light

that fell away from your attention
to your work growing smaller
the better you did it?

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

****FROG!...
***** *****

Abstract in nature, yet so very important to it. He is the warning sign,
the innervision to peace or self-destruction. Calmly and confidently in
eyes wide open he watches and protects the inner being of innocence
and the beauty of nature inspires him to love and give. He is not ugly!
And the prince is not a prince. But he can be crazy like a poet
clinging to the words of Gods and Demons and the drama of your
sneers and snickers of him. This is love for all of you stuck in
boredom and the intense madness of our darkside. In the danger of
the Forest he does not seperate his emotions. ...
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/books/review/Kirchwey-t.html?_r=1&ref=review --- ‘Poetry’s Shadow’


By KARL KIRCHWEY
Published: December 19, 2008 --- Here is a first book written from a very high floor of the Tower of Babel, and

the view is exhilarating. --- a review of AN AQUARIUM

Poems

By Jeffrey Yang

63 pp. Graywolf Press. Paper, $15

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/books/25poet.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bub2

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/magazine/28lives-t.html?_r=1&ref=books --- The Lure of Death





By MELANIE THERNSTROM
Published: December 24, 2008 --- Death is the ultimate subject for a poet. It’s the ultimate subject for all of

us, of course — the self impossibly contemplating its impossible absence — but for a poet whose work is to express

the inexpressible, it is a particular opportunity. “I had often wished for some dread disease . . . /Overwhelmed by

some unspecific disappointment or frustration, or joy, I longed for the “clarity” an illness might bring./It’s

beautiful to have enemies you can see!” Jason Shinder wrote in a journal he called “Cancer Book.”...

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/books/review/Barber-t.html?_r=1&ref=books --- --- The Bard of Despond



By DAVID BARBER
Published: December 25, 2008
"In spite of being considered armed and dangerous in so many precincts of American poetry that his mug shot ought to

be stapled up in the post office, there’s still as of this writing no price on William Logan’s head. But you wouldn’t

have much trouble rounding up plaintiffs for a class-action suit: arguably the most industrious and notorious poet-

critic to brandish that hyphen like a knife between his teeth since his acknowledged master Randall Jarrell was on

the prowl, Logan has perfected the gentle art of raising hackles by practicing poetry criticism as a blood sport

rather than a parlor game. Any old reviewer can ruffle feathers. Logan collects scalps." --- Review of STRANGE FLESH

By William Logan

93 pp. Penguin Poets. Paper, $18

[quasimodo1]

From Poetry, January 2009

IDIOT PSALMS

I. a psalm of Isaak, accompanied by Jew's harp.

O God Beloved if obliquely so,
dimly apprehended in the midst
of this, the fraught obscuring fog
of my insufficiently capacious ken,
Ostensible Lover of our kind-- while
apparently aloof-- allow
that I might glimpse once more
Your shadow in the land, avail
for me, a second time, the sense
of dire Presence in the pulsing
hollow near the heart.
Once more, O lord, from Your enormity incline
your Face to shine upon Your servant, shy
of immolation, if You will.

{first of four parts}

[quasimodo1]

II
The day’s at end and there’s nowhere to go,
Draw to the fire, even this fire is dying;
Get up and once again politely lying
Invite the ladies toward the mistletoe
With greedy eyes that stare like an old crow.
How pleasantly the holly wreaths did hang
And how stuffed Santa did his reindeer clang
Above the golden oaken mantel, years ago!

Then hang this picture for a calendar,
As sheep for goat, and pray most fixedly
For the cold martial progress of your star,
With thoughts of commerce and society,
Well-milked Chinese, Negroes who cannot sing,
The Huns gelded and feeding in a ring.

III
Give me this day a faith not personal
As follows: The American people fully armed
With assurance policies, righteous and harmed,
Battle the world of which they’re not at all.
That lying boy of ten who stood in the hall,
His hat in hand (thus by his father charmed:
“You may be President”), was not alarmed
Nor even left uneasy by his fall.
{excerpt from four part poem: MORE SONNETS FOR CHRISTMAS}

[quasimodo1]

Little Low Heavens
A talented verse mechanic cracks open the hood to illuminate the structure and ignition points that make a poem rev up and roar forever.


by Clive James

Any poem that does not just slide past us like all those thousands of others usually has an ignition point for our attention. To take the most startling possible example, think of “Spring,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Everyone knows the first line because everyone knows the poem. “Nothing is so beautiful as Spring” is a line that hundreds of poets could have written, and was probably designed to sound that way: designed, that is, to be merely unexceptionable, or even flat. Only two lines further on, however, we get “Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens” and we are electrified. I can confidently say “we” because nobody capable of reading poetry at all could read those few words and not feel the wattage. Eventually we see that the complete poem is fitting, in its every part, for its task of living up to the standards of thought and perception set by that single flash of illumination.

But we wouldn’t even be checking up if we had not been put on the alert by a lightning strike of an idea that goes beyond thought and perception and into the area of metaphorical transformation that a poem demands. A poem can do without satisfying that demand, but it had better have plenty of other qualities to make up for the omission, even if the omission is deliberate, and really I wonder if there can be any successful poem, even the one disguised as an unadorned prose argument, which is not dependent on this ability to project you into a reality so drastically rearranged that it makes your hair fizz even when it looks exactly like itself. {from an article published in Poetry Magazine -- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=182120 }

[Silas Thorne]

....Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

from Phillip Larkin's 'Here'

[quasimodo1]

"Adrian Mitchell is to feature in the February 2009 UK domain issue. As a tribute following his recent death, we have published his poet page in advance, along with archive audio recordings of him performing at the Poetry International Festival. Further poems will be published on 1 February 2009."

Read his biography and listen to the audio recordings at http://international.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=13553.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/books/12christensen.html?_r=1&em --- Inger Christensen, Scandinavian Poet, Is

Dead at 73

By MARGALIT FOX
Published: January 12, 2009
Inger Christensen, a distinguished Danish poet whose work — lyrical, philosophical, self-referential and exquisitely

mathematical — was a cornerstone of modern Scandinavian poetry, died on Jan. 2 in Copenhagen. She was 73 and lived in

Copenhagen.





She died after a short illness, said Susanna Nied, the American translator of her poetry.

[quasimodo1]

WAIT



Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax—
not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely,
time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail,
one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,
another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was
for whom everything always was going too slowly, too slowly.


It was me then who chopped, slashed, through you, across you,
relished you, gorged on you, slugged your invisible liquor down raw.
Now you're polluted; pulse, clock, calendar taint you, befoul you,
you suck at me, pull at me, barbed wire knots of memory tear me,
my heart hangs, inert, a tag-end of tissue, firing, misfiring,
trying to heave itself back to its other way with you. {two of four stanzas}

[quasimodo1]

from Poetry Magazine, February 2009

VIRGIL

Aeneid, II, 692-end

As he spoke we could hear, ever more loudly, the noise
Of the burning fires; the flood of flames was coming
Nearer and nearer. "My father, let me take you
Upon my shoulders and carry you with me.
The burden will be easy. Whatever happens,
You and I will experience it together,
Peril or safety, whichever it will be.
Little Iulus will come along beside me.
My wife will follow behind us. And you, my servants,
Listen to what say: just as you leave
The limits of the city there is a mound,
And the vestiges of a deserted temple of Ceres,
And a cypress tree that has been preserved alive
For many years by the piety of our fathers.
We will all meet there, though perhaps by different ways
And, Father, you must carry in your arms
The holy images of our household gods;
I, coming so late from the fighting and the carnage
Cannot presume to touch them until I have washed
Myself in running water." Thus I spoke.

{excerpt, translated from the Latin}

[JBI]

from Poetry Magazine, February 2009

VIRGIL

Aeneid, II, 692-end

As he spoke we could hear, ever more loudly, the noise
Of the burning fires; the flood of flames was coming
Nearer and nearer. "My father, let me take you
Upon my shoulders and carry you with me.
The burden will be easy. Whatever happens,
You and I will experience it together,
Peril or safety, whichever it will be.
Little Iulus will come along beside me.
My wife will follow behind us. And you, my servants,
Listen to what say: just as you leave
The limits of the city there is a mound,
And the vestiges of a deserted temple of Ceres,
And a cypress tree that has been preserved alive
For many years by the piety of our fathers.
We will all meet there, though perhaps by different ways
And, Father, you must carry in your arms
The holy images of our household gods;
I, coming so late from the fighting and the carnage
Cannot presume to touch them until I have washed
Myself in running water." Thus I spoke.

{excerpt, translated from the Latin}


I don't think that translation works particularly well - it may be accurate, but I don't think it is quite beautiful, it terms of language.

[quasimodo1]

I thought it unremarkable as well but posted it anyway. The fact that the bar is set low is an unfortunate statement. What I notice in this particular publication is that while submissions are greater than ever ...good or great poetry is no guaranteed result. Ferry has done better.

[quasimodo1]

Poetry Foundation
Year in Review
January 2009

The Poetry Foundation, like many, will remember 2008 as the year of the great financial crisis. From poets and their publishers, to schools and literary organizations, this year's economic collapse has afflicted everyone in the poetry community in ways that are both far-reaching and painfully individual. The Foundation's own challenge was to protect the value of its endowment and continue its work to support poetry and poets.

The U.S. stock market finished 2008 down 34% for the year. Losses on other types of investments, including real estate, private equity, and international, were similar. Thanks to the cadre of prudent fund managers who are responsible for investing the Foundation's endowment, our resources were not directly affected by defaults in the mortgage market, the failures of Wall Street firms and custodial banks, or the more recent losses of charitable foundations that were invested with Bernard Madoff. Although the value of the Foundation's portfolio has declined in line with the markets in which it is invested, there were no write-offs or permanent losses, and the endowment is positioned to participate fully in the eventual market recovery.

As a matter of prudent management the Foundation has adopted a budget for 2009 that will not exceed 5% of the value of the endowment, a common policy in the foundation world and one that the Poetry Foundation has heeded in its five years of operations. At the same time, we are doing everything possible to maintain our work on behalf of the field and to preserve our direct payments to poets and writers, publishers, and prizewinners.

The lean economic times notwithstanding, the Foundation continues to develop a broader and more engaged audience for poetry. All of the Foundation's programs, including its new initiatives, enter 2009 intact. The site for building the Foundation's permanent home in Chicago has been purchased and prepared, and a beautiful design by John Ronan Architects awaits the groundbreaking. When market conditions turn more favorable, we look forward to the sale of a bond issue and the start of construction. And the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, a think tank dedicated exclusively to issues of intellectual and practical importance to poetry, will see 2009 as its first formal year. Katharine Coles, poet laureate of Utah, former head of the creative writing program at the University of Utah, and founding director of the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature, is already at work as the Institute's inaugural director. She has selected as a first field of study for the Institute "Poetry and the New Media."

While tending to its responsibilities on the business side of the house — the necessary left-brain activity of an arts organization — the Foundation continued its mission to discover the best poetry and to celebrate it through publication, prizes, and criticism. This year the Foundation increased its number of Lilly Fellowships, our annual awards for emerging poets, from two to five. Providing $15,000 to each of five fellows, the fellowships provide no-strings-attached assistance to young poets at a formative time in their careers.

Poetry, for its part, published many first-time contributors (over two hundred of them in the past five years). To quote just one of the spirited and articulate poems from these newcomers, Sarah Lindsay's "Zucchini Shofar" begins:
No animals were harmed in the making of this joyful noise:
A thick, twisted stem from the garden
is the wedding couple's ceremonial ram's horn.
Its substance will not survive one thousand years,
nor will the garden, which is today their temple,
nor will their names, nor their union now announced
with ritual blasts upon the zucchini shofar.
Shall we measure blessings by their duration?
And it ends:
This moment's chord of earthly commotion
will never be struck exactly so again —
though love does love to repeat its favorite lines.
So let the shofar splutter its slow notes and quick notes,
let the nieces and nephews practice their flutes and trombones,
let the living room pianos invite unwashed hands,
let glasses of different fullness be tapped for their different notes,
let everyone learn how to whistle,
let the girl dawdling home from her trumpet lesson
pause at the half-built house on the corner,
where the newly installed maze of plumbing comes down
to one little pipe whose open end she can reach,
so she takes a deep breath
and makes the whole house sound.
Discovery and celebration: they are apparent in each new issue of Poetry, and they are a legacy going back to the magazine's very beginnings. Harriet Monroe and Ezra Pound, her "foreign correspondent," chose the poets they published with a combination of personal enthusiasm, neighborhood familiarity, and a perfect willingness to go against the grain. Publishing the new talents of their day — Eliot, Stevens, Moore, and Williams, among many — they tapped into a reservoir of underground energy that came to be known as Modernism. The rest, as they say, is history.

Speaking of underground energy, the Foundation tapped into a load of that this year through our blog, Harriet, and through the Printers' Ball. Inspired by Harriet Monroe's "Open Door" policy*, the blog has become an agora where, with suitable noise and excitement, aesthetically diverse poets come to debate the art form. The Printers' Ball, in a parallel way, showcases Chicago's independent publishing scene. One might think of the Printers' Ball and Harriet together as a kind of Salon des Refusés, that historic exhibition where the Impressionists found their identity in opposition to the French Academy. Whether any poet-descendants of Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, or Ginsberg were present at the recent Printers' Ball, I don't know, but the fact that the police showed up at the prior year's ball is a positive sign. It seems more than merely appropriate that the Foundation remain open in every way possible to the emergent talents and the underground energies of the moment.

Across our programs we continue to cultivate new poetry readers among the youngest members of our culture. This year Poetry Out Loud, the national recitation contest, reached more than 250,000 high school students across the country. The Foundation appointed the second Children's Poet Laureate, the renowned and delightful Mary Ann Hoberman. Our growing collection of successful audio programs, available on poetryfoundation.org, includes the popular monthly podcast featuring the editors of Poetry. In 2008 listeners downloaded our audio content more than five million times. The multifaceted Poetry Everywhere project received a Parents' Choice Award for its online educational curriculum. Classical Baby (I'm Grown Up Now): The Poetry Show — our collaboration with HBO and a kind of poetry primer for young children and their parents — premiered on television in April and received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Program.

Looking around at the widespread effects of the financial crisis, it seems that the old models, both business and social, are broken. At such moments in history, when there is no going back, poetry can intuit the future. As Yeats wrote after the failed Easter Rising of 1916:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
A few years later the Republic of Ireland was formally established.


Sincerely,

John Barr


* The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine. . . . To this end the editors hope to keep free of entangling alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written.

[quasimodo1]

MEN AT MY FATHER'S FUNERAL



The ones his age who shook my hand
on their way out sent fear along
my arm like heroin. These weren’t
men mute about their feelings,
or what’s a body language for?


And I, the glib one, who’d stood
with my back to my father’s body
and praised the heart that attacked him?
I’d made my stab at elegy,
the flesh made word: the very spit


in my mouth was sour with ruth
and eloquence. What could be worse?

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

LIVES OF THE SAINTS



I began as a darkness and remained so. My life was lit by occasional flares toward which I groped unevenly. I had no mother and no father to speak of. Then you came and it was a big midnight into which the empty stars had been sucked. All that was left were the curved streaks of their paths sliding through space as we turned on our axis and turned around our sun, and turned around our galaxy and turned once more. There was no turning point. All was in flux. All was darkness.
*
I was a schemer. I lit lamps in unlikely places to attract night's insects. I knew nothing of the day. Words sunk in me like ships crushed in an ice floe. I nursed hiddenness. Took on meaning. Imbibed the sound of thunder. I waited for things to come by and trapped them. My father told me that wild things will not suffer containment. I learned by entrapment. I learned by the sound of my knees sliding through fall leaves. I entered and left by the smallest of holes, like a bat. I peeked when I was supposed to cover my eyes. I saw things I was not intended to see. I told. I didn't tell. I said. I didn't say. I hid in the least spaces.
*
I was most ordinary and began as a thing. You didn't know me. We missed each other by minutes—my coming, your going. I made up words to explain it. They never did. At 12, I found something that was like you but was not you. I began to follow it. It led me everywhere. I fed it from a saucer on the chipped linoleum floor. I kept it lit.
*
I was a great liar and told many tales that were true. I kept things in pockets that no one knew about. I had suitcases ready at all times. And nobody could discover what it meant. I followed anacondas and slipstreams. I wanted a vegetable but all we had were flowers. Sometimes I took them down. I tried to remake the noise. I sat for examination. I was full of puncture holes. Marks appeared on my body overnight, as if from dreaming. I climbed the ladder from Hell and crossed. My robe trailed behind me and caught in the slats because I was already not tall enough for it. You believe me, don't you?
* {prose poem of ten parts}

[Silas Thorne]

When I returned from what I might characterise
as a last nervous piss, she said, turning the
ignition on, 'Do you mind?'

'You're in the box seat,' I said.
'The boot is on the other foot, now,' she said,
leaning determinedly on the accelerator.

'Then let it be on your head,' I said, as we
slithered heatedly across the street slap-bang
into the expensive plate-glass purple

sign-painted EXCELSIOR PET EMPORIUM ....


(excerpt)

[quasimodo1]

"STILL, however blurry “greatness” may be, it’s clear that segments of the poetry world have been fretting over its

potential loss since at least 1983. That’s the year in which an essay by Donald Hall, the United States poet laureate

from 2006 to 2007, appeared in The Kenyon Review bearing the title “Poetry and Ambition.” Hall got right to the

point: “It seems to me that contemporary American po*etry is afflicted by modesty of ambition — a modesty, alas,

genuine . . . if sometimes accompanied by vast pretense.” What poets should be trying to do, according to Hall, was

“to make words that live forever” and “to be as good as Dante.” They probably would fail, of course, but even so,

“the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.” Pretty strong stuff — and one

wonders how many plays Shakespeare would have managed to write had he subjected every line to the merciless scrutiny

Hall recommends." {excerpt from "The Great(ness) Game" article by David Orr, 2/19/09 --

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/books/review/Orr-t.html?em

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/books/review/Brouwer-t.html?_r=1&ref=review --- TIME AND THE TILTING EARTH

Poems

By Miller Williams

51 pp. Louisiana State University Press. Cloth, $45. Paper, $16.95 --- ---

"But Williams isn’t finished making *poems, and that’s a fact for which we should be thankful. His latest collection,

“Time and the Tilting Earth,” offers many pleasures. Chief among these are Williams’s way of entwining the pure

earthiness of language as it’s spoken with rigorous metrical precision, and, analogously, his affection for the

quotidian, with an insistence on confronting unanswerable but unavoidable existential problems." {excerpt from

review}

[JBI]

16.95 seems a little much for a 51 pager.

[~Sophia~]

Fragments 5 and 6

8 Fragments For Kurt Cobain
by Jim Carroll


5/
Then I translated your muttered lyrics
And the phrases were curious:
Like "incognito libido"
And "Chalk Skin Bending"

The words kept getting smaller and smaller
Until
Separated from their music
Each letter spilled out into a cartridge
Which fit only in the barrel of a gun

6/
And you shoved the barrel in as far as possible
Because that's where the pain came from
That's where the demons were digging

The world outside was blank
Its every cause was just a continuation
Of another unsolved effect

[quasimodo1]

THE TRUANT



'What have you there?' the great Panjandrum said
To the Master of the Revels who had led
A bucking truant with a stiff backbone
Close to the foot of the Almighty's throne.

'Right Reverend, most adored,
And forcibly acknowledged Lord
By the keen logic of your two-edged sword!
This creature has presumed to classify
Himself - a biped, rational, six feet high
And two feet wide; weighs fourteen stone;
Is guilty of a multitude of sins.
He has abjured his choric origins,
And like an undomesticated slattern,
Walks with tangential step unknown
Within the weave of the atomic pattern.
He has developed concepts, grins
Obscenely at your Royal bulletins,
Possesses what he calls a will
Which challenges your power to kill.'

'What is his pedigree?'

'The base is guaranteed, your Majesty -
Calcium, carbon, phosphorus, vapour
And other fundamentals spun
From the umbilicus of the sun,
And yet he says he will not caper
Around your throne, nor toe the rules
For the ballet of the fiery molecules.'

'His concepts and denials - scrap them, burn them -
To the chemists with them promptly.' ...

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

EL DORADO



We have a friend in common, the retired sophomore.
His concern: that I shall get it like that,
in the right and righter of a green bush
chomping on future considerations. In the ghostly
dreams of others it appears I am all right,
and even going on tomorrow there is much
to be said on all these matters, “issues,” like
“No rest for the weary.” (And yet—why not?)
Feeling under orders is a way of showing up,
but stepping on Earth—she’s not going to.
Ten shades of pleasing himself brings us to tomorrow
evening and will be back for more. I disagree
with you completely but couldn’t be prouder
and fonder of you. So drink up. Feel good for two.
{one of two stanzas, from Poetry Magazine, March 2009}

[JBI]

THE TRUANT



'What have you there?' the great Panjandrum said
To the Master of the Revels who had led
A bucking truant with a stiff backbone
Close to the foot of the Almighty's throne.

'Right Reverend, most adored,
And forcibly acknowledged Lord
By the keen logic of your two-edged sword!
This creature has presumed to classify
Himself - a biped, rational, six feet high
And two feet wide; weighs fourteen stone;
Is guilty of a multitude of sins.
He has abjured his choric origins,
And like an undomesticated slattern,
Walks with tangential step unknown
Within the weave of the atomic pattern.
He has developed concepts, grins
Obscenely at your Royal bulletins,
Possesses what he calls a will
Which challenges your power to kill.'

'What is his pedigree?'

'The base is guaranteed, your Majesty -
Calcium, carbon, phosphorus, vapour
And other fundamentals spun
From the umbilicus of the sun,
And yet he says he will not caper
Around your throne, nor toe the rules
For the ballet of the fiery molecules.'

'His concepts and denials - scrap them, burn them -
To the chemists with them promptly.' ...

{excerpt}
You reading Pratt now?

[quasimodo1]

Yea, somebody piqued my interest and he's really an outstanding poet. Such ficle tastes.

[JBI]

There is a hypertext available of his complete works. The site is kind of hard to navigate, but once you figure it out, it leads to good things:

http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/pratt/

If you're into Canadian poetry, I recommend you pick up Geddes' 15 Canadian poets X 3 (which is in the 4th edition now I believe). It has some great contemporary poets covered, and nice biographical sketches of almost all the major players in English Canadian verse.

[quasimodo1]

MARCH 1936

There is no silence upon the earth or under the earth like the silence
under the sea;
No cries announcing birth,
No sounds declaring death.
There is silence when the milt is laid on the spawn in the weeds and
fungus of the rock-clefts;
And silence in the growth and struggle for life.
The bonitoes pounce upon the mackerel,
And are themselves caught by the barracudas,
The sharks kill the barracudas
And the great molluscs rend the sharks,
And all noiselessly -
Though swift be the action and final the conflict,
The drama is silent.

There is no fury upon the earth like the fury under the sea.
For growl and cough and snarl are the tokens of spendthrifts who
know not the ultimate economy of rage.
Moreover, the pace of the blood is too fast.
But under the waves the blood is sluggard and has the same
temperature as that of the sea.

There is something pre-reptilian about a silent kill.

{excerpt}

[JBI]

Come Away, Death by E. J. Pratt


Willy-nilly, he comes or goes, with the clown's logic,
Comic in epitaph, tragic in epithalamium,
And unseduced by any mused rhyme.
However blow the winds over the pollen,
Whatever the course of the garden variables,
He remains the constant,
Ever flowering from the poppy seeds.

There was a time he came in formal dress,
Announced by Silence tapping at the panels
In deep apology.
A touch of chivalry in his approach,
He offered sacramental wine,
And with acanthus leaf
And petals of the hyacinth
He took the fever from the temples
And closed the eyelids,
Then led the way to his cool longitudes
In the dignity of the candles.

continued: http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/pratt/poems/texts/161/fr161annotated.html

[JBI]

From The Witches Brew by E. J. Pratt

Perched on a dead volcanic pile,
Now charted as a submerged peak,
Near to a moon-washed coral isle,
A hundred leagues from Mozambique,
Three water-witches of the East,
Under the stimulus of rum,
Decided that the hour had come
To hold a Saturnalian feast,
In course of which they hoped to find
For their black art, once and for all,
The true effect of alcohol
Upon the cold, aquatic mind.
From two Phoenicians who were drowned,
The witches three (whose surnames ran
Lulu, Ardath, Maryan)
Had by an incantation found
A cavern near the coast of Crete,
And saw, when they had entered in,
A blacksmith with a dorsal fin,
Whose double pectorals and webbed feet
Proved -- while his dusky shoulders swung --
His breed to be of land and water,
Last of great Neptune's stock that sprung
From Vulcan's union with his daughter.
The sisters' terms accepted, he,
Together with his family,
Left his native Cretan shore
To dig the witches' copper ore
Out of their sub-aquaceous mines
In the distant Carolines,
And forge a cauldron that might stand,
Stationary and watertight,
A thousand cubits in its height,
Its width a thousand breadths as spanned
By the smith's gigantic hand,
So that each fish, however dry,
Might have, before the Feast was through,
His own demonstrable supply
Of this Pan-Oceanic brew.
A thousand leagues or so away
Down the Pacific to Cape Horn,
And Southwards from Magellan lay
A table-land to which was borne
This cauldron from the Carolines,
For here, as well the sisters knew,
The Spanish conquerors of Peru
Had stored their rich and ancient wines,
About the time the English burst
Upon their galleons under Drake,
Who sank or captured them to slake
A vast Elizabethan thirst.
With pick and bar the Cretan tore
His way to the interior
Of every sunken ship whose hold
Had wines almost four centuries old.
Upon the broad Magellan floors,
Great passage-way from West to East,
Were also found more recent stores,
The products of a stronger yeast.
For twenty years or thereabout,
The Bacchanals of Western nations,
Scenting universal drought,
Had searched the ocean to find out
The most secluded ports and stations,
Where unmolested they might go
'To serve their god while here below,'
With all the strength of their libations.
So to the distant isles there sailed,
In honour of the ivy god,
Scores of log-loaded ships that hailed
From Christiania to Cape Cod
With manifests entitled ham,
Corn beef, molasses, chamois milk,
Cotton, Irish linen, silk,
Pickles, dynamite and jam,
And myriad substances whose form
Dissolved into quite other freights,
Beneath the magic of a storm
That scattered them around the Straits;
For this is what the blacksmith read,
While raking up the ocean bed: --
Budweiser, Guinness, Schlitz (in kegs),
Square Face Gin and Gordon's Dry,
O'Brien's, Burke's and Johnny Begg's,
Munich, Bock, and Seagram's Rye,
Dewar's, Hennessey's 3 Star,
Glenlivet, White Horse and Old Parr,
With Haig and Haig, Canadian Club,
Jamaica Rum, and other brands
Known to imbibers in all lands
That stock from Brewery or Pub.
All these the Cretan, with the aid
Of his industrious progeny,
Drew to the cauldron, and there laid,
By order of the witches three,
The real foundation for the spree.

OTHER INGREDIENTS

To make a perfect fish menu,
The witches found they had to place
Upon this alcoholic base
Great stacks of food and spices too.
Of all the things most edible
On which the souls of fish have dined,
That fish would sell their souls to find,
Most gracious to their sense of smell,
Is flesh exotic to their kind: --
Cold-blooded things yet not marine,
And not of earth, but half-between,
That live enclosed within the sand
Without the power of locomotion,
And mammal breeds whose blood is hot,
That court the sea but love it not,
That need the air but not the land, --
The Laodiceans of the ocean.
So in this spacious cauldron went
Cargoes of food and condiment.
Oysters fished from Behring Strait
Were brought and thrown in by the crate;
Spitzbergen scallops on half-shell,
Mussels, starfish, clams as well,
Limpets from the Hebrides,
Shrimps and periwinkles, these,
So celebrated as a stew,
Were meant to flavour up the brew.
Then for the more substantial fare,
The curried quarter of a tail
Hewn from a stranded Greenland whale,
A liver from a Polar bear,
A walrus' heart and pancreas,
A blind Auk from the coast of Java,
A bull moose that had died from gas
While eating toadstools near Ungava,
One bitter-cold November day;
Five sea-lion cubs were then thrown in,
Shot by the Cretan's javelin
In a wild fight off Uruguay,
With flippers fresh from the Azores,
Fijian kidneys by the scores,
Together with some pollywogs,
And kippered hocks of centipedes,
And the hind legs of huge bull frogs
Raked by the millions from the reeds
Of slimy Patagonian bogs.

Then before the copper lid
Was jammed upon the pyramid,
The sisters scattered on the top
Many a juicy lollipop;
Tongues from the Ganges crocodile,
Spawn from the delta of the Nile,
Hoofs of sheep and loins of goats,
Raised from foundered cattle-boats --
Titbits they knew might blend with hops,
Might strengthen rum or season rye,
From Zulu hams and Papuan chops
To filets mignons from Shanghai.
Now while volcanic fires burned,
Making the cauldron fiercely hot,
Lulu with her ladle churned
The pungent contents of the pot,
From which distinctive vapours soon
Rose palpably before the view.
Then Ardath summoned a typhoon
Which as it swooped upon the stew,
And swept around the compass, bore
To every sea and every shore
The tidings of the witches' Feast.
And from the West and from the East,
And from the South and from the North,
From every bay and strait and run,
From the Tropics to the Arctic sun,
The Parliament of fish came forth,
Lured by a smell surpassing far
The potencies of boiling tar,
For essences were in this brew
Unknown to blubber or to glue,
And unfamiliar to the nose
Of sailors hardened as they are
To every unctuous wind that blows
From Nantucket to Baccalieu.
The crudest oil one ever lit
Was frankincense compared to it.
It entered Hades, and the airs
Resuscitated the Immortals;
It climbed the empyrean stairs
And drove St. Peter from the portals.

Continued here: http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/pratt/poems/texts/075/fr075annotated.html

[quasimodo1]

“Buddhists Like School and I Don’t.”
An experimental poet meditates on the intersections of language, writing, and God.


by Fanny Howe

God is unevolved and therefore cannot be apprehended by the senses, and as such exists as the witness of what is and

also as light and energy, neither of which can be touched except by touching itself.

You put your hand to your cheek and touch your own light and your own energy.

You can call light and energy by the name of God if you want.

If you don’t want to say God, you must expect this choice to help make you lose your bearings until you understand

how it moves around, shifting its position from being in you and of you, to being far from you.

Divinity—Trinity—What’s the difference?

No difference? No difference, no words. No word for difference, no identity. The genealogical and psychological

search for an identity hitherto unnoticed, unknown, leads nowhere. The world is the unconscious but nature is not

symbolic.

The quest for a condition that exists in two separate states is what confuses people. The person looking for “me” (a

fixed identity) is also the same person looking for (a vapory word) “God.” This split search can only be folded into

one in the process of working on something—whether it is writing, digging, planting, painting, teaching—with a

wholeheartedness that qualifies as complete attention. In such a state, you find yourself depending on chance or

grace to supply you with the focus to complete what you are doing. Your work is practical, but your relationship to

it is illogical in the range of its possible errors and failures. You align yourself with something behind and ahead

and above you that is geometric in nature; you lean on its assistance, realizing the inadequacy of your words.

Simone Weil said in “Human Personality”:
At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can

make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater

number. . . . The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large

cell.
Yes, the problem of vocabulary in these matters is obvious, because a solution to the problem is made of the words.

Who doesn’t know that? If a bird has a problem with its whistle, it has to whistle to fix it.

All voices tend toward song, and the vibrations of music in the vocal cords deeply influence the way spoken words are

heard.

Franz Rosenzweig noted:
In actual conversation, something happens. I do not know in advance what the other will say to me because I myself do

not even know what I am going to say; perhaps not even whether I am going to say anything at all. . . . To need time

means being able to anticipate nothing, having to wait for everything, being dependent on the other for one’s own.
I understand that what is heard is what is already in the past and the proof for that is measurable. Sound has to

travel a little way; it has to overcome space in order to reach a pair of ears. In this space of time, a few

distortions can occur. Anxiety, misunderstanding can intervene, even heartbreak. Indeed, words themselves can, if

allowed, seem to lose their original intention on their way out of the mouth.

Socrates believed that the soul is eternal and contains knowledge of all things. In the trauma of birth, the soul

loses its memory and has to start all over again. But in the experience of living and learning, it finds its way back

to the truths that it lost.


* * *


Revision is the path taken by an autodidact like me. In revising you teach yourself. You find your own information

buried in your body. It is still alive until you are not.

Right until he committed suicide in the end, Socrates had the high spirits of someone who knew (as in recognized)

himself (his own condition).

One way to understand your own condition is to write something and spend a long time revising it. The errors, the

hits and misses, the excess—erase them all.

Now read what you have rewritten out loud in front of some other people. They will hear something that you didn’t say

aloud. They will hear what was there before you began revising and even before the words were written down. You won’t

hear anything but the humming of your own vocal cords.

It’s the same as what Remy de Gourmont in his “Dust for Sparrows” wrote from the point of view of the listener:
Never have literary works seemed so beautiful to me as when at a theatre or in reading, because of lack of habit or

lacking a complete knowledge of the language, I lost the meaning of many phrases. This threw about them a light veil

of somewhat silvery shadow, making the poetry more purely musical, more ethereal.
Even while I have gone back over the words, I have never been sure of the need for it, the use of writing at all, the

value of any completed poem, or the idea that writing might lead somewhere. I haven’t really known what I was doing,

only that I would keep on doing it. It is a form of promiscuity and wanderlust. I could just as well have been a

barmaid or a mailman. I could just as well throw all these papers in a river before sniffing some helium and letting

go, because it was in the end only a part of the natural world.


* * *


A Benedictine friend said there are three levels to transreligious experience: “My religion is best.” The second

level: “All religions are the same.” And the third level that changes the first two: “Through a deep reading of my

own tradition, I find that all religious traditions converge.” Likewise, through a deeper reading of my own language,

I should be able to uncover a few words that correspond to certain transcendent words in other cultures.

I shouldn’t need to co-opt words like Brahman and Atman, no matter how much I am drawn to them and the novelty of

their sound.

I must find in English the words that bear the same force as those two do and share their meaning. This is my job.

The worst sinners are the clerics who give God human attributes. Humans after all evolved from being slime into being

beasts, and like all creatures, it was fear that drove us to change our form over time. Fear of being devoured,

swallowed, and turned back into slime. Watch the scaled animal turn into a bird out of sheer terror, and you will see

what humans went through, too. Humans are still formed from those evolutionary stages and revert to bestial behavior

when threatened.

Even if all of evolution happened, from the eye of eternity, in one wink, as a swift unveiling to the present day,

this movement would be nothing like the stillness of God. This stillness is not something you come to, after years of

struggle, or learn about, then encounter, or find refuge in, after a fight. It doesn’t await you in a specific

location.

God is always in the same everyplace, without an adjective, an adverb, or a verb tense. The creator is creation

itself. A baboon has knowledge of God just as a bee does, and a human child or a leaf.

Fear is what holds humans back from evolving to full solidarity. Providing safety for people—it has to be an action

for all people. This is the difficulty. Everyone has to be safe for everyone to be safe. This is the messianic

message.

There are people like me who read a love letter over and over again. Every time they see a different message and a

different level of love, and, until they have, read it backward and forward several times, and de-emphasize certain

words. In fact, they cannot rest.

For these people sound is eternal, it has no beginning or end.

For others, the search for the right word produces a conclusion to a beginning.

In both cases, happiness is the goal.

Will I be happier if I call God Brahman?

Will I be happier if I call God Divine?

Will I be happier if I study the Trinity?

Will I be happier if I discard the concept of both One and Three and head toward the Zero that is emptiness for

Buddhists and fullness for Hindus?

I will only be happier if I write a poem.


The trees billow under a vague gray sky.
Nearby and not far away, suffering.
And the end of me.
But if I know I have everything
Then I can begin.
Lucky to enter completion conscious.
Lucky to be well. To have my cell.
Wine, words, wafer, in all their forms.
{excerpt, approx. one-quarter of the text, from March 2009 issue of Poetry Magazine}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/us/04poets.html?_r=1&hp --- http://www.clatsopcc.edu/fisherpoets/index.html ---Fisher Poets
12th Annual
Gathering
Feb. 27 & 28, March 1 2009

[quasimodo1]

IN THE HIMALAYAS


Men who do not wear watches know
The sad infusion a concave glass
Withholds. A life readies
For forgetfulness its forward distances,
But these wheels return their moment
In the thrash of sex. When afterwards
You ask what time it is, I cannot forswear
How near we are to that far country
Where the sun arches
Into the east, the Ganges withdraws
To its source, and mirrors rehearse
Our crabbed lives back to us.
On the mountain a Sherpa discovers
The frozen body dressed a generation before.
{excerpt}
Copyright © William Logan
http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmArticleID=1126

[quasimodo1]

from The Oxford Book of American Poetry
{chosen and edited by David Lehman}

INSPIRATION
Today

I loathe poetry. I hate the clotted,
dicty poems of the great modernists,
disdainful of their truant audience,
and I hate also proletarian
poetry, with its dutiful rancors

and sing-along certainties. I hate
poetry readings and the dreaded verb
"to share." Let me share this knife with your throat,
suggested Mack. Today I'm a gnarl, a knot,
a burl. I'm furled in on myself and won't

be opened. I'm the bad mood if you try
to cheer me out of I'll smack you. Impasse
is where I come to escape from. It takes
a deep belief in one's own ignorance;
it takes, I tell you, desperate measures.

1998
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://raintaxi.com/online/2008winter/lee.shtml --- Behind My Eyes
Li-Young Lee
W.W. Norton ($24.950
by Kristina Marie Darling
In Li-Young Lee’s Behind My Eyes, hieroglyphs collide head-on with parables, burning books, and “breath to fan the

fire’s nest,” setting the stage for an elegant collection of poems. A highly anticipated follow-up to the author’s

previous four books, Lee’s newest work examines the many contradictions inherent in the immigrant experience,

depicting them in spare, lyrical narratives throughout. Often juxtaposing thoughtful observations on identity and

family with Western attempts to commercialize and quantify, Lee’s poems convey the difficulty of negotiating one’s

heritage with American cultural values, proving at once philosophical and grounded in everyday life.

Pairing consumer culture with the intensely personal, Lee often parodies the commercial when conveying the

experiences of immigrants and refugees, suggesting that popular solutions like self-help and checklists prove

frivolous in truly critical situations. His poem “Self-Help for Fellow Refugees” exemplifies this trend:

Don’t ask her what she thought she was doing
turning a child’s eyes
away from history
and toward that place all human aching starts.

And if you meet someone
in your adopted country,
and think you see in the other’s face
an open sky, some promise of a new beginning,
it probably means you’re standing too far.

Mimicking the tone of a self-help book through his use of imperative sentences and extended lists, the content of the

poem creates a sharp contrast with the form the author appropriates. By such incongruities, Lee suggests that

“history” and “human aching” remain fundamentally incompatible with commercialized solutions—a theme conveyed with

elegance and refinement throughout the collection. {excerpt from RAINTAXI article}

[JBI]

I think I posted a Lee poem somewhere near the front of the thread, "Persimmons". If anyone is interested.

[quasimodo1]

THE ALBERT CHAIN


Like an accomplished terrorist, the fruit hangs
from the end of a dead stem, under a tree
riddled with holes like a sieve. Breath smelling
of cinnamon retires into its dream to die there.
Fresh air blows in, morning breaks, then the mists
close in; a rivulet of burning air
pumps up the cinders from their roots,
but will not straighten in two radiant months
the twisted forest. Warm as a stable,
close to the surface of my mind,
the wild cat lies in the suppleness of life,
half-stripped of its skin, and in the square
beyond, a squirrel stoned to death
has come to rest on a lime tree.

I am going back into war, like a house
I knew when I was young: I am inside,
a thin sunshine, a night within a night,
getting used to the chalk and clay and bats
swarming in the roof. Like a dead man
attached to the soil which covers him,
I have fallen where no judgment can touch me,
its discoloured rubble has swallowed me up.
For ever and ever, I go back into myself:
I was born in little pieces, like specks of dust,
only an eye that looks in all directions can see me.
I am learning my country all over again,
how every inch of soil has been paid for
by the life of a man, the funerals of the poor.


http://uk.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=8501&x=1 -- {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

CINEMA CALENDAR OF THE ABSTRACT HEART


the fibres give in to your starry warmth
a lamp is called green and sees
carefully stepping into a season of fever
the wind has swept the rivers' magic
and i've perforated the nerve
by the clear frozen lake ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

VICTORY


There is no Rescue Mission where it isn’t freezing
from the need that created it. The lost children
distill to pure chemical. Where Good is called No-Tone
it’s the one who cries out who doesn’t get a coat.
The children fuse colors because they don’t want to
separate. Daughters shot off of hydrants who cut
each other in the neck and gut, don’t care
which one of them will end up later in surgery.
And drugged sons pretending to be costumes,
well, they’re not welcome to comprehension either.
Why does a wild child confuse a moon
with a hole in his skin?
One was born soaked in gin.
His first sip was from a bottle of denial.
What can “leave me alone” mean after that?
The system is settled, dimensions fixed.
Another one’s hand feels like a starfish.
Makes me hysterical like the word perestroika.
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

from THE NERVE METER

An actor is seen as if through crystals.
Inspiration in stages.
One musn’t let in too much literature.


I have aspired no further than the clockwork of the soul, I have transcribed only the pain of an abortive adjustment.
I am a total abyss. Those who believed me capable of a whole pain, a beautiful pain, a dense and fleshy anguish, an anguish which is a mixture of objects, an effervescent grinding of forces rather than a suspended point
—and yet with restless, uprooting impulses which come from the confrontation of my forces with these abysses of offered finality
(from the confrontation of forces of powerful size),
and there is nothing left but the voluminous abysses, the immobility, the cold—
in short, those who attributed to me more life, who thought me at an earlier stage in the fall of the self, who believed me immersed in a tormented noise, in a violent darkness with which I struggled
—are lost in the shadows of man.


In sleep, nerves tensed the whole length of my legs.
Sleep came from a shifting of belief, the pressure eased, absurdity stepped on my toes.


It must be understood that all of intelligence is only a vast contingency, and that one can lose it, not like a lunatic who is dead, but like a living person who is in life and who feels working on himself its attraction and its inspiration (of intelligence, not of life).
The titillations of intelligence and this sudden reversal of contending parties.
Words halfway to intelligence.
This possibility of thinking in reverse and of suddenly reviling one’s thought.
This dialogue in thought.
The ingestion, the breaking off of everything.
And all at once this trickle of water on a volcano, the thin, slow falling of the mind.


To find oneself again in a state of extreme shock, clarified by unreality, with, in a corner of oneself, some fragments of the real world.


To think without the slightest breaking off, without pitfalls in my thought, without one of those sudden disappearances to which my marrow is accustomed as a transmitter of currents.
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

OBLIQUE RAIN

translated from the Portuguese by Isabel Pinto Franco

III

The Great Sphinx of Egypt dreams into this paper . . .
I write—and she appears through my transparent hand
And at the corner of the paper the pyramids arise . . .

I write—am troubled to see the tip of my quill
Become King Cheops’ profile . . .
All of a sudden I stop . . .
Everything darkens . . . I fall into an abyss made of time . . .
I’m buried under the pyramids writing verses under the clear light of
this lamp
And all Egypt crushes me from above through the lines I draw with
the quill . . .

I hear the Sphinx laugh inside
The sound of my quill running on paper . . .
A huge hand goes through me not being able to see it,
Sweeps everything to the corner of the ceiling that stands behind me,
And on the paper where I write, between it and the quill that writes
Lies King Cheops’ cadaver, staring at me with wide open eyes,
And in between our looks crossing each other the river Nile runs
And a happiness of sailing boats wanders
In a diffuse diagonal
Between me and what I think . . .

Funerals of King Cheops in old gold and Me! . . .

[quasimodo1]

from Aturuxos calados



Regard a tree.
Who would have better seized light’s longing?



Longing a labor is first, is first.
First the cold path of it. (Bring water.) Egregious



is a few steps over wet stones
hai ailala
or you might miss it













Shirred up, wet against the grain
silica might call out
its finger to the chest



pressed me still :





That day we passed between the two Toledos
anos annals années a-néantes espidas pido pidas





: rain’s hoof-marks
Horses shirred sleeping in wet fields









para María do Cebreiro

na hortiña do espello (¿espello?)
espiñas
as espiñas dos borrachos do neón
os borrachos do comprensible, do entendemento
estendido
ningures



o son aire rumor
en consecuencia



moi poucas palabriñas
cortesías
menos as eguas do pensamento,



empuxadas da lonxe.













That limitless strophe
: month



Sage or wary
Physically song’s capacity



obriga cargada

onérous
these days.













Did I have seized ruckus
Job’s weir
catching (outcome) those fishes
and old leaves
me in the mill house at La Chaux
it all broken down, stone pushed into
auga agua eaux
Writing’s “succumb” with great
happiness.
{excerpt from -- http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmarticleID=7555 }

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/books/20mayhall.html?ref=books

[quasimodo1]

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/why-the-plath-legacy-lives/?ref=books

[quasimodo1]

LANGUAGES



THERE are no handles upon a language
Whereby men take hold of it
And mark it with signs for its remembrance.
It is a river, this language,
Once in a thousand years
Breaking a new course
Changing its way to the ocean.
It is mountain effluvia
Moving to valleys
And from nation to nation
Crossing borders and mixing.
Languages die like rivers.
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/arts/21ziprin.html also... a "youtube" poem by Lionel Ziprin --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFveObkbc60

[quasimodo1]

from Poetry Magazine, April 2009
{translation issue}

THE NORTH WIND WHIPS

The north wind whips through,
in the streets papers and leaves
are chased with resentment.
Houses moan,
dogs curl into balls.
There is something in
the afternoon's fingers,
a catfish spine,
a rusty nail.

Someone unthinkingly
smoked cigarettes in heaven,
left it overcast, listless.
Here, at ground level, no one could
take their shadow for a walk,
sheltered in their houses, people
are surprised to discover their misery.

Someone didn't show,
their host was insulted.
Today the world,
agreed to open her thighs,
suddeny the village comprehends
that it is sometimes necessary to close their doors.

Who can tell me
why I meditate on this afternoon? ... {excerpt}


{translated from the Isthmus Zapotec by David Shook}

[quasimodo1]

DIES IRAE

A tinny angelus rings in your ear.
Is this the message from the Great Unknown?
A secret raven? A red sky? Signs of the times?
The “dark place” where most people don’t want to go?
Or are they merely selling the weather?
Wreathed in sea-smoke, Leukothea, the white goddess,
Speaks to you (in archaic Greek) of calculus,
The “lack” in lilac, lyrical blue milk of the mother.
“A hand passes over flowing water,” she says,
“You are moved by your motion.
Yet only the golden string knows where it is going.”
& looking up from his book, the counting master replies,
“The sleep-maker listens for a foot on the stairs.
Jews of One Lemon, Nothing can save you.”

{excerpt, first stanza-- http://bostonreview.net/BR34.1/asekoff.php ....."Dies Irae", Latin for day of mourning, the name of the hymn sung at the mass of the dead}

[quasimodo1]

http://bostonreview.net/about/contest/

[quasimodo1]

THE MEDITERRANEAN
Quem das finem, rex magne, dolorum?

Where we went in the boat was a long bay
A slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone--
Peaked margin of antiquity's delay,
And we went there out of time's monotone:
Where we went in the black hull no light moved
But a gull white-winged along the feckless wave,
The breeze, unseen but fierce as a body loved,
That boat drove onward like a willing slave:
Where we went in the small ship the seaweed
Parted and gave to us the murmuring shore,
And we made feast and in our secret need
Devoured the very plates Aeneas bore:
Where derelict you see through the low twilight
The green coast that you, thunder-tossed, would win,
Drop sail, and hastening to drink all night
Eat dish and bowl to take that sweet land in!
Where we feasted and caroused on the sandless
Pebbles, affecting our day of piracy,
What prophecy of eaten plates could landless
Wanderers fulfil by the ancient sea?
We for that time might taste the famous age
Eternal here yet hidden from our eyes
When lust of power undid its stuffless rage;
They, in a wineskin, bore earth's paradise.
Let us lie down once more by the breathing side
Of Ocean, where our live forefathers sleep
As if the Known Sea still were a month wide-- ...

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/books/review/Holt-t.html?_r=1&ref=review

[quasimodo1]

SOMETHING LIKE THAT


(translated by Liz Werner)




PARRA LAUGHS like he’s condemned to hell
but when haven’t poets laughed?
at least he declares that he’s laughing

they pass the years pass
the years
at least they seem to be passing
hypothesis non fingo
everything goes on as if they were passing

now he starts to cry
forgetting that he’s an antipoet

0

STOP RACKING YOUR BRAINS
nobody reads poetry nowadays
it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad

0

FOUR DEFECTS that my Ophelia won’t forgive me for:
old
lowlife
communist
and National Literature Prize

<<My family may be able to forgive you
for the first three
but never for the last>>

0
MY CORPSE and I
understand each other marvelously
my corpse asks me: do you believe in God?
and I respond with a hearty NO
my corpse asks: do you believe in the government?
and I respond with the hammer and sickle
my corpse asks: do you believe in the police?
and I respond with a punch in the face
then he gets up out of his coffin
and we go arm in arm to the altar

0

THE TRUE PROBLEM of philosophy
is who does the dishes

nothing otherworldly

God
*** the truth
******* the passage of time
absolutely
but first, who does the dishes

whoever wants to do them, go ahead
see ya later, alligator
******* and we're right back to being enemies ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

HAND RELIQUARY, AVE MARIA LANE



God knows that there is no proof
that part returns to wholeness
simply because miracles happen
at a single church-going.

Her verdant branches labelled
with the names of the five senses,
the garden not ours, she prayed
for her illness to last beyond the grave,

and be the unsealer of that tree.
She might have been dead for a week,
though she went on with her deep
dying, her womb a transparent crystal

turning into a brown relic
even before her death. The blinding
beauty of her hood opening
acted upon me as my own ghost ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/antholog/aaindx.htm#ryan From the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine based anthology of poets known and not-so-well-known. Reader friendly format enticing one to subscribe. Poets like...Bly, Collins, Hirshfield, Kunitz, Matthews and Kay Ryan.

[quasimodo1]

LOST PARROT


She can cry his name from today to tomorrow.
She can Charlie him this, cracker him that, there
in the topmost he hangs like
a Christmas ornament,
his tail
a cascade of emeralds and limes.

The child is heartsick. She has taped messages
to the mailboxes, the names
he responds to, his favorite seeds.
At twilight she calls and calls.

Oh, Charlie, you went everywhere with her,
to the post office and the mall, to the women's
room at the Marriott where you perched
on the stall, good-natured, patient.

And didn't you love to take her thumb
in your golden beak
and, squeezing tenderly, shriek and shriek
as if your own gentleness
were killing you? ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/books/review/Kirby-t.html?_r=1&ref=review --- My Daughter’s Murder

By DAVID KIRBY
Published: April 10, 2009
"At what point does life become art? 'Life being all inclusion and confusion,' Henry James wrote, 'and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which alone it is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.' Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno’s searing lines about the murder of her daughter are all sniffing, no finding. There may indeed be 'hard latent value' in the calculated slaughter of a child; if so, you won’t find it here" ... --- SLAMMING OPEN THE DOOR

By Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

61 pp. Alice James Books. Paper, $15.95

[quasimodo1]

XII. Here’s Our Clean Business Now Let’s Go Down the Hall to the Black Room Where I Make My Real Money

You want to see how things were going from the husband’s point of view---
let’s go round the back,
there stands the wife
gripping herself at the elbows and facing the husband.
Not tears he is saying, not tears again. But still they fall.
She is watching him.
I’m sorry he says. Do you believe me.
Watching.
I never wanted to harm you.
Watching.
This is banal. It’s like Beckett. Say something!
I believe

your taxi is here she said.
He looked down at the street. She was right. It stung him,
the pathos of her keen hearing.
There she stood a person with particular traits,
a certain heart, life beating on its way in her.
He signals to the driver, five minutes.
Now her tears have stopped.
What will she do after I go? he wonders. Her evening. It closed his breath.
Her strange evening.
Well he said.
Do you know she began.
What.


If I could kill you I would then have to make another exactly like you.
Why.
To tell it to.
Perfection rested on them for a moment like calm on a lake.
Pain rested.
Beauty does not rest.
The husband touched his wife’s temple
and turned
and ran
down
the
stairs.

--Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband: a fictional essay in 29 tangos
{excerpt} -- http://www.fort.org/carson_xii.html

[quasimodo1]

http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v3n2/nonfiction/wojahn_d/matthews.htm --- DAVID WOJAHN
Review | Search Party: Collected Poems, by William Matthews,
edited by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly
(Houghton Mifflin, 2004)

Search Party brings together the best work of a uniquely eloquent poet, one of the most original voices of his

generation, and surely the most readable. And the book comes along at the right time, for among those poets born

roughly between 1935 and 1945—a group which includes Glück, Hass, Wright, Palmer, Williams, Bidart, Plumly, Pinsky,

and Olds, among others—Matthews is the one whose reputation has seemed most at risk. Although Matthews was something

of a ubiquitous figure on the literary landscape of the 1980s and early '90s, recent anthologies have ignored him,

and his work has attracted little critical attention. Perhaps this has to do with Matthews' early death from a heart

attack in 1997, but I suspect that it has more to do with the writing itself: Matthews' mature style remains

blissfully indifferent to most of the prevailing literary fashions. Although his early work derives from the

surrealist-tinged poetics of Deep Image poets such as Merwin and James Wright, and he never wholly abandoned the Deep

Image predilection for startling pyrotechnical metaphors, the values of his mature work are Horatian—and Matthews

translated Horace—arising from good sense, wit, an insatiable curiosity, an affable authorial presence, and a

slightly shambling quest for wisdom. Matthews was not interested in the earnest disassemblings and assaults on

linearity which have come to be such an important aspect of our period style, nor did he display the self-indulgence

and mere schtick which contemporary poets have often confused with wit. Search Party makes a very persuasive case for

Matthews' continuing importance, thanks not only to the poems but also to a superbly insightful introductory essay by

his friend and fellow poet Stanley Plumly. The book is not a definitive Matthews—a good number of worthy poems from

his individual collections and even his 1992 Selected Poems have been omitted, and Plumly and his co-editor Sebastian

Matthews have culled only a tantalizingly small portion of the many poems which Matthews published in journals but

did not include in his books. Ideally, a Complete Matthews will be available someday; in the meantime, this book does

ample justice to his writing. {excerpt from review... Blackbird Archive}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/arts/17digges.html?_r=1&ref=books --- Deborah Digges, Poet Who Channeled Struggles, Dies at 59 (obituary, Margalit Fox, 4/16/09) Quoted in this obituary is the poem "Searsucker Suit" -- To the curator of the museum, to the exhibition of fathers,

to the next room from this closet of trousers

and trousers, full sail the walnut hangers of shirts,

O the great ghost ships of his shoes.

Through the racks and the riggings,

belt buckles ringing and coins in coat pockets

and moths that fly up from the black woolen remnants,

his smell like a kiss blown through hallways of cedar,

the shape of him locked in his burial clothes,

his voice tucked deep in his name,

his keys and the bells to his heart,

I am passing his light blue seersucker suit

with one grass-stained knee,

and a white shirt, clean boxers, clean socks, a handkerchief.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12Seidel-t.html?ref=books --- "Since Seidel published the first of his

10 collections nearly 50 years ago — a complete gathering of them, “Poems 1959-2009,” will be published this week —

his poetry has remained largely unknown to the general public while attracting heated critical commentary. Seidel has

numerous distinguished admirers inside the literary world — poets as famous as Billy Collins and Paul Muldoon,

critics as respected as Richard Poirier and Adam Phillips, novelists as laureled as Norman Rush and Jonathan Franzen

— and has been called by the critic Adam Kirsch perhaps “the best American poet writing today.” Meanwhile, from other

corners of that world, Seidel has earned different and more complicated epithets: “sinister,” “disturbing,” “savage,”

“the most frightening American poet ever” and even “the Darth Vader of contemporary poetry.” ...{excerpt from

article, NYTimes magazine} re: Frederick Seidel

[quasimodo1]

from THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE..CXVIII

By default, as it so happens, here we have
good and bad angels caught burning
themselves characteristic antiphons;
and here the true and the false
shepherds discovered
already deep into their hollow debate.
Is that all? No, add spinners of fine
calumny, confectioners of sugared
malice; add those who find sincerity
in heartless weeping. Add the pained,
painful clowns, brinksmen of perdition.
Sidney: best realizer and arguer
of music, that ‘divine
striker upon the senses’, steady my
music to your Augustinian grace-notes,
with your high craft of fret. I am glad
to have learned how it goes
with you and with Italianate-
Hebraic Milton: your voices pitched exactly—
somewhere—between Laus Deo and defiance.
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Stone's Secret



Otter-smooth boulder
lies under rolling
black river-water
stilled among frozen
hills and the still unbreathed
blizzards aloft;
silently, icily, is probed
stone's secret.

Out there --past trace
of eyes, past these
and those memorial skies
dotting back signals from
men's made mathematics (we
delineators of curves and time who are
subject to these) --
out there, inaccessible
to grammar's language the
stones curve vastnesses,
cold or candescent
in the perceived
processional of space. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/books/review/Longenbach-t.html?8bu&emc=bua2 --- Constantine Cavafy ---

COLLECTED POEMS

By C. P. Cavafy

Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn

547 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35


THE UNFINISHED POEMS

By C. P. Cavafy

Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn

121 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30

A review... "A Poet's Progress" by James Langenbach, April 17, 2009

[quasimodo1]

BIRDWATCHERS OF AMERICA -- I suffer now continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I received a singular warning: I felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.

BAUDELAIRE, Journals


It’s all very well to dream of a dove that saves,

Picasso’s or the Pope’s,
The one that annually coos in Our Lady’s ear

Half the world’s hopes,
And the other one that shall cunningly engineer
The retirement of all businessmen to their graves,

And when this is brought about
Make us the loving brothers of every lout—

But in our part of the country a false dusk

Lingers for hours; it steams
From the soaked hay, wades in the cloudy woods,

Engendering other dreams.
Formless and soft beyond the fence it broods
Or rises as a faint and rotten musk

Out of a broken stalk.
There are some things of which we seldom talk; ... {excerpt}

[JBI]

Look at that rhyme scheme on the above one, it's almost effortless, but the skeleton is so dominant - how does he do it!

[quasimodo1]

NABOKOV'S BLUES


The wallful of quoted passages from his work,
with the requisite specimens pinned next
to their literary cameo appearances, was too good

a temptation to resist, and if the curator couldn’t,
why should we? The prose dipped and shimmered
and the “flies,” as I heard a buff call them, stood

at lurid attention on their pins. If you love to read
and look, you could be happy a month in that small
room. One of the Nabokov photos I’d never seen:

he’s writing (left-handed! why did I never trouble
to find out?) at his stand-up desk in the hotel
apartment in Montreux. The picture’s mostly

of his back and the small wedge of face that shows
brims with indifference to anything not on the page.
The window’s shut. A tiny lamp trails a veil of light

over the page, too far away for us to read.
We also liked the chest of specimen drawers
labeled, as if for apprentice Freudians,

“Genitalia,” wherein languished in phials
the thousands he examined for his monograph
on the Lycaenidae, the silver-studded Blues.

And there in the center of the room a carillon
of Blues rang mutely out. There must have been
three hundred of them. Amanda’s Blue was there,

and the Chalk Hill Blue, the Karner Blue
(Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov),
a Violet-Tinged Copper, the Mourning Cloak,

an Echo Azure, the White-Lined Green Hairstreak,
the Cretan Argus (known only from Mt. Ida:
in the series Nabokov did on this beauty

he noted for each specimen the altitude at which
it had been taken), and as the ads and lovers say,
“and much, much more.” The stilled belle of the tower

was a Lycaeides melissa melissa. No doubt
it’s an accident Melissa rhymes, sort of, with Lolita,
The scant hour we could lavish on the Blues

flew by, and we improvised a path through cars
and slush and boot-high berms of mud-blurred snow
to wherever we went next. ..... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Review of her new book, "Darwin: A Life in Poems" --- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/books/18pade.html?em --- Darwin’s Descendant, on Origin of Poetry

By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: April 17, 2009
"The British poet Ruth Padel, a favorite to be named the Oxford Professor of Poetry this spring, is Charles Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter, though for much of her life she has preferred not to dwell on the connection.

“A feature of Darwins is that they’re quite reticent,” she said last week during a visit to New York that included a stop at the American Museum of Natural History."

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/nyregion/new-jersey/19poetrynj.html?_r=1&ref=books --- A Celebrated Princeton

Poet Organizes a Festival of His Peers



By MARY JO PATTERSON
Published: April 17, 2009
"POETRY is not everyone’s daily bread, but even those who would be hard pressed to name three great living poets

understand its power, says Paul Muldoon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and professor of creative writing at

Princeton University. ..."

[quasimodo1]

from The Colossus and Other Poems

WATERCOLOR OF GRANTCHESTER MEADOWS

There, spring lambs jam the sheepfold. In air
Stilled, silvered as water in a glass
Nothing is big or fat.
The small shrew chitters from its wilderness
Of grassheads and is heard.
Flits nimble-winged in thickets, and of good color.

Cloudrack and owl-hollowed willows slanting over
The bland Granta double their white and green
World under the sheer water
And ride that flux at anchor, upside down.
The punter sinks his pole.
In Byron's pool
Cattails part where the tame cygnets steer.

It is a country on a nursery plate. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

{from Nigeria, 1932-1967}

ELEGY FOR ALTO
{with Drum Accompaniment}

AND THE HORN may now paw the air howling goodbye. . . .

For the Eagles are now in sight:
Shadows in the horizon--

THE ROBBERS are here in black sudden steps of showers, of
caterpillars--

THE EAGLES have come again,
The eagles rain down on us--

POLITICIANS are back in giant hidden steps of howitzers, of
detonators--

THE EAGLES descend on us,
Bayonets and cannons--

THE ROBBERS descend on us to strip us of our laughter, of our
thunder--

THE EAGLES have chosen their game,
Taken our concubines--

POLITICIANS are here in this iron dance of mortars, of generators--

THE EAGLES are suddenly there,
New stars of iron dawn;

So let the horn paw the air howling goodbye. . . .

O mother mother Earth, unbind me; let this be my last testament;
let this be
The ram's hidden wish to the sword the sword's secret prayer to
the scabbard--

THE ROBBERS are back in black hidden steps of detonators--

FOR BEYOND the blare of sirened afternoons, beyond the
motorcades;
Beyond the voices and days, the echoing highways; beyond the
latescence
Of our dissonant airs; through our curtained eyeballs, through our
shuttered sleep,
Onto our forgotten selves, onto our broken images; beyond the
barricades
Commandments and edicts, beyond the iron tables, beyond the
elephant's
Legendary patience, beyond his inviolable bronze bust; beyond
our crumbling towers--

BEYOND the iron path careering along the same beaten track--

THE GLIMPSE of a dream lies smouldering in a cave, together with
the mortally wounded birds.
Earth, unbind me; ... {excerpt}

{in 1967, Christopher Okigbo was killed as a combatant in a Nigerian civil war}

[quasimodo1]

{Austria, 1926-1973}

INVOCATION OF THE GREAT BEAR

Great Bear, come down, shaggy night,
Cloud-coated beast with the old eyes,
star eyes.
Through the thickets your paws break
star claws.
We guard our herds with a watchful eye,
though caught in your spell, and mistrust
your tired flanks and sharp,
half--bared fangs,
old bear

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


Be afraid or don't be afraid!
Just drop your coins in the collection basket and give
the blind man a good word,
let him hold the bear on its leash.
And spice the lambs well.
Perhaps this bear
will break loose, stop threatening
and chase all the cones that have fallen
from the pines, from the great, winged ones
hurled down from Paradise.

{translated from the German by Mark Anderson, excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

{Brazil, 1902-1987}

SEVEN-SIDED POEM

When I was born, one of the crooked
angels who live in shadow, said:
Carlos, go on! Be gauche in life.

The houses watch the men,
men who run after women.
If the afternoon had been blue,
there might have been less desire.

The trolley goes by full of legs:
white legs, black legs, yellow legs.
My God, why all the legs?
My heart asks. But my eyes
Ask nothing at all.

The man behind the mustache
is serious, simple, and strong
He hardly ever speaks.

. . . . . . . .




Universe, vast universe,
if I had been named Eugene
that would not be what I mean
but it would go into verse
faster.

Universe, vast universe,
my heart is vaster.

I oughtn't to tell you,
but this moon
and this brandy
play the devil with one's emotions.

{translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Bishop, excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

{Italy, b. 1921}

HOW LONG

How long between the grain and the wind
of those garrets
higher, more spun out than the sky,
how long I have left you
my writings, my withered risks.
With angel and chimera
with ancient instrument,
with the diary and the drama
the nights play by turns with the sun.
I left you up there to save
from the cauterizing light
my uncertain roof
the disoriented gables,
terraces where the crazed hail walks:

you, only shadow in winter,
shadow among the ice-demons.
Moths and noxious butterflies
rats and moles descending to hibernate
taught and refined you,
Sagittarius and Capricorn
slanted cold lances at you
and Aquarius tempered in its silences
in its transparencies
a year dripping with blood, an inexplicable
loss of mine.

{excerpt, not from link posted below}

{translated from the Italian by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann} ...................
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=190728 --- Andrea Zanzotto is widely

considered Italy’s most influential living poet. The first comprehensive collection in thirty years to translate this

master European poet for an English-speaking audience, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto includes the

very best poems from fourteen of his major books of verse and a selection of thirteen essays that helps illuminate

themes in his poetry as well as elucidate key theoretical underpinnings of his thought. Assembled with the

collaboration of Zanzotto himself and featuring a critical introduction, thorough annotations, and a generous

selection of photographs and art, this volume brings an Italian master to vivid life for American readers. ...

[quasimodo1]

WHAT GOES ON
Selected and New Poems, 1995-2009.
By Stephen Dunn.
Norton, $24.95. --- ---

MERCURY DRESSING
Poems.
By J. D. McClatchy.
Knopf, $25. --- ---

ONE SECRET THING
By Sharon Olds.
Knopf, $26.95. --- ---

SESTETS
By Charles Wright.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23. --- --- {reviews of these new collections...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/books/review/Brouwer-t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bua2 }

[quasimodo1]

{Portugal, 1919-2004}

MUSE

Muse teach me the song
Revered and primordial...
.....................

Or changed into the wall
Of the first house
Or become he murmur
Of sea all around

(I remember the floor
Of well-scrubbed planks
Its soapy smell
Keeps coming back)

Muse teach me the song
Of the sea's breath
Heaving with brilliants
Muse teach me the song
Of the white room
And the square window

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

Because time pierces
Time divides
And time thwarts
Tears me alive
From the walls and floor
Of the first house

Muse teach me the song
Revered and primordial
To fix the brilliance
Of the polished morning

That rested its fingers
Gently on the dunes
And whitewashed the walls
Of those simple rooms

Muse teach me the song
That chokes my throat

{translated from the Portuguese by Ruth Fainlight, excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

{Serbia, 1922-1991}

THE SHADOW MAKER

You walk forever and ever
Over your own individual infinity
From head to heel and back

You're your own source of light
The zenith is in your head
In your heel its setting

Before it dies you let your shadows out
To lengthen to estrange themselves
To work miracles and shame
And bow down only to themselves

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

from Poetry, May 2009

WINTER

..........

Winter is out for a lot this year
the hand already is stiff
the crying of children is heard in the house
one will we be one life
I hear my house slip with the world
and scream all that has been screamed
the heart rams its boat into ice
shells rustling in the hull
winter is out for as much.

If I freeze fast in the ice
if you freeze fast my child
my great fear as I come
if you freeze fast my life:
then I am a vulture of wings and ice
tearing my liver, my living life
awake in eternity.

This winter is in for a lot.
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

BESIDE A CHRYSANTHEMUM

To bring one chrysanthemum
to flower, the cuckoo has cried
since spring.

To bring one chrysanthemum to bloom,
thunder has rolled
through the black clouds

Flower, like my sister returning
from distant, youthful byways
of throat-tight longing
to stand by the mirror:

{excerpt}

[jinjang]

So Chong-ju

The SNAKE

A lovely snake
lies on the footpath
thick with mint and musk.
What sorrow has shaped your form,
so repulsive?
Beautiful as a colored ankle-band
of my boy's.
Your forked tongue that darts, speechbound,
in and out of a red cave
was once glib enough
for your ancester to tempt Eve.
Bite spitefully into the blue sky.
Be gone with your repulsive head.

Breathless as if kerosene would burn my vitals
I chase it, hurling stones as it
as it slithers along the path
thick with musk and flowers,
but not to avenge Eve, Adam's spouse.

I wish to wear around my body
your skin-color lovelier than colored ankle-band.
With your beautiful lips redder than Cleopatra's,
sink into my soul, Snake.
You have lovely lips like a cat's,
like the lips of my daughter Sunhi
turning twenty.

-1936

[jinjang]

Yi Hyong-gi

FALLEN PETALS

It's beautiful to see one
sensible enough to go
when it is time to go

Passing through the inferno
of springtime passion
my love is fading now

Petals thickly falling
we must go now
loaded with parting bliss

Toward the deep green shade
toward autumn about to bear fruit
my youth fades like a flower

Let us part
our pale hands waving
when petals start to drift to the ground

My love, farewell,
you're my soul's sad eyes that mature
like water filling up a well

-1963

[quasimodo1]

So Chong-Ju


A SNEEZE
......
I stepped out
into the blue autumn day's
winds that touched the ricepaper door.
I sniffed at the weather,
and sneezed.

Somewhere
is someone
saying my words?

Somewhere
as someone says my words,
Has a flower overheard and passed them along?

The clouds split as I look up--
a shining brassy spot of sun
on the mountain's back.

Traces that stir
the waves of an old love.

Is someone
somewhere
saying my words?

..... {excerpt}

{translated from the Korean by David R. McCann}

[JBI]

So Chong-Ju


A SNEEZE
......
I stepped out
into the blue autumn day's
winds that touched the ricepaper door.
I sniffed at the weather,
and sneezed.

Somewhere
is someone
saying my words?

Somewhere
as someone says my words,
Has a flower overheard and passed them along?

The clouds split as I look up--
a shining brassy spot of sun
on the mountain's back.

Traces that stir
the waves of an old love.

Is someone
somewhere
saying my words?

..... {excerpt}

{translated from the Korean by David R. McCann}

Do you have the collection, or just one poem? I'm curious as to how the translation is, as I hear he was one of the most revered of modern Korean poets.

[jinjang]

"Traces that stir
the waves of an old love." of Korean poems for me!

I do not have it in Korean unfortunately and I am not sure how it is translated.

It seems to me that the poet is missing someone or something without being depressed but with a tingy of humor.

Thank you for kindling my interests in poetry!

[quasimodo1]

{Italy, b. 1947}

from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry
( edited by J.D. McClatchy )

TO SIMULATE THE BURNING OF THE HEART

To simulate the burning of the heart, the humiliation
of the viscera, to flee cursed
and cursing, to horde chastity
and to cry for it, to keep my mouth
from the dangerous taste of other mouths
and push it unfulfilled to fulfill itself with the poisons of food,
in the apotheosis of dinners when the already
swollen belly continues to swell;
to touch unreachable solitude and there
at the foot of a bed, a chair
or the stairs to recite a goodbye,
so that I can expel you from my fantasy
and cover you with ordinary clouds
so that your light will not fade my path,
....... {excerpt}

{translated from the Italian by Judith Baumel}

[jinjang]

I appreciate your choice of poems. I read this one 10 times, concentrating more on some lines than others.

I wondered for a while why the poet would call “the burning of the heart” “ the humiliation of the viscera”, but guessed the answer by reading “to touch unreachable solitude” “so that your light will not fade my path.” Some passionate people would rather plunge into the emotional abyss. This poem seems to indicate the person’s effort to seek detachment from “the burning of heart” and to seek peace rather than heart-breaking. Is it simply self-preservation?

When we read a poem, we all get different perception and appreciation. I hope I am not spoiling it by giving my interpretation.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/books/06garn.html?_r=1&ref=books --- MY HAPPINESS BEARS NO RELATION TO

HAPPINESS

A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century

By Adina Hoffman

Illustrated. 454 pages. Yale University Press. $27.50. --- Biography of Taha Muhummad

[quasimodo1]

THIS TIME I WON'T PERMIT THE BLUE

This time I won't permit the blue, glimpsed
and seen from behind the window, from the edge of one roof
to another, in the sole grand explanation
of repetition, carrying the glance beyond
every limit, beyond the vision of the distances,
Temptation and blackmail of lightness and movement, this time
I won't permit it to bribe me in the promise of light.

I won't permit the flight of odors, the air
beaten by sounds and by wings, the fast flashes
Of a pigeon mirrored in the shadow
Of the eaves, that, walking, embroiders the edge,
that throws itself in the vacuum only to later
rise up, I won't permit them to drag me through the streets
to beat my body, defaced of all geography,
oblivious to all tendency, in order to beat
in me the sleeping wound of stupor.

{translated from the Italian by Judith Baumel}

[Sapphire]

I really like this one! It makes me want to learn Italian, just to know how it would sound in that language :) Thank you very much for posting.

[jinjang]

I won't permit it to bribe me in the promise of light.
...
I won't permit them to drag me through the streets
to beat my body, defaced of all geography,
oblivious to all tendency, in order to beat
in me the sleeping wound of stupor.

What was her past experience such that she resists that much "the light" and that she wants to stay as "the sleeping wound of stupor?" It certainly rouses one's curiosity and imagination.

But, I would rather "throw" myself "in the vacuum" and suffer if I must. It feels so restrained and feel almost claustrophobic, otherwise.

Great poem!

[quasimodo1]

By BRAD STONE
Published: May 17, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO — "Turning itself into a kind of electronic vanity publisher, Scribd, an Internet start-up here, will

introduce on Monday a way for anyone to upload a document to the Web and charge for it.

The Scribd Web site is the most popular of several document-sharing sites that take a YouTube-like approach to text,

letting people upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework, recipes and the like. Users can read

documents on the site, embed them in other sites and share links over social networks and e-mail.

In the new Scribd store, authors or publishers will be able to set their own price for their work and keep 80 percent

of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with security software that will prevent their

texts from being downloaded or freely copied.

Authors can choose to publish their documents in unprotected PDFs, which would make them readable on the Amazon

Kindle and most other mobile devices. Scribd also says it is readying an application for the iPhone from Apple and

will introduce it next month. ..... " --- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/technology/start-

ups/18download.html?_r=1&ref=books

[quasimodo1]

"Ruth Padel, right, has been elected the new Oxford professor of poetry and will be the first woman to hold the post

since it was established in 1708, the Guardian reported." ---- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/books/18arts-301YEARMENON_brf.html?ref=books

[quasimodo1]

{Japan b. 1931}

A POETRY CALENDAR

I who wait for myself
I who don't appear
again today I turn a page of the sea
throw away a tight-lipped dead clam

the day not white dawn the beach white
a mother's barren womb a broken oar
.........................................

the day not white dawn a useless parasol
a suspicious laugh cold fried food

I who wait for myself
I who don't appear
again today I turn a page of the sky
sweep together and throw away all the sooty stardust

the day not quite dawn the grass full of hanging tears
I leaf and leaf through a calendar
Yes I don't appear
I who wait for myself
world of imaginary numbers love without arms

{translated from the Japanese by Naoshi Koriyama and Edward Lueders}
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

{Israel, b. 1936}

SURELY YOU REMEMBER

After they all leave,
I remain alone with the poems,
some poems of mine, some of others.
I prefer poems that others have written.
I remain quiet, and slowly
the not in my throat dissolves.
I remain.

Sometimes I wish everyone would go away.
Maybe it's nice, after all, to write poems.
You sit in your room and the walls grow taller.
Colors deepen.
A blue kerchief becomes a deep well.

You wish everyone would go away.
You don't now what's the matter with you.
Perhaps you'll think of something.
Then it all passes, and you are pure crystal.

After that, love.
Narcissus was so much in love with himself.
Only a fool doesn't understand
he loved the river, too.

You sit alone.
Your heart aches, but
it won't break.
The faded images wash away one by one.
Then the defects.
A sun sets at midnight. You remember
the dark flowers too.

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

Only a fool lets the sun set when it likes.
It always drifts off too early
westward to the islands.

Sun and moon, winter and summer
will come to you,
infinite treasures.

{translated from the Hebrew by Chana Block and Ariel Blockk}
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/books/review/Brouwer-t.html --- Poetry Chronicle




Reviews by JOEL BROUWER
Published: April 24, 2009
WHAT GOES ON
Selected and New Poems, 1995-2009.
By Stephen Dunn.
Norton, $24.95.

[quasimodo1]

TUOLOMNE


(Tu•ol'•omn•e. 1. a river in
California, north of the
Yosemite. 2. a meadowland on
the river, above Hetch-Hetchy.
3. a tribe, now vanished.)

for Meg Nye

Lord, look at the grass.
Globs, glebes, gallopings, a whole ocean
and blade after blade after blade
of promiscuous
grass.
It could make a man feel called.
Called on the carpet.
Yes, Lord, yes,
I let my seed fall on the rocky ground.
I never laid my talents out to found
The many-mansioned condominium.
I stop off to camp out on the way home
From a trip west to see my married daughter,
And look at me.
Big woodsman.
I’m so dumb
I build my space-age puptent on the sand.

You read me well enough.
Mornings, chilled to the marrow, when I stand
And squint out over the pebble-brightening water,
Something there is that shakes me by the scruff.

I forage off. I climb a little bluff
And kick my morning cat-hole in the dirt.
My knees are cold. They hurt.
I get down close to what my heel turned over.
All made of leaves! Oh look:
So many profligacies brought to book.
Look at the way the crumbs and fragments glisten.

Tell me again thy teachings, Lord, I’ll listen.

Happy the man who hunkers down and mulls
A second reading of the parables.
I brought your book along to do just that.
Let’s see now; have I got the message pat?

Where there is soil, plant seed. Where there is boulder,
Cover the same with buildings. Neither build
Nor scatter seed along the highway shoulder,
But if you are an ethnic, scavenge there
For someone newly robbed, or damn near killed,
Or both, whom it behooves you to befriend.
If you are merely indigent, perpend:
The hedges and the ditches are the place
To stand forth and be feculent in case
Some parvenu who planned a banquet gets
A mailboxfull of monogrammed regrets
And throws himself a little social tantrum.
If someone slips you money, don’t succumb
To modesty or misplaced moral scruple.
Throw it around! Invest! It might quadruple.
Weeds, you weed out. Collect the weed seed, though.
Your enemy may sink his pot of gold
In millet-fields and leave them unpatrolled.
Salt, you are meant to savor, not to sow,
Unless there be a grievance to avenge.
On sand, thou shalt not build nor plant nor scavenge,
But meditate. The sand shall be a standard
Of competition and comparison
In counting up the offspring of the dutiful.
The lily too shall function. It is beautiful.
Lastly, at unpredicted interval,
A sparrow shall conveniently fall
To test the quickness of the Cosmic Eyeball.
I have committed whimsy. There. So be it.
I have not followed wisdom as I see it.
You avalanche me sermons and I make
Rhymes for the sake of rhymes.
Break
This sinner, Lord, of his lamented crimes.

It’s not as if you hadn’t, lots of times,
Shown me the moon.
The kingdom brought to birth.
Convulsion in the ferns. The very earth
Rising above itself in ecstasies.
Haven’t I gone glass-eyed onto my knees
To pry into the busyness of these
Green legions, every microscopic blob
A roller-palace with a milling mob
Of chloroplasts careening around in it
A dozen or two dozen times a minute?
How furious they are as they compete
At drawing water up a hundred feet
To let a picturebook blue spruce complete
Its simulacrum of a waterfall.
A man’d have to think exceeding small
To get no hustle from that plasmic jazz.
Quadrillions! Every cell as frenzied as
A Circus Maximus beside a Tiber.
Whole generations toughen into fiber
And turn into the body of the mother
While I scratch out one verbal razzmatazz
And heavy up my notebook with another.
They have their conquests to consolidate.
And I? I guess I’m here to celebrate
Myself, your works, man’s passions, or the State,
Depending on which school I emulate.
And do I mock? I mock. And grieve? I grieve.
There’s nothing I would gladlier achieve
Than Poetry. I mean the serious thing.
Not this Pop-Popean ringa-dingdinging.

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

{Czech Republic, b. 1923}

MAN CURSING THE SEA

Someone
just climbed to the top of the cliffs
and began to curse the sea.

Dumb water, stupid pregnant water,
slow, slimy copy of the sky,
you peddler between sun and moon,
pettifogging pawnbroker of shells,
soluble, loud-mouthed bull,
fertilizing the rocks with your blood,
suicidal sword
dashed to bits on the headland,
hydra, hydrolizing the night,
breathing salty clouds of silence,
spreading jelly wings
in vain, in vain,
gorgon, devouring its own body,

water, you absurd flat skull of water---

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

And then he came down
and patted
the tiny immense stormy mirror of the sea.

There you go, water, he said,
and went his way.

{translated from the Czech by Stuart Friebert and Dana Habova}
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/nyregion/new-jersey/17colnj.html?ref=books --- Infinite Poetry, From a Finite Number


By KEVIN COYNE
Published: May 15, 2009
Union City



Kevin Coyne
POET’S CORNER A street sign in Union City honors a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.

New Jersey
Complete Coverage »
In the Region
Connecticut »
Westchester »
Long Island »IT’S not much of a yard by the standards of most of America — just a postage stamp of grass behind the house at the corner of Fourth Street and New York Avenue, fenced by chain link and shaded by an unruly maple, here in this densest of cities in this densest of states. But like many things in New Jersey, it turns out to be larger than it looks at first glance.

The eminent poet W. S. Merwin lived at this corner until he was 9, a block away from the Presbyterian church his father pastored. Several years ago, long after he had won his first Pulitzer, his boyhood city honored him with a street sign here: “W. S. Merwin Way,” it reads. Last month, Mr. Merwin won a second Pulitzer prize for poetry — the fourth New Jersey poet to win in the last 10 years, a streak that is unmatched of late by any other state, and one that raises the question of whether it is more than just a happy coincidence.

[quasimodo1]

{Belgium, b. 1942}

THE CITY

The city is covered with places you
took from me. Full of joint
footsteps, full of joint laughs.
They were sheltered by dreams and if need be
love grabbed the gun to protect them.

Tell my legs how to evade
what belonged to them.
Tell them. They refuse to believe
that the theaters have burnt, restaurants
were hit by plagues, terraces vanished
into thin air, hotels closed,
the courtyard was demolished.

I bow my head and think
the rain will not hit me. ............. {excerpt}

{translated from the Flemish by John van Tiel}

[quasimodo1]

THOUSANDS OF BROADWAYS
Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town.
By Robert Pinsky.
University of Chicago, $16.


Pinsky, a former poet laureate, first delivered the thoughts contained in this slim volume in a series of lectures at Rice University. Much of the book reads like the transcript of a class one might guiltlessly sleep through. “The American small town, by now a setting at least half-mythical,” he argues, “provides a mimetic arena where contradictions between slavery and freedom, or between abundance and emptiness, hark back to even more fundamental contradictions.”
{quote from review...NYTimes}

[Sapphire]

@the City

At first I did not read carefully and I thought the poem was written in 1942. I thought it was about WWII. Now I see I was wrong and the writer was born in that year.

I did not know this poet. I will check him out - thank you for introducing him. I have to say I like the Dutch version a bit better though. It says rather "the plague" than "plagues", "the terraces" than terraces etc. I wonder why the translator changed it. And the last verse is a bit different in translation too - putting a "." where a "," is. I kind of like that though... I guess translation is just as much about making choices as writing the poetry itself is :)

I like the idea - how a city looses all its charm when you loose the one you explored that city with. The one you lived with in that city.

[quasimodo1]

To Sapphire: It's great that you know Flemish and can re-translate with effect. Let me post another by the same author and you can give me your opinion of the translator/translation. q1

[quasimodo1]

{Belgium, b. 1942)

PARTY

After years the reunion. Brushed the dogs,
the feuds forgotten, the sons the image
of the father. Comparing weight:
belly, money, and ethics.

The late-comers are not expected earlier.
She who once was the queen, casts around
pictures of her daughters, and nobody
is surprised when the poet asks for the name
of the lady who was his big childhood love.

The laughers are talking condoms again, smoking almost
completely forbidden and anyone who does not embrace
United Europe now is lost. The cinders in the barbecue
Are glowing red. No lack of cancer causes here.

The munchies are going round, the whisky works its miracles
and from the wounds of the bacon the fat is dripping.
The names of the dead are exchanged like addresses
on the last holiday. {excerpt}

{translated from the Flemish by John Van Tiel}

[quasimodo1]

IN THE RING OF TWENTY SIGNS

—after Joseph Campbell

The third ring is the future scraping
the present: what is next enters, closes
itself to the past. The fifth ring is
observation. The sixth, satisfaction
of what is known. The fourth ring
is worry, but that is naive, short-lived,
a waste of time, which is the tenth ring,
the middle. The eleventh ring is pleasure;
feeding, but not gluttony, sex but not
depletion. The twelfth ring: love.
The thirteenth, love undone, unleashed
attachment. Rings six through nine are
marriage. The fourteenth ring is silence.
The fifteenth, desire. The sixteenth
ring, mercy. The sixteenth ring is true.
At seventeen you stand alone on the stairway.
The seventeenth ring is achievement.
The eighteenth gives it all away. Not
generously. Not regretfully. Just given.
The nineteenth ring is loneliness suffered
despite oneself. ..... {excerpt}



Barbara Helfgott Hyett teaches at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education and directs a bussiness, The Workshop for Publishing Poets, in Brookline, Mass. She is the author of four books and has had poems and essays published in over one hundred magazines and in twenty-two anthologies. (2001)

[quasimodo1]

LETTER TO THE AMERICAN POET, GREGORY CORSO

{translated from the Hungarian by Len Roberts and Lászlo Vértes}

I’d like to roam the world with you,
Corso,
derailer of time,
twentieth-century rowdy.
Your striped t-shirt reminds me of prison clothes,
runaway prisoner of poetry,
apostle of adultery.
Come on, tie up your sneakers,
let’s go to the Moon,
the Sahara,
and the capital of our good mood: Spoleto!

It’s night in Dome Square.
Marble cubes swim about in the glass of darkness,
like splinters of ice
in bitter whiskey.

Let’s drink the city down at one gulp!

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

•

It may be good to steal cars
if we can’t steal immortality

and to peal with the tin-box
if we can’t with Christ’s leg.

•

Let’s play—you like to play:
let’s poke each other’s eyes,
perhaps we’ll be kinder this way
than those who smile.
Let’s break up your bombs for eggs on a plate
and Europe may then admire a new art of cooking.

•

And moron! moron!—let’s holler
at the Polar Bear-Senator,
the prime minsters, who spend
the weekend in the barrel of a cannon.
Oh, weekends!
oh, Sundays!
oh, Whitehouses! Parliaments!
tanks crawl forth
from your snail shells everywhere
and the poets fall on their backs on their slimy tracks.
Morons! morons!—let’s holler at the poets
who fall on their backs,
they don’t deserve bread,
women,
they don’t deserve death.

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

Everything can happen to us
if we stay,
everything that has already happened to us.
Come on,
we should be that procession
which rambles every which-way,
changes homeland to get to like the other’s homeland,
signs the sea, as if some picture postcard,
and has a rest in the towns,
to let the towns have a rest, too,
and doesn’t petition for mercy
when it’s sued for its marching,
which it came to love on the seventh day.

{excerpt}

Sándor Csoóri is one of Hungary’s foremost poets and essayists. (1992)

Len Roberts’ translation of Sándor Csoóri’s Selected Poems has recently been published. (1992)

[quasimodo1]

{Poland, b. 1945}

ELECTRIC ELEGY
{for Robert Hass}

Farewell, German radio with your green eye
and your bulky box,
together almost composing
a body and soul. (Your lamps glowed
with a pink, salmony light, like Bergson's
deep self.)
Through the thick fabric
of the speaker (my ear glued to you as
to the lattice of a confessional), Mussolini once whispered,
Hitler shouted, Stalin calmly explained,
Bierut hissed, Gomulka held endlessly forth.
But no one, radio, will accuse you of treason;
no, your only sin was obedience absolute,
tender faithfulness to the megahertz;
whoever came was welcomed, whoever was sent
was received.
Of course I know only
the songs of Schubert brought you the jade
of true joy. To Chopin's waltzes
your electric heart throbbed delicately
and firmly and the cloth over the speaker
pulsated like the breasts of amorous girls
in old novels.
Not with the news, though,
Especially not Radio Free Europe or the BBC.
..........................
At night, forlorn signals found shelter
in your rooms, sailors cried out for help,
the young comet cried, losing her head.
Your old age was announced by a cracked voice,
then rattles, coughing, and finally blindness
(your eye faded), and total silence.
Sleep peacefully, German radio,
dream Schumann and don't waken
when the next dictator-rooster crows.

{translated from the Polish by Renata Gorczynski and C.K. Williams}
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

AMERICA POLITICA HISTORIA, IN SPONTANEITY

O this political air so heavy with the bells
and motors of a slow night, and no place to rest
but rain to walk—How it rings the Washington streets!
The umbrella’d congressmen; the rapping tires
of big black cars, the shoulders of lobbyists
caught under canopies and in doorways,
and it rains, it will not let up,
and meanwhile lame futurists weep into Spengler’s
prophecy, will the world be over before the races blend color?
All color must be one or let the world be done—
There’ll be a chance, we’ll all be orange!
I don’t want to be orange!
Nothing about God’s color to complain;
and there is a beauty in yellow, the old Lama
in his robe the color of Cathay;
in black a strong & vital beauty,
Thelonious Monk in his robe of Norman charcoal—
And if Western Civilization comes to an end
(though I doubt it, for the prophet has not
executed his prophecy) surely the Eastern child
will sit by a window, and wonder
the old statues, the ornamented doors;
the decorated banquet of the West—
Inflamed by futurists I too weep in rain at night
at the midnight of Western Civilization;
Dante’s step into Hell will never be forgotten by Hell;
the Gods’ adoption of Homer will never be forgotten by the Gods;
the books of France are on God’s bookshelf;
no civil war will take place on the fields of God;
and I don’t doubt the egg of the East its glory—
Yet it rains and the motors go
and continued when I slept by that wall in Washington
which separated the motors in the death-parlor
where Joe McCarthy lay, lean and stilled,
ten blocks from the Capitol—
I could never understand Uncle Sam
his red & white striped pants his funny whiskers his starry hat:
how surreal Yankee Doodle Dandy, goof!
American history has a way of making you feel
George Washington is still around, that is
when I think of Washington I do not think of Death—
{excerpt...roughly one third of this poem}.....poet referred to in post 442.

[Virgil]

Have you heard of Geoffry Hill Quasi? I just came across him today and it piqued my interest.

[quasimodo1]

yes, Virgil, I've heard of him. I think I may have posted something of his in the "fragments" thread some time back but I'm not sure. You can "find" him here... http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=3152 . What have you read that got your interest?

[Virgil]

yes, Virgil, I've heard of him. I think I may have posted something of his in the "fragments" thread some time back but I'm not sure. You can "find" him here... http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=3152 . What have you read that got your interest?

Well, it was in a magazine I was perrusing and I'm already forgetting. The writer of the article thought him the most important poet from England in the last decade or so and that he was very erudite. The bits of fragments that the article provided did show a highly crafted work.

[quasimodo1]

According to the Poetry Foundation database...he's definitely a scholarly poet, some say difficult and challenging. Like so many erudite-in-extremus poets... he's not everyman's poet... which intrigues me even more. --- http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=lang_en&id=LRoCcr1_U0AC&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&dq=Geoffrey+Hill,+poet&ots=zQe6L7bVyb&sig=K-udMHbiAAlpod0Cgz4A6mDQ3f8

[Virgil]

I'm going to have to explore him. :)

[quasimodo1]

"A scholar and critic as well as a poet, Hill has published several collections of criticism and essays. Between 1959 and 1996 he published four collections of poetry, but over the last two decades he has become more prolific, with The Orchards of Syon (2002), Speech! Speech! (2000), and The Triumph of Love (1998). Reviewing the poems in A Treatise of Civil Power (2007), critic Tim Martin notes, “Hill’s persistent (and persistently underrated) wit lends both lightness and a paradoxical gravity to even the most abstruse passages of his dense, argumentative verse.” tidbit from that site...

[quasimodo1]

Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings

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

Relieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust,
Their usage, pride, admitted within doors;
At home, under caved chantries, set in trust,
With well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs
They lie; they lie; secure in the decay
Of blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted,
Before the scouring fires of trial-day
Alight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head,
Budge through the clay and gravel, and the sea
Across daubed rock evacuates its dead.
{excerpt}

[jinjang]

SURELY YOU REMEMBER

This one applies to you, quasimodo1? I can imagine even when everyone leaves, if that is possible, you will be here reading poems.

MAN CURSING THE SEA

This one is brilliant! I will curse the sea when I get mad and surely my anger will be drowned in the vast sea. Then I will pat my shoulders with job well-done.

THE CITY
I agree with Sapphire. Memory lingers on in many different forms and ties us down…

IN THE RING OF TWENTY SIGNS
I wonder, if the poem parallels our lives with the rings, which ring I am in. Maybe the fourteenth.

Here is a very famous Korean poem most Korean people grew up with. It is a heart-breaking poem but the translation does not do the justice and I modified some lines at the end.

Poet: Han Yong-un (1879~1944)

“A devoted Buddhist monk since his youth, he became one of the 33 patriots who in 1919 signed the historical document declaring Korea independent of Japan…Love in his poems subsumes his love of the country and of humanity in general as well as his personal love.”

Translator: Jaihiun Joyce Kim

LOVE’S SILENCE

Love is gone, gone indeed is my love.
Tearing himself away from me, he has gone
One a narrow path that breaks through the brightness
of the green hill toward an autumn-tinted maple grove.
Our oath, shining and enduring
like a gold mosaicked flower, has turned to cold dust,
blown away in the breath of wind.
The memory of the first poignant kiss, though faded,
Has worked a complete change in the course of my fate
and withdrawn into forgetfulness.
Your fair looks have turned me blind.
Since it’s human to love, I feared with caution
a parting to come when we first met.
But the parting’s come, so unexpected,
it breaks my heart with renewed sorrow.
Yet I know parting can only undo love
if it causes idle tears to fall.
…
A love-song, unable to control its tunes,
lingers over the silence of love.

-1926

My own modification to deliver the meaning better:
Line 1: Love is gone, ah ah my loving love is gone. (The rhyming is missing.)
Line 2: Tearing, with lingering regret, himself away from me (Not going voluntarily and he is forced to go away from his love)
Line 7: blown away in a breath of breeze. (light wind not strong wind)
Line 10: disappeared with backward steps into forgetfulness. (It is not just withdrawing. It is walking backward still looking and fading)
Line 11: Your fragrant voice has turned me deaf and your flowery face has turned me blind.
Line 15: My heart bursts open with renewed sorrow.
Last line: twirls and surrounds the silence of love.

[quasimodo1]

THE RIVER

{translated from the Vietnamese by the author and Martha Collins}

We wake from our dream with no time to button our shirts,
To tie back our hair, to leave word with our families.
We run together from two distant places
Through fields of trembling grass.

Dewdrops are thrown in the air like stars;
The grass-spider, startled, runs to the end of its line.
Grasshoppers, toads are thrown in the air,
Seeds of yellow grass are thrown in the air and ring like bells.

We run from two directions and kneel on two banks;
The river’s a moving horizon between us.
The clouds are sails discolored by wind,
Unhappy sails that tear and mend themselves.

The gobies are golden keys to the door
Of the water world where our house is waiting.
No time to button our shirts, to tie back our hair—
The rattle of keys echoes, rushing along the banks.

Why don’t we keep running? Why have we stopped?
Why don’t we crawl in the river like brown turtles?
We’re perch that climbed the falls, deceived by tiny inlets;
We’re two cornflowers thrown on the floor of dusk.

We run through many fields, we run and look back.
Why not run into the river? Why do we kneel on the banks?
We turn our faces up to the sky like frogs,
Summoning not the rain, but each other’s hair.

We run through many fields, through seasons of plowing and

sowing

We run, dreaming we’re running from sky rebels.
Why do we come back to the banks of the river and cry?
And why do the ferryboats sink themselves before dawn?

We run through many fields, through seasons of wild grass;
Fresh grass-seeds roll in a pocket of your shirt. ......

{excerpt}




Nguyen Quang Thieu has published four books of poems in Vietnam, as well as fiction and translations. His most recent collections are The Insomnia of Fire (1992), which won the Writers’ Association National Award for poetry in 1993, and The Women Carry River Water (1995). A bilingual collection of his poems, translated with Martha Collins, will be published by the University of Massachusetts in early 1997. (1996)

Martha Collins’s second book of poems, The Arrangement of Space, will be published this fall. Her manuscript-in-progress, A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet, won the PSA’s di Castagnola Award. (1991)

[quasimodo1]

{Russia, b. 1948}

ELEGIES ON THE CARDINAL POINTS
{for M. Sh.}

I North

Down the winding lanes of Moscow, down its hopeless
convolutions
Someone's shadow flew past in sweet desperation.
On a pool she kissed an emerald duck,
Pressed some crusted leaves against her eyeballs,
Shrieking with laughter dodged a tramcar-bull
And warmed herself up on a tramwire spark.

At night-- come to the picture show, they pleaded,
"Bergman films!" Moments from your life repeated
Hundreds of times. Who knew that nightly cinemas are hired by
hell?
That strapped into their seats the dead sit in the hall
Gazing with tilted heads into the past?
Escorted there like soldiers to the baths?
"Waiting. Love. Your Marat." -- for Charlotte, a telegram.

I've cast off seven skins, eight souls, all my clothes,
And in my breast I've tracked a ninth soul down,
A gentle mole, it trembled in my hand,
Pale-blue iceborn snow-wife with a broomstick,
I poked two little eyes in and she died.

Look-- the vault of heaven's bestrewn and snowing wings and
feathers,
No sweeping them up in a week, stay buried in them forever.
Look-- under the moon fly Lion and Eagle and Bull,
And you sleep, you lie back in your body's serpentine coils.
Where's the angel? -- you ask, and I will most surely respond:
Where there's gloom-- there's a radiance, all the world is maimed,
The angel twined in gloom like a tenacious plant.
Steer for black point, for desolation and gloom,
Steer for darkness, for dark, for the rocks, the muddle, the pit.
The angel plays hide-and-seek? -- but he's there! -- in earth
underfoot.
He's no worm. Don't try to dig for him in a field.
See-- towards winter shining birds fly to the pole?

She gave a glance, began to groan
And stumbling on crenellations flew all night,
Her bloodspots dripping on hospitals, boulevards, mills. . . .
Don't worry! Your death is the birth of an angel of light.

[quasimodo1]

{Martinique, b. 1913}

ON THE ISLANDS OF ALL WINDS

lands which leap very high
not high enough however to keep their feet from remaining caught
by the peculium of the sea
booming its assault of irremediable faces

hunger of man heard by the mosquitoes and his thirst
for they are loaves laid out for a bird feast
sand saved against all hope or arms bent
to gather to one's breast all that lingers of
the out of season heat

O justice noon of reason too slow it does not matter
that nameless to the resinous torch of tongues
they do not know that their dirt offering
is in this too distant song recklessly achieved

the morning in the unbeknown of my voice will unveil
the bird which it nevertheless carries and Noon
why my voice remained encrusted with the blood of my panting
throat

from the islands from all of them you will say
that according to the heart a supernumerary of vertiginous birds

for a long long time seeking between sheets of sand
the wound at the coveted crossroad of the undermining sea
you found through the hiccup
the pit of the insult included in the bitter blood
that finally exulting in the wounded kine of the stars .....
{excerpt}

{translated from the French by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith}

[quasimodo1]

WALT WHITMAN'S BRAIN DROPPED ON LABORATORY FLOOR

At his request, after death, his brain removed
for science, phrenology, to study, and,
as the mortuary assistant carried it
(I suppose in a jar but I hope cupped
in his hands) across the lab’s stone floor he dropped it.

...........................................
of the skull’s outer ridges, valleys, would afford
particular insight. So Walt believed.
He had already scored high (between 6 and 7) for Ego.
And as if we couldn’t guess from his verses, he scored
high again (a 6 and a 7—7 the highest possible!) in Amativeness

(sexual love) and Adhesiveness (friendship,
brotherly love) when before his death
his head was read. He earned only 5 for Poetic Faculties
but that 5, pulled and pushed by his other numbers,
allowed our father of poesie to lay down some words

in the proper order on the page. That our nation
does not care does not matter, much.
That his modest federal job was taken from him,
and thus his pension, does not matter at all.
And that his brain was dropped and shattered, a cosmos,
on the floor, matters even less.



{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/books/review/Orr-t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bua2 --- On Poetry, The Edge of Night a review by David Orr --- May 22, 2009 "Many poets have been acquainted with the night; some have been intimate with it; and a handful have been so haunted and intoxicated by the darker side of existence that it can be hard to pick them out from the murk that surrounds them. As POEMS 1959-2009 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $40) demonstrates, Frederick Seidel has spent the last half-century being that darkest and strangest sort of poet. He is, it’s widely agreed, one of poetry’s few truly scary characters. This is a reputation of which he’s plainly aware and by which he’s obviously amused, at least to judge from the nervy title of his 2006 book, “Ooga-Booga.” This perception also colors the praise his collections typically receive — to pick one example from many, Calvin Bedient admiringly describes him as “the most frightening American poet ever,” which is a bit like calling someone “history’s most bloodthirsty clockmaker.” What is it about Seidel that bothers and excites everyone so much?" ...

[quasimodo1]

THE SCRIPT


So the wars went on for another century.
Under heaven roads sprang up, unconnected,
from three to eight feet wide,
impossible for vehicles to travel;
money also ran wild in form—
precious stones, shells, silk, bones;
scholars were busy inventing bizarre words
while people followed their own tongues
writing scripts of Worm,
of Vine, of Fish, of Cloud, of Bird.

As soon as the First Emperor conquered
the other kingdoms, he set standards
for coinage, roads, weights and measures.
His ministers advised him to fix
written words, which they argued
formed a foundation for the Empire
because a disordered official script
would cloud meanings, causing chaos.

The High Minister designed a script called
the Clerk Style, whose characters looked
august and simple, so his dictionary
of thirty-three thousand words
were carved on stone tablets while
all the other scripts were banned. ......... {excerpt}






Ha Jin has published several books of poetry and fiction. His most recent novel, Waiting (Pantheon, 1999) won the National Book Award. This coming fall he will publish a book of poems, Wreckage (Hanging Loose Press), and a book of short stories, The Bridegroom (Pantheon). (2000)

[jinjang]

Sin Sok-Cho (1909-1976)
THE GONG DANCE
*A Buddhist ritual dance performed by a monk or nun while striking a brass
gong set up on the floor.

Against my life-long wish to live
Like an immaculate petal
what shall I do
with the doleful spring
that gushes out
from the deep woods of my heart?

Perchance it’s like the sound of a bell
bonging from a remote temple in the green hill.
The bright moon is beaming in vain
on the empty temple;
a sleepless Philomel weeps so sadly,
on a spray in the back yard.
Woe is me. What shall I do?
How I’ve been dreaming
of the Nirvana
of matchless joy
that I can keep to myself!
Nevertheless,
dizzying dust has gathered unawares
on the clean mirror of my mind.

Flesh is sad.
A faulty-ridden body of this temporal world.
The maddening passion of the world
Grips my body like a beast.
O this form, in such beauty.
In my treasure woods there’s a path
Running forever split between mind
And its enthralling body
Where a hidden serpent wriggles.
Like a drifting cloud
Quietly flows a stream
On which ripple down fallen petals.
How the rolling waters break into jewels!
What can ever stay the mighty flowing
Before the stream empties into the blue sea?
How I envy that stream which flows freely at will!
Plum-blossoms blossoming white
Under the moon,
I lay me down alone
in nun’s quarters
but I can hardly get to sleep
as if laden with cares.

O dizzying concerns of this world.
What resignation for show!
Are the eight commandments and hymns for nothing?
O fruits of illusion born of human fate!
…..
lies the sad abyss of soul
I dream of.
…..
Is it this very suffering flesh
That is only real?
This very self that exists for a brief period,
this frame that flows flooded with use of life,
a mere flower-bud that burns with pure desire,
an illusory butterfly worn with cares.

….
In the dead of the night
in the quite of my upper room
I hear nothing but the dinning sound of water.
No other soul in sight but a lone candle-light
by which my neck band and my long-sleeved robe
are shed to ripple into a long-drawn sigh.
Like a dancing moth drawn to a flame
I chase a dream, sweet and endless.

Alas! Does solitude sire
a sinful serpent of thought?
….

On the myriad-folded ranges of mountains
arrow-roots, twined and tangled,
run wild and free to wrap tightly
around an alder, slim and straight.
Are men also born to live tangled
and free like that?
For me
I have no wish nor attachment left in me
for I am a mere flower that blossoms by nature.
This frame of mine that has grown big
charmed by the full-blown blossoms,
a sheer mass of roses.
Behold the hill where peach and plum blossoms
swirl in midair.

O seeds of evil chained to the eight phases of being.
How hard to cut off stubborn affinity
clinging to the three worlds*!
I wish to wander madly in the dream woods
assigned to me for a living
but I do not know whither to go
like a sailor beaten unconscious by the storm.

….
*The world of desire-driven beings, the world of beings with form, and the world of beings without form.

[quasimodo1]

to jinjang: Most elegant selection, appreciated it immensely. q1

[jinjang]

I am very happy to find one you appreciate. It is 9 pages long and much like a Buddhist monk chant. Pleasant day!

[quasimodo1]

DON'T BARE YOUR SOUL!


for Coleen Grissom


Don’t bare your soul to anyone, however gentle,
solicitous, seductive, or wise!
Don’t do it! Don’t
make that mistake!
Don’t bare your soul, and leave it to be scarified
like a Formica-topped table!
Greasy and wrinkled like an old dollar bill!
Blown like dirty confetti along the pavement!

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

And the long dreamy talk you once had, hand folded
into hand, feet clasping feet for warmth, pulse-
beats in equilibrium as, at dusk, as dusk deepens,
the interior darkness expands to meet the exterior,
and there is a breathless moment when both are equal—
that came to nothing in the end—as you should
have known!

So don’t bare your soul in intimacy, still less
in company!
Don’t do it! Don’t
make that mistake!
Don’t bless while being cursed!
Remember that Hell is memory with no power of alteration;
remorse that is one-sided merely; shame a mirror
showing only your face.
Don’t bare your soul to anyone, no matter who invites it!
No matter who whispers, I will love you forever—tell me
all your secrets!
Don’t do it!
And if you do it, don’t talk about it!
Not even to yourself!
And don’t write about it!
Especially not that!



{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

PAY PER VIEW



Don’t knock my dish.
I hold it dear, unincidental

at the household’s entryway: there is
intelligence in its half-

cocked concavity. No fixity of
whereabouts: and no direction but the shifting one

from whose beyond the next
known jolt could come.

Not homeless, just never at home,
just always out to lunch, just always in the head.

Soon enough I’ll have to see
real soil, real sand, real loam, real loess, real lee—earth’s ditch at large

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

VERMONT WATER






“Vermont water tastes like sherry wine.”
*** —Trad.
{For Seamus Heaney}
We’ve had our soft days
hems of rain sashaying
across the roof . . . muffled paradiddle . . .
the big pine’s brush lifted
flung down scattered dots
and the mist seen,
the air alive, but unheard.
Rain beads on the cattle bar,
not here, but in Wicklow
where you pointed out the droplets
poised and falling, beautiful.
Water is your sign. What pours
forth from jug and drain, voluble
life-giver, free to do as it pleases
until it pleases. Here water goes
underground to be dowsed by those
whose forked sticks spring downwards.
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

{India, b. 1928}

SANSKRIT

Awaken them; they are knobs of sound
that seem to melt and crumple up
like some jellyfish of tropical seas,
torn from sleep with a hand lined by prophecies.
Listen hard; their male, gaunt world sprawls the page
like rows of tree trunks reeking in the smoke
of ages, the branches glazed and dead;
as though longing to make up with the sky,
but having lost touch with themselves
were unable to fin d themselves, hold meaning.

And yet, down the steps into the water at Varanasi,
where the lifeless bodies seem to grow human,
the shaggy heads of word-buds move back and forth
between the harsh castanets of the rain
and the noiseless feathers of summer--
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

from LETTER IN APRIL: IV

Already on the street
with our money clutched
in our hands,
and the world is a white laundry,
where we are boiled and wrung
and dried and ironed,
and smoothed down
and forsaken
we sweep
back
in children’s dreams
of chains and jail
and the heartfelt sigh
of liberation
{excerpt}
{translated by Susanna Nied}

[quasimodo1]

Inger Christensen: The Last Words Are Hers by Siri Hustvedt


"Inger Christensen is dead. A great writer has died. I know that great is a word we often use to decorate a venerable cultural figure and then put him or her on a high shelf with the other moldering greats, but this is not my intention. Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart. I was in my early twenties when I first read Det, and I felt I had been sent a revelation. This work was like no other I had ever read—its rhythms and repetitions were of my own body, my heartbeat, my breath, the motion of my legs and the swing of my arms as I walked. As I read it, I moved with its music. But inseparable from that corporeal music, embedded in the cadences themselves, was a mind as rigorous, as tough, as steely as any philosopher’s. Christensen did not compromise. Paradox upon paradox accumulated in a game of embodied thought. Logic, systems, numbers came alive and danced for me, but they did so hand in hand with ordinary things, which her voice enchanted and made strange. She made me see differently. She made me feel anew the power of incantation." --- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=236636

[quasimodo1]

(Poland, b. 1924]

TO MARCUS AURELIUS
(for Professor Henryk Elzenberg)

Good night Marcus put out the light
and shut the book For overhead
is raised a gold alarm of stars
heaven is talking some foreign tongue
this the barbarian cry of fear
your Latin cannot understand
Terror continuous dark terror
against the fragile human land

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

Well Marcus better hang up your peace
give me your hand across the dark
Let it tremble when the blind world beats
on senses five like a failing lyre
Traitors-- universe and astronomy
reckoning of stars wisdom of grass
and your greatness too immense
and Marcus my defenseless tears

{translated from the Polish by Czelaw Mlosz and Peter Scott, excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

{Hungary, 1922-1991}

BETWEEN

The great sleeves of air,
air on which the bird
and the science of birds bear
themselves, wings on the fraying argument;
incalculable result
of a moment's leafy silhouette
bark and branch of a haze living upwards
like desire into the upper leaves
to inhale every three seconds
those big, frosty angels.

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

Between the sky and the earth.

Creaking of rocks. As
the sun's clear ores
into themselves almost, stone into metal, as
a creature steps on in his claws smoke,
and up above the escarpment
ribbons of burning hoof,
then night in the desert, night as
quenching and reaching
its stony core, night below zero, and as
the tendons, joints, plaques
split and tear, as
they are strained in endless
splitting ecstasy
by routine dumb lightning
in black and white--

Between the day and the night.

Aches and stabbings,
visions, voiceless aqueducts,
inarticulate risings,
unbearable tension
of verticals between up and down.

Climates. Conditions.
Between. Stone. Tanktraces.
A strip of black reed rimming the plain
written in two lines, in the lake, the sky,
two black plaques of signsystem,
diacritic on the stars--

Between the sky and the sky.

{translated from the Hungarian by Hugh Maxton, excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/weekinreview/31orr.html?_r=1&ref=books

[quasimodo1]

TO GIOVANNI DA PISTOIA WHEN THE AUTHOR WAS PAINTING THE VAULT OF THE SISTINE CHAPEL

—1509

I’ve already grown a goiter from this torture,
swollen up here like a cat from Lombardy
(or anywhere where the stagnant water’s poison).
My stomach’s squashed under my chin, my beard's
pointing at heaven, my brain’s crushed in a casket,
my breast twists like a harpy’s. My brush,
above me all the time, dribbles the paint
so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!

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

And because I’m like this, my thoughts
are crazy perfidious tripe:
anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe.

My painting is dead.
Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor.
I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.



Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet, painted the Sistine Chapel from 1508-1512. (1998)

Gail Mazur is Writer in Residence in the Graduate Writing Program at Emerson College. She is founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge. Her third book, The Common, was published by the University of Chicago press in 1995, and she has recently completed her fourth, They Can't Take That Away from Me. (1998)


{ http://www.bu.edu/agni/poetry/print/1998/48-buonarroti.html - excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

OUTER SPACE

If you could turn the moon
on a lathe, you would
because you are curious.

And that would explain
why the moon slivers,
but explain it stupidly

by not taking care
to ask how the moon rounds.
And so we go, stupid ideas

for feet. The better to wander
with, retort the feet,
and what can you say,

you who shaved those taut
spirals from the moon,
kinks of tightening light

that fell away from your attention
to your work growing smaller
the better you did it?

Threads on a screw, the worm
of a corkscrew, the circular
staircase to sleep....

Soon the moon is gone
as far as it can go and still come back.
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

{Greece, 1911-1996}

AEGEAN MELANCHOLY

What linking of soul to the halcyons of the afternoon!
What calm in the voices of the distant shore!
The cuckoo in the trees' mantilla,
And the mystic hour of the fishermen's supper,
And the sea playing on its concertina
The long lament of the woman,
The lovely woman who bared her breasts
When memory found the cradles
And lilac sprinkled the sunset with fire!

With caique and the Virgin's sails
Sped by the winds they are gone,
Lovers of the lilies' exile;
But how night here attends on sleep
With murmuring hair on shining throats
Or on the great white shores;
And how with Orion's gold sword
Is scattered and spilled aloft
Dust from the dreams of girls
Scented with mint and basil!

At the crossroad where the ancient sorceress stood
Burning the winds with dry rhyme, there,
Lightly, holding a pitcher full with the waters of silence,
Easily, as though they were entering Paradise,
Supple shadows stepped. . . . .
And from the crickets' prayer that fermented the fields
Lovely girls with the moon's skin have risen
To dance on the midnight threshing floor. . . .

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

O green gem-- what storm-prophet saw you
Halting the light at the birth of day,
The light at the birth of the tow eyes of the world!

{translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Phillip Sherrard, excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

{Greece, 1911-1996}

from THE AXION ESTI

Praised be the wooden table
the blond wine with the sun's stain
the water doodling across the ceiling
the philodendron on duty in the corner

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

The sixteen deckhands hauling the net
the restless seagull slowly cruising
stray voices out of the wilderness
a shadow's crossing through the wall

The islands with all their minimum and lampblack
the islands with the vertebrae of some Zeus
the islands with their boat yards so deserted
the islands with their drinkable blue volcanoes

Facing the meltemi with jib close-hauled
Riding the southwester on a reach
the full length of them covered with foam
with dark blue pebbles and heliotropes

Sifnos, Amorgos, Alonnisos
Thasos, Ithaka, Santorini
Kos, Ios, Sikinos

Praised be Myrto standing
on the stone parapet facing the sea
like a beautiful eight or a clay pitcher
holding a straw hat in her hand

The white and porous middle of day
the down off sleep lightly ascending
the faded gold inside the arcades
and the red horse breaking free

Hera of the tree's ancient trunk
the vast laurel grove, the light-devouring
a house like an anchor down in the depths
and Kyra-Penelope twisting her spindle

The straits for birds from the opposite shore
a citron from which the sky spilled out
the blue hearing half under the sea
the long-shadowed whispering of nymphs and maples

Praised be, on the remembrance day
of the holy martyrs Cyricus and Julitta,
a miracle burning threshing floors in the heavens
priests and birds chanting the AVE:

Hail you who walk and the footprints vanish
Hail you who wake and the miracles are born

Hail O Wild One of the depths' paradise
Hail O Holy One of the islands' wilderness

Hail Mother of Dreams, Girl of the Open Seas
Hail O Anchor-bearer, Girl of the Five Stars

Hail you of the flowing hair, gilding the wind
Hail you of the lovely voice, tamer of demons

Hail you who ordain the Monthly Ritual of the Gardens
Hail you who fasten the Serpent's belt of stars.

Hail O Girl of the just and modest sword
Hail O Girl prophetic and daedalic

{translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and George Savidis, excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

DO NOT!

Do not despair of man, and do not scold him,
Who are you that you should so lightly hold him?
Are you not also a man, and in your heart
Are there not warlike thoughts and fear and smart?
Are you not also afraid and in fear cruel,
Do you not think of yourself as usual,
Faint for ambition, desire to be loved,
Prick at a virtuous thought by beauty moved?
You love your wife, you hold your children dear,
Then say not that Man is vile, but say they are.
But they are not. So is your judgement shown ...


{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

{Russia, 1940-1996}

ROMAN ELEGIES

I. The captive mahogany of a private Roman
flat. In the ceiling, a dust-covered crystal island.
At sunset, the windowpanes pan a common
ground for the nebulous and the ironed.
Setting a naked foot on the rosy marble,
the body steps toward its future to its attire.
If somebody shouted "Freeze!" I'd perform that marvel
as this city happily did in its childhood hour.
The world's made of nakedness and of foldings.
Still, the latter's richer with love than a face, that's certain.
Thus an opera tenor's so sweet to follow
since he yields invariably to a curtain.
By nightfall, a blue eye employs a tear,
cleansing, to a needless shine, the iris;
and the moon overhead apes an emptied square
with no fountain in it. But of rock as porous.

II. The month of stalled pendulums. Only a fly in August
in a dry carafe's throat is droning its busy hymn.
The numerals on the clock face crisscross like earnest
anti-aircraft searchlights probing for seraphim.
The month of drawn blinds, of furniture wrapped in cotton
shrouds, of the sweating double in the mirror above the cupboard,
of bees that forget the topography of their hives and coated
with suntan honey, keep staggering seaward.
Get busy then, faucet, over the now-white, sagging
muscle, tousle the tufts of thin gray singes!
To a homeless torso and its idle, grabby
mitts, there's nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.
And they, in their turn, see themselves in the broken Jewish
r no less gladly: for the pieces fallen
so apart, saliva's the only solution they wish
for, as time's barbarous corneas scan the Forum.

{2 of 12 parts translated by the author}

[quasimodo1]

To Elsie

The pure products of America
go crazy—
mountain folk from Kentucky


or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and


valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between


devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure—


and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday


to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no


peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt


sheer rags—succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror


under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum—
which they cannot express—


Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood ...

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

THE SINGERS CHANGE, THE MUSIC GOES ON

No one really dies in the myths.
No world is lost in the stories.
Everything is lost in the retelling,
in being wondered at. We grow up
and grow old in our land of grass
and blood moons, birth and goneness.
A place of absolutes. Of returning.
We live our myth in the recurrence,
pretending we will return another day.
Like the morning coming every morning.
The truth is we come back as a choir. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2009/06/18/in-the-twitter-revolution-echoes-of-one-of-the-great-modern-poets/#more-1631

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/books/review/Orr-t.html?ref=review --- NYT... "On Poetry" piece by David Orr... July 10, 2009

[firefangled]

William Stafford is one of my favorite American poets. He was able to capture the most ordinary things and make them new with his seeing. In this age of living in bad faith, when so much is taken from us and no decision seems easy, we would do well to read William Stafford. The following is one of my favorite poems by him:

A Ritual To Be Read To Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

{omission}

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

—William Stafford

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/books/review/Logan-t.html?_r=1&ref=books --- from poets.org... In a review in The New Republic, the critic Helen Vendler wrote: "Louise Glück is a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems, published in a series of memorable books over the last twenty years, have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither "confessional" nor "intellectual" in the usual senses of those words."

[quasimodo1]

Kay Ryan's poem on W.G. Sebald... "He Lit a Fire With Icicles" --- http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=9144

[quasimodo1]

THE DISCIPLE
an obstinate disciple, so youthful
but the one whom jesus loved
who laid beside him at the last

kissing him was like kissing a door
slim flat stern with hinges on one side
but moveable on the other
how it swung open how we fell
there were boats and we took them
our nicotine-sour mouths in each other
like an element to shape something from
the bitterness gathered in the hollows
when it wore off we smoked

in the end a rain fell
a rain we could barely believe
it turned cold, things got wet and everywhere ...
{excerpt}

© 2004, zu Klampen! Verlag
From: Monika Rinck: Verzückte Distanzen. Gedichte
Publisher: Zu Klampen! Verlag. Edition Postskriptum: Springe, Germany 2004.,
ISBN: 3-933156-81-5

© Translation: Nicholas Grindell
From: shearsman (58 / 2003)

[quasimodo1]

The Myth of Innocence



One summer she goes into the field as usual
stopping for a bit at the pool where she often
looks at herself, to see
if she detects any changes. She sees
the same person, the horrible mantle
of daughterliness still clinging to her.

The sun seems, in the water, very close.
That's my uncle spying again, she thinks—
everything in nature is in some way her relative.
I am never alone, she thinks,
turning the thought into a prayer.
Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer.

No one understands anymore
how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers.
Also that he embraced her, right there,
with her uncle watching. She remembers
sunlight flashing on his bare arms.

This is the last moment she remembers clearly.
Then the dark god bore her away.

She also remembers, less clearly,
the chilling insight that from this moment
she couldn't live without him again.

The girl who disappears from the pool
will never return. A woman will return,
looking for the girl she was. ...

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Lagerfeld


Rome: an open city A lager
Down the catwalk troop the fashions
Of the millennium, bulletproof vests
For copulation Two gladiators
Are fighting for the job, long practised
In the tricks of throttling, they win applause
That´s what they went to school for HIM OR ME
The stink of fear In his empire
Lagerfeld is making a dream come true A PACK
OF WOMEN THE PICK OF BEAUTY
The winter collection for the wars in Dacia
Has made him rich IT IS ENOUGH TO TURN YOUR STOMACH
They are bearing my ideas, these are summer clothes
To the spoilt world A festival of beauty
Helena Christensen in evening wear Meanwhile
The two craftsmen have not let go
One is Commodus, the wild son
Of a cool father, the mother´s indiscretion
When he croaks the throne stands empty
And Septimius Severus the African
Will march with the XIVth from the wilderness of Vienna
Against the capital POOR ROME A barbarian
Emperor On his heels the rest of the world
Lgerfeld doesn´t watch He has a problem
He can make them more beautiful but not better
More and more beautiful Outfit of the brute beasts
RICH AND POOR A divided clientele
ATROCIOUS Paying and thieving
I enjoy undivided attention But
He knows what´s going on, he isn´t blind
The fifteen-year-old killer from Springfield
A MOUNTAIN OF CORPSES IN THE HIGHSCHOOL CAFETERIA
He has learned to lend a hand
he is in custody now in paper clothes Another fashion From America Gangs of children
Are combing North Rhine-Westphalia trainees
Looking for food at Hertie´s and Woolworth´s ...
{excerpt...© Translation David Constantine}

[quasimodo1]

Review: Rhyme and Unreason by David Orr (nyt) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/books/review/Orr-t.html?ref=books

[quasimodo1]

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,25399885-26063,00.html

[Kafka's Crow]

Here is a poem I literally grew up on. My ealiest memories of hearing this poem recited in my baby ears go back to a time from which almost all else disappears in the dark tunnel of memory, the strongest, the most memorable words in Urdu language. Later I fell out of touch with Rashid's poetry who has always been out of favour in the conservative society he wrote for. His poetry is non-conformist, both in form and content, his life-style rose more eyebrows than anybody else's, his death arose controversy. A modernist through and through, he wrote in a highly Persianised Urdu and was destined to be either hardly understood or, as more often than not, misunderstood. I came back to Rashid in my early 20s. Many years were spent reciting these verses in circles of friends like a young Stephen Daedalus. Now in my 40th year, I am still as devout a follower as I was 20 years ago or when as a baby I repeated his grand verses from this poem without understanding a word in them, just enjoying the rhytmic beauty of his language.



You are Afraid of Life?

----You are afraid of life?
But life is who you are, and life is who I am!
You are afraid of mankind?
But man is who you are, and man is who I am!

Man is language, man is expression,
but you are not afraid of that!
With the iron-bond of Word and Understanding, man is inextricably tied
With humanity's loins, life is inseparably tied
But you are not afraid of that!

Truth is you are afraid of the "Unsaid"
The time that has yet to come are you afraid of it,
Are you afraid to acknowledge the imminence of it?

---- Many periods of history have passed by before:
of freedom's remoteness, of godhood that is "self-less".
Even then you believe that it's useless to aspire,
that this night of suffocation is to Providence submission!

But what would you know,
that when lips fail to move, hands arise to life.
Hands arise to life to show to the way that is right,
as the expressions of light!
Hands cry out, yelling the end of the night.
You are afraid of light?
But light is who you are, and light is who I am,
You are afraid of light!

----The walls of the city
have been cleansed of the shadows of evil monsters.
The gown of night
has shredded to pieces, crumbled to dust.
From the mass of Humanity, the voice of Individual rises.
A cry of the soul rises.
On the paths of love, as if, some lover's passion leaps,
a new obsession leaps!
Humanity brims with life
Behold humanity laugh, see cities alive
Are you frightened now?
Yes 'Now' is who you are, yes 'Now' is who I am,
You are frightened of 'Now'!
______
Translated by Hamid Rahim Sheikh

[quasimodo1]

THE APICULTURALIST
In black veiled hat and canvas gauntlets
Jean Paucton, seventy, climbs the baroque stairs

of the Palais Garnier opera house
to his rooftop apiary.

The theatrical prop man studied beekeeping
at the Jardin’s venerable institute

then hauled onto the seventh floor ledge
his five weathered crates

swollen with honey, nearly a thousand pounds a year.

“The bees make an impression, do they not?”
he declares.
And you, dear poet?

Your little apiary of simile and syntax—the busy bite
that separates truth from Truth?

Do you not weary of the student manuscript, ... {excerpt}


http://www.kenyonreview.org/kro_full.php?file=hahn.php (August, 2009)

[quasimodo1]

WHEELING MOTEL

Poems

By Franz Wright

91 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95
Dark Glamour (a review)
By DAISY FRIED
Published: September 17, 2009 NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/books/review/Fried-t.html?_r=1&ref=books

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/books/25poetry.html?_r=1&ref=books

[quasimodo1]

Im Jahre eins, das war


das scharren am boden, aufgekratztes
schweigen &
vom tod gefaltet: winterfliegen.

das erste – ein kriegsherbst, wenn
die dinge schon von
einem nerv durchzogen sind, entzündet an

der luft. die treibjagd holt über
dem acker die schwerkraft
der gleise entfernungen

schrumpfen & wer
gerade unterwegs gewesen ist, verschwindet
in seinen gedanken: du

siehst die fische spuln an zarten strähnen
männer, die in hohen wellen husten. wenn
das blos reisende uns abwirft, hörst du

pferde im abfluss, getrappel &
eine brise, die
aus den kanälen chemisch ... {excerpt}








in the year one, that was


scraping on the ground, scratched up
silence &
folded by death: winter flies.

the first – a wartime fall when
things have already been
run through by a nerve, ignited by

the air. across the field, the battue
brings back the gravity
of the tracks distances

shrink & whoever
happens to be on the move vanishes
in his thoughts: you

see the fish spool men coughing in
great waves onto fragile strands. when
what merely travels scraps us, you hear

horses in the drain, clatter &
a breeze that
blows chemically up ... {excerpt}






© Translation Andrew Shields

[Jozanny]

I don't know much about poet Albert Goldbarth (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec09/poetry_08-17.html), but I thought it would be better to tack him in here rather than start a new thread, though granted this thread is getting long. I find male authors and poets who have bric-a-brac rooms annoying, though I guess I am not one to talk since this latest grand old man earns a living off the MFA circuit.

At first glance, he seems like another post-Frost mid-western romantic, but to quote Jim:
" He's the only poet to win the National Book Critics Circle Award twice."

I have no "fragments" to post this evening though.

[quasimodo1]

GRACE
Eyes open in the womb. The struggle arrives to turn darkness into light. Dangling on the wings of
the Phoenix. The creative process begins to turn ugly. Vandalizing and robbing graves of
child prodigies turning into serious discussions of Mass Murder and the therapeutic value of
saturday morning shopping sprees. The betrayal of genius is burning at the stake. The spider
descends. The violence is always there. The web embraces us all. More insidious than
drugs. More pleasurable than sex. Slightly entangled. Slightly confused. That possible
criminal element awakens you to the terror and lonliness of running into the silent pain of
someone else looking to you for answers. Glamorous and well financed pools of blood
profiling on neighborhood corners while smiling at and tempting the boldest gangsta rap. {one of two stanzas}

[quasimodo1]

OCTET BEFORE WINTER

The body is immobile, left behind
On the coral leatherette train-seat.
Thoughts revolve with the wheels but
Don't advance, stopped against the present,
The future which the engines bear away.
I want to wrench myself out of time's ballast,
Switch rails. The buildings raise a hideous
Hedge. Then rocks efface themselves
Before amorous, ravaged gardens.
I relinquish the acacias, lilacs, vulnerable
Foliage. Irises on the embankments, vague fairy-tale
Grass. A pact still links me
To the tree trunks, their branches' unpolished
Diamond on grey sky. I want their lines
To keep my cindered skeleton erect.

Often, like anyone, I ask myself
What ties me to life, especially in winter
When the dying year strikes out on its graph
Three hundred and sixty-five specific days circling the sun
Revolving back, as fatally, to night:
Sometimes they are huge bodies, illuminated
Igloos, their heads shrouded in fog
Gestures slow down then, voluptuously,
Like those of someone who knows he's going to faint,
But knows a wall of glass will break his fall
Or there's the tranquil pulse of flames between
What's wished for, what's forbidden, forbidden and wished
Showing a flux, a rhythm, an outpouring
Towards a heart which only believes in mechanical laws
The great watchmaker's clock, which we take apart
Patiently, piece by piece, to convince ourselves
That the poet who holds it poised above the void
Is an unprogrammed computer, an automaton

{two of ten stanzas, translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker}

[quasimodo1]

FROM THE DRESSING-ROOM

Left to itself, they say, every foetus
would turn female, staving in, nature
siding then with the enemy that
delicately mixes up genders. This
is an absence I have passionately sought,
brightening nevertheless my poet’s attic
with my steady hands, calling him my blue
lizard till his moans might be heard
at the far end of the garden. For I like
his ways, he’s light on his feet and does
not break anything, puts his entire soul
into bringing me a glass of water,


I can take anything now, even his being
away, for it always seems to me his
writing is for me, as I walk springless
from the dressing-room in a sisterly
length of flesh-coloured silk. ... {excerpt}

[Jozanny]

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,25399885-26063,00.html

I recently purchased an older translation of Cavafy's completed poems and fragments, but haven't taken the dive yet.

Became intrigued because of how his repressed orientation interpreted Hellenism for the 20th century, and hope at some point it is worth a thread. Scholars are disappointed with the new translation.

[quasimodo1]

"The Cavafy Archive website was created by the Center for Neo-Hellenic Studies (Spoudasterio Neou Hellenismou) in Athens, Greece, the current home of the poet's Archive. It contains all of Cavafy’s major works in the translation of Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (edited by G.P. Savidis), plus select alternative translations. It also contains a wealth of unpublished material from the poet’s Archive, plus a Cavafy Companion section and up-to-date information on Cavafy’s seminal presence in today’s world, as seen through the web." ...introduction to the Cavafy website-- http://www.cavafy.com/index.asp

[Jozanny]

"The Cavafy Archive website was created by the Center for Neo-Hellenic Studies (Spoudasterio Neou Hellenismou) in Athens, Greece, the current home of the poet's Archive. It contains all of Cavafy’s major works in the translation of Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (edited by G.P. Savidis), plus select alternative translations. It also contains a wealth of unpublished material from the poet’s Archive, plus a Cavafy Companion section and up-to-date information on Cavafy’s seminal presence in today’s world, as seen through the web." ...introduction to the Cavafy website-- http://www.cavafy.com/index.asp

quasi I just wrote you a longer reply, but my pc is unhappy and the link broke, but for now, I bookmarked this site, as it may be useful in the future, thank you.

I will return to what else I wrote another time.