fragments of contemporary poetry

[quasimodo1]

Night-hours. The edge of a fuller moon

waits among the interlocking patterns

of a flier's sky.

Sperm names, ovum names, push inside

each other. We are half-taught

our real names, from other lives.

Emphasize your eyes. Be my flare-

path, my uncold begetter,

my air-minded bird-sense.

{excerpt from the title poem of the collection... CAPTAIN LAVENDER)

[quasimodo1]

WHEELING MOTEL

Poems

By Franz Wright

91 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95

Dark Glamour (review)
By DAISY FRIED
Published: September 17, 2009
"Franz Wright’s frank self-*absorption, combined with his *poems’ structural vivacity and oddball precisions, may make readerly response to his poems dependent on readerly mood."

[quasimodo1]

THE GOD WHO LOVES YOU

It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you’d be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week—
Three fine houses sold to deserving families—
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you’re living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you’re used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You’re spared by ignorance? ... {excerpt}

<http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=172160>

[firefangled]

From her book One Secret Thing.

Everything

And some who are born live only for minutes,
others for two, or for three, summers,
or four, and when they go, everything
goes―the earth, the firmament―
and love stays, where nothing is, and seeks.

{excerpt}

[AuntShecky]

Quasi, the other day I got an email from Knopf. Oh boy, I thought, they've accepted my ms! But no, it was to announce Franz Wright's new book. There were two podcasts of Franz himself reading his own poems, but w/o text.
Anyway, I liked the line that was something about bringing one's life home and finding that there was "some assembly required."

[quasimodo1]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177023

[quasimodo1]

ALCHOHOL

You do look a little ill.


But we can do something about that, now.


Can’t we.


The fact is you’re a shocking wreck.


Do you hear me.


You aren’t all alone.


And you could use some help today, packing in the
dark, boarding buses north, putting the seat back and
grinning with terror flowing over your legs through
your fingers and hair . . .


I was always waiting, always here.


Know anyone else who can say that. .... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Dark Glamour (a review)
By DAISY FRIED
Published: September 17, 2009
Franz Wright’s frank self-*absorption, combined with his *poems’ structural vivacity and oddball precisions, may make readerly response to his poems dependent on readerly mood. Those who believe constant self-reference is the wrong procedure for poetry — those who are strenuously traditional or strenuously hipster — won’t cotton to “Wheeling Motel.” “You went to death, I to life, and / which was luckier God only knows,” Wright says, apparently to his father, in the book’s title poem. Troubled childhood, bad brain chemicals, addiction, recovery and death dominate Wright’s work. You couldn’t fake his obsessions, not over a 30-year career so steadily, idiosyncratically productive. ...

[quasimodo1]

ARTICLE... Marin County, Sort OfLife, shard-to-shard.
by Kay Ryan

"This is actually an abstract walk, one I’m making up, a generalized walk based on what I like. I have usually done this on a bicycle, but I was asked to write about a walk, so I’ll walk.

I’m walking along a road, not a busy road, a country road, but one where people do occasionally have things blow out of the back of their truck or their car window or even where people conceivably have littered. In any case, there are scraps of things here and there along the roadside. Bits of things, fragments of color and print, broken shapes, fading pink receipts.

There are whole things too, but I don’t care about them. Except for a while I was very interested in the sheer phenomenon of the number of Styrofoam cooler lids I came across. In a way they were parts, in the sense that they were the top part of a cooler that wasn’t any good anymore, going on down the road in the back of the truck. But I have never been especially interested in any story element in the things that lodge in the grasses in the inevitable ditch by the side of the road. I don’t care if those people’s beer gets hot. Well, of course I never want anybody’s beer to get hot, but what I mean to say is that I’m not interested in the previous life of shards as they reveal things about people; I’m interested in the life in shards, among shards, between shards, shard-to-shard.

There are two related pleasures in studying roadside trash. One is identifying the whole from the part. A particular half-buried bit of orange cardboard can only be part of a Wheaties box. That greasy curve of flat black stuff has got to be from some kind of automotive gasket. I admire how good the mind is, what a small actual bit it needs to call up the whole, and how it attributes value to things simply because it recognizes them. I take the keenest pleasure in knowing that a small trapezoid of gold slashed with red is part of a Dos Equis label. I know it. I’m a weird expert in these identifications. I don’t know how I trained, certainly not consciously. Maybe it’s just that I’ve always enjoyed looking down. I don’t know how many other people really like to do this. Maybe a lot. My brother is even better at it than I am, but maybe it’s just my tiny family." ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

ARTICLE... Athens: Peripatetic Fragments...A new world in the old.
by A.E. Stallings

Athenians cannot be proud, the joke goes. Because if their nose is in the air, they won’t see the potholes under their feet. The sidewalk is the most dangerous place to walk: watch out for motorbikes, cars backing up, tree stumps, broken pavement, sunken entrances, marble slick as ice, stray dogs, other people who aren’t looking up.

* * *

All street signs are in the genitive. The road of Heraclitus. So, too, are the surnames of women. She of Psaropoulos. Patronymics. Who are you=to whom do you belong.

* * *

Here is our blue-collar neighborhood, with its incongruous view of the Parthenon, and its butcher, baker, and candlestick maker (in that order) around the corner. With its farmers’ market on Mondays that trucks in at 4:00 am the autochthonous roots of things, like the roots of words, with the Attic and Laconic soil still clinging stubbornly to them. All the greens whose names I do not know.

* * *

Some call my neighborhood Neos Kosmos, the New World. But we are on the borders of Neos Kosmos. We live across the paved-over trickle that was the river, Kallirrhois (“the beautifully flowing”), from the old-town area of Athens, the Plaka, where, on Byron street, beneath the Acropolis, you can buy calendars with ancient Greek pornography. The real name of our neighborhood, known by the post office but none of the taxi drivers, is Cynosargous—the dog Argos, who waited on a dungheap for the exile’s return. The exile’s return, of course, is death.

Cynosargous is the ancient home of the Cynics.

[ipincif]

All street signs are in the genitive. The road of Heraclitus. So, too, are the surnames of women. She of Psaropoulos. Patronymics. Who are you=to whom do you belong.
__________________
Meilleur taux prets personnels | (http://pretspersonnels.net/)Simulation calcul prets personnels en ligne | (http://pretspersonnels.net/)taux prets personnels (http://pretspersonnels.net/prets-personnels/)

[quasimodo1]

Plaint in a Major Key

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. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Nabokov’s Last Puzzle {a review}
By DAVID GATES
Published: November 11, 2009 --- THE ORIGINAL OF LAURA

(Dying Is Fun)

By Vladimir Nabokov

Edited by Dmitri Nabokov

278 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35 -- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Gates-t.html?_r=1&ref=review

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/books/review/Vendler-t.html?_r=1&em

[Virgil]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/books/review/Vendler-t.html?_r=1&em

Nice to Helen Vendler still around critiquing. She must be up there in age. I don't think I've ever spent a dedicated amount ot time on Ashberry. I probably should.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/books/review/Burt-t.html?_r=1&nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3 --- EASY

Poems

By Marie Ponsot

[quasimodo1]

little tree

little tree
little silent Christmas tree
you are so little
you are more like a flower


who found you in the green forest
and were you very sorry to come away?
see i will comfort you
because you smell so sweetly


i will kiss your cool bark
and hug you safe and tight
just as your mother would,
only don't be afraid


look the spangles
that sleep all the year in a dark box
dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine,
the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads,


put up your little arms
and i'll give them all to you to hold
every finger shall have its ring
and there won't be a single place dark or unhappy


then when you're quite dressed
you'll stand in the window for everyone to see ...{excerpt} --

[Virgil]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/books/review/Burt-t.html?_r=1&nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3 --- EASY

Poems

By Marie Ponsot

Thanks Quasi. I had never heard of her. Found this one by her on the internet.


The Problem of Fiction
by Marie Ponsot

She always writes poems. This summer
she’s starting a novel. It’s in trouble already.
The characters are easy—a girl
and her friend who is a girl
and the boy down the block with his first car,
an older boy, sixteen, who sometimes
these warm evenings leaves his house to go dancing
in dressy clothes though it’s still light out.
The girl has a brother who has lots of friends,
is good in math, and just plain good which
doesn’t help the story. The story
should have rescues & escapes in it
which means who’s the bad guy; he couldn’t be
the brother or the grandpa or the father either,
or even the boy down the block with his first car.
[Snip]
Read the rest here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177094

[quasimodo1]

you have to love the Poetry Foundation (maybe not so much Poetry magazine)... besides they now sponsor PBS

[quasimodo1]

ADVENT 1966

Because in Vietnam the vision of a Burning Babe
is multiplied, multiplied,
the flesh on fire
not Christ’s, as Southwell saw it, prefiguring
the Passion upon the Eve of Christmas,
but wholly human and repeated, repeated,
infant after infant, their names forgotten,
their sex unknown in the ashes,
set alight, flaming but not vanishing,
not vanishing as his vision but lingering,
cinders upon the earth or living on
moaning and stinking in hospitals three abed;
because of this my strong sight,
my clear caressive sight, my poet’s sight I was given
that it might stir me to song,
is blurred.
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/pune/Poet-author-Dilip-Chitre-passes-away/articleshow/5324494.cms

--- Dilip Chitre --- his homepage --- In the pool of bliss,Bliss is all ripples." http://thebuckstopshere0.tripod.com/

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/books/review/Logan-t.html?=books&pagewanted=all --- A VILLAGE LIFE

By Louise Glück

[quasimodo1]

http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2009/1222/Best-of-2009-poetry-The-Looking-House-by-soldier-poet-Fred-Marchant

[quasimodo1]

GHAZAL OF THE BETTER-UNBEGUN



A book is a suicide postponed.
--Cioran
Too volatile, am I? too voluble? too much a word-person?
I blame the soup: I'm a primordially
stirred person.

Two pronouns and a vehicle was Icarus with wings.
The apparatus of his selves made an ab-
surd person.

The sound I make is sympathy's: sad dogs are tied afar.
But howling I become an ever more un-
heard person.

I need a hundred more of you to make a likelihood.
The mirror's not convincing-- that at-best in-
ferred person.

As time's revealing gets revolting, I start looking out.
Look in and what you see is one unholy
blurred person. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.


Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.


Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
The ox and *** and camel which adore.


Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/12/27/us/AP-US-Obit-Brutus.html?ref=global-home ---Dennis Brutus, South African poet... "Poetry" by Dennis Brutus --- http://logosonline.home.igc.org/brutus.htm

[quasimodo1]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=238462

[quasimodo1]

http://www.poetry.org.uk/poetrytrail.htm

[quasimodo1]

Struggles with Meaningless Things
In the beginning, there was chaos.
No, that’s not right.
In the beginning, there was nothing.
An empty space spread out, big and empty.
Time flowed by, two years to be specific. Various things were brought in.
Among them, a desk, a bed, a computer, shelves, chairs (two of them), a folding table,
An electric piano, a fax machine, and then lots of newspapers.
Books. Magazines. Fliers advertising plays. Envelopes. CDs. Faxes from different folks.
Letters from different people. Unimportant things. Important things.
Things that might be important one day.
(Now, all these things, no longer important,
Fill all the available space.

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

ENNUI

Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.
Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
of, while blasé princesses indict
tilts at terror as downright absurd.
{first of two stanzas}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/books/review/McHenry-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=poetrt%20reviews&st=cse

[quasimodo1]

from The Triumph of Love {XIII}


Whose lives are hidden in God? Whose?
Who can now tell what was taken, or where,
or how, or whether it was received:
how ditched, divested, clamped, sifted, over-
laid, raked over, grassed over, spread around,
rotted down with leafmould, accepted
as civic concrete, reinforceable
base cinderblocks:
tipped into Danube, Rhine, Vistula, dredged up
with the Baltic and the Pontic sludge:
committed in absentia to solemn elevation,
Trauermusik, musique funèbre, funeral
music, for male and female
voices ringingly a cappella,
made for double string choirs, congregated brass,
choice performers on baroque trumpets hefting,
like glassblowers, inventions
of supreme order?

[quasimodo1]

THE SNOW IS DEEP ON THE GROUND

The snow is deep on the ground.
Always the light falls
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.


This is a good world.
The war has failed.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the snow waits where love is.


Only a few go mad.
The sky moves in its whiteness
Like the withered hand of an old king. ... {excerpt}

[Babyguile]

Yea I thought of you quasimodo1 rather crudely :D and came up with this to post, love this poem.

From 'Mrs Quisimodo' by Carol Ann Duffy (about the last third of it)

The bells. The bells.
I made them mute.
No more apreggios or scales, no more stretti, trills
for christenings, weddings, great occasions, happy days.
No more practising
for bellringers
on smudgy autumn nights.
No more clarity of sound, divine, articulate
to purify the air
and bow the heads of drinkers in the city bars.
No single
solemn
funeral note
to answer
grief.

I sawed and pulled and hacked.
I wanted silence back.

Get this:

When I was done,
and bloody to the wrist,
I squatted down among the murdered music of the bells and
pissed.

[quasimodo1]

Excellent entry, TheDave ... Duffy doesn't get much notice since being a laureate, in the US at least. "Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion." Carol Ann Duffy

[quasimodo1]

http://coldfrontmag.com/news/salingers-poets --- Salinger’s Poets
by John Deming

[quasimodo1]

LETTERS FROM THE DEAD


I. From My Mother

You who have read as I read when I was eight
that the sea will disgorge at the end of time
its centuries of dead, walk with me now,
listen with me as a blue rain ticks down
from your roof. This is not Armageddon, just another day
I am out of life, a spirit, today age eight
and this same sun freckling the autumn grass
drew me out, another morning, summer ending,
1915 and after, seventy-five years
into a world I never learned to love enough.

Today, hand in hand, we will walk back
until I am that little girl, flowers in hand
she presses into a book, A Child’s Garden of Verses,
cowslip, Queen Anne’s lace, Wild Clover,
a piece of that day breaking off in my son’s hand
today, June 9, 2007. Now I look down,
he is so small from here, my son at late middle-age.
I watch him press it to his nose, scentless,
his lips, to see him taste it, tasteless, kissing it.
And I would come back, not even when he cries
and the memory of me flickers while he tries, failing at this.
{one of two parts}

[wlz]

Dennis Brutus!

[wlz]

Dennis Brutus!

[quasimodo1]

http://www.phillyimc.org/en/dennis-brutus-passes-reflection

[quasimodo1]

CHARITY
{Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust}
Goethe, Faust*
three times I didn’t give charity:
1. On a Kurfustendamm avenue
to a woman with a child
Dark birth, Albanian or gypsy or maybe just dirty
2. One girl thrusting herself with an alms box, kinder
kinder kinder, she hit
a small tin drum, Grass’s humpback dwarf voice
Kinder, she repeated, to children of the kinder type, an advertising slogan
an egg, which, upon opening, a surprise inside, inescapable evidence of your death
3. One more fellow stood by the bookstore with his empty skull extended
feed on wisdom, I advised him
Books are very nutritious, all who swallow books will
be invited to God’s table
And I did not give any one of them charity

And so
a dark person, vulgar primitive, man-monkey
animal, half-wit, murderer, liar, thief, debaucher
idiot awoke in me, raised
his head, coloured his un-pretty
mouth, with dishevelled instincts
I fed him the cheapest pizza with cheese and
salami, in the street, the hammering
of a pneumatic drill – every instant someone
lays the groundwork of their own hell

{excerpt}
*"Two souls, at least, live in my breast"

6 September 2007, Berlin

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/books/05book.html?ref=books

[quasimodo1]

A short history of Colombian poetry


February 1, 2010
I am also talking to you: in between woods, in between resins, in between a thousand restless leaves, from a single leaf, small green stain, of lushness, of grace, lone leaf in which the winds that ran through all the beautiful countries where green is made out of every other color, the winds who sang through the countries of Colombia, vibrate.

Aurelio Arturo http://colombia.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=15954&x=1

[quasimodo1]

http://www.cprw.com/Houlihan/bond.htm

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/books/15arts-SIDEWALKVERS_BRF.html?ref=books

[quasimodo1]

WORSHIPPING IMOINU
Whether winter or summer
Whether bombs burst or don’t burst
Beautiful women walk gracefully.
Faces eyes lips shaded with colours
The women walk.
Whether crossfire or no crossfire, whether deaths or no deaths
Men look at beautiful women.
Handsome men look at beautiful women, ugly men also look.


2

My wife growls
“I want to turn into a mole”,
She growls daily that she wants to become a mole.
Unable to bear her nagging I gave away a hundred rupees
Telling her she could be either a mole or an egret.
Turning into a swallow she flew away immediately.
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.cprw.com/Houlihan/bond.htm

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/books/05book.html?ref=books --- THE BEST OF IT, New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan 270 pages. Grove Press. $24. review by Dwight Garner

[quasimodo1]

THE CAVE PAINTERS



Holding only a handful of rushlight
they pressed deeper into the dark, at a crouch
until the great rock chamber
flowered around them and they stood
in an enormous womb of
flickering light and darklight, a place
to make a start. Raised hands cast flapping shadows
over the sleeker shapes of radiance.
They've left the world of weather and panic
behind them and gone on in, drawing the dark
in their wake, pushing as one pulse
to the core of stone. The pigments mixed in big shells
are crushed ore, petals and pollens, berries
and the binding juices oozed
out of chosen barks. The beasts
begin to take shape from hands and feather-tufts
(soaked in ochre, manganese, madder, mallow white)
stroking the live rock, letting slopes and contours
mould those forms from chance, coaxing
rigid dips and folds and bulges
to lend themselves to necks, bellies, swelling haunches,
a forehead or a twist of horn, tails and manes
curling to a crazy gallop.
Intent and human, they attach
the mineral, vegetable, animal
realms to themselves, inscribing
the one unbroken line
everything depends on, from that
impenetrable centre
to the outer intangibles of light and air, even
the speed of the horse, the bison's fear, the arc
of gentleness that this big-bellied cow
arches over its spindling calf, or the lancing
dance of death that
bristles out of the buck's
struck flank. On this one line they leave
a beak-headed human figure of sticks
and one small, chalky, human hand.
We'll never know if they worked in silence
like people praying—the way our monks
illuminated their own dark ages
in cross-hatched rocky cloisters,
where they contrived a binding
labyrinth of lit affinities
to spell out in nature's lace and fable
their mindful, blinding sixth sense
of a god of shadows—or whether (like birds
tracing their great bloodlines over the globe)
they kept a constant gossip up
of praise, encouragement, complaint. ... {excerpt} http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=27210

[quasimodo1]

"A Poet Who Doesn’t Do Lofty" -- review by By ELISSA GOOTMAN --- also... slideshow-- http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/21/nyregion/21poet-ss/index.html?ref=nyregion# ----- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/nyregion/21poet.html?ref=books

[solem grace]

At morn-at noon-at twilight dim-Maria! thou hast heard my hymn! In joy and woe- in good and ill- Mother of God, be with me still! When the hours flew brightly by, And not a cloud obscured the sky, My soul, lest it should truant be, Thy grace did guide to thine and thee; Now,when storms of Fate o'ercast Darkly my Present and my Past, Let my Future radiant shine With sweet hopes of thee and thine. "Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.'

[quasimodo1]

THE LIVING FIRE

New and Selected Poems, 1975-2010

By Edward Hirsch

237 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27 --------------- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/books/review/Campion-t.html?ref=books ...review

[quasimodo1]

BALLAD IN A


A Kansan plays cards, calls Marshall
a crawdad, that barb lands that rascal a slap;
that Kansan jackass scats,
camps back at caballada ranch.


Hangs kack, ax, and camp hat.
Kansan’s nag mad and rants can’t bask,
can’t bacchanal and garland a lass,
can’t at last brag can crack Law’s balls,


Kansan’s cantata rang at that ramada ranch,
Mañana, Kansan snarls, I’ll have an armada
and thwart Law’s brawn,
slam Law a damn mass war path.


Marshall’s a marksman, maps Kansan’s track,
calm as a shaman, sharp as a hawk,
Says: That dastard Kansan’s had
and gnaws lamb fatback.


{excerpt...from Poetry Magazine, April, 2010}

[quasimodo1]

"Nowadays, you can often spot a work
of poetry by whether it’s in lines
or no; if it’s in prose, there’s a good chance
it’s a poem." Charles Bernstein / A Review (Poet and Anti-Poet) by Daisy Fried, published April 7, 2010 -- { http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/books/review/Fried-t.html?src=me&ref=books } ...Charles Bernstein's website- { http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/ }

[shortstoryfan]

Thanks for posting that. Charles Bernstein is definitely on my radar to start reading soon, since he is the most mainstream of prominent member of the Language poets. I'm very interested in their work. I feel like I really do need to understand it to get a lot of poetry that is being published now, and the poetry that will be written in years to come.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/release_041310.html?id=186210

[shortstoryfan]

http://www.fishouse.org/

Forgive me if this has already been posted here, but I thought people who love contemporary poetry would love it! My teacher is actually on this site, which is how I learned about it...but it really does feature some great up and coming poets like V. Penelope Pelizzon and Oliver de la Paz (well, those are ones I enjoy regularly).

[quasimodo1]

{ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/books/14bourne.html } ...and thanks to shortstoryfan for her postings.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/building

[Milaneli]

When I ran away from a home country
Left the girlfriend and the village
Took the momentum from Hungary
Run over the Alps, Pyrenees
And jumped across the Atlantic

I caught a Greyhound bus to Austin
And came through Sacramento
On the dirty bus station of LA
Crowded with a colorful graffiti's

Took an apartment on Columbus Avenue
Got employed as a carpenter
But it did not last
It was expected to forge
Social Security Number

Then I met an agent
Who did not want me back to the roots
But to launch me
As an stunt in a movie of children
From the corn

Some fat lady was eager for love
So that year I served as a doormat
I paid for the whiskey with smiles
To one toothless Russian women

That’s how I succeeded in Hollywood
At present time I'm writing the scripts for the series
That you at home watching
With a open jaws

Mother, what you heard is true
That’s how I beat a history
Yes, Juan would also like to say hello
But right now he has a full mouth
Of my pride

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/books/review/Kirchwey-t.html?ref=books

[quasimodo1]

http://chronicle.com/article/Dead-Poets-Society/64989/ --- http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Math-of-Poetry/64249/

[quasimodo1]

POEM How the Pope is Chosen by James Tate http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=179801

[quasimodo1]

http://international.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=13844

[quasimodo1]

5/6/10... a review by David Orr --- Robert Hass’s Empathy and Desire ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/books/review/Orr-t.html?ref=books

[quasimodo1]

...from the Los Angeles Times: "What made Dylan Roar" ... http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-paperback-writers-20100523,0,2403126.story

[quasimodo1]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/release_052510.html?id=186224

[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, ...
{one of two stanzas}

[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. ...
{two of four stanzas}

[quasimodo1]

BIG CITY SPEECH
Use meAbuse me Turn wheels of fire on manhole hotheads Sing meSour me Secrete dark matter’s sheen on our smarting skin Rise and shineIn puddle shallows under every Meryl Cheryl Caleb Syd somnambulists and sleepyheads Wake usSpeak to us Bless what you’ve nurtured in your pits the rats voles roaches and all outlivers of your obscene ethic and politics Crawl on usFall on us you elevations that break and vein down to sulfuric fiber-optic wrecks through drill-bit dirt to bedrock Beat our browsFlee our sorrows Sleep tight with your ultraviolets righteous mica and drainage seeps your gorgeous color-chart container ships and cab-top numbers squinting in the mist

© 2009, W.S. Di Piero

[quasimodo1]

THE PARABOLIC BALLAD
My life, like a rocket, makes a parabola
flying in darkness, -- no rainbow for traveler.

There once lived an artist, red-haired Gauguin,
he was a bohemian, a former tradesman.
To get to the Louvre
from the lanes of Montmartre
he circled around
as far as Sumatra!

He had to abandon the madness of money,
the filth of the scholars, the snarl of his honey.
The man overcame the terrestrial gravity,
The priests, drinking beer, would laugh at his "vanity":
"A straight line is short, but it is much too simple,
He'd better depict beds of roses for people."

And yet, like a rocket, he flew off with ease
through winds penetrating his coat and his ears.
He didn't fetch up to the Louvre through the door
but, like a parabola,
pierced the floor!

Each gets to the truth with his own parameter
a worm finds a crack, man makes a parabola.
{excerpt} - { http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/andrei-voznesensky-defiant-russian-poet-dies-at-77/?ref=books } - { http://zhurnal.lib.ru/a/alec_v/voncollhtm.shtml }

[quasimodo1]

http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Math-of-Poetry/64249/

[quasimodo1]

http://media.poetryinternational.org/stream/

[quasimodo1]

NOX

By Anne Carson

Illustrated. Unpaged. New Directions. $29.95 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/books/review/Ratliff-t.html?ref=review --- Review By BEN RATLIFF
Published: June 3, 2010 "Lamentation"

[quasimodo1]

a review of "One More Theory about Happiness" by Paul Guest: review entitled "The Art of Pain" by Christopher R. Beha 6/3/10 / 202pp Ecco/Harper Collins 21.99 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/books/review/Beha-t.html?ref=books

[quasimodo1]

LIMITS

Only he
Remembered the day we met
And only I
The day we said goodbye:
“Last day of  June, our first blackberry pie,”
He always said.
A wood fire in the summer kitchen,
The hottest day.... A squall in the bedroom.
I can’t remember.


Nor he,
The December cube of  clay,
The storm the day before,
How the bare trees
Played Giant Step in the dawn wind,
Or how
On the other bed, rhythmically
Touching her knuckles to the wall,
My mother slipped forever into fantasy.


Only he
Remembered the spoken hate
(Its change too sheepish to impart)
Saw daggers still growing
In bristling clump out of my heart.


{EXCERPT}



NOTES: This poem is part of a special section of Poetry magazine's May issue



Source: Poetry (May 2010).

[quasimodo1]

Excerpt from "Nervous System"

When you look down
inside yourself
what is there?

You are a walking bag of surgical instruments
shining from the inside out

and that’s just
today

Tomorrow it could be different

When I think of the childhood inside me I think of sunlight dying
on a windowsill

The voices of my friends
in the sunlight

All of us running around
outside of our
deaths


--- http://www.coppercanyonpress.org/300_reading_room/reading_room.cfm

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/books/04excerpt_anthologist.html?ref=review Review of THE ANTHOLOGIST by Nicholson Baker (review entitled "Ryme and Unreason" by David Orr, September 1, 2009) Also, excerpt from the book... { http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/books/review/Orr-t.html?_r=1 } -- published September 4, 2009. "Novels about poetry are a dodgy proposition. After all, novelists already have a near monopoly on narrative and discursive fiction — turf once claimed by poetry — and it seems almost impolite for our prose writers, having triumphed so thoroughly over their sister art, to set themselves up as tour guides to poetry’s dwindling estate. And let’s face it, stories involving poets tend to be hokey or, worse, excruciatingly literary." quote from the review

[quasimodo1]

But Cummings saw it clearly, though he said he did not go to the Soviet Union with any specific agenda in mind. Early in the book, he has this conversation, which he transcribed in his idiosyncratic style with a hotel clerk:

“Have you any rooms?” I said.

“Yes” (not at all disagreeably).

“How much are they?”

“five dollars. But that includes breakfast.”

“Five… The redfox leans toward me. Why do you wish to go to Russia?

because I’ve never been there.

(He slumps,recovers). You are interested in economic and sociological problems?

no.

Perhaps you are aware that there has been a change of government in recent years?

yes(I say without being able to suppress a smile).

And your sympathies are not with socialism?

may I be perfectly frank?

Please!

I know almost nothing about these important matters and care even less.

(His eyes appreciate my answer). For what do you care?

my work.

Which is writing?

and painting.

What kind of writing?

chiefly verse;some prose.

Then you wish to go to Russia as a writer and painter? Is that it?

no;I wish to go as myself.

(An almost smile). Do you realize that to go as what you call Yourself will cost a great deal?

I’ve been told so.

{from ‘EIMI: A Journey Through Soviet Russia’ }http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/zz321/quasimodo1/eecummings.jpg

[quasimodo1]

ENDLESS INTER-STATES


1


They go down to the expressways, baskets
In hand, they go down with rakes, shovels
And watering cans, they go down to pick


Beans and trim tomato plants, they go down
In wide-brimmed hats and boots, passing
By the glass-pickers, the Geiger counters, those


Guarding the toxic wastes. They go down
Remembering the glide of automobiles, the
Swelter of children in back seats, pinching, twitching,


Sand in their bathing suits, two-fours of Molson’s
In the trunk of the car. They go down, past
The sifters, the tunnellers, those who transport


Soil from deep in the earth, and are content
To have the day before them, are content to imagine
Futures they will inhabit, beautiful futures


Filled with unimagined species, new varieties of
Plant life, sustainable abundance,
An idea of sufficient that is global. Or,


Because cars now move on rails underground,
The elevated roads are covered in earth,
Vines drape around belts of green, snake


Through cities, overgrown and teeming
With grackles and rats’ nests, a wall
Of our own devising, and the night


Watchmen with their machine guns
Keeping humans, the intoxicated,
Out. I am sorry for this version, offer


You coffee, hot while there is still
Coffee this far north, while there is still news
To wake up to, and seasons


Vaguely reminiscent of seasons.



2


Web-toed she walks into the land, fins
Carving out river bottoms, each hesitation
A lakebed, each mid-afternoon nap, a plateau,


Quaint, at least that is my dream of her,
Big shouldered, out there daydreaming
The world into existence, pleasuring herself


With lines and pauses. How else? What is a lake
But a pause? People circling it with structures, dipping
In their poles? Once she thought she could pass by


Harmless. Scraping wet shale, her knees down in it, she
Tries to remember earth, that ground cover. She tries
To reattach things, but why? What if the world


Is all action? What if thought isn’t glue, but tearing?
She sits at the lake edge where the water never meets
Earth, never touches, not really, is always pulling


Itself on to the next.



3


Now she sits by her memory of meadow, forlorn, shoeless.
She could scoop PCBs from the Hudson, she is
Always picking up after someone. But what? What


Is the primary trope of this romp? Where her uterus
Was the smell of buckshot and tar, an old man chasing
Her with a shotgun across his range. Cow pies and


Hornets’ nests, gangly boys shooting cats with BB guns,
Boys summering from Calgary, trees hollowed out,
Hiding all manner of contraband goods. When she peers


In the knotted oak, classic movies run on
The hour, Scout on the dark bark, Mildred
Pierce with a squirrel tale wrap. Nature is over,


She concludes. Nature is what is caught, cellular,
Celluloid. She sticks a thumb in another tree, a
Brownstone, a small girl—her heart a thing locked.


It’s been so long since she felt hopeful. (Perhaps nature
Is childhood.) The morning after Chernobyl
Out there with tiny umbrellas. All those internal


Combustions. This is a country that has accepted death
As an industry, it is not news. She has been warned.
Her ratings sag. She scans her least apocalyptic


Self and sees mariners floating, Ben
Franklin penning daily axioms, glasses lifting
From the river bank, planked skirts on Front,


China-like through the industrious, thinking, traffic
Clogged city, its brick heavy with desire for good.
Memory of meadow, Dickinson an ice pick scratching


Wings in her brain: if you see her standing, if you move
Too quickly, if you locate the centre, if you have other
Opportunities, by all means if you have other opportunities.
{excerpt, 3 of 6 parts} { http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/queyras/ }http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/zz321/quasimodo1/queyras_sina.jpg

[quasimodo1]

September 1961

This is the year the old ones,
the old great ones
leave us alone on the road.

The road leads to the sea.
We have the words in our pockets,
obscure directions. The old ones

have taken away the light of their presence,
we see it moving away over a hill
off to one side.

They are not dying,
they are withdrawn
into a painful privacy

learning to live without words.
E. P. "It looks like dying"--Williams: "I can't
describe to you what has been

happening to me"--
H. D. "unable to speak."
The darkness

twists itself in the wind, the stars
are small, the horizon
ringed with confused urban light-haze.

They have told us
the road leads to the sea,
and given

the language into our hands.
We hear
our footsteps each time a truck

has dazzled past us and gone
leaving us new silence.
One can't reach

the sea on this endless
road to the sea unless
one turns aside at the end, it seems,

follows
the owl that silently glides above it
aslant, back and forth,

and away into deep woods. ... --- http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/zz321/quasimodo1/DeniseLevertov.jpg

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Evening Hawk

From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.


His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.


The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.


Look! Look! he is climbing the last light
Who knows neither Time nor error, and under
Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings
Into shadow.


Long now,
The last thrush is still, the last bat
Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. ... {excerpt}
Copyright © 1985 by Robert Penn Warren.
http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/zz321/quasimodo1/RobertPennWarren-1.jpg
Source: From New and Selected Poems 1923-1985 (1985) ---

[quasimodo1]

AN IMPROVISATION FOR ANGULAR MOMENTUM

Walking is like
imagination, a
single step
dissolves the circle
into motion; the eye here
and there rests
on a leaf,
gap, or ledge,
everything flowing
except where
sight touches seen:
stop, though, and
reality snaps back
in, locked hard,
forms sharply
themselves, bushbank,
dentree, phoneline,
definite, fixed,
the self, too, then
caught real, clouds
and wind melting
into their directions,
breaking around and
over, down and out,
motions profound,http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/zz321/quasimodo1/ARAmmonsself-portraitwatercolor.jpg
alive, musical! ...
{excerpt & self-portrait, watercolor}

[quasimodo1]

Jayne Cortez: Online Poems


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

There It Is

And if we don't fight
if we don't resist
if we don't organize and unify and
get the power to control our own lives
Then we will wear
the exaggerated look of captivity
the stylized look of submission
the bizarre look of suicide
the dehumanized look of fear
and the decomposed look of repression
forever and ever and ever
And there it is

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cortez/online_poems.htm --- http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/zz321/quasimodo1/JanyeCortexandtheFirespitters.jpg

[quasimodo1]

Chinese Whispersby John Ashbery

John Ashbery
And in a little while we broke under the strain:
suppurations ad nauseam, the wanting to be taller,
though it‘s simply about being mysterious, i.e., not taller,
like any tree in any forest.
Mute, the pancake describes you.
It had tiny roman numerals embedded in its rim.
It was a pancake clock. They had ’em in those days,
always getting smaller, which is why they finally became extinct.
It was a hundred years before anyone noticed.
The governor general
called it “sinuous.” But we, we had other names for it,
knew it was going to be around for a long time,
even though extinct. And sure as shillelaghs fall from trees
onto frozen doorsteps, it came round again
when all memory of it had been expunged
from the common brain.
Everybody wants to try one of those new pancake clocks.
A boyfriend in the next town had one
but conveniently forgot to bring it over each time we invited him.
Finally the rumors grew more fabulous than the real thing:
I hear they are encrusted with tangles of briar rose,
so dense
not even a prince seeking the Sleeping Beauty could get inside.
What’s more, there are more of them than when they were extinct,
yet the prices keep on rising. They have them in the Hesperides
and in shantytowns on the edge of the known world,
blue with cold. All downtowns used to feature them.
Camera obscuras,
too, were big that year. But why is it that with so many people
who want to know what a shout is about, nobody can find the original recipe?
All too soon, no one cares. We go back to doing little things for each other,
pasting stamps together to form a tiny train track, and other,
less noticeable things. And the past is forgotten till next time.
How to describe the years? Some were like blocks of the palest halvah,
careless of being touched. Some took each others’ trash out,
put each other’s eyes out. So many got thrown out
before anyone noticed, that it was like a chiaroscuro
of collapsing clouds.
How I longed to visit you again in that old house! But you were deaf,
or dead. Our letters crossed. A motorboat was ferrying me out past
the reef, people on shore looked like dolls fingering stuffs.
More
keeps coming out, about the dogs I mean. Surely a simple embrace
from an itinerant fish would have been spurned at certain periods. Not now.
There is a famine of years in the land, the women are beautiful,
but prematurely old and worn. It doesn’t get better. Rocks half-buried
in bands of sand, and spontaneous execrations.
I yell to the ship’s front door,
wanting to be taller, and somewhere in the middle all this gets lost.
I was a phantom for a day. My friends carried me around with them. ... {excerpt} --- http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/zz321/quasimodo1/JohnAshberyco.jpg

[quasimodo1]

Tenderness and Rot by Kay Ryan


Tenderness and rot
share a border.
And rot is an
aggressive neighbor
whose iridescence
keeps creeping over.


No lessons
can be drawn
from this however.


One is not
two countries.
One is not meat
corrupting.


{excerpt} --- http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/zz321/quasimodo1/kay-ryan-niagara.jpg

[quasimodo1]

Explorers Cry Out Unheard


What I have in mind is the last wilderness.


I sweat to learn its heights of sun, scrub, ants,
its gashes full of shadows and odd plants,
as inch by inch it yields to my hard press.


And the way behind me changes as I advance.
If interdependence shapes the biomass,
though I plot my next step by pure chance
I can’t go wrong. Even willful deviance
connects me to all the rest. The changing past
includes and can‘t excerpt me. {excerpt} ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/nyregion/27about.html?ref=books


Marie Ponsot, “Explorers Cry Out Unheard” from The Bird Catcher. Copyright © 1998 by Marie Ponsot. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

[quasimodo1]

http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/zz321/quasimodo1/duncan_robert-1.jpg BENDING THE BOW

We've our business to attend Day's duties,
bend back the bow in dreams as we may
til the end rimes in the taut string
with the sending. Reveries are rivers and flow
where the cold light gleams reflecting the window upon the
surface of the table,
the presst-glass creamer, the pewter sugar bowl, the litter
of coffee cups and saucers,
carnations painted growing upon whose surfaces. The whole
composition of surfaces leads into the other
current disturbing
what I would take hold of. I'd been

in the course of a letter – I am still
in the course of a letter – to a friend,
who comes close in to my thought so that
the day is hers. My hand writing here
there shakes in the currents of... of air?
of an inner anticipation of...? reaching to touch
ghostly exhilarations in the thought of her.

At the extremity of this
design
"there is a connexion working in both directions, as in
the bow and the lyre"–
only in that swift fulfillment of the wish
that sleep
can illustrate my hand
sweeps the string. ... {excerpt}

-- { http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/duncan/online_poems.htm }

[quasimodo1]

The Cats Will Know


Rain will fall again
on your smooth pavement,
a light rain like
a breath or a step.
The breeze and the dawn
will flourish again
when you return,
as if beneath your step.
Between flowers and sills
the cats will know.


There will be other days,
there will be other voices.
You will smile alone.
The cats will know.
You will hear words
old and spent and useless
like costumes left over
from yesterday’s parties.


You too will make gestures.
You’ll answer with words—
face of springtime,
you too will make gestures.


The cats will know,
face of springtime;
and the light rain
and the hyacinth dawn
that wrench the heart of him
who hopes no more for you—
they are the sad smile... {excerpt} http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=182021

Translated by Geoffrey Brock
... http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/zz321/quasimodo1/cesare-pavese.jpg Cesare Pavese

[quasimodo1]

Pro Femina


ONE
From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women.
How unwomanly to discuss it! Like a noose or an albatross necktie
The clinical sobriquet hangs us: codpiece coveters.
Never mind these epithets; I myself have collected some honeys.
Juvenal set us apart in denouncing our vices
Which had grown, in part, from having been set apart:
Women abused their spouses, cuckolded them, even plotted
To poison them. Sensing, behind the violence of his manner—
“Think I'm crazy or drunk?”—his emotional stake in us,
As we forgive Strindberg and Nietzsche, we forgive all those
Who cannot forget us. We are hyenas. Yes, we admit it.


While men have politely debated free will, we have howled for it,
Howl still, pacing the centuries, tragedy heroines.
Some who sat quietly in the corner with their embroidery
Were Defarges, stabbing the wool with the names of their ancient
Oppressors, who ruled by the divine right of the male—
I’m impatient of interruptions! I’m aware there were millions
Of mutes for every Saint Joan or sainted Jane Austen,
Who, vague-eyed and acquiescent, worshiped God as a man.
I’m not concerned with those cabbageheads, not truly feminine
But neutered by labor. I mean real women, like you and like me.


Freed in fact, not in custom, lifted from furrow and scullery,
Not obliged, now, to be the pot for the annual chicken,
Have we begun to arrive in time? With our well-known
Respect for life because it hurts so much to come out with it;
Disdainful of “sovereignty,” “national honor;” and other abstractions;
We can say, like the ancient Chinese to successive waves of invaders,
“Relax, and let us absorb you. You can learn temperance
In a more temperate climate.” Give us just a few decades
Of grace, to encourage the fine art of acquiescence
And we might save the race. Meanwhile, observe our creative chaos,
Flux, efflorescence—whatever you care to call it!
{excerpt} --- http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/zz321/quasimodo1/carolyn_kizer.jpg

[quasimodo1]

W. S. Merwin to Be Named Poet Laureate
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: June 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/books/01poet.html?ref=books --- Song of Three Smiles

Let me call a ghost,
Love, so it be little:
In December we took
No thought for the weather.


Whom now shall I thank
For this wealth of water?
Your heart loves harbors
Where I am a stranger.


Where was it we lay
Needing no other
Twelve days and twelve nights
In each other’s eyes? ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Portrait of the Author

Cesare Pavese
to Leone

The window that faces this street is always
an empty abyss. The summer blue overhead
seems firmer somehow, with its passing cloud.
Here, nobody passes. It’s just us sitting here.


My colleague—who stinks—is sitting beside me
on the public street, and without moving his body
he strips off his pants. I take off my sweater.
The stones beneath us are cold, and my colleague
likes this, and I look at him, and nobody passes.
And suddenly, framed in the window, a woman,
brightly colored. Maybe she noticed the stink
and wanted to see. My colleague stands and looks back.
He has a sort of continuous beard from his face
to his ankles, it covers what pants do and pokes out
through his sweater. That beard stinks all by itself.
When he jumped through the window, into the dark,
the woman vanished. My eyes wander up
toward the nice solid strip of sky—it’s naked too.


I don’t stink, since I don’t have a beard. The stones
are cold on the skin of my back, which women like
because it’s so smooth: what don’t women like?
But no women pass by. Some ***** passes by
followed by a male whose fur is rain-drenched
and stinks bad. The smooth cloud in the sky
looks down, unmoving: it resembles a leaf pile.
My colleague has found himself supper tonight.
Women treat you well when you’re naked. At last
a kid appears from around the corner. He’s smoking,
he’s got curly hair, tough skin, and legs like an eel,
like me. Some fine day, the women will want
to take off his clothes and sniff for the good stink.
I stick out a foot as he passes. He falls to the ground,
and I ask for a cig. We smoke there in silence.
Translated by Geoffrey Brock ---
http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/zz321/quasimodo1/CesarePavese-1.jpg

[quasimodo1]

Broken Pot Used as Writing Material

Re-entry to your econiche
Is like the beautifying of a cathedral.
One reads these cloths of stem stitch,
Laid or couched stitch as natural numbers,
One reads a clock from twelve to six
Asserting that they moved when they didn’t.

Boundaries shift for the whole hand,
The left must close a pattern guided
By the right, since signals from the two eyes
Fail to recognise an everyday face.

{excerpt} --- http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/zz321/quasimodo1/MedbhMcGuckian.jpg

[quasimodo1]

http://media.poetryinternational.org/clips/2010/

[quasimodo1]

In Media Universe, Poetry’s Small Planet
By DANA JENNINGS
Published: July 22, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/books/23book.html?_r=1&ref=books

[quasimodo1]

"Nothing is more beautiful than a great humming central electric station that holds the hydraulic pressure of a mountain chain and the electric power of a vast horizon, synthesised in marble distribution panels bristling with dials, keyboards and shining communicators. These panels are our only models for the writing of poetry." from the Guardian article... http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/24/tom-mccarthy-futurists-novels-technology

[quasimodo1]

from The Nerve Meter


(Antonin Artaud) 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.
{excerpt}

[Paulclem]

Hi Quasimodo

I've not looked at this thread before, but flicking through i can see that this must be a labour of love for you. It's certainly a great resource.

:thumbsup:

[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. ...


{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

The one whose Reproach I Cannot Evade


She sits in her glass garden
and awaits the guests -
The sailor with the blue tangerines
the fish clothed in languages
the dolphin with a revolver in its teeth.

Dusk enters from stage left:
its voice falls like dew on the arbor.
Tiny bells
sway in the catalpa tree.

What is it she hopes to catch in her net
of love? Petals? Conch-shells?
The night-moth? She does not speak.
Tonight, I tell her, no one comes;
you wait in vain.

Yet at eight precisely
the moon opens its theatric doors,
an arm rises from the fountain,
the music box, face down
on her tabouret, swells and bursts
its cover - a tinkling flood of
rice moves over the table.

She smiles at me, false believer,
smiles and goes in, leaving
the garden empty and my thighs
half-eaten by the raging twilight.

George Hitchcock


http://www.philly.com/inquirer/obituaries/20100903_George_Hitchcock___Patron_of_poets__96.ht ml

[quasimodo1]

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/great-poetry-is-no-scandal/story-e6frgcjx-1225900776230

[quasimodo1]

A VILLAGE LIFE

By Louise Glück

72 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $23
"Poets, being creatures of routine, tend to settle into a style sometime in their 30s and plow those acres as if they’d been cleared by their fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Read a poet’s second or third book and you will see the style of his dotage. Poets restless in their forms, unwilling to take yesterday’s truth as gospel, are as rare as a blue rose; and rarer still are poets like Eliot, Lowell and Geoffrey Hill, who have convincingly changed their styles midcareer." ...from the review. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/books/review/Logan-t.html ---

[quasimodo1]

The Drowned Children


You see, they have no judgment.
So it is natural that they should drown,
first the ice taking them in
and then, all winter, their wool scarves
floating behind them as they sink
until at last they are quiet.
And the pond lifts them in its manifold dark arms.


But death must come to them differently,
so close to the beginning.
As though they had always been
blind and weightless. Therefore
the rest is dreamed, the lamp,
the good white cloth that covered the table,
their bodies.


And yet they hear the names they used
like lures slipping over the pond: ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

"It’s surely time to give up the Heaney/Muldoon analogizing. These are men whose poems — in terms of texture and structure, tactics and tone — could not be more dissimilar. But here they are, each with new books, issued within a two-week span by the same publisher. What’s a wide-awake couch potato to do but read them side by jowl? If there’s a better way to spend $50 in a bookstore this weekend, I don't know what it is." ...from the review. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/books/17book.html?_r=1&ref=books --- HUMAN CHAIN

By Seamus Heaney

85 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24. {another review... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/books/review/Logan-t.html?_r=1&nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3 }

.MAGGOT

By Paul Muldoon

134 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/27/AR2010082704859.html --- By Courtney Cook
Saturday, August 28, 2010

PHANTOM NOISE

By Brian Turner

Alice James.

93 pp. $16.95

[quasimodo1]

Deluge by Tamás Emod
translated from the Hungarian by Thomas Ország-Land (October 2010)
Tamás Emod 1888-1938: Hungarian poet, playwright and theatre director.



I. MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE


Beneath a rig of groans, in a tempest of tears,

engulfed by fear as an awesome deluge recurs,



on board a lost and battered, rudderless galley

afloat on the blood of this dreadful time of folly --



like sailors who trust their news to a bottle in the current,

I thrust these final verses into the torrent




so that, beyond death and terror and darkness, you

may still receive them one day in a better future,



you, in whom we have placed our faith and hopes

in vain, for we shall never reach your shores:



free shores, our home ever since the centaurs’ idylls,

cultured Europe, our ancient, classical cradle.



***


We signal our final farewells before the night covers us,

our helpless pleas of distress flashed over the flood,



and still salute the offspring of tomorrow,

we the galley slaves of the present, the ship and the oars



whose festive garlands have been torn away,

we sad and sensitive souls of this brutal age



who have foretold the worst and seen it all

who had screamed out in fear before we fell,



the children lusting for wisdom, humour and trust

before the depth of hell roared over us:



before our plight sinks into blind oblivion,

I send you these lines, the final news of our lives. ...
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Tribute and Farewell (a review)
By Abigail Deutsch
NOX By Anne Carson
New Directions, 2010
--- { http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/nox-carson/ }

[quasimodo1]

http://www.3amMagazine.com/3am/a-visionary-infection-will-stone-on-the-poet-georg-trakl/

[quasimodo1]

Poetry Festival, Newark, NJ -- Urban Beat for Poetry Festival By FELICIA R. LEE
Published: October 5, 2010 -- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/books/06dodge.html?_r=1&ref=books -- "The truth of that statement will be put to the test by an expected audience of about 20,000 poetry lovers at the festival, which is held every two years. They will interact with dozens of the most celebrated poets in the world, appearing in a lineup that this year includes Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Kay Ryan, Mark Strand, Mr. Baraka, Martin Espada, Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell." Felicia R. Lee, NYT

[quasimodo1]

THE SMALL ROOM
The men with the same face are talking all at once,
One is a theorist, another is a theorist,
The rest are all theorists.

Behind the unsealed door a masked man listens –
The sophist with club in hand,
He too is a theorist. And somewhat drunk.

What name shall I give the deaf man
Who closes his eyes and places
His fingers in his ears –
Neither wise nor foolish,
Perhaps intelligent.

He faces the outward view of the same
Street which the blind man, beneath
The balcony, has discovered and rediscovered
Over the years with his hand over his mouth.

And eyes bursting open.
{Togara Muzanenhamo, from Spirit Brides}

[quasimodo1]

National Poetry Day: unlock the mathematical secrets of verse --- By Steve Jones
Published: 12:00PM BST 05 Oct 2010 --- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/steve-jones/8043205/National-Poetry-Day-unlock-the-mathematical-secrets-of-verse.html

[quasimodo1]

http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/10/what-makes-a-poem-worth-reading/65215/ Article ...one of five installments by Adam Roberts from The Atlantic

[quasimodo1]

THE NERVE FIBERS


The nerve fibers, a veil on red music clanging,
cannoned from columns. An anthem bubbling.

Scientifically stretching over the cheeks
at the edge of one moment. The grey suit passed,

the overcoat, impressions everywhere.
Watching a negligible dog fetch as if it were human—

his hind legs so honest, so independent—
she stood in a doorway, not beautiful, never

specially clever, remote from herself. Over and over—
twist, turn, wake up, set going. Doomed to sinking—

decorate the dungeon, be decent.
The edge of her mind turning meaning for hours

at a time. Hours and days. A sound like a sickle.
Her head a bunch of heather. Then over.

The matted and tangled message, a red square.
The thinking nerves. The door of the room.

Dante : the Inferno. The English : London.
A piston thumping mechanically behind the screen. ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

from the collection "Sleek for the Long Flight" AN EGG IN THE CORNER OF ONE EYE --- I can only guess what it contains. I lean to the mirror like a teen-ager checking his complexion. Maybe it is sleep. Or a dream in which, like a bee or nursing mother or a radish, you eat to feed others. Or maybe it is a shard of light in the shape of an island from which dogs are leaping into the water, swimming toward a barking that only death can hear. On the eye's other shore life is upside-down. The dogs have swum for days to clamber up and, like an eye in its deathbed, shake out rays of light. Or maybe the light implodes. Or sinks into itself like a turned-off TV, the optic nerve subsiding like a snapped kitestring. I don't know. To open a tear is to kill whatever it was growing. I can't tell the difference between grief and joy. I tell myself that a tear is my dath, leaking. In this way weeping resemmbles menstruation. The egg that will be fertilized never sees the light of day.

[Silas Thorne]

NZ Poet Michael Harlow reciting his poem 'I am a Tyger':

http://www.ch9.co.nz/content/michael-harlow-0

[quasimodo1]

from the collection "Sleek for the Long Flight" ... SCORPIO

You are unpredictable, obsessed by sex and death, eager to assert your individuality. You

can be devious, but charming. You will not be invited to the party. You carry your young

on your back, because your tail cannot reach there and, instictively, they know that. You

wish they would get off. If you were born today, you would have been a great basketball

player except for the accident. Today's Scorpio daughter will be beautiful and intense:

when her wishes are granted, she's in trouble. When two of you are gathered in my name,

your tails will snarl in the air like incestuous lariats. You should take care of that

pressing financial obligation today. You have forgotten something. What do you think it

is? You are a spine whose legs have failed to evolve into ribs. Your conversation is

only about you: you never mention me. I am the one who made you what you are. It is my

fault. Tonight should be devoted to romantic pursuits. Whom shall we chase? We will not

be invited to the party. You ought to forget about me. You tend to be careless of others.

You are the only one I have ever loved.

[quasimodo1]

THE ASIANS DYING

When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains
The ash the great walker follows the possessors
Forever
Nothing they will come to is real
Nor for long
Over the watercourses
Like ducks in the time of the ducks
The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
Making a new twilight


Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything


{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

THE WAY TO THE RIVER

The way to the river leads past the names of
Ash the sleeves the wreaths of hinges
Through the song of the bandage vendor


I lay your name by my voice
As I go


The way to the river leads past the late
Doors and the games of the children born looking backwards
They play that they are broken glass
The numbers wait in the halls and the clouds
Call
From windows
They play that they are old they are putting the horizon
Into baskets they are escaping they are
Hiding


I step over the sleepers the fires the calendars
My voice turns to you


I go past the juggler’s condemned building the hollow
Windows gallery
Of invisible presidents the same motion in them all
In a parked cab by the sealed wall the hats are playing
Sort of poker with somebody’s


Old snapshots game I don’t understand they lose
The rivers one
After the other I begin to know where I am
I am home


Be here the flies from the house of the mapmaker
Walk on our letters I can tell
And the days hang medals between us
I have lit our room with a glove of yours be
Here I turn
To your name and the hour remembers
Its one word
Now


Be here what can we
Do for the dead the footsteps full of money
I offer you what I have my
Poverty ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

ONE OF THE LIVES



If I had not met the red-haired boy whose father
had broken a leg parachuting into Provence
to join the resistance in the final stage of the war
and so had been killed there as the Germans were moving north
out of Italy and if the friend who was with him
as he was dying had not had an elder brother
who also died young quite differently in peacetime
leaving two children one of them with bad health
who had been kept out of school for a whole year by an illness
and if I had written anything else at the top
of the examination form where it said college
of your choice or if the questions that day had been
put differently and if a young woman in Kittanning
had not taught my father to drive at the age of twenty
so that he got the job with the pastor of the big church
in Pittsburgh where my mother was working and if
my mother had not lost both parents when she was a child
so that she had to go to her grandmother’s in Pittsburgh
I would not have found myself on an iron cot
with my head by the fireplace of a stone farmhouse
{excerpt} {an article about Merwin... http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/antholog/merwin/pdmerwin.htm }

[quasimodo1]

Lines of Refusal



Nothing here, just the sound of the heat, the sound of the cars,
nothing, nothing

Sweet unrest

To the oldest son a scythe, to the second a ****, to the third a cat

Must avoid rivers, strivers, and voyeurs

Not gather, not tether, not tie

The young brother came to a town that was completely hung
with black crepe

Wrote his autobiography in exactly thirty-seven words

Crawled into a crawlspace and pulled shut the door

No friend, no grammar, no end

Later, he too will become an imposing statue

No wish, no fission, no sign

Then hurrying across the avenue

Snow and so on

A young red fox and so on

Face and hair and hands and so on

Each with the incomparable taste of its own life in its mouth

[John Trivolta]

=really good collection of heart touching poetry .

[quasimodo1]

THE WAY TO THE RIVER

The way to the river leads past the names of
Ash the sleeves the wreaths of hinges
Through the song of the bandage vendor


I lay your name by my voice
As I go


The way to the river leads past the late
Doors and the games of the children born looking backwards
They play that they are broken glass
The numbers wait in the halls and the clouds
Call
From windows
They play that they are old they are putting the horizon
Into baskets they are escaping they are
Hiding


I step over the sleepers the fires the calendars
My voice turns to you


I go past the juggler’s condemned building the hollow
Windows gallery
Of invisible presidents the same motion in them all
In a parked cab by the sealed wall the hats are playing
Sort of poker with somebody’s


Old snapshots game I don’t understand they lose
The rivers one
After the other I begin to know where I am
I am home


Be here the flies from the house of the mapmaker
Walk on our letters I can tell
And the days hang medals between us
I have lit our room with a glove of yours be
Here I turn
To your name and the hour remembers
Its one word
Now ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Rebecca Gould interviews the descendants of Titsian Tabidze, August 2010 --- http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/1930/tabidze_8_1_10/

[quasimodo1]

FOR THE ANNIVERSARY OF MY DEATH

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star


Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

TERM

At the last minute a word is waiting
not heard that way before and not to be
repeated or ever be remembered
one that always had been a household word
used in speaking of the ordinary
everyday recurrences of living
not newly chosen or long considered
or a matter for comment afterward
who would ever have thought it was the one
saying itself from the beginning through
all its uses and circumstances to
utter at last that meaning of its own
for which it had long been the only word
though it seems now that any word would do

ONLINE SOURCE: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/antholog/merwin/term.htm

[quasimodo1]

RAIN LIGHT All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning

ONLINE SOURCE:http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06262009/transcript1.html

[quasimodo1]

The Lovers


The lovers say nothing.
Love is the finest of the silences,
the one that trembles most and is hardest to bear.
The lovers are looking for something.
The lovers are the ones who abandon,
the ones who change, who forget.
Their hearts tell them that they will never find.
They don't find, they're looking.

The lovers wander around like crazy people
because they're alone, alone,
surrendering, giving themselves to each moment,
crying because they don't save love.
They worry about love. The lovers
live for the day, it's the best they can do, it's all they know.
They're going away all the time,
all the time, going somewhere else.
They hope,
not for anything in particular, they just hope.
They know that whatever it is they will not find it.
Love is the perpetual deferment,
always the next step, the other, the other.
The lovers are the insatiable ones,
the ones who must always, fortunately, be alone.

The lovers are the serpent in the story.
They have snakes instead of arms.
The veins in their necks swell
like snakes too, suffocating them.
The lovers can't sleep
because if they do the worms ear them.

They open their eyes in the dark
and terror falls into them.

They find scorpions under the sheet
and their bed floats as though on a lake.

The lovers are crazy, only crazy
with no God and no devil.

The lovers come out of their caves
trembling, starving,
chasing phantoms.
They laugh at those who know all about it,
who love forever, truly,
at those who believe in love as an inexhaustible lamp.

The lovers play at picking up water,
tattooing smoke, at staying where they are.
They play the long sad game of love.
None of them will give up.
The lovers are ashamed to reach any agreement. ...{excerpt}

(translated by W. S. Merwin)

[quasimodo1]

from GREGORY COWLES" review... "Hayes’s work is terrific, and characteristic of a certain strain in contemporary poetry: it’s grounded in narrative even as it’s linguistically dense and playful, with allusions to formal verse traditions and to pop culture new and old."
--- November 18, 2010, 3:15 pm ‘Lighthead,’ by Terrance Hayes: A.D.D. Poet Wins N.B.A. Poetry Award
By GREGORY COWLES --- http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/lighthead-by-terrance-hayes-a-d-d-poet-wins-n-b-a-poetry-award/?ref=review

[quasimodo1]

TOUCH ME Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour

[quasimodo1]

WHEN SHE WOULDN'T


When her recorded voice on the phone
said who she was again and again to the piles
of newspapers and magazines and the clothes


in the chairs and the bags of unopened mail
and garbage and piles of unwashed dishes.


When she could no longer walk
through the stench of it, in her don’t-need-nobody-
to-help-me way of walking, with her head


bent down to her knees as if she were searching
for a dime that had rolled into a crack


on the floor, though it was impossible to see
the floor. When the pain in her foot she disclosed
to no one was so bad she could not stand


at her refrigerator packed with food and sniff
to find what was edible. When she could hardly


even sit as she loved to sit, all night
on the toilet, with the old rinsed diapers
hanging nearby on the curtainless bar


of the shower stall, and the shoes lined up
in the tub, falling asleep and waking up


while she cut out newspaper clippings
and listened to the late-night talk
on her crackling radio about alien landings


and why the government had denied them.
When she drew the soapy rag across the agonizing


ache of her foot trying over and over to wash
the black from her big toe and could not
because it was gangrene.


When at last they came to carry my mother
out of the wilderness of that house ...{excerpt}

[Silas Thorne]

Resurrection by Michael Mckimm

As the cod that's cooked in a mountain
of salt comes out delicate as butter, a fur
of disappearances, unrecognisable,
so have I buried the book of our lives
in the salt mines of Cheshire, twenty
miles of white tunnels, two hundred feet deep. (excerpt)

from http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

Thanks q1 for introducing me to Terrance Hayes. I followed the link to another link and then heard him reading his poems. :)

[quasimodo1]

Waipounamu (Wall Poem)


Hoisting history on his back like a sugar-sack,
the swagger strides along greenstone trails.
All night the crib creeks are humming home,
and drowned towns float in their canvas shrouds.
They are just the ghosts of their original selves,
an emotional investment looted by snow-melt for
schemes to answer the Question of Illumination.
To tap this yearning for a golden age,
singing shepherds held wisps of tussock
which curled like lighted Chinese joss-sticks
on the fan-tan tables of sly-grog dens,
frozen in that glacier known as the past.
In the forgotten graveyards, hair grows into grass,
while wind sifts the sweet vernal over and over,
like diggers letting gold dust pour through their fingers.
The Kingston Flyer is chuffing
on the Great Northern Railway to Wakatipu.
John Turnbull Thompson cut the runholders loose
with a panoramic survey and the confidence of a faithhealer
in the middle of Queen Victoria's Royal Century,
when the boom-time harvest of Celtic place-names
seeded Central like a nouveau-Hibernian dialect
from Balclutha to Gimmerburn to Glendhu Bay.
Winter arrives on time in a glitzblitz of powdery snow.
The hoar-frost is a Quarztopolis of ice crystals,
turning weeping willows into frozen chandeliers. ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

TERM

At the last minute a word is waiting
not heard that way before and not to be
repeated or ever be remembered
one that always had been a household word
used in speaking of the ordinary
everyday recurrences of living
not newly chosen or long considered
or a matter for comment afterward
who would ever have thought it was the one
saying itself from the beginning through ...{excerpt} --- Online Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/antholog/merwin/term.htm

[quasimodo1]

Bella Akhmadulina, Bold Voice in Russian Poetry, Dies at 73 By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: November 29, 2010 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/world/europe/30akhmadulina.html?_r=1&ref=books

[quasimodo1]

THE GREAT LAMENT OF MY OBSCURITY THREE
where we live the flowers of the clocks catch fire and the plumes encircle the brightness in the distant sulphur morning the cows lick the salt lilies
my son
my son
let us always shuffle through the colour of the world
which looks bluer than the subway and astronomy
we are too thin
we have no mouth
our legs are stiff and knock together
our faces are formeless like the stars
crystal points without strength burned basilica ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

PERISHABLE, IT SAID


Perishable, it said on the plastic container,
and below, in different ink,
the date to be used by, the last teaspoon consumed.


I found myself looking:
now at the back of each hand,
now inside the knees,
now turning over each foot to look at the sole.


Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants,
then at the arguing jays.


Under the wooden table and lifted stones, looking.
Coffee cups, olives, cheeses,
hunger, sorrow, fears— ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

MATHEMATICS


I have envied those
who make something
useful, sturdy—
a chair, a pair of boots.


Even a soup,
rich with potatoes and cream.


Or those who fix, perhaps,
a leaking window:
strip out the old cracked putty,
lay down cleanly the line of the new.


You could learn,
the mirror tells me, late at night,
but lacks conviction.
One reflected eyebrow quivers a little.


I look at this
borrowed apartment—
everywhere I question it,
the wallpaper’s pattern matches.


Yesterday a woman
showed me
a building shaped
like the overturned hull of a ship,


its roof trusses, under the plaster,
lashed with soaked rawhide,
the columns’ marble
painted to seem like wood.
Though possibly it was the other way around?


I look at my unhandy hand,
innocent,
shaped as the hands of others are shaped.
Even the pen it holds is a mystery, really. ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

ANOTHER RIVER
The friends have gone home far up the valley
of that river into whose estuary
the man from England sailed in his own age
in time to catch sight of the late forests
furring in black the remotest edges
of the majestic water always it
appeared to me that he arrived just as
an evening was beginning and toward the end
of summer when the converging surface
lay as a single vast mirror gazing
upward into the pearl light that was
already stained with the first saffron
of sunset on which the high wavering trails
of migrant birds flowed southward as though there were
no end to them the wind had dropped and the tide
and the current for a moment seemed to hang
still in balance and the creaking and knocking
of wood stopped all at once ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

A Conversation With W.S. Merwin

Often a poet's contribution to his national literature is measured by awards, fellowships, and grants. W.S. Merwin's importance in the world of literature runs deeper and broader than acclaim and recognition. Merwin, as a historic figure, serves as a link from Pound and Auden (Auden selected Merwin's first book, A Mask for Janus, for the 1952 Yale Younger Poet Series) to the contemporary scene. However, it would be a mistake to view Merwin's growth as a mere rejection of contemporary neoclassicism for the pursuit of "daring experiments in metrical irregularity and thematic disorganization" of the sixties. His concern for discipline remains paramount. What makes his poetry attractive is more than an intangible charm. In Merwin, there is something to be learned.

Merwin has published nine books of poetry, including The Carrier of Ladders for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Moreover, he has written plays, essays, and radio scripts. Merwin has made a large part of his living by translating French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin. His Selected Translations 1948-1968 won the P.E.N. Translation Prize for 1968. Merwin's latest work is Unframed originals (Athenaeum, 1982), his third book of prose. -Jim Brock

{interview -- http://www3.wooster.edu/artfuldodge/interviews/merwin.htm }

[quasimodo1]

BREAD {for Wendell Berry}Each face in the street is a slice of bread
wandering on
searching


somewhere in the light the true hunger
appears to be passing them by
they clutch


have they forgotten the pale caves
they dreamed of hiding in
their own caves
full of the waiting of their footprints
hung with the hollow marks of their groping
full of their sleep and their hiding


have they forgotten the ragged tunnels
they dreamed of following in out of the light
to hear step after step ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://i201.photobucket.com/albums/aa46/Larry_Kuechlin/Utterance2.jpg

[quasimodo1]

SENTENCINGS



A thing too perfect to be remembered:
stone beautiful only when wet.


* * *


Blinded by light or black cloth—
so many ways
not to see others suffer.


* * *


Too much longing:


it separates us
like scent from bread,
rust from iron.


* * *


From very far or very close—
the most resolute folds of the mountain are gentle.


* * *


As if putting arms into woolen coat sleeves,
we listen to the murmuring dead.


* * *
http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/zz321/quasimodo1/JaneHirshfield.jpg

Any point of a circle is its start:
desire forgoing fulfillment to go on desiring. ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

INSOMNIA


Now you hear what the house has to say.
Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,
the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,
and voices mounting in an endless drone
of small complaints like the sounds of a family
that year by year you’ve learned how to ignore.


But now you must listen to the things you own,
all that you’ve worked for these past years,
the murmur of property, of things in disrepair,
the moving parts about to come undone,
and twisting in the sheets remember all
the faces you could not bring yourself to love. ...{excerpt - two of three stanzas}

[quasimodo1]

IN THESE SOFT TRINITIES


Whenever I see two women
crowned, constellated friends


it is as if three birch trees wept together
in a field by a constant spring.


The third woman isn’t there


exactly, but just before them a flame
bursts out, then disappears


in a blurred, electric shining
that lifts my hair like an animal’s.


In an aura of charged air I remember
my poor mother turned into royalty,
my sister and me in bobby socks


endlessly, all summer long
calling each other Margaret Rose


and Lillibet, Lillibet, Lillibet,
pretending to be princesses...


Now, swollen into these tall blooms
like paper cutouts in water,


in each new neighborhood garden
always, two women talking


nod their three curly heads together:
with bits of dirt on their foreheads, speckled
iris, flaming poppy


in the backyard dynasties of the multiflora
it is the famous funeral photograph
of the Dowager Queen, Queen Mother, stunned Young Queen,


three stepping stones in marble
that haunt me forever, clear
and mysterious as well water, the weight of it


in a bronze bucket swinging
powerfully from my hand.


As the plumcolored shadow rises,
full as a first child in the orchard,


the lost gardening glove on the path,
the single earring tucked


in an odd corner of the purse and then found


here double themselves, then triple:
in these soft trinities
the lives that begin in us


are born and born again like wings. ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

THE RETURN don’t go to sleep, don’t
Dear, the road is long yet
don’t go too near
the forest’s enticements, don’t lose hope

write the address
in snowmelt on your hand
or lean on my shoulder
as we pass the hazy morning

lifting the transparent storm curtain
we’ll arrive at where we are from
a green disk of land
around an old pagoda

there I will guard
your weary dreams
and drive off the flocks of nights
leaving only bronze drums, and the sun

as beyond the pagoda
tiny waves quietly
crawl up the beach
and draw back trembling {translated from the Chinese by Aaron Crippen}

[quasimodo1]

THE INDOORS IS ENDLESS

It’s spring in 1827, Beethoven
hoists his death-mask and sails off.


The grindstones are turning in Europe’s windmills.
The wild geese are flying northwards.


Here is the north, here is Stockholm
swimming palaces and hovels.


The logs in the royal fireplace
collapse from Attention to At Ease.


Peace prevails, vaccine and potatoes,
but the city wells breathe heavily.


Privy barrels in sedan chairs like paschas
are carried by night over the North Bridge.


The cobblestones make them stagger
mamselles loafers gentlemen.


Implacably still, the sign-board
with the smoking blackamoor.


So many islands, so much rowing
with invisible oars against the current!


The channels open up, April May
and sweet honey dribbling June.


The heat reaches islands far out.
The village doors are open, except one.


The snake-clock’s pointer licks the silence.
The rock slopes glow with geology’s patience.


It happened like this, or almost.
It is an obscure family tale


about Erik, done down by a curse
disabled by a bullet through the soul.


He went to town, met an enemy
and sailed home sick and grey.


Keeps to his bed all that summer.
The tools on the wall are in mourning.


He lies awake, hears the woolly flutter
of night moths, his moonlight comrades.


His strength ebbs out, he pushes in vain
against the iron-bound tomorrow.


And the God of the depths cries out of the depths
‘Deliver me! Deliver yourself!’


All the surface action turns inwards.
He’s taken apart, put together.


The wind rises and the wild rose bushes
catch on the fleeing light. ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

"The Best of It: New and Selected Poems" by Kay Ryan (Grove: 288 pp., $24). A lifelong Californian (and U.S. poet laureate from 2008-2010), Ryan creates poetry that is spare, laconic, awash with word play, but with a fierceness underneath. This collection frames the brilliance of her career. {one of his ten best books of 2010} -- by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times book critic, December 19, 2010 -- http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-yearend-ulin-list-20101219,0,722150.story

[quasimodo1]

Poetry by Terrance Hayes, Connie Wanek, Lisa Robertson & James Schuyler -- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/books/review/Burt-t.html -- LIGHTHEAD
By Terrance Hayes.
Penguin Poets. Paper, $18.


ON SPEAKING TERMS
By Connie Wanek.
Copper Canyon. Paper, $15.


LISA ROBERTSON’S MAGENTA SOUL WHIP
By Lisa Robertson.
Coach House. Paper, $14.95.


OTHER FLOWERS
Uncollected Poems.
By James Schuyler. Edited by James Meetze and Simon Pettet.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.

[quasimodo1]

NEW FOLK


I said Folk was dressed in Blues but hairier and hemped.
After "We acoustic banjo disciples!" Jebediah said, "When
and whereforth shall the bucolic blacks with good tempers
come to see us pluck as Elizabeth Cotton intended?"
We stole my Uncle Windchime's minivan, penned a simple
ballad about the drag of lovelessness and drove the end
of the chitlin' circuit to a joint skinny as a walk-in temple
where our new folk was not that new, but strengthened
by our twelve bar conviction. A month later, in pulled
a parade of well meaning alabaster post adolescents.
...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

AMARYLLIS


A flower needs to be this size
to conceal the winter window,
and this color, the red
of a Fiat with the top down,
to impress us, dull as we've grown.


Months ago the gigantic onion of a bulb
half above the soil
stuck out its green tongue
and slowly, day by day,
the flower itself entered our world,


closed, like hands that captured a moth,
then open, as eyes open,
and the amaryllis, seeing us,
was somehow undiscouraged.
It stands before us now


as we eat our soup; ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

THE BLUET


And is it stamina
that unseasonably freaks
forth a bluet, a
Quaker lady, by
the lake? So small,
a drop of sky that
splashed and held,
four-petaled, creamy
in its throat. The woods
around were brown,
the air crisp as a
Carr's table water
biscuit and smelt of
cider. There were frost
apples on the trees in
the field below the house.
The pond was still, then
broke into a ripple.
The hills, the leaves that
have not yet fallen
are deep and oriental
rug colors. Brown leaves
in the woods set off
gray trunks of trees.
But that bluet was
the focus of it all: ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

AFTER US
I don't know if we're in the beginning
or in the final stage.
-- Tomas Tranströmer

Rain is falling through the roof.
And all that prospered under the sun,
the books that opened in the morning
and closed at night, and all day
turned their pages to the light;

the sketches of boats and strong forearms
and clever faces, and of fields
and barns, and of a bowl of eggs,
and lying across the piano
the silver stick of a flute; everything

invented and imagined,
everything whispered and sung,
all silenced by cold rain.

The sky is the color of gravestones.
The rain tastes like salt, and rises
in the streets like a ruinous tide. ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

REQUIEM FOR THE PLANTAGENET KINGS


For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,
Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good,
To sound the constitution of just wars,
Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood.


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.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/t-s--eliot-and-the-demise-of-the-literary-culture-15564 ------- from Commentary Magazine ---- T.S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture
Joseph Epstein
November 2010 ------- “The dissociation of sensibility” is a reminder that Eliot, as he himself noted, launched “a few notorious phrases which have had a truly embarrassing success in the world.” Among these were “objective correlative” and “the auditory imagination.” Then there are all those sentences of his that, once read, are never forgotten:

“He had a mind so fine no idea can violate it” (this of Henry James).

“The more perfect the artist the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.”

“The progress of an artist is a continual self--sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least somethingdifferent.”

[quasimodo1]

Variation On a Theme by Rilke


A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me–a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day’s blow
rang out, metallic–or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.

[quasimodo1]

from Light: Blue Poles


Tonight, away begins to go
farther away, and the dream
what do we know of the dream
metallic leaps Jackson Pollock
silvery streams Jackson Pollock
I gaze across the sea


see in the distance your walk and you
pass the Pacific, distant and blue
phallus and Moloch pace my view
on into otherness


on into otherness?
are we in the world after or before
are we or are we not magnetic force
it is apparently me you inform: ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/arts/03vega.html?adxnnl=1&ref=obituaries&adxnnlx=1294059709-bP/6XW4+3fs/TJiPje3Axw ----- Janine Pommy Vega, Restless Poet, Dies at 68 -- By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: January 2, 2011 --- "Janine Pommy Vega, a poet and intimate of the Beat generation luminaries Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky whose lifelong quest for transcendence took her to San Francisco in the 1960s and ona pilgrimage to neolithic goddess-worship sites in the 1980s, died on Dec. 23 at her home in Willow, N.Y. She was 68." from the obituary --
--- http://books.google.com/books?id=X_AO3xgf5usC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Janine+Pommy+Vega+poems&source=bl&ots=u-uZMtDDRJ&sig=4NftdAP-ISLuDPKDO5iyz_Rxf2g&hl=en&ei=ickhTbzqCMKC8gaW9PXYDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CDkQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false -- for some of her poems --

[quasimodo1]

BUCKDANCER'S CHOICE

So I would hear out those lungs,
The air split into nine levels,
Some gift of tongues of the whistler


In the invalid’s bed: my mother,
Warbling all day to herself
The thousand variations of one song;


It is called Buckdancer’s Choice.
For years, they have all been dying
Out, the classic buck-and-wing men


Of traveling minstrel shows;
With them also an old woman
Was dying of breathless angina,


Yet still found breath enough
To whistle up in my head
A sight like a one-man band,


Freed black, with cymbals at heel,
An ex-slave who thrivingly danced
To the ring of his own clashing light


Through the thousand variations of one song
All day to my mother’s prone music,
The invalid’s warbler’s note,


While I crept close to the wall
Sock-footed, to hear the sounds alter,
Her tongue like a mockingbird’s break ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

THE DUSK OF HORSES



Right under their noses, the green
Of the field is paling away
Because of something fallen from the sky.

They see this, and put down
Their long heads deeper in grass
That only just escapes reflecting them

As the dream of a millpond would.
The color green flees over the grass
Like an insect, following the red sun over

The next hill. The grass is white.
There is no cloud so dark and white at once;
There is no pool at dawn that deepens

Their faces and thirsts as this does.
Now they are feeding on solid
Cloud, and, one by one,

With nails as silent as stars among the wood
Hewed down years ago and now rotten,
The stalls are put up around them.

Now if they lean, they come
On wood on any side. Not touching it, they sleep.
No beast ever lived who understood

What happened among the sun's fields,
Or cared why the color of grass
Fled over the hill while he stumbled,

Led by the halter to sleep
On his four taxed, worthy legs.
Each thinks he awakens where

The sun is black on the rooftop,
That the green is dancing in the next pasture,
And that the way to sleep ...{excerpt}



http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20385

[quasimodo1]

DEW LIGHT

Now in the blessed days of more and less

when the news about time is that each day

there is less of it I know none of that

as I walk out through the early garden

only the day and I are here with no

before or after and the dew looks up

without a number or a present age
{ https://www.aprweb.org/poem/dew-light }

[quasimodo1]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128239404 --- This PBS link has poems

from Merwin's "The Shadow of Sirius" collection. Also, interview with Merwin on the program

"Fresh Air". For a complete transcript of the interview...

{http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=128239404} --- Title ...<

'Sirius' Poetry From New Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin.

[quasimodo1]

THE HEAVEN OF ANIMALS

Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.


Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open.


To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood,
The deepest field.


For some of these,
It could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,


More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey


May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life, ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

SOFTEST OF TONGUES

To many things I've said the word that cheats
the lips and leaves them parted (thus: prash-chai
which means "good-bye") -- to furnished flats, to streets,
to milk-white letters melting in the sky;
to drab designs that habit seldom sees,
to novels interrupted by the din
of tunnels, annotated by quick trees,
abandoned with a squashed banana skin;
to a dim waiter in a dimmer town,
to cuts that healed and to a thumbless glove;
also to things of lyrical renown
perhaps more universal, such as love.
Thus life has been an endless line of land
receding endlessly.... And so that's that,
you say under your breath, and wave your hand,
and then your handkerchief, and then your hat.
To all these things I've said the fatal word,
using a tongue I had so tuned and tamed
that -- like some ancient sonneteer -- ... {excerpt} {for the rest of this classic poem... http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/antholog/nabokov/tongues.htm }

[quasimodo1]

A STOPWATCH AND AN ORDNANCE MAP


A stopwatch and an ordnance map.
At five a man fell to the ground
And the watch flew off his wrist
Like a moon struck from the earth
Marking a blank time that stares
On the tides of change beneath.
All under the olive trees.
A stopwatch and an ordnance map.
He stayed faithfully in that place
From his living comrade split
By dividers of the bullet
Opening wide the distances
Of his final loneliness.

All under the olive trees.
A stopwatch and an ordnance map. ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

MADRIGAL IN TIME OF WAR

Beside the rivers of the midnight town
Where four-foot couples love and paupers drown,
Shots of quick hell we took, our final kiss,
The great and swinging bridge a bower for this.


Your cheek lay burning in my fingers’ cup;
Often my lip moved downward and yours up
Till both adjusted, tightened, locksmith-true:
The flesh precise, the crazy brain askew.


Roughly the train with grim and piston knee
Pounded apart our pleasure, you from me;
Flare warned and ticket whispered and bell cried.
Time and the locks of bitter rail divide.


For ease remember, all that parted lie:
Men who in camp of shot or doldrum die,
Who at land’s-end eternal furlough take


—This for memento as alone you wake.

[quasimodo1]

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/455367/Poetry/overview --- from South Korea ---- --- POETRY ---- the movie --- http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/movies/11poetry.html = Full Review - NYT --

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/books/10book.html?_r=1&ref=books ---- a review -- Poems of Pain, the Raw and the Remembered --- By DANA JENNINGS
Published: February 9, 2011 ---- "EVERY RIVEN THING" by Christian Wiman -- 93pp, Farrar, Straus & Giroux -- $24

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/books/paul-violi-poet-dies-at-66.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=books ---- PAUL VIOLI --- OBITUARY entitled "Paul Violi, A Poet both Wry and Sly, dies at 66" -- by William Grimes, April 15, 2011 --- http://www.paulvioli.com/ --- Violi poem... "Counterman" -- http://www.cstone.net/~poems/countvio.htm --

[chipper]

the day the saucers came

by: NEIL GAIMAN

That day, the saucers landed. Hundreds of them, golden,
Silent, coming down from the sky like great snowflakes,
And the people of Earth stood and stared as they descended,
Waiting, dry-mouthed to find what waited inside for us
And none of us knowing if we would be here tomorrow

But you didn't notice it because
That day, the day the saucers came, by some coincidence,
Was the day that the graves gave up their dead
And the zombies pushed up through soft earth
or erupted, shambling and dull-eyed, unstoppable,
Came towards us, the living, and we screamed and ran,
But you did not notice this because

On the saucer day, which was the zombie day, it was
Ragnarok also, and the television screens showed us
A ship built of dead-man's nails, a serpent, a wolf,
All bigger than the mind could hold, and the cameraman could
Not get far enough away, and then the Gods came out
But you did not see them coming because

On the saucer-zombie-battling gods day the floodgates broke
And each of us was engulfed by genies and sprites
Offering us wishes and wonders and eternities
And charm and cleverness and true brave hearts and pots of gold
While giants feefofummed across the land, and killer bees,
But you had no idea of any of this because

That day, the saucer day the zombie day
The Ragnarok and fairies day, the day the great winds came
And snows, and the cities turned to crystal, the day
All plants died, plastics dissolved, the day the
Computers turned, the screens telling us we would obey, the day
Angels, drunk and muddled, stumbled from the bars,
And all the bells of London were sounded, the day
Animals spoke to us in Assyrian, the Yeti day,
The fluttering capes and arrival of the Time Machine day,
You didn't notice any of this because

you were sitting in your room, not doing anything
not even reading, not really, just
looking at your telephone,
wondering if I was going to call.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/books/review/on-poetry-matthew-zapruder-and-rachel-wetzsteon.html?_r=1&ref=books --- On Poetry
How Poets Achieve Their Styles -- By DAVID ORR
Published: April 22, 2011
---

[quasimodo1]

How It Happens

The sky said I am watching
to see what you
can make out of nothing
I was looking up and I said
I thought you
were supposed to be doing that
the sky said Many
are clinging to that
I am giving you a chance
I was looking up and I said
I am the only chance I have
then the sky did not answer
and here we are
with our names for the days
the vast days that do not listen to us

— W.S. MERWIN, poet laureate of the United States and author, most recently, of “The Shadow of Sirius,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2009

[quasimodo1]

http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2011/04/05/david_orr --- David Orr on Contemporary Poetry --- salon.com ------- Tuesday, Apr 5, 2011 20:30 ET
Modern poetry made less terrifying
Critic David Orr explains the mysteries and marvels of contemporary verse and the people who write it. {review of BEAUTIFUL AND POINTLESS} by David Orr -- 18.71 ...a guide to modern poetry

[quasimodo1]

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2192/the-art-of-poetry-no-42-octavio-paz --- Octavio Paz, The Art of Poetry No. 42
Interviewed by Alfred Mac Adam --- The Paris Review Interviews... --- Summer, 1991 --

[quasimodo1]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/19/070219fa_fact_goodyear ---
The Literary Life
The Moneyed Muse
What can two hundred million dollars do for poetry?by Dana Goodyear
February 19, 2007

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/19/070219fa_fact_goodyear#ixzz1MZyCqHCY --

[quasimodo1]

FOR THE LAST WOLVERINE

They will soon be down


To one, but he still will be
For a little while still will be stopping


The flakes in the air with a look,
Surrounding himself with the silence
Of whitening snarls. Let him eat
The last red meal of the condemned


To extinction, tearing the guts


From an elk. Yet that is not enough
For me. I would have him eat


The heart, and from it, have an idea
Stream into his gnarling head
That he no longer has a thing
To lose, and so can walk


Out into the open, in the full


Pale of the sub-Arctic sun
Where a single spruce tree is dying


Higher and higher. Let him climb it
With all his meanness and strength.
Lord, we have come to the end
Of this kind of vision of heaven,


As the sky breaks open


Its fans around him and shimmers
And into its northern gates he rises


Snarling complete in the joy of a weasel
With an elk’s horned heart in his stomach
Looking straight into the eternal
Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all


My way: at the top of that tree I place


The New World’s last eagle
Hunched in mangy feathers giving


Up on the theory of flight.
Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate
To the death in the rotten branches,
Let the tree sway and burst into flame


And mingle them, crackling with feathers,


In crownfire. Let something come
Of it something gigantic legendary


Rise beyond reason over hills
Of ice screaming that it cannot die,
That it has come back, this time
On wings, and will spare no earthly thing:


That it will hover, made purely of northern


Lights, at dusk and fall
On men building roads: ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

LIKE A SCARF

The directions to the lunatic asylum were confusing;
most likely they were the random associations
and confused ramblings of a lunatic.
We arrived three hours late for lunch
and the lunatics were stacked up on their shelves,
quite neatly, I might add, giving credit where credit is due.
The orderlies were clearly very orderly, and they
should receive all the credit that is their due.
When I asked one of the doctors for a corkscrew
he produced one without a moment's hesitation.
And it was a corkscrew of the finest craftsmanship,
very shiny and bright not unlike the doctor himself.
"We'll be conducting our picnic under the great oak
beginning in just a few minutes, and if you'd care
to join us we'd be most honored. However, I understand
you have your obligations and responsibilities,
and if you would prefer to simply visit with us
from time to time, between patients, our invitation
is nothing if not flexible. And, we shan't be the least slighted
or offended in any way if, due to your heavy load,
we are altogether deprived of the pleasure
of exchanging a few anecdotes, regarding the mentally ill,
depraved, diseased, the purely knavish, you in your bughouse,
if you'll pardon my vernacular. O yes, and we in our crackbrain
daily rounds, there are so many gone potty everywhere we roam,
not to mention in one's own home, dead moonstruck.
Well, well, indeed we would have many notes to compare
if you could find the time to join us after your injections."
My invitation was spoken in the evenest tones,
but midway through it I began to suspect I was addressing
an imposter. I returned the corkscrew in a nonthreatening manner.
What, for instance, I asked myself, would a doctor, a doctor of the mind,
be doing with a corkscrew in his pocket?
This was a very sick man, one might even say dangerous.
I began moving away cautiously, never taking my eyes off of him.
His right eyelid was twitching guiltily, or at least anxiously,
and his smock flapping slightly in the wind. ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS

(Translated By Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?


The barbarians are due here today.



Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?


Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.



Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?


Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.



Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?


Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.



Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?


Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking. ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

THE MAN-MOTH Here, above,
cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the

moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast

properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.


But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.


Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on

the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt. ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Eurydice
By H. D. (1886–1961)
I


So you have swept me back,
I who could have walked with the live souls
above the earth,
I who could have slept among the live flowers
at last;


so for your arrogance
and your ruthlessness
I am swept back
where dead lichens drip
dead cinders upon moss of ash;


so for your arrogance
I am broken at last,
I who had lived unconscious,
who was almost forgot;


if you had let me wait
I had grown from listlessness
into peace,
if you had let me rest with the dead,
I had forgot you
and the past.


II


Here only flame upon flame
and black among the red sparks,
streaks of black and light
grown colourless;


why did you turn back,
that hell should be reinhabited
of myself thus
swept into nothingness?


why did you glance back?
why did you hesitate for that moment?
why did you bend your face
caught with the flame of the upper earth,
above my face?


what was it that crossed my face
with the light from yours
and your glance?
what was it you saw in my face?
the light of your own face,
the fire of your own presence?


What had my face to offer
but reflex of the earth,
haycinth colour
caught from the raw fissure in the rock
where the light struck,
and the colour of azure crocuses
and the bright surface of gold crocuses
and of the wind-flower,
swift in its veins as lightning
and as white.


III


Saffron from the fringe of the earth,
wild saffron that has bent
over the sharp edge of earth,
all the flowers that cut through the earth,
all, all the flowers are lost;


everything is lost,
everything is crossed with black,
black upon black
and worse than black,
this colourless light.


IV


Fringe upon fringe
of blue crocuses,
crocuses, walled against blue of themselves,
blue of that upper earth,
blue of the depth upon depth of flowers,
lost;


flowers,
if I could have taken once my breath of them,
enough of them,
more than earth,
even than of the upper earth,
had passed with me
beneath the earth;


if I could have caught up from the earth,
the whole of the flowers of the earth,
if once I could have breathed into myself
the very golden crocuses
and the red,
and the very golden hearts of the first saffron,
the whole of the golden mass,
the whole of the great fragrance,
I could have dared the loss. ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

La Figlia che Piange

O quam te memorem virgo ...

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—
Lean on a garden urn—
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.


So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.


She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

{ La Figlia che Piange } - the girl who cries ---
{ O quam te memorem virgo... } - from Virgil: what am I to call you maiden? (... For you do not have a mortal face.)

Source: Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)

[quasimodo1]

Paris, October 1936

(translated from the Spanish by Daniel Bosch)

I alone leave all this behind.
I leave this bench, I leave my pants,
the things I’ve done, my “big chance,”
my number split through side to side,
I alone leave it all behind.

From the Champs Elysées or the turn
of the moon’s strange, narrow street,
my death leaves town, my cradle too,
and, alone, cut loose, others at every turn,
the one most like me completes his turn
and dispatches his shadows, singly, discrete. ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/books/poems-by-dean-young-dorianne-laux-tom-sexton-review.html?ref=books ---- Five Poets Seasoned by Life ---- --- By DANA JENNINGS
Published: May 29, 2011
"One of the great pleasures of poetry is catching a good poet in midcareer. Reading a savvy verse veteran is like watching Sandy Koufax paint a 1-0 shutout in his prime — some pure high heat here, a paralyzing curve there, then a little deliberate deception way down in the dirt." ...

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/books/poems-by-bao-phi-roberto-bolano-and-simon-armitage-review.html?_r=1&ref=bookreviews --- SÔNG I SING, by Bao Phi. 110 pages. Coffee House. $16. --- TRES, by Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Laura Healy. 173 pages. New Directions. $24.95. --- SEEING STARS, by Simon Armitage. 77 pages. Knopf. $25. -- --- HAPPY LIFE, by David Budbill. 119 pages. Copper Canyon. $16 --- THE BEST OF ARCHY AND MEHITABEL, by Don Marquis. 223 pages. Everyman’s Library. $13.50.

[stlukesguild]

Quasi... good to see you again. I got your e-mail... but I've been so tied up with work... and my work... that I forget to get back to you. Hope things are going well with you and yours. Send me another e-mail when you can.:wave:

[quasimodo1]

from the nytimes book review... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/books/17maslin.html

[quasimodo1]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/fictionreviews/9246089/The-best-recent-poetry-May-6.html

[quasimodo1]

NATIVE TREES

By W. S. Merwin
Neither my father nor my mother knew
the names of the trees
where I was born
what is that
I asked and my
father and mother did not
hear they did not look where I pointed
surfaces of furniture held
the attention of their fingers
and across the room they could watch
walls they had forgotten
where there were no questions
no voices and no shade { http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171876 }

[quasimodo1]

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/20155820?uid=3739864&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=47698997876947

[quasimodo1]

THE COMPLETE POEMS

By Philip Larkin

Edited by Archie Burnett

729 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $40. --- { http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/books/review/philip-larkins-complete-poems.html?ref=bookreviews }

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/31/arts/seamus-heaney-acclaimed-irish-poet-dies-at-74.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

[quasimodo1]

The Gypsy and the Wind

Playing her parchment moon
Precosia comes
along a watery path of laurels and crystal lights.
The starless silence, fleeing
from her rhythmic tambourine,
falls where the sea whips and sings,
his night filled with silvery swarms.
High atop the mountain peaks
the sentinels are weeping;
they guard the tall white towers
of the English consulate.
And gypsies of the water
for their pleasure erect
little castles of conch shells
and arbors of greening pine.

Playing her parchment moon
Precosia comes.
The wind sees her and rises,
the wind that never slumbers.
Naked Saint Christopher swells,
watching the girl as he plays
with tongues of celestial bells
on an invisible bagpipe.

Gypsy, let me lift your skirt
and have a look at you.
Open in my ancient fingers
the blue rose of your womb.

Precosia throws the tambourine
and runs away in terror.
But the virile wind pursues her
with his breathing and burning sword.

The sea darkens and roars,
while the olive trees turn pale.
The flutes of darkness sound,
and a muted gong of the snow.
(excerpt... http://boppin.com/lorca/gypsy.html )

[JBI]

Welcome back Quasimodo, that's a nice poem - almost enough to encourage me to learn Spanish, but not quite just yet (maybe once I am 40).