Poetry Bookclub 4

[quasimodo1]

So far, in this early phase, JBI has chosen Susan Goyette's collection...THE TRUE NAME OF BIRDS. As for myself, I recommend William Matthews' RISING AND FALLING... Medbh McGuckian's ON BALLYCASTLE BEACH... and Allen Tate's THE WINTER SEA. When we have additional choices, I'll order them in a clear listing. To all intending to join in... please choose more than one collection. q1

[quasimodo1]

update: Margaret Avison and Fred Wah have been added to the list... collections still to be determined.

[Virgil]

Oh I would love to read Bill Mathews. I met him when I was in college. But let me think and perhaps I'll nominate one myself.

[quasimodo1]

The True Names Of Birds
"The True Names of Birds is the first book-length collection from a voice that has captured the attention of Canadian

poetry readers for the last half-dozen years. Deeply centred in domestic life, Goyette's work is informed by a

muscular lyricism. These are poems that push the limits, always true to their roots. --- --- --- --- ---

http://www.flipkart.com/true-names-birds-susan-goyette/0919626998-hax3fvim0f --- Title: The True Names Of Birds
Author: Susan Goyette
ISBN: 0919626998
ISBN-13: 9780919626997, 978-0919626997
Binding: Paperback
Publishing Date: 11-1998
Publisher: Brick Books
Number of Pages: 64
Language: English

[quasimodo1]

To say: "I don't undertand what this means," is, at least, to recognize that "this" means. The problem is that

meaning is not a totality of sameness and predictability. Within each word, each sentence, meaning has slipped a

little out of sight and all we have are traces, shadows, still warm ashes. The meaning available from language goes

beyond the actual instance of this word, that word. A text is a place where a labyrinth of continually revealing

meanings are available, a place that offers more possibility than we can be sure we know, sometimes more than we want

to know. It isn't a container, static and apparent. Rather, it is noisy, frequently illegible. Reading into meaning

starts with a questioning glance, a seemingly obvious doubloon on a mast. The multiplicity can be read, should be

read, even performed. But then again, perhaps meaning is intransitive and unreadable, only meant to be made. No

sooner do we name meaning than it seems to dissipate. As a sure thing, it eludes us. It arouses us to attempt an

understanding, to interpret. But this is usually unsatisfying since whatever direction we approach from only leads us

to suspect there is no one direction. No single meaning is the right one because no "right ones" stand still long

enough to get caught. But because we do not know does not mean we are lost. Something that is strangely familiar, not

quite what we expect, but familiar, is present. That quick little gasp in the daydream, a sudden sigh of recognition,

a little sock of baby breath. Writing into meaning starts at the white page, nothing but intention. This initial

blinding clarity needs to be disrupted before we're tricked into settling for a staged and diluted paradigm of the

"real," the good old familiar, inherited, understandable, unmistakable lucidity of phrase that feels safe and sure, a

simple sentence, just-like-the-last-time-sentence. One makes (the) difference. Meaning generates and amplifies

itself, beyond itself, but never forgets; fragments of its memory and its potency exceed itself with meaning full of

desire and can only be found hiding between the words and lines and in a margin large enough for further thought,

music at the heart of thinking, go ahead. --- http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wah/write.htm ----Music

at the Heart of Thinking Ninety-four


"This is no mass synapse I'm after and I've known awhile now being lost is as simple as sitting on a log but

the fumble jerked mystique clouds grabbing as the staked mistake or stacked and treasured garbage belongs familiar to

a gardened world disturbed as heat..." {excerpt "from Music at the Heart of Thinking Ninety-four"}

[quasimodo1]

Favorite Pig," which the reviewer dubbed "charming" and deceptively lighthearted.

In Blues If You Want, Matthews focused on jazz, with many poem titles taken from favorite jazz tunes. Kenyon Review contributor Fred Chappell thought the collection was occasionally marred by "self-indulgence," but on the whole "warm" and "genial." In the Bloomsbury Review, Christopher Merrill pointed out the poet's exploration of the relationship between music and language, and lauded Matthews's "curiosity" and "wit."

"Things that don't last" are the subject of Matthews's 1995 collection, Time & Money: New Poems, according to a Publishers Weekly writer. The more than forty poems gathered here range from meditations on a visit to New York City by Ronald Reagan, to reflections on the death of Matthews's father, to a eulogy for jazz musician Charles Mingus. Several reviewers noted the ironic voice Matthews expresses in the poems, with notably different shadings from one piece to the next. Donna Seaman in Booklist, calling the works "fine, quietly furious poems," also praised Matthews for the linguistic gifts evident in the collection." excerpt from bio...The Poetry Foundation --- --- --- THE CLOISTER by William Matthews

The last light of a July evening drained
into the streets below: My love and I had hard
things to say and hear, and we sat over
wine, faltering, picking our words carefully.

The afternoon before I had lain across
my bed and my cat leapt up to lie
alongside me, purring and slowly
growing dozy. By this ritual I could

clear some clutter from my baroque brain.
And into that brief vacancy the image
of a horse cantered, coming straight to me,
and I knew it brought hard talk and hurt ... {excerpt} http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=179280

[quasimodo1]

Allen Tate (1899 - 1979)Allen Tate was a well-known man of letters from the American South, a central figure in the

fields of poetry, criticism, and ideas. In the course of a career spanning the middle decades of the twentieth

century, Tate authored poems, essays, translations, and fiction. Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor James

T. Jones wrote that his "influence was prodigious, his circle of acquaintances immense." Tate relished his "man of

letters" reputation—he consistently held for the highest standards of literature, feeling that the best creative

writing offers the most cogent expressions of human experience. Sewanee Review's J. A. Bryant, Jr. called Tate a

"sage" who "kept bright the instrument of language in our time and . . . made it illuminate as well as shine."

Tate was born and raised in Kentucky, the youngest of three sons of John Orley and Eleanor Varnell Tate. His family

moved frequently when he was young, and his elementary education was erratic. Influenced by his mother's love of

literature, however, he read extensively on his own, and he was admitted to Vanderbilt University in 1918. Tate

proved an excellent student, earning top honors and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. More importantly, while an

undergraduate he became aware of the special circumstances of Southern culture and sensibility. Dictionary of

Literary Biography essayist James A. Hart wrote, "With a Border background [Tate] had to face the question of whether

he was a Southerner or an American. Affirming the first, he had to confront the dominant positivist and materialistic

Yankee values which were supplanting the older values of the South." Under the influence of his teachers Walter Clyde

Curry, Donald Davidson, and John Crowe Ransom, Tate began to analyze his inheritance from a critical, but respectful,

perspective ... excertp from bio... The Poetry Foundation --- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?

id=6750#career ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-SONNETS OF THE BLOOD by Allen Tate

I


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



II


Near to me as perfection in the blood
And more mysterious far, is this, my brother:
A light vaulted into your solitude.
It studied burns lest you its rage should smother.
It is a flame obscure to any eyes,
Most like the fire that warms the deepest grave
(The cold grave is the deepest of our lies)
To which our blood is the indentured slave:
The fire that burns most secretly in you
Does not expend you hidden and alone,
The studious fire consumes not one, but two—
Me also, marrowing the self-same bone.
Our property in fire is death in life
Flawing the rocky fundament with strife. ... {excerpt from poem of 9 parts}

[JBI]

http://www.amazon.com/True-Names-Birds-Susan-Goyette/dp/0919626998/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239678704&sr=8-1

I'll do more thorough intros for my poets tomorrow.

[quasimodo1]

Medbh McGuckian (1950 - )Irish poet Medbh McGuckian has won acclaim for her imaginative verse, her lyricism, and her

themes on the feminine psyche. McGuckian's work has been compared to verse by such poets as Marianne Moore and

Elizabeth Bishop, and she has been called an "Irish Emily Dickinson" by Anne Stevenson in Times Literary Supplement.

Using lyrical language—rich in sound and emotion—to express the thoughts and feelings of the speaker, McGuckian

juxtaposes the concrete experiences of domestic life with evocative, dreamlike imagery. The resultant poetry is

sometimes described as esoteric, often erotic, and highly symbolic. Calvin Bedient, writing in Parnassus, enthused

that McGuckian "is Ireland's first great female poet—indeed, arguably its most original. No doubt she's too difficult

and Romantic to please everyone, at least right off. But of twentieth-century poets writing in English, she strikes

me as one of the most original and compelling—and as easily the most white-hot Irish poet since [William Butler]

Yeats." --- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=4565 ----------------------------------------

THE GOOD WIFE TAUGHT HER DAUGHTER by Medbh McGuckian

Lordship is the same activity
Whether performed by lord or lady.
Or a lord who happens to be a lady,
All the source and all the faults.

A woman steadfast in looking is a callot,
And any woman in the wrong place
Or outside of her proper location
Is, by definition, a foolish woman.

The harlot is talkative and wandering
By the way, not bearing to be quiet,
Not able to abide still at home,
Now abroad, now in the streets,

Now lying in wait near the corners,
Her hair straying out of its wimple.
The collar of her shift and robe
Pressed one upon the other. ... {excerpt} --- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178907

[quasimodo1]

JBI, please do Susan Goyette especially as I couldn't (as yet) find much relevent about her.

[JBI]

You won't find much - I doubt there is much, if anything, written about her. I'll check the CAN Lit-L and Canadian Literature Quarterly for some scholarly stuff, but in truth, she only has two volumes out, one in 98, and one in 04, so she is very new.

The Moon on Friday Night:
....................................erased all path to saturday
and swept up footsteps from the day before. It coaxed buttons
to the lips of buttonholes and whispered, 'you're beautiful,
so beautiful,' to women who speak the vernacular

of loneliness. Softly it slid into the hands of the men
they were with and lent its light to everything they touched.
'See,' the moonlight seemed to say, 'there are so many ways
to be naked and so many ways to be

Far from home.' The Light reminded the women of songs
they knew, songs written to gauge distance. Later,
still later on this island of Friday night, they sang
those songs under their breath as they bent

To tie their shoes. And they stayed bent for long after
their shoes were tied, hearing the wind for the first time
caught in a bucket of baby teeth.
......................(snip)


[.........]It light's up corners they'd kept dark, lights
their words and gives them new meaning. At night
they hold their husbands' hands to their mouths
'know this light,' they pray, 'touch me with this light.'

I'll send the remained to anyone who wants it.

[JBI]

Susan Goyette, The True Names of Birds (Brick Books) $12.95

Deeply centred in domestic life, the poems of The True Names of Birds are informed by a muscular lyricism. The first book-length collection from a voice that has captured the attention of Canadian poetry readers for the last half-dozen years, this book is full of poems that push the limits yet always remain true to their roots.

From http://www.writers.ns.ca/e_press3.html

[JBI]

Although published in 1998, Susan Goyette’s first collection, The True Names of Birds, is still a ‘hot’ book. Birds received considerable acclaim, including its inclusion on a Governor General’s Award shortlist. This acclaim is warranted; Goyette’s is an original and arresting voice in Canadian poetry. I don’t think I’ve read such compelling poetry based on the domestic world since Bronwen Wallace. Like MacDonald, Goyette probes those all-consuming, human questions: how do you live? How do you make a home?

For Goyette, the world is an endlessly mysterious text, an uncrackable code - "everything a sign," she writes in "To Keep You Well." "November: The Sawing of Women in Half" interrogates this notion of an over-arching system of signification that will make everything make sense:

'There must be a formation

that calls to birds. Some magic seen from the sky

that means rest. I haven’t learned it yet'

Later in the poem, we discover that "[s]ome people can translate anything into music. I’ve had to/adapt." There is, of course, no guidebook to life, as Goyette tell us: "There are books, encyclopedias in the library/explaining every magic trick invented'nothing/about music." Goyette plays effectively with the schmaltz of the magic show: "the sawing/ of women in half, the bouquet of doves." In contrast to the gimmickry, the bogus potential of ‘explanation’, there is the poem’s real problem - how to translate the world into music.

For Goyette, poetry is the art of translation. The poet-translator’s key tool is metaphor. Despite Goyette’s charmingly self-deprecating gestures - "All I’ve learned is how to pull/handkerchief after handkerchief from my sleeve/while someone else sings the blues" - she is, in fact, a highly adept ‘translator’. Her metaphors are rich and striking. In "Sisters," she writes: "We weren’t temples or even bungalows. We were apartments." "Regret is a woman who watches her reflection/in soup spoons and still water" ("Regret and All Her Nightgowns"). Many of Goyette’s metaphors are spun from the seasonal cycles and her close attention to the natural world. In "In This January," she writes: "My dreams are shoeboxes/filled with bones from my feet." Everyday activities accrue metaphorical dimensions, as in "A Gift for the Winter God" where the speaker is knitting: "Left alone, I unravel Autumn all the way/back to April and try to pick up what I’ve dropped."

After inhabiting Goyette’s poems for awhile, their weave of metaphors begins to spin into something even more profound: a mythological milieu that defines and gives musical resonance to the poet’s own life. This is how you make a home. The materials woven and translated into a music for living are, in Goyette, as often drawn from domestic objects as from the more esoteric world of nature. But the two are often connected. In "October," Goyette writes: "October leaves me with just a soup pot and a faint taste/of my mother. I make our home from cards in my pocket, pull/coins from the backs of my son’s ears." There is that schmaltzy magic again that Goyette both believes in and doesn’t. Similarly, in "The Mythology of Cures," the question of the artist’s authority arises: "I’ll create a mythology for this house. Trust me." Is Goyette winking at us here? Yes and no. These moments of self-irony point to an interesting tension between authority and tentativeness that informs Goyette’s aesthetic. There is that self-assuredness of voice in the collection’s title poem, for example: "There are more ways to abandon a child/than to leave them at the mouth of the woods." But these studied declarations function mainly as springboards into the real business of the poem which is much more exploratory, open-ended. The poems’ stated ‘premises’ are sometimes undercut by subtle irony or silence. By the end of this poem - also the collection’s opening piece - Goyette has moved us from ‘certain’ knowledge (which, as she knows, is something we construct) into a hauntingly elegiac territory:

'Here is the stillness of forest,

the sun columning before me temple-ancient,

that wonder is what I regret losing most; that wonder

and the true names of birds.

Goyette’s collection plumbs lost language, lost childhood. The poem’s tentative moments of loss and silence are striking in the way they open up possibility. But this encapsulization misses the strength of humour in Goyette’s work. "Confessions" illustrates this important counterpoint to the elegiac: "'please God of everlasting love/and lambs,/please give me something to confess/and a Barbie camper." Moments like this should not be underestimated; they ensure against earnestness.

Goyette has created a highly successful hybrid blend of narrative and lyric. Her line is long in length, rich in cadence. She is not a poet for quickie readings; her work demands time and slow immersion. And it’s well worth both.

From http://www.antigonishreview.com/bi-122/122-lynes.html

[stlukesguild]

Geoffrey Hill- The Triumph of Love
Anne Carson- Decreation
Anthony Hecht- The Darkness and the Light

[quasimodo1]

JBI: Now that's an expert exposition on Goyette and has completely captured my interest. I can see why she is a "hot' item in Canadian poetry...which always makes me ponder why American and Canadian poets experience such an arbitrary division...awareness wise. Such a long porous border yet poetry seems to need a special passport. Thanks for the lucid amplification.

[mortalterror]

Just thought I'd pop in and say that I liked the Allan Tate poem; but I wonder why you guys always want to discuss modern poetry. Right now, I'm in the mood for Firdawsi's Shahnamah, Ovid's Tristia, Blake's Milton, Camoes' Os Lusiadas, or maybe something by John Suckling or Petrarch.

[JBI]

JBI: Now that's an expert exposition on Goyette and has completely captured my interest. I can see why she is a "hot' item in Canadian poetry...which always makes me ponder why American and Canadian poets experience such an arbitrary division...awareness wise. Such a long porous border yet poetry seems to need a special passport. Thanks for the lucid amplification.

Avison is also a remarkable poet, as is Fred Wah. I think though, the difference between the two traditions is really that Canadian poetry doesn't really assemble figureheads as much, in the sense that there is no single papa bear to hold as the foundation. There also, despite what some critics like Margaret Atwood try to suggest, a "Canadian" voice that is used throughout the country, which makes Canadian poetry more like a series of several hundred voices, from different parts of the country, and different parts of the world.

The League of Canadian poets put out actually a decent intro guide (though it deals mostly with mainstream Canadian poetry) a while back, for young people and teachers, which gets up until people born around 1940.
http://www.youngpoets.ca/?q=digital_history_of_canadian_poetry_0
It's interesting to read. The Bibliography at the end is very useful as well.

But yeah, the reason why it would seem Americans don't particularly know or understand Canadian poetry is because it doesn't have a coherent tradition, and doesn't try to have one. Of course, I think French Canadian poetry has a tradition, but Quebec seems to be its own country, despite the fact that referendum failed. Quebec in many ways is more of a country than Canada is - surely they have a coherent sense of who they are, and of culture and tradition. The country as a whole though is very regional. Newfoundlanders seem to have forged their own tradition, and I think the Maritimes did as well, but outside of their? Western Canada has something, and they certainly publish a great deal of great poetry and scholarship, but a sense of coherency is not possible. Ontario generally just has far too many voices to have any sense of tradition.


It's probably better this way. In the end, I much prefer to have a few great poems from many minor poets, than full works from a few major poets. Lets be honest, even the best poets only really write a handful of good poems, and I think the Hebrew/Greek tradition seems to put too much emphasis on the poet, and not the poem, whereas the Japanese Tradition, the way I understand it, for instance, puts more on the poem and less on the poet.

[JBI]

Just thought I'd pop in and say that I liked the Allan Tate poem; but I wonder why you guys always want to discuss modern poetry. Right now, I'm in the mood for Firdawsi's Shahnamah, Ovid's Tristia, Blake's Milton, Camoes' Os Lusiadas, or maybe something by John Suckling or Petrarch.

We're trying to keep it all English texts to avoid needing translations. Do you though, know of a translation of Camoes? I could only find a mediocre prose one from Penguin at the library, and I'm wondering if a good verse one exists. Either way though, if you take Blake for instance, the thread would end up disappearing onto the Blake subforum, whereas if you take a modern-contemporary poet, we can keep it out here in the open. I think that was the brains behind the focus at any rate, that those poets already have subforum available, whereas these ones really don't - at least, that is why the first discussion on Yeats failed, because it kind of disappeared.

[JBI]

Margaret Avison, Biography

b. 1918 in Galt, Ontario. Infant and childhood years in Regina and Calgary (Sask. and Alta.). Educated in Ontario ( University of Toronto, 1936-40; M.A. 1963-5). Various daytime jobs, 1940-67, twice interrupted (8 months in Chicago on a Guggenheim Scholarship; two years' teaching at Scarborough College, University of Toronto: 1967-8). Conversion to Christian faith in early 1963. Late '63 till '85, family responsibilities. Worker in Evangel Hall '68-'73. For eight months ('73-'74) at the University of Western Ontario as Writer-in-Residence. Jobs '74-'78. Secretary, Mustard Seed Mission until retirement, '78-'86.

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/avison/bio.htm




Stone's Secret
Margaret Avison

From: Sunblue. Hantsport: Lancelot Press, 1978. pp.21-2

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

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


Continued here:
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/avison/poem3.htm




Not the Sweet Cicely of Gerardes Herball
(i.e. Oriental Myrrh, not English Myrrh)

Margaret Avison

From: Winter Sun. London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1960. p.12-13

Myrrh, bitter myrrh, diagonal,
Divides my gardenless gardens
Incredibly as far as the eye reaches
In this falling terrain.
Low-curled in rams-horn thickets,
With hedge-solid purposefulness
It unscrolls, glistening,
Where else the stones are white,
Sky blue.
No beetles move. No birds pass over.
The stone house is cold.
The cement has crumbled from the steps.
The gardens here, or fields,
Are weedless, not from cultivation but from
Sour unfructifying November gutters,
From winds that bore no fennel seeds,
Finally, from a sun purifying, harsh, like
Sea-salt.
The stubbled grass, dragonfly-green,
Between the stones, was not so tended.
mild animals with round unsmiling heads
Cropped unprotested, unprotesting
(After the rind of ice
Wore off the collarbones of shallow shelving rock)
And went their ways.


continued here: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/avison/poem1.htm

General link to half a dozen of her poems, http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/avison/poems.htm

If I were to choose a volume, probably: http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Poems-Margaret-Avison/dp/0195408594/ref=sr_1_18?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239683963&sr=8-18

or perhaps for a pricier option:
http://www.amazon.com/Always-Now-Collected-Poems-Vol/dp/0889842620/ref=pd_sim_b_1
or
http://www.amazon.com/Always-Now-Collected-Poems-Vol/dp/0889842558/ref=pd_sim_b_3
or
http://www.amazon.com/Always-Now-Collected-Margaret-Avison/dp/0889842612/ref=pd_sim_b_3

[mortalterror]

Do you though, know of a translation of Camoes? I could only find a mediocre prose one from Penguin at the library, and I'm wondering if a good verse one exists.

I've just been using this one over at sacred-texts http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/lus/index.htm . I can't read the original Portugese but it looks alright.


Either way though, if you take Blake for instance, the thread would end up disappearing onto the Blake subforum, whereas if you take a modern-contemporary poet, we can keep it out here in the open. I think that was the brains behind the focus at any rate, that those poets already have subforum available, whereas these ones really don't - at least, that is why the first discussion on Yeats failed, because it kind of disappeared.

I don't think we have a Firdawsi forum, or one for Camoes, Ovid, or Petrarch for that matter. If the plan were to stay within the English language then we've already strayed with Pasternak and Montale.

[quasimodo1]

"Blake's Milton was a lengthy, ambitious project close to his heart. Long an admirer of Milton and Paradise Lost,

Blake in this work penned both a paean to Milton and a criticism of Milton's religious stance in Paradise Lost.

Although generally favorable to Milton, the poem chastises the poet for advocating reason over inspiration and for

denigrating sex as a base impulse.

To announce his purpose and his affinity with Milton, Blake appends Milton's famous phrase to his title page as an

explanation of his own purpose: "To justify the ways of God to men." In Blake's poem, Milton returns to earth a

hundred years after his death as a Christ-like figure, his coming prepared by Los, the personification of the

creative impulse. By his return, Milton is poised to destroy both Urizen, the symbol of restrictive Reason, and

Satan, the chief symbol of society's corruption.

Blake called Milton his "Grand Poem" and originally intended an epic of twelve books to rival Paradise Lost. However,

he completed only two books.

In the illustration reproduced here, Blake clearly depicts Milton in a Christ-like image." -----------------------

-MILTON: A POEM IN TWO BOOKS
1804
-------------- http://library.uncg.edu/depts/speccoll/exhibits/Blake/milton.html

[JBI]

I've just been using this one over at sacred-texts http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/lus/index.htm . I can't read the original Portugese but it looks alright.



I don't think we have a Firdawsi forum, or one for Camoes, Ovid, or Petrarch for that matter. If the plan were to stay within the English language then we've already strayed with Pasternak and Montale.

Read the end of the Poetry 3 club. The idea was that translations, as have been seen the past two times, created too many complications. As it is, Firdawsi is probably impossible to get in an unabridged form for cheap, and his sheer length perhaps makes him an impossible discussion subject for a book club. Really though, there isn't a Petrarch forum? There should be - I'm sure there are Petrarch translations going back to the Renaissance. And I'm pretty sure there is an Ovid forum. The problem is, if these things go on to the subforum, they kind of become limited.

[stlukesguild]

Well... if we're tossing the old guys into the mix I'm certainly always up for Blake... and I'd throw Thomas Traherne into the mix as well.:D

[quasimodo1]

John Suckling 1609-1642 --- http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/suckling/ --- " ’T is expectation makes a

blessing dear;
Heaven were not heaven if we knew what it were."
Against Fruition.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.accd.edu/Sac/english/bailey/traherne.htm --- The Thomas Traherne Page






( 1637 - 1674 )


Major Works
Alan Bradford has edited Selected Poems and Prose for Penguin, 1991.
Roman Forgeries ( 1673 ).
Christian Ethicks ( 1675 ).
Centuries. Edited by Bertram Dobell, 1908. Edited by H. M. Margoliouth. Oxford, 1958. Reprinted by Morehouse, 1985.
Poetical Works. Edited by Gladys I. Wade, 1932.
"News" from Bartleby.
Six Poems On Line

About Traherne
Gladys I. Wade, Thomas Traherne. Princeton, 1944; 1946.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/lus/index.htm --- The Lusiad
by Luis de Camõens
trans. by William Julius Mickle
[1776, edition of 1877] -------------------------------------- Columbus was a failure.

He utterly failed to accomplish what NASA would call his 'mission profile,' that is, to find a practical trade route

to India. Of course, he did get the biggest consolation prize in history...

Vasco da Gama, who sailed from Portugal in 1498, however, succeeded in achieving Columbus' goal. He rounded the Cape

of Good Hope and reached India. This accomplishment was memorialized shortly thereafter by this epic poem written by

a Portuguese sailor, Luis de Camõens. Unless you were raised speaking Portuguese, it is unlikely you've heard of

Camõens. However, if you were, you probably already know that he's considered the Portuguese Shakespeare, and the

Lusiads the Portuguese national epic.

Although there have been several attempts to translate the Lusiads into English, none have been very successful until

the 20th century. Notably, Richard Burton attempted a translation, but it has been universally criticized. Mickle's

translation is provided here, not because it is of exceptional literary quality, but because it is in the public

domain, and better than some of the rest. If you would like to read this poem casually, I recommend a modern

translation such as Landeg White's (see box on right), or William Atkinsons' prose translation of 1972 (in the

Penguin Classics).

Mickle employs ABAB couplets, where the original whereas Camõens used ottava rima, an ABABABCC form. He also took a

few liberties with the text. In the most egregious case, he inserts a 300 line naval engagement which is not found in

the original; he also omits an entire section where de Gama engages in questionable conduct. However, the editor of

this, the 1877 edition, indicates these sections. Mickle's footnotes are worth consulting for the wealth of

information on the classical references, as well as Portuguese history. However, some of his annotations must be

taken with a grain of salt, particularly his five page footnote in book X where he deprecates Chinese culture, for no

particular reason.

That said, Mickle is not entirely unreadable, and a thorough reading of this edition along with the apparatus is wel

[mortalterror]

If we are including a poetry sample for each of our submissions here is one for Petrarch. It is in the public domain and can be found here. http://www.archive.org/stream/secretofpetrarch00milluoft

And what is life itself? A space of toil,
A wrestling, a stage-play, a labyrinth
Of errors, or a game of mountebanks,
A desert, a morass, a land of briers,
An unploughed valley, or a crest unclomb:
Sombre its caves, and what wild beasts dwell there!
There is the stream of tears, the sea of woes,
Rest ever anxious, labour all for naught,
Hope without fruit, false pleasure but true pain,
Full breadth of poverty but empty wealth,
Inglorious honour, waste of all desire,
Adversity with never-stayned complaint,
The sting in all enjoyment, and the sweet,
Alas, not seldom bitter; a brief halt
At wayside inns; a dirty prison; a ship
Without a rudder; a blind man unled;
A stormy sea, a dangerous coast, a port
All doubtful,--with no dearth of monstrous wreck;
Hate, lust, and anger, virtue aye assumed,
Successful fraud labelled with honour's name,
Innocence scoffed at, faith held up to scorn,
And puffed-up science that no science is;
A land of ghosts and spectres, 'neath the reign
Of Lucifer and demons; or a sleep
Death ends and every dream. But yet some way
Remains, thank heaven, to good life, and hereafter
Unto the eternal.

And for Firdawsi, a complete translation which is in the public domain and far superior to that of Dick Davis' prose can be found at http://www.archive.org/stream/shahnama01firduoft .

----------"My lord! consider how time passeth
Like wind above us. Why should wise men fret?
It withereth the cheek of cercis-bloom,
It darkeneth the radiant spirit's eyes;
It is at first a gain and then a pain,
And when the pain is done we pass away.
Since then our couch is dust, our pillow brick,
Why plant to-day a tree whose roots will ever
Be drinking blood, whose fruit will be revenge?
The earth hath seen and will see many lords
With scimitar and throne and signet-ring
Like us; but they who wore the crown of old
Made not a habit of revenge. I too,
The king permitting, will not live in ill.
I want not crown and throne. I will approach
My brothers in all haste and unattended,
And say 'My lords, dear as my soul and body!
Forbear your anger and abandon strife:
strife is unlovely in religious men.
Why set your hopes so much upon this world?
How ill it used Jamshid who passed away
At last, and lost the crown and throne and girdle!
And you and I at last must share his lot.
Live we in joy together and thus safe
From foes.' I will convert their vengeful hearts:
What better vengeance can I take than that?"

The English of John Suckling's poem Song is easily found.

Why so pale and wan fond lover?
Prithee why so pale?
Will, when looking well can't move her,
Looking ill prevail?
Prithee why so pale?

Why so dull and mute young sinner?
Prithee why so mute?
Will, when speaking well can't win her,
Saying nothing do't?
Prithee why so mute?

Quit, quit for shame, this will not move,
This cannot take her;
If of herself she will not love,
Nothing can make her;
The devil take her.

[quasimodo1]

Poets who have made the preliminary list include: William Matthews, Allen Tate, Medbh McGuckian, Susan Goyette, Margaret Allison, Fred Wah, Geofrey Hill, Anne carson, Anthony Hecht, William Blake, John Suckling, Thomas Traherne, Luis de Camoens (perhaps not included because he's in translation). Many other participants still need to add their choices. q1

[JBI]

The Writing philosophy of Fred Wah:


One makes (the) difference.

To say: "I don't undertand what this means," is, at least, to recognize that "this" means. The problem is that meaning is not a totality of sameness and predictability. Within each word, each sentence, meaning has slipped a little out of sight and all we have are traces, shadows, still warm ashes. The meaning available from language goes beyond the actual instance of this word, that word. A text is a place where a labyrinth of continually revealing meanings are available, a place that offers more possibility than we can be sure we know, sometimes more than we want to know. It isn't a container, static and apparent. Rather, it is noisy, frequently illegible. Reading into meaning starts with a questioning glance, a seemingly obvious doubloon on a mast. The multiplicity can be read, should be read, even performed. But then again, perhaps meaning is intransitive and unreadable, only meant to be made. No sooner do we name meaning than it seems to dissipate. As a sure thing, it eludes us. It arouses us to attempt an understanding, to interpret. But this is usually unsatisfying since whatever direction we approach from only leads us to suspect there is no one direction. No single meaning is the right one because no "right ones" stand still long enough to get caught. But because we do not know does not mean we are lost. Something that is strangely familiar, not quite what we expect, but familiar, is present. That quick little gasp in the daydream, a sudden sigh of recognition, a little sock of baby breath. Writing into meaning starts at the white page, nothing but intention. This initial blinding clarity needs to be disrupted before we're tricked into settling for a staged and diluted paradigm of the "real," the good old familiar, inherited, understandable, unmistakable lucidity of phrase that feels safe and sure, a simple sentence, just-like-the-last-time-sentence. One makes (the) difference. Meaning generates and amplifies itself, beyond itself, but never forgets; fragments of its memory and its potency exceed itself with meaning full of desire and can only be found hiding between the words and lines and in a margin large enough for further thought, music at the heart of thinking, go ahead.

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wah/write.htm

Biography:
Fred Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan in 1939, but he grew up in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. He studied music and English literature at the University of British Columbia in the early 1960's where he was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH. After graduate work in literature and linguistics at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the State University of New York at Buffalo, he returned to the Kootenays in the late 1960's where he taught at Selkirk College and was the founding coordinator of the writing program at David Thompson University Centre. He now teaches at the University of Calgary. He has been editorially involved with a number of literary magazines over the years, such as Open Letter and West Coast Line. He has published seventeen books of poetry. [....snip...]
[/quote]

from: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wah/bio.htm

[JBI]

Untitled by Fred Wah:



Untitled

IN THE DIAMOND, AT THE END OF A
long green vinyl aisle between booths of chrome, Naugahyde, and Formica, are two large swinging wooden doors, each with a round hatch of face-sized window. Those kitchen doors can be kicked with such a slap they're heard all the way up to the soda fountain. On the other side of the doors, hardly audible to the customers, echoes a jargon of curses, jokes and cryptic orders. Stack a hots! Half a dozen fry! Hot beef san! Fingers and tongues all over the place jibe and swear You mucka high!—Thloong you! And outside, running through and around the town, the creeks flow down to the lake with, maybe, a spring thaw. And the prairie sun over the mountains to the east, over my family's shoulders. The journal journey tilts tight-fisted through the gutter of the book, avoiding a place to start—or end. Maps don't have beginnings, just edges. Some frayed and hazy margin of possibility, absence, gap. Shouts in the kitchen. Fish an! Side a fries! Over easy! On brown! I pick up an order and turn, back through the doors, whap! My foot registers more than its own imprint, starts to read the stain of memory.

continued here: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wah/poem1.htm



Music at the Heart of Thinking Ninety-four

This is no mass synapse I'm after and I've known awhile now being lost is as simple as sitting on a log but the fumble jerked mystique clouds grabbing as the staked mistake or stacked and treasured garbage belongs familiar to a gardened world disturbed as heat


Continued here: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wah/poem3.htm



How to Hunt

Colour it brown
think about it
ahead of time
think about it
afterwards
listen to you
how alone you are
sitting on a log
in the forest
look at it about to happen
completely in your mind
and the world
all the trees
even the sky
size


Continued here: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wah/poem6.htm

Half a dozen poems: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wah/poems.htm



The subject matter of identity is also explored by Fred Wah as a recurrent topic in his prose poems written over several decades. Among Wah's dozen poetry collections... The p[ening poem of Waiting For Saskatchewan, starting with the title line, begins a chain of Wah's frequently-used signifier, foregrounding his mixed origins and family genealogy in composition:

waiting for saksatchewan
and the origins of grandparents countries places converged
europe asia railroads carpenters nailed grain elevators
he built on the street
and him cafes namely the "elite" or Center

The beginning of the poem illustrates Wah's poetic style of using fewer punctuations signs and more noun parallels. Wah only uses one set of quotation marks, a few commas, and some captialization in this poem. He parallels his nouns to each other, such as "Origins grandparents countries places" and "europe asia railroads carpenters." Without using verbs regularly to designate the relationship between the nouns as either subject or object, Wah positions the parallelled nouns as equal entitites in the line. Thus, rather than creating a traditional syntactic order of subject + verb + object, Wah's parallel nouns and run on lines produces a nonhierarchical relationship among the words, a paratactic sentence.

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


The search for his "genetic 'bag'" as a Eurasian leads the poet to take a physical journey to China. Grasp the Sparrow's Trail is a travel diary written during Wah's trip to mainland China via Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in search of his family's "bones." Each journal entry consists of two parts: an italicized prose passage recording the daily travel agenda and a poetic passage printed in normal font. This format itself embeds and embodies different dialogues: dialogues between the fonts, between the travelers (his wife Pauline, pp. 37, 38, 54), between the physical and psychological journeys, and between prose and poetry. While the poet's search for his genealogical roots in Canton is recieved doubtfully by the Chinese, since a Eurasian is not considered a Chinese, his mental dialogue with his father continues during the trip:

So what have I got going besides this "father" list?... I've misplaced the family information my mother gave me so I can't check out actual possible connections still here in the Canton region. I mention this to the guides and the others in our tour group, tell them my father was sent here as a child to be raised and educated by his Chinese relatives.

you were part Chinese. I tell them
They look at me. I'm pulling their leg.
So I'm Chinese too and that's why my name is Wah.
They don't really believe me. That's o.k.
When you're not "pure" you just make it up (43)

...


From Lien Chao, Beyond Silence, "A Discursive Strategy in Chinese Canadian Poetry", 131-134, 1997, TSAR Toronto.

[JBI]

The Mediterranean
by Allen Tate

Quen das finem, rex magne, dolorum?

Where we went in the boat was a long bay
a slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone--
Peaked margin of antiquity's delay,
And we went there out of time's monotone:

Where we went in the black hull no light moved
But a gull white-winged along the feckless wave,
The breeze, unseen but fierce as a body loved,
That boat drove onward like a willing slave:

Where we went in the small ship the seaweed
Parted and gave to us the murmuring shore
And we made feast and in our secret need
Devoured the very plates Aeneas bore:

Where derelict you see through the low twilight
The green coast that you, thunder-tossed, would win,
Drop sail, and hastening to drink all night
Eat dish and bowl--to take that sweet land in!

continued here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15304

Intro biography: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/16

[quasimodo1]

Allen Tate would be a primo choice for me. We still havn't heard from Dark Muse, Quark, Dapper Drake, Il Penseroso, Sofia 82, Jozanny (?), Dori, mayneverhave, saladin, Pensive, TheFifthElement, Petrarch's Love or alyssa1. Don't expect to hear from all the above...but anything close to half would be a plus. With or without them, a date will be set and a collection chosen....I expect by Saturday or so.

[JBI]

Quasi, check the end of the Book Club 3 thread - I think a shortlist of around 3-4 should be assembled before a real vote occurs.

[stlukesguild]

Anne Carson- Decreation

Anne Carson is an eminent classical scholar/translator. She has made acclaimed translations of Sapho, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (among others). As a poet, however, Carson is no staid academic classicist. She is an impulsive wandering omnivore whose books tend to be hybrids in which the boundaries are blurred between various genres -- poetry, prose, essay, drama, translation, criticism... even opera. Her writing presents an often surprising... even disorienting mixture of personalities: classical figures such as Sapho, Ovid, Longinus, Stesichoros, Herakles, Gyron, the medieval French heretic Marguerite Porete, Anna, the model for Pietro Vannucci (known as Perugino), Raphael's teacher, Virginia Woolf, the Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, etc... The figures are commonly imagined in a manner that is equally disorienting: Ovid in exile listening to the radio, the 15th century painter, Perugino and his model attending a phenomenology convention and discussing Heidegger, etc... Blended with these imagined and fantastic narratives, Carson presents us with lucid poems that explore her personal life. She is a post-modernist par excellence and one of the few Canadian authors to have moved beyond the provincialism of JBI's beloved Can-Lit.:D I've already read her books Plainwater and Autobiography of Red which I found both to be marvelous.

I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

-from Short Talks, Plainwater

On Ovid

I see him there on a night like this but cool, the moon blowing through the black streets. He sups and walks back to his room. The radio is on the floor. Its luminous green dial blares softly. He sits down at the table; people in exile write so many letters. Now Ovid is weeping. Each night at this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing. In his spare time he is teaching himself the local language (Getic) in order to compose in it an epic poem no one will ever read.

-from Plainwater

Cannicula di Anna

What we have here
is the story of a painter.
It occurs in Perugia
(ancient Perusia)
where lived the painter Pietro Vannucci
(c. 1445-1523)
who was called Perugino,
a contemporary of Michelangelo
and teacher of Raphael.
What do you need to know?...

In the story we have here
some philosophers of the present day
meet in conclave
upon the ancient rock of Perugia.
They seem to have commissioned,
for purposes of public relations,
a painter to record them
in pigments of the fifteenth century...

Famous phenomenologists of tutta l'Italia
have forgathered here.
They take things back to the sophists
then climb the stone stairs
for a heavy lunch.
There foreheads are not so tall
as the foreheads
of French phenomenologists
but they are much more good-natured...

It is perhaps not widely known
that a certain so-called Perugino
spent the years 1483 to 1486
covering with frescoes
that part of the Sistine Chapel
now immortalized by Michelangelo's Last Judgment.
which efforts were ruthlessly effaced
to make space for
his successor's more colossal genius...

Group Portrait: a special commission.
I paint the philosophers at table and
on the way to Being.
The bottle is difficult. I attempt
I attempt a color invented by Cimabue.
The phenomenologists engage in dialectic
about wine as vinegar.
To render the throat holes
(blackish red), I have acquired
sap of the tree draco dracaena (an expense
but the phenomenologists requested it)
or dragons' blood which, medieval legend
recounts, originally
soaked into the earth
during the epic wars
of elephants and dragons
thence to be gathered
by painters...

The phenomenologist from Paris hates mosquitoes
and carries a small electronic device
that lures the female mosquito to her death
by simulating the amorous cry of the male. Then,
to block the whining sound, he has pink earplugs.
As he sits in conversation
with the phenomenologist from Sussex
a mosquito is observed to enter.
The Englishman leaps to his feet,
calling, "Let us use the mosquito machine!"
and smashes the insect to the wall
with the device. It is the first sign
of wide ontological differences
that will open in the Anglo-French dialectic...

-from Plainwater

[stlukesguild]

Geoffrey Hill- The Triumph of Love

Amazon.com Review-
The Triumph of Love is a swan song for our most violent and turbulent of centuries. Geoffrey Hill has a reputation as a difficult poet, and it's true that this volume is no easy read, but it's by no means inaccessible, either. Forming a book-length poem divided into 150 sections, its free verse is rich with allusions from Petrarch to the Scott expedition and dense with the weight of history and philosophy. Hill takes nothing less than suffering as his subject, and his poems aren't shy about staring evil straight in the face--in particular, the Holocaust, an evil compounded by our inability to distinguish one of its victims from the next: "this, and this, / the unique face, indistinguishable, this, these, choked in a cess-pit of leaking Sheol." If the subject matter is uniformly somber, the style is not. Fragmented, colloquial, often interrupted by editorial asides, parodies, and snatches of song, The Triumph of Love marks something of a departure from the stately formalism of Hill's earlier books. Through it all runs the self-interrogating, self-mocking voice of the poet, questioning his right to write about such matters as well as the language he uses to do so. In the end, however, Hill finds that the elegy itself is the only answer to the questions history poses. "What / Ought a poem to be?" he asks himself, and answers (three times), "a sad and angry consolation." Widely recognized as one of Britain's distinguished poets, here Hill has produced a memorably sad and angry consolation for "a nation / with so many memorials but no memory."

http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Love-Geoffrey-Hill/dp/0618001832/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239768047&sr=1-3

"Geoffrey Hill must by now... be indisputably the best living poet in English and perhaps in the world. By the best poet I mean... the strongest and the deepest. He is the great cellist of contemporary poets... If one had to choose a contemporary poet in English whom Boris Pasternak would recognize, whom George Seferis and T.S. Eliot would take seriously, Geoffrey Hill is the most obvious choice."- Peter Levi

Geoffrey Hill is a marvelous... yet demanding poet. He is a poet of great formal solidity whose poetry confronts the most weighty issues: religious belief in the post-modern world, war and retribution, and lamentation for the human condition. His language grandiose... rigorous... with echoes of Milton and Hopkins. Perhaps the best description I've read of his verse is by fellow poet, Seamus Heaney, who declared that in Geoffrey Hill's poetry words "fall slowly and singly, like molten solder, and accumulate to a dull glowing nub."

The Eve of St. Mark

Stroke the small silk with your whispering hands,
godmother; nod and nod from the half-gloom;
broochlight intermittent between the fronds,
the owl immortal in its crystal dome.

Along the mantelpiece veined lustres trill,
the clock discounts us with a telling chime.
Familiar ministrants, clerks-of-appeal,
burnish upon the threshold of the dream:

churchwardens in wing-collars bearing scrolls
of copy-hold well-tinctured and well-tied.
Your photo album loved by the boy-king

preserve in sepia waterglass the souls
of distant cousins, virgin til they died,
and the lost delicate suitors who could sing.

-from Lachrime, New and Collected Poems 1952-1992

[quasimodo1]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=433 --- Samuel Beckett poetry --- ""He wanders among

misty bogs turned surreal, he talks to the wee folk of his own bad dreams, he files reports on introspected black

visions with a kind of blarney eloquence. Like an actress cradling a doll for her stage baby, his language keens and

croons about tales that are not quite there." Melvin Maddocks is talking about Samuel Beckett, a literary legend of

the twentieth century. "It is neither night nor morning. A man must find himself without the support of groups, or

labels, or slogans," writes R. D. Smith. And Beckett, by removing his characters from nearly all recognizable

contexts, Smith continues, is "engaged in finding or saving" himself. Martin Esslin writes: "What is the essence of

the experience of being? asks Beckett. And so he begins to strip away the inessentials. What is the meaning of the

phrase 'I am myself'? he asks . . . and is then compelled to try to distinguish between the merely accidental

characteristics that make up an individual and the essence of his self." A Time reviewer noted: "Some chronicle men

on their way up; others tackle men on their way down. Samuel Beckett stalks after men on their way out." Such is the

tone of most discussions of Beckett's work. But no single reviewer could communicate the unique power of Beckett's

writing, his use of "a language in which the emptiness of conventional speech is charged with new emotion." "While

[his] lesser colleagues work in rhetoric," writes Smith, Beckett produces poetry. "Well," says Harold Pinter, "I'll

buy his goods, hook, line, and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a

body of beauty. His work is beautiful." Leo Bersani, somewhat less politely, writes: "I know of no writer who has

come closer than Beckett in his novels to translating the rhythms of defecation into sentence structure." quoted from

The Poetry Foundation --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SERENA I by Samuel Beckett

without the grand old British Museum
Thales and the Aretino
on the bosom of the Regent’s Park the phlox
crackles under the thunder
scarlet beauty in our world dead fish adrift
all things full of gods
pressed down and bleeding
a weaver-bird is tangerine the harpy is past caring
the condor likewise in his mangy boa
they stare out across monkey-hill the elephants
Ireland
the light creeps down their old home canyon
sucks me aloof to that old reliable
the burning btm of George the drill
ah across the way a adder
broaches her rat
white as snow
in her dazzling oven strom of peristalsis
limae labor ... {excerpt}

[mortalterror]

I'm looking at the Carson fragment on Ovid and thinking it's very Hemingway in the way it portrays the expatriot life and how I hadn't really considered him from that perspective before. However, when I read Mrs. Carson's allusion laden poetry it makes me want to read the originals, she so esteems, rather than her own poetry. The bit about the painter is well done, but it's no Fra Lippo Lippi (http://classweb.gmu.edu/rnanian/Browning-FraLippoLippi.html), and she is no Robert Browning.

[Mr.Cloop]

I'm looking at the Carson fragment on Ovid and thinking it's very Hemingway in the way it portrays the expatriot life and how I hadn't really considered him from that perspective before. However, when I read Mrs. Carson's allusion laden poetry it makes me want to read the originals, she so esteems, rather than her own poetry. The bit about the painter is well done, but it's no Fra Lippo Lippi (http://classweb.gmu.edu/rnanian/Browning-FraLippoLippi.html), and she is no Robert Browning.

I completely agree

[quasimodo1]

Poetry Bookclub 4 seems to have suffered some depopulation, judging by how many former participants did not respond.

I make no assumptions about this, Godot in heaven knows how many times I've lapsed from participation. For many

sound reasons and some enthusiasm ... these are the eleven poets we have to choose from at this time. Sunday will be

the deadline for added suggestions. Here are the poets and the corresponding collection (which is not fixed in

stone). Fred Wah, SO FAR and DIAMOND GRILL. Seamus Heaney, THE HAW LANTERN and SEEING THINGS. Samuel Beckett,

COLLECTED POEMS: 1930-1978 and COLLECTED POEMS IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH. Mebdh McGuckian, ON BALLYCASTLE BEACH and

SHELMALIER. Susan Goyette, THE TRUE NAMES OF BIRDS and UNDONE. Anne Carson, DECREATION and GLASS, IRONY AND

GOD. Allen Tate, THE WINTER SEA, A BOOK OF POEMS and COLLECTED POEMS, 1919-1976. Anthony Hecht, THE DARKNESS

AND THE LIGHT, POEMS and THE VENETIAN VESPERS, POEMS. Geoffrey Hill, THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE AND THE ORCHARDS OF

SYON. Margaret Avinson, ALWAYS NOW: THE COLLECTED POEMs and CONCRETE AND WILD CARROT. William Matthews, RISING

AND FALLING: POEMS and SEARCH PARTY: COLLECTED POEMS.

[Virgil]

My vote goes to William Matthews. But all of the selections seem interesting. Where is St Lukes? Will he participate?

[quasimodo1]

Virgil, Stlukes is out there trying to outflank the sagging economy which is why he's been less visable. He'll get to us soon. Which collection of Matthews did you like (and feel free to choose any poetry collection of his. My vote would be for him as well, although Beckett does seem the most challenging.

[Virgil]

Oh I have no idea on the different collections. Which did you prefer?

[quasimodo1]

"Search Party" recieved the most critical comment, mostly good but there are other authors/commentators within. I'll try to find a piece from the work which, if possible, I'll post on "fragments".

[Dark Muse]

I would have to go for Seamus Heaney

[quasimodo1]

That makes two for Heaney and two for Matthews.

[JBI]

I vote Anne Carson. Though, as a second I would probably pick Geoffry Hill. Matthews doesn't really excite me, and to be honest, I have read Heaney to death already (including his translations), as well as studied him to an extent formally.

[quasimodo1]

Carson, Heaney and Matthews all have two votes.

[stlukesguild]

I'd probably go with Hill on my own... but all things considered, I'll throw my vote to Carson.

[stlukesguild]

By the way... the economy hasn't bee touching me much this week. I'm on Spring Break and I've just been spending nearly every free moment painting in my studio... indeed, that's where I'm off to in a few minutes.:wave:

[JBI]

I'd probably go with Hill on my own... but all things considered, I'll throw my vote to Carson.

Heh, I would have voted Hill if I thought he had a chance, but I figured I would probably be the only one who wanted him.

[quasimodo1]

Changing your votes is still an option.

[Jozanny]

My refrain is the same as it was before I left in late January. If Vine Street doesn't have the collection so I can read it, I don't see how yours truly can participate--given this caveat, however, I will vote for Avison.

I have been through hell and back these last six weeks, and when I saw that quasi pm'd me, even such a small thing as being a regular in these forums is enough to make me bawl and turn florid with emotion, the difference being, I still don't have a power chair, and my landlord has destroyed my writing life, but in the baby step scheme of things, Geek Squad saved my sanity by getting my pc back up just this afternoon. Not much of a greeting on my part to everyone, but okay, yes, I've missed you.

[JBI]

My refrain is the same as it was before I left in late January. If Vine Street doesn't have the collection so I can read it, I don't see how yours truly can participate--given this caveat, however, I will vote for Avison.

I have been through hell and back these last six weeks, and when I saw that quasi pm'd me, even such a small thing as being a regular in these forums is enough to make me bawl and turn florid with emotion, the difference being, I still don't have a power chair, and my landlord has destroyed my writing life, but in the baby step scheme of things, Geek Squad saved my sanity by getting my pc back up just this afternoon. Not much of a greeting on my part to everyone, but okay, yes, I've missed you.

Darn - had I known you would vote Avison :(. It's a shame too, since she never comes up on these boards, yet was quite the gifted poet, whereas I am certain Carson will surface a few more times yet.

Welcome back. It's been a while, how has everything been treating you?

[Virgil]

My refrain is the same as it was before I left in late January. If Vine Street doesn't have the collection so I can read it, I don't see how yours truly can participate--given this caveat, however, I will vote for Avison.

I have been through hell and back these last six weeks, and when I saw that quasi pm'd me, even such a small thing as being a regular in these forums is enough to make me bawl and turn florid with emotion, the difference being, I still don't have a power chair, and my landlord has destroyed my writing life, but in the baby step scheme of things, Geek Squad saved my sanity by getting my pc back up just this afternoon. Not much of a greeting on my part to everyone, but okay, yes, I've missed you.

Can I change my vote? If Jozy stays I'll take any thing she wishes.

[JBI]

Can I change my vote? If Jozy stays I'll take any thing she wishes.

Yeah, me too.

[quasimodo1]

All voting is still open to changes; somewhere near Sunday I suppose, we ought to focus on the last vote.

[Jozanny]

Aw Virgil. I owe you an apology so please accept that I am sorry. I'll leave it at that. If you don't remember pull your email before Sodahead. Back on topic: I have no particular preference for the nominations--of them all Avison intrigues me, but no big deal either way, except I agree with JBI on Heaney.

[quasimodo1]

These are the preferences as noted from the posts (Poetry Bookclub 4). Please contact me to correct or change your choice. Once the poet is decided, we'll arrive at some consensus on the collection. Seamus Heaney [Dark Muse, Kafka's Crow?] Anne Carson [JBI, stlukesguild] Allen Tate [mortalterror] Margaret Avinson [Jozanny] William Matthews [Virgil, quasimodo1]. Some of you were about to change your vote but in any case, please advise on changes or corrections. Since many former enthusiasts have not replied, let's make Tuesday a loose deadline. If it all comes together by tomorrow, so be it.

[quasimodo1]

http://jacketmagazine.com/29/avison.html --- 8 poems by Margaret Avinson

THE WORLD STILL NEEDS

Frivolity is out of season.
Yet, in this poetry, let it be admitted
The world still needs piano-tuners
And has fewer, and more of these
Grey fellows prone to liquor
On an unlikely Tuesday, gritty with wind,
When somewhere behind windows,
A housewife stays for him until the
Hour of the uneasy bridge-club cocktails
And the office rush at the groceteria
And the vesper-bell and lit-up buses passing
And the supper trays along the hospital corridor,
Suffering from
Sore throat and dusty curtains.
{excerpt, one of three stanzas}

[Jozanny]

If I may make another aside? (Me and my digressions!) I did start reading the Tate collection I purchased, and I am not disappointed, even though I just started with his early and more formal stanzas, but I did not swing my vote to him because I am still absorbing, and two, I'd have to find the text to join in. I think it is in my big plastic bin--but he would be my second choice if that gives mortal some heft.

[JBI]

I think I'll change to Avison, just because, now it seems like she has some chance of winning, whereas before I doubted anyone else would vote for her.

[Jozanny]

I think I'll change to Avison, just because, now it seems like she has some chance of winning, whereas before I doubted anyone else would vote for her.

I did not mean to slight Carson with that pick either;), but the samples luke provided in the past sort of gave me her number, and Avison seems to have some pleasant codes worth unraveling, at least at the moment, which would surprise my expections, and this is much to assume on so little familiarity, but there you go.

[JBI]

I did not mean to slight Carson with that pick either;), but the samples luke provided in the past sort of gave me her number, and Avison seems to have some pleasant codes worth unraveling, at least at the moment, which would surprise my expections, and this is much to assume on so little familiarity, but there you go.

Avison is quite the surprisor - her last book of verse just came out a few weeks ago (posthumously), and is supposed to be quite good as well. Really though, her career spanned near 50 years, which is just staggering, given that she is one of the last remnants of the transitional generation of late-modernism into post-modernism in Canadian verse. But even so, it's rather a shame no one on your side of the boarder pays much attention to her, as she was undoubtedly as skilled as I think Carson is - the difference between them, I would think, is Carson is rooted in both the post-modern tradition and in the Classical tradition, whereas Avison is far wilder and harder to categorize, and I think as a public, readers love to be able to categorize things. There is a great Code, that of Classical literature, sounding behind Carson, which makes her easier to translate, to some extent, whereas Avison is quite different:

For everyone
The swimmer's moment at the whirlpool comes,
But many at that moment will not say
"This is the whirlpool, then."
By their refusal they are saved
From the black pit, and also from contesting
The deadly rapids, and emerging in
The mysterious, and more ample, further waters.

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/avison/poem7.htm

The closest I can come to situating her within the tradition is to place her, both chronologically and poetically, behind modernist poets like P. K. Page (who I know had an affect on her work) but even so, the symbols aren't reliant on structural traditions, but rather on images taken outside of the tradition, and worked into a sort of metaphysical/meditative context. Perhaps in that sense, there is an echo of something like Wallace Stevens, but if there is, it is rather faint. Of course, this perhaps doesn't sound so spectacular, coming from post-modern perspectives, where we are as used to seeing a tin can as a symbol as we are an apple, but I think there is something beyond that - a sense of symbolism that exists in a stance before post-modernism, or perhaps outside of it - somewhere between what we would call the poetics of modernism, and yet somehow before, and apart from the poetics of post-modernism.

[quasimodo1]

JBI: Margaret Avison does suprise, expecially since for me, she is a fresh voice. It's amazing how effective the Canada-Us border is when it comes to poetry. Otherwise it's just osmosis through a semi-permeable membrane. Now as for the new vote tally...let me try to get this right... First, I have a pm to Kafka's Crow to confirm his vote. Also Mr. Cloop, even though he made just one post, I sent him an invite. As it stands now, notwithstanding the former comments, Heaney has Dark Muse and Kafka's Crow(?)...Anne Carson has Stlukesguild... Allen Tate has mortalterror... Avison has Jozanny, Virgil and JBI. It seems there is a swing vote...that would be me. Looks like at this point the Avison's have it.

[Jozanny]

I'll need to know what title we are going with, then I will try to remember my password at Amazon...

[quasimodo1]

addendum: I've been wanting to see Tate or Matthews on this thread for some time but now, in the light of other's preferences, I am, as happens so often, waffling.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2007/08/10/margaret-avison-obit.html --- Canadian poet Margaret Avison dies at 89
Last Updated: Friday, August 10, 2007 | 5:41 PM ET
CBC Arts
------------------------------------------------ "Canadian poet Margaret Avison, described as "one of the great religious poets" of the 20th century, has died at age 89.

Avison died last week in Toronto. No cause of death has been released.

Avison won the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize four years ago and was twice winner of the Governor General's Award for poetry in a literary career that spanned 40 years.

Her first book of poetry, The Winter Sun, was published in 1960 and she became a "committed Christian" in 1963, often writing about her faith.

Many critics compare her work to the great metaphysical poets of the 17th century.

"It was a private religious conviction," said Joseph Zezulka, an English professor at the University of Western Ontario and friend of Avison.

"She was kindliness itself. She had so much tolerance and charity for her fellow beings, and I think that's the important thing about her Christianity.

"Her contribution to Canadian literature was incalculable," he said, adding that she had an international following."

[quasimodo1]

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?WRD=Always+Now%3A+The+Collected+Poems --- --- --- --- http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?WRD=Concrete+and+Wild+Carrot The Barnes and Noble bookmarks for each collection including prices.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Always+Now%3A+The+Collected+Poems&x=19&y=13 ---- http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Concrete+and+Wild+Carrot&x=15&y=16 Same links on Avison's collections via Amazon

[quasimodo1]

Art has antennae always
in peril of pouncers, yet in-
domitably threading off into a
passing breeze. Art finds us
burrowing through our days, so
unroofs all usual places for
moments, irreversibly.
Old age excels
in listening. Voices sound
down the long corridors. This
opens beyond an unforeseen
gateway. To lift its
magic latch takes quiet
breathing. Curiosity is
unexacting, but expects
no less.

Toronto trees display the full
gamut of greens. These,
not the trees, age
in gold.
{excerpt...last two stanzas from "Soundings"}

[Quark]

Many critics compare her work to the great metaphysical poets of the 17th century.

That would be interesting--a contemporary poet with a 17th style. I think it would be a great thing. There isn't enough cleverness in today's poetry. Much of it is still locked in that 19th century dogma that poetry has to be all about quivering sensibility.


Art has antennae always
in peril of pouncers, yet in-
domitably threading off into a
passing breeze. Art finds us
burrowing through our days, so
unroofs all usual places for
moments, irreversibly.
Old age excels
in listening. Voices sound
down the long corridors. This
opens beyond an unforeseen
gateway. To lift its
magic latch takes quiet
breathing. Curiosity is
unexacting, but expects
no less.

Toronto trees display the full
gamut of greens. These,
not the trees, age
in gold.

I don't know if this one is really metaphysical, though. In fact, it still rings very 19th C. It sounds like the poet is saying art liberates one from the narrow-minded drudgery of ordinary life. We're "burrowing through our days" and art "unroofs" us. It's a message that resonates with a lot of what was said in the Victorian period. Mill tells us that poetry overcomes the "factitious tendencies" set up by education and everyday business to reunite readers with their "natural" feelings and associations. Avison seems like she's reaching for something similar here.

[Jozanny]

JBI: We may need genre in both a synchronic and diachronic flow through culture, borrowing from Coletta, who I am reading, uneasily, and trying not to email her in my ignorance of a really textual pruning, which she is attempting in Plotting The Past, but what I do is tend to disown genre rather quickly, and wait for the likes of Eco to push and complete the boundaries, but I like authors who refuse ease of placement, which is why I tired of the Beats long ago. I tend to like defiance in that way, and without knowing anything of Avison except a quick Google search before I voted, here, I think, is the defiance of personal conviction, muted, to be sure, but another poet can feel it in the simplicity of how she uses whirlpool in your excerpt--which to me seems to say: Most of us avoid suffering and the cost of going through it, though her trope makes it elusive. Not Romantic, but not quite the post-modern need to fragment without a holistic approach either. Eliot takes his personal conviction and lobs it, in relation to faith amid the death of world order, but Avison isn't firing a canon so much as offering another way, a different cohesion, a reminder of community perhaps. I cannot share her conviction, but I can respect it, and perhaps what she is offering through it. I will see if Vine has any titles first, before I check Amazon. I have to unpack, ease my duress, find my way back to my work--which I have started by meditating online most of the afternoon. Right now isn't the best time for me to be buying books, given what the movers damaged in throwing me and the objects in my life around. They broke my Moby Dick edition in half, and I having stopped crying yet. I know it is just stuff, most of it worthless, the extension of a failed writer still fighting, but this is my life that keeps getting taken apart, and I suppose my anger keeps me as much alive as what it corrodes. I had no idea this woman could speak to it, and it is a shame she so recently passed.

[quasimodo1]

Apparently, this group, and especially JoZ doesn't need a text to make the leep into analysis. As for your comment in that last posting, your writing reminded me of some of the best critics available and it's totally safe to say that "failure" is no prognosis for you as a scribe. While "real life" in all it's extremes and commonalities can bring anyone crashing into a not so sublime earth, whatever spark is required, you certainly have it. All that aside, there hasn't been a choice of text for Avison and although semi-stricly speaking we have until Tue for any kind of turnaround...it almost a given Avison will be the poet. I would choose ALWAYS NOW: THE COLLECTED POEMS since it encompasses more of her work but CONCRETE AND WILD CARROT, is an unknown source and therefore perhaps a period of her work which will have it's individual if not specialized content. Another round of preference, please.

[Virgil]

I lean to the collected works, given that I've never read her before and probably should experience a broad range of her work. But I can go either way.

[JBI]

I lean to the collected works, given that I've never read her before and probably should experience a broad range of her work. But I can go either way.

You do realize they are in 3 volumes, and are quite a few poems? I'm for one anthology, or perhaps one volume of the collected poems. It doesn't particularly concern me, as my public library has a large stock of resources on Avison (I'm going to be grabbing a little criticism to go with the discussion), but I think that 3 20$ books isn't really a good idea.

[quasimodo1]

Regarding the collections and their prices. Amazon is asking 19.95 for Volume 3 of ALWAYS NOW... / b&N's price for the same collection is approx 10.00. Amazon's price for CONCRETE AND WILD CARROT IS 7.20 / b&n's price is 13.50 for members...15.00 otherwise. There are some used books available for alot less. Since there are three volumes of ALWAYS NOW, volume three is the most available and most recent.

[quasimodo1]

Margaret Avison: Power, Knowledge and the Language of Poetry
by J.M. Kertzer


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

"Margaret Avison’s poetry is prompted and sustained by a sense of power to which the poems themselves give access.

They dramatize her efforts to contact the sources of that power and to gain the knowledge it permits, a contact that

is discouraged by the cynical frame of mind of modern man and so must be won through poetic effort, a knowledge that

is inhibited by his misplaced faith in reason. This power is the fundamental energy of being, a vitality displayed

by the natural world which her poems examine and celebrate; it is the energy of human apprehension and understanding,

granted by the combined forces of reason and imagination, or the rational imagination; and it is the transforming

energy of Christian faith. Recognition of, contact with and assent to these powers provide what Avison has called “a

truly inner knowing”1: an accurate and profound perception of the world and oneself, of the flesh and the spirit, of

the relation between nature, man and God. Power is knowledge, knowledge is power, and for the poet, both are

sustained by language. The creative word — which, at different points in her career, Avison expresses as the Greek

logos, a magical spell or invocation, a prayer, Christ as The Word — generates the power and conveys the wisdom that

the poet seeks. Poetic language is itself a means of power and knowledge." {excerpt from a longer and excellent

essay on Margaret Avison} --- http://www.uwo.ca/english/canadianpoetry/cpjrn/vol04/kertzer.htm

[quasimodo1]

Before anyone goes buying the text for Avison, be advised (as I learned the expensive way) that the entire text of CONCRETE AND WILD CARROT is contained in ALWAYS NOW, VOLUME THREE. 17.95 for the latter and 13.50 for the former. Research done the hard way. B&N, without trying to lay in a plug for that outfit, had them in store in four days.

[Virgil]

You guys have completely sold me on Avison. I had never heard of her. Just tell me which book to buy. I'm intrigued. :)

[quasimodo1]

Virgil, That's the thing, within ALWAYS NOW, Volume Three is the complete text of CONCRETE AND WILD CARROT. So there's only one choice really when for just a few dollars more you get three collections in that volume.

[Virgil]

Virgil, That's the thing, within ALWAYS NOW, Volume Three is the complete text of CONCRETE AND WILD CARROT. So there's only one choice really when for just a few dollars more you get three collections in that volume.

Ok great have we decided? When will this be final?

[quasimodo1]

I would say yes, I'm looking at the reciept and there's 4.45 difference between the collected poems and the smaller collection. So there we are...the subject of of poetry bookclub 4 ....ALWAYS NOW, Volume Three.

[Virgil]

Ok, I'll probably order by this weekend.

[quasimodo1]

Excerpt from "A Note on the Text" "...All of the poems in ALWAYS NOW having been considered and reconsidered, and small corrections having been made, the book contains definitively all of the published poems up to 2002 that Margaret Avison wishes to preserve."

[quasimodo1]

Margaret Avison, Writing Philosophy


(NOT Prescriptive) Initiate a poem only under compulsion. Hear the meaning, writing with a fix on the focus. Monitor the voice of the piece. If the focus lingers, overnight e.g., add or cut to clarify or simplify or complete the statement of the focus. After time has elapsed, reread rigorously, and revise--learned late from not doing it enough.





http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/avison/write.htm

[quasimodo1]

THE DUMBFOUNDING


When you walked here,
took skin, muscle, hair,
eyes, larynx, we
withheld all honor: "His house is clay,
how can he tell us of his far country ?"

Your not familiar pace
in flesh, across the waves,
woke only our distrust.
Twice-torn we cried "A ghost"
and only on our planks counted you fast.

Dust wet with your spittle
cleared mortal trouble.
We called you a blasphemer,
a devil-tamer.

The evening you spoke of going away
we could not stay.
All legions massed. You had to wash, and rise,
alone, and face
out of the light, for us.

You died.
We said,
"The worst is true, our bliss
has come to this."

When you were seen by men
in holy flesh again
we hoped so despairingly for such report
we closed their windpipes for it.

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.sentex.ca/~pql/always4.html An introduction to Margaret Avison's poetry.

[JBI]

THE DUMBFOUNDING


When you walked here,
took skin, muscle, hair,
eyes, larynx, we
withheld all honor: "His house is clay,
how can he tell us of his far country ?"

Your not familiar pace
in flesh, across the waves,
woke only our distrust.
Twice-torn we cried "A ghost"
and only on our planks counted you fast.

Dust wet with your spittle
cleared mortal trouble.
We called you a blasphemer,
a devil-tamer.

The evening you spoke of going away
we could not stay.
All legions massed. You had to wash, and rise,
alone, and face
out of the light, for us.

You died.
We said,
"The worst is true, our bliss
has come to this."

When you were seen by men
in holy flesh again
we hoped so despairingly for such report
we closed their windpipes for it.

{excerpt}

Hmm, I may be wrong, but I think it is safe to say she is talking about Jesus?

[quasimodo1]

Avison's poetry (and life) have the religious persuasion built into them and for myself, it's not important that my lack of organized religion as a meaningful thing comes into play at all. So far as I've read, she's a poet of great subtlety and economy and adds intense sincerety to the equation as well. Unique, completely unique.

[Jozanny]

Perhaps JBI, but seems to me she is playing off, or alluding to Eliot, though I could be terribly wrong.

I apologize to you all for my lagging here. My helper and I keep missing each other to finish up. My erstwhile father isn't coming by until later this week, if I am lucky to get that at all, and if we are keeping score, and substitute J for K, I am at the stage, in Kafka's famous piece, before I am willingly sacrificed by the plunging knife to my heart. The owner of a backgammon league once called me a drama queen, and that is true, charge accepted, but my hope has been simply and magnificently stripped away through their lack of competence and my own inability to assert myself better. I had a small box in my kitchen with some old issues of Small Press Review (and I am presently not sure my copy with my byline which was so pleasing to receive from Len, survived; it was in my publication copies in the closet) and DoubleTakes, which were irreplaceable. The volunteer threw them out, and I only have the one surviving issue of DT.

It was a beautiful photojournal with challenging articles and memoirs, contributions from friends. Wiped out because some stupid and rushed former housing manager did not stop to ask me if it wasn't trash, and I fortunately couldn't drive into her in the kitchen in hopes of at least breaking her leg.

I am 46 years old, and I cannot keep fighting these battles with society for the right to my autonomy, for the struggle to my voice to be heard. It is genuinely starting to overwhelm me, and I cannot use Avison's hard-on for the Incarnate. It must be nice, to really believe that a two-thousand year old radicalized rabbi is the *key* to all of this, a transmutation toward peace and triumph. I understand its power, and used to try to live in that belief, and I've been splitting apart like old wine skin ever since.

[stlukesguild]

The poem reminds me, in some ways, of Rilke's The Raising of Lazarus:

Yes, it was necessary for this common sort,
since they required signs, signs that screamed.
Yet he dreamt how for Martha and Mary
it would be enough simply to see
That he could. But none of them believed,
they all said to him, Lord, why come now?
And so he went, to do the unallowed
to peaceful nature.
In anger. His eyes almost shut,
he asked where the grave was. Tormentedly.
It seemed to them that his tears streamed,
and they thronged behind him full of curiosity.
Even on the way he thought it monstrous,
an appalling, frivolous experiment,
but suddenly a great fire broke out in him,
such an argument
against their prized distinctions,
their death and life, their here and there,
that he was enmity in every limb
when he instructed hoarsely, Lift the Stone!
A voice shouted that he must stink by now
(for he'd lain there four days) but He
stood tensed, entirely filled with that gesture
which rose in him and heavily, so heavily
lifted his hand- (no hand had ever raised itself
so slowly- with this much weight)
until it stood there, shining in the air;
and then it clenched, almost clawlike:
for now he dreaded that all the dead might
come rushing back through the suction
of that tomb, where the thing had started
to writhe up, larvae-like, from its stiff reclining-
but then just a single shape stood there,
crooked in the daylight, and one witnessed:
the inexact, vague Life again accept it.

tr. Edward Snow excerpted from Ranier Maria Rilke: Uncollected Poems

[Jozanny]

Another way to look at it JBI, is she is using the radical transformative event of the Incarnate Being, to take an ironic jab at the natural tendency to be hostile: to the outsider in our own neighborhood, to the pure, to the vulnerability of innocence, because it lays claim to a certain kind of superiority.

I don't want to purchase any of her collections, however, so, as usual, I will be doing this on the wing, if I do it at all.

[Jozanny]

I like "Not the Sweet Cicely of Gerardes Herball" better than her evocation to the Christ up there. This, from the first stanza,


It unscrolls, glistening,
Where else the stones are white,
Sky blue.
No beetles move. No birds pass over.
The stone house is cold.
The cement has crumbled from the steps.
The gardens here, or fields,
Are weedless, not from cultivation but from
Sour unfructifying November gutters,
From winds that bore no fennel seeds,
Finally, from a sun purifying, harsh, like
Sea-salt.

invites comparisons, to me, with Vassar Miller, who I have cited on the forum before, if you remember:


Vassar Miller

Love Song for the Future

To our ruined vineyards come,
Little foxes, for your share
Of our blighted grapes, the tomb
Readied for our common lair
Ants, we open you the cupboard;
Flee no more the heavy hand
Harmless as a vacant scabbard
Since our homes like yours are sand.

She says in her article that she likes American poets. JBI, is the title a Canadian landmark? In my late 20's, I published some poetry about Canada, because I almost had an affair with my Beat editor, but his wife confronted me during her divorce proceedings. I did not learn my lesson until I fell in love later, and then I did ... the good old days:lol:

Now I could probably make some money playing one of Macbeth's witches. (sigh)

[Virgil]

Om my gosh you guys have started. I forgot to order the book over the weekend. I'll go and order it tonight and hopefully it will get here my next week. :blush:

[Virgil]

Can someone tell me which book to buy? Is it the three volume , Always Now: The Collected Poems?

[JBI]

Yeah, the final volume.

[Virgil]

Yeah, the final volume.

Oh, just volume 3. Thanks.

[Jozanny]

Only with Google could I have figured out so quickly that she was referencing a historical bontanist. I do things like that, and sometimes my editors yell at me until I learned to draw out the trope better. I am not going to Paley, which probably does have her. I am not taking the C bus in this tin can. I am not going to U of Penn. I cannot check out there, and I am not buying any texts until things get better for me, if not worse, so big old Vine Street will have to do. Maybe Wednesday. We shall see.

***
And I was wrong, it will not be today. I know none of you can ease things for me in practical terms, but I haven't been in the best of shape since before March, let alone after what the relocation team did to me and what it will cost me eventually. I am hoping, by late this afternoon, that I can start pitching again. I need to get back to work, despite my psychological duress.

I will join in when I can if I can, maybe a couple of days.

[quasimodo1]

from Always Now, Volume Three
from Concrete and Wild Carrot

THE CRUX

Ever see somebody hit bedrock
too messed up to
say so too
hopeless a mess to get his chin
far enough off the ground to
even give in?
deadbeat?

Know what that's like yourself?

Now can you credit
anyone figuring he had to
steer his fair steady days and nights
deliberately
to some as yet (I'm guessing)
point of light beyond that
abysmal (other people's) living
end?
right down, past, the dead end
to the worst? There wasn't
a 'Lamb of God' for the
then lamb the wolf had torn.
But there gleamed
the point.

{excerpt}

[JBI]

To get this thing moving, since I haven't really been able to do any serious posting, because of exams, these past few weeks; let me get back to the first poem Quasi sent me. If anyone needs it, I'll forward it, but I think it is time to get into a little bit of close reading.




PACING THE TURN OF THE YEAR

A sudden season
has changed our world.
Everybody is out
to see, or bask, or
with their kind to exuberate.


The sudden changing implies a big step forward, the word exuberate seems to imply an overflowing - people are going outside to bask and see, which implies people were on edge, and remaining indoors.



Everything is new.


This line to me seems to be purposely hyperbolic. The opening of the poem comes off as overly confident, but I can't help but feel this line really is ironic, in the development, as what comes marks a very direct shift.



Trees that were only sticks
into the overcast
yesterday, are
soft and full of catkins
like newly shampooed children being
readied for the party.

Again, I feel a trace of hyperbole. This implies a certain freshness, and the youthful images imply a sort of coming into maturity, but readied for the party again has a dark layer floating over it, which will anticipate what is to follow. After all, the verb shampooed has a sense of someone else preforming the action, and of shaping these children for the occasion, and giving them this facade of cleanliness. The metaphor is unsettling to an extent, as it seems to be confident. The link between the Catkin, which would imply a blooming, and the shampoo, which would imply a grooming, seems to be rather difficult to believe. The metaphor doesn't seem to match well with the simile that follows it, and therefore creates a sense of presentation over reality.



Slender young saplings
shine, all the tender leaves
distinct, notes of music
atremble for a chance musician
strolling by to hear and
play -- for everybody, on bikes
or park benches or
wandering along


Again, the musicians are playing for someone, putting on the show, instead of just playing. The music of the trees feels arranged, and constructed for the passers by. The trees seem to be imbued with a romantic optimism, and seem to be constructed to show it. The strolling-day-in-the-park imagery that follows, implies a sense of natural pastoral, where everyone is relaxed, and not working.



the way
wended their way anywhere
on the odd quiet morning
the European war
was somehow ended; nobody
felt like cavorting, singing,
dancing, as their parents, 1918
in November, had.


Now the poem gets specific. We know we are now talking about the end of the Second World War, and the optimism of the people at it finally being concluded. However, the poem throws in a sharp jab here, by bringing up how the earlier generation had gone through the same thing, 27 years earlier. How then can a reader continue reading, without failing to notice that this dream of a better tomorrow wasn't actually a reality? There was a flaw in the end the last time, and this sense of false hope now begins to unsettle the poem.



A muted celebration
this sudden season.
All but the oak.


They had a muted celebration, and that implies that they had perhaps a darker finish. There was, I would think it can be argued, no cause for celebration after the First World War. Certainly for the Victors of the war, I would argue, there was a greater sense of having vanquished an enemy the second time. After all, World War 2 had more of an enemy surrendering feel to its end, rather than a ceasefire ending. And I think that is touched upon here. The Old oak, an Evergreen tree, which will take over a lot of the poem from this point onward, has not undergone anything. The Old grudges as misunderstandings still pervade the forest. The old hostilities are still there.



Rusty tatters left from far-off August's
leafy towers and gables,
in deeps and fullness, the amassing
in gloom and shadow of
greenness; now
ruined arthritic knobs and wrenched
limbs; next to nothing now
covering his nakedness.


Now the poem questions the destruction. These above lines don't seem to distinguish whether they are talking about the First or Second World War, and that seems to darken them. What is being focused is the pragmatic butchery, and not the celebration. The rawness of the world, and the damage - the celebrations of August - the month in which V. J. Day happened, and also referencing the summer season - are offset by the winter that follows, as people try to recover, and peace together what has happened - families are torn, countries in pieces, and generations of people wiped out - cities destroyed, and nuclear bombs dropped. The image of the naked man who dominates the end of the verse, then, seems to me a metaphor for an old, warn out world, which tries to cover itself up. Everything has been exposed - the butchery and the savageness of humanity - and there is no where to hide from this revelation.



The new is going to last?
These celebrants
toss their curls and
rollerblade past
the question.


Now then, the poem turns back on itself and asks the important question - after all this, has anything changed - this momentary peace and celebration for the end of fighting, is it really going to last, or are we just going to go back and do it all over again, which is what happened last time.



It was not posed by the
dour oaks,
stolider even than
the firs, their shabby
winter wear refurbished
at the tips,
standing there woodenly under
scrambling squirrels, a warm bath of
sunshine, thunderstorm,
by turns.


Now the Oaks reenter the poem. They are unmoved, the poem argues, they are evergreen, and have not been shaken by the winter, the sunshine, thunderstorms, or turns. They aren't putting on the celebration, they don't perpetuate this sense of cause for celebration. The unmoving oak remains standing, and the squirrels just scramble around them. The oaks have been cleaned, and made to look new, but they have not changed. The Oak knows too much, and knows nothing has changed. In it is a sense of realization that nothing changes.



Part of a celebration
is to discover
patience? And how
painful hope can be?

These questions, being rhetorical, seem imbued with the negative answers ingrained in rhetorical questions. The celebration is a celebration that is not going to last, or is just one step forward. The celebration then is just celebrating that we may have learned something, not that everything is made OK. Perhaps from this, something may change, despite the fact that not everything will, and this is just one step. The final question though, suggests hoping for anything to really change perhaps can be more painful. One can't help but recall the romantic sense of life after the French Revolution, that seemed to die before it was born with the rise of Napoleon. In that sense then, the poem asks if whether hoping for a brighter future is perhaps more painful, and whether celebrating something isn't just getting your hopes up, before they are squashed with the next catastrophe.



Alone, and mute stands
dark, one huge oak tree.


These final two lines then, set the poem off with a dark perspective. Of course, this poem was published way after 1945. It can be understood then, that the poem questions what has really changed, and what the world has really learned. The Old Oak remains solid and Large, and unmoving. The fact that the poem is a reflection allows it to acknowledge that right after World War II, the world didn't get less violent, but went on as if nothing had changed. The bearing of the world, symbolized by the naked man earlier seems not to have shaken anyone. The hope and optimism seems in vein, there really wasn't cause for celebration.

A very dark and pessimistic poem, I would think. Though, I think the poem does offer a sense of hope within it, and isn't completely dark. I think it, by making the Oak Tree Mute seems to imply that perhaps this demon can be silenced, and that perhaps maybe later we can achieve an end.


In many ways, this poem reminds me of On The Marginal Way by Richard Wilbur (another deeply haunting, yet unbelievably powerful poem), available here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171784

I think, if one is an optimist, one could compare the celebrants in Pacing the Turn of the Year to Wilbur's girls lying on the red rock:



That now recline and burn
Comely as Eve and Adam, near a sea
Transfigured by the sun’s return.
And now three girls lie golden in the lee
Of a great arm or thigh, and are as young
As the bright boulders that they lie among.


For this brief moment, the land with the people are in harmony - though the tide will change and wipe flood the picture, there is a brief pause, where everything is calm and peaceful, and I think the pessimism of Avison is not complete - there is still the hope, and though painful, perhaps things may change.

[Jozanny]

The spirit wants to join in, but my flesh has been a muted disappointment since birth. Quasi, I am sorry. I am terribly busy with bills and trying to get back to work. My uncle is repairing my old chair since I never expected these obstacles toward getting a new one, and with that back, I can dash around. I am a bit of a diehard about poets, and whose collections I will and won't buy, and I don't want Avison even though my vote altered the whole course of nominating. Maybe Tuesday or Wednesday I can dare to make a go at it with the bucket here, but I'd only be able to make that one trip to the library to see, but they should have her, given her age.

PS: Not to ignore JBI's analysis, but to return back for a moment to luke, Rilke's Lazarus is far superior to The Dumbfounding, and I am not sure if this was the note of comparison for you. To my sense, Avison was writing a love poem to Christ's martyrdom, which kind of turned off my enthusiasm for her, unfairly or not, as I was not looking for CS Lewis in Canadian garb, though she is apparently capable of appealing to my hedonism, on another level.

[quasimodo1]

Rilke is superior to most poets so "The Dumfounding" is no suprise but that is inherently unfair given the mixed fruit of all poetry. I am navigating around Avison's religiosity as best as possible but must admit it's a block. There's no doubting her belief which IS something remembered.

[Virgil]

I've been reading the poem. I'll try to post some comments tomorrow.

[JBI]

Rilke is superior to most poets so "The Dumfounding" is no suprise but that is inherently unfair given the mixed fruit of all poetry. I am navigating around Avison's religiosity as best as possible but must admit it's a block. There's no doubting her belief which IS something remembered.

Her religiosity however, seems very similar to someone like Eliot's, and in many ways, she is a follower of the later Eliot, it would seem. There is certainly a preoccupation with a similar tradition, and I feel, reading her concept of metaphor in many places, that there must have been a direct reaction, probably profound, caused by a reading of Four Quartets. That being said, I think she worked in metaphor and symbol which is outside the archetype and tradition, whereas Eliot built on familiar images, and seems to recast them to understand the world around him (for instance, Four elements in the Quartets, and the Rose which dominates the close of Little Gidding), and certainly their metrics are different, as Eliot certainly was first dominated by the Iambs of Elizabethan Verse and Drama, and then later Accentual forms, whereas Avison seems to mix more of a open form, in the style of some of Stevens' work.

Still though, that sense of religiousness is strong. Though, even though I am non-religious, to me it doesn't seem a block, since she goes beyond it always. To me, it feels her religious sensibility just stands in the background, and allows her to make sense of her surroundings, in a way that she can understand.

[Virgil]

from Always Now, Volume Three
from Concrete and Wild Carrot

THE CRUX


Oh I had been reading "The Crux."

I did think this was an interesting poem. I'm not sure I completely understand the ending.

I was taken a little aback with the very coloquial openning stanza, but I do think that is important to the poem. That everyman experience of hitting bedrock she pulls the reader in with "Know what that's like yourself?" I think anyone who's lived into their thirties at some point hits what seems like bedrock. So it's a common experience that is almost of an existential moment.

And then I think the theme takes shape:

Now can you credit
anyone figuring he had to
steer his fair steady days and nights
deliberately
to some as yet (I'm guessing)
point of light beyond that
abysmal (other people's) living
end?
To "steer" one's life to "some...point of light" given one's existential moment is I think what she is expressing. But how does one do that? She offers an example:

...There wasn't
a 'Lamb of God' for the
then lamb the wolf had torn.
But there gleamed
the point.
For the lamb, it too was at its existential moment, and it reached its fate. "But there gleamed/the point." The word "poiint" is repeated several times in the poem with different shadings of meaning. The lamb did not have a Lamb of God," i.e. Christ. Christ is the point. She then follows with another example, a child who only understands only his physical needs.


Ever see a child in his
highchair twisting with the
urgency of now, not knowing how
or what, only the
pangs, the poignancy
of Don't you see
that I need everything
right now?
The child is a microcosm of a mature man caught in his existential momnet of crises. And the "point" comes to the child in the concluding stanzas his needs are met:

He hears help coming.
Hope stills the moment.
Eagerness drums with heels and spoon
in a blissful lurch
towards all tomorrow.

The one the radiance touched
does see
and smile there, in that kitchen.
The point.
For Avison, I think the "steering" that life requires is Christ. It is impossible given our human pangs and desires to break through that existential crises without Him. Powerful and well crafted poem!

[Jozanny]

Quasi was kind enough to send me the above titled by Avison. The first stanza displays a clever playfulness:


Golden meadows of morning, evenings
when the last glister of
birdsong vanishes and
only the nighthawk is
still away out up there in the
gathering dark:


"glister of birdsong" is something only a poet can do, but she ruins it through her use of the metaphor *arena*


such an -- arena! That word is
unnerving.

and overwrought, one might add.

The last stanza seems confusing to me. I don't know if it is the "triumph" of her bliss in darkness that will, in its onslaught, become "far other", but I would have preferred that she stick with what the first stanza promised, rather than making an abrupt metaphysical transition to her views about the cost of salvation--if salvation is her reference point.

We will see what next week brings quasi; me thinks Avison misses certain notes that might have made her voice more challenging.... but I did tell you I hated most poets en masse, from the first book club revival....:D

I will go back and read JBI's pick, at some point.

[quasimodo1]

from Always Now, Volume Three

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

The three volumes of ALWAYS NOW contain all of Margaret Avison's published books of poetry. The author has removed a very few poems: "Public Address" (from Winter Sun), "The Two Selves" and "In Eporphyrial Harness" (from The Dumbfounding), "Highway in April", "The Evader's Meditation" and "Until Christmas" (from Sunblue), "Living the Shadow", "Insomnia" and "Beginning Praise" (from Selected Poems). The opening section of volume one, "From Elsewhere", is arranged according to date of publication, from 1932 to 1991, the date of Selected Poems. "From Elsewhere" includes the "Uncollected" and "New Poems" of that boo, except for the two noted above and "The Butterfly", which is here in its original form. All of the poems in "Always Now" having been considered and reconsidered, and small corrections having been made, the book contains definitively all the published poems up to 2002 that Margaret Avison wishes to preserve.

[Virgil]

Hey I just got the book in the mail. Boy did it take a while. I'll be reading and I'll try to catch up. Sorry if I've been absent lately here. :)

[Virgil]

I'm getting familiar with Avison's style and voice. The voice is a little different from anything I'm used to. Not sure I've read enough to put my finger on it. Here's a poem I thought ver good. It's on page 65.


Concert

Learning, I more and more
long for that simplicity,
clarity, that willingness
to speak (from anonymity...)
all those inpenetrables, when words
are more like bluebell petals under
an absorbed heaven.

[Snip]

Words have been given. Once.
Words that are storm and sun and rain.
Listening earth, where they have fallen,
finds seed casings begin
to split,
roots throb. As though
some unimaginable response
implicit in that speaking.

Fulfilment is in promise
and still more resonant longing.

[Jozanny]

Although the poem Quasi sent me was a little better than the others I have sampled through this discussion, Avison disappoints me, and I hereby withdraw from any further commentary.

I also withdraw from the poetry book club, for now. I have too much going on and frankly, can't appreciate anything through the nature of posting like this. I cannot gain intimacy with any of the selections having to be spoon fed, or picking shot gun samples on the web.

It is my problem to solve, but until I do, for now, bye, enjoy, and leave me out of the loop. Thank you all.

[quasimodo1]

ARTICLE... "Winter Pearl" How Margaret Avison balances image, thought, and story to convey the numinous in her "New Year's Poem."
by Linda Bierds
--- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=182461

[Virgil]

ARTICLE... "Winter Pearl" How Margaret Avison balances image, thought, and story to convey the numinous in her "New Year's Poem."
by Linda Bierds
--- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=182461

Thanks Quasi. That was interesting and "NewYear's Poem" was quite good.

[poetmin]

I want to be the members.

[JBI]

You mean you want to reboot this bookclub? Well, I would second it, as long as the author is available online. Though I doubt we will get much participation now that the majority of the old gang are either busy or retired from the forum.

[stlukesguild]

We can ask Neely and a few others. I'd be game. Poet?

[JBI]

We can ask Neely and a few others. I'd be game. Poet?

The last time we tried, it didn't even make it to a thread - I don't want to force people into a discussion, and it seems these poetry boards have been dead for a while, as the boards in general seem to be reducing in traffic.

[Pierre Menard]

I'm not one of the old-crew but I'd happily join. Got a fair bit of poetry on my shelf that is un-read or would be enticing to re-read.


Something like Montale's Cuttlefish Bones would be good, or if we wanted to go a slightly different path, Gongora's The Solitudes or heck, even The Odyssey could be pretty discussion worthy.

[Drkshadow03]

I would join if the poet interested me. I was attempting to read through some of Neruda's poems recently, but struggled through his surrealist style. I would love to have a discussion of Residence on Earth.

[Paulclem]

I'd like to take part too. The last one I was in we were discussing Leopardi. It seemed to fizzle out, but was good whilst it lasted.

[Drkshadow03]

I'd like to take part too. The last one I was in we were discussing Leopardi. It seemed to fizzle out, but was good whilst it lasted.

So Pablo Neruda then? :)

[cacian]

I will attempt it to see how it goes :)

[Paulclem]

So Pablo Neruda then? :)

Ok. That sounds good. Do you have a translation in mind that I can either order or download?

[LitNetIsGreat]

Just seen this, yes I would be up for this, Neruda would suit, as his name has been bouncing around for a while. Yes something online for easy access for JBI and others would be good though.

[Paulclem]

Suits me too. I know nothing about him - which is a good place to start.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Yes me too, but anything really that is half decent and all can get access to, as I don't mind.

Much better to read something and share a few thoughts than not to read anything. Easy instant online access stuff I would have thought would be the way forward, even if this is Wordsworth or so on, but if Neruda was fancied and is possible then whatever suits.

[Drkshadow03]

Unfortunately, Neruda isn't exactly easily accessible online since he is a 20th century poet in translation, which means everything is pretty much under copyright, and people would have to purchase a book or visit their libraries for a discussion.

[Drkshadow03]

If nobody wants to do Neruda because of lack of funds or desire for internet accessibility, I'd also be interested in reading some Thomas Hardy's poetry and Schiller.

[Paulclem]

If nobody wants to do Neruda because of lack of funds or desire for internet accessibility, I'd also be interested in reading some Thomas Hardy's poetry and Schiller.

I'll go with whatever. Neruda looks good. I'm happy to buy the book if there's no internet copies. The same with the others.

[Drkshadow03]

So who else wants to participate and is willing to acquire the book if we do Neruda?

[stlukesguild]

Usually we went about this by making nominations and then voting... but I'd have no problem with Neruda. I have some 8 or 9 volumes of Neruda's poetry... including Residence on Earth.

I would make a suggestion that you start this discussion in a new thread so that others might see it.

[Pierre Menard]

So who else wants to participate and is willing to acquire the book if we do Neruda?

More than happy to do Neruda. My local bookshop down the road has a number of his volumes so no issues with aquiring a book.

[Paulclem]

Shall we crack on with Neruda then? Residence on Earth?

[Drkshadow03]

Yep, sounds good. I'll start the thread tomorrow.