Your Favorite Poems from fellow Lit-Netters

Has anyone heard about the scandal with the Oxford professorship of poetry. It seems that Derek Walcott was going to get the honor, but then another poet named Ruth Padel ( a descendant of Darwin), another candidate, started sending derogatory emails to try and smear Walcott. Seems Walcott had in his past a couple of sexual harrassment claims against him that were never prosecuted. Padel admitted sending the emails, so has taken her name out of contention and Walcott is completely uninterested now.
I didn't know poets could be so cutthroat. I guess we have to wait and see who will finally accept the post. I like the way the Philadephia Inquirer's writer, John Timpane, finished his column. " Stay tuned. Seldom has the poetic world known such suspense, or tasted such bile."

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Originally Posted by Lynne50

Has anyone heard about the scandal with the Oxford professorship of poetry. It seems that Derek Walcott was going to get the honor, but then another poet named Ruth Padel ( a descendant of Darwin), another candidate, started sending derogatory emails to try and smear Walcott. Seems Walcott had in his past a couple of sexual harrassment claims against him that were never prosecuted. Padel admitted sending the emails, so has taken her name out of contention and Walcott is completely uninterested now.
I didn't know poets could be so cutthroat. I guess we have to wait and see who will finally accept the post. I like the way the Philadephia Inquirer's writer, John Timpane, finished his column. " Stay tuned. Seldom has the poetic world known such suspense, or tasted such bile."

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This raises the eternally interesting question of how and whether we should separate the artist from his or her art. Whilst I am far from wishing to defend Walcott in the face of the sexual harassment charges, in this I feel more distaste for Ms Padel in using that to disqualify a competitor.

But wouldn't your post be more appropriate - and more likely to get the attention it deserves if it were in the General Literature Forum, as a new thread?

now that is the most non-poetic news I've ever heard, at least in those environs.

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Originally Posted by quasimodo1

now that is the most non-poetic news I've ever heard, at least in those environs.

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And yet, my dear Q.,
whom do we suppose write poems?
Is it only the saints
among us, in which case
how thin the anthologies might be!

Is it the men and women
of serene temperament
and hearts as broad
as some long, leisurely unwinding
line of verse?

Remember Baudelaire and his
toi hypocrite lecteur,
mon semblable, mon frere!

to PrinceMyshkin: Now you know I love a dark poem as much as anybody; my remark is aimed at the lack of savoir faire in the "glorious" limelight, and hammering my Carribbean genious with such cheap shots. No, you're right...I'm not suprised. At least I/we are not degrading Joyce today...that's progress.

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Originally Posted by quasimodo1

to PrinceMyshkin: Now you know I love a dark poem as much as anybody; my remark is aimed at the lack of savoir faire in the "glorious" limelight, and hammering my Carribbean genious with such cheap shots. No, you're right...I'm not suprised. At least I/we are not degrading Joyce today...that's progress.

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Anyone who takes a shot at the ol' man, you send him or her to see me.

A Distance of Sixty-one Light-years

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Originally Posted by AuntShecky

A Distance of Sixty-one Light-years

For fifty years my mother’s bones lay still
above the Mohawk’s blue and sun-streaked line.
They don't hear the wind whining up the hill,
no hopeful birds, nor cheerless songs of mine.

They wouldn't know the one she used to call
“the shy one in the corner of the hall.”
Long past her age, and with each July,
I've grown more gray and wrinkled (but still shy.)

It’s good she never sees in her repose
the deeper hole in which I've dug myself:
the stark result of dreaming, I suppose,
with half a century of dust left on the shelf.

It’s just as well that separation hides
the tacit disappointment on both sides.

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Aunt Shecky
I don't think your mother would be disappointed. She would probably take much delight in reading your good poems.

Thanks Prince Myshkin for posting this.

No kidding. It's letter-perfect, in tone and word.

“Death and Oreos”

No good can I see in the world
Death and despair
Rape and murder
Sickness and famine
(Oreos on sale this week)
Three soldiers killed in a car bomb
Oreos sound good, come to think of it.


This poem by mutatis-mutandi really spoke out to me because it shows how easy it is to forget the horrible things in the world

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Originally Posted by kevinthediltz quoting Sophia

Girl Talk

If I could speak to you - Frida, Léonor, Leonora - Margaret
I would fiery say your sibylline minds change me.

Those double jointed hips, diarized scars,
stapled nipples, retractable wombs

skeletons wired with explosives -

it was the fallout of you.
The heap of cleavage and clitoris.
Dirty laundry, dirty bombs imploding

the femme enfant only authorized
to live - to love between man’s while.

Clearly - giving life means taking life,
the quickening egg devouring its host.

I would tell you I have a new canvas
turned to the wall - the birth of death.

Remedios nailed to a bed, raptors emerging
two by two from the nest between her legs.

Fiercely - your sibylline hands rearrange me.


By ~Sophia~

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Yes, this one's incredible.

Unbelievable. . .. . .

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Originally posted by quimissung
King Kong in Chains

The wide sky leapt above me like a salmon
finding its way upstream
The wind gently touched my face
with the delicate and deft fingers of a blind man
I knew the seasons and how they changed,
a sure knowledge I wore with my skin
And I knew not hunger, nor hungered
for more than I had, until I lost it
My string of pearls, unknotted, fell,
and rolled this way and that
Across the polished wooden floor
And even though I could hear them
And scrabbled on hand and knees
To find them, my search was fruitless
And I sat as daylight faded from my eyes
And my fingers grew useless,
My body no longer fit the space I lived in
And what I felt did not match what those around me felt
I became useless and hung from the side of a building
Far above them
And they were no more to me than ants crawling over and around
One another in an ambiance of unthinking industry
I hung there until my arms grew rubbery and unfeeling
And I grew desperate to cling to this brick and mortar,
Fighting to keep the fragile connection
Until my days were spent in an agony of wondering how long I could hold on
I dreamt that I held in the palm of my hand
a small delicate and fluttering thing
breathing all the life I could not find and looking
at me steadily
suddenly I could not breathe for looking
at the thing of iridescent beauty that lay in the hollow of its neck
my eyes absorbed its beauty
I could see, then, a shard of light among the darkened clouds
And even as I looked and wondered at it, I could not help but think
That if this small pulsing fluttering creature were to fall from my so great paw,
Would I go after it?
Or would I stay, smitten by the sky?

Qimissung

(for Pendragon)

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There's too many to choose from, so I'll just choose one of the most effective of his "snapshots" ;)

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Originally posted by PrinceMyshkin

Birds in adjacent cages
pondering
each other's dreams

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Here I sit with baited breath
as your cracked dry lips part
to fess your secrets in death
pour forth from wither'd heart
that which you held from me in life

Now your voice husks weak
And my hand shall smother
Any words you speak
Shallow yet mysterious mother
padlocked woman, closed lipped wife

_____
Delta40

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Originally Posted by DanielBenoit

Unbelievable. . .. . .

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Agreed! Qimissung is always exceptional, and

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There's too many to choose from, so I'll just choose one of the most effective of his "snapshots" ;)

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I overlooked your citation of this (one of my own favourites among my "Snapshots"). Thank you

Here's a recent one that somehow has escaped many comments:

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Originally Posted by DanBierce

~Sand~

The breakwalled harbor
holds sea-locked lives
as docklines stretch, then sag,
stretch, then sag
on the moon-sucked surge.

Mary tends a seaside bar, mends wounds,
dodges brawls. She escorts
the drowned and found to their graves.
The drowned and lost
langour in her dreams.

Fuel-dock Harry
rolls out hose, tops-off tanks,
ices the holds. Corporate pockets
take the cash. Harry
shut it down one day
with a two-barrel blast in his shack.

Harbor master Jim, widowed
now, patrols the dusk-dim
moorings abob in his wake
as complaints of gulls
land on cormorants black as dread.
They dive, beak death
to minnows and silver needlefish.

Bouy bells clong and clang
socked in a shawl of fog.
A raft of kelp, with its crew of flies,
shades a shale-toothed reef
as I watch phosphorescent swells
pilfer the helpless shore,

and this saddens me at times,
as I walk the beach,
feel the sand,
the mountain it had been,
being pulled from around my feet
to lie forever beyond the light.

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