fragments of contemporary poetry

William Stafford is one of my favorite American poets. He was able to capture the most ordinary things and make them new with his seeing. In this age of living in bad faith, when so much is taken from us and no decision seems easy, we would do well to read William Stafford. The following is one of my favorite poems by him:

A Ritual To Be Read To Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

{omission}

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

—William Stafford

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/bo..._r=1&ref=books --- from poets.org... In a review in The New Republic, the critic Helen Vendler wrote: "Louise Glück is a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems, published in a series of memorable books over the last twenty years, have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither "confessional" nor "intellectual" in the usual senses of those words."

Kay Ryan's poem on W.G. Sebald... "He Lit a Fire With Icicles" --- http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetrya...do?poemId=9144

THE DISCIPLE
an obstinate disciple, so youthful
but the one whom jesus loved
who laid beside him at the last

kissing him was like kissing a door
slim flat stern with hinges on one side
but moveable on the other
how it swung open how we fell
there were boats and we took them
our nicotine-sour mouths in each other
like an element to shape something from
the bitterness gathered in the hollows
when it wore off we smoked

in the end a rain fell
a rain we could barely believe
it turned cold, things got wet and everywhere ...
{excerpt}

© 2004, zu Klampen! Verlag
From: Monika Rinck: Verzückte Distanzen. Gedichte
Publisher: Zu Klampen! Verlag. Edition Postskriptum: Springe, Germany 2004.,
ISBN: 3-933156-81-5

© Translation: Nicholas Grindell
From: shearsman (58 / 2003)

The Myth of Innocence



One summer she goes into the field as usual
stopping for a bit at the pool where she often
looks at herself, to see
if she detects any changes. She sees
the same person, the horrible mantle
of daughterliness still clinging to her.

The sun seems, in the water, very close.
That's my uncle spying again, she thinks—
everything in nature is in some way her relative.
I am never alone, she thinks,
turning the thought into a prayer.
Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer.

No one understands anymore
how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers.
Also that he embraced her, right there,
with her uncle watching. She remembers
sunlight flashing on his bare arms.

This is the last moment she remembers clearly.
Then the dark god bore her away.

She also remembers, less clearly,
the chilling insight that from this moment
she couldn't live without him again.

The girl who disappears from the pool
will never return. A woman will return,
looking for the girl she was. ...

{excerpt}

Lagerfeld


Rome: an open city A lager
Down the catwalk troop the fashions
Of the millennium, bulletproof vests
For copulation Two gladiators
Are fighting for the job, long practised
In the tricks of throttling, they win applause
That´s what they went to school for HIM OR ME
The stink of fear In his empire
Lagerfeld is making a dream come true A PACK
OF WOMEN THE PICK OF BEAUTY
The winter collection for the wars in Dacia
Has made him rich IT IS ENOUGH TO TURN YOUR STOMACH
They are bearing my ideas, these are summer clothes
To the spoilt world A festival of beauty
Helena Christensen in evening wear Meanwhile
The two craftsmen have not let go
One is Commodus, the wild son
Of a cool father, the mother´s indiscretion
When he croaks the throne stands empty
And Septimius Severus the African
Will march with the XIVth from the wilderness of Vienna
Against the capital POOR ROME A barbarian
Emperor On his heels the rest of the world
Lgerfeld doesn´t watch He has a problem
He can make them more beautiful but not better
More and more beautiful Outfit of the brute beasts
RICH AND POOR A divided clientele
ATROCIOUS Paying and thieving
I enjoy undivided attention But
He knows what´s going on, he isn´t blind
The fifteen-year-old killer from Springfield
A MOUNTAIN OF CORPSES IN THE HIGHSCHOOL CAFETERIA
He has learned to lend a hand
he is in custody now in paper clothes Another fashion From America Gangs of children
Are combing North Rhine-Westphalia trainees
Looking for food at Hertie´s and Woolworth´s ...
{excerpt...© Translation David Constantine}

Review: Rhyme and Unreason by David Orr (nyt) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/bo...html?ref=books

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...-26063,00.html

Here is a poem I literally grew up on. My ealiest memories of hearing this poem recited in my baby ears go back to a time from which almost all else disappears in the dark tunnel of memory, the strongest, the most memorable words in Urdu language. Later I fell out of touch with Rashid's poetry who has always been out of favour in the conservative society he wrote for. His poetry is non-conformist, both in form and content, his life-style rose more eyebrows than anybody else's, his death arose controversy. A modernist through and through, he wrote in a highly Persianised Urdu and was destined to be either hardly understood or, as more often than not, misunderstood. I came back to Rashid in my early 20s. Many years were spent reciting these verses in circles of friends like a young Stephen Daedalus. Now in my 40th year, I am still as devout a follower as I was 20 years ago or when as a baby I repeated his grand verses from this poem without understanding a word in them, just enjoying the rhytmic beauty of his language.



You are Afraid of Life?

----You are afraid of life?
But life is who you are, and life is who I am!
You are afraid of mankind?
But man is who you are, and man is who I am!

Man is language, man is expression,
but you are not afraid of that!
With the iron-bond of Word and Understanding, man is inextricably tied
With humanity's loins, life is inseparably tied
But you are not afraid of that!

Truth is you are afraid of the "Unsaid"
The time that has yet to come are you afraid of it,
Are you afraid to acknowledge the imminence of it?

---- Many periods of history have passed by before:
of freedom's remoteness, of godhood that is "self-less".
Even then you believe that it's useless to aspire,
that this night of suffocation is to Providence submission!

But what would you know,
that when lips fail to move, hands arise to life.
Hands arise to life to show to the way that is right,
as the expressions of light!
Hands cry out, yelling the end of the night.
You are afraid of light?
But light is who you are, and light is who I am,
You are afraid of light!

----The walls of the city
have been cleansed of the shadows of evil monsters.
The gown of night
has shredded to pieces, crumbled to dust.
From the mass of Humanity, the voice of Individual rises.
A cry of the soul rises.
On the paths of love, as if, some lover's passion leaps,
a new obsession leaps!
Humanity brims with life
Behold humanity laugh, see cities alive
Are you frightened now?
Yes 'Now' is who you are, yes 'Now' is who I am,
You are frightened of 'Now'!
______
Translated by Hamid Rahim Sheikh

THE APICULTURALIST
In black veiled hat and canvas gauntlets
Jean Paucton, seventy, climbs the baroque stairs

of the Palais Garnier opera house
to his rooftop apiary.

The theatrical prop man studied beekeeping
at the Jardin’s venerable institute

then hauled onto the seventh floor ledge
his five weathered crates

swollen with honey, nearly a thousand pounds a year.

“The bees make an impression, do they not?”
he declares.
And you, dear poet?

Your little apiary of simile and syntax—the busy bite
that separates truth from Truth?

Do you not weary of the student manuscript, ... {excerpt}


http://www.kenyonreview.org/kro_full.php?file=hahn.php (August, 2009)

WHEELING MOTEL

Poems

By Franz Wright

91 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95
Dark Glamour (a review)
By DAISY FRIED
Published: September 17, 2009 NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/bo..._r=1&ref=books

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/bo..._r=1&ref=books

Im Jahre eins, das war


das scharren am boden, aufgekratztes
schweigen &
vom tod gefaltet: winterfliegen.

das erste – ein kriegsherbst, wenn
die dinge schon von
einem nerv durchzogen sind, entzündet an

der luft. die treibjagd holt über
dem acker die schwerkraft
der gleise entfernungen

schrumpfen & wer
gerade unterwegs gewesen ist, verschwindet
in seinen gedanken: du

siehst die fische spuln an zarten strähnen
männer, die in hohen wellen husten. wenn
das blos reisende uns abwirft, hörst du

pferde im abfluss, getrappel &
eine brise, die
aus den kanälen chemisch ... {excerpt}








in the year one, that was


scraping on the ground, scratched up
silence &
folded by death: winter flies.

the first – a wartime fall when
things have already been
run through by a nerve, ignited by

the air. across the field, the battue
brings back the gravity
of the tracks distances

shrink & whoever
happens to be on the move vanishes
in his thoughts: you

see the fish spool men coughing in
great waves onto fragile strands. when
what merely travels scraps us, you hear

horses in the drain, clatter &
a breeze that
blows chemically up ... {excerpt}






© Translation Andrew Shields

I don't know much about poet Albert Goldbarth , but I thought it would be better to tack him in here rather than start a new thread, though granted this thread is getting long. I find male authors and poets who have bric-a-brac rooms annoying, though I guess I am not one to talk since this latest grand old man earns a living off the MFA circuit.

At first glance, he seems like another post-Frost mid-western romantic, but to quote Jim:
" He's the only poet to win the National Book Critics Circle Award twice."

I have no "fragments" to post this evening though.

GRACE
Eyes open in the womb. The struggle arrives to turn darkness into light. Dangling on the wings of
the Phoenix. The creative process begins to turn ugly. Vandalizing and robbing graves of
child prodigies turning into serious discussions of Mass Murder and the therapeutic value of
saturday morning shopping sprees. The betrayal of genius is burning at the stake. The spider
descends. The violence is always there. The web embraces us all. More insidious than
drugs. More pleasurable than sex. Slightly entangled. Slightly confused. That possible
criminal element awakens you to the terror and lonliness of running into the silent pain of
someone else looking to you for answers. Glamorous and well financed pools of blood
profiling on neighborhood corners while smiling at and tempting the boldest gangsta rap. {one of two stanzas}

OCTET BEFORE WINTER

The body is immobile, left behind
On the coral leatherette train-seat.
Thoughts revolve with the wheels but
Don't advance, stopped against the present,
The future which the engines bear away.
I want to wrench myself out of time's ballast,
Switch rails. The buildings raise a hideous
Hedge. Then rocks efface themselves
Before amorous, ravaged gardens.
I relinquish the acacias, lilacs, vulnerable
Foliage. Irises on the embankments, vague fairy-tale
Grass. A pact still links me
To the tree trunks, their branches' unpolished
Diamond on grey sky. I want their lines
To keep my cindered skeleton erect.

Often, like anyone, I ask myself
What ties me to life, especially in winter
When the dying year strikes out on its graph
Three hundred and sixty-five specific days circling the sun
Revolving back, as fatally, to night:
Sometimes they are huge bodies, illuminated
Igloos, their heads shrouded in fog
Gestures slow down then, voluptuously,
Like those of someone who knows he's going to faint,
But knows a wall of glass will break his fall
Or there's the tranquil pulse of flames between
What's wished for, what's forbidden, forbidden and wished
Showing a flux, a rhythm, an outpouring
Towards a heart which only believes in mechanical laws
The great watchmaker's clock, which we take apart
Patiently, piece by piece, to convince ourselves
That the poet who holds it poised above the void
Is an unprogrammed computer, an automaton

{two of ten stanzas, translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker}

FROM THE DRESSING-ROOM

Left to itself, they say, every foetus
would turn female, staving in, nature
siding then with the enemy that
delicately mixes up genders. This
is an absence I have passionately sought,
brightening nevertheless my poet’s attic
with my steady hands, calling him my blue
lizard till his moans might be heard
at the far end of the garden. For I like
his ways, he’s light on his feet and does
not break anything, puts his entire soul
into bringing me a glass of water,


I can take anything now, even his being
away, for it always seems to me his
writing is for me, as I walk springless
from the dressing-room in a sisterly
length of flesh-coloured silk. ... {excerpt}

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by quasimodo1

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...-26063,00.html

---

I recently purchased an older translation of Cavafy's completed poems and fragments, but haven't taken the dive yet.

Became intrigued because of how his repressed orientation interpreted Hellenism for the 20th century, and hope at some point it is worth a thread. Scholars are disappointed with the new translation.

"The Cavafy Archive website was created by the Center for Neo-Hellenic Studies (Spoudasterio Neou Hellenismou) in Athens, Greece, the current home of the poet's Archive. It contains all of Cavafy’s major works in the translation of Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (edited by G.P. Savidis), plus select alternative translations. It also contains a wealth of unpublished material from the poet’s Archive, plus a Cavafy Companion section and up-to-date information on Cavafy’s seminal presence in today’s world, as seen through the web." ...introduction to the Cavafy website-- http://www.cavafy.com/index.asp

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by quasimodo1

"The Cavafy Archive website was created by the Center for Neo-Hellenic Studies (Spoudasterio Neou Hellenismou) in Athens, Greece, the current home of the poet's Archive. It contains all of Cavafy’s major works in the translation of Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (edited by G.P. Savidis), plus select alternative translations. It also contains a wealth of unpublished material from the poet’s Archive, plus a Cavafy Companion section and up-to-date information on Cavafy’s seminal presence in today’s world, as seen through the web." ...introduction to the Cavafy website-- http://www.cavafy.com/index.asp

---

quasi I just wrote you a longer reply, but my pc is unhappy and the link broke, but for now, I bookmarked this site, as it may be useful in the future, thank you.

I will return to what else I wrote another time.

Night-hours. The edge of a fuller moon

waits among the interlocking patterns

of a flier's sky.

Sperm names, ovum names, push inside

each other. We are half-taught

our real names, from other lives.

Emphasize your eyes. Be my flare-

path, my uncold begetter,

my air-minded bird-sense.

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

WHEELING MOTEL

Poems

By Franz Wright

91 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95

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

THE GOD WHO LOVES YOU

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

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

From her book One Secret Thing.

Everything

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

{excerpt}

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

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

ALCHOHOL

You do look a little ill.


But we can do something about that, now.


Can’t we.


The fact is you’re a shocking wreck.


Do you hear me.


You aren’t all alone.


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


I was always waiting, always here.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

Cynosargous is the ancient home of the Cynics.

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

Plaint in a Major Key

Without even leaving one's door,
One can know the whole world.
—Laozi

The rumble of the night sounds
even in the bright daylight
of morning. Life blooms amid
the Ten Thousand Things, but
does not bloom amid the Ten
Thousand Things. Shrivel-eyed
I wake up and tend to the One
here and now, clamoring to be
let out. Down with the gate,
out with the boy, to the rooms
of life's necessities, first
to void and next to fill.
The Order is only order which
is disorder, the only Disorder
is the disorder that is order.
We usher ourselves, each in our
own way, back down the way
for various brushings, combings,
other groomings. Each in our
own way we urge the other
toward some kind of growth:
one to assume, the other
to renounce; one to grow larger,
the other to grow smaller,
thereby growing larger. Words
do not work, and when they do not,
other words might. ... {excerpt}

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

(Dying Is Fun)

By Vladimir Nabokov

Edited by Dmitri Nabokov

278 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35 -- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/bo...r=1&ref=review

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/bo...t.html?_r=1&em

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by quasimodo1

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/bo...t.html?_r=1&em

---

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

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/bo...ooksupdateema3 --- EASY

Poems

By Marie Ponsot

little tree

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


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


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


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


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


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

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by quasimodo1

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/bo...ooksupdateema3 --- EASY

Poems

By Marie Ponsot

---

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

Quote:

---

The Problem of Fiction
by Marie Ponsot

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

---

[Snip]
Read the rest here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...html?id=177094

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

ADVENT 1966

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