http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/c...ow/5324494.cms
--- Dilip Chitre --- his homepage --- In the pool of bliss,Bliss is all ripples." http://thebuckstopshere0.tripod.com/
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http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/c...ow/5324494.cms
--- Dilip Chitre --- his homepage --- In the pool of bliss,Bliss is all ripples." http://thebuckstopshere0.tripod.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/bo...pagewanted=all --- A VILLAGE LIFE
By Louise Glück
GHAZAL OF THE BETTER-UNBEGUN
A book is a suicide postponed.
--Cioran
Too volatile, am I? too voluble? too much a word-person?
I blame the soup: I'm a primordially
stirred person.
Two pronouns and a vehicle was Icarus with wings.
The apparatus of his selves made an ab-
surd person.
The sound I make is sympathy's: sad dogs are tied afar.
But howling I become an ever more un-
heard person.
I need a hundred more of you to make a likelihood.
The mirror's not convincing-- that at-best in-
ferred person.
As time's revealing gets revolting, I start looking out.
Look in and what you see is one unholy
blurred person. ... {excerpt}
IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER
In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.
Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.
Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
The ox and *** and camel which adore.
Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss. ... {excerpt}
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009...ef=global-home ---Dennis Brutus, South African poet... "Poetry" by Dennis Brutus --- http://logosonline.home.igc.org/brutus.htm
Struggles with Meaningless Things
In the beginning, there was chaos.
No, that’s not right.
In the beginning, there was nothing.
An empty space spread out, big and empty.
Time flowed by, two years to be specific. Various things were brought in.
Among them, a desk, a bed, a computer, shelves, chairs (two of them), a folding table,
An electric piano, a fax machine, and then lots of newspapers.
Books. Magazines. Fliers advertising plays. Envelopes. CDs. Faxes from different folks.
Letters from different people. Unimportant things. Important things.
Things that might be important one day.
(Now, all these things, no longer important,
Fill all the available space.
{excerpt}
ENNUI
Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.
Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
of, while blasé princesses indict
tilts at terror as downright absurd.
{first of two stanzas}
from The Triumph of Love {XIII}
Whose lives are hidden in God? Whose?
Who can now tell what was taken, or where,
or how, or whether it was received:
how ditched, divested, clamped, sifted, over-
laid, raked over, grassed over, spread around,
rotted down with leafmould, accepted
as civic concrete, reinforceable
base cinderblocks:
tipped into Danube, Rhine, Vistula, dredged up
with the Baltic and the Pontic sludge:
committed in absentia to solemn elevation,
Trauermusik, musique funèbre, funeral
music, for male and female
voices ringingly a cappella,
made for double string choirs, congregated brass,
choice performers on baroque trumpets hefting,
like glassblowers, inventions
of supreme order?
THE SNOW IS DEEP ON THE GROUND
The snow is deep on the ground.
Always the light falls
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.
This is a good world.
The war has failed.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the snow waits where love is.
Only a few go mad.
The sky moves in its whiteness
Like the withered hand of an old king. ... {excerpt}
Yea I thought of you quasimodo1 rather crudely :D and came up with this to post, love this poem.
From 'Mrs Quisimodo' by Carol Ann Duffy (about the last third of it)
The bells. The bells.
I made them mute.
No more apreggios or scales, no more stretti, trills
for christenings, weddings, great occasions, happy days.
No more practising
for bellringers
on smudgy autumn nights.
No more clarity of sound, divine, articulate
to purify the air
and bow the heads of drinkers in the city bars.
No single
solemn
funeral note
to answer
grief.
I sawed and pulled and hacked.
I wanted silence back.
Get this:
When I was done,
and bloody to the wrist,
I squatted down among the murdered music of the bells and
pissed.
Excellent entry, TheDave ... Duffy doesn't get much notice since being a laureate, in the US at least. "Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion." Carol Ann Duffy
http://coldfrontmag.com/news/salingers-poets --- Salinger’s Poets
by John Deming
LETTERS FROM THE DEAD
I. From My Mother
You who have read as I read when I was eight
that the sea will disgorge at the end of time
its centuries of dead, walk with me now,
listen with me as a blue rain ticks down
from your roof. This is not Armageddon, just another day
I am out of life, a spirit, today age eight
and this same sun freckling the autumn grass
drew me out, another morning, summer ending,
1915 and after, seventy-five years
into a world I never learned to love enough.
Today, hand in hand, we will walk back
until I am that little girl, flowers in hand
she presses into a book, A Child’s Garden of Verses,
cowslip, Queen Anne’s lace, Wild Clover,
a piece of that day breaking off in my son’s hand
today, June 9, 2007. Now I look down,
he is so small from here, my son at late middle-age.
I watch him press it to his nose, scentless,
his lips, to see him taste it, tasteless, kissing it.
And I would come back, not even when he cries
and the memory of me flickers while he tries, failing at this.
{one of two parts}
Dennis Brutus!
Dennis Brutus!
CHARITY
{Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust}
Goethe, Faust*
three times I didn’t give charity:
1. On a Kurfustendamm avenue
to a woman with a child
Dark birth, Albanian or gypsy or maybe just dirty
2. One girl thrusting herself with an alms box, kinder
kinder kinder, she hit
a small tin drum, Grass’s humpback dwarf voice
Kinder, she repeated, to children of the kinder type, an advertising slogan
an egg, which, upon opening, a surprise inside, inescapable evidence of your death
3. One more fellow stood by the bookstore with his empty skull extended
feed on wisdom, I advised him
Books are very nutritious, all who swallow books will
be invited to God’s table
And I did not give any one of them charity
And so
a dark person, vulgar primitive, man-monkey
animal, half-wit, murderer, liar, thief, debaucher
idiot awoke in me, raised
his head, coloured his un-pretty
mouth, with dishevelled instincts
I fed him the cheapest pizza with cheese and
salami, in the street, the hammering
of a pneumatic drill – every instant someone
lays the groundwork of their own hell
{excerpt}
*"Two souls, at least, live in my breast"
6 September 2007, Berlin
A short history of Colombian poetry
February 1, 2010
I am also talking to you: in between woods, in between resins, in between a thousand restless leaves, from a single leaf, small green stain, of lushness, of grace, lone leaf in which the winds that ran through all the beautiful countries where green is made out of every other color, the winds who sang through the countries of Colombia, vibrate.
Aurelio Arturo http://colombia.poetryinternationalw...j_id=15954&x=1
WORSHIPPING IMOINU
Whether winter or summer
Whether bombs burst or don’t burst
Beautiful women walk gracefully.
Faces eyes lips shaded with colours
The women walk.
Whether crossfire or no crossfire, whether deaths or no deaths
Men look at beautiful women.
Handsome men look at beautiful women, ugly men also look.
2
My wife growls
“I want to turn into a mole”,
She growls daily that she wants to become a mole.
Unable to bear her nagging I gave away a hundred rupees
Telling her she could be either a mole or an egret.
Turning into a swallow she flew away immediately.
{excerpt}
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/bo...html?ref=books --- THE BEST OF IT, New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan 270 pages. Grove Press. $24. review by Dwight Garner
THE CAVE PAINTERS
Holding only a handful of rushlight
they pressed deeper into the dark, at a crouch
until the great rock chamber
flowered around them and they stood
in an enormous womb of
flickering light and darklight, a place
to make a start. Raised hands cast flapping shadows
over the sleeker shapes of radiance.
They've left the world of weather and panic
behind them and gone on in, drawing the dark
in their wake, pushing as one pulse
to the core of stone. The pigments mixed in big shells
are crushed ore, petals and pollens, berries
and the binding juices oozed
out of chosen barks. The beasts
begin to take shape from hands and feather-tufts
(soaked in ochre, manganese, madder, mallow white)
stroking the live rock, letting slopes and contours
mould those forms from chance, coaxing
rigid dips and folds and bulges
to lend themselves to necks, bellies, swelling haunches,
a forehead or a twist of horn, tails and manes
curling to a crazy gallop.
Intent and human, they attach
the mineral, vegetable, animal
realms to themselves, inscribing
the one unbroken line
everything depends on, from that
impenetrable centre
to the outer intangibles of light and air, even
the speed of the horse, the bison's fear, the arc
of gentleness that this big-bellied cow
arches over its spindling calf, or the lancing
dance of death that
bristles out of the buck's
struck flank. On this one line they leave
a beak-headed human figure of sticks
and one small, chalky, human hand.
We'll never know if they worked in silence
like people praying—the way our monks
illuminated their own dark ages
in cross-hatched rocky cloisters,
where they contrived a binding
labyrinth of lit affinities
to spell out in nature's lace and fable
their mindful, blinding sixth sense
of a god of shadows—or whether (like birds
tracing their great bloodlines over the globe)
they kept a constant gossip up
of praise, encouragement, complaint. ... {excerpt} http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch....html?id=27210
"A Poet Who Doesn’t Do Lofty" -- review by By ELISSA GOOTMAN --- also... slideshow-- http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...?ref=nyregion# ----- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/ny...html?ref=books
At morn-at noon-at twilight dim-Maria! thou hast heard my hymn! In joy and woe- in good and ill- Mother of God, be with me still! When the hours flew brightly by, And not a cloud obscured the sky, My soul, lest it should truant be, Thy grace did guide to thine and thee; Now,when storms of Fate o'ercast Darkly my Present and my Past, Let my Future radiant shine With sweet hopes of thee and thine. "Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.'
THE LIVING FIRE
New and Selected Poems, 1975-2010
By Edward Hirsch
237 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27 --------------- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/bo...html?ref=books ...review
BALLAD IN A
A Kansan plays cards, calls Marshall
a crawdad, that barb lands that rascal a slap;
that Kansan jackass scats,
camps back at caballada ranch.
Hangs kack, ax, and camp hat.
Kansan’s nag mad and rants can’t bask,
can’t bacchanal and garland a lass,
can’t at last brag can crack Law’s balls,
Kansan’s cantata rang at that ramada ranch,
Mañana, Kansan snarls, I’ll have an armada
and thwart Law’s brawn,
slam Law a damn mass war path.
Marshall’s a marksman, maps Kansan’s track,
calm as a shaman, sharp as a hawk,
Says: That dastard Kansan’s had
and gnaws lamb fatback.
{excerpt...from Poetry Magazine, April, 2010}
"Nowadays, you can often spot a work
of poetry by whether it’s in lines
or no; if it’s in prose, there’s a good chance
it’s a poem." Charles Bernstein / A Review (Poet and Anti-Poet) by Daisy Fried, published April 7, 2010 -- { http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/bo...c=me&ref=books } ...Charles Bernstein's website- { http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/ }
Thanks for posting that. Charles Bernstein is definitely on my radar to start reading soon, since he is the most mainstream of prominent member of the Language poets. I'm very interested in their work. I feel like I really do need to understand it to get a lot of poetry that is being published now, and the poetry that will be written in years to come.
http://www.fishouse.org/
Forgive me if this has already been posted here, but I thought people who love contemporary poetry would love it! My teacher is actually on this site, which is how I learned about it...but it really does feature some great up and coming poets like V. Penelope Pelizzon and Oliver de la Paz (well, those are ones I enjoy regularly).
{ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/books/14bourne.html } ...and thanks to shortstoryfan for her postings.
When I ran away from a home country
Left the girlfriend and the village
Took the momentum from Hungary
Run over the Alps, Pyrenees
And jumped across the Atlantic
I caught a Greyhound bus to Austin
And came through Sacramento
On the dirty bus station of LA
Crowded with a colorful graffiti's
Took an apartment on Columbus Avenue
Got employed as a carpenter
But it did not last
It was expected to forge
Social Security Number
Then I met an agent
Who did not want me back to the roots
But to launch me
As an stunt in a movie of children
From the corn
Some fat lady was eager for love
So that year I served as a doormat
I paid for the whiskey with smiles
To one toothless Russian women
That’s how I succeeded in Hollywood
At present time I'm writing the scripts for the series
That you at home watching
With a open jaws
Mother, what you heard is true
That’s how I beat a history
Yes, Juan would also like to say hello
But right now he has a full mouth
Of my pride