To Jozanny and others: Since acquiring the text might take some time, after one is selected...we will probably begin some days after Monday. I might be able to post one or two poems, depending on the text, and that could get us started.
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To Jozanny and others: Since acquiring the text might take some time, after one is selected...we will probably begin some days after Monday. I might be able to post one or two poems, depending on the text, and that could get us started.
Using a peculiar handicapping formula, these are the ratings for the selected poets: 0 for Hughes/ 1 for Johnson/ 3 for Collins/ 4 for Moore/ 5 for Ungaretti and Akhmatova/ 6 for Paz/ 7 for Bishop/ 8 for Plath/ and 9 for Roethke. Just a preminary evaluation which might stand until the real vote.
Thank you quasi.
Don't mean to imply that the discussion is closed to just members; it will not be. The members participating so far are Stlukesguild, JBI, Quark, Dark Muse, Dapper Drake, Virgil, Il Penseroso, Sofia 82, Jozanny, myself and ANYONE ELSE. Looking for more imput on the selected authors and collections...
Moving along at this dizzying pace...it apparently is Roethke that will be discussed. The original collection, Sequence: Sometimes Metaphysical Poems (1963) is the topic. Unless there is a move to chose any of the following:
Poetry Open House, Knopf, 1941.
The Lost Son and Other Poems, Doubleday, 1948.
Praise to the End!, Doubleday, 1951.
The Waking: Poems 1933-1953, Doubleday, 1953.
Words for the Wind: The Collected Verse of Theodore Roethke, Secker & Warburg, 1957, Doubleday, 1958.
I Am! Says the Lamb, Doubleday, 1961.
The Far Field, Doubleday, 1964.
The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, Doubleday, 1966.
Roethke is a new one to me, so I will try and see if I can get a hold of some of his stuff to look at.
I have Words for the Wind which is a volume of Roethke's collected poems through 1958. It appears I'll need to get an updated collected works to include those of Sometimes Metaphysical Poems. I am not at all against that. I like what I've read by Roethke and would certainly not be adverse to reading more. One problem, Quasi. I just checked into Amazon and the volume, Sometimes Metaphysical Poems is currently unavailable (out of print?). The Collected Poems, which runs around $10 may be the best alternative... or the library... but I prefer my own books so that I can jot notes, highlight, etc...
As Stlukesguild has posted, Sometimes Metaphysical Poems is not available so another text which is available could be the text to be discussed. http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Poem...0482229&sr=8-1 Anyone interested in the Poetry Bookclub...please advise if this is satisfactory. Obviously, a purchase might be required. Anyone interested in a final vote for the top five poets can make that happen as well. They are in descending order...Roethke, Plath, Bishop, Paz and Ungaretti tied with Akhmatova.
IN A DARK TIME
In a dark time, eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks-- is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire. ...
{excerpt, 1964}
Open House
My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
An epic of the eyes
My love, with no disguise.
My truths are all foreknown,
This anguish self-revealed.
I’m naked to the bone,
With nakedness my shield.
Myself is what I wear:
I keep the spirit spare. ... {excerpt}
{Theodore Roethke, “Open House” from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright 1941 by Theodore Roethke.}
Quasi... I have no problem with using Roethke's Collected Poems. If it's all agreed I'll put in an order to Amazon immediately and until it arrives I can utilize Words for the Wind which covers the collected poems up to 1958. I also have the collected works of Paz and Bishop and a collection of Akhmatova. I thought I had something by Ungaretti... but actually don't. As for Plath... well let's just say I'm not all that fond of the confessional poets and leave it at that.:D
I will not be joining in. I just ordered a substantial scholarly work, and on a personal level I have too much going on, sorry. If the selected text is unavailable, my branch isn't likely to have it.
Infirmity
In purest song one plays the constant fool
As changes shimmer in the inner eye.
I stare and stare into a deepening pool
And tell myself my image cannot die.
I love myself: that’s my one constancy.
Oh, to be something else, yet still to be!
Sweet Christ, rejoice in my infirmity;
There’s little left I care to call my own.
Today they drained the fluid from a knee
And pumped a shoulder full of cortisone;
Thus I conform to my divinity
By dying inward, like an aging tree.
The instant ages on the living eye;
Light on its rounds, a pure extreme of light
Breaks on me as my meager flesh breaks down—
The soul delights in that extremity.
Blessed the meek; they shall inherit wrath;
I’m son and father of my only death.
A mind too active is no mind at all;
The deep eye sees the shimmer on the stone;
The eternal seeks, and finds, the temporal,
The change from dark to light of the slow moon,
Dead to myself, and all I hold most dear,
I move beyond the reach of wind and fire. ... {four of six stanzas}
Theodore Roethke, “Infirmity” from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright © 1963 by Beatrice Roethke
To get this discussion started, before it needs CPR, we will use a website and perhaps even eliminate the need of purchasing a text...perhaps. The link, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...tml/?id=172122 will have the rest of this poem by Roethke...Big Wind
BIG WIND
Where were the greenhouses going,
Lunging into the lashing
Wind driving water
So far down the river
All the faucets stopped?—
So we drained the manure-machine
For the steam plant,
Pumping the stale mixture
Into the rusty boilers,
Watching the pressure gauge
Waver over to red,
As the seams hissed
And the live steam
Drove to the far
End of the rose-house,
Where the worst wind was,
Creaking the cypress window-frames,
Cracking so much thin glass
We stayed all night,
Stuffing the holes with burlap; .....
From The Oxford Book of American Poetry
(edited by David Lehman)
Theodore Roethke was born in Saginaw, Michigan. His father owned what one visitor from Holland
Called "the finest greenhouse in America." When Roethke was fourteen, the greenhouse--Roethke's
"symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth" --was sold after a bitter dispute between
Otto, the poet's father, and Otto's brother Charles. In the aftermath, Charles committed suicide; Otto
Died of cancer mere months later. Roethke, who had a history of mental breakdowns, taught for many
Years at the University of Washington, where his devoted students included Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, David Wagoner, and James Wright. "Write like someone else" was Roethke's best pedagogic
Advice. Of his 1948 book THE LOST SON, the author said, "In spite of all the muck and welter, the dark, thee dreck of these poems, I count myself among the happy poets." He suffered a fatal hear attack in a
Friend's swimming pool in 1963.
{This brief bio of Roethke is, I assume, David Lehman's way of engaging the reader for the poems to follow in this anthology. I am quoting it here because of the greenhouse reference.}
The second poem from this website... http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...html?id=172123 is "Child on top of a Greenhouse" and ought to be included in any discussion of the first poem.
Book to be the topic: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, Doubleday, 1966. One outlet for purchase= http://www.alibris.com/search/books/...dore%20Roethke
Oh great, Roethke was selected and I actually have that book. I will have to find it.Quote:
Originally Posted by quasimodo1
Thanks Virgil. Anybody having difficulty finding/acquiring the text? I have an extra and can ship it anywhere USA. q1
I'm still waiting on my copy from the library - I can't buy it because I just dropped 700$ for school books, and I am broke beyond belief.
Perhaps in the future we can check which collections are available in libraries or in print at a large distributor? I know with poetry collections this is chancy, but I didn't know when the nominating process was ongoing that the edition of Roethke selected was out of print.
It wouldn't matter; the collected Roethke is hardly more expensive than the anthology would have been anyway; in truth, you get more Roethke for your buck this way.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jozanny
If it would not be too much trouble, I would take you up on that. I don't really like to buy things online, so I don't if I will be able to get a hold of a copy of the book.Quote:
Originally Posted by quasimodo1
Anyone wanting the text of the first poem, please speak up.
Quasi, how are going to go through the book? Last time we went poem by poem and it was grueling and tiring and we never got through it. I think it would be too much to discuss every poem in the collection. I wish there was an easier way. One thought would be that each of us took turns selecting a poem.
Virgil, Your way sounds perfect. As you might have noticed, I sent the text of the first poem to all the players, at least those expressing interest so far. At this point, the method of approaching the book is open. I'm just trying to keep this thread from malingering...a project I'm quite fond of.
Yes I agree Virgil's idea does sound interesting
To awassini: Professor, if your comment is on topic and since very few here speak either Farsi or Arabic, perhaps you could translate.
Virgil and Dark Muse, Having each "member" choose a poem for discussion will be the loose rule. We could start with a look at "Feud" if there is any interest in the poem. Also, and please add to this if possible, the current group is composed of Dark Muse, Dapper Drake, Il Penseroso, JBI, Jozanny, Quark, myself, Sofia 82, Stlukesguild and Virgil.
Since the Rothke is agreed upon I'll pick up a copy of the Collected Poems at my local Borders (I saw it there last week). I like the idea of picking a specific poem each... perhaps as a starting point... for discussion. So how does this discussion work beyond that?
Stlukes: You ask a question that you are better suited to answer. A free-for-all approach to discussion rarely works as well as some format whether parliamentary or a template.
There are so many possibilities for an easy choice but I wanted a poem at once representatve and challenging, and THE SHAPE OF FIRE (pp 61--63) is clearly both. At this point, after one reading...I can't say I have much of an idea about its meaning. Let the speeches begin.
From The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke {FIRST POEM FOR DISCUSSION}
PP 61-63
THE SHAPE OF THE FIRE
I
What's this? A dish for at lips
Who says? A nameless stranger.
Is he a bird or a tree? Not everyone can tell.
Water recedes to the crying of spiders.
An old scow bumps over black rocks.
A cracked pod calls.
Mother me out of here. What more will the bones allow?
Will the sea give the wind suck? A toad folds into a stone.
These flowers are all fangs. Comfort me, fury.
Wake me, witch, we'll do the dance of rotten sticks.
Shale loosens. Marl reaches into the field. Small birds pass over water.
Spirit, come near. This is only the edge of whiteness.
I can't laugh at a procession of dogs.
In the hour of ripeness the tree is barren.
The she-bear mopes under the hill.
Mother, mother, stir from your cave of sorrow.
A low mouth laps water. Weeds, weeds, how I love you.
The arbor is cooler. Farewell, farewell, fond worm.
The warm comes without sound.
II
Where's the eye?
The eye's in the sty.
The ear's not here
Beneath the hair.
When I took off my clothes
To find a nose,
There was only one shoe
For the waltz of To,
The pinch of Where.
Time for the flat-headed man. I recognize that listener,
Him with the platitudes and rubber doughnuts,
Melting a the knees a varicose horror.
Hello, hello. My nerves knew you, dear boy.
Have you come to unhinge my shadow?
Last night I slept in the pits of a tongue.
The silver fish ran in and out of my special bindings;
I grew tired of the ritual of names and the assistant keeper of the
Mollusks:
Up over a viaduct I came, to the snakes and sticks of another winter,
A two-legged dog hunting a new horizon of howls.
The wind sharpened itself on a rock;
A voice sang:
Pleasure on ground
Has no sound,
Easily maddens
The uneasy man.
Who, careless, slips
In coiling ooze
Is trapped to the lips,
Leaves mare than shoes;
Must pull off clothes
To jerk like a frog
On belly and nose
From the sucking bog.
My meat eats me. Who waits at the gate?
Mother of quartz, your words writhe into my ear.
Renew the light, lewd whisper.
{two of five parts}
I will have to wait untill I can read the whole poem, but so far, I have no idea what it is about. It just sounds like a random collection of images, though some of them are kind of cool, they make no acutal sense.
After some research and because this poem seems so inaccessible, here are a few ideas about its makeup: The poems in this series, including "The Lost Son" are psychological comparisons, similar to what the German poets used to call a "bildungsroman" but also quite different because the poems don't show a linear progression from innocence to ethical strength. Also relative to the psychological factor is this quote from "Madness in the New Poetry" by Peter Davison..."Is madness a conflict between imagination and reality? (Theodore Roethke would call it "nobility of soul at odds with circumstance.") Perhaps, but what else but that very conflict gives rise to poetry? Where madness enters in we may expect incoherence; but let us take care to discriminate between the incoherence of not knowing how, and the incoherence of reaching beyond. Madness without poetry can sometimes, through the excitement that rises from it, arouse in the reader feelings much like those that would be aroused by poetry without madness. Longinus defined the difference as between the sublime and the beautiful; but twentieth-century psychiatric madness has all too little of the sublime about it. Where it engages the poet too closely with himself it tends to damage poetry, for the self should be the reservoir of poetry rather than its shallop. Poetry has suffered long from the preponderance of the idea that it exists to scratch the poet's itch. When madness enters in, the poet may try to cure himself upon the page, or to drive himself on to further intoxications of madness. If madness damages poetry, poetry must be defended. The poet as poet bears responsibility for the excellence and wholeness of his poem more than for his self's wholeness, no matter how mad he happens to be. In examining some of the books of verse published in the last year, I have kept in mind poetry before madness. Let us watch the outcome of each struggle." http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/65jan/davison.htm
Hehe I am trying to make heads or tails out of this poem
I really like this mine though it still somwhat baffles me, but from the other referecens within the first part of the poem, seems to be about the relationship or struggle between mother and sun.Quote:
Is he a bird or a tree? Not everyone can tell.
I really like this but have no idea what to make of itQuote:
Water recedes to the crying of spiders.
An old scow bumps over black rocks.
A cracked pod calls.
This makes me think of an old hagQuote:
Mother me out of here. What more will the bones allow?
Will the sea give the wind suck? A toad folds into a stone.
These flowers are all fangs. Comfort me, fury.
Wake me, witch, we'll do the dance of rotten sticks.
The contradiction of the line between the flowers and the fangs seem interesting, as it seems to suggest that somthing which should be comforting has taken a negative turn here, it puts me in the mind of an overbearing mother figure who suffocates her children and will not let them go.
There seems to be a lot of refrences to waterQuote:
Shale loosens. Marl reaches into the field. Small birds pass over water.Spirit, come near. This is only the edge of whiteness.
I can't laugh at a procession of dogs.
I find this interesting, the use of the word barren, placed in connection with the idea of a mother. It could almost be an "empty nest" syndrom, with the moping, and retreating in the cave of sorrow. Not coping with her children growing.Quote:
In the hour of ripeness the tree is barren.
The she-bear mopes under the hill.
Mother, mother, stir from your cave of sorrow.
"Time for the flat-headed man. I recognize that listener,
Him with the platitudes and rubber doughnuts,
Melting a the knees a varicose horror.
Hello, hello. My nerves knew you, dear boy.
Have you come to unhinge my shadow?
Last night I slept in the pits of a tongue.
The silver fish ran in and out of my special bindings;
I grew tired of the ritual of names and the assistant keeper of the
Mollusks:
Up over a viaduct I came, to the snakes and sticks of another winter,
A two-legged dog hunting a new horizon of howls.
The wind sharpened itself on a rock;" As you mentioned Muse, there are many references to water and to many things you would be familiar with and fond of if your early life was lived amidst greenhouses. This "greenhouse" effect (no pun) comes through in almost all Roethke's poetry. In this one, I'm still trying to make connections between the text and the authors psychological beginnings. In the passage above, his father is a clear reference but just how the son would "unhinge" him, I'm still guessing.
Are we discussing this poem: "Feud"?
Is this an early poem Quasi? It doesn't seem like Roethke's mature style, though a can pick up a echo. Here's the first stanza:
One thing I find interesting, and I do think Roethke employs this again, and that is the address to "you." "You dread," "you blubber," he puts the reader into the poem. It becomes a conversation.Quote:
Corruption reaps the young; you dread
The menace of ancestral eyes;
Recoiling from the serpent head
Of fate, you blubber in surprise.
Edit: Oops, I see we have changed the first poem to be discussed. Never mind.
I notice a lot of his images seem to repeat
These lines seem to refelct back to some of the things which he said in the first part of the poem.Quote:
Up over a viaduct I came, to the snakes and sticks of another winter,
A two-legged dog hunting a new horizon of howls.
The wind sharpened itself on a rock;
A voice sang:
Yes... "challenging" is certainly the word for it. Is it really "representative"? Most of what I have read by Rothke struck me as far more immediately accessible. Not that I question this. A great deal of Modern/Poet-Modern poetry is nearly abstract in nature... suggestive of a certain mood... atmosphere... idea... without ever being able to be reduced to a logical narrative meaning. As I first read through this poem I was certainly struck by the sound of his "music" as it were. Where a great deal of poetry has a sort of lilting musicality... often utilizing words that seem rooted in French and Italian and the Romance languages in general, Rothke repeatedly strikes me as producing a music that is rooted far more in the earthy Anglo-Saxon... harder... with hard guttural sounds... if that makes sense.
"Old scow bumps over black rocks..." "A cracked pod..." "A toad folds into a stone..." "That minnowy world of weeds and ditches..." "A slow snail lifting..." all of these words have a sound... and the images equally suggest something closer to the earth-bound dark and dank world of Beowolf and peat bogs and rough-tilled soil. In spite of the flow of images that suggests something Surrealistic or abstract... it is not the modernism of Rimbaud, Breton, Eliot, etc... that comes to mind but rather poetry such as that of Piers Plowman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound's translation of the Seafarer, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. There is a seeming love of the more guttural, Germanic/Anglo-Saxon sounds. I suppose this is most obvious in the use of consonance (and assonance) as opposed to the end rhyme... a technique favored in Anglo-Saxon poetry... and later revived by Manley Hopkins:
A toad folds into a stone...
Wake me, witch, we'll do the dance of rotten sticks...
Morning-fair, follow me further back,
Into that minnowy world of weeds and ditches,
When the herons floated high over the white houses,
And the little crabs slipped into silvery craters...
Now to dig deep into the soil of this poem to attempt a further understanding of the poet's intention beyond the music of the form or the language...