fragments of contemporary poetry

THE ART OF POETRY


To gaze at a river made of time and water
and remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

{excerpt}

--translated by Anthony Kerrigan

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}

http://www.danagioia.net/essays/eryan.htm Article by Dana Gioia

212
by Anna Akhmatova
translated from the Russian by Judith Hemschemeyer

And now you are depressed and despondent,
Renouncing fame and your dreams,
But for me you are irremediably dear,
And the darker you become, the more touching.
You drink wine, your nights are impure,
You don’t know reality from dream,
But your green eyes are tormented —
It’s clear that wine hasn’t brought you peace.
And your heart asks only for a quicker death,
Cursing the sluggishness of fate,
More and more often the west wind carries
Your reproaches and your pleas.
But could I really go back to you?
Under the pale sky of my native land,
I only know how to remember and sing,
But you don’t dare remember me.
So the days go by, and sorrows multiply,
How can I pray to the Lord for you?
You’ve guessed: my love is such
That even you can’t make it die.
July 22, 1917
Slepnyova
*
Anna Akhmatova was born Anna Gorenko into an upper-class family in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1889. Although frequently confronted with official goverment opposition to her work during her lifetime, she was deeply loved and lauded by the Russian people, in part because she did not abandon her country during difficult political times. She died in Leningrad, where she had spent most of her life, in 1966.
Judith Hemschemeyer’s translations of Anna Akhmatova will be brought out by Zephyr Press this spring. (1990)

AENEAS AT WASHINGTON
*
I myself saw furious with blood
Neoptolemus, at his side the black Atridae,
Hecuba and the hundred daughters, Priam
Cut down, his filth drenching the holy fires.
In that extremity I bore me well,
A true gentleman, valorous in arms,
Distinterested and honourable. Then fled
That was a time when civilization
Run by the few fell to the many, and
Crashed to the shout of men, the clang of arms:
Cold victualing I seized, I hoisted up
The old man my father upon my back,
In the smoke made by sea for a new world
Saving little--a mind imperishable
If time is, a love of past things tenuous
As the hesitation of receding love.
(To the reduction of uncitied littorals
We brought chiefly the vigor of prophecy,
Our hunger breeding calculation
And fixed triumphs.)
I saw the thirsty dove
In the glowing fields of Troy, hemp ripening
And tawny corn, the thickening Blue Grass
All lying rich forever in the green sun.
I see all things apart, the towers that men
Contrive I too contrived long, long ago.
Now I demand little. The singular passion
Abides its object and consumes desire
In the circling shadow of its appetite.
{excerpt}
*** 1933

Barbara Klar


Wind is Pine for listen.
Snap means wait.
And the shadow word
dangles from the witch's hair
and fights the old war of deadfall and pours
from the one-toothed gargoyles in the eaves of the forest,

in the gardens of the giants, their woody flowers creaking,
the word leaning west, west, growing vertical
against the wind's disorder, the raven trees planted
by one wingtip and flying.

From Not Speaking for One Week

Quasi, if you could find me more on this poet I would greatly appreciate it, as I can only dig up this little cutting. I know she isn't prolific, but I was very moved by this little snippet (though it is not yet published widely).

Edit, did some digging of my own through her publisher, and came up with these interesting poems:

http://www.openbooktoronto.com/magaz...ticles/cypress

Dusk in the narrow country
of the North Plateau. The lodgepoles have been
waiting, villages of the undead with their arms
out, the night clerks of stone hotels
with broken beds and caving basements.

I enter, cambium locking,
and the father of doors knows
I will wake without a body. Choose your tree.

In a country disappearing over cliffs, invisible
bones in the bone trees, mine is the lodgepole
of the hot pasture’s edge, candelabra
in the Church of Pine, a year’s hymns
bundled in the flames that light my death.

*

A low branch opens: back room, needle dust,
hip hollow last lain in before the discovery
of magnetic north. The hound who has been following
circles its sleep and lays down a long bone line.
It has followed for years toward this bearing,
muzzle pointing through the tree
to the north northwest of the afterlight.

I lie down also, kiss the velvet bone, hound skull
spearing its heartbeat, my arm around the great chest
thumping slowly and more slowly,
for a seasons-long minute
not at all. I am alone among
the dead again, a spoon
around the dark spoon of the hound
who will hover in the branches,
someone staring north
from Lodgepole, Montana,
the Hound Star rising.

I will live alone if I must, leave
for the coyotes the gift of flesh and lung,
I will walk downhill abandoned
in the flickering morning.

From Night Tree

MOTHER AND CHILD



We’re all dreamers; we don’t know who we are.
Some machine made us; machine of the world, the constricting family.
Then back to the world, polished by soft whips.
We dream; we don’t remember.
Machine of the family: dark fur, forests of the mother’s body.
Machine of the mother: white city inside her.
And before that: earth and water.
Moss between rocks, pieces of leaves and grass.
And before, cells in a great darkness.
And before that, the veiled world.
This is why you were born: to silence me.
Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn
to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece.
I improvised; I never remembered.
Now it’s your turn to be driven;
you’re the one who demands to know:
Why do I suffer? ... {excerpt}

"Mother and Child" by Louise Glück, from The Seven Ages. Copyright © 2001

From The Collected Poetry of Theodore Roethke

JUDGE NOT

Faces greying faster than loam-crumbs on a harrow;
Children, their bellies swollen like blown-up paper bags,
Their eyes, rich as plums, staring from newsprint,--
These images haunted me noon and midnight.
I imagined the unborn, starving in wombs, curling:
I asked: May the blessings of life, O Lord, descend on the living.

{excerpt}

MIDSUMMER



On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry,
the boys making up games requiring them to tear off  the girls’ clothes
and the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since last summer
and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones
leaping off  the high rocks — bodies crowding the water.


The nights were humid, still. The stone was cool and wet,
marble for  graveyards, for buildings that we never saw,
buildings in cities far away.


On cloudy nights, you were blind. Those nights the rocks were dangerous,
but in another way it was all dangerous, that was what we were after.
The summer started. Then the boys and girls began to pair off
but always there were a few left at the end — sometimes they’d keep watch,
sometimes they’d pretend to go off  with each other like the rest,
but what could they do there, in the woods? No one wanted to be them.
But they’d show up anyway, as though some night their luck would change,
fate would be a different fate.


At the beginning and at the end, though, we were all together.
After the evening chores, after the smaller children were in bed,
then we were free. Nobody said anything, but we knew the nights we’d meet
and the nights we wouldn’t. Once or twice, at the end of summer,
we could see a baby was going to come out of all that kissing.


And for those two, it was terrible, as terrible as being alone.
The game was over. We’d sit on the rocks smoking cigarettes,
worrying about the ones who weren’t there.


And then finally walk home through the fields,
because there was always work the next day.
And the next day, we were kids again, sitting on the front steps in the morning,
eating a peach.  Just that, but it seemed an honor to have a mouth.
And then going to work, which meant helping out in the fields.
One boy worked for an old lady, building shelves.
The house was very old, maybe built when the mountain was built.


And then the day faded. We were dreaming, waiting for night.
Standing at the front door at twilight, watching the shadows lengthen.
And a voice in the kitchen was always complaining about the heat,
wanting the heat to break.


Then the heat broke, the night was clear.
And you thought of  the boy or girl you’d be meeting later.
And you thought of  walking into the woods and lying down,
practicing all those things you were learning in the water.
And though sometimes you couldn’t see the person you were with,
there was no substitute for that person.


{excerpt} {from Poetry magazine}

http://www.slate.com/id/2196198/pagenum/all -- article in Slate about Kay Ryan

From The Norton Anthology of American Literature
(Baym, Gottesman, Holland, Kalstone, Murphy, Parker, Pritchard)

MAXIE ALLEN

Maxie Allen always taught her
Stipendiiary little daughter
To thank her Lord and lucky star
For eye that let her see so far.
For throat enabling her to eat
Her Quaker Oats and Cream-of-Wheat,
For tongue to tantrum for the penny,
For car to hear the haven't any,
For arm to toss, for leg to chance,
For heart to hanker for romance.

Sweet Annie tried to teach her mother
There was somewhat of something other.
And whether it was veils and God
And whistling ghosts to go unshod
Across the broad and bitter sod,
Or fleet love stopping at her foot
And giving her its never-root
To put into her pocket-book,
Or just a deep and human look,
She did not know; but tried to tell.

Her mother thought at her full well,
In inner voice not like a bell
(Which though not social has a ring
Akin to wrought bedevilling)
But like an oceanic thing:
What do you guess I am?
{excerpt}

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/bo...html?ref=books

"Cracking Wise" review of poet Brenda Shaughnessy




By DAVID KIRBY
Published: October 24, 2008 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WHY IS THE COLOR OF SNOW?
by Brenda Shaughnessy


Let's ask a poet with no way of knowing.
Someone who can give us an answer,
another duplicity to help double the world.

What kind of poetry is all question, anyway?
Each question leads to an iceburn,
a snownova, a single bed spinning in space.

Poet, Decide! I am lonely with questions.
What is snow? What isn't?
Do you see how it is for me.

Melt yourself to make yourself more clear
for the next observer.
I could barely see you anyway.

A blizzard I understand better,
the secrets of many revealed as one,
becoming another on my only head.

It's true that snow takes on gold from sunset
and red from rearlights. But that's occasional.
What is constant is white,

or is that only sight, a reflection of eyewhites
and light? Because snow reflects only itself,
self upon self upon self,

is a blanket used for smothering, for sleeping.
For not seeing the naked, flawed body.
Concealing it from the lover curious, ever curious!

Who won't stop looking.
White for privacy.
Millions of privacies to bless us with snow.

Don't we melt it?
Aren't we human dark with sugar hot to melt it?
Anyway, the question—

if a dream is a construction then what
is not a construction? If a bank of snow
is an obstruction, then what is not a bank of snow?

A winter vault of valuable crystals
convertible for use only by a zen
sun laughing at us.

{excerpt}

I have always been uncomfortable describing what already exists. Existing things are just too hot, too self-radiant. My words get soft and gluey if I try to mold them into a facsimile of something. If I were a sculptor, it would be as if I were forced to work with clay that clung to my fingers instead of sticking to my projected dog sculpture.—Kay Ryan

The Chairs That No One Sits In
By Billy Collins

You see them on porches and on lawns
down by the lakeside,
usually arranged in pairs implying a couple
who might sit there and look out
at the water or the big shade trees.
The trouble is you never see anyone
sitting in these forlorn chairs
though at one time it must have seemed
a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.
Sometimes there is a little table
between the chairs where no one
is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.
It might be none of my business,
but it might be a good idea one day
for everyone who placed those vacant chairs
on a veranda or a dock to sit down in them
for the sake of remembering
whatever it was they thought deserved
to be viewed from two chairs
side by side with a table in between. ... {excerpt, from Nov. Poetry}

From November 2008 Poetry magazine

PLAINT IN A MAJOR KEY

Plaint in a Major Key
by Jorge Sánchez
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. This makes
more sense than it seems, works
more often than it doesn't,
except when it really doesn't,
and then that disorder creeps
back in. In five minutes,
a different challenge. In five
hours, a different One. Six
more hours, the One is rubbing
eyes, untangled like a dragon,
shucked and undone like an oyster.
{excerpt}