fragments of contemporary poetry

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/bo...tml?ref=review ---FROM HARVEY RIVER

A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island.

By Lorna Goodison.

Illustrated. 288 pp. Amistad/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.95.

Related
First Chapter: ‘From Harvey River’ (March 30, 2008) ----------------------------------Lorna Goodison (born 1947) is a Jamaican poet -----“I’m a poet, but I didn’t choose poetry—it chose me […] it’s a dominating, intrusive tyrant. It’s something I have to do—a wicked force.” --I Am Becoming My Mother

William Matthews (1942-1997) quote describing the four thematic categories of

published poetry: "1. I went out into the woods today and it made me feel, you

know, sort of religious. 2. We're not getting any younger 3. It sure is cold and

lonely (a) without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey. 4. Sadness seems to be the

other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too

soon spent on we know not what."

NO RETURN
I like divorce. I love to compose
letters of resignation; now and then
I send one in and leave in a lemon-
hued Huff or a Snit with four on the floor.
Do you like the scent of a hollyhock?
To each his own. I love a burning bridge.
{first stanza}

BETWEEN HURRICANES
As we slide into the 3rd world we have created,
running from hurricanes,
with our SS# indelibly inked on our arms
storms swell and swallow our control.

I am flooded with life review,
the beliefs of my youth.
I reach for my first Bible
which has survived every move.
I am mystified by Revelation’s
hallucinations again.
{excerpt}

"Hamlet Off-Stage: Neutrinos Explain Suck-Uppers"
Neutrinos do zip but swap back and forth
into each other, much like Rosypoop
and Guildendoo do. For years it was thought
neutrinos hung out weightless as R&G.
No longer. Scientists have discovered
neutrinos possess mass. Though invisible,
neutrinos weigh as much as all the stars.
How could I have thought the R & G twins
weightless? ... {excerpt}

I haven't been reading much contemporary poetry as of late... to be honest, I haven't been reading much of anything as of late, focusing my time upon my current artistic efforts (although I have done some reading of various Hebrew Biblical texts as part of this body of work). Nevertheless... Geoffrey Hill is one of the few living poets who continues to speak to me. For all the reputation of John Ashberry I find myself somewhat unconvinced... But there is something... heavier... weightier... something suggesting a real gravitas in Hill's work. Even his language and syntax suggest something of a more muscular Anglo-Saxon strain of English... English without the fluid ease of the French influences. English that recalls the heft of Milton, Hopkins, Beowulf...:

IV.
Between bay window and hedge the impenetrable holly
strikes up again taut wintry vibrations.
The hellebore is there still,
half-buried; the crocuses are surviving.
From the front room I might be able to see
the coal fire's image planted in a circle
of cut-back rose bushes. Nothing is changed
by the strength of this reflection.

XI.
Above Dunkirk, the sheared anvil-
head of the oil-smoke column, the wind
beginning to turn, turning on itself, spiralling,
shaped on it's potter's wheel. But no fire-storm:
such phenomena were as yet unvisited
upon Judeo-Christian-Senecan Europe.
It is to Daniel, as to our own
tragic satire, that one returns
for mastery of the business; well-timed,
intermitted terror. How else recall
Mierendorff's ancient, instant, final cry__
madness___ in Leipzig, out of the sevenfold
fiery furnace?

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 Danude, 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 capella,
made for double string choirs, congregated brass,
choice performers on baroque trumpets hefting
like glassblowers, inventions
of supreme order?

-from The Triumph of Love
Geoffrey Hill

from TORNADOS by Thylias Moss

Truth is, I envy them
not because they dance; I out jitterbug them
as I'm shuttled through and through legs
strong as looms, weaving time. They
do black more justice than I, frenzy
of conductor of philharmonic and electricity, hair
on end, result of the charge when horns and strings release
the pent up Beethoven and Mozart. Ions played

instead of notes. The movement
is not wrath, not hormone swarm because
I saw my first forming above the church a surrogate
steeple. The morning of my first baptism and
salvation already tangible, funnel for the spirit
coming into me without losing a drop, my black
guardian angel come to rescue me before all the words

continued here: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poe...oss/online.htm

from Codicil by Derek Walcott

Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles,
one a hack's hired prose, I earn
me exile. I trudge this sickle, moonlit beach for miles,

tan, burn
to slough off
this live of ocean that's self-love.

To change your language you must change your life.

I cannot right old wrongs.
Waves tire of horizon and return.
Gulls screech with rusty tongues

continued here: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets...tt/poems/11267

from Those who thoroughly Bed the Estuary by Jay Wright


Those who thoroughly bed
the estuary
...............know
the value of relation,
the inflection and formal
variation
............water knows
...................from air.
Clearly,
everything consists
in the determinate word,
the order of one, two, three;
no tricky exclusion concerns us—
not here, not ever.

continued here: http://www.versedaily.org/bedtheestuary.shtml

from Adolescence II by Rita Dove

Although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting.
Sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert.
Venetian blinds slice up the moon; the tiles quiver in pale strips.

Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round
As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines.
They bring the scent of licorice. One sits in the washbowl,

One on the bathtub edge; one leans against the door.
"Can you feel it yet?" they whisper.
I don't know what to say, again. They chuckle,

continued here: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets...ove/poems/2201

On Reading Crowds and Power



1


Cloven, we are incorporate, our wounds
simple but mysterious. We have
some wherewithal to bide our time on earth.
Endurance is fantastic; ambulances
battling at intersections, the city
intolerably en fête. My reflexes
are words themselves rather than standard
flexures of civil power. In all of this
Cassiopeia's a blessing
as is steady Orion beloved of poets.
Quotidian natures ours for the time being
I do not know
how we should be absolved or what is fate. {first stanza}

The Schooner Flight


1 Adios, Carenage


In idle August, while the sea soft,
and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim
of this Caribbean, I blow out the light
by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion
to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight.
Out in the yard turning gray in the dawn,
I stood like a stone and nothing else move
but the cold sea rippling like galvanize
and the nail holes of stars in the sky roof,
till a wind start to interfere with the trees.
I pass me dry neighbor sweeping she yard
as I went downhill, and I nearly said:
“Sweep soft, you witch, ’cause she don’t sleep hard,”
but the ***** look through me like I was dead.
A route taxi pull up, park-lights still on.
The driver size up my bags with a grin:
“This time, Shabine, like you really gone!”
I ain’t answer the ***, I simply pile in
the back seat and watch the sky burn
above Laventille pink as the gown
in which the woman I left was sleeping,
and I look in the rearview and see a man
exactly like me, and the man was weeping
for the houses, the streets, that whole ****ing island. ------------------{1st stanza of this long poem}

Mr. Matthews was asked whether his work was the poetry of experience. He answered: ''Well, it's certainly not the poetry of innocence. Life happens to us whether we have the good sense to be interested in the way it happens to us or not. That's what it means to be alive."

In Memory of the Utah Stars

Each of them must have terrified
his parents by being so big, obsessive
and exact so young, already gone
and leaving, like a big tipper,
that huge changeling's body in his place.
The prince of bone spurs and bad knees.

The year I first saw them play
Malone was a high school freshman,
already too big for any bed,
14, a natural resource.
You have to learn not to
apologize, a form of vanity.
You flare up in the lane, exotic
anywhere else. You roll the ball
off fingers twice as long as your
girlfriend's. Great touch for a big man,
says some jerk. Now they're defunct
and Moses Malone, boy wonder at 19,
rises at 20 from the St. Louis bench,
his pet of a body grown sullen
as fast as it grew up.
------------------------------------{excerpt}

from Digging by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pin rest; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

continued here: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets...ey/poems/12699