fragments of contemporary poetry

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:

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Originally Posted by quasimodo1

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

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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:

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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

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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.