Printable View
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=128239404 --- This PBS link has poems
from Merwin's "The Shadow of Sirius" collection. Also, interview with Merwin on the program
"Fresh Air". For a complete transcript of the interview...
{http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=128239404} --- Title ...<
'Sirius' Poetry From New Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin.
THE HEAVEN OF ANIMALS
Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.
Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open.
To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood,
The deepest field.
For some of these,
It could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,
More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey
May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life, ...{excerpt}
SOFTEST OF TONGUES
To many things I've said the word that cheats
the lips and leaves them parted (thus: prash-chai
which means "good-bye") -- to furnished flats, to streets,
to milk-white letters melting in the sky;
to drab designs that habit seldom sees,
to novels interrupted by the din
of tunnels, annotated by quick trees,
abandoned with a squashed banana skin;
to a dim waiter in a dimmer town,
to cuts that healed and to a thumbless glove;
also to things of lyrical renown
perhaps more universal, such as love.
Thus life has been an endless line of land
receding endlessly.... And so that's that,
you say under your breath, and wave your hand,
and then your handkerchief, and then your hat.
To all these things I've said the fatal word,
using a tongue I had so tuned and tamed
that -- like some ancient sonneteer -- ... {excerpt} {for the rest of this classic poem... http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs...ov/tongues.htm }
A STOPWATCH AND AN ORDNANCE MAP
A stopwatch and an ordnance map.
At five a man fell to the ground
And the watch flew off his wrist
Like a moon struck from the earth
Marking a blank time that stares
On the tides of change beneath.
All under the olive trees.
A stopwatch and an ordnance map.
He stayed faithfully in that place
From his living comrade split
By dividers of the bullet
Opening wide the distances
Of his final loneliness.
All under the olive trees.
A stopwatch and an ordnance map. ...{excerpt}
MADRIGAL IN TIME OF WAR
Beside the rivers of the midnight town
Where four-foot couples love and paupers drown,
Shots of quick hell we took, our final kiss,
The great and swinging bridge a bower for this.
Your cheek lay burning in my fingers’ cup;
Often my lip moved downward and yours up
Till both adjusted, tightened, locksmith-true:
The flesh precise, the crazy brain askew.
Roughly the train with grim and piston knee
Pounded apart our pleasure, you from me;
Flare warned and ticket whispered and bell cried.
Time and the locks of bitter rail divide.
For ease remember, all that parted lie:
Men who in camp of shot or doldrum die,
Who at land’s-end eternal furlough take
—This for memento as alone you wake.
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/455367/Poetry/overview --- from South Korea ---- --- POETRY ---- the movie --- http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/02/11.../11poetry.html = Full Review - NYT --
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/bo..._r=1&ref=books ---- a review -- Poems of Pain, the Raw and the Remembered --- By DANA JENNINGS
Published: February 9, 2011 ---- "EVERY RIVEN THING" by Christian Wiman -- 93pp, Farrar, Straus & Giroux -- $24
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/bo...c=me&ref=books ---- PAUL VIOLI --- OBITUARY entitled "Paul Violi, A Poet both Wry and Sly, dies at 66" -- by William Grimes, April 15, 2011 --- http://www.paulvioli.com/ --- Violi poem... "Counterman" -- http://www.cstone.net/~poems/countvio.htm --
the day the saucers came
by: NEIL GAIMAN
That day, the saucers landed. Hundreds of them, golden,
Silent, coming down from the sky like great snowflakes,
And the people of Earth stood and stared as they descended,
Waiting, dry-mouthed to find what waited inside for us
And none of us knowing if we would be here tomorrow
But you didn't notice it because
That day, the day the saucers came, by some coincidence,
Was the day that the graves gave up their dead
And the zombies pushed up through soft earth
or erupted, shambling and dull-eyed, unstoppable,
Came towards us, the living, and we screamed and ran,
But you did not notice this because
On the saucer day, which was the zombie day, it was
Ragnarok also, and the television screens showed us
A ship built of dead-man's nails, a serpent, a wolf,
All bigger than the mind could hold, and the cameraman could
Not get far enough away, and then the Gods came out
But you did not see them coming because
On the saucer-zombie-battling gods day the floodgates broke
And each of us was engulfed by genies and sprites
Offering us wishes and wonders and eternities
And charm and cleverness and true brave hearts and pots of gold
While giants feefofummed across the land, and killer bees,
But you had no idea of any of this because
That day, the saucer day the zombie day
The Ragnarok and fairies day, the day the great winds came
And snows, and the cities turned to crystal, the day
All plants died, plastics dissolved, the day the
Computers turned, the screens telling us we would obey, the day
Angels, drunk and muddled, stumbled from the bars,
And all the bells of London were sounded, the day
Animals spoke to us in Assyrian, the Yeti day,
The fluttering capes and arrival of the Time Machine day,
You didn't notice any of this because
you were sitting in your room, not doing anything
not even reading, not really, just
looking at your telephone,
wondering if I was going to call.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/bo..._r=1&ref=books --- On Poetry
How Poets Achieve Their Styles -- By DAVID ORR
Published: April 22, 2011
---
How It Happens
The sky said I am watching
to see what you
can make out of nothing
I was looking up and I said
I thought you
were supposed to be doing that
the sky said Many
are clinging to that
I am giving you a chance
I was looking up and I said
I am the only chance I have
then the sky did not answer
and here we are
with our names for the days
the vast days that do not listen to us
— W.S. MERWIN, poet laureate of the United States and author, most recently, of “The Shadow of Sirius,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2009
http://www.salon.com/books/laura_mil...4/05/david_orr --- David Orr on Contemporary Poetry --- salon.com ------- Tuesday, Apr 5, 2011 20:30 ET
Modern poetry made less terrifying
Critic David Orr explains the mysteries and marvels of contemporary verse and the people who write it. {review of BEAUTIFUL AND POINTLESS} by David Orr -- 18.71 ...a guide to modern poetry
http://www.theparisreview.org/interv...42-octavio-paz --- Octavio Paz, The Art of Poetry No. 42
Interviewed by Alfred Mac Adam --- The Paris Review Interviews... --- Summer, 1991 --
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2..._fact_goodyear ---
The Literary Life
The Moneyed Muse
What can two hundred million dollars do for poetry?by Dana Goodyear
February 19, 2007
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...#ixzz1MZyCqHCY --
FOR THE LAST WOLVERINE
They will soon be down
To one, but he still will be
For a little while still will be stopping
The flakes in the air with a look,
Surrounding himself with the silence
Of whitening snarls. Let him eat
The last red meal of the condemned
To extinction, tearing the guts
From an elk. Yet that is not enough
For me. I would have him eat
The heart, and from it, have an idea
Stream into his gnarling head
That he no longer has a thing
To lose, and so can walk
Out into the open, in the full
Pale of the sub-Arctic sun
Where a single spruce tree is dying
Higher and higher. Let him climb it
With all his meanness and strength.
Lord, we have come to the end
Of this kind of vision of heaven,
As the sky breaks open
Its fans around him and shimmers
And into its northern gates he rises
Snarling complete in the joy of a weasel
With an elk’s horned heart in his stomach
Looking straight into the eternal
Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all
My way: at the top of that tree I place
The New World’s last eagle
Hunched in mangy feathers giving
Up on the theory of flight.
Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate
To the death in the rotten branches,
Let the tree sway and burst into flame
And mingle them, crackling with feathers,
In crownfire. Let something come
Of it something gigantic legendary
Rise beyond reason over hills
Of ice screaming that it cannot die,
That it has come back, this time
On wings, and will spare no earthly thing:
That it will hover, made purely of northern
Lights, at dusk and fall
On men building roads: ... {excerpt}