Welcome Back Quasimodo1, good trip?
Printable View
Welcome Back Quasimodo1, good trip?
hey JBI, outstanding trip. Just sort of getting back into the groove. Let me check out what's up with the Poetry Book Club thread.
For A Coming Extinction
Gray whale
Now that we are sinding you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing
I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day
The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours
{excerpt}
A Physics
When you get down to it, Earth
has our own great ranges
of feeling-Rocky, Smoky, Blue-
and a heart that can melt stones.
The still pools fill with sky,
as if aloof, and we have eyes
for all of this-and more, for Earth's
reminding moon. We too are ruled
by such attractions-spun and swaddled,
rocked and lent a light. We run
our clocks on wheels, our trains
on time. {excerpt}
WHAT HE THOUGHT
We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the Mayor, mulled a couple
matters over. "What does mean this 'flat drink?' someone asked.
What is "cheap date?" (Nothing we said lessened
this one's mystery). Among Italian writers we
could recognize our counterparts: the academic,
the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib. And there was one
administrator (The Conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone
narrated sights and histories
the hired van hauled us past. ... {excerpt} [ for more information on Heather McHugh-- http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/P...Hugh/index.cfm ]
I’m an unreliable witness
I zone out
Hail, storm and tempest
you’re marooned
in our marriage
again—
Have wizards knotted
snarls in our nerves,
nooses in our dreams?
Daughter born
in the land of granite
and cod’s head,
we can’t help where we live
A Nor’easter
again—
{from the collection Squandermania and the poem
"Marooned"} link:
http://bostonreview.net/BR33.3/belieu.php
Ghazal of the Better-Unbegun
A book is a suicide postponed.
--Cioran
Too volatile, am I? too voluble? too much a word-person?
I blame the soup: I'm a primordially
stirred person.
Two pronouns and a vehicle was Icarus with wings.
The apparatus of his selves made an ab-
surd person.
The sound I make is sympathy's: sad dogs are tied afar.
But howling I become an ever more un-
heard person.
I need a hundred more of you to make a likelihood.
The mirror's not convincing-- that at-best in-
ferred person.
As time's revealing gets revolting, I start looking out.
Look in and what you see is one unholy
blurred person. ... {excerpt}
STROKE
The literate are ill-prepared for this
snap in the line of life:
the day turns a trick
of twisted tongues and is
untiable, the month by no mere root
moon-ridden, and the yearly eloquences yielding more
than summer's part of speech times four. We better learn
the buried meaning in the grave: here
all we see of its alphabet is tracks
of predators, all we know of its tense
the slow seconds and quick centuries
of sex. ... {excerpt}
The Miracle of the Actual
While the poet was falling in love with people she hadn't met
certain Vietnamese were in their third generation of the torment of Agent Orange
which crafts real people like Picassos, joints in all directions, limbs ending.
Lingers at least fifty years like heartbreak, and breaks the mighty imagination
over angles like the Atlantic shatters clams on the jetties up and down New Jersey.
We kept expecting as a society for time to stop and let us into the air conditioning
to ponder and take our ease upon the new-aged recliners of the seventies.
Beholding the fine view, we would devise the humane, unbend some crooks.
It seemed like things were improving when reporters took a break writing about them,
we cannot believe in the population of China and think the scientists extremists.
The lovers Shirin and Khosro fell in love just hearing about each other
so long ago you could claim it never happened, or was a myth
and crossed Anatolia missing each other six or seven times, once,
Khosro saw her bathing and the sight of her back was enough to ruin him
for two or three more crossings until she finally arrived and lost her beauty
for him but not to him at the hand of some angry nephew. .....................{excerpt, from the Adirondack Review}
BY THE DEAD
PRIDE that sat on the beautiful brow,
Scorn that lay in the arching lips,
Will of the oak-grain, where are ye now?
I may dare to touch her finger-tips!
Deep, flaming eyes, ye are shallow enough;
The steadiest fire burns out at last.
Throw back the shutters, -- the sky is rough,
And the winds are high, -- but the night is past.
Mother, I speak with the voice of a man;
Death is between us, -- I stoop no more;
And yet so dim is each new-born plan,
I am feebler than ever I was before, --
{Anonymous . Selected Poems from The Atlantic
Monthly} ------------------------------------------- http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/mo...c/AnoAtla.html
.....A small database of anonymous poems
SONG FOR A MOUNTAIN-CLIMBER
Pure indifference
moves otherwise. It’s unconditional:
a little fling cannot diminish it:
impartially it flies from everything,
from man’s investments, and
his dearth. The thought that God
might care for us is
terrifying: ought
to keep us hooked on earth. ... {EXCERPT}
- new poetry by August Kleinzahler - title of the review above
By STEPHEN BURT
Published: May 25, 2008
- new poetry by August Kleinzahler - title of the review above
By STEPHEN BURT
Published: May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/bo...=1&oref=slogin
For The Twentieth Century
Bound, hungry to pluck again from the thousand
technologies of ecstasy
boundlessness, the world that at a drop of water
rises without boundaries,
I push the PLAY button:—
...Callas, Laurel & Hardy, Szigeti
you are alive again,—
the slow movement of K.218
once again no longer
bland, merely pretty, nearly
banal, as it is
in all but Szigeti's hands
*
Therefore you and I and Mozart
must thank the Twentieth Century, for
it made you pattern ... {excerpt}
F. Bidart, winner of the 2007 Bolingen Prize for poetry
Poetry May 2007 Atlantic Monthly
by Wyatt Prunty
1950
"Then let him ride in the bed of the truck
and wave the world home." That was the old man's answer.
So I made my small-fist climb up back
Of the cab, to see things in reverse and hear
The wind generalizing hedgerows and oaks,
And watch the avenues of fields that broke
Whenever a hedge gave out and sudden farm
Emerged, dogs barking alarm—
As we kept up that way,
Under the shade that tunneled and played
And deepened the road. But where were we going?
I never remember; only,
I owned cattle and barn, the loosely planked bridges
That rattled like drums, limbs flicking the sky,
And gravel busy under the musical tires;
Till filled with what ticked by, I wanted the entire
List of it, ... {excerpt} -- http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200705/prunty-poem