http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/bo...b3&oref=slogin Review entitled "Tripping To and Fro, Happily Skewering Poetry" by Janet Maslin, 10/1/08 of Billy Collins' new book BALLISTICS
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/bo...b3&oref=slogin Review entitled "Tripping To and Fro, Happily Skewering Poetry" by Janet Maslin, 10/1/08 of Billy Collins' new book BALLISTICS
ONE ART
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
{excerpt}
From The Colossus and other poems
BLUE MOLES
1. They're out of the dark's ragbag, these two
Moles dead in the pebbled rut,
Shapeless as flung gloves, a few feet apart--
Blue suede a dog or fox has chewed.
One, by himself, seemed pitiable enough,
Little victim unearthed by some large
creature
From his orbit under the elm root.
The second carcass makes a duel of the
Affair:
Blind twins bitten by bad nature.
The sky's far dome is sane and clear.
Leaves, undoing their yellow caves
Between the road and the lake water,
Bare no sinister spaces. Already
The moles look neutral as the stones.
Their corkscrew noses, their white hands
Uplifted, stiffen in a family pose.
Difficult to imagine how fury struck--
Dissolved now, smoke of an old war.
2. Nightly the battle-shouts start up
In the ear of the veteran, and again
I enter the soft pelt of the mole.
Light's death to them: they shrivel in it.
They move through their mute rooms while
I sleep,
Palming the earth aside, grubbers
After the fat children of root and rock.
By day, only the topsoil heaves.
Down there one is alone.
{excerpt}
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/26/poetry Interview "Olds' Worlds" by Marianne Macdonald (photograph of Sharon Olds)
From The Face of the Earth
MAKING YOUR OWN ECLIPSE
Making Your Own Eclipse
The word comes from a Greek word
for ‘abandonment’: we catch an untraceable
fire already kindled in another.
When night falls suddenly
for such a short period
in the clearest skies of the day
as a second darkening,
they could not have known
that what they were seeing was the Moon
acting as a screen.
For blue does not mean
its sensation in us, but the power
in it, the behaviour of the aligning
light in the pleasure-journey
of the obedient morning.
Across Ireland the blueness will drop
to temperatures of dusk,
a gentle east wind
will blow birds silent,
and stars along the Path
of Totality will decorate
the late forenoon.
Bleating flocks and fearful herds
will unexpectedly return to their stables
and patterns of light and dark
will tremble over the ground.
We will keep looking
at the fleecy space,
you curled up with your head
on my knee, saying, We
have been cheated, the twenty-
four seconds are passing and it
is much worse than we expected.
Then there will be the subtle
tension as the Moon begins
to creep into your face,
the cool band of air
in her shadow racing
about as close as it can,
to plunge into the gold spot
where the magnified Sun
will sail under the same perfect pearl.
{excerpt}
From The Oxford Book of American Poetry
(chosen and edited by David Lehman)
MAN LISTENING TO DISC
This is not bad--
Ambling along 44th Street
With Sonny Rollins for company,
His music flowing through the soft calipers
Of these earphones,
As if he were right beside me
On this clear day in March,
The pavement sparkling with sunlight,
Pigeons fluttering off the curb,
Nodding over a profusion of bread crumbs.
In fact, I would say
My delight at being suffused
With phrases from his saxophone--
Some like honey, some like vinegar--
Is surpassed only be my gratitude
To Tommy Potter for taking the time
To join us on this breezy afternoon
With his most unwieldy bass
And to the esteemed Arthur Taylor
Who is somehow managing to navigate
This crowd with his cumbersome drums.
And I bow deeply to Theloniious Monk
For figuring out a way
To motorize-- or whatever -- his huge piano
As he could be with us today.
The music is loud yet so confidential
I cannot help feeling even more
Like the center of the universe
Than usual as I walk along to a rapid
Little version of "The Way You Look Tonight,"
And all I can say to my fellow pedestrians,
To the woman in the white sweater,
The man in the tan raincoat and the heavy glasses,
Who mistake themselves for the center of the universe --
All I can say is watch your step
Because the five of us, instruments and all,
Are about to angle over
To the south side of the street
And then, in our own tightly knit way,
Turn the corner at Sixth Avenue.
{excerpt}
Untitled
The landscape crossed out with a pen
reappears here
what I am pointing to is not rhetoric
October over the rhetoric
flight seen everywhere
the scout in the black uniform
gets up, takes hold of the world
and microfilms it into a scream
wealth turns into floodwaters
a flash of light expands
into frozen experience
and just as I seem to be a false witness
sitting in the middle of a field
the snow troops remove their disguises
and turn into language
From The Oxford Book of American Poetry
(chosen and edited by David Lehman)
TO WORLD WAR TWO
Early on you introduced me to young women in bars
You were large, and with a large hand
You presented them in different cities,
Made me in San Luis Obispo, drunk
On French seventy-fives, in Los Angeles, on pousse-cafes.
It was a time of general confusion
Of being a body hurled at a wall.
I didn't do much fighting. I sat, rather I stood, in a foxhole.
I stood while the typhoon splashed us into morning.
It felt unusual
Even if for a good cause
To be part of a destructive force
With my rifle in my hands
And in my head
My serial number
The entire object of my existence
To eliminate Japanese soldiers
By killing them
With a rifle or with a grenade
And then, many years after that,
I could write poetry
Fall in love
And have a daughter
And think
About these things
From a great distance
If I survived
I was "paying by debt
To societry" a paid
Killer. It wasn't
Like anything I'd done
Before, on the paved
Streets of Cincinatti
Or on the ballroom floor
At Mr. Vathe's dancing class
What would Anne Marie Goldsmith
Have thought of mee
If instead of asking her to dance
I had put my BAR* to my shoulder
And shot her in the face
I thought about her in my foxhole--
One, in a foxhole near me, has his throat cut during the night
We take more precautions but it is night and it is you.
The typhoon continues and so do you.
"I can't be killed -- because of my poetry. I have to live on in order to write it."
I thought -- even crazier thought, or just as crazy --
"If I'm killed while thinking of oines, it will be too corny
When it's reported" ( I imagined it would be reported.!)
So I kept thinking lines of poetry. One that came to me on the beach in Leyte
Was :The surf comes in like masochistic lions."
I loved this terrible line. It was keeping by alive. My Uncle Leo wrote to me,
"You won't believe this, but someday you may wish
You were footlosse and twenty on Leyte again." I have never wanted
To be on Leyte again,
With you, whispering into my ear,
"Go on and win me! Tomorrow you may not be alive,
So do it today!" How could anyone ever win you?
How many persons would I have to kill Was older than you were and in camouflage. But for you
Who threw everything together, and had all the systems
Working for you all the time, this was trivial. If you could use me
You'd use me, and then forget. How else
Did I think you'd behave?
I'm glad you ended. I glad I didn't die. Or lose my mind.
As machines make ice
*footnote...Browning Automatic Rifle, high posered assualt rifle used primarily in secnd World War. (excerpt)
TO SEE HIM AGAIN
Never, never again?
Not on nights filled with quivering stars,
or during dawn's maiden brightness
or afternoons of sacrifice?
Or at the edge of a pale path
that encircles the farmlands,
or upon the rim of a trembling fountain,
whitened by a shimmering moon?
Or beneath the forest's
luxuriant, raveled tresses
where, calling his name,
I was overtaken by the night?
Not in the grotto that returns
the echo of my cry?
Oh no. To see him again --
it would not matter where --
in heaven's deadwater
or inside the boiling vortex,
under serene moons or in bloodless fright!
{excerpt}
http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.h...2-00e1541fbff3
The New Republic
Sing for Me, Muse, the Mania
by Christopher Benfey
Post Date Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
RETRODUCTION TO AMERICAN HISTORY
Cats walk the floor at midnight; that enemy of fog,
The moon, wraps the bedpost in receding stillness; sleep
Collects all weary nothings and lugs away the towers,
The pinnacles of dust that feed the subway.
What stiff unhappy silence waits on sleep
Struts like an officer; tongues next-door bewitch
Themselves with divination; I like a melancholy oaf
Beg the nightly pillow with impossible loves.
And abnegation folds hands, crossed like the knees
Of the complacent tailor, stitches cloaks of mercy
To the backs of obsessions.
Winter like spring no less
Tolerates the air; the wild pheasant meets innocently
The gun; night flouts illumination with meagre impudence.
In such serenity of equal fates, why has Narcissus
Urged the brook with questions? Merged with the element
Speculation suffuses the meadow with drops to tickle
The cow’s gullet; grasshoppers drink the rain.
Antiquity breached mortality with myths.
Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates
A cornice on the Third National Bank. Vocabulary
Becomes confusion, decoration a blight; the Parthenon
In Tennessee stucco, art for the sake of death. Now
(The bedpost receding in stillness) you brush your teeth
“Hitting on all thirty-two;” scholarship pares
The nails of Catullus, sniffs his sheets, restores
His “passionate underwear;” morality disciplines the other
Person; every son-of-a-***** is Christ, at least Rousseau;
Prospero serves humanity in steam-heated universities, three
Thousand dollars a year. Simplicity, Flamineo, is obscene;
Sunlight topples indignant from the hill.
In every railroad station everywhere every lover
Waits for his train. He cannot hear. The smoke
Thickens. Ticket in hand, he pumps his body
Toward lower six, for one more terse ineffable trip,
His very eyeballs fixed in disarticulation. The berth
Is clean; no elephants, vultures, mice or spiders
Distract him from nonentity: his metaphors are dead. ... {half of this poem}
For those interested, One Art by BishopQuote:
Originally Posted by quasimodo1
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets...shop/poems/860
quasi, I really like this. I hope Tate wins because it seems I can sink my teeth into these motifs with enthusiasm, and I am motivated to read his work purely for myself, so I may just make an Amazon purchase, but I will wait until I know which collection you are going to select.Quote:
Originally Posted by quasimodo1
What a passage. Let me see if I can influence unfairly the vote. "Vocabulary
Becomes confusion, decoration a blight; the Parthenon
In Tennessee stucco, art for the sake of death."
SONNETS OF THE BLOOD
I
What is the flesh and blood compounded of
But a few moments in the life of time?
This prowling of the cells, litigious love,
Wears the long claw of flesh-arguing crime.
Consider the first settlers of our bone,
Observe how busily they sued the dust,
Estopped forever by the last dusted stone.
It is a pity that two brothers must
Perceive a canker of perennial flower
To make them brothers in mortality:
Perfect this treason to the murderous hour
If you would win the hard identity
Of brothers—a long race for men to run
Nor quite achieved when the perfection’s won.
{excerpt}
Is this one of your humorous moments which always lose me?:p I ordered new The Collected Poems 1919-1976 FGS classics, because as usual, TNR is always right and I'd die happy if I could intern with them just a few short months, but I am only a semi-intelligentsia snark, for a crip.:DQuote:
Originally Posted by quasimodo1
I bought it because this is a keeper, at least for me, whether he wins the vote or not.
Delivery date est is 10/16, but I usually get Amazon purchases in about 3 days.
Yes, another attempt at levity which is my case tends to be Murphyesque, sucking stones, crutches and mews of the southeastern aspect. I am trying to get FGS...have you ever used Library of America...they are moving and having a big sell off. Mostly classic stuff. Please tell me your remark about the TNR is ascerbic.
TIERRA DEL FUEGO
You who see our homes at night
and the frail walls of our conscience,
you who hear our conversations
droning on like sewing machines
—save me, tear me from sleep,
from amnesia.
Why is childhood—oh, tinfoil treasures,
oh, the rustling of lead, lovely and foreboding—
our only origin, our only longing?
Why is manhood, which takes the place of ripeness,
an endless highway,
Sahara yellow?
After all, you know there are days
when even thirst runs dry
and prayer’s lips harden.
Sometimes the sun’s coin dims
and life shrinks so small
that you could tuck it
in the blue gloves of the Gypsy
who predicts the future
for seven generations back
and then in some other little town
in the south a charlatan
decides to destroy you,
me, and himself.
You who see the whites of our eyes,
you who hide like a bullfinch
in the rowans,
like a falcon
in the clouds’ warm stockings
—open the boxes full of song,
open the blood that pulses in aortas
of animals and stones,
light lanterns in black gardens. ... {excerpt}
Translated by Clare Cavanah
quasi, your encyclopedic skills tend to astound, which is why as a poet myself I might drown in them if I am not careful to back off now and then:p.Quote:
Originally Posted by quasimodo1
Yes, I enjoy Library of America texts as very finely edited, and have much of James and Faulkner and Paine and Sherman's memoirs, among others, and no, when it comes to The New Republic, to me they represent the dying breed of a true American and (American-Jewish) intelligentsia--with the possible exception of Michelle Cottle. Oddly, I don't like their female opinion writers as much--too much of a b----y streak in tonality, :D
That said though, their editors made me nearly skid mark my underwear by treating me with respect when I applied to work for them. I keep torturing my columns in near tears hoping one day I am satisfied enough to keep trying to crack their ceiling with my byline. The quality of their work and literary depth is the closest thing I have to a religion.
Now I have to go look up this Adam Z who you posted. You can pm me anytime. All is forgiven:lol: (I'm joking).
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}
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/bo...ks&oref=slogin -- Robert Lowell and
Elizabeth Bishop review of "Words in Air"
The Lemons
by Eugenio Montale
translated from the Italian by Millicent Bell
But listen—those famous poets
everyone studied in school—they got stirred up
among plants we don’t know here: box privet or acanthus.
As for me, I love the roads that shrivel
into parched, weed-cluttered
ditches where boys
catch a skinny eel or two in a puddle;
the paths that follow the banks and sidle
down between clumps of cane
and put you down in the lemon groves, among the trees.
{exceprt}
By PETER STEVENSON
Published: November 7, 2008
“In childhood nothing happened.” So Donald Hall writes in his enchanting memoir, and what’s admirable about that
sentence is not just the pleasure in coming across such a cheeky volley in the opening pages of an account of a life
in our post-Freudian age, but the choice Hall made not to insert a comma between “childhood” and “nothing.” A comma —
“In childhood, nothing happened” — would have insisted on a dramatic pause that the reader would be expected to
applaud politely, nodding at the poet’s foreshadowing that clearly something did happen and it must have been simply
stupendous, and here we go. But Hall means what he says, repeating the phrase “Nothing happened” twice, like a chorus
or incantation, on the following page. ...cont.
UNPACKING THE BOXES
A Memoir of a Life in Poetry
By Donald Hall
195 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $24 -- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/bo...html?ref=books
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/bo...html?ref=books -- Changing Light
By AUGUST KLEINZAHLER
Published: November 7, 2008
The poetry of James Merrill is a good deal closer to a Haydn piano trio or Boccherini quintet than it is to Walt
Whitman’s “barbaric yawp.” Like the 18th-century Galante style in music, Merrill’s work has a high, almost lacquered
finish and prizes the qualities of refinement, intricacy of design and formal containment. It is music for the court,
for the knowledgeable and cultivated listener. At his best — in a handful of poems where he’s most restrained and the
emotional core of the work, however camouflaged or subdued, is most intense — Merrill has few peers, and none among
contemporary *poets working in meter and rhyme. -- SELECTED POEMS
By James Merrill. Edited by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser
298 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. Paper, $16
Related
Compare Several Drafts of 'The Kimono' (randomhouse.com)
An Excerpt From James Merrill's 'Selected Poems' (randomhouse.com)
From Collected Poems 1920-1954
(revised bilingual edition translated
and annotated by Jonathan Galassi)
from Noons and Shadows
HOUSE BY THE SEA
The journey ends here:
in the petty worries that split
the heart that can't cry out anymore.
The minutes now are regular and fixed
like the revolutions of the pump.
One turn: water surfaces, resounds.
Another turn: more water, and some creaking.
{excerpt}