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So far, in this early phase, JBI has chosen Susan Goyette's collection...THE TRUE NAME OF BIRDS. As for myself, I recommend William Matthews' RISING AND FALLING... Medbh McGuckian's ON BALLYCASTLE BEACH... and Allen Tate's THE WINTER SEA. When we have additional choices, I'll order them in a clear listing. To all intending to join in... please choose more than one collection. q1
update: Margaret Avison and Fred Wah have been added to the list... collections still to be determined.
Oh I would love to read Bill Mathews. I met him when I was in college. But let me think and perhaps I'll nominate one myself.
The True Names Of Birds
"The True Names of Birds is the first book-length collection from a voice that has captured the attention of Canadian
poetry readers for the last half-dozen years. Deeply centred in domestic life, Goyette's work is informed by a
muscular lyricism. These are poems that push the limits, always true to their roots. --- --- --- --- ---
http://www.flipkart.com/true-names-b...998-hax3fvim0f --- Title: The True Names Of Birds
Author: Susan Goyette
ISBN: 0919626998
ISBN-13: 9780919626997, 978-0919626997
Binding: Paperback
Publishing Date: 11-1998
Publisher: Brick Books
Number of Pages: 64
Language: English
To say: "I don't undertand what this means," is, at least, to recognize that "this" means. The problem is that
meaning is not a totality of sameness and predictability. Within each word, each sentence, meaning has slipped a
little out of sight and all we have are traces, shadows, still warm ashes. The meaning available from language goes
beyond the actual instance of this word, that word. A text is a place where a labyrinth of continually revealing
meanings are available, a place that offers more possibility than we can be sure we know, sometimes more than we want
to know. It isn't a container, static and apparent. Rather, it is noisy, frequently illegible. Reading into meaning
starts with a questioning glance, a seemingly obvious doubloon on a mast. The multiplicity can be read, should be
read, even performed. But then again, perhaps meaning is intransitive and unreadable, only meant to be made. No
sooner do we name meaning than it seems to dissipate. As a sure thing, it eludes us. It arouses us to attempt an
understanding, to interpret. But this is usually unsatisfying since whatever direction we approach from only leads us
to suspect there is no one direction. No single meaning is the right one because no "right ones" stand still long
enough to get caught. But because we do not know does not mean we are lost. Something that is strangely familiar, not
quite what we expect, but familiar, is present. That quick little gasp in the daydream, a sudden sigh of recognition,
a little sock of baby breath. Writing into meaning starts at the white page, nothing but intention. This initial
blinding clarity needs to be disrupted before we're tricked into settling for a staged and diluted paradigm of the
"real," the good old familiar, inherited, understandable, unmistakable lucidity of phrase that feels safe and sure, a
simple sentence, just-like-the-last-time-sentence. One makes (the) difference. Meaning generates and amplifies
itself, beyond itself, but never forgets; fragments of its memory and its potency exceed itself with meaning full of
desire and can only be found hiding between the words and lines and in a margin large enough for further thought,
music at the heart of thinking, go ahead. --- http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wah/write.htm ----Music
at the Heart of Thinking Ninety-four
"This is no mass synapse I'm after and I've known awhile now being lost is as simple as sitting on a log but
the fumble jerked mystique clouds grabbing as the staked mistake or stacked and treasured garbage belongs familiar to
a gardened world disturbed as heat..." {excerpt "from Music at the Heart of Thinking Ninety-four"}
Favorite Pig," which the reviewer dubbed "charming" and deceptively lighthearted.
In Blues If You Want, Matthews focused on jazz, with many poem titles taken from favorite jazz tunes. Kenyon Review contributor Fred Chappell thought the collection was occasionally marred by "self-indulgence," but on the whole "warm" and "genial." In the Bloomsbury Review, Christopher Merrill pointed out the poet's exploration of the relationship between music and language, and lauded Matthews's "curiosity" and "wit."
"Things that don't last" are the subject of Matthews's 1995 collection, Time & Money: New Poems, according to a Publishers Weekly writer. The more than forty poems gathered here range from meditations on a visit to New York City by Ronald Reagan, to reflections on the death of Matthews's father, to a eulogy for jazz musician Charles Mingus. Several reviewers noted the ironic voice Matthews expresses in the poems, with notably different shadings from one piece to the next. Donna Seaman in Booklist, calling the works "fine, quietly furious poems," also praised Matthews for the linguistic gifts evident in the collection." excerpt from bio...The Poetry Foundation --- --- --- THE CLOISTER by William Matthews
The last light of a July evening drained
into the streets below: My love and I had hard
things to say and hear, and we sat over
wine, faltering, picking our words carefully.
The afternoon before I had lain across
my bed and my cat leapt up to lie
alongside me, purring and slowly
growing dozy. By this ritual I could
clear some clutter from my baroque brain.
And into that brief vacancy the image
of a horse cantered, coming straight to me,
and I knew it brought hard talk and hurt ... {excerpt} http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...html?id=179280
Allen Tate (1899 - 1979)Allen Tate was a well-known man of letters from the American South, a central figure in the
fields of poetry, criticism, and ideas. In the course of a career spanning the middle decades of the twentieth
century, Tate authored poems, essays, translations, and fiction. Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor James
T. Jones wrote that his "influence was prodigious, his circle of acquaintances immense." Tate relished his "man of
letters" reputation—he consistently held for the highest standards of literature, feeling that the best creative
writing offers the most cogent expressions of human experience. Sewanee Review's J. A. Bryant, Jr. called Tate a
"sage" who "kept bright the instrument of language in our time and . . . made it illuminate as well as shine."
Tate was born and raised in Kentucky, the youngest of three sons of John Orley and Eleanor Varnell Tate. His family
moved frequently when he was young, and his elementary education was erratic. Influenced by his mother's love of
literature, however, he read extensively on his own, and he was admitted to Vanderbilt University in 1918. Tate
proved an excellent student, earning top honors and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. More importantly, while an
undergraduate he became aware of the special circumstances of Southern culture and sensibility. Dictionary of
Literary Biography essayist James A. Hart wrote, "With a Border background [Tate] had to face the question of whether
he was a Southerner or an American. Affirming the first, he had to confront the dominant positivist and materialistic
Yankee values which were supplanting the older values of the South." Under the influence of his teachers Walter Clyde
Curry, Donald Davidson, and John Crowe Ransom, Tate began to analyze his inheritance from a critical, but respectful,
perspective ... excertp from bio... The Poetry Foundation --- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?
id=6750#career ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-SONNETS OF THE BLOOD by Allen Tate
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.
II
Near to me as perfection in the blood
And more mysterious far, is this, my brother:
A light vaulted into your solitude.
It studied burns lest you its rage should smother.
It is a flame obscure to any eyes,
Most like the fire that warms the deepest grave
(The cold grave is the deepest of our lies)
To which our blood is the indentured slave:
The fire that burns most secretly in you
Does not expend you hidden and alone,
The studious fire consumes not one, but two—
Me also, marrowing the self-same bone.
Our property in fire is death in life
Flawing the rocky fundament with strife. ... {excerpt from poem of 9 parts}
http://www.amazon.com/True-Names-Bir...9678704&sr=8-1
I'll do more thorough intros for my poets tomorrow.
Medbh McGuckian (1950 - )Irish poet Medbh McGuckian has won acclaim for her imaginative verse, her lyricism, and her
themes on the feminine psyche. McGuckian's work has been compared to verse by such poets as Marianne Moore and
Elizabeth Bishop, and she has been called an "Irish Emily Dickinson" by Anne Stevenson in Times Literary Supplement.
Using lyrical language—rich in sound and emotion—to express the thoughts and feelings of the speaker, McGuckian
juxtaposes the concrete experiences of domestic life with evocative, dreamlike imagery. The resultant poetry is
sometimes described as esoteric, often erotic, and highly symbolic. Calvin Bedient, writing in Parnassus, enthused
that McGuckian "is Ireland's first great female poet—indeed, arguably its most original. No doubt she's too difficult
and Romantic to please everyone, at least right off. But of twentieth-century poets writing in English, she strikes
me as one of the most original and compelling—and as easily the most white-hot Irish poet since [William Butler]
Yeats." --- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...t.html?id=4565 ----------------------------------------
THE GOOD WIFE TAUGHT HER DAUGHTER by Medbh McGuckian
Lordship is the same activity
Whether performed by lord or lady.
Or a lord who happens to be a lady,
All the source and all the faults.
A woman steadfast in looking is a callot,
And any woman in the wrong place
Or outside of her proper location
Is, by definition, a foolish woman.
The harlot is talkative and wandering
By the way, not bearing to be quiet,
Not able to abide still at home,
Now abroad, now in the streets,
Now lying in wait near the corners,
Her hair straying out of its wimple.
The collar of her shift and robe
Pressed one upon the other. ... {excerpt} --- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...html?id=178907
JBI, please do Susan Goyette especially as I couldn't (as yet) find much relevent about her.
You won't find much - I doubt there is much, if anything, written about her. I'll check the CAN Lit-L and Canadian Literature Quarterly for some scholarly stuff, but in truth, she only has two volumes out, one in 98, and one in 04, so she is very new.
The Moon on Friday Night:
....................................erased all path to saturday
and swept up footsteps from the day before. It coaxed buttons
to the lips of buttonholes and whispered, 'you're beautiful,
so beautiful,' to women who speak the vernacular
of loneliness. Softly it slid into the hands of the men
they were with and lent its light to everything they touched.
'See,' the moonlight seemed to say, 'there are so many ways
to be naked and so many ways to be
Far from home.' The Light reminded the women of songs
they knew, songs written to gauge distance. Later,
still later on this island of Friday night, they sang
those songs under their breath as they bent
To tie their shoes. And they stayed bent for long after
their shoes were tied, hearing the wind for the first time
caught in a bucket of baby teeth.
......................(snip)
[.........]It light's up corners they'd kept dark, lights
their words and gives them new meaning. At night
they hold their husbands' hands to their mouths
'know this light,' they pray, 'touch me with this light.'
I'll send the remained to anyone who wants it.
From http://www.writers.ns.ca/e_press3.htmlQuote:
Susan Goyette, The True Names of Birds (Brick Books) $12.95
Deeply centred in domestic life, the poems of The True Names of Birds are informed by a muscular lyricism. The first book-length collection from a voice that has captured the attention of Canadian poetry readers for the last half-dozen years, this book is full of poems that push the limits yet always remain true to their roots.
From http://www.antigonishreview.com/bi-122/122-lynes.htmlQuote:
Although published in 1998, Susan Goyette’s first collection, The True Names of Birds, is still a ‘hot’ book. Birds received considerable acclaim, including its inclusion on a Governor General’s Award shortlist. This acclaim is warranted; Goyette’s is an original and arresting voice in Canadian poetry. I don’t think I’ve read such compelling poetry based on the domestic world since Bronwen Wallace. Like MacDonald, Goyette probes those all-consuming, human questions: how do you live? How do you make a home?
For Goyette, the world is an endlessly mysterious text, an uncrackable code - "everything a sign," she writes in "To Keep You Well." "November: The Sawing of Women in Half" interrogates this notion of an over-arching system of signification that will make everything make sense:
'There must be a formation
that calls to birds. Some magic seen from the sky
that means rest. I haven’t learned it yet'
Later in the poem, we discover that "[s]ome people can translate anything into music. I’ve had to/adapt." There is, of course, no guidebook to life, as Goyette tell us: "There are books, encyclopedias in the library/explaining every magic trick invented'nothing/about music." Goyette plays effectively with the schmaltz of the magic show: "the sawing/ of women in half, the bouquet of doves." In contrast to the gimmickry, the bogus potential of ‘explanation’, there is the poem’s real problem - how to translate the world into music.
For Goyette, poetry is the art of translation. The poet-translator’s key tool is metaphor. Despite Goyette’s charmingly self-deprecating gestures - "All I’ve learned is how to pull/handkerchief after handkerchief from my sleeve/while someone else sings the blues" - she is, in fact, a highly adept ‘translator’. Her metaphors are rich and striking. In "Sisters," she writes: "We weren’t temples or even bungalows. We were apartments." "Regret is a woman who watches her reflection/in soup spoons and still water" ("Regret and All Her Nightgowns"). Many of Goyette’s metaphors are spun from the seasonal cycles and her close attention to the natural world. In "In This January," she writes: "My dreams are shoeboxes/filled with bones from my feet." Everyday activities accrue metaphorical dimensions, as in "A Gift for the Winter God" where the speaker is knitting: "Left alone, I unravel Autumn all the way/back to April and try to pick up what I’ve dropped."
After inhabiting Goyette’s poems for awhile, their weave of metaphors begins to spin into something even more profound: a mythological milieu that defines and gives musical resonance to the poet’s own life. This is how you make a home. The materials woven and translated into a music for living are, in Goyette, as often drawn from domestic objects as from the more esoteric world of nature. But the two are often connected. In "October," Goyette writes: "October leaves me with just a soup pot and a faint taste/of my mother. I make our home from cards in my pocket, pull/coins from the backs of my son’s ears." There is that schmaltzy magic again that Goyette both believes in and doesn’t. Similarly, in "The Mythology of Cures," the question of the artist’s authority arises: "I’ll create a mythology for this house. Trust me." Is Goyette winking at us here? Yes and no. These moments of self-irony point to an interesting tension between authority and tentativeness that informs Goyette’s aesthetic. There is that self-assuredness of voice in the collection’s title poem, for example: "There are more ways to abandon a child/than to leave them at the mouth of the woods." But these studied declarations function mainly as springboards into the real business of the poem which is much more exploratory, open-ended. The poems’ stated ‘premises’ are sometimes undercut by subtle irony or silence. By the end of this poem - also the collection’s opening piece - Goyette has moved us from ‘certain’ knowledge (which, as she knows, is something we construct) into a hauntingly elegiac territory:
'Here is the stillness of forest,
the sun columning before me temple-ancient,
that wonder is what I regret losing most; that wonder
and the true names of birds.
Goyette’s collection plumbs lost language, lost childhood. The poem’s tentative moments of loss and silence are striking in the way they open up possibility. But this encapsulization misses the strength of humour in Goyette’s work. "Confessions" illustrates this important counterpoint to the elegiac: "'please God of everlasting love/and lambs,/please give me something to confess/and a Barbie camper." Moments like this should not be underestimated; they ensure against earnestness.
Goyette has created a highly successful hybrid blend of narrative and lyric. Her line is long in length, rich in cadence. She is not a poet for quickie readings; her work demands time and slow immersion. And it’s well worth both.
Geoffrey Hill- The Triumph of Love
Anne Carson- Decreation
Anthony Hecht- The Darkness and the Light
JBI: Now that's an expert exposition on Goyette and has completely captured my interest. I can see why she is a "hot' item in Canadian poetry...which always makes me ponder why American and Canadian poets experience such an arbitrary division...awareness wise. Such a long porous border yet poetry seems to need a special passport. Thanks for the lucid amplification.
Just thought I'd pop in and say that I liked the Allan Tate poem; but I wonder why you guys always want to discuss modern poetry. Right now, I'm in the mood for Firdawsi's Shahnamah, Ovid's Tristia, Blake's Milton, Camoes' Os Lusiadas, or maybe something by John Suckling or Petrarch.
Avison is also a remarkable poet, as is Fred Wah. I think though, the difference between the two traditions is really that Canadian poetry doesn't really assemble figureheads as much, in the sense that there is no single papa bear to hold as the foundation. There also, despite what some critics like Margaret Atwood try to suggest, a "Canadian" voice that is used throughout the country, which makes Canadian poetry more like a series of several hundred voices, from different parts of the country, and different parts of the world.Quote:
Originally Posted by quasimodo1
The League of Canadian poets put out actually a decent intro guide (though it deals mostly with mainstream Canadian poetry) a while back, for young people and teachers, which gets up until people born around 1940.
http://www.youngpoets.ca/?q=digital_...adian_poetry_0
It's interesting to read. The Bibliography at the end is very useful as well.
But yeah, the reason why it would seem Americans don't particularly know or understand Canadian poetry is because it doesn't have a coherent tradition, and doesn't try to have one. Of course, I think French Canadian poetry has a tradition, but Quebec seems to be its own country, despite the fact that referendum failed. Quebec in many ways is more of a country than Canada is - surely they have a coherent sense of who they are, and of culture and tradition. The country as a whole though is very regional. Newfoundlanders seem to have forged their own tradition, and I think the Maritimes did as well, but outside of their? Western Canada has something, and they certainly publish a great deal of great poetry and scholarship, but a sense of coherency is not possible. Ontario generally just has far too many voices to have any sense of tradition.
It's probably better this way. In the end, I much prefer to have a few great poems from many minor poets, than full works from a few major poets. Lets be honest, even the best poets only really write a handful of good poems, and I think the Hebrew/Greek tradition seems to put too much emphasis on the poet, and not the poem, whereas the Japanese Tradition, the way I understand it, for instance, puts more on the poem and less on the poet.
We're trying to keep it all English texts to avoid needing translations. Do you though, know of a translation of Camoes? I could only find a mediocre prose one from Penguin at the library, and I'm wondering if a good verse one exists. Either way though, if you take Blake for instance, the thread would end up disappearing onto the Blake subforum, whereas if you take a modern-contemporary poet, we can keep it out here in the open. I think that was the brains behind the focus at any rate, that those poets already have subforum available, whereas these ones really don't - at least, that is why the first discussion on Yeats failed, because it kind of disappeared.Quote:
Originally Posted by mortalterror
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/avison/bio.htmQuote:
Margaret Avison, Biography
b. 1918 in Galt, Ontario. Infant and childhood years in Regina and Calgary (Sask. and Alta.). Educated in Ontario ( University of Toronto, 1936-40; M.A. 1963-5). Various daytime jobs, 1940-67, twice interrupted (8 months in Chicago on a Guggenheim Scholarship; two years' teaching at Scarborough College, University of Toronto: 1967-8). Conversion to Christian faith in early 1963. Late '63 till '85, family responsibilities. Worker in Evangel Hall '68-'73. For eight months ('73-'74) at the University of Western Ontario as Writer-in-Residence. Jobs '74-'78. Secretary, Mustard Seed Mission until retirement, '78-'86.
Continued here:Quote:
Stone's Secret
Margaret Avison
From: Sunblue. Hantsport: Lancelot Press, 1978. pp.21-2
Otter-smooth boulder
lies under rolling
black river-water
stilled among frozen
hills and the still unbreathed
blizzards aloft;
silently, icily, is probed
stone's secret.
Out there --past trace
of eyes, past these
and those memorial skies
dotting back signals from
men's made mathematics (we
delineators of curves and time who are
subject to these) --
out there, inaccessible
to grammar's language the
stones curve vastnesses,
cold or candescent
in the perceived
processional of space.
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpo...ison/poem3.htm
continued here: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpo...ison/poem1.htmQuote:
Not the Sweet Cicely of Gerardes Herball
(i.e. Oriental Myrrh, not English Myrrh)
Margaret Avison
From: Winter Sun. London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1960. p.12-13
Myrrh, bitter myrrh, diagonal,
Divides my gardenless gardens
Incredibly as far as the eye reaches
In this falling terrain.
Low-curled in rams-horn thickets,
With hedge-solid purposefulness
It unscrolls, glistening,
Where else the stones are white,
Sky blue.
No beetles move. No birds pass over.
The stone house is cold.
The cement has crumbled from the steps.
The gardens here, or fields,
Are weedless, not from cultivation but from
Sour unfructifying November gutters,
From winds that bore no fennel seeds,
Finally, from a sun purifying, harsh, like
Sea-salt.
The stubbled grass, dragonfly-green,
Between the stones, was not so tended.
mild animals with round unsmiling heads
Cropped unprotested, unprotesting
(After the rind of ice
Wore off the collarbones of shallow shelving rock)
And went their ways.
General link to half a dozen of her poems, http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpo...ison/poems.htm
If I were to choose a volume, probably: http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Poems...683963&sr=8-18
or perhaps for a pricier option:
http://www.amazon.com/Always-Now-Col...ref=pd_sim_b_1
or
http://www.amazon.com/Always-Now-Col...ref=pd_sim_b_3
or
http://www.amazon.com/Always-Now-Col...ref=pd_sim_b_3
I've just been using this one over at sacred-texts http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/lus/index.htm . I can't read the original Portugese but it looks alright.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
I don't think we have a Firdawsi forum, or one for Camoes, Ovid, or Petrarch for that matter. If the plan were to stay within the English language then we've already strayed with Pasternak and Montale.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
"Blake's Milton was a lengthy, ambitious project close to his heart. Long an admirer of Milton and Paradise Lost,
Blake in this work penned both a paean to Milton and a criticism of Milton's religious stance in Paradise Lost.
Although generally favorable to Milton, the poem chastises the poet for advocating reason over inspiration and for
denigrating sex as a base impulse.
To announce his purpose and his affinity with Milton, Blake appends Milton's famous phrase to his title page as an
explanation of his own purpose: "To justify the ways of God to men." In Blake's poem, Milton returns to earth a
hundred years after his death as a Christ-like figure, his coming prepared by Los, the personification of the
creative impulse. By his return, Milton is poised to destroy both Urizen, the symbol of restrictive Reason, and
Satan, the chief symbol of society's corruption.
Blake called Milton his "Grand Poem" and originally intended an epic of twelve books to rival Paradise Lost. However,
he completed only two books.
In the illustration reproduced here, Blake clearly depicts Milton in a Christ-like image." -----------------------
-MILTON: A POEM IN TWO BOOKS
1804
-------------- http://library.uncg.edu/depts/specco...ke/milton.html
Read the end of the Poetry 3 club. The idea was that translations, as have been seen the past two times, created too many complications. As it is, Firdawsi is probably impossible to get in an unabridged form for cheap, and his sheer length perhaps makes him an impossible discussion subject for a book club. Really though, there isn't a Petrarch forum? There should be - I'm sure there are Petrarch translations going back to the Renaissance. And I'm pretty sure there is an Ovid forum. The problem is, if these things go on to the subforum, they kind of become limited.Quote:
Originally Posted by mortalterror
Well... if we're tossing the old guys into the mix I'm certainly always up for Blake... and I'd throw Thomas Traherne into the mix as well.:D
John Suckling 1609-1642 --- http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/suckling/ --- " ’T is expectation makes a
blessing dear;
Heaven were not heaven if we knew what it were."
Against Fruition.
http://www.accd.edu/Sac/english/bailey/traherne.htm --- The Thomas Traherne Page
( 1637 - 1674 )
Major Works
Alan Bradford has edited Selected Poems and Prose for Penguin, 1991.
Roman Forgeries ( 1673 ).
Christian Ethicks ( 1675 ).
Centuries. Edited by Bertram Dobell, 1908. Edited by H. M. Margoliouth. Oxford, 1958. Reprinted by Morehouse, 1985.
Poetical Works. Edited by Gladys I. Wade, 1932.
"News" from Bartleby.
Six Poems On Line
About Traherne
Gladys I. Wade, Thomas Traherne. Princeton, 1944; 1946.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/lus/index.htm --- The Lusiad
by Luis de Camõens
trans. by William Julius Mickle
[1776, edition of 1877] -------------------------------------- Columbus was a failure.
He utterly failed to accomplish what NASA would call his 'mission profile,' that is, to find a practical trade route
to India. Of course, he did get the biggest consolation prize in history...
Vasco da Gama, who sailed from Portugal in 1498, however, succeeded in achieving Columbus' goal. He rounded the Cape
of Good Hope and reached India. This accomplishment was memorialized shortly thereafter by this epic poem written by
a Portuguese sailor, Luis de Camõens. Unless you were raised speaking Portuguese, it is unlikely you've heard of
Camõens. However, if you were, you probably already know that he's considered the Portuguese Shakespeare, and the
Lusiads the Portuguese national epic.
Although there have been several attempts to translate the Lusiads into English, none have been very successful until
the 20th century. Notably, Richard Burton attempted a translation, but it has been universally criticized. Mickle's
translation is provided here, not because it is of exceptional literary quality, but because it is in the public
domain, and better than some of the rest. If you would like to read this poem casually, I recommend a modern
translation such as Landeg White's (see box on right), or William Atkinsons' prose translation of 1972 (in the
Penguin Classics).
Mickle employs ABAB couplets, where the original whereas Camõens used ottava rima, an ABABABCC form. He also took a
few liberties with the text. In the most egregious case, he inserts a 300 line naval engagement which is not found in
the original; he also omits an entire section where de Gama engages in questionable conduct. However, the editor of
this, the 1877 edition, indicates these sections. Mickle's footnotes are worth consulting for the wealth of
information on the classical references, as well as Portuguese history. However, some of his annotations must be
taken with a grain of salt, particularly his five page footnote in book X where he deprecates Chinese culture, for no
particular reason.
That said, Mickle is not entirely unreadable, and a thorough reading of this edition along with the apparatus is wel
If we are including a poetry sample for each of our submissions here is one for Petrarch. It is in the public domain and can be found here. http://www.archive.org/stream/secret...arch00milluoft
And what is life itself? A space of toil,
A wrestling, a stage-play, a labyrinth
Of errors, or a game of mountebanks,
A desert, a morass, a land of briers,
An unploughed valley, or a crest unclomb:
Sombre its caves, and what wild beasts dwell there!
There is the stream of tears, the sea of woes,
Rest ever anxious, labour all for naught,
Hope without fruit, false pleasure but true pain,
Full breadth of poverty but empty wealth,
Inglorious honour, waste of all desire,
Adversity with never-stayned complaint,
The sting in all enjoyment, and the sweet,
Alas, not seldom bitter; a brief halt
At wayside inns; a dirty prison; a ship
Without a rudder; a blind man unled;
A stormy sea, a dangerous coast, a port
All doubtful,--with no dearth of monstrous wreck;
Hate, lust, and anger, virtue aye assumed,
Successful fraud labelled with honour's name,
Innocence scoffed at, faith held up to scorn,
And puffed-up science that no science is;
A land of ghosts and spectres, 'neath the reign
Of Lucifer and demons; or a sleep
Death ends and every dream. But yet some way
Remains, thank heaven, to good life, and hereafter
Unto the eternal.
And for Firdawsi, a complete translation which is in the public domain and far superior to that of Dick Davis' prose can be found at http://www.archive.org/stream/shahnama01firduoft .
----------"My lord! consider how time passeth
Like wind above us. Why should wise men fret?
It withereth the cheek of cercis-bloom,
It darkeneth the radiant spirit's eyes;
It is at first a gain and then a pain,
And when the pain is done we pass away.
Since then our couch is dust, our pillow brick,
Why plant to-day a tree whose roots will ever
Be drinking blood, whose fruit will be revenge?
The earth hath seen and will see many lords
With scimitar and throne and signet-ring
Like us; but they who wore the crown of old
Made not a habit of revenge. I too,
The king permitting, will not live in ill.
I want not crown and throne. I will approach
My brothers in all haste and unattended,
And say 'My lords, dear as my soul and body!
Forbear your anger and abandon strife:
strife is unlovely in religious men.
Why set your hopes so much upon this world?
How ill it used Jamshid who passed away
At last, and lost the crown and throne and girdle!
And you and I at last must share his lot.
Live we in joy together and thus safe
From foes.' I will convert their vengeful hearts:
What better vengeance can I take than that?"
The English of John Suckling's poem Song is easily found.
Why so pale and wan fond lover?
Prithee why so pale?
Will, when looking well can't move her,
Looking ill prevail?
Prithee why so pale?
Why so dull and mute young sinner?
Prithee why so mute?
Will, when speaking well can't win her,
Saying nothing do't?
Prithee why so mute?
Quit, quit for shame, this will not move,
This cannot take her;
If of herself she will not love,
Nothing can make her;
The devil take her.
Poets who have made the preliminary list include: William Matthews, Allen Tate, Medbh McGuckian, Susan Goyette, Margaret Allison, Fred Wah, Geofrey Hill, Anne carson, Anthony Hecht, William Blake, John Suckling, Thomas Traherne, Luis de Camoens (perhaps not included because he's in translation). Many other participants still need to add their choices. q1
The Writing philosophy of Fred Wah:
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wah/write.htmQuote:
One makes (the) difference.
To say: "I don't undertand what this means," is, at least, to recognize that "this" means. The problem is that meaning is not a totality of sameness and predictability. Within each word, each sentence, meaning has slipped a little out of sight and all we have are traces, shadows, still warm ashes. The meaning available from language goes beyond the actual instance of this word, that word. A text is a place where a labyrinth of continually revealing meanings are available, a place that offers more possibility than we can be sure we know, sometimes more than we want to know. It isn't a container, static and apparent. Rather, it is noisy, frequently illegible. Reading into meaning starts with a questioning glance, a seemingly obvious doubloon on a mast. The multiplicity can be read, should be read, even performed. But then again, perhaps meaning is intransitive and unreadable, only meant to be made. No sooner do we name meaning than it seems to dissipate. As a sure thing, it eludes us. It arouses us to attempt an understanding, to interpret. But this is usually unsatisfying since whatever direction we approach from only leads us to suspect there is no one direction. No single meaning is the right one because no "right ones" stand still long enough to get caught. But because we do not know does not mean we are lost. Something that is strangely familiar, not quite what we expect, but familiar, is present. That quick little gasp in the daydream, a sudden sigh of recognition, a little sock of baby breath. Writing into meaning starts at the white page, nothing but intention. This initial blinding clarity needs to be disrupted before we're tricked into settling for a staged and diluted paradigm of the "real," the good old familiar, inherited, understandable, unmistakable lucidity of phrase that feels safe and sure, a simple sentence, just-like-the-last-time-sentence. One makes (the) difference. Meaning generates and amplifies itself, beyond itself, but never forgets; fragments of its memory and its potency exceed itself with meaning full of desire and can only be found hiding between the words and lines and in a margin large enough for further thought, music at the heart of thinking, go ahead.
Biography:
Fred Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan in 1939, but he grew up in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. He studied music and English literature at the University of British Columbia in the early 1960's where he was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH. After graduate work in literature and linguistics at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the State University of New York at Buffalo, he returned to the Kootenays in the late 1960's where he taught at Selkirk College and was the founding coordinator of the writing program at David Thompson University Centre. He now teaches at the University of Calgary. He has been editorially involved with a number of literary magazines over the years, such as Open Letter and West Coast Line. He has published seventeen books of poetry. [....snip...]
[/quote]
from: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wah/bio.htm
Untitled by Fred Wah:
continued here: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wah/poem1.htmQuote:
Untitled
IN THE DIAMOND, AT THE END OF A
long green vinyl aisle between booths of chrome, Naugahyde, and Formica, are two large swinging wooden doors, each with a round hatch of face-sized window. Those kitchen doors can be kicked with such a slap they're heard all the way up to the soda fountain. On the other side of the doors, hardly audible to the customers, echoes a jargon of curses, jokes and cryptic orders. Stack a hots! Half a dozen fry! Hot beef san! Fingers and tongues all over the place jibe and swear You mucka high!—Thloong you! And outside, running through and around the town, the creeks flow down to the lake with, maybe, a spring thaw. And the prairie sun over the mountains to the east, over my family's shoulders. The journal journey tilts tight-fisted through the gutter of the book, avoiding a place to start—or end. Maps don't have beginnings, just edges. Some frayed and hazy margin of possibility, absence, gap. Shouts in the kitchen. Fish an! Side a fries! Over easy! On brown! I pick up an order and turn, back through the doors, whap! My foot registers more than its own imprint, starts to read the stain of memory.
Continued here: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wah/poem3.htmQuote:
Music at the Heart of Thinking Ninety-four
This is no mass synapse I'm after and I've known awhile now being lost is as simple as sitting on a log but the fumble jerked mystique clouds grabbing as the staked mistake or stacked and treasured garbage belongs familiar to a gardened world disturbed as heat
Continued here: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wah/poem6.htmQuote:
How to Hunt
Colour it brown
think about it
ahead of time
think about it
afterwards
listen to you
how alone you are
sitting on a log
in the forest
look at it about to happen
completely in your mind
and the world
all the trees
even the sky
size
Half a dozen poems: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wah/poems.htm
From Lien Chao, Beyond Silence, "A Discursive Strategy in Chinese Canadian Poetry", 131-134, 1997, TSAR Toronto.Quote:
The subject matter of identity is also explored by Fred Wah as a recurrent topic in his prose poems written over several decades. Among Wah's dozen poetry collections... The p[ening poem of Waiting For Saskatchewan, starting with the title line, begins a chain of Wah's frequently-used signifier, foregrounding his mixed origins and family genealogy in composition:
waiting for saksatchewan
and the origins of grandparents countries places converged
europe asia railroads carpenters nailed grain elevators
he built on the street
and him cafes namely the "elite" or Center
The beginning of the poem illustrates Wah's poetic style of using fewer punctuations signs and more noun parallels. Wah only uses one set of quotation marks, a few commas, and some captialization in this poem. He parallels his nouns to each other, such as "Origins grandparents countries places" and "europe asia railroads carpenters." Without using verbs regularly to designate the relationship between the nouns as either subject or object, Wah positions the parallelled nouns as equal entitites in the line. Thus, rather than creating a traditional syntactic order of subject + verb + object, Wah's parallel nouns and run on lines produces a nonhierarchical relationship among the words, a paratactic sentence.
..............
The search for his "genetic 'bag'" as a Eurasian leads the poet to take a physical journey to China. Grasp the Sparrow's Trail is a travel diary written during Wah's trip to mainland China via Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in search of his family's "bones." Each journal entry consists of two parts: an italicized prose passage recording the daily travel agenda and a poetic passage printed in normal font. This format itself embeds and embodies different dialogues: dialogues between the fonts, between the travelers (his wife Pauline, pp. 37, 38, 54), between the physical and psychological journeys, and between prose and poetry. While the poet's search for his genealogical roots in Canton is recieved doubtfully by the Chinese, since a Eurasian is not considered a Chinese, his mental dialogue with his father continues during the trip:
So what have I got going besides this "father" list?... I've misplaced the family information my mother gave me so I can't check out actual possible connections still here in the Canton region. I mention this to the guides and the others in our tour group, tell them my father was sent here as a child to be raised and educated by his Chinese relatives.
you were part Chinese. I tell them
They look at me. I'm pulling their leg.
So I'm Chinese too and that's why my name is Wah.
They don't really believe me. That's o.k.
When you're not "pure" you just make it up (43)
...
continued here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15304Quote:
The Mediterranean
by Allen Tate
Quen das finem, rex magne, dolorum?
Where we went in the boat was a long bay
a slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone--
Peaked margin of antiquity's delay,
And we went there out of time's monotone:
Where we went in the black hull no light moved
But a gull white-winged along the feckless wave,
The breeze, unseen but fierce as a body loved,
That boat drove onward like a willing slave:
Where we went in the small ship the seaweed
Parted and gave to us the murmuring shore
And we made feast and in our secret need
Devoured the very plates Aeneas bore:
Where derelict you see through the low twilight
The green coast that you, thunder-tossed, would win,
Drop sail, and hastening to drink all night
Eat dish and bowl--to take that sweet land in!
Intro biography: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/16
Allen Tate would be a primo choice for me. We still havn't heard from Dark Muse, Quark, Dapper Drake, Il Penseroso, Sofia 82, Jozanny (?), Dori, mayneverhave, saladin, Pensive, TheFifthElement, Petrarch's Love or alyssa1. Don't expect to hear from all the above...but anything close to half would be a plus. With or without them, a date will be set and a collection chosen....I expect by Saturday or so.
Quasi, check the end of the Book Club 3 thread - I think a shortlist of around 3-4 should be assembled before a real vote occurs.
Anne Carson- Decreation
Anne Carson is an eminent classical scholar/translator. She has made acclaimed translations of Sapho, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (among others). As a poet, however, Carson is no staid academic classicist. She is an impulsive wandering omnivore whose books tend to be hybrids in which the boundaries are blurred between various genres -- poetry, prose, essay, drama, translation, criticism... even opera. Her writing presents an often surprising... even disorienting mixture of personalities: classical figures such as Sapho, Ovid, Longinus, Stesichoros, Herakles, Gyron, the medieval French heretic Marguerite Porete, Anna, the model for Pietro Vannucci (known as Perugino), Raphael's teacher, Virginia Woolf, the Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, etc... The figures are commonly imagined in a manner that is equally disorienting: Ovid in exile listening to the radio, the 15th century painter, Perugino and his model attending a phenomenology convention and discussing Heidegger, etc... Blended with these imagined and fantastic narratives, Carson presents us with lucid poems that explore her personal life. She is a post-modernist par excellence and one of the few Canadian authors to have moved beyond the provincialism of JBI's beloved Can-Lit.:D I've already read her books Plainwater and Autobiography of Red which I found both to be marvelous.
I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.
-from Short Talks, Plainwater
On Ovid
I see him there on a night like this but cool, the moon blowing through the black streets. He sups and walks back to his room. The radio is on the floor. Its luminous green dial blares softly. He sits down at the table; people in exile write so many letters. Now Ovid is weeping. Each night at this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing. In his spare time he is teaching himself the local language (Getic) in order to compose in it an epic poem no one will ever read.
-from Plainwater
Cannicula di Anna
What we have here
is the story of a painter.
It occurs in Perugia
(ancient Perusia)
where lived the painter Pietro Vannucci
(c. 1445-1523)
who was called Perugino,
a contemporary of Michelangelo
and teacher of Raphael.
What do you need to know?...
In the story we have here
some philosophers of the present day
meet in conclave
upon the ancient rock of Perugia.
They seem to have commissioned,
for purposes of public relations,
a painter to record them
in pigments of the fifteenth century...
Famous phenomenologists of tutta l'Italia
have forgathered here.
They take things back to the sophists
then climb the stone stairs
for a heavy lunch.
There foreheads are not so tall
as the foreheads
of French phenomenologists
but they are much more good-natured...
It is perhaps not widely known
that a certain so-called Perugino
spent the years 1483 to 1486
covering with frescoes
that part of the Sistine Chapel
now immortalized by Michelangelo's Last Judgment.
which efforts were ruthlessly effaced
to make space for
his successor's more colossal genius...
Group Portrait: a special commission.
I paint the philosophers at table and
on the way to Being.
The bottle is difficult. I attempt
I attempt a color invented by Cimabue.
The phenomenologists engage in dialectic
about wine as vinegar.
To render the throat holes
(blackish red), I have acquired
sap of the tree draco dracaena (an expense
but the phenomenologists requested it)
or dragons' blood which, medieval legend
recounts, originally
soaked into the earth
during the epic wars
of elephants and dragons
thence to be gathered
by painters...
The phenomenologist from Paris hates mosquitoes
and carries a small electronic device
that lures the female mosquito to her death
by simulating the amorous cry of the male. Then,
to block the whining sound, he has pink earplugs.
As he sits in conversation
with the phenomenologist from Sussex
a mosquito is observed to enter.
The Englishman leaps to his feet,
calling, "Let us use the mosquito machine!"
and smashes the insect to the wall
with the device. It is the first sign
of wide ontological differences
that will open in the Anglo-French dialectic...
-from Plainwater
Geoffrey Hill- The Triumph of Love
Amazon.com Review-
The Triumph of Love is a swan song for our most violent and turbulent of centuries. Geoffrey Hill has a reputation as a difficult poet, and it's true that this volume is no easy read, but it's by no means inaccessible, either. Forming a book-length poem divided into 150 sections, its free verse is rich with allusions from Petrarch to the Scott expedition and dense with the weight of history and philosophy. Hill takes nothing less than suffering as his subject, and his poems aren't shy about staring evil straight in the face--in particular, the Holocaust, an evil compounded by our inability to distinguish one of its victims from the next: "this, and this, / the unique face, indistinguishable, this, these, choked in a cess-pit of leaking Sheol." If the subject matter is uniformly somber, the style is not. Fragmented, colloquial, often interrupted by editorial asides, parodies, and snatches of song, The Triumph of Love marks something of a departure from the stately formalism of Hill's earlier books. Through it all runs the self-interrogating, self-mocking voice of the poet, questioning his right to write about such matters as well as the language he uses to do so. In the end, however, Hill finds that the elegy itself is the only answer to the questions history poses. "What / Ought a poem to be?" he asks himself, and answers (three times), "a sad and angry consolation." Widely recognized as one of Britain's distinguished poets, here Hill has produced a memorably sad and angry consolation for "a nation / with so many memorials but no memory."
http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Love-G...9768047&sr=1-3
"Geoffrey Hill must by now... be indisputably the best living poet in English and perhaps in the world. By the best poet I mean... the strongest and the deepest. He is the great cellist of contemporary poets... If one had to choose a contemporary poet in English whom Boris Pasternak would recognize, whom George Seferis and T.S. Eliot would take seriously, Geoffrey Hill is the most obvious choice."- Peter Levi
Geoffrey Hill is a marvelous... yet demanding poet. He is a poet of great formal solidity whose poetry confronts the most weighty issues: religious belief in the post-modern world, war and retribution, and lamentation for the human condition. His language grandiose... rigorous... with echoes of Milton and Hopkins. Perhaps the best description I've read of his verse is by fellow poet, Seamus Heaney, who declared that in Geoffrey Hill's poetry words "fall slowly and singly, like molten solder, and accumulate to a dull glowing nub."
The Eve of St. Mark
Stroke the small silk with your whispering hands,
godmother; nod and nod from the half-gloom;
broochlight intermittent between the fronds,
the owl immortal in its crystal dome.
Along the mantelpiece veined lustres trill,
the clock discounts us with a telling chime.
Familiar ministrants, clerks-of-appeal,
burnish upon the threshold of the dream:
churchwardens in wing-collars bearing scrolls
of copy-hold well-tinctured and well-tied.
Your photo album loved by the boy-king
preserve in sepia waterglass the souls
of distant cousins, virgin til they died,
and the lost delicate suitors who could sing.
-from Lachrime, New and Collected Poems 1952-1992
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...et.html?id=433 --- Samuel Beckett poetry --- ""He wanders among
misty bogs turned surreal, he talks to the wee folk of his own bad dreams, he files reports on introspected black
visions with a kind of blarney eloquence. Like an actress cradling a doll for her stage baby, his language keens and
croons about tales that are not quite there." Melvin Maddocks is talking about Samuel Beckett, a literary legend of
the twentieth century. "It is neither night nor morning. A man must find himself without the support of groups, or
labels, or slogans," writes R. D. Smith. And Beckett, by removing his characters from nearly all recognizable
contexts, Smith continues, is "engaged in finding or saving" himself. Martin Esslin writes: "What is the essence of
the experience of being? asks Beckett. And so he begins to strip away the inessentials. What is the meaning of the
phrase 'I am myself'? he asks . . . and is then compelled to try to distinguish between the merely accidental
characteristics that make up an individual and the essence of his self." A Time reviewer noted: "Some chronicle men
on their way up; others tackle men on their way down. Samuel Beckett stalks after men on their way out." Such is the
tone of most discussions of Beckett's work. But no single reviewer could communicate the unique power of Beckett's
writing, his use of "a language in which the emptiness of conventional speech is charged with new emotion." "While
[his] lesser colleagues work in rhetoric," writes Smith, Beckett produces poetry. "Well," says Harold Pinter, "I'll
buy his goods, hook, line, and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a
body of beauty. His work is beautiful." Leo Bersani, somewhat less politely, writes: "I know of no writer who has
come closer than Beckett in his novels to translating the rhythms of defecation into sentence structure." quoted from
The Poetry Foundation --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SERENA I by Samuel Beckett
without the grand old British Museum
Thales and the Aretino
on the bosom of the Regent’s Park the phlox
crackles under the thunder
scarlet beauty in our world dead fish adrift
all things full of gods
pressed down and bleeding
a weaver-bird is tangerine the harpy is past caring
the condor likewise in his mangy boa
they stare out across monkey-hill the elephants
Ireland
the light creeps down their old home canyon
sucks me aloof to that old reliable
the burning btm of George the drill
ah across the way a adder
broaches her rat
white as snow
in her dazzling oven strom of peristalsis
limae labor ... {excerpt}
I'm looking at the Carson fragment on Ovid and thinking it's very Hemingway in the way it portrays the expatriot life and how I hadn't really considered him from that perspective before. However, when I read Mrs. Carson's allusion laden poetry it makes me want to read the originals, she so esteems, rather than her own poetry. The bit about the painter is well done, but it's no Fra Lippo Lippi, and she is no Robert Browning.
I completely agreeQuote:
Originally Posted by mortalterror
Poetry Bookclub 4 seems to have suffered some depopulation, judging by how many former participants did not respond.
I make no assumptions about this, Godot in heaven knows how many times I've lapsed from participation. For many
sound reasons and some enthusiasm ... these are the eleven poets we have to choose from at this time. Sunday will be
the deadline for added suggestions. Here are the poets and the corresponding collection (which is not fixed in
stone). Fred Wah, SO FAR and DIAMOND GRILL. Seamus Heaney, THE HAW LANTERN and SEEING THINGS. Samuel Beckett,
COLLECTED POEMS: 1930-1978 and COLLECTED POEMS IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH. Mebdh McGuckian, ON BALLYCASTLE BEACH and
SHELMALIER. Susan Goyette, THE TRUE NAMES OF BIRDS and UNDONE. Anne Carson, DECREATION and GLASS, IRONY AND
GOD. Allen Tate, THE WINTER SEA, A BOOK OF POEMS and COLLECTED POEMS, 1919-1976. Anthony Hecht, THE DARKNESS
AND THE LIGHT, POEMS and THE VENETIAN VESPERS, POEMS. Geoffrey Hill, THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE AND THE ORCHARDS OF
SYON. Margaret Avinson, ALWAYS NOW: THE COLLECTED POEMs and CONCRETE AND WILD CARROT. William Matthews, RISING
AND FALLING: POEMS and SEARCH PARTY: COLLECTED POEMS.
My vote goes to William Matthews. But all of the selections seem interesting. Where is St Lukes? Will he participate?