A.R. Ammons is an undervalued poet. He's got some really fine poetry.
A.R. Ammons is an undervalued poet. He's got some really fine poetry.
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena
My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/
Hey Virgil, been taking a good look at this guy for awhile now. He has the pedigree from heaven...all the best schools, big time professor and prolific poet who is amazingly down on the earth. Think I have a book you might enjoy... send it in a bit. quasi
A new review of a collection of poems. Review title..."Formalities" by James Longenbach... Poems by Mary Jo Salter in her new book "A Phone Call to the Future" (new and selected poemms). Fragments of her work within this review. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/bo...tml?ref=books# [cr: nytimes]
CALLED INTO PLAY
Fall fell: so that's it for the leaf poetry:
some flurries have whitened the edges of roads
and lawns: time for that, the snow stuff: &
turkeys and old St. Nick: where am I going to
find something to write about I haven't already
written away: I will have to stop short, look
down, look up, look close, think, think, think:
but in what range should I think: should I
figure colors and outlines, given forms, say
mailboxes, or should I try to plumb what is
{first few couplets of this poem}
CONSOLATION
Darwin.
They say he read novels to relax,
But only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
If anything like that turned up,
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.
True or not,
I’m ready to believe it.
Scanning in his mind so many times and places,
he’d had enough of dying species,
the triumphs of the strong over the weak,
the endless struggles to survive,
all doomed sooner or later.
He’d earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction
with its diminutions.
{first few lines by this Polish poet, mentioned by another poster}
MAKE IFA
Make Ifa make Ifa make Ifa Ifa Ifa
In sanctified chalk
of my silver painted soot
In criss-crossing whelps
of my black belching smoke
In brass masking bones
of my bass droning moans
in hub cap bellow
of my hammer tap blow
In steel stance screech
of my zumbified flames
In electrified mouth
of my citified fumes
In bellified groan
of my countrified pound
In compulsivefied conga
of my soca moka jumbi
MAKE IFA MAKE IFA MAKE IFA IFA
IFA
{this first part of Jayne Cortez' poem is something possibly beyond analysis but it's tribal sound is way out there}
That is the title of this review by Dan Chiasson. The work discussed is "The Best American Erotic Poems" an anthology edited by David Lehman. subtitle: "from 1800 to the present", 300pp Scribner Poetry $30 I think I'll let the buyers of this collection find the fragments for themselves. In the review, which describes the book as something of a competition, W.H.Auden wins hands down. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/bo...u&oref=slogin#
Speaking To You (From Rock Bottom)
Speaking to you
this hour
these days when
I have lost the feather of poetry
and the rains
of separation
surround us tock
tock like Go tablets
Everyone has learned
to move carefully...
{introductory lines to a great poem}
THROWN FOR A LOOP
There's so much more belief than truth, and
that is lucky in a way, belief inclining us
more toward what we need than what we'll get:
but we really do believe what we believe and
we hope it will work out: but put a plug of
gold on the scale opposite a sack full of
painted feathers, truth will that great woven
cluster outweigh: the fulcrum could be called
"getting along"--and that's where balanced
persons no doubt stand:
{first couplets of this poem, from the collection, "Glare"}
...I won't be longer on the porch
than it takes to look out once
and see what I've taught myself
in two months here to discern:
night restoring its opacities,
though for an instant as intense
and evanescent as waking from a dream
of eating blackberries and almost
being able to remember it, I think
I see the parts -- haze, dusk, light
broken into grains, fatigue,
the mineral dark of the White Mountains,
the wavering shadows steadying themselves --
separate, then joined, then seamless:
the way, in fact, Frost's great poems,
like all great poems, conceal
what they merely know, to be
predicaments... {from ON THE PORCH AT THE FROST PLACE, FRANCONIA, NH excerpt}
A Walk
February on the narrow beach, 3:oo
A.M. I set out south. Cape Cod Light
on its crumbling cliff above me turns
its wand of light so steadily
it might be tolling a half-life,
it might be the second-hand
of a schoolroom clock,
a kind of blind radar.
These bluffs deposited by glaaciers
are giving themselves away
to the beaches down the line, three
feet of coastline a year. I follow
them south at my own slow pace.
Ahead my grandfather died
in a boat and my father
found him and here I come.
{first two stanzas of this poem}
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
{excerpt from this poem}
Persimmons by Li-Young Lee
In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose
persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down the newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew on the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet
all of it, to the heart.
Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down,
I teach her Chinese. Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten.
Naked: I've forgotten.
Ni, wo: you me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.
Continued here: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minst...oems/1245.html
ELEGY
Poems.
By Mary Jo Bang.
92 pp. Graywolf Press. $20 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/bo...html?ref=books.
Last edited by quasimodo1; 03-29-2008 at 11:24 AM. Reason: add link
TURN THANKS TO MISS MIRRY
ill-tempered domestic helper who hated me.
She said that she had passed through hell bareheaded.
and that a whitening ash from hell’s furnace
had sifted down upon her and that is why she gray early.
Called me “Nana.” Nanny’s name I have come to love.
She twisted her surname Henry into Endry
in her railing against the graceless state of her days.
She was the repository of 400 years of resentment
for being uprooted and transplanted, condemned
to being a stranger on this side of a world
where most words would not obey her tongue. {first three stanzas}
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