fragments of contemporary poetry

[quasimodo1]

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}

[Psycheinaboat]

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

[quasimodo1]

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)

[quasimodo1]

http://www.slate.com/id/2197576/pagenum/all/

[quasimodo1]

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}

[quasimodo1]

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

[quasimodo1]

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}

[JBI]

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

For those interested, One Art by Bishop

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets...shop/poems/860

[Jozanny]

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.

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.

[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."

[quasimodo1]

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}

[Jozanny]

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."

Is this one of your humorous moments which always lose me? 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.

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.

[quasimodo1]

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.

[quasimodo1]

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

[Jozanny]

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.

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.

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,

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 (I'm joking).