Poetry Bookclub 2

[Jozanny]

No, but they can't say,


An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.


To be honest, as a Jew who had his whole families past history wiped out, I find this highly insulting.

It is insulting JBI, and I hope Hughs does not include it in the edition I have; what a rotten trinket. I have used Stalinist Russian imagery to discuss writing in my poetry, but one immerses in the imagery to join it to the mindset--what she is doing here is childish and diminishing.

[Virgil]

No, but they can't say,


An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.


To be honest, as a Jew who had his whole families past history wiped out, I find this highly insulting.

What exactly is insulting about it? She is not ridiculing Jews in any way. If you look at that entire poem, she is speaking from a little girl's voice, and there are metaphors through out the poem. I found that poem quite original.

Actually I'm surprised. I have not come across serious readers who did not like Plath. I would love to discuss her. Could be interesting debate.

[Jozanny]

What exactly is insulting about it? She is not ridiculing Jews in any way. If you look at that entire poem, she is speaking from a little girl's voice, and there are metaphors through out the poem. I found that poem quite original.

Actually I'm surprised. I have not come across serious readers who did not like Plath. I would love to discuss her. Could be interesting debate.

Then you can do it without me. My objection to Plath rests on the cult of personality which is so dependent on the modality of her poetic tropes. She was stale when I was in highschool, and there are fresher stronger more interesting voices out there--and that verse JBI cited is offensive even if it was written as a childish ditty. It isn't ironic; it is a mirror reflection of bigotry in formation. One cannot get away from boards like this where it is always stale performers like Plath or Dostoevsky as the epitome of Russian realism. There are so many other interesting things going on in the literary world, and the majority of posters here never venture forth. It is a real shame.

[JBI]

What exactly is insulting about it? She is not ridiculing Jews in any way. If you look at that entire poem, she is speaking from a little girl's voice, and there are metaphors through out the poem. I found that poem quite original.

Actually I'm surprised. I have not come across serious readers who did not like Plath. I would love to discuss her. Could be interesting debate.

She isn't writing from a child's point of view, she just writes childishly. The verse is insulting, because she went through virtually no hardships, had a good upbringing in a wealthy family, with a good education, yet has the nerve to equate herself with a Jew in a concentration camp being sent to his death simply for racial prejudice. I find that insulting. In the words of the movie Election, Who the &*^% does she think she is?

[quasimodo1]

So I'm guessing that Plath as a subject would be too volatile or just enough? Anyone familiar with her collection, COLOSSUS?

[Virgil]

Then you can do it without me. My objection to Plath rests on the cult of personality which is so dependent on the modality of her poetic tropes.

I admit she has resonated into a cult of personality, but I think that unlike Bukowski there is a there there. I don't understand what you mean by "modality of her poetic tropes." every poet uses poetic tropes.

She isn't writing from a child's point of view, she just writes childishly. The verse is insulting, because she went through virtually no hardships, had a good upbringing in a wealthy family, with a good education, yet has the nerve to equate herself with a Jew in a concentration camp being sent to his death simply for racial prejudice. I find that insulting. In the words of the movie Election, Who the &*^% does she think she is?

First of all lots of people were using the Jew in a concentration camp as a metaphor post WWII. Lots. In poetry and fiction. If she's a product of her age than what's wrong with that? It's like saying Shakespeare shouldn't be using Renaissance metaphors or Dante using Christian metaphors. I studied Plath in college with that same professor I quoted above with a Roethke poem, Karl Malkoff. And he was Jewish and felt no insult and he thought her poetyr of quality, enough to include in a class of Stevens, Wiliiams, Lowell, and the other great American second half 20th century poets .

So I'm guessing that Plath as a subject would be too volatile or just enough? Anyone familiar with her collection, COLOSSUS?

No I'm not familiar with the collection but I guess I have a deal of her poems and I can find iton the internet. I bet it woould be a fiesty discussion. But if people don't want to I understand.

Here's a poem:

Death & Co.
by Sylvia Plath

Two, of course there are two.
It seems perfectly natural now——
The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded
And balled¸ like Blake's.
Who exhibits

The birthmarks that are his trademark——
The scald scar of water,
The nude
Verdigris of the condor.
I am red meat. His beak

Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.
He tells me how badly I photograph.
He tells me how sweet
The babies look in their hospital
Icebox, a simple

Frill at the neck
Then the flutings of their Ionian
Death-gowns.
Then two little feet.

[Snip]
http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/p...th/poems/18927

I find this a solid poem by a world class poet.

[Jozanny]

So I'm guessing that Plath as a subject would be too volatile or just enough? Anyone familiar with her collection, COLOSSUS?

Dear no,

If Virgil and DarkMuse want to do Plath, I simply will not join in. I did not know that Plath, too, dabbled in anti-semitic musings, which, again, was once so acceptable in certain segments of British and American society. I wearied of her pretty much as soon as I decided to become a writer, but it was the weariness tinged bemused.

This discovery through JBI has rattled me a bit though. As I mentioned previously, I enjoy "Blackberrying". She manages here to stop sniveling and let the imagery do what her biography should not have to--but even here, new wave feminism has long moved past this kind of transcribed idealism.

In short, to me Sylvia has long been a minor figure, too entangled in her own story for me to much care. When the vote is taken if the chips are in her favor I will wait for someone more interesting, that is all. You're the leader q.

[Dark Muse]

IAnd he was Jewish and felt no insult and he thought her poetyr of quality, enough to include in a class of Stevens, Wiliiams, Lowell, and the other great American second half 20th century poets

In my opinion she is better then Lowell, I do not particularly care for his works all that much. Some of them are interesting, but I cannot say I am a huge fan.

So I'm guessing that Plath as a subject would be too volatile or just enough? Anyone familiar with her collection, COLOSSUS?

I do not know that particular collection, currently I have a collection of her works that are part of an athology of Contemperary Poetry. And once upon a time ago I got a couple of collections of her work from the librabry, but obviously I do not have them now, and cannot recall which collections they were.

[quasimodo1]

Poetry Bookclub



The choices for a vote.

OCTAVIO PAZ

ANA AHKMATOVA

EUGENIO MONTALE

MEDBH McGUCKIAN

ELIZABETH BISHOP

SYLVIA PLATH

ALLEN TATE

Let's see, that's one South American, one Russian, one Italian, one Irishperson, two American women and one American man. I hate to bother Logos for this, so just send or post a first and second choice. Gracias

[Virgil]

I've never read Montale. I may pick that one. But I'll hold out for now.

[Jozanny]

Tate is my first choice.

Paz is second because he is on my shelf.

[Dark Muse]

Plath is my first choice, and Bishop my second

[stlukesguild]

JoZ... you never cease to amaze me. I am in complete agreement with you with regard to Sylvia. To often her poetry reminds me of the diaristic sniveling of some teenager who believes that the fact that her daddy may have been too distant (while working overtime to give her all the material comforts she so enjoys) or the fact that Bobby doesn't like her... or some equally profound stuff... is not only a personal tragedy but a tragedy of the greatest depths. I agree completely with JBI's suggestion that a comparison of her little personal "traumas" with the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust is insulting in the extreme. "Oh I suffer! See how I suffer. My headache is virtually a brain tumor... no its like the guillotine." This self-proclaimed suffering has formed a virtual cult that embraces her imagined suffering and turned her into Saint Sylvia.

[stlukesguild]

1st choice- Eugenio Montale
2nd choice- Octavio Paz
3rd choice- Elizabeth Bishop

Last possible choice- Saint Sylvia

[quasimodo1]

Poetry Bookclub bibliographies



AKHMATOVA

Poetry

Anna Akhmatova: Poems (1983)
Anno Domini MCMXXI (1922) - rus
Evening (1912) - rus
Plantain (1921) - rus
Poems of Akhmatova (1967)
Rosary (1914)
Selected Poems (1976)
Selected Poems (1989)
The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova (1990)
Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova (1985)
White Flock (1914)

BISHOP

North & South (Houghton Mifflin, 1946)
A Cold Spring|Poems: North & South — A Cold Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1955)
A Cold Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1956)
Questions of Travel (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965)
The Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969)
Geography III, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976)
The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983)
Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006)
Other works:


McGUCKIAN

Her first published poems appeared in two pamphlets, Single Ladies: Sixteen Poems and Portrait of Joanna, in 1980, the year in which she received an Eric Gregory Award. In 1981 she co-published Trio Poetry 2 with fellow poets Damian Gorman and Douglas Marshall, and in 1989 she collaborated with Nuala Archer on Two Women, Two Shores. Medbh McGuckian's first major collection, The Flower Master (1982), which explores post-natal breakdown, was awarded a Rooney prize for Irish Literature, an Ireland Arts Council Award (both 1982) and an Alice Hunt Bartlett Award (1983). She is also the winner of the 1989 Cheltenham Prize for her collection On Ballycastle Beach.

Medbh McGuckian has also edited an anthology, The Big Striped Golfing Umbrella: Poems by Young People from Northern Ireland (1985) for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, written a study of the car in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, entitled Horsepower Pass By! (1999), and has translated into English (with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin) The Water Horse (1999), a selection of poems in Irish by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. A volume of Selected Poems: 1978-1994 was published in 1997, and among her latest collections are The Book of the Angel (2004) and 'The Currach Requires No Harbours' (2007).

Recent criticism of McGuckian has pointed to her extensive use of unacknowledged source material, from Russian poetry and elsewhere, a discovery that may have motivated her decision to name (on the acknowledgements page) the primary source for her latest collection, The Currach Requires No Harbour.

MONTALE

Ossi di seppia (1925)
La casa dei doganieri e altre poesie (1932)
Le occasioni (1939)
Finisterre (1943)
La fiera letteraria (Poetry criticism, 1948)
La bufera e altro (1956)
La farfalla di Dinard (Journalism, 1956)
Satura (1962)
Accordi e pastelli (1962)
Il colpevole (1966)
Xenia (1966)
Fuori di casa (1969)
Diario del '71 e del '72 (1973)
Posthumous Diary (1996)
The Storm & Other Poems, trans. Charles Wright (Oberlin College Press, 1978), ISBN 0-932440-01-0
Selected Poems, trans. Jonathan Galassi, Charles Wright, & David Young (Oberlin College Press, 2004), ISBN 0-932440-98-3

PAZ

His works include the poetry collections La Estación Violenta, (1956), Piedra de Sol (1957), and in English translation the most prominent include two volumes which include most of Paz in English: Early Poems: 1935–1955 (tr. 1974), and Collected Poems, 1957–1987 (1987). Many of these volumes have been edited and translated by Eliot Weinberger, who is Paz's principal translator into American English.


PLATH

Plath has been criticized for her controversial allusions to the Holocaust, and is known for her uncanny use of metaphor. Her work has been compared to and associated with Anne Sexton, W.D. Snodgrass, and other confessional poets.
While the few critics who responded to Plath's first book, The Colossus, did so favorably, it has also been described as somewhat staid and conventional in comparison to the much more free-flowing imagery and intensity of her later work.

The poems in Ariel mark a departure from her earlier work into a more personal arena of poetry. It is a possibility that Lowell's poetry—which is often labeled "confessional"—played a part in this shift. Indeed, in an interview before her death she listed Lowell's Life Studies as an influence. The impact of Ariel was dramatic, with its potentially autobiographical descriptions of mental illness in poems such as, "Tulips", "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus".

In 1982, Plath became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for The Collected Poems. In 2006, a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University discovered a previously unpublished sonnet written by Plath entitled "Ennui". The poem, composed during Plath's early years at Smith College, is published in Blackbird, the online journal.


TATE

Poetry

Poems, 1928-1931, 1932.
The Mediterranean and Other Poems, 1936.
Selected Poems, 1937.
The Winter Sea, 1944.
Poems, 1920-1945, 1947.
Poems, 1922-1947, 1948.
Two Conceits for the Eye to Sing, If Possible, 1950.
Poems, 1960.
Poems, 1961.
Collected Poems, 1970.
The Swimmers and Other Selected Poems, 1970.