fragments of contemporary poetry

[quasimodo1]

THE TRUANT



'What have you there?' the great Panjandrum said
To the Master of the Revels who had led
A bucking truant with a stiff backbone
Close to the foot of the Almighty's throne.

'Right Reverend, most adored,
And forcibly acknowledged Lord
By the keen logic of your two-edged sword!
This creature has presumed to classify
Himself - a biped, rational, six feet high
And two feet wide; weighs fourteen stone;
Is guilty of a multitude of sins.
He has abjured his choric origins,
And like an undomesticated slattern,
Walks with tangential step unknown
Within the weave of the atomic pattern.
He has developed concepts, grins
Obscenely at your Royal bulletins,
Possesses what he calls a will
Which challenges your power to kill.'

'What is his pedigree?'

'The base is guaranteed, your Majesty -
Calcium, carbon, phosphorus, vapour
And other fundamentals spun
From the umbilicus of the sun,
And yet he says he will not caper
Around your throne, nor toe the rules
For the ballet of the fiery molecules.'

'His concepts and denials - scrap them, burn them -
To the chemists with them promptly.' ...

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

EL DORADO



We have a friend in common, the retired sophomore.
His concern: that I shall get it like that,
in the right and righter of a green bush
chomping on future considerations. In the ghostly
dreams of others it appears I am all right,
and even going on tomorrow there is much
to be said on all these matters, “issues,” like
“No rest for the weary.” (And yet—why not?)
Feeling under orders is a way of showing up,
but stepping on Earth—she’s not going to.
Ten shades of pleasing himself brings us to tomorrow
evening and will be back for more. I disagree
with you completely but couldn’t be prouder
and fonder of you. So drink up. Feel good for two.
{one of two stanzas, from Poetry Magazine, March 2009}

[JBI]

THE TRUANT



'What have you there?' the great Panjandrum said
To the Master of the Revels who had led
A bucking truant with a stiff backbone
Close to the foot of the Almighty's throne.

'Right Reverend, most adored,
And forcibly acknowledged Lord
By the keen logic of your two-edged sword!
This creature has presumed to classify
Himself - a biped, rational, six feet high
And two feet wide; weighs fourteen stone;
Is guilty of a multitude of sins.
He has abjured his choric origins,
And like an undomesticated slattern,
Walks with tangential step unknown
Within the weave of the atomic pattern.
He has developed concepts, grins
Obscenely at your Royal bulletins,
Possesses what he calls a will
Which challenges your power to kill.'

'What is his pedigree?'

'The base is guaranteed, your Majesty -
Calcium, carbon, phosphorus, vapour
And other fundamentals spun
From the umbilicus of the sun,
And yet he says he will not caper
Around your throne, nor toe the rules
For the ballet of the fiery molecules.'

'His concepts and denials - scrap them, burn them -
To the chemists with them promptly.' ...

{excerpt}

You reading Pratt now?

[quasimodo1]

Yea, somebody piqued my interest and he's really an outstanding poet. Such ficle tastes.

[JBI]

There is a hypertext available of his complete works. The site is kind of hard to navigate, but once you figure it out, it leads to good things:

http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/pratt/

If you're into Canadian poetry, I recommend you pick up Geddes' 15 Canadian poets X 3 (which is in the 4th edition now I believe). It has some great contemporary poets covered, and nice biographical sketches of almost all the major players in English Canadian verse.

[quasimodo1]

MARCH 1936

There is no silence upon the earth or under the earth like the silence
under the sea;
No cries announcing birth,
No sounds declaring death.
There is silence when the milt is laid on the spawn in the weeds and
fungus of the rock-clefts;
And silence in the growth and struggle for life.
The bonitoes pounce upon the mackerel,
And are themselves caught by the barracudas,
The sharks kill the barracudas
And the great molluscs rend the sharks,
And all noiselessly -
Though swift be the action and final the conflict,
The drama is silent.

There is no fury upon the earth like the fury under the sea.
For growl and cough and snarl are the tokens of spendthrifts who
know not the ultimate economy of rage.
Moreover, the pace of the blood is too fast.
But under the waves the blood is sluggard and has the same
temperature as that of the sea.

There is something pre-reptilian about a silent kill.

{excerpt}

[JBI]

Come Away, Death by E. J. Pratt


Willy-nilly, he comes or goes, with the clown's logic,
Comic in epitaph, tragic in epithalamium,
And unseduced by any mused rhyme.
However blow the winds over the pollen,
Whatever the course of the garden variables,
He remains the constant,
Ever flowering from the poppy seeds.

There was a time he came in formal dress,
Announced by Silence tapping at the panels
In deep apology.
A touch of chivalry in his approach,
He offered sacramental wine,
And with acanthus leaf
And petals of the hyacinth
He took the fever from the temples
And closed the eyelids,
Then led the way to his cool longitudes
In the dignity of the candles.

continued: http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/pratt/p...annotated.html

[JBI]

From The Witches Brew by E. J. Pratt

Perched on a dead volcanic pile,
Now charted as a submerged peak,
Near to a moon-washed coral isle,
A hundred leagues from Mozambique,
Three water-witches of the East,
Under the stimulus of rum,
Decided that the hour had come
To hold a Saturnalian feast,
In course of which they hoped to find
For their black art, once and for all,
The true effect of alcohol
Upon the cold, aquatic mind.
From two Phoenicians who were drowned,
The witches three (whose surnames ran
Lulu, Ardath, Maryan)
Had by an incantation found
A cavern near the coast of Crete,
And saw, when they had entered in,
A blacksmith with a dorsal fin,
Whose double pectorals and webbed feet
Proved -- while his dusky shoulders swung --
His breed to be of land and water,
Last of great Neptune's stock that sprung
From Vulcan's union with his daughter.
The sisters' terms accepted, he,
Together with his family,
Left his native Cretan shore
To dig the witches' copper ore
Out of their sub-aquaceous mines
In the distant Carolines,
And forge a cauldron that might stand,
Stationary and watertight,
A thousand cubits in its height,
Its width a thousand breadths as spanned
By the smith's gigantic hand,
So that each fish, however dry,
Might have, before the Feast was through,
His own demonstrable supply
Of this Pan-Oceanic brew.
A thousand leagues or so away
Down the Pacific to Cape Horn,
And Southwards from Magellan lay
A table-land to which was borne
This cauldron from the Carolines,
For here, as well the sisters knew,
The Spanish conquerors of Peru
Had stored their rich and ancient wines,
About the time the English burst
Upon their galleons under Drake,
Who sank or captured them to slake
A vast Elizabethan thirst.
With pick and bar the Cretan tore
His way to the interior
Of every sunken ship whose hold
Had wines almost four centuries old.
Upon the broad Magellan floors,
Great passage-way from West to East,
Were also found more recent stores,
The products of a stronger yeast.
For twenty years or thereabout,
The Bacchanals of Western nations,
Scenting universal drought,
Had searched the ocean to find out
The most secluded ports and stations,
Where unmolested they might go
'To serve their god while here below,'
With all the strength of their libations.
So to the distant isles there sailed,
In honour of the ivy god,
Scores of log-loaded ships that hailed
From Christiania to Cape Cod
With manifests entitled ham,
Corn beef, molasses, chamois milk,
Cotton, Irish linen, silk,
Pickles, dynamite and jam,
And myriad substances whose form
Dissolved into quite other freights,
Beneath the magic of a storm
That scattered them around the Straits;
For this is what the blacksmith read,
While raking up the ocean bed: --
Budweiser, Guinness, Schlitz (in kegs),
Square Face Gin and Gordon's Dry,
O'Brien's, Burke's and Johnny Begg's,
Munich, Bock, and Seagram's Rye,
Dewar's, Hennessey's 3 Star,
Glenlivet, White Horse and Old Parr,
With Haig and Haig, Canadian Club,
Jamaica Rum, and other brands
Known to imbibers in all lands
That stock from Brewery or Pub.
All these the Cretan, with the aid
Of his industrious progeny,
Drew to the cauldron, and there laid,
By order of the witches three,
The real foundation for the spree.

OTHER INGREDIENTS

To make a perfect fish menu,
The witches found they had to place
Upon this alcoholic base
Great stacks of food and spices too.
Of all the things most edible
On which the souls of fish have dined,
That fish would sell their souls to find,
Most gracious to their sense of smell,
Is flesh exotic to their kind: --
Cold-blooded things yet not marine,
And not of earth, but half-between,
That live enclosed within the sand
Without the power of locomotion,
And mammal breeds whose blood is hot,
That court the sea but love it not,
That need the air but not the land, --
The Laodiceans of the ocean.
So in this spacious cauldron went
Cargoes of food and condiment.
Oysters fished from Behring Strait
Were brought and thrown in by the crate;
Spitzbergen scallops on half-shell,
Mussels, starfish, clams as well,
Limpets from the Hebrides,
Shrimps and periwinkles, these,
So celebrated as a stew,
Were meant to flavour up the brew.
Then for the more substantial fare,
The curried quarter of a tail
Hewn from a stranded Greenland whale,
A liver from a Polar bear,
A walrus' heart and pancreas,
A blind Auk from the coast of Java,
A bull moose that had died from gas
While eating toadstools near Ungava,
One bitter-cold November day;
Five sea-lion cubs were then thrown in,
Shot by the Cretan's javelin
In a wild fight off Uruguay,
With flippers fresh from the Azores,
Fijian kidneys by the scores,
Together with some pollywogs,
And kippered hocks of centipedes,
And the hind legs of huge bull frogs
Raked by the millions from the reeds
Of slimy Patagonian bogs.

Then before the copper lid
Was jammed upon the pyramid,
The sisters scattered on the top
Many a juicy lollipop;
Tongues from the Ganges crocodile,
Spawn from the delta of the Nile,
Hoofs of sheep and loins of goats,
Raised from foundered cattle-boats --
Titbits they knew might blend with hops,
Might strengthen rum or season rye,
From Zulu hams and Papuan chops
To filets mignons from Shanghai.
Now while volcanic fires burned,
Making the cauldron fiercely hot,
Lulu with her ladle churned
The pungent contents of the pot,
From which distinctive vapours soon
Rose palpably before the view.
Then Ardath summoned a typhoon
Which as it swooped upon the stew,
And swept around the compass, bore
To every sea and every shore
The tidings of the witches' Feast.
And from the West and from the East,
And from the South and from the North,
From every bay and strait and run,
From the Tropics to the Arctic sun,
The Parliament of fish came forth,
Lured by a smell surpassing far
The potencies of boiling tar,
For essences were in this brew
Unknown to blubber or to glue,
And unfamiliar to the nose
Of sailors hardened as they are
To every unctuous wind that blows
From Nantucket to Baccalieu.
The crudest oil one ever lit
Was frankincense compared to it.
It entered Hades, and the airs
Resuscitated the Immortals;
It climbed the empyrean stairs
And drove St. Peter from the portals.

Continued here: http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/pratt/p...annotated.html

[quasimodo1]

“Buddhists Like School and I Don’t.”
An experimental poet meditates on the intersections of language, writing, and God.


by Fanny Howe

God is unevolved and therefore cannot be apprehended by the senses, and as such exists as the witness of what is and

also as light and energy, neither of which can be touched except by touching itself.

You put your hand to your cheek and touch your own light and your own energy.

You can call light and energy by the name of God if you want.

If you don’t want to say God, you must expect this choice to help make you lose your bearings until you understand

how it moves around, shifting its position from being in you and of you, to being far from you.

Divinity—Trinity—What’s the difference?

No difference? No difference, no words. No word for difference, no identity. The genealogical and psychological

search for an identity hitherto unnoticed, unknown, leads nowhere. The world is the unconscious but nature is not

symbolic.

The quest for a condition that exists in two separate states is what confuses people. The person looking for “me” (a

fixed identity) is also the same person looking for (a vapory word) “God.” This split search can only be folded into

one in the process of working on something—whether it is writing, digging, planting, painting, teaching—with a

wholeheartedness that qualifies as complete attention. In such a state, you find yourself depending on chance or

grace to supply you with the focus to complete what you are doing. Your work is practical, but your relationship to

it is illogical in the range of its possible errors and failures. You align yourself with something behind and ahead

and above you that is geometric in nature; you lean on its assistance, realizing the inadequacy of your words.

Simone Weil said in “Human Personality”:
At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can

make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater

number. . . . The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large

cell.
Yes, the problem of vocabulary in these matters is obvious, because a solution to the problem is made of the words.

Who doesn’t know that? If a bird has a problem with its whistle, it has to whistle to fix it.

All voices tend toward song, and the vibrations of music in the vocal cords deeply influence the way spoken words are

heard.

Franz Rosenzweig noted:
In actual conversation, something happens. I do not know in advance what the other will say to me because I myself do

not even know what I am going to say; perhaps not even whether I am going to say anything at all. . . . To need time

means being able to anticipate nothing, having to wait for everything, being dependent on the other for one’s own.
I understand that what is heard is what is already in the past and the proof for that is measurable. Sound has to

travel a little way; it has to overcome space in order to reach a pair of ears. In this space of time, a few

distortions can occur. Anxiety, misunderstanding can intervene, even heartbreak. Indeed, words themselves can, if

allowed, seem to lose their original intention on their way out of the mouth.

Socrates believed that the soul is eternal and contains knowledge of all things. In the trauma of birth, the soul

loses its memory and has to start all over again. But in the experience of living and learning, it finds its way back

to the truths that it lost.


* * *


Revision is the path taken by an autodidact like me. In revising you teach yourself. You find your own information

buried in your body. It is still alive until you are not.

Right until he committed suicide in the end, Socrates had the high spirits of someone who knew (as in recognized)

himself (his own condition).

One way to understand your own condition is to write something and spend a long time revising it. The errors, the

hits and misses, the excess—erase them all.

Now read what you have rewritten out loud in front of some other people. They will hear something that you didn’t say

aloud. They will hear what was there before you began revising and even before the words were written down. You won’t

hear anything but the humming of your own vocal cords.

It’s the same as what Remy de Gourmont in his “Dust for Sparrows” wrote from the point of view of the listener:
Never have literary works seemed so beautiful to me as when at a theatre or in reading, because of lack of habit or

lacking a complete knowledge of the language, I lost the meaning of many phrases. This threw about them a light veil

of somewhat silvery shadow, making the poetry more purely musical, more ethereal.
Even while I have gone back over the words, I have never been sure of the need for it, the use of writing at all, the

value of any completed poem, or the idea that writing might lead somewhere. I haven’t really known what I was doing,

only that I would keep on doing it. It is a form of promiscuity and wanderlust. I could just as well have been a

barmaid or a mailman. I could just as well throw all these papers in a river before sniffing some helium and letting

go, because it was in the end only a part of the natural world.


* * *


A Benedictine friend said there are three levels to transreligious experience: “My religion is best.” The second

level: “All religions are the same.” And the third level that changes the first two: “Through a deep reading of my

own tradition, I find that all religious traditions converge.” Likewise, through a deeper reading of my own language,

I should be able to uncover a few words that correspond to certain transcendent words in other cultures.

I shouldn’t need to co-opt words like Brahman and Atman, no matter how much I am drawn to them and the novelty of

their sound.

I must find in English the words that bear the same force as those two do and share their meaning. This is my job.

The worst sinners are the clerics who give God human attributes. Humans after all evolved from being slime into being

beasts, and like all creatures, it was fear that drove us to change our form over time. Fear of being devoured,

swallowed, and turned back into slime. Watch the scaled animal turn into a bird out of sheer terror, and you will see

what humans went through, too. Humans are still formed from those evolutionary stages and revert to bestial behavior

when threatened.

Even if all of evolution happened, from the eye of eternity, in one wink, as a swift unveiling to the present day,

this movement would be nothing like the stillness of God. This stillness is not something you come to, after years of

struggle, or learn about, then encounter, or find refuge in, after a fight. It doesn’t await you in a specific

location.

God is always in the same everyplace, without an adjective, an adverb, or a verb tense. The creator is creation

itself. A baboon has knowledge of God just as a bee does, and a human child or a leaf.

Fear is what holds humans back from evolving to full solidarity. Providing safety for people—it has to be an action

for all people. This is the difficulty. Everyone has to be safe for everyone to be safe. This is the messianic

message.

There are people like me who read a love letter over and over again. Every time they see a different message and a

different level of love, and, until they have, read it backward and forward several times, and de-emphasize certain

words. In fact, they cannot rest.

For these people sound is eternal, it has no beginning or end.

For others, the search for the right word produces a conclusion to a beginning.

In both cases, happiness is the goal.

Will I be happier if I call God Brahman?

Will I be happier if I call God Divine?

Will I be happier if I study the Trinity?

Will I be happier if I discard the concept of both One and Three and head toward the Zero that is emptiness for

Buddhists and fullness for Hindus?

I will only be happier if I write a poem.


The trees billow under a vague gray sky.
Nearby and not far away, suffering.
And the end of me.
But if I know I have everything
Then I can begin.
Lucky to enter completion conscious.
Lucky to be well. To have my cell.
Wine, words, wafer, in all their forms.
{excerpt, approx. one-quarter of the text, from March 2009 issue of Poetry Magazine}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/us...s.html?_r=1&hp --- http://www.clatsopcc.edu/fisherpoets/index.html ---Fisher Poets
12th Annual
Gathering
Feb. 27 & 28, March 1 2009

[quasimodo1]

IN THE HIMALAYAS


Men who do not wear watches know
The sad infusion a concave glass
Withholds. A life readies
For forgetfulness its forward distances,
But these wheels return their moment
In the thrash of sex. When afterwards
You ask what time it is, I cannot forswear
How near we are to that far country
Where the sun arches
Into the east, the Ganges withdraws
To its source, and mirrors rehearse
Our crabbed lives back to us.
On the mountain a Sherpa discovers
The frozen body dressed a generation before.
{excerpt}
Copyright © William Logan
http://www.pshares.org/issues/articl...ArticleID=1126

[quasimodo1]

from The Oxford Book of American Poetry
{chosen and edited by David Lehman}

INSPIRATION
Today

I loathe poetry. I hate the clotted,
dicty poems of the great modernists,
disdainful of their truant audience,
and I hate also proletarian
poetry, with its dutiful rancors

and sing-along certainties. I hate
poetry readings and the dreaded verb
"to share." Let me share this knife with your throat,
suggested Mack. Today I'm a gnarl, a knot,
a burl. I'm furled in on myself and won't

be opened. I'm the bad mood if you try
to cheer me out of I'll smack you. Impasse
is where I come to escape from. It takes
a deep belief in one's own ignorance;
it takes, I tell you, desperate measures.

1998
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://raintaxi.com/online/2008winter/lee.shtml --- Behind My Eyes
Li-Young Lee
W.W. Norton ($24.950
by Kristina Marie Darling
In Li-Young Lee’s Behind My Eyes, hieroglyphs collide head-on with parables, burning books, and “breath to fan the

fire’s nest,” setting the stage for an elegant collection of poems. A highly anticipated follow-up to the author’s

previous four books, Lee’s newest work examines the many contradictions inherent in the immigrant experience,

depicting them in spare, lyrical narratives throughout. Often juxtaposing thoughtful observations on identity and

family with Western attempts to commercialize and quantify, Lee’s poems convey the difficulty of negotiating one’s

heritage with American cultural values, proving at once philosophical and grounded in everyday life.

Pairing consumer culture with the intensely personal, Lee often parodies the commercial when conveying the

experiences of immigrants and refugees, suggesting that popular solutions like self-help and checklists prove

frivolous in truly critical situations. His poem “Self-Help for Fellow Refugees” exemplifies this trend:

Don’t ask her what she thought she was doing
turning a child’s eyes
away from history
and toward that place all human aching starts.

And if you meet someone
in your adopted country,
and think you see in the other’s face
an open sky, some promise of a new beginning,
it probably means you’re standing too far.

Mimicking the tone of a self-help book through his use of imperative sentences and extended lists, the content of the

poem creates a sharp contrast with the form the author appropriates. By such incongruities, Lee suggests that

“history” and “human aching” remain fundamentally incompatible with commercialized solutions—a theme conveyed with

elegance and refinement throughout the collection. {excerpt from RAINTAXI article}

[JBI]

I think I posted a Lee poem somewhere near the front of the thread, "Persimmons". If anyone is interested.

[quasimodo1]

THE ALBERT CHAIN


Like an accomplished terrorist, the fruit hangs
from the end of a dead stem, under a tree
riddled with holes like a sieve. Breath smelling
of cinnamon retires into its dream to die there.
Fresh air blows in, morning breaks, then the mists
close in; a rivulet of burning air
pumps up the cinders from their roots,
but will not straighten in two radiant months
the twisted forest. Warm as a stable,
close to the surface of my mind,
the wild cat lies in the suppleness of life,
half-stripped of its skin, and in the square
beyond, a squirrel stoned to death
has come to rest on a lime tree.

I am going back into war, like a house
I knew when I was young: I am inside,
a thin sunshine, a night within a night,
getting used to the chalk and clay and bats
swarming in the roof. Like a dead man
attached to the soil which covers him,
I have fallen where no judgment can touch me,
its discoloured rubble has swallowed me up.
For ever and ever, I go back into myself:
I was born in little pieces, like specks of dust,
only an eye that looks in all directions can see me.
I am learning my country all over again,
how every inch of soil has been paid for
by the life of a man, the funerals of the poor.


http://uk.poetryinternationalweb.org...bj_id=8501&x=1 -- {excerpt}