Poetry Bookclub 4

[JBI]

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!

continued here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15304

Intro biography: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/16

[quasimodo1]

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.

[JBI]

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.

[stlukesguild]

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. 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

[stlukesguild]

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

[quasimodo1]

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}

[mortalterror]

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.

[Mr.Cloop]

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 agree

[quasimodo1]

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.

[Virgil]

My vote goes to William Matthews. But all of the selections seem interesting. Where is St Lukes? Will he participate?

[quasimodo1]

Virgil, Stlukes is out there trying to outflank the sagging economy which is why he's been less visable. He'll get to us soon. Which collection of Matthews did you like (and feel free to choose any poetry collection of his. My vote would be for him as well, although Beckett does seem the most challenging.

[Virgil]

Oh I have no idea on the different collections. Which did you prefer?

[quasimodo1]

"Search Party" recieved the most critical comment, mostly good but there are other authors/commentators within. I'll try to find a piece from the work which, if possible, I'll post on "fragments".

[Dark Muse]

I would have to go for Seamus Heaney

[quasimodo1]

That makes two for Heaney and two for Matthews.