fragments of contemporary poetry

[quasimodo1]

{Belgium, b. 1942}

THE CITY

The city is covered with places you
took from me. Full of joint
footsteps, full of joint laughs.
They were sheltered by dreams and if need be
love grabbed the gun to protect them.

Tell my legs how to evade
what belonged to them.
Tell them. They refuse to believe
that the theaters have burnt, restaurants
were hit by plagues, terraces vanished
into thin air, hotels closed,
the courtyard was demolished.

I bow my head and think
the rain will not hit me. ............. {excerpt}

{translated from the Flemish by John van Tiel}

[quasimodo1]

THOUSANDS OF BROADWAYS
Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town.
By Robert Pinsky.
University of Chicago, $16.


Pinsky, a former poet laureate, first delivered the thoughts contained in this slim volume in a series of lectures at Rice University. Much of the book reads like the transcript of a class one might guiltlessly sleep through. “The American small town, by now a setting at least half-mythical,” he argues, “provides a mimetic arena where contradictions between slavery and freedom, or between abundance and emptiness, hark back to even more fundamental contradictions.”
{quote from review...NYTimes}

[Sapphire]

@the City

At first I did not read carefully and I thought the poem was written in 1942. I thought it was about WWII. Now I see I was wrong and the writer was born in that year.

I did not know this poet. I will check him out - thank you for introducing him. I have to say I like the Dutch version a bit better though. It says rather "the plague" than "plagues", "the terraces" than terraces etc. I wonder why the translator changed it. And the last verse is a bit different in translation too - putting a "." where a "," is. I kind of like that though... I guess translation is just as much about making choices as writing the poetry itself is

I like the idea - how a city looses all its charm when you loose the one you explored that city with. The one you lived with in that city.

[quasimodo1]

To Sapphire: It's great that you know Flemish and can re-translate with effect. Let me post another by the same author and you can give me your opinion of the translator/translation. q1

[quasimodo1]

{Belgium, b. 1942)

PARTY

After years the reunion. Brushed the dogs,
the feuds forgotten, the sons the image
of the father. Comparing weight:
belly, money, and ethics.

The late-comers are not expected earlier.
She who once was the queen, casts around
pictures of her daughters, and nobody
is surprised when the poet asks for the name
of the lady who was his big childhood love.

The laughers are talking condoms again, smoking almost
completely forbidden and anyone who does not embrace
United Europe now is lost. The cinders in the barbecue
Are glowing red. No lack of cancer causes here.

The munchies are going round, the whisky works its miracles
and from the wounds of the bacon the fat is dripping.
The names of the dead are exchanged like addresses
on the last holiday. {excerpt}

{translated from the Flemish by John Van Tiel}

[quasimodo1]

IN THE RING OF TWENTY SIGNS

—after Joseph Campbell

The third ring is the future scraping
the present: what is next enters, closes
itself to the past. The fifth ring is
observation. The sixth, satisfaction
of what is known. The fourth ring
is worry, but that is naive, short-lived,
a waste of time, which is the tenth ring,
the middle. The eleventh ring is pleasure;
feeding, but not gluttony, sex but not
depletion. The twelfth ring: love.
The thirteenth, love undone, unleashed
attachment. Rings six through nine are
marriage. The fourteenth ring is silence.
The fifteenth, desire. The sixteenth
ring, mercy. The sixteenth ring is true.
At seventeen you stand alone on the stairway.
The seventeenth ring is achievement.
The eighteenth gives it all away. Not
generously. Not regretfully. Just given.
The nineteenth ring is loneliness suffered
despite oneself. ..... {excerpt}



Barbara Helfgott Hyett teaches at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education and directs a bussiness, The Workshop for Publishing Poets, in Brookline, Mass. She is the author of four books and has had poems and essays published in over one hundred magazines and in twenty-two anthologies. (2001)

[quasimodo1]

LETTER TO THE AMERICAN POET, GREGORY CORSO

{translated from the Hungarian by Len Roberts and Lászlo Vértes}

I’d like to roam the world with you,
Corso,
derailer of time,
twentieth-century rowdy.
Your striped t-shirt reminds me of prison clothes,
runaway prisoner of poetry,
apostle of adultery.
Come on, tie up your sneakers,
let’s go to the Moon,
the Sahara,
and the capital of our good mood: Spoleto!

It’s night in Dome Square.
Marble cubes swim about in the glass of darkness,
like splinters of ice
in bitter whiskey.

Let’s drink the city down at one gulp!

..................................

•

It may be good to steal cars
if we can’t steal immortality

and to peal with the tin-box
if we can’t with Christ’s leg.

•

Let’s play—you like to play:
let’s poke each other’s eyes,
perhaps we’ll be kinder this way
than those who smile.
Let’s break up your bombs for eggs on a plate
and Europe may then admire a new art of cooking.

•

And moron! moron!—let’s holler
at the Polar Bear-Senator,
the prime minsters, who spend
the weekend in the barrel of a cannon.
Oh, weekends!
oh, Sundays!
oh, Whitehouses! Parliaments!
tanks crawl forth
from your snail shells everywhere
and the poets fall on their backs on their slimy tracks.
Morons! morons!—let’s holler at the poets
who fall on their backs,
they don’t deserve bread,
women,
they don’t deserve death.

..................................

Everything can happen to us
if we stay,
everything that has already happened to us.
Come on,
we should be that procession
which rambles every which-way,
changes homeland to get to like the other’s homeland,
signs the sea, as if some picture postcard,
and has a rest in the towns,
to let the towns have a rest, too,
and doesn’t petition for mercy
when it’s sued for its marching,
which it came to love on the seventh day.

{excerpt}

Sándor Csoóri is one of Hungary’s foremost poets and essayists. (1992)

Len Roberts’ translation of Sándor Csoóri’s Selected Poems has recently been published. (1992)

[quasimodo1]

{Poland, b. 1945}

ELECTRIC ELEGY
{for Robert Hass}

Farewell, German radio with your green eye
and your bulky box,
together almost composing
a body and soul. (Your lamps glowed
with a pink, salmony light, like Bergson's
deep self.)
Through the thick fabric
of the speaker (my ear glued to you as
to the lattice of a confessional), Mussolini once whispered,
Hitler shouted, Stalin calmly explained,
Bierut hissed, Gomulka held endlessly forth.
But no one, radio, will accuse you of treason;
no, your only sin was obedience absolute,
tender faithfulness to the megahertz;
whoever came was welcomed, whoever was sent
was received.
Of course I know only
the songs of Schubert brought you the jade
of true joy. To Chopin's waltzes
your electric heart throbbed delicately
and firmly and the cloth over the speaker
pulsated like the breasts of amorous girls
in old novels.
Not with the news, though,
Especially not Radio Free Europe or the BBC.
..........................
At night, forlorn signals found shelter
in your rooms, sailors cried out for help,
the young comet cried, losing her head.
Your old age was announced by a cracked voice,
then rattles, coughing, and finally blindness
(your eye faded), and total silence.
Sleep peacefully, German radio,
dream Schumann and don't waken
when the next dictator-rooster crows.

{translated from the Polish by Renata Gorczynski and C.K. Williams}
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

AMERICA POLITICA HISTORIA, IN SPONTANEITY

O this political air so heavy with the bells
and motors of a slow night, and no place to rest
but rain to walk—How it rings the Washington streets!
The umbrella’d congressmen; the rapping tires
of big black cars, the shoulders of lobbyists
caught under canopies and in doorways,
and it rains, it will not let up,
and meanwhile lame futurists weep into Spengler’s
prophecy, will the world be over before the races blend color?
All color must be one or let the world be done—
There’ll be a chance, we’ll all be orange!
I don’t want to be orange!
Nothing about God’s color to complain;
and there is a beauty in yellow, the old Lama
in his robe the color of Cathay;
in black a strong & vital beauty,
Thelonious Monk in his robe of Norman charcoal—
And if Western Civilization comes to an end
(though I doubt it, for the prophet has not
executed his prophecy) surely the Eastern child
will sit by a window, and wonder
the old statues, the ornamented doors;
the decorated banquet of the West—
Inflamed by futurists I too weep in rain at night
at the midnight of Western Civilization;
Dante’s step into Hell will never be forgotten by Hell;
the Gods’ adoption of Homer will never be forgotten by the Gods;
the books of France are on God’s bookshelf;
no civil war will take place on the fields of God;
and I don’t doubt the egg of the East its glory—
Yet it rains and the motors go
and continued when I slept by that wall in Washington
which separated the motors in the death-parlor
where Joe McCarthy lay, lean and stilled,
ten blocks from the Capitol—
I could never understand Uncle Sam
his red & white striped pants his funny whiskers his starry hat:
how surreal Yankee Doodle Dandy, goof!
American history has a way of making you feel
George Washington is still around, that is
when I think of Washington I do not think of Death—
{excerpt...roughly one third of this poem}.....poet referred to in post 442.

[Virgil]

Have you heard of Geoffry Hill Quasi? I just came across him today and it piqued my interest.

[quasimodo1]

yes, Virgil, I've heard of him. I think I may have posted something of his in the "fragments" thread some time back but I'm not sure. You can "find" him here... http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...t.html?id=3152 . What have you read that got your interest?

[Virgil]

yes, Virgil, I've heard of him. I think I may have posted something of his in the "fragments" thread some time back but I'm not sure. You can "find" him here... http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...t.html?id=3152 . What have you read that got your interest?

Well, it was in a magazine I was perrusing and I'm already forgetting. The writer of the article thought him the most important poet from England in the last decade or so and that he was very erudite. The bits of fragments that the article provided did show a highly crafted work.

[quasimodo1]

According to the Poetry Foundation database...he's definitely a scholarly poet, some say difficult and challenging. Like so many erudite-in-extremus poets... he's not everyman's poet... which intrigues me even more. --- http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&...d0Cgz4A6mDQ3f8

[Virgil]

I'm going to have to explore him.

[quasimodo1]

"A scholar and critic as well as a poet, Hill has published several collections of criticism and essays. Between 1959 and 1996 he published four collections of poetry, but over the last two decades he has become more prolific, with The Orchards of Syon (2002), Speech! Speech! (2000), and The Triumph of Love (1998). Reviewing the poems in A Treatise of Civil Power (2007), critic Tim Martin notes, “Hill’s persistent (and persistently underrated) wit lends both lightness and a paradoxical gravity to even the most abstruse passages of his dense, argumentative verse.” tidbit from that site...