fragments of contemporary poetry

[firefangled]

William Stafford is one of my favorite American poets. He was able to capture the most ordinary things and make them new with his seeing. In this age of living in bad faith, when so much is taken from us and no decision seems easy, we would do well to read William Stafford. The following is one of my favorite poems by him:

A Ritual To Be Read To Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

{omission}

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

—William Stafford

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/bo..._r=1&ref=books --- from poets.org... In a review in The New Republic, the critic Helen Vendler wrote: "Louise Glück is a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems, published in a series of memorable books over the last twenty years, have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither "confessional" nor "intellectual" in the usual senses of those words."

[quasimodo1]

Kay Ryan's poem on W.G. Sebald... "He Lit a Fire With Icicles" --- http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetrya...do?poemId=9144

[quasimodo1]

THE DISCIPLE
an obstinate disciple, so youthful
but the one whom jesus loved
who laid beside him at the last

kissing him was like kissing a door
slim flat stern with hinges on one side
but moveable on the other
how it swung open how we fell
there were boats and we took them
our nicotine-sour mouths in each other
like an element to shape something from
the bitterness gathered in the hollows
when it wore off we smoked

in the end a rain fell
a rain we could barely believe
it turned cold, things got wet and everywhere ...
{excerpt}

© 2004, zu Klampen! Verlag
From: Monika Rinck: Verzückte Distanzen. Gedichte
Publisher: Zu Klampen! Verlag. Edition Postskriptum: Springe, Germany 2004.,
ISBN: 3-933156-81-5

© Translation: Nicholas Grindell
From: shearsman (58 / 2003)

[quasimodo1]

The Myth of Innocence



One summer she goes into the field as usual
stopping for a bit at the pool where she often
looks at herself, to see
if she detects any changes. She sees
the same person, the horrible mantle
of daughterliness still clinging to her.

The sun seems, in the water, very close.
That's my uncle spying again, she thinks—
everything in nature is in some way her relative.
I am never alone, she thinks,
turning the thought into a prayer.
Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer.

No one understands anymore
how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers.
Also that he embraced her, right there,
with her uncle watching. She remembers
sunlight flashing on his bare arms.

This is the last moment she remembers clearly.
Then the dark god bore her away.

She also remembers, less clearly,
the chilling insight that from this moment
she couldn't live without him again.

The girl who disappears from the pool
will never return. A woman will return,
looking for the girl she was. ...

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Lagerfeld


Rome: an open city A lager
Down the catwalk troop the fashions
Of the millennium, bulletproof vests
For copulation Two gladiators
Are fighting for the job, long practised
In the tricks of throttling, they win applause
That´s what they went to school for HIM OR ME
The stink of fear In his empire
Lagerfeld is making a dream come true A PACK
OF WOMEN THE PICK OF BEAUTY
The winter collection for the wars in Dacia
Has made him rich IT IS ENOUGH TO TURN YOUR STOMACH
They are bearing my ideas, these are summer clothes
To the spoilt world A festival of beauty
Helena Christensen in evening wear Meanwhile
The two craftsmen have not let go
One is Commodus, the wild son
Of a cool father, the mother´s indiscretion
When he croaks the throne stands empty
And Septimius Severus the African
Will march with the XIVth from the wilderness of Vienna
Against the capital POOR ROME A barbarian
Emperor On his heels the rest of the world
Lgerfeld doesn´t watch He has a problem
He can make them more beautiful but not better
More and more beautiful Outfit of the brute beasts
RICH AND POOR A divided clientele
ATROCIOUS Paying and thieving
I enjoy undivided attention But
He knows what´s going on, he isn´t blind
The fifteen-year-old killer from Springfield
A MOUNTAIN OF CORPSES IN THE HIGHSCHOOL CAFETERIA
He has learned to lend a hand
he is in custody now in paper clothes Another fashion From America Gangs of children
Are combing North Rhine-Westphalia trainees
Looking for food at Hertie´s and Woolworth´s ...
{excerpt...© Translation David Constantine}

[quasimodo1]

Review: Rhyme and Unreason by David Orr (nyt) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/bo...html?ref=books

[quasimodo1]

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...-26063,00.html

[Kafka's Crow]

Here is a poem I literally grew up on. My ealiest memories of hearing this poem recited in my baby ears go back to a time from which almost all else disappears in the dark tunnel of memory, the strongest, the most memorable words in Urdu language. Later I fell out of touch with Rashid's poetry who has always been out of favour in the conservative society he wrote for. His poetry is non-conformist, both in form and content, his life-style rose more eyebrows than anybody else's, his death arose controversy. A modernist through and through, he wrote in a highly Persianised Urdu and was destined to be either hardly understood or, as more often than not, misunderstood. I came back to Rashid in my early 20s. Many years were spent reciting these verses in circles of friends like a young Stephen Daedalus. Now in my 40th year, I am still as devout a follower as I was 20 years ago or when as a baby I repeated his grand verses from this poem without understanding a word in them, just enjoying the rhytmic beauty of his language.



You are Afraid of Life?

----You are afraid of life?
But life is who you are, and life is who I am!
You are afraid of mankind?
But man is who you are, and man is who I am!

Man is language, man is expression,
but you are not afraid of that!
With the iron-bond of Word and Understanding, man is inextricably tied
With humanity's loins, life is inseparably tied
But you are not afraid of that!

Truth is you are afraid of the "Unsaid"
The time that has yet to come are you afraid of it,
Are you afraid to acknowledge the imminence of it?

---- Many periods of history have passed by before:
of freedom's remoteness, of godhood that is "self-less".
Even then you believe that it's useless to aspire,
that this night of suffocation is to Providence submission!

But what would you know,
that when lips fail to move, hands arise to life.
Hands arise to life to show to the way that is right,
as the expressions of light!
Hands cry out, yelling the end of the night.
You are afraid of light?
But light is who you are, and light is who I am,
You are afraid of light!

----The walls of the city
have been cleansed of the shadows of evil monsters.
The gown of night
has shredded to pieces, crumbled to dust.
From the mass of Humanity, the voice of Individual rises.
A cry of the soul rises.
On the paths of love, as if, some lover's passion leaps,
a new obsession leaps!
Humanity brims with life
Behold humanity laugh, see cities alive
Are you frightened now?
Yes 'Now' is who you are, yes 'Now' is who I am,
You are frightened of 'Now'!
______
Translated by Hamid Rahim Sheikh

[quasimodo1]

THE APICULTURALIST
In black veiled hat and canvas gauntlets
Jean Paucton, seventy, climbs the baroque stairs

of the Palais Garnier opera house
to his rooftop apiary.

The theatrical prop man studied beekeeping
at the Jardin’s venerable institute

then hauled onto the seventh floor ledge
his five weathered crates

swollen with honey, nearly a thousand pounds a year.

“The bees make an impression, do they not?”
he declares.
And you, dear poet?

Your little apiary of simile and syntax—the busy bite
that separates truth from Truth?

Do you not weary of the student manuscript, ... {excerpt}


http://www.kenyonreview.org/kro_full.php?file=hahn.php (August, 2009)

[quasimodo1]

WHEELING MOTEL

Poems

By Franz Wright

91 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95
Dark Glamour (a review)
By DAISY FRIED
Published: September 17, 2009 NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/bo..._r=1&ref=books

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/bo..._r=1&ref=books

[quasimodo1]

Im Jahre eins, das war


das scharren am boden, aufgekratztes
schweigen &
vom tod gefaltet: winterfliegen.

das erste – ein kriegsherbst, wenn
die dinge schon von
einem nerv durchzogen sind, entzündet an

der luft. die treibjagd holt über
dem acker die schwerkraft
der gleise entfernungen

schrumpfen & wer
gerade unterwegs gewesen ist, verschwindet
in seinen gedanken: du

siehst die fische spuln an zarten strähnen
männer, die in hohen wellen husten. wenn
das blos reisende uns abwirft, hörst du

pferde im abfluss, getrappel &
eine brise, die
aus den kanälen chemisch ... {excerpt}








in the year one, that was


scraping on the ground, scratched up
silence &
folded by death: winter flies.

the first – a wartime fall when
things have already been
run through by a nerve, ignited by

the air. across the field, the battue
brings back the gravity
of the tracks distances

shrink & whoever
happens to be on the move vanishes
in his thoughts: you

see the fish spool men coughing in
great waves onto fragile strands. when
what merely travels scraps us, you hear

horses in the drain, clatter &
a breeze that
blows chemically up ... {excerpt}






© Translation Andrew Shields

[Jozanny]

I don't know much about poet Albert Goldbarth , but I thought it would be better to tack him in here rather than start a new thread, though granted this thread is getting long. I find male authors and poets who have bric-a-brac rooms annoying, though I guess I am not one to talk since this latest grand old man earns a living off the MFA circuit.

At first glance, he seems like another post-Frost mid-western romantic, but to quote Jim:
" He's the only poet to win the National Book Critics Circle Award twice."

I have no "fragments" to post this evening though.

[quasimodo1]

GRACE
Eyes open in the womb. The struggle arrives to turn darkness into light. Dangling on the wings of
the Phoenix. The creative process begins to turn ugly. Vandalizing and robbing graves of
child prodigies turning into serious discussions of Mass Murder and the therapeutic value of
saturday morning shopping sprees. The betrayal of genius is burning at the stake. The spider
descends. The violence is always there. The web embraces us all. More insidious than
drugs. More pleasurable than sex. Slightly entangled. Slightly confused. That possible
criminal element awakens you to the terror and lonliness of running into the silent pain of
someone else looking to you for answers. Glamorous and well financed pools of blood
profiling on neighborhood corners while smiling at and tempting the boldest gangsta rap. {one of two stanzas}