excerpt from Villon, III
How can I sing with love in my bosom?
Unclean, immature and unseasonable salmon.
Complete Poems
09 September 2007
Basil Bunting
[from Basil Bunting's Complete Poems, 2000]
excerpt from Villon, III
How can I sing with love in my bosom?
Unclean, immature and unseasonable salmon.
Complete Poems
excerpt from Villon, III
How can I sing with love in my bosom?
Unclean, immature and unseasonable salmon.
Complete Poems
08 September 2007
William Meredith
[from William Meredith's Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems, 1997]
A View of the Brooklyn Bridge
The growing need to be moving around it to see it,
To prevent its freezing, as with sculpture and metaphor,
Finds now skeins, now strokes of the sun in a dark
Crucifixion etching, until you end by caring
What the man's name was who made it,
The way old people care about names and are
Forever seeing resemblances to people now dead.
Of stone and two metals drawn out so
That at every time of day
They speak out of strong resemblances, as:
Wings whirring so that you see only where
Their strokes finish, or: spokes of dissynchronous wheels.
Its pictures and poems could accurately be signed
With the engineer's name, whatever he meant.
These might be called: Tines inflecting a river, justly,
Or (thinking how its cables owe each something
To the horizontal and something to the vertical):
A graph of the odds against
Any one man's producing a masterpiece.
Yet far from his, the engineer's, at sunrise
And again at sunset when,
Like the likenesses the old see,
Loveliness besets it as haphazard as genes:
Fortunate accidents take the form of cities
At either end; the cities give their poor edges
To the river, the buildings there
The fair color that things have to be.
Oh the paper reeds by a brook
Or the lakes that lie on bayous like a leopard
Are not at more seeming random, or more certain
In their sheen how to stand, than these towns are.
And of the rivering vessels so and so
Where the shadow of the bridge rakes them once,
The best you can think is that, come there,
A pilot will know what he's done
When his ship is fingered
Like that Greek boy whose name I now forget
Whose youth was one long study to cut stone;
One day his mallet slipped, some goddess willing
Who only meant to take his afternoon,
So that the marble opened on a girl
Seated at music and wonderfully fleshed
And sinewed under linen, riffling a harp;
At which he knew not that delight alone
The impatient muse intended, but, coupled with it, grief —
The harp-strings in particular were so light —
And put his chisel down for marvelling on that stone.
Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems
A View of the Brooklyn Bridge
The growing need to be moving around it to see it,
To prevent its freezing, as with sculpture and metaphor,
Finds now skeins, now strokes of the sun in a dark
Crucifixion etching, until you end by caring
What the man's name was who made it,
The way old people care about names and are
Forever seeing resemblances to people now dead.
Of stone and two metals drawn out so
That at every time of day
They speak out of strong resemblances, as:
Wings whirring so that you see only where
Their strokes finish, or: spokes of dissynchronous wheels.
Its pictures and poems could accurately be signed
With the engineer's name, whatever he meant.
These might be called: Tines inflecting a river, justly,
Or (thinking how its cables owe each something
To the horizontal and something to the vertical):
A graph of the odds against
Any one man's producing a masterpiece.
Yet far from his, the engineer's, at sunrise
And again at sunset when,
Like the likenesses the old see,
Loveliness besets it as haphazard as genes:
Fortunate accidents take the form of cities
At either end; the cities give their poor edges
To the river, the buildings there
The fair color that things have to be.
Oh the paper reeds by a brook
Or the lakes that lie on bayous like a leopard
Are not at more seeming random, or more certain
In their sheen how to stand, than these towns are.
And of the rivering vessels so and so
Where the shadow of the bridge rakes them once,
The best you can think is that, come there,
A pilot will know what he's done
When his ship is fingered
Like that Greek boy whose name I now forget
Whose youth was one long study to cut stone;
One day his mallet slipped, some goddess willing
Who only meant to take his afternoon,
So that the marble opened on a girl
Seated at music and wonderfully fleshed
And sinewed under linen, riffling a harp;
At which he knew not that delight alone
The impatient muse intended, but, coupled with it, grief —
The harp-strings in particular were so light —
And put his chisel down for marvelling on that stone.
Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems
07 September 2007
Thom Gunn
[from Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats, 1992]
Odysseus on Hermes
his afterthought
I was seduced by innocence
— beard scarcely visible on his chin —
by the god within.
The incompletion of youth
like the new limb of the cactus growing
— soft-green — not fully formed
the spines still soft and living,
potent in potential,
in process and so
still open to the god.
When complete and settled
then closed to the god.
So sensing it in him
I was seduced by the god,
becoming in my thick maturity
suddenly unsettled
un-solid
still being formed —
in the vulnerability, edges flowing,
myself open to the god.
I took his drug
and all came out right in the story.
Still thinking back
I seek to renew that power
so easily got
seek to find again that knack
of opening my settled features,
creased on themselves,
to the astonishing kiss and gift
of the wily god to the wily man.
The Man with Night Sweats: Poems
Odysseus on Hermes
his afterthought
I was seduced by innocence
— beard scarcely visible on his chin —
by the god within.
The incompletion of youth
like the new limb of the cactus growing
— soft-green — not fully formed
the spines still soft and living,
potent in potential,
in process and so
still open to the god.
When complete and settled
then closed to the god.
So sensing it in him
I was seduced by the god,
becoming in my thick maturity
suddenly unsettled
un-solid
still being formed —
in the vulnerability, edges flowing,
myself open to the god.
I took his drug
and all came out right in the story.
Still thinking back
I seek to renew that power
so easily got
seek to find again that knack
of opening my settled features,
creased on themselves,
to the astonishing kiss and gift
of the wily god to the wily man.
The Man with Night Sweats: Poems
Ellen Doré Watson
[from Ellen Doré Watson's We Live in Bodies, 1997]
On the Seventh Anniversary of the Conception of My First Child
I look to the world. I ponder the possibility of number two.
Out the window fresh nubs of dead wood suggest
putting on some lullabies and sitting on the front stoop
to blow bubbles. The chickens with the wounds of winter
on their backs have tired of walking tiptoe in the mud.
They long to do the cross-stitch in the grass; they’re
dreaming of getting into real estate. It’s a Spring thing.
There’s an attic full of baby clothes that want to get out.
They sigh and whisper with the rafters, sell all your roadmaps —
hell, forget how to drive. I try to see myself as the eager
young poppy in the corner of the garden, always the first
to wave her red hanky at each passing cloud. I rise like
dough on that childlike thought. I can shut out the checkbook
crying me a river, and the bellyaching rooms, too full
to cough. What needles is this craving for another someone,
for the pain and beauty of something tugging day and night,
something needy that has no words. Most days it’s words I want.
My eyes do their searching thing, but no skywriting in the high
thin air, no runes in the compost. The weather-beaten chicken shed
is looking awfully sullen, playing it close to the vest. Soon darts
of green will gather at its ankles. We believe this on the flimsiest
of evidence. Just as we know the scanty remains of the woodpile
and cluttered gutters will take a back seat to the question of those
small boulders in the garden: are they saying goodbye, sucked
down under glacial mud, or rising up in the moonlight with a whiff
of sour milk on their breath?
We Live in Bodies: Poems
On the Seventh Anniversary of the Conception of My First Child
I look to the world. I ponder the possibility of number two.
Out the window fresh nubs of dead wood suggest
putting on some lullabies and sitting on the front stoop
to blow bubbles. The chickens with the wounds of winter
on their backs have tired of walking tiptoe in the mud.
They long to do the cross-stitch in the grass; they’re
dreaming of getting into real estate. It’s a Spring thing.
There’s an attic full of baby clothes that want to get out.
They sigh and whisper with the rafters, sell all your roadmaps —
hell, forget how to drive. I try to see myself as the eager
young poppy in the corner of the garden, always the first
to wave her red hanky at each passing cloud. I rise like
dough on that childlike thought. I can shut out the checkbook
crying me a river, and the bellyaching rooms, too full
to cough. What needles is this craving for another someone,
for the pain and beauty of something tugging day and night,
something needy that has no words. Most days it’s words I want.
My eyes do their searching thing, but no skywriting in the high
thin air, no runes in the compost. The weather-beaten chicken shed
is looking awfully sullen, playing it close to the vest. Soon darts
of green will gather at its ankles. We believe this on the flimsiest
of evidence. Just as we know the scanty remains of the woodpile
and cluttered gutters will take a back seat to the question of those
small boulders in the garden: are they saying goodbye, sucked
down under glacial mud, or rising up in the moonlight with a whiff
of sour milk on their breath?
We Live in Bodies: Poems
05 September 2007
mountain scenery
In her book Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite [New York, Norton, 1959], Marjorie Hope Nicholson documents the change in taste that occurred in the eighteenth century with regard to mountain scenery. While seventeenth-century poets and theologians conceived of mountains as "warts, wens, and blisters" that mar the earth, travelers in the eighteenth century sought them out as sources of the sublime.
e.g.
A Country so deform´d, the Traveller
Would swear those parts Nature´s pudenda were:
Like Warts and Wens hills on the one side swell,
To all but natives inaccessible;
Th´other a blue scrofulous scum defiles
Flowing from th´earths impostumated boyles (...)
[Charles Cotton, The Wonders of the Peake (London 1681), 1-2]
[these tidbits found here and here]
e.g.
A Country so deform´d, the Traveller
Would swear those parts Nature´s pudenda were:
Like Warts and Wens hills on the one side swell,
To all but natives inaccessible;
Th´other a blue scrofulous scum defiles
Flowing from th´earths impostumated boyles (...)
[Charles Cotton, The Wonders of the Peake (London 1681), 1-2]
[these tidbits found here and here]
John Milton
[from John Milton's L'Allegro, 1645]
There on Beds of Violets blew,
And fresh-blown Roses washt in dew . . .
To hear the Lark begin his flight,
And singing startle the dull night,
From his watch-towre in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise;
Then to come in spight of sorrow,
And at my window bid good morrow . . .
Mountains on whose barren brest
The labouring clouds do often rest;
Meadows trim with Daisies pide,
Shallow Brooks, and Rivers wide.
Towers, and Battlements it sees
Boosom'd high in tufted Trees,
Wher perhaps some beauty lies . . .
Such sights as youthfull Poets dream
On Summer eeves by haunted stream. . . .
These delights, if thou canst give,
Mirth with thee, I mean to live.
There on Beds of Violets blew,
And fresh-blown Roses washt in dew . . .
To hear the Lark begin his flight,
And singing startle the dull night,
From his watch-towre in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise;
Then to come in spight of sorrow,
And at my window bid good morrow . . .
Mountains on whose barren brest
The labouring clouds do often rest;
Meadows trim with Daisies pide,
Shallow Brooks, and Rivers wide.
Towers, and Battlements it sees
Boosom'd high in tufted Trees,
Wher perhaps some beauty lies . . .
Such sights as youthfull Poets dream
On Summer eeves by haunted stream. . . .
These delights, if thou canst give,
Mirth with thee, I mean to live.
02 September 2007
John Milton
[from Anonymous Life of Milton]
He rendred his Studies and various Works more easy & pleasant by allotting them thir several portions of the day. Of these the time friendly to the Muses fell to his Poetry; And hee waking early (as is the use of temperate men) had commonly a good Stock of Verses ready against his Amanuensis came; which if it happend to bee later than ordinary, hee would complain, saying hee wanted to bee milkd.
The Riverside Milton
He rendred his Studies and various Works more easy & pleasant by allotting them thir several portions of the day. Of these the time friendly to the Muses fell to his Poetry; And hee waking early (as is the use of temperate men) had commonly a good Stock of Verses ready against his Amanuensis came; which if it happend to bee later than ordinary, hee would complain, saying hee wanted to bee milkd.
The Riverside Milton
01 September 2007
David Ferry
[from David Ferry's Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations, 1999]
Mary in Old Age
. . .
IV
Of Others Who Were There
There was: the old lady in the nursing home
Who kept coming up to me and standing much too close
To me, sniffing at my body or my soul
As if it were something deliciously stinking,
Thrilling to her, or else a flowering bush,
Nourishment for a ravenous questioning;
Staring into my ear the way the child
In the comic routine long ago in the movies
Stared silently into the coils of the ear
Of the man sitting there next to the child,
Trying to watch the movie on the screen,
Driven wild inside by the child's relentless gaze:
As if the ear could speak its secrets back.
Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (Phoenix Poets Series)
Mary in Old Age
. . .
IV
Of Others Who Were There
There was: the old lady in the nursing home
Who kept coming up to me and standing much too close
To me, sniffing at my body or my soul
As if it were something deliciously stinking,
Thrilling to her, or else a flowering bush,
Nourishment for a ravenous questioning;
Staring into my ear the way the child
In the comic routine long ago in the movies
Stared silently into the coils of the ear
Of the man sitting there next to the child,
Trying to watch the movie on the screen,
Driven wild inside by the child's relentless gaze:
As if the ear could speak its secrets back.
Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (Phoenix Poets Series)
31 August 2007
Simone Weil
[from Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace, 1947]
Obedience. There are two kinds. We can obey the force of gravity or we can obey the relationship of things. In the first case we do what we are driven to by the imagination which fills up empty spaces. We can affix a variety of labels to it, often with a show of truth, including righteousness and God. If we suspend the filling up activity of the imagination and fix our attention on the relationship of things, a necessity becomes apparent which we cannot help obeying. Until then we have not any notion of necessity and we have no sense of obedience.
After that we cannot be proud of what we do, even though we may accomplish marvels.
Gravity and Grace (Routledge Classics)
Obedience. There are two kinds. We can obey the force of gravity or we can obey the relationship of things. In the first case we do what we are driven to by the imagination which fills up empty spaces. We can affix a variety of labels to it, often with a show of truth, including righteousness and God. If we suspend the filling up activity of the imagination and fix our attention on the relationship of things, a necessity becomes apparent which we cannot help obeying. Until then we have not any notion of necessity and we have no sense of obedience.
After that we cannot be proud of what we do, even though we may accomplish marvels.
Gravity and Grace (Routledge Classics)
26 August 2007
George Steiner
[from George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language & Translation]
We must not trust the translation whose words are entirely ‘un-broken’. As with a sea-shell, the translator can listen strenuously but mistake the rumour of his own pulse for the beat of the alien sea.
Yet ‘mis-taking’, to grasp in place of, to transliterate, as it were, between seizure and surrogation, is indispensable. We have seen that serious understanding depends on a linguistic and cultural experiencing of resistant difference. But the transcendence of difference, the process of internalizing the probabilities of non-communication, of acute doubt as to whether the thing can be done at all, demands Wahlverwandschaft (elective affinity). At close linguistic-cultural quarters the translator often finds himself in a state of recognition. The hermeneutic and praxis of his decipherment and subsequent restatement are those of mirrors and déjà-vu. He has been here before he came. He has chosen his source-text not arbitrarily but because he is kindred to it. The magnetism can be one of genre, tone, biographical fantasy, conceptual framework. Whatever the bonding, his sense of the text is a sense of homecoming or, as the sentimental tag precisely puts it, of a home from home. Poor translation follows on negative ‘mistaking’: erroneous choice or mechanical, fortuitous circumstance have directed the translator to an original in which he is not at home. The alienness is not one of differentiation undergone, circumscribed as a moment in the dialectic of transit, but a muddled, vacant disaccord which can, in fact, be independent of linguistic difference. Thus there are within our own tongue and culture numerous works with which we have no just relation, which leave us cold. Positive ‘mistaking’ on the contrary generates and is generated by the feeling of at-homeness in the other language, in the other community of consciousness. The point is a central one. Translation operates in a dual or dialectical or bipolar energy field (one’s preference between these terms being simply a question of meta-language). Resistant difference — the integral and historical impermeability, apartness of the two languages, civilizations, semantic composites — plays against elective affinity — the translator’s pre- and recognition of the original, his intuition of legitimate entry, of an at-homeness momentarily dislocated, i.e. located across the frontier. At close quarters, say as between two European languages, the charge is maximal at both poles. The shock of difference is as strong as that of familiarity. The translator is held off as powerfully as he is drawn in. Translucency comes of the unresolved antinomy of the two currents, of the vital swerve into and away from the core of the original. Some such picture seems to obtain in the micron spaces between high-energy particles drawn together by gravity but kept apart by repulsion.
But notice how ‘positive mistaking’, the translator’s recognition or Narcissism on which the business depends for half its logic, sets odd psychological traps. Once the translator has entered into the original, the frontier of language passed, once he has certified his sense of belonging, why go on with the translation? He is now, apparently, the man who needs it least. Not only can he hear and read the original for himself, but the more unforced his immersion the sharper will be his realization of a uniquely rooted meaning, of the organic autonomy of the saying and the said. So why a translation, why the circumvention which is the way home (the third movement in the hermeneutic)? Undoubtedly translation contains a paradox of altruism — a word on which there are stresses both of ‘otherness’ and of ‘alteration’. The translator performs for others, at the price of dispersal and relative devaluation, a task no longer necessary or immediate to himself. But there is also a proprietary impulse. It is only when he ‘brings home’ the simulacrum of the original, when he recrosses the divide of language and community, that he feels himself in authentic possession of his source. Safely back he can, as an individual, discard his own translation. The original is now peculiarly his. Appropriation through understanding and metamorphic re-saying shades, psychologically as well as morally, into expropriation. This is the dilemma which I have defined as the cause of the fourth, closing movement in the hermeneutic of translation. After completing his work, the genuine translator is en fausse situation. He is in part a stranger to his own artifact which is now radically superfluous, and in part a stranger to the original which his translation has, in varying degrees, adulterated, diminished, exploited, or betrayed through improvement. I will come back to the consequent need for compensation, for a restoration of parity. This need is obsessive in the distances, at once resistant and magnetic, of Hobbes to Thucydides, of Hölderlin to Sophocles, of MacKenna to Plotinus, of Celan to Shakespeare, of Nabokov to Pushkin.
After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
We must not trust the translation whose words are entirely ‘un-broken’. As with a sea-shell, the translator can listen strenuously but mistake the rumour of his own pulse for the beat of the alien sea.
Yet ‘mis-taking’, to grasp in place of, to transliterate, as it were, between seizure and surrogation, is indispensable. We have seen that serious understanding depends on a linguistic and cultural experiencing of resistant difference. But the transcendence of difference, the process of internalizing the probabilities of non-communication, of acute doubt as to whether the thing can be done at all, demands Wahlverwandschaft (elective affinity). At close linguistic-cultural quarters the translator often finds himself in a state of recognition. The hermeneutic and praxis of his decipherment and subsequent restatement are those of mirrors and déjà-vu. He has been here before he came. He has chosen his source-text not arbitrarily but because he is kindred to it. The magnetism can be one of genre, tone, biographical fantasy, conceptual framework. Whatever the bonding, his sense of the text is a sense of homecoming or, as the sentimental tag precisely puts it, of a home from home. Poor translation follows on negative ‘mistaking’: erroneous choice or mechanical, fortuitous circumstance have directed the translator to an original in which he is not at home. The alienness is not one of differentiation undergone, circumscribed as a moment in the dialectic of transit, but a muddled, vacant disaccord which can, in fact, be independent of linguistic difference. Thus there are within our own tongue and culture numerous works with which we have no just relation, which leave us cold. Positive ‘mistaking’ on the contrary generates and is generated by the feeling of at-homeness in the other language, in the other community of consciousness. The point is a central one. Translation operates in a dual or dialectical or bipolar energy field (one’s preference between these terms being simply a question of meta-language). Resistant difference — the integral and historical impermeability, apartness of the two languages, civilizations, semantic composites — plays against elective affinity — the translator’s pre- and recognition of the original, his intuition of legitimate entry, of an at-homeness momentarily dislocated, i.e. located across the frontier. At close quarters, say as between two European languages, the charge is maximal at both poles. The shock of difference is as strong as that of familiarity. The translator is held off as powerfully as he is drawn in. Translucency comes of the unresolved antinomy of the two currents, of the vital swerve into and away from the core of the original. Some such picture seems to obtain in the micron spaces between high-energy particles drawn together by gravity but kept apart by repulsion.
But notice how ‘positive mistaking’, the translator’s recognition or Narcissism on which the business depends for half its logic, sets odd psychological traps. Once the translator has entered into the original, the frontier of language passed, once he has certified his sense of belonging, why go on with the translation? He is now, apparently, the man who needs it least. Not only can he hear and read the original for himself, but the more unforced his immersion the sharper will be his realization of a uniquely rooted meaning, of the organic autonomy of the saying and the said. So why a translation, why the circumvention which is the way home (the third movement in the hermeneutic)? Undoubtedly translation contains a paradox of altruism — a word on which there are stresses both of ‘otherness’ and of ‘alteration’. The translator performs for others, at the price of dispersal and relative devaluation, a task no longer necessary or immediate to himself. But there is also a proprietary impulse. It is only when he ‘brings home’ the simulacrum of the original, when he recrosses the divide of language and community, that he feels himself in authentic possession of his source. Safely back he can, as an individual, discard his own translation. The original is now peculiarly his. Appropriation through understanding and metamorphic re-saying shades, psychologically as well as morally, into expropriation. This is the dilemma which I have defined as the cause of the fourth, closing movement in the hermeneutic of translation. After completing his work, the genuine translator is en fausse situation. He is in part a stranger to his own artifact which is now radically superfluous, and in part a stranger to the original which his translation has, in varying degrees, adulterated, diminished, exploited, or betrayed through improvement. I will come back to the consequent need for compensation, for a restoration of parity. This need is obsessive in the distances, at once resistant and magnetic, of Hobbes to Thucydides, of Hölderlin to Sophocles, of MacKenna to Plotinus, of Celan to Shakespeare, of Nabokov to Pushkin.
After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
22 August 2007
20 August 2007
Richard Hugo
[from Richard Hugo's "Death in the Aquarium}"]
. . . and wouldn't we welcome dying unknown,
unnamed on the floor of the ocean,
our bones ignored by the only clock there,
that slow unrhythmic waver of kelp --
our bones giving off the phosphorus
that collects in pockets and waits,
then one night washes in glowing?
And lovers, lovers would stop making love
and stand there, each suddenly alone
amazed at that gleam riding sand.
. . . and wouldn't we welcome dying unknown,
unnamed on the floor of the ocean,
our bones ignored by the only clock there,
that slow unrhythmic waver of kelp --
our bones giving off the phosphorus
that collects in pockets and waits,
then one night washes in glowing?
And lovers, lovers would stop making love
and stand there, each suddenly alone
amazed at that gleam riding sand.
Frank O'Hara
[from Frank O'Hara's Collected Poems, 1995]
Poem
I don't know as I get what D. H. Lawrence is driving at
when he writes of lust springing from the bowels
or do I
it could be the bowels of the earth
to lie flat on the earth in spring, summer or winter is sexy
you feel it stirring deep down slowly up to you
and sometimes it gives you a little nudge in the crotch
that's very sexy
and when someone looks sort of raggedy and dirty like Paulette Goddard
in Modern Times it's exciting, it isn't usual or attractive
perhaps D.H.L. is thinking of the darkness
certainly the crotch is light
and I suppose
any part of us that can only be seen by others
is a dark part
I feel that about the small of my back, too and the nape of my neck
they are dark
they are erotic zones as in the tropics
whereas Paris is straightforward and bright about it all
a coal miner has kind of a sexy occupation
though I'm sure it's painful down there
but so is lust
of light we can never have enough
but how would we find it
unless the darkness urged us on and into it
and I am dark
except when now and then it all comes clear
and I can see myself
as others luckily sometimes see me
in a good light
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara
Poem
I don't know as I get what D. H. Lawrence is driving at
when he writes of lust springing from the bowels
or do I
it could be the bowels of the earth
to lie flat on the earth in spring, summer or winter is sexy
you feel it stirring deep down slowly up to you
and sometimes it gives you a little nudge in the crotch
that's very sexy
and when someone looks sort of raggedy and dirty like Paulette Goddard
in Modern Times it's exciting, it isn't usual or attractive
perhaps D.H.L. is thinking of the darkness
certainly the crotch is light
and I suppose
any part of us that can only be seen by others
is a dark part
I feel that about the small of my back, too and the nape of my neck
they are dark
they are erotic zones as in the tropics
whereas Paris is straightforward and bright about it all
a coal miner has kind of a sexy occupation
though I'm sure it's painful down there
but so is lust
of light we can never have enough
but how would we find it
unless the darkness urged us on and into it
and I am dark
except when now and then it all comes clear
and I can see myself
as others luckily sometimes see me
in a good light
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara
My New Gig
Monthly Fiction Writing Group
led by Sean Scapellato and Carol Peters
meets the second Tuesday of each month
starting September 11, 2007, 7-9 PM
Charleston County Main Library, 68 Calhoun Street
free
For all those closet novelists out there: bring your favorite pen and paper, your works-in-progress, your fictive mind. During our recurring fiction workshop series, we’ll be tackling major topics of the craft: dialogue, plot, character, tone, point of view, imagery. We’ll look at process, discipline, revision, submitting, editing. Our two hours will be split with instruction and interactive exercises, questions and answers, and brief sharing of exercises. Use this time to meet other writers and to put pen to paper. We’ll be helping you formulate ideas, improve your works in progress, and learn substantive techniques about the craft and art of fiction. Designed to help fiction writers at all levels, from beginning to professional, this time will allow for introspection and work on individual projects as well as a chance to learn about the many techniques of story. Sponsored by the Charleston County Public Library and The Lowcountry Initiative for the Literary Arts (LILA). For more information please call 843-805-6930.
led by Sean Scapellato and Carol Peters
meets the second Tuesday of each month
starting September 11, 2007, 7-9 PM
Charleston County Main Library, 68 Calhoun Street
free
For all those closet novelists out there: bring your favorite pen and paper, your works-in-progress, your fictive mind. During our recurring fiction workshop series, we’ll be tackling major topics of the craft: dialogue, plot, character, tone, point of view, imagery. We’ll look at process, discipline, revision, submitting, editing. Our two hours will be split with instruction and interactive exercises, questions and answers, and brief sharing of exercises. Use this time to meet other writers and to put pen to paper. We’ll be helping you formulate ideas, improve your works in progress, and learn substantive techniques about the craft and art of fiction. Designed to help fiction writers at all levels, from beginning to professional, this time will allow for introspection and work on individual projects as well as a chance to learn about the many techniques of story. Sponsored by the Charleston County Public Library and The Lowcountry Initiative for the Literary Arts (LILA). For more information please call 843-805-6930.
19 August 2007
Buson & Jack Gilbert
[Buson, translated by Lucien Stryk]
A sudden chill —
in our room my dead wife's comb,
underfoot.
[from Jack Gilbert's The Great Fires, 1996]
Married
I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife's hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko's avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.
Zen Poems of China and Japan: The Crane's Bill (An Evergreen Book)
The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992
A sudden chill —
in our room my dead wife's comb,
underfoot.
[from Jack Gilbert's The Great Fires, 1996]
Married
I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife's hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko's avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.
Zen Poems of China and Japan: The Crane's Bill (An Evergreen Book)
The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992
18 August 2007
Elizabeth Daryush
[Elizabeth Daryush, from Collected Poems, 1976]
Drought
The shadeless elms, the poplars shimmerless
Have yellowed, dropped their flaccid leaves a full
Two months before their time; the alder-pool
Is a black miry swamp, ploughed by the press
Of tortured, thirsty cattle; or look where
Once would a spreading line of verdure show
The river’s lush umbrageous path, that now
Is a white hard road, hedged with willows bare.
Autumn will flush no harvest in these fields
Failed of slow Nature’s sober, ripening clime,
Nor winter in these woods brighten with rime
Red berry, brown nut, her late-lavished yields
To bird and beast: the blighted copse they rob
Already of its last lean hip and cob.
Collected poems [of] Elizabeth Daryush
Drought
The shadeless elms, the poplars shimmerless
Have yellowed, dropped their flaccid leaves a full
Two months before their time; the alder-pool
Is a black miry swamp, ploughed by the press
Of tortured, thirsty cattle; or look where
Once would a spreading line of verdure show
The river’s lush umbrageous path, that now
Is a white hard road, hedged with willows bare.
Autumn will flush no harvest in these fields
Failed of slow Nature’s sober, ripening clime,
Nor winter in these woods brighten with rime
Red berry, brown nut, her late-lavished yields
To bird and beast: the blighted copse they rob
Already of its last lean hip and cob.
Collected poems [of] Elizabeth Daryush
more from Mary Kinzie
Philip Hobsbaum's rhyme rankings (the larger the number, the stronger the rhyme):
2.00 interior/superior
1.50 mystery/mastery
1.00 terse/hearse
0.75 world/walled, wheels/wells
0.50 bar/fire, hair/got there
0.25 on/organ
W. K. Wimsatt on rhyme:
Wimsatt makes the further point that it is not sounds that rhyme but meanings (or the single-syllabled meaning-nuggets linguists call "morphemes"), which now clash under the cover of likeness. What comes together in the technique we call rhyme are not so much aural signifiers as semantic ones with subtle syntactical identities, for it is Wimsatt's view that "words have no character as rhymes until they become points in a syntactic succession." . . .
In the couplets of Pope, in particular, Wimsatt believes the disparity between the auditory resemblance and the logical divergence--a divergence in both function (syntax) and meaning (root) -- is exploited with unparalleled cleverness. . . . not only words that rhyme, but small parts of larger, countermatching line-segments (clauses and phrases), which come together with a closure in sound that contradicts the contrast in meaning . . .
A Poet's Guide to Poetry (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)
2.00 interior/superior
1.50 mystery/mastery
1.00 terse/hearse
0.75 world/walled, wheels/wells
0.50 bar/fire, hair/got there
0.25 on/organ
W. K. Wimsatt on rhyme:
Wimsatt makes the further point that it is not sounds that rhyme but meanings (or the single-syllabled meaning-nuggets linguists call "morphemes"), which now clash under the cover of likeness. What comes together in the technique we call rhyme are not so much aural signifiers as semantic ones with subtle syntactical identities, for it is Wimsatt's view that "words have no character as rhymes until they become points in a syntactic succession." . . .
In the couplets of Pope, in particular, Wimsatt believes the disparity between the auditory resemblance and the logical divergence--a divergence in both function (syntax) and meaning (root) -- is exploited with unparalleled cleverness. . . . not only words that rhyme, but small parts of larger, countermatching line-segments (clauses and phrases), which come together with a closure in sound that contradicts the contrast in meaning . . .
A Poet's Guide to Poetry (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)
16 August 2007
15 August 2007
Mary Kinzie
[from Mary Kinzie's A Poet's Guide to Poetry, 1999]
Metrical “correctness,” which leads Surrey to pile one closed pentameter line upon another, does not insure good poetry (and the Surrey versions of many Wyatt works seem padded out — note the frequency of doubled phrases linked by and), just as metrical “incorrectness” does not absolutely diminish a fine poem, although it makes the job riskier . . . Of course, meter that always limps and lurches may irk the reader and distract the writer ar the wrong moment. The middle ground may yield greater success — lines, that is to say, in which neither is the variation so wild as to cancel out the background music of metrical expectation, nor the metrical ground base so rigid as to silence all departures from the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables.
A Poet's Guide to Poetry (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)
Metrical “correctness,” which leads Surrey to pile one closed pentameter line upon another, does not insure good poetry (and the Surrey versions of many Wyatt works seem padded out — note the frequency of doubled phrases linked by and), just as metrical “incorrectness” does not absolutely diminish a fine poem, although it makes the job riskier . . . Of course, meter that always limps and lurches may irk the reader and distract the writer ar the wrong moment. The middle ground may yield greater success — lines, that is to say, in which neither is the variation so wild as to cancel out the background music of metrical expectation, nor the metrical ground base so rigid as to silence all departures from the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables.
A Poet's Guide to Poetry (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)
14 August 2007
Timothy Steele
[from Timothy Steele’s After Sapphics and Other Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986]
Toward Calgary
Out over these parched, gusty plains,
Loose dirt is lifted to a sail;
Beyond wide distances, a train’s
Smoke draws a horizontal trail.
Posts bear a wire, mile after mile,
Across deep views toward which winds roll,
That wire the only obstacle
Between the winds and the North Pole.
Here one could drive what seems an age,
Seeing no more than levelled land
And, on the road, slow-skidding sage
And skating shapes of wind-blown sand.
Here one could try the radio's dial
And, as the inching needle slips
Through far, infrequent static, feel
A stilled world at the fingertips.
And one might sense nothing but thirst
Or soundless hours in this place
Where all horizons are dispersed
Continuously into space.
Yet from caked, crumbly ground and rocks
The spiky purple lupines grow
And cacti shaped like tuning forks.
And some who've crossed such precincts know
The prudent heart is like these plains,
Where quietness has grown immense,
No landmarks rendering its terrains
Measurable to human sense,
And where, remote of any tree,
The sky is an inclusive drift
Of radiance chastening, endlessly,
Needless invention, needless thrift.
Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986
Toward Calgary
Out over these parched, gusty plains,
Loose dirt is lifted to a sail;
Beyond wide distances, a train’s
Smoke draws a horizontal trail.
Posts bear a wire, mile after mile,
Across deep views toward which winds roll,
That wire the only obstacle
Between the winds and the North Pole.
Here one could drive what seems an age,
Seeing no more than levelled land
And, on the road, slow-skidding sage
And skating shapes of wind-blown sand.
Here one could try the radio's dial
And, as the inching needle slips
Through far, infrequent static, feel
A stilled world at the fingertips.
And one might sense nothing but thirst
Or soundless hours in this place
Where all horizons are dispersed
Continuously into space.
Yet from caked, crumbly ground and rocks
The spiky purple lupines grow
And cacti shaped like tuning forks.
And some who've crossed such precincts know
The prudent heart is like these plains,
Where quietness has grown immense,
No landmarks rendering its terrains
Measurable to human sense,
And where, remote of any tree,
The sky is an inclusive drift
Of radiance chastening, endlessly,
Needless invention, needless thrift.
Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986
13 August 2007
Alice Fulton
[from Alice Fulton’s “Give: Daphne and Apollo” in After Ovid: The New Metamorphoses, ed. Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun]
. . . Remember how
music was aroused in the old technology?
The stylus vibrated, shaking a crystal in its head,
and the groove culled this trembling.
The stylus made electrons fly
from the atom, climb a wire through
the crystal to the gate. There
the slight current was amplified,
bridling the large —
and vinyl gave
rise to sonatas, rise to bop.
This gives the odd god
and hound dog, dolphin and electron,
the novation and the moment
of change. Since the truly new
looks truly wrong at first,
it gives the sublime and grotesque,
hoping you’ll receive them kindly,
hoping for the best — newness
being not so much a truth
as it is emotion.
Can you feel for the dark
matter, background
lines of lace of brides? Will you
receive the hybridized and recombined,
the downsized and the amplified?
The greenery and systemic herbicide:
the laurel wreath. . . .
After Ovid: New Metamorphoses
. . . Remember how
music was aroused in the old technology?
The stylus vibrated, shaking a crystal in its head,
and the groove culled this trembling.
The stylus made electrons fly
from the atom, climb a wire through
the crystal to the gate. There
the slight current was amplified,
bridling the large —
and vinyl gave
rise to sonatas, rise to bop.
This gives the odd god
and hound dog, dolphin and electron,
the novation and the moment
of change. Since the truly new
looks truly wrong at first,
it gives the sublime and grotesque,
hoping you’ll receive them kindly,
hoping for the best — newness
being not so much a truth
as it is emotion.
Can you feel for the dark
matter, background
lines of lace of brides? Will you
receive the hybridized and recombined,
the downsized and the amplified?
The greenery and systemic herbicide:
the laurel wreath. . . .
After Ovid: New Metamorphoses
12 August 2007
Thom Gunn
[from Thom Gunn's Collected Poems, 1994]
Moly
Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake.
I woke. What beasthood skin she made me take?
Leather toad that ruts for days on end,
Or cringing dribbling dog, man's servile friend,
Or cat that prettily pounces on its meat,
Tortures it hours, then does not care to eat:
Parrot, moth, shark, wolf, crocodile, ass, flea.
What germs, what jostling mobs there were in me.
These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough.
No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof.
Into what bulk has method disappeared?
Like ham, streaked, I am gross — gray, gross, flap-eared.
The pale-lashed eyes my only human feature.
My teeth tear, tear. I am the snouted creature
That bites through anything, root, wire, or can.
If I was not afraid I'd eat a man.
Oh a man's flesh already is mine.
Hand and foot poised for risk. Buried in swine.
I root and root, you think that is greed,
It is, but I seek out a plant I need.
Direct me, gods, whose changes are all holy,
To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly:
Cool flesh of magic in each leaf and shoot,
From milky flower to the black forked root.
From this fat dungeon I could rise to skin
And human title, putting pig within.
I push my big gray wet snout through the green,
Dreaming the flower I have never seen.
Collected Poems
Moly
Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake.
I woke. What beasthood skin she made me take?
Leather toad that ruts for days on end,
Or cringing dribbling dog, man's servile friend,
Or cat that prettily pounces on its meat,
Tortures it hours, then does not care to eat:
Parrot, moth, shark, wolf, crocodile, ass, flea.
What germs, what jostling mobs there were in me.
These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough.
No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof.
Into what bulk has method disappeared?
Like ham, streaked, I am gross — gray, gross, flap-eared.
The pale-lashed eyes my only human feature.
My teeth tear, tear. I am the snouted creature
That bites through anything, root, wire, or can.
If I was not afraid I'd eat a man.
Oh a man's flesh already is mine.
Hand and foot poised for risk. Buried in swine.
I root and root, you think that is greed,
It is, but I seek out a plant I need.
Direct me, gods, whose changes are all holy,
To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly:
Cool flesh of magic in each leaf and shoot,
From milky flower to the black forked root.
From this fat dungeon I could rise to skin
And human title, putting pig within.
I push my big gray wet snout through the green,
Dreaming the flower I have never seen.
Collected Poems
09 August 2007
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
[from Walter Jackson Bate's Coleridge, 1968]
As to Nightingales — they are almost as numerous with us and as incessant in song as Frogs with you. Ah! (I groaned forth a few nights ago, when qualmy and twitchy from the effects of an Aperient) Ah! PHIlomel! ill do thy strains accord with those of CALomel!
. . .
I envy dear Southey's power of saying one thing at a time in short and close sentences, whereas my thoughts bustle along like a Surinam Toad, with little toads sprouting out of back, side, and belly, vegetating while it crawls
COLERIDGE
As to Nightingales — they are almost as numerous with us and as incessant in song as Frogs with you. Ah! (I groaned forth a few nights ago, when qualmy and twitchy from the effects of an Aperient) Ah! PHIlomel! ill do thy strains accord with those of CALomel!
. . .
I envy dear Southey's power of saying one thing at a time in short and close sentences, whereas my thoughts bustle along like a Surinam Toad, with little toads sprouting out of back, side, and belly, vegetating while it crawls
COLERIDGE
07 August 2007
Terri McCord
The marvelous and prolific Finishing Line Press will soon publish a chapbook by my friend and sister poet Terri McCord of Greenville, SC.
06 August 2007
Jilly Dybka
I suppose everyone except me knew that Wikipedia refers to my friend and sister poet Jilly Dybka in their Dock Ellis entry.
Anne Haines
I'm delighted to learn that Finishing Line Press is preparing to publish a chapbook by my friend and sister poet Anne Haines.
Ron Silliman
Read Ron's blog posting today, or at least this quoted paragraph:
Thus if poetry is about vocabulary & poems themselves are not referential, we have – no one is more clear about this than Ashbery – a hierarchy of vocabulary. At the pinnacle are the three great orienting pronouns, I, you and we, followed very closely by proper names – Rappahannock or Wimpy or whatever – followed by nouns, as such, then adverbs & verbs and then all other words. It is worth noting that what puts the three pronouns at the pinnacle is their implication of presence, these invariably are the pronouns of immanence, as he, she and they are not.
Thus if poetry is about vocabulary & poems themselves are not referential, we have – no one is more clear about this than Ashbery – a hierarchy of vocabulary. At the pinnacle are the three great orienting pronouns, I, you and we, followed very closely by proper names – Rappahannock or Wimpy or whatever – followed by nouns, as such, then adverbs & verbs and then all other words. It is worth noting that what puts the three pronouns at the pinnacle is their implication of presence, these invariably are the pronouns of immanence, as he, she and they are not.
05 August 2007
Ernst Bloch
[from George Steiner's After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation]
We hypothesize and project thought and imagination into the 'if-ness', into the free conditionalities of the unknown. Such projection is no logical muddle, no abuse of induction. It is far more than a probabilistic convention. It is the master nerve of human action. Counter-factuals and conditionals, argues Bloch, make up a grammar of constant renewal. They force us to proceed afresh in the morning, to leave failed history behind. Otherwise our posture would be static and we would choke on disappointed dreams. . . . Bloch has insisted that 'reasonings on a supposition' are not, as Hume in his exercise of systematic doubt ruled, 'chimerical and without foundation'. They are, on the contrary, the means for our survival and the distinctive mechanism of personal and social evolution. Natural selection, as it were, favoured the subjunctive.
We hypothesize and project thought and imagination into the 'if-ness', into the free conditionalities of the unknown. Such projection is no logical muddle, no abuse of induction. It is far more than a probabilistic convention. It is the master nerve of human action. Counter-factuals and conditionals, argues Bloch, make up a grammar of constant renewal. They force us to proceed afresh in the morning, to leave failed history behind. Otherwise our posture would be static and we would choke on disappointed dreams. . . . Bloch has insisted that 'reasonings on a supposition' are not, as Hume in his exercise of systematic doubt ruled, 'chimerical and without foundation'. They are, on the contrary, the means for our survival and the distinctive mechanism of personal and social evolution. Natural selection, as it were, favoured the subjunctive.
04 August 2007
Sir Thomas Urquhart's Logopandecteision of 1653
[from George Steiner's After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation]
The object is 'to appropriate the words of the universal language with the things of the universe'. Only a 'Grammatical Arithmetician' . . . will bring about this indispensable accord. Urquhart's interlingua contains eleven genders and ten cases besides the nominative. Yet the entire edifice is built on 'but two hundred and fifty prime radices upon which all the rest are branches'. Its alphabet counts ten vowels, which also serve as digits, and twenty-five consonants; together these articulate all sounds of which the vocal organs of man are capable. This alphabet is a powerful means of arithmetical logic: 'What rational Logarithms do by writing, this language doth by heart; and by adding of letters, shall multiply numbers; which is a most exquisite secret.' The number of syllables in a word, moreover, is proportionate to the number of its significations. Urquhart kept his 'exquisite secret' but the anticipation of his claim on modern symbolic logic and computer languages is striking. As is Urquhart's assurance that the phonetic and syntactic rules of his 'universal character' have inherent mnemonic advantages. A child, he says, will acquire fluency in the new speech with little effort because the structure of the idiom in fact reproduces and reenacts the natural articulations of thought.
After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
The object is 'to appropriate the words of the universal language with the things of the universe'. Only a 'Grammatical Arithmetician' . . . will bring about this indispensable accord. Urquhart's interlingua contains eleven genders and ten cases besides the nominative. Yet the entire edifice is built on 'but two hundred and fifty prime radices upon which all the rest are branches'. Its alphabet counts ten vowels, which also serve as digits, and twenty-five consonants; together these articulate all sounds of which the vocal organs of man are capable. This alphabet is a powerful means of arithmetical logic: 'What rational Logarithms do by writing, this language doth by heart; and by adding of letters, shall multiply numbers; which is a most exquisite secret.' The number of syllables in a word, moreover, is proportionate to the number of its significations. Urquhart kept his 'exquisite secret' but the anticipation of his claim on modern symbolic logic and computer languages is striking. As is Urquhart's assurance that the phonetic and syntactic rules of his 'universal character' have inherent mnemonic advantages. A child, he says, will acquire fluency in the new speech with little effort because the structure of the idiom in fact reproduces and reenacts the natural articulations of thought.
After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
Kamau Braithwaite
[from Kamau Braithwaite's Dreamstories, 1998]
from The Black Angel
. . .but like he cdn't hear be->
cause i cdn't speak and in anycase my words. as words. fall>>
chalk & foolish on my tongue
Dreamstories (Longman Caribbean Writers)
from The Black Angel
. . .but like he cdn't hear be->
cause i cdn't speak and in anycase my words. as words. fall>>
chalk & foolish on my tongue
Dreamstories (Longman Caribbean Writers)
03 August 2007
George Steiner
[from George Steiner's After Babel: Aspects of Language & Translation, 1998]
It is likely that the current of language passing through the mind, either in voluntary self-address or in the perhaps random but almost certainly uninterrupted soliloquy of mental activity, contributes largely to the definition of 'interior time' . . .
The modulations of inference, of provisionality of conjecture, of hope through which consciousness maps ahead of itself, are facts of grammar. . . .
The tragic vision of Greek literature turns on this deep paradox: the event most expected, most consequent on the internal logic of action, is always the most surprising . . . We know precisely what Oedipus will discover -- in a crucial sense he too has known all along. Yet with each narration or performance of the fable our sense of shock is renewed. . . . Eteocles' knowledge that death waits for him at the seventh gate does not void his action; it gives it the dignity of meaning.
[Thucydides] The past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.
After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
It is likely that the current of language passing through the mind, either in voluntary self-address or in the perhaps random but almost certainly uninterrupted soliloquy of mental activity, contributes largely to the definition of 'interior time' . . .
The modulations of inference, of provisionality of conjecture, of hope through which consciousness maps ahead of itself, are facts of grammar. . . .
The tragic vision of Greek literature turns on this deep paradox: the event most expected, most consequent on the internal logic of action, is always the most surprising . . . We know precisely what Oedipus will discover -- in a crucial sense he too has known all along. Yet with each narration or performance of the fable our sense of shock is renewed. . . . Eteocles' knowledge that death waits for him at the seventh gate does not void his action; it gives it the dignity of meaning.
[Thucydides] The past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.
After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
Christopher Isherwood
[from Christopher Isherwood’s novel, Prater Violet, 1945]
The King’s Road was wet-black, and deserted as the moon. . . . The little houses had shut their doors against all strangers and were still, waiting for dawn, bad news and the milk. There was nobody about. Not even a policeman. Not even a cat.
It was that hour of the night at which man’s ego almost sleeps.
The King’s Road was wet-black, and deserted as the moon. . . . The little houses had shut their doors against all strangers and were still, waiting for dawn, bad news and the milk. There was nobody about. Not even a policeman. Not even a cat.
It was that hour of the night at which man’s ego almost sleeps.
Robert Creeley
[from Robert Creeley's The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 2006]
The World
I wanted so ably
to reassure you, I wanted
the man you took to be me,
to comfort you, and got
up, and went to the window,
pushed back, as you asked me to,
the curtain, to see
the outline of the trees
in the night outside.
The light, love,
the light we felt then,
greyly, was it, that
came in, on us, not
merely my hands or yours,
or a wetness so comfortable,
but in the dark then
as you slept, the grey
figure came so close
and leaned over,
between us, as you
slept, restless, and
my own face had to
see it, and be seen by it,
the man it was, your
grey lost tired bewildered
brother, unused, untaken —
hated by love, and dead,
but not dead, for an
instant, saw me, myself
the intruder, as he was not.
I tried to say, it is
all right, she is
happy, you are no longer
needed. I said,
he is dead, and he
went as you shifted
and woke, at first afraid,
then knew by my own knowing
what had happened —
and the light then
of the sun coming
for another morning
in the world.
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005
The World
I wanted so ably
to reassure you, I wanted
the man you took to be me,
to comfort you, and got
up, and went to the window,
pushed back, as you asked me to,
the curtain, to see
the outline of the trees
in the night outside.
The light, love,
the light we felt then,
greyly, was it, that
came in, on us, not
merely my hands or yours,
or a wetness so comfortable,
but in the dark then
as you slept, the grey
figure came so close
and leaned over,
between us, as you
slept, restless, and
my own face had to
see it, and be seen by it,
the man it was, your
grey lost tired bewildered
brother, unused, untaken —
hated by love, and dead,
but not dead, for an
instant, saw me, myself
the intruder, as he was not.
I tried to say, it is
all right, she is
happy, you are no longer
needed. I said,
he is dead, and he
went as you shifted
and woke, at first afraid,
then knew by my own knowing
what had happened —
and the light then
of the sun coming
for another morning
in the world.
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005
David Ferry
[from David Ferry’s Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations, 1999]
Character Analysis of Mary in Earlier Life
Her spinster eccentricity often
Said things for the sake of startling you.
She was like that. It seemed a form of shyness,
Putting you off with her charm flirtatiously.
It was a powerful entrapped wild innocent conventional nature.
The rage in her charm steadily
Burned its way through the materials of her life
So that there was always almost nothing left.
To put it another way:
Where she was was always stranded on a high platform
She got to on high heels getting across
On a tight rope strung out over the abyss.
Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (Phoenix Poets Series)
Character Analysis of Mary in Earlier Life
Her spinster eccentricity often
Said things for the sake of startling you.
She was like that. It seemed a form of shyness,
Putting you off with her charm flirtatiously.
It was a powerful entrapped wild innocent conventional nature.
The rage in her charm steadily
Burned its way through the materials of her life
So that there was always almost nothing left.
To put it another way:
Where she was was always stranded on a high platform
She got to on high heels getting across
On a tight rope strung out over the abyss.
Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (Phoenix Poets Series)
Thomas Hardy
[Thomas Hardy]
I Look into My Glass
I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, “Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!”
For then, I, undistressed
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.
But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.
I Look into My Glass
I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, “Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!”
For then, I, undistressed
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.
But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.
21 July 2007
John Skelton
[excerpt from John Skelton’s “Philip Sparrow," ~1805]
from Philip Sparrow
Sometime he would gasp
When he saw a wasp;
A fly or a gnat,
He would fly at that;
And prettily he would pant
When he saw an ant.
Lord, how he would pry
After the butterfly!
Lord, how he would hop
After the gressop!
And when I said, “Phip, Phip!”
Then he would leap and skip,
And take me by the lip.
Alas, it will me slo
That Philip is gone me from! . . .
[gressop = grasshopper]
from Philip Sparrow
Sometime he would gasp
When he saw a wasp;
A fly or a gnat,
He would fly at that;
And prettily he would pant
When he saw an ant.
Lord, how he would pry
After the butterfly!
Lord, how he would hop
After the gressop!
And when I said, “Phip, Phip!”
Then he would leap and skip,
And take me by the lip.
Alas, it will me slo
That Philip is gone me from! . . .
[gressop = grasshopper]
20 July 2007
Jaki Shelton Green
[from Jaki Shelton Green's Breath of the Song, 2005]
dust memoirs
I
candles drip air
washed away smiles linger to breathe;
a skeletal interpretation of motherhood
suspends itself above penurized nativity.
go into yourself and free those
midsummer visits free those grasshopper tragedies;
free those public telephones with passionate coffin smells
drip into your burial urn. drip.
this is called neurotic fiction. i am going out of myself into a
woman without skin, into a face without a mouth, into
a woman without a man i am woeman. woeman. this is
neurotic fission. drip, drip into my confusions. i am
vaguely alive, am dying alive native depression and
intellectual inclinations balance this head. keep it adrift.
i have no sweet songs of georgia pine to sing. i have no
succulent verse of carolina wind to whisper. i have only
come to bury my dead. i have only come to bury my dead.
this is my only sonnet. write in the dust with or without
the sandman's help . . . the moon is late. is somewhere raging
suicides and spreading apart skies. such is a product of my
unconsciousness. i do not know who i am and why i
choose . . . life? the writing will actualize the deed the
writing will fire the first plunge and sink the first little dove
into painless death. . . .
Breath of the Song: New And Selected Poems
dust memoirs
I
candles drip air
washed away smiles linger to breathe;
a skeletal interpretation of motherhood
suspends itself above penurized nativity.
go into yourself and free those
midsummer visits free those grasshopper tragedies;
free those public telephones with passionate coffin smells
drip into your burial urn. drip.
this is called neurotic fiction. i am going out of myself into a
woman without skin, into a face without a mouth, into
a woman without a man i am woeman. woeman. this is
neurotic fission. drip, drip into my confusions. i am
vaguely alive, am dying alive native depression and
intellectual inclinations balance this head. keep it adrift.
i have no sweet songs of georgia pine to sing. i have no
succulent verse of carolina wind to whisper. i have only
come to bury my dead. i have only come to bury my dead.
this is my only sonnet. write in the dust with or without
the sandman's help . . . the moon is late. is somewhere raging
suicides and spreading apart skies. such is a product of my
unconsciousness. i do not know who i am and why i
choose . . . life? the writing will actualize the deed the
writing will fire the first plunge and sink the first little dove
into painless death. . . .
Breath of the Song: New And Selected Poems
16 July 2007
Laurie Sheck
[from Laurie Sheck's Captivity, 2007]
Or resolve into a calm
For there is so much crumbling and instead. I think of you now writing
that last
Note. How the aparts multiply, grow wild with clash and scatter. Or
resolve into a calm
I can barely understand — a wasp's nest, maybe, the papery regularity of
its cells,
All those steady carefuls lining up. Your thin, your brittle wrist, gave
back
Its weight, its mass, its shadow — but to what? And now, in me, the far of
your death
Sternly whitens the notion of to see. You, now, not singular, but
interspersed
Among the questions,
Elsewheres of water rushing down stone steps.
A ragged fabric
And then the mind begins to starve itself. As if the brain clefts were
giving back their networks,
All their tensile webs. Unsafe the worldspeed and the scalded
Warnings. Quiet as errors in genetic script
Or handcuffs left rusting on a table, the folds and softs
Are vanished from the air. Shock knits a ragged fabric. Each move leads
into
Ambush and undone.
That I might step
Then I came to a peace so random it felt dangerous.
Rough battlefield, expectancy, most tenuous and fragile contract,
How can I step with threadbare tenderness
Across the zero hour of each strike and batter?
Why do we live in time? — its edges crumbling, its contours filling with
monuments,
Hard data. But there is a very plain in things that sometimes comes
Just calmly. It holds no trade routes, no borders fortressed, guarded.
That I may briefly touch it. That I might step into the curious
Despite —
Captivity
Or resolve into a calm
For there is so much crumbling and instead. I think of you now writing
that last
Note. How the aparts multiply, grow wild with clash and scatter. Or
resolve into a calm
I can barely understand — a wasp's nest, maybe, the papery regularity of
its cells,
All those steady carefuls lining up. Your thin, your brittle wrist, gave
back
Its weight, its mass, its shadow — but to what? And now, in me, the far of
your death
Sternly whitens the notion of to see. You, now, not singular, but
interspersed
Among the questions,
Elsewheres of water rushing down stone steps.
A ragged fabric
And then the mind begins to starve itself. As if the brain clefts were
giving back their networks,
All their tensile webs. Unsafe the worldspeed and the scalded
Warnings. Quiet as errors in genetic script
Or handcuffs left rusting on a table, the folds and softs
Are vanished from the air. Shock knits a ragged fabric. Each move leads
into
Ambush and undone.
That I might step
Then I came to a peace so random it felt dangerous.
Rough battlefield, expectancy, most tenuous and fragile contract,
How can I step with threadbare tenderness
Across the zero hour of each strike and batter?
Why do we live in time? — its edges crumbling, its contours filling with
monuments,
Hard data. But there is a very plain in things that sometimes comes
Just calmly. It holds no trade routes, no borders fortressed, guarded.
That I may briefly touch it. That I might step into the curious
Despite —
Captivity
15 July 2007
Malena Morling
[from Malena Morling's Ocean Avenue, 1999]
Standing on the Earth Among the Cows
for Elena
When I was driving through Wyoming
past fields of just-overturned earth
black in the noon sun
and past thousands of cows
totally at home in the open,
I stopped the car to stop moving
and got out to stand among them
and I said nothing in English or Swedish.
Now I want to be whoever I was at that moment
when I discovered my own breathing
among the cows' breathing in the field
and studied their satin bellies
and udders slowly filling with milk.
I was not separate from anything living, I was
equally there and there was nothing to wait for.
Ocean Avenue (The New Issues Press Poetry Series)
Standing on the Earth Among the Cows
for Elena
When I was driving through Wyoming
past fields of just-overturned earth
black in the noon sun
and past thousands of cows
totally at home in the open,
I stopped the car to stop moving
and got out to stand among them
and I said nothing in English or Swedish.
Now I want to be whoever I was at that moment
when I discovered my own breathing
among the cows' breathing in the field
and studied their satin bellies
and udders slowly filling with milk.
I was not separate from anything living, I was
equally there and there was nothing to wait for.
Ocean Avenue (The New Issues Press Poetry Series)
Maurice Manning
[from Maurice Manning's Bucolics, 2007]
XXXI
did you teach the woodpecker how
to knock its head against the wood
of hollow trees did you say this
is how you do it Boss then knock
your own head so hard into
the tree it made a rattle clap
I'm thinking nine is the number of times
the bird must knock the tree to make
it rattle right does that sound right
to you is nine the number Boss
to make a rattle clap it sounds
all right to me the number sounds
just right inside the rattle Boss
did you teach birds to count did you
teach me to count what counts beyond
the numbers up above them Boss
are you a number or a sound
or something else I can't learn how
to think about you birdbrain Boss
you rattle me you knock me down
Bucolics
XXXI
did you teach the woodpecker how
to knock its head against the wood
of hollow trees did you say this
is how you do it Boss then knock
your own head so hard into
the tree it made a rattle clap
I'm thinking nine is the number of times
the bird must knock the tree to make
it rattle right does that sound right
to you is nine the number Boss
to make a rattle clap it sounds
all right to me the number sounds
just right inside the rattle Boss
did you teach birds to count did you
teach me to count what counts beyond
the numbers up above them Boss
are you a number or a sound
or something else I can't learn how
to think about you birdbrain Boss
you rattle me you knock me down
Bucolics
13 July 2007
Susan Hutton
[from Susan Hutton's On the Vanishing of Large Creatures, 2007]
Is More Than
The beautiful folded fish nets, the bleached floats,
the ropes and anchors arranged along the shore
belie their heartless presence in the sea. Meanwhile,
the fish have made a heaven of the air. They rise from their cold nights
toward the multiplying dawn. The colors are marvelous, splendid.
It's unfair when they're caught. The escapists: confirmed liars.
The rest: it ends badly, but it simplifies things.
The idea of heaven was once all that mattered: whole and perfect,
beyond complaint. And in the seven such days I spent
in Riomaggiore, knives and forks clattered at me
from other windows while I ate. When the church bells ran in the
morning
we were all yanked from sleep. I lived easily in their habits
while my world was fresh. After a thousand breakfasts together,
the table really is a table, just as the grass is really the grass.
There is the smell, for one thing, and the way the table stands.
On the Vanishing of Large Creatures (Carnegie Mellon Poetry)
Is More Than
The beautiful folded fish nets, the bleached floats,
the ropes and anchors arranged along the shore
belie their heartless presence in the sea. Meanwhile,
the fish have made a heaven of the air. They rise from their cold nights
toward the multiplying dawn. The colors are marvelous, splendid.
It's unfair when they're caught. The escapists: confirmed liars.
The rest: it ends badly, but it simplifies things.
The idea of heaven was once all that mattered: whole and perfect,
beyond complaint. And in the seven such days I spent
in Riomaggiore, knives and forks clattered at me
from other windows while I ate. When the church bells ran in the
morning
we were all yanked from sleep. I lived easily in their habits
while my world was fresh. After a thousand breakfasts together,
the table really is a table, just as the grass is really the grass.
There is the smell, for one thing, and the way the table stands.
On the Vanishing of Large Creatures (Carnegie Mellon Poetry)
Rosanna Warren
[from Rosanna Warren's Stained Glass, 1993]
Child Model
for Rosalie Carlson
(Greenland Eskimo mummy, boy, four years old,
National Geographic, February 1985)
I want to adopt you, doll-like child,
your death, your National
Geographic resurrection. Cold
has clasped you in its cache, all
gaze, all shimmer. Arctic star,
cuddled in sealskin grave-creche, still
you wait there for your mother,
trusting she'll trudge back through the snow,
famine, centuries: lift you from this glamour,
snatch you, full-limbed, laughing home. But now
in these pages, trapped, you touch
for comfort tiny beads of bone. We know
nothing of you save that such
patient beauty, still unputrefied,
was never seen in death. We clutch
you, ancient child: we need
to think you're saved, as if one face unmarred
in Kodachrome rescued all others who have died
ugly, bruised, disqualified.
Stained Glass: Poems
Child Model
for Rosalie Carlson
(Greenland Eskimo mummy, boy, four years old,
National Geographic, February 1985)
I want to adopt you, doll-like child,
your death, your National
Geographic resurrection. Cold
has clasped you in its cache, all
gaze, all shimmer. Arctic star,
cuddled in sealskin grave-creche, still
you wait there for your mother,
trusting she'll trudge back through the snow,
famine, centuries: lift you from this glamour,
snatch you, full-limbed, laughing home. But now
in these pages, trapped, you touch
for comfort tiny beads of bone. We know
nothing of you save that such
patient beauty, still unputrefied,
was never seen in death. We clutch
you, ancient child: we need
to think you're saved, as if one face unmarred
in Kodachrome rescued all others who have died
ugly, bruised, disqualified.
Stained Glass: Poems
12 July 2007
11 July 2007
Rosanna Warren
[from Rosanna Warren's "Sappho: Translation as Elegy" in The Art of Translation: voices from the field, edited by Rosanna Warren]
My translation of Catullus' "ille mi par . . ." occurs, with another Catullus poem in the Sapphic meter, in a volume of my own poems. But these possessive phrases become obtrusive, as indeed they ought in matters of authorship. The purpose in focusing on a translation of a translation is not to claim that the world needs yet another version of this perennially retranslated poem; nor is it to demonstrate that I have outpaced all my predecessors and found a perfect English equivalent for Catullus. Rather, I should like to offer it, impersonally, as a small instance of lyric lineage, a type or model for poetry's perpetual re-engendering of itself. It is to argue that poetry is, finally, a family matter, involving the strains of birth, love, power, death, and inheritance; and that, given such strains (in every sense), one is never "by onself" however isolated the act of writing may appear. The so-called original poems in my book are, in their own way, translations of several lyric traditions into personal experience and idiom, and are possible only because of strenuous acts of reading, one form of which we know, conventionally, as translation. I am concerned here with the way in which the individual poet inherits poetry, or, in Eliot's formulation, is catalyzed by it; and I take translation as a specific and especially focused instance of the reception and transformation of literary tradition.
The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field
My translation of Catullus' "ille mi par . . ." occurs, with another Catullus poem in the Sapphic meter, in a volume of my own poems. But these possessive phrases become obtrusive, as indeed they ought in matters of authorship. The purpose in focusing on a translation of a translation is not to claim that the world needs yet another version of this perennially retranslated poem; nor is it to demonstrate that I have outpaced all my predecessors and found a perfect English equivalent for Catullus. Rather, I should like to offer it, impersonally, as a small instance of lyric lineage, a type or model for poetry's perpetual re-engendering of itself. It is to argue that poetry is, finally, a family matter, involving the strains of birth, love, power, death, and inheritance; and that, given such strains (in every sense), one is never "by onself" however isolated the act of writing may appear. The so-called original poems in my book are, in their own way, translations of several lyric traditions into personal experience and idiom, and are possible only because of strenuous acts of reading, one form of which we know, conventionally, as translation. I am concerned here with the way in which the individual poet inherits poetry, or, in Eliot's formulation, is catalyzed by it; and I take translation as a specific and especially focused instance of the reception and transformation of literary tradition.
The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field
10 July 2007
Henri Cole
[from Henri Cole's Blackbird and Wolf, 2007]
American Kestrel
I see you sitting erect on my fire escape,
plucking at your dinner of flayed mouse,
like the red strings of a harp, choking a bit
on the venous blue flesh and hemorrhaging tail.
With your perfect black-and-white thief's mask,
you look like a stuffed bird in a glass case,
somewhere between the animal and human life.
The love word is far away. Can you see me?
I am a man. No one has what I have:
my long clean hands, my bored lips. This is my home:
Woof woof, the dog utters, afraid of emptiness,
as I am, so my soul attaches itself to things,
trying to create something neither confessional
nor abstract, like the moon breaking through the pines.
Blackbird and Wolf: Poems
American Kestrel
I see you sitting erect on my fire escape,
plucking at your dinner of flayed mouse,
like the red strings of a harp, choking a bit
on the venous blue flesh and hemorrhaging tail.
With your perfect black-and-white thief's mask,
you look like a stuffed bird in a glass case,
somewhere between the animal and human life.
The love word is far away. Can you see me?
I am a man. No one has what I have:
my long clean hands, my bored lips. This is my home:
Woof woof, the dog utters, afraid of emptiness,
as I am, so my soul attaches itself to things,
trying to create something neither confessional
nor abstract, like the moon breaking through the pines.
Blackbird and Wolf: Poems
Richard McCann
[from Richard McCann's "The Universe Concealed," the last chapter of Mother of Sorrows, 2005]
My friend Helen and I are rowing a boat on Eagle Lake. It's almost dusk, but Helen is wearing her swimsuit because she's working on a tan. She has brought along her bottle of Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil and a Panasonic cassette player made of cheap white plastic, like a teenage girl's. As we row, we listen to The Torah Tapes, which Helen has secured from a Hasidic man who runs a shop on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. He also sells special Yahrzeit candles, she says, although she prefers the ordinary kind that come in blue paper wrappers, available in regular grocery stores. She says they remind her of the Dixie cups of ice cream her father bought her when she was a girl in Livington, New Jersey.
"Be neither sad nor regretful," says Rabbi Ezekiel Stollman. Rabbi Stollman's our invisible passenger, the one whose voice we strain to hear when the Panasonic's batteries are running low. On The Torah Tapes, he speaks in a kind of up-and-down chanting. He says that sadness is arrogance and vanity. The things that sadden us are actually blessings, he says, coming to us from a universe that's concealed.
While Rabbi Stollman talks, I feel the rhythm of rowing — the bending forward, and then the long leaning back, pulling the oars through water — as a kind of secret davening. Helen sits across form me, adjusting her swimsuit's straps. "You think I'm getting too much sun?" she asks.
For several days now, since coming to the Eagle Lake Lodge and Cottages, where we plan to spend a week, we've been making a list of the things we would see if the concealed universe were suddenly and astonishingly revealed to us. At the top of the list, we have written "UV rays."
Beneath that we have written "Joshua," the name of Helen's twelve-year-old son, who died a year ago, and then the names of my friends who have died — Jim, Edward Marcellus, Larry, George, Darnell, Allen, Ricardo, Stanley, Paul, Jaime, Billy, Eduardo, and, most recently, Francisco.
Helen says we should make a list of the things we hope will remain concealed forever. At the top of that list, she says, she'll put the cotton prosthesis she was given after her mastectomy, not long before Josh was killed. On a third list, a list of things that are generally concealed but which we believe might be revealed to us with a minimum of effort, if we put our minds to it, we plan to write "penises."
Mother of Sorrows
My friend Helen and I are rowing a boat on Eagle Lake. It's almost dusk, but Helen is wearing her swimsuit because she's working on a tan. She has brought along her bottle of Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil and a Panasonic cassette player made of cheap white plastic, like a teenage girl's. As we row, we listen to The Torah Tapes, which Helen has secured from a Hasidic man who runs a shop on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. He also sells special Yahrzeit candles, she says, although she prefers the ordinary kind that come in blue paper wrappers, available in regular grocery stores. She says they remind her of the Dixie cups of ice cream her father bought her when she was a girl in Livington, New Jersey.
"Be neither sad nor regretful," says Rabbi Ezekiel Stollman. Rabbi Stollman's our invisible passenger, the one whose voice we strain to hear when the Panasonic's batteries are running low. On The Torah Tapes, he speaks in a kind of up-and-down chanting. He says that sadness is arrogance and vanity. The things that sadden us are actually blessings, he says, coming to us from a universe that's concealed.
While Rabbi Stollman talks, I feel the rhythm of rowing — the bending forward, and then the long leaning back, pulling the oars through water — as a kind of secret davening. Helen sits across form me, adjusting her swimsuit's straps. "You think I'm getting too much sun?" she asks.
For several days now, since coming to the Eagle Lake Lodge and Cottages, where we plan to spend a week, we've been making a list of the things we would see if the concealed universe were suddenly and astonishingly revealed to us. At the top of the list, we have written "UV rays."
Beneath that we have written "Joshua," the name of Helen's twelve-year-old son, who died a year ago, and then the names of my friends who have died — Jim, Edward Marcellus, Larry, George, Darnell, Allen, Ricardo, Stanley, Paul, Jaime, Billy, Eduardo, and, most recently, Francisco.
Helen says we should make a list of the things we hope will remain concealed forever. At the top of that list, she says, she'll put the cotton prosthesis she was given after her mastectomy, not long before Josh was killed. On a third list, a list of things that are generally concealed but which we believe might be revealed to us with a minimum of effort, if we put our minds to it, we plan to write "penises."
Mother of Sorrows
09 July 2007
Rick Mulkey
[from Rick Mulkey's Before the Age of Reason, 1998]
Cain's Apology
I didn't want to work; Dad made us.
You held a pick; I held a shovel.
And every time you gladly buried your pick
into that black sod, I wanted to bury
my shovel into your black hair.
When I clenched your neck, blood leaped:
I don't know if it was anger or fear
but as I pressed you against the ground,
the vein in your left temple swelled
and branched like a flooding stream.
We were only boys, fifteen and ten.
But I used the man talk. A kid
apprenticed to movie tough guys,
I imitated the slurs of punch-drunk boxers,
spit hanging from my lip,
or the bound-for-hell curses of rednecks
at the Milner Matz lounge,
welts and scars on their cheeks.
I spat bruising words tongued in rail yards
where peroxide whores, numb from Mad Dog,
waited for Norfolk & Western brakemen.
I didn't know the power of words.
Or the difficulty in taking them back.
If I could change my life,
change yours, alter that the last time
I held you was by the throat
then I'd choke back words
meant to make you small, words
which made me smaller. I'd unclench
the past. Gladly plant trees
in shale hard soil.
Before the Age of Reason
Cain's Apology
I didn't want to work; Dad made us.
You held a pick; I held a shovel.
And every time you gladly buried your pick
into that black sod, I wanted to bury
my shovel into your black hair.
When I clenched your neck, blood leaped:
I don't know if it was anger or fear
but as I pressed you against the ground,
the vein in your left temple swelled
and branched like a flooding stream.
We were only boys, fifteen and ten.
But I used the man talk. A kid
apprenticed to movie tough guys,
I imitated the slurs of punch-drunk boxers,
spit hanging from my lip,
or the bound-for-hell curses of rednecks
at the Milner Matz lounge,
welts and scars on their cheeks.
I spat bruising words tongued in rail yards
where peroxide whores, numb from Mad Dog,
waited for Norfolk & Western brakemen.
I didn't know the power of words.
Or the difficulty in taking them back.
If I could change my life,
change yours, alter that the last time
I held you was by the throat
then I'd choke back words
meant to make you small, words
which made me smaller. I'd unclench
the past. Gladly plant trees
in shale hard soil.
Before the Age of Reason
07 July 2007
A. R. Ammons
[from section 6 of A. R. Ammons's Garbage, 1993]
. . . on writing a poem — you sit vacant and
relaxed (if possible), your mind wandering
freely, unengaged and in search of focus: you
may sit this way for several minutes till the
void unsettles you a bit and you become impatient
with the intrusion of an awareness of yourself
sitting with a touch of unwelcome exasperation
over a great blank: but you keep your mind
open and on the move and eventually there is a
trace of feeling like a bit of mist on a backroad
but then it reappears stronger and more central,
still coming and going, so the mind can't
grab it and hold on to it: but the mind begins
to make an effort, to shed from itself all
awareness except that of going with the feeling,
to relax and hold the feeling — the feeling
is a brutal burning, a rich, raw urgency:
the mind knows that it is nothing without the
feeling, so concentrating on the feeling, it
dreams of imminent shapes, emergences, of
clust'ral abundances, of free flow, forms discernible,
material, concrete, shapes on the move, and
then the mind gives way from its triggering, and
the mechanisms of necessity fall into, grasping the
upheaval, the action of making; the presence
of pressure appears, forces open a way, the
intensity heightens, groans of anguish and
satisfaction break from the depths of the
body, and the sweet dream occurs, the work
payloads, the fall-away slips through, the body
contracts and returns, ease lengthens through
the byways, and the mind picks up on the
environment again, turns to the practical
policing of the scene, restores itself to
normalcy and the objective world, the body hitching
itself up on the way: shit fire (and save matches):
we wheeled down the long glide from the mountains
into Wheeling: morning fog smoked away the tops
of hills and a river (or two) confluencing slashed
across by scary iron bridges jammed the the narrowed
valley road, when the big black mouth of a tunnel
suddenly opened out of fog in solid rock, all the
events at once happening in the shakes: but then going
on down Route 7 along the Ohio; mammoth standings
of steam, way out of size, too solid to vanish, oozed
up from the nuclear craters, so much so tall that even
on our side of the river the outsized opal shades
of steam broke across us, shadowing us once and again:
slows like flying by or trying to drive to a mountain,
the far ahead lingering far behind: the freeway of
refineries, chemical steams, the gross companies
toughening the banks down by the banks of the O-hi-o.
Garbage: A Poem
. . . on writing a poem — you sit vacant and
relaxed (if possible), your mind wandering
freely, unengaged and in search of focus: you
may sit this way for several minutes till the
void unsettles you a bit and you become impatient
with the intrusion of an awareness of yourself
sitting with a touch of unwelcome exasperation
over a great blank: but you keep your mind
open and on the move and eventually there is a
trace of feeling like a bit of mist on a backroad
but then it reappears stronger and more central,
still coming and going, so the mind can't
grab it and hold on to it: but the mind begins
to make an effort, to shed from itself all
awareness except that of going with the feeling,
to relax and hold the feeling — the feeling
is a brutal burning, a rich, raw urgency:
the mind knows that it is nothing without the
feeling, so concentrating on the feeling, it
dreams of imminent shapes, emergences, of
clust'ral abundances, of free flow, forms discernible,
material, concrete, shapes on the move, and
then the mind gives way from its triggering, and
the mechanisms of necessity fall into, grasping the
upheaval, the action of making; the presence
of pressure appears, forces open a way, the
intensity heightens, groans of anguish and
satisfaction break from the depths of the
body, and the sweet dream occurs, the work
payloads, the fall-away slips through, the body
contracts and returns, ease lengthens through
the byways, and the mind picks up on the
environment again, turns to the practical
policing of the scene, restores itself to
normalcy and the objective world, the body hitching
itself up on the way: shit fire (and save matches):
we wheeled down the long glide from the mountains
into Wheeling: morning fog smoked away the tops
of hills and a river (or two) confluencing slashed
across by scary iron bridges jammed the the narrowed
valley road, when the big black mouth of a tunnel
suddenly opened out of fog in solid rock, all the
events at once happening in the shakes: but then going
on down Route 7 along the Ohio; mammoth standings
of steam, way out of size, too solid to vanish, oozed
up from the nuclear craters, so much so tall that even
on our side of the river the outsized opal shades
of steam broke across us, shadowing us once and again:
slows like flying by or trying to drive to a mountain,
the far ahead lingering far behind: the freeway of
refineries, chemical steams, the gross companies
toughening the banks down by the banks of the O-hi-o.
Garbage: A Poem
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Eolian Harp
Composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire, 1795
My pensive Sara! thy soft cheek reclined
Thus on mine arm, most soothing sweet it is
To sit beside our Cot, our Cot o'ergrown
With white-flower'd Jasmin, and the broad-leav'd Myrtle,
(Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love!)
And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light,
Slow saddening round, and mark the star of eve
Serenely brilliant (such should Wisdom be)
Shine opposite! How exquisite the scents
Snatch'd from yon bean-field! and the world so hush'd!
The stilly murmur of the distant Sea
Tells us of silence.
And that simplest Lute,
Placed length-ways in the clasping casement, hark!
How by the desultory breeze caress'd,
Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover,
It pours such sweet upbraiding, as must needs
Tempt to repeat the wrong! And now, its strings
Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes
Over delicious surges sink and rise,
Such a soft floating witchery of sound
As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve
voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land,
Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers,
Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,
Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untam'd wing!
O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where —
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so fill'd;
Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
Is Music slumbering on her instrument.
And thus, my Love! as on the midway slope
Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon,
Whilst through my half-clos'd eye-lids I behold
The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main,
And tranquil muse upon tranquillity;
Full many a thought uncall'd and undetain'd,
And many idle flitting phantasies,
Traverse my indolent and passive brain,
As wild and various as the random gales
That swell and flutter on this subject Lute!
But thy more serious eye a mild reproof
Darts, O belovéd Woman! nor such thoughts
Dim and unhallow'd dost thou not reject,
And biddest me walk humbly with my God.
Meek Daughter in the family of Christ!
Well hast thou said and holily disprais'd
These shapings of the unregenerate mind;
Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break
On vain Philosophy's aye-babbling spring.
For never guiltless may I speak of him,
The Incomprehensible! save when with awe
I praise him, and with Faith that inly feels;
Who with his saving mercies healéd me,
A sinful and most miserable man,
Wilder'd and dark, and gave me to possess
Peace, and this Cot, and thee, heart-honour'd Maid!
Composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire, 1795
My pensive Sara! thy soft cheek reclined
Thus on mine arm, most soothing sweet it is
To sit beside our Cot, our Cot o'ergrown
With white-flower'd Jasmin, and the broad-leav'd Myrtle,
(Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love!)
And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light,
Slow saddening round, and mark the star of eve
Serenely brilliant (such should Wisdom be)
Shine opposite! How exquisite the scents
Snatch'd from yon bean-field! and the world so hush'd!
The stilly murmur of the distant Sea
Tells us of silence.
And that simplest Lute,
Placed length-ways in the clasping casement, hark!
How by the desultory breeze caress'd,
Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover,
It pours such sweet upbraiding, as must needs
Tempt to repeat the wrong! And now, its strings
Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes
Over delicious surges sink and rise,
Such a soft floating witchery of sound
As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve
voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land,
Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers,
Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,
Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untam'd wing!
O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where —
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so fill'd;
Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
Is Music slumbering on her instrument.
And thus, my Love! as on the midway slope
Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon,
Whilst through my half-clos'd eye-lids I behold
The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main,
And tranquil muse upon tranquillity;
Full many a thought uncall'd and undetain'd,
And many idle flitting phantasies,
Traverse my indolent and passive brain,
As wild and various as the random gales
That swell and flutter on this subject Lute!
But thy more serious eye a mild reproof
Darts, O belovéd Woman! nor such thoughts
Dim and unhallow'd dost thou not reject,
And biddest me walk humbly with my God.
Meek Daughter in the family of Christ!
Well hast thou said and holily disprais'd
These shapings of the unregenerate mind;
Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break
On vain Philosophy's aye-babbling spring.
For never guiltless may I speak of him,
The Incomprehensible! save when with awe
I praise him, and with Faith that inly feels;
Who with his saving mercies healéd me,
A sinful and most miserable man,
Wilder'd and dark, and gave me to possess
Peace, and this Cot, and thee, heart-honour'd Maid!
05 July 2007
Norman Nicholson
[from Norman Nicholson's "For Hokey and Henrietta," 1944]
What more can you learn to ask for in your prayers,
Than years unpredicted as weather, and days
Adventurous as a lobby full of bears.
Norman Nicholson: Collected Poems
What more can you learn to ask for in your prayers,
Than years unpredicted as weather, and days
Adventurous as a lobby full of bears.
Norman Nicholson: Collected Poems
04 July 2007
A. K. Ramanujan
[from A. K. Ramanujan's essay "On Translating a Tamil Poem" in The Art of Translation: voices from the field, edited by Rosanna Warren, 1985]
The translation must not only re-present, but represent, the original. One walks a tightrope between the To-language and the From-language, in a double loyalty. A translator is an "artist on oath." Sometimes one may succeed only in re-presenting a poem, not in closely representing it. At such times one draws consolation from parables like the following: A Chinese emperor ordered a tunnel to be bored through a great mountain. The engineers decided that the best and quickest way to do it would be to begin work on both sides of the mountain, after precise measurements. If the measurements are precise enough, the two tunnels will meet in the middle, making a single one. "But, what happens if they don't meet?" asked the emperor. The counselors, in their wisdom, answered, "If they don't meet, we will have two tunnels instead of one." So, too, if the representation in another language is not close enough, but still succeeds in "carrying" the other poem in some sense, we will have two poems instead of one.
The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field
The translation must not only re-present, but represent, the original. One walks a tightrope between the To-language and the From-language, in a double loyalty. A translator is an "artist on oath." Sometimes one may succeed only in re-presenting a poem, not in closely representing it. At such times one draws consolation from parables like the following: A Chinese emperor ordered a tunnel to be bored through a great mountain. The engineers decided that the best and quickest way to do it would be to begin work on both sides of the mountain, after precise measurements. If the measurements are precise enough, the two tunnels will meet in the middle, making a single one. "But, what happens if they don't meet?" asked the emperor. The counselors, in their wisdom, answered, "If they don't meet, we will have two tunnels instead of one." So, too, if the representation in another language is not close enough, but still succeeds in "carrying" the other poem in some sense, we will have two poems instead of one.
The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field
02 July 2007
01 July 2007
Kwame Dawes
[from Kwame Dawes's Impossible Flying, 2007]
Ward
The dirt track turns to marl in the wind tunnel
between Maternity — the pale yellow gowns of swollen
women, a constant slash of light through the gray
louvres — and the whitewashed ward where you are.
My heart grows as I walk by casually,
trying to pretend I have forgotten your eyes pleading
with me in the brightly lit greeting room,
pointing to the stumble and glossolalia
of the pretty girl who does not care that her breasts
are poking out of the too small hospital issue
green tunic. Around us the sterile slow pace
of medicated bodies. Like her, I imagine
that you don’t belong; I imagine you are too
astute, too collected for this; your pathologies
are civil things. And yet I see the scars
on your knuckles, and you drool, how you drool,
your tongue, not yours, just a clumsy lump
of meat in your mouth. You are telling me you need
to go, lucid as anyone I know, until you laugh,
reminding me of the morning I held you down,
tied your wings, did not have the faith;
and in that same clean logic, your eyes
stared steadily at me as you spoke in soft
conspiracy, I woulda be flying now,
you know that? I woulda be flying if you never
hold me down . . . It has been a week
since I stopped. That last time the orderlies
told me of the straps you strained against,
the electricity, the padded walls, the shit
in your pants, the tears, as if you were
someone else, as if they needed me
to understand the lunatic’s dialect, as if
they saw in me the hubris of class, or the hope
of sanity; as if I did not understand
the commonness of tragedy. That day I did not stop.
I simply bowed my head and walked away
weeping, angry at my tears, at the noble sorrow —
as if it was me caught in this wrestle
with the chemistry of the head — the demon tyranny.
I wept (a good verb) like an actor, testing each mood,
swept, yes, by the passion of the narrative,
but consumed by the tragic consequence
of fear. I wept as I walked the stony path
to Papine, helpless like that. Tonight
is the seventh night I have walked past.
It becomes easier, now. I fear only
that you will see me going by, not stopping.
Maybe you will see my lips moving, praying
for the miracle promised — another vanity —
the scripted prophecy of my peace.
Impossible Flying
Ward
The dirt track turns to marl in the wind tunnel
between Maternity — the pale yellow gowns of swollen
women, a constant slash of light through the gray
louvres — and the whitewashed ward where you are.
My heart grows as I walk by casually,
trying to pretend I have forgotten your eyes pleading
with me in the brightly lit greeting room,
pointing to the stumble and glossolalia
of the pretty girl who does not care that her breasts
are poking out of the too small hospital issue
green tunic. Around us the sterile slow pace
of medicated bodies. Like her, I imagine
that you don’t belong; I imagine you are too
astute, too collected for this; your pathologies
are civil things. And yet I see the scars
on your knuckles, and you drool, how you drool,
your tongue, not yours, just a clumsy lump
of meat in your mouth. You are telling me you need
to go, lucid as anyone I know, until you laugh,
reminding me of the morning I held you down,
tied your wings, did not have the faith;
and in that same clean logic, your eyes
stared steadily at me as you spoke in soft
conspiracy, I woulda be flying now,
you know that? I woulda be flying if you never
hold me down . . . It has been a week
since I stopped. That last time the orderlies
told me of the straps you strained against,
the electricity, the padded walls, the shit
in your pants, the tears, as if you were
someone else, as if they needed me
to understand the lunatic’s dialect, as if
they saw in me the hubris of class, or the hope
of sanity; as if I did not understand
the commonness of tragedy. That day I did not stop.
I simply bowed my head and walked away
weeping, angry at my tears, at the noble sorrow —
as if it was me caught in this wrestle
with the chemistry of the head — the demon tyranny.
I wept (a good verb) like an actor, testing each mood,
swept, yes, by the passion of the narrative,
but consumed by the tragic consequence
of fear. I wept as I walked the stony path
to Papine, helpless like that. Tonight
is the seventh night I have walked past.
It becomes easier, now. I fear only
that you will see me going by, not stopping.
Maybe you will see my lips moving, praying
for the miracle promised — another vanity —
the scripted prophecy of my peace.
Impossible Flying
May Swenson
[from May Swenson's Nature: Poems Old and New, 1971]
Waterbird
Part otter, part snake, part bird the bird Anhinga,
jalousie wings, draped open, dry. When slack-
hinged, the wind flips them shut. Her cry,
a slatted clatter, inflates her chin-
pouch; it's like a fish's swim-
bladder. Anhinga's body, otter-
furry, floats, under water-
mosses, neck a snake with white-
rimmed blue round roving eyes. Those long feet stilt-
submerged. Otter-
quick over bream that hover in water-
shade, she feeds, finds fillets among the water-
weeds. Her beak, ferrule of a folded black
umbrella, with neat thrust impales her prey.
She flaps up to dry on the crooked, look-
dead-limb of the Gumbo Limbo, her tan-
tipped wing fans spread, tail a shut fan dangled.
Nature: Poems Old and New
Waterbird
Part otter, part snake, part bird the bird Anhinga,
jalousie wings, draped open, dry. When slack-
hinged, the wind flips them shut. Her cry,
a slatted clatter, inflates her chin-
pouch; it's like a fish's swim-
bladder. Anhinga's body, otter-
furry, floats, under water-
mosses, neck a snake with white-
rimmed blue round roving eyes. Those long feet stilt-
submerged. Otter-
quick over bream that hover in water-
shade, she feeds, finds fillets among the water-
weeds. Her beak, ferrule of a folded black
umbrella, with neat thrust impales her prey.
She flaps up to dry on the crooked, look-
dead-limb of the Gumbo Limbo, her tan-
tipped wing fans spread, tail a shut fan dangled.
Nature: Poems Old and New
20 June 2007
15 June 2007
Charles McLeod
[excerpt from Charles McLeod's "Exit Wounds" in the Spring 2007 issue of ZYZZYVA]
Mission Street was miles long, and I’d been over every inch of it, from the Greyhound station at the foot of the Bridge out to Silver Avenue, where most of the shop signs were in Spanish. But I could never remember what stood where, the specific order of things, so I walked the blocks again and again, checking and rechecking, hoping some wide, precious idea might strike me, because I could feel myself getting older, the ports closing, the ships pulling up their ropes.
Mission Street was miles long, and I’d been over every inch of it, from the Greyhound station at the foot of the Bridge out to Silver Avenue, where most of the shop signs were in Spanish. But I could never remember what stood where, the specific order of things, so I walked the blocks again and again, checking and rechecking, hoping some wide, precious idea might strike me, because I could feel myself getting older, the ports closing, the ships pulling up their ropes.
Russell Edson
[from Russell Edson's The Intuitive Journey, 1976]
The Fall
There was a man who found two leaves and came indoors holding them out saying to his parents that he was a tree.
To which they said then go into the yard and do not grow in the living room as your roots may ruin the carpet.
He said I was fooling I am not a tree and he dropped the leaves.
But his parents said look it is fall.
The Tunnel: Selected Poems of Russell Edson
The Fall
There was a man who found two leaves and came indoors holding them out saying to his parents that he was a tree.
To which they said then go into the yard and do not grow in the living room as your roots may ruin the carpet.
He said I was fooling I am not a tree and he dropped the leaves.
But his parents said look it is fall.
The Tunnel: Selected Poems of Russell Edson
14 June 2007
William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley
[William Carlos Williams, 1923]
To Elsie
The pure products of America
go crazy —
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure —
and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday
to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt
sheer rags — succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror
under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum —
which they cannot express —
unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood
will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder
that she'll be rescued by an
agent —
reared by the state and
sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs —
some doctor's family, some Elsie —
voluptuous water
expressing with broken
brain the truth about us —
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts
addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
[Robert Creeley, 1957]
I Know a Man
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, — John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.
The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1: 1909-1939
Selected Poems
To Elsie
The pure products of America
go crazy —
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure —
and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday
to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt
sheer rags — succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror
under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum —
which they cannot express —
unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood
will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder
that she'll be rescued by an
agent —
reared by the state and
sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs —
some doctor's family, some Elsie —
voluptuous water
expressing with broken
brain the truth about us —
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts
addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
[Robert Creeley, 1957]
I Know a Man
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, — John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.
The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1: 1909-1939
Selected Poems
08 June 2007
James K. Baxter
I climbed up to a hole in the bank in a hill above the sea, and there fell into the attitude of listening out of which poems may rise — not to the sound of the sea but to the unheard sound of which poems are translations — it was then that I first endured that intense effort of listening, like a man chained to the ground trying to stand upright and walk — and from this intensity of listening the words emerged —
05 June 2007
Patrick Kavanagh
[from Patrick Kavanagh's Come Dancing with Kitty Stobling, 1958]
Canal Bank Walk
Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.
Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)
Canal Bank Walk
Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.
Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)
01 June 2007
Thylias Moss
[from Thylias Moss's At Redbones, 1990]
The Tattoo
He had a blonde woman on his chest and he
was in prison. Just her head and it
was tilted so that she could look up at
his chin, the cliff just jumped off.
She's the glossy cover superimposed on
the table, the vinyl Chrysler seat,
wherever she lies.
A convict improvising isn't new. A black man
made a convict by the blonde woman on his chest
isn't new. Decapitations aren't new. Nothing
this man did is new. He didn't mean to be
a copy cat.
He wore her like a designer label. With her on
you could call him revealed but not naked.
She masked his heart. She kept it from hungry
others, even the starving self.
It was like she was being born right from
his rib cage. It was like rereading Genesis.
He was just a dark transitory cocoon.
It was like he just wanted to boast
about what he could produce
besides excrement.
At Redbones (CSU poetry series)
The Tattoo
He had a blonde woman on his chest and he
was in prison. Just her head and it
was tilted so that she could look up at
his chin, the cliff just jumped off.
She's the glossy cover superimposed on
the table, the vinyl Chrysler seat,
wherever she lies.
A convict improvising isn't new. A black man
made a convict by the blonde woman on his chest
isn't new. Decapitations aren't new. Nothing
this man did is new. He didn't mean to be
a copy cat.
He wore her like a designer label. With her on
you could call him revealed but not naked.
She masked his heart. She kept it from hungry
others, even the starving self.
It was like she was being born right from
his rib cage. It was like rereading Genesis.
He was just a dark transitory cocoon.
It was like he just wanted to boast
about what he could produce
besides excrement.
At Redbones (CSU poetry series)
Maxine Kumin
[from Maxine Kumin's Up Country: Poems of New England, 1972]
Watering Trough
Let the end of all bathtubs
be this putting out to pasture
of four Victorian bowlegs
anchored in grasses.
Let all longnecked browsers
come drink from the shallows
while faucets grow rusty
and porcelain yellows.
Where once our nude forebears
soaped up in this vessel
come, cows, and come, horses.
Bring burdock and thistle,
come slaver the scum of
timothy and clover
on the castiron lip that
our grandsires climbed over
and let there be always
green water for sipping
that muzzles may enter thoughtful
and rise dripping.
Up Country: Poems of New England, New and Selected
Watering Trough
Let the end of all bathtubs
be this putting out to pasture
of four Victorian bowlegs
anchored in grasses.
Let all longnecked browsers
come drink from the shallows
while faucets grow rusty
and porcelain yellows.
Where once our nude forebears
soaped up in this vessel
come, cows, and come, horses.
Bring burdock and thistle,
come slaver the scum of
timothy and clover
on the castiron lip that
our grandsires climbed over
and let there be always
green water for sipping
that muzzles may enter thoughtful
and rise dripping.
Up Country: Poems of New England, New and Selected
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