what poetry are you reading

i'm reading david antin's talking at the boundaries. what poetry are you reading?

it would maybe need a caveat before being uncontroversially included in a poetry thread; maybe it's better in a which erratically typeset books are you reading discussion. i love him talking around marriage, in a private occasion in a public place, & this loose solution he found to wanting to use poetry without reciting poetry, to be able to digress to make himself understood, this long memory of a girl he was involved with in new york & what it is to him now & then the interruption of trying to remember what it was to him then.

suppose you sign another agreement
that is you decide that you have a relationship with each other
which is of such an order that you have
appetite for each other
interest in each other fondness for each other
whatever the word means you love each other so to speak
but you dont have any control of each other
that is
as soon as anybody feels some other impulse he/she goes makes it with whoever he/she wants
you can try that
its difficult
and i know this kind of experience
its the kind of experience that takes away
a kind of evenness
a kind of funny unpressured life
that is
it puts life at the pressure of a romantic adventure
because anything can dissociate into its separate parts at any moment
you can always at the moment of an adventure disappear from somebody else

i'm reading sharon olds too. i can only read one or two a day, they're so intense. & for days on end i would go back & read robert creeley's please. i think i first read it on ilx? it felt powerful to pick it up everyday & need to read it for comfort.

for James Broughton

Oh god, let's go.
This is a poem for Kenneth Patchen.
Everywhere they are shooting people.
People people people people.
This is a poem for Allen Ginsberg.
I want to be elsewhere, elsewhere.
This is a poem about a horse that got tired.
Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.
I want to go home.
I want you to go home.
This is a poem that tells the story,
which is the story.
I don't know. I get lost.
If only they would stand still and let me.
Are you happy, sad, not happy, please come.
This is a poem for everyone.

i'm reading anthony hecht 'collected later,' which has in it the transparent man, flight among the tombs, and the darkness and the light

also p stoked to have a copy of thom gunn's fighting terms on the way.

Hypnos Waking - Rene Char Early surrealist who later was a major figure in the Resistance, contains complete translations of 'Leaves of Hypnos' his war journal and Le Poeme Pulverise
Figured Image - Anna-Marie Albiach Translated by Keith Waldrop Rough going with this gal who is concerned with language and the body in a very textural/french way. Post Apollo Press does an excellent job with their books, I'd like to find everything by them.
Mute Objects of Expression - Francis Ponge Translated by Lee Fahnestock One of my favorite french poets who writes about objects or nature.
Early Poems 1947-1959 - Yves Bonnefoy Translated by Galway Kinnell and Richard Pevear Contains a complete translation of 'On the Motion and Immobility of Douve' one of the most beautiful poems I have read. I never tired of him.
Breathturn - Paul Celan Translated by Pierre Joris I also really like Sun & Moon Press, I have a few more Celan books but I'm completely lost, Maybe I need to read German, I took a break from him and Think I'll take him up again this year.

is the motion and immobility of douve a book length thing, jacob? i feel tentative with long poems, & reading what you both read it feels like you're maybe a lil more ambitious.

i just e-mailed my friend & included a jack gilbert poem & was so pleased to find it online, on a tumblr ("stillgreen"), because it's so specific, so gently transportive,

Trying to Have Something Left Over
Jack Gilbert

There was a great tenderness to the sadness
when I would go there. She knew how much
I loved my wife and that we had no future.
We were like casualties helping each other
as we waited for the end. Now I wonder
if we understood how happy those Danish
afternoons were. Most of the time we did not talk.
Often I took care of the baby while she did
housework. Changing him and making him laugh.
I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before
throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with
my mouth against the tiny ear and throw
him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up.
The only way to leave even the smallest trace.
So that all his life her son would feel gladness
unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined
city of steel in America. Each time almost
remembering something maybe important that got lost.

re celan: i think if german is needed then it's a reaaal fluent german, in which case i'm screwed. i've found that it helps to be able to parse the german, at least, maybe because it helps to sort of justify some of the choices in the english (absent which they can sometimes have a tinge of, come off it, pal to them), some of the patterns of sound and syllabation are audible/visible, etc. —but for the most part i just had to reread repeatedly, and be in the right mood. trying to take in the whole sequence of one of the breathturn sequence books seems to be crucial too.

-

lately i've reread a little creeley. that's all.

strangely, I've just been reading Celan as well (selected poems, Hamburger trans.)—having previously been of the I'm completely lost, Maybe I need to read German mindset towards him, I now think I'm starting to "get it" a little more...

'On the Motion and Immobility of Douve' is a book length poem, but well worth reading. I've also been reading Edmond Jabes's Book Of Questions which are astonishing and sometimes heartbreaking.

I am only familiar with Jabes via Derrida's essays, which made him seem both brilliant & tedious

I think I would like to read what Derrida wrote about Jabes, which book is the essay from?

Writing & Difference—I believe the title of the essay is "Edmund Jabes & the Question of the Book"—I read it c.college because I was into, like, Borges & 'postmodernism' & shit, so possibly I didn't totally get it... I remember the characterization of the jew as a fold in history(?)

in that perloff essay (on gass on rilke) i linked on another thread she takes that celan as an epitome of the translatable

i think i'm going to read some celan this year

i've been failing to read 'dear world and everyone in it' for months. dear world and everyone in it, i don't care about your shitty poetry

John Berryman - The Dream Songs
Michael Robbins - Alien Vs Predator

Both discovered via ILB.

in that perloff essay (on gass on rilke) i linked on another thread she takes that celan as an epitome of the translatable

She talks about Trakl too, who is also mentioned by Michael Hofmann is given v high praise in this piece on Kraus/Vienna, so his name has been in my mind lately. Hope to track something down.

mr bones vs predator, that would be good

Robbins, of course, was not the first to call Rilke a “jerk.” John Berryman did this scandalously in The Dream Songs[1] (first published in 1964). Robbins has absorbed Berryman’s haunting work, the vaguely formalistic structure (rhythmic lines of varying length/beat and ninja rhymes that ambush the reader), frequent references to movies, songs, art, black culture, multiple narrative identities, uninhibited sexual appetites and the brooding sense of loss that lies at the heart of it all, and nuked it till it has bloomed with an acid glow that (&c &c)

TAKING SIDES: Rilke vs. Berryman-Robbins (aka 'Team Snark')

not reading him right now, but closely following developments in this r s thomas on crisp packets story.

Michael Robbins - Alien Vs Predator

― o. nate, Thursday, January 2, 2014 6:28 PM (4 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

did you like this? i enjoyed it at first, but once i 'got it' i sort of didn't enjoy it anymore.

also

https://twitter.com/alienvsrobbins/status/410099232586997760

what adrienne rich should i start with, do people think?

xp haha

did you like this? i enjoyed it at first, but once i 'got it' i sort of didn't enjoy it anymore

I still like it, yeah. I take it down from the shelf and read one or two every once in a while. Some I like better than others. The best ones hold up well, I think.

I'm not as familiar with Rich's work as I'd like, so I hope others better informed can advise, but Diving into the Wreck is probably a good place to start; I'm also partial to the long poem "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" from the book of the same title.

xp

In music I'm attracted to ambitious disasters; in literature I'm attracted to larval states, during which poets and novelists haven't found their voices. The Diamond Cutters and Snapshots of a Daughter in Law are my favorites of hers: I love the tension between the glacial severity of her images and barely suppressed anger (the enjambments are harsh and sharp too).

you can find a cheap Norton anthology of her selected works that also includes her (essential) essays

November 1968

Stripped you're beginning to float free up through the smoke of brushfires and incinerators the unleafed branches won't hold you nor the radar aerials

You're what the autumn knew would happen after the last collapse of primary color once the last absolutes were torn to pieces you could begin

How you broke open, what sheathed you until this moment I know nothing about it my ignorance of you amazes me now that I watch you starting to give yourself away to the wind

wait go http://www.best-poems.net/adrienne_rich/poem-43.html for formatting

I don't know, I always found Rich really dry, but it was a talk she gave on Emily Dickinson that made me curious about that author. Because before that I thought Dickinson wrote "little girl scout prayers" as Rich put it (possibly not verbatim), while discussing her image.

(I've at least read one of those Norton selected or collected poems of Rich's.)

Her Dickinson essay is fantastic!

I heard a recorded talk she gave, presumably close to the essay, or maybe a reading of it. (I don't think I ever went on to read in print form what she had to say about Dickinson.)

'on lies, secrets, and silence' is a good essay collection

i am going to post a short verse of a joseph ceravolo poem when i get home, get ready for it

buckle up

my *selected berryman* showed up last night and man

those fuckin sonnets

"Maybe our safeties…come for our risk’s sake."

aw i'm just about to pick up dream songs, from the library, cause i never tended to berryman much
& then i read something last week on a blog that knocked me for six, like wow

& i didn't post the ceravolo poem because it was too simple, out of context
like you needed the mess of the whole thing
he is really interesting!, i think. maybe because sometimes i am cruising this sorta in-love-with-eileen-myles wave of tumblr poetry that takes this elemental small-scale form as a template but has this maybe predictable voice?, now, like there's not a solipsism but a fixed reach to it? a formula by which it roams. & the ceravolo is crazy, it's like frank o'hara free jazz, i can't believe he gets so far with so little, eschewing so much, relying on you so much
maybe i'll post it later

ah yeah i just read that one last night too, damn near devoured the whole little selected in a few hours

so much to chew on

those fuckin sonnets

I'm an admirer of Berryman's sonnets, too. He leaves enough of the trad structure intact that it frees his sense of language, imagery and ideas to climb forward, and his plays against the trad sonnet structure gain extra weight because they are so deliberate.

i got halfway through this great long thing on berryman on the bus home last night, stopped reading to start reading the selected, then picked it back up and realized the whole thing is sort of a long-form review of the selected itself. happy accident.

man sharon olds' the dead and the living just came in and i tried to read a bit of it before bed

fuckin mistake.

just awful dark stuff, not meant for the pillow.

mary karr's viper rum is winning me over though. every third one or so is a gut punch, like a slightly unstiffened O'Connor. and i like my O'Connor just fine.

This has a lovely cover, but the prose poems it consists of did nothing for me.
http://ndbooks.com/images/made/images/covers/Fullblood_Arabian_300_450.jpg
I found them facile and pseudo-profound (the nod to Khalil Gibran in Lydia Davis's introduction should have tipped me off), but plenty of people disagree with me.

there is just so much in Olds; they're not even so panoramic, just so full and imaginable. three a day, max.

& wait is TDATL the recent one?

nah its one from the early 80s.

Petrarch b/w English Alliterative Revival stuff; then a reading of Villon's Testament to close the middle ages

newyear

Seaton's version of Cold Mountain Poems.

read a.e. housman's 'a shropshire lad' on my kindle a few weeks ago. uneven but some great stuff.

rereading Walcott after all the attention over the new collected poems.

i read goethe and herrick, felt very leisured and cultured

like an Englishman in 1841.

xp ya Housman's great, seems underappreciated (maybe due to the conservatism of his forms?) but the books qua books hold together really well

Housman attracted such immoderate adulation in his day that there had to be a reaction against him for a time. Now it's safe to dust him off and put him back into his niche.

Aimless I forget, are you a UK poster?

that Shambhala Editions Cold Mountain Poems has caught my eye many times in B&N without my ever buying it... I've put so much effort into learning to appreciate european poetry these past few years, it's made me very reluctant to explore other traditions, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time

I post from Oregon, USA, where I've lived about 57 of my 59 years. But when you love literature and are a monoglot in English, you learn to love English lit.

newyear

― xyzzzz__, Friday, February 28, 2014 8:50 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wow

At the moment, I've been dipping into my copy of Padraic Colum's poetry, titled Poems, a late compilation that does not identify itself as a 'collected poems of'. Padraic can't be described as anything but a "minor poet", but he had a nice touch when he keeps his loftier ambitions in check. Methinks the mere existence of Yeats lifted the work of every Irish poet well above what they could have achieved without him.

Just before that I was paddling around in the poetry of Stevie Smith and in doing so I decided to remove her from my shelves and sell her off during my next selling spree. A few of her early poems have charm, but her charms are very rapidly exhausted.

yknow, i think i would really enjoy a history of american poetry whose driving narrative was basically repetitions of

'i am the poet of america!!!'

'no you're not fukk u'

america's one true poet was t.s. eliot iirc

FITE!

rrrr tom you know me TOO WELL fukk u

no you know what ts eliot was the one true poet of 20th c. britannia and after that you guys have been up shit's creek, no bard to sing your songs, how does it feel

i mean we got like. geoffrey hill and shit, i dunno

rereading an old Helen Vendler collection published in the late seventies. Essays on Moore, Merrill, Stevie Smith, Lowell, Stevens, and Gluck.

and, like, carol ann duffy

all bases covered, is what i'm saying

albion liveth still and everafter

but they'll be doing it in the Championship come August

can't see how anybody cd mistake Eliot's hyper-tense class paranoia for anything other than oh shit hold on

so yeah i really don't have the stomach for louise gluck

she's a bit of a psychosexual hack tbh

nah that was your mother

which Gluck you been reading? I dig the two most recent collections, particularly A Village Life, where she sounds like an aging writer trying to age faster(?)

Ararat and The House on Marshland. The first book felt too glib.

i was reading the other one that starts with a and the one with the boat on the cover

Meanwhile, apropos of the ongoing surrealism obsession mentioned on the other "what are you reading" thread, I picked up the recent (1990s) English translation of Breton's Clair de terre, which is mostly baffling, occasionally charming (as in the 'poem' listing off all of the Bretons in the Paris phonebook), and lacks a parallel French text due to copyright issues (boo!). Also bought a Gerard de Nerval selected works (not the Penguin edition, an older one, translated by Wagner--the Encyclopedia of Literary Translations into English praises his handling of the poetry, moreso than the novellas), which I am enjoying in spite of its hermetic density of allusion & personal mythology.

I should clarify: de Nerval's prose works (of which I've only tackled 'Sylvie' thus far) do not strike me as terribly obscure; but the poetry, which abounds in allusions both Classical and Medieval (thank heaven for endnotes!), seems also to take for granted a familiarity with the prose.

I haven't read De Nerval in years, but I enjoyed the copy I use to have. I think it was published by Exact Change. My favorite surrealist was Eluard, but sadly I never found a complete translation of him. I always wanted to like Lautréamont, but I never enjoyed actually reading him. Have you read Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre Breton by Mark Polizzotti? Breton was such a curious guy, I sort of hate him and love him.

the Polizzotti biography was recommended in the other thread; I may look into once I finish the Balakian, or if a cheap copy falls into my lap.

Maldoror is wonderful in small doses & particular moods, but the narrowness of its emotional range can get kind of suffocating. I don't know what to make of the Poesies, and I find the body of critical literature around Lautreamont somewhat maddening (possible exception: Gaston Bachelard's monograph, which I remember being decently insightful... I can't make heads or tails of Blanchot's long essay, though, & I usually dig his criticism)

Marvell. I don't know why

I recently finished Anne Carson's latest book, Red Doc>, her oblique successor to Autobiography of Red, and while I enjoyed it I found it frustratingly diffuse in comparison to the earlier book or Nox. The strongest passages in the book, which focus on the death of G/Geryon's mother, follow from the Celan-pastiche lyrics on mourning in Decreation but seem a little too loosely connected to Red Doc>'s earlier wisps of narrative. I'll probably find more in it on a second reading, though.

To be clear, I don't generally read Carson for the sake of narrative.

i think the exact change edition of nerval had the poems translated by robert duncan from memory and they used the earlier wagner translations for the stories. and yeah, the chimera poems are pretty dense with classical/esoteric allusions (haven't read the wagner edition i have of his work yet, but it has a lot more editorial matter than the exact change). aurelia is a trip, and if you ever see a copy of his journey to the orient it's a+ 19th century orientalism

i read maldoror in snatches over lunch breaks while studying and loved it, so maybe it's best to approach it in pieces? (also have his complete works sitting here unread, so need to read poesies sometime too)

i think i prefer what i've read of the parasurrealist poets more than the actual thing, people like michaux & daumal, etc

which reminds me of the very to the point and hilarious open letter daumal wrote to breton after rejecting the latter's invitation to join the surrealists which ends with daumal inviting breton to join his own group and includes this classic kiss off: "beware of eventually figuring in the study guides to literary history"

Marvell's flecknoe poem is pretty good. I feel like I enjoy the prose translations provided of his Latin and Greek verse more so than I do his English verse, though, which is probably a sign that seventeenth c . verse is just not for me.

bro u gotta read herrick

i've read herrick but idk if i've read him y'know

you gotta do the hesperides all as a thing, none of this anthologized 'virgins' junk

man that shit sounds long though

well i thought for a second he was out of print but no, there is a lovely £125 edition from OUP last year. same for the next volume with commentary.

they're all super short tho, it's like a 17th c. blog

i luckily happened into a well-appointed old norton complete poetry of, for some reason he went so out of fashion that they seem to have stopped printing him, but there must be something like that kicking around your dusty old country

doing Stephen Dobyns' velocities: new and selected now--a lot of it doesn't resonate so much, but the occasional piece of music breaks through--

He has a job that he goes to. It could be at a bank
or a library or turning a piece of flat land
into a ditch. All day something that refuses to
show itself hovers at the corner of his eye,
like a name he is trying to remember, like
expecting a touch on the shoulder, as if someone
were about to embrace him, a woman in a blue dress
whom he has never met, would never meet again.
And it seems the purpose of each day's labor
is simply to bring this mystery to focus. He can
almost describe it, as if it were a figure at the edge
of a burning field with smoke swirling around it
like white curtains shot full of wind and light.

man that is some p egregious prose w line breaks you got there

one good thing about the seventeeth century was, they knew where you put a line break, and knew it hard

actually that bit includes the indentation at the start of the second line onwards that suggests this is all 'one line'

so

Prose poetry is exceedingly difficult to qualify as poetry. Very few attempts succeed. Rimbaud managed that trick better than most.

all poem it seems the purpose of each reader's labor is simply to bring each line into focus.

Love, love Dobyns's Cemetery Nights and "Beauty."

Prose poems: loved Killarney Clary's books; still might.

Here's Beauty.

The Tobacco Shop

Generally think of Michael Hofmann as a bit of a crepe but was moved by the insane hyperbole of his LRB rave to give Karen Solie a whirl and, wow, she's pretty great.

Also catching up with Harry Clifton's new selected, which feels a little over-refined in comparison.

Hofmann is a man of 'extremes' - he's more like a rock journo at points: a good, and a bad, thing. The LRB needs him tho'.

Really enjoyed that piece too.

picked up Ashbery's "Quick Question," also just ordered selected Auden. haven't read much Ashbery and am sort of struggling for a way in.

It is as though the actual Ashbery poem were concealed from you,writtenon the other side of a mirrored surface, and you saw only the reflectionof your reading. But by reflecting your reading, Ashbery’s poems allowyou to attend to your attention, to experience your experience, thereby enabling a strange kind of presence. But it is a presence that keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the true poem remains beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror: “You have it but youdon’t have it. / You miss it, it misses you. / You miss each other.”

That's from the novel "leaving the atocha station." I'm not really an expert on ashbery but i like the poems i've read for something like those reasons. his poems always exist just on the edge of comprehensibility. at the moment you feel absorbed, like you are grasping it, it slips away.

also he has a nice voice. you can listen to him reading "daffy duck in hollywood" here http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/daffy-duck-hollywood

there's probably a deeper way of appreciating his poems than those two reasons though.

yeah i was thinking about buying that novel today actually

I adore Ashbery but every time I pick up a new volume at the store or library I put it down. His poems have become such fine-tuned machines: a quasi-profundity here, interlaced with a demotic quip there. I don't need to read anymore.

there's probably a deeper way of appreciating his poems than those two reasons though.

― Treeship,

There isn't really! His considerable pleasures are surface. Plus, there's depth in surface, if that makes sense.

Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror is maybe his most accessible book, and the title poem is p lucid imo. It's a narrative poem for the most part and is a long, discursive but entirely readable meditation on the creative act, the inadequacy of language as a vessel for the stuff of any moment's experience, etc (insofar as an Ashbery poem can be "about" any one thing). So many great lines that just quicken yr heart a little.

Another good one is Three Poems, all prose poems and on the other side of the easy-to-parse scale, but virtuosic in the way that they mix different types of voices and discourses and organize them into a holistic end product. Also the Caliban section to the audience in Auden's The Sea in the Mirror (prob incl in that Selected Poems) is a huge influence on this book and one of my favorite poems ever.

Houseboat Days is a particular favorite; so are the sonnets in Shadow Train and the title poem of Wakefulness ("Little by little the idea of the true way returned to me.").

yeah self-portrait is definitely a major marker of clarity – that's a work where the pleasure has something in common with stevens, & not the more usual ashbery joy of sliding slightly off sense while riding syntax & tone (& then sense pulling you back)

Been reading quite a lot of German poetry lately: Goethe, Heine (love his last poems -- they seem to be looking forward to death), Holderlin (and his vision of ancient Greece), Rilke's Duino Elegies.

Picked up a couple of Italian poets in the Penguin European Modern poets edition (you see quite a lot of these in 2nd hand shops): Montale and Quasimodo. Looking forward to a run of Italian, French, Eastern European and Russian poetry I've collected, so I'll be returning to this thread for much of the summer.

xposts: The Sea & the Mirror is really good; probly the only Auden I've read (while studying The Tempest) but I'd buy the Collected Poems just to get a copy.

Lately I have been reading all the non-Mariner, non-Khan Coleridge poems + Charles Lamb's letters to Coleridge + Coleridge on Imagination by I. A. Richards (a book Stevens owned and annotated!); but not the Biographia Literaria just yet.

i read 'ode to dejection' carefully a while back, it's no wonder i ditched english for philosophy in college, i really wasn't ready to read a bunch of the shit we had to read

Going through all the 'conversation poems', with their stereotyped three-part structure, has given me a new appreciation for the more dynamic & surprising shifts in e.g. "Tintern Abbey".

"Dejection" is one I need to read a few more times—tends to be grouped in with the conversation poems based on tone + genesis (many of its lines were quarried from an earlier, unpublished poem to Sarah Not-Coleridge's-Wife) but there's clearly more going on there... like I said, I haven't fully comprehended it yet. At present, I think I prefer Shelley's 'Stanzas Written in Dejection', which treat similar content in a more pleasingly musical form.

keeping up with this thread along with the I Love Comics 'what are you reading' thread, it's really something to see the symmetry of people who follow newer releases versus people who happily explore the classics.

pfft, what am i gonna do, read emily gould

Frederick Seidel again, Karen Solie for the first time, back to Dryden.

read a bunch of george herbert last night!

I do love Herbert but I read the Church Porch recently & he can be a drag.

Drink not the third glasse, which thou canst not tame,
When once it is within thee; but before
Mayst rule it, as thou list; and poure the shame,
Which it would poure on thee, upon the floore.
It is most just to throw that on the ground,
Which would throw me there, if I keep the round.

NO! DRINK IT!

I read about a dozen Bab Ballads last night, but they hardly count as poetry.

ashbery was mentioned earlier by mr. hoos and i want to share the text of "wet casements" for people who haven't read it.

“When Eduard Raban, coming along the passage, walked into the open
doorway, he saw that it was raining. It was not raining much.”—Franz Kafka, “Wedding Preparations in the Country”

The conception is interesting: to see, as though reflected
In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through
Their own eyes. A digest of their correct impressions of
Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your
Ghostly transparent face. You in falbalas
Of some distant but not too distant era, the cosmetics,
The shoes perfectly pointed, drifting (how long you
Have been drifting; how long I have too for that matter)
Like a bottle imp toward a surface which can only be approached,
Never pierced through into the timeless energy of a present
Which would have its own ideas on these matters,
Are an epistemological snapshot of the processes
That first mentioned your name at some crowded cocktail
Party long ago, and someone (not the person addressed)
Overheard it and carried that name around in his wallet
For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in
And out of it. I want that information very much today,

Can’t have it, and this makes me angry.
I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that
Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling
Of dancing on a bridge. I shall at last see my complete face
Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge.

I shall keep to myself.
I shall not repeat others’ comments about me.

Last night I read this harsh review of Charles Wright's new book (hey, it shows up on my Longreads; not actively seeking out The New Criterion), and found myself completely opposite to the reviewer. I used to have a hard time with Wright's poems, but the last few books have become clearer and more straightforward and less B.S.-ey.

i'm fond of charles wright!

wow, slam after slam in that thing.

Without even clicking, is it by Logan? I hqve his first volume of crit but boy has his schtick hardened.

Yep, it's a group review by Logan: four hatchet jobs and a kind one at the end.

Petrarca - Songs and Sonnets (tr. Nicholas Kilmer). I'd love to read the whole lot, loved so much of the selection. Be great to see a nice, two-volume edition of these.

Logically followed up w/Chretien de Troyes - Erec and Enide

Collection of Pasolini's poetry: http://bookforum.com/inprint/021_02/13281

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo5512072.html

just arrived over the weekend all together:

- louise gluck first four books
- tracy smith life on mars
- brian turner here, bullet (the hurt locker guy)

xp I have that Kilmer translation too! only Petrarch I've read tbh... anyone familiar with any of the more recent, comprehensive volumes?

i have found the david young translations published by f-s-g very readable.

Sounds great - is it the whole lot?

yes, 366

monolingual edition tho

That's fine. See if I can order that. tx.

I don't know if I should post here or in the book suggestions thread, but are there any recent books of poetry you all would recommend to someone who mostly likes Anne Carson, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, Jackie Wang, Fanny Howe, and CAConrad (whose A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics I'm reading at the moment) among currently-working English-language poets?

Err, that should be Susan Howe, but I'm fine with her sister's work as well.

on a 'what i'm reading' note--

after the deluge of verbiage in auden, louise gluck is really pretty, spare and refreshing.

complete donald justice, selected gerard manley hopkins & selected wc williams on the way.

tracy smith's 'life on mars' was pretty astonishing and humbling, 'here, bullet' was pretty uninteresting.

Thanks, HOOS (willfully interpreting your 'what I'm reading' as a recommendation, direct or indirect)--will check out Life on Mars.

it's terrific, subtle, rhythmic, truly emotive, hits all my buttons

yeah Life on Mars is excellent... need to dig out my copy for a reread; I remember being impressed at first by the craft (the one that begins "They're gassing geese at is a tightly-wound shock-absorber of a poem) and then gradually following her into the more diffuse cosmic-emotional-Bowian climaxes over a couple of weeks.

anyone read her previous volume, Duende?

i haven't yet--though i did watch this awesome reading/talk she did with patrick rosal, whose book i'm now grabbing, that has some of duende in it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r35xjnHyhqw

Reading quite a bit by Verlaine, Milosz, Salvatore Quasimodo.

Chretien's Cliges has love as suffering so otm. Something you read as symbolic, i.e. Cupid's arrow becomes powerful by thorough description moving toward argument. Burton Raffel's translation might be the only one worth a pop.

Been getting into John Clare, specifically his sonnets, which are pleasantly irregular—there's no division into stanzas, the poems rarely execute a "turn", & he has a tendency to carry a rhyme a line or two farther than you expect (a fair number of them begin ABAB BCDC; see also the poem I've posted below, whose octave runs ABAB ACBC). It gives me the sense of a poet who enjoys rhyming for its own sake, who's read enough sonnets to internalize the form, but doesn't feel bound to adhere to it if an alternative presents itself.

Anyway, I've rambled long enough, so... I post this not only as a representative sample, but also because I'm having some trouble parsing the last few lines. Anyone wanna take a shot?

Burthorp Oak

Old noted oak! I saw thee in a mood
Of vague indifference, and yet with me
Thy memory, like thy fate, hath lingering stood
For years, thou hermit in the lonely sea
Of grass that waves around thee! Solitude
Paints not a lonelier picture to the view,
Burthorp! Than thy one melancholy tree,
Age-rent, and shattered to a stump. Yet new
Leaves come upon each rift and broken limb
With every spring, and Poesy's visions swim
Around it of old days and chivalry,
And desolate fancies bid the eyes grow dim
With feelings, that earth's grandeur should decay
And all its olden memories pass away.

Actually, everything from "Poesy's visions swim/Around it" is where I lose the thread (around what??) & even before that, it's not clear whether he's describing the actual sight of new leaves returning to the Burthorp oak or, more likely, using a poetic commonplace to modify his mental picture of the oak...

I'm reading it as the a contemplation of the tree's age calling forth imaginings of the past, which inspires a kind of mourning that things pass away, even as new life comes forth every spring.

i sure hope i've not just restated you

fully immersed in gerard manley hopkins this week

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavor end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worst, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now, leaved how thick! Laced they are again.
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; Birds build--but not I build, no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

man

xp to Hoos: nah man that was helpful. I think you've pretty much got it; there's just a few infelicitous word choices that leave me scratching my head ("desolate fancies", for example, almost certainly means "mental representations of desolation", but overexposure to Coleridge of late has me imagining a poet whose power of 'fancy' has dried up, leaving him unable to reverse the decay of earth's grandeur—& the invocation of a poetic golden age a few lines earlier would seem to justify this reading...)

Is the tree still standing in that poem? The part about "shattered to a stump" makes me think not. That might explain the "desolate fancies".

you guys know Gertrude Schnackenberg? I'm reading her.

Oh wait, I think it's still standing (hence "Leaves come upon each rift and broken limb / With every spring"), but the image of the tree "shattered to a stump" is "not lonelier" than the actual view of it standing in solitude. Perhaps these thoughts are examples of the "desolate fancies" mentioned later.

xp

rereading walcott. so good.

depressingly googled around and saw that zillions of new-agers have embraced "love after love" as some anthem to narcissism. i sorta wish he'd never written it, if he's going to be remembered for that instead of lines like

"and all you best dread the day i am healed / of being a human. All you fate in my hand, / ministers, businessmen, Shabine have you friend, I shall scatter your lives like a handful of sand, / I who have no weapon but poetry and / the lance of palms and the sea's shining shield!"

i could live a lifetime with the schooner flight

haven't seen an exclamation mark in a poem in forever maybe i read too much modern poetry

reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art."

Xp
o. nate, it hadn't even occurred to me that in reacting to "shattered to a stump," he was describing a potential, rather than actual, modification of the tree—I pictured some deep rift left by a lightning-strike—but now that you say that I think I've got the whole picture!

This might help with the mental picture:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowthorpe_Oak

oh, thanks! but this sentence (from one of the links in the article) is even more unclear than the poem:

There is sufficient space within the hollow trunk to hold a party and one former tenant of the farm had a roof and a door installed and used the recess as an additional room in which 39 people have stood at one time and 13 have sat down comfortably to tea while successive generations of children born and raised on the farm have played in its branches.

what is the referent of "it" in "poesy's visions swim around it "

Burthorp!

I think it has to be "tree" but I wanted to advance a claim for " poesy "

It's a just claim. Poesy's visions do swim around poesy, in a meltiness, a soft decline stirred by the poet, who goes from "vague indifference," to identifying with the tree's decline and vulnerability--pathos as reproach for vague indifference, which seems a lesser state---but from all this decay and grey he makes something new, a poem.

But I prefer several poems on this thread.

I don't like it much at all tbh.

296

Your thin shoulders are for turning red under whips,
turning red under whips, and flaming in the raw cold.

Your child's fingers are for lifting flatirons,
for lifting flatirons, and for knotting cords.

Your tender soles are for walking on broken glass,
walking on broken glass, across bloody sand.

And I'm for burning like a black candle lit for you,
for burning like a black candle that dare not pray.

(1934)

I'll post a better Clare poem when I get home tonight; I mostly put that one up cuz it happened to be irritating me at the time...

K, here's one that better shows off his fine descriptive powers (albeit with a rather tacked-on conclusion) :

AN IDLE HOUR.

SAUNTERING at ease, I often love to lean
O’er old bridge walls, and mark the flood below,
Whose ripples, through the weeds of oily green,
Like happy travelers chatter as they go;
And view the sunshine dancing on the arch,
Time keeping to the merry waves beneath.
While on the banks some drooping blossoms parch,
Thirsting for water in the day’s hot breath,
Right glad of mud-drops splashed upon their leaves,
By cattle plunging from the steepy brink; 10
Each water-flower more than its share receives,
And revels to its very cups in drink:—
So in the world, some strive, and fare but ill,
While others riot, and have plenty still.

Charles Wright's Negative Blue just arrived, collecting Chickamauga, Black Zodiac, and Appalachia.

I was excited for it because I remembered loving Chickamauga when I first read it a few years ago, but it's leaving me pretty cold now. Seems ponderous and samey.

Rereading "The Fortunate Traveler" disappointed me. Chunks of the poem are didactic or crumble into mere rhetoric. But

Wright's recent books (Sestets, Littlefoot) are my favorites of his. Less jive, clearer thoughts.

i think i used to find his extended riffs on the view from his backyard enchanting for their sense of possibility but now its like "oh we're getting another two page lawn chair meditation great"

picked up stephen burt's "close calls with nonsense"

OK, so I signed up to Scribd's online library on a whim, it it has shitloads of interesting-looking poetry and plays for the borrowing. Kind of hard to know where to start.

picked up a signed (!) 77 Dream Songs in an oakland shop over the weekend

the only downside of reading berryman over again is that his sublime weird syntax gets deep into my brain and i wind up badly imitating him in my own writing for weeks. just

Let us suppose, valleys & such ago,
one pal unwinding from his labours in
one bar of Chicago,
and this did actual happen. This was so.
And many graces are slipped, & many a sin
even that laid man low

but this will be remembered & told over,
that she was heard at last, haughtful & greasy,
to bawl in that low bar:
'You can biff me, you can bang me, get it you'll never.
I may be only a Polack broad but I don't lay easy.
Kiss my ass, that's what you are.'

Women is better, braver. In a foehn of loss
entire, which too they hotter understand,
having had it,
we struggle. Some hang heavy on the sauce,
some invest in the past, one hides in the land.
Henry was not his favourite.

fucking exquisitely stumbling to my ears.

Going through View with a Grain of Sand by Szymborska.

Maybe I should post this gem on the OK cupid thread instead of here:

True Love

True love. Is it normal
is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people
who exist in a world of their own?

Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,
drawn randomly from millions but convinced
it had to happen this way - in reward for what?
For nothing.
The light descends from nowhere.
Why on these two and not on others?
Doesn't this outrage justice? Yes it does.
Doesn't it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,
and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.

Look at the happy couple.
Couldn't they at least try to hide it,
fake a little depression for their friends' sake?
Listen to them laughing - its an insult.
The language they use - deceptively clear.
And their little celebrations, rituals,
the elaborate mutual routines -
it's obviously a plot behind the human race's back!

It's hard even to guess how far things might go
if people start to follow their example.
What could religion and poetry count on?
What would be remembered? What renounced?
Who'd want to stay within bounds?

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life's highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn't populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there's no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

The moved onto Lorca - A Poet in New York.

Ode to Walt Whitman

By the East River and the Bronx
boys were singing, exposing their waists
with the wheel, with oil, leather, and the hammer.
Ninety thousand miners taking silver from the rocks
and children drawing stairs and perspectives.

But none of them could sleep,
none of them wanted to be the river,
none of them loved the huge leaves
or the shoreline's blue tongue.

By the East River and the Queensboro
boys were battling with industry
and the Jews sold to the river faun
the rose of circumcision,
and over bridges and rooftops, the mouth of the sky emptied
herds of bison driven by the wind.

But none of them paused,
none of them wanted to be a cloud,
none of them looked for ferns
or the yellow wheel of a tambourine.

As soon as the moon rises
the pulleys will spin to alter the sky;
a border of needles will besiege memory
and the coffins will bear away those who don't work.

New York, mire,
New York, mire and death.
What angel is hidden in your cheek?
Whose perfect voice will sing the truths of wheat?
Who, the terrible dream of your stained anemones?

Not for a moment, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,
have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies,
nor your corduroy shoulders frayed by the moon,
nor your thighs pure as Apollo's,
nor your voice like a column of ash,
old man, beautiful as the mist,
you moaned like a bird
with its sex pierced by a needle.
Enemy of the satyr,
enemy of the vine,
and lover of bodies beneath rough cloth...

Not for a moment, virile beauty,
who among mountains of coal, billboards, and railroads,
dreamed of becoming a river and sleeping like a river
with that comrade who would place in your breast
the small ache of an ignorant leopard.

Not for a moment, Adam of blood, Macho,
man alone at sea, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,
because on penthouse roofs,
gathered at bars,
emerging in bunches from the sewers,
trembling between the legs of chauffeurs,
or spinning on dance floors wet with absinthe,
the faggots, Walt Whitman, point you out.

He's one, too! That's right! And they land
on your luminous chaste beard,
blonds from the north, blacks from the sands,
crowds of howls and gestures,
like cats or like snakes,
the faggots, Walt Whitman, the faggots,
clouded with tears, flesh for the whip,
the boot, or the teeth of the lion tamers.

He's one, too! That's right! Stained fingers
point to the shore of your dream
when a friend eats your apple
with a slight taste of gasoline
and the sun sings in the navels
of boys who play under bridges.

But you didn't look for scratched eyes,
nor the darkest swamp where someone submerges children,
nor frozen saliva,
nor the curves slit open like a toad's belly
that the faggots wear in cars and on terraces
while the moon lashes them on the street corners of terror.

You looked for a naked body like a river.
Bull and dream who would join wheel with seaweed,
father of your agony, camellia of your death,
who would groan in the blaze of your hidden equator.

Because it's all right if a man doesn't look for his delight
in tomorrow morning's jungle of blood.
The sky has shores where life is avoided
and there are bodies that shouldn't repeat themselves in the dawn.

Agony, agony, dream, ferment, and dream.
This is the world, my friend, agony, agony.
Bodies decompose beneath the city clocks,
war passes by in tears, followed by a million gray rats,
the rich give their mistresses
small illuminated dying things,
and life is neither noble, nor good, nor sacred.

Man is able, if he wishes, to guide his desire
through a vein of coral or a heavenly naked body.
Tomorrow, loves will become stones, and Time
a breeze that drowses in the branches.

That's why I don't raise my voice, old Walt Whitman,
against the little boy who writes
the name of a girl on his pillow,
nor against the boy who dresses as a bride
in the darkness of the wardrobe,
nor against the solitary men in casinos
who drink prostitution's water with revulsion,
nor against the men with that green look in their eyes
who love other men and burn their lips in silence.

But yes against you, urban faggots,
tumescent flesh and unclean thoughts.
Mothers of mud. Harpies. Sleepless enemies
of the love that bestows crowns of joy.

Always against you, who give boys
drops of foul death with bitter poison.
Always against you,
Fairies of North America,
Pájaros of Havana,
Jotos of Mexico,
Sarasas of Cádiz,
Apios of Seville,
Cancos of Madrid,
Floras of Alicante,
Adelaidas of Portugal.

Faggots of the world, murderers of doves!
Slaves of women. Their bedroom bitches.
Opening in public squares like feverish fans
or ambushed in rigid hemlock landscapes.

No quarter given! Death
spills from your eyes
and gathers gray flowers at the mire's edge.
No quarter given! Attention!
Let the confused, the pure,
the classical, the celebrated, the supplicants
close the doors of the bacchanal to you.

And you, lovely Walt Whitman, stay asleep on the Hudson's banks
with your beard toward the pole, openhanded.
Soft clay or snow, your tongue calls for
comrades to keep watch over your unbodied gazelle.

Sleep on, nothing remains.
Dancing walls stir the prairies
and America drowns itself in machinery and lament.
I want the powerful air from the deepest night
to blow away flowers and inscriptions from the arch where you sleep,
and a black child to inform the gold-craving whites
that the kingdom of grain has arrived.

And then, yes, logocally following that with a selection of Whitman's poems.

I still have trouble with Lorca... the Gypsy Ballads are nice, & the late sonnets, but I always feel like I'm missing something when I read his more laconic lyrics. I suspect that some of them contain as little meaning as the cradle songs he once lectured about (I've long been haunted by a couplet from 'Poem of the Deep Song', Campanas de Córdoba en la madrugada / Campanas de amanecer in Grenada, which seems exemplary in this respect).

*en Grenada, durr

HECK I'll just give ya the whole poem

ALBA
Campanas de Córdoba
en la madrugada.
Campanas de amanecer
en Granada.
Os sienten todas las muchachas
que lloran a la tierna
soleá enlutada.
Las muchachas
de Andalucía la alta
y la baja.
Las niñas de España
de pie menudo
y temblorosas faldas,
que han llenado de luces
las encrucijadas.
¡Oh, campanas de Córdoba
en la madrugada.
y oh, campanas de amanecer
en Granada!

*when I say I feel I'm missing something, I suppose I'm mostly referring to cultural context)

There was an arc and an argument to Poet in New York that made it -- if not exactly substantial, the args from our standpoint are sorta old and creaky, at least something to chew over.

Whitman I'm just finding it way more rough going.

Tsvetaeva - Ratcatcher. She had 'White' sympathies, and that is expressed in her hatred of Bolshies (they are the rats). However she has no sympathy for the greedy villagers either. She sides with the lone artist, who - like Tsvetaeva - is a producer of sound.

Reading some poems by Montale and Holub next.

btw this is happening

2014 ILX Poetry Contest: The Captain Lorax Prize (Submissions Thread)

currently carrying Crane's *The Bridge*, a selected Sean Thomas Dougherty (too much prose poetry and Henry Rollins-as-Milquetoast for my taste, but the occasional burst of light), and Rigoberto Gonzalez's *Unpeopled Eden* which is pretty breathtaking in its gravity and lighthandedness.

The Faerie Queen, again — still never made it thru a whole book (I've started I, II, and now III) but I'm determined to get it this time! Probably doesn't hurt that I was just reading Scott, getting in the swordplay-and-chivalry mood.

"The Bridge" is legit stunning in places, incomprehensible in others, sometimes stunning-incomprehensible.

Started a book which comes out next year, 'Dark Sparkler' by Amber Tamblyn, a collection of poems inspired by actresses who died young. Not sure it entirely works, but when it does it's pretty good.

Jayne Mansfield

Your neck was a study of the asterisk,
the silken shape of Sanskrit,
the sucker punch of succulents.

Your neck a thinning glacier,
fine as the grind of a blade curve,
soft as a k in a known word
long as they say about slow burns.

Your neck the place where pearls retired
below the face your girls admired.

Your neck was a fortune you did not spend.
Your neck is what they’ll remember the most.
Your neck in the end.

ugh

been thinking ed dorn's gunslinger was lookin interesting

but hearing him read it, is just

ugh

the educated coastal elite tone of voice and enunciation patterns from the old dayz always irritate the hell out of me

you can hear dorn trying to get into the vernacular he wrote on the page, but he's so… uptight… that he can't commit to it, he just rushes whenever he has to drawl a little or drop some word endings

vindicating

from what i know of the book proper, i would still check gunslinger out

i mean i hate (dislike) the way wcw reads his own poetry too so

Osip Mandesltam by James Greene. This poem is in a diff translation I found online:

A Greek flute’s theta and iota –
as if words weren’t enough for the ear –
un-carved, and unaccountable,
ripened, toiled, crossed the frontier.

Impossible to leave it behind:
clenched teeth can’t deny it,
the tongue can’t prod it into line,
the lips can’t dissipate it.

The flautist knows no peace –
it seems to him he’s alone,
that he formed his native sea
from lilac clay, long ago.

With distinct, ambitious murmur,
relentless remembering lips, he
hastens to gather the sounds,
cherish them, neatly, stingily.

Later we’re unable to repeat him,
clods of clay in the palms of the sea,
and when I’m filled with the ocean,
my measure can only be disease.

And my lips are unable to sing,
there is murder too at the root.
Involuntarily, waning, waning,
I diminish the power of the flute.

grabbed maggie nelson's *bluets* which is weird but quite lovely

also got *the art of the sonnet* which is a wonderful little various artists critical examination

Poem

Though we seek always the known absolute
Of all our days together, love will not occur
For us. Love is a fact
Beyond the witches wood of facts that is
Our sorcery's domain. And though we may
Charm lion into squirrel, push back the sea,
Love is made outlaw, set beyond all art,
The ultimate error of our reasoning.

But when I see you walking or catch your face
Edged with the season's most erratic leaves
Love grows superfluous, and I look at you
As I would look at flowers. Our only need:
The sympathy of darkness for the seed.

the first poem john ashbery ever published, as 'joel michael symington'

i really liked bluets; i read it after reading some anne carson because max had talked about her on ilx, looking for something that was mentioned in the same breath. i think carson is a tough comparison - because the precise-almost-strict tone reads ever-so-slightly fussily in others' work, like the nelson book, & doesn't at all in carson's - but i liked it a lot. i wrote her an e-mail maybe a year later to ask whether it was through her or some interview or something that i'd heard this story about the colour blue that i couldn't get out of my head; it was about an old artisan, centuries ago, renown for his work with stained glass, but most particularly for the nonpareil blues he would incorporate into his windows. he was sought after, and expensive, & ended up the artist of many & varied famous stained glass designs; something written down or remembered said that he was unique in sourcing incredibly exotic materials, crushed sapphires, with which to work, & that remnant scraps of his invoices detailed the materials he used. & then, centuries later, more recently, a portion of the windows had somehow been tested to gauge its composition, & the tests revealed the materials involved, none of which were sapphires, crushed or otherwise. he had used whatever he had used & billed for crushed sapphires, this poetic & expensive reimbursable. i was sure i'd heard the story in an aside during an interview or an unpublished bluet or something, but i hadn't, & she wrote back to say she didn't know either, & i still can't remember where i heard the story, what exactly its tethered to in my mind if not this catalogue of devotional historical uses of the colour blue.

schlump - perhaps from Michael Taussig, What Color is the Sacred?
(haven't read the whole book, but from what I recall, that sounds like a story that might appear in it)

reading Rumi because I never really have

surprised at how affecting some of it is, the translation is really refreshingly contemporary & almost shades into something like Sexton at times

"a"

I own the uneecummings version: "A"

"a"

― j., Tuesday, October 7, 2014 7:27 PM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh yo how is this

i sent lj todesfuge and demanded he start reading celan

Howard Moss. Graceful to a fault blank verse.

well hoos i don't know, i have read zukofsky a bit for many years, because of all the wcw/pound/objectivist/langpo connections, but never gotten too into him save for enjoying his lyrics. got inspired to pick up "a" again and with some more herrick in me and a different feel for voice in the intervening years i enjoy him more and care less about the allusiveness/opacity. the structures seem plainer now but i think maybe much of 'anew' (except for '80 flowers' haha) will still seem more approachable, if you haven't read him. lovely love songs. then again there's a lotta marx in "a" - half of one installment is built out of quotes - so if you're you…

the personal centeredness does seem to make "a" more friendly than 'paterson' or the cantos, even if it's caught up with private inscrutables.

xp Celan is okay, but I have my doubts sometimes about his translatability

obv reading celan in translation can never be the same as reading him in german but there are some v good bilingual editions (the felstiner is my favorite) and i think his words are powerful enough to survive translation + carry meaning.

It is also possible that I just don't "get" him & the fault is not translation... idk. Iirc, Hamburger makes a big deal out of his 'minor language' characteristics, though I could barely explain what I/he means by that.

"Todesfuge" is definitely one of the better ones I've read, though... I remember reading another longer poem of his (I forget the title) that came into focus for me when I realized it was structured almost like the camps, with a fence around it warning "KEEP OUT"

found the poem I was thinking of--"The Straitening"--my past self may have badly misread it

as far as "untranslatability", though, I was thinking of stuff like the stammering in "Tübingen, Jänner"

i may be getting more of an assist than i appreciate from my meager german, but i do think the breathturn stuff is gettable enough in translation to be read. it may take some repetition, to allow things to accrue.

celan seems kind of the epitome of a translatable poet

cynicism and disgust are the universal language

I'm not sure I read Celan as cynical as much as wounded and skeptical, but disgusted, sure. I feel like the Felstiner, Hamburger, and Pierre Joris translations, along with the ready availability of bilingual editions, have given me a beginner's purchase on Celan's writing, but my German is too weak for me to know quite what I'm missing.

Returning with relish to Jack Spicer:

We proclaim a silent revolution. The poems above our heads, without tongues, are tired of talking to each other over the gabble of our beliefs, our literary personalities, our attempts to project their silent conversation to an audience. When we give tongue we amplify. We are telephone switchboards deluded into becoming hi-fi sets. The terrible speakers must be allowed silence. They are not speaking to us.

Funny I order a copy of the Celan/Bachmann correspondence from my library. For people in London the Anselm Kiefer show has a big engagement with Celan's poetry.

Joseph Brodsky - a selection on Penguin. Didn't really find a way in, which is a shame as I love his essays.

Currently reading Canti by Leopardi and liking lots of it (tr. Jonathan Galassi). Terrific quotes from his letters and Zibaldone form part of the annotations, which I must investigate next year.

Ungaretti (tr. Patrick Creagh).

I was trying to figure out why none of the translations of "Tübingen, Jänner" quite lived up to the one in my head, and so I checked when I went home and it turns out it was actually a partial translation which appears in the text of (the English translation of) Enrique Vila-Matas's Bartleby & Co., which was perhaps the first place I ever encountered Celan('s writing):

If a man
if a man came
if a man came into the world, today, with
the patriarchs' beard of
light: he could only,
if he spoke of this
time, could
only stutter, stutter
on on
only only.

that's nice, & bartleby & co is a cute book
rushing & sleepy so will try to post again once i've actually seen the book you mentioned, bernard, but just wanted to say thanks for yr reply about my colour mystery!, i really appreciate it, & though i haven't read the book it sounds really up my street, & could still be an original source of somebody's since-transmitted anecdote. thanks.

swung by the library and got a seidel, james merril, and patrick rosal's boneshepherds which is pretty mellifluous

urgh, i had just about managed to forget about the existence of frederick seidel

yeah i really thought grabbing a selected would surface the stuff that made his acclaim make sense--outside a small handful though, i'm seeing very little magic and lots of sneering self regard

I think he has a sharp sense of rhythm at times, but I tend to find his poetic persona tiresome and his tone too predictably "edgy"--basically challops in couplets that flirt with doggerel.

yeah i appreciate his rhythm but he just doesn't really say anything worthwhile most of the time imo

idk i think you need to be totally prepared to immerse yrself in white upperclass id to get anything out of it and even then

people have told me i'm oversimplifying

i read like three collections. i think the selected might be a worse way to go; it's not like it's hard to read, and i think the internal logic of the collections is one thing that helps them seem like they're doing a thing

seidel ain't never showed me nothing I couldn't live without

Having recently purchased an ex-lib copy of Cool, Calm and Collected, the collected poems of Carolyn Kizer (Copper Canyon Press, 2001), I spent about an hour and a half last night reading her poetry. It's both personal and personable. Her poems have a strong voice and a measure of self-deprecating humor (with a mere hint of wit). On the whole I found her company quite congenial and pleasant.

Manley Hopkins.

The good times are here agane.

lol

more like:

No, no, the great good, the ab-
solute good – say it – good times!
Here you are. Agane!

Needs more diacriticals but otm

I've hung out with the author and so am biased, but I'm enjoying Diana Hamilton's chapbook from 2012, "Okay, Okay," a series of collage-based prose poems about women weeping in public, gendered affects, the online culture of advice, the emotional claustrophobia of offices, &c.:

What a great way to not be taken seriously! Try pinching yourself behind the knee or biting your lip. Go to a bathroom stall. When you come out with red puffy eyes, and
swollen face, blame it on allergies. Go somewhere like an empty park and shout as loud as you can, “I think I need Conflicting Parts Integration!” So, why are you hypersensitive?
The next time something that you will cry over occurs tell that person that if they ever do something like that to you again that you will kill them. Play to their desire
to end the situation. I’m not that creative with my words maybe you can better express but look at them like an animal. Of course, deny your threat if questioned. Emotions
lead that we are anthropomorphic. Not only will it make you feel better, it’ll make people less uncomfortable.

randomly picked up a used copy of Jorie Graham's selected poems ('96), but apart from a couple of poems ("Fission" and "From the New World") I'm not sure I Get It -- any fans here?

got The Essential Etheridge Knight in the mail, really enjoying some of it so far.

I sold off my Geoffrey Hill last weekend. I couldn't derive any pleasure from any of his poems. Neither sensual pleasure nor intellectual pleasure.

Four Greek Poets collection (includes 2x nobel prize winners on this, I clearly needed to bump up my quota of Nobel Prize winners this week!)

Somwhat more seriously I can't quite get into Cavafy. Fairly dry set of historical poems, or maybe its the selection. Seferis and esp Elytis I like.

John Donne selection. Onto some Hardy and Lawrence next.

Went through most of Blake. Just Jerusalem left now. I read Keynes's old Penguin text during the day then look at the Complete Illuminated Books in bed at night. This is the life!

Cavafy's amazing imo – I'd blame the translation, but i think that edition would be the Keeley/Sherrard ones, which I've always liked. This website gives a good selection.

(Seferis has never really taken for me, & I don't know the other two in that volume)

Oh, also started reading The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century German Poems, ed by Hofmann – it's terrific. Did you recommend this to me, xyzzzz? It feels very you…

but re Cavafy I am a sucker for poised reflective historical melancholia.

Yes I did pick The Faber Book, saying there were a ton of copies of it at Judd for 3.95 (now no more as you all took advntage of my tip).

Thanks for the Cavafy webpage. It is Keeley/Sherrard. I'll investigate and re-read that essay by Brodsky again.

Elytsis's Body of Summer:

A long time has passed since the last rain was heard
Above the ants and lizards
Now the sun burns endlessly
The fruit paints its mouth
The pores in the earth open slowly
And beside the water that drips in syllables
A huge plant gaze into the eye of the sun.

Who is he that lies on the shores beyond
Stretched on his back, smoking silver-burnt olive leaves?
Cicadas grow warm in his ears
Ants are at work on his chest
Lizards slide in the grass of his armpits
And over the seaweed of his feet a wave rolls lightly
Sent by the little siren that sang:

" O body o summer, naked, burnt
Eaten away by oil and salt
Body of rock and shudder of the heart
Great ruffling wind in the osier hair
Beneath of basil above the curly pubic mound
Full of stars and pine needles
Body , deep vessel of the day!

"Soft rains come, violent hail
The land passes lashed in the claws of snow-storm
Which darkens in the depths with furious waves
The hills plunge into the dense udders of the clouds
And yet behind all this you laugh carefree
And find your deathless moment again
And the sun finds you again in the sandy shores
As the sky finds you again in your naked health."

Sorry to expand on the above yes I did recommend The Faber book. Has all sorts of wonderful things in it, lots to hunt down in individual vols too, or to look out for if the younger poets haven't yet had a dedicated vol in English.

I am trying to get hold of the Faber book of Italian 20th century poems. Real shame they don't do one for Spanish 20th century.

rereading Donald Justice.

I'm starting to read Alice Notley's Culture of One. I'm still looking for a way into it, but (at least on the basis of The Descent of Alette) I can't think of many other contemporary poets who are as powerful at reworking the serial poem into a fractured visionary narrative.

I'm starting to 'get' Jorie Graham a bit more--she seems to have a lot invested in the postmodern/Critical Theoretical discourse about what poetry 'can' or 'ought to' do?

she writes as if she's enjambing her lecture notes, yes

Funny, for I just wrote a brief Galway Kinnell eulogy for my blog and mentioned my admiration for Graham up to The End of Beauty.

xp to self: e.g. one of the poems (either "What Is Called Thinking" or one of the ones called "History", I forget) where she struggles to keep observing a deer without allowing the observations to be caught up in a 'story'

Alfred I think "enjambing her lecture notes" sells it a bit short--there is a deliberate obscurity/withholding of detail (I am tempted to call this 'plotting') that makes the poems interesting to go through, even if they ultimately fail to deliver any memorable phrases

Got hold of a library copy of The Prophecies of Nostradamus (tr. Richard Sieburth). Guess I'll put it here.

If you read Nostradamus alongside Emily Dickinson (both short poems-as-riddles that have lots darkness and death as subject) you enter some sort of weird dimension.

I need to drink more.

i looked sort of idly through the books of jack spicer last night. and even more idly through my collected prynne.

Swinburne.

oh, also i'm two hundred pages into chaucer

Mausoleum, Enzensberger. Thanks for the recommendation, xyzzzz. It is great.
& it's Milton time for me. I just want to hide in bed reading Paradise Lost.

I've been spurred to read Anne Boyer's chapbook My Common Heart after coming across her poem "Revolt of the Peasant Girls": http://www.pen.org/poetry/revolt-peasant-girls

We were basic. We’d earned archery badges. We played piano. We threw I-Ching. The townspeople were little Pharisees. We saw the facts under their Izod vestments.
Who doesn’t finally emerge armed from the creek bed, antediluvian, robust?
Who will ever forget what we did at the railroad interchange, the alleyway, the grain elevator, main street, or on one of two hills?
The first hill was named after a conqueror: the second after the conquered. This was a site on the small patch of the conquistador’s chain mill. This was a rock drenched with indigenous blood. Later in both places generations of fleeing evacuees carved these numbers:
7 Billion
<3’s
ZERO
Generations of evacuees carved out these numbers, but this was a museum in which we the peasant girls had long planned to live: the new mall. We went long risk on belly trenches beside the aquamarine fountain. There were defaults among shop rotations where we could realize. Either in the mall or seventeen miles apart, approximately, we could stand without family on the two hills and signal victory over the sign-light of Dairy Queen.

Dickinson + Nostradamus sounds like something I need to try

I found a $.99 little pocket-sized edition of Blake's Songs & have been carrying it around with me. The only other Blake I own is the decidedly non-portable Complete Illuminated Works so this makes for a nice supplement; also if I'm not mistaken it includes some poems that are absent from my illustrated edition?

Hunted down this interview with Sieburth to read later. A new translator to trust; I really like his intro to the Nostradamus vol.

Oh -he did the Penguin selected Gerard de Nerval - that's a great book.

I was looking at that, and the Sieburth selection of Pound's work for Faber. One more to order at my library then.

That site is really great, plenty of interest.

a new poem I just discovered called "rage againt the dying of the light"

just my $0.02

I avoided Dylan Thomas for a long time on (as it turned out, mistaken) assumption that it would all be like that...
then I read an essay somewhere that put me on to "Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait", after that I was (heh) hooked

Yeah, the Sieburth selected Pound is solid: useful notes, shrewd choices.

So I spent Friday night reading about 100-ish poems by Paul Celan (tr. Michael Hamburger). Yeah, great way to spend a Friday night at my age.

I don't think you'd be able to derive too much of his autobiog from his poems (apart from Death Fugue most notably). I could see him in conversation with Russian poets from the early 20th century, esp. Osip Mandelstam (how many mentions of stones, with the word 'white' also around there, not too far behind) (also he translated his poetry into German). But at first you think 'ffs there is no music', as you go on you think, 'well maybe he is making the non-musicality' into another kind of music (but the whole anti-/NO/ thing is a thing you could state it and then think this is really banal). So much in here is about not being able to say anything, the futility of language, the shadow it casts. I need to read Heidegger. Fuck knows whether I'll ever bother to do that. Maybe Being and Time could be the next choice at the ILB reading club. Just a chapter or two ;-)

The fact I read almost all of it in a sitting (and I almost never do that with any single collection of a poet) is something.

I spent longer time reading the intro than the poems themselves. I didn't think the last poems were more 'difficult', or seeing whether they presented different challenges (as Hamburger says they did in the German speaking world). I'll follow his advice and let them be.

I hear a music in Celan, sometimes harsh, sometimes delicate, but I don't know if that's a function of not knowing German well enough to develop an ear for it, when I read Celan aloud I sound it out slowly and with difficulty. The Mandelstam comparison seems apt in terms of their emotional force and hermeneutic difficulty. Peter Joris has an interesting commentary on Celan's relationship with Heidegger (and particularly Heidegger's never-quite-disavowed Fascism) here: http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/joris/todtnauberg.html

how do we feel about Lisa Robertson

one way street - thanks for the link.

I have started reading a compilation of Italian 20th century poetry on Faber. (Woof I will bring this to the FAP so you can have a look :-))

got an old paperback of christopher marlowe's poetry and translations. have only read the two extant cantos of "hero and leander," good stuff. dirty.

finally picked up berryman's sonnets! loving.

berryman's sonnets! YES!

Yeah, the sonnets are delightful--definitely my favorite work by Berryman next to the Dream Songs and "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet."

Finished a selection of D.H. Lawrence's poetry (ed. Keith Sagar). The last 50 or so pages were especially affecting (Pansies and The Last Poems).

The Faber Book of Italian 20th century Poems was rad, I need my own copy of it. Also in need of further selections by Ungaretti, Pavese (he seems really underrated) and Pasolini was surprisingly good (unlike a novel or two of his I tried). Lots of others here and there. Faber should def do a 20th century edition of French and Spanish poetry, maybe even Russian.

Songs of Kabir on NYRB. The translation has a lot of improvisation to it, certainly words (like Chromosome) are used and I liked the commentary.

Passion for Solitude
By Cesare Pavese

Translated By Geoffrey Brock

I’m eating a little supper by the bright window.
The room’s already dark, the sky’s starting to turn.
Outside my door, the quiet roads lead,
after a short walk, to open fields.
I’m eating, watching the sky—who knows
how many women are eating now. My body is calm:
labor dulls all the senses, and dulls women too.

Outside, after supper, the stars will come out to touch
the wide plain of the earth. The stars are alive,
but not worth these cherries, which I’m eating alone.
I look at the sky, know that lights already are shining
among rust-red roofs, noises of people beneath them.
A gulp of my drink, and my body can taste the life
of plants and of rivers. It feels detached from things.
A small dose of silence suffices, and everything’s still,
in its true place, just like my body is still.

All things become islands before my senses,
which accept them as a matter of course: a murmur of silence.
All things in this darkness—I can know all of them,
just as I know that blood flows in my veins.
The plain is a great flowing of water through plants,
a supper of all things. Each plant, and each stone,
lives motionlessly. I hear my food feeding my veins
with each living thing that this plain provides.

The night doesn’t matter. The square patch of sky
whispers all the loud noises to me, and a small star
struggles in emptiness, far from all foods,
from all houses, alien. It isn’t enough for itself,
it needs too many companions. Here in the dark, alone,
my body is calm, it feels it’s in charge.

pansies & nettles, lawrence at his most compressed and splenetic. i do have a faber collection of 20th century french poetry from 2002 which is nice and wide ranging (part of the same series?)

this one: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jun/08/featuresreviews.guardianreview24

Marvellous - I'll hunt that down.

coming to feel Lisa Robertson actually v good, if anyone's counting

Ezra Pound - Poems & Translations. Started by reading some of his earlier poems but then jumped to the sections from The Cantos. Love a lot of Sieburth's annotations, a reasonable digest of what would've been hard to swallow, and actually conveys the ambitions and scale of the thing. I have to say I love when this thing goes to China, not sure why, just like a poet engaging with that. Although I'm sure many others have.

Fried my brain on the remainder of the excerpts from The Cantos. I found out there was an Italian fascist calendar last night.

rachel zucker. idk

Back to Brecht. Hadn't read his poems in years, but Hofmann's book of German verse reminded me.
Enjoyed this hofmann article on the new biography too. Very tempted to read it.

Trying a bit too hard huh?

I’m not really sure what the case against Brecht is. That he treated women and co-workers badly? That he played fast and loose with the intellectual property of others, but was litigiously possessive of his own? That he wrote no more hit shows after The Threepenny Opera? That he failed to crack America? That he wouldn’t denounce the Soviet Union? That he was drab and a killjoy? That he had it cushy after settling back in East Germany in 1949? That he was consumed with his own importance?

Yes to many of these things. Most of the people that complain about him are disgusting liberal types tho'.

His poetry is effortlessly great (one of the highlights of all the reading I've done this year) - be great to find a copy of the collected poems sometime.

Having trouble getting the sense of these lines (from the "Introduction" to Blake's Songs of Experience)

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past and Future sees
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walk'd among the ancient trees,

Calling the lapsed Soul
And weeping in the evening dew:
That might controll
The starry pole,
And fallen fallen light renew!

Actually "That might control / The starry pole" is obscure to me, too--can't tell if 'might' is the subject of 'control' (but then wouldn't it be 'Might'?), or if not, what the subject of 'might control' is.

recommend decent Pushkin translations (don't say Vlad the Nab)

xp If it is anything definite in the previous lines, it seems to me that "the voice of the Bard" would be the subject.

Hmmm, you could very well be right--that exclamation point was throwing me, making me imagine "The Holy Word" as the subject of all that follows

I think I'd lean towards 'holy word' as subject of 'might control', though I think there's a little ambiguity there. It's the parallel 'that' construction, plus the Word is more likely than the bard's voice to be able to reorder the poles/restore light.

recommend decent Pushkin translations (don't say Vlad the Nab)

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 14 December 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

According to Robert Chandler the decent ones are by James Falen and Stanley Mitchell (Onegin). Then there is Anthony Wood (The Bridgeroom). Listed in the Russian Short Stories on Penguin. Chandler has translated a few prose works by Pushkin and I'll be reading Queen of Spades shortly.

Hadn't read Miller Williams before these excerpts:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/03/arts/miller-williams-laconic-arkansas-poet-dies-at-84.html?referrer&_r=2

August Kleinzahler ftw, and to beat the holiday malaise.

Wait that is Lucinda Williams's dad, right?

can someone help me gloss a bit of Milton's Il Penseroso? Feel I'm being a bit dim, but can't untangle it fully. He's talked about courting melancholy outside ('To behold the wandring Moon / Riding near her highest noon') and then has started saying how he courts Her when the weather's crap - first by the fireplace and then

'Or let my Lamp at midnight hour,
Be seen in som high lonely Towr,
Where I may oft out-watch the Bear
With thrice great Hermes, or unsphear
The spirit of Plato to unfold
What Worlds, or what vast Regions hold
The immortal mind that hath forsook
Her mansion in this fleshly nook:'

Most of that's fine, but it's the last three lines that I can't get right. Basically it's whether you read it as 1 'The immortal mind that hath forsook her mansion, in this fleshy nook' or 2 'The immortal mind that hath forsook, her mansion in this fleshy nook' (commas for pauses rather than gr sense).

I'm assuming the usual neo-platonic spheres:

Gloss 1: He wishes to know the Worlds/Regions that hold the general mind - these are the regions in the outer spheres, in which the mind has its 'mansion' (as in the astrological term rather than 'big house' obv), which the individual example of the mind has forsaken to be in the physical human.

Consequences: the individual mind partakes (presumably by the chain of being) of the general infinite mind, and in doing so is partly held there. this implies a sort of chipping off the ideal/infinite block to create the human.

OR

Gloss 2: That the mind's mansion is the fleshy nook, and that it forsakes by existing on in those celestial worlds/vast regions (presumably as a consequence of a dual nature - part of flesh, but also infinite.)

Consequences: the mind is part of the flesh, but partakes of the infinite - this is a specific-to-general process. As I say that suggests to me duality rather than a chain of being and makes it the less likely interpretation (especially with Hermes Trismegistus making his appearance there).

I'm crap at this sort of area, but am suspecting 1, with perhaps some tweaks, or 'you've got it completely rong u fule'.

Yeah, I'd lean towards (1). 'Mansion' and 'nook' are such contrastive terms that I doubt he's identifying them with each other.

yep, quite. cheers jmm. it's a really good set of lines in a not enormously appealing poem, and in order to really fulfil the power of those wonderful "vast regions", it's still a bit of a shit team tho. movement forward is superb, but sloppy stuff from Townsend and Rose, who both feel second rate, as well as the inevitable vertonghen. (yes I know he had a good match against Chelsea). feels like poch has worked wonders really.

er what the actual fuck! no idea how I managed to put that there.

meant to say

... it needs to reasoning to be clear

(1) seems closest to me.

I think he is using 'unsphear' in the sense of unleash or let loose with a vague nod to the celestial spheres, although the connection is tenuous. The 'spirit of Plato' that is being unleashed I read here as the Platonic worldview, which Milton admires, but as a Christian can't fully endorse. What he can do is use Plato's sublimity to inspire his thinking toward contemplating the infinite mind of God, which is OK.

The use of 'forsook' implies the entire immortal mind left its mansion to inhabit human flesh. You may recall that Jesus is part of the trinity and therefore he is God/celestial intelligence/immortal mind personified in human flesh.

So, Milton seems to be saying, very ornately: I'd like to spend lots of time in the quiet hours of the night contemplating the vastness of God's intelligence, kind of like my buddy Plato did, and btw God is also Jesus Christ, who was flesh, like you and me, and doesn't that blow your mind.

finding this v tricky and don't have time but I am leaning slightly 2

fwiw i think mansion/nook non-contrastive - 'mansion' has a strong sense of 'dwelling place' at this point, with a particular sense of 'where the soul resides'. (cf Tyndale using it to translate 'skenos', 'tent' in 2 Corinthinans 5.1)

I want to write more but I have to watch The Way We Were right now. I'd really rather think about Milton.

So, Milton seems to be saying, very ornately: I'd like to spend lots of time in the quiet hours of the night contemplating the vastness of God's intelligence, kind of like my buddy Plato did, and btw God is also Jesus Christ, who was flesh, like you and me, and doesn't that blow your mind.

interesting aimless, thanks. In fact I was coming to this from Blake/Swedenborg so the physical nature of Christ was uppermost in my mind here.

hoping woof can tear himself away. "mansion" point interesting, and on that note have you all seen this?

OED in two minutes

I didn't know 'mansion' also had that astrological sense. If there's a double meaning intended there, then it's more straightforward on reading 1, where the mansion of the mind is identified with the celestial spheres. Reading 2 doesn't incorporate the double meaning quite as neatly. Maybe it gives the line a more ironic force.

I'm now leaning strongly 2. I need to check the texts but timaeus and phaedo have souls ascending to the spheres post flesh-life - ie he's calling back plato to get a report on those spheres.

Aimless's argument interesting but Milton's classical and christian heads a complicated fit, even at this age (early 20s I think?).

like I think it's not about the incarnation (despite M's interest in that) - it's a flirting-with-dark-arts thing about summoning dead classical souls (+ classical allusion) that fits with the following lines about daemons (and w/ this vision of the melancholiac).

agree it's the best set of lines in the poem - Yeats's ref to them in Phases of the Moon made me find them - I think that might have been the first time I read (or enjoyed) Milton.

I think he is using 'unsphear' in the sense of unleash or let loose with a vague nod to the celestial spheres, although the connection is tenuous.

fwiw, imo, no way - primary sense surely has to be 'pull out or down from the celestial spheres'.

I should wind down now but I think the tenses point to 2 too - it's fuzzier to have the immortal mind simultaneously be held by the worlds/regions and have forsaken them (whereas it's all good if the soul has forsaken the body and is now held by the world/regions)

_I think he is using 'unsphear' in the sense of unleash or let loose with a vague nod to the celestial spheres, although the connection is tenuous. _

fwiw, imo, no way - primary sense surely has to be 'pull out or down from the celestial spheres'.

yes absolutely. and no don't wind down if you're still feeling on it. found the argument to 2 interesting.

now need to read yeats's ph of the m obv.

primary sense surely has to be 'pull out or down from the celestial spheres'

Then, if Milton intends to unsphear Plato's spirit in order for it (him?) to get to work unfolding Worlds and whatnot, then a literal reading would require Milton to engage in a kind of Faustian calling up of Plato's ghost, which would seem to disqualify a literal reading. If you give it a metaphorical reading, then it reduces quickly to more of a vague invocation. Of course, Plato being pagan, he would not have made into Heaven, and Milton was not a catholic, so it would be something of a puzzle to pin down exactly where Milton thought Plato's spirit was residing.

UNSPH34R

ha yeah it does give me pause to say 'Milton is advocating necromancy'. I do think he wants that sense though, for a Faustian frisson - so dead literally it's something like "I'm going to stay up late reading Plato(*) and go deep into what he says happens to souls after death (ie good souls go to the stars in the spheres) and that is likely what happened to Plato's soul - the bit of him that wrote what I'm reading - after death, so I am 'calling him down from the spheres'"; but I think, yes, he wants a confusion between literal and metaphorical to hit a reader(**) - there's a moment when you think he's talking about actually summoning a ghost.

'Daemons' in the following lines play a similar game maybe - he's clearly using it in an Anc. Greek sense (and I don't see how that would fit with standard christianity - tho' it'd sort of be angels in neo-platonic christianity iirc?), but there's a flash of the unholy there too. I think it’s a sort of posturing by allusion or maybe a way of dramatising the Melancholic man - hints of a destructive darkness in the glamours of hidden knowledge.

Trismegistus is a similarly unsettling name to drop before he goes into this - that syncretic/hermetic/magical tradition isn't at home in mainstream christianity at this point. But I don’t think Milton is exactly a mainstream Christian, even this early (taking 1631/2 as most likely date) - he's already incredibly well-read, frustrated with Charles I's Anglican Church and obsessively interested in the Classical world, or his imagined version of it. Without question he’s a believer, and a devout one, but I think he’s figuring things out and trying things on still, finding different ways to put the classical and christian together - eg his poem on Christ's Nativity (where paganism is gorgeously banished by christ's arrival) or Lycidas (where the tension or confusion has its strongest or strangest effects). In this one (or two, since it's inseparable from L'Allegro), I think he’s basically relaxing - ‘I’m going to play with this classical stuff I love’. Little of it makes any sense in a christian way imo, it's all classical allusion/myth as playground or holodeck.

I don't know if that made sense and I should sleep.

*I think it is the Timaeus maybe? I've dug around and think it's 42b that's directly relevant here, "And he that has lived his appointed time well shall return again to his abode in his native star" - the demons/elements in the next lines would fit too. This would definitely make the body a temporary mansion/stopping-place for the immortal soul. I'd never read the timaeus before. it's nuts.

**Who is this for? If early 1630s, M is still around Cambridge. I would guess someone like Charles Diodati would be the intended audience - trusted friend, comparably smart and learned, probably able to get that Milton isn’t a Necromancer while admiring his game. Basically I think he's showing off to his mates - he is a bit prone to that early on.

great posts, thanks woof. on the angels/dæmons thing, yes, I think they're angels for Milton tho i remember Empson takes Frances Yates to task about her glossing dæmons into angels and demons for the earlier periods she deals with.

coming late to the German 20th century poetry Faber volume, which is, as everyone's been saying, excellent.

coming to 'Of Poor B.B.' straight after Il Penseroso, while questions such as 'what is the nature of our mind?' and 'what is the nature of the place which it inhabits?' (or 'what is the nature of those 'vast plains') meant the first lines of that poem also spoke to me of the places we inhabit even when we are not there:

I, Bertolt Brech, came out of the black forests,
My mother moved me into the cities as I lay
Inside her body. And the coldness of the forests
Will be inside me till my dying day.

The later verses, on the 'houses we held to be indestructible' get enriched and complicated by the reading that by houses he also means our fleshy bodies - I think the line 'We know we're only tennants, provisional ones' allows this interpretation, but doesn't require it. That reading does give a hell of a kick to the preceding line though!

'The house makes glad the eater: he clears it out'

Even leaving that reading to one side, it's a raw elemental poem - 'Of those cities will remain what passed through them, the wind!' - the same wind, presumably, that passes through the black forests from which he came and which sits within him.

That complicated reading where, like those endless gifs, the outer is continually made into the inner is continually made into the outer, giving impermanence and permanence at the same time is encouraged perhaps by the poem A Cloud earlier in the Brecht, where the breaking up of a cloud in a moment where he holds his lover 'like a dream' is expressive of ephemerality in itself, the ephemerality of the experience within which its disintegration took place, but also the only thing he ultimately remembers of that fixed details of that day - a point of permanence. Perhaps also, although the cloud is white, of darkness within innocence being the permanent expression and memorial of that innocence.

ugh, re-reading, that's a hopelessly garbled post, apologies. have been battling eurostar hell, and was writing that very dishevelled, tired and hungover in the waiting room at gare du nord. maybe will unpick it later, but now i'm back home, going for a pint first. stopping only to say that the Empson essay is Elizabethan Spirits, and i just looked it up again and see that it mentions il penseroso for the same reason:

Agrippa is much more hopeful than the Hermetica about these spirits, saying in a splendid passage that they may in their three grades bring inspiration to a technician or an artist or a philosopher, and Dame Frances gives this due prominence {Occult Philosophy, p. 53). But she spells them as 'demons' not as 'daemons'. The OED makes clear that English writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were conscious that a 'daemon' in Plato is quite different from a 'demon' in a sermon, and used the spellings for the distinc- tion; it was given up in the eighteenth century, perhaps out of distaste for pedantry, and perhaps Dame Frances feels the same. So she quotes Milton as confessing, in 'II Penseroso' (lines 93-4), that he has some contact, during his reading at night, with 'those Demons that are found . . . underground'.'daemons', and had mentioned the spirit of Plato just before; he would be indignant at this misspelling, regarding it as typical of the ignorant slander by which he was persecuted.

just trying to link up woof's yeats ref - i ought to read that, but I'm assuming my il p/blake ref is unwittingly a consequence of yeats, as I got to it via Kathleen Raine.

Fizzles, you may have already seen it, but Walter Benjamin's brief commentary on "Of Poor B.B." in "Commentary on Some Poems by Brecht" is worth reading--Benjamin's stress on transience moves his reading close to an anticipation of the late theses "On the Concept of History." I'll stay out of the Milton controversy, but I love woof's posts here.

I'm starting to read Ingeborg Bachmann's poetry in Peter Filkins's translations: the translations so far are stiff on their own terms but at least don't seem seriously misleading, and it's a bilingual edition, so I'm trying to puzzle out some of the originals. At least after reading her first collection, Gestundete Zeit and starting her second, I was a little surprised not to find a degree of formal disjunction similar to that of Celan or her late novel Malina--she does interesting things with the tension between the stately beauty of her verse and its subtle evocation of the horrors of fascism, though. Also listening again, after a few years, to Jack Spicer's Vancouver lectures on poetics (on poetic dictation from outside, the serial poem, and the compositional process: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Spicer.html ), reading some poems a friend's been working on in response to Spicer's "Imaginary Elegies," and starting kari edwards's last book, Bharat Jiva, about which CA Conrad's written (here.

http://marjorieperloff.com/reviews/songs-in-flight/

This is a highly critical review of the Filkins.

Brecht fun to read in the original, particularly Vom armen B.B.

xyzzzz__, I've read and basically agree with Perloff's review; what I've read of Anderson's translations are typically closer and more compelling than Filkins's work, even if he translated considerably less of Bachmann's work. I'm mostly using Filkins's versions to supplement my rudimentary German while I try to read the originals.

Ah! I was wondering if Empson had anything pertinent to say on spirits/ghosts/d(a)emons - it seemed like one of those questions of early modern belief that sets him on a roll, but I wasn't near books to check. Thank you.

Essay's here for lrb readers btw:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v02/n07/william-empson/elizabethan-spirits

rereading Housman!

has anyone read anthony madrid, either the book or pieces of it

damn, that Empson essay. Really was thinking that it was pretty clear-headed for late Empson – a bit closer to the shore than a lot of his speculative jaunts. Then he gets into interpreting Faustus at the end and:

A play needs a plot, and Marlowe made Faust try to escape Hell by becoming a Middle Spirit; he bought the help of Mephistophelis, who was a Middle Spirit, not a devil, by promising him his immortal soul. Neither of them dare say this because the Devil would overhear, but the Chorus to Act Two, which is mysteriously missing, explained what they are hinting at; a Chorus was needed because the Devil could not overhear it. By the end of Act Two Faust is already certain that he has been cheated, and is damned; he takes to horse-play to stave off his terrors; but after his terrible final speech denouncing Hell he cries ‘Ah, Mephistophelis’, and dies in his friend’s arms with ecstasy, finding that his plan has worked after all.

it makes me want to reread Faustus, even though it is a bizarre reading.

ha ha, i love empson's bizarre readings - allowing interpretations based on propositions withheld as a dramatisation of a fear of being heard by the Devil is a particular good'un.

and thanks one way street - now you mention it i think remembering seeing it, but would have forgotten otherwise. and yes - next step is to get the German originals of my favourites in the volume so far.

he takes to horse-play to stave off his terrors

new board description?

i mean I say 'close to the shore' for that Empson essay, but tbh I was thinking "I am troubled by this in various ways but will let it go FOR NOW" when he was giving his explanation of changelings:

To discover that your baby is a moron is a slow, painful process, and the men cannot feel it decent to interfere with any palliation for the mother such as letting her be told that her real child is being much appreciated among the fairies. The trouble is that it has lost its chance of Heaven, but it will live unusually long. This comfort was often enough. It made baby-watching a very responsible business, and probably increased the unhealthy shutting of windows, because the fairies flew in there, but to speak against it would be callous. If the baby had been stolen by devils, that would be horrible, and there could be no connivance in the belief.

not poetry per se but i picked up berryman's out of print novel 'recovery,' his thinly-veiled unfinished autobio about AA-in-the-clinic. its a very unflattering but thoughtfully drawn self portrait imo, shouldn't be OOP even if it is unfinished.

i got looks reading it at the bar.

just picked up 'our andromeda' too, looking forward to it.

i got looks reading it at the bar.

how ugly were they

ha it was all the regulars so they thought it was pretty funny actually, got a story out of the bartender about how "we don't use styrofoam cups at the water cooler here anymore because people kept saying it reminded them of the meeting they were skipping"

I've been reading more of Ingeborg Bachmann, and going slowly through Jorie Graham's selected poems, many of which leave me slightly cold despite her obvious intelligence and ability to sustain a tone of high seriousness. I think I might be more receptive to individual books of her poetry (so far I'm most impressed with her work from Erosion), since her methods seem to vary distinctly from book to book. I'm also reading Jackqueline Frost's 2013 book, The Antidote, which is a dense and oblique (occasionally prolix) but spirited commentary on the conditions of the Oakland Commune, and which does interesting things with the communizing potential of Franciscan poverty, and with Hegel's reading of gender in the Oresteia (as far as I can tell). (For the sake of transparency, I should mention that I consider Jack a friend.)

Think of torches and thirst. If there is no spirit for youth, and we have given up that gallery of ghosts. But GIVEN AGAINST, this is the antidote. I took it there, that night. As before, I was medicating with something like music. As before, I kept my monastery and lived on the lithe ancestry of words I came close to understanding.

All sunless gestures will remain oblique. I remain called in the calling to which I am called, knowing what a curse is, insulated by others, as secrecy among us is choral.

How then to dérive. To point to the beginning because of forgetting and returning. Beginning because we wish to adopt movement outside of narrative. To see crisis not as a great hill that comes into relief against the depth of a valley, but as the voltaic atmosphere and eccentricity of fog.

heavens me, i should look into that frost book

did you ever read 'the hole', hoos? have i already asked you that?

I've learned that with Graham, Rich, and Gluck I prefer their early work, years before they broke the vessels, as it were: the tension between their embryonic selves and what I know they'll become fascinates me. I'm reading Gluck's The House on Marshland fer instance.

I am not much of a poetry fan, but have random impromptu-ly enjoyed hearing Edward Field and Patricia Spears Jones read in the past two months

did you ever read 'the hole', hoos? have i already asked you that?

― j., Tuesday, February 3, 2015 2:45 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't think you have asked me that and i have not read it but i will check it out

who is it that wrote it

I've learned that with Graham, Rich, and Gluck I prefer their early work, years before they broke the vessels, as it were: the tension between their embryonic selves and what I know they'll become fascinates me. I'm reading Gluck's The House on Marshland fer instance.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, February 3, 2015 2:48 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i still haven't read much graham but i feel this entirely on rich and gluck both--*descending figure* has become one of my favorite things around

its sort of the height of powers, right, the moment where a writer is full of beans and confidently striding forward but not yet cruising amiably on momentum

oh um

not to be crass but i have a chapbook out as of today

which is some poetry you can be reading http://hoosteen.net/soft-asylum

Congratulations, HOOS!

hoos - http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780982212073/the-hole.aspx?rf=1
thought i read some stuff that made some LA-area OWS connections re it, but don't see them on the book page proper atm, so unsure

thx one way

j i will totally take a peek at that. noticing in the descrip

think of certain movements of Zukofsky's "A" for example or Williams's Paterson

both of which seem to be popping up as v hip crushes lately

PATERSON IS ALWAYS A HIP CRUSH

well done hooz

tanx

can anyone comment on Bill Shute's Kendra Steiner editions?

was gonna order the new Matt Krefting CDr and figured I'd take a chapbook or two while i'm at it. feeling rather sheepish in that poetry has always been something of a cultural blindspot for me, so i've little in the way of references here.

Philip Levine RIP.

oh shit

All those GI-era poets were born within a year of each other: Strand, Kinnell, Levine, Merrill, Merwin, Ashbery, James Wright...

GI-bill (whether or not they qualified)

just finished reading this. its a good one.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2512/the-art-of-poetry-no-39-philip-levine

woof - this is the Cavafy - Pessoa film I was telling you about (and for anyone else in the thread, a random find).

What?

thanks xyzzzz! I look forward to getting a chance to look at that.

Currently reading + enjoying R F Langley. Very very slim collected, that's how I like it now.

Points for a Compass Rose, Evan S. Connell. Pretty clearly influenced by Pound and by a strong disaffection from catholic church. Connell shows a large competence and facility with language, but his poetics here aren't about language. His metrical invention is very subdued and barely registers a pulse. His interest seems all concentrated on the distillation of his ideas.

Picked up Vendler's Part of Nature, Part of Us, essays on ~contemporary American poets~. She calls Berryman "unhanded by the world" which I really liked.

^^^^ I love that book.

I'm starting Ariana Reines's The Cow, which looks at femininity, abjection, the voraciousness of capital, and places of indistinction between humanity and animal with an abrasive verve, and which goes further than most of the appropriation-prone poetry I've read in both exploring and eliciting disgust. I'm finishing Saeed Jones's more formally traditional but graceful first book, Prelude to Bruise, which is unsparing about the ubiquity of anti-black violence writ large (Jasper, TX) and woven into ordinary intimacy, and also has some of my favorite recent lyric poems on desire:

Boy in a Whalebone Corset

The acre of grass is a sleeping
swarm of locusts, and in the house
beside it, tears too are mistaken.
thin streams of kerosene
when night throws itself against
the wall, when Nina Simone sings
in the next room without her body
and I’m against the wall, bruised
but out of mine: dream-headed
with my corset still on, stays
slightly less tight, bones against
bones, broken glass on the floor,
dance steps for a waltz
with no partner. Father in my room
looking for more sissy clothes
to burn. Something pink in his fist,
negligee, lace, fishnet, whore.
His son’s a whore this last night
of Sodom. And the record skips
and skips and skips. Corset still on,
nothing else, I’m at the window;
he’s in the field, gasoline jug,
hand full of matches, night made
of locusts, column of smoke
mistaken for Old Testament God.

"indistinction between humanity and animality," I mean

hey wow i just started reines' mercury, am loving it so far,

The Black Earth

I called my brother
It started to rain
We got bedbugs he said
You already told me I said, you said
The exterminators were coming
Not til Wednesday he said
Are they biting you I asked
A ton he said, all over. I wanted to know
What it felt like, the bites. They’re super
Itchy he said but I have some what do you call it
Cortaid. You have to get rid of your mattress
I said, Get rid of it, and wash the sheets
And everything you own, look on the internet.
What’s the point of washing everything when the exterminators
Are coming Wednesday he said. Wednesday
Is far away I said and no matter what you have to get rid
Of your mattress because you won’t be able to keep it because
The bugs lay eggs in there.
It rained on me in my world.
Last night I saw a picture of my brother
On Facebook. He was in high school and dressed
For the prom, with intense dark eyes and the strong
Throat of early manhood. Now he lets bugs
Eat him. The lobes of his head bulge. His body
Swells as he gives himself away. I let
Bugs eat me in my dreams. I relate to the glamor
Of certain homeless women. Glamor on which
Their humanity depends, not the crutch
Of common fate.
His flesh is yellow gray no matter what
I say. I accept to take colors
To get through the day by their light.
Lost women keening at me sideways
On the subway to compliment my shoes
Smelling of shit in an extraordinary combination of textures
And prints, one gold
Tooth in their heads. The way junky
Ladies suck on candy canes. I could disappear
Into that world forever, the one where I measure out my needs
Against some evil Calvinist who knows nothing
Of the armor a woman must wear. I and my jealous, narrow heart
Have disappeared into that world
I think about being a person to rule
The internet with my finite goals
And self-possession, like the false
Simplicity of this. I think about the fat I want
To consolidate my sorrow in this world, I want it in my ass
And thighs. Wouldn’t it be nice to round out my self with whosoever’s mouth
Could just pout in silence and be fair. Little simplicity
If any is transmitted by me. It would be good to transmit
Impossibility simply; not the same thing. I see his face
Eaten by bugs and years of forcefed legal drugs
As a zebra cadaver swells with rot and worms, as my heart
Swells with love for what cannot
Respond. If he wants to let the bugs eat his face
He will let them. I stand here frankly
Using my imagination, my heart
In batten, not doing a thing.

I love that. There's something impressively unforced about Reines's language no matter how far she goes into extremity.

That Philip Levine interview Scott linked is really good. Makes me want to pick up some of his work.

Lately, in terms of poetry, I read Philip Larkin's Collected Poems straight through (it's not very long), and now I'm dipping here and there into a Les Murray collection.

in spasms i'm reading high windows by larkin, too - even slimmer, & just crazily consistent & strong - & it's so rich; i know he's kinda fairly present or well described as narrator, this ornery, wearisome grumpy guy, but putting that out of mind or fresh to it the reflective, regretful mood is just always so strong-

Stopping the diary
Was a stun to memory,
Was a blank starting,

One no longer cicatrized
By such words, such actions
As bleakened waking.

l wanted them over.
Hurried to burial
And looked back on

Like the wars and winters
Missing behind the Windows
of an opaque childhood.

And the empty pages?
Should they ever be filled
Let it be with observed

Celestial recurrences,
The day the flowers come.
And when the birds go.

+ hey one way street that's very well put; something planimetric about the writing, that it can express personally & then describe fantastically & not even notably seem to change register in between

Philip Larkin's Collected Poems straight through (it's not very long)

is that right!

might have to grab that

i know he's kinda fairly present or well described as narrator, this ornery, wearisome grumpy guy

I think that's partly why I found it fairly easy to read the collected poems straight through, as I usually would with a novel but rarely with poems: that consistent narrative voice and similarity of mood made it easier for me to key into each poem, without the initial disorientation that I would feel with a more eclectic or diverse poet. That persistent gloominess, shot through with occasional rays of wonder or awe, makes it easier to vibe off the atmosphere even if I occasionally skimmed over some of the subtleties of metaphor or syntax.

Also there are recurring motifs, like his unhappy childhood - so a brief reference, like in the poem above, evokes a richer context after reading other poems on the topic.

I don't know what I am doing there. I do
notice the more I lose touch
with what I previously saw as my life
the more real my spot in the dark winter pew becomes

"they turn machine guns into songs and songs into machine guns/the hand of freedom without lies/the hand that Fidel shook" -- Nazim Hikmet

following it up with Yannos Ritsos and a Victor Serge novel so that's what I am all about this week.

leaves of grass!!

at the used book store yesterday I picked up a Yeats collected poems (to replace my old copy which remains in the possession of an ex) + Harold Bloom's monograph on Yeats (with a bonus postcard from Yeats' grave site tucked between the pages!)

otm xp

Nicanor Parra!

THE VICES OF THE MODERN WORLD

Modern delinquents
Are authorized to convene daily in parks and gardens.
Equipped with powerful binoculars and pocket watches
They break into kiosks favored by death
And install their laboratories among the rosebushes in full flower.
From there they direct the photographers and beggars that roam the neighborhood
Trying to raise a small temple to misery
And, if they get a chance, having some woebegone shoeshine boy.
The cowed police run from these monsters
Making for the middle of town
Where the great year's end fires are breaking out
And a hooded hero is robbing two nuns at gun point.

The vices of the modern world:
The motor car and the movies,
Racial discrimination,
The extermination of the Indian,
The manipulations of high finance,
The catastrophe of the aged,
The clandestine white-slave trade carried on by international sodomites,
Self-advertisement and gluttony,
Expensive funerals,
Personal friends of His Excellency,
The elevation of folklore to a spiritual category,
The abuse of soporifics and philosophy,
The softening-up of men favored by fortune,
Autoeroticism and sexual cruelty,
The exaltation of the study of dreams and the subconscious to the detriment of common sense,
The exaggerated faith in serums and vaccines,
The deification of the phallus,
The international spread-legs policy patronized by the reactionary press,
The unbounded lust for power and money,
The gold rush,
The fatal dollar dance,
Speculation and abortion,
The destruction of idols,
Overdevelopment of dietetics and pedagogical psychology,
The vices of dancing, of the cigarette, of games of chance,
The drops of blood that are often found on the sheets of newlyweds,
The madness for the sea,
Agoraphobia and claustrophobia,
The disintegration of the atom,
The gory humor of the theory of relativity,
The frenzy to return to the womb,
The cult of the exotic,
Airplane accidents,
Incinerations, mass purges, retention of passports,
All this just because,
To produce vertigo,
Dream-analysis,
And the spread of radiomania.

As has been demonstrated
The modern world is composed of artificial flowers
Grown under bell jars like death,
It is made of movie stars
And blood-smeared boxers fighting by moonlight
And nightingale-men controlling the economic lives of the nations
With certain easily explained devices;
Usually they are dressed in black like precursors of autumn
And eat roots and wild herbs.
Meanwhile the wise, gnawed by rats,
Rot in the crypts of cathedrals
And souls with the slightest nobility are relentlessly persecuted by the police.

The modern world is an enormous sewer,
The chic restaurants are stuffed with digesting corpses
And birds flying dangerously low.
That's not all: the hospitals are full of impostors,
To say nothing of those heirs of the spirit who found colonies in the anus of each new surgical case.

Modern industrialists occasionally suffer from the effects of the poisoned atmosphere.
They are stricken at their sewing machines by the terrifying sleeping sickness
Which eventually turns them into angels, of a sort.
They deny the existence of the physical world
And brag about being poor children of the grave.
And yet the world has always been like this.
Truth, like beauty, is neither created nor lost
And poetry is in things themselves or is merely a mirage of the spirit.
I admit that a well-planned earthquake
Can wipe out a city rich in traditions in a matter of seconds,
And that a meticulous aerial bombardment
Smashes trees, horses, thrones, music,
But what does it matter
If, while the world's greatest ballerina
Is dying, poor and abandoned, in a village in southern France,
Spring restores to man a few of the vanished flowers.

What I say is, let's try to be happy, sucking on the miserable human rib.
Let's extract from it the restorative liquid,
Each one following his personal inclinations.
Let's cling to this divine table scrap!
Panting and trembling,
Let's suck those lips that drive us wild.
The lot is cast.
Let's breathe in this enervating and destructive perfume
And for one more day live the life of the elect.
Out of his armpits man extracts the wax he needs to mold the faces of his idols
And out of woman's sex the straw and the mud for his temples.
Therefore
I grow a louse on my tie
And smile at the imbeciles descending from the trees.

I ordered my first book of Antipoems recently. there is N O good poetry in it -- Not One. only Antipoetry as far as the I can C

There are some really good runs in these. Trying to chase up on what Bolano likes (reading his Between Parenthesis collection): Lihn, Gimferrer, Dario and so on. I think its going to be bloody hard to find much, Parra is all I've found thus far.

Maybe I need to actually start re-learning Spanish.

got a selected schwartz in the mail yesterday! lovely old stuff.

Lately, mostly Eileen Myles's Not Me:

I imitate her and
I don't do it well. She didn't leave her wallet
or us in a store.
I'm just a pale imitation
it is simply not my style
to open the hearts of strangers to my true
personhood. I hope you accept
this tiny confession of what
I am currently going through.
And if you are experiencing something of similar nature
tell someone, not me,
but tell someone. It's the new
human program to be in. It would
be nice for at least
these final moments if
we could sigh
with the relief
of being in
the same program
with all the
other humans
whispering
in school. I can't quite locate
this terror, but I am trying
to be my mother
or Edward the Confessor
smiling down on you with up-praying
hands.

I found a copy of Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language for fifty cents. I bought it, brought it home, and I've been reading it. So far I've liked it very well, whereas when I've picked up some of her later collections and browsed them to see how I liked them, I didn't respond to them nearly as favorably. I don't know why.

so hey does anybody get their poetry in blog form

new poetry? nah
I do find blogs useful for big-name 20th-century stuff that has yet to pass into the public domain

Four Greek Poets collection (includes 2x nobel prize winners on this, I clearly needed to bump up my quota of Nobel Prize winners this week!)

Somwhat more seriously I can't quite get into Cavafy. Fairly dry set of historical poems, or maybe its the selection. Seferis and esp Elytis I like.

John Donne selection. Onto some Hardy and Lawrence next.

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 28 October 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but re Cavafy I am a sucker for poised reflective historical melancholia.

― woof, Tuesday, 28 October 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Totally wrong on this - made my way through Cavafy's complete poems and its a book for all time. Such a singular sensibility and reading 'em is also trippy: you have these historical poems alongside passionate homoeroticism. Not valuing one over the other - it would be easy to. The Historical poems are a bit more work to decode, you may want to look at notes but actually I also felt it was unnecessary. The characters he revives from Greek history and myth are given emotions to express, he always makes them more than cut outs.

All done in the best free verse I've read since Pessoa

Need to check back on the excerpts from the Penguin. Just as likely I picked this up on the wrong day. Or maybe the selection didn't work.

I changed my opinion from the v first poem in the collection. Nothing historical or erotic here.

With no consideration, no pity, no shame,
they have built walls around me, thick and high.
And now I sit here feeling hopeless.
I can’t think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind—
because I had so much to do outside.
When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed!
But I never heard the builders, not a sound.
Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world.

I suppose I've often needed a bit of existential grease to get me going.

I'm reading the new Merrill bio!

Not poetry, but -adjacent: I've been reading Anne Boyer's series of short notes on poetics, most recently What They Will Say to Deter You:

2. They will tell you not to look around, tell you that the only thing that is poetry is lyric poetry. Whatever is not lyric, what is always arising (how can you not also notice it?) they will tell you is definitionally not poetry. Whatever is lyric they will tell you is poetry, even when it is not.

3. They will tell you not to look back, that lyric poetry is universally the lyric as it is revived in European romanticism, but they won’t actually say this, they will say that this particular and historical form of the lyric is also what is ahistorical and has existed forever. It will be very confusing to be a historical subject who is taught to read a historically particular form of poetry ahistorically and then also to read every other poem as if it were a poem not from its time but from that one. You will be given only one way to read a poem, and therefore you will be expected to impose on every “poem” a restrictive and exclusive poemness. Each poem you will be asked to identify as such will be used to exclude all of the others. A poem becomes the problem with borders.

4. The people who have thought this far about poetry and consider themselves very aesthetically advanced and will go around putting the frame of the poem on everything. This is because a hundred years ago a man from Europe thought to do this to a toilet. These aesthetically advanced people enthralled to the acts of a hundred years ago will frame corpses, graveyards, transcripts, autopsy reports, student loan bills, and newspaper articles with “poetry.” They will make you think that poetry is a dune buggy race between nominalists.

5. You will pay for the sins of Percy Shelley but you will not know why.

yeah they're really great
making something as vague as poetry month mean something

the miguel james poems she posted, & i think translated, too, are really wonderful

You want flowers
Me, a horse, a guitar
And to never work, never, never.

http://www.typomag.com/issue18/james.html

this is kind of what i am getting at when i am getting at Where Are The Poetry Blogs

i am also open to poetry via twitter

feel like i'm bargaining here

These might not be quite what you're looking for, but I'm partial to Jackie Wang's blog, as well as Bhanu Kapil's:

http://loneberry.tumblr.com/
http://jackkerouacispunjabi.blogspot.com/?view=classic

Also, the contents of the latest issue of my favorite communist poetry journal, Lana Turner, are available here:

http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/contents/print-issue-7-contents-2

Cathy Park Hong's "Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde" is essential, but it's a strong issue throughout.

no hey that's great, thank you. hyped to read. i just feel like there are stretches of time - the afternoon at work; 1am on a cellphone - super suited to reading shorter poems through tired eyes.

did you read any of the bhanu kapil books? i've only ever dipped into them in bookstores, she seems great.

I really want to read Ban, but I'm too broke to buy books and it seems to be registered by my library but absent from the stacks. I'll stop adding to my recommendations for now, but I just remembered Joshua Jennifer Espinoza's blog (which I stumbled across out of an interest in trans poetics and trans women's writing):

http://joshuajenniferespinoza.com/

i am also open to poetry via twitter

― tender is the late-night daypart (schlump), Wednesday, 22 April 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ah yes :-)

I follow George Szirtes, he often tweets poetry or stories he is writing.

lol i signed up for the academy of american poets' 'poem-a-day' email service, i am web 2.0

anne boyer's list of shit they say seems ... weirdly outside my experience of what people who do english lit are meant to think, like the exact opposite. i wonder if its an MFA thing or an american thing she's talking about.

also i am considering printing out her tumblr posts so i can read them at leisure

yeah what about all the I MUST WRITE AN EPIC modernists?? (of course they did it by shmushing lyrics together but)

i am reading SPRING AND ALL (we make bratwurst of them) again

i mean come on this is so cheap

10. I don’t tell you any of this. I would like you to make a poem you can turn into a thousand ships and a thousand ships you can turn into unimagined forms, alphabets too, the epics of the spaces between your eyelashes, poems with which you learn how to make anything old into anything new, but mostly the world.

yeah none of what they tell you ever ends up contesting ossified orthodoxies in favor of TURNING YOUR POEM INTO A HEART

Boyer's list as I read it is directed against the culture of MFA programs and mainstream poetry journals (which do seem to focus on the lyric) and the more dessicated forms of Conceptual Poetry (i.e. Kenneth Goldsmith), and also functions indirectly as a defense of her own political poetry; the other notes in the series on poetry are subtler in thinking about the relation between language and politics, but it seemed worth linking to what was then the most recent one.

certainly - but it reads like a rehash of decades of langpo poetics re same. it's irritating that poetry is so required to have this constant accompaniment of theoretical posturing to 'defend' it (arguably for institutional reasons that are not too far off from MFA culture, publication demands, etc!) that it results in so much… indulgence.

I'm reading View with a Grain of Sand, a selection of poems by Wistawa Szymborska. I enjoy her intellectual playfulness, which seems to run through every one of her poems, even when they are wistful or bleak.

yesterday i checked out from the library collected poems by david markson and questions of travel by elizabeth bishop and read the first poem in each.

i hope to read more.

Flowers of Evil (tr. Richard Howard)

Also began on The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, appreciate the depth and range of coverage - its great to read Lermontov's poetry for the first time and more Pushkin (although I dislike the description of him as the equivalent of Goethe in Germany). Always more Pushkin.

The problem is there is almost too much of it, have people forgot how to curate? Something of the length of Faber book of German/Italian 20th century poems would be more preferable. I know the project covers a bigger period.

Its only a quibble at the moment.

Taking a break from the mighty The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry to read some shorter books from Roberto Bolano and Apollinaire. Bolano was just good at fkn everything, scary.

"Boyer's list as I read it is directed against the culture of MFA programs and mainstream poetry journals (which do seem to focus on the lyric) and the more dessicated forms of Conceptual Poetry (i.e. Kenneth Goldsmith), and also functions indirectly as a defense of her own political poetry; the other notes in the series on poetry are subtler in thinking about the relation between language and politics, but it seemed worth linking to what was then the most recent one.

― one way street, Wednesday, April 22, 2015 4:03 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink"

yeah this was what i was wondering -- idk -- are MFA programs really so backwards?? is there really such a thing as a 'mainstream poetry journal'?? --

i never looked at maggie nelson's bluets because MFA ha ha ha, then i saw it has some kind of wittgenstein connection, and it and her recent work has all kind of gendery stuff in it, so i took a look - turned out it seemed to have fully integrated the 'dessicated' and the 'political' into MFA-ish refracted lyricism, so i guess my picture of mfa programs needed some updating

the wittgenstein part was total shit though, just pointless pastiche used to add a veneer of culture it seemed

The problem is there is almost too much of it, have people forgot how to curate?

Or edit and anthologise, yes - and you're right, Hofmann's 20th C German poems is a fantastic exception. I noticed this with biography about a decade ago - including everything, pertinent or not, so a narrative gets drowned in impedimenta. Feels like academic/research methods dictate selection, and perhaps a fear of imposing an editorial view. That's fine if you've got one of those grand apparatus 12 volume collections with footnotes up to your eyeballs, but it makes it unwieldy, and for the casual but interested reader, difficult to access.

yeah this was what i was wondering -- idk -- are MFA programs really so backwards?? is there really such a thing as a 'mainstream poetry journal'?? --
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Wednesday, May 6, 2015 9:21 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You're right, "mainstream poetry journals" was hasty and imprecise (I think we can agree that Silliman's opposition between the comfortable poets of the "School of Quietude" and the experimentalists of the "post-avant" is dubiously neat), and my vague secondhand impression of MFA culture (from speaking to some friends who have been part of one particular program) is that MFA programs aren't necessarily hostile to radical or collective projects but don't foster them--nor would one expect them to, since (at least from outside) they seem to mostly serve a professionalizing function. Anyway, I was hastily sketching out the vision of the literary scene that Boyer seems to be trying to ward away rather than necessarily endorsing that vision as true. I think Boyer's fifth note on poetry is probably more useful in making explicit her anxiety that poetry mostly serves a decorative function in society:

Sometimes it’s easy to believe that poetry is decorative to the leisure of the children of the rich or a flourish to a cop car or a form of banking and pacification or a strident and fractured whining or a frame with nothing in it but Kenny Goldsmith and everyone else’s blood. Sometimes it’s easy to believe also that the object world is anchorless and unenchanted and that the choice is mfa and new york city and that every against is a for, every contra- will be transmuted into a pro-, then to believe in the abstracted everywhereness of nothing and in the complicated habits of techno-courtiers and the harried morning, the harried noontime, the harried afternoon, the harried evening, the harried midnight. Then perhaps easy to mistake the couple for the commune, to mistake the family for nature, to forget the object world is anchored and enchanted, to mistake for intelligence the weak theory emancipated from emancipation in the prisonhouse of doctorates or to mistake for necessary the thoughts of the upright slender white fathers and sons. Then it is easy to believe the word “struggle” attached to the “my” of a king, to mistake it for true, also, when they say the light of the screen in your face is fate and not history and to mistake it for inevitability that requires you to wear a nametag to work, then to mistake it for your own agency to smile at bosses or customers or men. Sometimes it is easy to wake up Easter morning and write “books are the detritus of tragic industry” but then to remember that apart from any book and earlier than any fake-inevitablity and later than any fake-inevitability too there is refusal and dialectic and our compañeras and possibility and every living, circulating, necessary poem.

Or edit and anthologise, yes - and you're right, Hofmann's 20th C German poems is a fantastic exception.

I'd urge you or anyone to look at the Italian Faber collection (there is also a French poetry one which I haven't seen). I wish that Faber had done a Russian one.

Feels like academic/research methods dictate selection, and perhaps a fear of imposing an editorial view.

I was going through some more last night and there was one point where a poem was selected to say (and I paraphrase) 'this poet is not very good but we are selecting because the translator deserves to be remembered' and I thought this was one instance of what you might be describing. Academic can be great - sometimes ideas can't help to be complex and dry, or placing a bigger limit on your demand but here it doesn't work - feels indulgent.

I think Robert Chandler's project (or what I see as his project) of rescuing Russian prose from just being Dostoevsky vs Tolstoy plus a few 19th century guys - and having any other Russian prose rising to the fore due to its political circumstances in a tabloidy manner (Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn) rather than because it is great conflicted art (Platonov, Shamalov etc) is great for prose but its coming up a cropper for poetry.

- 150 pgs cover 1750s - 1900. Don't think its anyone's fault but I'm finding it hard to connect with anyone else but Pushkin (apart from Lermontov but then again he has a notable work of prose as well)

- There are then nearly 400 pages for 20th century, etc. But as I'm going through it a lot of this seems to have been well covered elsewhere. Futurism, Acmeists. 200/400 cover the 1910s-1930s I'd say, not an exactly neglected period. A few of the poets I haven't heard much of have frustratingly few poems and I note them here to chase: Kuzmin is brilliant - any fans of Cavafy would like. Voloshin can be explosive. Sofia Parnok has an interesting biog, frustrating to have three short poems. They are really good! At the moment I'd say it would've been worth sacrificing earlier eras for more from these. This set of translations by Paul Schmidt looks like a better shaping of that period.

- Throughout we have biog intros to the poet ranging from 1-5 pages. An anxiety to have context (and maybe cover the fact that some of these poets should have more poems?) Faber is good for just letting it be. Trusts the reader to chase up on any threads.

- Then it samples the latter part of the 20th century, which I haven't got to properly yet, and meant to showcase Shamalov's poetry (among others). Skipped to some of these and I'd say its the book's big selling point/contribution.

I'd urge you or anyone to look at the Italian Faber collection

i bought this, in fact I bought it in january, but it never got delivered. Realised this a couple of weeks ago (possibly as a result of this thread in fact), and they apologised and sent it out immediately. Haven't looked into it properly yet, though an immediate response was 'i know fuck all about italian poetry'.

All I know about Italian poetry is that Dante Alighieri is much better than Gabriele D'Annunzio.

Think of D'Annuzio as something people at a certain time read. Like I dunno Henry Miller or Keroauc.

Have read The Inferno since I finished all the Russian poetry. In the end The Penguin Book... is very uneven but Shamolov is so good, and if it means more of his poetry is translated then I'm all for it. Another find was Arseny Tarkovsky.

The other Russian poets who got similarly sized selections were Ivanov and Slutsky. Only a couple of Ivanov poems had a substantial charm to them for me to have another look.

There were 2-3 poets from the OBEIRU avant-garde group (whom Pussy Riot gave a nod to) and it just doesn't quite fit in this collection, which is part of the point as they don't want to fit in, but do the editors get that in their worries to be as historically comprehensive as possible?

Too many poets at the end had one single poem to them. Felt tired. Little chance of impact, and when there is any -- like in Yevgeny Vinokurov's "Missing the Troop Train" -- then, well, I am not going to get to anything else anytime soon, and its unlikely to be available anyway!

After Inferno I've stayed medieval w/Villon. Now finishing some poems by Gunter Grass.

Good article. Unfortunately subscriber-only:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/04/john-berryman-tragedy-comedy-together/

I bought Kate Tempest's Brand New Ancients on a whim, and I love it. I know it was written to be read -- or really, performed -- but it works on the page, too. What she does seems kind of obvious but would be easy to do badly.

Yeah, I want to read her poetry and plays. Was immediately impressed by her use of language on Everybody Down, the delivery and writing: conversational and seemingly spontaneous, but lucid zoom-shot phrases in the midst of tumultous grey scenes, Went a bit convenient and otherwise soft toward the end, but that's about the plot choices, not the language(or music). (h'm-m-m, it's gonna be a novel too). She's got charisma.

Re-reading a Selected Roethke with a fresher sensitivity. So lovely.

From Twitter:

http://www.africanpoetryprize.org/winning-poems-2015

that Safia Elhillo is some of the best poetry I've read in a while

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/each-day-unexpected-salvation-john-cage

http://www.asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Poetry&id=78

I've read this a couple of times and could not resist quoting:

[...] It would be December.
A jade horse beneath the waters
A double transparency, a line in mid-air
All these things at your fingertips
All undone through the portal of time
Silent and blue. [...]

[And ... ]

[...] It little matters to me
Being nothing around you, a shadow, tattered stuff
In the judgement of your mother and sister. [...]

[Reckless ... save yourself ... give what you can ... when it comes to you]

I bought a copy of Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouveres, tr. Frederick Goldin, and just finished the section on Guillaume IX before supper.

berryman's dream songs

dennis johnson - incognito lounge, at the moment.

in more of a nonfic mood at the moment but oh man i love hilda hilst

Bhanu Kapil's Ban En Banlieue

reading through a selected adrienne rich right now, enamored

also picked up the out of print book of berryman critical essays "the freedom of the poet"

I can't read Rich after 1980 :(

Of the Rich I've browsed around in, I best liked The Dream of a Common Language, which also fits Alfred's criteria of pre-1980 poems.

Her Dickinson essay is one of the most lucid things about her I've read.

I can't read Rich after 1980 :(

Is this like a poetry after Auschwitz thing? What happened in 1980?

Her verse collapsed into well-meaning doggerel.

its funny i met someone recently who's reading her from the present day backwards, and i'm sure we must have very different impressions

I got an affection for the first collections of poets like Rich, Berryman, Merrill.

What do y'all think of John Hollander and Anthony Hecht?

I like Hecht's monologues and Holocaust poems. None of the postwar formalists compare with Merrill imo.

Fair enough. A recent favorite of mine has been August Kleinzahler. I came across one of his poems entitled "A History of Western Music" and never looked back. His memoir is really good too.

Okay, please to inform where to start with Merrill.

james merrill: c/d, s/d

just found this thread!

poems i've been reading a lot over the past couple of weeks:

paz - certainty
rilke - archaic torso of apollo
jarell - 90 north
wc williams - a love song
verlaine - clair de lune