[Ezra Pound, a fragment of a very late Canto that was never finished]
― Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 7 May 2004 06:49 (twenty years ago) link
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,
For two gross of broken statues,For a few thousand battered books.
[Ezra Pound, the last section of "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley", about WWI]
― Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 7 May 2004 06:55 (twenty years ago) link
I have read the 'Four Quartets' now. Wow. I think you were onto something when you said his poetry is a worldweary sigh. But what a sigh!
― cozen (Cozen), Friday, 7 May 2004 13:11 (twenty years ago) link
― yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Friday, 7 May 2004 14:06 (twenty years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 7 May 2004 15:18 (twenty years ago) link
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough.
--Ezra Pound
― pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Friday, 7 May 2004 23:43 (twenty years ago) link
There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;...
And I have known the eyes already, known them all--The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase....
― pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Friday, 7 May 2004 23:52 (twenty years ago) link
― pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Sunday, 9 May 2004 16:40 (twenty years ago) link
― cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 9 May 2004 16:54 (twenty years ago) link
In the back of a garbage truck parked on a side street, five garbage collectors gobble a chocolate cake, the gift of a lady each would like to squeeze a lot.
Sprawled in the gutter a black dog licks his dick like there is no tomorrow, and no tomorrow either for the five men eating with grubby fingers, smearing
the hand-cut slabs of thick black cake onto cheeks, chins, noses and sometimes their mouths. That frosting dribbles sweetness like a cut wrist drips blood
and they suck it from their fingernails and gulp down the last crumbs. How disgusting! squawks a passing matron to her friend. Had they fathomed the fullness
of the world's filth they would never have trusted their pristine garbage to these galoots. One puffs out his cheeks to make a poot-poot noise like a fart,
and the matrons scuttle off to eat sweet creams and read their lady poems. What a dreadful world! The immortal verse of Keats versus a dog's red dick on the concrete.
Such contradictions make us rich. The black dog whacks his tail against the sidewalk. These garbage guys are his heroes and the dog reckons that if he's polite
all five will let him lick their fingers clean. The hot sun baking his belly, his fleas idle for a change, the prospect of sweet things in his mouth. Why, if he
could talk, he'd make a speech against the intellect, art and math. What's so precious about what's not there? Into the trash with Einstein and his furious sums!
Stephen Dobyns
― scott seward (scott seward), Sunday, 9 May 2004 16:56 (twenty years ago) link
Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
― scott seward (scott seward), Sunday, 9 May 2004 17:11 (twenty years ago) link
A woman travels to Brazil for plastic surgery and a face-lift. She is sixty and has the usual desire to stay pretty. Once she is healed she takes her new face out on the streets of Rio. A young man with a gun wants her money. Bang, she's dead. The body is shipped back to New York, but in the morgue there is a mix-up. The son is sent for. He is told that his mother is one of these ten different women. Each has been shot. Such is modern life. He studies them all but can't find her. With her new face, she has become a stranger. Maybe it's this one, maybe it's that one. He looks at their breasts. Which ones nursed him? He presses their hands to his cheek. Which ones consoled him? He even tries climbing into their laps to see which feels more familiar but the coroner stops him. Well, says the coroner, which is your mother? They all are, says the young man, let me take them as a package. The coroner hesitates, then agrees. Actually it solves a lot of problems. The young man has the ten women shipped home, then cremates them all together. You've seen how some people have a little urn on the mantle? This man has a huge silver garbage can. In the spring, he drags the garbage can out to the garden and begins working the teeth, the ash, the bits of bone into the soil. Then he plants tomatoes. His mother loved tomatoes. They grow straight from seed, so fast and big that the young man is amazed. He takes the first ten into the kitchen. In their roundness, he sees his mother's breasts. In their smoothness, he finds the consoling touch of her hands. Mother, mother, he cries, and flings himself on the tomatoes. Forget about the knife, the fork, the pinch of salt. Try to imagine the filial starvation, think of his ravenous kisses.
― scott seward (scott seward), Sunday, 9 May 2004 17:23 (twenty years ago) link
from Louise Gluck's "October"
Snow had fallen. I remembermusic from an open window.
Come to me, said the world.This is not to sayit spoke in exact setencesbut that I perceived beauty in this manner.
Sunrise. A film of moistureon each living thing. Pools of cold lightformed in the gutters.
I stoodat the doorway,ridiculous as it now seems.
What others found in art,I found in nature. What others foundin human love, I found in nature.Very simple. But there was no voice there.
Winter was over. In the thawed dirt,bits of green were showing.
Come to me, said the world. I was standingin my woolcoat at a kind of bright portal--I can finally saylong ago; it give me considerable pleasure. Beauty
the healer, the teacher--
death cannot harm memore than you have harmed me,my beloved life.
― Donald, Sunday, 9 May 2004 17:56 (twenty years ago) link
{James Schuyler 'Faure's Second Piano Quartet': in honour of the new Mark Ford-edited New York school anthology}
― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Sunday, 9 May 2004 21:23 (twenty years ago) link
in a dusty shop you pause in, or a baryou never tried, and a smell will do as well; then you're
suddenly very far from what you know.You found it as a child, when the next field to you
was the world's end, a breeze of being gone.Now it begins to give, a single nerve, low down:
it sags, as if it felt the gravityat long last.[...]
The Nerve - Glynn Maxwell
― bnw (bnw), Sunday, 9 May 2004 22:50 (twenty years ago) link
IZUMI SHIKIBU
(Now if I could only find a haiku about writing haiku... then my artist friend could paint that on my body instead of just ideograms...)
― yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Monday, 10 May 2004 12:52 (twenty years ago) link
First: Five syllables.Second: Seven syllables.Third: Five syllables.
("Haiku" by Ron Padgett.)
― Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 10 May 2004 22:17 (twenty years ago) link
denis johnson - you
― lauren (laurenp), Monday, 10 May 2004 22:46 (twenty years ago) link
-- Casuistry (chri...), May 10th, 2004* * * * Darlin', not only do you warrant special mention in my blog for this, but I'll be sure to credit you when the photo of my fleshy calligraphy project is posted (and I'll send you the link!)
― yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Tuesday, 11 May 2004 13:19 (twenty years ago) link
Today's poem comes from Robert Grenier, who is one of my favorites, although I think perhaps his poems work better if you read, like, thirty of them rather than just one. But here's one:
IT'S NOT SO MUCH THAT SHE'S TAKING A LONG TIME
it's probably more that she has to stand in a long line
― Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 12 May 2004 18:29 (twenty years ago) link
On a day like any other day, like "yesterday or centuries before," in a town with the one remembered street, shaded by the buckeye and the sycamore-- the street long and true as a theorem, the day like yesterday or the day before, the street you walked down centuries before-- the story the same as the others flooding in from the cardinal points is turning to take a good look at you. Every creature, intelligent or not, has disappeared-- the humans, phosphorescent, the duplicating pets, the guppies and spaniels, the Woolworth's turtle that cost forty-nine cents (with the soiled price tag half-peeled on its shell)-- but, from the look of things, it only just happened. The wheels of the upside-down tricycle are spinning. The swings are empty but swinging. And the shadow is still there, and there is the object that made it, riding the proximate atmosphere, oblong and illustrious above the dispeopled bedroom community, venting the memories of those it took[...]
The Disappearances - Vijay Seshadri
― bnw (bnw), Thursday, 13 May 2004 02:10 (twenty years ago) link
― the pomefox, Thursday, 13 May 2004 13:05 (twenty years ago) link
― aimurchie, Friday, 14 May 2004 10:18 (twenty years ago) link
1 You blame me that I do not write 2 with the accent of the age: 3 the eunuch voice of scholarship, 4 or the reformer's rage 5 (blurred by a fag-end in the twisted lip). 6 You blame me that I do not call 7 truculent nations to unite. 8 I answer that my poems all 9 are woven out of love's loose ends; 10 for myself and for my friends.
11 You blame me that I do not face 12 the banner-headline fact 13 of rape and death in bungalows, 14 cities and workmen sacked. 15 Tomorrow's time enough to rant of those, 16 when the whirlpool sucks us in. 17 Turn away from the bitter farce, 18 or have you now forgotten 19 that cloud, star, leaf, and water's dance 20 are facts of life, and worth your glance?
21 You blame me that I do not look 22 at cities, swivelled, from 23 the eye of the crazy gunman, or 24 the man who drops the bomb. 25 Twenty years watching from an ivory tower 26 taller than your chimney-stack, 27 I have seen fields beyond the smoke: 28 and think it better that I make 29 in the sloganed wall the people pass, 30 a window---not a looking-glass.
― cozen (Cozen), Friday, 14 May 2004 13:40 (twenty years ago) link
― aimurchie, Friday, 14 May 2004 15:16 (twenty years ago) link
― Fred (Fred), Saturday, 15 May 2004 09:59 (twenty years ago) link
(TSE, of course. Some poetry to celebrate my birthday! Among some talk --and time for-- you and me.!)
― pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Saturday, 15 May 2004 18:04 (twenty years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 15 May 2004 18:20 (twenty years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 15 May 2004 18:26 (twenty years ago) link
― Gregory Henry (Gregory Henry), Saturday, 15 May 2004 18:59 (twenty years ago) link
― cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 15 May 2004 20:12 (twenty years ago) link
"The Truth About Horace."
It is very aggravatingTo hear the solemn pratingOf the fossils who are stating That old Horace was a prude;When we know that with the ladiesHe was always raising HadesAnd with many an escapade his Best productions are imbued.
There's really not much harm in aLarge number of his carminaBut these people find alarm in a Few records of his acts;So they'd squelch the muse caloric,And to students sophomoricThey'd present as metaphoric What old Horace meant for facts.
We have always thought 'em lazy;Now we adjudge 'em crazy!Why, Horace was a daisy That was very much alive!And the wisest of us know himAs his Lydia verses show him,--Go, read that virile poem,-- It is No. 25.
He was a very owl, sir,And starting out to prowl, sir,You bet he made Rome howl, sir, Until he filled his date;With a massic-laden dittyAnd a classic maiden prettyHe painted up the city, And Maecenas paid the freight!
― Begs2Differ (Begs2Differ), Sunday, 16 May 2004 13:26 (twenty years ago) link
The pedigree of HoneyDoes not concern the Bee,Nor lineage of EcstasyDelay the ButterflyOn spangle journeys to the peakOf some perceiveless thing—The right of way to TripoliA more essential thing.
--
The Pedigree of HoneyDoes not concern the Bee—A Clover, any time, to him,Is Aristocracy—
~Emily Dickinson
― yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Sunday, 16 May 2004 13:35 (twenty years ago) link
[...]Here I am, floating through the skywith my head on wrongso that my hair tickles my neckand my chin sticks up,and the lovers kissing in the gardenlook comical, their feet strainingto touch the ground.It's been a long time since someonekissed me in the garden.My mouth's up too high.[...]
Rene Wenger - "After Chagall"
― bnw (bnw), Monday, 17 May 2004 01:42 (twenty years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 17 May 2004 05:03 (twenty years ago) link
― Begs2Differ (Begs2Differ), Monday, 17 May 2004 13:12 (twenty years ago) link
The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not wantTo be always stressing either its flux or its permanence, I do not want to be a tragic or philosophic chorusBut to keep my eye only on the nearer futureAnd after that let the sea flow over us.
Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle, Join hands and make believe that joinedHands will keep away the wolves of waterWho howl along our coast. And be it assumedThat no one hears them among the talk and laughter.
['Wolves' - Louis Macneice]
― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 17 May 2004 13:58 (twenty years ago) link
― Archel (Archel), Monday, 17 May 2004 14:31 (twenty years ago) link
1 For three days and three nights, he has listened 2 to the pounding of a terrible jug band 3 now reduced to a wheezy concertina 4 and the disinterested thump of a tea-chest bass. 5 It seems safe to look: wires trail on the pillowcase, 6 a drip swings overhead; then the clear tent 7 becomes his father's clapped-out Morris Minor, 8 rattling towards home. The windscreen presents 9 the unshattered myth of a Scottish spring; 10 with discreet complicity, the road 11 swerves to avoid the solitary cloud. 12 On an easy slope, his father lets the engine 13 cough into silence. Everything is still. 14 He frees the brake: the car surges uphill.
- Don Paterson
― cozen (Cozen), Monday, 17 May 2004 17:56 (twenty years ago) link
- Federico Garcia Lorca
― cozen (Cozen), Monday, 17 May 2004 18:06 (twenty years ago) link
― lauren (laurenp), Monday, 17 May 2004 18:56 (twenty years ago) link
― lauren (laurenp), Monday, 17 May 2004 18:57 (twenty years ago) link
I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve; What then? poor beastie, thou maun live! A daimen-icker in a thrave 'S a sma' request: I'll get a blessin wi' the lave, An' never miss't!
Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin! It's silly wa's the win's are strewin! An' naething, now, to big a new ane, O' foggage green! An' bleak December's winds ensuin, Baith snell an' keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an' wast, An' weary Winter comin fast, An' cozie here, beneath the blast, Thou thought to dwell, Till crash! the cruel coulter past Out thro' thy cell.
That wee-bit heap o' leaves an' stibble, Has cost thee monie a weary nibble! Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble, But house or hald. To thole the Winter's sleety dribble, An' cranreuch cauld!
But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!
Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me! The present only toucheth thee: But Och! I backward cast my e'e, On prospects drear! An' forward, tho' I canna see, I guess an' fear!
― aimurchie, Tuesday, 18 May 2004 03:55 (twenty years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 18 May 2004 07:13 (twenty years ago) link
― aimurchie, Tuesday, 18 May 2004 10:06 (twenty years ago) link
― cozen (Cozen), Tuesday, 18 May 2004 10:07 (twenty years ago) link
― aimurchie, Tuesday, 18 May 2004 11:01 (twenty years ago) link
― Scott & Anya (thoia), Tuesday, 18 May 2004 13:37 (twenty years ago) link
― Scott & Anya (thoia), Tuesday, 18 May 2004 13:38 (twenty years ago) link
(translated by K. Kalocsay)
― Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 18 May 2004 17:22 (twenty years ago) link