The Poetry Thread

This book saved my life.
This book takes place on one of the two small tagalong moons of Mars.
This book requests its author's absolution, centuries after his death.
This book required two of the sultan's largest royal elephants to bear it; this other book fit in a gourd.
This book reveals The Secret Name of God, and so its author is on a death list.
This is the book I lifted high over my head, intending to smash a roach in my girlfriend's bedroom; instead, my back unsprung, and I toppled painfully into her bed, where I stayed motionless for eight days.
This is a "book." That is, an audio cassette. This other "book" is a screen and a microchip. This other "book," the sky.
In chapter three of this book, a woman tries explaining her husband's tragically humiliating death to their daughter: reading it is like walking through a wall of setting cement.
This book taught me everything about sex.
This book is plagiarized.
This book is transparent; this book is a codex in Aztec; this book, written by a prisoner, in dung; the wind is turning the leaves of this book: a hill-top olive as thick as a Russian novel.
This book is a vivisected frog, and ova its text.
[...]

Library -- Albert Goldbarth

What is D'Agata? Is that a lit mag?

Reasons run out and we are
ready to play backgammon
once again. Come on, I say.
I know when I am being
watched. Even in the washroom
here's a window left unlatched
and various small monsters
have nipped softly in to take
up key positions amongst
sunny patches on the walls.
Look at the little angels.
Chits of demons. Fools and spies.
Look at the conclusive way
in which their detail lies. One
touch would be catastrophe
or a whisper to the wise.

[...]

- R. F. Langley

Btw cozen, you asked somewhere else about getting hold of my book. The website for ordering it is broken, but if you send me your address I will post you a free copy - you can send me something of your choice in return if you like :)

[email protected]

...Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?
...
- from Little Gidding

So I had another reading tonight. I read the first 20 minutes of my 4-hour piece as part of this experimental dance/music/poetry deal. So here's the cool part: there were all these kids unexpectedly in the audience. About 7 of them, 8-12 years old. And, it turns out, they really enjoyed my piece. They were all very polite and came up to me to tell me how much they liked it and they said some smart things about the piece (and the other pieces as well). It was great!

CJD I was plundered by a pirate
CJF Describe the pirate
CJN She is armed
CJP How is she armed?
CJS She has long guns
CJW I have no long guns
BLD I am a complete wreck

[Hannah Weiner, from her book "Code Poems", "from the International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations"]

Btw congrats on the reading and the response :)

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

-- GK Chesterton

from city winter - frank o'hara

I brought Selected O'Hara to Dublin!

the snow drifts low
and yet neglects to cover me, and i
dance just ahead to keep my heart in sight.
how like a queen, to seek with jealous eye
the face that flees you, hidden city, white
swan. there's no art to free me, blinded so.

i want my feet to be bare,
i want my face to be shaven, and my heart -
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

:)

cozen: yay!

You can
SING
here

'Notice in Hell'

HALT
'COMMIT ADULTERY

- Edwin Morgan

[...]

Or maybe think so; the eloquence of melt
is however upon me, the path become a
stream, and I lay that down
trusting the ice to withstand the heat;

[...]

- J. H. Prynne (for mark s)

that's an amazing phrase.

[...]

Maybe yes, maybe no; the pattiness of melt
is however upon me, the cheese dripping
in a stream, and I scream that
no lettuce is cold enough to salve;

[...]

Forget the clatter of ballistics,
The monologue of falling stones,
The sharp vectors
And the stiff numbered grids.

It's so much more a thing of pliancy, persuasion,
Where space might cup itself around a planet
Like your palm around a stone,

Where you, yourself the planet,
Caught up in some geodesic dream,
Might wake to feel it enfold your weight
And know there is, in fact, no falling.

It is this, and the existence of limits.

- Rebecca Elson

We stitched and sutured Ill-fated futures,
Amassed the past in archaic computers
Come join the ranks in our data banks,
It's a life without thanks

Remember that night I drank and you cried?
And on your bed all night's where we lied
I stayed awake, you fell asleep
On tear soaked sheets

And we're so new and young like science
Full of ideas and naive defiance
We'll lose it all with each passing fall
As our wake up call

We'll stare straight up and wonder why the
Sky is blue; it reflects the sea
We'll all be sayin' "Science explained
Our lives again"

And we're always sayin'
Science explained
Our lives again
That's the science of the seasons

We stitched and sutured Ill-fated futures,
Amassed the past in archaic computers
Come join the ranks in our data banks,
It's a life without thanks

We'll travel countries and sit beneath palm trees
And feel the heat in a warm pastel breeze
Let's take a trip; let's go to Spain
By all night train

Or across the sea in Ocean Liners
To opium dens in Asia Minor
We'll spend our days wasting our pay on
Wasting away

We'll stare straight up and wonder why the
Sky is blue; it reflects the sea
We'll all be sayin' "science explained
Our lives again"

And we're always sayin'
Science explained
Our lives again
That's the science of the seasons.

- M. A. Hart (mp3 here.)

'Museé des Beaux Arts'

[...]

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure, the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

- W. H. Auden

Under her brow the snowy wing-case
delivers truly the surprise
of days which slide under sunlight
past loose glass in the door
into the reflection of honour spread
through the incomplete, the trusted. So
darkly the stain skips as a livery
of your pause like an apple pip,
the baltic loved one who sleeps.
[...]

I mean, wow.

Just as good, and half as long!

As white is she
And to my touch as choice and briefly satisfactory
As whitebeam leaves that the wind whips aloft,
That tell to the eye their texture soft:
Sweet message sent
To fingertips, and sweetness quickly spent.

Where she goes
Sliding curtains of the rain on rods of sun her ways enclose,
River-whirling gulls her gay sky recieves,
Road, their hostile posters furled,
Bless with arching eaves;
She my love by London gentled as by space the spinning world.

- Anne Ridler, Young Man's Song

Now, not that there's anything wrong with the poem for using those words -- they do slide into one another nicely, and it's well crafted enough and it doesn't seem to be trying to hit you over the head with some obvious meaning -- but where the poem gets interesting (for me) is where it leaves the obviously poetic words behind and finds poetry someplace I haven't seen before, such as the phrase "an apple pip". "Pip" and "slide" are both great onomatopoetic [sp?] words, but "slide" has been in a jillion poems and "pip" hasn't.

And "baltic" is such a nice change after "apple pip" -- /b/ being so similar to /p/, the /aw/ and /i/ in "baltic" so similar to the /a/ and /i/ in "apple pip", with the "tic" really lauching you off into new sonic territory -- but then it just goes back to more obviously poetic terms again.

Well, the index doesn't list any but it does have an entry for "sled":

Glass was the Street -- in tinsel Peril
Tree and Traveller stood --
Filled was the Air with merry venture
Hearty with Boys the Road --

Shot the lithe Sleds like shod vibrations
Emphasized and gone
It is the Past's supreme italic
Makes this present mean --

[1498, c. 1880.]

[Hm, it came out a sort of Christmas-in-July offering.]

I was, as they later confirmed, a very sick boy.
The star performer at the meeting-house,
my eyes rolled back to show the whites, my arms
outstretched in catatonic supplication
while I gibbered impeccably in the gorgeous tongues
of the aerial orders. On Tuesday nights, before
I hit the Mission, I'd nurse my little secret:
Blind Annie Spall, the dead evangelist
I'd found still dying in creditable squalor
above the fishmonger's in Rankine Street.
The room was ripe with gurry and old sweat;
from her socket in the greasy mattress, Annie
belted through hoarse chorus after chorus
while I prayed loudly, absently enlarging
the crater that I'd gouged in the soft plaster.
Her eyes had been put out before the war,
just in time to never see the daughter
with the hare-lip and the kilt of dirty dishtowels
who ran the brothel from the upstairs flat
and who'd chap to let me know my time was up,
then lead me down the dark hall, its zoo-smell,
her slippers peeling off the sticky lino.
At the door, I'd shush her quiet, pressing
my bus-fare earnestly into her hand.

Four years later. Picture me: drenched in patchouli,
strafed with hash-burns, casually arranged
on Susie's bed. Smouldering frangipani;
Dali's The Persistence of Memory;
pink silk loosely knotted round the lamp
to soften the light; a sheaf of Penguin Classics,
their spines all carefully broken in the middle;
a John Martyn album mumbling through the speakers.
One hand was jacked up her skirt, the other trailing
over the cool wall behind the headboard
where I found the hole in the plaster again.
The room stopped like a lift; Sue went on talking.
It was a nightmare, Don. We had to gut the place.

I think this is definitely a 'working class poem' despite his protestations, to the contrary, that he's written only one of those ('an elliptical stylus'). again, this, like that, challenges the reader's (or writer's) impulse towards indentification and is actually more emetic than angering, I think. the first 7 lines of the second stanza are quite flat I think, clichéd almost ('strafed', 'mumbling', the careful breaking), perhaps it's intent made apparent. you can almost feel the rhythm of the poem stop, with its lift, as if your body, your thoughts have ceased to progress but yet your eyes, drawn in by the poem, on rails now, your eyes read on and, on surface, take in what the rest of you doesn't take in. that shift into italics, a shift into another person's voice heard rather than spoken. god, what a poem.

what does it mean? thread?