The Poetry Thread

She hated bleak and wintry things alone.
All that was warm and quick, she loved too well-
A light, a flame, a heart against her own;
It is forever bitter cold, in Hell.

Vl. The Actress

Her name, cut clear upon this marble cross,
Shines, as it shone when she was still on earth;
While tenderly the mild, agreeable moss
Obscures the figures of her date of birth.

from "Tombstones in the Starlight" by Dorothy Parker

The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you've been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical:
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
--Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.

[Elizabeth Bishop. I shamelessly nicked the last verse of this for a song of mine a few years ago. I will be paying you royalties in eternity, Liz.]

I am in love with the LION poetry database.

bnw quoted an excerpt of hass' 'misery and splendor' upthread and provided a link to a realplayer file of hass reading the poem.

Hass, Robert:Churchyard [from Human Wishes (1989), Ecco Press]

[1]  Somerset Maugham said a professional was someone who could do his
best work when he didn't particularly feel like it. There was a picture of
him in the paper, a face lined deeply and morally like Auden's, an old
embittered tortoise, the corners of the mouth turned down resolutely to
express the idea that everything in life is small change. And what he
said when he died: I'm all through, the clever young men don't write
essays about me. In the fleshly world, the red tulip in the garden
sunlight is almost touched by shadow and begins to close up. Someone
asked me yesterday: are deer monogamous? I thought of something I had
read. When deer in the British Isles were forced to live in the open
because of heavy foresting, it stunted them. The red deer who lived in
the Scottish highlands a thousand years ago were a third larger than the
present animal. This morning, walking into the village to pick up the
car, I thought of a roof where I have slept in the summer in New York,
pigeons in the early morning sailing up Fifth Avenue and silence in
which you imagine the empty canyons the light hasn't reached yet. I was
standing on the high street in Shelford, outside the fussy little teashop,
and I thought a poem with the quick, lice-ridden pigeons in it might
end: this is a dawn song in Manhattan. I hurried home to write it and, as
I passed the churchyard, school was letting out. Luke was walking
toward me smiling. He thought I had come to meet him. That was when I
remembered the car, when he was walking toward me through the spring
flowers and the eighteenth-century gravestones, his arms full of school
drawings he hoped not to drop in the mud.

Oh, play that thing! Mute glorious Storyvilles
Others may license, grouping around their chairs
Sporting-house girls like circus tigers (priced

Far above rubies) to pretend their fads,
While scholars manques nod around unnoticed
Wrapped up in personnels like old plaids.

On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.

I mean, the ending's the payload, and that, but the tigers are the bit I really love, 'cos when Larkin lets the piss and misery go and starts throwin' around the Big Transcendental Culture-packed Signifieds he is hotter than gosh. Which might also explain why I like this so much, from a German laydee called Sarah Kirsch, and bought unopened for two pounds:

This unforgettable green
A faded glow
Veils the earth I walk
Through the marshes my soft throat
Juts out into another life.

On the river the Brontes are floating
With hats like iron pots
On the bank someone has mowed the grass someone
Primes the pump in the
Crumbling house.

(I realise this is everythat awful abt modern poetry, but even so...)

Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents' summer home,
Bruce's college girlfriend asked him
to improve his expertise at oral sex,
and offered him some technical advice:

Use nothing but his tonguetip
to flick the light switch in his room
on and off a hundred times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances
of force and latitude.

Imagine him at practice every evening,
more inspired than he ever was at algebra,
beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,
thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye,
the quadratic equation of her climax
yield to the logic
of his simple math.

Maybe he unscrewed
the bulb from his apartment ceiling
so that passersby would not believe
a giant firefly was pulsing
its electric abdomen in 13 B.

Maybe, as he stood
two inches from the wall,
in darkness, fogging the old plaster
with his breath, he visualized the future
as a mansion standing on the shore
that he was rowing to
with his tongue's exhausted oar.

Self Improvement - Tony Hoagland

I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer

The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself

I have always wondered about the leftover
energy, water rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting there long after midnight.

From:

anyone lived in a pretty how town...
E.E. Cummings

...someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)...

here is a short excerpt from the last page of the "Winter" section.

A prayer that asks

where in the hour's dark moil is mercy?

Ain't no ladders tumbling down from heaven
for what heaven we had we made. An embassy

of ashes & dust. Where was safety? Home?

Lynda Hull

with a solid rope

Will God hear?

Will he take me all the way?

Like water in goblets of unbaked clay

I drip out slowly,

and dry.

My soul whirs. Dizzy. Let me

discover my home.

- Lal Ded

[Jacob Polley - who is sickeningly young, talented and good looking, and also reading at the South Bank in London tonight.)

Withdrawing from the present,
wandering a past that is alive
in books only.In love
with women, outlasted
by their smiles; the richness
of their apparel puts
the poor in perspective.
The brush dipped in blood
and the knife in art
have preserved their value.
Smouldering times: sacked
cities,incinerable hearts

and the fledgling God
tipped out of his high
nest into the virgin's lap
by the incorrigible cuckoo.

R.S Thomas

Transformations

Portion of this yew
Is a man my grandsire knew,
Bosomed here at its foot:
This branch may be his wife,
A ruddy human life
Now turned to a green shoot.

These grasses must be made
Of her who often prayed,
Last century, for repose;
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose.

So, they are not underground,
But as nerves and veins abound
In the growths of upper air,
An they feel the sun and rain,
And the energy again
That made them what they were!

E E Cummings again:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

My favourite Larkin poem (only 12 lines so it's not too much of a cheat):

Water

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My litany would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

[...]
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.
[...]

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Mark Strand - "Keeping Things Whole"

"Tower of Light"
~Pablo Neruda

The ice-cream van waits, outside the school,
for the pupil's recovered memory of unanswered
notes to question his hunger when, for dancing's sake,
he'll giggle across the playground for cones and sherbet.
A joy-rider on the front page ("only FIVE years"),
he thinks through P.E.'s politics of dodge-ball,
magic tricks, Louise Alison, and girls
when a woman's voice breaks the cabin's dark, half human
half nothing-at-all, travelling from somewhere
behind something, unnamed. Its edges talk of his dad,
who has long moved on, hungover and drinking,
from report cards to bills, his criminal record and catalogues
of memory - drawn, with the drunk's anaesthetic ardour,
by hurting his wife and child. Trouser's at half-mast he'll act
the fool dropped on his attention-span as a child and ignore
this seriousness, again giggling and swearing, as he orders.

But if we should cut here, stop
to stalk left across Scotland,
our imagination animating along
Maginot Lines of dissolution
to the ruined hamlet
of Wester Sallochy
none of this is going on
but the poetry. Oh dear

Educated in the Humanities,
they headed for the City, their beliefs
implicit in the eyes and arteries
of each, and their sincerity displayed
in notes, in smiles, in sheaves
of decimal etcetera.
[...]

- Glyn Maxwell (The High Achievers)

the burnside poem was characteristically brilliant, obv., to round off my 'editor's note' above.

"You can't go home again." Thomas Wolfe
"That's shit." Bill Holm

Who sed that?
Did somebody say that
or was it in one of them darn books you read?

It doesn't matter
if it's a pile of crap
I go home ever day
don't matter where I am
I'm the prodigal son coming back
I don't even need a Greyhound bus
I can go to my town right now
right here talking to you
because this
is everywhere
I've ever been

--David Lee MY TOWN

Poetry is home to me. I am more comfortable here than anywhere. It's everywhere I've ever been. I don't even need a Greyhound bus.

for all you formalists and uninformalists

I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (Ozymandias)

Joan Larkin (my former teacher) - "Sonnet Positive"

What? That's poetry, that is!

I would contribute to a sonnet thread if you start one I expect david... I haven't read 101 Sonnets though so there's a chance I have 101 fewer things to say than those who have :)

(for Anna)

She brought me a box of magnetic words,
and now the kitchen has become a poem
that writes itself, unpredictably, at night.
Under our fingers sudden meanings form,
these phrases stick like burrs.
We are all accidental poets,
wild and free
raw
sculpt ing.
The room is loaded, layered
with chance collisions,
broken language.

These days we feed off words.
We can't make a sandwich
without making
a point.
Breakfast produces gloomy sentiments,
a morning smear
cigarette pain.
Lunchtimes become journeys
which begin, and end, at the fridge door
in an unfinished sentence,
break out of

When the house is empty
I find messages with the frozen food
like cries for help.
Who wrote i like him dead this morning?
she suffered ?
Graffiti artists of white goods,
we are all anonymous.
Like children we scatter words;
random and ominous,
they cling.
Who wrote we don't make sense
as if it made sense?

Soon the box runs out; we all get bored.
The fridge buzzes, inscrutably,
and I go hungry
for magnetic words.

[by Rachel Playforth]

Gluck is quite literally one of the worst poets alive.

Well she’s dead now, so.

I meant her poems.

Poetry about fascism doesn’t tend ti be ‘about’ fascism in the way you might want it to be, but:

Brecht is good.
Sarajevo Blues by Semezdin Mehmedinovic
In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy by Daniel Borzutsky

a lot of this also depends on what you consider to be fascism. I would consider many Palestinian writers to be writing under and about fascism, but…

thank you table. i don't know what i'm actually looking for here but that seems like a good start

Borzutsky also a translator, his translation of Raúl Zurita’s ‘Country of Planks’ is great. (Zurita’s book is about living and dying under Pinochet, so… relevant!)

THESEUS
O mankind so deluded! so pointlessly deluded!
why investigate, study, devise ten thousand technologies
yet you do not know this one thing and cannot grasp it:
how to teach a mindless man to think.

HIPPOLYTOS
That would be quite a genius
who could make fools think.
but this is no time for philosophy, father,
i fear your sorrows make your tongue go wild.

THESEUS
PHUE!
what human beings need is some clear index
of who is a friend and who is not-
a diagnostic of soul-
and every man should have two voices,
one righteous and the other however it happens to be,
so that the righteous voice could refute the unrighteous
and we would not be duped.

HIPPOLYTOS
Has someone slandered me to you?
But I've committed no crime!
your words fill me with dread,
slipping, strange words.

THESEUS
PHEU! the human mind! to what lengths will it
not go?
where will its reckless impudence end?

that's from Anne Carson's translation of Hippolytos