what poetry are you reading

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 i was sure i'd heard the story in an aside during an interview or an unpublished bluet or something, but i hadn't, & she wrote back to say she didn't know either, & i still can't remember where i heard the story, what exactly its tethered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'