what poetry are you reading

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.