The Poetry Thread

here's a little something poem I wrote mainly just as a formal exercise in trying out rhyme and syllable strength, I'm not sure I like it either, a little too mean but why not - it doesn't even have a name:

You inhale and hold,
weighing the smoke,
a thought knuckles in
and then I choke:

"It's you, it's not me;
sorry to say -
now pack up your bag,
go on your way."

It is interesting the way rhyme pushes you towards thinking that the poem is 'about' the rhymed words, when in this case I want it to be about 'a thought knuckles in' which I think is a great line.

As usual, the Nipper is partly to blame.

who are you reading, the pinefox? and why did you have to be wheeled back round?

I picked up robin robertson's second collection today ('slow air'; I was poised so close to buying 'the pleasure of the text' and jacob polley's first; mmm money money) after reading his first earlier in the week and being underwhelmed in proportion to the praise in its jacket quotes ('its honesty, insight and sheer lyrical power'; 'the best new poet in britain.') too much fluff not enough oomph for me to be honest (except a few stand-out poems like 'the flaying of marsyas' which is... phenomenal.) but this new one is a bit special so far, if extremely maudlin in its lyricism, here's a sample:

"Art Lesson"

She stood at his
burnt windows
until she saw herself
answered in their dark,
the way glass gets
blacked at night
in a lighted room.
She went home,
pulled the curtains;
drew a red bath.

What I have been reading: Larkin and Muldoon.

I have been half-thinking of trying to write a poem about You (Cozen!). But do I really know how to write poems? I half-wish that I could have a lesson from Archel.

Actually I might have to give a workshop for a bunch of e2e kids soon and I have no idea what to do :/

My pains at last some respite shall afford,
Whilst I behold the battles you maintain,
When fleets of glasses sail about the board,
From whose broadsides volleys of wit shall rain."

The Disable Debauchee
~John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester

Raglan Road - Patrick Kavanagh
On Raglan Road on an Autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue,
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day

On Grafton street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passions pledge
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay -
O I loved too much and by such by such is hapiness thrown away

I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that's known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay
when the angel woos the clay he'd lose his wings at the dawn of day

or the classic:

Stony Grey Soil
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
the laugh from my love you thieved;
you took the gay child o fmy passion
and gave me your clod-conceived.

you clogged the feet of my boyhood
and I believed that my stumble
had the poise and stride of Apollo
and his voice my thick-tongued mumble

[...]

you flung a ditch on my vision
o fbeauty, love and truth
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
you burgled my bank of youth!

[...]

this is the garden:colours come and go

this is the garden:colours come and go,
frail azures fluttering from night's outer wing
strong silent greens silently lingering,
absolute lights like baths of golden snow.
This is the garden:pursed lips do blow upon cool flutes within wide glooms,and sing (of harps celestial to the quivering string) invisible faces hauntingly and slow.

This is the garden. Time shall surely reap and on Death's blade lie many a flower curled, in other lands where other songs be sung; yet stand They here enraptured,as among the slow deep trees perpetual of sleep some silver-fingered fountain steals the world.

Whatever the difference is, it all began
the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers
and his four-day-old smile dawned on him again,
possessed him, till it would not fall or waver;
and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin
but his own smile, or one I'd rediscovered.
Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the true path was as lost to me as ever
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran.
See how the true gift never leaves the giver:
returned and redelivered, it rolled on
until the smile poured through us like a river.
How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men!
I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.

Was that written AFTER we talked about the pome that is not by D Paterson?

Ye white antarctic birds of upper 57th street,
you gallery of white antarctic birds, you street
with white antarctic birds and cabs and white
antarctic birds you street, ye and you the
street and birds I walk upon the galleries of
streets and birds and longings, you the birds
antarctic of the conversations and the bank
machines, you the atm of longing, the longing
for the atm machines, you the lover of the
banks and me and birds and others too and
cabs, and you the cabs and you the subtle
longing birds and me, and you the
conversations yet antarctic, and soup and
teeming white antarctic birds and you the
books and phones and atms the bank
machines antarctic, and you the banks and
cabs, and him the one I love, and those who
love me not, and all antarctic longings, and all
the birds and cabs and also on the street
antarctic of this longing.

-- Lisa Jarnot

This is by Stephen Crane.

I was thinkin' about posting 'Thirteen' here, but I ws worried ppl might consider it all sycophantic and stuff! I actually sent Archel's page to two friends of mine who are big into the idea of being poetesses only the other week...

That birthday
would not slip past like all the others.
She felt her eyes widening
as it stuck in her throat,
that sickly pink-white icing.
She blew out the candles
and started wishing.
Her flesh dripped off like wax.

(Rachel Playforth)

James Wright - "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota"

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I think I still need to read them more slowly.

The whole meaning of the one about the horse has not reached me, yet.

But it will!

I have been reading sean o'brien's essays on contemporary british poetry the deregulated muse and can report that it is very good.

Do you like the poem, 'The Park By The Railway'?

he says a few things I don't agree with in his essays and his aesthetic is more politically guided than my own; he doesn't manage to reach and talk about a few of my favourite poets in any depth but he has managed to open my eyes to a few people I had once glancingly dismissed (hughes [I read the birthday letters and got upset in the same way as I did with the lock-and-key cartography of pale fire]; and even, miraculously, motion.)

I have his collection ghost train (??) out at the moment, but it's resting in glasgow. I'm not sure I've read the poem you mention.

I have also taken out, in your honour, muldoon's why brownlee left.

Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

[...]

the atrium of the heart beckons with pendulous lips
any seaman would point his submarine inside: sirens sing
an eye flutters. strewn with carrion: the cliffs

pilot: could I go deep into the plasma of the sea
pull myself from the wreckage. red tide, white squid
refractile bodies caught in this prismatic stream

surely salvation bilges. suffers our immersion
as a macrocyte absorbs a viral fret. into this deep
the whorl of shell and wave flash brilliant consecration

how the anvil beats within the limpet ear. we drift
[...]

D. A. Powell - [the atrium of the heart beckons with pendulous lips]

The Volkswagen parked in the gap,
But gently ticking over.
You wonder if it's lovers
And not men hurrying back
Across two fields and a river.

last night I found an old issue of Poetry Review what was designed by Jerry the Nipper, who was also writin' in it. And it also contained reviews of Sean O'Brien's anthology The Firebox, along with the Armitage / Crawford collection, AND Ian Sansom on The Deregulated Muse!

Meanwhile, I read something like 90pp of SO'B's pomes earlier in the day so for once I knew a little of what I was talking about, I mean, reading about.

I am not wholly sold on his... subtlety? intelligence?

But I guess what's thrown me most is the wee sketch of bristling him next to Sansom's review.

Should I blame the Nipper?

Most of it is real; crap.

[...]

And grave by grave we civilize the ground.

[...]

(is there any nipper writing in them?)

JtN: you were otm re: 'Skid'. my copy arrived this morning; I'm enthralled.