what poetry are you reading

i'm reading david antin's talking at the boundaries. what poetry are you reading?

it would maybe need a caveat before being uncontroversially included in a poetry thread; maybe it's better in a which erratically typeset books are you reading discussion. i love him talking around marriage, in a private occasion in a public place, & this loose solution he found to wanting to use poetry without reciting poetry, to be able to digress to make himself understood, this long memory of a girl he was involved with in new york & what it is to him now & then the interruption of trying to remember what it was to him then.

suppose you sign another agreement
that is you decide that you have a relationship with each other
which is of such an order that you have
appetite for each other
interest in each other fondness for each other
whatever the word means you love each other so to speak
but you dont have any control of each other
that is
as soon as anybody feels some other impulse he/she goes makes it with whoever he/she wants
you can try that
its difficult
and i know this kind of experience
its the kind of experience that takes away
a kind of evenness
a kind of funny unpressured life
that is
it puts life at the pressure of a romantic adventure
because anything can dissociate into its separate parts at any moment
you can always at the moment of an adventure disappear from somebody else

i'm reading sharon olds too. i can only read one or two a day, they're so intense. & for days on end i would go back & read robert creeley's please. i think i first read it on ilx? it felt powerful to pick it up everyday & need to read it for comfort.

for James Broughton

Oh god, let's go.
This is a poem for Kenneth Patchen.
Everywhere they are shooting people.
People people people people.
This is a poem for Allen Ginsberg.
I want to be elsewhere, elsewhere.
This is a poem about a horse that got tired.
Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.
I want to go home.
I want you to go home.
This is a poem that tells the story,
which is the story.
I don't know. I get lost.
If only they would stand still and let me.
Are you happy, sad, not happy, please come.
This is a poem for everyone.

i'm reading anthony hecht 'collected later,' which has in it the transparent man, flight among the tombs, and the darkness and the light

also p stoked to have a copy of thom gunn's fighting terms on the way.

Hypnos Waking - Rene Char Early surrealist who later was a major figure in the Resistance, contains complete translations of 'Leaves of Hypnos' his war journal and Le Poeme Pulverise
Figured Image - Anna-Marie Albiach Translated by Keith Waldrop Rough going with this gal who is concerned with language and the body in a very textural/french way. Post Apollo Press does an excellent job with their books, I'd like to find everything by them.
Mute Objects of Expression - Francis Ponge Translated by Lee Fahnestock One of my favorite french poets who writes about objects or nature.
Early Poems 1947-1959 - Yves Bonnefoy Translated by Galway Kinnell and Richard Pevear Contains a complete translation of 'On the Motion and Immobility of Douve' one of the most beautiful poems I have read. I never tired of him.
Breathturn - Paul Celan Translated by Pierre Joris I also really like Sun & Moon Press, I have a few more Celan books but I'm completely lost, Maybe I need to read German, I took a break from him and Think I'll take him up again this year.

is the motion and immobility of douve a book length thing, jacob? i feel tentative with long poems, & reading what you both read it feels like you're maybe a lil more ambitious.

i just e-mailed my friend & included a jack gilbert poem & was so pleased to find it online, on a tumblr ("stillgreen"), because it's so specific, so gently transportive,

Trying to Have Something Left Over
Jack Gilbert

There was a great tenderness to the sadness
when I would go there. She knew how much
I loved my wife and that we had no future.
We were like casualties helping each other
as we waited for the end. Now I wonder
if we understood how happy those Danish
afternoons were. Most of the time we did not talk.
Often I took care of the baby while she did
housework. Changing him and making him laugh.
I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before
throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with
my mouth against the tiny ear and throw
him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up.
The only way to leave even the smallest trace.
So that all his life her son would feel gladness
unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined
city of steel in America. Each time almost
remembering something maybe important that got lost.

re celan: i think if german is needed then it's a reaaal fluent german, in which case i'm screwed. i've found that it helps to be able to parse the german, at least, maybe because it helps to sort of justify some of the choices in the english (absent which they can sometimes have a tinge of, come off it, pal to them), some of the patterns of sound and syllabation are audible/visible, etc. —but for the most part i just had to reread repeatedly, and be in the right mood. trying to take in the whole sequence of one of the breathturn sequence books seems to be crucial too.

-

lately i've reread a little creeley. that's all.

strangely, I've just been reading Celan as well (selected poems, Hamburger trans.)—having previously been of the I'm completely lost, Maybe I need to read German mindset towards him, I now think I'm starting to "get it" a little more...

'On the Motion and Immobility of Douve' is a book length poem, but well worth reading. I've also been reading Edmond Jabes's Book Of Questions which are astonishing and sometimes heartbreaking.

I am only familiar with Jabes via Derrida's essays, which made him seem both brilliant & tedious

I think I would like to read what Derrida wrote about Jabes, which book is the essay from?

Writing & Difference—I believe the title of the essay is "Edmund Jabes & the Question of the Book"—I read it c.college because I was into, like, Borges & 'postmodernism' & shit, so possibly I didn't totally get it... I remember the characterization of the jew as a fold in history(?)

in that perloff essay (on gass on rilke) i linked on another thread she takes that celan as an epitome of the translatable

i think i'm going to read some celan this year

i've been failing to read 'dear world and everyone in it' for months. dear world and everyone in it, i don't care about your shitty poetry

John Berryman - The Dream Songs
Michael Robbins - Alien Vs Predator

Both discovered via ILB.

in that perloff essay (on gass on rilke) i linked on another thread she takes that celan as an epitome of the translatable

She talks about Trakl too, who is also mentioned by Michael Hofmann is given v high praise in this piece on Kraus/Vienna, so his name has been in my mind lately. Hope to track something down.

mr bones vs predator, that would be good

Robbins, of course, was not the first to call Rilke a “jerk.” John Berryman did this scandalously in The Dream Songs[1] (first published in 1964). Robbins has absorbed Berryman’s haunting work, the vaguely formalistic structure (rhythmic lines of varying length/beat and ninja rhymes that ambush the reader), frequent references to movies, songs, art, black culture, multiple narrative identities, uninhibited sexual appetites and the brooding sense of loss that lies at the heart of it all, and nuked it till it has bloomed with an acid glow that (&c &c)

TAKING SIDES: Rilke vs. Berryman-Robbins (aka 'Team Snark')

not reading him right now, but closely following developments in this r s thomas on crisp packets story.

Michael Robbins - Alien Vs Predator

― o. nate, Thursday, January 2, 2014 6:28 PM (4 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

did you like this? i enjoyed it at first, but once i 'got it' i sort of didn't enjoy it anymore.

also

https://twitter.com/alienvsrobbins/status/410099232586997760

what adrienne rich should i start with, do people think?

xp haha

did you like this? i enjoyed it at first, but once i 'got it' i sort of didn't enjoy it anymore

I still like it, yeah. I take it down from the shelf and read one or two every once in a while. Some I like better than others. The best ones hold up well, I think.

I'm not as familiar with Rich's work as I'd like, so I hope others better informed can advise, but Diving into the Wreck is probably a good place to start; I'm also partial to the long poem "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" from the book of the same title.

xp

In music I'm attracted to ambitious disasters; in literature I'm attracted to larval states, during which poets and novelists haven't found their voices. The Diamond Cutters and Snapshots of a Daughter in Law are my favorites of hers: I love the tension between the glacial severity of her images and barely suppressed anger (the enjambments are harsh and sharp too).

you can find a cheap Norton anthology of her selected works that also includes her (essential) essays

November 1968

Stripped you're beginning to float free up through the smoke of brushfires and incinerators the unleafed branches won't hold you nor the radar aerials

You're what the autumn knew would happen after the last collapse of primary color once the last absolutes were torn to pieces you could begin

How you broke open, what sheathed you until this moment I know nothing about it my ignorance of you amazes me now that I watch you starting to give yourself away to the wind

wait go http://www.best-poems.net/adrienne_rich/poem-43.html for formatting

I don't know, I always found Rich really dry, but it was a talk she gave on Emily Dickinson that made me curious about that author. Because before that I thought Dickinson wrote "little girl scout prayers" as Rich put it (possibly not verbatim), while discussing her image.

(I've at least read one of those Norton selected or collected poems of Rich's.)

Her Dickinson essay is fantastic!

I heard a recorded talk she gave, presumably close to the essay, or maybe a reading of it. (I don't think I ever went on to read in print form what she had to say about Dickinson.)

'on lies, secrets, and silence' is a good essay collection

i am going to post a short verse of a joseph ceravolo poem when i get home, get ready for it

buckle up

my *selected berryman* showed up last night and man

those fuckin sonnets

"Maybe our safeties…come for our risk’s sake."

aw i'm just about to pick up dream songs, from the library, cause i never tended to berryman much
& then i read something last week on a blog that knocked me for six, like wow

& i didn't post the ceravolo poem because it was too simple, out of context
like you needed the mess of the whole thing
he is really interesting!, i think. maybe because sometimes i am cruising this sorta in-love-with-eileen-myles wave of tumblr poetry that takes this elemental small-scale form as a template but has this maybe predictable voice?, now, like there's not a solipsism but a fixed reach to it? a formula by which it roams. & the ceravolo is crazy, it's like frank o'hara free jazz, i can't believe he gets so far with so little, eschewing so much, relying on you so much
maybe i'll post it later

ah yeah i just read that one last night too, damn near devoured the whole little selected in a few hours

so much to chew on

those fuckin sonnets

I'm an admirer of Berryman's sonnets, too. He leaves enough of the trad structure intact that it frees his sense of language, imagery and ideas to climb forward, and his plays against the trad sonnet structure gain extra weight because they are so deliberate.

i got halfway through this great long thing on berryman on the bus home last night, stopped reading to start reading the selected, then picked it back up and realized the whole thing is sort of a long-form review of the selected itself. happy accident.

man sharon olds' the dead and the living just came in and i tried to read a bit of it before bed

fuckin mistake.

just awful dark stuff, not meant for the pillow.

mary karr's viper rum is winning me over though. every third one or so is a gut punch, like a slightly unstiffened O'Connor. and i like my O'Connor just fine.

This has a lovely cover, but the prose poems it consists of did nothing for me.
http://ndbooks.com/images/made/images/covers/Fullblood_Arabian_300_450.jpg
I found them facile and pseudo-profound (the nod to Khalil Gibran in Lydia Davis's introduction should have tipped me off), but plenty of people disagree with me.

there is just so much in Olds; they're not even so panoramic, just so full and imaginable. three a day, max.

& wait is TDATL the recent one?

nah its one from the early 80s.

Petrarch b/w English Alliterative Revival stuff; then a reading of Villon's Testament to close the middle ages

newyear

Seaton's version of Cold Mountain Poems.

read a.e. housman's 'a shropshire lad' on my kindle a few weeks ago. uneven but some great stuff.

I'm rereading Rita Dove. What do we think of her?

She has only four mentions on ILX, including the two on this thread.

Rita Dove is okay. She has a sense of the line that I can get behind, even if I think some of her work falls into the 'dilatory epiphanic' mode that so annoys me.

Isn't "Dilatory Epiphanic" a Paul Simon song?

Lol

I only know Thomas and Beulah

Diane di Prima passed away today. One of the greats and one of the few left of her generation. Her kind and generous spirit will be missed.

Aimless that macniece you posted in april last year was the ticket and no mistake

yeah I remember being really struck by that one

Muireadh dhea you're at least ninety percent irish by poetry alone at this stage yrself

I'm at the point in the term where I'm so exhausted I can't really read anything at all but have been sitting up and browsing Frank O'Hara when I can't sleep. His profligacy allows for a lightness of reading and the tumble of images, the sense of movement, the roll call of names and places scrolling by in a great horny rush is oddly soothing. CK Stead wrote about Shakespeare that even at his most clotted, his eyes and his mind, like those of a runner are set well ahead of his feet and I love that sense of O'Hara flooding the page with sense impressions.

Anyway, this caught my eye last night:

Mayakovsky

1
My heart’s aflutter!
I am standing in the bath tub
crying. Mother, mother
who am I? If he
will just come back once
and kiss me on the face
his coarse hair brush
my temple, it’s throbbing!

then I can put on my clothes
I guess, and walk the streets.

2
I love you. I love you,
but I’m turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.

Words! be
sick as I am sick, swoon,
roll back your eyes, a pool,

and I’ll stare down
at my wounded beauty
which at best is only a talent
for poetry.

Cannot please, cannot charm or win
what a poet!
and the clear water is thick

with bloody blows on its head.
I embrace a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.

3
That’s funny! there’s blood on my chest
oh yes, I’ve been carrying bricks
what a funny place to rupture!
and now it is raining on the ailanthus
as I step out onto the window ledge
the tracks below me are smoky and
glistening with a passion for running
I leap into the leaves, green like the sea

4
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

Actually relatively housebound for O'Hara? I get a bit of Dylan Thomas from this; maybe some Hart Crane.

Also Kafka's The Lost Writings, published in translation by Michael Hofmann last year. And very rainy day relatable just now; thanks.

maybe especially:
what a funny place to rupture!
and now it is raining on the ailanthus
as I step out onto the window ledge
the tracks below me are smoky and
glistening with a passion for running
I leap into the leaves, green like the sea

4
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

Love that O'Hara poem

Jim Morrison's poem "Ode to L.A. While Thinking of Brian Jones, Deceased" was distributed at each of The Doors two July 21, 1969 shows at the Aquarius Theatre in Los Angeles. Jim Morrison died exactly two years after Brian Jones on July 3, 1971, both of them were 27 yrs old. pic.twitter.com/fpltB6MyZi

— Wendy O'Rourke (@wendyOrourke) July 3, 2019

I prefer God Star

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/05/27/lovesick-for-a-god/

hans arp

read that nyrb article when that issue came out and definitely made me interested. how is it?

Clayton Eshleman died last year.  Years ago on ILB I posted the single fact I knew about him, found in the biography of Zukofsky by Scroggins.  The poem mentioned was called "The Moistinsplendour" and it appeared in the Spring 1968 issue of Caterpillar.  Last month I read the biography of Lorine Niedecker by Peters, and Niedecker disliked that poem too.  That motivated me to dig it up.  Google found the title in Eshleman's book Indiana, published in 1969, which would be right.  Google didn't lie, but it turns out Eshleman used the word in a different poem, and the poem of that title isn't collected there.  It's a nice-looking book from Black Sparrow, and at 178 pages it's a substantial collection of poetry.  I've been trying to understand why so little of the poetry worked.  The bad judgment evidenced by that anecdote wasn't a one-off, it's throughout the book.  Separately, I was waiting for a transfiguration of all those personal musings into poetry.  Eshleman never managed it, though he tried very hard (possibly too hard).  I was reminded of watching someone flick his cigarette lighter over and over but never start a flame.  There were some fun passages, though.

I come in fury against Robert Bly & the Falsifiers of the animal.

Swindle cloaked in spiritum - Robert Kelly - but more true:
I see Robert Kelly exercising in the Valley of Death.

Robert Lowell is the Wickerman of Scandinavia: Merton the
Spectre of Hart Crane.

Must Barbara be expelled to cast out Johnson?

It was all an unnecessary detour, because the issue of Caterpillar is here with the poem I was looking for.  Relevant sample:

  OUR MASS
TURBINED
  INTO MAREEEEEEEE,
flunking
you,
fuckit outa you,
fuckit outa you,
our Lady
  in the Sea
ops groind
oru
eating,
  at the base of the tree
there aint no Artaud thing to rehearse
no Louis eating Celia
   wirejawed retriever
locked in its curse,

    lower level,
to aim
    at who are human,
now regenerated
youd suckoff Zukofsky
who wld suckoff you
   means you no

longer play by their games.

Well, that would put off the hypersensitive, uxorious, 64-year-old Zukofsky.  Eshleman really does seem to be purging himself of him.

This is a kristMass
DECK THE HALLS

   Out old Fustum out Zukofsky
Out old Blakam

Eshleman reminds me of Vachel Lindsay, a sort of headlong un-self-aware carrying on in the wrong direction.

Eshleman was a terrible poet but a fine editor and an incredible translator-- his work on Césaire is enough to endear him to me for life.

But yeah, his poetry is...awful. Jerry Rothenberg his friend was the same way, incredible editor and critic, but his poetry was just abysmal

Reading Robert Kelly pic.twitter.com/nK4bqpOWGa

— Charlotte Mandell (@avecsesdoigts) March 18, 2022

"Clayton Eshleman died last year"

I love his work on Vallejo's poetry.

can't say i much liked the one kelly collection i've read, but should give him another go, i guess.

still need to make a start on the césaire translation mentioned above. have had it sitting around for over a decade now.

only poetry i've read in an age is orlando furioso which probably doesn't count as it was translated into prose (still good though!)

& mention of clark coolidge's name here/other ilb threads was ringing a bell for me... turns out it's because he played drums for serpent power :-O

nlt, Coolidge is/was a very accomplished jazz drummer. He's written some about jazz, too.

Kelly is very hit or miss for me. There's a bit too much self-conscious feeling "mysticism" in his work for me to really latch onto anything too much, tho a friend of mine was his student and swears by him, and one of my favorite poets (Kenneth Irby) was good friends with him.

I've only encountered Kelly via Charlotte's twitter. In the main I really connect with what is flowing out of him but I've not actually sat down with a book of his.

Or not reading.

Across the hall was Hannah. She'd been a normal, middle class housewife, married to an accountant or something in Connecticut or somewhere. Then she had taken LSD, or lots of LSD, and her life had gone on a little detour. Now she lived alone in the East Village, saw words on her forehead, and made poems out of them.

Years later, I was in a used book store and actually saw her book. There was a picture of Hannah's pleasant, loppy face beaming out from the cover. Written on her forehead in crayon was, "I See Words on My Forehead." I wonder how many copies were sold.

-- John Lurie

Lurie might well have been bemused. I have looked into Hannah Weiner's Open House and it was painful to read. Code Poems was great, but what the poetry world makes of her later ramblings I don't know. Having been the lifeline for nearly 20 years of a close friend suffering from schizophrenia, I loathe mental illness and all its works.

fwiw that book he mentions goes for a fair amount of money these days

i've read 'spoke' and 'the fast' by hannah weiner in the last couple of years, both - the latter particularly - are great

Ammons, Tape for the Turn of the Year
Ammons, Sphere

I Share My Bed with a Large Dog

After I’ve rumpled the sheets
wrestled and tossed and turned
After I’ve seen you shake in your dreams
and pulled you back from your apprehensions

After the deep breathing and chests heaving
stretching and whining and wide yawning snores
After the first sun shows on the ceiling
slips down the wall, the dresser, the floor

After your nose starts to sound like a whistle
I raise my phone to check in on the weather
After you have seen me move you feel better
Your brown eyes wide open and paw pads like leather

only after that —
and after the your sharp elbows rib my core —
only after all of that could we crawl out of bed

sorry, i meant that for another thread

sure you did

for me: Beowulf!

i truly did!

which translation?

The Heaney one after a friend said I must.

Saner, So This Is The Map

I picked up a collection of Robinson Jeffers's poetry lately and have been reading his epic narrative poem, Tamar. I guess I don't read a lot of narrative poems, especially 20th century ones, but the material strikes as being a rather strange basis for writing a long poem about. A family living on an isolated stretch of the California coast is troubled by incest and madness. Maybe the point will become clearer by the end.

picked up Louis MacNiece's Autumn Journal last night. been a while since i read it, but it turns out i was exactly in the right mood. the mixture of poetic and more, well, 'journal' like cadences is very appealing - the a, b, c, b rhymes and half rhymes in the first section are one example of that, but so are the slightly awkward quotidian observations and considerations that don't quite fit into the poetic - either for reasons of scansion or register. the 'then, but then again' arguments – little palinodes, to use a word MacNeice uses early on of the retraction of summer to autumn - appropriate to someone observing and discussing with themselves. Emotional content closely linked with the immediate context and reminders, whether on the train up to London with his dog.

One line early on doesn't make sense to me, and I was going to take it to the poetry interpretation thread, but it's difficult to state the problem without citing all of the first section. That first section is very clear, and then, in that train up to London with his dog, 'a symbol of the abandoned order' who

Lies on the carriage floor,
Her eyes inept and glamorous as a film star's,
Who wants to live, ie wants more
Presents, jewellery, furs, gadgets, solicitations
As if to live were not
Following the curve of a planet or controlled water
But a leap in the dark, a tangent, a stray shot.

Although there are some complications here, they're not hugely difficult, but I actually understand what 'controlled water' means. By analogy of the eliptical orbit 'curve of a planet', the 'controlled water' might mean a similar arc - but making water, that is having a piss, seems, to say the least, not right here. so is he talking about water out of a hose? That's as good as I can manage here, but it's not very satisfactory. Otherwise, i'm not at all clear.

Controlled water is a weird term that does exist. In the context of this I read it two ways:

As if to live were not
Following the curve of a planet or controlled water

So the first refers to the tides, no? The moon is earth’s satellite and in its orbit. However the moon also influences the tides. The tides exist as they do because the moon’s gravitational pull controls them. Tides are gradual, they erode cliffs and carve out the coastline over time.

Controlled water is a really weird term. Could refer to a lot of things within this context - rivers carving their pathways out, the effect of water on the natural landscape, the efforts to keep said bodies of water fit for consumption or to manage them in some way. It’s a long term project because of the delicacy of the ecosystem.

Idk, that’s the best I have. It is a weird line.

I don't know that poem, but coming after "curve of a planet" the phrase "controlled water" suggests to me the idea of the curious way gravity keeps all the water on the planet, trapped in a ball. It seems impossible that it all stays so neatly in shape rather than spilling out into space, but that is how physics works. And if that is the way the whole universe is set up, how crazy is it to expect (as the dog doesm as we do) that we might defy those forces and leap into the dark, go off on tangents, etc.

yep, i hadn't considered tides or that wider gravitational effect - seems very possible. my overall reading of the passage is that there is a difference between the life that recognises it follows a curve of forces and tensions torquing against each other, creating a defined, if mysterious, path, rather than a set of more or less accidental or arbitrary incidents, almost frivolous, without connexion.

the implication is not fate at work, as such, but capturing the path between intersecting movements... from summer to autumn, in the train's movement, in *movement's* movement, in people's movement:

Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire,
Ebbing away down ramps of shaven lawn where close-clipped yew
Insulates the lives of retired generals and admirals

(the opening lines)

And the rebels and the young
Have taken the train to town or the two-seater
Unravelling rails or road
Losing the thread deliberately behind them -
Autumnal palinode.
And I am in the train nowq too and summer is going
South as I go north

^ those last lines exactly what I mean by that torque created by intersecting forces.

this has now turned into a post that sits better on the other thread!

As if to live were not
Following the curve of a planet or controlled water

I agree that the use of "controlled water" is perplexing. I like the suggestion of the arc of water from a hose or from a man taking a piss, but I suspect he probably meant something about navigating a river or canal, e.g. following the bend in a river.

It seems the prevalence of the term "controlled water" was rising rapidly in the 1930s, and has since fallen.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=controlled+water&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=29&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true&direct_url=t4%3B%2Ccontrolled%20water%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bcontrolled%20water%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BControlled%20Water%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BControlled%20water%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BCONTROLLED%20WATER%3B%2Cc0

The Early Poems of Yvor Winters 1920-28

Now we’ve no hope of going back,
cutter, to that grey quay
where we moored twice and twice unwillingly
cast off our cables to put out at the slack
when the sea’s laugh was choked to a mutter
and the leach lifted hesitantly with a stutter
and sulky clack, how desolate the swatchways look,
cutter …

… We have no course to set,
only to drift too long, watch too glumly, and wait,
wait.

Basil Bunting, Perche no Spero

why would he want to go back to that? Does he say?

Oh wait, at least he wasn't here, right? I know the feeling.

McMichael, Four Good Things