The Poetry Thread

Archaic Torso Of Apollo

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 was looking at Archel's poems.

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!

good call on that rilke poem after the wright one.

gregory: I know!

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

Really?

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

(oh, in response to your qn. upthread, pf, yes I that was written AFTER but I think I was still giddy with the excesses of drink.)

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.

Octavio Paz, 'Between Going and Staying'

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.

[...]

Fantastic Voyage (1966, Richard Fleischer, dir.)

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]

"Ireland", Paul Muldoon

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.

Some Auden for the weekend.

That's the most honour I've ever had, round here.

A funny thing about The Deregulated Muse is this:

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?

It's funny looking at things you have written a long (or even a short) time ago. I am doing that now.

Most of it is real; crap.

"To the Western World", L. Simpson

[...]

And grave by grave we civilize the ground.

[...]

It is worth saying, here, how good Poetry Review was during the Nipper's tenure. Perhaps I (have?) never appreciated it enough.
That issue with JtN, Sansom (I), Burt on Heaney, et al, really ain't shallow nor weak. I could read a lot more of this stuff.

what are issue numbers, I'll seek them out post-haste!

(is there any nipper writing in them?)

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

Read THE NIPPER'S REVIEW OF PAUL FARLEY in an issue from c.1998 or, no, 1999?

If the Nipper was in, the country, he could tell us, naturally, or artificially.

I think that JtN provided some of the best moments in the guid magazine, but I am [fill in word: you decide].

References.

Summer 1998, vol 88, #2: JtN on Farley: pp.88-89

Winter 1998, vol 88, #4: JtN on Pessoa: pp.13-14.

The second piece (there) quotes Paterson and Rimbaud, and mentions FO'B and a tad obliquely JJ's tenners.

The first piece (above) mentions the Dandy Warhols, Thomas Pynchon and... Don Paterson.

How long can you hold out?

"If the world of modern male letters is increasingly an area defined by the pub, the record shop and the football terraces, a kind of literary Bermuda triangle where talented writers lose themselves in blokish enthusiasms, then Farley would appear to have all the right credentials."

The Truth of Masks.

Is the Farley one online too?

Odd... premonition of Ewing.

Five words can say only.

(from Bob Perelman's "Chronic Meanings".)

Do we think that JtN put that article (of his) on line him self?

It is certainly a possibility. He is the master self-aggrandizer of our time. I'm joking.

I have been re-reading things. Some of it is perhaps not crap.

Do you mean, your things?

Sometimes.

People! This is for cutting and pasting lines from any poem...

My Little Utopia

Why the high, wrought-iron fence
With sharp spikes
And four padlocks and a chain
Over the heavy gate?

I drop by in late afternoon.
Make sure it's locked,
And peek through the bars
At the rows of sunny flowers.

The tree-lined winding path
Already streaked with shadow
Masking a couple kissing
As they mosey away from me.

Charles Simic

13 I win you a ring at the rifle range
14 For the twentieth time, but you've chosen
15 A yellow, implausible fish in a bag
16 That you hold to one side when I kiss you.
17 Sitting in the waiting-room in darkness
18 Beside the empty cast-iron fireplace,
19 In the last of the heat the brick gives off,
20 Not quite convinced there will be no more trains,
21 At the end of a summer that never began
22 Till we lost it

From Sean O'Brien, 'The Park By The Railway'

(this one might be quite good, I think)

Haha.

Where should we meet but in this shabby park
2 Where the railings are missing and the branches black?
3 Industrial pastoral, our circuit
4 Of grass under ash, long-standing water
5 And unimportant sunsets flaring up
6 Above the half-dismantled fair. Our place
7 Of in-betweens, abandoned viaducts
8 And modern flowers, dock and willowherb,
9 Lost mongrels, birdsong scratching at the soot
10 Of the last century. Where should we be
11 But here, my industrial girl? Where else
12 But this city beyond conservation?

It's all good.

Let's look at the face of tragedy. Let's see it's creases,
its aquiline profile, its masculine jawbone. Let's hear it's thesis,
contralto with its diabolic rises:
the aria of effect beats cause's wheezes.
How are you, tragedy? We haven't seen you lately.
Hello, the medal's flip side gone lazy.
Let's examine your aspect, lady.

the first lines of Portrait of Tragedy - Joseph brodsky

Let's put our fingers into her mouth that gnashes
scurvy-eaten keyboards inflamed by wolfram flashes
showing her spit- rich palate with blizzards of kinfolk's ashes
Let's yank her hem, see if she blushes.
Well, tragedy, if you want, surprise us.
Show us a body betrayed or its demise, devices
for lost innocence, inner crisis.

third stanza Portrait of Tragedy - Joseph Brodsky

The next rung up from extra and dogsbody
and all the clichés are true – days waiting for
enough light, learning card games, penny-ante,
while fog rolls off the sea, a camera
gets moisture in its gate, and Roman Polanski
curses the day he chose Snowdonia.

He picked you for your hair to play this role:
a look had reached Bootle from Altamont
that year. You wouldn’t say you sold your soul
but learned your line inside a beating tent

(From 'Keith Chegwin as Fleance' - Paul Farley)

boom. You have to care more. For us the dreamer is
a quincunx of trees in a gale of ink with a grace
as of owls that are not mere birds. For further guidelines
send nine dollars. If you are a churl, do not submit,
but do subscribe. We stay up late, and morning finds us
crusted with homage to fickle dancers whose hair is frizzy.
If you wish your poems returned, check the alley out back.
Know this, know this, we are not just "doing our thing",
we are not just "another eccentric mag". Things have gone
way, way past that. Life whispered "spring" and we sprang.
Do not take us for granted at Whang.

(From 'Whang Editorial Policy' by Mark Halliday. Full text here: http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/review/pr88-4/halliday.htm)

[...]
Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,
Me breathing booze at her,
She leaning out of her pot toward the window.
Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me -
And that was scary -
So when that snuffling cretin of a maid
Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,
I said nothing.

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,
I was that lonely.

(from 'The Geranium' By Theodore Roethke)

[...]
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

(the end of 'Frost At Midnight' by ST Coleridge obv. I have always loved that last line quite unreasonably much.)

"silent icicles" is great, also.

Thread back to proper usage?
It's fanciful.

My Life At Home During Banking Hours

For a solid month I tried
to think of something new to say about rivers
I called the newspaper to find out
how many horses were left on earth,
and numbly watched mosquitos swarm
over a pile of high-heeled shoes
while my colleagues hunted in the corners.

At least I was not in the line of work
that had me spending most of my day
avoiding God. My desk held painfully
complicated sufaces filled with shadow cassettes,
black bear theory and drinking water.

There was the sadness in a name like Jesse Winchester
and the wind howling
on the answering machine when I returned home
from daydreaming in a margarita shop.

All the blessings and counter-blessings
that move my mind like FM waves
from a butter churn, and granted me the sight
of parallel collies standing on a hilltop

And the rain falling on the United States
while it wonders
'What is the United States?'

I used to sing a song that went
'No more Springs, no more Summers, no more Falls'
I believed I was nearing the morning when
nettles would pour from the shower head.
When I would be ripped out of the world for re-casting
of blues and plastic.

I believed that I would finally break
where I had been bent,
that I would lose the game inside the game
But that has not happened,
And now I don't expect it ever will.

(David Berman)

I have only ever heard this pome and never seen it, so some of the words are almost certainly wrong and I have made up the formatting.

But I love it so.

the full text, for interested parties, of the keith chegwin as fléance poem is hidden somewhere on ile.

Poetry is only for wimps and wankers. Fortunately everybody is somtimes. Now, what are the differences between American and European poetry today?
Oops I am in the wrong thread. Ok. Let´s have a poem:

The Pope's Penis

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat - and at night,
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.

----- Sharon Olds

Finally: “Asked what distinguished him, as a poet, from an ordinary man, Wallace Stevens replied, Inability to see much point to the life of an ordinary man.”

Okay, it's official. The Pope's Penis is now my favorite poem of all time.

Wallace Stevens wuz wrong.

I think he means "ordinary man" as unexamined life, fwiw.

bnw, will you post an extract of your own poesie some time? False modesty be damned.

Well you tell me: what's the point in being ordinary. Seem's a pretty low aim somehow. Everybody should try for more. Of course, on closer inspection, most people are a bit out of the ordinary. Go ahead, name one person which is totally ordinary. This post may have been beside the point though.

Sumer is icumen in - loudly sing cuckoo!

yikes... now i will be editing something to post for the next 5 hours

okay, this one's a few years old, (so I am fairly safely detached from it.)

--
After An Argument Over Global Warming

You feign sleep and face the wall
because you believe in ice shelves
cleaving under the weight of their water.

Your birthmark melts down in the dark.
The lack of pigment sapped into a lack of light.

We stood in the kitchen with the faucet running.
You at the sink washing the same plate over and over, me
propped up on the counter top. I spoke of the shoreline

creeping upward in inches over centuries.
The gradual spread of seashore
and drift of continents.

You saw the bayou sucked into the Gulf.
Desert droughts blooming in the countryside.
Monsoons washing out the soil.

And when I said "Beauty is slow," you dropped the plate
like a shard of ice and bolted into the bedroom.
The faucet running.