The Poetry Thread

I think about that late TSE these days and reckon: I am no longer sure that TSE and EP are good models for a poet.

I don't claim that they would care either way, or reckon that their being models was the most important thing about them.

Oddly, this just reminded me of the open mic horror last night: the first 'act' was a man clutching a book of Goons scripts, which he proceeded to read from, DOING ALL THE VOICES. For about TEN MINUTES.

I've not read much eliot, to be honest, and have read so little pound as to be able to say I haven't read pound at all.

[Ezra Pound, a fragment of a very late Canto that was never finished]

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

[Ezra Pound, the last section of "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley", about WWI]

I have read the 'Four Quartets' now. Wow. I think you were onto something when you said his poetry is a worldweary sigh. But what a sigh!

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

--Ezra Pound

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;...

And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase....

In the back of a garbage truck parked on a side street,
five garbage collectors gobble a chocolate cake,
the gift of a lady each would like to squeeze a lot.

Sprawled in the gutter a black dog licks his dick
like there is no tomorrow, and no tomorrow either
for the five men eating with grubby fingers, smearing

the hand-cut slabs of thick black cake onto cheeks,
chins, noses and sometimes their mouths. That frosting
dribbles sweetness like a cut wrist drips blood

and they suck it from their fingernails and gulp down
the last crumbs. How disgusting! squawks a passing
matron to her friend. Had they fathomed the fullness

of the world's filth they would never have trusted
their pristine garbage to these galoots. One puffs out
his cheeks to make a poot-poot noise like a fart,

and the matrons scuttle off to eat sweet creams and read
their lady poems. What a dreadful world! The immortal
verse of Keats versus a dog's red dick on the concrete.

Such contradictions make us rich. The black dog whacks
his tail against the sidewalk. These garbage guys
are his heroes and the dog reckons that if he's polite

all five will let him lick their fingers clean. The hot
sun baking his belly, his fleas idle for a change,
the prospect of sweet things in his mouth. Why, if he

could talk, he'd make a speech against the intellect,
art and math. What's so precious about what's not there?
Into the trash with Einstein and his furious sums!

Stephen Dobyns

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

A woman travels to Brazil for plastic
surgery and a face-lift. She is sixty
and has the usual desire to stay pretty.
Once she is healed she takes her new face
out on the streets of Rio. A young man
with a gun wants her money. Bang, she's dead.
The body is shipped back to New York,
but in the morgue there is a mix-up. The son
is sent for. He is told that his mother
is one of these ten different women.
Each has been shot. Such is modern life.
He studies them all but can't find her.
With her new face, she has become a stranger.
Maybe it's this one, maybe it's that one.
He looks at their breasts. Which ones nursed him?
He presses their hands to his cheek.
Which ones consoled him? He even tries
climbing into their laps to see which
feels more familiar but the coroner stops him.
Well, says the coroner, which is your mother?
They all are, says the young man, let me
take them as a package. The coroner hesitates,
then agrees. Actually it solves a lot of problems.
The young man has the ten women shipped home,
then cremates them all together. You've seen
how some people have a little urn on the mantle?
This man has a huge silver garbage can.
In the spring, he drags the garbage can
out to the garden and begins working the teeth,
the ash, the bits of bone into the soil.
Then he plants tomatoes. His mother loved tomatoes.
They grow straight from seed, so fast and big
that the young man is amazed. He takes the first
ten into the kitchen. In their roundness,
he sees his mother's breasts. In their smoothness,
he finds the consoling touch of her hands.
Mother, mother, he cries, and flings himself
on the tomatoes. Forget about the knife, the fork,
the pinch of salt. Try to imagine the filial
starvation, think of his ravenous kisses.

Stephen Dobyns

from Louise Gluck's "October"

Snow had fallen. I remember
music from an open window.

Come to me, said the world.
This is not to say
it spoke in exact setences
but that I perceived beauty in this manner.

Sunrise. A film of moisture
on each living thing. Pools of cold light
formed in the gutters.

I stood
at the doorway,
ridiculous as it now seems.

What others found in art,
I found in nature. What others found
in human love, I found in nature.
Very simple. But there was no voice there.

Winter was over. In the thawed dirt,
bits of green were showing.

Come to me, said the world. I was standing
in my woolcoat at a kind of bright portal--
I can finally say
long ago; it give me considerable pleasure. Beauty

the healer, the teacher--

death cannot harm me
more than you have harmed me,
my beloved life.

{James Schuyler 'Faure's Second Piano Quartet': in honour of the new Mark Ford-edited New York school anthology}

in a dusty shop you pause in, or a bar
you never tried, and a smell
         will do as well;
         then you're

suddenly very far from what you know.
You found it as a child,
         when the next field
         to you

was the world's end, a breeze of being gone.
Now it begins to give,
         a single nerve,
         low down:

it sags, as if it felt the gravity
at long last.
[...]

The Nerve - Glynn Maxwell

IZUMI SHIKIBU

(Now if I could only find a haiku about writing haiku... then my artist friend could paint that on my body instead of just ideograms...)

First: Five syllables.
Second: Seven syllables.
Third: Five syllables.

("Haiku" by Ron Padgett.)

denis johnson - you

First: Five syllables.
Second: Seven syllables.
Third: Five syllables.

("Haiku" by Ron Padgett.)

-- Casuistry (chri...), May 10th, 2004
* * * *
Darlin', not only do you warrant special mention in my blog for this, but I'll be sure to credit you when the photo of my fleshy calligraphy project is posted (and I'll send you the link!)

Today's poem comes from Robert Grenier, who is one of my favorites, although I think perhaps his poems work better if you read, like, thirty of them rather than just one. But here's one:

IT'S NOT SO MUCH THAT SHE'S TAKING A LONG TIME

it's probably more that she has to stand in a long line

On a day like any other day,
like "yesterday or centuries before,"
in a town with the one remembered street,
shaded by the buckeye and the sycamore--
the street long and true as a theorem,
the day like yesterday or the day before,
the street you walked down centuries before--
the story the same as the others flooding in
from the cardinal points is
turning to take a good look at you.
Every creature, intelligent or not, has disappeared--
the humans, phosphorescent,
the duplicating pets, the guppies and spaniels,
the Woolworth's turtle that cost forty-nine cents
(with the soiled price tag half-peeled on its shell)--
but, from the look of things, it only just happened.
The wheels of the upside-down tricycle are spinning.
The swings are empty but swinging.
And the shadow is still there, and there
is the object that made it,
riding the proximate atmosphere,
oblong and illustrious above
the dispeopled bedroom community,
venting the memories of those it took
[...]

The Disappearances - Vijay Seshadri

1          You blame me that I do not write
2          with the accent of the age:
3          the eunuch voice of scholarship,
4          or the reformer's rage
5          (blurred by a fag-end in the twisted lip).
6          You blame me that I do not call
7          truculent nations to unite.
8          I answer that my poems all
9          are woven out of love's loose ends;
10        for myself and for my friends.

11        You blame me that I do not face
12        the banner-headline fact
13        of rape and death in bungalows,
14        cities and workmen sacked.
15        Tomorrow's time enough to rant of those,
16        when the whirlpool sucks us in.
17        Turn away from the bitter farce,
18        or have you now forgotten
19        that cloud, star, leaf, and water's dance
20        are facts of life, and worth your glance?

21        You blame me that I do not look
22        at cities, swivelled, from
23        the eye of the crazy gunman, or
24        the man who drops the bomb.
25        Twenty years watching from an ivory tower
26        taller than your chimney-stack,
27        I have seen fields beyond the smoke:
28        and think it better that I make
29        in the sloganed wall the people pass,
30        a window---not a looking-glass.

(TSE, of course. Some poetry to celebrate my birthday! Among some talk --and time for-- you and me.!)

"The Truth About Horace."

It is very aggravating
To hear the solemn prating
Of the fossils who are stating
That old Horace was a prude;
When we know that with the ladies
He was always raising Hades
And with many an escapade his
Best productions are imbued.

There's really not much harm in a
Large number of his carmina
But these people find alarm in a
Few records of his acts;
So they'd squelch the muse caloric,
And to students sophomoric
They'd present as metaphoric
What old Horace meant for facts.

We have always thought 'em lazy;
Now we adjudge 'em crazy!
Why, Horace was a daisy
That was very much alive!
And the wisest of us know him
As his Lydia verses show him,--
Go, read that virile poem,--
It is No. 25.

He was a very owl, sir,
And starting out to prowl, sir,
You bet he made Rome howl, sir,
Until he filled his date;
With a massic-laden ditty
And a classic maiden pretty
He painted up the city,
And Maecenas paid the freight!

The pedigree of Honey
Does not concern the Bee,
Nor lineage of Ecstasy
Delay the Butterfly
On spangle journeys to the peak
Of some perceiveless thing—
The right of way to Tripoli
A more essential thing.

--

The Pedigree of Honey
Does not concern the Bee—
A Clover, any time, to him,
Is Aristocracy—

~Emily Dickinson

[...]
Here I am, floating through the sky
with my head on wrong
so that my hair tickles my neck
and my chin sticks up,
and the lovers kissing in the garden
look comical, their feet straining
to touch the ground.
It's been a long time since someone
kissed me in the garden.
My mouth's up too high.
[...]

Rene Wenger - "After Chagall"

The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not want
To be always stressing either its flux or its permanence,
I do not want to be a tragic or philosophic chorus
But to keep my eye only on the nearer future
And after that let the sea flow over us.

Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,
Join hands and make believe that joined
Hands will keep away the wolves of water
Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed
That no one hears them among the talk and laughter.

['Wolves' - Louis Macneice]

1 For three days and three nights, he has listened
2 to the pounding of a terrible jug band
3 now reduced to a wheezy concertina
4 and the disinterested thump of a tea-chest bass.
5 It seems safe to look: wires trail on the pillowcase,
6 a drip swings overhead; then the clear tent
7 becomes his father's clapped-out Morris Minor,
8 rattling towards home. The windscreen presents
9 the unshattered myth of a Scottish spring;
10 with discreet complicity, the road
11 swerves to avoid the solitary cloud.
12 On an easy slope, his father lets the engine
13 cough into silence. Everything is still.
14 He frees the brake: the car surges uphill.

- Don Paterson

- Federico Garcia Lorca

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave 'S a sma' request:
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' wast,
An' weary Winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee-bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald.
To thole the Winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!