The Poetry Thread

October
Edward Thomas

Philip Larkin "Faith Healing"

We went there for the dance: a ritual
of touch and distance, webs of courtesy
and guesswork; shifts
from sunlight into shade;
and when the patients came downstairs
to join us, smiling, utterly polite,
in new-pressed clothes, like cousins twice-removed,
they had the look of people glimpsed in mirrors,
subtle as ghosts, yet real, with the vague
good-humour of the lost.

[...]

'The Asylum Dance', John Burnside.

a curse against elegies - anne sexton

At the Fishhouses - Elizabeth Bishop

Don Juan
Byron

Misery and Splendor - Robert Hass

Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damn you sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,
So 'gainst the winter's balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm,
Sing Goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

Ancient Music
Ezra Pound

---
Mark Levine, "Work Song"

M.

i love larkin so much.

and elliot not so much.

and john burnside a whole whack more.

and don paterson the most.

in fact, i'm going to break the 10 line rule too ('cos i think it is a stupid, if sensible, rule):

'Addenda' by Don Paterson

(i)

1            The Gellyburn is six feet under;
2            they sunk a pipe between its banks,
3            tricked it in and turfed it over.
4            We heard it rush from stank to stank,
5            Ardler Wood to the Caird Estate.

6            Scott said when you crossed the river
7            you saw sparks; if you ran at it
8        something snagged on the line of water.

(ii)

1            It was Scott who found the one loose knot
2            from the thousand dead eyes in the fence,
3            and inside, the tiny silver lochan
4            with lilies, green rushes, and four swans.
5            A true artist, he set his pitch:

6            uncorking the little show for tuppence
7            he'd count a minute on his watch
8            while a boy set his eye to the light.

(iii)

1            One week he was early, and turned up
2            at the Foot Clinic in Kemback Street
3            to see a little girl parade
4            before the Indian doctor, stripped
5            down to just her underthings.

6            Now he dreams about her every night
7            working through his stretches: The Mermaid;
8            The Swan; The Tightrope-Walker; Wings.

(iv)

1            They leave the party, arm in arm
2            to a smore so thick, her voice comes
3            to him as if from a small room;
4            their footprints in the creaking snow
5            the love-pact they affirm and reaffirm.

6            Open for fags, the blazing kiosk
7            crowns old Jock in asterisks.
8            He is a saint, and Scott tells him so.

(sorry)

go to the front of the class!

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

("The Snow Man" - Wallace Stevens)

("He Held Radical Light" [1st stanza] - A. R. Ammons)

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied....not one is demented with the
mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived
thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.

("Leaves of Grass" - Walt Whitman)

Early germ
warfare. The dead
hurled this way look like wheels
in the sky. Look: there goes
Larry the Shoemaker, barefoot, over the wall,
and Mary Sausage Stuffer, see how she flies,
and the Hatter twins, both at once, soar
over the parapet, little Tommy's elbow bent
as if in a salute,
and his sister, Mathilde, she follows him,
arms outstretched, through the air,
just as she did
on earth.

Plague Victims Catapulted Over Walls Into Besieged City - Thomas Lux

It exhales softly,
Especially now, approaching springtime,
When tendrils of green are plaited

Across the humus, desperately frail
In their passage against
The dark, unredeemed parcels of earth.

A Chosen Light
John Montague

The Windhover
Gerard Manley Hopkins

"Not so," said a man.
"The voice of God whispers in the heart
So softly
That the soul pauses,
Making no noise,
And strives for these melodies,
Distant, sighing, like faintest breath,
And all the being is still to hear."

( Stephen Crane )

The Merman

For Nico

The ripples on your wall:
fake sea-lights the soft sunlight makes.

You sleep under water.
Learn to love the counterfeit

and in the mess of shalts and shoulds and musts
find what you want.

Don't forget: I once stood loving
what was not here.

J. T. Barbarese

Egg

And when the lodger, on the second day,
asks her if she knows the word cock

she looks ahead and simply starts walking,
steadying the word like an egg.

Paula wants to marry me
but I gave her the cold shoulder:
she's way too old. I'd have given
it a thought if she were older.

Martial (trans. William Matthews)

'steadying'!

'like an egg'!

Fine.

But stop driving it around
in a van. Stop biting
your nails and sweating,
and for God's sake stop
saying not to be afraid.

Just get it over with.

—Ron Koertge

Come on poetrylovers step up with some more lines

also: what about: i. oswald's 'dart' ii. stevens' 'harmonium' and iii. molloy's 'hare soup'? anyone?

excerpt of 'Essay On The Personal'
Stephen Dunn

1          What innocence? Whose guilt? What eyes? Whose breast?
2          Crumpled orphan, nembutal bed,
3          white hearse, Los Angeles,
4          OiMaggio! Los Angeles! Miller! Los Angeles! America!
5          That Death should seem the only protector---
6          That all arms should have faded, and the great cameras and lights
7             become an inquisition and a torment---
8          That the many acquaintances, the autograph-hunters, the
9             inflexible directors, the drive-in admirers should become
10           a blur of incomprehension and pain---
11        That lonely Uncertainty should limp up, grinning, with
12           bewildering barbiturates, and watch her undress and lie
13           down and in her anguish
14        call for him! call for him to strengthen her with what could
15        only dissolve her! A method
16        of dying, we are shaken, we see it. Strasberg!
17        Los Angeles! Olivier! Los Angeles! Others die
18        and yet by this death we are a little shaken, we feel it,
19        America.
20        Let no one say communication is a cantword.
21        They had to lift her hand from the bedside telephone.
22        But what she had not been able to say
23        Perhaps she had said. 'All I had was my life.
24        I have no regrets, because if I made
25        any mistakes, I was responsible.
26        There is now---and there is the future.
27        What has happened is behind. So
28        it follows you around? So what?'---This
29        to a friend, ten days before.
30        And so she was responsible.
31        And if she was not responsible, not wholly responsible, Los Angeles?
32           Los Angeles? Will it follow you around? Will the slow
33           white hearse of the child of America follow you around?

No room has ever been as silent as the room
Where hundreds of violins are hung in unison.

from "The Wasteland", T.S. Eliot

Coming

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon --
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

-Anna Akhmatova
from "Requiem" (1957)

Italy stands the other side,
  While, like a guard between,
The solemn Alps,
The siren Alps,
  Forever intervene!

[Emily Dickinson]

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

She hated bleak and wintry things alone.
All that was warm and quick, she loved too well-
A light, a flame, a heart against her own;
It is forever bitter cold, in Hell.

Vl. The Actress

Her name, cut clear upon this marble cross,
Shines, as it shone when she was still on earth;
While tenderly the mild, agreeable moss
Obscures the figures of her date of birth.

from "Tombstones in the Starlight" by Dorothy Parker

The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you've been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical:
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
--Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.

[Elizabeth Bishop. I shamelessly nicked the last verse of this for a song of mine a few years ago. I will be paying you royalties in eternity, Liz.]

I am in love with the LION poetry database.

bnw quoted an excerpt of hass' 'misery and splendor' upthread and provided a link to a realplayer file of hass reading the poem.

Hass, Robert:Churchyard [from Human Wishes (1989), Ecco Press]

[1]  Somerset Maugham said a professional was someone who could do his
best work when he didn't particularly feel like it. There was a picture of
him in the paper, a face lined deeply and morally like Auden's, an old
embittered tortoise, the corners of the mouth turned down resolutely to
express the idea that everything in life is small change. And what he
said when he died: I'm all through, the clever young men don't write
essays about me. In the fleshly world, the red tulip in the garden
sunlight is almost touched by shadow and begins to close up. Someone
asked me yesterday: are deer monogamous? I thought of something I had
read. When deer in the British Isles were forced to live in the open
because of heavy foresting, it stunted them. The red deer who lived in
the Scottish highlands a thousand years ago were a third larger than the
present animal. This morning, walking into the village to pick up the
car, I thought of a roof where I have slept in the summer in New York,
pigeons in the early morning sailing up Fifth Avenue and silence in
which you imagine the empty canyons the light hasn't reached yet. I was
standing on the high street in Shelford, outside the fussy little teashop,
and I thought a poem with the quick, lice-ridden pigeons in it might
end: this is a dawn song in Manhattan. I hurried home to write it and, as
I passed the churchyard, school was letting out. Luke was walking
toward me smiling. He thought I had come to meet him. That was when I
remembered the car, when he was walking toward me through the spring
flowers and the eighteenth-century gravestones, his arms full of school
drawings he hoped not to drop in the mud.

If no, then I'm not sure I understand the question.

(interesting tidbit/bragging: I talked to Dorraine Laux a bit about that article when I met her.)

Public Address (excerpt)

[...]
The screen goes blank, all that was

etched there in light--a flashbulb's
thumbprint in the back of the skull.
Sometimes we only die, sometimes
champagne corks fly from our wounds.

The coldest day of the year and still
there's flowering. The lovers' bodies,
once long grass, strike and strike each other.
How else control fire but to make your own? A dye

must be squeezed from the poisonous berries,
the sand melted translucent. each work
an evasion, secret, clue, the subject always
missing just as the dream is never

inside the sleeper but rises above like
a sweet scum above boiling milk, the body
like a dead body but warm, inviting,
arousable. Who has not looked down the throat

of an orchid into color that can't be seen
like the cosmic black humming behind
noon blue? We want only to be admitted.
We want only to be left out.

Dean Young

When I've got my editor hat on, nothing sets the alarm bells off so quickly as randomly placed line breaks, put in just because the 'poet' is dimly convinced that poetry has line breaks.

(Then again, with some of the dodgy things that email can do to formatting, it's often anyone's guess where the line breaks are intended to be, if anywhere.)

That sentence sounds not wholly grammatical, yet still sufficiently suggestive.

I think what I'm talking about are those "prose w/ line breaks" pieces that seem to use breaks in such a way that disregard them as being a pause or an emphasis on the line's effect as an independent part of a larger whole.

I'd agee that ultra-conventional breaks are probably nothing to pat yourself on the back for either. They're worth experimenting with.

CLAIRE BATEMAN
MONOGRAPH

It would later be said of our era
that even the boring parts were interesting,
& vice versa.

Without the least trace of irony,
officials christened space shuttles
after doomed & sunken
cities of yore.

Nearly all of us
constructed dashboard altars
upon which we lavished
particular & minute devotions
as we cruised past scenes
that seemed to represent disaster’s aftermath
but almost always resolved
into simple sequences of yard sales—
derelict undergarments & mattresses
exposed on sullenly tilting lawns—
each just another item on the ever-growing
list of events not to be taken
personally.

For their arcane significance,
we pondered signs such as these:

IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU'D BE HOME RIGHT NOW!

&

GOD SEES EVERYTHING, EVEN YOU READING THIS SIGN!

Though the varieties of available lip-gloss shades
& the total number of famous people in history
were exponentially increasing
so that it became ever more difficult
to distinguish plum from maroon
or the living from the dead,
it still took approximately
the same six years
for a single exhaled breath
to become evenly mixed with the atmosphere.

For none of us was it ever clear
whether that rumbling sound we kept hearing
was static or heartfelt applause.

Everyone was professionally lonely,
yet we ceased not our shining.

Many aspired to but did not actually achieve
the office of Notary Public.

This was not considered a tragedy.

Seen

In your field of vision, there is a place where no image is fixed,
where injury carved its cave of nothing,
gathered blackness around a splinter's wooden slip.
One eye, you say, scans the world.
The other examines the self's invisible wanting.
In that equation, I believe myself to be
the point connecting one destination to another,
somewhere you paused to draw lines to the next warm station.
I emit no light, no heat
but gather, in cupped hands, what fell to the ground
when limbs were shaken by your grasping wind.

Mark Wunderlich

From too much hope of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

-- A. C. Swinburne

--- Thomas Hood

I laugh at his poems,
As he laughs at mine.
They read like
The words of a blind man
Describing the sun.

I wanted to add Sean O'Brien to it, last night, but I don't know how to make the lines all go together.

(Excuse the repitition, I am providing a public service.)

For that thundery corridor

Painting its Forth into Scotland and back,

For the drizzly grind of the coal-train

Or even the Metro, that amateur transport,

Sparking and chattering every verse-end.

from Sean O'Brien, 'The Eavesdroppers'

...
Where darkness is
Once there was a mirror
And I therein was King.
...

Where is everyone?

Happy baby!

They are buffeted by this wind and that,
never really knowing where they are going.

They think they have no choice over their destiny,
but we know the path and we follow it without question.

Remember, there is sacrifice involved in any kind of life,
even those that choose the safe way must sacrifice the thrill.

The point is if you know what you want,
you must be prepared to sacrifice everything to get it.

Those that realise this are the fortunate ones.

- Thomas Schumacher ‘The Fortunate Ones’

"she my love by london gentled as by space the spinning world"

i read this poem this morning and thought: how startling, how beautiful, and then I discovered that the only google result for it is... me, on this thread.

Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry
by Howard Nemerov

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

While out today I bought a book of poems from a charity store because it was a book of Kenneth Rexroth translations out of the Chinese, and Rexroth has previously torn my brain to giddy shreds

I had heard Rexroth was a polyglot and a skilled translator, but I did not know I'd be reduced to tears on the train home

His first 35 translations are of Tu Fu's work, an 8th-century poet whom he claims is alongside Catullus and Baudelaire as the greatest non-epic and non-dramatic poet in history

One of the poems, just one, was too long for a single page. I did not know this and upon the end of the page thought the poem done - it had reached a moment of such wisdom that I shudderingly re-read the tract and felt something settle over me

There turned out to be nine more lines.

TO WEI PA, A RETIRED SCHOLAR

We drink ten toasts rapidly from
The rhinoceros horn cups.
Ten cups, and still we are not drunk.
We still love each other as
We did when we were schoolboys.
Tomorrow morning mountain peaks
Will come between us, and with them
The endless, oblivious
Business of the world.

                            Tu Fu

This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then why
When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.—
Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

- GMH

Simon Armitage writes a poem on the occasion of the death of the Duke of Edinburgh.

The Patriarchs – An Elegy

The weather in the window this morning
is snow, unseasonal singular flakes,
a slow winter’s final shiver. On such an occasion
to presume to eulogise one man is to pipe up
for a whole generation – that crew whose survival
was always the stuff of minor miracle,
who came ashore in orange-crate coracles,
fought ingenious wars, finagled triumphs at sea
with flaming decoy boats, and side-stepped torpedoes.

Husbands to duty, they unrolled their plans
across billiard tables and vehicle bonnets,
regrouped at breakfast. What their secrets were
was everyone’s guess and nobody’s business.
Great-grandfathers from birth, in time they became
both inner core and outer case
in a family heirloom of nesting dolls.
Like evidence of early man their boot-prints stand
in the hardened earth of rose-beds and borders.

They were sons of a zodiac out of sync
with the solar year, but turned their minds
to the day’s big science and heavy questions.
To study their hands at rest was to picture maps
showing hachured valleys and indigo streams, schemes
of old campaigns and reconnaissance missions.
Last of the great avuncular magicians
they kept their best tricks for the grand finale:
Disproving Immortality and Disappearing Entirely.

The major oaks in the wood start tuning up
and skies to come will deliver their tributes.
But for now, a cold April’s closing moments
parachute slowly home, so by mid-afternoon
snow is recast as seed heads and thistledown.

I think there's a rather uncertain mix of the specific and the general here. If this is for the Duke, then why is it so general and generational? But if it's so general, why include the line about 'a zodiac out of sync', apparently specifically referring to his Greek origins and not applicable to other patriarchs?

This:

On such an occasion
to presume to eulogise one man is to pipe up
for a whole generation

-- seems to pick up the tone of parts of the FOUR QUARTETS, and of Auden who was contemporary with them. I'm unsure that 'pipe up' fits well here, even though Armitage is probably trying to imply a hint of a bagpiper playing in tribute.

Trash poem for a trash human

instead of trying to eulogize Philip, he wisely chose to skate away immediately into generalities about WWII. for me the poem never really rises above the imagery of wartime propaganda films or lends vitality to the people or events it purports to capture. ceremonial poems are hard.

I don't actually think so! I think it's hard to write a ceremonial poem about a person who was a malevolent racist with a noted passion for younger women.

It's simply tiresome how these old British hack poets refuse to deal with actual history, instead writing again and again about "the genius" of a generation and the trauma of the bombing of London. Give me a break.

I've read and witnessed any number of poems written for ceremonial occasions that were excellent. Hell, I read one by a student the other day that was written for a funeral of a cat that was more interesting than this crap.

I am sure it was an excellent cat and an even better public figurehead

Amber Sparks
@ambernoelle
·
17h
Hi Covid here
I have eaten
the years
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for other shit
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so full of days

The last John Ashbery poem.

https://harpers.org/archive/2018/08/climate-correction-john-ashbery-final-poem/?fbclid=IwAR3fNZESezGzE53zhJyAME6ZNqrdjdJHEcQQ662a9D5IoBvVGfXPKbNyOPs

Good interview here with Louise Gluck, where she talks a bit about Ashbery:

SH: How did you know (your book) was done? The book is quite short, but that brevity feels important to the effect of it.

LG: Well, for a long time it wasn’t; it was just skimpy and a little mannered. But during this period, I finally came to understand the poetry of John Ashbery, whose work had eluded me the whole of my life, though I was moved by him as a person. He was a radiant presence, kind of angelic, but the poems just exhausted me. They seemed interminable—in fact, some of them still do—but those that don’t were like nothing I’d ever read. What changed him for me was Karin Roffman’s book [The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life]. It made Ashbery available to me, but it was also in itself remarkable. Did I tell you the story about reading the book and writing her a letter?

SH: No, I just remember talking to you when you were in the middle of reading it, I think a few years ago. It sounded like it fixed something for you at the time.

LG: It did. So I wrote her a letter of ardent appreciation. And then I thought, “I have to write Ashbery.” But when you’re writing to someone you revere, you want to commend yourself to the person; your ego gets involved. Also, I couldn’t say, you know, “I never liked your work, but now I really see how extraordinary it is, though I certainly came to it a little late.” In any case, the letter was hard to write. It was the beginning of the semester at Yale; it was my first night in New Haven for that year. And I thought, “I absolutely have to write this letter. I have to do it. I have to do it this week. As soon as I get home, I have to.” And then I had an e-mail in the very early morning from Frank (Bidart), who said Ashbery had died. And I never wrote my letter. I mean, I’m sure he had other things on his mind. But I would have liked… I would have liked to put some flowers at his feet. I think his work showed me something. But the book I was trying to write came in the most tortured little drips—I thought of it as rusty water coming out of the tap. And then Covid happened, and I thought, “Well, that’s it for writing,” you know.

Gluck is quite literally one of the worst poets alive.