also: what about: i. oswald's 'dart' ii. stevens' 'harmonium' and iii. molloy's 'hare soup'? anyone?
― cozen (Cozen), Thursday, 18 March 2004 23:31 (twenty years ago) link
excerpt of 'Essay On The Personal'Stephen Dunn
― bnw (bnw), Friday, 19 March 2004 00:28 (twenty years ago) link
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?
― cozen (Cozen), Friday, 19 March 2004 00:33 (twenty years ago) link
No room has ever been as silent as the roomWhere hundreds of violins are hung in unison.
― cozen (Cozen), Friday, 19 March 2004 01:08 (twenty years ago) link
from "The Wasteland", T.S. Eliot
― weather1ngda1eson (Brian), Friday, 19 March 2004 10:44 (twenty years ago) link
Coming
On longer evenings,Light, chill and yellow,Bathes the sereneForeheads of houses.A thrush sings,Laurel-surroundedIn the deep bare garden,Its fresh-peeled voiceAstonishing the brickwork.It will be spring soon,It will be spring soon --And I, whose childhoodIs a forgotten boredom,Feel like a childWho comes on a sceneOf adult reconciling,And can understand nothingBut the unusual laughter,And starts to be happy.
― donald, Friday, 19 March 2004 14:08 (twenty years ago) link
― Maria D., Friday, 19 March 2004 14:38 (twenty years ago) link
― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Friday, 19 March 2004 14:56 (twenty years ago) link
-Anna Akhmatovafrom "Requiem" (1957)
― marisa (marisa), Friday, 19 March 2004 15:40 (twenty years ago) link
Italy stands the other side, While, like a guard between,The solemn Alps,The siren Alps, Forever intervene!
[Emily Dickinson]
― Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 20 March 2004 00:58 (twenty years ago) link
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 lookYour 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 fledAnd paced upon the mountains overheadAnd hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
― I'm Passing Open Windows (Ms Laura), Saturday, 20 March 2004 07:56 (twenty years ago) link
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
― weather1ngda1eson (Brian), Saturday, 20 March 2004 10:05 (twenty years ago) link
The still explosions on the rocks,the lichens, growby spreading gray, concentric shocks.They have arrangedto meet the rings around the moon, althoughwithin our memories they have not changed.
And since the heavens will attendas long on us,you've been, dear friend,precipitate and pragmatical:and look what happens. For Time isnothing if not amenable.
The shooting stars in your black hairin bright formationare 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.]
― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Saturday, 20 March 2004 11:34 (twenty years ago) link
― cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 20 March 2004 11:46 (twenty years ago) link
― cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 20 March 2004 12:00 (twenty years ago) link
I am in love with the LION poetry database.
― cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 20 March 2004 14:40 (twenty years ago) link
― donald, Saturday, 20 March 2004 18:30 (twenty years ago) link
bnw quoted an excerpt of hass' 'misery and splendor' upthread and provided a link to a realplayer file of hass reading the poem.
― cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 20 March 2004 19:17 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Saturday, 20 March 2004 23:04 (twenty years ago) link
Oh, play that thing! Mute glorious StoryvillesOthers may license, grouping around their chairsSporting-house girls like circus tigers (priced
Far above rubies) to pretend their fads,While scholars manques nod around unnoticedWrapped up in personnels like old plaids.
On me your voice falls as they say love should,Like an enormous yes.
I mean, the ending's the payload, and that, but the tigers are the bit I really love, 'cos when Larkin lets the piss and misery go and starts throwin' around the Big Transcendental Culture-packed Signifieds he is hotter than gosh. Which might also explain why I like this so much, from a German laydee called Sarah Kirsch, and bought unopened for two pounds:
This unforgettable greenA faded glowVeils the earth I walkThrough the marshes my soft throatJuts out into another life.
On the river the Brontes are floatingWith hats like iron potsOn the bank someone has mowed the grass someonePrimes the pump in theCrumbling house.
(I realise this is everythat awful abt modern poetry, but even so...)
― Gregory Henry (Gregory Henry), Sunday, 21 March 2004 03:52 (twenty years ago) link
Just before she flew off like a swanto her wealthy parents' summer home,Bruce's college girlfriend asked himto improve his expertise at oral sex,and offered him some technical advice:
Use nothing but his tonguetipto flick the light switch in his roomon and off a hundred times a dayuntil he grew fluent at the nuancesof force and latitude.
Imagine him at practice every evening,more inspired than he ever was at algebra,beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye,the quadratic equation of her climaxyield to the logicof his simple math.
Maybe he unscrewedthe bulb from his apartment ceilingso that passersby would not believea giant firefly was pulsingits electric abdomen in 13 B.
Maybe, as he stoodtwo inches from the wall,in darkness, fogging the old plasterwith his breath, he visualized the futureas a mansion standing on the shorethat he was rowing towith his tongue's exhausted oar.
Self Improvement - Tony Hoagland
― bnw (bnw), Sunday, 21 March 2004 06:23 (twenty years ago) link
― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Sunday, 21 March 2004 11:52 (twenty years ago) link
I dreamed I called you on the telephoneto say: Be kinder to yourselfbut you were sick and would not answer
The waste of my love goes on this waytrying to save you from yourself
I have always wondered about the leftoverenergy, water rushing down a hilllong after the rains have stopped
or the fire you want to go to bed frombut cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-downthe red coals more extreme, more curiousin their flashing and dyingthan you wish they weresitting there long after midnight.
― aimurchie, Sunday, 21 March 2004 14:49 (twenty years ago) link
― cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 21 March 2004 15:09 (twenty years ago) link
― cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 21 March 2004 15:11 (twenty years ago) link
From:
anyone lived in a pretty how town...E.E. Cummings
...someones married their everyoneslaughed their cryings and did their dance(sleep wake hope and then)theysaid their nevers they slept their dream stars rain sun moon(and only the snow can begin to explainhow children are apt to forget to rememberwith up so floating many bells down)...
― yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Sunday, 21 March 2004 16:19 (twenty years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 21 March 2004 16:57 (twenty years ago) link
here is a short excerpt from the last page of the "Winter" section.
A prayer that asks
where in the hour's dark moil is mercy?
Ain't no ladders tumbling down from heavenfor what heaven we had we made. An embassy
of ashes & dust. Where was safety? Home?
Lynda Hull
― aimurchie, Sunday, 21 March 2004 19:11 (twenty years ago) link
with a solid rope
Will God hear?
Will he take me all the way?
Like water in goblets of unbaked clay
I drip out slowly,
and dry.
My soul whirs. Dizzy. Let me
discover my home.
- Lal Ded
― cheeesoo (cheeesoo), Sunday, 21 March 2004 20:45 (twenty years ago) link
[Jacob Polley - who is sickeningly young, talented and good looking, and also reading at the South Bank in London tonight.)
― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 22 March 2004 12:26 (twenty years ago) link
― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 22 March 2004 12:42 (twenty years ago) link
― cozen (Cozen), Monday, 22 March 2004 15:57 (twenty years ago) link
Withdrawing from the present,wandering a past that is alivein books only.In lovewith women, outlastedby their smiles; the richnessof their apparel putsthe poor in perspective.The brush dipped in bloodand the knife in arthave preserved their value.Smouldering times: sackedcities,incinerable hearts
and the fledgling Godtipped out of his highnest into the virgin's lapby the incorrigible cuckoo. R.S Thomas
― aimurchie (aimurchie), Monday, 22 March 2004 16:12 (twenty years ago) link
Transformations
Portion of this yewIs a man my grandsire knew,Bosomed here at its foot:This branch may be his wife,A ruddy human lifeNow turned to a green shoot.
These grasses must be madeOf her who often prayed,Last century, for repose;And the fair girl long agoWhom I often tried to knowMay be entering this rose.
So, they are not underground,But as nerves and veins aboundIn the growths of upper air,An they feel the sun and rain,And the energy againThat made them what they were!
― donald, Monday, 22 March 2004 16:37 (twenty years ago) link
E E Cummings again:
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)i am never without it(anywhere i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling) i fear no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true) and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
― yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Monday, 22 March 2004 21:06 (twenty years ago) link
― cozen (Cozen), Tuesday, 23 March 2004 02:46 (twenty years ago) link
My favourite Larkin poem (only 12 lines so it's not too much of a cheat):
Water
If I were called inTo construct a religionI should make use of water.
Going to churchWould entail a fordingTo dry, different clothes;
My litany would employImages of sousing,A furious devout drench,
And I should raise in the eastA glass of waterWhere any-angled lightWould congregate endlessly.
― Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 23 March 2004 10:55 (twenty years ago) link
[...]They were beautifuland, if I never ate one,it was because I knew it might be missedor because I knew it would not be replacedand because you do not eatthat which rips your heart with joy.[...]
― Archel (Archel), Tuesday, 23 March 2004 11:22 (twenty years ago) link
When I walkI part the airand alwaysthe air moves into fill the spaceswhere my body's been.
We all have reasonsfor moving.I moveto keep things whole.
Mark Strand - "Keeping Things Whole"
― bnw (bnw), Wednesday, 24 March 2004 00:35 (twenty years ago) link
"Tower of Light"~Pablo Neruda
― yesabibliophile (yesabibliophile), Wednesday, 24 March 2004 19:11 (twenty years ago) link
― cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, 24 March 2004 19:20 (twenty years ago) link
The ice-cream van waits, outside the school,for the pupil's recovered memory of unanswerednotes to question his hunger when, for dancing's sake,he'll giggle across the playground for cones and sherbet.A joy-rider on the front page ("only FIVE years"),he thinks through P.E.'s politics of dodge-ball,magic tricks, Louise Alison, and girlswhen a woman's voice breaks the cabin's dark, half humanhalf nothing-at-all, travelling from somewherebehind something, unnamed. Its edges talk of his dad, who has long moved on, hungover and drinking,from report cards to bills, his criminal record and cataloguesof memory - drawn, with the drunk's anaesthetic ardour,by hurting his wife and child. Trouser's at half-mast he'll actthe fool dropped on his attention-span as a child and ignorethis seriousness, again giggling and swearing, as he orders.
But if we should cut here, stopto stalk left across Scotland,our imagination animating alongMaginot Lines of dissolutionto the ruined hamletof Wester Sallochynone of this is going onbut the poetry. Oh dear
― cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, 24 March 2004 23:02 (twenty years ago) link
Educated in the Humanities,they headed for the City, their beliefsimplicit in the eyes and arteriesof each, and their sincerity displayedin notes, in smiles, in sheavesof decimal etcetera. [...]
- Glyn Maxwell (The High Achievers)
― Archel (Archel), Thursday, 25 March 2004 09:23 (twenty years ago) link
― cozen (Cozen), Friday, 26 March 2004 19:26 (twenty years ago) link
the burnside poem was characteristically brilliant, obv., to round off my 'editor's note' above.
― cozen (Cozen), Friday, 26 March 2004 19:34 (twenty years ago) link
― cozen (Cozen), Friday, 26 March 2004 20:50 (twenty years ago) link
― bnw (bnw), Friday, 26 March 2004 22:21 (twenty years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 27 March 2004 05:38 (twenty years ago) link
"You can't go home again." Thomas Wolfe"That's shit." Bill Holm
Who sed that?Did somebody say thator was it in one of them darn books you read?
It doesn't matterif it's a pile of crapI go home ever daydon't matter where I amI'm the prodigal son coming backI don't even need a Greyhound busI can go to my town right nowright here talking to youbecause thisis everywhereI've ever been
--David Lee MY TOWN
Poetry is home to me. I am more comfortable here than anywhere. It's everywhere I've ever been. I don't even need a Greyhound bus.
― pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Saturday, 27 March 2004 07:32 (twenty years ago) link
for all you formalists and uninformalists
I met a traveler from an antique land,Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:And on the pedestal these words appear:"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (Ozymandias)
― donald, Sunday, 28 March 2004 03:47 (twenty years ago) link
― Jaq (Jaq), Tuesday, 1 November 2005 13:22 (eighteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 1 November 2005 18:06 (eighteen years ago) link
"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.
― lords of hyrule (c sharp major), Sunday, 21 March 2010 10:08 (fourteen years ago) link
Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetryby Howard Nemerov
Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzleThat while you watched turned to pieces of snow Riding a gradient invisibleFrom silver aslant to random, white, and slow.
There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.And then they clearly flew instead of fell.
― INSUFFICIENT FUN (bernard snowy), Tuesday, 23 March 2010 20:31 (fourteen years ago) link
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
― acoleuthic, Friday, 17 September 2010 20:16 (thirteen years ago) link
We drink ten toasts rapidly from The rhinoceros horn cups.Ten cups, and still we are not drunk.We still love each other asWe did when we were schoolboys.Tomorrow morning mountain peaksWill come between us, and with themThe endless, obliviousBusiness of the world.
Tu Fu
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfoldWhat 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, fonderA 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
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, 25 July 2014 21:54 (nine years ago) link
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 morningis snow, unseasonal singular flakes,a slow winter’s final shiver. On such an occasionto presume to eulogise one man is to pipe upfor a whole generation – that crew whose survivalwas always the stuff of minor miracle,who came ashore in orange-crate coracles,fought ingenious wars, finagled triumphs at seawith flaming decoy boats, and side-stepped torpedoes.
Husbands to duty, they unrolled their plansacross billiard tables and vehicle bonnets,regrouped at breakfast. What their secrets werewas everyone’s guess and nobody’s business.Great-grandfathers from birth, in time they becameboth inner core and outer casein a family heirloom of nesting dolls.Like evidence of early man their boot-prints standin the hardened earth of rose-beds and borders.
They were sons of a zodiac out of syncwith the solar year, but turned their mindsto the day’s big science and heavy questions.To study their hands at rest was to picture mapsshowing hachured valleys and indigo streams, schemesof old campaigns and reconnaissance missions.Last of the great avuncular magiciansthey kept their best tricks for the grand finale:Disproving Immortality and Disappearing Entirely.
The major oaks in the wood start tuning upand skies to come will deliver their tributes.But for now, a cold April’s closing momentsparachute slowly home, so by mid-afternoonsnow is recast as seed heads and thistledown.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 17 April 2021 10:53 (two years ago) link
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 occasionto presume to eulogise one man is to pipe upfor 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.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 17 April 2021 10:56 (two years ago) link
Trash poem for a trash human
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Thursday, 22 April 2021 01:06 (two years ago) link
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.
― sharpening the contraindications (Aimless), Thursday, 22 April 2021 02:01 (two years ago) link
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.
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Thursday, 22 April 2021 12:07 (two years ago) link
I am sure it was an excellent cat and an even better public figurehead
― imago, Thursday, 22 April 2021 12:12 (two years ago) link
Amber Sparks@ambernoelle·17hHi Covid here I have eaten the years that were in the iceboxand which you were probably saving for other shitForgive me they were delicious so sweet and so full of days
― dow, Saturday, 18 December 2021 20:26 (two years ago) link
The last John Ashbery poem.
https://harpers.org/archive/2018/08/climate-correction-john-ashbery-final-poem/?fbclid=IwAR3fNZESezGzE53zhJyAME6ZNqrdjdJHEcQQ662a9D5IoBvVGfXPKbNyOPs
― Legalize Suburban Benches (Raymond Cummings), Sunday, 19 December 2021 14:42 (two years ago) link
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.
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.
― deep luminous trombone (Eazy), Wednesday, 19 January 2022 01:47 (two years ago) link
Gluck is quite literally one of the worst poets alive.
― we need outrage! we need dicks!! (the table is the table), Wednesday, 19 January 2022 14:38 (two years ago) link