The Poetry Thread

God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open.

O poplar, you are great
among the hill-stones,
while I perish on the path
among the crevices of the rocks.

-H.D.

Who's this moving alive over the moor?

An old man seeking and finding a difficulty.

Has he remembered his compass his spare socks
does he fully intend going in over his knees off the military track from Okehampton?

keeping his course through the swamp spaces
and pulling the distance around his shoulders

the source of the Dart - Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor,
seven miles from the nearest road
and if it rains, if it thunders suddenly
where will he shelter looking round
and all that lies to hand is his own bones?

[...]

- Alice Oswald.

[Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves]

under her dark veil - anna akhmatova

[...]

I think his family is so ancient,
His heart must still be over on the right,
Though I have searched for it before
In full swing until it shrank to nothing,
Merging with my name, that comes
From nowhere, and is ownerless,
Like all we can see of the stars.

Now, like them, I lie with my back
To him, his chance neighbour,
Watching the entrance to the house,
But not the house. The long autumn
Has scattered its poisonous seeds,
So I will have no October child.

[...]

- Medbh McGuckian

This book saved my life.
This book takes place on one of the two small tagalong moons of Mars.
This book requests its author's absolution, centuries after his death.
This book required two of the sultan's largest royal elephants to bear it; this other book fit in a gourd.
This book reveals The Secret Name of God, and so its author is on a death list.
This is the book I lifted high over my head, intending to smash a roach in my girlfriend's bedroom; instead, my back unsprung, and I toppled painfully into her bed, where I stayed motionless for eight days.
This is a "book." That is, an audio cassette. This other "book" is a screen and a microchip. This other "book," the sky.
In chapter three of this book, a woman tries explaining her husband's tragically humiliating death to their daughter: reading it is like walking through a wall of setting cement.
This book taught me everything about sex.
This book is plagiarized.
This book is transparent; this book is a codex in Aztec; this book, written by a prisoner, in dung; the wind is turning the leaves of this book: a hill-top olive as thick as a Russian novel.
This book is a vivisected frog, and ova its text.
[...]

Library -- Albert Goldbarth

What is D'Agata? Is that a lit mag?

Reasons run out and we are
ready to play backgammon
once again. Come on, I say.
I know when I am being
watched. Even in the washroom
here's a window left unlatched
and various small monsters
have nipped softly in to take
up key positions amongst
sunny patches on the walls.
Look at the little angels.
Chits of demons. Fools and spies.
Look at the conclusive way
in which their detail lies. One
touch would be catastrophe
or a whisper to the wise.

[...]

- R. F. Langley

Btw cozen, you asked somewhere else about getting hold of my book. The website for ordering it is broken, but if you send me your address I will post you a free copy - you can send me something of your choice in return if you like :)

rp30@sussex.ac.uk

...Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?
...
- from Little Gidding

So I had another reading tonight. I read the first 20 minutes of my 4-hour piece as part of this experimental dance/music/poetry deal. So here's the cool part: there were all these kids unexpectedly in the audience. About 7 of them, 8-12 years old. And, it turns out, they really enjoyed my piece. They were all very polite and came up to me to tell me how much they liked it and they said some smart things about the piece (and the other pieces as well). It was great!

CJD I was plundered by a pirate
CJF Describe the pirate
CJN She is armed
CJP How is she armed?
CJS She has long guns
CJW I have no long guns
BLD I am a complete wreck

[Hannah Weiner, from her book "Code Poems", "from the International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations"]

Btw congrats on the reading and the response :)

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

-- GK Chesterton

from city winter - frank o'hara

I brought Selected O'Hara to Dublin!

the snow drifts low
and yet neglects to cover me, and i
dance just ahead to keep my heart in sight.
how like a queen, to seek with jealous eye
the face that flees you, hidden city, white
swan. there's no art to free me, blinded so.

i want my feet to be bare,
i want my face to be shaven, and my heart -
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

:)

cozen: yay!

You can
SING
here

'Notice in Hell'

HALT
'COMMIT ADULTERY

- Edwin Morgan

[...]

Or maybe think so; the eloquence of melt
is however upon me, the path become a
stream, and I lay that down
trusting the ice to withstand the heat;

[...]

- J. H. Prynne (for mark s)

that's an amazing phrase.

[...]

Maybe yes, maybe no; the pattiness of melt
is however upon me, the cheese dripping
in a stream, and I scream that
no lettuce is cold enough to salve;

[...]

Forget the clatter of ballistics,
The monologue of falling stones,
The sharp vectors
And the stiff numbered grids.

It's so much more a thing of pliancy, persuasion,
Where space might cup itself around a planet
Like your palm around a stone,

Where you, yourself the planet,
Caught up in some geodesic dream,
Might wake to feel it enfold your weight
And know there is, in fact, no falling.

It is this, and the existence of limits.

- Rebecca Elson

We stitched and sutured Ill-fated futures,
Amassed the past in archaic computers
Come join the ranks in our data banks,
It's a life without thanks

Remember that night I drank and you cried?
And on your bed all night's where we lied
I stayed awake, you fell asleep
On tear soaked sheets

And we're so new and young like science
Full of ideas and naive defiance
We'll lose it all with each passing fall
As our wake up call

We'll stare straight up and wonder why the
Sky is blue; it reflects the sea
We'll all be sayin' "Science explained
Our lives again"

And we're always sayin'
Science explained
Our lives again
That's the science of the seasons

We stitched and sutured Ill-fated futures,
Amassed the past in archaic computers
Come join the ranks in our data banks,
It's a life without thanks

We'll travel countries and sit beneath palm trees
And feel the heat in a warm pastel breeze
Let's take a trip; let's go to Spain
By all night train

Or across the sea in Ocean Liners
To opium dens in Asia Minor
We'll spend our days wasting our pay on
Wasting away

We'll stare straight up and wonder why the
Sky is blue; it reflects the sea
We'll all be sayin' "science explained
Our lives again"

And we're always sayin'
Science explained
Our lives again
That's the science of the seasons.

- M. A. Hart (mp3 here.)

'Museé des Beaux Arts'

[...]

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure, the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

- W. H. Auden

Under her brow the snowy wing-case
delivers truly the surprise
of days which slide under sunlight
past loose glass in the door
into the reflection of honour spread
through the incomplete, the trusted. So
darkly the stain skips as a livery
of your pause like an apple pip,
the baltic loved one who sleeps.
[...]

I mean, wow.

Just as good, and half as long!

As white is she
And to my touch as choice and briefly satisfactory
As whitebeam leaves that the wind whips aloft,
That tell to the eye their texture soft:
Sweet message sent
To fingertips, and sweetness quickly spent.

Where she goes
Sliding curtains of the rain on rods of sun her ways enclose,
River-whirling gulls her gay sky recieves,
Road, their hostile posters furled,
Bless with arching eaves;
She my love by London gentled as by space the spinning world.

- Anne Ridler, Young Man's Song