The Poetry Thread

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.

Oh, play that thing! Mute glorious Storyvilles
Others may license, grouping around their chairs
Sporting-house girls like circus tigers (priced

Far above rubies) to pretend their fads,
While scholars manques nod around unnoticed
Wrapped 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 green
A faded glow
Veils the earth I walk
Through the marshes my soft throat
Juts out into another life.

On the river the Brontes are floating
With hats like iron pots
On the bank someone has mowed the grass someone
Primes the pump in the
Crumbling house.

(I realise this is everythat awful abt modern poetry, but even so...)

Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents' summer home,
Bruce's college girlfriend asked him
to improve his expertise at oral sex,
and offered him some technical advice:

Use nothing but his tonguetip
to flick the light switch in his room
on and off a hundred times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances
of 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 climax
yield to the logic
of his simple math.

Maybe he unscrewed
the bulb from his apartment ceiling
so that passersby would not believe
a giant firefly was pulsing
its electric abdomen in 13 B.

Maybe, as he stood
two inches from the wall,
in darkness, fogging the old plaster
with his breath, he visualized the future
as a mansion standing on the shore
that he was rowing to
with his tongue's exhausted oar.

Self Improvement - Tony Hoagland

I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer

The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself

I have always wondered about the leftover
energy, water rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting there long after midnight.

From:

anyone lived in a pretty how town...
E.E. Cummings

...someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)...

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 heaven
for what heaven we had we made. An embassy

of ashes & dust. Where was safety? Home?

Lynda Hull

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

[Jacob Polley - who is sickeningly young, talented and good looking, and also reading at the South Bank in London tonight.)

Withdrawing from the present,
wandering a past that is alive
in books only.In love
with women, outlasted
by their smiles; the richness
of their apparel puts
the poor in perspective.
The brush dipped in blood
and the knife in art
have preserved their value.
Smouldering times: sacked
cities,incinerable hearts

and the fledgling God
tipped out of his high
nest into the virgin's lap
by the incorrigible cuckoo.

R.S Thomas

Transformations

Portion of this yew
Is a man my grandsire knew,
Bosomed here at its foot:
This branch may be his wife,
A ruddy human life
Now turned to a green shoot.

These grasses must be made
Of her who often prayed,
Last century, for repose;
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose.

So, they are not underground,
But as nerves and veins abound
In the growths of upper air,
An they feel the sun and rain,
And the energy again
That made them what they were!

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)

My favourite Larkin poem (only 12 lines so it's not too much of a cheat):

Water

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My litany would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

[...]
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.
[...]

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Mark Strand - "Keeping Things Whole"

"Tower of Light"
~Pablo Neruda

The ice-cream van waits, outside the school,
for the pupil's recovered memory of unanswered
notes 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 girls
when a woman's voice breaks the cabin's dark, half human
half nothing-at-all, travelling from somewhere
behind 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 catalogues
of memory - drawn, with the drunk's anaesthetic ardour,
by hurting his wife and child. Trouser's at half-mast he'll act
the fool dropped on his attention-span as a child and ignore
this seriousness, again giggling and swearing, as he orders.

But if we should cut here, stop
to stalk left across Scotland,
our imagination animating along
Maginot Lines of dissolution
to the ruined hamlet
of Wester Sallochy
none of this is going on
but the poetry. Oh dear

Educated in the Humanities,
they headed for the City, their beliefs
implicit in the eyes and arteries
of each, and their sincerity displayed
in notes, in smiles, in sheaves
of decimal etcetera.
[...]

- Glyn Maxwell (The High Achievers)

the burnside poem was characteristically brilliant, obv., to round off my 'editor's note' above.

"You can't go home again." Thomas Wolfe
"That's shit." Bill Holm

Who sed that?
Did somebody say that
or was it in one of them darn books you read?

It doesn't matter
if it's a pile of crap
I go home ever day
don't matter where I am
I'm the prodigal son coming back
I don't even need a Greyhound bus
I can go to my town right now
right here talking to you
because this
is everywhere
I'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.

for all you formalists and uninformalists

I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand 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 decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (Ozymandias)

Joan Larkin (my former teacher) - "Sonnet Positive"

What? That's poetry, that is!

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.