what poetry are you reading

wait go http://www.best-poems.net/adrienne_rich/poem-43.html for formatting

I don't know, I always found Rich really dry, but it was a talk she gave on Emily Dickinson that made me curious about that author. Because before that I thought Dickinson wrote "little girl scout prayers" as Rich put it (possibly not verbatim), while discussing her image.

(I've at least read one of those Norton selected or collected poems of Rich's.)

Her Dickinson essay is fantastic!

I heard a recorded talk she gave, presumably close to the essay, or maybe a reading of it. (I don't think I ever went on to read in print form what she had to say about Dickinson.)

'on lies, secrets, and silence' is a good essay collection

i am going to post a short verse of a joseph ceravolo poem when i get home, get ready for it

buckle up

my *selected berryman* showed up last night and man

those fuckin sonnets

"Maybe our safeties…come for our risk’s sake."

aw i'm just about to pick up dream songs, from the library, cause i never tended to berryman much
& then i read something last week on a blog that knocked me for six, like wow

& i didn't post the ceravolo poem because it was too simple, out of context
like you needed the mess of the whole thing
he is really interesting!, i think. maybe because sometimes i am cruising this sorta in-love-with-eileen-myles wave of tumblr poetry that takes this elemental small-scale form as a template but has this maybe predictable voice?, now, like there's not a solipsism but a fixed reach to it? a formula by which it roams. & the ceravolo is crazy, it's like frank o'hara free jazz, i can't believe he gets so far with so little, eschewing so much, relying on you so much
maybe i'll post it later

ah yeah i just read that one last night too, damn near devoured the whole little selected in a few hours

so much to chew on

those fuckin sonnets

I'm an admirer of Berryman's sonnets, too. He leaves enough of the trad structure intact that it frees his sense of language, imagery and ideas to climb forward, and his plays against the trad sonnet structure gain extra weight because they are so deliberate.

i got halfway through this great long thing on berryman on the bus home last night, stopped reading to start reading the selected, then picked it back up and realized the whole thing is sort of a long-form review of the selected itself. happy accident.

man sharon olds' the dead and the living just came in and i tried to read a bit of it before bed

fuckin mistake.

just awful dark stuff, not meant for the pillow.

mary karr's viper rum is winning me over though. every third one or so is a gut punch, like a slightly unstiffened O'Connor. and i like my O'Connor just fine.

This has a lovely cover, but the prose poems it consists of did nothing for me.
http://ndbooks.com/images/made/images/covers/Fullblood_Arabian_300_450.jpg
I found them facile and pseudo-profound (the nod to Khalil Gibran in Lydia Davis's introduction should have tipped me off), but plenty of people disagree with me.

there is just so much in Olds; they're not even so panoramic, just so full and imaginable. three a day, max.

& wait is TDATL the recent one?

nah its one from the early 80s.

Petrarch b/w English Alliterative Revival stuff; then a reading of Villon's Testament to close the middle ages

newyear

Seaton's version of Cold Mountain Poems.

read a.e. housman's 'a shropshire lad' on my kindle a few weeks ago. uneven but some great stuff.

rereading Walcott after all the attention over the new collected poems.

i read goethe and herrick, felt very leisured and cultured

like an Englishman in 1841.

xp ya Housman's great, seems underappreciated (maybe due to the conservatism of his forms?) but the books qua books hold together really well

Housman attracted such immoderate adulation in his day that there had to be a reaction against him for a time. Now it's safe to dust him off and put him back into his niche.

Aimless I forget, are you a UK poster?

that Shambhala Editions Cold Mountain Poems has caught my eye many times in B&N without my ever buying it... I've put so much effort into learning to appreciate european poetry these past few years, it's made me very reluctant to explore other traditions, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time

I post from Oregon, USA, where I've lived about 57 of my 59 years. But when you love literature and are a monoglot in English, you learn to love English lit.

newyear

― xyzzzz__, Friday, February 28, 2014 8:50 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wow

At the moment, I've been dipping into my copy of Padraic Colum's poetry, titled Poems, a late compilation that does not identify itself as a 'collected poems of'. Padraic can't be described as anything but a "minor poet", but he had a nice touch when he keeps his loftier ambitions in check. Methinks the mere existence of Yeats lifted the work of every Irish poet well above what they could have achieved without him.

Just before that I was paddling around in the poetry of Stevie Smith and in doing so I decided to remove her from my shelves and sell her off during my next selling spree. A few of her early poems have charm, but her charms are very rapidly exhausted.

yknow, i think i would really enjoy a history of american poetry whose driving narrative was basically repetitions of

'i am the poet of america!!!'

'no you're not fukk u'

america's one true poet was t.s. eliot iirc

FITE!

rrrr tom you know me TOO WELL fukk u

no you know what ts eliot was the one true poet of 20th c. britannia and after that you guys have been up shit's creek, no bard to sing your songs, how does it feel

i mean we got like. geoffrey hill and shit, i dunno

rereading an old Helen Vendler collection published in the late seventies. Essays on Moore, Merrill, Stevie Smith, Lowell, Stevens, and Gluck.

and, like, carol ann duffy

all bases covered, is what i'm saying

albion liveth still and everafter

but they'll be doing it in the Championship come August

can't see how anybody cd mistake Eliot's hyper-tense class paranoia for anything other than oh shit hold on

so yeah i really don't have the stomach for louise gluck

she's a bit of a psychosexual hack tbh

nah that was your mother

which Gluck you been reading? I dig the two most recent collections, particularly A Village Life, where she sounds like an aging writer trying to age faster(?)

Ararat and The House on Marshland. The first book felt too glib.

i was reading the other one that starts with a and the one with the boat on the cover

Meanwhile, apropos of the ongoing surrealism obsession mentioned on the other "what are you reading" thread, I picked up the recent (1990s) English translation of Breton's Clair de terre, which is mostly baffling, occasionally charming (as in the 'poem' listing off all of the Bretons in the Paris phonebook), and lacks a parallel French text due to copyright issues (boo!). Also bought a Gerard de Nerval selected works (not the Penguin edition, an older one, translated by Wagner--the Encyclopedia of Literary Translations into English praises his handling of the poetry, moreso than the novellas), which I am enjoying in spite of its hermetic density of allusion & personal mythology.

I Share My Bed with a Large Dog

After I’ve rumpled the sheets
wrestled and tossed and turned
After I’ve seen you shake in your dreams
and pulled you back from your apprehensions

After the deep breathing and chests heaving
stretching and whining and wide yawning snores
After the first sun shows on the ceiling
slips down the wall, the dresser, the floor

After your nose starts to sound like a whistle
I raise my phone to check in on the weather
After you have seen me move you feel better
Your brown eyes wide open and paw pads like leather

only after that —
and after the your sharp elbows rib my core —
only after all of that could we crawl out of bed

sorry, i meant that for another thread

sure you did

for me: Beowulf!

i truly did!

which translation?

The Heaney one after a friend said I must.

Saner, So This Is The Map

I picked up a collection of Robinson Jeffers's poetry lately and have been reading his epic narrative poem, Tamar. I guess I don't read a lot of narrative poems, especially 20th century ones, but the material strikes as being a rather strange basis for writing a long poem about. A family living on an isolated stretch of the California coast is troubled by incest and madness. Maybe the point will become clearer by the end.

picked up Louis MacNiece's Autumn Journal last night. been a while since i read it, but it turns out i was exactly in the right mood. the mixture of poetic and more, well, 'journal' like cadences is very appealing - the a, b, c, b rhymes and half rhymes in the first section are one example of that, but so are the slightly awkward quotidian observations and considerations that don't quite fit into the poetic - either for reasons of scansion or register. the 'then, but then again' arguments – little palinodes, to use a word MacNeice uses early on of the retraction of summer to autumn - appropriate to someone observing and discussing with themselves. Emotional content closely linked with the immediate context and reminders, whether on the train up to London with his dog.

One line early on doesn't make sense to me, and I was going to take it to the poetry interpretation thread, but it's difficult to state the problem without citing all of the first section. That first section is very clear, and then, in that train up to London with his dog, 'a symbol of the abandoned order' who

Lies on the carriage floor,
Her eyes inept and glamorous as a film star's,
Who wants to live, ie wants more
Presents, jewellery, furs, gadgets, solicitations
As if to live were not
Following the curve of a planet or controlled water
But a leap in the dark, a tangent, a stray shot.

Although there are some complications here, they're not hugely difficult, but I actually understand what 'controlled water' means. By analogy of the eliptical orbit 'curve of a planet', the 'controlled water' might mean a similar arc - but making water, that is having a piss, seems, to say the least, not right here. so is he talking about water out of a hose? That's as good as I can manage here, but it's not very satisfactory. Otherwise, i'm not at all clear.

Controlled water is a weird term that does exist. In the context of this I read it two ways:

As if to live were not
Following the curve of a planet or controlled water

So the first refers to the tides, no? The moon is earth’s satellite and in its orbit. However the moon also influences the tides. The tides exist as they do because the moon’s gravitational pull controls them. Tides are gradual, they erode cliffs and carve out the coastline over time.

Controlled water is a really weird term. Could refer to a lot of things within this context - rivers carving their pathways out, the effect of water on the natural landscape, the efforts to keep said bodies of water fit for consumption or to manage them in some way. It’s a long term project because of the delicacy of the ecosystem.

Idk, that’s the best I have. It is a weird line.

I don't know that poem, but coming after "curve of a planet" the phrase "controlled water" suggests to me the idea of the curious way gravity keeps all the water on the planet, trapped in a ball. It seems impossible that it all stays so neatly in shape rather than spilling out into space, but that is how physics works. And if that is the way the whole universe is set up, how crazy is it to expect (as the dog doesm as we do) that we might defy those forces and leap into the dark, go off on tangents, etc.

yep, i hadn't considered tides or that wider gravitational effect - seems very possible. my overall reading of the passage is that there is a difference between the life that recognises it follows a curve of forces and tensions torquing against each other, creating a defined, if mysterious, path, rather than a set of more or less accidental or arbitrary incidents, almost frivolous, without connexion.

the implication is not fate at work, as such, but capturing the path between intersecting movements... from summer to autumn, in the train's movement, in *movement's* movement, in people's movement:

Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire,
Ebbing away down ramps of shaven lawn where close-clipped yew
Insulates the lives of retired generals and admirals

(the opening lines)

And the rebels and the young
Have taken the train to town or the two-seater
Unravelling rails or road
Losing the thread deliberately behind them -
Autumnal palinode.
And I am in the train nowq too and summer is going
South as I go north

^ those last lines exactly what I mean by that torque created by intersecting forces.

this has now turned into a post that sits better on the other thread!

As if to live were not
Following the curve of a planet or controlled water

I agree that the use of "controlled water" is perplexing. I like the suggestion of the arc of water from a hose or from a man taking a piss, but I suspect he probably meant something about navigating a river or canal, e.g. following the bend in a river.

It seems the prevalence of the term "controlled water" was rising rapidly in the 1930s, and has since fallen.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=controlled+water&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=29&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true&direct_url=t4%3B%2Ccontrolled%20water%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bcontrolled%20water%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BControlled%20Water%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BControlled%20water%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BCONTROLLED%20WATER%3B%2Cc0

The Early Poems of Yvor Winters 1920-28

Now we’ve no hope of going back,
cutter, to that grey quay
where we moored twice and twice unwillingly
cast off our cables to put out at the slack
when the sea’s laugh was choked to a mutter
and the leach lifted hesitantly with a stutter
and sulky clack, how desolate the swatchways look,
cutter …

… We have no course to set,
only to drift too long, watch too glumly, and wait,
wait.

Basil Bunting, Perche no Spero

why would he want to go back to that? Does he say?

Oh wait, at least he wasn't here, right? I know the feeling.

McMichael, Four Good Things

was at the museum of contemporary art in barcelona this afternoon, and there’s an exhibit that features this poem, by forough farrokhad, which I found almost unbearably moving

My entire soul is a murky verse
Reiterating you within itself
Carrying you to the dawn of eternal burstings and blossomings
In this verse, I sighed you, AH!
In this verse,
I grafted you to trees, water and fire

Perhaps life is
A long street along which a woman
With a basket passes every day

Perhaps life
Is a rope with which a man hangs himself from a branch
Perhaps life is a child returning home from school

Perhaps life is the lighting of a cigarette
Between the narcotic repose of two lovemakings
Or the puzzled passage of a passerby
Tipping his hat
Saying good morning to another passerby with a vacant smile

Perhaps life is that blocked moment
When my look destroys itself in the pupils of your eyes
And in this there is a sense
Which I will mingle with the perception of the moon
And the reception of darkness
In a room the size of one solitude
My heart
The size of one love
Looks at the simple pretexts of its own happiness,
At the pretty withering of flowers in the flower pots
At the sapling you planted in our flowerbed
At the songs of the canaries
Who sing the size of one window.
Ah
This is my lot
This is my lot
My lot
Is a sky, which the dropping of a curtain seizes from me
My lot is going down an abandoned stairway
And joining with something in decay and nostalgia
My lot is a cheerless walk in the garden of memories
And dying in the sorrow of a voice that tells me:
“I love
Your hands”
I will plant my hands in the flowerbed
I will sprout, I know, I know, I know
And the sparrows will lay eggs
In the hollows of my inky fingers
I will hang a pair of earrings of red twin cherries
Round my ears
I will put dahlia petals on my nails
There is an alley
Where the boys who were once in love with me,
With those disheveled hairs, thin necks and gaunt legs
Still think of the innocent smiles of a little girl
Who was one night blown away by the wind
There is an alley which my heart
Has stolen from places of my childhood
The journey of a volume along the line of time
And impregnating the barren line of time with a volume
A volume conscious of an image
Returning from the feast of a mirror
This is the way
Someone dies
And someone remains
No fisherman will catch pearls
From a little stream flowing into a ditch
I Know a sad little mermaid
Dwelling in the ocean
Softly, gently blowing
Her heart into a wooden flute
A sad little mermaid
Who dies with a kiss at night

her name sounded vaguely familiar, and it’s the director who made THE HOUSE IS BLACK — what a remarkable, regrettably brief life

Slowly reading my way through the 2022 Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers anthology. The longer narrative poems tend to feature lots of death and weird sex, and the shorter lyric ones are defiantly nihilistic in a sort of zen way. Recommended.

correction: 2002, not 2022.