The Poetry Thread

[...]
I have come late but I have come before
Later with slaked steps from stone to stone
To hope to find you listening for the door.

I stand in the ticking room. My dear, I take
A moth kiss from your breath. The shore gulls cry.
I leave this at your ear for when you wake.

- WS Graham

*sigh*

Bid adieu, adieu, adieu,
Bid adieu to girlish days,
Happy Love is come to woo
Thee and woo thy girlish ways--
The zone that doth become thee fair,
The snood upon thy yellow hair.

When thou hast heard his name upon
The bugles of the cherubim
Begin thou softly to unzone
Thy girlish bosom unto him
And softly to undo the snood
That is the sign of maidenhood.

-joyce

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust Descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer and--sans End!
-Rubaiyat- Omar Khayyam

A distinctly autumnal feel is descending on the poetry thread, no?

Spectrum

Brown from the sun's mid-afternoon caress,
And where not brown, white as a bridal dress,
And where not white, pink as an opened plum.

And where not pink, darkly mysterious,
And when observed, openly furious,
And then obscured, while the red blushes come.

--William Dickey

Once more:

...
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sunlight
And the legends of green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

...
POEM IN OCTOBER--Dylan Thomas

pepek, dear, you rule - this is one of my fav Thomas poems...

I like this thread a lot and must participate (slightly more than 10 lines).

(...)
So we must be careful, those of us who were
born with
the wrong number of fingers or the gift
of loving; we must do our best to behave
like normal members of society and not make
nuisances
of ourselves; otherwise it could go hard
with us.
It is better to bite back your tears,
swallow your laughter,
and learn to fake the mildly self-depreciating
titter
favoured by the bourgeoisie
than to be left entirely alone, as you will be,
if your disconformity embarrasses
your neighbours; I wish I didn't keep forgetting
that.

- Alden Nowlan, from "He Attempts to Love His Neighbours"

Tao
(For F.R.Scott)

Things that are blown or carried by a stream
seem to be living - not in that they oppose the wind
or oppose the water, but in that they move
lightly blown,
lightly flowing, like things that move

We who are actually living do best when we do not resist,
do not insist, when winds and waters blow,
but go gently with them, being of their kind,
in the secret of wind and water, the thought of flow

Louis Dudek

rrobyn thx

(rrobyn a friend and I were just talking about this same feeling, but this poem captures it much better than we could. thanks.)

So glad to see this one movin' again!

[...]
I will walk up the road behind the house
& think of a young boy running in & out
through the doors of darkness, calling his
friends by name; his friends call back, leaping
into the tall grass to meet him.

I return to the house. From a window, a woman
shouts for the boy to come in.

I feel sorry for her
like the fool that I am,
like the man I will never be.

-Pier Giorgio Di Cicco

Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!
[...]

-To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough

Woo, I bought Alice Oswald's Dart and Sarah Wardle's Fields Away for £2.94 yesterday :)

I have poems to be writin' after my camping trip (head is full of sheep mainly) but in the meantime:

We, too, had known golden hours
When body and soul were in tune,
Had danced with our true loves
By the light of a full moon,
And sat with the wise and good
As tongues grew witty and gay
Over some noble dish
Out of Escoffier;
Had felt the intrusive glory
Which tears reserve apart,
And would in the old grand manner
Have sung from a resonant heart.

In the jangle and smecksheck of the social
I do the decent do-si-do, I say Hello,
How's it going? Not too bad, yourself?
I mingle and pay my dues.
I crinkle and share my views.
In the jangle and smecksheck of the social
I walk strafed by the flak of smiles
and the dart-smart of glances,
nodding and lauding and helping to weave
the enclosing tapestryification
that butters the toast of the social.

{The first lines of a new Mark Halliday poem.

Nice. 'I crinkle'!

i'm so poetry-free these days. what should i be reading?

Cereal boxes.

Touris, white man, wipin his face,
Met me in Golden Grove market place.
He looked at m'ol' clothes brown wid stain ,
An soaked right through wid de Portlan rain,
He cas his eye, turn up his nose,
He says, 'You're a beggar man, I suppose?'
He says, 'Boy, get some occupation,
Be of some value to your nation.'
I said, 'By God and dis big right han
You mus recognize a banana man.
[...]

-Evan Jones

(Incidentally, although this is probably not the right thread for it, I got my first review for Three Voices - only one sentence, of which most was taken up by a quote from one of the poems - but still! I am 'laconic' apparently.)

"Snatch of Sliphorn Jazz"

Are you happy? It's the only
way to be, kid.
Yes, be happy, it's a good nice
way to be.
But not happy-happy, kid, don't
be too doubled-up doggone happy.
It's the doubled-up doggone happy-
happy people... bust hard... they
do bust hard... when they bust.
Be happy, kid, go to it, but not too
doggone happy.

-Carl Sandburg

I often see flowers from a passing car
That are gone before I can tell what they are.

I want to get out of the train and go back
To see what they were beside the track.

I name all the flowers I am sure they weren't;
Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt--

Not bluebells gracing a tunnel mouth--
Not lupine living on sand and drouth.

Was something brushed across my mind
That no one on earth will ever find?

Heaven gives its glimpses only to those
Not in position to look too close.

-Robert Frost

I still believe in it.

This thread is fantastic.

I'll contribute a poem that an English professor made us memorize during my sophomore year of college:

Westren wind when wilt thou blow
The small rain down can rain
Christ that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again

(Anonymous)

To Live By

Work from the original toward
the beautiful,
unless the latter comes first
in which case
reverse your efforts to find
a model worthy of such
inane desire.

Even the mouth's being
divided into two lips is
not enough to make words
equal themselves.

Eavesdroppers fear
the hermit's soliloquy.

Wake up, wound, the knife said.

--Bill Knott

"My own prejudice is in favour of poets whose worlds are not too esoteric. I would have a poet, able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions." (Louis MacNiece)

i really like that bill knott poem, bnw. thanks.

"So fuck you, Larry Eigner." (Louis MacNiece)

"You too, Emily Dickinson." (Louis MacNiece)

I have been using macniece's obiter in interviews recently, inverting poet into lawyer and dropping the able-bodied as unnecessary.

This Is A Photograph Of Me
Margaret Atwood

It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;

then, as you scan
it, you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.

In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.

(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.

I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)

And is 'appreciative of women' necessary?

xpost

oh yeah, that bit too I have changed, to 'people'.

no-one has offered me a job.

that margaret atwood poem is one I love and it is strange to see it again, here of all places. it is a poem that I love from a time when I was falling in love and it was part of the big, unco-ordinated apparatus of desire that too hold of me, a long while ago now. I didn't know its name nor author, it's queer to read it again, three years later, out of love now, but still falling.

Long walks at night--
that's what good for the soul:
peeking into windows
watching tired housewives
trying to fight off
their beer-maddened husbands.

-Charles Bukowski

If you stare at the poem long enough, you will see your love, etc.

yes

The Gateway

Now the heart sings with all its thousand voices
To hear this city of cells, my body, sing.
The tree through the stiff clay at long last forces
Its thin strong roots and taps the secret spring.

And the sweet waters without intermission
Climb to the tips of its green tenement;
The breasts have borne the grace of their possession,
The lips have felt the pressure of content.

Here I come home: in this expected country
They know my name and speak it with delight.
I am the dream and you my gates of entry,
The means by which I waken into light.

--- AD Hope

Actually I meant to post this, more seasonal, one, but I like the above too.

Winter Love

Let us have winter loving that the heart
May be in peace and ready to partake
Of the slow pleasure spring would wish to hurry
Or that in summer harshly would awake,
And let us fall apart, O gladly weary,
The white skin shaken like a white snowflake.

-Elizabeth Jennings

Does anybody care for this "verse w/ line breaks" movement that has taken over much of contemporary poetry (American, at least)? I have to say when I see something that looks like this, I am instantly repelled. I read the first couple stanzas, liked them, and then could feel the poem wandering off. That feeling + the length + the fact I can see names of characters and dialogue makes me not want to read it AT ALL. Am I just lazy?

Do you mean *prose* with line breaks?

If yes, then no I don't much like it - the words should be CHOSEN and should do some WORK, dammit - but then there is some poetry which appears to be prosey in that way but on closer reading isn't at all.

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

Er i meant prose with line breaks, obv. Too much coffee. There was a really vicious article on webdelsol a couple years ago condemning a lot of contemporary poetry for this offense. Pretty much every tool of poetry is cast aside: rhyme, meter, fragments, etc. And the only thing making these "poems" is that they have line breaks, and not even those are really utilized to any effect. I guess I don't really understand the aesthetics of this approach.

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

(hate to stall out this thread on my negativity so...)

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