The Poetry Thread

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 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

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

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

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.)

xpost

-Charles Bukowski

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

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

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

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

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

When I've got my editor hat on, nothing sets the alarm bells off so quickly as randomly placed line breaks, put in just because the 'poet' is dimly convinced that poetry has line breaks.

(Then again, with some of the dodgy things that email can do to formatting, it's often anyone's guess where the line breaks are intended to be, if anywhere.)

That sentence sounds not wholly grammatical, yet still sufficiently suggestive.

I think what I'm talking about are those "prose w/ line breaks" pieces that seem to use breaks in such a way that disregard them as being a pause or an emphasis on the line's effect as an independent part of a larger whole.

I'd agee that ultra-conventional breaks are probably nothing to pat yourself on the back for either. They're worth experimenting with.

CLAIRE BATEMAN
MONOGRAPH

It would later be said of our era
that even the boring parts were interesting,
& vice versa.

Without the least trace of irony,
officials christened space shuttles
after doomed & sunken
cities of yore.

Nearly all of us
constructed dashboard altars
upon which we lavished
particular & minute devotions
as we cruised past scenes
that seemed to represent disaster’s aftermath
but almost always resolved
into simple sequences of yard sales—
derelict undergarments & mattresses
exposed on sullenly tilting lawns—
each just another item on the ever-growing
list of events not to be taken
personally.

For their arcane significance,
we pondered signs such as these:

IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU'D BE HOME RIGHT NOW!

&

GOD SEES EVERYTHING, EVEN YOU READING THIS SIGN!

Though the varieties of available lip-gloss shades
& the total number of famous people in history
were exponentially increasing
so that it became ever more difficult
to distinguish plum from maroon
or the living from the dead,
it still took approximately
the same six years
for a single exhaled breath
to become evenly mixed with the atmosphere.

For none of us was it ever clear
whether that rumbling sound we kept hearing
was static or heartfelt applause.

Everyone was professionally lonely,
yet we ceased not our shining.

Many aspired to but did not actually achieve
the office of Notary Public.

This was not considered a tragedy.

Seen

In your field of vision, there is a place where no image is fixed,
where injury carved its cave of nothing,
gathered blackness around a splinter's wooden slip.
One eye, you say, scans the world.
The other examines the self's invisible wanting.
In that equation, I believe myself to be
the point connecting one destination to another,
somewhere you paused to draw lines to the next warm station.
I emit no light, no heat
but gather, in cupped hands, what fell to the ground
when limbs were shaken by your grasping wind.

Mark Wunderlich

From too much hope of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

-- A. C. Swinburne

--- Thomas Hood

I laugh at his poems,
As he laughs at mine.
They read like
The words of a blind man
Describing the sun.

I wanted to add Sean O'Brien to it, last night, but I don't know how to make the lines all go together.

(Excuse the repitition, I am providing a public service.)

For that thundery corridor

Painting its Forth into Scotland and back,

For the drizzly grind of the coal-train

Or even the Metro, that amateur transport,

Sparking and chattering every verse-end.

from Sean O'Brien, 'The Eavesdroppers'

...
Where darkness is
Once there was a mirror
And I therein was King.
...

Where is everyone?

Happy baby!

They are buffeted by this wind and that,
never really knowing where they are going.

They think they have no choice over their destiny,
but we know the path and we follow it without question.

Remember, there is sacrifice involved in any kind of life,
even those that choose the safe way must sacrifice the thrill.

The point is if you know what you want,
you must be prepared to sacrifice everything to get it.

Those that realise this are the fortunate ones.

- Thomas Schumacher ‘The Fortunate Ones’