what poetry are you reading

This might help with the mental picture:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowthorpe_Oak

oh, thanks! but this sentence (from one of the links in the article) is even more unclear than the poem:

There is sufficient space within the hollow trunk to hold a party and one former tenant of the farm had a roof and a door installed and used the recess as an additional room in which 39 people have stood at one time and 13 have sat down comfortably to tea while successive generations of children born and raised on the farm have played in its branches.

what is the referent of "it" in "poesy's visions swim around it "

Burthorp!

I think it has to be "tree" but I wanted to advance a claim for " poesy "

It's a just claim. Poesy's visions do swim around poesy, in a meltiness, a soft decline stirred by the poet, who goes from "vague indifference," to identifying with the tree's decline and vulnerability--pathos as reproach for vague indifference, which seems a lesser state---but from all this decay and grey he makes something new, a poem.

But I prefer several poems on this thread.

I don't like it much at all tbh.

296

Your thin shoulders are for turning red under whips,
turning red under whips, and flaming in the raw cold.

Your child's fingers are for lifting flatirons,
for lifting flatirons, and for knotting cords.

Your tender soles are for walking on broken glass,
walking on broken glass, across bloody sand.

And I'm for burning like a black candle lit for you,
for burning like a black candle that dare not pray.

(1934)

I'll post a better Clare poem when I get home tonight; I mostly put that one up cuz it happened to be irritating me at the time...

K, here's one that better shows off his fine descriptive powers (albeit with a rather tacked-on conclusion) :

AN IDLE HOUR.

SAUNTERING at ease, I often love to lean
O’er old bridge walls, and mark the flood below,
Whose ripples, through the weeds of oily green,
Like happy travelers chatter as they go;
And view the sunshine dancing on the arch,
Time keeping to the merry waves beneath.
While on the banks some drooping blossoms parch,
Thirsting for water in the day’s hot breath,
Right glad of mud-drops splashed upon their leaves,
By cattle plunging from the steepy brink; 10
Each water-flower more than its share receives,
And revels to its very cups in drink:—
So in the world, some strive, and fare but ill,
While others riot, and have plenty still.

Charles Wright's Negative Blue just arrived, collecting Chickamauga, Black Zodiac, and Appalachia.

I was excited for it because I remembered loving Chickamauga when I first read it a few years ago, but it's leaving me pretty cold now. Seems ponderous and samey.

Rereading "The Fortunate Traveler" disappointed me. Chunks of the poem are didactic or crumble into mere rhetoric. But

Wright's recent books (Sestets, Littlefoot) are my favorites of his. Less jive, clearer thoughts.

i think i used to find his extended riffs on the view from his backyard enchanting for their sense of possibility but now its like "oh we're getting another two page lawn chair meditation great"

picked up stephen burt's "close calls with nonsense"

OK, so I signed up to Scribd's online library on a whim, it it has shitloads of interesting-looking poetry and plays for the borrowing. Kind of hard to know where to start.

picked up a signed (!) 77 Dream Songs in an oakland shop over the weekend

the only downside of reading berryman over again is that his sublime weird syntax gets deep into my brain and i wind up badly imitating him in my own writing for weeks. just

Let us suppose, valleys & such ago,
one pal unwinding from his labours in
one bar of Chicago,
and this did actual happen. This was so.
And many graces are slipped, & many a sin
even that laid man low

but this will be remembered & told over,
that she was heard at last, haughtful & greasy,
to bawl in that low bar:
'You can biff me, you can bang me, get it you'll never.
I may be only a Polack broad but I don't lay easy.
Kiss my ass, that's what you are.'

Women is better, braver. In a foehn of loss
entire, which too they hotter understand,
having had it,
we struggle. Some hang heavy on the sauce,
some invest in the past, one hides in the land.
Henry was not his favourite.

fucking exquisitely stumbling to my ears.

Going through View with a Grain of Sand by Szymborska.

Maybe I should post this gem on the OK cupid thread instead of here:

True Love

True love. Is it normal
is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people
who exist in a world of their own?

Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,
drawn randomly from millions but convinced
it had to happen this way - in reward for what?
For nothing.
The light descends from nowhere.
Why on these two and not on others?
Doesn't this outrage justice? Yes it does.
Doesn't it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,
and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.

Look at the happy couple.
Couldn't they at least try to hide it,
fake a little depression for their friends' sake?
Listen to them laughing - its an insult.
The language they use - deceptively clear.
And their little celebrations, rituals,
the elaborate mutual routines -
it's obviously a plot behind the human race's back!

It's hard even to guess how far things might go
if people start to follow their example.
What could religion and poetry count on?
What would be remembered? What renounced?
Who'd want to stay within bounds?

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life's highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn't populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there's no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

The moved onto Lorca - A Poet in New York.

Ode to Walt Whitman

By the East River and the Bronx
boys were singing, exposing their waists
with the wheel, with oil, leather, and the hammer.
Ninety thousand miners taking silver from the rocks
and children drawing stairs and perspectives.

But none of them could sleep,
none of them wanted to be the river,
none of them loved the huge leaves
or the shoreline's blue tongue.

By the East River and the Queensboro
boys were battling with industry
and the Jews sold to the river faun
the rose of circumcision,
and over bridges and rooftops, the mouth of the sky emptied
herds of bison driven by the wind.

But none of them paused,
none of them wanted to be a cloud,
none of them looked for ferns
or the yellow wheel of a tambourine.

As soon as the moon rises
the pulleys will spin to alter the sky;
a border of needles will besiege memory
and the coffins will bear away those who don't work.

New York, mire,
New York, mire and death.
What angel is hidden in your cheek?
Whose perfect voice will sing the truths of wheat?
Who, the terrible dream of your stained anemones?

Not for a moment, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,
have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies,
nor your corduroy shoulders frayed by the moon,
nor your thighs pure as Apollo's,
nor your voice like a column of ash,
old man, beautiful as the mist,
you moaned like a bird
with its sex pierced by a needle.
Enemy of the satyr,
enemy of the vine,
and lover of bodies beneath rough cloth...

Not for a moment, virile beauty,
who among mountains of coal, billboards, and railroads,
dreamed of becoming a river and sleeping like a river
with that comrade who would place in your breast
the small ache of an ignorant leopard.

Not for a moment, Adam of blood, Macho,
man alone at sea, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,
because on penthouse roofs,
gathered at bars,
emerging in bunches from the sewers,
trembling between the legs of chauffeurs,
or spinning on dance floors wet with absinthe,
the faggots, Walt Whitman, point you out.

He's one, too! That's right! And they land
on your luminous chaste beard,
blonds from the north, blacks from the sands,
crowds of howls and gestures,
like cats or like snakes,
the faggots, Walt Whitman, the faggots,
clouded with tears, flesh for the whip,
the boot, or the teeth of the lion tamers.

He's one, too! That's right! Stained fingers
point to the shore of your dream
when a friend eats your apple
with a slight taste of gasoline
and the sun sings in the navels
of boys who play under bridges.

But you didn't look for scratched eyes,
nor the darkest swamp where someone submerges children,
nor frozen saliva,
nor the curves slit open like a toad's belly
that the faggots wear in cars and on terraces
while the moon lashes them on the street corners of terror.

You looked for a naked body like a river.
Bull and dream who would join wheel with seaweed,
father of your agony, camellia of your death,
who would groan in the blaze of your hidden equator.

Because it's all right if a man doesn't look for his delight
in tomorrow morning's jungle of blood.
The sky has shores where life is avoided
and there are bodies that shouldn't repeat themselves in the dawn.

Agony, agony, dream, ferment, and dream.
This is the world, my friend, agony, agony.
Bodies decompose beneath the city clocks,
war passes by in tears, followed by a million gray rats,
the rich give their mistresses
small illuminated dying things,
and life is neither noble, nor good, nor sacred.

Man is able, if he wishes, to guide his desire
through a vein of coral or a heavenly naked body.
Tomorrow, loves will become stones, and Time
a breeze that drowses in the branches.

That's why I don't raise my voice, old Walt Whitman,
against the little boy who writes
the name of a girl on his pillow,
nor against the boy who dresses as a bride
in the darkness of the wardrobe,
nor against the solitary men in casinos
who drink prostitution's water with revulsion,
nor against the men with that green look in their eyes
who love other men and burn their lips in silence.

But yes against you, urban faggots,
tumescent flesh and unclean thoughts.
Mothers of mud. Harpies. Sleepless enemies
of the love that bestows crowns of joy.

Always against you, who give boys
drops of foul death with bitter poison.
Always against you,
Fairies of North America,
Pájaros of Havana,
Jotos of Mexico,
Sarasas of Cádiz,
Apios of Seville,
Cancos of Madrid,
Floras of Alicante,
Adelaidas of Portugal.

Faggots of the world, murderers of doves!
Slaves of women. Their bedroom bitches.
Opening in public squares like feverish fans
or ambushed in rigid hemlock landscapes.

No quarter given! Death
spills from your eyes
and gathers gray flowers at the mire's edge.
No quarter given! Attention!
Let the confused, the pure,
the classical, the celebrated, the supplicants
close the doors of the bacchanal to you.

And you, lovely Walt Whitman, stay asleep on the Hudson's banks
with your beard toward the pole, openhanded.
Soft clay or snow, your tongue calls for
comrades to keep watch over your unbodied gazelle.

Sleep on, nothing remains.
Dancing walls stir the prairies
and America drowns itself in machinery and lament.
I want the powerful air from the deepest night
to blow away flowers and inscriptions from the arch where you sleep,
and a black child to inform the gold-craving whites
that the kingdom of grain has arrived.

And then, yes, logocally following that with a selection of Whitman's poems.

I still have trouble with Lorca... the Gypsy Ballads are nice, & the late sonnets, but I always feel like I'm missing something when I read his more laconic lyrics. I suspect that some of them contain as little meaning as the cradle songs he once lectured about (I've long been haunted by a couplet from 'Poem of the Deep Song', Campanas de Córdoba en la madrugada / Campanas de amanecer in Grenada, which seems exemplary in this respect).

*en Grenada, durr

HECK I'll just give ya the whole poem

ALBA
Campanas de Córdoba
en la madrugada.
Campanas de amanecer
en Granada.
Os sienten todas las muchachas
que lloran a la tierna
soleá enlutada.
Las muchachas
de Andalucía la alta
y la baja.
Las niñas de España
de pie menudo
y temblorosas faldas,
que han llenado de luces
las encrucijadas.
¡Oh, campanas de Córdoba
en la madrugada.
y oh, campanas de amanecer
en Granada!

*when I say I feel I'm missing something, I suppose I'm mostly referring to cultural context)

There was an arc and an argument to Poet in New York that made it -- if not exactly substantial, the args from our standpoint are sorta old and creaky, at least something to chew over.

Whitman I'm just finding it way more rough going.

Tsvetaeva - Ratcatcher. She had 'White' sympathies, and that is expressed in her hatred of Bolshies (they are the rats). However she has no sympathy for the greedy villagers either. She sides with the lone artist, who - like Tsvetaeva - is a producer of sound.

Reading some poems by Montale and Holub next.

btw this is happening

2014 ILX Poetry Contest: The Captain Lorax Prize (Submissions Thread)

currently carrying Crane's *The Bridge*, a selected Sean Thomas Dougherty (too much prose poetry and Henry Rollins-as-Milquetoast for my taste, but the occasional burst of light), and Rigoberto Gonzalez's *Unpeopled Eden* which is pretty breathtaking in its gravity and lighthandedness.

The Faerie Queen, again — still never made it thru a whole book (I've started I, II, and now III) but I'm determined to get it this time! Probably doesn't hurt that I was just reading Scott, getting in the swordplay-and-chivalry mood.

"The Bridge" is legit stunning in places, incomprehensible in others, sometimes stunning-incomprehensible.

Started a book which comes out next year, 'Dark Sparkler' by Amber Tamblyn, a collection of poems inspired by actresses who died young. Not sure it entirely works, but when it does it's pretty good.

Jayne Mansfield

Your neck was a study of the asterisk,
the silken shape of Sanskrit,
the sucker punch of succulents.

Your neck a thinning glacier,
fine as the grind of a blade curve,
soft as a k in a known word
long as they say about slow burns.

Your neck the place where pearls retired
below the face your girls admired.

Your neck was a fortune you did not spend.
Your neck is what they’ll remember the most.
Your neck in the end.

ugh

been thinking ed dorn's gunslinger was lookin interesting

but hearing him read it, is just

ugh

the educated coastal elite tone of voice and enunciation patterns from the old dayz always irritate the hell out of me

you can hear dorn trying to get into the vernacular he wrote on the page, but he's so… uptight… that he can't commit to it, he just rushes whenever he has to drawl a little or drop some word endings

vindicating

from what i know of the book proper, i would still check gunslinger out

i mean i hate (dislike) the way wcw reads his own poetry too so

Osip Mandesltam by James Greene. This poem is in a diff translation I found online:

A Greek flute’s theta and iota –
as if words weren’t enough for the ear –
un-carved, and unaccountable,
ripened, toiled, crossed the frontier.

Impossible to leave it behind:
clenched teeth can’t deny it,
the tongue can’t prod it into line,
the lips can’t dissipate it.

The flautist knows no peace –
it seems to him he’s alone,
that he formed his native sea
from lilac clay, long ago.

With distinct, ambitious murmur,
relentless remembering lips, he
hastens to gather the sounds,
cherish them, neatly, stingily.

Later we’re unable to repeat him,
clods of clay in the palms of the sea,
and when I’m filled with the ocean,
my measure can only be disease.

And my lips are unable to sing,
there is murder too at the root.
Involuntarily, waning, waning,
I diminish the power of the flute.

grabbed maggie nelson's *bluets* which is weird but quite lovely

also got *the art of the sonnet* which is a wonderful little various artists critical examination

Poem

Though we seek always the known absolute
Of all our days together, love will not occur
For us. Love is a fact
Beyond the witches wood of facts that is
Our sorcery's domain. And though we may
Charm lion into squirrel, push back the sea,
Love is made outlaw, set beyond all art,
The ultimate error of our reasoning.

But when I see you walking or catch your face
Edged with the season's most erratic leaves
Love grows superfluous, and I look at you
As I would look at flowers. Our only need:
The sympathy of darkness for the seed.

the first poem john ashbery ever published, as 'joel michael symington'

i really liked bluets; i read it after reading some anne carson because max had talked about her on ilx, looking for something that was mentioned in the same breath. i think carson is a tough comparison - because the precise-almost-strict tone reads ever-so-slightly fussily in others' work, like the nelson book, & doesn't at all in carson's - but i liked it a lot. i wrote her an e-mail maybe a year later to ask whether it was through her or some interview or something that i'd heard this story about the colour blue that i couldn't get out of my head; it was about an old artisan, centuries ago, renown for his work with stained glass, but most particularly for the nonpareil blues he would incorporate into his windows. he was sought after, and expensive, & ended up the artist of many & varied famous stained glass designs; something written down or remembered said that he was unique in sourcing incredibly exotic materials, crushed sapphires, with which to work, & that remnant scraps of his invoices detailed the materials he used. & then, centuries later, more recently, a portion of the windows had somehow been tested to gauge its composition, & the tests revealed the materials involved, none of which were sapphires, crushed or otherwise. he had used whatever he had used & billed for crushed sapphires, this poetic & expensive reimbursable. i was sure i'd heard the story in an aside during an interview or an unpublished bluet or something, but i hadn't, & she wrote back to say she didn't know either, & i still can't remember where i heard the story, what exactly its tethered to in my mind if not this catalogue of devotional historical uses of the colour blue.

schlump - perhaps from Michael Taussig, What Color is the Sacred?
(haven't read the whole book, but from what I recall, that sounds like a story that might appear in it)

reading Rumi because I never really have

surprised at how affecting some of it is, the translation is really refreshingly contemporary & almost shades into something like Sexton at times

"a"

I own the uneecummings version: "A"

"a"

― j., Tuesday, October 7, 2014 7:27 PM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh yo how is this

i sent lj todesfuge and demanded he start reading celan

Howard Moss. Graceful to a fault blank verse.

well hoos i don't know, i have read zukofsky a bit for many years, because of all the wcw/pound/objectivist/langpo connections, but never gotten too into him save for enjoying his lyrics. got inspired to pick up "a" again and with some more herrick in me and a different feel for voice in the intervening years i enjoy him more and care less about the allusiveness/opacity. the structures seem plainer now but i think maybe much of 'anew' (except for '80 flowers' haha) will still seem more approachable, if you haven't read him. lovely love songs. then again there's a lotta marx in "a" - half of one installment is built out of quotes - so if you're you…

the personal centeredness does seem to make "a" more friendly than 'paterson' or the cantos, even if it's caught up with private inscrutables.

xp Celan is okay, but I have my doubts sometimes about his translatability

obv reading celan in translation can never be the same as reading him in german but there are some v good bilingual editions (the felstiner is my favorite) and i think his words are powerful enough to survive translation + carry meaning.

It is also possible that I just don't "get" him & the fault is not translation... idk. Iirc, Hamburger makes a big deal out of his 'minor language' characteristics, though I could barely explain what I/he means by that.

"Todesfuge" is definitely one of the better ones I've read, though... I remember reading another longer poem of his (I forget the title) that came into focus for me when I realized it was structured almost like the camps, with a fence around it warning "KEEP OUT"