The Poetry Thread

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!

I would contribute to a sonnet thread if you start one I expect david... I haven't read 101 Sonnets though so there's a chance I have 101 fewer things to say than those who have :)

(for Anna)

She brought me a box of magnetic words,
and now the kitchen has become a poem
that writes itself, unpredictably, at night.
Under our fingers sudden meanings form,
these phrases stick like burrs.
We are all accidental poets,
wild and free
raw
sculpt ing.
The room is loaded, layered
with chance collisions,
broken language.

These days we feed off words.
We can't make a sandwich
without making
a point.
Breakfast produces gloomy sentiments,
a morning smear
cigarette pain.
Lunchtimes become journeys
which begin, and end, at the fridge door
in an unfinished sentence,
break out of

When the house is empty
I find messages with the frozen food
like cries for help.
Who wrote i like him dead this morning?
she suffered ?
Graffiti artists of white goods,
we are all anonymous.
Like children we scatter words;
random and ominous,
they cling.
Who wrote we don't make sense
as if it made sense?

Soon the box runs out; we all get bored.
The fridge buzzes, inscrutably,
and I go hungry
for magnetic words.

[by Rachel Playforth]

here's a little something poem I wrote mainly just as a formal exercise in trying out rhyme and syllable strength, I'm not sure I like it either, a little too mean but why not - it doesn't even have a name:

You inhale and hold,
weighing the smoke,
a thought knuckles in
and then I choke:

"It's you, it's not me;
sorry to say -
now pack up your bag,
go on your way."

It is interesting the way rhyme pushes you towards thinking that the poem is 'about' the rhymed words, when in this case I want it to be about 'a thought knuckles in' which I think is a great line.

As usual, the Nipper is partly to blame.

who are you reading, the pinefox? and why did you have to be wheeled back round?

I picked up robin robertson's second collection today ('slow air'; I was poised so close to buying 'the pleasure of the text' and jacob polley's first; mmm money money) after reading his first earlier in the week and being underwhelmed in proportion to the praise in its jacket quotes ('its honesty, insight and sheer lyrical power'; 'the best new poet in britain.') too much fluff not enough oomph for me to be honest (except a few stand-out poems like 'the flaying of marsyas' which is... phenomenal.) but this new one is a bit special so far, if extremely maudlin in its lyricism, here's a sample:

"Art Lesson"

She stood at his
burnt windows
until she saw herself
answered in their dark,
the way glass gets
blacked at night
in a lighted room.
She went home,
pulled the curtains;
drew a red bath.

What I have been reading: Larkin and Muldoon.

I have been half-thinking of trying to write a poem about You (Cozen!). But do I really know how to write poems? I half-wish that I could have a lesson from Archel.

Actually I might have to give a workshop for a bunch of e2e kids soon and I have no idea what to do :/