**What Are You Reading Now? -- Poetry

Poetry threads have had mixed results here. Some have been fantastic, some have died early. This is attempt one for this year; our chance to discuss the poetry we reading now, and post* about our new or old finds and favorites.

This is for 2011...but feel free to start early.

*preferably within the copyright laws

If I read any poetry attentively it is likely to be one or two book length poems. I will certainly mention it or them here when I do, but I don't think I do quotations well.

Robert

I'm glad to see this topic here! I expect I'll read quite a few poetry collections and anthologies this year; many, but not all, will be New Zealand poetry. My first poetry book for the year will be first collection Wit Of The Staircase by Saradha Koirala. With Saradha's permission, I posted a poem from this collection, "Echolalia", on my blog here:

http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/2010/11/tuesday-poem-echolalia-by-saradha.html

and am now looking forward to reading the whole collection.

I'm rereading Rain by Don Paterson, which was my last book of 2010 and demanded a second reading -- listen to me "demanded" I mean I enhoyed it so much and got so much from it I immediately wanted to read it again (though I did wait a week or two).

I also started Paul Muldoon's Horse Latitudes which I am enjoying, more than previous failed attempts with it since reading an extract from an introduction he's written to a selected poems for Robert Frost. the extract, in the TLS, was a reading of Directive by Frost and its helped me to allow myself to dive into Muldoon, its given me a clue to Muldoon too.

Lots of other ongoing reads, like Elizabeth Bishop and Keats. Some others I am well stuck with - I wonder if that would be a good thread, reading we are endlessly stuck in (e.g book 2 of Paradise Lost since the dsalon read early last year), stuckness with no end in sight but I have not wholly given up on yet. This is the history of a lot of my reading, over decades even, and sometimes I come back and resolve the sticking point (fiction as well as poetry) to much satisfaction.

Tony - paradise lost has a nice film of dust on my bedside table. I think I finished book four, and i have every intention of getting back to it again this year (which will involve some re-reading, I imagine)

Tim - regarding koirala, what does a northerly mean in NZ (assuming this was a reference to NZ). In texas we have blue northerns, which are sudden bursts of cold air before a cold front (from the north, an "arctic" cold front). In west texas the temperature will plummet so fast that animals have been known to freeze in place.

>5 dchaikin:, dchaikin: Saradha Koirala lives in Wellington, N.Z., as I do. Here, at about latitude 41° S, the two prevailing wind directions are north to northwesterly (which bring warm, moist air down from the subtropical regions to the north), and southwesterlies (which bring cold weather fronts up from the Southern Ocean, and ultimately Antarctica). Wellington is notoriously windy: wind gusts of 130km/h (80 mph) are not uncommon here, and although southerlies bring the worst weather, northerlies are usually the strongest winds.

So a northerly here, and likely in the context of Saradha's poem, is a warm, humid, and often very strong wind.

Well, I wrote this up as completed for the end of 2010, but is one ever really finished with most poetry books? When I am reading one, and even if I 'finish' one, I don't think I ever have the sense of completion one has with a collection or novel. Of course, I rarely read a poetry collection cover to cover in a straightforward linear fashion. Anyway, here's my latest poetry reading:



Continuum by Nina Cassian (2010, poetry, Romanian)

Cassian is a prominent Romanian poet, author of 50 or more volumes, many in Romanian, some in English. She was born in Romania but was exiled in the mid-80s and now lives in NYC. "Continuum" is her latest collection (I think she must be in her 80s now?).

The first time I picked this collection up, I did not connect well with it, but my later forays into this volume have been more fruitful. The collection is varied and I particularly like the poems under the heading of 'homages' - about various 'greats' like Poe and Dickinson, Plath and the Greek poet Ritsos. But here is a poem from another section of the book I particularly liked:

Spring Snow

Scrounging—a barbaric word—
through my past,
I encounter dead butterflies
and stuffed animals
and the rag of infatuation,
also a piece torn from the flag
of love for humanity.
The days embrace themselves,
choke themselves,
enter the night.

Scrounging again, I find
wool, linen, pollen—
and purity.
It's like spring snow,
a paradoxical regeneration,
a lot of untouched, white silence
and, vanished, the shape of my lover
in the sheets.

Everything starts with the letter 'S'
of Snow
everything is written cleanly
in my conscience,
and everything is quiet and fresh
and there is no butchered past.

I remain pure and fresh
as at birth.

"a piece torn from the flag of love for humanity"

Just a piece? :(

Posting from 2010 is fine. I think, with poetry, if it's on your mind then your are reading it now.

I finished a very small collection of 60 of Basho's Haikus. Reviewed on my thread and the translation challenge. Here was my favorite:

Wake, butterfly –
it's late, we’ve miles
to go together.

>9 janemarieprice: I saw that on your thread, Jane. It was lovely.

I'm reading A Murder of Crows by Larry D. Thomas, which arrived new in December. I may sample later. But for now, here is the beginning of one from the 1994 issue of The Texas Review, which parallels my life:

excerpt is the beginning of Children in the Bedroom by Brooke Horvath. This poem was later published by Horvath as part of a 1995 collection titled Consolation at Ground Zero

We cannot keep them
out of here, away
from the mystery of it.
The two-year-old pages
through volume seven
of the Interpreter’s Bible,
the kindergartner
fills out an order form
from a Victoria’s Secret
catalog.

They love the way
forgotten belongings
materialize here
unexpectedly, and the view
from our window, so much
more glamorous
than that from theirs.
They love the pictures
of and by themselves,
the scale, the mirror
on the door, the big bed
for bouncing or for lying
adultly still.

>11 dchaikin:, dchaikin: I like that poem a lot!

I have now finished Wit of the Staircase by Saradha Koirala, a poet who lives in my hometown of Wellington, New Zealand. Here is my brief review:

I enjoyed this first collection a lot. Saradha Koirala's poems are short (mostly), elegantly constructed, and pull in a range of words you don't often find in New Zealand poetry.There isn't a bad poem in the book: I found some of them a bit slight (which may just be another way of saying that I didn't connect with the subject matter), but the best of them, such as "Echolalia", "Once a fort knight", "Nepal" and "Courtenay Place" are an excellent marriage of form and content.

Next, I'm planning to read 2010 collection "Lives of the Poets" by New Zealand poet John Newton, and 1997 collection (2nd ed 2007) Hemingway in Spain by US/Australian poet David Reiter.

Reading Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. Just begun.

I'm reading Collected poems, Ted Hughes and collected poems, Lawrence Durrell Its quite amazing to switch between the two. Both are excellent nature poets but the language could hardly be more different. There is the blood and guts of Hughe's descriptions of nature in England and then there is the soft sensual poetics of Durrells Greek islands.

Here is a short extract from Durrell's; Cities, Plains and People that caught my fancy:

To all who turn and start descending
The long sad river of their growth:
The tidebound, tepid, causeless
Continuum of terrors in the spirit,
I give you here unending
In idleness an innocent beginning

Until your pain becomes a literature

baswood, I feel somehow intimidated by the name Lawrence Durrell, but those lines are lovely.

One from A Murder of Crows that I read this past weekend, posted with permission form Larry D. Thomas:

All Because She Wanted To

Though the shrillness of her screaming
to discernment may belie it,
the gull soars, careens, glides and swoops
with a gracefulness so devoid
of beastliness one must think twice
to realize she's still earthbound.
Could she not be a bored angel,
winded from singing hosannas,
diving from the sterile, blue vault
of heaven to the stench of fish,
the vile devourment of offal
she'll strop from her lips with her wing,
all because she wanted to, all
without the slightest twinge of guilt?

The next poem in the book is titled "The Screaming, Actual Angel".

#15
Thanks for the link to Larry D Thomas. I will explore further

Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems by Wesley McNair (2010, US).

I've been following Wesley McNair since the early 90s. He from my home state, but nationally known, albeit under-recognized by the general reading public. His poetry is clear, straightforward, thoughtful, and wonderfully-wrought. He writes about the extraordinary in the every day; beauty in a common moment, if you will. His poetry is reminiscent of that by Billy Collins. They are very much contemporaries, both born in 1941, and both writing about some of the same subjects around getting older.

I'd love to share a very funny poem that both dukedom and I thought very clever and funny, titled "The Characters of Dirty Jokes," but I thought some might be offended (so, you'll have to buy the book! ha ha!). There is another one titled "Smoking", about Bogart & Bacall smoking on screen, that reminded me just a little of Billy Collins's "The Last Cigarette" - same wistfulness (it's too long to transcribe). McNair has several poems in this collection related to hair, and the losing of it. "The Bald Spot," "On Losing My Hair," and this one:

Hymn to the Comb-Over

How the thickest of them erupt just
above the ear, cresting in waves so stiff
no wind can move them. Let us praise them
in all of their varieties, some skinny
as the bands of headphones, some rising
from a part that extnds halfway around
the head, others four or five strings
stretched so taut the scalp resembles
a musical instrument. Let us praise the sprays
that hold them, and the combs that coax
such abundance to the front of the head
in the mirror, the combers entirely forget
the back. And let us celebrate the combers,
who address the old sorrow of time's passing
day after day, bringing out of the barrenness
of mid-life this ridiculous and wonderful
harvest, no wishful flag of hope but, thick
or thin, the flag itself, unfurled for us all
in subways, office and mall across America.

Not only do I love the humor in this, but also the wistfulness and the sounds—the music of it is just wonderful. These are not his only subjects, of course.

Lois, that made me smile.

Lois, I liked that one a lot.

I've now moved on to US-born, Australia-domiciled poet David P. Reiter and his collection Hemingway In Spain. I am enjoying it so far, but I'm a little handicapped by my lack of knowledge of Hemingway's life, having never been a big fan of his writing. That's my fault rather than the book's.

Another from Larry D. Thomas. This is from Five Lavender Minutes of an Afternoon, a chapbook published last month through the online literary review Right Hand Pointing. You can access the collection for free here: https://sites.google.com/site/larrydthomasfive/home.

Red-Letter Epiphany

Its cover was worn,
white leather, scuffed
as the bull hide boots
of a working cowhand.

I’ll never forget
the first time I held it,
looked to see if Mama
were around, and opened it.

What few books Mama had
were prized, off-limits to me
and Bobo, my kid brother,
till we made it to first grade

and learned to read.
I’d never seen onionskin,
and loved the way it felt
between my thumb and fingers.

When Mama yelled, I jerked,
gripped the forbidden book
for a split second
by a single page

of onionskin, and heard it
tear from the spine
as the rest of the New
Testament crashed to the floor.

I stood frozen, holding
a fragment of onionskin with
words red as cardinals
trembling in a field of snow.

ETA the picture

So far this year, I've read Indexical Elegies by Jon Paul Fiorentino, which I did not enjoy; Poets and Killers by Helen Hajnoczky, which is a collection of found poetry based on advertizing that was okay; and Lightduress by Paul Celan, a brilliant poet I reread every year. In my chapter on melancholia and experimental forms, I use Celan's work as an example.

From Lightduress:

Heartsound-fibulas, fenced in,

the pair of cranes
thinks itself before you,

aspectral
the light of your flower bestows itself,

the mantis's trapleg
meets your over-
starry
Always.

cocoafiend - interesting poem. If you get a chance, please post the title (unless the 1st line is the title).

I've started Florida in Poetry: A History of the Imagination, edited by Club Reads Jane A. Jones and Maurice O'Sullivan. I'm going to try to read it through at a pace of a couple poems a day. It's almost 300 pages, so I might be here awhile.

> 21, cocoafiend: I agree with you completely about Paul Celan!

I'm still working my way through Hemingway in Spain and continuing to enjoy it. Next up are Punctured Experimental by Iain Britton and "Lives of the Poets" by John Newton, both recent collections by New Zealand poets.

22, dchaikin, the first line is the poem's title (as translated by Pierre Joris, in the Green Integer edition)

timjones, an interesting point you raise about intertextual works, such as Hemingway in Spain - as readers, how obliged are we to get familiar with writers or texts to which our reading refers? I distinctly recall reading Good Night Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet when I had, to my embarrassment, not yet read Othello - though I knew the story, of course. I consequently felt that I had not *really* read Ann-Marie MacDonald's play...

My less dramatic (but still niggling) oversights include reading Lisa Robertson's Xeclogues, without knowing much about Virgil. Some lapses seem alright - not knowing much about John Donne's Holy Sonnets, perhaps, while reading Margaret Edson's Wit - but others are unthinkable - failing to read Jane Eyre before taking on Wide Sargasso Sea or neglecting Robinson Crusoe before reading Coetzee's Foe.

It occurred to me that I should have given examples from poetry for this thread...

The T.E. Lawrence Poems by Gwendolyn MacEwen
The Semi-Conducting Dictionary (Our Strindberg) by Natalee Caple
The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Sharon McCartney
Erin Moure's suites of experimental translations of Paul Celan

the endless references to Gertrude Stein in avant garde quarters...

I'm still dipping into all the books I had started in January, but I've been teaching Blake to my students this week. We've gone beyond The Songs of Innocence and Experience into The Book of Thel, The Visions of the Daughters of Albion and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell -- glorious stuff.

Infancy, fearless, lustful, happy! nestling for delight
In laps of pleasure; Innocence! honest, open, seeking
The vigorous joys of morning light; open to virgin bliss.
Who taught thee modesty, subtil modesty! child of night & sleep
When thou awakest. wilt thou dissemble all thy secret joys
Or wert thou not awake when all this mystery was disclos'd!
Then com'st thou forth a modest virgin knowing to dissemble
With nets found under thy night pillow, to catch virgin joy,
And brand it with the name of whore: & sell it in the night,
In silence, ev'n without a whisper, and in seeming sleep,
Religious dream and holy vespers, light thy smoky fires:
Once were thy fires lighted by the eyes of honest morn
And does my Theotormon seek this hypocrite modesty!
This knowing, artful, secret. fearful, cautious, trembling hypocrite.
Then is Oothoon a whore indeed! and all the virgin joys
Of life are harlots: and Theotormon is a sick mans dream
And Oothoon is the crafty slave of selfish holiness

from Visions of the Daughters of Albion -- complete here: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Visions_of_the_Daughters_of_Albion

>24 cocoafiend:, cocoafiend - I never feel that readers are 'obliged' to do anything at all - which is the main reason I do not join book challenges, unless I set them for myself - but I certainly think it would benefit my reading of Hemingway in Spain to have read more Hemingway.

Looking through my poetry collection, I don't have many collections that I would classify as intertextual (unlike quite a lot of the fiction), but I frequently wish my knowledge of mythology was better when reading a collection like Ithaca Island Bay Leaves. In this regard, I am lazy, because my wife knows a lot more than I do and I can always ask her!

27, timjones - good point - a sense of obligation can kill the joy of reading... I feel the same way as you about mythology, which I read voraciously as a child and have since almost entirely forgotten, it seems!

Reading some selected Seamus Heaney for a course - I've never really read him before, what I did didn't grab me, but I may be getting him better now. Also aim to read some Donne.

Tony, I read Field Work last year, but was a bit mystified. Quite frankly, it was too complex for me. One RL friend advised me to start with some Heaney's earlier work, as he felt that was more accessible.

Thanks Dan -- we're reading a range, though all in my copy of Opened Ground that is selected up to '96 I think.

sad to see this thread unused.

I've said it elsewhere but I've been reading Osip Mandelstam's selected poems, translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, at least since my last post -- I like him very much.

You are absolutely right TonyH. I am reading Poems Chiefly from Manuscript by John Clare. Expect to see some Clare poems coming to this thread soon.

I bought I Love a Broad Margin to My Life by Maxine Hong Kingston last week, which is quite unique, as it is a biography written in verse form. Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the book:

HOME

I am turning 65 years of age.
In 2 weeks I will be 65 years old.
I can accumulate time and lose
time? I sit here writing in the dark—
can't see to change these penciled words—
just like my mother, alone, bent over her writing,
just like my father bent over his writing, alone
but for me watching. She got out of bed,
wrapped herself in a blanket, and wrote down
the strange sounds Father, who was dead,
was intoning to her. He was reading aloud
calligraphy that he'd written—carved with inkbrush—
on his tombstone. She wasn't writing in answer.
She wasn't writing a letter. Who was she writing to?
Nobody.
This well-deep outpouring is not for
anything. Yet we have to put into exact words
what we are given to see, hear, know.
Mother's eyesight blurred; she saw trash
as flowers. ‟Oh. How very beautiful.”
She was lucky, seeing beauty, living
in beauty, whether or not it was there.

Darryl, looks like a good purchase, I really like those last four lines, more please when you have got the time.

>34 kidzdoc: - not unique though. John Betjeman wrote his autobiography, Summoned By Bells in verse 50 years ago.

Walking from school is a consummate art:
Which route to follow to avoid the gangs,
Which paths to find that lead, circuitous,
To leafy squirrel haunts and plopping ponds,
For dreams of Archibald and Tiger Tim;
Which hiding place is safe, and when it is;
What time to leave to dodge the enemy.
I only once was trapped. I knew the trap -
I heard it in their tones: "Walk back with us."
I knew they weren't my friends; but that soft voice
Wheedled me from my route to cold Swain's Lane.
There in a holly bush they threw me down,
Pulled off my shorts, and laughed and ran away;
And, as I struggled up, I saw grey brick,
The cemetery railings and the tomb.

Have pulled several editions of Pasternak's poetry off the shelf and have been reading his poetry the last few evenings (and comparing translations). I had an obsession with Pasternak a couple of decades ago and amassed a little collection of his work, and books about him or his work—most of which I haven't really looked at for about a decade (though I have pulled Zhivago down once or twice during that time).

While a fan of poetry, I read very little translated poetry because of what I imagine is the difficulty of translating it would be. Pasternak's poetry rhymed in Russian, so at least one of the translators (A pair, actually) tried to stay faithful to that. Imagine how difficult to translate the essence of the poem and make it also rhyme in the new language! Which is why I tend to prefer the unrhymed translations.

Will share more when I have time.

... glad to see this thread revived...

Well, I'm reading an old issue of The Cape Rock, published through Southeast Missouri State University. It's their 20th anniversary issue from 1984, and collects their selected best over those 20 years. Wonderful stuff.

I have spent most of the time since I last posted what I was reading (post 22, Jan 27), reading Jane's Florida in Poetry, and finally finished a short time ago. I had some planned breaks, but skipped the last two as I got use to reading that particular book, and very attached to it. Authors to follow up on include Donald Justice, Judith Berke, Yvonne Sapia, Van k. Brock, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Alison Kolodinsky, Richard Wilbur, and especially the mesmerizing Enid Shomer... I might have heard of Justice and Wilbur before. The rest are new to me. I'll try to review this, if I can, soon-ish.

I also have read Before the Troubadour Exits : Poems by Jeffrey C. Alfier, Dark Pearls by Larry D. Thomas & a new (2011) issue of the San Pedro River Review, which is all poetry.

I made a few purchases too: The People Look Like Flowers at Last by Charles Bukowski & To Be Read in 500 Years by Albert Goldbarth.

> 37, avaland: I am with you on rhymed vs unrhymed translation of Russian poetry. The Russian language offers so many unforced opportunities for rhyme compared to English that I think it's very hard to make a good rhymed translation into English of Russian poetry - at least, it's hard for me!

Hark to the melody of distant bells
That on the wind with pleasing hum rebounds
By fitful starts, then musically swells
Oer the dun stilly grounds;
While on the meadow bridge the pausing boy
Listens the mellow sounds,
And hums in vacant joy.

Now homeward-bound, the hedger bundles round
His evening faggot, and with every stride
His leathern doublet leaves a rustling sound.
Till silly sheep beside
His path start tremulous, and once again
Look back dissatisfied,
Then scour the dewy plain.

How sweet the soothing calm that smoothly stills
Oer the heart's every sense its opiate dews,
In meek-eyed moods and ever balmy trills!
That softens and subdues,
With gentle quiet's bland and sober train,
Which dreamy eve renews
In many a mellow strain.

I love to walk the fields, they are to me
A legacy no evil can destroy;
They, like a spell, set every rapture free
That cheered me when a boy.
Play--pastime--all time's blotting pen concealed,
Comes like a new-born joy,
To greet me in the field.

For nature's objects ever harmonize
With emulous taste, that vulgar deed annoys;
It loves in quiet moods to sympathize,
And meet vibrating joys
Oer nature's pleasant things; nor will it deem
Pastime the muse employs
A vain obtrusive theme

from Summer Images - John Clare

these seeming memories are clever
imitations. these simplest of my thoughts
are falsified.
my past speeds to a doubt
and all is suspect in the blur.
multiplicity occurs. I cannot breath.
the storer and the forger merge.

I make things up.
they harden and become
memories.
they stay and all is undone.

These are the opening lines of The Clean Clutter by Marjorie Stelmach. I found it in the 1984 issue of The Cap Rock, which I just finished reading through. I've now picked up a 2011 issue of The Iowa Review

The Shepherd's Tree

Huge elm, with rifted trunk all notched and scarred,
Like to a warrior's destiny! I love
To stretch me often on thy shadowed sward,
And hear the laugh of summer leaves above;
Or on thy buttressed roots to sit, and lean
In careless attitude, and there reflect
On times, and deeds, and darings that have been--
Old castaways, now swallowed in neglect;
While thou art towering in thy strength of heart,
Stirring the soul to vain imaginings,
In which life's sordid being hath no part.
The wind of that eternal ditty sings,
Humming of future things, that burn the mind
To leave some fragment of itself behind.

John Clare

Stirring the soul to vain imaginings, ... I can relate to this line. Enjoying Clare's poems.

R. S. Thomas - saw the documentary Into the west about him this week -- a challenging bloke I bet, but his poetry, I've really connected to in recent days, had his selected and have been flicking through, never unrewarded.

I am reading Vagabondia, Carman Bliss free download from Gutenburg. here is an extract from the title poem:

Here we are free
To be good or bad
Sane or mad
Merry or grim
As the mood may be,-
Free as the whim
Of a spook on a spree,-
Free to be oddities
Not mere commodities,
Stupid and saleable
Wholly available
Ranged upon shelves,
Each with his puny form
In the same uniform,
Cramped and disabled;
We are not labelled,
We are ourselves

I've been slowly reading The Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill for the last few months. What a strange and original epic! I'd like to quote from it, but I'm unsure about how to get permission - it's still under copyright from Alfred A. Knopf. How much can I quote without running into problems? You can't even get the book except secondhand anymore. Yes, I know, that doesn't mean much.

#46 We sort of covered this issue on dchaikin's thread - post no 238 http://www.librarything.com/topic/104839#2705182 I think the rule of thumb is post away; within reason

Ok, thanks.

Hmm, maybe Samos from the third book, Scripts for the Pageant. I hope it isn't too long:

And still, at sea all night, we had a sense
Of sunrise, golden oil poured upon water,
Soothing its heave, letting the sleeper sense
What inborn, amniotic homing sense
Was ferrying him - now through the dream-fire
In which (it has been felt) each human sense
Burns, now through ship's radar's cool sixth sense,
Or mere unerring starlight - to an island.
Here we were. The twins of Sea and Land,
Up and about for hours - hues, cries, scents -
Had placed at eye level a single light
Croissant: the harbor glazed with warm pink light.

Fire-wisps were weaving a string bag of light
For sea stones. Their astounding color sense!
Porphyry, alabaster, chrysolite
Translucences that go dead in daylight
Asked only the quick dip in holy water
For the saint of cell on cell to come alight -
Illuminated crystals thinking light,
Refracting it, the gray prismatic fire
Or yellow-gray of sea's diliute sapphire...
Wavelengths daily deeply score the leit-
Motifs of Loom and Wheel upon this land.
To those who listen, it's the Promised Land.

A little spin today? Dirt roads inland
Jounce and revolve in a nerve-jangling light,
Doing the ancient dances of the land
Where, gnarled as olive trees that shag the land
With silver, old men - their two-bladed sense
Of spendthrift poverty, the very land
Being, if not loaf, tomb - superbly land
Upright on the downbeat. We who water
The local wine, which "drinks itself" like water,
Clap for more, cry out to be this island
Licked all over by a white, salt fire,
Be noon's pulsing ember raked by fire,

Know nothing, now, but Earth, Air, Water, Fire!
For once out of the frying pan to land
Within their timeless, everlasting fire!
Blood's least red monocle, O magnifier
Of the great Eye that sees by its own light
More pictures in "the world's enchanted fire"
Than come and go in any shrewd crossfire
Upon the page, of syllable and sense,
We want unwilled excursions and ascents,
Crave the upward-rippling rungs of fire,
The outward-rippling rings (enough!) of water...
(Now some details - how else will this hold water?)

Our room's three flights above the whitewashed water-
front where Pythagoras was born. A fire
Escape of sky-blue iron leads down to water.
Yachts creak on mirror berths, and over water
Voices from Sweden or Somaliland
Tell how this or that one crossed the water
To Ephesus, came back with toilet water
And a two kilo box of Turkish delight
- Trifles. Yet they shine with such pure light
In memory, even they, that the eyes water.
As with the setting sun, or innocence,
Do things that fade especially make sense?

Samos. We keep trying to make sense
Of what we can. Not souls of the first water -
Although we've put on airs, and taken fire -
We shall be dust of quite another land
Before the seeds here planted come to light.

If it is too long, I'll just whip out the Ouija board and ask Merrill himself if it's ok ;)

#48 I thought I was reading something by Robert Browning but then I looked at the end rhymes all that water and all that fire - very effective.

RODINI

Windless plane-trees above Rodini
To the pencil or the eye are tempters

Where of late trees have become ears in leaf
Curved for the cicada's first monotony.

Hollow the comb, mellow the sweetness
Amber the honey-spoil, drink, drink.

In theses windless unechoing valleys
The mind slips like a chisel hand

Touching the surface of this clement blue
Yet must not damage the solitary Turk

Gathering his team and singing, in whose brain
The same disorder and the loneliness-

The what-we-have-in-common of us all
Is there enough perhaps to found a world?

Then of what you said once, the passing
Of something on the road beyond the tombstones

Reflecting on dark hair with its sudden theft
Of blue from the darkness of violets

And below the nape of the neck a mole
All mixed in this odourless water-clock of hours.

So one is grateful, yes, to the ancient Greeks
For the invention of time, lustration of penitents

Not so much for what they were
But for where we lie under the windless planes.

Lawrence Durrell

I am still reading Durrells collected poems. They are thought provoking as often the subject of them lies tantalisingly out of reach, but many transport me to those Greek islands where time does seem to stand still.

Lustration means a water purification ritual performed by the Ancient Greeks

It seems like the Greek islands have become a bit of a theme here :) Nice poem by Durrell, baswood.

Time to post another poem and from Lawrence Durrell there is an obvious link to D H Lawrence. I love his Pansies and here is one of them:

We are Transmitters

As we live we are transmitters of life.
And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us.

That is part of the mystery of sex, it is a flow onwards.
Sexless people transmit nothing.

And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work,
life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be
ready
and we ripple with life through the days.

Even if it is a woman making an apple dumpling, or a man
a stool,
If life goes into the pudding, good is the pudding
good is the stool,
content is the woman, with fresh life rippling in her,
content is the man.

Give, and it shall be given unto you
is still the truth about life.
But giving life is not so easy.
It doesn't mean handing it out to some mean fool, or
letting the living dead eat you up.
It means kindling the life-quality where it was not,
even if it's only in the whiteness of a washed pocket-
handkerchief

D H Lawrence.

I could probably have picked a more gracefully worded poem from Island Fire : An Anthology of Literature from Hawai'i, but this is the one I keep thinking about. It's Hawaii, yet I can take it home with me. I can find ways to adjust it even to here, to Houston.

A Small Rebuttal
by Barbara B. Robinson

Some people say
Honolulu is just a
rotten cement city.
Too many beehive buildings
full of rotten piggy people.
Just noise and pollution
and crime.
And you can't see the ocean
from Kalakaua Avenue.
But just today—
I saw a mynah bird ring
at Makiki Park.
And I saw two blocks of cars
stop
and wait
for a puppy to cross
Beretania Street
and no horns beeped.

And I saw
A small girl chase a dime
an old Filipino man
had dropped
and carry it back to him.
And his fierce pock-marked face
lit up in Aloha,
and he gave her
the hibiscus from his hat band—
and—
she carried it away
like a crimson beacon
to show her friend.

I promised some various translations of Pasternak's poetry I was indulging in back in May. I was quite obsessed with Pasternak for awhile, and collected his books and anything related as I found them, and even bought a few. Pasternak's poetry rhymes in the Russian and back in his younger days it would have been meant to be read out loud.

First, and excerpt of one of my favorite poems. This is 4 of it's 7 stanzas. The poet is seeing the world through a mirror in his house. It is from his collection "My Sister Life"* written during the revolution, though it was not published until 1922.

The Mirror (1917)

In the mirror is steaming a cocoa cup
A lace curtain sways, and along
The path to the chaos of garden and steppe
The mirror runs to the swing.

There swaying pines needle the air with resin;
There, fussily bending to look
For its glasses, the garden is combing the grass;
There Shade is reading a book.

And into the background, the darkness, beyond
The gate into grasslands sweet
With drugs, down the path, between snail-trails and twigs
The quartz shimmers white in the heat.

The soul can't be mined, like a seam with saltpetre,
Or hacked out, like gems, with a pick.
The huge garden shakes in the hall, in the mirror—
But the glass does not break.

From Selected Poems of Boris Pasternak (1984)
Translated from the Russian by John Stallworthy and Peter France.

And the same poem from:
Sister My Life* translated by Phillip C. Flayderman (1967)

*notice the difference in translating the title of the collection!

The Mirror

On the shelf of the hall mirror, a steaming
Cup of cocoa rests. Satin sways;
And—the mirror rushes out in a straight path
To the tumbledown chaos of swing and garden.

There the pine trees prick the air
With their resin and their swaying;
And absent-minded garden plots have mislaid
Spectacles on the grass; Shade reads a book.

Further back, in the dark, beyond the fence
To the steppe, in the odor of opiates,
And mixed with twigs and snails,
Flows a pathway of hot and glittering quartz.

The enormous garden thrashes, harasses the mirror—
And yet it does not shatter the glass!
Everything seems bathed in a gelatinous film
From the mirror to the sound in the tree trunks.

**I'm cross-posting this on my thread also

And as a more interesting example of how translations vary, here is the first stanza of a poem from the same collection ("My Sister Life" or "Sister My Life" depending of which translation you are reading from)

The Weeping Garden
(It's Time for the Birds to Sing 5)

The awful one!—He drips and listens:
Is he all alone in the world—
He crumples a branch like lace at the window—
Or is there a witness here?

(from The Poetry of Boris Pasternak translated by George Reavey, 1959, G. P. Putnam & Sons)
------

The Weeping Garden

It's terrible: dripping and listening
If it's as much alone as ever—
Crumpling a lacy branch at the window—
Or if there's an eavesdropper.

(from the Stallsworthy/France volume mentioned in the previous post)
--------

The Weeping Garden

How horrible! It drips and listens,
Is it then the only one in the world
That pushes the branch in at the window,
Like a bit of lace in embroidery? Or someone is
watching.

(from the Flayderman volume noted in the previous post)
-------

These are translations from three different decades: the 50s, the 60s and the 80s (seems I need to find a 70s collection!). If I were to recommend a collection to start with, I would suggest the Stallsworthy/France translations in the Penguin edition which is apt to still be in print. It has a nice but not overly long introduction by the translator that gives one just the right amount of information about Pasternak and his poetry (for a beginner).

I should add that some of the translations in the Reavey collection (1959) actually rhyme in English and I can't imagine how he managed to do that. Also the Flayderman is a dual language edition, with the Russian on the left page and the English on the right.

#54 The Mirror,
Interesting reading those two translations. Much harder I would have thought to preserve the rhyming scheme. I think the first translation with the rhyme intact is inspired. How flat the second version appears afterwards.

>55 avaland: Yes, in the first translation the rhyming is imperfect but I think they attempted to keep the rhythm.

Here is what Pasternak said about translation:

"Translations are pointless unless their link with the original is closer than is usually the case. Textual equivalence is too weak a link to guarantee the value of a translation. Translations of this kind do not deliver what they have promised. Their pale replicas give no idea of the essential feature of the onjects which they attempt to reflect — their power. In order for a translation to achieve its aim, it must be tied to the original and the translation must be that between foundation and building, between trunk and branches. The translation must be the work of an author who has felt the influence of the original long before he begins his work. It must be the fruit of the original, its historical consequence.

More than this; we have said that translation is inconceivable because the principle charm of a work of art lies in its unrepeatability. How then can a translation repeat it? But translation is conceivable, because ideally it too will be a work of art; sharing a common text, it will stand alongside the original, unrepeatable in its own right. And translation is conceivable because for centuries before our time whole literatures have translated one another. Translation is not a method of getting to know isolated works, it is the channel whereby cultures and people communicate down the centuries."

(Pasternak was a translator himself)

Here is a third version: -

The Weeping Garden

The garden is frightful! It drips, it listens:
Is it in loneliness here,
Crushing a branch like lace at a window,
Or is there a witness near?

This one translated by Eugene M. Kayden. He was a native Russian who emigrated to the US at 16 - he started translating poetry to improve his English.

This is an interesting article about translating Pasternak by his niece (it also includes original audio files) - Translating Pasternak.

I read an interesting article in The TLS recently that suggests we might approach modern poetry as though it were a crossword puzzle. Here is my edited version:

What is poetry about? And other puzzles

Poetry is a form of writing that amongst other things deliberately employs puzzles as a means of engaging the reader in the pleasurable business of solving them:
- For many readers the primary puzzle is: what is the poem about
- At one extreme we sometimes wonder how we are meant to know anything at all

An intrinsic part of the pleasure of poetry is to be able to unravel difficulties and solve puzzles:
- Most obscurities can be solved if we are prepared to work at it
- Solving puzzles is satisfying
- The suspicion that the poem is about something more than its ostensible subject
- We expect cognitive enlightenment from our reading

What does it mean ? What is the poem about?
- If we are not clear then is it the poets fault or ours the reader?
- Is the poet being sincere in what she/he says?
BUT
- To be sympathetic to a poem that we might not yet understand is to be understanding
- We should meet the poet half way

The puzzles and the Brick Wall moment
- If we find more meaning than we suspected was there, we dignify the poem, even if the meaning was ours and not the poets.
-We can however encounter that brick wall moment when we have to concede the puzzle.

Why are some poems obscure?
- The poets leaps, shortcuts and difficult metaphors have not taken the reader with him/her
- The poet wants to reflect the complicated world we live in by deliberate making the poem more complicated; for example T S Eliot's dislocation of ideas
- A poet sets out to be obscure to impress his readership.

There are other reasons for obscurity
- The poet doesn't know what he/she is doing
- A mistake on behalf of the poet or the printer
- The poet playing a pointless game.

The above is an edited version of an edit from Who is Ozymandias by Roy Fuller.

Here is a poem to puzzle over:

Mrs. Noah: Taken After the Flood" by Jo Shapcott

I can't sit still these days. The ocean
is only memory, and my memory as fluttery
as a lost dove. Now the real sea beats
inside me, here, where I'd press fur and feathers
if I could. I'm middle-aged and plump.
Back on dry land I shouldn't think these things:
big paws which idly turn to bat the air,
my face by his ribs and the purr which ripples
through the boards of the afterdeck,
the roar - even at a distance - ringing in my bones,
the rough tongue, the claws, the little bites,
the crude taste of his mane. If you touched my lips
with salt water I would tell you such words,
words to crack the sky and launch the ark again.

>59 baswood: Interesting...

>> I like #60 a lot, but I don't feel any particular need to "solve" it - unlike the TLS article quoted earlier, I think the best way to approach poems is to experience them, rather than to solve them.

Here is a space poem for you Tim

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0NxZXd9ejo

As I struggle to figure out poetry, to work out the various puzzles, I can't help but feel the equating poetry to a puzzle misses completely the entire purpose of poetry.

But, I feel bad writing and posting that, because I can't really defend it.

Don't feel bad Dan, I started reading that article in either the TLS or the Guardian or both at the time and its not really what I am wanting from a poem either, so I stopped.

Dan, have you read Molly Peacock's How to Read a Poem? You might find it interesting and I think it would address your concerns. I can't agree about the puzzle approach, but I can agree with some of the points listed there about why a poem might be obtuse.

My son, the computer engineer, in college had to write a paper analyzing Robert Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening." Being very logically minded he decided the poem might be about hypothermia (seriously!), accumulated his evidence within the poem (and even went outside the poem to research the temperatures in New Hampshire during the winter the poem was written), and wrote his paper. Er, it did not go over well with the instructor. He was told that the 'right answer' was that it was about suicide. We actually thought he should have received points for creativity (and I was appalled with the whole 'right answer' idea).

#66 Interesting avaland. There never is a right answer concerning a poem or any other piece literature for so many reasons. There can however be a wrong answer, if say a poem was wilfully misinterpreted or the interpreter was not able to make a reasonable case for the interpretation. Sounds like your son was treated a little harshly.

Here's something that would have helped me a lot in High School - hell, it might still help me!

Not much he kens, I ween, of woman's breast,
Who thinks that wanton thing is won by sighs;
What careth she for hearts when once possess'd?
Do proper homage to thine idol's eyes;
But not too humbly, or she will despise
Thee and thy suit, though told in moving tropes:
Disguise ev'n tenderness, if thou art wise;
Brisk Confidence still best with woman copes;
Pique her and soothe in turn, soon Passion crowns thy hopes.

- Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto 2, Stanza 34

A bit sexist perhaps, but Byron's record shows that he did 'ken' women not too badly, I ween.

>67 baswood: - I'm not sure that logic follows - the lack of a definitive right answer does not preclude the existence of a wrong answer.

>66 avaland: - There a couple of British equivalents I can think of: Ruth Padel's 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and Tom Paulin's The Secret Life of Poems. Both of these books give an overview of poetry but then focus of individual poems - I found them useful than a more dry academic approach. (And Paulin has the added attraction of being slightly bonkers).

I could never be accused of being logical.

I also like Ruth Padel's book, there is plenty there to agree and disagree with. I will look out for Tom Paulin's book. Bonkers sounds good.

Noting all these titles. I have a book called How Does a Poem Mean? (2nd edition, 1975) by John Ciardi, but haven't read it.

Funny, not sure I've thought of it that way, but I have been unintentionally comfortable with the idea that there are wrong answers even when there aren't right ones. Sometimes the "right" answer can fill in a large hazy place with not clear boundary, but still you can usually tell whether your within that place or not.

>63 baswood:, baswood: Thanks!

Talking of such things, I have been hard at work recently editing an issue of the Science Fiction Poetry Association's online journal Eye to the Telescope devoted to speculative poetry by Australian and New Zealand poets. You can read the results here:

http://eyetothetelescope.com/

To find out more about the magazine, and about speculative poetry, see

http://eyetothetelescope.com/submit.html

No one moved to post about Transtromer's (sorry about my lack of accents) Nobel? I hadn't read him and now have read a few poems which I liked and will read more. Are people discussing this elsewhere? Am glad a poet got it - a pity there is just one prize, not sure I believe in them either, but still.

>73 tonikat: I did mention Tranströmer on my Club Read and 75 Books threads on Thursday. I have two of his poetry collections, and I'll start reading The Half-Finished Heaven this weekend.

Teju Cole has a lovely article about Tomas Tranströmer, including several of his poems, in one of The New Yorker blogs:

Miracle Speech: The Poetry of Tomas Tranströmer

ooo thank you I will enjoy that.

I'm sorry -- its perfectly possible everybody has been talking nothing but Transtromer on their threads but I have had even less time than usual to be keeping up with them, so it was a bit of a nerve I posted here. I'll go check yours right now. I very much liked those I read on the web, soem I had heard before -- the one about beign in a Cherry tree especially. I've been very good though andmerely added his collected and Half-Finished Heaven to my wishlist.

wow I like the Teju Cole piece, refined consideration of someone he is tuned into. But perhaps I have eaten the wedding cake before the courting. Again I wonder why all this was not in my life more before. I can't wait to read more -- but then that goes for most of my wishlist and Heaney whom he mentions who I have started to get (and how could I have ever not been getting it is again the question -- maybe I just did not try enough, the bog man poem I tried did not grab me, at least then)

#75 - kd, thanks for the link, great article.

I'm working my way though my Norton Criticial edition of Keats' Poetry and prose, am on the poems of 1817 so far, onto the epistles, so not very far in, but loving it - and it has me hot to read Spenser that I see dan read this year (just caught up with threade) and I missed (yet another) salon group read (so wish i had the time for group reads).

I got the new Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove as a Christmas gift, so I'm dipping in and out of that -- seems it got a scathing review from Helen Vendler in the New York Review of Books -- I'll have to take a look in the next couple of days.