What We Are Reading: Poetry & Drama

Discovering Dickinson? Memorizing Moliere? This is the place for you!

Hello - Last night, I read the Prologue to:

American Poets Say Goodbye to the Twentieth Century
(edited by Andrei Codrescu and Laura Rosenthal, 1996, abe.com)
and will wait to start on January 1, 2017.

The first poet is Keith Abbott.

Hi!

I don't read poetry books like a novel - just a little at a time, and I've been doing this with Your Soul is a River by Nikita Gill. It's rather visual, and I think if I did read it straight through it would be repetitive, but it's a lot of wistful pretty this way.

Now

"Out of your whole life give but a moment!
All of your life that has gone before,
All to come after it,—so you ignore,
So you make perfect the present,—condense,
In a rapture of rage, for perfection’s endowment,
Thought and feeling and soul and sense—
Merged in a moment which gives me at last
You around me for once, you beneath me, above me—
Me—sure that despite of time future, time past,—
This tick of our life-time’s one moment you love me!
How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet—
The moment eternal—just that and no more—
When ecstasy’s utmost we clutch at the core
While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!"

-Robert Browning

^This is from a Poem-A-Day. If you have not signed up for this, do yourself a favor.

Most of the old school poetry has left me a bit cold but I do like this one.

>1 drneutron: such a wag you are, Jim, but you did encourage me to find out a bit about Molière. ignorance, fortunately, is remediable to a degree. i like what i read and his life was fascinating. i'll be listening to a play or two from audible.com, so thanks a lot for your waggery. :-)

^I have been reading The Universe of Us, by Lang Leav. I am really connecting with this collection. Most are very short but pack a lovely punch.

>6 msf59: & >7 msf59: Thanks Mark, yes "tomorrow could be different"!

Terror

Face-down; odor
of dusty carpet. The
grip of anguished stillness.

Then your naked voice, your
head knocking the wall, sideways,
the beating of trapped thoughts against iron.

If I remember, how is it
my face shows
barely a line? Am I
a monster, to sing
in the wind on this sunny hill?

And not taste the dust always,
and not hear that rending, that retching?
How did morning come, and the days
that followed, and the quiet nights?

Denise Levertov
With eyes at the back of our heads

>9 mirrordrum: Thanks, Ellie. I like that one. I may have to track down a Levertov collection.

^Another gem from The Universe of Us

>11 msf59: That's lovey, Mark.

Found the thread!

I've been enjoying Bright Dead Things by Ada Limon, recommended by Mark, Mamie, Ellen and no doubt others. This is one of hers that jumped out at me.

What It Looks Like To Us and the Words We Use

By Ada Limón

All these great barns out here in the outskirts,
black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass.
They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use.
You say they look like arks after the sea’s
dried up, I say they look like pirate ships,
and I think of that walk in the valley where
J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said,
No. I believe in this connection we all have
to nature, to each other, to the universe.
And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there,
low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss,
and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets,
woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so.
So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky,
its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name
though we knew they were really just clouds—
disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.

>7 msf59: Good one by Lang Leav, Mark. People with anxiety and depression issues will particularly appreciate this one.

>9 mirrordrum: Nice one, Ellie. Gosh, I haven't read Denise Levertov in too long.

>11 msf59: I like this one. As I said elsewhere, I quarrel with the last line. But quarreling with a poem is a rum game; it's a good 'un and a striking last line.

I'm a big fan of John Berryman's crazy Dreamsongs, in which he takes a scathing and ironic look at himself and us, via Henry and Mr. Bones. Here's an example.

4

Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken paprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying
'You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance'. I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni. - Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.

Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes
downcast . . . The slob beside her feasts . . . What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
- Mr. Bones: there is.

shooooeeee. amazing stuff here. i caved and bought Bright dead things. small print, and small it is, be damned.

>14 jnwelch: why is it a rum thing to react to a line of a poem, Joe? i had the same reaction. the poem ended for me with the next to last line. i don't quarrel with the poem. it's a wonderful poem. it just ends there for me. don't poets want a relationship with their readers in which readers participate? that's one of the things i like so much about SLAM poetry. i reckon i'm being invited to participate in some way.

there's an enjoyable page on Berryman's Dream Songs except for the last piece done by a woman who just had to go wafting along into Freudian crap trap. i have no patience!

I, Too

"I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America."

-Langston Hughes

^From Poem-A-Day

>15 jnwelch: I like this, Joe! I had not heard of Berryman.

>17 msf59: That is beautiful, and so powerful especially with the racial climate of America today. I've never read anything by Langston Hughes before (I've heard of him but not more than that).

The Simple Truth

"I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat" she said,
"Even if you don't I'll say you did."
Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it. "

-Philip Levine

^This is the title poem from his collection, The Simple Truth. If you have not read this award-winning poet give him a try.

>20 msf59: Great one, Mark. He's powerful, isn't he. What have we all left unsaid in our lives? Are there no words for it?

>18 msf59: Oh good, Mark. He's not everyone's flavor. He's a wild man, and I love his originality, and his scathing honesty. The Dream Songs are definitely worth a gander if you like that one.

>20 msf59: I certainly like that one Mark.

>21 jnwelch: It's years since I read Berryman Joe. Maybe I'll pull a volume off the shelf as part of my weekly poetry volume reading project. This week it is Emily Dickinson.

Thoughts While Walking

"A steel hush freezes the trees.
It is my mind stretched to stiff lace,
And draped on high wide thoughts.

My soul is a large sallow park
And people walk on it, as they do on the park before me.
They numb my levelness with dumb feet,
Yet I cannot even hate them."

-Maxwell Bodenheim

^From Poem-A-Day

>22 Caroline_McElwee: Glad you like the Levine, Caroline. Try one of his collections if you can.

If you come across a Dickinson, worth sharing, please do so.

I've dropped 'The Simple Truth' into my basket Mark.

Will do re the Dickinson. Maybe I'll track down an old favourite for you.

California Poem

"There’s trouble on the mountain
And the valley’s full of smoke
There’s crying on the mountain
And again the same heart broke.

The lights are on past midnite
The curtains closed all day
There’s trouble on the mountain
The valley people say."

-Johnny Cash (1966)

^I started a collection called Forever Words, that Cash's son recently compiled. Not far in, but I like what I am reading. We knew he was a gifted songwriter, but he was also a poet at heart.

>25 Caroline_McElwee: I think much of what Levine writes is more poetic verse, but most of it is truly dazzling.

Thanks for sharing the poems, Mark.

>26 msf59: Some singers are poets, Mark, like Cohen, Dylan, Cash and many others
I always try to listen to the words in a song.

Forever

“You tell me that I must perish
Like the flowers that I cherish,
Nothing remaining of my name
Nothing remaining of my fame
But the trees that I planted
Still are young
The songs I sang
Will still be sung"

-Johnny Cash. Written the summer of 2003, shortly before his death.

>29 FAMeulstee: You sure have that right, Anita!

Dear Johnny. Loved his work since I was a kid.

Just finished 100 Prized Poems : Twenty-Five Years of the Forward Books which included this one :

>33 PaulCranswick: Thanks, for including that, Paul!

>33 PaulCranswick: touching poem Paul.

>33 PaulCranswick: Ah, I never did outgrow my mother. And she'd argue that no one in the family has ever stopped being a child (herself included, or rather, in particular).

But a lovely poem nonetheless.

I taste a liquor never brewed –
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling – thro’ endless summer days –
From inns of molten Blue –

When “Landlords” turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove’s door –
When Butterflies – renounce their “drams” –
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –
And Saints – to windows run –
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the – Sun!

Emily Dickinson

>37 Caroline_McElwee: That one made me thirsty, Caroline! I like the Dickinson.

Children of Aleppo

"The children were asking
a thousand questions about why
the sky was blue and grass was green
when suddenly their tongues
were stilled by an answer they
never saw. Now silence rings
in their place so loud a stone
can hear it in Arkansas.
So why not the men inside
the sky who only hear the roar
beneath their wings that rip
the clouds? Who believe the distance
is theirs for the way it turns
the heavens into a high of feeling
nothing at all? In which
they have everywhere to turn
as excellent pilots—really
superb—with nowhere to go."

-Chard deNiord

From Poem-A-Day

"I Too..."

From THE INTELLECTUAL DEVOTIONAL:

Langston Hughes

"The best-known poet of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s
and one of the most influential African-American writers of the twentieth century,
Langston Hughes (1902-1967) wrote hundreds of trenchant, poignant poems
about the effects of bigotry and segregation on American blacks."

I thought this was a good one from Poem-a-Day:

Elegy for a Year

Joseph Fasano

Before I watched you die, I watched the dying
falter, their hearts curled and purring in them

like kitfoxes asleep
beside their shadows, their eyes pawed out by the trouble

of their hunger. I was
humbling, Lord, like the taxidermist’s

apprentice. I said
yes, and amen, like the monk brushing

the barley from the vealcalf’s
withers, the heft of it

as it leans against his cilice.
Winter, I have watched the lost

lie down among their bodies, clarified
as the birdsong

they have hymned of.
I have heard the earth sing longer than the song.

Come, I said, come
summer, come

after: you were the bull-elk in the moonlight
of my threshold, knocking off the mosses from its antlers

before it backed away, bewildered, into foliage.
You were thin-ribbed, were hawk-

scarred, were few.
Yes, amen, before I heard you giving up

your singing, you were something stumbling hunted
to my open door; you were thinning with the milkweed

of the river. Winter, Wintering, listen: I think of you
long gone now

through the valley, scissoring
your ancient way

through the pitch pines. Not waiting, but the great elk
in the dark door. Not ravens

where they stay, awhile, in furor,
but the lost thing backing out

among the saplings, dancing off the madness
of its antlers. Not stone, not cold

stone, but fire. The wild thing, musk-blooded, at my open
door, wakening and wakening and

wakening, migrations
in the blindness of its wild eyes,

saying Look at them, look at how they have to.
Do something with the wildness that confounds you.



Copyright © 2017 Joseph Fasano. Used with permission of the author.

About This Poem

“I began writing this poem with nothing in mind but a simple idea: I would speak, after some months of silence, directly to the particularly tumultuous year that had passed, as though it were some strange wild thing that had paid its visit. I soon found that the poem had grabbed me by the collar and that the year, with all of its deliveries and indifferences, was speaking brutally—and truthfully—to me.”
—Joseph Fasano

Loved the tone Joe. Had to look up 'cilice' (spiked garter worn by penitents).

This was one of the first poems I read by Emily Dickinson, in an autobiography by the actress Frances Farmer, who also uses it for her title:

Will there really be a morning?

Will there really be a morning?
Is there such a thing as day?
Could I see it from the mountains
If I were as tall as they?
Has it feet like water-lilies?
Has it feathers like a bird?
Is it brought from famous countries
Of which I have never heard?
Oh, some scholar! Oh, some sailor!
Oh, some wise man from the skies!
Please to tell a little pilgrim
Where the place called morning lies!

By Emily Dickinson

>43 Caroline_McElwee: I love that poem. So much that I've written it down in a notebook so I'll always have it near me.

>42 Caroline_McElwee: Thanks, Caroline. I had to look up cilice, too! :-)

P.S. I love his comment about it, too.

>43 Caroline_McElwee: Lovely.

One more Dickinson:

There is no frigate like a book (1263)

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul.

Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886

No need to explain why this belongs on LT.

Autopsy

"Last night, I dreamed that my passport bled.
I dreamed that my passport was a tombstone
For our United States, recently dead.
I dreamed that my passport was made of bone—

That it was a canoe carved out of stone.
"But I can't swim," I said. "I will drown
If I can't make the shore. I'll die alone
In the salt. No, my body will be found

With millions of bodies, all of them brown."
I dreamed that my passport was a book of prayers,
Unanswered by the gods, but written down
By fact checkers in suits. "There are some errors

In your papers," they said. Then took me downstairs
To a room with fingernails on the floor.
I dreamed that my passport was my keyware,
But soldiers had set fire to the doors,

To all doors—a conflagration of doors.
I dreamed that my passport was my priest:
"Sherman, will you battle the carnivores
Or will you turn and abandon the weak?

Will you be shelter? Or will you concede?"
Last night, I dreamed that my passport was alive
When it entered the ICU. It breathed, it breathed,
Then it sighed and closed its eyes. It did not survive."

Sherman Alexie 2017

^This was just posted on FB. Nice job, Mr. Alexie.

>47 msf59: That is a powerful poem by Alexie, thanks for sharing Mark!

Very powerful Mark. The strange anomalie when there is crisis, often creativity spikes.

This one from Poem-A-Day is somewhat long, but awfully good. Danez Smith is a young Midwestern poet on the rise.

February 1, 2017

C.R.E.A.M.

Danez Smith

after Morgan Parker, after Wu-Tang



in the morning I think about money

green horned lord of my waking

forest in which I stumbled toward no salvation

prison made of emerald & pennies

in my wallet I keep anxiety & a condom

I used to sell my body but now my blood spoiled

All my favorite songs tell me to get money

I’d rob a bank but I’m a poet

I’m so broke I’m a genius

If I was white, I’d take pictures of other pictures & sell them

I come from sharecroppers who come from slaves who do not come from kings

sometimes I pay the weed man before I pay the light bill

sometimes is a synonym for often

I just want a grant or a fellowship or a rich white husband & I’ll be straight

I feel most colored when I’m looking at my bank account

I feel most colored when I scream ball so hard motherfuckas wanna find me

I spent one summer stealing from ragstock

If I went to jail I’d live rent-free but there is no way to avoid making white people richer

A prison is a plantation made of stone & steel

Being locked up for selling drugs = Being locked up for trying to eat

a bald fade cost 20 bones now a days

what’s a blacker tax than blackness?

what cost more than being American and poor?

here is where I say reparations.

here is where I say got 20 bucks I can borrow?

student loans are like slavery but not but with vacation days but not but police

I don’t know what it says about me when white institutions give me money

how much is the power ball this week?

I’mma print my own money and be my own god and live forever in a green frame

my grandmamma is great at saving money

before my grandfather passed he showed me where he hid his money & his gun

my aunt can’t hold on to a dollar, a job, her brain

I love how easy it is to be bad with money

don’t ask me about my taxes

the b in debt is a silent black boy trapped





Copyright © 2017 Danez Smith. Used with permission of the author.



About This Poem

“Looking to Morgan Parker’s work always helps me figure out my way through the work and the world. Her poem ‘All They Want Is My Money My Pussy My Blood’ is one of the best poems I’ve ever read, and thinking about her lines and play and boldness in that poem helped guide me through thinking about money, something that usually makes me itchy, nauseous, and cranky.”
—Danez Smith

>50 jnwelch: Thanks for sharing that one, Joe. I liked it too. Did you see the Alexie up there?

Lucifer At The Starlite

"Here's my bright idea for life on earth:
better management. The CEO
has lost touch with the details. I'm worth
as much, but I care; I come down here, I show
my face, I'm a real regular. A toast:
To our boys and girls in the war, grinding
through sand, to everybody here, our host
who's mostly mist, like methane rising
from retreating ice shelves. Put me in command.
For every town, we'll have a marching band.
For each thoroughbred, a comfortable stable;
for each worker, a place beneath the table.
For every forward step a stumbling.
A shadow over every starlit thing."

-Kim Addonizio

^This is the title poem to, Lucifer At The Starlite a terrific collection, I just finished. Of course I have to tip my hat to Joe, for putting this wonderful poet on my radar.

Where Childhood Went

" The teeth sold to the fairies
are tombstones in the graveyard of the fireflies.

By their cold caught light
you can make out the big house submerged

in the backyard creek,
thought-minnows spinning in motes in the attic.

The lovely young parents, so long preserved,
are showing signs of rot,

the kitten named Princess, signs
of invisibilty. But look, the old dolls

are doing well; they smile and smile.
And the witch? Darling, the witch was real."

-Kim Addonizio

PROTEST

"To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men. The human race
Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised
Against injustice, ignorance, and lust,
The inquisition yet would serve the law,
And guillotines decide our least disputes.
The few who dare, must speak and speak again
To right the wrongs of many. Speech, thank God,
No vested power in this great day and land
Can gag or throttle. Press and voice may cry
Loud disapproval of existing ills;
May criticise oppression and condemn
The lawlessness of wealth-protecting laws
That let the children and childbearers toil
To purchase ease for idle millionaires.

Therefore I do protest against the boast
Of independence in this mighty land.
Call no chain strong, which holds one rusted link.
Call no land free, that holds one fettered slave.
Until the manacled slim wrists of babes
Are loosed to toss in childish sport and glee,
Until the mother bears no burden, save
The precious one beneath her heart, until
God’s soil is rescued from the clutch of greed
And given back to labor, let no man
Call this the land of freedom."

-Ella Wheeler Wilcox 1914

^Wow, this one is perfectly appropriate...

I was taking a quick look at the poetry shelves at my library and I stumbled upon a volume called Just Saying. Now, how could I resist a title like that? I had never heard of Rae Armantrout, but she seems to be an acclaimed poet. Not sure, I will complete the collection. Much of it is sailing over my silver head but here is the title poem:

Just Saying

"What might be said

to disport itself

along the cinderblock

in leaves.

*

What I write

I write instead

of ivy.

*

Green snouts

in evidence or—

more

to the point—

insolent

and tense.

*

What might be said

to writhe

professionally

as the days

nod and wink."

-Rae Armantrout

^I like the flow of it, but not sure what it really means. Any help here?

>54 msf59: Very appropriate Mark.
>55 msf59: Hmm, its more of a sense poem to me than a making sense I guess. Would have to live with it for a while. As you say it is the flow that takes you, floating on a cool breeze perhaps. A musing.

Cellophane: An Assay

There are kinds of transparence.
Yours was invented
sometime between
tempered glass and Saran Wrap.

I have at times wanted to be you:
something looked through and past.

You were born noble: a tree.
Caustics and acids changed you
to what you now are,
protective, stiff, almost weightless.

Both captive and guard,
your desire is to be frivolous, self-destructive,
undone and opened.
Your bright red necklace announces:
“Tear here.”

Inside you, tobacco.
Inside you, peppermints, gingersnaps, gum.
You would not be found
wrapping a mattress or a gun.

You were dictated into the world
by the muse of “it could be.”
You were unlikely but useful,
so kept.

Your art is audible, immodest:
to preserve against time.

In this, you are like a small metal flute
whose throat knows no aging
or a few words
from the second century,
stumbled on once in translation_

“I come from the river, husband,
Its brushy bank left these scratches.”

Made to be seen through, for pleasure.
By Jane Hirshfield, from the volume ‘The Beauty’

This really stopped me in my tracks last night. Wonderful, wonderful. The subject so domestic, the poem saying so much about something so few would think to write about.

>20 msf59: Mark, this was my last week's volume of poetry and I really liked it, so thanks for bringing Philip Levine into my life.

>57 Caroline_McElwee: Wow! Cellophane: An Assay is terrific! It packs quite a punch. Thanks for sharing, Caroline. Is the rest of the collection as strong?

>58 Caroline_McElwee: Glad you liked the Levine. I hope to read more of his.

If You Are Holding This Book



^I have been reading Dog Songs, by Mary Oliver. I love dogs but this one isn't singing to me, the way I hoped, although there are still a few gems sprinkled throughout.

>59 msf59: the standard of this volume is good Mark, but of course we tend to post the best. I'm half through, so who knows what's ahead.

>57 Caroline_McElwee: "Like"

Ice Would Suffice


"How swift, how far
the sea
carries a body from shore.

Empires fail, species are lost,
spotted frogs
and tufted puffins forsaken.

After eons of fauna and flora, hominids have stood
for mere years
baffled brains atop battered shoulders.

In a murky blanket of heavens
an icy planet
made of diamond spins.

Our sun winks like the star
it was
billions of years ago, without ambition.

We bury bodies in shallow dirt, heedless of lacking space
or how long
our makeshift planet will host us."

-Risa Denenberg

^From Poem-A-Day

I like it Mark. Something we regularly need reminding of.

An old favourite (LT loses the layout):

Don’t Let That Horse

Don’t let that horse
eat that violin

cried Chagall’s mother

But he
kept right on
painting

And became famous

And kept on painting
The Horse With Violin In Mouth

And when he finally finished it
he jumped up upon the horse
and rode away
waving the violin

And then with a low bow gave it
to the first naked nude he ran across

And there were no strings
attached

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Don’t Let That Horse...” from A Coney Island of the Mind. Copyright © 1958 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, www.wwnorton.com/nd/welcome.htm.
Source: These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1993)
back to top

>65 Caroline_McElwee: I like that, Caroline. Nice, playful rhythm to it.

I haven't read any poetry the past 2 weeks, but I am hoping to get back on that "horse". I have Above the River: the Complete Poems, home from the library. Joe recommended this one.

Have you read Wright? Joe speaks highly.

Yes Mark, I have had that very volume for years, but not dipped in recently.

I slipped too on poetry reading the past ten days, I had started a volume by Louis de Berniéres, so need to get that going again.

I am always up for suggestions. I trust my LT friends, more than anyone else.

I wish people were posting over here, more often. It feels like the outcast thread.

A lot of folk had poetry spoilt for them at school Mark. I don't know why I loved it from a young age, we were read it by my parents and their friends, and my dad still has the anthology we mostly used, it still gets pulled down from time to time.

I think also because a lot of poetry takes some effort to unravel, it puts people off. They can be afraid of not understanding, too. I enjoy getting a deeper meaning from rereading.

All very good points, Caroline. I avoided it for years but finally saw the light. Hallelujah!

>69 Caroline_McElwee: I like those points, too, Caroline.

I try to convince folks poetry is no big deal - just like other kinds of reading, there are some you'll like, some you won't, some that will resonate for you, some you won't "get". But there's definitely an initial hurdle to get over in how many people view poetry these days.

I had fun in high school with a friend who likes to write - he's musical, and wrote lyrics while I wrote poetry. So that got me started. I thought my parents had no interest, but while I was in college, my dad surprised me with a poem he had written.

I loved Coney Island of the Mind back then. Nice to be reminded of it. I should dig it out.

Go James Wright! I'm not as fond of his early ones, but when he finds that serene, honest, unpretentious voice, it takes off for me. The Branch Will Not Break is a particularly good collection.

I tried to translate the poem "Denkend aan Holland" by Hendrik Marsman. The poem was written in 1936 when Marsman was on holiday at the Mediterranean Sea. In 2000 it was chosen as "The poem of the century".

Remembering Holland by Hendrik Marsman

Thinking of Holland
I see broad rivers
slowly moving through
endless lowland,
lines of unthinkable
thin poplars like
large cane plumes
at the horizon stand;

and sunk into these
unbounded spaces
are farmhouses
spread through the land,
tree clumps, towns,
truncated towers,
churches and elm trees
together in bond.

The sky hangs low
and grey, many colored
smothering damps make
the sun disappear
and in every region
the voice of the water
sometimes causing disaster
is heard with some fear.

That's beautiful, thanks for the translation.

>68 msf59: oh no! I really only just found this thread (why did I wait so long?), but I'll be chiming in from time to time. I've just put my poetry collection on a more accessible shelf, so I might actually read some of it. News to follow.

>74 ffortsa: I am so glad you found this thread, Judy. We NEED more participation. I NEED more recs and ideas. Please share.

Reading Myself

"Like thousands, I took just pride
and more than just,
struck matches that brought my
blood to a boil;
I memorized the tricks to set the
river on fire—
somehow never wrote something
to go back to.
Can I suppose I am finished with
wax flowers
and have earned my grass on the
minor slopes of Parnassus....
No honeycomb is built
without a bee
adding circle to circle, cell to cell,
the wax and honey of a
mausoleum—
this round dome proves its maker
is alive;
the corpse of the insect lives
embalmed in honey,
prays that its perishable work
live long
enough for the sweet-tooth bear
to desecrate—
this open book...my open coffin."

-Robert Lowell

^I have not read Lowell but I am very impressed with my introduction.

My favorite Robert Lowell poem:

Skunk Hour

By Robert Lowell

(For Elizabeth Bishop)

Nautilus Island’s hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
she’s in her dotage.

Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria’s century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The season’s ill—
we’ve lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he’d rather marry.

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars . Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind’s not right.

A car radio bleats,
“Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air—
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

>77 jnwelch: I like it, Joe! Thanks for sharing. I had not been familiar with Lowell. Glad I am now.

Ghazal: The Dark Times


Tell us that line again, the thing about the dark times…
“When the dark times come, we will sing about the dark times.”

They’ll always be wrong about peace when they’re wrong about
justice…
Were you wrong, were you right, insisting about the dark times?

The traditional fears, the habitual tropes of exclusion
Like ominous menhirs, close into their ring about the dark times.

Naysayers in sequins or tweeds, libertine or ascetic
Find a sensual frisson in what they’d call bling about the dark times.

Some of the young can project themselves into a Marshall Plan future
Where they laugh and link arms, reminiscing about the dark times.

From every spot-lit glitz tower with armed guards around it
Some huckster pronounces his fiats, self-sacralized king, about the
dark times.

In a tent, in a queue, near barbed wire, in a shipping container,
Please remember ya akhy, we too know something about the dark
times.

Sindbad’s roc, or Ganymede’s eagle, some bird of rapacious ill omen
From bleak skies descends, and wraps an enveloping wing about the
dark times.

You come home from your meeting, your clinic, make coffee and look
in the mirror
And ask yourself once more what you did to bring about the dark
times.

-Marilyn Hacker

From Poem-A-Day

>77 jnwelch: like it. I've read some Lowell and some Bshop, and have some of their correspondence. Colm Tôibin wrote a lovely little appreciation of Bishop, Joe.

>79 msf59: I've not read Marilyn Hacker Mark, thanks for the introduction. A prescient poem.

>80 Caroline_McElwee: Elizabeth Bishop had some very good ones, didn't she, Caroline. She used to fill in for Lowell teaching at Harvard. A former student of hers, Megan Marshall, just wrote a biography of her called Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast. Apparently Bishop was a private person, and taught only reluctantly.

I just enjoyed the very different (from Bishop and Lowell) There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce by Morgan Parker. Many of the poems do actually reference Beyonce, and one of my favorites was "White Beyonce". But I thought the title poem probably conveyed the flavor of the collection best.

Please Wait (Or, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé)

Morgan Parker

Please wait to record Love Jones at 8:48 Saturday on BET
Until your life is no longer defined by Beyoncé
Ants crawling over fallen leaves and little pieces of dog shit
Empty chicken boxes glowing with the remembrance of grease
There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé: self-awareness,
Leftover mascara in clumps, recognizing a pattern
This is for all the grown women out there
Whose countries hate them and their brothers
Who carry knives in their purses down the street
Maybe they will not get out alive
Maybe they will turn into air or news or brown flower petals
There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé:
Lavender, education, becoming other people,
The fucking sky
It’s so overused because no one’s sure of it
How it floats with flagrant privilege
And feels it can ask any question
Everyday its ego gets bigger and you let that happen
But one day your shit will be unbelievably together
One day you’ll care a whole lot you’ll always take vitamins
And exercise without bragging and words will fit perfectly
Into your mouth like an olive soaked in gin
The glory of an olive soaked in gin & its smooth smallness
A gloss will snowfall onto your cheeks, the top of your lip
The sidewalks will be the same, evidenced
Combing your records you’ll see the past and think OK
Once I was a different kind of person

Like the poem Joe.

Might have to look out that Bishop biog.

Scriptorium by Melissa Range, a new release (ER book for me) has a number of really good ones, but I particularly wanted to share this one, about attitudes toward the South in the U.S.

Regionalism

People mock the South wherever I pass through.
It's so racist, so backward, so NASCAR.
I don't hate it, but they all do.

As if they themselves marched out in blue,
they're still us-themming it about the Civil War,
mocking the South, wherever it is (they've never passed through).

It's a formless humid place with bad food (except for BBQ) -
the grits, slick boiled peanuts, sweet tea thick as tar.
I don't hate it, but they all do,

though they love Otis Redding, Johnny Cash, the B-52s.
The rest of it can go ahead and char.
People mock my Southern mouth wherever I pass through,

my every "might could have" and "fixin' to,"
my flattened vowels that make "fire" into "far."
I don't hate how I talk, where I'm from, but they all do

their best to make me. It's their last yahoo
in a yahooing world of smear, slur and mar.
People mock the South, its past. They're never through.
I'm damned if I don't hate it, and damned if I do.

That looks like an interesting volume Joe.

>84 Caroline_McElwee: 'Tis, Caroline. She looks like a rising star to me. The facility with forms impresses me as much as the content.

I've been on a Kim Addonizio kick, and couldn't resist posting this one. I hope it works out for her.

Party

by Kim Addonizio

I know we’ve just met and everything
but I’d really like to fall apart on you now.
I’d like to think you’re the kind of person
who’d refill my glass all night, then pour me
shitfaced into your car and take me home with you
so I could regurgitate salmon and triple cream brie
and chocolate strawberries into your toilet,
and then you’d cook me a little something –
I’d like to think you’re the kind of person who cooks –
while I rambled incoherently about my loneliness.
I know we’ve just met but I feel like maybe
you’d feed me and tuck me into your big bed
and only touch me as you covered me with the comforter.
I feel like you own a comforter. I also somehow sense
that your family was extremely dysfunctional
in a way that differs from mine only in surface details,
like which person was the black hole
and which the distant, faint mark in space
that might have been a star. I feel all that.
I feel kind of, I don’t know, like my inner space heater
and TV and washing machine are all going at once.
Do you own a coffee grinder?
I have an ice-cube tray. The last ice disappeared
a few months ago, into the freezer mist.
I miss that ice but once the mist gets hold of it,
it’s gone for good. Unrelenting mist. Many-headed
mist. Who knew mist had undone so many.
I feel like my underwear would fit in your silverware caddy.
It’s just a feeling, though. I could be wrong about that.
Could you get me another drink now?
I think we have chemistry. I really need a lab partner.
Could I just, you know, let my molecules separate
while you keep an eye on the burner? The flame’s kind of fickle.
Here’s hoping it doesn’t go out.

I like that Joe. Another new-to-me writer to add to the list. That's why this thread is so great.

>87 Caroline_McElwee: Glad to hear it, Caroline. She's become one of my favorites. I'm on my fourth collection of hers.

>86 jnwelch: I LOVE "Party", Joe. She is such a talent. I plan on getting to Tell Me, this month.

I have been reading Incendiary Art, by Patricia Smith. I usually have to reread each stanza but she is such a potent poet. Here is the title poem:

Incendiary Art

"The city’s streets are densely shelved with rows
of salt and packaged hair. Intent on air,
the funk of crave and function comes to blows

with any smell that isn’t oil—the blare
of storefront chicken settles on the skin
and mango spritzing drips from razored hair.

The corner chefs cube pork, decide again
on cayenne, fry in grease that’s glopped with dust.
The sizzle of the feast adds to the din

of children, strutting slant, their wanderlust
and cussing, plus the loud and tactless hiss
of dogged hustlers bellowing past gusts

of peppered breeze, that fatty, fragrant bliss
in skillets. All our rampant hunger tricks
us into thinking we can dare dismiss

the thing men do to boulevards, the wicks
their bodies be. A city, strapped for art,
delights in torching them—at first for kicks,

to waltz to whirling sparks, but soon those hearts
thud thinner, whittled by the chomp of heat.
Outlined in chalk, men blacken, curl apart.

Their blindly rising fume is bittersweet,
although reversals in the air could fool
us into thinking they weren’t meant as meat.

Our sons don’t burn their cities as a rule,
born, as they are, up to their necks in fuel."

Patricia Smith, 1955

^The imagery and smells are nearly tangible.

The Moon After Election Day

"I’m looking at the moon tonight,
the closest it’s been to Earth since 1948
and feel relieved we can do little to ruin it.
That can’t be true, you say, and for a
moment
even the moon’s loneliness escapes
isolation
and depends on something else. It’s
attached.
Like us and what we abandon. Us
and the evil we refuse. The same evil
we share history with, the thin membrane
between you or me and the worst of life.
It’s already past midnight and another
election
is over in the United States of America.
The oceans will not continue into infinity.
Nor will our money. Nor will this suffering.
We have voted and proven again
we do not know one another. I am trying
so hard to understand this country, I tell
you
even as I’m about to fail loving you (I
know this)
in the way people need to be loved
which is without deception, which is almost
impossible. Don’t you love it though, you
say,
and I remember the first time I saw you in a
room
without anyone else. Don’t you love the
moon?
And because it’s easy to say it, I do, I make
sure
to tell you I do. Despite the news I knew
years ago:
no one saves anyone. We’re on the moon."

-Alex Dimitrov

Trust the Hours (Wait)

"Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?"

-excerpt from Galway Kinnell Has anyone read him?

October Fullness

"...I breathed the air of so many places
without keeping a sample of any.
In the end, everyone is aware of this:
nobody keeps any of what he has,
and life is only a borrowing of bones.
The best thing was learning not to have too much
either of sorrow or of joy..."

-excerpt from Pablo Neruda

Love the Neruda of specially. ...the borrowing of bones.

I just saw the new film 'Neruda', a crazy dream.