In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in.
For this week’s Medium Cool, let’s talk about poetry.
The recent death of Polish poet Adam Zagajewski (who I met once, and whose poetry I adore) reminded me that we haven’t had poetry as our subject here.
I’ll keep it simple. Whose poetry stays with you? Has there been a poet’s work that has moved you, obsessed you, changed the way you think about something?
I’d love to discover some new poets in this week’s edition.
Mo MacArbie
No one hip, but Thomas Hardy is the one author I picked up from school and later read recreationally.
BGinCHI
@Mo MacArbie: Underrated as a poet.
billcinsd
Rainier Marie Rilke
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rainer-maria-rilke
debbie
Wallace Stevens forever! Also Mary Oliver.
zhena gogolia
Pushkin
Lermontov
Osip Mandelstam
Sergey Gandlevsky
Marina Tsvetaeva
Delvig
Baratynsky
Do I need to go on? Do you have a few hours?
Keats
laura
Marge Piercy’s To Be Of Use is a poem I’d recite whenever I was invited to the retirement sendoff for the blue collar workers I represented- and always had a copy for the worker who’s rest was so well earned. I appreciate Philip Irvine’s poems for that same reason – work, those looking for work, the work and the end of work.
Poems for pleasure or solace are wide and varied and picking one would be picking a favorite child Nicky Giovanni/billy Collins/w.s. Merwin/Richard Brautigan/Mary Oliver……
zhena gogolia
Here’s a Gandlevsky (loses a lot in translation)
Anthological
Seneca teaches me
that fear is unworthy of a man
for saving face
take the side of death
the poplar colonel of the courtyard
the feverish yakking of first friendship
all night through
the smell of the lindens
that finds room for a whole life
that is what I am leaving
and Seneca teaches me
2008
KSinMA
Seamus Heaney, Emily Dickinson, Galway Kinnell, Geraldine Brooks— just a few at random.
Tehanu
John Milton. I hated him when I was in school. Then I discovered that you need to be at least 50 before you can get him.
John Ciardi, whom I loved in school and still love.
“Night after night forever the dolls lay stiff
by the children’s dreams. On the goose-feathers of the rich,
on the straw of the poor, on the gypsy ground—
wherever the children slept, dolls have been found
in the subsoil of the small loves stirred again
by the Finders After Everything. Down lay
the children by their hanks and twists. Night after night
grew over imagination. The fuzzies shed, the bright
buttons fell out of the heads, arms ripped, and down
through goose-feathers, straw; and the gypsy ground
the dolls sank, and some—the fuzziest and most loved
changed back to string and dust, and the dust moved
dream-puffs round the Finders’ boots as they dug,
sieved, brushed, and came on a little clay dog,
and a little stone man, and a little bone girl, that had kept
their eyes wide open forever, while all the children slept.”
Eamon Grennan, “Chorus.” Claudia Burbank, “First Birth” and “Googling Myself I Learn I Am a Victim of Hurricane Katrina.” Henry Reed, “Naming of Parts.” Robert Nye, “On the Sea-Wall.” Harold Monro, “Overheard on a Saltmarsh.”
dnfree
My favorite poet since I was in college in the 1960s, and he continued to move me throughout life. He died a couple of years ago. This is from the Poetry Foundation website.
William Stanley (W.S.) Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and raised in New Jersey and Scranton, Pennsylvania, the son of a Presbyterian minister. His numerous collections of poetry, his translations, and his books of prose have won praise over seven decades. Though his early poetry received great attention and admiration, Merwin would continue to alter and innovate his craft with each new book, and at each stage he served as a powerful influence for poets of his generation and younger poets. For the entirety of his writing career, he explored a sense of wonder and celebrated the power of language, while serving as a staunch anti-war activist and advocate for the environment. He won nearly every award available to an American poet, and he was named U.S. poet laureate twice. A practicing Buddhist as well as a proponent of deep ecology, Merwin lived since the late 1970s on an old pineapple plantation in Hawaii which he has painstakingly restored to its original rainforest state. Poet Edward Hirsch wrote that Merwin “is one of the greatest poets of our age. He is a rare spiritual presence in American life and letters (the Thoreau of our era).”
Another Scott
I love Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (I suspect Albatrossity likes it too.)
I was introduced to Edna late, but Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies has always stuck with me as well.
Good poetry is very powerful. Bad poetry can be lots of fun.
And Pete could write some very evocative lyrics. Sea and Sand:
Looking forward to the responses!
Cheers,
Scott.
BGinCHI
@debbie:
I was obsessed with Stevens for several years and carried his Collected Poetry with me everywhere.
Mike J
Speaking of poetry, I will not be going on vacation to Nantucket this year.
zhena gogolia
I was once shocked to find that my students didn’t know Keats at all. Part of their priceless heritage.
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is–
I hold it towards you.
BGinCHI
@Mike J: I have a good friend who can compose a limerick on command and I have been secretly jealous of this for 30 years.
BGinCHI
@dnfree:
Merwin is a great poet.
Those early books have really stayed with me.
zhena gogolia
Mandelstam:
As womanly silver shines,
That has struggled with oxide and adulteration,
So does quiet work turn silver
The iron plow and the voice of the poet.
1937
PJ
@zhena gogolia:
Poetry wasn’t taught in the public school I went to, I’m not sure if that’s true elsewhere.
brendancalling
Charles Simic, “Crazy About Her Shrimp.” https://www.poeticous.com/charles-simic/crazy-about-her-shrimp
BGinCHI
@zhena gogolia:
“I am half in love with easeful death” pops morbidly into my head at least once a week.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
I think my favorite poem is Housman’s “Loveliest of trees”. Frost’s “Fire and Ice”, Auden’s “Stop all the clocks”. I tend to like shorter poems, which I can memorize, like the first two I mentioned. But I also like story poems.
Phylllis
I’m an Emily Dickinson & William Carlos Williams fan. There have been a couple of non-fiction books I’ve read in the past couple of years that had the feel of poetry to them–The Yellow House and The Fact of a Body.
zhena gogolia
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
That Auden poem plays a memorable role in Four Weddings and a Funeral!
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@zhena gogolia: that’s where I first heard it and became obsessed with finding out the poet!
PJ
Yeats is still my favorite, but this passage from Heaney’s Station Island gives me an impetus when I discouraged:
Then I knew him in the flesh
out there on the tarmac among the cars,
wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.
His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers
came back to me, though he did not speak yet,
a voice like a prosecutor’s or a singer’s,
cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite
as a steel nib’s downstroke, quick and clean,
and suddenly he hit a litter basket
with his stick, saying, “Your obligation
is not discharged by any common rite.
What you do you must do on your own.
The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night
dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,
so ready for the sack-cloth and ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’
ETA: Those are three-line stanzas, but WordPress does something weird with them.
Benw
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI
I am Waiting could’ve been a critique of the TFG years, with everything bad being bigger and stupider.
zhena gogolia
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
He’s great. John Hannah does such a good job with that scene.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
I always thought T.S.Eliot was too intellectual for me, but I find as I get older I like his stuff a lot.
zhena gogolia
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
The Waste Land is amazing. I have an edition by Lawrence Rainey that has really good annotations.
PJ
I had known Jacques Prevert from his screenplays to many great French films of the ’30s, but recently I started getting into his poems. This is from a collection called Preversities, translated by Norman Shapiro:
Fiesta
And the glasses were empty
and the bottle was smashed
And the bed was wide open
and the door was shut tight
And all the stars of shattered glass
of happiness and beauty kept
twinkling with their resplendent light
over the dust of the room unswept
I was dead drunk
a bonfire flashing in the air
and you were living drunk
in my arms lying bare.
Mr. Prosser
Everyone in my generation (born in the Forties) probably had to read The Red Badge of Courage in Junior High, but Stephen Crane’s poetry is marvelous:
Should the wide world roll away
Leaving black terror
Limitless night,
Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand
Would be to me essential
If thou and thy white arms were there
And the fall to doom a long way.
zhena gogolia
@PJ:
RIP, Norman!
Norman would have been a good jackal.
Princess Leia
Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, David Whyte, Denise Levertov, Wislawa Szymborska, Naomi Shihab Nye are some of my favorites.
Also love the Mystical poets like Rumi and Hafiz!
KSinMA
Robert Hayden:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46461/those-winter-sundays
oatler.
Always Marry An April Girl
Praise the spells and bless the charms,
I found April in my arms.
April golden, April cloudy,
Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;
cope
I went through phases in terms of my interest in poetry. The first poets I remember finding interesting were Robert Service and Rudyard Kipling (I know, I know) in grade school.
Later, in high school, I read Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” in my lit book. This sent me after other WW I poets including Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon. In college while studying “Contemporary American and British Poets” as a freshman, I got into E. E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams. Strangely, these were not the poets we studied in the class but I discovered them and other modern poets just browsing poetry anthologies.
It was during this period that I suffered a short infatuation with Richard Brautigan, fortunately cured early on. I spared myself indulging in any Rod McKuen or Kalil Gibran, thank goodness. Ginsberg never did much for me either. Of course I had a copy of the recently deceased Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Coney Island of the Mind”, a required prop for any ’60s college male taking English classes beyond the introductory.
Later in life, I came to appreciate T. S. Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Dorothy Parker, Dylan Thomas, W.B. Yeats and some others whom I cannot remember. I have to throw in Robert Burns for dramatic and entertainment value.
Now in my dotage, I am exposed to poetry mainly at the 3 Quarks Daily website and The New Yorker. I find occasional poems to which I take a shine but never sufficiently to track down anthologies by the authors. Pity.
Nelle
@laura: We read “To Be of Use” at our small wedding.
raven
I’ve mentioned the Dickinson tv series that is on Apple TV at least three times and have not had so much as a comment. Well, I’m not a poetry person beyond the Beats but the series made me like her.
raven
@cope: I saw
Ferlinghetti recite from Tyrannus Nix at the U of I in 70 or so.
schrodingers_cat
Amir Aziz : Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega EVERYTHING WILL BE REMEMBERED (Nothing will be forgotten)
https://youtu.be/PHk_5gEXDY0
ETA Roger Waters has done a reading of the English translation but it was not as powerful
Citizen Scientist
I’ve been reading Mary Oliver as of late. She has a way with nature-treated poems.
Haydnseek
Charles Bukowski. Just start anywhere. But since so many of us here are cat lovers, as he was, might as well start with the poem “One Tough Motherfucker.” Can’t link but it’s easy to find with a quick search.
rivers
Philip Larkin. These lines from “Faith Healing” haunt me:
” In everyone there sleeps /A sense of life lived according to love./To some it means the difference they could make/ By loving others, but across most it sweeps/ As All they might have done had they been loved. /That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,/ As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps . . .”
schrodingers_cat
@raven: I don’t know much about her but I am interested.
Nelle
I love Dickinson’s ” A certain slant of light” in particular.
Jane Kenyon on death, “Twilight After Haying” and “Let Evening Come” have been great comforts when dealing with the deaths of those I love. Her “Peonies at Dusk” because peonies are the great fragrance of life.
banditqueen
Many greats already mentioned, so here’s another:
<blockquote>What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode? <em>Langston Hughes</em> </blockquote>
AE Housman’s poems set to music
banditqueen
Many greats already mentioned, so here’s another:
AE Housman’s poems set to music
debbie
@cope:
Have you tried https://poets.org/poem-a-day ?
Jack Canuck
I see someone mentioned Rilke already, but I’ll second the vote there. The translation makes a big difference too though, for non-English poetry. This is the Stephen Mitchell translation of the poem ‘Evening’; it’s probably not the widely preferred translation, but I find it to be so much more evocative than any other version I’ve found:
The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;
and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes
a star each night, and rises;
and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.
On another note, ee cummings is another poet that I’ve always loved. A previous partner loved his work and re-introduced me to it after initial exposure in high school.
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
There could be an interesting discussion about the difference between poetry and lyrics, too. Lots of similarities, obviously, but it seems to me that there’s a fundamental difference because of the pairing of the words with music for lyrics.
banditqueen
@banditqueen: sorry about the duplicate mixup–difference between visual and text when it comes to posting
TinRoofRusted
Billy Collins. I first saw his poem To My Favorite Seventeen Year Old Girl and laughed because my daughter was 17. I started reading everything by him after that. My 17 year old went to a Poetry slam later that year and met him. I was jealous.
debbie
@rivers:
I love Larkin.
Princess Leia
Burning the Old Year
By Naomi Shihab Nye
Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.
So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.
Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.
Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.
debbie
@TinRoofRusted:
He was on NPR a lot when he was poet laureate. I love his work, but I realized I liked it more when I heard it, as opposed to me reading it to myself.
Uncle Cosmo
@dnfree: Dagnabittohell, you beat me to my Poifick Master & Hero Of The Zeitgeist!!
I heard Merwin read 3 times, met him twice, had the chance to chat a bit with him the first time. I told him, Your poetry got me through some really rough times in 1973. He looked somewhere between stunned and pleased, and said, Thank you for telling me that.
I told him I was a mathematician who was trying to write poetry and he said, Some of the most talented writers I’ve taught were scientists and mathematicians. I went on, I’ve been trying to write like you for years and can’t manage it and he shot back, Oh, don’t imitate! but then looked thoughtful: If you must imitate, imitate diction – the images should be your own.
I said, Of course, and he smiled and said, Of course.
Here is the poem that introduced me to his work & started the process of getting me through those rough times. Specifically, the last line:
Bleak acceptance. That was when I felt the benthos beneath my feet, after 18 months of one shipwreck after another, and pushed up the long way toward light and air.
Every April 17 I post this one in honor of my father’s passing. And I will spend a good half hour to anyone who’ll sit still for it, deconstructing these deceptively simple six lines:
And as for imitating his style, this was the best I could manage. It was dedicated to him, written not long after that first meeting in 1981 when he appeared all in black and a black cape, and published in the sadly defunct Baltimore City Paper:
(NB I fucking HATEHATEHATE having to wrestle with this idiotic Text window!!! SEVEN EDITS and the goddamn text will not stay stable!!!!)
MomSense
Maria Howe.
West of the Rockies
I love Evolution by Langdon Smith, an evolutionary biologist with literary inclinations. It straddles the funny territory between agnosticism and spirituality in a way I find moving and satisfying.
MomSense
@MomSense:
Stupid autocorrect – Marie Howe.
wataguy
@Princess Leia:
I wish Nye were better known. These lines will be with me as long as I live:
West of the Rockies
@Uncle Cosmo:
I loved your whole comment. I miss my own father. 13 years ago on Good Friday.
dexwood
Poetey has never been near the top of things I love. Although I had two great high school English teachers and two great college instructors who loved poetry, it just never grabbed me, pulled me in like novels and music. Hell, I used to feel guilty, inadequate, unenlightened because I didn’t “appreciate” poetry. Got over that. Still, two New Mexico poets I know and like and have read are Larry Goodell and V. B. Price. Price is the son of Vincent Price the actor. Would make a link or two if not on my phone, but y’all have enough to go on.
Spanky
@Uncle Cosmo:
raven
@schrodingers_cat:
The series is really different. All the young people speak in contemporary language and the old people in 1860’s. It is not for everyone and purists hate it. It rocks and Hailee Steinfeld is great
Trailer
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I’ve never really understood poetry. though there are a couple poems I’m fond of for reasons I can’t put my finger on.
But as for new poets: A classmate in an online class I’m taking mentioned that her father just died, and that he was a well-known English poet. Then she read us one of his poems, a charming one about an elderly cat.
I know nothing about him, but I give you Harry Guest.
TinRoofRusted
@debbie: I would agree. His poetry is written for the ear I think. And to me that is high praise. I read Beowulf in high school and college and was more interested in the historical aspects. Until I got the audiobook of Seamus Harney’s translation. I listen to it once a year. It is amazing.
raven
I don’t see how music isn’t poetry.
BGinCHI
@PJ:
That’s a GREAT poem. Damn.
Josie
It has been over 50 years since I first saw this poem and it still gives me chills.
Crystal Moment
by Robert P. T. Coffin (1892–1955)
Once or twice this side of death
Things can make one hold his breath.
From my boyhood I remember
A crystal moment of September.
A wooded island rang with sounds
Of church bells in the throats of hounds.
A buck leaped out and took the tide
With jewels flowing past each side.
With his head high like a tree
He swam within a yard of me.
I saw the golden drop of light
In his eyes turned dark with fright.
I saw the forest’s holiness
On him like a fierce caress.
Fear made him lovely past belief,
My heart was trembling like a leaf.
He leans towards the land and life
With need above him like a knife.
In his wake the hot hounds churned
They stretched their muzzles out and yearned.
They bayed no more, but swam and throbbed
Hunger drove them till they sobbed.
Pursued, pursuers reached the shore
And vanished. I saw nothing more.
So they passed, a pageant such
As only gods could witness much,
Life and death upon one tether
And running beautiful together.
laura
@Haydnseek: oh that poem, that tough raggedy ass cat.
Robert Sneddon
Rabbie Burns, because I’m Scottish. He was a rascal and over-fond of the ladies and he loved them all and worked as a Revenuer and wrote the original paean to the lower classes and the unity of mankind, “A man’s a man for a’ that”.
Then let us pray that come it may,
As come it will for a’ that,
That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth
Shall bear the gree an’ a’ that.
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s comin yet for a’ that,
That Man to Man the warld o’er
Shall brithers be for a’ that.
But probably my favourite Burns is the wonderful ballad-verse Tam o’Shanter, a story of barely-dressed witches dancing before the Black Goat and a hairsbreadth escape from doom and destruction at the end to satisfy the entranced listeners, young and old.
When chapman billies leave the street,
And drouthy neebors, neebors meet,
As market-days are wearing late,
An’ folk begin to tak the gate;
While we sit bousing at the nappy,
And getting fou and unco’ happy,
We think na on the lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters, slaps and styles,
That lie between us and our hame,
Whare sits our sulky sullen dame,
Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.
Scotland celebrates Rabbie Burns birthday every year with good whisky and good eating and good fellowship, toasts and boasts and recital of his poetry, accompanied by bagpipes at close range in more formal dinners.
raven
Bein the son of a sailor’
Uncle Cosmo
@Spanky: HA! GOOD ONE!!!!
Fortunately, I only had one encounter with the generic Sister Sadistica in my brief childhood flirtation with The One Holy Catholic And Apostolic Church – she swooped in on my blind quarter hidden in the sun & loosed an IHS-666 Infrared Homing Callused Palm’s Edge that caught me behind the right ear and had me seeing galaxies for a couple of minutes as the Polish refugee screamed STOOOPEEED!
debbie
@raven:
It is. Just look at Dylan. Listen to Emmylou sing Every Grain of Sand or Bruce sing Chimes of Freedom. Every bit as much poetry as any mentioned in this thread.
Ozzy, on the other hand…
raven
And then old Kipling after he sent his son off the meat grinder. (But, apparently, it wasn’t about his son.)
raven
@debbie: Didn’t Zimmerman get some reward?
BGinCHI
@cope:
Cummings is an interesting example of a poet whose known work is not exactly representative of the whole.
Reading recently back through his books I was reminded that those clever and lovely poems most of us know from anthologies are much more digestible than the politics, sexuality, and experimental ballistics of his other stuff.
A poet to really study and linger over.
BGinCHI
@raven: We are going to try it soon!! All cued up.
dexwood
@raven: I gotta agree. My love of music, so many songs, go directly to the arrangement of words supported by the tune. That I get.
Original Lee
Rainer Maria Rilke. I was a German language major in college, and felt as if I’d rolled down a steep grassy slope a la Princess Bride the first time I read one of his poems, Put Out My Eyes.
Lösch mir die Augen aus
Lösch mir die Augen aus: ich kann dich sehn,
wirf mir die Ohren zu: ich kann dich hören,
und ohne Füße kann ich zu dir gehn,
und ohne Mund noch kann ich dich beschwören.
Brich mir die Arme ab, ich fasse dich
mit meinem Herzen wie mit einer Hand,
halt mir das Herz zu, und mein Hirn wird schlagen,
und wirfst du in mein Hirn den Brand,
so werd ich dich auf meinem Blute tragen.
His thing-poems remain some of my favorites.
BGinCHI
@rivers: If I had to pick just one poet (not counting Shakespeare, cuz that’s different) as my favorite, who constantly surprises and amazes, who makes me laugh and cry and think, it would be that curmudgeonly old prick Larkin.
I so, so, so love his work.
raven
@BGinCHI: I can’t wait to see what you think!
dnfree
We used to sing this by Rabindranath Tagore in the Unitarian church as a hymn.
Now I recall my childhood when the sun
burst to my bedside with the day’s surprise;
faith in the marvelous bloomed anew each dawn,
flowers bursting fresh within my heart each day.
Then looking on the world with simple joy,
on insects, birds, and beasts, and common weeds,
the grass and clouds had fullest wealth of awe;
my mother’s voice gave meaning to the stars.
Now when I turn to think of coming death,
I find life’s song in starsongs of the night,
in rise of curtains and new morning light,
in life reborn in fresh surprise of love.
cope
@debbie: I’ll have a look at it, thanks.
zhena gogolia
@raven:
I haven’t seen it — it gets great reviews.
raven
@zhena gogolia: Apple TV is pretty obscure.
zhena gogolia
@dexwood:
Wow, interesting that Vincent Price’s son became a poet.
Scamp Dog
@TinRoofRusted: I have two editions of his Beowulf, one with his translation on one side and the Old English on the other. The second replaces the Old English with images of period artifacts, pictures of reconstructed buildings of that era, or landscapes of the area. I love them both.
schrodingers_cat
@raven: I used to live less than a mile away from the Dickinson homestead. When I said I don’t know much about her, I was referring to her poetry.
raven
Felanius Kootea
Martín Espada
Imagine the Angels of Bread
This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges,
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.
This is the year that those
who swim the border’s undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.
If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.
So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@KSinMA:
I have always loved that poem more than I can say,
dexwood
@zhena gogolia: Journalist, college instructor, blogger. too.
Felanius Kootea
Warsan Shire is another contemporary poet that I like. She was born in Kenya to Somali parents before moving to the UK and was the Young Poet Laureate of London from 2013 – 2014.
Home
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilet
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough
the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here
marv
Only because hasn’t been mentioned (and you made the Shakespeare exception, with which I agree): Gerard Manley Hopkins. And want to send a shout out to memorizing poems one loves – I’d rather have the few dozen I know by heart than all the others I’ve enjoyed. Hard to explain. Will add I’m back in a classroom at a too advanced age (middle schoolers!) and something came up a few weeks ago that got me going on Hamlet’s To be or not speech, and I committed to memory. However familiar I was with consummation devoutly to be wished and so on, it’s just a whole different animal to me to have it from start to finish
Yutsano
Rumi.
I also have a personal connection to Invictus.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@raven: Listen to/read the lyrics of Leonard Cohen.
raven
@Yutsano: I have a personal connection to Coleman Barks.
debbie
@raven:
Nobel. Patti Smith accepted it for him.
raven
@The Fat Kate Middleton: I remember you well from the Chelsea Hotel. . .
zhena gogolia
@Felanius Kootea:
Wow, that is powerful.
raven
@debbie: I saw her at the Dali Lama gig at Emory.
lowcountryboil
On January 20, 2021, I posted “Ozymandias” by Percy Blythe Shelley. It seemed appropriate for the former guy.
“Ozymandias” — Percy Blythe Shelley
I met a traveller 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.”
The Fat Kate Middleton
@BGinCHI: He’s my man, too. There isn’t a poem of his I don’t love.
raven
@The Fat Kate Middleton:
If you want a boxer
I will step into the ring for you
And if you want a doctor
I’ll examine every inch of you
If you want a driver, climb inside
Or if you want to take me for a ride
You know you can
I’m your man
The Fat Kate Middleton
@raven: Yes! You seem to know him.
raven
@The Fat Kate Middleton: Oh yea, very much so. The last scene of McCabe and Mrs Miller is stunning.
debbie
If you set his voice aside, Tom Waits is a poet.
Kim Walker
I quite love Theodore Roethke. I marked out one of his poems (The Waking) to be read at my funeral. Whenever that may be. Also Walt Whitman – my husband and I had one of his poems read at our wedding.
Princess Leia
@Felanius Kootea:
@Felanius Kootea:
So, so love that poem- thank you!
BGinCHI
@marv: Margaret, are you grieving. Over Goldengrove unleaving?
BGinCHI
@The Fat Kate Middleton:
GMTA!
cope
@BGinCHI: “It took a Nipponized bit of the old 6th Avenue El…” might be my most favorite line he wrote
Geoduck
I won’t pretend the man was deeply profound or anything, but if you ever want a chuckle or two, try reading one Shel Silverstein’s poetry collections.
citizen dave
@debbie: Tom Waits for sure; and as Haydnseek checked upthread, Charles Bukowski. Was going to say poetry is not my thing, but putting forward Waits makes me realize that many songwriters are poets of some sort.
Minnesota’s Mr. Zimmerman: “Yippee! I’m a poet and I know it/Hope I don’t blow it” he wrote in “I Shall Be Free No 10” in 1964.
AWOL
Poets: A few good souls, a few fascist souls, a few infantile souls, and one damn funny soul:
Ars Poetica
The goose that laid the golden egg
Died looking up its crotch
To find out how its sphincter worked.
Would you lay well? Don’t watch.
X.J. Kennedy
And another classic from X.J.:
In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus One Day (ronnowpoetry.com)
dexwood
Have always loved this succinct poem though.
Fleas.
Adam had ’em.
Night all.
Shane in SLC
I’ll come out of lurking for this one; I’ve been reading a lot of great contemporary Black poets lately.
Evie Shockley’s semi-automatic is a book-length excavation of the history of violence against African American bodies. It’s a harrowing read; it’s taken me forever to get through it because I can’t take in more than a poem or two at a time.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/151252/anti-immigration-
Roger Robinson is a Trinidad-born British poet; his Portable Paradise is inspired by the Grenfell Tower fire, but delves more deeply into the Windrush scandal and the whole experience of Caribbean immigrants in London.
https://rogerrobinsononline.com
Jamaican-born Shara McCallum’s Madwoman weaves Greek myth with Caribbean folklore in an extended meditation on madness and history.
https://sharamccallum.com/poems-online/
South African poet Gabeba Baderoon is a long-time favorite of mine. The personal and the political have never been woven together more seamlessly than in her poetry.
https://poets.org/poem/green-pincushion-proteas
I’ve also been teaching St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott this semester, and it’s a treat to get back in touch with his work.
https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/atpoem/28371/auto/0/29735/Derek-Walcott/THE-LIGHT-OF-THE-WORLD/en/tile
EthylEster
Ò@Mo MacArbie:
My favorite is about the Titanic.
Jean
@debbie: Yes to Wallace Stevens (and I’d add W. H. Auden) and surely, Mary Oliver. So many contemporary poets to include. I’ve used so many in classes over the years, I wouldn’t know when to end the list of poets students loved as much s I did.
BGinCHI
@cope: Terrific.
I’m gonna do a deep dive into his work soon.
marv
@BGinCHI:
O man – that poem and Ode to a Nightingale got me started on memorizing poetry way back when. I was in college, making long road trips in the 70’s when the speed limit was 55, which I observed, and seemed safe to go for it then. I’ll have to be pretty far gone to lose Spring and Fall from memory. But the most fun Hopkins poem to me to recite – The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo – I wouldn’t have thought to memorize in a hundred years if I hadn’t stumbled across a killer recitation by Richard Burton on youtube
Falling Diphthong
Christina Rossetti, particularly for The Silent Land.
I went back to the Odyssey after reading a travel book from an author who had “loved” The Odyssey as a teenager, ran into it again as a 40-year-old, and was like “Whoa, this isn’t about the thrill of adventure, this is about wanting to stop being shipwrecked on these damn magical islands and just stay home already.”
BGinCHI
@Shane in SLC: Shockley is tremendous. So powerful.
Have you gotten to Claudia Rankine’s latest?
I taught Natasha Trethewey’s book Native Guard in the fall for the 3rd or fourth time. It’s such an amazing book, and much more than the sum of its parts.
BGinCHI
@marv:
Wow. Very cool.
I’ve never been much of a memorizer. Though by accretion I have a ton of poetry in my head.
raven
@EthylEster: Ever heard this
Jaime Brockett – Legend of the USS Titanic (FULL)
“It was midnight on the sea, the band was playin’ “Nearer My God To Thee” Fare thee well Titanic, fare thee well
Shane in SLC
@BGinCHI: Does Rankine have a new one since Citizen? If so, no, I haven’t read it yet. I like Trethewey a lot as well.
rivers
@raven: This was the first poem I ever read. I was 9 and I remember the excitement of realizing that language could do this.
raven
@rivers: Cool!
raven
@BGinCHI: Did you know Coleman?
BGinCHI
@Shane in SLC:
Yep. Called Just Us.
BGinCHI
@raven:
Billy Ray Valentine’s butler in Trading Places?
Or someone in Athens…..
Zelma
Thank you for this thread. Poetry has never grabbed me; too literal minded, I think. But I read all of the above and appreciate poetry’s power more for the reading of them.
I have just two books of poetry on my shelves: The Complete Poems of Andrew Marvell and The Collected Poems of A.E. Houseman. Why these two I have no idea.
raven
@BGinCHI: Coleman Barks, UGA Poetry Prof and Rumi translator. I posted about him above.
AWOL
Two I’ve always loved from Cummings.
The former was misinterpreted in an infamous editorial by the NYT three decades ago (it was praised for its innocence by the Times wanker, which it is not).
[in Just-] by E. E. Cummings | Poetry Foundation
Leonard Bernstein, on weekend daytime TV giving his Harvard Lectures, introduced me to this poem almost fifty years ago:
E. E. Cummings – My sweet old etcetera | Genius
BGinCHI
@raven: Nope. I was probably there before he got there.
The Marilyn Brownstein years.
raven
@BGinCHI: Oh no, he taught here for 30 years. He’s quite infirm now but I hung with him in the early 80’s
Benw
Music is definitely poetry. Leave Ozzy alone.
Yutsano
@Benw: Some music is poetry. But not all.
MagdaInBlack
@raven: “The Essential Rumi” is here on my side table, well worn.
Ripley
I have a terrible time remembering any of the poetry I’ve found interesting, but I’ve long been a fan of Robinson Jeffers.
raven
@MagdaInBlack: I have a really good story about that.
MagdaInBlack
@raven: Do tell?
raven
@MagdaInBlack: I gotta watch the end of this game!
HinTN
@raven: Late to the party but I agree.
billcinsd
@Yutsano: Pretty much all music is poetry, but there is much bad poetry
PaulB
I’m not much of one for poetry, alas, but a few poems over the years have moved me. I loved how much is said in this short poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, for example:
“My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— It gives a lovely light!”
The last lines of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” also said something to me:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Benw
@billcinsd: For example,
“Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good!”
Is bad poetry!
MagdaInBlack
@raven: Tease.
Eta: Thank you, go see the game ?
raven
@MagdaInBlack: I had known him from bars and parties for a number of years. I had been sober for a few years and I went to see him do a reading in Atlanta. I talked to him after the show and he was delighted to know I’d developed an interest in spiritual matters. The next day I went to the big Barnes and Noble on Peachtree and looked all over for the Essential and other of his books and I came up dry. I was pretty disappointed and, three days later, a package came and he sent it to me along with a DVD of the Moyers shows!
PaulB
“Richard Cory,” by Edwin Arlington Robinson has a deeper meaning for me and it’s one I cannot read without pain, precisely because of the personal experience that gives that meaning.
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
raven
And Bama ties it on a bomb at the buzzer!!! OT.
PaulWartenberg
April is National Poetry Month.
Anyone want to do poetry submissions here?
AWOL
@PaulB: Set to music by Simon & Garfunkel. 1967?
raven
@AWOL: zactly
Emma
By Warsan Shire (video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI9D92Xiygo&ab_channel=GarrettMogge):
raven
And if California slides into the ocean
Like the mystics and statistics say it will
I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill
Don’t the sun look angry through the trees
Don’t the trees look like crucified thieves
Don’t you feel like Desperados under the eaves
Heaven help the one who leaves
BGinCHI
@raven:
Well damn. No, I didn’t know him.
Sounds like an amazing guy.
raven
@BGinCHI: He was on the road a great deal, big time literary superstar in his area. I just figured he was well known in the department.
laura
I love this post and every comment. Poems so evanescent and lasting and so many unknown ones to seek and so many reasons a poem is the right measure of a moment. Crushing on this post.
BGinCHI
@raven:
I did my MA there in Political Philosophy, so I was technically in the Political Science Dept. I did a lot of courses in English, and my thesis advisor was from English (Vinay Dharwadker), but I didn’t know everyone.
AWOL
@raven: Thanks. Taught to me and 29 others by a liberal JHS English teacher in Trumplandia in 1972 or so. On glorious vinyl.
Inspectrix
I go to the Poetry Foundation poem of the day regularly. I started writing free verse last summer but I haven’t shared any pieces with another living soul yet.
I am happy to see many Mary Oliver fans here.
This is a poem about words that I bookmarked recently:
Words are Birds
BY FRANCISCO X. ALARCÓN
words
are birds
that arrive
with books
and spring
they
love
clouds
the wind
and trees
some words
are messengers
that come
from far away
from distant lands
for them
there are
no borders
only stars
moon and sun
some words
are familiar
like canaries
others are exotic
like the quetzal bird
some can stand
the cold
others migrate
with the sun
to the south
some words
die
caged—
they’re difficult
to translate
and others
build nests
have chicks
warm them
feed them
teach them
how to fly
and one day
they go away
in flocks
the letters
on this page
are the prints
they leave
by the sea
Kattails
Shite. working at a deadline all day, missed both the mysteries and the poetry. Bah.
Robert Frost: Two Tramps in Mud Time; A Considerable Speck.
Someone I would like to look up, an Englishman, Edward Thomas. I have a bit of his done in a calligraphy anthology–calligraphers live and breathe this stuff of course. The poem “Sowing”, visually evocative of the end of the day:
“I tasted deep the hour
Between the far owl’s chuckling first soft cry
And the first star”
Don’t know how to get out of the automatic double spacing.
Jazzman
Kay Ryan. I discovered her by accident when one of her poems, “Patience”, was quoted some years ago in (of all places) the comic strip “Boondocks” by Aaron McGruder. Here’s an excerpt:
Who would
have guessed
it possible
that waiting
is sustainable—
a place with
its own harvests.
Or that in
time’s fullness
the diamonds
of patience
couldn’t be
distinguished
from the genuine
in brilliance
or hardness.
I also like the Beat poets, especially Ferlinghetti (who never claimed to be “beat”) and the underrated Gregory Corso. Here’s the beginning of Corso’s funny and touching poem “Marriage”:
Should I get married? Should I be good?
Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?
Don’t take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
and she going just so far and I understanding why
not getting angry saying You must feel! It’s beautiful to feel!
Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky…
Benw
@raven: crazy game!
Nelle
@Kattails: Robert MacFarlane refers to Edward Thomas a lot, particularly in The Old Ways, but also The Wild Places and Underland. MacFarlane is a master in prose, but it times. on poetry at times.
hitchhiker
Gary Snyder, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems.
I had an English teacher in 1968 who was determined to haul us Traverse City kids into the world of the mind. She somehow arranged to have Snyder come and speak to us; he wore sandals and jeans, and read to us in a public school that was just filled with ignorance. At that time every girl still had to come to school in a dress or skirt, no matter how cold it was, and we stupidly did.
Snyder was a revelation, as my English teacher (Mrs. Bade, if you want to know) had hoped. She wrote out this poem on the back chalkboard in our classroom, and without intending to, I memorized it. Riprap is what they call loose stones gathered and used to form a foundation for a breakwater.
Riprap
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles—
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
randy khan
I don’t know nearly enough about poetry. I have been delighted that the New York Times Magazine has been publishing a poem every week for the last several years, chosen and introduced by poets. I’ve read a lot of really fascinating works as a result.
I have bits and pieces of many poems that have caught my eye in my head, but not a lot in the way of complete poems.
Things that have stuck with me:
Frost’s Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening – those last three lines:
Seemingly more fun, until the end, e.e. cummings:
Check this link to see how it’s supposed to be typeset. One thing I love about this poem is how it tells you how to read it. He did that a lot.
the pollyanna from hell
White light bright gaw green youngling slight/ And aye the son of morning/ And aye that light aborning
Grin chagrin nor wit nor win/ Find in me a willing spirit/ Grin chagrin nor wit nor win/ Find in me a willing spirit
Red fire grew on the green wild green/ And aye the fleeting pronghorn/ And aye the green wild hartshorn
Grin chagrin nor wit nor win/ Bring to me a broken spirit/ Grin chagrin nor wit nor win/ Bring to me a broken spirit
Smoke ash blew on the green wild green/ And aye the captive turkey/ And aye the green wild savory
Grin chagrin nor wit nor win/ Dawn for aye that burning spirit/ Grin chagrin nor wit nor win/ Dawn for aye that burning spirit
I’m not scared, I’m not mad anymore/ My thoughts have settled surely/ To apprehend life purely
Lullaby for a Sleepless Parent, maybe 1990? Pandemic threat to my kids brought it back to me.
Albatrossity
I’ve lived with a poet for the past 20+ years. One of the perks is that, through her, I’ve been able to hear about poets that are amazing. One of them is Michelle Boisseau. Sadly, she is no longer with us, but here is a sampling of some of her work.
Uncle Cosmo
Which is merely to say music (and poetry) obey one of the (if not the) fundamental laws of the multiverse, Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap.
(Originally formulated by SF titan Theodore Sturgeon in the form “90% of science fiction is crap,” subsequently extended to everything else because obviously, amirite??)
Uncle Cosmo
@Jazzman: I saw Corso read at Goucher College in IIRC 1968. The place was packed. He delivered a whole passle of rather, um, non-descript verse. And at the end he asked if anyone had any requests.
The crowd rose as one and in chorus demanded the single poem they had come to hear – the one that he had left out:
He replied mildly, “I can’t.” And when the crowd roared Why not?!?!?, simply pointed to the first row … where sat his wife and child.
Subsequently I memorized that poem, and would deliver dramatic readings to whoever would sit still for one. I’ve forgotten a lot in the intervening decades, but I have to recover it – because once we have hammered Thuh Varss into the turf and I finally get up to Wellesley to visit my best-buddy astronomer and finally meet his current better half, he will demand a performance for her, and I am not about to disappoint!
Miss Bianca
@Josie: Late to the party, but I loved that poem. Thanks for that!