Poetry

superb stuff, yeah...and while were on the topic of Pound and Pound- alikes or his possible progenitors there's always Aurthur Hugh Clough who i was getting into recently as part of something that i wrote.... his "Amours des Voyages " which is a series of Cantos done as a kind of poetic travelogue of fin de siecle (i think) Europe,

stuff like....

Rome disappoints me much; I hardly as yet understand it, but
Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it.
All the foolish destructions, and all the sillier savings,
All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages,
Seem to be treasured up here to make fools of present and future


and this...

THERE are two different kinds, I believe, of human attraction:
One which simply disturbs, unsettles, and makes you uneasy,
And another that poises, retains, and fixes and holds you.
I have no doubt, for myself, in giving my voice for the latter.
I do not wish to be moved, but growing where I was growing,
There more truly to grow, to live where as yet I had languished.
I do not like being moved: for the will is excited; and action
Is a most dangerous thing; I tremble for something factitious,
Some malpractice of heart and illegitimate process;
We are so prone to these things, with our terrible notions of duty

it's all here..

http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/clough10.html

"to live where as yet i had languished"....

thanks for the mortmain help!

pale hopalong

I'm new here. Hi and whatever, etc.

'Famous' poets I've been reading: Celan (in translation, unfortunately), Stevens (always), John Ashbery (beautiful), Michael Palmer (though his newer work disappoints).

Two lesser known poets worth checking out:

M Sarki. His book Zimble Zamble Zumble in particular. They are tiny little poems, but sharp. Consider:

Gordon Gordon!

Teacher, teacher,
what are we to do?
It has come to my attention
the body of our work --
the bulk of
our great poetry! --
is untranslatable
into any language.

Even this one.


Or:

Descending Argot of a Retired Hog Farmer


This is his chunky
pottage. His resolute
acumen for chowder.

A disembosomed
vulnerability producing
heroic evidence of an

old fallopian stroll.
The muscled being
of an excessive life.

Nice, hey?

A review: http://www.elimae.com/essays/Moran/RevZZZ.html


See also Gillian Conoley.

For example:

Profane Halo


This was the vernal the unworldly human

the most elegant car in the train.

A faithful and anonymous band of huntsmen,

a runner of red carpet

spotted with pheasants

on which an origin, a cold sun shone.

These were the black shoes,

the skirt one smoothed to speak.

The unknown tongue for which I am not the master,

chiefly the messengers

circling back through the vectors as the ashes adjust,

a loner with a hat,

a loner on a cold dark street,

a man gone away for cigarettes

on an otherwise calm evening.

And the signs that said yield, and then Ssssshh, and then

let me sweep the porch for you.

A woman’s black beads scattering into order.

Girl running along outside of herself toward.

Pale hopalong.

And time scarred up to do a beauty.

Dear Sunset that was sun of now,

Near Greatness, dear tongue my Queen, dear rock solid,

how could we know that we are forerunners?

The first characters in a crowd

and yet we were outwardly quiet.

We assemble here toward the river

or wherever the horse leads us,

dear oarsman the valleys are green,

some bodies piled

some bodies marked and burned away.

New ones just wiped of their meconium.

In the whites of the lovers in the evenings under.

Dear human mood dear mated world.

There, there, now.

Dear ease of vicarious place, oil in sea.

Dear ravishment of fountain

figure in the fold.

These are the beers we drink like oxygen

in hats as large as I.

The loner going door-to-door, the paint excelling

the door in cubes of prescience, durations of grey.

Here we attach the theatre of a girl

the miniature size comprehensible

the door a seed

the tree a dwarf

the hay a stack

the uncreated still.

Cool of the evening,

thine ears consider well

the uncreated still.

Huntsman in the quietened alley

in the dark-arched door.

Train long and harpiethroated.

Haydust thine ears enscripture.

Before gardens and after gardens

for vespers,

earth’s occasional moonlessness

lays hands

on the data in the street,

under which loose animal

the unbending pale of whose complaint becomes the dust’s surround



- six

This is really great. Please can someone recommend me some more poetry to read?

jenks said:

A Map Of Love

Donald Justice

Your face more than others' faces
Maps the half-remembered places
I have come to I while I slept—
Continents a dream had kept
Secret from all waking folk
Till to your face I awoke,
And remembered then the shore,
And the dark interior.[/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR]

Click to expand...

Another one I like:

Medusa
BY LOUISE BOGAN

I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
Facing a sheer sky.
Everything moved,—a bell hung ready to strike,
Sun and reflection wheeled by.

When the bare eyes were before me
And the hissing hair,
Held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
Formed in the air.

This is a dead scene forever now.
Nothing will ever stir.
The end will never brighten it more than this,
Nor the rain blur.

The water will always fall, and will not fall,
And the tipped bell make no sound.
The grass will always be growing for hay
Deep on the ground.

And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day,
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.

That Medusa one is great.

Here's an obscure one that nobody's ever heard of:

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939

That's nice, although it fuels my suspicion that I need a better grasp of Greek mythology to get the most from older poetry (though, upon checking, I see that Yeats wrote that in the 20thC )!

Louise Bogan is a briliant poet; After the Persian is another of hers that's well worth reading.

its not so much greek mythology that offers the key to that poem (leda gets raped by zeus in the form of a swan) its yeats personal system of symbology, to which a vision offers the clearest guide.

http://www.yeatsvision.com/history.html
read

I agree with you that I feel like I'd get more out of poetry if I was familiar with classical mythology, but for the purposes of this poem, all you need to know is:

'Leda and the Swan is a story and subject in art from Greek mythology in which the god Zeus, in the form of a swan, seduces or rapes Leda. According to later Greek mythology, Leda bore Helen and Polydeuces, children of Zeus, while at the same time bearing Castor and Clytemnestra, children of her husband Tyndareus, the King of Sparta.'

Helen = abducted, kick starting the Trojan war

and

Clytemnestr = the wife of Agamemnon, ruler of the Ancient Greek kingdom of Mycenae or Argos. In the Oresteia by Aeschylus, she murdered Agamemnon – said by Euripides to be her second husband

I'm sure I've read somewhere that Yeats might have intended a parallel with the Virgin Mary's impregnation by God - and the resulting suffering of Christ (not to mention all the religious wars).

I like what I've read of Yeats but I am intimidated (or put off) by the mythology and mysticism (his PERSONAL mythological system) that seems to be important to understand in order to appreciate the poems. E.G. Need to know about his theory of historical 'gyres' in order to understand 'The Second Coming'.

luka said:

http://www.yeatsvision.com/history.html
read

Click to expand...

CHEERS!

I never 'got' poetry until I started reading it aloud and trying to memorise some of it. I like reading it when I'm stoned, cos I can't read anything else when I'm stoned.

thanks both. when i have time i will read that bit about Yeats and history.

have to agree with Corpsey - I am put off by the thought that so much understanding of a poet's personal symbology/numerology/mythology is needed to appreciate his work.

its not needed to appreciate it, its just another dimension to it. there are poets who cant be enjoyed without doing the background reading but thats not the norm.

Blake is another example that springs to mind immediately.

yeah and he was the big influence on yeats. you can enjoy a lot of it without background reading just as you can enjoy kubrick without reading about how he faked the moon landings. i just happen to enjoy reading about faking the moon landings more than i enjoy watching the films. its another dimension like i say. more brilliant than the sun is largely about that mode of enjoyment.

This is heavy going for a hot, hungover day. I rather like the idea of history operating in cycles, as much as I disbelieve it, or at the least doubt it.

learn to think in terms of symbols and images. its not so much an attempt at literal verifiable truth its about encapsulating reality and experience in a series of images/symbols. thats whats going on here and its why theres so much common ground between a poet like yeats and occultism.

What are your favourite Yeats poems, luka?

I've got a volume of his poetry and I've been dipping into it haphazardly.

I liked this one, which seems more straightforward than e.g. Leda and the Swan

WHY should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly-fisher's wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream,
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it a matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort,
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad.

i dont know corpsey. i dont really read poetry. im not into it.

I don't believe you, you need more people.

Here's a rather good one I read last night.

24. Fallen Majesty

ALTHOUGH crowds gathered once if she but showed her face,
And even old men’s eyes grew dim, this hand alone,
Like some last courtier at a gypsy camping place,
Babbling of fallen majesty, records what’s gone.

The lineaments, a heart that laughter has made sweet,
These, these remain, but I record what’s gone. A crowd
Will gather, and not know it walks the very street
Whereon a thing once walked that seemed a burning cloud.

The gyres are a way to hold all of human history in a single thought. There's no room for sub clauses or caveats sadly.