Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
The inherent decadence of that one actually gave me a sort of cold thrill along the spine as I read it out just now.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I don't read the half dozen poems woven between the outpourings of Rod Liddle, James Delingpole et al in my weekly Spectator. Because they're proper shit.

How do they rate next to E. J. Thribb (age 17 1/2)?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Luke was just bragging to me about how much he's been making recently. Next time any of you see him, remember he's in the chair for drinks.
 

Leo

Well-known member
i can see the guardian headline now: "experts warn brexit could adversely affect the domestic poetry market."

btw, nice hat. necessary gear while laboring away in the midday sun. might want to get a cravat to protect ya neck, tho.
 
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luka

Well-known member
if i see a silk scarf with a particularly captivating print i might buy. no cravat tho thats edmunds department

His Farewell to Sack
By Robert Herrick


Farewell thou thing, time past so known, so dear
To me as blood to life and spirit; near,
Nay, thou more near than kindred, friend, man, wife,
Male to the female, soul to body; life
To quick action, or the warm soft side
Of the resigning, yet resisting bride.
The kiss of virgins, first fruits of the bed,
Soft speech, smooth touch, the lips, the maidenhead :
These and a thousand sweets could never be
So near or dear as thou wast once to me.
O thou, the drink of gods and angels! wine
That scatter'st spirit and lust, whose purest shine
More radiant than the summer's sunbeam shows;
Each way illustrious, brave, and like to those
Comets we see by night, whose shagg'd portents
Foretell the coming of some dire events,
Or some full flame which with a pride aspires,
Throwing about his wild and active fires;
'Tis thou, above nectar, O divinest soul !
Eternal in thyself, that can'st control
That which subverts whole nature, grief and care,
Vexation of the mind, and damn'd despair.
'Tis thou alone who, with thy mystic fan,
Workst more than wisdom, art, or nature can
To rouse the sacred madness and awake
The frost-bound blood and spirits, and to make
Them frantic with thy raptures flashing through
The soul like lightning, and as active too.
'Tis not Apollo can, or those thrice three
Castalian sisters, sing, if wanting thee.
Horace, Anacreon, both had lost their fame,
Hads't thou not fill'd them with thy fire and flame.
Phoebean splendour! and thou, Thespian spring!
Of which sweet swans must drink before they sing
Their true pac'd numbers and their holy lays,
Which makes them worthy cedar and the bays.
But why, why longer do I gaze upon
Thee with the eye of admiration?
Since I must leave thee, and enforc'd must say
To all thy witching beauties, Go away.
But if thy whimpering looks do ask me why,
Then know that nature bids thee go, not I.
'Tis her erroneous self has made a brain
Uncapable of such a sovereign
As is thy powerful self. Prithee not smile,
Or smile more inly, lest thy looks beguile
My vows denounc'd in zeal, which thus much show thee
That I have sworn but by thy looks to know thee.
Let others drink thee freely, and desire
Thee and their lips espous'd, while I admire
And love thee, but not taste thee. Let my muse
Fail of thy former helps, and only use
Her inadultrate strength: what's done by me
Hereafter shall smell of the lamp, not thee.

Source: Works of Robert Herrick Vol. 1 (London Lawrence & Bullen, 1891)
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I've been reading through this over the last week

61dkzZY-9LL._SX315_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg


And it seems to me that I'm finally beginning to get an inkling of what poetry's all about. I've never really been able to hear the 'music' in poetry that people talk about, but this book is helping me to understand what that music is - the metre, the rhythm, the tempo and the meaning, all working together at once, like harmony, melody, rhythm, dynamics and tempo.
 

luka

Well-known member
L’Extase de M. Poher
(by J.H. Prynne)

Why do we ask that, as if wind in the
telegraph wires were nailed up in some
kind of answer, formal derangement of
the species. Days and weeks spin by in
theatres, gardens laid out in rubbish, this
is the free hand to refuse everything.
No
question provokes the alpha rhythm by
the tree in our sky turned over; certain
things follow:
who is the occasion
now what
is the question in
which she
what for is a version
of when, i.e.
some payment about time again and how
“can sequence conduce” in order as more
than the question: more gardens: list
the plants as distinct
from lateral
front to back or not
grass “the most
successful plant on our
heart-lung by-
pass and into passion sliced into bright
slivers, the yellow wrapping of what we do.
Who is it: what person could be generalised
on a basis of “specifically” sexual damage,
the townscape of that question.
Weather
of the wanton elegy, take a chip out of
your right thumb. Freudian history again makes
the thermal bank: here
credit 92°
a/c payee only, reduce to
now what
laid out in the body
sub-normal
on grass etc, hay as a touch of the
social self put on a traffic island. Tie
that up, over for next time, otherwise there
is a kind of visual concurrence;
yet
the immediate body of wealth is not
history, body-fluid not dynastic. No
poetic gabble will survive which fails
to collide head-on with the unwitty circus:
no history running
with the french horn into
the alley-way, no
manifest emergence
of valued instinct, no growth
of meaning & stated order.
we are too kissed and fondled,
no longer instrumental
to culture in “this” sense or
any free-range system of time:
1. Steroid metaphrast
2. Hyper-bonding of the insect
3. 6% memory, etc
any other rubbish is mere political rhapsody,
the gallant lyricism of the select, breasts and elbows,
what
else is allowed by the verbal smash-up piled
under foot. Crush tread trample distinguish
put your choice in the hands of the town
clerk, the army stuffing its drum. Rubbish is
pertinent; essential; the
most intricate presence in
our entire culture; the
ultimate sexual point of the whole place turned
into a model question.
 

luka

Well-known member
POETRY

The Windhover
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
 
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