Read Serious Poetry with me & Corpsey

luka

Well-known member
One of the things me and corpse have in common is that we're bang into self improvement. We always feel we're not doing enough. Tortured in fact. We have a book club where we read proper poetry together and we're just deciding what the next one is going to be. You can join in too.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
possibilities

The Divine Comedy (or just 'Inferno' - we'd have to pick a translation - I've got Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Esolen translations to hand... Pound recommended Binyon's). Disadvantage here is obviously it's not in English so the language effects are unsatisfactory. OTOH many of our faves were well into Dante - Joyce, Blake, Milton, etc.

The Prelude (1805)
http://triggs.djvu.org/djvu-editions.com/WORDSWORTH/PRELUDE1805/Download.pdf

Very very long. A landmark in Romanticism. Wordsworth's own 'Paradise Lost'.
 

luka

Well-known member
The problem being that I've tried both abd found them very boring. Another possibility is Blakes Jerusalem. Again quite long. But not that long.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
"One of the things me and corpse have in common is that we're bang into self improvement. We always feel we're not doing enough. Tortured in fact."

Boredom is a sort of torture, isn't it?

'Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.'
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
OH, there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
That blows from the green fields and from the clouds
And from the sky; it beats against my cheek,
And seems half conscious of the joy it gives.
O welcome messenger! O welcome friend! 5
A captive greets thee, coming from a house
Of bondage, from yon city’s walls set free,
A prison where he hath been long immured.


Straight away I am put off by 'O welcome messenger!' and 'yon city'. You have to become immune to the contempt this sort of bardic posturing stirs up in your cynical post modern cyber heart.
 

luka

Well-known member
Keep making suggestions. We could go very old. A book of the Canterbury tales of some other chaucer thing.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I bought the Beckett trilogy a while back when I was reading a biography of him. I am curious about them but I'm also slightly concerned they'll depress the fuck out of me.
 

luka

Well-known member
I think they made me ill. One was ok then I got sick halfway through the next one
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Too much of that sort of Beckett thing makes you feel dank, musty, slightly anti-social, possibly a public nuisance, certainly low in spirits. It can actually have a physically depleting effect on you. Probably a lot more fun to write than read. I tend to think with Beckett, the shorter the better.
 

luka

Well-known member
Absolutely. I wasn't joking. It really happened. Got any suggestions for our self improvement group Oliver?
 

craner

Beast of Burden
You could do the Arthur Golding translation of Metamorphoses, Pound called it the most beautiful poem in the English language.
 

luka

Well-known member
Probably not the whole thing but a section would be realistic. I left my copy in Sydney but easy to get a new one.
 

luka

Well-known member
I've read a modern translation of the Ovid. Cos Pound keeps using it in the cantos. The sailors kidnapping dionysus.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
How did you get on with Virgil?

I read the Robert Fitzgerald translation which was good. It's like the Iliad and the Odyssey jammed into one book, but the other way around. The artifice and its political purpose in Augustan Rome ultimately vitiates the work in comparison to its Greek models and rivals, but that just unleashes lots of other interesting angles.

J K Huysman's dismissal of Virgil in À rebours is stunningly scathing.
 
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