Read Serious Poetry with me & Corpsey

luka

Well-known member
Donne is too hard. Yeats is too ridiculous. Granted they are both good. I can see that.
 

luka

Well-known member
I wanted to be quite strict and keep it to things that have really meant something to me and that I still read and engage with. I might have forgotten one or two things. I thought it would take the piss to say Shakespeare.
 

luka

Well-known member
Then there's things I've enjoyed to one degree or another but haven't changed me or my writing in any appreciable way, stuff like Charles Olson (although his projective verse essay I found energising and useful) David Jones, Holderlin, Sylvia Plath (Craner I think disapproves but it was important to me early on along with Rilke as a pure intensity) Frank o Hara, this, that and the other. I think the first two volumes of the poems for the millenium anthologies are brilliant too.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I suppose you have to consider whether to classify verse drama as Poetry or not, because that fortifies the field for the English poets in an important way if you can include the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Not since 2001. I mostly remember some of the rhetorical stabs, like the Arthur Golding thing.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Reading a bio of Pope

'He never grew taller than four and a half feet, was hunchbacked, and required daily care throughout adulthood.'

Incidentally Pope translated The Iliad, surely one of those totems to be climbed
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
is pound the fascist or is that eliot? or were they both?

Eliot was anti-semitic (although I believe this is still disputed, by Craig Raine, at least). Also a Catholic (Anglican) Royalist. I'm not quite sure where Pound/Eliot's anti-semitism sprang from, perhaps it was simply 'in the air' at the time - but it definitely had something to do with 'usury'. Related to the persistent Modernist antagonism towards bourgeoisie, capitalist values.

Last night I was listening to a podcast in which Jonathan Haidt's book 'The Righteous Mind' was discussed. Apparently scientific experiments have shown that people are more likely to adopt right-wing positions (defence of authority, tradition, power, etc.) when in a threatened or disgusted psychological state, and more likely to adopt left-wing positions when induced to feel compassionate.

This is instructive when considering Eliot, who seems to have been in a near-constant state of anxiety and disgust, particularly with the contemporary landscape of "broken images". Not sure re: Pound.
 

droid

Well-known member
My Father Perceived as a Vision of St Francis

It was the piebald horse in next door’s garden
frightened me out of a dream
with her dawn whinny. I was back
in the boxroom of the house,
my brother’s room now,
full of ties and sweaters and secrets.
Bottles chinked on the doorstep,
the first bus pulled up to the stop.
The rest of the house slept

except for my father. I heard
him rake the ash from the grate,
plug in the kettle, hum a snatch of a tune.
Then he unlocked the back door
and stepped out into the garden.
Autumn was nearly done, the first frost
whitened the slates of the estate.
He was older than I had reckoned,
his hair completely silver,
and for the first time I saw the stoop
of his shoulder, saw that
his leg was stiff. What’s he at?
So early and still stars in the west?

They came then: birds
of every size, shape, colour; they came
from the hedges and shrubs,
from eaves and garden sheds,
from the industrial estate, outlying fields,
from Dubber Cross they came
and the ditches of the North Road.
The garden was a pandemonium
when my father threw up his hands
and tossed the crumbs to the air. The sun
cleared O’Reilly’s chimney
and he was suddenly radiant,
a perfect vision of St Francis,
made whole, made young again,
in a Finglas garden.
 

luka

Well-known member
We seem to have decided there's so serious poetry worth reading. Unless corpse wants me to join him in something I've already read. Prynnes Brass or some cantos or whatever
 

luka

Well-known member
No way im reading shelly or any of that fairies and knights and elven mincers crowd sorry it disgusts me political radicalism or not I don't care.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Reading Craner's essay on Pound. Makes hard reading, even though I've not read any of Pound's poetry (I've read and adored his literary criticism).
 

craner

Beast of Burden
The Defence of Guenevere by William Morris

But, learning now that they would have her speak,
She threw her wet hair backward from her brow,
Her hand close to her mouth touching her cheek,

As though she had had there a shameful blow,
And feeling it shameful to feel ought but shame
All through her heart, yet felt her cheek burned so,

She must a little touch it; like one lame
She walked away from Gauwaine, with her head
Still lifted up; and on her cheek of flame

The tears dried quick; she stopped at last and said:
"O knights and lords, it seems but little skill
To talk of well-known things past now and dead.

"God wot I ought to say, I have done ill,
And pray you all forgiveness heartily!
Because you must be right, such great lords--still

"Listen, suppose your time were come to die,
And you were quite alone and very weak;
Yea, laid a dying while very mightily

"The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak
Of river through your broad lands running well:
Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak:

" 'One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,
Now choose one cloth for ever; which they be,
I will not tell you, you must somehow tell

" 'Of your own strength and mightiness; here, see!'
Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes,
At foot of your familiar bed to see

"A great God's angel standing, with such dyes,
Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands
Held at two ways, light from the inner skies

"Showing him well, and making his commands

ETC.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I've been wondering about the fairies lately

How nowadays we insinctively recoil from them as being ridiculous and sickly

But back in the 19th century, right up until Yeats's time they were clearly credible and SERIOUS as imaginative tools

Perhaps fairies were debased by Walt Disney or something?
 
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