been reading a lot of this stuff recently - must be the slight hint of spring in the air
http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/lyrics2.htm
thread death
been reading a lot of this stuff recently - must be the slight hint of spring in the air
http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/lyrics2.htm
garrett dweller
i've always liked this one...
Hatteras Calling by Conrad Aiken
Southeast, and storm, and every weathervane
shivers and moans upon its dripping pin,
ragged on chimneys the cloud whips, the rain
howls at the flues and windows to get in,
the golden rooster claps his golden wings
and from the Baptist Chapel shrieks no more,
the golden arrow in the southeast sings
and hears on the roof the Atlantic Ocean roar.
Waves among wires, sea scudding over poles,
down every alley the magnificence of rain,
dead gutters live once more, the deep manholes
hollow in triumph a passage to the main.
Umbrellas, and in the Gardens one old man
hurries away along a dancing path,
listens to music on a watering-can,
observes among the tulips the sudden wrath,
pale willows thrashing to the needled lake,
and dinghies filled with water; while the sky
smashes the lilacs, swoops to shake and break,
till shattered branches shriek and railings cry.
Speak, Hatteras, your language of the sea:
scour with kelp and spindrift the stale street:
that man in terror may learn once more to be
child of that hour when rock and ocean meet.
in fact he's done a lot of good stuff...somewhere between Stevens and Eliot..but apparently more "minor" than either.
thread death
that line and a half is pretty fucking perfectOriginally Posted by vernoncrane
garrett dweller
scour with kelp and spindrift the stale street
for some reason that line always reminds me of Pound's "Go my songs, to the lonely and unsatisfied"... a great poem in itself errr.....hang on...
COMMISSION -
GO, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied,
Go also to the nerve-wracked, go to the enslaved-by-convention,
Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors.
Go as a great wave of cool water,
Bear my contempt of oppressors. -
Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.
Go to the bourgeoise who is dying of her ennuis,
Go to the women in suburbs.
Go to the hideously wedded,
Go to them whose failure is concealed,
Go to the unluckily mated,
Go to the bought wife,
Go to the woman entailed. -
Go to those who have delicate lust,
Go to those whose delicate desires are thwarted,
Go like a blight upon the dullness of the world;
Go with your edge against this,
Strengthen the subtle cords,
Bring confidence upon the algae and the tentacles of the soul. -
Go in a friendly manner,
Go with an open speech.
Be eager to find new evils and new good,
Be against all forms of oppression.
Go to those who are thickened with middle age,
To those who have lost their interest. -
Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family-
Oh how hideous it is
To see three generations of one house gathered together!
It is like an old tree with shoots,
And with some branches rotted and falling. -
Go out and defy opinion,
Go against this vegetable bondage of the blood.
Be against all sorts of mortmain. - -
if anyone can explain what mortmain is i'd be grateful, but it's a magnificent avowal of the liberating/transformative power of poetry..shame he was an old fascist, really.
actually, maybe "speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative" might do quite well as the main theme on the Artic Monkey's thread.."go like a blight against the dullness of the world"...manifesto enough for me!
thread death
[QUOTE=vernoncrane]Be against all sorts of mortmain. - -
if anyone can explain what mortmain is i'd be grateful, but it's a magnificent avowal of the liberating/transformative power of poetry..shame he was an old fascist, really.
QUOTE]
is mortmain the dead hand (from the french i presume) - that which weights us. Something Joyce, Lawrence et al were all banging on about in the twenties ( i remember a DHL story where the grandmother is described as a fat toad, her whole being oppressing the famiily)
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not Vanity.
Here error is all in the not done
all in the diffidence that faltered.
Canto LXXXI
garrett dweller
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!
Wild Horses
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
Darned cockwombles.
This is really great. Please can someone recommend me some more poetry to read?
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.
i corpse therefore i am
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
Darned cockwombles.
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.
Beast of Burden
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.
Beast of Burden
i corpse therefore i am
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'.
i corpse therefore i am
i corpse therefore i am
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.
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