Poetry

[jenks]

So i thought maybe if i asked for something uncontentious - a name, a line of verse, a poem - i might get some joy.

do we read poetry anymore?

if we do, then whom do we read?

ancient or modern, i don't mind - the faber gang; the prynne obsessives; famous seamus; logue reading hill sinclair or the dear dead ones, even ruth padel, even carson...

go on

[jenks]

something to get the ball rolling

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.

I am making no claims that it is the greatest poem, just one i like and enjoy reading when the kids are in bed

[bassnation]

i like this one of drydens - "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day". it was used by phillip k dick in counter clock world. its supposed to be rapturous in a religious sense but in dick's context its very creepy.

So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour
The trumpet shall be heard on high
The dead shall live, the living die
And Music shall untune the sky

http://www.bartleby.com/101/399.html

[martin]

http://www.connectotel.com/patchen/patchh25.html

[martin]

Actually, most stuff by Kenneth Patchen, he was genius. He did this incredible, surreal radio play called 'The City Wears A Slouch Hat' back in 1942, with John Cage doing backing 'sounds'. Cortical Foundation stuck it out on CD about 5 years ago.

I'm also a sucker for Baudelaire, Yeats, Byron, Shelley, Padraig Pearse and 'The Rubaiyat of Omaar Khayyam" which I've possibly spelt wrong

[Melmoth]

I'll give you this Jenks, you're nothing if not tenacious.

I love the New York poet John Ashbery, at 82 the greatest living writer in English, funny, melancholy, profound and surreal by turns. His best book is The Double Dream of Spring,
but my favourite poem is As One Put Drunk into the Packet Boat, this is the last verse

“…The night sheen takes over. A moon of Cistercian pallor
Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed.
Finally involved with the business of darkness.
And a sigh heaves from all the small things on earth,
The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons
Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower
Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night.
The summer demands and takes away too much,
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.”

[sufi]

This one by Choman Hardi - from her collection 'Life for Us' which i heard her reading a while back and turned up on Poetry on the tube.

My children

I can hear them talking, my children
fluent English and broken Kurdish

And whenever I disagree with them
they will comfort each other by saying:
Don't worry about mum, she's Kurdish.

Will I be the foreigner in my own home?

Reprised by a little known unpublished poet - Samanserdem

Life for all

This planet is human's home
It needs justice peace and freedom
let's life for all
that is my best goal
i gnash my teeth
when I see the world
there is no justice, freedom, and peace.

[sufi]

the map of love is beautiful, thanks Jenks

i get regular inspiration from the daily rumi at khamush.com :

Divan 1465:1-3, 6

You who have invited me to your house! lead the way!
I am so bewildered, I do not know the way home.
You who have enchanted the city and the village alike!
Where is the house? show it to me! I do not know the way home.
How do you expect knowledge, of the one who is not even alive? Come forward! do not hurt me anymore! I do not know the way home.
O glorious musician! play your drum with your hands
Play this tune to my heart's content:

I do not know the way home.

Translated by Fatemeh Keshavarz

[jenks]

i do not know the way home - indeed...

sufi's inspirations got me thinking about T E Hulme and the Imagists - a bit of a bugger to track down any on the net and then i found this:

I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

which i just love

[luka]

i[ve been reading the cantos and olson. craners been reading zukofsky. he put this on http://cittaviolenta.blogspot.com


Louis Zukofsky, 55 Poems, 1935

11

Stubbing the cloud-fields - the searchlight, high
In the roseate twilight of rain-sky, green! green spring
In the heavens mild in the spring; or down suddenly
Earthwards, plunge deep suddenly earthwards,
Like escape, stampede of cattle horns, ghastly, ghastly
Their giant heads invisible for joy, grief, cavalcade, plunge earthwards,
And into our hearts, O sacrifice,
But we emerge! (emerge upon a level roof that fronts the sky,
The skylight of your room to rear,)
So we can breathe, the rain air and the spring
Ours, till again it moves along the sky
Down or up, machine-rayed, powerful!

[Ness Rowlah]

The Back Seat of My Mother's Car by Julia Copus.

Apparently her own invention, the specular poem,
where the second verse is the mirror of the first.
The poem that made the biggest impression on me from
the "Staying Alive" collection.

---

We left before I had time
to comfort you, to tell you that we nearly touched
hands in that vacuous half-dark. I wanted
to stem the burning waters running over me like tiny
rivers down my face and legs, but at the same time I was reaching out
for the slit in the window where the sky streamed in,
cold as ether, and I could see your fat mole-fingers grasping
the dusty August air. I pressed my face to the glass;
I was calling to you - Daddy! - as we screeched away into
the distance, my own hand tingling like an amputation.
You were mouthing something I still remember, the noiseless words
piercing me like that catgut shriek that flew up, furious as a sunset
pouring itself out against the sky. The ensuing silence
was the one clear thing I could decipher -
the roar of the engine drowning your voice,
with the cool slick glass between us.

With the cool slick glass between us,
the roar of the engine drowning, your voice
was the one clear thing I could decipher -
pouring itself out against the sky, the ensuing silence
piercing me like that catgut shriek that flew up, furious as a sunset.
You were mouthing something: I still remember the noiseless words,
the distance, my own hand tingling like an amputation.
I was calling to you , Daddy, as we screeched away into
the dusty August air. I pressed my face to the glass,
cold as ether, and I could see your fat mole-fingers grasping
for the slit in the window where the sky streamed in
rivers down my face and legs, but at the same time I was reaching out
to stem the burning waters running over me like tiny
hands in that vacuous half-dark. I wanted
to comfort you, to tell you that we nearly touched.
We left before I had time.

[JimO'Brien]

Luka and Craner - if you like Pound and Zukofsky why not try Basil Bunting?



On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos

There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?

There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

Basil Bunting

[owen]

the apparation of these faces in the crowd
petals on a wet, black bough.

more poems should have only two lines

[luka]

craner loves bunting, i have briggflats which i've looked at but was inderwhelmed, craner tells me it's not the best thing of his to start out with so i'm not dismissing the man. any reccomendation?

[jenks]

this place gives a flavour:

http://www.dur.ac.uk/basil_bunting_p...re/bnquot.html

i like his earlier stuff but brigghouseflats is great once it gets going