Poetry

[Corpsey]

Reminds me of Heaney's reading of his 'Beowulf', gently incantatory

 

[Benny Bunter]

Plus Golding's in a more constrictive form and still manages to make it more free than Hughes, Golding's way better

 

[version]

Evening Hawk​

By Robert Penn Warren

From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.

His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.

The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.

Look! Look! he is climbing the last light
Who knows neither Time nor error, and under
Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings
Into shadow.

Long now,
The last thrush is still, the last bat
Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom
Is ancient, too, and immense. The star
Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain.

If there were no wind we might, we think, hear
The earth grind on its axis, or history
Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.

 

[Benny Bunter]

There's loads of good poems about birds of prey isn't there?

 

[Benny Bunter]

The Dalliance of the Eagles
Walt Whitman

Skirting the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,)
Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,
The rushing amorous contact high in space together,
The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling,
Till o’er the river pois’d, the twain yet one, a moment’s lull,
A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing,
Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate diverse flight,
She hers, he his, pursuing.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Not sure if that one came before or after this, but I know Hopkins admired Whitman, so maybe there's some connection?

The Windhover

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-vermillion.

 

[Corpsey]

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Love that. I always had a prejudiced idea that Tennyson was really stuffy and boring but then I read some and realised I was very wrong.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Note how all these 4 poems have that dramatic plunging fall image, they all seem quite closely related, apart from the obvious common subject matter.

 

[woops]

Not sure if that one came before or after this, but I know Hopkins admired Whitman, so maybe there's some connection?

The Windhover

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-vermillion.

what is the wingspan of this bird?

 

[Benny Bunter]

I suppose it's a bit like the kingfisher figure that runs through Hopkins, Eliot and Olson.

 

[Benny Bunter]

what is the wingspan of this bird?

Good question, Jeremy.

 

[Benny Bunter]

On a different but related note, I really love Wallace Stevens' gaudy parade of bantam roosters, peacocks, parakeets and cockatoos. I wonder if him going for these more exotic, colourful birds was a sort of reaction to all these brown killer birds of prey you often get in the poetic tradition.

 

[Benny Bunter]

The kingfisher obviously goes very deep, all the way back to the Greek halcyon legend. Prynne's tapped into that one too.

 

[version]

Ian Penman · Brussels Pout: Baudelaire’s Bad End

Bored, cigar-smoking, distrait. He could be lost in reverie, or just bored to tears. Charles Baudelaire might be one of...

www.lrb.co.uk

 

[Benny Bunter]

Where do you start with Baudelaire, for someone with extremely basic French?

Part of me wants to get into the French stuff, but I've tried with Rimbaud and while I really like some of it it's never fully connected - maybe it's just the translations I've got that aren't that good, I dunno, or maybe it's something else that puts me off, something prejudiced maybe.

Gonna come out and say it - Spanish avant garde/modernist poetry (Lorca, Neruda, to a lesser extent Cernuda & Alberti) shits all over the French gear imo.

Willing to change my mind though if someone can recommend a good edition of something.

 

[william_kent]

Where do you start with Baudelaire, for someone with extremely basic French?

Part of me wants to get into the French stuff, but I've tried with Rimbaud and while I really like some of it it's never fully connected - maybe it's just the translations I've got that aren't that good, I dunno, or maybe it's something else that puts me off, something prejudiced maybe.

Gonna come out and say it - Spanish avant garde/modernist poetry (Lorca, Neruda, to a lesser extent Cernuda & Alberti) shits all over the French gear imo.

Willing to change my mind though if someone can recommend a good edition of something.

Il n'existe pas deux genres de poésies; il n'en est qu'une.

 

[Benny Bunter]

I actually understood that!

Trying to read poetry in other languages is brilliant, it really twists yer brain in quite painful but pleasant ways.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Ooh I think I read a lautremont thing once in the poems for the millennium anthology that was really good, can't remember what it was now. Probably something really perverse.

 

[william_kent]

that Lautreamont book is good because there's an English translation on the opposite page to the original

but, I'm at an age where I can freely admit, that as a native English speaker, Prynne can "twist my brain"