Poetry
- Thread starter jenks
- Start date
-
- Tags
- austere paul auster living austerely baggy bumhole due to heroin each bush of memory conceals a sniper heraldic pigeon like a bat outta hell mess of pottage mixed biscuits is a version but he has clamydia mixed biscuits is a virgin but he has clamydia oaten cakes plain home-made cheese reality being too prickly for my lofty character someone put me on to a frenchman
version
Well-known member
FOREARMS
Douglas Oliver
A purple-haired woman
with a paper handkerchief for a face
runs down the rue des Messageries.
Between the perspective of buildings
tall crane idle against the lines of morning
and a doleful green lion with navy-blue eyes
tattering down to emerald wraiths
dissipates its body in smoke.
Among the stream of Lubavitchers
this Saturday from the synagogue
comes a half-transparent gesture
with a hand that turns in mid-air
and comes back boldly dark blue.
Feminine ginger forearms
poke from a national marine’s white blouse,
black slacks and sailor boy hat,
red-head squatting on the pavement bollard
where rue Faubourg Poissonières
widens for our supermarket;
could be any teenager’s frail life,
enlisted to right our errors
of despair, aggression, superstition.
Cirrus on blue above.
Matt black fighter plane
dropped in the road by a child
sets its heel on the sparkling tarmac,
the silhouette of it skids about and becomes
curling tyre marks, or a relic of
a dangerous attitude, setting children’s lives
at risk. Our corruption needs copious innocence
to work on: I remember green fields,
a cook crossing to the airmen’s mess
at Innesbrook, cirrus on blue in that vignette.
They could enlist me then; they couldn’t now.
That summer of ’57, like a tornado
in my mind I tell you,
green imploding on black
like a green bomb splotch on the Suez Canal.
In this morning’s sunshine,
a cook crossing now to the boulangerie
triggered that memory. Opening the Trib
two paces down from the Metro,
I see they opened fire on the President of Egypt
yesterday as his motorcade
drove to the Addis Ababa summit.
Nearly caused war with Sudan; young Egyptian
forearms writing out enlistment papers;
one day there’s a youth’s flayed arms but no youth,
green body tattering down in bomb smoke.
Douglas Oliver
A purple-haired woman
with a paper handkerchief for a face
runs down the rue des Messageries.
Between the perspective of buildings
tall crane idle against the lines of morning
and a doleful green lion with navy-blue eyes
tattering down to emerald wraiths
dissipates its body in smoke.
Among the stream of Lubavitchers
this Saturday from the synagogue
comes a half-transparent gesture
with a hand that turns in mid-air
and comes back boldly dark blue.
Feminine ginger forearms
poke from a national marine’s white blouse,
black slacks and sailor boy hat,
red-head squatting on the pavement bollard
where rue Faubourg Poissonières
widens for our supermarket;
could be any teenager’s frail life,
enlisted to right our errors
of despair, aggression, superstition.
Cirrus on blue above.
Matt black fighter plane
dropped in the road by a child
sets its heel on the sparkling tarmac,
the silhouette of it skids about and becomes
curling tyre marks, or a relic of
a dangerous attitude, setting children’s lives
at risk. Our corruption needs copious innocence
to work on: I remember green fields,
a cook crossing to the airmen’s mess
at Innesbrook, cirrus on blue in that vignette.
They could enlist me then; they couldn’t now.
That summer of ’57, like a tornado
in my mind I tell you,
green imploding on black
like a green bomb splotch on the Suez Canal.
In this morning’s sunshine,
a cook crossing now to the boulangerie
triggered that memory. Opening the Trib
two paces down from the Metro,
I see they opened fire on the President of Egypt
yesterday as his motorcade
drove to the Addis Ababa summit.
Nearly caused war with Sudan; young Egyptian
forearms writing out enlistment papers;
one day there’s a youth’s flayed arms but no youth,
green body tattering down in bomb smoke.
sus
Moderator
I like that in the history of Dissensus. Two hundred pages of Prynne discussion. A hundred pages of Pound. A hundred pages of Wordsworth. There are two off-hand mentions of Robert Frost. One of them's by Ian and it's really about Jim Morrison, Frost is just a shorthand for a famous american poet. The other is Benny and it's actually about Paul Zimmer but Frost gets brought up for comparison. Just complete blanketing out
sus
Moderator
I was listning to a lecture by Langdom Hammer and he said Frost was one of the Bloomsbury group, knew Pound, was as well educated but at some point in his 20s decided he wanted to write for all kinds and sorts, not just be 'caviar' a la Pound.
So he masks himself in obviousness, takes up metaphors of the American countryside, becomes the pastoral poet of New England, and all his ambiguity is in tone: is he serious is he joking. Zero challenges of establishing reference. All in how the common reference is being handled, in the ironic doubleness
So he masks himself in obviousness, takes up metaphors of the American countryside, becomes the pastoral poet of New England, and all his ambiguity is in tone: is he serious is he joking. Zero challenges of establishing reference. All in how the common reference is being handled, in the ironic doubleness
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
I like Frost a lot, what I've read of him. I suppose he hasn't been discussed on here so much cos, on the surface at least, he's not as excitingly avant garde as the other big names of that era, but there's a lot going on in the poems if you sit with them for a while, ambiguities in tone, as you say, and they're all perfectly constructed. Plus, he's got a great voice and face.
sus
Moderator
Poems & Poets
Topics & Themes
Features
Events & Programs
About Us
Poetry Magazine
January/February 2025Subscribe
Subscribe
Search
Share
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Topics & Themes
Features
Events & Programs
About Us
Poetry Magazine
January/February 2025Subscribe
Subscribe
Search
Birches
By Robert FrostShare
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
version
Well-known member
Halfway through a Mallarmé collection and it's not doing much. He sounds as though he'd be exactly my thing, but actually reading him hasn't grabbed me. Can't think of a single line or image which has really resonated. Perhaps it's down to the translation, but the reading experience has mostly been stiff and awkward. Not getting any sense of depth or energy to the stuff, just clunky lines on a page.
Had a similar experience with Baudelaire. I'd read him waiting for it to hit, but it never did.
Had a similar experience with Baudelaire. I'd read him waiting for it to hit, but it never did.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Probably the translation. I haven't read any Mallarme apart from that roll of the dice thing, but if I did I'd probably read it in Spanish - the Spanish translations of Valery and Baudelaire I've read are miles better than the English ones which always seem really clunky, especially when it's more formal verse.Halfway through a Mallarmé collection and it's not doing much. He sounds as though he'd be exactly my thing, but actually reading him hasn't grabbed me. Can't think of a single line or image which has really resonated. Perhaps it's down to the translation, but the reading experience has mostly been stiff and awkward. Not getting any sense of depth or energy to the stuff, just clunky lines on a page.
Had a similar experience with Baudelaire. I'd read him waiting for it to hit, but it never did.
version
Well-known member
The prose pieces are better. I find the stuff with a rhyme scheme throws me off and I end up concentrating on the rhythm more than anything. He's a bit too precious for me too. I'm not keen on the delicate, flowery thing.
One element which I think's just him and not the translation is how difficult it is to pin down. He'll describe watching a play or visiting someone then suddenly it becomes totally unmoored and I've forgotten how it even started or what's going on. I'll get to the end of a passage and realise I've no idea what I've just read.
One element which I think's just him and not the translation is how difficult it is to pin down. He'll describe watching a play or visiting someone then suddenly it becomes totally unmoored and I've forgotten how it even started or what's going on. I'll get to the end of a passage and realise I've no idea what I've just read.
version
Well-known member
Joris died just a few days ago.
Pierre Joris, Translator of the ‘Impossible’ Paul Celan, Dies at 78
A notable poet in his own right, he was best known for rendering into English the words of a poet who reacted to the Holocaust by inventing a new version of German.www.nytimes.com
In memory of Pierre Joris
"not to worry:you had your birthgiven you / youwill be given your death ---in between keep moving."-- Pierre Joris (July 14, 1946 - February 27, 2025)We were deeply saddened to learn from Nicole Peyrafitte that her husband, Pierre Joris, the acclaimed poet and translator, passed away earlier...
www.nyswritersinstitute.org