Re: poetry thread

[Guest]

it is possible to make it without bacon.

...but it just might not have the same appeal to a carnivore

[Guest]

A Close Call While Shopping
Charles Bukowski

pushing my cart through the supermarket
today
the thought passed through my mind
that I could start
knocking cans from the shelves and
also rolls of towels, toilet paper,
silver foil,
I could throw oranges, bananas, tomatoes
through the air, I could take cans of
beer from the refrigerated section and
start gulping them, I could pull up
women's skirts, grab their asses,
I could ram my shopping cart through
the plate-glass window...

then another thought occurred to me:
people generally consider something
before they do it.

I pushed my cart along...

a woman in a checkered skirt was
bending over the pet food section.
I seriously considered grabbing her
ass
but I didn't, I rolled on
by.

I had the items I needed and I rolled
my cart up to the checkout stand.
a lady in a red smock with a nameplate
on
awaited me.
the nameplate indicated her as
"Robin."

Robin looked at me: "how you doing?"
she asked.

"fine," I told her.

and then she began tabulating my
purchases
not in the least knowing that
the fellow standing there before her
had just two minutes ago been
one grab from the
madhouse.

[eddie]

THE WORKMAN's FRIEND

When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night-
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

When Money's tight and is hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt--
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

When health is bad and your heart feels strange,
And your face is pale and wan,
When doctors say that you need a change,
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN

When food is scarce and your larder bare
And no rashers grease your pan,
When hunger grows as your meals are rare--
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

In time of trouble and lousy strife,
You have still got a darlint plan,
You still can turn to a brighter life-
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

(Myles na Gopaleen aka Flann O'Brien)

[eddie]

The antic soul
rides the wry, red brain;
horses know horses know
what they're thinking about
(you might say curse that alien corn),
the bloody heart
lusts in its foul tenement
o blow, viaticum pump, blow
on your last glazed fruit-valves.

(Myles na Gopaleen aka Flann O'Brien)

[Guest]

The Trawler
by Anthony Lawrence

Like an old shed held together
by wires and panels of light
blue wood, a trawler
is making its way upriver.
A man emerges
to check on what he’s found
in the deep sleep
of his long, productive night.
On deck, his fingers
dripping water, he looks out
to where a line of gulls
are trailing like sunbleached
prayer flags,
feeding on what a lifted net
releases to the tide: prawn
husks and undersize fish
that glitter down to where
nothing is wasted.
Sometimes it seems
he’s been at it too long,
yet on mornings like these,
when things come together,
it’s not about time or profit,
risk or investment.
Light floods through
the wheel-house window.
The river widens
into a working harbour,
with tugs and tankers,
cranes and lines of men
in hard hats in readiness
for the loading to begin.
At the fisherman’s co-op,
on the filleting floor,
an egret steps aside
to let him pass, its neck
like a neon tube on the blink.
Someone is talking about
the new moon’s influence
on mulloway. A forklift driver
swears the moon phase
makes no difference,
and is about to climb down
and explain, when a man
wearing a chain-mail glove
throws a mullet into the air.
A white bird swallowing is enough
to silence any conversation.

[Guest]

History of the Night
by Jorge Luis Borges

Throughout the course of the generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights;
we shall never know in what age it came to mean
the starry hours.
Others created the myth.
They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
that spin our destiny,
they sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
who crows his own death.
The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
to Zeno, infinite words.
She took shape from Latin hexameters
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
of his stricken soul.
Now we feel her to be inexhaustible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.

And to think that she wouldn't exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.

[Guest]

it is possible to make it without bacon.

...but it just might not have the same appeal to a carnivore

but it possibly may appeal to a vegan

[Guest]

it is possible to make it without bacon.

...but it just might not have the same appeal to a carnivore

but it possibly may appeal to a vegan

...well doc, if the 'treacherous young witch' is worth her bacon, she could no doubt make it with dirt and still cast a spell

[eddie]

Cloths of Heaven

William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

[Guest]

it is possible to make it without bacon.

...but it just might not have the same appeal to a carnivore

but it possibly may appeal to a vegan

...well doc, if the 'treacherous young witch' is worth her bacon, she could no doubt make it with dirt and still cast a spell

hmmmmmm , there could be an interesting story written about this , maybe in the style of Stephen King !

[Guest]

it is possible to make it without bacon.

...but it just might not have the same appeal to a carnivore

but it possibly may appeal to a vegan

...well doc, if the 'treacherous young witch' is worth her bacon, she could no doubt make it with dirt and still cast a spell

hmmmmmm , there could be an interesting story written about this , maybe in the style of Stephen King !

hmmmmmm, there has been an interesting poem written about it, a la eddie, on a previous page

[eddie]

Letters to Monica by Philip Larkin – review

Love, in other words

Nicholas Lezard guardian.co.uk, Thursday 4 August 2011 10.00 BST


Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica by Philip Larkin

At first I thought: no, too private, too intimate, and at the furthest end of the spectrum of what I want to know about Philip Larkin. This is for specialists only, surely: a 40-year correspondence with the woman he – well, it's an odd-sounding word when we use it of Larkin, but here it is – loved; filleted down from 1,421 letters, or 7,500 pages. And then there is the whole business of making more judgments about Larkin: give people a correspondence they were never a part of and they feel as though they are still entitled to pronounce. When it comes to Larkin's private life everyone seems to excuse, or indeed encourage, the urge to find fault: Larkin was weird, Larkin was miserable, he pissed and moaned too much (one or two reviewers have even found time to take a swipe at Monica Jones, the other, largely invisible, correspondent here) . . . I'm reminded of Martin Amis's unimprovable line on the biography: "In Andrew Motion's book, we have the constant sense that Larkin is somehow falling short of the cloudless emotional health enjoyed by, for instance, Andrew Motion."

Well, there's plenty of ammunition for those who like to take pot-shots at the man. There's a poem in here about work which complains about working "till I kick the bucket; / FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT", which may lack the lyrical deftness of "Toads" but does have a similar essence; while his reaction to Betjeman's telling him he met Kingsley Amis and his wife "& had a long chat or some such nonsense" is to say "Grr, brr. They're all the same really. The only good life is to live in some sodding seedy city & work & keep yr gob shut & be unhappy." (In which case you could say that Larkin had a very good life indeed.)

But he opened up to Monica, a woman as sharply funny as he was (her nickname for EM Forster, we learn, was "old Sell-Soul", which you have to love), and there are moments of great tenderness and insight here, even if this was not a conventionally happy relationship. You can imagine Monica's frustrations. She was a good-looking woman with, apparently, no shortage of offers , and miles from the man she loved. "Dear one, you are always in my thoughts – I love you and don't want you to be in any doubt of it." You don't have to be unusually sensitive to make a good stab at what prompted that sentence, that italicised "are".

You can also see poems taking shape under your eyes. We can feel relief that "This Be the Verse" didn't use the word "foist", which he was contemplating (as in "they foist on you the faults they had" – it would have knocked half the stuffing out of the poem); and the last line of "An Arundel Tomb" went through several incarnations before finding its final, unimprovably ambiguous shape: "That what survives of us is love . . . All that survives of us is love . . ."

Yes, there is the odd startling political opinion, the occasional moment when we are reminded that this is a man who, were we ignorant of his art, we might find hard to get along with; but there is certainly not so much of Larkin the misogynist, the one who complained elsewhere that "everything about the relationship between men and women makes me angry. It's all a fucking balls-up, it might have been planned by the army or the Ministry of Food." His relationship with Monica may have been a balls-up in one sense, but in another it was not: and if we are to use the privilege of peering into his private life with the proper respect we should demonstrate when being shown into someone else's bedroom, we can see concern, humanity, tenderness. The letters almost dwindle to a halt in 1973, because Larkin's mother moved into a nursing home in Leicester, where Monica lived. And they were with each other until the end of his life. That's not really a balls-up.

And this is a proper correspondence, intelligent but easy, fluent, encouraging; we see the charm and the point of sitting down, at the end of the day, or the beginning of an evening, and putting one's thoughts into writing, and sending them off to someone we love.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

[Guest]

Ophelia
by Arthur Rimbaud

I

On the calm black water where the stars are sleeping
White Ophelia floats like a great lily;
Floats very slowly, lying in her long veils...
- In the far-off woods you can hear them sound the mort.

For more than a thousand years sad Ophelia
Has passed, a white phantom, down the long black river.
For more than a thousand years her sweet madness
Has murmured its ballad to the evening breeze.

The wind kisses her breasts and unfolds in a wreath
Her great veils rising and falling with the waters;
The shivering willows weep on her shoulder,
The rushes lean over her wide, dreaming brow.

The ruffled water-lilies are sighing around her;
At times she rouses, in a slumbering alder,
Some nest from which escapes a small rustle of wings;
- A mysterious anthem falls from the golden stars.

II

O pale Ophelia! beautiful as snow!
Yes child, you died, carried off by a river!
- It was the winds descending from the great mountains of Norway
That spoke to you in low voices of better freedom.

It was a breath of wind, that, twisting your great hair,
Brought strange rumors to your dreaming mind;
It was your heart listening to the song of Nature
In the groans of the tree and the sighs of the nights;

It was the voice of mad seas, the great roar,
That shattered your child's heart, too human and too soft;
It was a handsome pale knight, a poor madman
Who one April morning sate mute at your knees!

Heaven! Love! Freedom! What a dream, oh poor crazed Girl!
You melted to him as snow does to a fire;
Your great visions strangled your words
- And fearful Infinity terrified your blue eye!

III

- And the poet says that by starlight
You come seeking, in the night, the flowers that you picked
And that he has seen on the water, lying in her long veils
White Ophelia floating, like a great lily.

trans. by Oliver Bernard: Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems (1962)


Lizzie Siddal, posing for Rossetti's Ophelia.

[Guest]

Jerusalem
by William Blake (1757-1827)

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

[eddie]

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

Blue-rinsed ladies from the Tory shires of England who belt these lines out at Women's Institute assemblies little know that they are ardently extolling the virtues of fucking.

[Guest]

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

Blue-rinsed ladies from the Tory shires of England who belt these lines out at Women's Institute assemblies little know that they are ardently extolling the virtues of fucking.

...so the sword isn't a pen then?

[eddie]

...so the sword isn't a pen then?

Pen? Close.

[Guest]

[Guest]

...^^...but seriously eddie, erotic imagery never appeared to me when reading Jerusalem (although I can see now how it could)

[eddie]

...^^...but seriously eddie, erotic imagery never appeared to me when reading Jerusalem (although I can see now how it could)

Peter Ackroyd's Blake bio gives a good account of all the various Dissenting sects (Swedenborgians, Muggletonians etc etc) active in Blake's time. Sex was part of the agenda of Liberty to some of these cults.

He was a dissenter to his bones, a dangerous occupation for the subject of a monarch in an age of Revolution. Many of the obscurities in Blake were necessary: he didn't want to be tried for treason- although he came pretty close on one occasion when he turfed one of King George's redcoats out of his garden with harsh words about the paid slaves of tyrants.

He's buried with his wife in the Dissenters' cemetery at Bunhill Fields, London.

[Guest]

Sex was part of the agenda of Liberty to some of these cults.

'The lust of the goat is the bounty of God'
from Proverbs of Hell

...I could put that in the Pan thread

[Guest]

This mad carnival of loving
by: Heinrich Heine (1799-1856)

This mad carnival of loving,
This wild orgy of the flesh,
Ends at last and we two, sobered,
Look at one another, yawning.

Emptied the inflaming cup
That was filled with sensuous potions,
Foaming, almost running over--
Emptied is the flaming cup.

All the violins are silent
That impelled our feet to dancing,
To the giddy dance of passion--
Silent are the violins.

All the lanterns now are darkened
That once poured their streaming brilliance
On the masquerades and murmurs--
Darkened now are all the lanterns.
TRANS. by LOUIS UNTERMEYER

[eddie]

'The lust of the goat is the bounty of God'
from Proverbs of Hell

Blake, "Two Angels Descending,"
Pencil drawing, c. 1822
Note the serpentine phallus images.


From Vala, or the Four Zoas, "The Golden Chapel," pencil, c. 1797

"[I]n Blake's own, pre-Victorian milieu, his antinomian sexual theories would have found sympathetic readers and listeners among the motley crew of Moravians, Swedenborgians, Kabbalists, alchemists, and millenarians who populated the clandestine world of illuminist Freemasonry in London. From the evidence of his drawings, notebooks, and illuminated prophecies, it is clear that Blake maintained a life-long commitment to radical theories of sexuality. Indeed, Mrs. Blake had much to cry about, as she struggled first to comprehend and then to collaborate with his theory and praxis. Blake's own confidence in his sexual credo was possibly rooted in his early family life, for his father allegedly associated with Swedenborgians, Moravians, and other "irregular" Freemasons. From each of these societies, with their overlapping memberships, young Blake could have imbibed the theosophy of desire that fueled his visionary art and troubled his marriage...."

(Marsha Keith Schuchard)

[Guest]

...^...well...I remember reading thatl Blake and his wife used to sit naked in a garden room reading Paradise Lost aloud to each other, and weren't perturbed by the arrival of the odd guest...but Tantric sex...didn't know about that

[eddie]

I've been trying, without success, to find on the web a startling Blake cartoon (I'm pretty sure it's by Blake, at any rate) of a kind of circular orgy with the participants all being taken from behind.

All very Charles Manson, really.

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