Re: poetry thread

[Guest]

...here the whole bottom of the leaf is encrusted...the top of the leaf leaf is dull eucalyptus green and the underside is pure silver (in harsh sunlight). You just can't help licking one. I love salt. I consider it a food group

[Guest]

Happy New Year

Mira, no pido mucho,
solamente tu mano, tenerla
como un sapito que duerme así contento.
Necesito esa puerta que me dabas
para entrar a tu mundo, ese trocito
de azúcar verde, de redondo alegre.
¿No me prestás tu mano en esta noche
de fìn de año de lechuzas roncas?
No puedes, por razones técnicas.
Entonces la tramo en el aire, urdiendo cada dedo,
el durazno sedoso de la palma
y el dorso, ese país de azules árboles.
Así la tomo y la sostengo,
como si de ello dependiera
muchísimo del mundo,
la sucesión de las cuatro estaciones,
el canto de los gallos, el amor de los hombres.


Happy New Year

Look, I don't ask much,
just your hand, to hold it
like a little frog who'd sleep there happily.
I need that door you gave me
for coming into your world, that little chunk
of green sugar, of a lucky ring.
Can't you just spare me your hand tonight
at the end of a year of hoarse-voiced owls?
You can't, for technical reasons. So
I weave it in the air, warping each finger,
the silky peach of the palm
and the back, that country of blue trees.
That's how I take it and hold it, as
if so much of the world
depended on it,
the succession of the four seasons,
the crowing of the roosters, the love of human beings.


By Julio Cortázar
Translation by Stephen Kessler

[eddie]

Ted Hughes to take place in Poets' Corner

Memorial to the former poet laureate, who died in 1998, to be unveiled in Westminster Abbey's South Transept

Maev Kennedy

The Guardian, Tuesday 6 December 2011


Ted Hughes' memorial in Poets Corner, Westminster Abbey. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

A slab inscribed with poignant lines from a poem by Ted Hughes, uniting in one stone his love of poetry, fishing, and his adopted county, Devon, is to be dedicated in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey.

The lines from his poem That Morning recall a day when he stood deep in an Alaskan stream as a shoal of salmon flickered by: "So we found the end of our journey, So we stood alive in the river of light, Among the creatures of light, creatures of light".

The poet laureate died in 1998, one of the most critically admired and popular poets of the 20th century. Members of his family including his widow, Carol, and Frieda, his daughter with Sylvia Plath, will join friends and fellow poets including the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, former poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Simon Armitage and Blake Morrison, authors Michael Morpurgo and Graham Swift, and others from the arts world.

The slab of Kirkstone green slate was designed by the Devon stonemason Ronald Parsons, and carved as he listened to recordings of Hughes reading his own work. It will be unveiled at the foot of the memorial to TS Eliot – Hughes's mentor and a director of his publisher, Faber and Faber. All the members of a family scarred by tragedy will be recalled in the ceremony. Heaney – who said at Hughes's funeral, "No death outside my immediate family has left me feeling more bereft; no death in my lifetime has hurt poets more" – will give the oration on Tuesday night and read several Hughes poems, including Some Pike for Nicholas, another fishing poem recalling some of his happiest hours with his son, Nicholas, who killed himself in 2009. Plath killed herself in the bitterly cold winter of 1963. Actor Juliet Stevenson will read other poems including Hughes's tender verse about his daughter Full Moon and Little Frieda.

The son immortalised in the poetry of both parents – including the fishing poem now inscribed on the memorial slab, and in Sylvia Plath's Nick and the Candlestick – became an expert on fisheries and ocean science, but killed himself in 2009 after battling depression for years.

Plath's death, when Hughes had an affair and she killed herself in the bitterly cold winter of 1963, cast a long shadow over the rest of his life. Some of her more passionate admirers held him responsible for her death, and the name "Hughes" was repeatedly chiselled off her tomb stone in Yorkshire. He publicly gave his side of the story only in the last year of his life, in the TS Eliot and Forward prize winning anthology Birthday Letters. Her life, and their early happy years together, will be recalled in a letter to Plath which will be read by Lord Evans, former chairman of Faber and Faber.

His memorial in the corner of the South Transept, one of the best loved parts of the abbey for visitors, joins a dazzling assembly of poets, actors and authors, including Shakespeare, Edmund Spencer, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Johnson, and Sir Laurence Olivier. Most are buried elsewhere, and many took centuries to earn their place in the company: the most recently unveiled was to Elizabeth Gaskell who died in 1865. The tradition began almost accidentally: the first poet buried there, Geoffrey Chaucer, won his place not because he wrote the Canterbury Tales but because he was clerk of works to the palace of Westminster.

• This article was amended on 6 December 2011. The original referred to TS Eliot as one of Ted Hughes's predecessors as poet laureate. This has been removed as incorrect.

[Guest]

I Am Waiting
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti b. 1919

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier


and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep thru the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder


I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

[Guest]

Walking Around
by Pablo Neruda

It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie
houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse
sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.

It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.

Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.

I don't want so much misery.
I don't want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.

That's why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the
night.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist
houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.

There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical
cords.

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic
shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling.

[Guest]

Romance
by Edgar Allan Poe

Romance, who loves to nod and sing
With drowsy head and folded wing
Among the green leaves as they shake
Far down within some shadowy lake,
To me a painted paroquet
Hath been—most familiar bird—
Taught me my alphabet to say,
To lisp my very earliest word
While in the wild wood I did lie,
A child—with a most knowing eye.

Of late, eternal condor years
So shake the very Heaven on high
With tumult as they thunder by,
I have no time for idle cares
Through gazing on the unquiet sky;
And when an hour with calmer wings
Its down upon my spirit flings,
That little time with lyre and rhyme
To while away—forbidden things—
My heart would feel to be a crime
Unless it trembled with the strings.

[Guest]

Once he wrote a movie plot
On the run
Off the cuff
Full of symbols packing punch


Once he wrote a movie plot
But he won't do that no more
Cos he says he's out to lunch.

[Guest]

I want to write a poem
all the books are put away

so here I am with a red pen
and a post-it yellow page.

[Guest]

Write me what you’re wearing. Are you warm?
Write me how you sleep. Is your bed soft?
Write me how you look. Are you the same?
Write me what you miss. Is it my arm?

Tell me: are they letting you alone?
Can you hold out? What will their next move be?
What are you doing? Is it what should be done?
What are you thinking of? Is it of me?

Questions are all that I can give you, and
I take what answers come, because I must.
If you are tired, I can’t give you a hand;

Or, hungry, feed you. Thus, it is as though
I were not in the world, did not exist.
It is as though I had forgotten you.




Schreib mir, was du anhast! Ist es warm?
Schreib mir, wie du liegst! Liegst du auch weich?
Schreib mir, wie du aussiehst! Ist’s noch gleich?
Schreib mir, was dir fehlt! Ist es mein Arm?

Schreib mir, wie’s dir geht! Verschont man dich?
Schreib mir, was sie treiben! Reicht dein Mut?
Schreib mir, was du tust! Ist es auch gut?
Schreib mir, woran denkst du? Bin es ich?

Freilich hab ich dir nur meine Fragen!
Und die Antwort hör ich, wie sie fällt!
Wenn du mud bist, kann ich dir nichts tragen.

Hungerst du, hab ich dir nichts zum Essen.
Und so bin ich grad wie aus der Welt
Nicht mehr da, als hätt ich dich vergessen.


by Bertolt Brecht
(From the collection written during the WWII)

[Guest]

Philip Larkin's reputation here in the UK nosedived after his posthumous correspondence laid bare not a confused Everyman (like the rest of us) but a rather nasty crypto-Fascist porn-loving misogynist.

That's as maybe, but I still think the poems themselves have merit- if you manage to disassociate them in your own mind from the rather unpleasant creep who wrote them, that is.

I've just found this:

"We should be careful of each other, we should be kind, while there is still time." Philip Larkin

... and thought of what you said

[eddie]

CHRISTMAS EVE IN THE WORKHOUSE

It was Christmas night in the workhouse
And the paupers was having their dinners.
And the preacher he called from the top of the hall--
"Get down on your knees, you sinners.

And them poor paupers knelt in that cheerless room
On their benches hard and wooden.
And the preacher called in a voice of doom--
"Bring on the Christmas puddin."

"Put down your heads," says he with a leer,
"Cause I want you all to think
Of the sins of the flesh that has brung us here,
Tobacco and women and drink."

"And I'm telling youse now and I'm telling youse good.
" And his voice took a dangerous edge.
"No one gets to ate the puddin
Till everyone takes the pledge."

And a chill of doom ran round the room.
You could cut the air with a knife
As each man searched in the depths of his soul
For the sins of his wasted life.

And then them paupers rose as one
And said as bold as brass.
"You can keep your Christmas puddin and stick it ....

[Guest]

Dance me to the end of love
a song by Leonard Cohen

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We're both of us beneath our love, we're both of us above
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

[Guest]

^ I was listening to that song when my sister came and asked "are you listening to Julio Iglesias? "
It was because of the music (chorus) at the beginning...

[Guest]

Leonard Cohen’s “Going Home”
Posted by The New Yorker



The Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen has a poem in the magazine this week, “Going Home,” that he also set to music on his upcoming album, “Old Ideas.”


Going Home
by Leonard Cohen

I love to speak with Leonard
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
He’s a lazy bastard
Living in a suit

But he does say what I tell him
Even though it isn’t welcome
He will never have the freedom
To refuse

He will speak these words of wisdom
Like a sage, a man of vision
Though he knows he’s really nothing
But the brief elaboration of a tube

Going home
Without my sorrow
Going home
Sometime tomorrow
To where it’s better
Than before

Going home
Without my burden
Going home
Behind the curtain
Going home
Without the costume
That I wore

He wants to write a love song
An anthem of forgiving
A manual for living with defeat

A cry above the suffering
A sacrifice recovering
But that isn’t what I want him to complete

I want to make him certain
That he doesn’t have a burden
That he doesn’t need a vision

That he only has permission
To do my instant bidding
That is to SAY what I have told him
To repeat

Going home
Without my sorrow
Going home
Sometime tomorrow
Going home
To where it’s better
Than before

Going home
Without my burden
Going home
Behind the curtain
Going home
Without the costume
That I wore

I love to speak with Leonard
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
He’s a lazy bastard
Living in a suit

[eddie]

I've reached the Paradiso section of my contemporary Divine Comedy...been writing some more poems about my personal Beatrice...going to use this as as an epigraph for this section:

She lit a burner on the stove and offered me a pipe
"I thought you'd never say hello" she said
"You look like the silent type"
Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burning coal
Pouring off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you
Tangled up in blue
(Bob Dylan)

Don't know that it really matters but Bob gets the century wrong: Dante lived in 14th c. Tuscany.

[eddie]

Remember the I Ching reading you did for me, Moony? The Marriage hexagram? We were puzzling over whether this referred to book or babe. Turns out it was both.

[Guest]

I know I'm not Moony but... do I understand what you're saying? Is she a witch?

[eddie]

Is she a witch?

Indubitably.

[Guest]

Remember the I Ching reading you did for me, Moony? The Marriage hexagram? We were puzzling over whether this referred to book or babe. Turns out it was both.

...you are going to MARRY her?????

[Guest]

that's the question I didn't dare to ask

[Guest]

[eddie]

Ha! Beat you to the draw. That illustration's already in the book: Dante's first sight of Beatrice working on the gateline at Liverpool Street station. But great anticipation there, Moony.

Marriage? Dunno about that. If it comes to anything of the sort, I'd imagine that a wood and a druid would probably come into it at some point.

[Guest]

Remember the I Ching reading you did for me, Moony? The Marriage hexagram? We were puzzling over whether this referred to book or babe. Turns out it was both.

...took me ages to locate the hexagram and appropriate line.

...a snow white steed
progress delayed by a betrothal
unwarranted suspicion

Makes no sense to me

[Guest]

Dante's first sight of Beatrice

...the musician ex-partner sent it as a postcard from Firenze, a long time ago. I still have it.

[Guest]

Marriage? Dunno about that. If it comes to anything of the sort, I'd imagine that a wood and a druid would probably come into it at some point.

Pagan weddings, in many cases performed by a recognized druid, will now be allowed in Ireland.

Following a five-year campaign the Irish state has now recognized the right of the Pagan Federation Ireland to perform weddings.

Couples will now be able to be legally married after a ceremony that concludes with jumping over a broomstick to mark crossing over from an old life to a new one.

Pagan weddings are also known as hand-fasting and most recently, the nephew of Richard Branson got married that way and they have become increasingly popular. http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Pagan-weddings-now-allowed-in-Ireland-84903247.html

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