| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
 Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2007 11:28 am Post subject: PokerPulse Gambler's Guide to Poetry - Read, Write, Teach It |
 |
|
| Quote: | WELCOME!
PokerPulse Gambler's Guide to Poetry
|
How to read, write and even TEACH the miserable stuff:
| Quote: | Staying Alive
Real Poems for Unreal Times
Paperback
Edited by Bloodaxe founder Neil Astley
A terrific compilation by an expert of his favorite works worldwide! A labor of love and it shows. |
What is poetry and why is it poetry?
| Quote: | | Quote: | Coleridge: Poetry; the best words in the best order.
Dana Gioia: Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning.
Keats: It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
Yeats: Poetry is truth seen with passion.
Boswell: “Sir, what is poetry?”
Johnson: “Why Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.”
Christopher Logue: Poetry cannot be defined, only experienced.
Wordsworth: Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge … Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility…
T.S. Eliot: … it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquility. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences… a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation… Poetry is not a turning loose from emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of presonality, but an escape from personality.
David Constantine: It is a widening of consciousness, an extension of humanity. We sense an ideal version when we read, and with it arm ourselves, to quarrel with reality.
Sylvia Plath: My poems do not turn out to be about Hiroshima, but about a child forming itself finger by finger in the dark. They are not about the terrors of mass extinction, but about the bleakness of the moon over a yew tree in a neighboring graveyard… In a sens,e these poems are deflections. I do not think they are an escape.
Archibald MacLeish:
A poem should not mean
But be.
R. S. Thomas:
Poetry is that
which arrives at the intellect
by way of the heart.
(Fom Poets on Poetry, p. 18) |
| Quote: | One should only read books which bite and sting one.
If the book we are reading does not wake us up with
a blow to the head, what's the point in reading?
A book must be the axe which smashes
The frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold
no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry.
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were
taken off, I know that is poetry.
Emily Dickinson
(From unnumbered page before the Table of Contents) |
|
A wonderfully cheerful, effective new guide:
The Ode Less Travelled
Unlocking the Poet Within
Hardcover AND CD Audio
By British author/actor/adventurer *Stephen Fry
Narrated by the author
| Quote: | This is not an academic book. It is unlikely to become part of the core curriculum. It may help you with your English exams because it will certainly allow you to be a smart-arse in Practical Criticism papers (if such things still exist) and demonstrate that you know a trochee from a dactyl, a terza from an ottava rima and assonance from enjambment, in which case I am happy to be of service. It is over a quarter of a century since I did any teaching and I have no idea if such knowledge is considered good or useless these days; for all I know it will count against you.
I have written this book because over the past thirty-five years I have derived enormous private pleasure from writing poetry and like anyone with a passion I am keen to share it. You will be relieved to hear that I will not be burdening you with any of my actual poems (except sample verse specifically designed to help clarify form and metre): I do not write poetry for publication, I write it for the same reason that, according to Wilde, one should write a diary, to have something sensational to read on the train. And as a way of speaking to myself. But most importantly of all for pleasure.
This is not the only work on prosody (the art of versification) ever published in English, but it is the one that I should like to have been available to me many years ago. It is technical, yes, inasmuch as it investigates technique, but I hope that does not make it dry, obscure or difficult - after all, 'technique' is just the Greek for 'art'. I have tried to make everything approachable without being loopily matey or absurdly simplistic.
I certainly do not attempt in this book to pick up where those poor teachers left off and instruct you in poetry appreciation. I suspect, however, that once you have started writing a poem of any real shape you will find yourself admiring and appreciating other poets' work a great deal more...(From the excellent Foreward at pgs. xviii-xix) |
Two more excellent how-to manuals:
A Poetry Handbook
Paperback
By Pulitzer Prize-winning U.S. poet Mary Oliver
| Quote: | To make a poem, we must make sounds. Not random sounds, but chosen sounds.
How much does it matter what kinds of sounds we make? How do we choose what sounds to make?
"Go!" does not sound like "Stop!" Also, in some way, the words do not feel the same. "Hurry up!" does not sound or feel like its opposite, "Slow down!" "Hurry up!" rustles with activity, leaps to its final punch. "Slow down!" pours from the tongue, as flat as two plates. Sounds differ. Sounds matter. "No ideas but in things," said William Carlos Williams. And, for our purposes here, no things but in the sounds of the words representing them. A "rock" is not a "stone."
But, why is a rock not a stone? (Opening paragraps of the chapter entitled, Sound, at p. 19) |
and:
Rules for the Dance
A Handbook for Writing
and Reading Metrical Verse
By Mary Oliver
| Quote: | Metrical poetry belongs to a certain era - a few centuries - and with every passing year that contained time grows more distant, its methods more estranged from our own. The reader of modern poetry feels at ease with the cadences of conversation. To read Chaucer's poems, now, requires a diligent and even extraordinary effort; it requires, indeed, a specialized knowledge of the language and the versification of Chaucer's time. The same thing, in our age, is happening to metrical poetry. It is no longer a safe bet that students will have been prepared for meter by having heard, over and over the rhythms of Mother Goose. In schools, students are encouraged to follow their own unpatterned expressions, and little if any memorization of metrical poems is now required.
As a result, students and other readers of Milton, of Shakespeare, of Wordsworth, of Wilfred Owen, even of Frost, come to the poems, frankly, with tin ears. They cannot scan. They don't know an iamb from an anapest. They read for comprehension and hear little if anything of the interwoven pleasures of the sound and the pattern of the poem, which are also deeply instructive concerning the statement of the poem, along with the meanings of the words themselves. Not knowing how to listen, they read the poem but they do not hear it sing, or slide, or slow down, or crush with the heel of sound, or leap off the line, or hurry, or sob, or refuse to move from the self-pride of the calm pentameter no matter what fire is rustling through it.
...Without an understanding of this music, Shakespeare is only the sense we can make of him; he is the wisdom without the shapeliness, which is one half of the poem.
So, most of all, I wrote this book to help readers of metrical poems enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure. I hope their understanding and pleasure of metric poetry will be deepened and complicated, so much so that their response to the poems becomes not only comprehension, but comprehension accompanied by a felt experience. (From the Foreward at pgs. viii-ix) |
What poetry is NOT:
The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks
Hardcover
By Frostback Robertson Davies, alter ego of
humorist Samuel Marchbanks
| Quote: | OF UNIVERSITY VERSE
I received an undergraduate magazine this morning, containing the kind of poetry which boys and girls write between eighteen and twenty-one, full of words like "harlot," "stench," "whore" and the like. The young have a passion for strong meaty words, and like to write disillusioned verses with jagged edges about the deceit and bitterness of life. I idly turned my hand to versifying, and produced this nice bit of undergraduate poetry, which I offer free to any university magazine:
DISSILUSION
Ugh!
Take it away!
Life - the thirty-cent breakfast
Offered to vomiting Man
In this vast Hangover -
The World.
Onward I reel
Till Fate - the old whore -
Loose or costive
Drops me in the latrine of Oblivion -
Plop!
(From Savoury at pgs. 356-357) |
Just who is this Marchbanks?
| Quote: | "Let's talk about your life," I said. "Readers of our selection will expect to be given some information about your life. Come on, Sam; were you really born in a place called Skunk's Misery?"
"To doubt it is to doubt geography," said he. "You will find it only on the largest maps, but if you enquire of the right people , in the right place, they will tell you where it is. The old homestead has sunk rather far into the swamp, I understand, but some relics of it are still there. The weekly paper, The Skunk's Misery Trombone, on which I learned my craft; the barbershop where as a boy I had my ten-cent haircut, with the barber's stomach, warm and maternal, lolled over me like a duvet. You behold in me the descendant - unworthy perhaps, but probably not - of pioneers and Loyalists. I am a WASP, and nothing of the derision that is nowadays directed at that ethnic group touches me."
"But a WASP is a White Anglo-Saxon; you are always blowing about the purity of your Celtic descent."
"You surely don't suggest that I describe myself as a WC, do you? That would simply by playing into the hands of my detractors. No, no; for those loose thinkers who have no conception of a Celt, I must appear as a WASP." (From the Introduction, p. XII) |
And who might YOU be?
| Quote: | OF EDITORS
... I think that Canada is wise never to have created a stamp with the head of an editor on it; editors at best are disagreeable fellows, professional contradicters and sassers back. An editor of any degree of experience becomes incapable of complete agreement with anyone, and he reads the dictionary so much that he always knows more nasty names for any particular offence than the man who has committed it. Whatever an editor may be in his private life, he is professionally ferocious, and he can turn on his tap of belligerence at a moment's notice. There was a time when the horsewhipping of editors was a common sport, and shooting their hats off in the street was regarded as mere pleasantry. Now the law forbids both of these manly pastimes... But glorifying an editor by putting him on a stamp is as inexplicable to other nations as is our Canadian custom of worshipping the beaver, that other unattractive, gnawing, surly mammal. To be obliged to lick even the back of an editor's picture would be intolerable to a free man, though, an instant later, he could punch the picture in the face with his thumb. (From The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks, p. 294) |
How does one read poetry?
The Best Poems of the English Language
From Chaucer Through Frost
Selected and with Commentary by
Harold Bloom
Hardcover
| Quote: | ... Poetry is in the first place poetry, a high and ancient art. It raises your consciousness of glory and of grief, of woe or wonder, as Shakespeare phrased it. Shakespeare spoke of "wonder-wounded hearers": they are the readers this volume seeks to serve.
... There are 108 poets represented in this book (aside from Anonymous), with about 24 given in something like their full abundance. Essentially, this is the anthology I've always wanted to possess. It reflects sixty years of deep and passionate reading, going back to my love of William Blake and Hart Crane, of William Shakespeare and John Milton, that vitalized my life from my twelfth year onward.
... Ultimately, we seek out the best poems because something many, if not most, of us quests for the transcendental and extraordinary, however secular, however well within the realm of the natural. We long, as Wordsworth wrote, for "something evermore about to be." The marvelous comes to us, when it comes, in very different forms: ideally in another person, but sometimes by an otherness in the self. (From the Introduction) |
| Quote: | 1
Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative. Figuration is a departure from the literal, and the form of a great poem itself can be a trope ("turning") or figure. A common dictionary equivalent for "figurative language" is "metaphorical," but a metaphor actually is a highly specific figure, or turning from the literal. Kenneth Burke, a profound student of rhetoric, or the language of figures, distringuished four fundamental tropes: irony, synecdoche, metonymy, and metaphor. ... We learn to wince when Hamlet says: "I humbly thank you" or its equivalent, since the prince generally is neither humble nor grateful.
... 2
Language, to a considerable extent, is concealed figuration: ironies and synecdoches, metonymies and metaphors that we recognize only when our awareness increases. Real poetry is aware of and exploits these ruined tropes, though it is both a burden and a resource, for later poets in a tradition, that language ages into this wealth of figuration. The major poets of the twentieth century, in Britain and America, were those who could best exploit this equivocal richness: Thomas Hardy, W. B Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane among them.
... 3
Greatness in poetry depends upon splendor of figurative language and on cognitive power, or what Emerson termed "meter-making argument." Shakespeare is first among poets at representing thought, which pragmatically does not differ from thinking in poetry, a process not yet fully adumbrated. Angus Fletcher's Colors of the Mind can be recommended for its "conjectures on thinking in literature," which is the book's subtitle.
Colors of the Mind
Conjectures on Thinking in Literature
Paperback
By Angus Fletcher
... One definition of poetic power is that it so fuses thinking and remembering that we cannot separate the two processes. Can a poem, of authentic strength, be composed without remembering a prior poem, whether by the self or by another? Literary thinking relies upon literary memory, and the drama of recognition, in every writer, contains within it a moment of coming to terms with another writer, or with an earlier version of the self.
... 4
The art of reading poetry begins with mastering allusiveness in particular poems, from the simple to the very complex.
... At issue is how to determine the appropriateness of an allusion, and since great poetry is very nearly as allusive as it is figurative, the question of accuracy in tracing allusiveness is crucial.
... 5
... There is a benign haunting in poetic tradition, one that transcends the sorrows of influence, particularly the new poet's fear that there is little left for her or him to do. In truth, there is everything remaining to be thought and sung, provided an individual voice is attained.
... 6
What makes one poem better than another? The question, always central to the art of reading poetry, is more crucial today than every before, since extrapoetic considerations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and assorted ideologies increasingly constitute the grounds for judgment in the educational institutions and the media of the English-speaking world.
... The ancient idea of the Sublime, as set forth by the Hellenistic critic we call "Longinus," seems to me the origin of my expectation that great poetry will possess an inevitability of phrasing. Longinus tells us that in the experience of the Sublime we apprehend a greatness to which we respoond by a desire for identification, so that we will become what we behold. Loftiness is a quality that emanates from teh realm of aspiration, from what Wordsworth called a sense of something evermore about to be.
On the Sublime
Hardcover
Longinus
... 7
... As you read a poem, there should be several questions in your mind. What does it mean, and how is that meaning attained? Can I judge how good it is? Has it transcended the history of its own time and the events of the poets life, or is it now only a period piece?
... 8
... consciousness is to poetry what marble is sculpture: the material that is being worked.
... The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists of ourselves. Even Shakespeare cannot make me into Falstaff or Hamlet, but all great poetry asks us to possessed by it. To possess it by memory is a start, and to augment our consiousness is the goal. The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes. (From The Art of Reading Poetry, pgs. 1-20) |
| Quote: | | Note: Windy and one might not agree with all the selections and comments but a noble and useful work with an enthusiasm for its subject that's catching. Surely there are few better texts for explaining poetic devices - the nuts and bolts of the thing - and their effective application. At the very least, a wonderful anthology in the great Norton tradition, the cornerstone of every self-respecting survey course. |
| Quote: | The Northon Anthology of Literature
Volume I
8th Edition
The Norton Anthology of Literature
Volume II
8th Edition
|
Best practices we've collected along our chequered way:
1. Good poetry SHOWS the reader; it doesn’t TELL.
| Quote: | My Fair Lady
DVD
Featuring the Lerner and Lowe classic,
Show Me here on YouTube.com
| Quote: | | Think of Lerner and Lowe’s hit song from My Fair Lady: Show Me. Showing requires ACTIVE – not passive (telling) – words - VERBS, and lots of ‘em. |
|
2. Poetry is oral. Listen to it.
| Quote: | | An excellent source is The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, celebrated host of A Prairie Home Companion. He reads a poem each day. Listen and learn. Teachers: Even if you are not lacking in the poet's romantic lilt and warble, avail yourself of the ba-zillion excellent sound recordings available courtesy public funds at most libraries in the free world. Need suggestions? Write to legal@pokerpulse.com. Like all other noble savants, we live to serve. |
3. When analyzing a poem for meaning, forget metre, at least for awhile. Follow the ACTION by studying, again, the
... Still stuck and there's a paper due?
Oy! Is there a place in poetry for footballers and yobs?
Uncle Fred in Springtime
Paperback
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | A faint stir of interest ruffled the tone of Pongo's face.
"What do you mean, your fine? Were you pinched last night?"
"Yes. There was a bit of unpleasantness at the Ball, and they scooped me in. It was Ricky's fault."
"Who," asked Lord Ickenham, "is Ricky?"
"My cousin. Arlaric Gilpin."
"Poet. Beefy chap with red hair. It was he who introduced this girl Polly to Horace," interpolated Pongo, supplying additional footnotes. "She was giving him dancing lessons."
"And how did he come to mix you up in unpleasantness?"
"Well, it was like this. Ricky, though I didn't know it, is engaged to Polly. And another thing I didn't know was that he hadn't much liked the idea of her giving me dancing lessons and, when she told him I was taking her to the Ball, expressly forbade her to go. So when he found us together there... I say, he wasn't hanging about outside when you arrived, was he?"
"I saw no lurking figure."
"He said he was going to look in to-day and break my neck."
"I didn't know poets broke people's necks."
"Ricky does. He once took on three simultaneous costermongers in Covent Garden and cleaned them up in five minutes. He had gone there to get inspiration for a pastoral, and they started chi-iking (sic) him, and he sailed in and knocked them base over apex into a pile of Brussels sprouts."
"How different from the home life of the late Lord Tennyson. But you were telling us about this trouble at the Ball." (-- pgs. 50-51) |
Yes, and don't miss the bit about poetry's Gangs and Bullies, the second talking point in Neil Astley's StAnza lecture, 2005:
| Quote: | Our self-regarding poetry establishment is completely out of touch with the readership of poetry at grassroots level, and if they aren't responsive to that audience, they will lose it completely. I don't often find myself agreeing with A.N. Wilson but he seems spot on with this remark: 'Today's English poets are huddled behind a stockade composed of the public's indifference and their own self-importance' (Daily Telegraph, 24 January 2005).
Nor is this a peculiarly English or British phenomenon: it seems to go with the nature of the all-too-familiar beast, Homo poeticus. This is Billy Collins, writing in the New York Times: 'One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else' (23 February 2003). |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3018#3018
Last edited by editor on Tue Feb 02, 2010 12:53 pm; edited 54 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2007 8:48 am Post subject: |
|
|
In no particular order:
PokerPulse Favorite poems, collections and anthologies
| Quote: | Being Alive
Papberback
Edited, again, by Neil Astley
If it's anything like its predecessor, this collection will be one of the best by a master editor. We await our copy. Please check back soon for updates and samples. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3073#3073
Last edited by editor on Tue Aug 04, 2009 2:48 pm; edited 10 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2007 9:09 am Post subject: |
|
|
From the Fighting Irish:
Contemporary Irish Poetry
An Anthology
Hardcover
Edited by Anthony Bradley
| Quote: | Brendan Gone
for Derek Mahon
Man seasick with drink
Steadying himself against a lamp post
Before he is game to risk: chance
The long street's precipice brink
Like a very fleshy ghost
Doing a St. Vitus dance
In night's depth, the disappearing
Act, the deep, death-fearing, lost
Irish bachelor in a New York flat
After money-making years of waste
Blown up with beer false fat
Losing one's boy taste
For life, woman, or
Enemy enounter during war
At night bolts his apartment door
Alone, window-hurtling to the street
A corpse once young and sweet.
(Padraic Fiacc, pgs. 150-151) |
| Quote: | | Note: A solid if dated collection of contemporary Irish poetry's heavyweights. Includes brief bios but no interpretive guides. Women poets are conspicuously absent. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3074#3074
Last edited by editor on Fri Jul 31, 2009 3:24 pm; edited 8 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 11:08 am Post subject: |
|
|
From Losing Streak:
Loss
An Anthology
Edited by Elspeth Barker
Hardcover
| Quote: | One Art
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
(Elizabeth Bishop, of course, at p. 2) |
A small but perfect consolation prize for any kind of loss. It's an esoteric collection probably intended to be a gift one might send to comfort a friend following a death but don't be deceived. These are extremely powerful selections of poetry and prose poems. A wonder.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3106#3106 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 12:56 pm Post subject: |
|
|
From Losing Streak:
Poems to Read
A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology
Edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz
| Quote: | Years of Solitude
To the one who sets a second place at the table anyway.
To the one at the back of the empty bus.
To the ones who name each piece of stained glass projected on
a white wall.
To anyone convinced that a monologue is a conversation with
the past.
To the one who loses with the deck he marked.
To those who are destined to inherit the meek.
To Us.
(Dionisio Martinez, at p. 274) |
A fruit-laden project whose spoils may be hurled at any reptile claiming not to hear the sweet, sad music of poetry.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3107#3107
Last edited by editor on Mon Dec 01, 2008 10:50 am; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Sat Nov 17, 2007 1:41 pm Post subject: |
|
|
From Omens and Lucky Charms:
Horse Latitudes
Hardcover
By Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Muldoon
Even better, listen to the author read his work.
| Quote: | | Editor's Note: This one is unfortunately not yet available as an audiobook, but we're hopeful. Please check back for updates. In the meantime, ESL students may get a feel for the lyrical Irish lilt by listening to the author read a few selections at his website. We were unable to activate the clips when we checked Nov. 17/07, but we'll persevere. Cups up to the poet for acknowledging the yawning gap in the market for this type of product and attempting to fill it! |
| Quote: | The Old Country
I
Where every town was tidy town
and every garden a hanging garden.
A half could be had for half a crown.
Every major artery would harden
since every meal was a square meal.
Every clothesline showed a line of undies
yet no house was in dishabille.
Every Sunday took a month of Sundays
till everyone got it off by heart
every start was a bad start
since all conclusions were foregone.
Every wood had its twist of woodbine.
Every cliff its herd of fatalistic swine.
Every runnel was a Rubicon.
II
Every runnel was a Rubicon
and every annual a hardy annual
applying itself like linen to a lawn.
Every glove compartment held a manual
and a map of the roads, major and minor.
Every major road had major roadworks.
Every wishy-washy water diviner
had stood like a bulwark
against something worth standing against.
The smell of incense left us incensed
at the firing of the fort.
Every heron was a presager
of some disaster after which, we'd wager,
every resort was a last resort.
III
Every resort was a last resort
with a harbor that harbored an old grudge.
Every sale was a selling short.
There were those who simply wouldn't budge
from the Dandy to the Rover.
That shouting was the shouting
but for which it was all over -
the weekend, I mean, we set off on an outing
with the weekday train timetable.
Every tower was a tower of Babel
that graced each corner of a bawn
where every lookout was a poor lookout.
Every rill had its unflashy trout.
Every runnel was a Rubicon.
IV
Every runnel was a Rubicon
where every ditch was a last ditch.
Every man was "a grand wee mon"
whose every pitch was another sales pitch
now every boat was a burned boat.
Every cap was a cap in hand.
Every coat a trailed coat.
Every band was a gallant band
across the broken bridge
and broken ridge after broken ridge
where you couldn't beat a stick with a big stick.
Every straight road was a straight up speed trap.
Every decision was a snap.
Every cut was to the quick.
V
Every cut was a cut to the quick
when the weasel's twist met the weasel's tooth
and Christ was somewhat impolitic
in branding as "weasels fighting in a hole," forsooth,
the petrol smugglers back on the old sod
when a vendor of red diesel
for whom every rod was a green rod
reminded one and all that the weasel
was nowhere to be found in that same quarter.
No mere mortar could withstand a ten-inch mortar.
Every hope was a forlorn hope.
So it was that the defenders
were taken in by their own blood splendour.
Every slope was a slippery slope.
VI
Every slope was a slippery slope
where every shave was a very close shave
and money was money for old rope
where every grave was a watery grave
now every boat was, again, a burned boat.
Every dime-a-dozen rat a dime-a-dozen drowned rat
except for the whitrack, or stoat,
which the very Norsemen had down pat
as a weasel-word
though we know their speech was rather slurred
Every time was time in the nick
just as every nick was a nick in time.
Every unsheathed sword was somehow sheathed in rime.
Every cut was a cut to the quick.
VII
Every cut was a cut to the quick
what with every feather a leather to ruffle.
Every whittrack was a whittrack.
Everyone was in a right kerfuffle
when from his hob some hobbledehoy
would venture the witterick was a curlew.
Every wall was a wall of Troy
and every hunt a hunt in the purlieu
of a demesne so out of bounds
every hound might have been a hellhound.
At every lane end stood a milk churn
whose every dent was a sign of indenture
to some pig wormer or cattle drencher.
Every point was a point of no return.
VII
Every point was a point of no return
for those who had signed the Covenant in blood.
Every fern was a maidenhair fern
that gave every eye an eyeful of mud
ere it was plucked out and cast into the flame.
Every rowan was a mountain ash.
Every swath-swathed mower made of his graft a game
and the hay sash
went to the kemper best fit to kemp.
Every secretary was a temp
who could shift shape
like the river goddesses Banna and Boann.
Every two-a-penny maze was, at its heart, Minoan.
Every escape was a narrow escape.
IX
Every escape was a narrow escape
where every stroke was a broad stroke
of an ax on a pig nape.
Every pig was a pig in a poke
though it scooted once through the Diamond
so unfalt -- so unfalteringly.
The threshold of pain was outlimened
by the bar raised at high tea
now every scone was a drop scone.
Every ass had an ass's jawbone
that night itself drop from grin to girn.
Every malt was single malt.
Every pillar was pillar of salt.
Every point was a point of no return.
X
Every point was a point of no return
where to make a mark was to overstep the mark.
Every brae had its own braw burn.
Every meadow had its meadowlark
that stood in for the laverock.
Those Norse had tried fjord after fjord
to find a tight wee place to dock.
When he made scourge of small whin cords,
Christ drove out the moneylenders
and all the other bitter-enders
when the thing to have done was take up the slack.
Whin was to furze as furze was to gorse.
Every hobbledehoy had his hobbledehorse.
Every track was an inside track.
XI
Every track was an inside track
where every horse had the horse sense
to know it was only a glorified hack.
Every graineen of gratitude was immense
and every platitude a familiar platitude.
Every kemple of hay was a kemple tossed in the air
by a haymaker in a hay feud.
Every chair at the barn dance a musical chair
given how every paltry poltroon
and his paltry dog could carry a tune
yet no one would carry the can
any more than Samson would carry the temple.
Every spinal column was a collapsing stemple.
Every flash was a flash in the pan.
XII
Every flash was a flash in the pan
and every border a herbaceous border
unless it happened to be an
herbaceous border as observed by the Recorder
or recorded by the Observer.
Every widdie stemmed from a willow bole.
Every fervor was a religious fervor
by which we'd fly the godforsaken hole
into which we'd been flung by it.
Every pit was a bottomless pit
out of which every pig needed a piggyback.
Every cow had subsided in its subsidy.
Biddy winked at Paddy and Paddy winked at Biddy.
Every track was an inside track.
Every track was an inside track
and every job an inside job.
Every whitterick had been a witrack
until, from his hobbledehob,
that hobbledehobbledhoy
had insisted the whitterick was a curlew.
But every boy was still "one of the boys"
and every girl "ye girl ye"
for whom every dance was a last dance
and every chance a last chance
and every letdown a terrible letdown
from the days when every list was a laundry list
in that old country where, we reminisced,
every town was a tidy town.
(-- pgs. 38-46) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3126#3126
Last edited by editor on Tue Aug 04, 2009 2:49 pm; edited 3 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2007 12:46 pm Post subject: |
|
|
From Losing Streak:
Poetry Like Bread
Poets of the Political Imagination
from Curbstone Press
Hardcover
Edited by Martin Espada
| Quote: | Who Understands Me But Me
By former U.S. maximum-security prison inmate, Jimmy Santiago Baca
They turn the water off, so I live without water,
they build walls higher, so I live without treetops,
they paint the windows black, so I live without sunshine,
they lock my cage, so I live without going anywhere,
they take each last tear I have, I live without tears,
they take my life and crush it, so I live without a future,
they say I am beastly and fiendish, so I have no friends,
they stop up each hope, so I have no passage out of hell,
they give me pain, so I live with pain,
they give me hate, so I live with my hate,
they have changed me, and I am not the same man,
they give me no shower, so I live with my smell,
they separate me from my brothers, so I live without brothers,
who understands me when I say this is beautiful?
who understands me when I say I have found other freedoms?
I cannot fly or make something appear in my hand,
I cannot make the heavens open or the earth tremble,
I can live with myself, and I am amazed at myself, my love,
my beauty,
I am taken by my failures, astounded by my fears,
I am stubborn and childish,
in the midst of this wreckage of life they incurred,
I practise being myself,
and I have found parts of myself never dreamed of by me,
they were goaded out from under rocks in my heart
when the walls were built higher,
when the water was turned off and windows painted black.
I followed these signs
like an old tracker and followed the tracks deep into myself,
followed the blood-spotted path,
deeper into dangerous regions, and found so many parts of myself,
who taught me water is not everything,
and gave me new eyes to see through walls,
and when they spoke, sunlight came out of their mouths,
and I was laughing at me with them,
we laughed like children and made pacts to always be loyal,
who understands me when I say this is beautiful?
(-- pgs. 44-45) |
The best of an occasionally powerful collection.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3138#3138
Last edited by editor on Tue Aug 04, 2009 2:50 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2007 12:53 pm Post subject: |
|
|
From Losing Streak:
Faber Book of
Twentieth Century Scottish Poetry
Hardcover
Edited by Douglas Dunn
| Quote: | Bless This House
A sampler for Glasgow bedsits
Bless this house, wherever it is,.
This house and this and this and this
Pitched shaky as small nomad tents
Within Victorian permanence,
Where no names stay long, no families meet
In Observancy Road and Clouston Street
Where Harry and Sally who want to be 'free'
And Morag who works in the BBC
And Andy the Artist and Mhairi and Fran
(Whose father will never understand)
And John from Kilmarnock and Jean from the Isles
And Michael who jogs every day for miles
And Elspeth are passing through this year:
Bless them the short time they are here.
Bless the cup left for a month or more
On the dust of the window-ledge, the door
That won't quite shut, the broken fan,
The snowscape of fat in the frying pan.
Bless each burnt chop, each unseen smile
That they may nourish their hopes a while.
Bless the persistence of their faith,
The gentle incense of their breath.
Bless the wild dreams that are seeded here,
The lover to come, the amazing career.
Bless such small truths as they may find
By the lonely night-light of the mind.
Bless these who camp out in the loss of the past
And scavenge their own from what others have lost,
Who have the courage to reach for what they cannot see
And have gambled what was for what may never be.
So turn up the hi-fi, Michael and John.
What is to come may be already gone.
And pull up the covers, Jean and Mhairi.
The island is far and you've missed the ferry.
-- William McIlvanney, pgs. 304-305 |
An acquired taste, like rolled oats.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3139#3139
Last edited by editor on Tue Aug 04, 2009 2:52 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2007 1:03 pm Post subject: |
|
|
From Losing Streak:
Modern French Poetry
Paperback
Selected and Translated by
Martin Sorrell
| Quote: | J’ai tant rêvé de toi
J’ai tant rêvé de toi que tu perds ta réalité.
Est-il encore temps d’atteindre ce corps vivant
Et de baiser sur cette bouche la naissance
De la voix qui m’est chère ?
J’ai tant rêvé de toi que mes bras habitués
En étreignant ton ombre
À se croiser sur ma poitrine ne se plieraient pas
Au contour de ton corps, peut-être.
Et que, devant l’apparence réelle de ce qui me hante
Et me gouverne depuis des jours et des années,
Je deviendrais une ombre sans doute.
Ô balances sentimentales.
J’ai tant rêvé de toi qu’il n'est plus temps
Sans doute que je m’éveille.
Je dors debout, le corps exposé
À toutes les apparences de la vie
Et de l’amour et toi, la seule
qui compte aujourd'hui pour moi,
Je pourrais moins toucher ton front
Et tes lèvres que les premières lèvres
et le premier front venu.
J’ai tant rêvé de toi, tant marché, parlé,
Couché avec ton fantôme
Qu’il ne me reste plus peut-être,
Et pourtant, qu’a être fantôme
Parmi les fantômes et plus ombre
Cent fois que l’ombre qui se promène
Et se promènera allègrement
Sur le cadran solaire de ta vie.
I've dreamed such dreams of you
I've dreamed such dreams of you that you're losing your reality.
Do I still have time to reach your vital body, to kiss
into life that voice I love so much?
I've dreamed such dreams of you that my arms,
long practised in hugging your shadow and falling flat
across my chest, might not yield to your body's shape.
Faced with the real presence of what's haunted and
guided me all these days and years, doubtless I'd become
a shadow.
Fine balance of feelings!
I've dreamed such dreams of you that the time for
waking must have come and gone. I'm asleep on my feet,
exposed to every image of life and love, and you, the only
thing which counts for me now, any lips, any forehead
will be easier for me to touch than your forehead, your
lips.
I've dreamed such dreams of you, I've walked so
much, talked so much, lain so much with your shadow,
that perhaps now all I can be is a ghost among ghosts, a
hundred times more shadow than the moving shadow
cast and lightly cast again across your life measured by
the sun.
-- Robert Desnos
(-- pgs. 62-63) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3141#3141
Last edited by editor on Wed Jun 11, 2008 11:46 am; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Sat Nov 24, 2007 3:01 pm Post subject: |
|
|
The Best Poems of the English Language
From Chaucer Through Frost
Selected and with Commentary by
Harold Bloom
Hardcover
| Quote: | ... Poetry is in the first place poetry, a high and ancient art. It raises your consciousness of glory and of grief, of woe or wonder, as Shakespeare phrased it. Shakespeare spoke of "wonder-wounded hearers": they are the readers this volume seeks to serve.
... There are 108 poets represented in this book (aside from Anonymous), with about 24 given in something like their full abundance. Essentially, this is the anthology I've always wanted to possess. It reflects sixty years of deep and passionate reading, going back to my love of William Blake and Hart Crane, of William Shakespeare and John Milton, that vitalized my life from my twelfth year onward.
... Ultimately, we seek out the best poems because something many, if not most, of us quests for the transcendental and extraordinary, however secular, however well within the realm of the natural. We long, as Wordsworth wrote, for "something evermore about to be." The marvelous comes to us, when it comes, in very different forms: ideally in another person, but sometimes by an otherness in the self. (From the Introduction) |
| Quote: | | Note: A windy text and one might not agree with all the selections and comments but a noble and useful work with an enthusiasm for its subject that's catching. Surely there are few better texts for explaining poetic devices - the nuts and bolts of the thing - and their effective application. At the very least, a wonderful anthology in the great Norton tradition, the cornerstone of every self-respecting survey course. |
| Quote: | The Northon Anthology of Literature
Volume I
8th Edition
The Norton Anthology of Literature
Volume II
8th Edition
|
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3160#3160
Last edited by editor on Wed Jun 11, 2008 11:17 am; edited 3 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 10:27 am Post subject: |
|
|
The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks
Hardcover
By Frostback Robertson Davies, alter ego of humorist Samuel Marchbanks
| Quote: | OF UNIVERSITY VERSE
I received an undergraduate magazine this morning, containing the kind of poetry which boys and girls write between eighteen and twenty-one, full of words like "harlot," "stench," "whore" and the like. The young have a passion for strong meaty words, and like to write disillusioned verses with jagged edges about the deceit and bitterness of life. I idly turned my hand to versifying, and produced this nice bit of undergraduate poetry, which I offer free to any university magazine:
DISSILUSION
Ugh!
Take it away!
Life - the thirty-cent breakfast
Offered to vomiting Man
In this vast Hangover -
The World.
Onward I reel
Till Fate - the old whore -
Loose or costive
Drops me in the latrine of Oblivion -
Plop!
(From Savoury at pgs. 356-357) |
Just who is this Marchbanks critic?
| Quote: | "Let's talk about your life," I said. "Readers of our selection will expect to be given some information about your life. Come on, Sam; were you really born in a place called Skunk's Misery?"
"To doubt it is to doubt geography," said he. "You will find it only on the largest maps, but if you enquire of the right people , in the right place, they will tell you where it is. The old homestead has sunk rather far into the swamp, I understand, but some relics of it are still there. The weekly paper, The Skunk's Misery Trombone, on which I learned my craft; the barbershop where as a boy I had my ten-cent haircut, with the barber's stomach, warm and maternal, lolled over me like a duvet. You behold in me the descendant - unworthy perhaps, but probably not - of pioneers and Loyalists. I am a WASP, and nothing of the derision that is nowadays directed at that ethnic group touches me."
"But a WASP is a White Anglo-Saxon; you are always blowing about the purity of your Celtic descent."
"You surely don't suggest that I describe myself as a WC, do you? That would simply by playing into the hands of my detractors. No, no; for those loose thinkers who have no conception of a Celt, I must appear as a WASP." (From the Introduction, p. XII) |
And who might YOU be?
| Quote: | OF EDITORS
... I think that Canada is wise never to have created a stamp with the head of an editor on it; editors at best are disagreeable fellows, professional contradicters and sassers back. An editor of any degree of experience becomes incapable of complete agreement with anyone, and he reads the dictionary so much that he always knows more nasty names for any particular offence than the man who has committed it. Whatever an editor may be in his private life, he is professionally ferocious, and he can turn on his tap of belligerence at a moment's notice. There was a time when the horsewhipping of editors was a common sport, and shooting their hats off in the street was regarded as mere pleasantry. Now the law forbids both of these manly pastimes... But glorifying an editor by putting him on a stamp is as inexplicable to other nations as is our Canadian custom of worshipping the beaver, that other unattractive, gnawing, surly mammal. To be obliged to lick even the back of an editor's picture would be intolerable to a free man, though, an instant later, he could punch the picture in the face with his thumb. (From The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks, p. 294) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3169#3169
Last edited by editor on Tue Aug 04, 2009 2:53 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 1:39 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Run with the Hunted
Audio Cassette
Masterfully edited by Buk's publisher, John Martin
Written and read by Charles Bukowski
| Quote: | Luck
Once we were young at this machine
drinking smoking typing
it was a most splendid
miraculous time
still is
Only now instead of
moving toward time it moves
toward us makes each word
drill into the paper
clear
fast
hard
feeding a closing space
Friendly Advice to A Lot of Young Men
Go to Tibet
Ride a camel
Read the Bible
Dye your shoes blue
Grow a beard
Circle the world in a paper canoe
Subscribe to the Saturday Evening Post
Chew on the left side of your mouth only
Marry a woman with one leg and shave with a
straight razor
and carve your name in her arm
Brush your teeth with gasoline
Sleep all day and climb trees at night
Be a monk and drink buckshot and beer
Hold your head under water and play the violin
Do a belly dance before pink candles
Kill your dog
Run for mayor
Live in a barrel
Break your head with a hatchet
Plant tulips in the rain
but
Don't write poetry
(Both from Side One) |
| Quote: | To his publisher, John Martin (of Black Sparrow Press)
| Quote: | 8-12-86
Hello John:
Thanks for the good letter. I don't think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don't get it right. They call it "9 to 5." It's never 9 to 5, there's no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don't take lunch. Then there's OVERTIME and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there's another sucker to take your place.
You know my old saying, "Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors."
And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don't want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.
As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can't believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?
Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: "Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don't you realize that?"
They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn't want to enter their minds.
Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned:
"I put in 35 years . . . "
"It ain't right . . . "
"I don't know what to do . . . "
They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn't they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?
I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I'm here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I've found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system. . .
I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: "I'll never be free!"
One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life.
So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I'm gone) how I've come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die.
To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.
yr boy,
Hank |
|
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3186#3186
Last edited by editor on Wed Jun 11, 2008 11:24 am; edited 2 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2008 3:35 pm Post subject: |
|
|
A few Polish favorites:
Road-side Dog
Hardcover
By Czeslaw Milosz
Translated by the author and Robert Hass
| Quote: | The gods of ancient Greece were capricious. Human fates depended upon their will, yet humans had a hard time trying to guess what would win the gods' favor, what would provoke their anger.
...Considering that the Creator of the universe had already lost much of His authority in the eighteenth century, when He was magnanimously granted the title of the Great Clockmaker who, once having put machinery in motion, did not meddle with its functioning; considering that the terrible suffering of people in the ensuing centuries, provoked by wars and genocide, made interventions by Providence seem even less probable; considering, finally, that the human mind learned to link the notion of scienfitic truth with empirical proof -- cosmologists attempting to find out how the universe came into being carefully avoided any ideas that would suggest their affiliation with religion. Some scientists, though, wondering at the precision of the laws governing matter after the Big Bang, were not loath to postulate the existence of powerful intelligences which act in a manner incomprehensible to us, possibly for their own amusement. One of these men of science, Sebastian Kuo, even expressed the opinion that our universe might be their experiment based upon quantum mechanics, or even a simulation. His book, however - which, he himself concedes, is on the border of science fiction - has for its primary subject our life on earth and examines the highly enigmatic role in it of chance and coincidence. We are inclined - goes the argument - to intuit a logic behind events which we can almost grasp, yet it eludes us and we are sentenced to ignorance again. Should we not imagine two teams, endowed with intelligence inaccessible to us, engaged in a sort of game of chess, using us as if we were symbols in a computer? This would explain glimpses of logic in our personal histories, so that we are inclined sometimes to believe in Fatum, when a sudden departure from regularity occurs, when obviously another hand has entrered the game. What the Greeks told themselves about the gods' councils, loves, and mutual entities, on which the adventures of mortals depended, was clever, for it proved - reasons the scientist - that they had an intuitive grasp of the distance separating our will from a higher sort of calculation, indifferent to our desires and laments. (From Olympians' Games at pgs. 167-169) |
| Quote: | The Triumph of Narrative
Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture
Hardcover
By Robert Fulford
| Quote: | A complex writer who enjoys plain statements, Czeslaw Milosz begins his recent book, Road-Side Dog, with the simplest and most traditional of opening phrases: "I went on a journey." He remembers riding in a two-horse wagon across the Lithuanian countryside, long ago. As each new village appeared, the barking of a dog announced the arrival of the wagon. Milosz briefly sketches this nostalgic scene, then mentions offhandedly where the trip is taking us: "That was the beginning of the century; this is its end."
Milosz, the 1980 winner of the Nobel Prize, 88 years old next month, has seen more of the 20th century's changes than almost anyone. "I come from a place without automobiles, bathrooms, or telephones," he said in his book Visions from San Francisco Bay. That rural isolation remains part of him: "I am still that same small boy who on his first visit to the big city was alarmed by the sound of water in the toilet"; he thought he had broken it by pulling the chain.
Since then, he has lived under the Nazis and the Communists and the capitalists. He has written for underground magazines in wartime Warsaw, and for The New Yorker. He's been desperately poor and comfortably prosperous. He's been a Marxist, of sorts, and today he remains a Roman Catholic, of sorts. Empires have risen and fallen around him. Hitler came to power in 1933, the same year Milosz, 22, published his first book of poems; for a dozen years, the Nazis dominated the lives of Milosz and everyone he knew. Then Hitler gave way to Stalin and his heirs, who lasted much longer and sometimes looked as if they would last forever.
As a young man, Milosz thought the Marxists were vital and bracing; he learned later that they were death under another name. But eventually they, too, went away. Lithuania, where Milosz was born to a Polish family, was erased from history when it was appropriated by the Soviet Union in 1940 -- and then was reborn in 1991 as the Republic of Lithuania. Milosz also suffered erasure. For nearly 30 years, from the time he defected to the West until he won the Nobel Prize, official Poland declined to acknowledge his existence. After he won the prize, however, the Communist government in Warsaw claimed and published him, or parts of him: It printed his Nobel Prize acceptance speech only after editing out the anti-Communist part. Later, in the post-Communist era, he went home as a hero. On the monument to Gdansk workers killed during the 1970 protests, Solidarity inscribed a Milosz poem ("Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You kill one, but another is born"), written in secret in 1950 when he was working as a cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Washington.
In old age, Milosz has split his life between Krakow and Berkeley, where he taught at the University of California for two decades. Why go back to California? To feel, as he might put it, not-at-home. The nomadic life, forced on him by history, long ago became essential to his personality. He will not give up his outsider status: A Polish patriot, he nevertheless regrets (as he wrote in a journal entry, published three years ago) that some of his poems "promote that moaning -- noble -- patriotic Polish blockheadedness"; he regrets "my bouts of national orthodoxy" even more than his flirtations with communism.
Years ago, talking to a journalist, he speculated on why he had chosen California. Perhaps it was because "it gave me a perfect feeling of estrangement and isolation," which "is part of being alive in the 20th century." That emotion has always been an essential force in his poetry; the ruptures he has experienced, and the tragedies he has witnessed, are lodged in every line, so firmly placed that they easily survive translation into English. His prose writing is equally persuasive. The Captive Mind, published in 1953, analyzes what his preface calls a "stupefying and loathsome phenomenon," the creation of Communist orthodoxy in Eastern Europe. Having outlived its subject, that book deserves to stand beside two works of fiction on the same subject, George Orwell's 1984 and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon.
Milosz has always been anxious to remind us that dictatorship is not mainly a problem for intellectuals. Most of those who suffer are the anonymous, undocumented millions, their lives extinguished almost by whim. A 1960 essay, published in his collection Emperor of the Earth, tells in 14 heart-rending pages the story of Gilbert Brognart, a French teenager who went to Poland on holiday with a Polish friend in the summer of 1939, was caught there by the start of the war, blundered into trouble with the Soviet authorities when he tried to get home by way of the Baltic Republics, and vanished into a Siberian slave-labour camp, dying there 11 years later. His story eventually became known because, wherever he went, he wrote his name and home address on the prison wall.
Milosz, as much as anyone, has earned the right to pass judgment on his century and, in Road-Side Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the most striking passages describe the nihilism that has followed the decline of religion and the rise of science. But Road-Side Dog is no formal attempt at a summing up: Its quirky title (referring not only to the dogs encountered on that trip long ago but also to Milosz himself, barking at the passing world from the side of the road) introduces an unclassifiable selection of comments, myths and anecdotes, bits and pieces that have fallen off Milosz's mind. On one level, he's a modest man; on another, he's the sort of writer who believes his notebooks are worth printing -- and, in this case, he's right.
Road-Side Dog reminds us, in its remarkable breadth, that Milosz is a historical phenomenon, whose life in the post-Soviet period has given renewed meaning to the words with which he opened his Nobel acceptance speech in 1980: "My presence here . . . should be an argument for all those who praise life's God-given, marvellously complex unpredictability." (From a column by Fulford in The Globe and Mail May 15/99) |
|
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3363#3363
Last edited by editor on Tue Apr 07, 2009 12:42 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 5:58 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Second Space
New Poems by Czeslaw Milosz
Hardcover
Translated by the author and Robert Hass
| Quote: | The beauty of nature is suspect.
Oh yes, the splendor of flowers.
Science is concerned to deprive us of illusions.
Though why it is eager to do so is unclear.
The battles among genes, traits that secure success, gains and losses.
My God, what language these people speak
In their white coats. Charles Darwin
At least had pangs of conscience
Making public a theory that was, as he said, devilish.
And they? It was, after all, their idea:
To segregate humans, write off as a genetic loss
Some of their own species and poison them.
"The pride of the peacock is the glory of God,"
Wrote William Blake. There was a time
When disinterested beauty by its sheer superabundance
Gratified our eyes. What have they left us?
Only the accountancy of a capitalist enterprise.
(-- p. 25) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3367#3367
Last edited by editor on Thu Jan 03, 2008 6:02 pm; edited 2 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 5:58 pm Post subject: |
|
|
From Losing Streak:
Jan Kochanowski
Laments
Translated by Seamus Heaney and
Stanislaw Baranczak
| Quote: | Jan Kochanowski (1530-84), the greatest poet of not just Poland but the entire Slavic world up to the beginning of the 19th century, was at the same time both the worst -and the best-equipped person to deal with personal tragedy. The entire experience of the first five decades of his life had been apparently consistent with the kind of outlook that he, the Renaissance poet par excellence, derrived from the spirit of the epoch and from his thoroughly Humanistic education. His cast of mind was formed by a philosophy of the golden mean and moderation, and this in turn produced a quiet acceptance of whatever life might bring, a tendency to handle the vicissitudes of earthly existence in a rational and orderly way, one always seasoned with a dose of healthy scepticism as regards both gain and loss, success and failure, happiness and misery.
The stable - or stable-seeming - foundation of such an outlook was provided by both ancient thought and Christian theology. For a 16th century Humanist - in this case, moreover, a poet whose earlier work included not only a Classical tragedy with a plot borrowed from Homer but also a poetic translation of the Psalms - elements of stoicism or epicureanism could merge conflictlessly with the belief in Providential protection bestowed on the just as a reward for their virtuous lives. (Calvinism was to score a huge, if short-lived success in Poland, but only several decades later.)
Yet it is precisely this kind of stable and secure philosophical foundation that may well be the first thing to crack 'when the Parcae cease to spin/Their thread, when sorrows enter in,/When Death knocks at the door'. And this is what happened to Kochanowski in middle age when Death snatched away his youngest child, a 2-1/2-year-old daughter called Ursula, devastating the poet's hitherto unshakeable equanimity. In such a case, the hiatus between the palpability of pain and abstractness of argument expands into an untraversable gap. All of a sudden, pain reaches a degree of intensity that cannot be explained away. No rationalization makes sense to us any more when its very philosophical basis is pulled out like a rug from under our feet -when we can no longer subscribe to the belief that each of us is to a large extent a master of his or her own fate, and that we therefore have the right at least to hope that our actions, if purposeful, timely and determined enough, may bring the desired result:
'You weep in vain,' my friends will say. But then,
What is not vain, by God, in lives of men?
If nothing else, the irretrievability of the loss alone suffices to make the attitude of rationalistic patience and stoical resignation just one of the numerous 'error[s] of our minds', a sorry product of humanity's 'insane conceit.' Our steady climb towards the heights of quasi-divine Wisdom has, as a rule, an abrupt and humiliating end:
Wisdom for me was castles in the air;
I'm hurled, like all the rest, from the topmost stair.
(From the Introduction by S.B. at pgs. vii-viii) |
| Quote: | Lament I
All Heraclitus' tears, all threnodies
And plaintive dirges of Simonides,
All keens and slow airs in the world, all griefs,
Wrung hands, wet eyes, laments and epitaphs,
All, all assemble, come from every quarter,
Help me to mourn my small girl, my dear daughter,
Whom cruel Death tore up with such wild force
Out of my life, it left me no recourse.
So the snake, when he finds a hidden nest
Of fledgling nightingales, rears and strikes fast
Repeatedly, while the poor mother bird
Tries to distract him with a fierce, absurd
Fluttering - but in vain! The venomous tongue
Darts, and she must retreat on ruffled wing.
'You weep in vain,' my friends will say. But then,
What is not vain, by God, in lives of men?
All is in vain! We play at blind man's buff
Until hard edges break into our path.
Man's life is error. Where, then, is relief?
In shedding tears or wrestling down my grief?
(-- p. 3) |
| Quote: | Tren I
Wszytki placze, wszytki lzy Heraklitowe
I lamenty, i skargi Symonidowe,
Wszytki troski na swiecie, wszytki wzdychania
I zale, i frasunki, i rak lamania,
Wsytki a wszytki za raz w dom sie moj noscie,
A mnie plakac mej wdziecznej dziewki pomozcie,
Zktora mie niepobozna smierc rozdzielila
I wszytkich moich pociech nagle zbawila.
Tak wiec smok, upatrzywzy gniazdko krjome,
Slowiczki liche zbiera, a swe lakome
Gardlo pasie; tymczasem matka szczebiece
Uboga, a na zbojce coraz sie miece,
Prozno! bo i na same okrutnik zmierza,
A ta nieboga ledwe umyka pierza
'Prozno plakac' - podobno drudzy rzeczecie.
Coz, prze Bog zywa, nie jest prozno na swiecie?
Wszytko prozno! Macamy, gdzie miekcej w rzeczy,
A ono wszedy cisnie! Blad - wiek czioieczy!
Nie wiem, co lzej: czy w smutku jawnie zalowac,
Czyli sie z przyrodzeniem gwaltem mocawac?
(-- pg. 2) |
Yes, and here's another loss just as bad or worse:
| Quote: | | As Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, has written of Kochanowski: 'His presence belies foggy notions common in the West about a barbaric Eastern Europe. And yet, the Renaissance literature of Poland is virtually unknown in the West because of the lack of translations. The Laments of Kochanowski should be ranked with the world classics. There were some attempts to translate Laments into English in the past, but now something has happened which allows the English-speaking reader to have nearly direct access to his work. Namely, the cooperation of two excellent poets, Professor Stanislaw Baranczak of Harvard and Seamus Heaney. That team has translated Laments, preserving its metres and rhythms. It is a rare accomplishment, which brings joy to me as an inheritor of Kochanowski's language and of the Renaissance tradition.' (From the back cover) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3368#3368
Last edited by editor on Wed Jun 11, 2008 11:47 am; edited 2 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
FAQ 
Search 
Memberlist 
Usergroups
Profile 
Log in to check your private messages 
Log in 
