April is Poetry Month

[Yui-chan]

26 April, 2006

 

since feeling is first

e.e. cummings

 

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the world

 

my blood approves,

and kisses are a better fate

than wisdom

lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry

—the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids' flutter which says

 

we are for each other: then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life's not a paragraph

 

And death i think is no parenthesis

 

 

[i tend to think of cummings as the quintessential example of a poet

who's worth the effort -- his syntax can be wonky and weird at first,

but when the payoff is something as sweet and happy and unsaccharine

as this, who can resist him?]

 

A YEAR AGO TODAY: The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats --

http://www.well.com/www/eob/poetry/The_Second_Coming.html

[Sweetcherrie]

I really like this last one. Gives me those warm fuzzy feelings inside feelings inside, and the way he plays with words is brilliant.

 

Thanks again for doing this Yui, it gives me a chance to get to know poetry by the poem instead of a whole bunch at the same time.

[Yui-chan]

27 April, 2006

 

Crusoe in England

Elizabeth Bishop

 

A new volcano has erupted,

the papers say, and last week I was reading

where some ship saw an island being born:

at first a breath of steam, ten miles away;

and then a black fleck--basalt probably--

rose in the mate's binoculars

and caught on the horizon like a fly.

They named it. But my poor old island's still

un-rediscovered, un-renamable.

None of the books has ever got it right.

 

...

 

Dreams were the worst. Of course I dreamed of food

and love, but they were pleasant rather

than otherwise. But then I'd dream of things

like slitting a baby's throat, mistaking it

for a baby goat. I'd have

nightmares of other islands

stretching away from mine, infinities

of islands, islands spawning islands,

like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs

of islands, knowing that I had to live

on each and every one, eventually,

for ages, registering their flora,

their fauna, their geography.

 

Just when I thought I couldn't stand it

another minute longer, Friday came.

(Accounts of that have everything all wrong.)

Friday was nice.

Friday was nice, and we were friends.

If only he had been a woman!

I wanted to propagate my kind,

and so did he, I think, poor boy.

He'd pet the baby goats sometimes,

and race with them, or carry one around.

--Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.

 

And then one day they came and took us off.

 

Now I live here, another island,

that doesn't seem like one, but who decides?

My blood was full of them; my brain

bred islands. But that archipelago

has petered out. I'm old.

I'm bored too, drinking my real tea,

surrounded by uninteresting lumber.

The knife there on the shelf--

it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix.

It lived. How many years did I

beg it, implore it, not to break?

I knew each nick and scratch by heart,

the bluish blade, the broken tip,

the lines of wood-grain in the handle...

Now it won't look at me at all.

The living soul has dribbled away.

My eyes rest on it and pass on.

 

The local museum's asked me to

leave everything to them:

the flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes,

my shedding goatskin trousers

(moths have got in the fur),

the parasol that took me such a time

remembering the way the ribs should go.

It still will work but, folded up

looks like a plucked and skinny fowl.

How can anyone want such things?

--And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles

seventeen years ago come March.

 

 

[This is only part of the full poem -- if you'd like to read it all,

you can go here: http://www.caterina.net/crusoe.html I love how

Elizabeth Bishop brings Robinson Crusoe to life, gives him this

conversational, wistful voice, and examines what happens after the

story has ended. So fascinating and sad, and the idea of Crusoe who

reads newspapers and lives an ordinary life somehow makes him seem so

much more real. My favorites are the lines the poem seems to build

to, but which at the same time seem to stand so alone: "--Pretty to

watch; he had a pretty body." And the way the parts that mean the

most are so matter-of-fact and hide so much: "And then one day they

came and took us off." And those killer last two lines.

 

Other (shorter!) Bishop poems you might like:

-- Letter to N.Y. --

http://community.livejournal.com/greatpoet...html?mode=reply

-- Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore --

http://www.ncguru.org/poems/eb-invit.htm ]

 

A YEAR AGO TODAY: Dream Song 1, John Berryman --

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/april_is/message/26

[Yui-chan]

28 April, 2006

 

Dream Song 145

John Berryman

 

Also I love him: me he's done no wrong

for going on forty years -- forgiveness time --

I touch now his despair,

he felt as bad as Whitman on his tower

but he did not swim out with me or my brother

as he threatened --

 

a powerful swimmer, to take one of us along

as company in the defeat sublime,

freezing my helpless mother:

he only, very early in the morning,

rose with his gun and went outdoors by my window

and did what was needed.

 

I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong

& so undone. I've always tried. I -- I'm

trying to forgive

whose frantic passage, when he could not live

an instant longer, in the summer dawn

left Henry to live on.

 

 

[The Dream Songs are written in a format John Berryman invented partly

to address the big issues that plagued him, most notably the suicide

of his father when Berryman was a child. I strongly recommend reading

more, because they vary wildly in tone and topic, can be very funny or

very sad, and are really unique in the way they play with syntax and

voice. A lot of them are an internal dialogue between a

Berryman-character called Henry and a voice of conscience and reason,

Mr. Bones, and this idea of the fragmentary self gets played out in

the last stanza of this poem: "I -- I'm" Like he's broken in two.

And I think this is such a beautiful and hard look at how you go about

trying to make yourself forgive someone for something so

unforgiveable.

 

If you're interested, I linked quite a few other Berryman poems at the

bottom of this post from last year:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/april_is/message/26 ]

 

A YEAR AGO TOAY: Having It Out With Melancholy, Jane Kenyon --

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/april_is/message/27

[Yui-chan]

29 April, 2006

 

Fever 103º

Sylvia Plath

 

Pure? What does it mean?

The tongues of hell

Are dull, dull as the triple

 

Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus

Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable

Of licking clean

 

The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.

The tinder cries.

The indelible smell

 

Of a snuffed candle!

Love, love, the low smokes roll

From me like Isadora's scarves, I'm in a fright

 

One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.

Such yellow sullen smokes

Make their own element. They will not rise,

 

But trundle round the globe

Choking the aged and the meek,

The weak

 

Hothouse baby in its crib,

The ghastly orchid

Hanging its hanging garden in the air,

 

Devilish leopard!

Radiation turned it white

And killed it in an hour.

 

Greasing the bodies of adulterers

Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.

The sin. The sin.

 

Darling, all night

I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.

The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.

 

Three days. Three nights.

Lemon water, chicken

Water, water make me retch.

 

I am too pure for you or anyone.

Your body

Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern ----

 

My head a moon

Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin

Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.

 

Does not my heat astound you. And my light.

All by myself I am a huge camellia

Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.

 

I think I am going up,

I think I may rise ----

The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I

 

Am a pure acetylene

Virgin

Attended by roses,

 

By kisses, by cherubim,

By whatever these pink things mean.

Not you, nor him.

 

Not him, nor him

(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) ----

To Paradise.

 

 

[A poem about being sick. I love how vivid the images are! There's

no slack writing here, every line is full of sensation.]

 

A YEAR AGO TODAY: King Lear Considers What He's Wrought, Melissa

Kirsch -- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/april_is/message/28

[Yui-chan]

30 April, 2006

 

Preludes

T.S. Eliot

 

I

 

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

Six o'clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about your feet

And newspapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat

On broken blinds and chimneypots,

And at the corner of the street

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

 

II

 

The morning comes to consciousness

Of faint stale smells of beer

From the sawdust-trampled street

With all its muddy feet that press

To early coffee-stands.

 

With the other masquerades

That times resumes,

One thinks of all the hands

That are raising dingy shades

In a thousand furnished rooms.

 

III

 

You tossed a blanket from the bed

You lay upon your back, and waited;

You dozed, and watched the night revealing

The thousand sordid images

Of which your soul was constituted;

They flickered against the ceiling.

And when all the world came back

And the light crept up between the shutters

And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,

You had such a vision of the street

As the street hardly understands;

Sitting along the bed's edge, where

You curled the papers from your hair,

Or clasped the yellow soles of feet

In the palms of both soiled hands.

 

IV

 

His soul stretched tight across the skies

That fade behind a city block,

Or trampled by insistent feet

At four and five and six o'clock;

And short square fingers stuffing pipes,

And evening newspapers, and eyes

Assured of certain certainties,

The conscience of a blackened street

Impatient to assume the world.

 

I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing.

 

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;

The worlds revolve like ancient women

Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

 

 

[so T.S. Eliot is my favorite poet of all time, ever. I think his

longer stuff is where he really shines (The Waste Land, The Love Song

of J. Alfred Prufrock), but I love how even in his smaller, early

poems, like this one, he has such a knack for filling the gritty

little details of everyday life with a sadness and wistfulness. I

like how he uses vision in the third section -- the flickering images

on the ceiling and how the way you look out at the ordinary street can

change so much -- and the last two little stanzas that bring in some

loveliness to all the bleak parts. It's also interesting to pay

attention to all the movement in the poem, how things shift in

relation to one another.]

 

A YEAR AGO TODAY: A Song for Simeon, T.S. Eliot --

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/april_is/message/29

 

I can't believe National Poetry Month is over already! I hope you had

as much fun as I did. If you'd like to keep reading poetry, check out

the following resources:

 

-- The Writer's Almanac -- daily e-mail newsletter with a poem and

literary facts about this day in history, by Garrison Keillor --

http://mail.publicradio.org/writers

-- Poetry Daily posts a poem every day -- http://www.poems.com/today.htm

-- Greatpoets is a LiveJournal community with a fairly wide range of

submissions -- http://community.livejournal.com/greatpoets/

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Martha

[Yui-chan]

Well, that's the end of National Poetry Month. If anyone is interested, I can go back and post the ones from the beginning of the month that I missed. Would you like to see those?

 

Thanks,

~Yui

[Sweetcherrie]

I would

 

And once again, thank you for doing this...also..hmm

 

Maybe the AVV could do something like this, but more as a Pen Poetry month? just wondering here...

[Ayshela]

ooh! *waves hand wildly* mememememememememeeee!!!!

umm..

yesplease?

=)

when you have time, I'd love to see them! Thank you SO much for posting these!