Favorite Poems

An Arundel Tomb 2

Had another go at doing the link. I think it will work this time.

http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/177058

todski28 said:

One Mighty Fine Piece of Strange

For lovesticks like Louise it’s all
thin edges. Staying as sleek

as her heels. Body a blade, attitude
a razor. It’s the way she walks

the wire, quivering on stilettos
with hints of rum and ruin

like balance is a yardstick of courage,
like freezing traffic stiff as a man < placement

reminds her how much woman
she is. And it’s the way she talks

without words, her open invitation
to look, follow. Good god, how sharp

she shines with a twist and blink,
cutting her own slice of hot sky,

yellow hair swinging its sunfingers
as she turns, eyes living lightning

and nylon flashing electric, thunder
hips rumbling, blowing your mind

like the big bang. It’s the damned
way she stops and dares you

to dream, then damns the dream
that dares to stop. You just know

she’s been to culinary school
but won’t cook you by the book,

that she’ll chew you raw then pick
her teeth with your bones. You’ll

run home ragged, that fuckdoll
branded on in scars and pictures

you hide under the mattress.
As you sleep she’ll slip through

sheets like a scalpel, slide inside.
But what really makes her special

is knowing that stealing your dreams
is only petty larceny.

Patrick Carrington

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Really? Where did you find this? Besides the oblivious tricks, notice the bold, the evidence of interweaving of text.
PS He had three books published, maybe more

twelveoone said:

Really? Where did you find this? Besides the oblivious tricks, notice the bold, the evidence of interweaving of text.
PS He had three books published, maybe more

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http://www.wordriot.org/template.php?ID=707 all six are Damn Damn exceptional poems. I was undecided which I liked best however the first seemed to fit the theme tzara and trix were painting.

Miriam Tazewell
By John Crowe Ransom


When Miriam Tazewell heard the tempest bursting
And his wrathy whips across the sky drawn crackling
She stuffed her ears for fright like a young thing
And with heart full of the flowers took to weeping.

But the earth shook dry his old back in good season,
He had weathered storms that drenched him deep as this one,
And the sun, Miriam, ascended to his dominion,
The storm was withered against his empyrean.

After the storm she went forth with skirts kilted
To see in the hot sun her lawn deflowered,
Her tulip, iris, peony strung and pelted,
Pots of geranium spilled and the stalks naked.

The spring transpired in that year with no flowers
But the regular stars went busily on their courses,
Suppers and cards were calendared, and some bridals,
And the birds demurely sang in the bitten poplars.

To Miriam Tazewell the whole world was villain,
The principle of the beast was low and masculine,
And not to unstop her own storm and be maudlin,
For weeks she went untidy, she went sullen.


for the pentulip crowd

Disabled
Wilfred Owen

He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,
Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park
Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,
Voices of play and pleasure after day,
Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him.

* * * * *

About this time Town used to swing so gay
When glow-lamps budded in the light-blue trees,
And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim,—
In the old times, before he threw away his knees.
Now he will never feel again how slim
Girls' waists are, or how warm their subtle hands,
All of them touch him like some queer disease.

* * * * *

There was an artist silly for his face,
For it was younger than his youth, last year.
Now, he is old; his back will never brace;
He's lost his colour very far from here,
Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry,
And half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race
And leap of purple spurted from his thigh.

* * * * *

One time he liked a blood-smear down his leg,
After the matches carried shoulder-high.
It was after football, when he'd drunk a peg,
He thought he'd better join. He wonders why.
Someone had said he'd look a god in kilts.
That's why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg,
Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts,
He asked to join. He didn't have to beg;
Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years.
Germans he scarcely thought of, all their guilt,
And Austria's, did not move him. And no fears
Of Fear came yet. He thought of jewelled hilts
For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes;
And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears;
Esprit de corps; and hints for young recruits.
And soon, he was drafted out with drums and cheers.

* * * * *

Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal.
Only a solemn man who brought him fruits
Thanked him; and then inquired about his soul.

* * * * *

Now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes,
And do what things the rules consider wise,
And take whatever pity they may dole.
Tonight he noticed how the women's eyes
Passed from him to the strong men that were whole.
How cold and late it is! Why don't they come
And put him into bed? Why don't they come?

Although this is not normally considered a poem (depends how you feel about it), and I don’t consider myself a Christian, still it is one of the greatest writings on the subject of love that I've ever read. And although I generally dislike Paul's teachings, he ought to be sanctified for this passage alone.
(I don't think this translation does full justice to the Greek original, I just found it in an English Bible)

FROM "CORINTHIANS 1ST"

13:1 If I speak with the languages of men and of angels, but don’t have love, I have become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. 13:2 If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but don’t have love, I am nothing. 13:3 If I dole out all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but don’t have love, it profits me nothing.
13:4 Love is patient and is kind; love doesn’t envy. Love doesn’t brag, is not proud, 13:5 doesn’t behave itself inappropriately, doesn’t seek its own way, is not provoked, takes no account of evil; 13:6 doesn’t rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; 13:7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 13:8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will be done away with. Where there are various languages, they will cease. Where there is knowledge, it will be done away with. 13:9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part; 13:10 but when that which is complete has come, then that which is partial will be done away with. 13:11 When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child. Now that I have become a man, I have put away childish things. 13:12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, even as I was also fully known. 13:13 But now faith, hope, and love remain—these three. The greatest of these is love.

Strange Meeting
Wilfred Owen, 1893 - 1918

It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand fears that vision’s face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
“Strange, friend," I said, “Here is no cause to mourn.”
“None," said the other, “Save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something has been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress,
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery;
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot—wheels
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now . . .”

Owen got his start emulating Keats, look rhyming couplets...
richlier strange word choice, strained, seems to me so perfect.

BTW this looks like it was the last one he was working on, to take some of the myth away, it was more just unfinished. As I remember reading this was started earlier than some others that were done. Eerie, still.

twelveoone said:

Strange Meeting
Wilfred Owen, 1893 - 1918

It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand fears that vision’s face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
“Strange, friend," I said, “Here is no cause to mourn.”
“None," said the other, “Save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something has been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress,
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery;
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot—wheels
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now . . .”

Owen got his start emulating Keats, look rhyming couplets...
richlier strange word choice, strained, seems to me so perfect.

BTW this looks like it was the last one he was working on, to take some of the myth away, it was more just unfinished. As I remember reading this was started earlier than some others that were done. Eerie, still.

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Thanks for this post, 1201, it is one of the earliest examples of poems that I studied in English (starting with Oscar Wilde and passing to Owen) and still I recall the vivid impression made to me by this one.
Later I came into touch with his poetry again in my student years while I was analyzing Benjamin Britten's War Requiem(1962) into which Britten has incorporated this one and another eight poems by Owen together with the Latin text.
Great anti-war poetry and music!

4th chorus of "Agamemnon" by Aeschylus (c. 525/524 BC – c. 456/455 BC)

just an excerpt from a great tragedy. the music by the poet himself is lost, but the words hold their own music through rhythm and other suggestions even in modern English. I think there is a musical setting in the 50ies or 60ies by Iannis Xenakis but I can't find it.


Who was He who found for thee
That name, truthful utterly—
Was it One beyond our vision
Moving sure in pre-decision
Of man's doom his mystic lips?
Calling thee, the Battle-wed,
Thee, the Strife-encompassèd,
HELEN? Yea, in fate's derision,
Hell in cities, Hell in ships,
Hell in hearts of men they knew her,
When the dim and delicate fold
Of her curtains backward rolled,
And to sea, to sea, she threw her
In the West Wind's giant hold;
And with spear and sword behind her
Came the hunters in a flood,
Down the oarblade's viewless trail
Tracking, till in Simoïs' vale
Through the leaves they crept to find her,
A Wrath, a seed of blood.

I love a smartass poem when it's done right...

The Afterlife: Letter to Sam Hamill

BY HAYDEN CARRUTH

You may think it strange, Sam, that I'm writing
a letter in these circumstances. I thought
it strange too—the first time. But there's
a misconception I was laboring under, and you
are too, viz. that the imagination in your
vicinity is free and powerful. After all,
you say, you've been creating yourself all
along imaginatively. You imagine yourself
playing golf or hiking in the Olympics or
writing a poem and then it becomes true.
But you still have to do it, you have to exert
yourself, will, courage, whatever you've got, you're
mired in the unimaginative. Here I imagine a letter
and it's written. Takes about two-fifths of a
second, your time. Hell, this is heaven, man.
I can deluge Congress with letters telling
every one of those mendacious sons of bitches
exactly what he or she is, in maybe about
half an hour. In spite of your Buddhist
proclivities, when you imagine bliss
you still must struggle to get there. By the way
the Buddha has his place across town on
Elysian Drive. We call him Bud. He's lost weight
and got new dentures, and he looks a hell of a
lot better than he used to. He always carries
a jumping jack with him everywhere just
for contemplation, but he doesn't make it
jump. He only looks at it. Meanwhile Sidney
and Dizzy, Uncle Ben and Papa Yancey, are
over by Sylvester's Grot making the sweetest,
cheerfulest blues you ever heard. The air,
so called, is full of it. Poems are fluttering
everywhere like seed from a cottonwood tree.
Sam, the remarkable truth is I can do any
fucking thing I want. Speaking of which
there's this dazzling young Naomi who
wiped out on I-80 just west of Truckee
last winter, and I think this is the moment
for me to go and pay her my respects.
Don't go way. I'll be right back.

Source: Poetry (January 1999).

Carruth lived and wrote in my home state of Vermont before moving to Syracuse, NY, where he taught until his death. Vermont has a picture postcard reputation as a tourist state and has drawn many poets and writers to live here. Vermont, however, has a hardscrabble side to it as well, and I'm not sure there is anyone better to have portrayed that side than Carruth did.

[size=+2]To His Beloved Self, the Author Dedicates These Verses[/size]

[size=+1]Vladimir Mayakovsky [/size]

Four words.
Heavy, like a punch.
"Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's – unto the Lord what is the Lord's."

And for one
such as me,
where do I turn?
Where is my rest prepared?

Where* I
an infant,
like the Great ocean,
I would stand on tiptoes like the waves,
caressing with the tides the moon.
Where shall I find a beloved,
one such as I?
Such would not fit into the tiny sky!

Oh, were I a pauper!
Like a billionaire!
What is money to the soul?
An insatiable thief is in her.
My desires' unruly horde
will not be satisfied by the gold of all the Californias.

If I am to be tongue-tied,
like Dante,
or Petrarch,
set my soul aflame for the one!
With verses direct her to turn to ash!
And my words
and my love –
a triumphal arc:
voluptuously,
without a trace will pass through her
the lovelies of all the centuries.

Oh, were I
quiet
like the thunder,
I would moan,
embrace with my quaking the earth's decrepit monastery.
I would with all the thunder's might
roar away with the voice of a giant –
the comets will throw up their burning hands
crashing down in their loneliness.

With my eyes' light I would gnaw at the nights –
Oh, were I
lusterless like the sun!
As though I need nothing more
than to water with my shining
the earth's starved bosoms.

I will walk on,
dragging my beastly lover.
On what night,
delirious,
sickening,
by what Goliaths was I sired,
so giant
and so useless?


1916
translated from the Russian by Alex Cigale

* That is how this word is spelled but it does not make sense. It is probably a typo meaning "were" like in the following verses.

by [size=+1]Vladimir Mayakovsky[/size] (1893-1930)

(From the prologue of [size=+2]A Cloud in Trousers.)[/size]


Your thoughts,
dreaming on a softened brain,
like an over-fed lackey on a greasy settee,
with my heart's bloody tatters I'll mock again;
impudent and caustic, I'll jeer to superfluity.

Of Grandfatherly gentleness I'm devoid,
there's not a single grey hair in my soul!
Thundering the world with the might of my voice,
I go by – handsome,
twenty-two-year-old.

translated by Rudy Negenborn

by [size=+1]Gaius Valerius Catullus[/size] (c.84-54 BC)

[size=+2]Carmen 5[/size]


Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,
and let us judge all the rumors of the old men
to be worth just one penny!
The suns are able to fall and rise:
When that brief light has fallen for us,
we must sleep a never ending night.
Give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred,
then another thousand, then a second hundred,
then yet another thousand more, then another hundred.
Then, when we have made many thousands,
we will mix them all up so that we don't know,
and so that no one can be jealous of us when he finds out
how many kisses we have shared.

Latin Original

Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis!
soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus inuidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

There are thirty five translators mentioned in the book from which I copied the following, so I don’t know to whom we can be thankful for this particular one which is obviously a task of love and full of English language music.
I regret very much that I did not learn German in my life. Even for reading only Brecht it would be worth the effort.

By [size=+1]Bertolt Brecht[/size]

(From "Early Poems and Psalms" 1913-1920)

[size=+2]BALLAD OF THE PIRATES[/size]

1
Frantic with brandy from their plunder
Drenched in the darkness of the gale
Splintered by frost and stunned by thunder
Hemmed in the crows-nest, ghostly pale
Scorched by the sun through tattered shirt
(The winter sun kept them alive)
Amid starvation, sickness, dirt
So sang the remnant that survived:
Oh heavenly sky of streaming blue!
Enormous wind, the sails blow free!
Let wind and heavens go hung! But oh,
Sweet Mary, let us keep the sea!

2
No waving fields with gentle breezes
Or dock side bar with raucous band
No dance hall warm with gin and kisses
No gambling hell kept them on land.
They very quickly tired of fighting
By midnight girls began to pall:
Their rotten hulk seemed more inviting
That ship without a flag at all.
Oh heavenly sky of streaming blue!
Enormous wind, the sails blow free!
Let wind and heavens go hung! But oh,
Sweet Mary, let us keep the sea!

3
Riddled with rats, its bilges oozing,
With pestilence and puke and piss,
They swear by her when they're out boozing,
And cherish her just as she is.
In storms they'll reckon their position,
Lashed to the halyards by their hair:
They'd go to heaven on one condition-
That she can find a mooring there.
Oh heavenly sky of streaming blue!
Enormous wind, the sails blow free!
Let wind and heavens go hung! But oh,
Sweet Mary, let us keep the sea!

4
They loot their wine and belch with pleasure,
While bales of silk and bars of gold
And precious stones and other treasure
Weigh down the rat-infested hold.
To grace their limps, all hard and shrunken
Sacked junks yield vari-coloured stuffs
Till out their knives come in some drunken
Quarrel about a pair of cuffs.
Oh heavenly sky of streaming blue!
Enormous wind, the sails blow free!
Let wind and heavens go hung! But oh,
Sweet Mary, let us keep the sea!

5
They murder coldly and detachedly
Whatever comes across their path
They throttle gullets as relaxedly
As fling a rope up to the mast.
At wakes they fall upon the liquor
Then stagger overboard and drown
While the remainder give a snigger
And wave a toe as they go down.
Oh heavenly sky of streaming blue!
Enormous wind, the sails blow free!
Let wind and heavens go hung! But oh,
Sweet Mary, let us keep the sea!

6
Across a violet horizon
Caught in the ice by pale moonlight
On pitch-black nights when mist is rising
And half the ship is lost from sight
They lurk like wolves between the hutches
And murder for the fun of it
And sing to keep warm in their watches
Like children drumming as they shit.
Oh heavenly sky of streaming blue!
Enormous wind, the sails blow free!
Let wind and heavens go hung! But oh,
Sweet Mary, let us keep the sea!

7
They take their hairy bellies with them
To stuff with food on foreign ships
Then stretch them out in sweet oblivion
Athwart the foreign women's hips
In gentle winds, in blue unbounded
Like noble beasts they graze and play
And often seven bulls have mounted
Some foreign girl they've made their prey.
Oh heavenly sky of streaming blue!
Enormous wind, the sails blow free!
Let wind and heavens go hung! But oh,
Sweet Mary, let us keep the sea!

8
Once you have danced till you're exhausted
And boozed until your belly sags
Though sun and moon unite their forces -
Your appetite for fighting flags.
Brilliant with stars, the night will shake them
While music plays in gentle ease
And wind will fill their sails and take them
To other undiscovered seas.
Oh heavenly sky of streaming blue!
Enormous wind, the sails blow free!
Let wind and heavens go hung! But oh,
Sweet Mary, let us keep the sea!

9
But then upon an April evening
Without a star by which to steer
The placid ocean, softly heaving
Decides that they must disappear.
The boundless sky they love is hiding
The stars in smoke that shrouds their sight
While their beloved winds are sliding
The clouds towards the gentle light.
Oh heavenly sky of streaming blue!
Enormous wind, the sails blow free!
Let wind and heavens go hung! But oh,
Sweet Mary, let us keep the sea!

10
At first they're fanned by playful breezes
Into the night they mustn't miss
The velvet sky smiles once, then closes
Its hatches on the black abyss.
Once more they feel the kindly ocean
Watching beside them on their way
The wind then lulls them with its motion
And kills them all by break of day.
Oh heavenly sky of streaming blue!
Enormous wind, the sails blow free!
Let wind and heavens go hung! But oh,
Sweet Mary, let us keep the sea!

11
Once more the final wave is tossing
The cursed vessel to the sky
When suddenly it clears disclosing
The mighty reef on which they lie.
And, at the last, a strange impression
While rigging screams and storm winds howl
Of voices hurtling to perdition
Yet once more singing, louder still:
Oh heavenly sky of streaming blue!
Enormous wind, the sails blow free!
Let wind and heavens go hung! But oh,
Sweet Mary, let us keep the sea!

From one of my favorite prose poets, John Bennett

Ode to My Mother

Something's gone awry askew askance somewhere, this disconcerted rhythm this discordant symphony of my brain this terrible mix of lucid light and clinical disease; alzheimer's, let's call it that, this dit-dit-dat that keeps delving thru my word bank, a strange merge of August chrome and a decaying maze of neurons, the same message that came dimly for the the dim from the caved-in tunnel of my mother's life, the faint (not dim) persistent tapping, the dit-dit-dat of her urgent shutdown cry, and me listening all my days, my ear to the coaldust iron earth in my Communion virgin whites, bony-kneed child who stood spread-eagle at the threshold of her trance to keep them out to keep them from going in there with their glib insufficient tools to make matters only worse.

And now she's gone, tough old Irish saint who never took her fierce eye from the lodestar of her deepest meaning. They had her down to 80 pounds with tubes and fancy gizmos, they had her translated into Latin names they could neither hex nor find a cure for, they drank her blood and ate her flesh and turned her bones to trinkets. They mauled her noble face with rouge and sold her to the highest bidder. White boys in a limo drove her off before her skin'd grown cold and black men with a back-hoe placed her in the earth in the shadow of the nation's war room before the needle of our numbness found our vein of grief.

Life, said a colonel at her grave side, holding up an eagle clutching arrows and the cross of Jesus, must go on; and he led us like an usher from my mother's grave, her coffin still suspended in the air. I turned back and told the black men--put her down. They did, and I buried my fingers in the moist soil to which she'd soon return and sent a handful raining down upon her coffin.

Now, nine months later, the time it takes a human life to form, the first cry of loss escapes me, skinny boy in soot-black virgin white, and I raise my fist from my iron loveless past and leaping high, lock my legs around the sun and fuck it blind.


The spacing between paragraphs is mine as I couldn't get them to indent.