Current faves

[another realm]

I know I'm new here, and maybe this has been done before, but I would like to find out what poets other members find to be their current favorites. It was a thread like this on another site that kindled my reading and writing of poetry. Before that thread I believe the last poem I wrote was in early grade school.

Currently the poet that moves me most is John Ashbery.

Paradoxes and Oxymorons
John Ashbery

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.
What’s a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the stream and chatter of typewriters.

It has been played once more. I think you exist only
To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

How about all of you? Any current favorites?

 

[wildsweetone]

hello again another realm

here's one that made me do a doubletake when i read it.


Thirst

You’ve seen the pictures—
children powdered to tawny in fields,
withered like the stalks.
In the chokehold of a dry land
where dust drifted like snow—

there are others without photos,
the ones you left
to bake in the stove of dank midnights
like this, when sleep was all
that was left of their innocence.

In your dreams they rap on the drywall
behind your bed. You
tear apart the plasterboard

and find them gripping their throats,
tongues extended at cracked angles,
their eyes closed wounds.

They hold out their cupped hands
for the water
that drips from your raincoat.

by TheRainMan



i know he's written plenty more that are suitable as favourites of mine but, there's something about this poem...

 

[annaswirls]

I am not sure if you meant faves in general or favorite lit poets, but here is my fave out there writing now, not here but around, James Lineberger.

Here is the one we had at mannequin envy:

Dancing with Hart Crane

He didn't let on
he was
a poet but do they ever do they
even in bed
what he said what he did say was watch
this and in the middle of The Blue
Danube
he waltzed away from me
with his eyes closed and backed off the ledge
into the pool which had been drained
did he know that who knows and covered with a tarp stretched
over it so no one would fall in
and hurt
himself but dumb me leave it to me oh God
I said are you hurt and he was floating on his back in waves
of black canvas with his arms and legs
spread out like he was still
falling and he giggled like a girl
saying
hurt hurt you syphilitic cunt can't
you see
it fucking hurts all over

~James Lineberger

 

[another realm]

Thank you, wildsweetone and annaswirls. There are no "rules" on lit or non-lit authors. Whatever moves you and wherever you find them is fine by me.

Today I would like to share a poem that was written by a friend of mine. She has been instrumental in my love of poetry and this one really moved me. As a gift, she gave me a handwritten volume of her poetry. She has given me permission to post this but asked to only use her net initials for her name.

October Song
l.p.

Tonight a man
breathes deeply
lilting into slumber
at my ear,
clearly content.

My smile slips --
it cannot sustain --
and a renegade tear
slides down
my nose.

Hungry, I feast on his skin
with my eyes,
sleep eluding and
his scent everywhere
on me

This landscape, this bed,
so barren before
now lush with life --
how in God's name
did this happen

This wonder, this terror,
this slipping into
something as comfortable
as faded jeans,
weak-kneed and quaking

Where words I choked on
before roll around on
my tongue but still
won't take wing.

October, month of dying,
was always my darkest,
but this one, filled
with light,
feels like birth.

 

[bluerains]

Jack Gilbert is current

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
Get it wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Eqyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not a language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.

and an old fav..





Wallace Stevens, "The Man with the Blue Guitar" (excerpts)


I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

II

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero's head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

III

Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,

To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,

To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

To bang from it a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings…

IV

So that's life, then: things as they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.

A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing,

And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?

The feelings crazily, craftily call,
Like a buzzing of flies in autumn air,

And that's life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.

V

Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,

Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,

Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.

The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows. Poetry

Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,

Ourselves in poetry must take their place,
Even in the chattering of your guitar.

VI

A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;

Ourselves in the tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place

Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them, on the blue guitar,

Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;

For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when

The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar

Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.

VII

It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.

When shall I come to say of the sun,
It is a sea; it shares nothing;

The sun no longer shares our works
And the earth is alive with creeping men,

Mechanical beetles never quite warm?
And shall I then stand in the sun, as now

I stand in the moon, and call it good,
The immaculate, the merciful good,

Detached from us, from things as they are?
Not to be part of the sun? To stand

Remote and call it merciful?
The strings are cold on the blue guitar.

VIII

The vivid, florid, turgid sky,
The drenching thunder rolling by,

The morning deluged still by night,
The clouds tumultuously bright

And the feeling heavy in cold chords
Struggling toward impassioned choirs,

Crying among the clouds, enraged
By gold antagonists in air--

I know my lazy, leaden twang
Is like the reason in a storm;

And yet it brings the storm to bear.
I twang it out and leave it there.

IX

And the color, the overcast blue
Of the air, in which the blue guitar

Is a form, described but difficult,
And I am merely a shadow hunched

Above the arrowy, still strings,
The maker of a thing yet to be made;

The color like a thought that grows
Out of a mood, the tragic robe

Of the actor, half his gesture, half
His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk

Sodden with his melancholy words,
The weather of his stage, himself.

X

Raise reddest columns. Toll a bell
And clap the hollows full of tin.

Throw papers in the streets, the wills
Of the dead, majestic in their seals.

And the beautiful trombones-behold
The approach of him whom none believes,

Whom all believe that all believe,
A pagan in a varnished care.

Roll a drum upon the blue guitar.
Lean from the steeple. Cry aloud,

"Here am I, my adversary, that
Confront you, hoo-ing the slick trombones,

Yet with a petty misery
At heart, a petty misery,

Ever the prelude to your end,
The touch that topples men and rock."

…

XV

Is this picture of Picasso's, this "hoard
Of destructions", a picture of ourselves,

Now, an image of our society?
Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg,

Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon,
Without seeing the harvest or the moon?

Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead

At a table on which the food is cold?
Is my thought a memory, not alive?

Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?



XXIII

A few final solutions, like a duet
With the undertaker: a voice in the clouds,

Another on earth, the one a voice
Of ether, the other smelling of drink,

The voice of ether prevailing, the swell
Of the undertaker's song in the snow

Apostrophizing wreaths, the voice
In the clouds serene and final, next

The grunted breath scene and final,
The imagined and the real, thought

And the truth, Dichtung und Wahrheit, all
Confusion solved, as in a refrain

One keeps on playing year by year,
Concerning the nature of things as they are.



XXX

From this I shall evolve a man.
This is his essence: the old fantoche

Hanging his shawl upon the wind,
Like something on the stage, puffed out,

His strutting studied through centuries.
At last, in spite of his manner, his eye

A-cock at the cross-piece on a pole
Supporting heavy cables, slung

Through Oxidia, banal suburb,
One-half of all its installments paid.

Dew-dapper clapper-traps, blazing
From crusty stacks above machines.

Ecce, Oxidia is the seed
Dropped out of this amber-ember pod,

Oxidia is the soot of fire,
Oxidia is Olympia.

XXXI

How long and late the pheasant sleeps…
The employer and employee contend,

Combat, compose their droll affair.
The bubbling sun will bubble up,

Spring sparkle and the cock-bird shriek.
The employer and employee will hear

And continue their affair. The shriek
Will rack the thickets. There is no place,

Here, for the lark fixed in the mind,
In the museum of the sky. The cock

Will claw sleep. Morning is not sun,
It is this posture of the nerves,

As if a blunted player clutched
The nuances of the blue guitar.

It must be this rhapsody or none,
The rhapsody of things as they are.


XXXII

Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.

How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,

Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.


XXXIII

That generation's dream, aviled
In the mud, in Monday's dirty light,

That's it, the only dream they knew,
Time in its final block, not time

To come, a wrangling of two dreams.
Here is the bread of time to come,

Here is its actual stone. The bread
Will be our bread, the stone will be

Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except

The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

 

[another realm]

Very nice, bluerain. I especially enjoy the Jack Gilbert selection.

As many fans of the Grateful Dead are aware, Robert Hunter has written many lyrics that "speak" to the masses. What most don't know is that he writes poetry as well. Here one that I have always enjoyed.

Poets On Poets
Robert Hunter

Poets on poets writing on
black balloons in the dark
with pencils of light
Poets sweeping the stairs
of syntax with red brooms
and mops of human hair
Poets in white face crashed
in a birdcage awaiting
the call of the catman
Poets with poorboys burning
a festive tire for heat near
Town's End on Christmas Eve

To sink is to swim
if to swim is to fly
is to fly is to fly
in the manner of Irving
black poet of gloom
who genuinely jumped
the Golden Gate
carrying roses in '65
in order to survive --
Fog horns tell his tale

Candles of the coronation
Torch light of the Sun's corona
grant us sweet song of passage

Poets sworn to the breath
and genius of coincidence
leaving lines as they lay
Poets with word processors
performing infinite revision
approximating spontaneity
Poets listing flat perceptics
in concrete cadenzas
eliciting the music of matter
Poets performing subluxory
transection upon the lungs
and the liver of language

There is meat in the
skin of the fleece
of the sacrifice /
shank, chop
& a rack of rib
but the portion
consigned to smoke
for the nostrils of God
feeds only the worm
at the root of the word

Blood of the coronation
Torch light of the corona
grant swift song in passing

Poets on poets become Catholic
or High Anglican at the
apex of agnostic careers
Poets in Tantric ecstasy
blowing blue steam out
of the top of the skull
Poets collecting trading cards
of oriental deities, chewing
the tough bubble gum of Dharmakaya
Poets with ouija boards
converting sub-text of the soul
into apodictic synecdoche

All of this dies
None of this dies,
returns full blown
as though never
said before; as though
controversy had
little or nothing to say
except why nobody
cares much for poetry
except poets and
owners of offset presses

Blood of the coronation
Flood light of the corona
suffer kind songs of passage

Poets on poets obeying the dictum
to make it new while finding
no ideas but in things
Poets become other than poets
by assiduous application
of structural linguistic theory
Poets born less than poets
becoming poets because
a poet is something to be
Poets who are only poets
rising on wings of Ezra where
weight of air cannot bear them

Once it was Heaven
Once it was hot
high sweaty joy
and celebration
in the English dep't
well into Summer
preceding redolent Fall
till Winter came
rescinding the
free rent of the sun

Milk of the coronation
Torch song of the corona
lend us sweet light of passage

Poets exercising seven
types of ambiguity
in dog-feather beds on acid
Poets notorious for
public drunkenness on
major career occasions
Poets boiling water at 4 a.m.
to sterilize pencils before
writing the name of God
Poets tanning skins of
fresh butchered critics to write
Fuck You in brush calligraphy

Paper is cheap
The heart and pencil
perform as well
for you as another
but consider
what it portends
to tell others whom
you do not know
the whimsies of your soul
in a public fashion

Mud of the coronation
Fell light of the corona
give us a serious song

Poets who subtract all but
the most pregnant words in
quest of ultimate density
Poets employing only
lower case "i" as
advertisement of humility
Poets who refuse to use
"I" at all yet speak
of themselves alone
Poets who salt their song
with numerous "I's" yet
seem to possess none

How can we help
believe in our own,
considering what
we have been
and conspire to be,
full of a fine fury
tempered by time
and circumstance
into exquisite anger
weaponed with words?

Bonfires of the coronation
Flares of the Sun's corona
Rouse us to song in passage

Poets who lose change in
the gutter and try to fish
it out with gum on a string
--complaining
Poets who believe God speaks
in dactyls and consider
the practice of poetry prayer
--;complaining of
Poets who serve it up
by the pound admitting
it's all a crock and so what?
--complaining of
Poets in bathrobes fencing
with cardboard tubes
Easter Sunday on the moon

Risen ... it is risen
full on the face of
Balboa's Pacific
tugging the waves
by neckties of froth
twice reflected light
lending sheen to
candescent roar,
throat of the sea
wide open to the sky

Candles of the coronation
Torch light of the Sun's corona
grant us sweet song of passage
and a tongue of swords to explode
the pus sack of deep profanity

 

[bluerains]

humbled by your beauty...

Very nice, bluerain. I especially enjoy the Jack Gilbert selection.

As many fans of the Grateful Dead are aware, Robert Hunter has written many lyrics that "speak" to the masses. What most don't know is that he writes poetry as well. Here one that I have always enjoyed.

Poets On Poets
Robert Hunter

Poets on poets writing on
black balloons in the dark
with pencils of light
Poets sweeping the stairs
of syntax with red brooms
and mops of human hair
Poets in white face crashed
in a birdcage awaiting
the call of the catman
Poets with poorboys burning
a festive tire for heat near
Town's End on Christmas Eve

To sink is to swim
if to swim is to fly
is to fly is to fly
in the manner of Irving
black poet of gloom
who genuinely jumped
the Golden Gate
carrying roses in '65
in order to survive --
Fog horns tell his tale

Candles of the coronation
Torch light of the Sun's corona
grant us sweet song of passage

Poets sworn to the breath
and genius of coincidence
leaving lines as they lay
Poets with word processors
performing infinite revision
approximating spontaneity
Poets listing flat perceptics
in concrete cadenzas
eliciting the music of matter
Poets performing subluxory
transection upon the lungs
and the liver of language

There is meat in the
skin of the fleece
of the sacrifice /
shank, chop
& a rack of rib
but the portion
consigned to smoke
for the nostrils of God
feeds only the worm
at the root of the word

Blood of the coronation
Torch light of the corona
grant swift song in passing

Poets on poets become Catholic
or High Anglican at the
apex of agnostic careers
Poets in Tantric ecstasy
blowing blue steam out
of the top of the skull
Poets collecting trading cards
of oriental deities, chewing
the tough bubble gum of Dharmakaya
Poets with ouija boards
converting sub-text of the soul
into apodictic synecdoche

All of this dies
None of this dies,
returns full blown
as though never
said before; as though
controversy had
little or nothing to say
except why nobody
cares much for poetry
except poets and
owners of offset presses

Blood of the coronation
Flood light of the corona
suffer kind songs of passage

Poets on poets obeying the dictum
to make it new while finding
no ideas but in things
Poets become other than poets
by assiduous application
of structural linguistic theory
Poets born less than poets
becoming poets because
a poet is something to be
Poets who are only poets
rising on wings of Ezra where
weight of air cannot bear them

Once it was Heaven
Once it was hot
high sweaty joy
and celebration
in the English dep't
well into Summer
preceding redolent Fall
till Winter came
rescinding the
free rent of the sun

Milk of the coronation
Torch song of the corona
lend us sweet light of passage

Poets exercising seven
types of ambiguity
in dog-feather beds on acid
Poets notorious for
public drunkenness on
major career occasions
Poets boiling water at 4 a.m.
to sterilize pencils before
writing the name of God
Poets tanning skins of
fresh butchered critics to write
Fuck You in brush calligraphy

Paper is cheap
The heart and pencil
perform as well
for you as another
but consider
what it portends
to tell others whom
you do not know
the whimsies of your soul
in a public fashion

Mud of the coronation
Fell light of the corona
give us a serious song

Poets who subtract all but
the most pregnant words in
quest of ultimate density
Poets employing only
lower case "i" as
advertisement of humility
Poets who refuse to use
"I" at all yet speak
of themselves alone
Poets who salt their song
with numerous "I's" yet
seem to possess none

How can we help
believe in our own,
considering what
we have been
and conspire to be,
full of a fine fury
tempered by time
and circumstance
into exquisite anger
weaponed with words?

Bonfires of the coronation
Flares of the Sun's corona
Rouse us to song in passage

Poets who lose change in
the gutter and try to fish
it out with gum on a string
--complaining
Poets who believe God speaks
in dactyls and consider
the practice of poetry prayer
--;complaining of
Poets who serve it up
by the pound admitting
it's all a crock and so what?
--complaining of
Poets in bathrobes fencing
with cardboard tubes
Easter Sunday on the moon

Risen ... it is risen
full on the face of
Balboa's Pacific
tugging the waves
by neckties of froth
twice reflected light
lending sheen to
candescent roar,
throat of the sea
wide open to the sky

Candles of the coronation
Torch light of the Sun's corona
grant us sweet song of passage
and a tongue of swords to explode
the pus sack of deep profanity

http://www.thelondonderryschool.org/images/bekah2.jpg

 

[another realm]

To Infinite Eternity
Edwin Honig

I

Death is closer
to infinite eternity
than life is

and each life closer
to each least breath
than the blankness of
infinite eternity itself

II

To think blankness
rouses certain terror
and in the feeling
the sudden sense

of self responding
down to the smallest
unaided particle

of its existence
as answer to
the blankness of
sure nonexistence

III

Then infinite eternity
may be the opposite
of felt existence

durable as any
measurably
felt time

IV

I say hello
to myself

and to break
the terror

of nonexistence
I restore my self

to existence whatever
the consequence

 

[another realm]

let me begin again
philip levine

let me begin again as a speck
of dust caught in the night winds
sweeping out to sea. let me begin
this time knowing the world is
salt water and dark clouds, the world
is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn
comes slowly and changes nothing. let
me go back to land after a lifetime
of going nowhere. this time lodged
in the feathers of some scavenging gull
white above the black ship that docks
and broods upon the oily waters of
your harbor. this leaking freighter
has brought forth a hold full of hayforks
from spain, great jeroboams of dark
algerian wine and quill pens that can't
write english. the sailors have stumbled
off towards the bars or the bright houses.
the captain closes his log and falls asleep.
1/10'28. tonight i shall enter my life
after being at sea for ages, quietly,
in a hospital named for an automobile.
the one child of millions of children
who has flown alone by the stars
above the black wastes of moonless waters
that stretched forever, who has turned
golden in the full sun of a new day.
a tiny wise child who this time will love
his life because it is like no other.

 

[another realm]

To A Frustrated Poet

To A Frustrated Poet
R.J. Ellmann

This is to say
I know
You wish you were in the woods,
Living the poet life,
Not here at a formica topped table
In a meeting about perceived inequalities in the benefits and
..... allowances offered to employees of this college,
And I too wish you were in the woods,
Because it's no fun having a frustrated poet
In the Dept. of Human Resources, believe me.
In the poems of yours that I've read, you seem ever intelligent
..... and decent and patient in a way
Not evident to us in this office,
And so, knowing how poets can make a feast out of trouble,
Raising flowers in a bed of drunkenness, divorce, despair,
I give you this check representing two weeks' wages
And ask you to clean out your desk today
And go home
And write a poem
With a real frog in it
And plums from the refrigerator,
So sweet and so cold.

 

[bluerains]

Do not stand at my grave and weep

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glint on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you wake in the morning hush,
I am the swift, uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft starlight at night.

Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there, I do not sleep.
Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there, I did not die!



Mary Frye (1932)

 

[another realm]

The Song of Life
Jiddu Krishmamurti

Love not the shapely branch,
Nor place its image alone in thy heart.
It dieth away.

Love the whole tree.
Then thou shalt love the shapely branch,
The tender and the withered leaf,
The shy bud and the full-blown flower,
The falling petal and the dancing height,
The splendid shadow of full love.

Ah, love Life in its fullness.
It knoweth no decay.