What Are You Reading?

[Angeline]

What are you reading now that's making an impression on you, impressing you? Share a poem or prose excerpt in this thread.

I got a wonderful book by the poet Adrienne Rich this weekend, The Facts of a Doorframe. I took a seminar with her in college many years ago (one of the advantages of going to college near NYC), but was too young and dumb to really appreciate her then. But ah now it's a different story.

Here's a quote by her from the foreward. It really speaks to me.

A poem may be written in the moment, but it does its work in time. May be written in acute emotion yet drives toward precision, compression, the existential intentionality of art which is its way of discovering meaning. Made in and from the material of language, poetry is continually wrestling with its own medium.

The language of poetry is the language of a society and the poet's relation to that society is implicit--or naked--in the poem: in image and metaphor, in traditions invoked or contended against, urgency or relaxation of the breath, musics listened to, echoes of conversations overheard, the entire complex of choices made, along with the subterranean dimension in all art.

The range and nuance of her insight make me swoon.

 

[BlueskyBeauty]

Radiant Love

On the horizon of my awareness
I can see you
I know who you are
and why you have come
Patiently you wait for me
as I stumble
and fall
Your mercy
has reached my heart
across this endless desert
and I am brought back into life
Some day
I too shall stand
upon the fringes of consciousness
as you do
Radiating love to all

Phillip Higginbotham(aka Mockingbird):

 

[sandspike]

don't read much, but look and listen

I'm lazy and have two jobs, so i don't read much. I get my
ideas from listening to blues and beach and what goes on
around me that I enjoy. I read as much literotica poetry as I
can, for the joy of it and to get ideas about various forms.
I thought I'd post now because I can see this thread will be
getting deep soon. It isn't because I won't understand the meat of the post it goes back to the 1st 2 words of my post.

 

[Angeline]

For Memory
Adienne Rich

Old words: trust fidelity
Nothing new yet to take their place.

I rake leaves, clear the lawn, October grass
painfully green beneath the gold
and in this silent labor thoughts of you
start up
I hear your voice: disloyalty betrayal
stinging the wires

I stuff the old leaves into sacks
and still they fall and still
I see my work undone

One shivering rainswept afternoon
and the whole job to be done over

I don't know what you know
unless you tell me
there are gashes in our understandings
of this world
We came together in a common
fury of direction
barely mentioning difference
(what drew our finest hairs
to fire
the deep, difficult troughs
unvoiced)
I fell through a basement railing
the first day of school and cut my forehead open--
did I ever tell you? More than forty years
and I still remember smelling my own blood
like the smell of a new schoolbook
And did you ever tell me
how your mother called you in from play
and from whom? To what? These atoms filled by ordinary dust
the common life we each and all bent out of orbit from
to which we must return simply to say
this is where I come from
this is what I knew

The past is not a husk yet change goes on

Freedom. It isn't once, to walk out
under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers
of light, the fields of dark--
freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine
remembering, putting together, inch by inch
the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.

1979

 

[Angeline]

Re: don't read much, but look and listen

I'm lazy and have two jobs, so i don't read much. I get my
ideas from listening to blues and beach and what goes on
around me that I enjoy. I read as much literotica poetry as I
can, for the joy of it and to get ideas about various forms.
I thought I'd post now because I can see this thread will be
getting deep soon. It isn't because I won't understand the meat of the post it goes back to the 1st 2 words of my post.

Hi sandspike.

You don't have to understand, know the stuff in any academic way imo. Just feel the music of the language and enjoy it. I love this stuff, but you know I love the beach, too, and you know I love the blues.

And if you read here, you're not lazy!

 

[PatCarrington]

What are you reading now that's making an impression on you, impressing you? Share a poem or prose excerpt in this thread.

The White Deer by Jay Wright


The sun says she is there,
a dawn moon in a green field.

I imagine she came down
riding the wooden horse ark;
or perhaps she was coiled within it,
and leapt from its serpent embrace
when it lightly touched the earth.

But these are matters for a winter evening,
after the snow has been cleared
and the thick docks of maple and birch
have been split and put away.
No need to resolve them now,
or to imagine they are resolvable
without the enhanced water of the neighbors'
contemplation and resolve.

Before spring fully arrives,
we will all be thoroughly adept in her roots
and able to hear her wet foot ripple the grass
as she paddles from under the evergreens,
into the clearing.

 

[Angeline]

Re: Re: What Are You Reading?

The White Deer by Jay Wright


The sun says she is there,
a dawn moon in a green field.

I imagine she came down
riding the wooden horse ark;
or perhaps she was coiled within it,
and leapt from its serpent embrace
when it lightly touched the earth.

But these are matters for a winter evening,
after the snow has been cleared
and the thick docks of maple and birch
have been split and put away.
No need to resolve them now,
or to imagine they are resolvable
without the enhanced water of the neighbors'
contemplation and resolve.

Before spring fully arrives,
we will all be thoroughly adept in her roots
and able to hear her wet foot ripple the grass
as she paddles from under the evergreens,
into the clearing.

Oh, I'm a convert.

If I post another Adrienne, will you give me another Jay?

 

[Angeline]

Excepted from Twenty-One Love Poems by Adrienne Rich.

XX

That conversation we were always on the edge
of having, runs on in my head,
at night the Hudson trembles in New Jersey light
polluted water yet reflecting even
sometimes the moon
and I discern a woman
I loved, drowning in secrets, fear wound round her throat
and choking her like hair. And this is she
with whom I tried to speak, whose hurt, expressive head
turning aside from pain, is dragged down deeper
where it cannot hear me,
and soon I shall know I was talking to my own soul.

 

[PatCarrington]

Excepted from Twenty-One Love Poems by Adrienne Rich.

XX

That conversation we were always on the edge
of having, runs on in my head,
at night the Hudson trembles in New Jersey light
polluted water yet reflecting even
sometimes the moon
and I discern a woman
I loved, drowning in secrets, fear wound round her throat
and choking her like hair. And this is she
with whom I tried to speak, whose hurt, expressive head
turning aside from pain, is dragged down deeper
where it cannot hear me,
and soon I shall know I was talking to my own soul.

Excerpted from Boleros by Jay Wright

Night enters the Plaza, step by step, in the singular
flaring of lamps on churro carts, taco stands,
benches set with deep bowls of pozole,
on rugs embroidered with relics, crosses, bones,
pamphlets, dream books.

Around this cathedral, there is an order never shaken;
all our eyes and postures speak of a certainty
of being forever in place.

These are the ones who always
hear the veiled day fall,
the street tile's serpentine hiss
under the evening's drone.
Compadre, not all have come
from Reforma, along Madero.

There are those whose spotless white manta tell me
they are not from here -- as now, you see, a village
wedding party come to engage the virgin's peace.

 

[Reltne]

Been watching John Denver's "Wildlife Concert" on PBS and pondering on the difference between song and poetry. Song lyrics can be much simpler and repetitive and yet still be much more moving and unforgettable. Music and intonation reach places that mere words can't.

 

[Guest]

Anthology of Short Fiction

No poetry

Short stories by Andersen, Bradbury, Canin, Capote, Hemingway, Joyce, Kafka, and Melville.

I'm on Raymond Carver's A Small Good Thing

The anthology is much more enlightening then the horror novel trash I normally read and I'm able to go to go to bed without hearing strange thumps in the night or get the creepy-crawlies.




- neo

 

[Angeline]

Been watching John Denver's "Wildlife Concert" on PBS and pondering on the difference between song and poetry. Song lyrics can be much simpler and repetitive and yet still be much more moving and unforgettable. Music and intonation reach places that mere words can't.

Reltne, I very much feel what you are saying. The combination of physical sense affected by the sound of notes, meolody, harmony combined with words that tug the imagination in so many ways make much music poetry to me. That's what I was getting at in my poetry and lyrics thread I guess--that it's hard to draw the distinction between when a song is just a song and when it's a poem, too. I feel that as much listening to a simple blues lyric as I do stuff by Joni Mitchell or Tom Waits, which lots of people, I think, would call poetry.

That notion is something Adrienne Rich touches on later in the foreward I excerpted at the beginning of this thread. Look:

My life has been enmeshed so long with poetry that I cannot, looking back at this collection of five decades, imagine how I would have survived without this doorframe, this work. But first it was the poetry of others, in English--Blake, Keats, Longfellow, Robert Louis Stevenson, Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, the King James version of the Bible--listened to and read to in childhood, that let me know the doorframe was there for me, that such a possibility existed. And there were the rhythms of everyday sayings and rhymes and narration, songs sung at the living-room piano, my parents' Southern tonalities, African American talk, speeches on the radio during World War II. You can absorb all this and still not know what, literally, to make of it. Whatever I have come to make of it I owe to these early certainly privileged beginnings and to my later awakening to the power and responsibilities of the art--through the poems of my contemporaries, through friends, teachers, lovers, and students, through political movements, and of course through mistakes and accidental turnings.

I think she means, in other words, it's all good.

 

[Angeline]

Re: Anthology of Short Fiction

No poetry

Short stories by Andersen, Bradbury, Canin, Capote, Hemingway, Joyce, Kafka, and Melville.

I'm on Raymond Carver's A Small Good Thing

The anthology is much more enlightening then the horror novel trash I normally read and I'm able to go to go to bed without hearing strange thumps in the night or get the creepy-crawlies.




- neo

Halloween's coming baby. Get out the H.P. Lovecraft.

You can leave your light on.

 

[champagne1982]

"Then it didn't matter to you that he had never been to university or medical school?"

"People believed in him," growled Mad Etta. "He had the right touch and loving heart. If you like your doctor, you is half-way better. Most sickness is caused by what's between the ears..."

There was sundogs out this morning when we were putting the coffin in the grave, shimmering like peaches there in the cold pink sky. I imagined for a second that I could see Dr. Don's face in one of them, but only for a second.
The Moccasin Telegraph by W.P. Kinsella published 1983. The story is Dr. Don.

 

[Angeline]

Neruda

Love, a question
has destroyed you

I have come back to you
from thorny uncertainty

I want you straight as
the sword or the road.

But you insist
on keeping a nook
of shadow that I do not want.

My love,
understand me,
I love all of you,
from eyes to feet, to toenails,
inside,
all the brightness, which you kept.

It is I, my love,
who knocks at your door.
It is not the ghost, it is not
the one who once stopped
at your window.
I knock down the door;
I enter all your life;
I come to live in your soul;
you cannot cope with me.

You must open door to door,
you must obey me,
you must open your eyes
so that I may search in them,
you must see how I walk
with heavy steps
along all the roads
that, blind, were waiting for me.

Do not fear,
I am yours,
but
I am not the passenger or begger,
I am your master, the one you were waiting for,
and now I enter
your life,
no more to leave it,
love, love, love,
but to stay.

(translated from Spanish by Donald Walsh)

 

[Tathagata]

Moanin' At Midnight";The Life and Times Of Howlin' Wolf

oh and two Bukowski books

 

[Carillon]

This poem recently caught my eye:

Naming Her Flaming
by L. A. Mistral

Her cunt,
an abacus;

counting each red hair
with the tip of his tongue;

measuring the exact
length of flames.

Licking could not
extinguish them;

he tried to blow them out,
but they got so hot

they each spoke their names
in conflagrations of articulate curls.

 

[Angeline]

Moanin' At Midnight";The Life and Times Of Howlin' Wolf

oh and two Bukowski books

Did you know ee saw him read? We just both read a great Buk book (which I can't remember the title of at the moment cause um I'm tired and I'm thinking about a poem).

Ok. I wussed out and asked ee. Bukowski and the Beats. (Good name for a band lol).

Oh. Good evening my meikhel.

 

[Tathagata]

Did you know ee saw him read? We just both read a great Buk book (which I can't remember the title of at the moment cause um I'm tired and I'm thinking about a poem).

Ok. I wussed out and asked ee. Bukowski and the Beats. (Good name for a band lol).

Oh. Good evening my meikhel.

I'll bet that was a trip
I love his style and his sense of humor
he really always paints himself in the middle of this surreal world
which is just everyday stuff


and my mother had a cat named pyewacket when she was a kid


good morning nashemoleh

 

[tungtied2u]

n'maste minkey

what are you doing up?

 

[tungtied2u]

I'm reading

Shambala....The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche....and The Sun magazine....and a map so I know how to get from Chicago O'Hare to my daughter's apartment...

 

[Tathagata]

Re: n'maste minkey

what are you doing up?

I'm always up at this hour except on weekends
I don't LIKE it...but I'm up
lol

namaste'

 

[tungtied2u]

Re: Re: n'maste minkey

I'm always up at this hour except on weekends
I don't LIKE it...but I'm up
lol

namaste'

I don't like it...but i have to catch a plane....have a good day tath.

 

[Angeline]

I Am Waiting
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder


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



I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the living end
and I am waiting
for dad to come home
his pockets full
of irradiated silver dollars
and I am waiting
for the atomic tests to end
and I am waiting happily
for things to get much worse
before they improve
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the human crowd
to wander off a cliff somewhere
clutching its atomic umbrella
and I am waiting
for Ike to act
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder


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


I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am waiting
for Ole Man River
to just stop rolling along
past the country club
and I am waiting
for the deepest South
to just stop Reconstructing itself
in its own image
and I am waiting
for a sweet desegregated chariot
to swing low
and carry me back to Ole Virginie
and I am waiting
for Ole Virginie to discover
just why Darkies are born
and I am waiting
for God to lookout
from Lookout Mountain
and see the Ode to the Confederate Dead
as a real farce
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for Tom Swift to grow up
and I am waiting
for the American Boy
to take off Beauty's clothes
and get on top of her
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder


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

 

[Seakla]

Words of Wisdom

In the town I used to live in we had a festival every year themed for Old West days. Rex Allen Jr., country-music singer, came and sang one night and the nthe next day he stayed to enjoy the festivities. I sat next to him on a bench and we chatted for a few minutes. I told him I wrote poetry.

He told me "the thing that makes a song or poem great is if you write it from the heart."

Just thought I would share that.

I have been hanging out on other boards but decided that I finally needed to visit the poetry boards. I write poetry too so I will be checking out the posts here and maybe even posting some myself.