Poetry

[liberavieve]

Since we have a thread on books, I figured there might be some interest in poetry, too. Mini-books, in a way. So, does anyone have any particular favourites or recommendations?

Here's a short one to begin:

XXVI
A.E. Housman, from More Poems

Good creatures, do you love your lives
And have you ears for sense?
Here is a knife like other knives,
That cost me eighteen pence.

I need but stick it in my heart
And down will come the sky,
And earth's foundations will depart
And all you folk will die.

[maartendas]

Oh, this is totally my topic!

Where to start?

Classical Chinese Poetry - an anthology - translated & edited by David Hinton.
Since it's not a bad idea to start at the beginning, and the Chinese poetic tradition is the oldest one in the world, and this anthology is just incredibly rich and beautiful. Truly timeless even though it is firmly rooted in its own time and conventions. But the imagery and themes are genre- and border-transcending.

Since we're probably going to have to limit ourselves to poems in English or at least available in English I can't recommend my favourite Dutch poets... pity. Although, I've no idea whether some of them may be translated into English (*makes mental note to find out sometime*)

But, for poetry in English, here are some of my favourites:

Anne Sexton:

"And we both wrote poems we couldn't write
and cried together the whole long night
and fell in love with a delicate breath
on the eve that great men call for death

- from: Eighteen Days Without You

E.E. Cummings:

Lusciously creative and life-affirming. My personal favourite is called: i am a little church (no great cathedral). Apparently it is also made into a composition for choir by a composer by the name of Joshua Saulle (the words are in the description box on the Youtube page):

[youtube][/youtube]

American composer Eric Whitacre also turned several poems of Cummings to choral works, gloriously recorded by Polyphony on their album Cloudburst, although alas Youtube has no examples.

W.H. Auden:

Very versatile, so hard to pick one example, but the one that always comes to mind is Musée des Beaux Arts.

Oh yes and this ofcourse:

[youtube][/youtube]

Leonard Cohen:

Most famed for his singing but he started out originally as a poet and to me he always will be. Take for instance the lyrics of Suzanne (originally published as a poem).

Don Paterson - Waking with Russell

Other languages:

Rainer Maria Rilke (German):

Currently reading his Book of Hours (in German), and feeling like I met a kindred soul.

Cesare Pavese (Italian):

...ai miei signi piú scabri non manca un sorriso
- from: Gente spaesata

Which translates - though bear with me, I only know the Dutch translation:

Even my roughest dreams do not lack a smile
- from: Lost people

Czeslaw Milosz - The Gift (Polish):

A classic (again, the words are in the description box on the Youtube page):

[youtube][/youtube]

I'll stop for now

[liberavieve]

Maartendas, your knowledge of non-English poetry is making me feel like a Philistine! I'm going to need to add 'learn Dutch' to my list of things to do before I'm too creaky and crotchety to do them.

E.E. Cummings

Lusciously creative and life-affirming. My personal favourite is called: i am a little church (no great cathedral).

Agreed. It took me a long time to even be able to stand E.E. Cummings; but I feel like his work gets more affirming, as you've put it, the more I read. 'i am a little church (no great cathedral)' is gorgeous and is one of those things that sometimes makes me think, 'This is how life ought to be.' In terms of his poems, I also love:

POEM(or
"the divine right of majorities,
that illegitimate offspring of the
divine right of kings" Homer Lea)
E.E. Cummings

here are five simple facts no sub

human superstate ever knew
(1 )we sans love equals mob
love being youamiare(2)
the holy miraculous difference between
firstrate & second implies nonth
inkable enormousness by con
trast with the tiny stumble from second to tenth
rate(3)as it was in the begin

ning it is now and always will be or
the onehundredpercentoriginal sin
cerity equals perspicuity(4)

Only The Game Fish Swims Upstream &(5)
unbeingdead isn't beingalive

—and—

seeker of truth
E.E. Cummings

seeker of truth

follow no path
all paths lead where

truth is here

Musée des Beaux Arts

Yes! Another lovely one. There are quite a few poems that came out of Bruegel's painting, but I think that Auden's, here, does it best for me. William Carlos Williams also has a fairly nice take on it, titled, after the painting, Landscape With the Fall of Icarus.

One of my favourite Auden poems has to be September 1, 1939. It's maybe a bit long to post in its entirety, but it begins...

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

...and has some moments that are very nearly breathtaking.

Even my roughest dreams do not lack a smile
- from: Lost people

That's just wonderful.

[maartendas]

Aah! One of my favourite poems in Dutch is translated to English, I never knew! (for I never had a reason to go look for it or even wonder about it):

Martinus Nijhoff - Het kind en ik

The Child and I

I wanted to go fishing one day,
I felt a little despondent.
I made between the cat's tails
with a hand an air hole in the ice.

Light rose up from underneath
out of the black mirror ground.
I saw an unsullied garden
and a child who sat there.

He sat at his writing table
writing on a piece of slate.
I recognized the word under
the chalk; it was one of my own.

But then he wrote it again
with neither haste nor shyness,
that which I in my life
never had dreamed to write.

And each time that I nodded
to show that I knew,
he let the water quiver slightly
and it was erased.

(Translation by Cliff Crego)

The rhyme in the original is lost here, sadly, but you get an idea

--edit: the 'ice' in the first stanza is not there in the original - the original uses a word that means 'hole' as we use it in Dutch when we mean a hole in the ice - but in the poem the hole is made in duckweed...! Just thought I'd mention that...

Thanks for your recommendations, liberavieve I liked the seeker of truth. That Auden poem is amazing. It made me think of Blake ("I wandered thro' each charter'd street, Near where the charter'd Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet, Marks of weakness, marks of woe" - from his poem 'London', or parts of 'Auguries of Innocence', and even another poem by Martinus Nijhoff called Awater which was very modern and groundbreaking at the time, telling a tale of modern man as a kind of Everyman, followed by the narrator as he walks through the city after a days'work, passing a bar, a barber, etc - a fragment of it is also translated in English here).

The W C Williams one - I wasn't too impressed with that. Auden's is much more striking and has more depth. But it did remind me of a W C Williams poem that I do like very much:

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Boy, poetry night on Sunday

[Yorkie]

I was reminded of this one when watching a film recently:

Tiger Tiger. burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye.
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile His work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger Tiger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

The Tiger
William Blake

And Britains favourite poem:

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

[maartendas]

The Tiger forms a pair with The Lamb, that Libera used, but ofcourse you knew that already

I know the other one, because I once saw a very impressive rendition of it by Dennis Hopper, but I can't remember the name of the poet or the title of the poem so you're gonna have to search that one yourself

[Yorkie]

The second one is 'If' by Rudyard Kipling.

[maartendas]

The second one is 'If' by Rudyard Kipling.

[youtube][/youtube]

[Yorkie]

Nice one Maartendas. The legend that is Johnny cash too.

This is from the film I saw with the reading of part of The Tiger:

[youtube][/youtube]

[paul]

Poetry?

I think i'm well out of my depth with this thread,

the Poetry I know would not be appropriate on most forums.

[Murkskis]

Interesting thread, although it takes kind of concentration to get the meaning out of the verses.

I just remembered about poetry in Elvish (a language created by J.R.Tolkien for his fantasy works).
The level of abstraction is either quite genius or slightly crazy Take your side
[youtube][/youtube]

P.s. If you got the meaning- be so kind and let me know

[liberavieve]

Interesting thread, although it takes kind of concentration to get the meaning out of the verses.

I just remembered about poetry in Elvish (a language created by J.R.Tolkien for his fantasy works).
The level of abstraction is either quite genius or slightly crazy Take your side
[youtube][/youtube]

P.s. If you got the meaning- be so kind and let me know

Very mind-boggling. I can't pretend to even begin getting my mind around it.

I wonder if Elvish school-leavers retain any working knowledge of the language beyond 'Can I have permission to go to the toilet, please?'

[symphonica7]

Does anyone have any original poems?!! Please post.....

[TullyBascombe]

Interesting thread, although it takes kind of concentration to get the meaning out of the verses.

I just remembered about poetry in Elvish (a language created by J.R.Tolkien for his fantasy works).
The level of abstraction is either quite genius or slightly crazy Take your side
[youtube][/youtube]

P.s. If you got the meaning- be so kind and let me know

J.R. Tolkien did concoct an entire Elvish language for his works. Back in the 1960's, during the Tolkien craze, you could find copies of his Elvish dictionary and grammar in most local bookstores. I don't know where you'd need to look now.

[maartendas]

Does anyone have any original poems?!! Please post.....

Go over to my website

But, since that's all in Dutch, here are some from when I was also writing in English (circa 2001/2002):

On a sad tomorrow

oh you that hide in deathbed falling
calling painted darkness day
remember only this, or nothing:
songbooks grace your land of clay

on a sad tomorrow

and you in
clouds and suits of grey be
calculating birds of prey

let words of madness stain your wings

this night holds worlds where nomads sing

slash your artless falsehood prison

crash like rivers on your way.


Further still

help me kiss
this earthbound sun,
that sailor's lantern, lifted high,
and carry forth my waking cry,
this nudist tune I somehow spun,

through valleys
deep as childhood sleep
and ruins void of laughter,
across the desert's thirsty reign
and plains of sweet hereafter

carry it lightly, like a gun,
a lance, a daring nightmare glance,
to where the haunted dogs all meet
in endless, yes defenceless streets,

and further still,
oh, further still,
to taunt the waves before they kill,
inside their suicidal run,
over graves and roads

unpaved, for
now our journey has begun,

painting stars
on virgin skies, rendering
our last good-byes.


Shores between

how these years
will tire on the sand,

watching parents growing
older still,
leaving us
as we set sail,
crooked like a waltz,
for shores unseen,
relentlessly, endlessly
dying inbetween,
keeping the lullabies that tried,

safely tucked inside
and warm,
so their withered
wisdom is
unable to hear
the hiss of this
blistered,
crazy storm,
preceding the calm,

parting eager palms
from strong forgiving hands.

And, especially for you symphonica :

When skies forbid

to still believe,
dare to see this
life achieved

laid bare in detailed music

hold your sweet
and dying heart,
caress it like a bird

take us and
awaken us
with symphonies unheard.