Hail Poetry!

Bree -- I had never read the entire Highwayman so I went to your link (thanks for that). Ahhh, a sad story, but at least in the end they were together. What a great poem to memorize, so full of description and rhythm. I'll bet the kids loved saying "hell" too... in 7th-8th grade? LOL

I wish all kids were asked to memorize... frequently. I don't understand why they aren't, it seems to me to teach a lot of good things, besides the joy of a good poem known throughout your life. I had my own children to learn a few short things, there is a short window when they're amenable enough. I wish I'd pushed it more.

I learned the first twenty or so lines of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales... in middle English. Everyone in my high school had to do it to graduate. (ahem) Whan that Aprile in the shoures soute.. the droughte of March had perc'ed to the rote...

Piffka, bree, Raggedyaggie, et al

I first 'met' Akhmatova (along with many other poets I had never heard of) two years ago in a wonderful anthology entitled:

"The Poetry of Our World:
An International Anthology of Contemporary Poetry"

(Edited by Jeffrey Paine with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Sven Birkets, Joseph Brodsky, Carolyn Forché, and Helen Vendler)
Harper Collins, New York, 2000.

After reading some AA's poems in the above anthology I rushed out and bought a volume of her selected poems. However I was a little careless. The volume I bought was by a different translator whose renderings I did not like as much as those I had read in the anthology.

The translations I liked best were by Stanley Kunitz* with Max Hayward. and those are the ones you see on this thread.









* Kunitz and his poems would be a nice subject for another day.

Thanks, Jjorge. I'll have to look for that anthology. You certainly found someone special with Akhmatova.

I memorized a short poem by e.e. cummings when I was in college. Will enter it here, but not from memory (in case I make a mistake):

Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

[i'm not sure the poem will look the way it should here--the format is worth checking on to see it the way he wrote it!]

Anthony Hecht is a poet with whose works I'm unfamiliar, but I intend to remedy that after reading the article about him in today's New York Times. The article describes him as the "epitome of Formalism in poetry", and as "a classicist if there ever was one, for whom rhyme and metric schemes constitute poetry's essential music", which may explain why his work isn't more widely known. I especially like this quote:

"One wants to feel in control," he says of Formalism. "If you are writing in free verse, what makes it a poem? A number of my contemporaries wrote in free verse, but it became random jottings from their minds. Some enjoyed a period of celebrity. I don't think they are going to be read very long. It's as if someone says, `I thought of a butterfly,' and it becomes a poem because it's sanctioned by their own brilliance."

You can find the complete article (for the next week, anyway) at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/21/books/21HECH.html

D'artgnan -- Well, the e.e.cummings format is fine on the emailed posts, but it doesn't look right here... way too much left margining. An odd little poem and an odd one to have memorized. I remember in H.S. having one of my teachers reading us the cummings poem about an egg being cracked on the countertop. I thought at the time... "Wow, I'm becoming educated to things I'd never heard of before!"

Bree -- Was the Anthony Hecht a commentary on D'A's remembered poem or just a happy coincidence?

I read the article and it is very interesting... surprising though that of the poem extracts that were offered, not all were as formalized as one might have thought. Hard to find large numbers of his poems, but one which was featured in the article is on the web. I was so attracted to the line "small navy of carts" that I was very pleased to find it!

A Hill

In Italy, where this sort of thing can occur,
I had a vision once -- though you understand
It was nothing at all like Dante's, or the visions of saints,
And perhaps not a vision at all. I was with some friends,
Picking my way through a warm, sunlit piazza
In the early morning. A clear fretwork of shadows
From huge umbrellas littered the pavement and made
A sort of lucent shallows in which was moored
A small navy of carts. Books, coins, old maps,
Cheap landscapes and ugly religious prints
Were all on sale. The colors and noise
Like the flying hands were gestures of exultation,
So that even the bargaining
Rose to the ear like a voluble godliness.
And then, when it happened, the noises suddenly stopped,
And it got darker; pushcarts and people dissolved
And even the great Farnese Palace itself
Was gone, for all its marble; in its place
Was a hill, mole-colored and bare. It was very cold,
Close to freezing, with a promise of snow.
The trees were like old ironwork gathered for scrap
Outside a factory wall. There was no wind,
And the only sound for a while was the little click
Of ice as it broke in the mud under my feet.
I saw a piece of ribbon snagged on a hedge,
But no other sign of life. And then I heard
What seemed the crack of a rifle. A hunter, I guessed;
At least I was not alone. But just after that
Came the soft and papery crash
Of a great branch somewhere unseen falling to earth.

And that was all, except for the cold and silence
That promised to last forever, like the hill.

Then prices came through, and fingers, and I was restored
To the sunlight and my friends. But for more than a week
I was scared by the plain bitterness of what I had seen.
All this happened about ten years ago,
And it hasn't troubled me since, but at last, today,
I remembered that hill; it lies just to the left
Of the road north of Poughkeepsie; and as a boy
I stood before it for hours in wintertime.

Piffka, as I feared, the formatting was lost on the cummings poem. It's not supposed to have a justified left margin! Ach, well...

Thanks for posting that Hecht poem! Will require some re-reading, but it's evocative already...

D'a... at least I saw the good formatting in my email! I was also going to say that cummings use of strange sequences of words reminds me of a teeshirt my daughter brought home from London... "over me come snog and here" is, I think, the exact quote. There was an ad campaign for one of the clothes designers and then these silly teeshirts. I loved 'em.

The Hecht is good... Glad you liked it.

I've searched all over for the e.e.cummings poem I half-remember but I cannot find it on the web or my sorry excuse for an American Anthology.

D'artagnan

Thanks for posting 'Buffalo Bill'.
I don't like a lot of e.e. cummings but I've always liked that one.
Cummings' glimpse of Buffalo Bill is so vividly alive that, for a few moments, it makes us see the terrible reality of death with a new clarity.

for more on mortality, death etc see:
http://nytimes.abuzz.com/interaction/s.256325/discussion/

Yes, that's a good one, jjorge. I liked some of cummings' love poetry, too, but must look at it again to see if I still feel that way.

I really liked the Wild Bill poem, too, partly because I used to work with a friend who was related... and named Bill, but his family had changed the spelling of the name because they were embarassed by the Wild one. Partly because Wild Bill's horse sounds so beautiful and I am a horse-lover.

The formatting makes the poem... the way Jesus is placed way to the right of the margin... the running together of the onetwothree to show how fast he could shoot clay pigeons... and the abrupt connection of the blue-eyed boy and Mister Death, though I wonder, was Wild Bill blue-eyed. Hmmm, should look that up!

Piffka: I note you love horses, but there are not many poems, if any, about horses are there? Do you enjoy Joan Baez? If you do, I'm sure you would like Gabriel and Me, both the melody and the words: (The grey quiet horse wears the reins of dawn and nobody knows what mountain he's from, In his mouth he carries the golden key, and nobody sees him but Gabriel and me.) Have you heard it?

I'd like to add a Stephen Spender poem here. It's longer than I thought, but hopefully you've not read it before. Sea poems have always fascinated me. This one moves me.

Seascape

There are some days the happy ocean lies
Like an unfingered harp, below the land.
Afternoon guilds all the silent wires
Into a burning music for the eyes
On mirrors flashing between fine-strung fires
The shore, heaped up with roses, horses, spires
Wanders on water tall above ribbed sand.

The motionlessness of the hot sky tires
And a sigh, like a woman's from inland,
Brushes the instrument with shadowy hand
Drawing across those wires some gull's sharp cry
Or bell, or shout, from distant, hedged-in, shires;
These, deep as anchors, the hushing wave buries.

Then from the shore, two zig-zag butterflies
Like errant dog-roses cross the bright strand
Spiralling over waves in dizzy gyres
Until they fall in wet reflected skies.
They drown. Fishermen understand
Such wings sunk in such ritual sacrifice.

Remembering legends of undersea, drowned cities.
What voyagers, oh what heroes, flamed like pyres
With helmets plumed have set forth from some island
And them the seas engulfed. Their eyes
Distorted to the cruel waves desires,
Glitter with coins through the tide scarcely scanned,
While, far above, that harp assumes their sighs.

Raggedyaggie

Your mention of of Piffka's love of horses made me think of this poignant poem by Donald Hall.


'Names of Horses'

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in the meadow and hayfield,
the mowing machine
clacketing beside, while the sun walked high in the morning;
and after noon's heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.

Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
of a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.


When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you
every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,
and lay the shotgun's muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground make your monument.

For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground--old toilers, soil makers:

O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.

(Donald Hall)

Jjorge: Names of Horses is so beautiful - so sad. (in winter frost heaved your bones in the ground). I have never heard that poem before. I do hope this will be a first for Pifka, too.

Here's an outstanding piece of modern poetry I'd like to share with you all.

This Imagined Permanence by Natalie Stephens

I recall the late-night subway platforms in other worlds.
Where women carry broken glass in self defense or in defense of self.
As dictated by necessity and passion. Or lust.

My breasts still know the unrequited episodes of one-way love.
The bluish imprints that grazed my nipples. Before the coming of absence.
Before the onslaught of leaving.
Before the option arose as a direction dictated by loss of memory.
Before breath reemerged at windy bus stops where belligerent laughter rose far above the city's ceiling taunting life.

The torn running shoes and faded jeans.
The scuffed army boots and short phrases scribbled hurriedly on knapsacks and in notebook margins.
The keys I wear around my neck.

The linguistics of self preservation in after-hour donut shops.
Where coffee stains and cigarette butts converge on counter tops.
Where eyes glance furtively at rainy streets and city light bulbs implode with the passing of clicking heels.

The sticky chewing gum under movie seats.
The sweaty palms in cocktail parties and back seats of cars.

How choice becomes irrelevant and assertion necessitates struggle.
How enigmatic stares in smoky bars become declarations of war whispered over wine and under starlit nights.
How teeth marks become commonplace and expected.

How question marks cease to matter and the process of questioning
dissolves at the risk of disappearing.
And open palms cease to reach for answers for fear of losing too much blood at once.

I recently read two new collections of poems: The Last Uncle, by Linda Pastan, and Now the Green Blade Rises, by Elizabeth Spires. The poets' styles are different -- Pastan is almost conversational, while Spires is more formal -- but it struck me that, in many of the poems, they were speaking about the same things, albeit in different voices.

Over the next few days, I'll post pairs of poems -- one each by Pastan and Spires -- that I think complement each other. Here's the first pair.

Bess
-- Linda Pastan

When Bess, the landlord's black-eyed
daughter, waited for her highwayman
in the poem I learned by breathless
heart at twelve, it occurred to me

for the first time that my mild-eyed
mother Bess might have a life
all her own -- a secret past
I couldn't enter, except in dreams.

That single sigh of a syllable
has passed like a keepsake
to this newest child, wrapped now
in the silence of sleep.

And in the dreams I enter,
I could be holding my infant mother
in my arms: the same wide cheekbones,
the name indelible as a birthmark.


Riddle
-- Elizabeth Spires

What you were and were not:
I was. Both you and not you.
I grew by taking from you.

Once, years ago, the scrim
parted: we were in the car,
smoke from your cigarette

spiralling round you,
and I, a child, saw you
for a moment as someone

unfamiliar, apart
from me, as I might see
a stranger on the street.

Older, I looked at you
and saw myself, saw more
than I was prepared to see.

Our last best selves survive.
They shine in a dim place,
and I am more and less

than what I was,
the riddle now not
who you were, Mother,

but what am I?

Auden is a great poet and so is Christiana Rossetti and Langston Hughes. Try getting on to the internet with their names and you will experience the joy of their poetry.