Poems that you love

[Lizzie]

I thought that you might be waiting out of timidity, and I was trying to encourage you ><

The world's in need of empathetic people; consider yourself needed.


Now here's a woman to be reckoned with:

Are you saying I'm not to be reckoned with? Joking.

Thank you for your kind words >< 
Always appreciated with me

[Leanne]

I don't remember if I've posted this before. I will again anyway.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE’S GRAVE
by Dorothy Porter

How do you bury a poet?

Surely not
how they buried Baudelaire
thrown in with his parents
like an infant death.

It stretches
to a ghastly irony
Pasternak’s remark
that poets should remain
children.

Do poets really want to trade
the lingering savour
of experience
for guileless eyes?

There’s something
repulsive
about an empty fresh
adult face.

Such baby faces
can be seen in uniform
or with a foot
on a slaughtered tiger.

They can be capable
of anything
or a long lullaby
of nothing.

I want to exhume Baudelaire
and give him his own
magnificent mercurial vault.

From one angle
an arching ebony cat.
From another
sneering black marble
spleen.

No poet
dead or alive
should rot
with their parents.

[Lizzie]

(Don't let this one put you off because of its length. It's worthwhile.)

The Erotic Philosophers


It’s a spring morning; sun pours in the window
As I sit here drinking coffee, reading Augustine.
And finding him, as always, newly minted
From when I first encountered him in school.
Today I’m overcome with astonishment
At the way we girls denied all that was mean
In those revered philosophers we studied;
Who found us loathsome, loathsomely seductive;
Irrelevant, at best, to noble discourse
Among the sex, the only sex that counted.
Wounded, we pretended not to mind it
And wore tight sweaters to tease our shy professor.

We sat in autumn sunshine “as the clouds arose
From slimy desires of the flesh, and from
Youth’s seething spring.” Thank you, Augustine.
Attempting to seem blasé, our cheeks on fire,
It didn’t occur to us to rush from the room.
Instead we brushed aside “the briars of unclean desire”
And struggled on through mires of misogyny
Till we arrived at Kierkegaard, and began to see
That though Saint A. and Søren had much in common
Including fear and trembling before women,
The Saint scared himself, while Søren was scared of us.
Had we, poor girls, been flattered by their thralldom?

Yes, it was always us, the rejected feminine
From whom temptation came. It was our flesh
With its deadly sweetness that led them on.
Yet how could we not treasure Augustine,
“Stuck fast in the bird-lime of pleasure”?
That roomful of adolescent poets manqué
Assuaged, bemused by music, let the meaning go.
Swept by those psalmic cadences, we were seduced!
Some of us tried for a while to be well-trained souls
And pious seekers, enmeshed in the Saint’s dialectic:
Responsible for our actions, yet utterly helpless.
A sensible girl would have barked like a dog before God.

We students, children still, were shocked to learn
The children these men desired were younger than we!
Augustine fancied a girl about eleven,
The age of Adeodatus, Augustine’s son.
Søren, like Poe, eyed his girl before she was sixteen,
To impose his will on a malleable child, when
She was not equipped to withstand or understand him.
Ah, the Pygmalion instinct! Mold the clay!
Create the compliant doll that can only obey,
Expecting to be abandoned, minute by minute.
It was then I abandoned philosophy,
A minor loss, although I majored in it.

But we were a group of sunny innocents.
I don’t believe we knew what evil meant.
Now I live with a well-trained soul who deals with evil,
Including error, material or spiritual,
Easily, like changing a lock on the kitchen door.
He prays at set times and in chosen places
(At meals, in church), while I
Pray without thinking how or when to pray,
In a low mumble, several times a day,
Like running a continuous low fever;
The sexual impulse for the most part being over.
Believing I believe. Not banking on it ever.

It’s afternoon. I sit here drinking kir
And reading Kierkegaard: “All sin begins with fear.”
(True. We lie first from terror of our parents.)
In, I believe, an oblique crack at Augustine,
Søren said by denying the erotic
It was brought to the attention of the world.
The rainbow curtain rises on the sensual:
Christians must admit it before they can deny it.
He reflected on his father’s fierce repression
Of the sexual, which had bent him out of shape;
Yet he had to pay obeisance to that power:
He chose his father when he broke with his Regina.

Søren said by denying the erotic
It is brought to the attention of the world.
You must admit it before you can deny it.
So much for “Repetition”—another theory
Which some assume evolved from his belief
He could replay his courtship of Regina
With a happy ending. Meanwhile she’d wait for him,
Eternally faithful, eternally seventeen.
Instead, within two years, the bitch got married.
In truth, he couldn’t wait till he got rid of her,
To create from recollection, not from living;
To use the material, not the material girl.

I sip my kir, thinking of Either/Or,
Especially Either, starring poor Elvira.
He must have seen Giovanni a score of times,
And Søren knew the score.
He took Regina to the opera only once,
And as soon as Mozart’s overture was over,
Kierkegaard stood up and said, “Now we are leaving.
You have heard the best: the expectation of pleasure.”
In his interminable aria on the subject
S.K. insisted the performance was the play.
Was the overture then the foreplay? Poor Regina
Should have known she’d be left waiting in the lurch.

Though he chose a disguise in which to rhapsodize,
It was his voice too: Elvira’s beauty
Would perish soon; the deflowered quickly fade:
A night-blooming cereus after Juan’s one-night stand.
Søren, eyes clouded by romantic mist,
Portrayed Elvira always sweet sixteen.
S.K.’s interpretation seems naive.
He didn’t seem to realize that innocent sopranos
Who are ready to sing Elvira, don’t exist.
His diva may have had it off with Leporello
Just before curtain time, believing it freed her voice
(So backstage legend has it), and weakened his.

I saw La Stupenda sing Elvira once.
Her cloak was larger than an army tent.
Would Giovanni be engulfed when she inhaled?
Would the boards shiver when she stamped her foot?
Her voice of course was great. Innocent it was not.
Søren, long since, would have fallen in a faint.
When he, or his doppelgänger, wrote
That best-seller, “The Diary of a Seducer,”
He showed how little he knew of true Don Juans:
Those turgid letters, machinations, and excursions,
Those tedious conversations with dull aunts,
Those convoluted efforts to get the girl!

Think of the worldly European readers
Who took Søren seriously, did not see
His was the cynicism of the timid virgin.
Once in my youth I knew a real Don Juan
Or he knew me. He didn’t need to try,
The characteristic of a true seducer.
He seems vulnerable, shy; he hardly speaks.
Somehow, you know he will never speak of you.
You trust him—and you thrust yourself at him.
He responds with an almost absentminded grace.
Even before the consummation he’s looking past you
For the next bright yearning pretty face.

Relieved at last of anxieties and tensions
When your terrible efforts to capture him are over,
You overflow with happy/unhappy languor.
But S.K’s alter-ego believes the truly terrible
Is for you to be consoled by the love of another.
We women, deserted to a woman, have a duty
To rapidly lose our looks, decline, and die,
Our only chance of achieving romantic beauty.
So Augustine was sure, when Monica, his mother,
Made him put aside his nameless concubine
She’d get her to a nunnery, and pine.
He chose his mother when he broke with his beloved.

In Søren’s long replay of his wrecked romance,
“Guilty/Not Guilty,” he says he must tear himself away
From earthly love, and suffer to love God.
Augustine thought better: love, human therefore flawed,
Is the way to the love of God. To deny this truth
Is to be “left outside, breathing into the dust,
Filling the eyes with earth.” We women,
Outside, breathing dust, are still the Other.
The evening sun goes down; time to fix dinner.
“You women have no major philosophers.” We know.
But we remain philosophic, and say with the Saint,
“Let me enter my chamber and sing my songs of love.”

~Carolyn Kizer

[Lizzie]

The Minefield

He was running with his friend from town to town.
They were somewhere between Prague and Dresden.
He was fourteen. His friend was faster
and knew a shortcut through the fields they could take.
He said there was lettuce growing in one of them,
and they hadn't eaten all day. His friend ran a few lengths ahead,
like a wild rabbit across the grass,
turned his head, looked back once,
and his body was scattered across the field.

My father told us this, one night,
and then continued eating dinner.

He brought them with him—the minefields.
He carried them underneath his good intentions.
He gave them to us— in the volume of his anger,
in the form of a stick, a belt,
in the bruises we covered up with sleeves,
In the way he threw anything against the wall,
a radio, that wasn't even ours,
a melon, once, opened like a head.
In the way we still expect, years later and continents away,
that anything might explode at any time,
and we would have to run on alone
with a vision like that
only seconds behind.

— Diane Thiel

[Lizzie]

This might just be my new favorite. I'm working on committing it to memory.

Beach Whispers

In the night wind astir
The pale dune grasses sing
"We are what we always whirr,
Food for ruminant thought,"
Soft, neither out of tune
Nor in it as their commotion
Mingles with the hiss
Of water falling all over
Itself to claim the sand.
Ears open and eyes shut
We barely understand
What they could be said to say
About the neap and spring
Of tides and even more
About how to uncover
The orders of all this:
The crown of the bright moon,
The fiefdom of the ocean,
The serfdom of the shore,
(Such dark politics) and,
Nightly feigning his role
Of deus absconditus, sole
Absentee landlord of it all,
Some otherwhere the sun
Reigns from his distant hall.

~John Hollander

[next]

Theory of Memory  - Louise Glück

Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet
incapable of forming durable attachments, long before this, I was a glorious
ruler uniting all of a divided country -- so I was told by the fortune-teller
who examined my palm.  Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps
behind you; it is difficult to be sure.  And yet, she added, what is the difference?  
Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortuneteller.  All the
rest is hypothesis and dream.




The Couple in the Park   - Louise Glück

A man walks alone in the park and beside him a woman walks, also alone.
How does one know?  It is as though a line exists between them, like a line on a
playing field.  And yet, in the photograph they might appear a married couple,
weary of each other and of the many winters they have endured together.
At another time, they might be strangers about to meet by accident.  She
drops her book; stooping to pick it up, she touches, by accident, his hand and
her heart springs open like a child's music box.  And out of the box comes
a little ballerina made of wood.  I have created this, the man thinks; though
she can only whirl in place, still she is a dancer of some kind, not simply a
block of wood.  This must explain the puzzling music coming from the trees.

[cvanshelton]

"Distant mountains approach my heart" that is the bee's knees right there. 

I thought that you might be waiting out of timidity, and I was trying to encourage you ><

The world's in need of empathetic people; consider yourself needed.


Now here's a woman to be reckoned with:


Golden Rice Sheaves   - Zheng Min - Translated from Chinese by poetryeastwest.com

Golden rice stands in sheaves
in the newly cut autumn field.
I think of many exhausted mothers,
I see rugged faces along the road at dusk.
On the day of harvest, a full moon hangs
atop the towering trees,
and in the twilight, distant mountains
approach my heart.
Nothing is more quiet than this, a statue,
shouldering so much weariness –
you lower your head in thought
in the autumn field that stretches afar.
Silence. Silence. History is nothing
but a small stream flowing under your feet.
And you stand over there,
becoming a thought of humanity.




A Glance    - Zheng Min - Translated from Chinese by poetryeastwest.com

—While contemplating Rembrandt's Young girl at a half-open door

What’s beautiful are the two shoulders sinking
into the shadows locking the chest, rich as an orchard.
Only the radiant face, a dream suddenly appearing,
corresponds to the slim fingers that rest on the low

gate. River of time carries away another leaf.
From her half lowering eyes, sphinxlike, flows out a tranquility
that dazzles. Her unchangeable calm is facing a limited life
when in a chance evening she casts a long glance
at this changing world.

[RiverNotch]

The Erotic Philosophers

~Carolyn Kizer

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And 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 have not love, I am nothing. And if I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profiteth me nothing.

Lovely, lovely poem.

[cvanshelton]

Loving against Love

Entering into the intimate cruelty
of revising one with two,
but not with three.
Taking care of the trunk more than the fruit
and nesting, if necessary,
on the fallen trunk
in its bare root.
Insisting sometimes on the flower,
but without the theft of cutting it
or seizing its perfume.

And when two no longer revise one,
recapturing the cruelty of loving against love
and traveling toward zero,
only toward zero.

-Roberto Juarroz
     translated by Mary Crow

[Lizzie]

The Erotic Philosophers

~Carolyn Kizer

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And 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 have not love, I am nothing. And if I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profiteth me nothing.

Lovely, lovely poem.

Oh, yay!!! I'm glad you liked it!

[Lizzie]

YolaSM, that was a nice one from Bukowski especially how he closed it. Here's my favorite from him. It was one of the ones that starting me reading and writing more poems.

Dreamlessly

Old, grey-haired waitresses
in cafes at night
have given it up,
and as I walk down sidewalks of
light and look into windows
of nursing homes
I can see that it is no longer
with them.
I see people sitting on park benches
and I can see by the way they
sit and look
that it is gone.

I see people driving cars
and I see by the way
they drive their cars
that they neither love nor are
loved -
nor do they consider
sex. It is all forgotten
like an old movie.

I see people in department stores and
supermarkets
walking down aisles
buying things
and I can see by the way their clothing
fits them and by the way they walk
and by their faces and their eyes
that they care for nothing
and that nothing cares
for them.

I see a hundred people a day
who have given up
entirely.

If I go to the racetrack
or a sporting event
I can see thousands
that feel for nothing or
no one
and get no feeling
back.

Everywhere I see those who
crave nothing but
food, shelter, and
clothing; they concentrate
on that,
dreamlessly

I do not understand why these people do not
vanish
I do not understand why these people do not
expire
why the clouds
do not murder them
or why the dogs
do not murder them
or why the flowers and the children
do not murder them,
I do not understand.

I suppose they are murdered
yet I can’t adjust to the
fact of them
because they are so many.

Each day,
each night,
there are more of them
in the subways and
in the buildings and
in the parks

they feel no terror
at not loving
or at not
being loved

so many many many
of my fellow

creatures

--Charles Bukowski

GREAT one Todd. Brilliant. My favorite bit is the "I do not understand" stanza.

[kolemath]

The Dogs at Live Oak Beach, Santa Cruz

BY ALICIA OSTRIKER

As if there could be a world 
Of absolute innocence 
In which we forget ourselves 

The owners throw sticks 
And half-bald tennis balls 
Toward the surf 
And the happy dogs leap after them 
As if catapulted— 

Black dogs, tan dogs, 
Tubes of glorious muscle— 

Pursuing pleasure 
More than obedience 
They race, skid to a halt in the wet sand, 
Sometimes they'll plunge straight into 
The foaming breakers 

Like diving birds, letting the green turbulence 
Toss them, until they snap and sink 

Teeth into floating wood 
Then bound back to their owners 
Shining wet, with passionate speed 
For nothing, 
For absolutely nothing but joy.


You may disagree, but there's nothing like a good praise poem to unwind.  Forget the intense search for devices for a minute and just enjoy poetry.

[rayheinrich]

I Love Bukowski, I have been a tireless proponent of his for years. This poem is and example of one of the things I dislike (along with the misogyny):
His rampant egotism. Here a false dichotomy. He, of course, putting himself firmly in the category of "feeling people". Such hubris. But I love his left-wing
politics, depiction of life, romanticism. Most of all his honesty, his succinct style. (And that his real first name is Heinrich. )

One of my favorite Bukowski poems:


      The Blackbirds Are Rough Today     -   Charles Bukowski
       
        lonely as a dry and used orchard
        spread over the earth
        for use and surrender.
       
        shot down like an ex-pug selling
        dailies on the corner.
       
        taken by tears like
        an aging chorus girl
        who has gotten her last check.
       
        a hanky is in order your lord your
        worship.
       
        the blackbirds are rough today
        like
        ingrown toenails
        in an overnight
        jail---
        wine wine whine,
        the blackbirds run around and
        fly around
        harping about
        Spanish melodies and bones.
       
        and everywhere is
        nowhere---
        the dream is as bad as
        flapjacks and flat tires:
       
        why do we go on
        with our minds and
        pockets full of
        dust
        like a bad boy just out of
        school---
        you tell
        me,
        you who were a hero in some
        revolution
        you who teach children
        you who drink with calmness
        you who own large homes
        and walk in gardens
        you who have killed a man and own a
        beautiful wife
        you tell me
        why I am on fire like old dry
        garbage.
       
        we might surely have some interesting
        correspondence.
        it will keep the mailman busy.
        and the butterflies and ants and bridges and
        cemeteries
        the rocket-makers and dogs and garage mechanics
        will still go on a
        while
        until we run out of stamps
        and/or
        ideas.
       
        don't be ashamed of
        anything; I guess God meant it all
        like
        locks on
        doors.
       
          - - -

[Lizzie]

Why are brilliant people always such pricks  

Makes me feel icky for still loving them.

Thanks for sharing, Ray

[rayheinrich]

Why are brilliant people always such pricks  

Makes me feel icky for still loving them.

Thanks for sharing, Ray

    But there are bunches of brilliant people who are lovable as well.
    My hero William Carlos Williams was one; and Einstein, I hear, was a big teddy bear.

[Lizzie]

Why are brilliant people always such pricks  

Makes me feel icky for still loving them.

Thanks for sharing, Ray

    But there are bunches of brilliant people who are lovable as well.
    My hero William Carlos Williams was one; and Einstein, I hear, was a big teddy bear.

You're right, Ray. You are very lovable

I just think it's a terrible bind when an author has a horrible personality or a really warped view of reality, but you still love their work.

How can I love misogynistic egotism???? It's giving me a crisis.

[Achebe]

I think misogyny or racism are very minor personality issues in a writer. It can limit their work and its appeal, which is punishment enough.
But what would be really interesting is if there was a writer who was so far gone to the other side, that redemption was impossible, and yet wrote powerfully. Like a serial paedophile or Nazi war criminal. Or a KKK grand master personally implicated in several lynchings. Now that would be a real test of how well we can separate the dancer from the dance.

---

Religious books not counting, obviously, because God does all of these things regularly.

[rayheinrich]

I think misogyny or racism are very minor personality issues in a writer. It can limit their work and its appeal, which is punishment enough.
But what would be really interesting is if there was a writer who was so far gone to the other side, that redemption was impossible, and yet wrote powerfully. Like a serial paedophile or Nazi war criminal. Or a KKK grand master personally implicated in several lynchings. Now that would be a real test of how well we can separate the dancer from the dance.

    Two famous examples:
D.W. Griffith, one of the seminal directors of film. His film "The Birth of a Nation" is considered to be in the top 10
of every film ever made. In his film, where he pretty much created the basics for all films after it, he brilliantly
portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroes who save a white woman from being raped by subhuman blacks.

Leni Riefenstahl was a pioneering woman film director who made extraordinary propaganda films ("Triumph of the Will"
her most famous) for the Nazis. And she did so willingly and fervently. Her compositional/editing techniques are
considered groundbreaking.

So, yeah, people (at least critics) seem to be able to separate art from artist.  

Religious books not counting, obviously, because God does all of these things regularly.

    Funny how, most of the time, authors come out looking like the good guys.

[kolemath]

Hogs get the last laugh

'The Pig'
by Roald Dahl

In England once there lived a big
And wonderfully clever pig.
To everybody it was plain
That Piggy had a massive brain.
He worked out sums inside his head,
There was no book he hadn’t read,
He knew what made an airplane fly,
He knew how engines worked and why.
He knew all this, but in the end
One question drove him round the bend:
He simply couldn’t puzzle out
What LIFE was really all about.
What was the reason for his birth?
Why was he placed upon this earth?
His giant brain went round and round.
Alas, no answer could be found,
Till suddenly one wondrous night,
All in a flash, he saw the light.
He jumped up like a ballet dancer
And yelled, “By gum, I’ve got the answer!”
“They want my bacon slice by slice
“To sell at a tremendous price!
“They want my tender juicy chops
“To put in all the butchers’ shops!
“They want my pork to make a roast
“And that’s the part’ll cost the most!
“They want my sausages in strings!
“They even want my chitterlings!
“The butcher’s shop! The carving knife!
“That is the reason for my life!”
Such thoughts as these are not designed
To give a pig great peace of mind.
Next morning, in comes Farmer Bland,
A pail of pigswill in his hand,
And Piggy with a mighty roar,
Bashes the farmer to the floor . . .
Now comes the rather grizzly bit
So let’s not make too much of it,
Except that you must understand
That Piggy did eat Farmer Bland,
He ate him up from head to toe,
Chewing the pieces nice and slow.
It took an hour to reach the feet,
Because there was so much to eat,
And when he’d finished, Pig, of course,
Felt absolutely no remorse.
Slowly he scratched his brainy head
And with a little smile, he said,
“I had a fairly powerful hunch
“That he might have me for his lunch.
“And so, because I feared the worst,
“I thought I’d better eat him first.”

[just mercedes]

I love this poem - you can hear it read here by the author https://soundcloud.com/phantom-pen/snowy


Snowy

On Monday morning she brought me tea
well-stirred, no hint of honey, but
the tang of gum smoked to my fingertips
as they drummed high country hoofbeats
in snowtime dreaming.

There are words, secret echoes,
that only a melting river knows.

I heard, leftwards, a breast open to
shadows. I have no eyes for tender glances,
coy silk bouncing from kindled wicks,
petals soft and insipid on the stoop.

On Mondays I drink my tea
and stare directly into the sun.

~Leanne Hanson