[William A. Baurle]

John -

Yes, the MacClatchy anthology does include Brodsky (an amazingly great poet whom I have recommended to Andrew Szilvasy in a PM - and he bought The Collected and was pleased with it) , and Transtromer, and Walcott - how could any anthology of world poetry forget Walcott?, but, I am not seeing Montale or Quasimodo.??

His book also leaves out Seifert and Soyinka.

Holy moly - one wishes for a thousand more years to appreciate all these poets!

John - it might help to dispel some confusion if you put the poet's name at the end of the poem? I assume the first poem you cite is by Seifert? and the second by Soyinka?

Rock on, my friend!

[John Isbell]

Yes, and we seem to be sticking to modernity here as well.
I've edited my post with the poets' names more clearly indicated - thanks, Bill. Quasimodo as far as i can tell has not been well served by translators, but there's a good bilingual Montale, by Galassi, from which i shall quote:

"Haul your paper ships on the seared
shore, little captain,
and sleep, so you won't hear
the evil spirits setting sail in swarms.

In the kitchen garden the owl darts
and wet smoke hangs heavy on the roofs.
The moment that ruins the slow work of months
is here: now it cracks in secret, now shears with a gust.

The break is coming: maybe with no sound.
The builder knows his day of reckoning.
Only the grounded boat is safe for now.
Tie up your flotilla in the canes."

Eugenio Montale

The Vintage also seems to lack Aleixandre, another Nobel laureate. But it beats Milosz's rather idiosyncratic A Book of Luminous Things. I don't myself know a better modern world poetry anthology.

[John Isbell]

Oh - a little Penguin Quasimodo came out in 1965, by Jack Bevan.

Here's one i quite like - I see i've not annotated my (rather fragile) copy.

"Colours of Rain and Iron

You said: death, silence, solitude,
like love, and life. Words
of our random images.
And each morning the wind rose light,
and time with the colour of rain and iron
passed on the stones
and our muffled drone of the damned.
Truth is still far away.
Tell me, man, split on the cross,
and you with your blood-clotted hands,
how shall i answer those that ask?
Say, now: before other silence
fills up our eyes, before other wind
rises, and other rust flowers."

Salvatore Quasimodo

[Michael F]

One of my favorites by Marianne Moore. I'm not sure how well-known it is, but it's not in my Norton Anthology, and it should be. It’s got many of the elements that I admire in her best poems: playfulness, erudition, love of animals, whimsical tropes, a wonderful eye and tongue for description, and finally, importantly, relevance beyond the ostensible subject. She wrote many poems around the notions of armor and shield; I think that offers some insight into what lay underneath the often distanced and tempered surface of her poetry.


His Shield

The pin-swin or spine-swine
(the edgehog miscalled hedgehog) with all his edges out,
echidna and echinoderm in distressed-
pin-cushion thorn-fur coats, the spiny pig or porcupine,
the rhino with horned snout–
everything is battle-dressed.

Pig-fur won’t do, I’ll wrap
myself in salamander-skin like Presbyter John.
A lizard in the midst of flames, a firebrand
that is life, asbestos-eyed asbestos-eared, with tattooed nap
and permanent pig on
the instep; he can withstand

fire and won’t drown. In his
unconquerable country of unpompous gusto,
gold was so common none considered it; greed
and flattery were unknown. Though rubies large as tennis-
balls conjoined in streams so
that the mountain seemed to bleed,

the inextinguishable
salamander styled himself but presbyter. His shield
was his humility. In Carpasian
linen coat, flanked by his household lion-cubs and sable
retinue, he revealed
a formula safer than

an armorer’s: the power of relinquishing
what one would keep; that is freedom. Become dinosaur-
skulled, quilled or salamander-wooled, more ironshod
and javelin-dressed than a hedgehog battalion of steel, but be
dull. Don’t be envied or
armed with a measuring rod.

-- Marianne Moore

[William A. Baurle]

Thanks for that, Michael. M.M. had some astonishingly good poems. I will try to remember her further down the line, and hunt up my [Found it!] Viking hard cover of The Poems of Marianne Moore.

But for now, I said I was going to go formal. This is not exactly a formal poem, rather song lyrics written in what I would call "high style" for a rock lyricist. I have the good fortune of having a Dad (still kicking [& w/ a ponytail, no less] at 73, God bless his sweet soul) who loved music, and rock music in particular. My earliest memories are of waking up on weekends, when Dad was home from work, to the smell of coffee & breakfast cooking, accompanied by music, played on vinyl in one of those old furniture stereo systems. I will never forget the smell of the clean, lemon-scented wood, the warmth of the analog speakers, that special sense of "What is coming next?" when we (my brother, sister, and I) heard the phonograph needle settle down on the record as it spun around...

The best part was that my father would open the albums, show us lyrics if they were available, or, if not, we would listen and talk about the words to the songs, and what we thought they meant. I still remember trying to figure out, "Life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?" Everything was profound and rife with meaning, on those happy weekends.

I think this is a great poem, even without music.


***

Whaling Stories

Paling well after sixteen days, a mammoth task was set.
Sack the town, and rob the tower, and steal the alphabet.
Close the door and bar the gate, but keep the windows clean.
God's alive inside a movie! Watch the silver screen!

Rum was served to all the traitors; pygmies held themselves in check;
Bloodhounds nosed around the houses, down dark alleys sailors crept.
Six bells struck, the pot was boiling - soup spilled out on passers-by;
Angels mumbled incantations, closely watched by God on high.

Lightning struck out - fire and brimstone! Boiling oil and shrieking steam!
Darkness struck with molten fury, flashbulbs glorified the scene.
Not a man who had a finger, not a man who could be seen,
Nothing called (not name nor number) - Echo stormed its final scream.

Daybreak washed with sands of gladness, rotting all it rotted clean.
Windows peeped out on their neighbors, inside fireside bedsides gleam.
Shalimar, the trumpets chorused, angels wholly all shall take.
Those alive will meet the prophets, those at peace shall see their wake.

— Keith Reid




Had to append this song as well:

In the Autumn of My Madness

In the autumn of my madness when my hair is turning grey
For the milk has finally curdled and I've nothing left to say
When all my thoughts are spoken (save my last departing birds)
Bring all my friends unto me and I'll strangle them with words

In the autumn of my madness which in coming won't be long
For the nights are now much darker and the daylight's not so strong
And the things which I believed in are no longer quite enough
For the knowing is much harder and the going's getting rough

[Clive Watkins]

Back in 2001 I posted this extract from the concluding paragraphs of “The Titanic”, the powerful narrative poem by the fine Canadian poet E. J. Pratt (1882 - 1964). How well known is he these days? His control of the relationships between line, metre and syntax is masterly.

The entire poem, over a thousand lines in length, can be found by clicking on a link here: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/pratt/).

Clive Watkins


Out on the water was the same display
Of fear and self-control as on the deck -
Challenge and hesitation and delay,
The quick return, the will to save, the race
Of snapping oars to put the realm of space
Between the half-filled lifeboats and the wreck.
The swimmers whom the waters did not take
With their instant death-chill struck out for the wake
Of the nearer boats, gained on them, hailed
The steersmen and were saved: the weaker failed
And fagged and sank. A man clutched at the rim
Of a gunwale, and a woman's jewelled fist
Struck at his face: two others seized his wrist,
As he released his hold, and gathering him
Over the side, they staunched the cut from the ring....


Aboard the ship, whatever hope of dawn
Gleamed from the Carpathia's riding lights was gone,
For every knot was matched by each degree
Of list. The stern was lifted bodily
When the bow had sunk three hundred feet, and set
Against the horizon stars in silhouette
Were the blade curves of the screws, hump of the rudder.
The downward pull and after buoyancy
Held her a minute poised but for a shudder
That caught her frame as with the upward stroke
Of the sea a boiler or a bulkhead broke.
Climbing the ladders, gripping shroud and stay,
Storm-rail, ringbolt or fairlead, every place
That might befriend the clutch of hand or brace
Of foot, the fourteen hundred made their way
To the heights of the aft decks, crowding the inches
Around the docking bridge and cargo winches.
And now that last salt tonic which had kept
The valour of the heart alive-the bows
Of the immortal seven that had swept
The strings to outplay, outdie their orders, ceased.
Five minutes more, the angle had increased
From eighty on to ninety when the rows
Of deck and port-hole lights went out, flashed back
A brilliant second and again went black.
Another bulkhead crashed, then following
The passage of the engines as they tore
From their foundations, taking everything
Clean through the bows from 'midships with a roar
Which drowned all cries upon the deck and shook
The watchers in the boats, the liner took
Her thousand fathoms journey to her grave.

And out there in the starlight, with no trace
Upon it of its deed but the last wave
From the Titanic fretting at its base,
Silent, composed, ringed by its icy broods,
The gray shape with the palaeolithic face
Was still the master of the longitudes.

[Michael F]

Clive,

That is a compelling narrative. The last section is really marvelous. I was surprised by the choice of longitudes instead of latitudes, which would have been my instinct, and probably the obvious choice -- but it works for me!

[William A. Baurle]

Thanks for that, Clive. Hard to believe I've never heard of this poet, and me having been rummaging around in archives all over the net for the past several years.

I've just begun to read the poem from the beginning. Great stuff.

[John Isbell]

The Pratt is extremely vivid. Thank you, Clive. It reminds me a little for some reason of Hart Crane, though Crane is I think more precious. Here's the opening of "Voyages", chosen almost at random:

"I

Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
Gaily digging and scattering.

And in answer to their treble interjections
The sun beats lightning on the waves,
The waves fold thunder on the sand;
And could they hear me I would tell them:

O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
By time and the elements; but there is a line
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel."

Hart Crane

[William A. Baurle]

RATS LIVE ON NO EVIL STAR

A palindrome seen on the side of a barn in Ireland


After Adam broke his rib in two
and ate it for supper,
after Adam, from the waist up,
an old mother,
had begun to question the wonder
Eve was brought forth.
Eve came out of that rib like an angry bird.
She came forth like a bird that got loose
suddenly from its cage.
Out of the cage came Eve,
escaping, escaping.
She was clothed in her skin like the sun
and her ankles were not for sale.

God looked out through his tunnel
and was pleased.

Adam sat like a lawyer
and read the book of life.
Only his eyes were alive.
They did the work of a blast furnace.

Only later did Adam and Eve go galloping,
galloping into the apple.
They made the noise of the moon-chew
and let the juice fall down like tears.

Because of this same apple
Eve gave birth to the evilest of creatures
with its bellyful of dirt
and its hair seven inches long.
It had two eyes full of poison
and routine pointed teeth.
Thus Eve gave birth.
In this unnatural act
she gave birth to a rat.
It slid from her like a pearl.
It was ugly, of course,
but Eve did not know that
and when it died before its time
she placed its tiny body
on that piece of kindergarten called STAR.

Now all us cursed ones falling out after
with our evil mouths and our worried eyes
die before our time
but do not go to some heaven, some hell
but are put on the RAT’S STAR
which is as wide as Asia
and as happy as a barbershop quartet.
We are put there beside the three thieves
for the lowest of us all
deserve to smile in eternity
like a watermelon.

— Anne Sexton

***

For Eleanor Boylan Talking With God

God has a brown voice,
as soft and full as beer.
Eleanor, who is more beautiful than my mother,
is standing in her kitchen talking
and I am breathing in my cigarettes like poison.
She stands in her lemon-colored sun dress
motioning to God with her wet hands
glossy from the washing of egg plates.
She tells him! She tells him like a drunk
who doesn’t need to see to talk.
It’s casual but friendly.
God is as close as the ceiling.

Though no one can ever know,
I don’t think he has a face.
He had a face when I was six and a half.
Now he is large, covering up the sky
like a great resting jellyfish.
When I was eight I thought the dead people
stayed up there like blimps.
Now my chair is as hard as a scarecrow
and outside the summer flies sing like a choir.
Eleanor, before he leaves tell him…
Oh Eleanor, Eleanor,
tell him before death uses you up.

— Anne Sexton

***

The opening of Rats above doesn't look right to me, the first 5 or 6 lines look and sound wrong. I copied it from a blog, and I can't find my copy of Sexton at the moment - I may be all wet, but I think there's some sort of mistake there. I will find that book and report back.