Lance, I can't tell you how many high school term papers of mine sent me to Shapiro's prosody handbook. Thank heaven and the Arlington County Public Library for that book.

Shapiro's "The Leg" is a powerful poem; let's see if I can get a link to work.

Maryann and Bill,

Glad to find other Shapiro fans. Maryann, I think his was one of the first prosody handbooks, wasn't it? He and Babette Deutsch. There are dozens now. And Bill, I'm still waiting for you to post some more abut Frank Stanford and The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. The Poetry Foundation has a brief bit but it's not very informative.

Since Bill has never come back on this, I will, even though I've only read the first thousand lines or so of Battlefield... It's over 15,000 lines without punctuation or divisions of any kind. Reading it is extraordinarily immersive. Like reading Finnegans Wake or Dhalgren. It bears little resemblance to other long poems or sequences you might think of, like the Cantos or the Maximus poems, or Song of Myself. I have yet to hit a passage where Frank has a MESSAGE of the sort that provides that fundamental motivation for other authors of long works. It is sometimes a little hard to follow because it is inherently digressive--what I've read--but once you get tuned into it, it's remarkably clear. I think it may turn out to be an honest-to-god epic (unlike the Cantos or the Maximus poems, for instance). If you're not from the South, you may struggle with the language a bit, which is Mississippi-Memphis-Arkansas.

My copy of Battlefield lists ten other books by Frank Stanford, the first published in 1971. He shot himself in 1978, before he turned thirty. Holy shit. It seems he absolutely could not stop writing.

It may great. I'm in no position to say. But it is not just a literary curiosity, like the gargantuan work of Sade or Schreber. Frank may have been crazy, I don't know, but it's very clear he wasn't just crazy. He was also incredibly gifted.

I would post a quote, but I don't know how to pick.

Pat

Gavin Ewart for me. It is disgraceful that his books are out of print. Larkin agrees with me, but It doesn't really matter if no-one agrees with me. A very nice man too.

Two Semantic Limericks

1. According to The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1933)

There existed an adult male person who had lived a relatively short time, belonging or pertaining to St. John’s*, who desired to commit sodomy with the large web-footed swimming-birds of the genus Cygnus or subfamily Cygninae of the family Anatidae, characterized by a long and gracefully curved neck and a majestic motion when swimming.

So he moved into the presence of the person employed to carry burdens, who declared: “Hold or possess as something at your disposal my female child! The large web-footed swimming birds of the genus Cygnus or subfamily Cygninae of the family Anatidae, characterized by a long and gracefully curved neck and a majestic motion when swimming, are set apart, specially retained for the Head, Fellows and Tutors of the College.”

2. According to Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (Edition of 1765)

There exifted a person, not a woman or a boy, being in the firft part of life, not old, of St John’s* who wifhed to – the large water-fowl, that have along and very straight neck, and are very white, excepting when they are young (their legs and feet being black, as are their bills, which are like that of a goofe, but fomething rounder, and a little hooked at the lower ends, the two fides below their eyes being black and fhining like ebony).

In consequence of this he moved step by step to the one that had charge of the gate, who pronounced: “Poffefs and enjoy my female offspring! The large water-fowl, that have a long and very straight neck, and are very white, excepting when they are young (their legs and feet being black, as are their bills, which are like that of a goofe, but fometimes rounder, and a little hooked at the lower ends, the two fides below their eyes being black and fhining like ebony) are kept in ftore, laid up for a future time, for the fake of the gentlemen with Spanish titles.”

*A college of Cambridge University

John, you really should have posted this on the Translation board, but here goes:

There was a young man at St. John's
Who wanted to bugger the swans.
He went to the porter,
Who said, 'Take my daughter!
The swans are reserved for the Dons'.

That's a disgraceful slur on the Cantabrigensians.
As I recall it was the ducks they favoured.

There was a young man of St. John's
Who decided to bugger the swans.
'Oh no.' cried the porter,
'You'd best take my daughter.
Them swans are reserved for the dons.'

That is Gavin's ur-text.

I too think it is St. John's Oxford which is meant. The swans are, after all, on the Isis. I don't know that Cambridge HAS swans. At Merton, once a year, we ate swan.

Gavin of course, was a Cambridge man (Christ's) though not a spy as it happens. He probably didn't know there was a St. John's at Oxford.

I take issue with you there, John.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/wirecopy/...lent-swan.html

I think paragraph 6 is particularly relevant to the subject under discussion.

I didn't know about Mr Asbo. Swans are bad news. Just ask Leda.

Deceptive grin
 

This Gavin Ewart poem has stuck in my memory ever since I first read it many years ago. I don’t think it’s available on-line anywhere; I agree with John, his work is a pleasure to read. This is a unique fusion, for me, of Auden/Larkin and Ewart's own surreal wit:



The Deceptive Grin of the Gravel Porters



Through the rain forests, up a long river,
over greensand and clay and red earth,
they toil like ants in their long procession,
hacking at difficulties that grow and close again,
covering once more the path behind them.

Following these unimportant carriers of the unimportant,
we seldom see them. When we do, they grin.
After the bad patches they turn with a kind of smirk
and beckon us. There are large animals too
that rustle through the hemispheres.

Travelling over chalk to a familiar sea
is all we dream of where the trees are strangled
by the great sneering creepers. Sunlit birds
yakkety yak above our own deep gloom,
hundreds of feet over our inadequate heads.

How did they do it? We see the marks on trees
but made by what? teeth, weapons, little axes?
They don’t communicate except to grin.
We know they’re there but jungles grow so fast
and all we have are bruised and bleeding hands.

Thanks for diving into Frank Stanford's battlefield, Patrick! And reporting on your immersion! Great review! I was planning to post an essay on it, though I hardly think I need to, since the proof is in the eating, and you have pointed the way to potential diners.

I think of the poem as built on a systole-diastole rhythm, alternating between soaring surrealistic-rhetorical lyrical expansions and earthy, humorous and/or romantic narratives. It is set in the late 50's-early 60's mainly in the Mississippi delta levee camps, also in Memphis with a little time in New Orleans. The protagonist is 12 year old Francis, a precocious clairvoyant white child. It is readily available now, which it wasn't for many years. Someone described it as Huck Finn written by Andre Breton.

Frank Stanford's epitaph reads, "It wasn't a dream it was a flood."

The Singing Knives is an early book of his, all shorter and longer lyrics, some very strong.

Gail,

This was such a good idea! A badly neglected poet, it seems to me, is Kenneth Allott, who is better known as a critic, but he had an interesting style that was unique to him. A new book of his collected verse, containing new poems of his that never made it into either of his two books, came out, I believe, a few months ago.

I'm sorry to have no quote to give you, but he is well worth looking up.

William Jay Smith, who once did enjoy some fame, I think, for a poem called 'American Primitive' --


London

Temptation, oh, temptation, sang the singers,
And the river passed them by like Banquo's ghost.
Deliver us from evil, and the river;
All are lost.

Salvation, oh, salvation, sang the singers,
And the ribs that rose and fell were barrel staves;
And I saw beyond the mist, the magic circle,
The hungry waves.

The river like a serpent moved among them,
And mingled, as it coiled upon each eye,
The faint, the dark, the scarcely flowing water,
And the quiet sky.

Death-in-Life is on us, cried the people.
Leaves from Birnam Wood are on the wind.
Holy, holy, holy, sang the singers,
All have sinned.

The stars have disappeared above the city
Like jewels from the crown of Banquo's ghost;
And London Bridge is falling, falling, falling,
Scaled, and crossed.

xxx- William Jay Smith

I'm piggybacking again, but here are some links:

Kennth Allott at Old Poetry

Salt's reprint of his Collected

Edna St. Vincent Millay.

One of my favorites. Do you know the poet?

The Toys
MY little Son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,
I struck him, and dismiss'd
With hard words and unkiss'd,
—His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darken'd eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein'd stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I pray'd
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with trancèd breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
'I will be sorry for their childishness.'

I know the poem, Sam, and admire it.
So in that sense I would not think it underrated.
Best,
David

'I saw you take his kiss!' ''Tis true.'
'O modesty!' 'T'was strictly kept.
'He thought me asleep; at least I knew
'He thought I thought he thought I slept.'

Great punctuaters, these Victorian guys!

It struck me, reading Sam's recent post, that many of the "underrated" poets would have become "forgotten poets" were it not for the great anthologists.

Without Arthur Quiller-Couch, for example, CP would probably have disappeared among the dust of peripheral pre-raphaelites, only arising occasionally when blown-upon by academics in search of an easy thesis. No P without Q, so to speak.

I see that Frank Stanford's name has come up here. We were friends c. 1969-71. Frank was truly bipolar (fuelled by J. D.'s and drugs) and could crank the stuff out brilliantly. He had his own fascinating mythology and used it well. I think the first book, The Singing Knives, is the best. A selected Stanford is still available from UArk Press.

Dear Lord, if he'd looked like that while addressing the poor child, he'd've scared it witless!

He has a resemblance to Mark Twain, though, don't you think... (anything to divert the mind from that horrifying animation).

That's unfathomably creepy - the animation, I mean, not the poem - isn't that the same guy who's done Sam's poems for U-tube, reading "The Revelation," by CP, in the links?

Sam,
"The Toys" is one of my favorite poems. I can never read it without getting all "weepy" at the end!
Cathy

I mean to take nothing away from Raine's talent nor an effort to revive the reputation of a deserving woman poet, but this poem might be a case of misattribution. Though this poem was attributed to Raine in Nina Kossman's _Gods and Mortals_, my understanding is that it is actually the work of Colin Way Reid, from his book _Open Secret_. Kossman's attributions to Raine are all suspect with the exception of "Medea." _The Women Poets in English_ by Ann Stanford might be more reliable for Raine attributions.

Thanks, Chris.

Before Professor Grierson's 1921 Anthology were not many metaphysical poets (Marvell, Herbert and Vaughan in particular) more or less forgotten and Donne left as a horrible example. A toast to Professor Grierson therefore, who was, incdentally, my English teacher's landlord. My English teacher, Hector MacIver, unlocked the pleasures of Donne to me by making us translate the meanings of various poems into prose. Note that he made us do it. He did not do it himself.

Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,

That got a diagram on the board. As did, incidentally 'the beast with two backs).

This is very interesting, Chris, thank you. Raine's Selected Poems, which I have, came out in 1988 -- who would suspect a misattribution to so recent a poet, if you had not been so kind as to point it out?

Several poems noted above that aren't in my book -- 'The World' and 'Envoi' -- do show up in her Collected Poems in the part that is viewable on Amazon.com. There's a generous portion scanned for viewing there, but as almost three hundred pages are withheld and there are already a number of fine poems I'd never seen before, I think I'll have to check it out.

Thanks again,

Ed

Re Stanford:
Sam,
Great to hear you were friends with Frank Stanford. I have heard (or read) him quoted as saying, "Let's put on a pot of coffee and write all night!" To my mind battlefield is a touchstone for significance and intensity in a long poem. I first learned of it from Bob Dickerson, an Arkansan. C.D. Wright and Forrest Gander have served Stanford's legacy devotedly. What a project it must have been to re-edit battlefield for re-publication in 2000--and now it's even available on Amazon!

Below is a favorite of mine from The Singing Knives.
Best wishes,
Bill


The Pump

There was always a lizard
Or a frog around the pump,
Waiting for a little extra water
Or a butterfly to light.

Jimmy said the pump gave him the worms.
I got the worms under the slick boards.
The pump would bite you in the winter.
It got hold of Jimmy and wouldn’t let go.

The blades of Johnson grass were tall
And sharp around the pump stand.
I had to hoe them all the time
Nobody filled the prime jar, though.

One time, I cut the tongue
Out of a Buster Brown shoe
And gave it to the pump.
It made a good sucker washer.

Sometimes the pump seemed like Jesus.
I liked bathing buck naked
Under the pump,
Not in a goddamn washtub.

Estate of Frank Stanford © C.D. Wright
Source: The Singing Knives (Lost Road Publishers, 1979)

The Galahs

Not all the clamour of resurgent spring
and those green heartbeats in the veins of morning
outdo the winter tracery of forms,
of stripped branches against the blue sky’s chill.

Someone has set the white clouds running free
behind a palisade of reaching stems
and built a blue and white heraldic field
where pink galahs come drifting in descent.

Not all the power of summer at its height
filling his park with flowers and bees and honey
outdoes the winter’s cold when the galahs come
to perch on twigs where the buds bide their time.

xxx- R.H. Morrison

I guess a thread with this title could go on forever, but I’ve been meaning to mention a poet I started a thread about a few years back, the Welsh poet Vernon Watkins—in my opinion, greatly underappreciated.

Here’s another one by him, in addition to the ones on that thread. It’s from his collection Fidelities (1968), although I’m copying it from his Collected Poems (Golgonooza Press, 1986):


Rebirth

Just as the will to power
From youth exhausted spins
To earth, it sees a flower
Rooted in ruins.
From that remaking hour
Perception begins.

This for which I care,
By the crowd denied,
Holds a truth so clear,
By none identified.
I would expound it here,
But my tongue is tied.

Dearest things are so:
Neglected, they stay;
Applauded, they go.
The river runs away
And we check its flow
Only when we play.

Strange, that in all we make
A solemn purpose can,
More than most things, break,
While some lesser plan
By accident will wake
The deepest roots in man.

My vote would be for the late Scottish poet George MacBeth. (But steer clear of his novels; they're dreadful.) Once a major figure on the British poetry scene, it's a shame he's not more read these days. Here is "The God of Love":

The God of Love

The musk-ox is accustomed to near-Arctic conditions. When danger threatens, these beasts cluster together to form a defensive wall, or a "porcupine", with the calves in the middle.
– Dr Wolfgang Engelhart

I found them between far hills, by a frozen lake.
On a patch of bare ground. They were grouped
In a solid ring, like an ark of horn. And around
Them circled, slowly closing in,
Their tongues lolling, their ears flattened against the wind,

A whirlpool of wolves. As I breathed, one fragment of bone and
Muscle detached itself from the mass and
Plunged. The pad of the pack slackened, as if
A brooch had been loosened. But when the bull
Returned to the herd, the revolving collar was tighter. And only

The windward owl, uplifted on white wings
In the glass of air, alert for her young,
Soared high enough to look into the cleared centre
And grasp the cause. To the slow brain
Of each beast by the frozen lake what lay in the cradle of their crowned

Heads of horn was a sort of god-head. Its brows
Nudged when the arc was formed. Its need
Was a delicate womb away from the iron collar
Of death, a cave in the ring of horn
Their encircling flesh had backed with fur. That the collar of death

Was the bone of their own skulls: that a softer womb
Would open between far hills in a plunge
Of bunched muscles: and that their immortal calf lay
Dead on the snow with its horns dug into
The ice for grass: they neither saw nor felt. And yet if

That hill of fur could split and run – like a river
Of ice in thaw, like a broken grave –
It would crack across the icy crust of withdrawn
Sustenance and the rigid circle
Of death be shivered: the fed herd would entail its under-fur

On the swell of a soft hill and the future be sown
On grass, I thought. But the herd fell
By the bank of the lake on the plain, and the pack closed,
And the ice remained. And I saw that the god
In their ark of horn was a god of love, who made them die.

Thanks, Andrew, for posting this one by George Macbeth. I remember this very clearly from school-days, way back in the seventies - as I remember his anthology, which we studied for A-level. It was a very good anthology - at least as I remember it. And you're right, he does seem to have disappeared from the scene. I have just Googled him and he has an unbelievably long list of titles to his name - including a great many of those novels you warn us against. I also discovered this quite interesting presentation of this poem in The Guardian by Carol Rumens - who also plays quite an active part in the discussion that follows.

I used the word "remember" a lot in my remarks above. It's because reading this poem again brought back to mind how much I liked this poem at the time, although I had almost entirely forgotten it in the intervening years (if that makes any sense).

Anyway, here's another one of his which I haven't thought of for many years but which now comes back to mind. I must now seek out a Selected Poems of his (I imagine the Collected would be a rather intimidating volume).