I see we all appreciate the meta poem, but only secretly
in this day and age. They truly are dreadful
when they're bad...

A belated warm welcome to Marilyn, a thanks to Maryann
for starting this thread, (Ralph, I love Ferlinghetti's 'speadeagled in the empy air'), and some bits from Marge Piercy's "Teaching Experience", which I wouldn't call GOOD, but certainly good,and worth a mention here, for its insistence on the physical.


One is cracking his knuckles,
another glares at me,
another is stoned and slumps
on the end of her spine,
the fourth is rehearsing the balcony
scene, the fifth is pricing
my clothing piece by piece.

I could show you how
to prune a grapevine, I could
show you how to roast a goose
wasting nothing, not the bones
for soup or the fat rendered
its sweet aroma spreading.
I could show you the red eye
of Antares, I could show you
where the marsh hawk builds
her gawky nest, how to follow
through the banks and paper thickets
the spore of a corporate
choice in damaged genes.

In these rooms words float
devoid of their shadows in action.
Teach poetry ? Learn how
to wring the neck of a chicken,
how to sustain orgasm, learn
how to build and mend. In universities
one learns about universities,
in jail about jail. If in poetry
all you learn is words,
you pass wind.

Breath is the life.
Breathe words that move you
out, that speed your blood and slow
it, but use your hands, use
your back, use the long muscles
of your legs, use the twin
lobes of forebrain and the wise
snake coiled on your spine.
Let words be born from you
wet and kicking. Let them cry,
but you, keep quiet and moving.

`````````



[This message has been edited by wendy v (edited April 03, 2006).]

Ode

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

-- Arthur O'Shaughnessy

Marion,
It's nothing like as good without the Elgar accompaniment.
Gregory

A lot of interesting poems--some marvelous, some godawful. Here are two that may interest you. The first is my version of Borges' contribution to the subject:

THE ART OF POETRY

To look at the river made of time and water
And to remember time is another river,
To know that we too vanish like the river
And that our faces flow away like water.

To feel that being awake is another sleep
That dreams it is not dreaming, that the death
That spreads fear in our flesh is the very death
That we die every night and call sleep.

To see in the day or in the year a symbol
Of all the days of man and of his years,
And to transpose the insult of the years
Into a music, a murmuring, a symbol.

To see in death a sleep, or in the sunset
A golden sadness--such is poetry,
Beggared yet immortal, poetry
That comes back like the dawn and like sunset.

Sometimes, in late afternoon, a face
Looks at us from the depths of a dark mirror;
Art ought to be like that unblinking mirror
Revealing to each of us his own true face.

They say Ulysses, sick and tired of marvels,
Wept with love at the sight of Ithaca,
Green and simple. Art is that Ithaca
Of simple green eternity, not marvels.

And it is also like the unending river,
Going yet staying, mirror of the same
Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
And yet another, like the unending river.

'

And here's one of mine, not in the same class at all, but
not contemptible:

FISHING AROUND

Keeping his feet, a feeling in his gut,
Heart in his mouth, a slow bee in his bonnet,
Silently groaning under God knows what,
He wants to see if he can write a sonnet:
Nothing spectacular, just some decent verse,
Each phoneme brooded on, each syllable weighed,
The diction plain, the sentence fairly terse
(To please you, lovely reader, meter-made).

And now he feels he's in his element,
Baiting a hook and casting forth the line,
And through clear water sees a heaven-sent
Swift flash of silver rise into air and shine.
Ah, let it go—-go, dart back to the deep.
A lovely thing, but much too small to keep.

(That wonderful elaborate pun in line 8 I borrowed from my late friend Henri Coulette.)


S

Fun thread. As I mentioned on the "Discerning Eye" board, Timothy Steele's fine new book Toward the Winter Solstice includes a poem, "A Muse," about poetic inspiration. It appears his muse is a harsh (or at least stand-offish and unpredictable) mistress!

I don't know if it's appropriate to post the poem here, since the book is just out, and the poem is also in the current issue of The Threepenny Review. But you can find it on Threepenny's website at this link:
http://www.threepennyreview.com/samp...eele_sp06.html

Another poem about poetry that I like is Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Populist Manifesto," in which he urges contemporary poets to stop speaking in code directed only to other poets, to come down out of their towers, and again be Whitman's wild children and swingers of birches. You can find it at this link:
http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.a...745&poem=31768

Robert Mezey,
A warm thanks for showing above the battlements and yes, damn it, this meter-made loved the hendecasyllabics. Or were they? They are in Greekish anyhow. How closely must one cling to make a breathing poem? If one wants to avoid an eternal Bolero? I presume the form of the first is a faithful translation of Borges' original.
Janet



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited April 28, 2006).]

Janet,
You mean the Borges poem? It's straight pentameter, and for
masochistic and sentimental reasons, I kept strictly to Fitzgerald's "Rubiyat", rhyming exactly and using no metrical
variations that he didn't use. Borges does the same thing in Spanish, though of course he can't begin to sound anything like Fitzgerald. I'm glad you mentioned the poem, becauee I think it is perhaps the finest "ars poetica" since Horace.
(I must say that I thought the Collins and Bly attempts, and some others, were pretty awful, and yes, that MacLeish poem does make me groan: almost everything he says about a poem strikes me as wrong or untrue. For example, a poem must mean AND be. Being is not worth much if it's meaningless.)

Robert,
Of course the Borges is in IP. I had been reading a lot of Sapphics etc and your/Borges? line endings achieve a similar ritualistic chanting effect. My mistake and apologies for my rushed reading.


May I be an intermediary between you and MacLeish and suggest that if a poem's meaning adds up to more than journalism it is because it has achieved a state of "being"? I have read poems that have little meaning but a strong presence and others with nothing but meaning and no presence. I agree with you except to say that if one thing can be dispensed with it is, in the end, "meaninng". I am often exasperated by online comments that want more information. I usually feel that less information would strengthen the poem.

Again my humble apologies for my Greek reading of your quite wonderful translation of Borges. Both of you travelled in time so the mistake was probably not as far out as all that. The poem is about that after all and has far more "being" than most I have read. Thanks for it.
Janet

Both the Borges-Mezey and the Mezey are impressive. But I’m confused by the reference to Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat, whose quatrains rhyme aaxa, whereas The Art of Poetry goes abab with word identity rather than standard rhyme.

Dear Henry Quince,
You're quite right---"The Art of Poetry" has nothing to do with Fitzgerald's Rubiyat: it was late at night and I had a senior moment. Borges did write a Rubiyat, and in my translation I did keep pretty strictly to Fitxgerald's prosodic structure. For your interest, I'll copy it out:

RUBIYAT

Now let my voice take up the Persian's verse
And call to mind that time is the diverse
Inweaving of the eager dreams we are,
Dreams that the Secret Dreamer shall disperse.

Let it proclaim once more that fire is ash
And flesh is dust, the river's casual splash
The fleeting image of your life and mine
That slowly, slowly vanish, in a flash.

Let it repeat that pride's elaborate tower
Is like the passing breeze, the blowing flower,
That to the radiance of the Eternal One
A century is briefer than an hour.

Say once more that the nightingale, as bright
And clear as gold in the echoing vault of night,
Sings only once; nor do the frugal stars
Fritter away their treasury of light.

And let the moon come back into the lines
Your patient hand sets down, just as it shines
At blue dawn in your garden. That same moon
Seeks you in vain among the columbines.

Under the moon that rises early or late
On tender evenings, learn to imitate
The simple wells on whose reflecting face
A few eternal images circulate.

Come back, O Persian moon, shine overhead,
And hazy golds the empty twilights shed.
Today is yesterday. You are all those
Whose faces are now dust. You are the dead.