[Rob Wright]

The War Music I'm nominating is the second volume by Logue with that title. It covers his retelling of Homer's Iliad books 1—4 and 16—19.

I know it is not to everyone's taste, and fans of Lattimore may despair at this suggestion, but I find the images rich and original, and the story propelled forward by the language.

I think Logue had a great time writing it, and fun is not a quality I often associate with contemporary poetry. Well, yes, the book is a raid on something very old, but the idiom is very contemporary.

When I'm dry I go back to it, and that's not something I can say for many books written in the last thirty years.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Yes, War Music is a marvelous book.

Nemo

[Nigel Mace]

As this wonderful thread has developed I've been struck by how it has yet to recognise one of the most publicly widespread means by which poetry has made connections with its public in the 20th century - song, and the poetry movements which were associated with it. For many that was where their verse remained but for a number it also led to some slender volumes which, to me, stood out as memorable moments in my reading of poetry. Prime among those, for me, were the poems of Fran Landesman and especially in this collection which tacks between large scale politics and the politics of the personal, between love and its disappointments with eloquence and almost unbearable poignancy. There are weaker pieces, of course, - even slipshod ones too 'easy' in their drive and thus too pale to gain traction - and there are ones I can never forget. So let me pitch for this haunting little book and the gems like "The Grooves of Change", "Make Lemonade", "The Artist v. Death", "Missed Understandings", "Semi-Detached" and, perhaps especially, the bitter sweet "The Early Winds of Morning" and the joyfully ecstatic "Come With Me" which never fails to move me with its absolute affirmation of shared love. The other books also have their charms - perhaps most of all in "The Ballad of the Sad Young Men" - but this is, to me, the gem.

[R. Nemo Hill]

62. The Bridge by Hart Crane

A masterpiece, and one that breaks absolutely every rule that Eratospherian critique here establishes. It is unabashedly ornate, hyper-modified, riddled with archaisms, filled with cataclysmic shifts of tone and diction, unapologetically dense. I’ve returned to it again recently, more well-versed than I once was, and I am amazed at how almost every school of poetry is recalled or prefigured within its diverse yet interrelated parts. And amazed as well as what appears on first read to be the mesmerizingly impenetrable music of surfaces yields up a complexity of thought that clarifies its own mystical leaps of intuition. No less a myth of our times than The Wasteland, yet one (in Hart Crane's own estimation) less assailed by pessimism. Indeed, despite the grim circumstances of its author’s life, or perhaps because of them, it takes to anguished heart Rilke’s dictum that poetry be, above all else, an act of praise.



This from Part VI, Quaker Hill...

So, must we from the hawk’s far-stemming view,
Must we descend as worm’s eye to construe
Our love of all we touch, and take it to the Gate
As humbly as a guest who knows himself too late,
His news already told? Yes, while the heart is wrung,
Arise—yes, take this sheaf of dust upon your tongue!
In one last angelus lift throbbing throat—
Listen, transmuting silence with that stilly note

Of pain that Emily, that Isadora knew!
While high from dim elm-chancels hung with dew,
That triple-noted clause of moonlight—
Yes, whip-poor-will, unhusks the heart of fright,
Breaks us and saves, yes, breaks the heart, yet yields
That patience that is armour and that shields
Love from despair—when love foresees the end—
Leaf after autumnal leaf
.................................break off,
..............................................descend—
.................................................. ...........descend—



And this from the final section, Part VIII, Atlantis...

We left the haven hanging in the night—
Sheened harbor lanterns backward fled the keel.
Pacific here at time’s end, bearing corn, —
Eyes stammer through the pangs of dust and steel.
And still the circular, indubitable frieze
Of heaven’s meditation, yoking wave
To kneeling wave, one song devoutly binds—
The vernal strophe chimes from deathless strings!

O Thou, steeled Cognizance whose leap commits
The agile precincts of the lark’s return;
Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing
In single chrysalis the many twain, —
Of stars thou art the stitch and stallion glow
And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom—
Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time’s realm
As love strikes clear direction for the helm.



The book is readily available
http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?keyword=the+bridge+hart++crane&mtype=B& hs.x=0&hs.y=0
Though I salivate for this edition:
http://www.alibris.com/booksearch.detail?invid=11289741801&keyword=the+br idge+hart+crane&qsort=&page=1

Nemo

[R. Nemo Hill]

63. Exile by St.-John Perse

Really the Bollingen Collected Poems is full of one gem after another, but it is the single work Exile that is dearest to me. When I first discovered the poems of St.-John Perse I was instantly fascinated—I’d never encounter anything like them before and devoured the Collected cover to cover, as well as his letters. Most people I know are not familiar with his work at all, despite his 1960 Nobel Prize. Those who are, know of him almost exclusively through T.S. Eliot’s translation of Anabasis. Perse wrote exclusively in the prose poem format, but there can be little doubt that the language he employs is unadulterated poetry. One of the most captivating parts of his work is his vocabulary which is so sensually rich in technical terms that a list of the words I learned through reading him is a poem in itself.

...seisms, phasmas, vanessas, almagesta, portulains, spandrel, natron, alburnum, latria, uriae, aurochs, saltwort, crockets, culm, achene, anopheles...

Timeless and resoundingly mythic, to me these poems sound like long-lost anonymous manuscripts discovered in some forgotten cave or cask. Indeed, though he led a very public life as a statesman and diplomat, Perse seems to have purged his work of all details of selfhood, choosing a path of self-effacement—in stark contrast to that chosen by the confessionalists who are legion. His is a voice that always seems to come from very far away. And yet the great paradox of this otherworldly approach is that it manages to come across as intensely political, and—for me—almost unbearably intimate.


“...He who, in the midnight hours, ranges the stone galleries assessing the title-deeds of a beautiful comet; he who, between two wars, watches over the purity of great crystal lenses; he who rises before daylight to clean out the fountains, and the great epidemics are at an end; he who does the lacquering on the high seas with his daughters and his sons’ wives, and they have had enough of the ashes floating above the land...
.....He who soothes the insane in the great blue-chalk asylums, and it is Sunday over the rye-fields, the time of great blindness; he who, at the entry of the armies, goes up to the organs in their solitude; he who dreams one day about strange quarry-prisons, and it is a little after mid-day, the time of great bereavement; he who, at sea, below the wind from a low-lying island, is awakened by the dry scent of a little immortelle of the sands; he who stays awake in the ports, embraced by women of another race, and there is a vetiver flavour in the armpit smell of the low, receding night, and it is a little after midnight, the time of great opacity; he whose breathing, asleep, is one with the sea’s breathing, and at the turn of the tide he turns on the bed like a ship putting about...”

(translated by Denis Devlin)


I did a reading in New York City of this single long poem, Exile, about six or seven years ago—one of the best performances I’ve ever given. I had goosebumps for the duration.

http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?qwork=14047134&matches=3&cm_sp=works*li sting*title


"...There has always been this clamour, there has always been this splendour."

Nemo

[David Rosenthal]

Crane, The Bridge -- absolutely right. Good thing you looked in, Nemo.

David R,

[R. Nemo Hill]

You beat me to the Edwin Arlington Robinson, David, though I might have been inclined to single out one of his later, longer, under-appreciated blank verse works (all of which are included in the Collected) just to stir up the pot. Perhaps Amaranth or Glory Of The Nightingales or Matthias At The Door.

Nemo

[Andrew Frisardi]

Good choice with the St.-John Perse, Nemo. Here's another non-Anglophone nomination.

The Duino Elegies blew me away the first time I read it in Stephen Spender’s translation, and then it blew me away even more in Stephen Mitchell’s. The opening line is one of the most famous lines of 20th-century poetry:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies?

Rilke’s whole oeuvre attests to the authenticity of his search for an answer to that opening question—which of course is never answered. Instead he acknowledges that life is preparation for something we can’t even begin to comprehend:

and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure. (Stephen Mitchell’s trans.)

The Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus (which was almost my Rilke choice for this thread) were written for the most part in that month in 1922 (I think it was) when Rilke was the embodiment of the inspired poet in the ancient sense.

Rilke more than most poets lived that ideal of negative capability that Keats wrote about. He is one of the poets whose intuition breaks down mental categories and cages, the habitual barrier between the seen and the unseen.

Like a student of Zen, he suggests in the Elegies that the adequate symbol is what simply is. The Elegies end:

If the endlessly dead awakened a symbol in us,
perhaps they would point to the catkins hanging from the bare
branches of the hazel-trees, or
would evoke the raindrops that fall onto the dark earth in springtime.

And we, who have always thought
of happiness rising, would feel
the emotion that almost overwhelms us
whenever a happy thing falls.

Even in translation the quality of Rilke’s poetic thought comes through—he’s one of the main reasons I hope to learn German some day.

I know the Edward Snow translation as well, which has struck me as very well done. But I’d love to hear from others here, especially someone who knows what the original is like, what translation they like best.

[Philip Morre]

After this thread had seemed to be wilting a bit, I see that all of a sudden some big guns are coming out, so I wanted to get this in, while there's time. Bunting was almost buried and forgotten by the sixties but was miraculously disinterred by a small group of fans, led I think by Tom Pickard, (he was working the night shift on a local paper) upon which he came up with this, arguably (as they say) the greatest long poem in English of the century. Cyril Connolly among others picked up on it and its publication led to a brief autumn of fame for the poet. Here are a couple of fragments from part 2:

Poet appointed dare not decline
to walk among the bogus, nothing to authenticate
the mission imposed, despised
by toadies, confidence men, kept boys,
shopped and jailed, cleaned out by whores,
touching acquaintance for food and tobacco.
Secret, solitary, a spy, he gauges
lines of a Flemish horse
hauling beer, the angle, obtuse,
a slut’s blouse draws on her chest,
counts beat against beat, bus conductor
against engine against wheels against
the pedal, Tottenham Court Road, decodes
thunder, scans
porridge bubbling, pipes clanking, feels
Buddha’s basalt cheek
but cannot name the ratio of its curves
to the half-pint
left breast of a girl who bared it in Kleinfeldt’s.
He lies with one to another for another,
sick, self-maimed, self-hating,
obstinate, mating
beauty with squalor to beget lines still-born.

. . . . . . . . . . .


It tastes good, garlic and salt in it,
with the half-sweet white wine of Orvieto
on scanty grass under great trees
where the ramparts cuddle Lucca.

It sounds right, spoken on the ridge
between marine olives and hillside
blue figs, under the breeze fresh
with pollen of Apennine sage.

It feels soft, weed thick in the cave
and the smooth wet riddance of Antonietta's
bathing suit, mouth ajar for
submarine Amalfitan kisses.

It looks well on the page, but never
well enough. Something is lost
when wind, sun, sea upraid
justly an unconvinced deserter.

[Philip Morre]

Can I also propose, by way of tidying, that the blank space at 49 be occupied by Lorca's Romancero Gitano, which Chiago Mapocho claimed recently had already been put up, but which does not appear to have been.
Also 59 ought to be Les Murray: Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996), as semi-suggested, rather than New Collected Poems (2002), which does not qualify.