[John Riley]

I have it as Akhmatova in my files, Andrew. Maybe I'll check my collected to make certain. I do like the poem.

Bronk is always compared to Stevens and of course he comes up short. I do agree he has one tone and it wears thin in long stretches. I do have a place in me though for his poems and the type of poems he wrote. They don't have the dimensions of Steven or Frost, have fewer aspects or levels, but several of them are interesting and worth going back to periodically.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by John Riley

I have it as Akhmatova in my files, Andrew. Maybe I'll check my collected to make certain. I do like the poem.

Bronk is always compared to Stevens and of course he comes up short. I do agree he has one tone and it wears thin in long stretches. I do have a place in me though for his poems and the type of poems he wrote. They don't have the dimensions of Steven or Frost, have fewer aspects or levels, but several of them are interesting and worth going back to periodically.

Yeah, I liked it too. I looked for it and found the attribution to the other poet. And I think a credit for Janice Soderling as translator but it is an unnamed document that has come up so it could be misleading. Lemme know. Interested.

[Andrew Szilvasy]

Originally Posted by John Riley

Bronk is always compared to Stevens and of course he comes up short. I do agree he has one tone and it wears thin in long stretches. I do have a place in me though for his poems and the type of poems he wrote. They don't have the dimensions of Steven or Frost, have fewer aspects or levels, but several of them are interesting and worth going back to periodically.

I agree, John. It's not really a fair comparison. I really did like what I read of Bronk. In fact, I do revisit his work, and it has inspired my work indirectly, and a few times directly (I have a poem that takes a line from the following poem). He is what he is: a compelling poet who--once you've gotten a sense of his poetry--does mostly variations on a theme by Bronk.

"Midsummer"

A green world, a scene of green, deep
with light blues, the greens made deep
by those blues. One thinks how
in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen
(through a window, maybe) far behind the serene
sitter’s face, the serene pose, as though
in some impossible mirror, face to back,
human serenity gazed at a green world
which gazed at this face.
which gazed at this face.And see now,
here is that place, those greens
are here, deep with those blues. The air
we breathe is freshly sweet, and warm, as though
with berries. We are here. We are here.
Set this down too, as much
as if an atrocity had happened and been seen.
The earth is beautiful beyond all change.

[William A. Baurle]

I'm going Gluck on you again.

I find her subjects profound and her expression unique and excellent in almost every way, except that she has a tendency to veer away from the concrete and rely on abstractions, particularly in her longer poems. Her short poems are usually better. This gem was included in Edward Field's seminal anthology of American poetry, A Geography of Poets, in 1979, but doesn't seem to be one of her more popular poems. Why, I can't figure out. I'm posting it mainly because of the discussion going on in Richard Meyer's thread, "Good Friday".

***

The Gift

Lord, you may not recognize me
speaking for someone else.
I have a son. He is
so little, so ignorant.
He likes to stand
at the screen door, calling
oggie, oggie, entering
language, and sometimes
a dog will stop and come up
the walk, perhaps
accidentally. May he believe
this is not an accident.
At the screen
welcoming each beast
in love’s name, Your emissary.

— Louise Gluck

[John Isbell]

This seems like a decent time to plug the Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters, of which this is fairly representative:

"Mickey McGrew

It was just like everything else in life:
Something outside myself drew me down,
My own strength never failed me.
Why, there was the time I earned the money
With which to go away to school,
And my father suddenly needed help
And I had to give him all of it.
Just so it went till i ended up
A man-of-all-work in Spoon River.
Thus when I got the water-tower cleaned,
And they hauled me up the seventy feet,
I unhooked the rope from my waist,
And laughingly flung my giant arms
Over the smooth steel lips of the top of the tower -
But they slipped from the treacherous slime,
And down, down, down, I plunged
Through bellowing darkness!"

[John Isbell]

I like this thread, and was wondering whom I'd post here: Seferis? Elytis?
But I think I'll put in Yehuda Amichai, in Bloch and Mitchell's version:

"The Diameter of the Bomb

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city that she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won't even mention the howl of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God."

John

[William A. Baurle]

Crushing poem, John.** It reminds me of some of the more God-critical poems of one of my favorite poets (at one time my favorite poet), Menke Katz. Katz doesn't find "no God" as Amichai seems to in this poem, but he is extremely critical of God, and goes about it fearlessly. The Big Kahuna's Big, after all, and He/She can take it. Who needs a shrinking-violet god who can't handle criticism? I guess certain people do. I shouldn't be so flippant.

Technical problem: I see quotation marks at the end of the poem but I can't find where the quote begins?

J.D. McClatchy's The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry contains many of Amichai's poems, but not that one. Thanks!

*

I just discovered a beaut' from a poet I've only known from two or three anthologies, and those being old ones. I decided to finally do a search, and I was delighted to see he has a website, with an offering of poems. The first one I read hit me in the gut. It feels like it just couldn't have been an accident to have thought to look for this particular poet at this particular time, and to find a poem that hits me so hard, no less, being that it's along the lines of what I've been thinking obsessively about: The possibility* of God, or a god-like Being, making mistakes, and bungling things up, and trying like hell to fix things.

*Nota: I say "possibility". I am not putting forth a proposition to be considered as an actual hypothesis - I'm just a poet (I hope that's what I am, because if I'm not, boy oh boy do I ever need to find another hobby) thinking out loud, wearing his heart, and his few remaining marbles, on his sleeve.

On to the poem, which by the way is formatted with a lot of indentation on the web-page, but I will not take the trouble to do it here, as it requires too many x's and too much finger work:

**Edited in 4.10.17: just click "quote" and you can see the proper indentation.

***

Lot's Wife

Lot’s wife,
she knew.
But how little
we learn about her.
Some say
she was named Edith, but later
she may have
taken a different name, a
different language,
in another country. Was she
sad, as they claimed,
and disobedient to turn and look?
Was she punished, as they claimed,
and became a pillar of salt?

Some say she
and the others
had seen it coming,
long before the two angels
appeared
with their warning of
catastrophe.

God would try and fail

(again).

The old methods, napalm,
mass slaughter,
would lead where
they usually led: guerrilla war,
resistance that lasts for
centuries; underground
networks
where pleasure makes its own
rules, identities are hidden and
the labyrinth of tunnels grows
ever longer and
deeper.

I leave it for you to decide. The supposed winners
write these tales.

Some say
she was part of the underground
and her disguise worked and she
vanished into history leaving
behind only a story still taken as a warning
and a truth.

— Lou Lipsitz

***
**I hope to be able to say something about your poem in Metrical, once I get my thoughts about it collected sufficiently. May take a few hours, or a few days...but it will come.

[John Isbell]

Good morning, Bill,

And doubly thank you for sharing the Lipsitz: the poem is great and I've never heard of him. I love when this starts happening:

"The old methods, napalm,
mass slaughter,
would lead where
they usually led"

How true. Amichai made a great impression on me when i first discovered him, not least for this bomb poem, but he's worth a volume in his own right. May I recommend the Bloch/Mitchell? Mitchell also does a great job with Rilke in Ahead of All Parting, which has the German facing. Amichai is no atheist, but a bomb can make a person wonder.
Your posts are always thought-provoking, Bill, which life deserves more of.

OK, I'll randomly post a Seferis poem now, in Keeley and Sherrard's version:

"Interlude of Joy

That whole morning we were full of joy,
my God, how full of joy.
First, stone leaves and flowers shone
then the sun
a huge sun all thorns and so high in the sky.
A nymph collected our cares and hung them on the trees
a forest of Judas trees.
Young cupids and satyrs played there and sang
and you could see rose-colored limbs among the black laurels
flesh of little children.
The whole morning long we were full of joy;
the abyss a closed well
tapped by the tender hoof of a young faun.
Do you remember its laugh - how full of joy!
Then clouds rain and the wet earth,
you stopped laughing when you lay down in the hut
and opened your large eyes as you watched
the archangel practicing with a fiery sword -
'Inexplicable,' you said, 'inexplicable.
I don't understand people:
no matter how much they play with colors
they all remain pitch-black.'"

Cheers,
John