[Andrew Frisardi]

Lovely thread. I’m especially glad to be reminded of Edith Scovell, whose Selected I will get a copy of. Clive, I have only read parts of your essay so far but I look forward to the rest.

Here’s one by Ruth Pitter (1897-1992):

Stormcock in Elder

In my dark hermitage, aloof
From the world’s sight and the world’s sound,
By the small door where the old roof
Hangs but five feet above the ground,
I groped along the shelf for bread
But found celestial food instead:

For suddenly close at my ear,
Loud, loud and wild, with wintry glee,
The old unfailing chorister
Burst out in pride of poetry;
And through the broken roof I spied
Him by his singing glorified.

Scarcely an arm’s-length from the eye,
Myself unseen, I saw him there;
The throbbing throat that made the cry,
The breast dewed from the misty air,
The polished bill that opened wide
And showed the pointed tongue inside;

The large eye, ringed with many a ray
Of minion feathers, finely laid,
The feet that grasped the elder-spray;
How strongly used, how subtly made
The scale, the sinew, and the claw,
Plain through the broken roof I saw;

The flight-feathers in tail and wing,
The shorter coverts, and the white
Merged into russet, marrying
The bright breast to the pinions bright,
Gold sequins, spots of chestnut, shower
Of silver, like a brindled flower.

Soldier of fortune, northwest Jack,
Old hard-times’ braggart, there you blow
But tell me ere your bagpipes crack
How you can make so brave a show,
Full-fed in February, and dressed
Like a rich merchant at a feast.

One-half the world, or so they say,
Knows not how half the world may live;
So sing your song and go your way,
And still in February contrive
As bright as Gabriel to smile
On elder-spray by broken tile.

[Clive Watkins]

Thanks for posting this, Andrew. It's a long time since I last read it. What an engaging poem it is!

Clive

[William A. Baurle]

Clive and Andrew F,

Thanks for the Pitter, whom I know of, but vaguely, and for the introduction to Edith Scovell. I'm embarrassed to say I never knew of Scovell until this thread. I will look into her work further. Amazing how many poets one can miss in one life-time!

Great link here. (and mentions you, Clive.)

Michael - great Mary Oliver poem! I said some disparaging things about her a long time ago on another board, but now that I'm considerably older, and hopefully a tiny bit wiser, her poems mean and matter a lot more to me now than they did before.

***

Though I've loved Muriel Rukeyser's poems for years, I've never had a collection of hers. Must get one soon. I was thinking of a particular poem, where she says something immortal, "The universe is made of stories." I will find it and post it, later.

But I just happened upon this poem, and it seems to fit not only the general direction this thread has taken, but also many of the threads going on at the Sphere: the theme of universal understanding, tolerance, and love.

***

St. Roach

For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you,
for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth,
they showed me by every action to despise your kind;
for that I saw my people making war on you,
I could not tell you apart, one from another,
for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you,
for that all the people I knew met you by
crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling
xxwater on you, they flushed you down,
for that I could not tell one from another
only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender.
xxNot like me.
For that I did not know your poems
And that I do not know any of your sayings
And that I cannot speak or read your language
And that I do not sing your songs
And that I do not teach our children
xxxxxto eat your food
xxxxxor know your poems
xxxxxor sing your songs
But that we say you are filthing our food
But that we know you not at all.

Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time.
You were lighter that the others in color, that was
xxxneither good nor bad.

I was really looking for the first time.
You seemed troubled and witty.

Today I touched one of you for the first time.
You were startled, you ran, you fled away
Fast as a dancer, light, strange, and lovely to the touch.
I reach, I touch, I begin to know you.

— Muriel Rukeyser

***

[Michael F]

Ah, Bill. It’s my hope, too, that I’m growing a little wiser and not just older. How many poems have I scudded over and failed to get? A barking dog or an empty stomach can render me utterly stupid. But just this morning I re-read a poem and finally got it.

Delight!

Progress…

[William A. Baurle]

Originally Posted by Michael Ferris

Ah, Bill. It’s my hope, too, that I’m growing a little wiser and not just older. How many poems have I scudded over and failed to get? A barking dog or an empty stomach can render me utterly stupid. But just this morning I re-read a poem and finally got it.

Delight!

Progress…

Indeed! I must have read Eliot's Four Quartets a hundred times in my late teens and early twenties, and hardly understood a thing. Now it seems like every line is crystal clear and heavy with meaning.

However, I still don't grok the title. I know there are four poems, but there are five sections to each poem, hence, wouldn't a better title be Four Quintets ?

***

Here's a great poem by a great contemporary poet:

Gospel: Juan

We crossed the border
Hours before dawn
Through a hole
Dug under a fence.

We crossed
Dressed as soldiers,
Faces painted
Mud green

The coyotes
That promised
We’d make it, gave us
A straw broom

To drag behind,
Erasing our tracks.
They gave us meat
Drugged for the dogs.

Farther off,
There were engines,
Voices, a light
That swept the ground.

We crossed
On our bellies.
I wonder
If we’ll ever stand up.

— Tracy K. Smith

**Edited out the TMI.

This poem is part of a series, but I think it works just fine on its own.

I wanted to include another doozy by Smith called "Betty Blue", but I can't find an online version. I highly recommend her book, The Body's Question. Nearly every poem is dynamite.

[William A. Baurle]

This next poem is masterful, and I daresay hardly anyone will know of it. I hope I'm wrong, though.

Maybe a male poet might be in order, after all the ladies. Especially this poet, who is terribly under-read and under-appreciated. I also picked this poem because of its technical expertise, since we've been doing a lot of free verse in this thread.

***

Love-Making; April; Middle Age

A fresh west wind from water-colored clouds
Stirs squills and iris shoots across the grass
Now turning fiery green. This storm will pass
In dits and stipples on the windowpane
Where we lie high and dry, and the low sun
Will throw rose rays at our gray heads upon
The back-room bed's white pillows. Venus will
Descend, blue-white, in horizontal airs
Of red, orange, ochre, lemon, apple green,
Cerulean, azure, ultramarine,
Ink, navy, indigo, at last midnight.
Now, though, this clouded pewter afternoon
Blurs in our window and intensifies
The light that dusts your eyes and mine with age.

We turn our thirties over like a page.

— L.E. Sissman

[Clive Watkins]

I liked this poem by John Knoepfle the first time I read it back in the mid-1960s – its plainness of speech and a kind of tragic power for all that ostensibly it is only about a group of young men getting ready for a football match. It is from Knoepfle’s first book, Rivers into Islands (University of Chicago Press, 1965). It is interesting to compare it with what I guess is the much more well-known “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” by James Wright (in The Branch Will Not Break, 1963 – https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...s/detail/47733). I think Knoepfle’s the better poem.

John Knoepfle (1923 – ): October Scrimmage

Below the office window
players stretch their cleats
over sweatsocks. They wear
promethean shoulderpads
this ancient afternoon, and I
can hear the murmur of their chatter
magnified down classroom brick
from where I crouch
within my cage of glass.
The team they play for
is famous in this town, and they
are all heroes. On the field
the scrimmage roars in dust
the wind whirls from the west
away, always from the west
away, and the sun there
wrinkles a shadow line of oak
against the school wall
in back of the boys who spit
on their hands and roll laces
to thread impossible eyes.

The ending of Knopfle’s poem puts me in mind of "Wings" by the Czech poet Miroslav Holub (1923 - 1998):

We have
a map of the universe
for microbes,
we have a map of a microbe
for the universe.

We have
A Grand master of chess
made of electronic circuits.

But above all we have
the ability to sort peas,
to cup water in our hands,
to seek
the right screw
under the sofa
for hours.

This
gives us
wings.

(translated by Ian Milner and George Theiner, in Selected Poems: Miroslav Holub, Penguin Books, 1967.)

Clive Watkins