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05-04-2017, 06:28 AM
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Join Date: Sep 2016
Location: Seattle
Posts: 2,626
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Quote:
Originally Posted by William A. Baurle
H.D. rocks. That gem of hers is not exactly hidden, though, as it appears in several big anthologies.
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Fair enough. I even got it from an anthology, actually.
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05-05-2017, 11:37 PM
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Join Date: Sep 2001
Location: Arizona, USA
Posts: 1,844
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Aaron Novick
Fair enough. I even got it from an anthology, actually.
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No problem, Aaron. It's a great poem, and a lot of folks here probably haven't read it.
Don't mind me. I'm a walking anthology myself. It's amazing how the brain works. I can't change a tire, despite being shown how about a dozen times. I can't do anything mechanical, actually. I have trouble installing batteries. I'm proud of myself every time I can change a lightbulb. Seriously. I feel like Clint Eastwood after I do that. But when it comes to poems and poets, I don't seem to forget that stuff. ?
My life would be far better, and I'd have a better job and more money, if I could learn how to do basic, essential, things.
Onward!
Last edited by William A. Baurle; 05-05-2017 at 11:39 PM.
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05-08-2017, 10:07 PM
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Join Date: Sep 2001
Location: Arizona, USA
Posts: 1,844
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The “William P. Frye”
I saw her first abreast the Boston Light
At anchor; she had just come in, turned head,
And sent her hawsers creaking, clattering down.
I was so near to where the hawse-pipes fed
The cable out from her careening bow,
I moved up on the swell, shut steam and lay
Hove to in my old launch to look at her.
She’d come in light, a-skimming up the Bay
Like a white ghost with topsails bellying full;
And all her noble lines from bow to stern
Made music in the wind; it seemed she rode
The morning air like those thin clouds that turn
Into tall ships when sunrise lifts the clouds
From calm sea-courses.
There, in smoke-smudged coats,
Lay funnelled liners, dirty fishing-craft,
Blunt cargo-luggers, tugs, and ferry-boats.
Oh, it was good in that black-scuttled lot
To see the Frye come lording on her way
Like some old queen that we had half forgot
Come to her own. A little up the Bay
The Fort lay green, for it was springtime then;
The wind was fresh, rich with the spicy bloom
Of the New England coast that tardily
Escapes, late April, from an icy tomb.
The State-house glittered on old Beacon Hill,
Gold in the sun…. ’Twas all so fair awhile;
But she was fairest—this great square-rigged ship
That had blown in from some far happy isle
On from the shores of the Hesperides.
They caught her in a South Atlantic road
Becalmed, and found her hold brimmed up with wheat;
“Wheat’s contrabrand,” they said, and blew her hull
To pieces, murdered one of our staunch fleet,
Fast dwindling, of the big old sailing ships
That carry trade for us on the high sea
And warped out of each harbor in the States.
It wasn’t law, so it seems strange to me—
A big mistake. Her keel’s struck bottom now
And her four masts sunk fathoms, fathoms deep
To Davy Jones. The dank seaweed will root
On her oozed decks, and the cross-surges sweep
Through the set sails; but never, never more
Her crew will stand away to brace and trim,
Nor sea-blown petrels meet her thrashing up
To windward on the Gulf Stream’s stormy rim;
Never again she’ll head a no’theast gale
Or like a spirit loom up, sliding dumb,
And ride in safe beyond the Boston Light,
To make the harbor glad because she’s come.
—Jeanne Robert Foster
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05-13-2017, 01:42 PM
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Join Date: Sep 2016
Location: Seattle
Posts: 2,626
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I've been reading some of Pessoa's poetry lately. I've found that the poems generally don't stand out as individuals, but I like the effect they make compiled. Here's an exception, a poem I really love just for itself:
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06-10-2017, 03:43 PM
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Join Date: Mar 2017
Location: TX
Posts: 6,630
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I just picked up a volume called New European Poets, 330 pages of poetry from Malta to Belarus. So it covers a lot of ground. Here's a Polish poem by Dariusz Suska (translated by Alissa Valles):
Death is the top player in our playground,
not Suchy, who can keep a ball in the air,
or Chybowski, who is master of matches.
Death is our top player, Imiolczyk himself
with all his best tricks didn't come near
though once he put his head through glass
and the glass doors burst like ocean spray
and blood from his knees and his nose lay
clotted under the stairs. Death was the one
to beat Gruby on a bike, the first to switch
to a board. Death rules, is what I'm saying,
it builds us; builds, while we are decaying.
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06-11-2017, 05:51 AM
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Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: a foothill of the Catskills
Posts: 968
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A musician friend sent me this just the other day. It’s a two-fer: German Romantic poet Friederich Rückert and Gustav Mahler. A three-fer, really, with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing it.
Take seven minutes and listen to it, if you can … so very poetic, so very beautiful.
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06-11-2017, 06:40 AM
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Join Date: Mar 2017
Location: TX
Posts: 6,630
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Tremendous. I enjoyed the video too, with its surprise piano. My favorite C20th baritone and possibly my favorite composer.
Rueckert doesn't get taught in German Romanticism courses, but great composers set him to music. Here (if I'm lucky) is a link to his Kindertotenlieder, also set by Mahler, which have a powerful back story. This is Kathleen Ferrier singing it in London, 1947. She died young.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3J2e-L62bY
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06-11-2017, 08:30 AM
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Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: a foothill of the Catskills
Posts: 968
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John,
Thank you so much for that. The ending of “In diesem Wetter” is indeed transcendent, and I look forward to spending more time with the songs. One of my favorite pastimes recently is spending the evening hours discovering music I don’t know … it never gets old.
A question for you on Rückert: this is the second time I’ve stumbled on him and it seems I need to read him. Can you recommend a good translation, a good selection? I read some German, so ideally I’d love to see both German and English, but I’ll take good English. You can certainly PM me, so we don't hijack this thread.
Thanks!
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06-12-2017, 06:55 AM
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Join Date: Mar 2017
Location: TX
Posts: 6,630
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Here's a Finnish poem from New European Poets, translated by Donald Adamson:
Postcard
I saw your picture in the paper yesterday, and today
though the report concerns a tragic accident
and apparently you're avoiding us, your relatives
I felt the urge to tell you a couple of things:
A singer should always be smiling
and your smile won't sell if you don't soon get your teeth fixed.
Furthermore you should sit on a stone and listen to how
your inner teeth are grinding.
There's nothing to beat it! Especially in the morning
when you can stare out over the open water and see its hugeness,
an enormous colored lens from which the sun's iris detaches itself
in order to study the people of this town.
Don't ever let the same terror walk the same path three times,
it leaves the tracks of a forestry machine in the brain, instead
you should walk these paths, across water
everything appears in a different light, absolutely everything:
a robin is chirping wildly, there are violets, and lungwort!
I know what I'm talking about, I too
have been reading the paw of a tiny creature.
Helena Sinervo
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06-12-2017, 07:04 AM
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Join Date: Aug 2016
Location: Boston, MA
Posts: 4,198
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Quote:
Originally Posted by John Isbell
I just picked up a volume called New European Poets, 330 pages of poetry from Malta to Belarus. So it covers a lot of ground. Here's a Polish poem by Dariusz Suska (translated by Alissa Valles):
Death is the top player in our playground,
not Suchy, who can keep a ball in the air,
or Chybowski, who is master of matches.
Death is our top player, Imiolczyk himself
with all his best tricks didn't come near
though once he put his head through glass
and the glass doors burst like ocean spray
and blood from his knees and his nose lay
clotted under the stairs. Death was the one
to beat Gruby on a bike, the first to switch
to a board. Death rules, is what I'm saying,
it builds us; builds, while we are decaying.
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This is brilliant, to my ears. And I have lots of Polish in me.
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