Share A Poet

[Stella_Omega]

Well, he was French- what did you expect? And he died young- wonder what he expected?? !!

Go read John Donne- he was pretty fiery, but in a more discreet way.

One hundred percent English, don't ye know- Born and bred in Rochester
He was Charles II's favorite. His big mouth caused him to be banished from court several times, and each time the king would relent and send for him again.

He died of syphilis and possibly cirrhosis, and he was pretty upset about catching the clap- since he actually preached a more self-controlled hedonism than this poem shows. He loved his famiy, and took good care of them, he preferred living in the Country to life at court.
There are a handlful of satirical poems like this one where he makes fun of himself- taking the piss out, and to me they are just so funny.
Plus, the meter and the rhymes remind me so much- of AA Milne, of "Winnie The Pooh" fame. Not the bedtime poems I remember from my childhood!

 

[BooMerengue]

One hundred percent English, don't ye know- Born and bred in Rochester
He was Charles II's favorite. His big mouth caused him to be banished from court several times, and each time the king would relent and send for him again.

He died of syphilis and possibly cirrhosis, and he was pretty upset about catching the clap- since he actually preached a more self-controlled hedonism than this poem shows. He loved his famiy, and took good care of them, he preferred living in the Country to life at court.
There are a handlful of satirical poems like this one where he makes fun of himself- taking the piss out, and to me they are just so funny.
Plus, the meter and the rhymes remind me so much- of AA Milne, of "Winnie The Pooh" fame. Not the bedtime poems I remember from my childhood!

Ohhh, my bad! Well, what do you expect? I drank the drink you gave me and now I'm all drunk and shit... Your fault, you know!

 

[Stella_Omega]

Ohhh, my bad! Well, what do you expect? I drank the drink you gave me and now I'm all drunk and shit... Your fault, you know!

yep, as usual.. blame it on the bulldagger, that's what she's there for

 

[BooMerengue]

yep, as usual.. blame it on the bulldagger, that's what she's there for

Whats a bulldagger? A bull dyke? A drag queen? Is that what you are? (I know what a drag queen is- I read Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, you know. I'm not that blonde! lol

Stel? I don't give a shit what you are- it's who you are that counts. (But I bet I have some sexy underwear you'd cry for! LOL) As long as you keep me drunk and look better in my underwear than I do, we'll be best pals!

Oh, yeah. You have to be nice. Always. Or at least try.

I am bonked. Going to bed. Good night.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Whats a bulldagger? A bull dyke? A drag queen? Is that what you are? (I know what a drag queen is- I read Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, you know. I'm not that blonde! lol

Stel? I don't give a shit what you are- it's who you are that counts. (But I bet I have some sexy underwear you'd cry for! LOL) As long as you keep me drunk and look better in my underwear than I do, we'll be best pals!

Oh, yeah. You have to be nice. Always. Or at least try.

I am bonked. Going to bed. Good night.

Sweet dreams!

 

[Guest]

This is a marvelous poem. I had never seen it. Thank you for sharing it.

It is nice, isn't it? All the debate about Sylvia Plath made me seek out more of Ted's work. Some of it's very sexy. he was quite the lad - poor sylvie.

 

[Stella_Omega]

A modern sonnet- I think it's the first one I ever read On Purpose, so to speak. It was in my highschoool literature textbook, along with some other odd choices that I've never found again!


"The End Of The World"

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.

-- Archibald MacLeish

 

[wildsweetone]

i just want to say... that sounds quite odd.

 

[Stella_Omega]

i just want to say... that sounds quite odd.

What does?

 

[wildsweetone]

the poem. it's kind of like looking at a weird painting mainly in water colour and sepia... kind of circus-y-like. odd. it gives me a weird feeling.

i'll look it up when i've some time and see what i can find.

i mean, what is the top that blew off?

does it mean circus tent? big top? geez

without the poet saying circus or big top or obvious words like those, that's the impression i get. the image he's showing isn't one i would normally see. i don't know the people mentioned, i shall look them up too.

my apologies, i'm waffling out loud again. ignore me i'll look it up tomorrow.



thank you for posting the poem!

 

[Stella_Omega]

the poem. it's kind of like looking at a weird painting mainly in water colour and sepia... kind of circus-y-like. odd. it gives me a weird feeling.

i'll look it up when i've some time and see what i can find.

i mean, what is the top that blew off?

does it mean circus tent? big top? geez

without the poet saying circus or big top or obvious words like those, that's the impression i get. the image he's showing isn't one i would normally see. i don't know the people mentioned, i shall look them up too.

my apologies, i'm waffling out loud again. ignore me i'll look it up tomorrow.



thank you for posting the poem!

Yes, he's talking about the total end of the universe coming while some people are watching a circus show... All the names are just typical performer's names and acts; no one is actually a famous name or anything.
Back when he wrote it, circuses were still common, now they aren't.

You are very intuitive!

 

[wildsweetone]

i'm still learning. *smile* (i think i'll still be learning when i'm 90 )

thanks for letting me know i wasn't going completely nuts. lol

 

[wildsweetone]

The Herbivores


Barefoot on grass.
Life to life, like body to body.
This is why the herbivores have hooves:
Not to caress what they kill.


by Yuri Tarnopolsky

 

[Rybka]

A modern sonnet- I think it's the first one I ever read On Purpose, so to speak. It was in my highschoool literature textbook, along with some other odd choices that I've never found again!


"The End Of The World"

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.

-- Archibald MacLeish

Archie was the first poet that I ever read (in school too) that turned me on to poetry. - I was fortunate enough to meet him later in life at the Melon's in Antigua. He, Frost, and Cummings have had the most influence on me and what I like.

I was excited by a different poem, although the theme is stragely similar:

Epistle to be left in the Earth

. . . It is colder now, there are many stars, we are drifting
North by the Great Bear, the leaves are falling,
The water is stone in the scooped rocks, to southward
Red sun grey air:

The crows are slow on their crooked wings, the jays have left us:
Long since we passed the flares of Orion,

Each . . . believes in his heart he will die,
Many have written last thoughts and last letters.

None know if our deaths are now or forever:
None know if this wandering earth will be found.

We lie down and the snow covers our garments.
I pray you, you (if any open this writing)
Make in your mouths the words that were our names.

I will tell you all we have learned, I will tell you everything:

The earth is round, there are springs under the orchards,
The loam cuts with a blunt knife,

Beware of elms in thunder, the lights in the sky are stars-

We think they do not see, we think also
The trees do not know nor the leaves of the grasses hear us:
The birds too are ignorant.

Do not listen. Do not stand at dark in the open windows.

We before you have heard this: they are voices

They are not words at all but the wind rising.
Also none among us has seen God.
(. . . We have thought often
The flaws of the sun in the late and driving weather
Pointed to one tree but it was not so.)
As for the nights I warn you the nights are dangerous:
The wind changes at night and the dreams come.
It is very cold, there are strange stars near Arcturus.
Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky.

~ Archibald MacLeish

 

[Rybka]

A modern sonnet- I think it's the first one I ever read On Purpose, so to speak. It was in my highschoool literature textbook, along with some other odd choices that I've never found again!


"The End Of The World"

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.

-- Archibald MacLeish

Archie was the first poet that I ever read (in school too) that turned me on to poetry. - I was fortunate enough to meet him later in life at the Melon's in Antigua. He, Frost, and Cummings have had the most influence on me and what I like.

I was excited by a different poem, although the theme is stragely similar:

Epistle to be left in the Earth

. . . It is colder now, there are many stars, we are drifting
North by the Great Bear, the leaves are falling,
The water is stone in the scooped rocks, to southward
Red sun grey air:

The crows are slow on their crooked wings, the jays have left us:
Long since we passed the flares of Orion,

Each . . . believes in his heart he will die,
Many have written last thoughts and last letters.

None know if our deaths are now or forever:
None know if this wandering earth will be found.

We lie down and the snow covers our garments.
I pray you, you (if any open this writing)
Make in your mouths the words that were our names.

I will tell you all we have learned, I will tell you everything:

The earth is round, there are springs under the orchards,
The loam cuts with a blunt knife,

Beware of elms in thunder, the lights in the sky are stars-

We think they do not see, we think also
The trees do not know nor the leaves of the grasses hear us:
The birds too are ignorant.

Do not listen. Do not stand at dark in the open windows.

We before you have heard this: they are voices

They are not words at all but the wind rising.
Also none among us has seen God.

(. . . We have thought often
The flaws of the sun in the late and driving weather
Pointed to one tree but it was not so.)

As for the nights I warn you the nights are dangerous:
The wind changes at night and the dreams come.

It is very cold, there are strange stars near Arcturus.

Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky.

~ Archibald MacLeish

 

[Stella_Omega]

Nice to read other works by him, thanks Rybka .
i feel that e.e.cummngs rythm- similar times, I suppose.

 

[Tzara]

Ah! Back across the whole effing country a'gin!

It's a long long way to Tipperary, but it is certainly a long enough way from Boston to Seattle. Yikes.

And what to read but poetry? My thanks to Fly for some hint he made (perhaps it was his tongue hanging out, which compliments those lovely mismatched eyes he is sportin' nowadays) about Kim Addonizio.

Yeah, yeah. Now my tongue is hanging out and I don't even like tattoos! Well, I guess it's all in context.

I, uh, liked this one. The initial image is to die for.

You don't know what love is

but you know how to raise it in me
like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to
wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.
How to start clean. This love even sits up
and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.
Any day now she'll try to eat solid food. She'll want
to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive
to some cinderblock shithole in the desert
where she can drink and get sick and then
dance in nothing but her underwear. You know
where she's headed, you know she'll wake up
with an ache she can't locate and no money
and a terrible thirst. So to hell
with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt
and your tongue down my throat
like an oxygen tube. Cover me
in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

 

[flyguy69]

My only comment about Kim Addonizio was this: sigh!

She is an amazing poet, and the example you provide is illustrative.

I recently came across a poetry exercise based upon a form poem in one of her books. The form is called a "sonnenzio" and she provides this background, which almost allays my suspicions regarding the name!

The Sonnenizio was invented in Florence in the thirteenth century by Vanni Fucci as an irreverant form whose subject was usually the impossibility of everlasting love. Dante retaliated by putting Fucci into the seventh chasm of the Inferno as a thief. Originally composed of hendecasyllabics, the sonnenizio gradually moved away from metrical constraints and began to tackle a wider variety of subject matter. The sonnenizio is fourteen lines long. It opens with a line from someone else's sonnet, repeats a word from that line in each succeeding line of the poem, and closes with a rhymed couplet.

Here is her example:

Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part;
or kiss anyway, let's start with that, with the kissing part,
because it's better than the parting part, isn't it —
we're good at kissing, we like how that part goes:
we part our lips, our mouths get near and nearer,
then we're close, my breasts, your chest, our bodies partway
to making love, so we might as well, part of me thinks —
the wrong part, I know, the bad part, but still
let's pretend we're at that party where we met
and scandalized everyone, remember that part? Hold me
like that again, unbutton my shirt, part of you
wants to I can tell, I'm touching that part and it says
yes, the ardent partisan, let it win you over,
it's hopeless, come, we'll kiss and part forever.

The first line is taken from a sonnet by 16th century poet Michael Drayton.

It's a long long way to Tipperary, but it is certainly a long enough way from Boston to Seattle. Yikes.

And what to read but poetry? My thanks to Fly for some hint he made (perhaps it was his tongue hanging out, which compliments those lovely mismatched eyes he is sportin' nowadays) about Kim Addonizio.

Yeah, yeah. Now my tongue is hanging out and I don't even like tattoos! Well, I guess it's all in context.

I, uh, liked this one. The initial image is to die for.

You don't know what love is

but you know how to raise it in me
like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to
wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.
How to start clean. This love even sits up
and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.
Any day now she'll try to eat solid food. She'll want
to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive
to some cinderblock shithole in the desert
where she can drink and get sick and then
dance in nothing but her underwear. You know
where she's headed, you know she'll wake up
with an ache she can't locate and no money
and a terrible thirst. So to hell
with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt
and your tongue down my throat
like an oxygen tube. Cover me
in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

 

[lindiana]

Queen Elizabeth I of England (1533-1603)


Written on a Wall at Woodstock

Oh Fortune, thy wresting wavering state
Hath fraught with cares my troubled wit,
Whose witness this present prison late
Could bear, where once was joy's loan quit.
Thou causedst the guilty to be loosed
From bands where innocents were inclosed,
And caused the guiltless to be reserved,
And freed those that death had well deserved.
But all herein can be nothing wrought,
So God send to my foes all they have thought

 

[KR]

Nizar Qabbani

"Woman" by Nizar Qabbani

Woman who was inscribed
in books of magic,
before you came
the world was prose.
Now poetry is born.
Give me time to catch
the colt that runs toward me,
your breast,
a bedouin breast, sweet
as cardamom seeds
as coffee brewing over embers
its form ancient as Damascus brass,
as Egyptian temples.

Woman whose thighs are like
the desert palm that golden
dates fall from,
your breasts speak seven tongues
and I was made to listen
to them all.
Give me the chance
to avoid this storm,
this sweeping love,
this wintry air,
and to be convinced to blaspheme,
and to enter
the flesh of things.

Give me the chance
to be the one
to walk on water.
---

Love Letter 6
Woman in whose voice
silver and wine mingle
in the rains
From the mirrors of your knees
the day begins its journey
life puts out to sea
---

Love Letter 13
I am not a teacher
to teach you how to love
Fish need no teacher
to learn how to swim
and birds need no teacher
to learn how to fly
Love has no notebooks
and the greatest lovers in history
never knew how to read

 

[Angeline]

As We Are So Wonderfully Done With Each Other
Kenneth Patchen


As we are so wonderfully done with each other
We can walk into our separate sleep
on floors of music where the milkwhite cloak of childhood
lies

oh my love, my golden lark, my soft long doll
Your lips have splashed my dull house with print of flowers
My hands are crooked where they spilled over your dear
curving

It is good to be weary from that brilliant work
It is being God to feel your breathing under me

A waterglass on the bureau fills with morning
Don't let anyone in to wake us

 

[Stella_Omega]

Here's a poem that I read long, long ago, and I could never find again. Thank you, Google!

Turns out, it's by W.H. Auden; A sonnet about Edward Lear

Left by his friend to breakfast alone on the white
Italian shore, his Terrible Demon arose
Over his shoulder; he wept to himself in the night,
A dirty landscape-painter who hated his nose.

The legions of cruel inquisitive They
Were so many and big like dogs: he was upset
By Germans and boats; affection was miles away:
But guided by tears he successfully reached his Regret.

How prodigiuous the welcome was. Flowers took his hat
And bore him off to introduce him to the tongs;
The demon's false nose made the table laugh; a cat
Soon had him waltzing madly, let him squeeze her hand;
Words pushed him to the piano to sing comic songs;

And children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land.

 

[Tzara]

Landscape with Fall of Icarus
William Carlos Williams

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

 

[vampiredust]

Fog by Amy Clampitt

A vagueness comes over everything,
as though proving color and contour
alike dispensable: the lighthouse
extinct, the islands' spruce-tips
drunk up like milk in the
universal emulsion; houses
reverting into the lost
and forgotten; granite
subsumed, a rumor
in a mumble of ocean.
Tactile
definition, however, has not been
totally banished: hanging
tassel by tassel, panicled
foxtail and needlegrass,
dropseed, furred hawkweed,
and last season's rose-hips
are vested in silenced
chimes of the finest,
clearest sea-crystal.
Opacity
opens up rooms, a showcase
for the hueless moonflower
corolla, as Georgia
O'Keefe might have seen it,
of foghorns; the nodding
campanula of bell buoys;
the ticking, linear
filigree of bird voices.

 

[TheRainMan]

The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower


The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.


--- Dylan Thomas