National (USA) Poetry Month

[Tzara]

One of the things we often look for in poetry is emotional connections—to world or personal events, personal relationships, and similar kinds of narrative subjects. This isn't to say that all poetry has an emotional aspect, as we wouldn't expect an emotional jolt from a limerick or a double dactyl, for example, but it is more often than not some kind of emotional experience that we seek in reading poetry.

I think today's poem does a good job of portraying a subtly emotional event through both setting and language:

Conversation with Lace Thong and Car Keys
Molly Spencer

She is in the kitchen bent over
In a blue lace thong when he comes
Through the door blows by her forgot my keys he says

She says oh
She is standing up now having found
What she was looking for she forgets now what it was

Down the hall the thunk of a drawer
Opening the broken music of his hands
Running over its contents did you find them

She says yes he says good she says

Blows back through the kitchen
The keys jangle their little found song gotta go
He says bye she says bye

To a door already latched shut she says
To the ringing quiet I guess I’ll get dressed now

It was seam tape she needed no it was
A pair of shears she slides into her jeans then she

Snips the loose thread at the crotch

Source: If the house (2019)​

The setting alone reveals a lot about the relationship between the narrator and her partner without outright telling us about it and without being specific. These are intimate partners—I assume they're married, but that isn't clear from the poem—who have lost at least some of the sexual intensity of their relationship. While we shouldn't expect the guy merely encountering his partner wearing only a lace thong to be immediately overcome with lust and some kind of sexual coupling to ensue (well, we would if the poem had been written for Lit, but it wasn't), we might reasonably expect some kind of mildly sexual or affectionate reaction. All we get, though, is the mere acknowledgement of each other's existence.

That the relationship is at least somewhat askew is nicely conveyed through the use of enjambment to slightly scramble the reader's sense of the dialogue between the two:

Down the hall the thunk of a drawer
Opening the broken music of his hands
Running over its contents did you find them

She says yes he says good she says​

where it gets a little confusing as to who is saying what to whom and, later, here:

He says bye she says bye

To a door already latched shut she says
To the ringing quiet I guess I’ll get dressed now​

It's as though the narrator and her partner aren't really talking to each other, but uttering phrases into the ether.

The last line seems to confirm the severing of the (sexual?) relationship, though I interpret it as the narrator perhaps symbolically "cutting ties" rather than a more Freudian interpretation.

Anyway, it's a poem I found very interesting on several levels.

 

[Lyricalli]

I think today's poem does a good job of portraying a subtly emotional event through both setting and language:

Conversation with Lace Thong and Car Keys
Molly Spencer​

I really liked the use of enjambment in this, particularly in the dialogue section, where it does lose you for a moment about who is saying what. I agree that it conveys the feeling of people talking at each other, or to the ether, rather than to each other.

Then you come back to the title. Not conversation about lace thong and car keys, but with, and they may as well have been talking to the thong and the keys.​

 

[Tzara]

I will add a poem by Charles Bukowski that speaks in his straightforward, sometimes gut punch voice about writing poetry.

If you were like me, Bukowski seemed at one time like the way forward. All you needed to do to be a poet was to need it enough.

And it worked for him, personally, because of his relationship with John Martin.

For the rest of us, I think, revision is still something important. And (despite Piscator's Ferlinghetti quote), craft.

But just blasting things out has its advantages.

A really good post, Angie. Thanks.

 

[Levitating_Bed]

This is just to say, (I kid, I kid - but seriously) a heartfelt thanks to Tzara for this thread. It's a joy.

I was aware of it back in 2019, but had entirely missed it last year as the first few months of the quarantine kept me busy busy busy as Vonnegut would say (Hank Chinaski and I have the same job, but I'm pretty sure I'm better suited to it then he was). So, it's amazing to be reading it fresh right now. I can't decide which is the better prize - the poems I probably never would have stumbled across on my own, or the affectionate, intelligent, criticism that bookends or follows them. It's also fun to listen to Angie and Tzara talk about whose jazz encyclopedia is thicker. It's a sad smile to find Annie's posts in any thread - I never knew her, but I treasure those too.

And, speaking un-parenthetically of Mr. Bukowski, I'm with Tzara on that. I still love his poetry 30 plus years after first reading it, but the older I get, my eyes might roll a bit more at the earnestness of his persona. Besides, it was Rilke that talked me out of any thought of writing-as-career with Letters to a Young Poet, and I don't think there's any necessarily right way or reason to do it. I guess I'd rather take advice from Burroughs. What's that line about poetry being the only true art form that's left because you can't make any money at it..? I'd rather spend an hour looking for a good poem than scrolling through Instagram and I'm more content than ever with building my own little word sandcastles as a quiet act of simple creation. A shovel in the dirt keeps the devil gone as Bruce says. It just feels good to do. And who doesn't like the smell of wet earth?

If I get inspired (or so stuck trying to write 30 poems in a single month - what was I thinking?) maybe I'll try and add one. But whether I do or not, thanks again to all involved for the inspiration.

 

[Tzara]

This is just to say, (I kid, I kid - but seriously) a heartfelt thanks to Tzara for this thread. It's a joy.

Thanks, LB. It's kind of fun to write, as well.

 

[Tzara]

As I've said repeatedly, I like form poetry. And, as I've also said repeatedly, perhaps my favorite of all forms is the Onegin Stanza, a sonnet variant invented by Alexander Pushkin for his verse novel Eugene Onegin (here's my explanation of the form on The Thread of Forms).

One of the best examples of the form is by the great Russian-American novelist/poet/translator Vladimir Nabokov, "known for his unique blend of erudition and playfulness," as the bio note on one of his books describes him. Nabokov wrote "On Translating 'Eugene Onegin'" while he was doing exactly that, over a period of several years. The poem, originally published in a slightly different form in The New Yorker, shows the form to great advantage—it is witty, clever, and thoroughly brilliant, and I am completely in awe of it:

On Translating "Eugene Onegin"
Vladimir Nabokov

1
What is translation? On a platter
A poet’s pale and glaring head,
A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
The parasites you were so hard on
Are pardoned if I have your pardon,
O, Pushkin, for my stratagem:
I traveled down your secret stem,
And reached the root, and fed upon it;
Then, in a language newly learned,
I grew another stalk and turned
Your stanza patterned on a sonnet,
Into my honest roadside prose—
All thorn, but cousin to your rose.

2
Reflected words can only shiver
Like elongated lights that twist
In the black mirror of a river
Between the city and the mist.
Elusive Pushkin! Persevering,
I still pick up Tatiana’s earring,
Still travel with your sullen rake.
I find another man’s mistake,
I analyze alliterations
That grace your feasts and haunt the great
Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.
This is my task—a poet’s patience
And scholiastic passion blent:
Dove-droppings on your monument.

Source: Collected Poems (2012)​

Pushkin's verse novel is noted for the brilliance of its composition as well, which is why so many readers find Nabokov's translation of the work (in four volumes of introduction, text, extensive commentary, and index) so disappointing and frustrating. Rather than render the poem in its wonderfully engaging form, Nabokov (as he states in "On Translating 'Eugene Onegin'") translates it as prose, with a slight iambic feel. And, even at that, in a manner that seems pedantic to the extreme. Look at this example, from the description of Lenski's death (Onegin kills him in a duel) in Canto Six:

With an insolent epigram
'tis pleasant to enrage a bumbling foe;
pleasant to see how, bending stubbornly
his buttsome horns, he in the mirror
looks at himself involuntarily
and is ashamed to recognize himself;
more pleasant, friends, if, as the fool he is,
he howls out: It is I!
Still pleasanter—in silence to prepare
an honorable grave for him
and quietly at his pale forehead
aim, at a gentlemanly distance;
but to dispatch him to his fathers
will hardly pleasant be for you.​

and compare it to the James Falen translation in the Onegin Stanza form:

With epigrams of spite and daring
It's pleasant to provoke a foe;
It's pleasant when you see him staring—
His stubborn, thrusting horns held low—
Unwillingly within the mirror,
Ashamed to see himself the clearer;
More pleasant yet, my friends, if he
Shrieks out in stupid shock: that's me!
Still pleasanter is mute insistence
Of granting him his resting place
By shooting at his pallid face
From some quite gentlemanly distance.
But once you've had your fatal fun,
You won't be pleased to see it done.​

Nabokov was quite sensitive to the criticism his translation received, and attacked his critics in return with his usual superior attitude: "In an era of inept and ignorant imitations, whose piped-up background music has hypnotized innocent readers into fearing literality's salutary jolt, some reviewers are upset by the humble fidelity of my version."

What's even more odd is that Nabokov had experimented with translating some of the text in form, and even published some examples of these. That he chose the style and format he did seems something of a mystery.

Interestingly, in his early novel The Gift, which features a young writer who somewhat resembles Pushkin, the final paragraph is written in Onegin Stanza without line breaks, so as to resemble prose.

 

[Tzara]

Today's poem is interesting as a pretty direct comment on the lack of permanence in life, with a little ironic twist at the end. I like the poem's straightforward style, which suits its subject well:

The Promise
Jane Hirshfield

Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider,
who fled.

Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.

Stay, I said to my body.
It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth
of riverine valley meadows,
of fossiled escarpments,
of limestone and sandstone.
It looked back
with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always.

Source: Come, Thief (2011)​

The poem makes good use of anaphora ("the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses"), a literary technique that in poetry is especially associated with Ms. butters' favorite poet, Walt Whitman. It gives the poem a little bit of the feeling of a chant or incantation, with the poet seeking some kind of permanence in her relationship with the world. The twist at the end is especially ironic in how Hirshfield subtly undermines it by using the plural ("loves") rather than the singular to suggest that the sworn-to permanence (of any particular lover) is only illusory.

 

[Lyricalli]

The Promise
Jane Hirshfield

The poem makes good use of anaphora ("the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses"), a literary technique that in poetry is especially associated with Ms. butters' favorite poet, Walt Whitman. It gives the poem a little bit of the feeling of a chant or incantation, with the poet seeking some kind of permanence in her relationship with the world. The twist at the end is especially ironic in how Hirshfield subtly undermines it by using the plural ("loves") rather than the singular to suggest that the sworn-to permanence (of any particular lover) is only illusory.

I like this quite a lot, and am particularly drawn to the twist at the end. While I don't know how Hirshfield meant it when it was written, it appealed to me in different ways. Loves doesn't have to refer only to lovers. If loves are people, well, people are never permanent. The love that one has for someone, however, can feel quite permanent, staying with you even after the person has gone.

 

[todski28]

Today's poem is interesting as a pretty direct comment on the lack of permanence in life, with a little ironic twist at the end. I like the poem's straightforward style, which suits its subject well:

The Promise
Jane Hirshfield

Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider,
who fled.

Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.

Stay, I said to my body.
It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth
of riverine valley meadows,
of fossiled escarpments,
of limestone and sandstone.
It looked back
with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always.

Source: Come, Thief (2011)​

The poem makes good use of anaphora ("the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses"), a literary technique that in poetry is especially associated with Ms. butters' favorite poet, Walt Whitman. It gives the poem a little bit of the feeling of a chant or incantation, with the poet seeking some kind of permanence in her relationship with the world. The twist at the end is especially ironic in how Hirshfield subtly undermines it by using the plural ("loves") rather than the singular to suggest that the sworn-to permanence (of any particular lover) is only illusory.

I appreciate you pulling double duties here Tzara, writing plus finding and commenting on other pieces, as well as your normal every day.

the use of repetitive words in the same piece tends to annoy me in poetry if it's a piece designed to sort of flow from thought to thought, as opposed to this where each stanza is more like an individual component of the same poem.

as to the write itself, I agree with Calli's point re: individual people. about the memories it stirs being a constant as opposed to the impermanence of everything else in life.

interesting find thankyou

 

[Piscator]

I've been rather depressed lately, apparently just because—there is no particular reason for me to be depressed. (Well, other than the malaise about COVID-19.) So I was thinking I might post something silly today for a change.

I was also thinking that I haven't posted anything by a UK poet (or, for that matter, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc. among primarily Anglophone countries other than the USA and Canada). So today's poem has me killing two birds with one stone, or hitting two stresses with one choriamb, or something like that:

The Uncertainty of the Poet
Wendy Cope

The Tate Gallery yesterday announced that it had paid £1 million
for a Giogio de Chirico masterpiece, The Uncertainty of the Poet.
It depicts a torso and a bunch of bananas.
—Guardian, 2 April 1985

I am a poet.
I am very fond of bananas.

I am bananas.
I am very fond of a poet.

I am a poet of bananas.
I am very fond.

A fond poet of "I am, I am"—
Very bananas,

Fond of "Am I bananas,
Am I?"—a very poet.

Bananas of a poet!
Am I fond? Am I very?

Poet bananas! I am.
I am fond of a "very."

I am of very fond bananas.
Am I a poet?

Source: Serious Concerns (1992)
​

I have written poems like this that repetitively mangle the word order to produce different senses, but Cope does this better than I ever did. Plus it makes fun of art! (Even, especially, art I'm fond of.)


Anyway, that's it for today. "Wash your hands!" says Dr. Fauci.

Digging back in this treasure trove, I looked up the painting and can't get it out of my mind. As always thanks and curses for sharing.

 

[Tzara]

I have been reading a lot of Sharon Olds recently. While it's always a bit dicey to identify the persona of a first person poem with its author, Olds is one of the more obviously "confessional" of modern poets, often writing about such subjects as her parents, her children, her divorce (in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Stag's Leap), and perhaps most notoriously, about sex. Oddly, she herself considers her work not so much influenced by such famous confessional poets as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton as by near contemporaries like Galway Kinnell and Gwendolyn Brooks.

I had kind of a hard time picking one of Olds' poems to post today. I'd really wanted to post one of her oral sex poems, like "Blow Job Ode," which can be quite startling in their explicitness and, for want of a better term, joy, but I decided on the following poem because I wanted to talk about how she structured the poem:

I Cannot Forget the Woman in the Mirror
Sharon Olds

Backwards and upside down in the twilight, that
woman on all fours, her head
dangling and suffused, her lean
haunches, the area of darkness, the flanks and
ass narrow and pale as a deer’s and those
breasts hanging down toward the center of the earth
.........................like plummets, when I
swayed from side to side they swayed, it was
so dark I couldn’t tell if they were gold or
plum or rose. I cannot get over her
moving toward him upside down in the mirror like a
fly on the ceiling, her head hanging down and her
tongue long and black as an anteater’s
going toward his body, she was so clearly an
animal, she was an Iroquois scout creeping
naked and noiseless, and when I looked at her
she looked at me so directly, her eyes so
dark, her stare said to me I
belong here, this is mine, I am living out my
true life on this earth.

Source: The Gold Cell (1987)​

In the poem, the narrator is watching herself having sex, apparently looking behind her (with her head down, the image she sees is upside-down). There is Olds' usual vivid description of the body ("her lean / haunches, the area of darkness, the flanks and / ass narrow and pale as a deer's"), but what I find especially interesting is her end word choices.

One of the standard comments about poetry is about how end words are particularly emphasized to the reader—that their salience is heightened by their position in the text. Usually this means at the end of the line, and looking at many poems you'll find strong nouns and active verbs in that position, but in this poem the end-of-line words are rather noticably bland. Of the nineteen end words (I'm treated the indented line as a word wrap instead of an intended break), fourteen are prepositions (that, those), conjunctions (and, or, so), or pronouns (I, her, my)—not exactly power words.

On the other hand, the beginning words of the lines are much more evocative: backwards, woman, dangling, haunches, etc. It's as though Olds has reversed the usual positioning of the salient words from the end of the line to the front of it, perhaps to mimic the reversed view the narrator has of her body.

It may just be that she wanted the punch of the words at the start of the line, or wanted to de-emphasize the end of the line to "pull" the reader through the line break more smoothly. I don't (of course) know. But it certainly seems deliberate and gives the reader another thing to think about when reading the poem.

Anyway, hope you're all having a good day.

 

[Tzara]

I think I may have posted this poem before, but if I did, it was some time ago, and I wanted to talk about it because of its choice of form, in light of Calli's recent thread on the limerick.

The limerick is kind of looked down upon as a poetic form, a fate common to forms associated with light verse. Probably because they often are mildly bawdy or risqué, limericks are particularly likely to be beneath the attention of serious poets, except perhaps when they are linguistically slumming.

This poem by Scott Beal, though, uses the limerick as the structural basis for the intrinsically somber form of elegy—in this case, an elegy for a very young poet of his acquaintance who committed suicide:

Elegy in Six Limericks
Scott Beal
—for Spencer Miles Kimball

There was an old man of Ann Arbor
who was notably shy of the barber.
..........While he’d calibrate phrases
..........and navigate mazes
his bright beard grew to cover the harbor.

I say harbor implying a coastline,
though our town’s in a midwestern ghost clime.
..........We have water and air,
..........frozen yogurt, despair,
but few sheltering shores where the boats line.

There were some old nerves who rang off-key.
I can’t say if he slurped or spurned coffee.
..........In so few ways I knew him
..........but meant something to him.
When he harbored delights, he spoke softly.

There was an old man with a weapon
no substance or cease-fire could threaten.
..........If you’d beg him, or scold him,
..........if you loved him and told him,
it rose up inside him, against him.

We have stood by the earth where his flesh is.
We have studied his words and made guesses.
..........Each few weeks I’m amazed
..........at his dead Facebook page
with its offer: Send Spencer a Message.

I say harbor implying a boat.
I say earth where his flesh is a coat.
..........Send Spencer a Message
..........Send Spencer a Message
His beard grew to cover his throat.

Source: Wait 'Til You Have Real Problems (2014)​

As is typical of many light verse forms, the limerick has a very strong rhythmic component, here dominated by anapests that give the form its herky-jerky feel. While that would seem to counter the spirit of an elegy, Beal seems to use it and its repetitive structure as a kind of ritual chant. Since suicide often invoke confusion as well as grief (Could I have done or said something? Did I miss the signs of despair?), the sing-songy repetition might be interpreted as the narrator trying to calm himself, or bring some kind of order to his feelings.

There is also the weirdness we have nowadays of social media accounts surviving the account owner, often with inappropriate comments such as the exhortation here to "Send Spencer a message," as if he were still able to receive it.

All in all, a curious use of the form.

 

[Lyricalli]

All in all, a curious use of the form.

It's a beautiful use of the form, completely unexpected. Makes me wonder if Spencer was a fan of limericks.

While most limericks are read lightly, with a bright sing-songy air and feel, one can read these as a dirge, in heavier tones, and I think it's quite effective.

 

[Tzara]

I'm kind of pressed for time today, so I'm mostly going to just post this poem without much in the way of comment. One interesting detail about the poet, Ellen Bass, is that one of her teachers at Boston University was Anne Sexton—not that her poetry seems to me to resemble Sexton's at all. I like that the poem is set in the Portland airport (I'm presuming Oregon, not Maine, as Bass teaches in the low-residence MFA at Pacific Univerity). It's kind of an unusual location, which is fun:

Gate C22
Ellen Bass

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching—
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after—if she beat you or left you or
you’re lonely now—you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.

Source: The Human Line (2007)​

I love the amount of detail that Bass provides in this poem, about the surroundings in the airport that are so typical yet familiar, about the fact that the couple is older, about how their faces look and how they ignore everyone around them. It's an interesting combination of personal intimacy and a public space, where the poet seems to be able to share, at least in part, in the couple's joy in meeting up with each other after a separation.

 

[Tzara]

Today's poet, Denis Johnson, was something of a rock star among writers. He was versatile—publishing poetry, plays, and fiction—and was semi-idolized by many other writers (one of my teachers talked about him as if he were a cross between Mick Jagger and Jesus of Nazareth). He's best known for his fiction, especially for Tree of Smoke, which won the National Book Award, and his influential story collection Jesus' Son, which probably inspired as many short story writers as did Johnson's teacher, Raymond Carver.

His career began, though, as a poet. He published his first volume of poetry at the age of 19. My instructor raved particularly about his use of line breaks, but I think I especially like his almost pyrotechnic use of language.

Here's one of his poems:

Heat
Denis Johnson

Here in the electric dusk your naked lover
tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth.
It's beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin,
Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover,
streaming with hatred in the heat
as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin
to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones,
and such a last light—full of spheres and zones.
August,
............you're just an erotic hallucination,
just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,
are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night,
this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion,
the bogus moon of tenderness and magic
you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?

Source: The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (1995)​

I'm still trying to crank out mini-essays on John Locke and George Berkeley, so I'll just let the poem speak for itself.

See you all tomorrow. Be well.

 

[Tzara]

I'm tired after a day of trying to read The Wealth of Nations and I'm sort of lacking in energy. Maybe you are too. Here's a pick-me-up (pun, I suppose, intended):

On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica
Jill Alexander Essbaum

She stood before him wearing only pantries
and he groped for her Volvo under the gauze.
She had saved her public hair, and his cook
went hard as a fist. They fell to the bad.
He shoveled his duck into her posse
and all her worm juices spilled out.
Still, his enormous election raged on.
Her beasts heaved as he sacked them,
and his own nibbles went stuff as well.
She put her tong in his rear and talked ditty.
Oh, it was all that he could do not to comb.

Source: No Tell Motel (2004)​

One sometimes comes across something like this in the New Poems, though usually with no quite so many spelling errors.

It probably says something about me that I'd lave to shovel my duck into Ms. Essbaum's posse.



My God, but there is some good stuff going down (ahem) on Calli's NaPoWriMo thread. Keep it up, people.

 

[Lyricalli]

I'm tired after a day of trying to read The Wealth of Nations and I'm sort of lacking in energy. Maybe you are too. Here's a pick-me-up (pun, I suppose, intended):

On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica
Jill Alexander Essbaum
​

I needed this laugh, thanks for posting it.

My God, but there is some good stuff going down (ahem) on Calli's NaPoWriMo thread. Keep it up, people.

And some of it's from you.​

 

[todski28]

I'm tired after a day of trying to read The Wealth of Nations and I'm sort of lacking in energy. Maybe you are too. Here's a pick-me-up (pun, I suppose, intended):

On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica
Jill Alexander Essbaum

She stood before him wearing only pantries
and he groped for her Volvo under the gauze.
She had saved her public hair, and his cook
went hard as a fist. They fell to the bad.
He shoveled his duck into her posse
and all her worm juices spilled out.
Still, his enormous election raged on.
Her beasts heaved as he sacked them,
and his own nibbles went stuff as well.
She put her tong in his rear and talked ditty.
Oh, it was all that he could do not to comb.

Source: No Tell Motel (2004)​

One sometimes comes across something like this in the New Poems, though usually with no quite so many spelling errors.

It probably says something about me that I'd lave to shovel my duck into Ms. Essbaum's posse.



My God, but there is some good stuff going down (ahem) on Calli's NaPoWriMo thread. Keep it up, people.

Dear God, if this was written in rhyming couplets it could probably be confused with some of my first pieces here

Thanks for the laugh Tzara

and what Calli said about your poetry!

 

[Piscator]

I'm tired after a day of trying to read The Wealth of Nations and I'm sort of lacking in energy. Maybe you are too. Here's a pick-me-up (pun, I suppose, intended):

On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica
Jill Alexander Essbaum

She stood before him wearing only pantries
and he groped for her Volvo under the gauze.
She had saved her public hair, and his cook
went hard as a fist. They fell to the bad.
He shoveled his duck into her posse
and all her worm juices spilled out.
Still, his enormous election raged on.
Her beasts heaved as he sacked them,
and his own nibbles went stuff as well.
She put her tong in his rear and talked ditty.
Oh, it was all that he could do not to comb.

Source: No Tell Motel (2004)​

One sometimes comes across something like this in the New Poems, though usually with no quite so many spelling errors.

It probably says something about me that I'd lave to shovel my duck into Ms. Essbaum's posse.



My God, but there is some good stuff going down (ahem) on Calli's NaPoWriMo thread. Keep it up, people.

pluck the duck

And for those of us of a certain age Lorna Crozier's "My Last Erotic Poem"

 

[Angeline]

I'm tired after a day of trying to read The Wealth of Nations and I'm sort of lacking in energy. Maybe you are too. Here's a pick-me-up (pun, I suppose, intended):

On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica
Jill Alexander Essbaum

She stood before him wearing only pantries
and he groped for her Volvo under the gauze.
She had saved her public hair, and his cook
went hard as a fist. They fell to the bad.
He shoveled his duck into her posse
and all her worm juices spilled out.
Still, his enormous election raged on.
Her beasts heaved as he sacked them,
and his own nibbles went stuff as well.
She put her tong in his rear and talked ditty.
Oh, it was all that he could do not to comb.

Source: No Tell Motel (2004)​

One sometimes comes across something like this in the New Poems, though usually with no quite so many spelling errors.

It probably says something about me that I'd lave to shovel my duck into Ms. Essbaum's posse.



My God, but there is some good stuff going down (ahem) on Calli's NaPoWriMo thread. Keep it up, people.

Omg that's hilarious! And thank goodness my door was shut: I really don't want to explain to any of the staff here what is so darn funny.

Also, tods I know you were pretty typo prone when you first came here but I'd have remembered if you'd ever reached such delirious heights of malapropism!

Annd one more comment: I agree with P'tor that the Crozier poem is very funny, well worth a listen.

 

[Tzara]

I don't think I've ever posted a poem by my namesake on Lit, so (drumroll) direct from the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, 1916, I give you

springtime
Tristan Tzara

with your beautiful fingernails
put the child in the vase in the middle of the night
and the sore
a rose of winds
the thunder in feathers see
an evil water flows with the limbs of the antelope

suffer below have you found cows birds?
the thirst the venom of the peacock in the cage
the king in exile through the clearness of the pit slowly mummifies
in the vegetable garden
sow crushed locusts
plant ants' hearts in the salt fog a lamp drags its tail over the sky
the tiny glitter of glass objects in the bellies of fleeing deer
on the tips of short black branches for a cry

Source: Chanson Dada: Selected Poems, tranlated by Lee Harwood (2005)​

Though Romanian by birth, Tzara wrote in French. I've always been interested in the problem of translation, and I kind of wonder how a reader would know if a translation of a Dadaist poem was accurate, since the texts are usually obscure, if not downright senseless.

If you can read French, Princeton actually has an online digital copy of Dada number 2 from 1917, where this poem appeared. Even if you can't read French, you can see the formatting of the poem differs from that in Harwood's translation (though he based his translation on a later version of the poem, published in 1918). I might give translating it a shot myself if I run out of inspirational topics for the NaPoWriMo thread (looking directly at you, Champers).

Anyway, kind of goofy, as one might expect from one of the major figures of the Dadaist movement. Kind of fun, too.

Later, all.

 

[Tzara]

One thing I know I don't do well, or often, enough (along with donating to charity, reading news magazines, and listening to old Byrds LPs), is read foreign language poetry. This is partly because, like most Americans, I am linguistically a functional illiterate, as English is the only language I have any real fluency in and that even that fluency is, as my teachers have often told me, questionable.

I don't know that it is a true statement to assert that every culture that has ever existed has produced poetry, but I'd bet anyone that by far the majority of them have. And even those of us who appreciate and read poetry often don't read poems originally written in other languages.

One reason for this is, of course, that we usually have to rely on translations, and translations are, I think justifiably, suspect. (I'll try to talk more about this later in the week.)

But I think it's also that poetry, more than novels or non-fiction, often does not cross linguistic boundaries well, that the condensed complexity of a poem, with its embedded cultural, structural, and linguistic idiosyncracies, is simply extremely difficult to render accurately in another language.

OK. Soapbox off. Here's a poem by one of the twentieth century's great poets (and great love poem poets), Pablo Neruda:

Sonnet XI
Pablo Neruda

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratúe.

Source: One Hundred Love Sonnets, translated by Stephen Tapcott (1959)​

Neruda (birth name Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto) was, in addition to being a poet, a political figure in the Marxist-leaning government of Salvador Allende, serving as ambassador to France. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

 

[Angeline]

Tzara, that is my favorite Neruda sonnet and one of my favorite poems of his. It's so sensuous and urgent. Obviously you have excellent taste.

One of my very favorite poets is Forugh Farrokhzad, who wrote in Farsi. It's very frustrating to read various English translations of her poems. Different translations of the same poem can vary a lot, and yet they still manage to convey the delicacy and powerful femininity of her writing. I wish I could read her original poems though I'm glad to have discovered her even in translation.

 

[Lyricalli]

When trying to learn another language, you really start to realize the subtleties that just attempting direct translation miss. So, it's no surprise that a poem may have different translations into the same language, or that there are differing opinions on which ones are best.

The English translations of Neruda that I've read are so lovely, and it's hard to imagine them being better, but I know that they must be even lovelier in Spanish.

 

[Piscator]

As an old man still in the middle of "French in Progress" I quite understand the difficulties of translation. One of my worst "textes" fell apart when I used Google Translate in describing my fascination with my the African Cichlids in my aquarium and recent evidence that their recent speciation, more than 700 species in 150 million years and are the fish equivalent of Darwin's Finches, resultsed from hybridization of stock from the Congo and Nile Basins.It sounds awkward even in English,

But sometimes the energy comes through regardless of language problems as in "Danser Encore" a flashmob anti-confinement song/performance by HK and friends, which Jocelyne, our instructor shared last week. I more than sympathize with their energy and sentiments but shudder at the unmasked faces.