Poetry

[Omo]

I don't know whether there exists already such a thread, but I couldn't find one.

Do you read poetry? Who are your favourite poets? And which poems do you like most?

Do you read poetry in translation? Which poems to do have memorised by heart? And what was the last poetry collection you read?

[Mirabell]

Poetry

American Poetry

[Stewart]

I've merged the two titled poetry together.

[heidiadonis]

I read last weekend Uncollected Poems: Bilingual Edition Rainer Maria Rilke translated and compiled by Edward Snow.

Here is my favorite among the collection:

O the curves of my longing through the cosmos,
and on all the streaks: my being's flung-outness.
Many an aspect returning
only after a thousand years on the sad ellipsis
of its momentum and passing on.
...

I am not sure how many lines I am allowed to post. One poem a day makes my day.

[Manuel76]

From classic american poetry I love Dickinson and an old anthology from Whitman with his most famous poems which are among my favorites. Then I decided to buy his Complete Poetry and felt very dissapointed, I tried to like it but felt very embarrased by what seemed to me clumsy, silly verses, among the worst I've ever read. Later on when I read some books by Neruda (Odes) I felt exactly the same way.

I prefer Poe's tales to his poetry. I didn't enjoyed much The Waste Land from Eliot, and didn't seem to me as interesting as other long poems from the same period. I'll try the Four Quartets.

Among spanish XX century poets my favorites are Antonio Machado (Soledades, Campos de Castilla), Cesar Vallejo (Trilce) and Luis Cernuda (Los placeres prohibidos, Donde habite el olvido, Ocnos).

[heidiadonis]

My poems for today:

Edgar Allan Poe

IMITATION

A dark unfathom’d tide
Of interminable pride-
A mystery, and a dream,
Should my early life seem;
I say that dream was fraught
With a wild and waking thought
Of beings that have been,
Which my spirit hath not seen,
Had I let them pass me by,
With a dreaming eye!
Let none of earth inherit
That vision on my spirit;
Those thoughts I would control,
As a spell upon his soul:
For that bright hope at last
And that light time have past,
And my worldly rest hath gone
With a sight as it pass’d on:
I care not tho’ it perish
With a thought I then did cherish.

Chang JIAN
Staying the night at Wang Changling's retreat
Translated by Peter Harris

The clear stream is immeasurable deep;
Where you live as a hermit there is only a lonely cloud.
At the edge of the pines a silver of moon is showing,
Its limpid light still shining there for you.
Shadows of flowers sleep under your peony courtyard.
I'm going to take my leave of the world, like you,
And join the phoenixes and cranes in the western hills.

[beelzebubbles]

Thank you for posting the poems HiediAdonis, especially the Rilke.

You, beloved, who were lost
before the beginning, who never came,
I do not know which sounds might be precious to you.
No longer do I try to recognize you, when, as a surging wave,
something is about to manifest. All the huge
images in me, the deeply-sensed far-away landscapes,
cities and towers and bridges and un-
suspected turns of the path,
the powerful life of lands
once filled with the presence of gods:
all rise with you to find clear meaning in me,
your, forever, elusive one.

You, who are all
the gardens I've ever looked upon,
full of promise. An open window
in a country house—, and you almost stepped
towards me, thoughtfully. Sidestreets I happened upon,—
you had just passed through them,
and sometimes, in the small shops of sellers, the mirrors
were still dizzy with you and gave back, frightened,
my too sudden form.—Who is to say if the same
bird did not resound through us both
yesterday, separate, in the evening?

--Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Cliff Crego

[heidiadonis]

beelzebubbles, that is a wonderful poem, possibly, one of the bests of Rilke.
I wonder what Mirabell thinks of the translation. The poems are best read in the original language, but I can not add another language to my learning because I want to focus on just three.

[beelzebubbles]

What languages do you speak HA?

[Eric]

Omo revived this thread after more than a year. One whole year! That does not give the impression that very many WLFers read much poetry. But I hope that people will read more poetry.

I myself read it sporadically. I'm more attuned to prose, but sometimes I read poetry for a while.

Omo asks:

Do you read poetry? Who are your favourite poets? And which poems do you like most?

Do you read poetry in translation? Which poems to do have memorised by heart? And what was the last poetry collection you read?

Good questions.

1) I read poetry, but sporadically.
2) My favourite poets are a ragbag of quite disparate ones. Edward Thomas, Boleslaw Lesmian, W.B. Yeats, Walter de la Mare, Karel van de Woestijne are but a few of them. You will find no pattern.
3) It's hard to say which poems I like most. I tend to like a body of work by my favourite poets, not only odd poems.
4) I most certainly read poetry in translation when I can't read the original language. You may lose things, but it's better than being shut out from their work altogether.
5) I very, very rarely memorise poems by heart. We have libraries. But, for some reason I, an Englishman, think first of Yeats' "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death", and Lesmian's "Garbus". The former for some intangible reason involving inevitability, the latter helped by the Ewa Demarczyk song which used the words as lyrics.
6) The last poetry collection I read was Arvid Mörne's collected poems called ""Vandringsdagen" (Day of Wandering) in the original Swedish. I was in the mood for his rather bleak and sorrowful nature poems.
7) The last poems I translated (a question not asked by Omo) were a few by Brecht from the German to be included in a novel I was translating. Translating poetry is the most hands-on way of reading poems that I know of.

[beelzebubbles]

Just Walking Around

What name do I have for you?
Certainly there is no name for you
In the sense that the stars have names
That somehow fit them. Just walking around,

An object of curiosity to some,
But you are too preoccupied
By the secret smudge in the back of your soul
To say much and wander around,

Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets to be kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting.
Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way,
The one that looped among islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.

--John Ashberry

[Mirabell]

some poems I like a lot.

Poem of the Day shigekuni.

[Eric]

I too like some poems a lot. And I sometimes wonder whether there is, after all a red thread running though what I like. For example, I am not so keen on the kind of inward whorl of writing about writing poetry. And I find that some American (i.e. U.S.) poets do try to cram rather too many images into one poem, in a neo-Whitmanesque attempt to write about everything, moods, scenes, and masses of disparate detail, within the space of fifty lines.

I prefer poems that are focussed on one image, one event, albeit with variations. Where the poet is not trying to paint too broad a canvas. I've mentioned Lesmian. What he does well is revivify one folk poem or theme. Yeats too, sticks to one large idea per poem, also drawing on mythology. Circling round one idea means you can see it from different angles. Whereas those poems that throw everything in, like a risotto, never have time to develop, before moving on the the next impression or view.

I like the way Trakl conjures up a slightly hallucinatory version of woods and landcapes, often in garish colours. Poets like Yeats and Jonker have a certain amount of rhythmic repetition. I like that too. I like a slighly fay-like approach to the subject matter (de la Mare, Wichman, Södergran,) but also the zany gentle satire of poets such as Elo Viiding.

What I like about the Flemish poet Karel van de Woestijne is his blending of moods, feelings, and the times of day, the seasons of the year. His rhymes are good, not hackneyed, sonorous at times. He is a very self-serious poet. There is a fairly unremitting quality to his verse. This has caused later poets to mock him a lot in pastiche. But if you switch off your urge to laugh at his seriousness, and get into his mood, I feel you get a lot out of this poet. He is tricky to translate as his rhymes can descend to doggerel in unskilled hands. But along with Guido Gezelle, he is perhaps one of the best poets that the Flemings have produced. Incidentally, van de Woestijne loved to use hyphenated words, some of which would be joined as one in modern Dutch, but sometimes he achieves an unusual image, or oxymoronic effects such as with schitter-matte scheen (sparkle-matt sheen, or similar). So for this month, the first of eight stanzas:

October, slooper van mijn streven en mijn hopen,
uw moker is van lood
die weegt ter loome leên me en houdt mijn nek gestopen.
October; en uw aêm, mijn lammer lijf beslopen,
October, maakt mijne oogen groot.

Without even delving into the meaning you can see many "oh"-sounds as in October, slooper, hopen, moker, lood, loome, gestopen, beslopen, oogen, groot. All the same "oh"-sound (not "oo" as you would think from English). Tricky to translate. I'll try another time. But it starts with "October, demolisher of my strivings and my hopes, / your sledgehammer is of lead...".

[heidiadonis]

I read them and memorize some. I agree with Eric on the fact that translating poems is the most pleasant way for me to learn a language.

I ran into this poem the other day and I really like it as an everlasting foreigner:

Li-Young Lee

FROM ANOTHER ROOM

Who lay down at evening
and woke at night
a stranger to himself? A country

wholly unfounded to himself, who wondered
behind closed eyes
if his fate meant winter knitting

Outcome underground, summer
Overdue, or spring's pure parable, the turning
in every turning thing, fruit and flower,
jar, spindle, and story?

He is the one who heard
the hidden dove's troubled voice
and has been asking
ever since: whose sleep
builds and unbuilds those great rooms, Night and Day?

He's the one who knows
what a gleaned thing his own voice is,
something the birds
discarded, trading for a future, Call him

One whom night found beyond
the fallen gate,

Where the mower never mows
with no way to go but toward
the growing shadow of the earth.

... this is the half of the poem

[john h]

Mirabell, I've been meaning to thank you for some time for mentioning Weldon Kees in one of your posts on another thread (I can't remember exactly which one). I picked up Kees "Collected Poems" on your recommendation and couldn't have enjoyed it more. He was one depressed guy but what great stuff he wrote. Reminded me a lot of Baudelaire.

[Mirabell]

Originally Posted by john h

Mirabell, I've been meaning to thank you for some time for mentioning Weldon Kees in one of your posts on another thread (I can't remember exactly which one). I picked up Kees "Collected Poems" on your recommendation and couldn't have enjoyed it more. He was one depressed guy but what great stuff he wrote. Reminded me a lot of Baudelaire.

Yes! He's among the great underrated American poets, championed by some of the great contemporary poets but that is frequently not enough.

[waalkwriter]

I can't imagine anyone not being blown away by the sheer force of narrative, vision, and suffering of Rimbaud in A Season in Hell, its simply an astounding work.

Other major poets I am hugely in awe of are Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren, T.S. Elliot, and of course the vastly underrated and enormously powerful Gabriela Mistral, whose work in my opinion overshadows her much better known pupil Neruda. Her sad musings on her homeland, beautiful words and rhymes, simple and elegant style, and overwhelmingly filling of sadness and emotion in works such as Sonetos de la Muerte and Desolacion are incredible. Especially a note must be given to her last work, Poema de Chile.

[beelzebubbles]

Emily Dickinson (1830–86). Complete Poems. 1924.
Part Three: Love

XLVI

HE fumbles at your spirit
As players at the keys
Before they drop full music on;
He stuns you by degrees,

Prepares your brittle substance 5
For the ethereal blow,
By fainter hammers, further heard,
Then nearer, then so slow

Your breath has time to straighten,
Your brain to bubble cool,— 10
Deals one imperial thunderbolt
That scalps your naked soul.

[Jan Mbali]

One of my favourite South African poems. I sense everything meeting inside the head of a universal yet South African child. Space, time, history. And he is on the move. Asking questions. Watch out.
The poet was a bicylce messenger, so called a "messenger boy" by whites until he came out with the seminal collection "Sound of a Cowhide Drum" in the bad old 1970s. Only Agostino Neto's "Western Civilization" compares in terms of highly evolved and powerful simplicity.

Oswald Mtshali

Slowly he moves
to and fro, to and fro,
then faster and faster
he swishes up and down.

His blue shirt
billows in the breeze
like a tattered kite.

The world whirls by:
east becomes west,
north turns to south;
the four cardinal points
meet in his head.

Mother!
Where did I come from?
When will I wear long trousers?
Why was my father jailed?

[Mirabell]

Robert Lowell: The Soldier


In time of war you could not save your skin.
Where is that Ghibbeline whom Dante met
On Purgatory's doorstep, without kin
To set up chantries for his God-held debt?
SO far from Campaldino, no one knows
Where he is buried by the Archiano
Whose source is Camaldoli, through the snows,
Fuggendo a piedi e sanguinando il piano,
The soldier drowned face downward in his blood.
Until the thaw he waited, then the flood
Roared like a wounded dragon over shoal
And reef and snatched away his crucifix
And rolled his body like a log to Styx;
The angels fought with bill-hooks for his soul.