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Poems

Started by Smeraldina Rima, October 01, 2017, 01:25:33 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

kalowski

A personal favourite:
AN OLD MAN'S THOUGHT OF SCHOOL.
———

[The following poem was recited personally by the author Saturday afternoon, October 31, at the inauguration of the fine new Cooper Public School, Camden, New Jersey]

An old man's thought of School;
An old man, gathering youthful memories and blooms, that youth itself cannot.

Now only do I know you!
O fair auroral skies! O morning dew upon the grass!

And these I see--these sparkling eyes,
These stores of mystic meaning--these young lives,
Building, equipping, like a fleet of ships--immortal ships!
Soon to sail out over the measureless seas,
On the Soul's voyage.

Only a lot of boys and girls?
Only the tiresome spelling, writing, ciphering classes?
Only a Public School?

Ah more--infinitely more;
(As George Fox rais'd his warning cry, "Is it this pile of brick and
mortar--these dead floors, windows, rails--you call the church?
Why this is not the church at all--the Church is living, ever living Souls.")

And you, America,
Cast you the real reckoning for your present?
The lights and shadows of your future--good or evil?
To girlhood, boyhood look--the Teacher and the School.hood look—the teacher and the
school.

Walt Whitman

I have some thoughts about Death At Leavenworth. I'm going to put them into this pixel box and hope I don't look stupid afterwards. If you have some thoughts about my thoughts I would be interested to hear them.

'a friend not made to die till the chrysalis
of sense peeled from him and his sixth sense learned
it had been born to supra-sensual moths.'



I've heard death described as the 'end of illusion'. I've heard the same about 'enlightenment' too. It seems some people find enlightenment during their everyday life, while others get there around the time of death. This part of the poem seems to be talking about the moment of death.

'the chrysalis of sense peeled from him' - The mind/psyche/everything we think we are dissolves around the time of death.

'and his sixth sense learned' - The deeper self/spirit recognises it is returning to where it came from/not going anywhere at all.

'it had been born to supra-sensual moths.' - Moths can represent death; they seem to here. So - 'born to die'? I don't think an enlightened person is afraid of death, so this person who was 'not made to die' is now prepared.

The 'supra-sensual' part is the hardest to understand. Supra (above) sensual (pleasure); what is that? ecstasy? joy? Peace? It doesn't seem like these 'supra-sensual moths' should be feared.


I fear I haven't articulated this well enough. I guess it doesn't matter that much.

I was also drawn in by the poem. You've helped me see some of the deathly moth imagery better and ways of taking meanings from the lines in isolation.

I took it that the sixth sense (suggesting something like a human soul) learned after the chrysalis peeled that it had been born to (i.e. it learns that its parents are) supra-sensual moths. Presumably it learns that it too is a supra-sensual moth. One example of this way of thinking about human life beside the life-cycle of a moth - here specifically the silk-worm - occurs in Thomas Browne's Religio Medici. The pupa corresponds to the 'secondine' or the 'slough of flesh' cast off by the human before the ineffable 'last World'. The margin notes the stages 1. in the womb. 2. in the world. 3. in the next. After finishing with the silk-worm, this part goes on to discuss not being afraid of death as you were writing about.



Religio Medici

Some other thoughts that I had and didn't resolve while reading the poem:

    Is it important that a moth pupa is not called a chrysalis, while a butterfly pupa is? The transmigration seems to have an extra level of separation because of this, not only passing from a sensual chrysalis to a supra-sensual butterfly - or from a sensual pupa and cocoon to a supra-sensual moth - but to a different insect group in the transformation.

    Is it important that the moths are supra rather than super-sensual or are the words interchangable? My first thought is to read the parental moths as being simply transcendent in relation to the sensual world but supra leaves some room to read them as intensely or uniquely sensual.

    Do you read - in terms of the emphasised meaning - 'his sixth sense learned/ it had been born to supra-sensual moths' or his sixth sense learned/ it had been born to supra-sensual moths'. What is the main thing being learned at that moment?

    I like the stanza break as pupal stage. The poem seems to be an adapted sonnet (with two extra lines) so there is some expectation that a turn might come here. There is an extra turn in the last two lines but here it seems to go from the mental world of metaphysical poetry to something different with fragmented thoughts when turning to scenes of Ned in Leavenworth and addressing him.

    Out there at Leavenworth [,the place] that bored you/ Out there at Leavenworth[.] That bored you[!]
   
    How do you read 'shy at you shoulder strap'?

You don't need to answer these thoughts written as questions.

Ok my interpretation has changed now.

I think you're right that 'supra-sensual' refers to a transcendence of the sensual world, and that - 'it had been born to supra-sensual moths' - is the same as saying we (or him in the poem) are 'supra-sensual moths', i.e. there is something in us that is transcendent (spirit), yet, like the moth, we have physical bodies that will perish soon enough.

I think this is where the death/moth association is important. 'Supra-sensual' connotes the 'spirit' that cannot die, and 'moth' connotes 'death' or the 'body' that does die.

Your observation about the disjunction between 'moth' and 'chrysalis' is very interesting with this in mind. Were it 'supra-sensual butterflies', the whole death association is lost. What does that leave? Immortality?

So that might explain why it's 'moth' rather than 'butterfly', but it doesn't explain why it's 'chrysalis' rather than 'cocoon'. If we are interpreting this section along the lines of 'enlightenment' (as I have so babblingly done), then this gives a jarring sense of something unachievable - an impossible transformation - which is maybe how it feels until it actually happens.

As to the question of what 'his sixth sense learned' - I now see 'sixth sense' as literally meaning sixth sense or 'intuition'. We can intuit that a deeper place (within us) exists - spirit/peace/enlightenment - without actually 'knowing' it for sure. At the moment of death he 'learns' that it is real and that he is it; while his body dies like a 'moth', his 'supra-sensual' spirit is revealed and 'known'.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Quote from: Smeraldina Rima on August 14, 2020, 01:14:38 PM
    I like the stanza break as pupal stage. The poem seems to be an adapted sonnet (with two extra lines) so there is some expectation that a turn might come here. There is an extra turn in the last two lines but here it seems to go from the mental world of metaphysical poetry to something different with fragmented thoughts when turning to scenes of Ned in Leavenworth and addressing him.

Yes I think there is a 'transformation' between the first and last eight lines.

The first eight can be split into two parts: the first five lines which are straightforward and relatable, and the next three which are cryptic.

The last eight lines are sort of a hybrid of the two: both simple and cryptic - like how you mention the oddness of 'shy at you shoulder-strap', and the ambiguousness of 'bored', plus the speaker's own sense of mystery with the question at the end.


As for 'shy at you...' - I have no idea. The only thought that came to mind was - 'could it be a typo?' I can't seem to think of a reason why he would write that instead of 'your'.

And why is 'Across' capitalised? Then Across where? I was also wondering if he was imagined - or known - back among old friends or back among friends generally by making new friends in Leavenworth. And how much the friends were a part of the boredom.

There's a strange reciprocity between the description of the unpeeled spirit and the boredom, misery and uncertainty of how this "dying to the world" manifests in the life as overdose or suicide, while the speaker seems to feel the attraction of the realisation of the spirit and the pain of the loss of the friend.

#125
I see 'Across' in opposition to 'Up' (Heaven) or 'Down' (Tesco). The soul/spirit/whatever the fuck it is that animates us (and everything else in the universe) has nowhere to go upon death; there is no 'up' or 'down', the energy just 'remains' in the world.

So - 'back among friends; and then Across' - is the same as - 'back among friends; and then dead'. Except 'Across' has all that extra meaning.

I think it is capitalised in the same way you would capitalise 'Heaven'. Without that it is harder to see the allusion.

.

You could also take it more literally, similar to the Sylvia Plath poem I Am Vertical, with its opening line - 'But I would rather be horizontal.' He is no longer 'upright', he is 'across' or 'horizontal' - 'in the ground'.

Thanks. And it seems to gather together suggestions of the crucifixion with a pun and being supine in the hospital before being in the ground. The plain directional language of 'back among'... 'and then Across' in this confused temporal and spiritual description again made me think of a John Donne poem - To His Mistress Going to Bed - where prepositions make up one whole line ('Licence my roving hands, and let them go,/ Before, behind, between, above, below.') there in a different kind of conversation of the soul becoming unbodied ('Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,/ As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth'd must be,/ To taste whole joys.')

I found some writing about "Death at Leavenworth" and the sequence that it belongs to here. Go to page 126 in the chapter called "The Flagon and The Cat". It answers a lot of our questions without making us seem like total numpties. 'You' was a typo.

I think I'll get the Collected Works which AO linked to.

Twit 2


My preview only goes up to page 64. Are you looking at a preview as well?

Yes. I'll send you what I can see.

Before he lapsed into fascist delusions, and before he began the endless, pompous, grave and self-consciously monumental Cantos, Ezra Pound often had a dandyish and charming lightness of touch. 
One of the high points of his early work was his 1915 book Cathay a book of translations of Chinese poetry- though given his poems were based on another American's rough translation of a Japanese translation of the Chinese originals, it's probably fair to say they're not super-accurate and are should be thought of as Pound originals.
Here are two poems from that book.

The River Song by Li Po/ Rihaku, 8th Century AD, Translated Ezra Pound.

This boat is of shato-wood, and its gunwales are cut magnolia,
Musicians with jewelled flutes and with pipes of gold
Fill full the sides in rows, and our wine
Is rich for a thousand cups.
We carry singing girls, drift with the drifting water,
Yet Sennin needs
A yellow stork for a charger, and all our seamen
Would follow the white gulls or ride them.
Kutsu's prose song
Hangs with the sun and moon.

King So's terraced palace is now but barren hill,
But I draw pen on this barge
Causing the five peaks to tremble,
And I have joy in these words
like the joy of blue islands.
(If glory could last forever
Then the waters of Han would flow northward.)

And I have moped in the Emperor's garden, awaiting an order-to-write !
I looked at the dragon-pond, with its willow-coloured water
Just reflecting the sky's tinge,
And heard the five-score nightingales aimlessly singing.

The eastern wind brings the green colour into the island grasses at Yei-shu,
The purple house and the crimson are full of Spring softness.
South of the pond the willow-tips are half-blue and bluer,
Their cords tangle in mist, against the brocade-like palace.
Vine-strings a hundred feet long hang down from carved railings,
And high over the willows, the fine birds sing to each other, and listen,
Crying—'Kwan, Kuan,' for the early wind, and the feel of it.
The wind bundles itself into a bluish cloud and wanders off.
Over a thousand gates, over a thousand doors are the sounds of spring singing,
And the Emperor is at Ko.
Five clouds hang aloft, bright on the purple sky,
The imperial guards come forth from the golden house
with their armour a-gleaming.
The Emperor in his jewelled car goes out to inspect his flowers,
He goes out to Hori, to look at the wing-flapping storks,
He returns by way of Sei rock, to hear the new nightingales,
For the gardens at Jo-run are full of new nightingales,
Their sound is mixed in this flute,
Their voice is in the twelve pipes here.

The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter
By Li Po/ Rihaku, Trans. Ezra Pound.

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse;
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look-out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-Yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the west garden—
They hurt me.
I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

Quote from: Scarlet Intangible on August 16, 2020, 09:34:41 PM
My preview only goes up to page 64. Are you looking at a preview as well?
Thanks very much for a very interesting discussion last month on "Death at Leavensworth", I was sorry not to join in at the time.
What were some of the salient points in that book?




Quote from: kalowski on August 13, 2020, 08:59:53 PM
A personal favourite:
AN OLD MAN'S THOUGHT OF SCHOOL.
.....

Only a lot of boys and girls?
Only the tiresome spelling, writing, ciphering classes?
Only a Public School?

Thanks for that. It made me feel sad because at the moment I get the impression my kid's schooldays are basically just like the above quote and lacking the kind of visionary thing Whitman was aiming at.

Quote from: Twit 2 on August 16, 2020, 10:05:26 AM
I do like his stuff. This one is rather special:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=19869
Cheers. It seems like a key part of Wheelwright's working method was to give his poems a confusing sense of narrative, where the various 'plot' elements can't really be resolved or flatly contradict each other.


Rainbow Moses

QuoteI've been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite,

Can stop the bleeding – most people forgot this

when the war ended.

Gosh, I wonder why?

Twit 2

Been massively enjoying Don Paterson's Zonal, where the informal yet precise style combined with a long line is clearly influenced by CK Williams. This one by the latter is great, I think. "Describe what you see out of a window" is standard writing workshop fare, but like anything, if done well, why not?

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57036/from-my-window

Twit 2

Ingeborg Bachmann:


Retinend

What is it about?


I've been toking on some Class A Tonks, and having a stonking bonkers time.

Haven't smoked poetry in yonks.

Come get conked:

https://soundcloud.com/poetryfoundation/diary-of-a-rebel-by-rosemary-tonks



Spoiler alert
Backlisted (my dealer) recently did an episode on her, featuring Stewart Lee:

https://soundcloud.com/backlistedpod/the-bloater-by-rosemary-tonks
[close]

Despite the spectre of Smeraldina's absence; despite the haunting tumbleweed - we must press on. I am feeling the pull of poetry. I am feeling a little like this:


At Castle Wood - Emily Bronte

The day is done, the winter sun
Is setting in its sullen sky;
And drear the course that has been run,
And dim the hearts that slowly die.

No star will light my coming night;
No morn of hope for me will shine;
I mourn not heaven would blast my sight,
And I ne'er longed for joys divine.

Through life's hard task I did not ask
Celestial aid, celestial cheer;
I saw my fate without its mask,
And met it too without a fear.

The grief that pressed my aching breast
Was heavier far than earth can be;
And who would dread eternal rest
When labour's hour was agony?

Dark falls the fear of this despair
On spirits born of happiness;
But I was bred the mate of care,
The foster-child of sore distress.

No sighs for me, no sympathy,
No wish to keep my soul below;
The heart is dead in infancy,
Unwept-for let the body go.


There she goes - Queen Goth, proto emo; oh Emily!

Thanks for rebooting this.

Here is an anonymous song lyric that was used in the 16th century, but is thought to be much older.

Westron Wynd:

Westron wynde, when wyll thow blow
The smalle rayne downe can rayne?
Cryst yf my love were in my armys,
And I yn my bed agayne!

Modern spelling:
Western Wind, when wilt thou blow,
(that) the small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!

A glob of Gerard Manley Hopkins, perhaps?


    Inversnaid

    This darksome burn, horseback brown,
    His rollrock highroad roaring down,
    In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
    Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

    A windpuff-bonnet of fáawn-fróth
    Turns and twindles over the broth
    Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
    It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

    Degged with dew, dappled with dew,
    Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
    Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
    And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

    What would the world be, once bereft
    Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
    O let them be left, wildness and wet;
    Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.


Sorry Gerard - did you say: Long live the shears and the bulldozers yet?

Here is a good reading by Ted Hughes (at 7:39). Listening to this helped me find the rhythm I struggled to find (when I read it first for myself).


Quote from: Astronaut Omens on May 14, 2021, 06:49:04 PM
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!

Horny filth.

One day we will all be as dead as Edna St. Vincent Millay - so just think about that, will yay?


         Spring

         To what purpose, April, do you return again?
         Beauty is not enough.
         You can no longer quiet me with the redness
         Of little leaves opening stickily.
         I know what I know.
         The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
         The spikes of crocus.
         The smell of the earth is good.
         It is apparent that there is no death.
         But what does that signify?
         Not only under ground are the brains of men
         Eaten by maggots.
         Life in itself
         Is nothing,
         An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
         It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
         April
         Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.


I've only just realised (the other day) what "a flight of uncarpeted stairs" is getting at. Read on if you want some probably obvious analysis:


First - "uncarpeted" suggests a place that is not fully 'home'. It suggests, for example, a place that someone has just moved into, where the stairs haven't yet been 'done'. It suggests a 'temporary' state.

And so does the image of "stairs" - a staircase is a 'transitional' place, used to get from one floor to another. Again, it links with the word 'temporary' (and also hints at that whole pesky 'heaven and hell' thing).

So two words - "uncarpeted stairs" - within a poem about life and death, conjure up quite a lot, and seem perfectly chosen. I've probably missed things too. Anyone see anything more?

Quite an anarchic flick of the wrist in this one:


    The Bull of Bendylaw - Sylvia Plath

    The black bull bellowed before the sea.
    The sea, till that day orderly,
    Hove up against Bendylaw.

    The queen in the mulberry arbor started
    Stiff as a queen on a playing card.
    The king fingered his beard.

    A blue sea, four horny bull-feet,
    A bull-snouted sea that wouldn't stay put,
    Bucked at the garden gate.

    Along box-lined walks in the florid sun
    Toward the rowdy bellow and back again
    The lords and ladies ran.

    The great bronze gate began to crack,
    The sea broke in at every crack,
    Pellmell, blueblack.

    The bull surged up, the bull surged down,
    Not to be stayed by a daisy chain
    Nor any learned man.

    O the king's tidy acre is under the sea,
    And the royal rose in the bull's belly,
    And the bull on the king's highway.


In what my inner critics are calling 'blind vanity' and 'you fucking moron', I have made the mistake of recording myself reading this and posting it onto youtube. To compound the error, I am posting a link to it here. Lord have mercy on my socks.

Missing the poetry thread. I'm liking this one by Ginsberg:


The End

I am I, old Father Fisheye that begat the ocean, the worm at my
       own ear, the serpent turning around a tree,
I sit in the mind of the oak and hide in the rose, I know if any
       wake up, none but my death,
come to me bodies, come to me prophecies, come all fore-
       boding, come spirits and visions,
I receive all, I'll die of cancer, I enter the coffin forever, I close
       my eye, I disappear,
I fall on myself in winter snow, I roll in a great wheel through
       rain, I watch fuckers in convulsion,
car screech, furies groaning their basso music, memory fading
       in the brain, men imitating dogs,
I delight in a woman's belly, youth stretching his breasts and
       thighs to sex, the cock sprung inward
gassing its seed on the lips of Yin, the beasts dance in Siam,
       they sing opera in Moscow,
my boys yearn at dusk on stoops, I enter New York, I play my
       jazz on a Chicago Harpsichord,
Love that bore me I bear back to my Origin with no loss, I float
       over the vomiter
thrilled with my deathlessness, thrilled with this endlessness I
       dice and bury,
come Poet shut up eat my word, and taste my mouth in your
       ear.

                                                                         New York, 1960


Anybody got a poem to post?

Twit 2

Posted this in the wildlife thread recently:

Quote from: Twit 2 on August 14, 2022, 08:26:51 PMPipistrelles

In the centre of the sheep-field
a stand of Douglas firs
hold between them, tenderly,
a tall enclosure, like a vase.

How could we have missed it
before today – just never seen
this clear, translucent vessel
tinted like citrine?

What we noticed were pipistrelles:
cinder-like, friable; flickering
the place hained by trees
till the air seemed to quicken,

and the bats were a single
edgy intelligence, testing an idea
for a new form,
which unfolded, cohered

before our eyes. The earth's
mind is such interstices, cells
charging with cool dawn light;
– is that what they were telling us?

– but they vanished, suddenly
before we'd understood,
and the trees grew in a circle,
elegant and mute.

KATHLEEN JAMIE (2002)


kalowski


Love that one Twit 2! I love the image of the bats in stanzas 3 and 4 and how they are 'testing an idea for a new form'. And I learnt three new words from reading it.

And I love the energy of that one Kalowski. It reminds me, not necessarily in the language, but in the uplifting feeling and sense of mission, of the song Introvert by Little Simz, which I've been listening to lately.

I bought a small book of Emily Dickinson's poems yesterday and read this cute little one for the first time, which tugged at my heart a little at the end, and contrasts nicely with the Ginsberg one I just posted (one being written from the voice of the poet and the other being written from the voice beyond the poet):


This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me -
The simple News that Nature told -
With tender Majesty

Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see -
For love of Her - Sweet - countrymen -
Judge tenderly - of Me


I really like how those two poems link at the end, with 'Judge tenderly - of Me' versus 'Come Poet, shut up eat my word' bringing a nice little tonal clash.

kalowski

Quote from: Scarlett Tangible on August 22, 2022, 09:44:42 AMAnd I love the energy of that one Kalowski. It reminds me, not necessarily in the language, but in the uplifting feeling and sense of mission, of the song Introvert by Little Simz, which I've been listening to lately.

Most of the poems in the London Review of Books leave me cold with their almost comic pretentiousness, but this one was fantastic.