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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

National Poetry Day

12:16 / 04.10.01

Come on, you know what to do.

The author loving these homely meats specially, viz: cream, pancakes, buttered pippin-pies (laugh, good people) and tobacco; writ to that worthy and virtuous gentlewoman, whom he calleth mistress, as followeth

If there were, oh! an Hellespont of cream
Between us, milk-white mistress, I would swim
To you, to show to both my love's extreme,
Leander-like, - yea! dive from brim to brim.
But met I with a buttered pippin-pie
Floating upon't, that would I make my boat
To waft me to you without jeopardy,
Though sea-sick I might be while it did float.
Yet if a storm should rise, by night or day,
Of sugar-snows and hail of caraways,
Then, if I found a pancake in my way,
It like a plank should bring me to your kays;
Which having found, if they tobacco kept,
The smoke should dry me well before I slept.

- John Davies of Hereford.

By the way, may I recommend to you the New Penguin Book of English Verse? Paperback is a tenner - really good anthology.

deletia

13:03 / 04.10.01

I Say I Say I Say

Anyone here had a go at themselves
for a laugh? Anyone opened their wrists
with a blade in the bath? Those in the dark
at the back, listen hard. Those at the front
in the know, those of us who have, hands up,
let's show that inch of lacerated skin
between the forearm and the fist. Let's tell it
like it is: strong drink, a crimson tidemark
round the tub, a yard of lint, white towels
washed a dozen times, still pink. Tough luck.
A passion then for watches, bangles, cuffs.
A likely story: you were lashed by brambles
picking berries from the woods. Come clean, come good,
repeat with me the punchline 'Just like blood'
when those at the back rush forward to say
how a little love goes a long long long way.

Simon Armitage

Regrettable Juvenilia

13:18 / 04.10.01

Funnily enough, I went off searching for an Armitage poem online when I saw this thread. And I found this one, which I'd forgotten how much I like:

quote:You May Turn Over And Begin...

'Which of these films was Dirk Bogarde
not in? One hundredweight of bauxite

makes how much aluminium?
how many tales in 'The Decameron'?'

General Studies, the upper sixth, a doddle, a cinch
for anyone with an ounce of common sense

or a calculator
with a memory feature.

Having galloped through but not caring enough
to check or double-check, I was dreaming of

milk-white breasts and nakedness, or more specifically
virginity.

That term - everybody felt the heat
but the girls were having none of it:

long and cool like cocktails,
out of reach, their buns and pigtails

only let out for older guys with studded jackets
and motor-bikes and spare helmets.

One jot of consolation
was the tall spindly girl riding pillion

on her man's new Honda
who, with the lights at amber,

put down both feet and stood to stretch her limbs,
to lift the visor and push back her fringe

and to smooth her tight jeans.
As he pulled off down the street

she stood there like a wishbone,
high and dry, her legs wide open,

and rumour has it he didn't notice
til he came round in the ambulance

having underbalanced on a tight left-hander.
'A Taste of Honey'. Now I remember.

I'm sure that's formatted wrong, but don't blame me, blame the BBC.

13:59 / 04.10.01

Excerpt from Cassandra, by H.D.

Why do you blind my eyes?
why do you dart and pulse
till all the dark is home,
then find my soul
and ruthless draw it back?
scaling the scaleless,
opening the dark?
speak, nameless, power and might;
when will you leave me quite?
when will you break my wings
or leave them utterly free
to scale heaven endlessly?

[ 04-10-2001: Message edited by: Persephone ]

Regrettable Juvenilia

14:00 / 04.10.01

Hey kids, I know you think someone like John Donne's just a fusty old git from the 15=6th and 17th centuries, but look! Kinky conflicted crisis-of-faith poetry:

quote:Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to'another due,
Labor to'admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

There's loads more good stuff like this online at the University of Toronto's website. Go find some or it's just going to be me pasting loads of 'em up...

Whisky Priestess

14:28 / 04.10.01

There's a poem called Games People Play, I'm almost sure - unless it's one of Haus's. Bird poems must be easy to find. How about the bit with the albatross from the Ancient Mariner? ST Coleridge is always good for a bit of mystical doomy gloom.

deletia

14:35 / 04.10.01

quote:Originally posted by Whisky Priestess:
There's a poem called Games People Play,

'Fraid so.

14:38 / 04.10.01

Thanks, Whiskey. I found something I liked on Flyboy's link & pasted it in place of my original post above, slightly making this thread a little discontinuous... my head's a little backwards & panicked today, sorry...

The Return Of Rothkoid

14:39 / 04.10.01

So's Gerard Manley Hopkins. Poetry-burnin' Jesuit-o-doom. quote:No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief’

NO worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing—
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’.

  O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.Though too long to copy in here, "The Wreck Of The Deutschland"'s a goodie, too.

Coleridgean (?) bird-and-celestial-dice-gaming to be found here.

16:14 / 04.10.01

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (excerpt)

Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!

Clouds of the west -- sun there half an hour high -- I see you also face to face.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,
The simple, compact, well-join'd scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,
The similitudes of the past and those of the future,

The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river,
The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,

The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,

The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,
Others will see the islands large and small;

Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

Walt Whitman.

[whole poem
here.

I'm not going to excerpt it, because it's too difficult to pick a part, but the Waste Land by TS Eliot is another of my favourites.

The whole poem. with 'hypertext notes' is here.

Whisky Priestess

07:23 / 05.10.01

I see our Doggerel Laureate Mr. Motion has chosen to mark National Poetry Day with another of his embarrassing little doings on the living-room carpet of literature, as printed in Metro:

Diving

by the Typewriter Monkeys

The moment I tire
Of difficult sand grains
and giddy pebbles
I roll with the punch
Of a shivering wave
and am cosmonaut

of a basalt ledge
in a moony sea-hall
spun beyond blue.
Faint but definite
heat of the universe
flutters my skin;
quick fish apply
as something to love,
what with their heads
of gong-dented gold;
plankton I push

an easy way through
would be dust or dew
in the world behind
if that mattered at all,
which is no longer true,
with its faces and cries.

Sometimes I want to weep for the sins of the world, and then I read a Motion poem and I just want to kill.

08:04 / 05.10.01

No, thank you john
Christina Rossetti

I never said I loved you, John:
Why will you tease me day by day,
And wax a weariness to think upon
With always "do" and "pray"?

You know I never loved you, John;
No fault of mine made me your toast:
Why will you haunt me with a face as wan
As shows an hour-old ghost?

I dare say Meg or Moll would take
Pity upon you, if you'd ask:
And pray don't remain single for my sake
Who can't perform that task.

I have no heart? -- Perhaps I have not;
But then you're mad to take offence
That I don't give you what I have not got:
Use your own common sense.

Let bygones be bygones:
Don't call me false, who owed not to be true:
I'd rather answer "No" to fifty Johns
Than answer "Yes" to you.

Let's mar our pleasant days no more,
Song-birds of passage, days of youth:
Catch at today, forget the days before:
I'll wink at your untruth.

Let us strike hands as hearty friends;
No more, no less; and friendship's good:
Only don't keep in view ulterior ends,
And points not understood.

In open treaty. Rise above
Quibbles and shuffling off and on:
Here's friendship for you if you like; but love, --
No, thank you, John.

deletia

08:11 / 05.10.01

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
I'd better shut up,
For you're waving a gun...

10:32 / 05.10.01

A caller burn o' siller sheen,
Ran cannily out o'er the green,
and whan our gutcher's drouth had been
To bide right sair,
He loutit down and drank bedeen
A dainty skair.

I

If I remember anything at all
of how we spent this winter, I'll recall

the afternoon we found a woodland spring
of caller water; how, as we drove home,

the scent of it still lingered on your hair
and, like distant music, I could hear

the burn's slow purl. It's what we listen for
that makes us who we are: snow on the air

above a hill-town; strays out on the rim
of ditch, or marsh; the silence of a room

the dead have not abandoned; this bright spill
of silver, or a whisper from the well

where blackness pools and gathers in the soil.
It's what we listen for that makes us whole:

The keenest ear finds order in a stone,
perfection in a wisp of nerve and bone,

a resurrection in each stream of clear
cold water - 'caller burn, beyond compare'.

We listen to retrieve the souls we are
from meek adjustment; and to know our power:

though nobody steps twice in the same
quick stream, we are more innocent of time

than we believe: as water graces all,
we dwell in grace, untainted by the Fall.

From Four Variants of 'Caller Water' by John Burnside

11:02 / 05.10.01

O make me a mask and a wall to shut from your spies
Of the sharp, enamelled eyes and the spectacled claws
Rape and rebellion in the nurseries of my face,
Gag of a dumbstruck tree to block from bare enemies
The bayonet tongue in this undefended prayerpiece,
The present mouth, and the sweetly blown trumpet of lies,
Shaped in old armour and oak the countenance of a dunce
To shield the glistening brain and blunt the examiners,
And a tear-stained widower grief drooped from the lashes
To veil belladonna and let the dry eyes percieve
Others betray the lamenting lies of their losses
By the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve.

– Dylan Thomas

13:50 / 05.10.01

One of my favorites from all time:

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Wallace Stevens

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

From Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

13:52 / 05.10.01

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles
this is fucking magic.

14:00 / 05.10.01

Geoffrey Hill

Mercian Hymns XII

Their spades grafted through the variably-resistant
soil. They clove to the hoard. They ransacked
epiphanies, vertebra of the chimera, armour of
wild bees' larvae. They struck the fire-dragon's
faceted skin.

The men were paid to caulk water-pipes. They brewed
and pissed amid splendour; their latrine seethed
its estuary through nettles. They are scattered
to your collations, moldywarp.

It is autumn. Chestnut-boughs clash their inflamed
leaves. The garden festers for attention: telluric
cultures, enriched with shards, corns, nodules, the
sunk solids of gravity. I have raked up a golden
and stinking blaze.

15:10 / 05.10.01

Nothing Gold Can Stay
by Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her first leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.