#Assisi : a #poem by #PaulCelan
Posts tagged poem
—Wallace Stevens, Poetry, October 1921
From The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine (University of Chicago Press, October 2012). Find some of Christian Wiman’s favorite discoveries from the past 100 years of Poetry—the introduction to the centennial anthology is available here.
From The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest
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Today, on what would’ve been Guest’s 92nd birthday, take some time to revisit Peter Gizzi’s “Barbara Guest: Fair Realist” — an excellent piece of writing about the work of an amazing poet.
Getting At Experience: Ekphrasis in Ashbery’s “The Skaters”
John Ashbery’s long poem “The Skaters,” from Rivers and Mountains (1966), has been described by one critic as the quintessential postmodern long poem. Incorporating techniques such as pastiche and moments of ars poetic meditation, the text is a series of juxtapositions; it’s hard to know if the poem is even about skaters. And thus it is a good example of what many readers consider Ashbery’s difficulty.
And when the poet Martín Espada discusses his own poetic relationship to Walt Whitman in “A Branch on the Tree of Whitman,” he laments the prevalence in the poetry world of what he considers a move away from communication. For Espada, Ashbery’s difficulty is evidence of contemporary poetry’s cynical disengagement with the world of experience:
Look at the movement toward obscurity…where the goal is to adopt a pose of detached, hip cynicism and not to engage with the world. Whitman is so deeply engaged with the world; you get that sense that he’s so involved. …We see, in a lot of ways, especially in the MFA world, people fleeing from the Whitman model, running in the opposite direction, toward what I don’t know. Toward Ashbery? Toward Stevens in some way? (29)Espada continues, claiming this move toward “obscurity” is “a flight from anything that could move people, anything that could change people. It is, in some ways, profoundly dishonest” (29). In contrast, Espada claims that the poetry of the political imagination is often “clear, concrete” and “urgently direct.”
On the Momentum of Memory : Adam Clay
What will survive of us
is not love but rather water
and sound and light.
The museums will it so.
from A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World
Apparently, Brilburn Logue is Alan Moore.
This is for when the slats of the night slam shut on you, for when the radio is broken and crackles like uranium orchids. For when the föhn-wind rattles the telegraph wires like a handful of bones, and for when dream ambulances skitter through the streets at midnight. In the amusement arcade a sailor whose muscles writhe with tattoos and pornography, doubled up, his vomiting emeralds. Elsewhere a black man with brass teeth and a swallow skin tie is laughing and laughing and offering poisoning candy floss to the children. This is for when your cuff gets caught in the cogs of an urban evening, for when your vision is frayed and you don’t have any more lust. This is for the wasp-woman. This is for the torturers’ wives with their thumbs blue as billiard chalk. This is for all the mathematicians who got mixed up in the dream gang. This is for when you get caught in a sleep-riot, this is for when your jism turns to platinum, for when the television is full of murder, for when the sky is out of order, for when your room is crawling with cheap poetry. This is for when your veins are singing with indigo for when the radiator is full of ever. For when your sex is full of voodoo, for when your clothes are imaginary, for when your kitchen is dead. This is for when your flesh creeps and never comes back.
Holiday of a Lifetime
Your ex transferred
a photo
to a jigsaw. Years later,
underneath a shelf,
you find a centre piece.
Sit at the desk. It’s mid-
November.
Your cigarette, neglected,
unthreads air
to ash. The study’s walls are
strung with hoops of light
thrown by a glass
of water. The…
by Percy Shelley
Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread, —- behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and…
Waving Adieu, Adieu, AdieuThat would be waving and that would be crying,Crying and shouting and meaning farewell,Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the centre,Just to stand still without moving a hand..In a world without heaven to follow, the stopsWould be endings more poignant than partings, profounder,And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,Just to be there and just to behold..To be one’s singular self, to despiseThe being that yielded so little, acquiredSo little, too little to care, to turnTo the ever-jubilant weather, to sip.One’s cup and never to say a word,Or to sleep or just to lie there still,Just to be there, just to be beheld,That would be bidding farewell, be bidding farewell..One likes to practice the thing. They practice,Enough, for heaven. Ever-jubilant,What is there here but weather, what spirithave I except it comes from the sun?.by Wallace Stevens
Magritte, Souvenir de voyage, 1955
My friends dismantle the control room
which is an intuitive experiment in courage
It can be difficult to hold everything together
without a stable core but what fun is that
What we are doing is not hypothetical It is
the assemblage of a large…
Magritte, The Lovers, 1928
Take off that ridiculous hat & tell me you love me
is what I want to say but my tongue is not so evolved
My tongue rides a hobbyhorse in a big wet parlor
It acts like a baby in a castle dragging one miraculous oar
& while you get smaller & smaller on the lip…
Rene Magritte, Golconda, 1953
A whale is not a type of information
Neither is a ship’s rigging nor a peach three
If you were not alive you would already
know this When my friends come over
we sit on the carpet & fall into obscurity
because we do not love information
We sit on the…
A poem by Lytton Smith.
Don’t you just love those moments when you decide out of nowhere to pick up that random book you’ve been meaning to read forever now and finally take a glance and of course you find an answer, or one of them, for which you’ve been searching. And for all your guesses and questions about what it is you were struggling so hard to find (only that you knew you were) and then there it is: both better framed and better explained than you even imagined. And how concrete and satisfied you will feel then. But first you must read that book, you must discover that perfect poem.
The Tightrope Walker’s Childhood
Fear of wheatfields. Fear of groundbeetles.
Fear of where the tree trunk disappearsbelow ground. Fear of ground opening
to absence like the magician’s trick cabinet.…
ONE SASHAY IN JENNIFER
Jaded are my souvenirs, for they swell beyond the festivals where I tout them.
Um, soiled assassins are beautiful wearing the genocide they traveled to find me, but that’s love.
My arm is a contra for justice that injures the poor.
I mail sorcerers earfuls of misery, of hate—who value the confinement of my monocle!
You fashionable perverts fair well at the spirit crap because no wife is humane. I’ve dipped a stranger’s sores in my fat; they require brute force because I love them.
Not playing lacrosse indicates you must shine apples using Jesus or be forced to renounce the glorious suckle crime brings. Jesus sucked the crime from apples.
And the prime idiot resides on your tax form under sign here.
Or the deer will drive suave tractors and point and you will know their reach beyond any chef’s ability to fester your resplendent, pickled gums.
I am cleft of the charities that birthed me. Any whiff of rape inspires.
Your restored hyenas, etc…, they pivot like demons without ego, captain.
Ah! The trollop has a pencil. Conjure some attendance for my tiny itch, mister Satan, or I’ll quiz your beard. I am a civilian with paraplegic instructions yelling hard-ons back down, so sayeth this damn humble carny.
