Poems to celebrate World Poetry Day

Thanks Ingrid. You made me think of my friend Michael Bayley, with whom I’ve lost touch, but some of whose poems appeared in Faber Poetry Introductions 7, way back in 1990. Including this one:

_Nightmare_

After she died,
he thought of the horse
they’d always denied her,

even heard it one night,
clip-clopping the landing
in her mother’s shoes.

Twenty years ago, I used your wrote this poem.

What I’d like to write

Of course, I’d really like to write a book
He said – a book the length of many pages,
The pages turning, pages of grey cloud,
Pages of white sky, branches moving
In long Victorian streets, pages of light,
Pages of wet paving and streetlight.
He’d like, he said, but faltering, fingers smudging,
Uncertain hand dragging across the lines
And the slow days passing – windy and light days,
Hauled up one by one like frames of film
Each blue frame lifting up and gone
All the unwritten days. He’d like, he thought,
He’d like to write something – a letter home,
Almost a letter – letters of the light,
The cats he’d seen at midnight, orange smudges
Of streetlight – a letter of the wind, the street
As the moments’ pages turned he would write
All the unwriteable days hauling past,
All of the traffic and the quiet nights.
Yes, you’d like, the days flick by, you would,
You’d like to write, but failing, hand limp,
Close the book, let the pen drop, give up the attempt.

This poem has been killing me with nostalgia ever since I first read it. Uncannily, it is very similar to the poem selected by Chris in topic and execution.

秋風や
むしりたがりし
赤い花
一茶

For which I offer three translations.

Oh, the autumn wind
She would so feel like plucking
Many red flowers
Issa

The autumn wind blows
Away red flowers she would
Pick if she were there
Issa

Ces fleurs si rouges
Elle les ramasserait tant
Oh le vent d’automne
Issa

Apologies for the length of this, but it’s colonised my imagination recently:

Cesare Pavese, ‘Smokers of Paper’ trans. Geoffrey Brock.

He’s brought me to bear his band. He sits in a corner
mouthing his clarinet. A hellish racket begins.
Outside, through flashes of lightning, wind gusts
and rain whips, knocking the lights out
every five minutes. In the dark, their faces
give it their all, contorted, as they play a dance tune
from memory. Full of energy, my poor friend
anchors them all from behind. His clarinet writhes,
breaks through the din, passes beyond it, releasing
like a lone soul, into a dry, rough silence.

The poor pieces of brass have been dented too often:
the hands working the stops also work in the fields,
and the obstinate brows stay fixed on the ground.
Miserable worn-out blood, weakened
by too many labors—you can hear it groan
in their notes, as my friend struggles to lead them,
his own hands hardened from swinging a hammer,
from pushing a plane, from scraping a living.

He’s lost all his old comrades, and he’s only thirty.
Part of the postwar group that grew up on hunger.
They all came to Turin, to look for a life,
and discovered injustice. He learned, without smiling,
how to work in a factory. He learned how to measure
the hunger of others with his own fatigue—
injustice was everywhere. He tried to find peace
by walking, at night, down streets without ends,
half-asleep, but found only thousands of streetlamps
blazing down on iniquity: hoarse women and drunks,
staggering puppets, far from their homes, He came,
one winter, to Turin—factory lights, smoke and ash—
and he learned what work is. He accepted that work
was part of a man’s hard fate; if all men did that,
there just might be some justice in this world.
And he found new comrades. He suffered their long words,
he listened and waited for them to be over.
He made them his comrades. Families of them
in each house, the city surrounded by them, the face
of the world covered with them. And each of them
felt desperate enough to conquer the world.

They sound harsh tonight, despite all the time
he spent coaching each player. He ignores the loud rain
and the flickering lights. His face is severe,
fixed on some grief, almost biting the mouthpiece.
I’ve seen this expression before, one evening, just us
and his brother, who’s ten years sadder than him.
We were up late in the dim light, the brother studying
a lathe he had built that didn’t work right,
and my poor friend cursing the fate that kept him there,
bound to his hammer and plane, feeding a pair
of old people he never asked for.
That’s when he yelled
that it wasn’t fate that made the world suffer
or made the daylight spark blasphemous outbursts:
man is the guilty one. If we only could just leave,
and be hungry and free, and say no
to a life that uses our love and our piety,
our families, our patches of dirt, to shackle our hands.

(I think I’m OK on copyright since this is freely available at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/182022)

(DD adds – I think you are, but perhaps from now on in could people just quote an opening passage and provide the link when dealing with modern or translated stuff? Poetryfoundation.org have definitely got permission for it but I don’t know whether that means it’s OK for us to reproduce. Thanks.)

That pretty little poem reminded me of WisÅ‚awa Szymborska, Ingrid. I think she died this year or last. If you don’t know her, I think you would like her.

This one is well known but worth repeating on world poetry day because it sums up so completely what poetry is:

The un-red deer
In the un-green forest

The antlers which do not appear
And are not like branches

The hounds which do not bay
With tails which do not swish

The heather beyond and the insignificant stumble
Of the horse not pulled up

By the rider who does not see all this
Nor hear nor smell it

Or does so but it does not matter
The horn sounds Gone away

Or, if it does not, is there hunter,
Hunted, or the broken tree

Swept by the wind from the channel?

C.H. Sisson

“The Low Road” by Marge Piercy

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can’t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can’t stop them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.

Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds and hold a fund-raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.

A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million your own country.

It goes on one at at time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said No,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.

Jeffrey Davis’s poems are really good.

A poem I wrote in Dec. 2011:

1758
I do not represent
Or signify
One thing beyond this small space held;
No voice to sound
To who would hear,
No eye to sight
What cannot be seen.
From a piece of time
Does the least feather of a pigeon depend,
And my mortal soul,
That spires could touch
If I would them,
With every else will end
In the merest trough of matter,
A once of nothing.

I can’t match the good stuff above, so I’ll prove Lewis Carroll’s claim that “Any fairly practised writer, with the slightest ear for rhythm, could compose, for hours together, in the easy running metre of The Song of Hiawatha”, with some doggerel I wrote a year ago about the closing of a local video store called Generation X. Here’s hoping CT formatting doesn’t screw it up…

…

When will Netflix organize a
zombie walk on uptown streets or
sponsor The TriCity Roller
Girls (a flat-track roller derby team)?
When will iTunes hand out dog treats,
welcome pets into the store, or
join with next-door coffee shop to
raise some money for a goat?

Amazon will never help to
run a standup festival, or
carve a space for LGBT
films (and also TV series).
Nor will Googlers ever be as
cool as staff who know their subject,
finding just the film you mean when
hazy recollections are the most you
can recount about some movie.

…

(The whole thing).

I am not a poet

I am not a poet
I do have a partiality for words beginning with P.
I am a parent, a partner, a patron, a person even.
Perhaps I should add poet.
I love poetry, but I also love
prose, plot and personalities.
If I were a poet I would write about poverty, prejudice, pretence
Privilege, paranoia, peace, philanthropy, power, the powerless.
Poets are true artisans, practitioners of precision, surgeons of the writing world.
We put poets on pedestals, they are popular people, but no one reads their poetry.
So what is the point?
No, I am not a poet.
I do though try to write poetry

planned obsolescence

tomorrow
these words will be
one day old
like those
writ yesterday
writ without
guarantee
or false promise
unwarranted
meant only to say
tomorrow
we will all be
one day old
like yesterday

This is my translation of the Latin inscription on the Stone of Bologna:

To the Gods of the Dead

Aelia Laelia
Curly-locks
Neither man nor woman
Nor androgyny
Not girl or boy
Not crone or maiden
Neither Madonna nor whore
But all things
You are destroyed
By neither famine nor iron
Nor by poison
But by everything
You are not taken
Into the waters
Nor into the sky
Nor are you within the earth
But everywhere

Lucius Agatho Priscus
Not your husband or your lover
Not needed by you
Not sad
Not rejoicing
Not weeping
This which is amassed
Not a pyramid
Not your tomb
He knows and knows not
What he has done

This is the grave
In which there is no body
This is the body
That is held within no tomb

Jung called this poem “a flypaper for every conceivable projection that buzzed in the human mind.”

This is a great idea! Thanks. Here’s mine.

Resolutions
(12-31-08)

I will observe tomorrow
the southern traditions of my
mother, now a species at 92
who molted her brain several times
to become something which cannot
distinguish me from my brother,
or sweets from feces and spit:
so hours from now
I will be eating
black-eyed peas to assure
that I will have
money this coming year,
but also sweeping the floor
and making sure
I wash a good-sized
load of laundry,
both of which
my mother assured
all my life
should be avoided
on New Year’s day
if one does not wish
to sweep one out
or wash one out
of the family.

Here’s a couple epigrams from Martial’s Liber Spectaculorum, a description of spectacles shown at the Colosseum. All the disgusting cruelty (to person and beast) and sycophantic emperor-worship you could want!

18.
Lambere securi dextram consueta magistri
tigris, ab Hyrcano gloria rara iugo,
saeva ferum rabido laceravit dente leonem —
res nova, non ullis cognita temporibus.
Ausa est tale nihil, silvis dum vixit in altis:
postquam inter nos est, plus feritatis habet.

She is taught to quietly lick her trainer’s hand,
this tiger, a rare prize from Hyrcania;
but she savaged a lion with her awful jaws —
a novelty, a thing never seen before.
She would not have dared such an attack, when she lived in the jungle:
come among men, she has learned to be more wild.
—————————————————————————–
21.
Quicquid in Orpheo Rhodope spectasse theatro
dicitur, exhibuit, Caesar, harena tibi.
Repserunt scopuli mirandaque silva cucurrit,
quale fuisse nemus creditur Hesperidum.
Adfuit immixtum pecori genus omne ferarum
et supra vatem multa pependit avis,
ipse sed ingrato iacuit laceratus ab urso:
haec tantum res est facta παρ᾽ἱστορίαν.

Everything seen in Rhodope when Orpheus sang
(as they say), has been shown, Caesar, in your arena.
The rocks crept forth, the miraculous forest walked,
just as, we are told, the Hesperian woods did once.
And among these was a flock of all kinds of beasts,
And many birds flew over the bard’s head —
but the man was ripped to bits by an un-charmed bear:
only that bit was changed from the source-material.
———————————————————————

Oh, and here’s a totally untranslatable bit of filth (read it aloud!) from the anonymous Priapea, my favorite collection of dick-jokes:

7.
Cum loquor, una mihi peccatur littera, nam T
P dico semper, blaesaque lingua mea est.

Get it?

Argh, and a mistake I can’t blame on the computer: “mea” in the Priapea poem ought to be “mihi.”

links as plaintext since the crookedtimber markup never renders the way I expect it to..

Seamus Heaney, In the Attic
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2009/02/09/090209po_poem_heaney

last stanza:

As I age and blank on names,
As my uncertainty on stairs
Is more and more the light-headedness

Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,
As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable,

It’s not that I can’t imagine still
that slight untoward rupture and world-tilt
As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.

**

In Greece once on vacation, I ran for several hours each day. My Greek relatives wanted to know if I was being paid to do all this running.

I am paid in the red coin of the sun going down,
the notes of waves susurrant in the pebbles
which cannot be counterfeited;
the figs ripening and the wind that bears their scent
chattering of cicadas,
goat bells in the olive grove, behind the monastery,
cool sweet water from the mountain springs;
the wages are good enough.

**

Something in Afrikaans, Breyten Breytenbach: Seven years in jail for treason against the apartheid government, wrote The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, the opposite of a crime against humanity, poetry in fact; this is a different poem though.
http://www.breytenbreytenbach.blogspot.com/2005/11/die-gat-in-die-lug-vir-ons-huis.html

ek maak die venster oop
en die son kom drink
met ‘n helder tong
aan die wyn in my glas

ek kan nie kla nie
soms kyk die reen duisende oe
teen die ruite
maar kry nie vastrapplek nie
en die paddavissies gly grond toe

roughly,

I open the window
and the sun comes to drink
with a clear tongue
of the wine in my glass

I can’t complain
sometimes the rain looks with a thousand eyes
against the panes
but does not find a foothold
and the tadpole drops slide to the ground

That poem by(?) William Timberman is wonderful. I *immediately* thought it was about me, despite never having worn a shirt anyone made for me.

A. Gellius – don’t get it.

A borrowed poem, philosophical, from the Montreal poet Louis Dudek:

Freedom

My two dogs
tied to a tree
by a ten-foot leash
kept howling and whining for an your
till I let them off.

Now they are lying quietly on the grass
a few feet further from the tree
and they haven’t moved at all since I let them go.

Freedom may be
only an idea
but it’s a matter of principle
even to a dog.

The fish hook poem is Margaret Atwood, and it actually goes

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

“It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” ― William Carlos Williams

Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the
mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and deca-
dence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stub-
bornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thick-
ening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there
are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught–they say–
God, when he walked on earth.

Robinson Jeffers

By Francisco de Quevedo. Loose translation:

That the self-important teenager,
led by poverty,
turns his nobility to theft
as a liberal art,
that he should hoard each coin
deep inside himself,
that’s allright.

But if in such dire straits,
the unhappy wretch,
by sheer cluelessness,
resorts to holdups at the crossroads;
that he should be introduced
to the confessor,
on the way to the gibbet,
that is bad.

One of my favorite poems, by the Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge, in a translation(*) by Robert Bly:

It’s the Dream

It’s that dream that we carry with us
that something wonderful will happen,
that it has to happen,
that time will open,
that the heart will open,
that doors will open,
that the mountains will open,
that wells will leap up,
that the dream will open,
that one morning we’ll slip in
to a harbor that we’ve never known.

Since it’s a short poem, I’ll add the Norwegian original too. It’s from the 1966 collection Dropar i austvind:

Det er den draumen me ber på

Det er den draumen me ber på
at noko vedunderleg skal skje,
at det må skje –
at tidi skal opna seg
at hjarta skal opna seg
at dører skal opna seg
at berget skal opna seg
at kjeldor skal springa –
at draumen skal opna seg,
at me ei morgonstund skal glida inn
på ein våg me ikkje har visst um.

(*) There are a couple of other English translations available, including by Robin Fulton. The differences between them are small, but this is probably the version that is closest to the original.

From Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, perhaps the ultimate love song of the economist:

FIRST VOICE

From where you are you can hear in Cockle Row in the spring,
moonless night, Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper,
dream of

SECOND VOICE
her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samsonsyrup-gold-maned,
whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass’d and
barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes
like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving
hotwaterbottled body.

MR EDWARDS

Myfanwy Price!

MISS PRICE

Mr Mog Edwards!

MR EDWARDS

I am a draper mad with love. I love you more than all the
flannelette and calico, candlewick, dimity, crash and merino,
tussore, cretonne, crepon, muslin, poplin, ticking and twill
in the whole Cloth Hall of the world. I have come to take
you away to my Emporium on the hill, where the change hums
on wires. Throw away your little bedsocks and your Welsh
wool knitted jacket, I will warm the sheets like an electric
toaster, I will lie by your side like the Sunday roast.

MISS PRICE

I will knit you a wallet of forget-me-not blue, for the
money, to be comfy. I will warm your heart by the fire so
that you can slip it in under your vest when the shop is
closed.

MR EDWARDS

Myfanwy, Myfanwy, before the mice gnaw at your bottom drawer
will you say

MISS PRICE

Yes, Mog, yes, Mog, yes, yes, yes.

MR EDWARDS

And all the bells of the tills of the town shall ring for
our wedding.

[_Noise of money-tills and chapel bells_

One of the few poems I know that translates perfectly from German ito English is Christian Morganstern’s Fisches Nachtgesang. Unfortunately, it’d be hopeless for me to render the HTML properly, so I’ve just given the link.

I love all of these. And I am impressed by the poems people are posting that they wrote. To the poets: Please keep writing and translating things. Please publish or blog or disseminate your work in some way for others (if you are up to it).

Thank you, everyone and thank you Ingrid for this idea. I wish we could do this every week.

Here’s one by Fernando Pessoa

Countless lives inhabit us.
I don’t know, when I think or feel,
Who it is that thinks or feels.
I am merely the place
Where things are thought or felt.

I have more than just one soul.
There are more I’s than I myself.
I exist, nevertheless,
Indifferent to them all.
I silence them: I speak.

The crossing urges of what
I feel or do not feel
Struggle in who I am, but I
Ignore them. They dictate nothing
To the I I know: I write.

And another (one of mine): http://www.patrickatwater.com/p/my-avalon.html

Apologies for the link offsite but it’s a pdf and a bit long for these pages. Brings back good memories though — great thread everyone.

Cheers

Friedrich Hoelderlin

Menschenbeifall

Ist nicht heilig mein Herz, schoeneren Lebens voll,
Seite ich liebe? Warum achtetet ihr mich mehr,
Da ich stolzer und wilder,
Worterreicher und leerer war?

Ach! Der Menge gefaellt, was auf dem Marktplatz taugt,
Und es ehret der Knecht nur den Gewaltsamen;
An das Goettliche glauben
Die allein, die es selber sind.

The Acclaim of Men

Is it not holy, my heart, more full of beautiful life,
Since I love? Why do they respect me more,
Since I am prouder and wilder,
More eloquent and emptier?

Oh! The crowd is pleased with the marketplace trade,
And they honor the servant only in the powerful;
In the God-like believe
Those alone who themselves are it.

(Yes, I’m aware my old translation contains a number of syntactic solecisms, but it goes into English better that way, or so I thought).

I wrote this as a response to this : http://ailsaandlisa.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/what-i-learnt-at-university/ which is much much better, and was itself I think inspired by, among others, this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAtwxtte-vs

What I learned at university

That Charles the fifth’s mother was called Joanna the Mad.
And she wasn’t the only one.

That by stretching my legs as far as they then went,
and heaving with my arms, which then were nearly strong,
and trusting that i’d left it off the catch,
I could break into my room, above the laundry steps.

Eights sides of handwritten a4 takes two hours.
A dissertation can be done in a month at top whack, but
a thesis takes five years, and this I felt to be unfair.

To love St Mary, a buttery spindle appearing behind the Camera as I, a lucky bastard, walked to breakfast.
To hate the ranked up lights on the Belgrave Road, riding in Simon’s car, save when all went green that one time.
To spot the trams,  like fat grey slugs, climb the bridge by the Parkway, and race downstairs to catch them.

That DTB means 
down the bar.
And that was fun.

That PRO means
public record office.
And that was fun.

That TURT means
trans-ureathral resection of tumour.
And that was more fun than the alternative.

That I was as clever as I had suspected,
 and as lazy as I had feared,
 but not nearly as nice as I had hoped.

To be poor and homeless, though never both together.

To sit inside the window pod, on bare concrete in the sky, 
two hundred feet above Vicky Park, and accidentally become
(via Greg and Lucy’s incessant friendly bickering, their way to fight off boredom)
a historian.

That the weekend feels like a Mark Three carriage,
doing two fifty BPM past Ratcliffe’s concrete towers
while Debbie sings “11.59”.

That love was not a menu – love was in charge.

Chris Williams: thanks for the link to AilsaandLisa …. there’s tremendous stuff there.

Something Brecht wrote late (some might say too late):

Und ich dachte immer, die allereinfachsten Worte
Müssen genügen. Wenn ich sage, was ist
Muß jedem das Herz zerfleischt sein.
Daß du untergehst, wenn du dich nicht wehrst.
Das wirst du doch einsehn.

And I always thought
That the simplest words must be enough.
That when I say what is, everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds.
That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up.
Surely you see that.