Poetry

[Queen Mab]

Is anyone else a reader of poetry? Any favourite poets you'd like to share?

I've been reading some Shelley lately, and that man was brilliant. A feminist, atheist, vegetarian proto-socialist in the 1810's! It's absolutely remarkable. And he writes some stunning poetry too. Queen Mab just had me spellbound, read it on marxists.org.


Hence commerce springs, the venal interchange
Of all that human art or Nature yield;
Which wealth should purchase not, but want demand,
And natural kindness hasten to supply
From the full fountain of its boundless love,
Forever stifled, drained and tainted now.

Isn't that basically a description of communism? It's incredible to discover that one of the greatest poets of the English language was more or less a socialist.

[Prometeo liberado]

Rise like lions after slumber
in unvanquishable number
And shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep have fallen on you
Ye are many, they are few

[blake 3:17]

I do love Shelley, but have a preference for Blake. Who cares?

From Jim Smith's 100 Most Frightening Things:

Finding, waking, phone off hook

A man forcing her, getting rough

Rosedale ravine leapover impulse

Her crying mouth trembling unsure line

Blood in the toilet, paper red

Her loss of face

Men with suntans all over their bodies

Loss of all her papers I keep—yes

The loss of any sum of money at all

I never want to see you again

[blake 3:17]

My favourite poet in recent years has been James Schuyler dead nearly 25 years.

From an episodic memoir of him:


The city poet who knows, like no other, the names of all flowers. Of whom else can it be said, he is our best (or only) descriptive poet? Was this ever said, as it might have been, of John Clare? “You can’t get at a sunset naming colors.” Every poem, a view. The sense in each of a scrim of exact detail so carefully woven as to be seamless, impregnable to the monsters raging, ready to pounce or tear through from the other side. The central character, if any, of most of his poems is the day, the poem geared to get it down, nail it in its lineaments as it appears and goes: “a nothing day,” “day the color of a head cold,” “Dark day,” “a day subtle and suppressed,” “May 24th or so,” “a day like any other,” and so on. His writing has what filmmakers call “room tone,” c.f., Charles North’s remark about Schuyler’s perfect pitch.

***

One hot day in 1961, when I was working in the office at ARTnews, Tom Hess said, “Go down to Jimmy Schuyler’s and pick up his reviews.” I hardly knew Jimmy then, but I had heard from John Myers that he had been having psychiatric troubles. The reviews for that month were long overdue; Jimmy apparently had told Tom that he had them but in his present mental disarray couldn’t manage the trip uptown from his place on lower Broadway to deliver them. Once there, I rang the bell a few times and got no response. Baffled as to what to do next, I went to a corner phone booth and called Frank who suggested I try Jimmy’s number. That worked, and Jimmy buzzed me in. The apartment was a mess, Jimmy in pajamas sort of silently, aimlessly padding around the front room. No, he said firmly, giving me a somewhat stony look, there were no reviews. I left, feeling useless and rude, an intruder in someone else’s private soul dust.

***

Schuyler told an interviewer that, to engage his interest, he sometimes wrote the first drafts of his art reviews in verse lines, then later rearranged them, closed up and slightly altered, in paragraphs. According to Frank O’Hara, the 1950s ARTnews poets Barbara Guest, John Ashbery and O’Hara himself, used to show their monthly short reviews and longer articles to Jimmy for style checks. Frank said, “Jimmy was the real writer; he knew where the commas were supposed to go.”

***

Cy Twombly [Stable; through January], fleeing for his creative life from the white hell of Black Mountain, shows Siberian slabs (those diamonds they’ve found there, what makes them so sure they’re not just frozen tears?). Fabulously underpriced. J.S. [1957]

http://jacket2.org/article/schuyler-entries

Was very excited to come across a Paris Review interview with Dennis Cooper where Cooper gives great appreciation to Schuyler and his plain writing -- which is totally BaZonGa Massive Messed & super clean gorgeous

[Tenka]

Shelley is one of the few poets whom I can stand. However, I am absurdly jealous of poets in general because I've always wanted to do what they do yet find myself to be distinctly unpoetic. Maybe I should read more poetry.

[Prometeo liberado]

Shite! Almost forgot about this epic piece. Christ, no one, and I mean no one on Ruport Murdochs pay roll could dream up righteous musings like this.


I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, 5 Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings

[Niall]

Shite! Almost forgot about this epic piece. Christ, no one, and I mean no one on Ruport Murdochs pay roll could dream up righteous musings like this.

Yeats, I learned the lake isle of inisfree when I was 11. Still can recite it now. Love him. Also Seamus Heaney RIP. I also like Wilfred Owen. Paints a very bleak picture of what war is really like. Dulce et decorum est is brilliant.
Alfred Noyes has some great poems too. If I sat down and thought about Im sure I could name more

[Il Medico]

Poetry is meant to be heard, imo. So here are some audio links of poems I like.

May I Feel Said He by E.E Cummings

https://soundcloud.com/hiddlestonersargentina/may-i-feel-said-he-de-e-e


Kublai Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

http://www.4shared.com/audio/9lt_b4P4/06-Benedict_Cumberbatch_-_Kubl.html


The Tyger by William Blake
http://www.bencrystal.com/media/tyger.mp3

As I walked Out One Evening by W.H. Auden
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtbYtb50z2M

She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron
http://ex.fm/song/fpqoi

Ozymandias by Percy Shelly
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3dpghfRBHE

Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare
http://www.touchpress.com/titles/shakespeares-sonnets/18/Shall-I-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day/

Sonnet 138 by William Shakespeare
http://www.touchpress.com/titles/shakespeares-sonnets/138/When-my-love-swears-that-she-is-made-of-truth/

Sonnet 130 by William Shakespeare
http://www.touchpress.com/titles/shakespeares-sonnets/130/My-mistress-eyes-are-nothing-like-the-sun/*Note: You can listen to all the Sonnets on the website from those links, I only linked a few though.*

[Philosophos]

I read poetry freaquently, but mostly in greek because I can't get the "right" feelings from english poems, you know language gap and stuff. One of my favorites is Odysseas Elytes. He won a Nobel prize in 1980 I think and he has lots of his work translated in many languages. Here's some of his work hope you like it http://lyricstranslate.com/en/monograma-monogram.html

[Sixiang]

Yes I do love poetry as well. I have to say that my favorite poet is William Shakespeare. His sonnets are the most superb pieces of the English language that I have ever read. I also quite enjoy Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

As for American poets, I like Edgar Allen Poe's haunting poetry and Emily Dickinson's poems are short but superb in my opinion. I often find that the poet themselves ends up interesting me more than their poetry. The background lives of poets always fascinates me especially since a lot of the really good ones have bizarre and interesting life stories. Allen Ginsberg comes to mind. He wrote some great poems in my opinion because he accurately expressed the intellectual-cultural ambiguity that many U.S. youths felt in the 1950s and 1960s and I think some of his words are still quite relevant today. However, I also find that when you try to read a bunch of his poems in a row, you find that many of them are too long and they almost seem like he's just listing off sentences and images in his head. "Howl" is certainly a historical document for the ages to describe how his generation was feeling.

More recently, however, I have been reading traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese poetry and have found great pleasure in reading them. Li Bo and Du Fu are the proverbial best poets of the Chinese tradition. The Classic of Odes (Shi Jing) is a collection of beautiful ancient poems.


I am absurdly jealous of poets in general because I've always wanted to do what they do yet find myself to be distinctly unpoetic.
lol. Same here.

[Firebrand]

I've always loved Rossetti's poems. Partly because they tell a story and partly because they show the strength of women who were living in a very patriarchal society.

""I'd be too proud to beg," quoth she,
And pride was in her tone.
And pride was in her lifted head,
And in her angry eye,
And in her foot, which might have fled,
But would not fly."

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

walt whitman, allen ginsberg, bukowski. loads more, i loved poetry and write a lot of it