Poetry.

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the library
Not a department was stirring, not even the bindery;
The trolleys were stacked by the lift with great care,
In hopes that vacation soon would be there;

The AV staff were nestled all snug in their beds,
With visions of Schwarzenegger lodged in their heads;
With Leesha in her office, and Martin his cap,
Acquisitions had just settled down for a nap,

When out on the bridge there arose such a clatter,
Oscar sprang from his lodge to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
But there are none in AV so my head I did bash.

The moon on the minimal dirty brown snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below,
When, what to our wondering eyes should appear,
But a shadowy figure, with the stench of reindeer,

With a lackadaisical gait, and a beard plain to see,
We thought for a moment it must be big AP.
But reindeer fast as fines on TR did accrue,
And he whistled, and shouted, and pointed, so rude;

"Now, DASHER! now, DANCER! now, PRANCER and VIXEN!
On, COMET! on CUPID! on, DONDER and BLITZEN!
I have many books out, and all are quite late!
I need to return them or Christmas must wait!"

To their posts of a sudden the ID staff took flight,
So they could help old St Nick with his pre-Christmas plight,
And Erin and Katy and Hannah and Liz
Gathered armfuls of books from the sleigh of St Nick.

And then, in a twinkling, his books were returned,
and as it was Christmas his fines they were spurned
(But don’t get your hopes up, we’re not normally kind,
It’s just that he promised to leave mince pies behind).

We sighed disappointed as St Nick had to leave
To give presents to all of the kids who believe.
Relieved of his books and his overdue fines
He bid us farewell with a glint in his eyes.

As he sprang to his sleigh, and his team they took flight,
I did hear him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
“Forget books for six days, for they shall not be missed,
It’s Christmas time now, so go and get pissed!”

And I think you should read them aloud, if you're so inclined - it's an honor to be asked, and you should be proud of these :)

fuck poetry contests imo

except the ilx poetry contest, the absolute highlight of my writing year

Could you be more specific about the ones we ought to fuck? I would like to do my part.

fuck poetry
contests
imo

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Thursday, November 4, 2010 12:05 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

fixed that
for
you

Nice
One
Dayo

thinkin baout pantaoums tbh

"If I were talking to a young writer, I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers."

I thought that was just lovely. Here: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4052/the-art-of-poetry-no-16-john-berryman#.VAYDCmkhh8c.facebook

the ilx poetry contest, the absolute highlight of my writing year

yeah. I should probably try to make this happen sometime soon. the slumbering poets of ilx should rise again and make glad the hearts of the world.

I'd also caution young poets from reading Berryman.

lol

why? i adore his stuff.

to me those Dream Songs are so confessional that they're inscrutable; their otherwise admirable compression is constriction.

it's been about fifteen years though

lol

"i haven't read this shit in 15 years, pretty sure it sucks"

also enjoyed learning from that interview that merwin was a student of berryman's, i'd had no idea.

those paris review interview s are a goddamn goldmine

those Dream Songs are so confessional that they're inscrutable; their otherwise admirable compression is constriction.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, September 2, 2014 6:50 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean i think with the kind of passing biographical familiarity you can get from a good foreword they're not all that inscrutable. and in adding the sonnets to the pile, i think there's a lot of his work worth getting to know.

you can also just read the shit and not worry about "what it all means, man*"

*pot

now I think parts of the Anne Bradstreet poem are damn impressive. As far as that generation goes Merrill and Hecht and Bishop are still my favorites.

see i don't really go in for the bradstreet for some reason, it doesn't have the stagger i love so much about the dream songs and even the sonnets--feels very dry to me, idk.

i haven't read much merrill! i keep meaning to. michael robbins wrote a long review of some new selected or collected merrill that piqued my interest. i do love hecht and bishop though. lowell i can't seem to get--talk about needing a biography at hand to figure out what he's talking about!

almost wrote my thesis on Merrill.

I'm with you on Lowell; I prefer his tortured, more formal, forbidding earlier verse. I used to teach "For the Union Dead" and "Near the Ocean" often, usually to good effect.

you can also just read the shit and not worry about "what it all means, man*"

*pot

― famous instagram God (waterface), Tuesday, September 2, 2014 6:55 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and yeah this is part of what i like about the dream songs too--even when they're opaque without knowing what they're probably 'about' i think their surfaces gleam v nicely

James Merrill: Days of 1964

Houses, an embassy, the hospital.
Our neighborhood sun-cured if trembling still
In pools of the night’s rain . . .
Across the street that led to the center of town
A steep hill kept one company part way
Or could be climbed in twenty minutes
For some literally breathtaking views,
Framed by umbrella pines, of city and sea.
Underfoot, cyclamen, autumn crocus grew
Spangled as with fine sweat among the relics
Of good times had by all. If not Olympus,
An out-of-earshot, year-round hillside revel.

I brought home flowers from my climbs.
Kyria Kleo who cleans for us
Put them in water, sighing Virgin, Virgin.
Her legs hurt. She wore brown, was fat, past fifty,
And looked like a Palmyra matron
Copied in lard and horsehair. How she loved
You, me, loved us all, the bird, the cat!
I think now she was love. She sighed and glistened
All day with it, or pain, or both.
(We did not notably communicate.)
She lived nearby with her pious mother
And wastrel son. She called me her real son.

I paid her generously, I dare say.
Love makes one generous. Look at us. We’d known
Each other so briefly that instead of sleeping
We lay whole nights, open, in the lamplight,
And gazed, or traded stories.

One hour comes back—you gasping in my arms
With love, or laughter, or both,
I having just remembered and told you
What I’d looked up to see on my way downtown at noon:

poor old Kleo, her aching legs,
Trudging into the pines. I called.
Called three times before she turned.
Above a tight, skyblue sweater, her face
Was painted. Yes. Her face was painted
Clown-white, white of the moon by daylight,
Lidded with pearl, mouth a poinsettia leaf.
Eat me, pay me—the erotic mask
Worn the world over by illusion
To weddings of itself and simple need.

Startled mute, we had stared—was love illusion?—
And gone our ways. Next, I was crossing a square
In which a moveable outdoor market’s
Vegetables, chickens, pottery kept materializing
Through a dream-press of hagglers each at heart
Leery lest he be taken, plucked,
The bird, the flower of that November mildness,
Self lost up soft clay paths, or found, foothold,
Where the bud throbs awake
The better to be nipped, self on its knees in mud—
Here I stopped cold, for both our sakes;

And calmer on my way home bought us fruit.

Forgive me if you read this. (And may Kyria Kleo,
Should someone ever put it into Greek
And read it aloud to her, forgive me, too.)
I had gone so long without loving,
I hardly knew what I was thinking.

Where I hid my face, your touch, quick, merciful,
Blindfolded me. A god breathed from my lips.
If that was illusion I wanted it to last long;
To dwell, for its daily pittance, with us there,
Cleaning and watering, sighing with love or pain.
I hoped it would climb when it needed to the heights
Even of degradation as I for one
Seemed, those days, to be always climbing

Into a world of wild
Flowers, feasting, tears— or was I falling, legs
Buckling, heights, depths,
Into a pool of each night’s rain?
But you were everywhere beside me, masked,
As who was not, in laughter, pain, and love.

thx bros

this is part of what i like about the dream songs too--even when they're opaque without knowing what they're probably 'about' i think their surfaces gleam v nicely

that's how I feel about early Lowell – all that "The Lord survives the rainbow of His will" twaddle which appeals to me on a purely syntactic and prosodic level.

see that is just so boring to me

I brought home flowers from my climbs.
Kyria Kleo who cleans for us
Put them in water, sighing Virgin, Virgin.
Her legs hurt. She wore brown, was fat, past fifty,
And looked like a Palmyra matron
Copied in lard and horsehair. How she loved
You, me, loved us all, the bird, the cat!
I think now she was love. She sighed and glistened
All day with it, or pain, or both.
(We did not notably communicate.)
She lived nearby with her pious mother
And wastrel son. She called me her real son.

^boring

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

my baseball poetry blog http://terriblebaseballpoems.tumblr.com/

James Merrill: A Renewal

Having used every subterfuge
To shake you, lies, fatigue, or even that of passion,
Now I see no way but a clean break.
I add that I am willing to bear the guilt.

You nod assent. Autumn turns windy, huge,
A clear vase of dry leaves vibrating on and on.
We sit, watching. When I next speak
Love buries itself in me, up to the hilt.

there is a bizarre corner of youtube where you find something called "henrycore" where some weirdo has matched berryman reading dream songs with various eminem beats and its awful and weird

pfft, swordplay

xpost

gosh i like that 'a renewal'

check out Divine Comedies, Hoos, although his last volume A Scattering of Salts is as strong as his other work. I love the guy. As much as I admire Auden, in some ways he surpassed him in play, charm, and unfussy wisdom.

interesting! i do like auden a lot, i'll take that comparison under advisement