what poetry are you reading

wow, slam after slam in that thing.

Without even clicking, is it by Logan? I hqve his first volume of crit but boy has his schtick hardened.

Yep, it's a group review by Logan: four hatchet jobs and a kind one at the end.

Petrarca - Songs and Sonnets (tr. Nicholas Kilmer). I'd love to read the whole lot, loved so much of the selection. Be great to see a nice, two-volume edition of these.

Logically followed up w/Chretien de Troyes - Erec and Enide

Collection of Pasolini's poetry: http://bookforum.com/inprint/021_02/13281

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo5512072.html

just arrived over the weekend all together:

- louise gluck first four books
- tracy smith life on mars
- brian turner here, bullet (the hurt locker guy)

xp I have that Kilmer translation too! only Petrarch I've read tbh... anyone familiar with any of the more recent, comprehensive volumes?

i have found the david young translations published by f-s-g very readable.

Sounds great - is it the whole lot?

yes, 366

monolingual edition tho

That's fine. See if I can order that. tx.

I don't know if I should post here or in the book suggestions thread, but are there any recent books of poetry you all would recommend to someone who mostly likes Anne Carson, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, Jackie Wang, Fanny Howe, and CAConrad (whose A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics I'm reading at the moment) among currently-working English-language poets?

Err, that should be Susan Howe, but I'm fine with her sister's work as well.

on a 'what i'm reading' note--

after the deluge of verbiage in auden, louise gluck is really pretty, spare and refreshing.

complete donald justice, selected gerard manley hopkins & selected wc williams on the way.

tracy smith's 'life on mars' was pretty astonishing and humbling, 'here, bullet' was pretty uninteresting.

Thanks, HOOS (willfully interpreting your 'what I'm reading' as a recommendation, direct or indirect)--will check out Life on Mars.

it's terrific, subtle, rhythmic, truly emotive, hits all my buttons

yeah Life on Mars is excellent... need to dig out my copy for a reread; I remember being impressed at first by the craft (the one that begins "They're gassing geese at is a tightly-wound shock-absorber of a poem) and then gradually following her into the more diffuse cosmic-emotional-Bowian climaxes over a couple of weeks.

anyone read her previous volume, Duende?

i haven't yet--though i did watch this awesome reading/talk she did with patrick rosal, whose book i'm now grabbing, that has some of duende in it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r35xjnHyhqw

Reading quite a bit by Verlaine, Milosz, Salvatore Quasimodo.

Chretien's Cliges has love as suffering so otm. Something you read as symbolic, i.e. Cupid's arrow becomes powerful by thorough description moving toward argument. Burton Raffel's translation might be the only one worth a pop.

Been getting into John Clare, specifically his sonnets, which are pleasantly irregular—there's no division into stanzas, the poems rarely execute a "turn", & he has a tendency to carry a rhyme a line or two farther than you expect (a fair number of them begin ABAB BCDC; see also the poem I've posted below, whose octave runs ABAB ACBC). It gives me the sense of a poet who enjoys rhyming for its own sake, who's read enough sonnets to internalize the form, but doesn't feel bound to adhere to it if an alternative presents itself.

Anyway, I've rambled long enough, so... I post this not only as a representative sample, but also because I'm having some trouble parsing the last few lines. Anyone wanna take a shot?

Burthorp Oak

Old noted oak! I saw thee in a mood
Of vague indifference, and yet with me
Thy memory, like thy fate, hath lingering stood
For years, thou hermit in the lonely sea
Of grass that waves around thee! Solitude
Paints not a lonelier picture to the view,
Burthorp! Than thy one melancholy tree,
Age-rent, and shattered to a stump. Yet new
Leaves come upon each rift and broken limb
With every spring, and Poesy's visions swim
Around it of old days and chivalry,
And desolate fancies bid the eyes grow dim
With feelings, that earth's grandeur should decay
And all its olden memories pass away.

Actually, everything from "Poesy's visions swim/Around it" is where I lose the thread (around what??) & even before that, it's not clear whether he's describing the actual sight of new leaves returning to the Burthorp oak or, more likely, using a poetic commonplace to modify his mental picture of the oak...

I'm reading it as the a contemplation of the tree's age calling forth imaginings of the past, which inspires a kind of mourning that things pass away, even as new life comes forth every spring.

i sure hope i've not just restated you

fully immersed in gerard manley hopkins this week

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavor end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worst, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now, leaved how thick! Laced they are again.
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; Birds build--but not I build, no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

man

xp to Hoos: nah man that was helpful. I think you've pretty much got it; there's just a few infelicitous word choices that leave me scratching my head ("desolate fancies", for example, almost certainly means "mental representations of desolation", but overexposure to Coleridge of late has me imagining a poet whose power of 'fancy' has dried up, leaving him unable to reverse the decay of earth's grandeur—& the invocation of a poetic golden age a few lines earlier would seem to justify this reading...)

Is the tree still standing in that poem? The part about "shattered to a stump" makes me think not. That might explain the "desolate fancies".

you guys know Gertrude Schnackenberg? I'm reading her.

Oh wait, I think it's still standing (hence "Leaves come upon each rift and broken limb / With every spring"), but the image of the tree "shattered to a stump" is "not lonelier" than the actual view of it standing in solitude. Perhaps these thoughts are examples of the "desolate fancies" mentioned later.

xp

rereading walcott. so good.

depressingly googled around and saw that zillions of new-agers have embraced "love after love" as some anthem to narcissism. i sorta wish he'd never written it, if he's going to be remembered for that instead of lines like

"and all you best dread the day i am healed / of being a human. All you fate in my hand, / ministers, businessmen, Shabine have you friend, I shall scatter your lives like a handful of sand, / I who have no weapon but poetry and / the lance of palms and the sea's shining shield!"

i could live a lifetime with the schooner flight

haven't seen an exclamation mark in a poem in forever maybe i read too much modern poetry

reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art."

Xp
o. nate, it hadn't even occurred to me that in reacting to "shattered to a stump," he was describing a potential, rather than actual, modification of the tree—I pictured some deep rift left by a lightning-strike—but now that you say that I think I've got the whole picture!

This might help with the mental picture:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowthorpe_Oak

oh, thanks! but this sentence (from one of the links in the article) is even more unclear than the poem:

There is sufficient space within the hollow trunk to hold a party and one former tenant of the farm had a roof and a door installed and used the recess as an additional room in which 39 people have stood at one time and 13 have sat down comfortably to tea while successive generations of children born and raised on the farm have played in its branches.

what is the referent of "it" in "poesy's visions swim around it "

Burthorp!

I think it has to be "tree" but I wanted to advance a claim for " poesy "

It's a just claim. Poesy's visions do swim around poesy, in a meltiness, a soft decline stirred by the poet, who goes from "vague indifference," to identifying with the tree's decline and vulnerability--pathos as reproach for vague indifference, which seems a lesser state---but from all this decay and grey he makes something new, a poem.

But I prefer several poems on this thread.

I don't like it much at all tbh.

296

Your thin shoulders are for turning red under whips,
turning red under whips, and flaming in the raw cold.

Your child's fingers are for lifting flatirons,
for lifting flatirons, and for knotting cords.

Your tender soles are for walking on broken glass,
walking on broken glass, across bloody sand.

And I'm for burning like a black candle lit for you,
for burning like a black candle that dare not pray.

(1934)

I'll post a better Clare poem when I get home tonight; I mostly put that one up cuz it happened to be irritating me at the time...

K, here's one that better shows off his fine descriptive powers (albeit with a rather tacked-on conclusion) :

AN IDLE HOUR.

SAUNTERING at ease, I often love to lean
O’er old bridge walls, and mark the flood below,
Whose ripples, through the weeds of oily green,
Like happy travelers chatter as they go;
And view the sunshine dancing on the arch,
Time keeping to the merry waves beneath.
While on the banks some drooping blossoms parch,
Thirsting for water in the day’s hot breath,
Right glad of mud-drops splashed upon their leaves,
By cattle plunging from the steepy brink; 10
Each water-flower more than its share receives,
And revels to its very cups in drink:—
So in the world, some strive, and fare but ill,
While others riot, and have plenty still.

Charles Wright's Negative Blue just arrived, collecting Chickamauga, Black Zodiac, and Appalachia.

I was excited for it because I remembered loving Chickamauga when I first read it a few years ago, but it's leaving me pretty cold now. Seems ponderous and samey.

Rereading "The Fortunate Traveler" disappointed me. Chunks of the poem are didactic or crumble into mere rhetoric. But

Wright's recent books (Sestets, Littlefoot) are my favorites of his. Less jive, clearer thoughts.