Favorite Poems/Poets

[Little Red Riding Hood]

Vallejo, Neruda, Lorca,Whitman, Tagore, Bukowski, Baudelaire,Lezama, Saint-John Perse, Rimbaud.... Cortazar (his stories are poetry, are awesome, I love him!)

[The Killer Snark]

I like a lot of those with the exception of Buckowski. Whitman I love. My French is terrible but I learned most of the French I know from a dual translation of Rimbaud.

[Little Red Riding Hood]

Nice!

[The Killer Snark]

Memoire is really best read in the French (not that I'm fluent) because despite being one of Rimbaud's best poems, the metre is pretty wayward, and it doesn't accurately translate meaning-wise except as pretty clumsy English. Pity what became of Rimbaud's life really. Poor guy was doomed from birth.

[Little Red Riding Hood]

And what about the drunken boat?:

Or moi, bateau perdu sous les cheveux des anses,

Jeté par l'ouragan dans l'éther sans oiseau,

Moi dont les Monitors et les voiliers des Hanses

N'auraient pas repêché la carcasse ivre d'eau ;

Libre, fumant, monté de brumes violettes,

Moi qui trouais le ciel rougeoyant comme un mur

Qui porte, confiture exquise aux bons poètes,

Des lichens de soleil et des morves d'azur,

Qui courais, taché de lunules électriques,

Planche folle, escorté des hippocampes noirs,

Quand les juillets faisaient crouler à coups de triques

Les cieux ultramarins aux ardents entonnoirs ;

Moi qui tremblais, sentant geindre à cinquante lieues

Le rut des Béhémots et les Maelstroms épais,

Fileur éternel des immobilités bleues,

Je regrette l'Europe aux anciens parapets !

J'ai vu des archipels sidéraux ! et des îles

Dont les cieux délirants sont ouverts au vogueur :

- Est-ce en ces nuits sans fond que tu dors et t'exiles,

Million d'oiseaux d'or, ô future Vigueur ? -

Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleuré ! Les Aubes sont navrantes.

Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer :

L'âcre amour m'a gonflé de torpeurs enivrantes.

Ô que ma quille éclate ! Ô que j'aille à la mer !

Si je désire une eau d'Europe, c'est la flache

Noire et froide où vers le crépuscule embaumé

Un enfant accroupi plein de tristesses, lâche

Un bateau frêle comme un papillon de mai.

...Do you also like Cortazar!? Are you read it :"All Fires The Fire" or "The End of the Game"?

Are stories, not poems, but the man is a poet when he write tales

Look this fragment of his disturbing "Secret Weapons":

.

[The Killer Snark]

I love The Drunken Boat. I don't pretend to know what all of this means offhand without a facing English text to guide me, but look at the music of the thing:

J'ai vu des archipels sidéraux ! et des îles

Dont les cieux délirants sont ouverts au vogueur :

- Est-ce en ces nuits sans fond que tu dors et t'exiles,

Million d'oiseaux d'or, ô future Vigueur ? -

Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleuré ! Les Aubes sont navrantes.

Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer :

L'âcre amour m'a gonflé de torpeurs enivrantes.

Ô que ma quille éclate ! Ô que j'aille à la mer !

Si je désire une eau d'Europe, c'est la flache

Noire et froide où vers le crépuscule embaumé

Un enfant accroupi plein de tristesses, lâche

Un bateau frêle comme un papillon de mai.

Je ne puis plus, baigné de vos langueurs, ô lames,

Enlever leur sillage aux porteurs de cotons,

Ni traverser l'orgueil des drapeaux et des flammes,

Ni nager sous les yeux horribles des pontons.

( have seen sidereal archipelagos! and islands

Whose delirious skies are open to the sea-wanderer:

(But, in truth, I have wept too much! Dawns are heartbreaking.

Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.

Acrid love has swollen me with intoxicating torpor

O let my keel burst! O let me go into the sea!

If I want a water of Europe, it is the black

Cold puddle where in the sweet-smelling twilight

A squatting child full of sadness releases

A boat as fragile as a May butterfly.

No longer can I, bathed in your languor, o waves,

Follow in the wake of the cotton boats,

Nor cross through the pride of flags and flames,

Nor swim under the terrible eyes of prison ships.)

That translation is the one I used to have lying about in my house. It doesn't flow in places, but it is accurate, which makes it easier to just glance at the English and read from the French.

I've never read Cortazari, no. The most naturally poetic prose writer I know of, but who was also a fine poet, is Mervyn Peake.

[The Killer Snark]

A few short selections from the often sublime Dante Gabriel Rosetti, a better poet than his sister (who I really like), savaged by critics at the time and now completely unrecognised. But he produced some of the most exquisite and melancholic lyric poetry of his time. Another victim of High Modernist critics like TS Eliot attempting to undermine the nineteenth century to justify their own poetic ambitions, and often their immediate forebears. Crane and Pound were the exceptions to that rule. The influence of Rosetti on both poets is more palpable than with any other Late-Romantic English poet's work. Pound actually believed Rosetti's translation of Dante's La Vita Nuova to be definitive in English, also hard to track.

Silent Noon

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass, --

The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:

Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms

'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.

All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,

Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge

Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.

'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly

Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky: --

So this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above.

Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,

This close-companioned inarticulate hour

When twofold silence was the song of love.

A Death-Parting

LEAVES and rain and the days of the year,

(Water-willow and wellaway,)

All these fall, and my soul gives ear,

And she is hence who once was here.

(With a wind blown night and day.)

Ah! but now, for a secret sign,

(The willow's wan and the water white,)

In the held breath of the day's decline

Her very face seemed pressed to mine.

(With a wind blown day and night.)

O love, of my death my life is fain;

(The willows wave on the water-way,)

Your cheek and mine are cold in the rain,

But warm they'll be when we meet again.

(With a wind blown night and day.)

Mists are heaved and cover the sky;

(The willows wail in the waning light,)

O loose your lips, leave space for a sigh,—

They seal my soul, I cannot die.

(With a wind blown day and night.)

Leaves and rain and the days of the year,

(Water-willow and wellaway,)

All still fall, and I still give ear,

And she is hence, and I am here.

(With a wind blown night and day.)

A Sea-Spell

Her lute hangs shadowed in the apple-tree,

While flashing fingers weave the sweet-strung spell

Between its chords; and as the wild notes swell,

The sea-bird for those branches leaves the sea.

But to what sound her listening ear stoops she?

What netherworld gulf-whispers doth she hear,

In answering echoes from what planisphere,

Along the wind, along the estuary?

She sinks into her spell: and when full soon

Her lips move and she soars into her song,

What creatures of the midmost main shall throng

In furrowed self-clouds to the summoning rune,

Till he, the fated mariner, hears her cry,

And up her rock, bare breasted, comes to die?

Sudden Light

I HAVE been here before,

But when or how I cannot tell:

I know the grass beyond the door,

The sweet keen smell,

The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before,—

How long ago I may not know:

But just when at that swallow's soar

Your neck turned so,

Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.

Has this been thus before?

And shall not thus time's eddying flight

Still with our lives our love restore

In death's despite,

And day and night yield one delight once more?

The Orchard-Pit

Piled deep below the screening apple-branch

They lie with bitter apples in their hands:

And some are only ancient bones that blanch,

And some had ships that last year's wind did launch,

And some were yesterday the lords of lands.

In the soft dell, among the apple-trees,

High up above the hidden pit she stands,

And there for ever sings, who gave to these,

That lie below, her magic hour of ease,

And those her apples holden in their hands.

This in my dreams is shown me; and her hair

Crosses my lips and draws my burning breath;

Her song spreads golden wings upon the air,

Life's eyes are gleaming from her forehead fair,

And from her breasts the ravishing eyes of Death.

Men say to me that sleep hath many dreams,

Yet I knew never but this dream alone:

There, from a dried-up channel, once the stream's,

The glen slopes up; even such in sleep it seems

As to my waking sight the place well known.

My love I call her, and she loves me well:

But I love her as in the maelstrom's cup

The whirled stone loves the leaf inseparable

That clings to it round all the circling swell,

And that the same last eddy swallows up.

For modern poetry to improve in published form, it has to remember what its roots are, so it seems to me incredible that guys like this are more or less banned from the curriculums of schools.

Having said that, I liked Norman MacCaig (taught in my school) and Edwin Morgan, but both are dead.

[Little Red Riding Hood]

Another writer/ poet: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

[Little Red Riding Hood]

Just Beautiful, TKS!

Could you copy something from Mervyn Peake here?

Didn´t you read Julio Cortázar?! I recommend it fervently.!

The Man is a Beast! He wrote stories, but is a poet when he writes, is .. just...WoW !.... AMAZING... hallucinating!..

................He leaves me breathless......................

Try to get "Secret weapons" ( the story, not the book, are different things) "A place called Kindberg"and "Freeway of South".

I assure you that you will never regreat.

[Old-Growth]

Poetry can be enhanced by music, as in this case: Silent Noon as set by Ralph Vaughn Williams

Thomas Allen, baritone

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hJLoNu5tLgI

Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Tenor

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b0P5thALf1U

Take your pick, they both sing this song well. There are actually more performances on You Tube, quite a few in fact, but these two are enough, perhaps.

This is from the House of Life: a collection of six songs on love sonnets by DGR.

[The Killer Snark]

I'll Google him. I'll try and find a Peake excerpt on the Internet. Unfortunately, it might not make much sense, because I'm going to try and find the first page of Book 2 of Gormenghast, which is loaded with references from the first novel:

Couldn't find it. I'll have to post some quotes about characters instead. Re: the antihero cum villain Steerpike-

If ever he had harboured a conscience in his tough narrow breast he had by now dug out and flung away the awkward thing - flung it so far away that were he ever to need it again he could never find it. High-shouldered to a degree little short of malformation, slender and adroit of limb and frame, his eyes close-set and the colour of dried blood, he is climbing the spiral staircase of the soul of Gormenghast, bound for some pinnacle of the itching fancy - some wild, invulnerable eyrie best known to himself; where he can watch the world spread out below him, and shake exultantly his clotted wings. Limb by limb, it appeared that he was sound enough, but the sum of these several members accrued to an unexpectedly twisted total. His face was pale like clay and save for his eyes, mask-like. These eyes were set very close together, and were small, dark red, and of startling concentration. (There are better physical descriptions, though, of Steerpike in the book, who has malformed high shoulders and albino-like hair. Personality-wise, he is similar to Littlefinger in ASOIAF.)

Re: the castle -Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

....Withdrawn and runinous it brooods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracks. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue off spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet bears away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll's hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs...

And darkness winds bewteen the characters.

Etc. Better passages in the novels, though. Quotes are hard to find.

Here's a few of his poems.

TO LIVE IS MIRACLE ENOUGH

To live at all is miracle enough.

The doom of nations is another thing.

Here in my hammering blood-pulse is my proof.

Let every painter paint and poet sing

And all the sons of music ply their trade;

Machines are weaker than a beetle’s wing.

Swung out of sunlight into cosmic shade,

Come what come may the imagination’s heart

Is constellation high and can’t be weighed.

Nor greed nor fear can tear our faith apart

When every heart-beat hammers out the proof

That life itself is miracle enough.

VAN GOGH

Dead, the Dutch Icarus who plundered France

And left her fields the richer for our eyes.

Where writhes the cypress under burning skies,

Or where proud cornfields broke at his advance,

Now burns a beauty fiercer than the dance

Of primal blood that stamps at throat and thighs.

Pirate of sunlight! and the laden prize

Of coloured earth and fruit in summer trance

Where is your fever now? and your desire?

Withered beneath a sunflower’s mockery,

A suicide you sleep with all forgotten.

And yet your voice has more than words for me

And shall cry on when I am dead and rotten

From quenchless canvases of twisted fire.

He was also a first-rate nonsense poet, as follows:

CANNOT GIVE THE REASONS

I cannot give the reasons,

I only sing the tunes:

the sadness of the seasons

the madness of the moons.

I cannot be didactic

or lucid, but I can

be quite obscure and practic-

ally marzipan

In gorgery and gushness

and all that's squishified.

My voice has all the lushness

of what I can't abide

And yet it has a beauty

most proud and terrible

denied to those whose duty

is to be cerebral.

Among the antlered mountains

I make my viscous way

and watch the sepia mountains

throw up their lime-green spray.

OF PYGMIES, PALMS AND PIRATES

Of pygmies, palms and pirates,

Of islands and lagoons,

Of blood-bespotted frigates,

Of crags and octoroons,

Of whales and broken bottles,

Of quicksands cold and grey,

Of ullages and dottles,

I have no more to say.

Of barley, corn and furrows,

Of farms and turf that heaves

Above such ghostly burrows

As twitch on summer eves

Of fallow-land and pasture,

Of skies both pink and grey,

I made my statement last year

And have no more to say.

Peake was also a great illustrator of novels and a fine artist. He also looked like a film star. He didn't have it all, though. He died of Parkinson's pretty young. A number of characters (like Orella Tyrell) are obviously influenced by Peake in ASOIAF, and he has always been one of the favourite writers of GRRM, who also bumps off his main characters all the time in gruesome ways.

[The Killer Snark]

OldGrowth- I wasn't aware that Vaughn Williams had adapted this. Thanks. That Laura Redmond chick is gorgeous. It's a very good adaptation of the work: still keeps the original's metric phrasing without twisting it to suit the music. I love DGR, and am frustrated that The House of Life is out of print, because as a sonnet sequence it is at least equal to Shakespeare's. Robert Browning is another classic Victorian I keep getting told to check out who doesn't get read now. I don't know anything about Browning. I'm a follower of 20th century poetry to an extent, but we need to reassess the Pre-Raphaelites. Basically, they influenced a lot of poetry which was derivative and awful, which was why High Modernism had to happen, but Swinburne, Dante Rossetti et al were left to take the flak for it. I guess we should be grateful Tennyson survives.

[Old-Growth]

Another writer/ poet: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

you mean like this?

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,

And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife;

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,

And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

John Masefield, "Sea Fever".

This was set by John Ireland and here is baritone Thomas Allen again:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RbQEuIBzuNk

A mezzo-soprano, viz. Robin Hendrix:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj5ZsLvVjnw

I am not familiar with this singer, but I thought it would be interesting to hear a mezzo singing this.

Another baritone who sings expressively.

Michael Hanley:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DtinNrVQ-OI&feature=plpp

Here, as might surprise, is a clip from the original star trek in which Captain Kirk quotes the Masefield poem:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-eXB1Yj05Fw

I have not found a plain reading of the poem on You Tube that I like, but I will keep trying: as usual there are dozens of entries on that site. But see the link Angalin gives a couple of posts further on.

[The Killer Snark]

The Masefield poem is actually in a skippy kind of sprung metre, which is quietly ahead of its time.

[Little Red Riding Hood]

Yes, Old Growth! :D

And Like this:

Leonard Cohen (other of my favorites)

THE END OF MY LIFE IN ART

This is the end of my life in art. At last I have found the woman I am looking for. It is summer. It is the summer. It is the summer I waited for. We are living in a suite on the fifth floor of the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. She is as beautiful as Lili Marlene. She is as beautiful as Lady Hamilton. Except for the fear of losing her I have no complaint. I have not been denied the full measure of beauty. Nights and mornings we kiss each other. The feathery palms rise through the smog. The curtains stir. The traffic moves on Sunset over painted arrows, words and lines. It is best not even to whisper about this perfection. This is the end of my life in art. I am drinking a Red Needle, a drink I invented in Needles, California, tequila and cranberry juice, lemon and ice. The full measure. I have not been denied the full measure. It happened as I approached my forty-first birthday. Beauty and Love were granted me in the form of a woman. She wears silver bracelets, one on each wrist. I am happy with my luck. Even if she goes away I will say to myself, I have not been denied the full measure of beauty. I said that to myself in Holston, Arizona, in a bar across the street from or motel, when I thought she would be leaving the next morning. This is drunken talk. This is Red Needles talking. It is too smooth. I am frightened. I don’t know why. Yesterday I was so frightened that I could hardly hand a Red Needle to a monk on Mount Baldy. I’m frightened and tired. I am an old man with a silver ornament. These stiff movements should not be accompanied by tiny silver bells. She must be plotting against me in my bed. She wants me to be Carlo Ponti. The black maid is stealing my credit cards. I should go sailing alone through the pine trees. I should get a grip on myself. O god her skin is soft and brown. I would sell my family graves. I am old enough for that. I better have another drink. If I could write a song for her I could pay for this suite. She saw the men in Afghanistan, she saw the elders, how can she stay here with me? It is true I am a hero of the Sahara but she did not see me under sand and fire, mastering the sphincters of my cowardice. And she could not know how beautiful these words are. Nobody could. She could not perceive the poignant immortality of my life in art. Nobody can. My vision of the traffic on Sunset Boulevard through the concrete lilies of the balcony railing. The table, the climate, the perfect physique for a forty-year-old artist, famous, happy, frightened. Six in the morning. Six-o-five. The minutes go by. Six-ten. Women. Women and children. The light gone from Los Angeles they say, the original movie light, but this view of Sunset Boulevard satisfactory in every way. My life in art closing down. Monica sleeping. All the wandering mind is hers. My devotions begin to embarrass me. She should grow tired of them soon. I am tired of them now. She is pregnant. Our love-making is sweet because of this. She will not have the child. Six-twenty. We drink Red Needles every night. She tells me of the gay San Francisco world. The weight of her beauty has become intolerable. People in the liquor store actually pop-eyed and double-took as she went by with her long hair and her sacrificial child, her second-hand clothes and her ordinary face mocking all the preparations for allurement here in the heart of Hollywood, so ripe she is in the forces of beauty and music as to frighten me, who has witnessed the end of his life in art. Six-forty. I want to go back to bed and get inside her. That’s the only time there’s anything approaching peace. And when she sits on my face. When she lowers herself onto my mouth This feels like doom. This is a pyramid on my chest. I want to change blood with her. I want her slavery. I want her promise. I want her death. I want the thrown acid to disencumber me. I want to stop staring. Six-fifty. Ruined in Los Angeles. I should start smoking again. I’m going to start smoking again. I want to die in her arms and leave her. You need to smoke a pack a day to be that kind of man. When we were on the road I was always ready to drive her to the nearest airport and say goodbye but now I want her to die without me. I started my exercises again today. I need some muscle now. I need a man in the mirror to whisper courage when I shave and to tell me once again about the noble ones who conquered all of this.

[Old-Growth]

Little Red Riding Hood and The Killer Snark :

A good musical setting will often enhance the poem set, in my experience, bringing out the feeling or an image in the text. Do you think that John Ireland's music does that for "Sea Fever"? Or at least does it make the words come out more strongly? (Ya gotta like Thomas Allen's voice :)

If the rhythm of Masefield's poem is more free and "springy" than more traditional verse, it does not seem to have bothered John Ireland: he found a voice line and accompaniment to suit.

Was the Leonard Cohen work the text for one of his songs? It does not sound like it. In any case it would not be the first time that Cohen would find himself writing something like that about a woman :), and he did not stop writing---so much for the end of his art.... The sentiment is bit off-putting, actually---other artists seem to have found lovers that had a similar hold on them without feeling the need to abandon their art (Goethe and Debussy come to mind).

[The Killer Snark]

No, Old-Growth. The text itself was the song. It was intended to be groaned out in a gravelly monotone while someone squeezed an accordion in the background, in something of the manner of Greek heroic poetry. Cohen had once actually intended to recite/sing this at a concert dressed as Homer but he got sidetracked into a soliloquy with a prop skull that he was holding, and the audience threw fruit.

[Little Red Riding Hood]

Wow! what a good anecdote, TKS! :cheers:

I must make a confession: I've never heard to Leonard Cohen. Ever.

However, I love his poems, are so passionate..! this is one of my favorites. There is another poem, who was published it in a magazine in my country long ago that I loved and I could not find it again.

[King Tyrion I]

you mean like this?

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,

And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife;

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,

And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

John Masefield, "Sea Fever".

This was set by John Ireland and here is baritone Thomas Allen again:

http://m.youtube.com...h?v=RbQEuIBzuNk

A mezzo-soprano, viz. Robin Hendrix:

http://m.youtube.com...h?v=Pj5ZsLvVjnw

I am not familiar with this singer, but I thought it would be interesting to hear a mezzo singing this.

Another baritone who sings expressively.

Michael Hanley:

http://m.youtube.com...OI&feature=plpp

Here, as might surprise, is a clip from the original star trek in which Captain Kirk quotes the Masefield poem:

http://m.youtube.com...h?v=-eXB1Yj05Fw

I have not found a plain reading of the poem on You Tube that I like, but I will keep trying: as usual there are dozens of entries on that site.

:thumbsup:

Great! =o) Really. I really <3 that.

Saint Ex is best in his native language, though.

[Old-Growth]

Thanks Lord_Tyrion. I need to be a bit careful with things like the link to the Star Trek clip lest Angalin decide that I am committing multimedia and banish me to the Entertainment sub-forum. How would you answer the question about that poem and John Ireland's music that I put to LRRH and TKS?