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Poetry

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by Bubbler, Apr 14, 2008.

  1. rpmmutant

    rpmmutant Member

    There is no love in Mudville;
    The Mighty Casey has struck out.
     
  2. Chi City 81

    Chi City 81 Guest

    My favorite poem:

    In Songbird did Kubla Khan
    A stately pleasure-dome decree:
    Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
    Through caverns measureless to man
    Down to a sunless sea.

    So twice five miles of fertile ground
    With walls and towers were girdled round:
    And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
    Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
    And here were forests ancient as the hills,
    Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

    But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
    Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
    A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
    As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
    By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

    And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
    As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
    A mighty fountain momently was forced:
    Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
    Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
    Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
    And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
    It flung up momently the sacred river.

    Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
    Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
    Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
    And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
    And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
    Ancestral voices prophesying war!

    The shadow of the dome of pleasure
    Floated midway on the waves;
    Where was heard the mingled measure
    From the fountain and the caves.

    It was a miracle of rare device,
    A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
    A damsel with a dulcimer
    In a vision once I saw:
    It was an Abyssinian maid,
    And on her dulcimer she played,
    Singing of Mount Abora.

    Could I revive within me
    Her symphony and song,
    To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
    That with music loud and long,
    I would build that dome in air,
    That sunny dome ! those caves of ice!

    And all who heard should see them there,
    And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
    His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
    Weave a circle round him thrice,
    And close your eyes with holy dread,
    For he on honey-dew hath fed,
    And drunk the milk of Paradise.

    -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
     
  3. joe

    joe Active Member

    Sounds like Rush to me.
     
  4. jgmacg

    jgmacg Guest

    Thanks, Palli.

    Because it's bedtime I'll ring off, but in every class I've ever taught, and here in the Workshop, I encourage young writers of every kind to read and write as much poetry as they can stomach.

    It's the purest application of language, and in a lot of ways it's the purest form of storytelling. I write a lot of it by way of simple exercise, and read a lot of it to keep me in touch with what's possible. I read Whitman at my wife's grandpa's funeral.

    If Whitman's not your guy, try Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams. Or Frost or Sandburg or Adrienne Rich. If you want great poetry of the ordinary, of the everyday, read Seamus Heaney or Charlie Simic. Billy Collins, from the PBS show tonight, is terrific. Or Donald Hall, who's as big a baseball fan as anyone on this site. Philip Levine for the poetry of American Work, or Jim Dickey for the poetry of the American South. Bukowski, Merwin, Jarrell. Ginsberg, Eliot, Auden, Thomas, Plath.

    There's someone out there who'll crack your head open. In a good way. It just takes some time to find them.
     
  5. zeke12

    zeke12 Guest

    Since I name-dropped Auden...

    He disappeared in the dead of winter:
    The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
    And snow disfigured the public statues;
    The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
    What instruments we have agree
    The day of his death was a dark cold day.

    Far from his illness
    The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
    The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
    By mourning tongues
    The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

    But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
    An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
    The provinces of his body revolted,
    The squares of his mind were empty,
    Silence invaded the suburbs,
    The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

    Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
    And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
    To find his happiness in another kind of wood
    And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
    The words of a dead man
    Are modified in the guts of the living.

    But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
    When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
    And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
    And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
    A few thousand will think of this day
    As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

    What instruments we have agree
    The day of his death was a dark cold day.
    II

    You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
    The parish of rich women, physical decay,
    Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
    Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
    For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
    In the valley of its making where executives
    Would never want to tamper, flows on south
    From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
    Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
    A way of happening, a mouth.
    III

    Earth, receive an honoured guest:
    William Yeats is laid to rest.
    Let the Irish vessel lie
    Emptied of its poetry.

    In the nightmare of the dark
    All the dogs of Europe bark,
    And the living nations wait,
    Each sequestered in its hate;

    Intellectual disgrace
    Stares from every human face,
    And the seas of pity lie
    Locked and frozen in each eye.

    Follow, poet, follow right
    To the bottom of the night,
    With your unconstraining voice
    Still persuade us to rejoice;

    With the farming of a verse
    Make a vineyard of the curse,
    Sing of human unsuccess
    In a rapture of distress;

    In the deserts of the heart
    Let the healing fountain start,
    In the prison of his days
    Teach the free man how to praise.
     
  6. Chi City 81

    Chi City 81 Guest

    No love for Coleridge? :(
     
  7. pallister

    pallister Guest

    I do like Coleridge, Doc. "Mariner" is a good lyric poem as well.

    jg, my current job is the first in my career in which I have no outlet to write. So I started writing in my spare time a couple of years ago. It's all songwriting/poetry of some sort. It's very cathartic, and often I find I don't really know what I'm thinking until I write it down.

    However, as much as I enjoy writing lyrics and such, I just can't get past more than a poem or two when I'm at the bookstore searching for new stuff to read. Not sure why, but it just doesn't appeal to me.
     
  8. zeke12

    zeke12 Guest

    Oh, and since jg dropped WCW...

    so much depends
    upon

    a red wheel
    barrow

    glazed with rain
    water

    beside the white
    chickens.

    Perfection.
     
  9. zebracoy

    zebracoy Guest

    I present to you, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot. We spent four weeks in my high school English class analyzing the hell out of this thing - and I didn't understand a damn thing anyone said about it.

    But it still, several years later, haunts me to this day.

    Oh, and to whoever posted the Emily Dickinson poem: Fuck that shit.

     
  10. Rumpleforeskin

    Rumpleforeskin Active Member

    Sometimes the best poetry is the poetry that we agonize over trying to understand its meaning.
     
  11. zebracoy

    zebracoy Guest

    No...I understood the meaning. I sat right there, read the words, and envisioned a dude freezing cold walking down a street at night.

    That works for me, at least. Never worked for the folks teaching the classes, though.
     
  12. Bubbler

    Bubbler Well-Known Member

    I agree with this wholeheartily. Songwriting is poetry ... with a significant, obvious, difference.

    Here's the rub: would you read Dylan without musical accompaniment? He's an undeniable poet, but I'd be lying if I said I'd read his words without the music to go with it.
     
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