Posts tagged poetry

poetsorg:

Not sure what to read at the beach this summer? We’re pretty sure you would like one of these:

The Collected Poems
by Ai
Bringing together thirty years of poetry across eight books, this first complete edition of Ai’s work reveals her mastery of the dramatic monologue.

Quick Question
by John Ashbery
Despite his nerves and his remembrances, Ashbery’s rollicks show that he’s still one of our youngest poets at heart.

red doc >
by Anne Carson
This book finds Carson once again blurring the lines of prose and poetry, and challenging both genres within a single poem.

88 Sonnets
by Clark Coolidge
This welcoming embrace of the mind’s ghosts and dalliances amounts to a remarkable intimacy in Coolidge’s latest collection.

Senegal Taxi
by Juan Felipe Herrera
Herrera takes on Sudanese injustice in this latest collection of monologues, transcripts, and prose poems, telling the story of three children as they try to escape a ravaged village. 
Lake Superior
by Lorine Niedecker
Written in the spare style that typifies her work, Niedecker’s poem was the distilled product of a road trip she took with her husband Al Millen in 1966. 

Partially Kept
by Martha Ronk
Throughout her ninth collection, Ronk calls upon language to reconcile the space in which the body ends and nature begins. 

Sorry Was in the Woods
by Michelle Taransky
Unlike Frost, who stopped himself from entering the woods out of fear, Taransky’s latest sends her headlong into darkness and deepness. 

Meme
by Susan Wheeler
Much like memes themselves, which operate by means of refrain and repetition, each of these poems begins with a stock phrase that will ring familiar to most who grew up in America in the last fifty years. 

Fall Higher
by Dean Young
Like Whitman, Young is a wandering poet whose tongue refuses nothing in its desire to taste the multitudes. 

Lucie Brock-Broido’s last book, Trouble in Mind, came out in 2004, so we are more than ready for a major new collection from her; watch for Stay, Illusion, to come this October. Looking both back and forward, then, here’s one of Brock-Broido’s many turns on the self-portrait poem.

Self-Portrait with Her Hair on Fire

Now, it is as dark as the pathos of pushing a wheel-
Chair through the museum of a great metropolis.

I cannot tell you this, not now, not ever, even
In the letter I have written that is so epic

That if you were to open it, the pages would sail out
In the wind like confection moths being born

In the thousands out of their sacks, blowing
Away, page by page, in a wind the color of her hair

Across a medieval pillow endlessly scorched,
The singe of something living tinged with fire.

I will go on loving as I love the backs
                  Of things and the invisible,

As I love the hideous or an attention
                  So attentive it is next to worshipping.

Learn more about Lucie Brock-Broidos Trouble in Mind and browse other titles by Lucie Brock-Broido.

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The writer Gretel Ehrlich, a longtime passionate student of Japanese poetry and culture, returned to Japan in 2011 after an earthquake and Tsunami devastated the Tohoku coast. As Ehrlich explains, during a literally earth-shattering six minutes on March 11, there were “Three sorrows: quake, tsunami, meltdown. In the quake’s ‘seismic moment,’ the total energy released was two hundred thousand times the energy at the earth’s surface, equal to six hundred million times the energy of the bomb dropped at Hiroshima.” In Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami, poetry is one of the tools she uses to try to understand what she is seeing and the hardships suffered by the people of that region. She finds solace in lines from T. S. Eliot, Roberto Calasso, Basho, Saigyo, and others, and she writes poems of her own along the way. Even the instructions of her driver and friend Abyss-San—advice on how to avoid radiation or how to make curry—become poetry, their sustenance worthy of heightened attention in the face of seismic devastation and grief. Below, one from Ehrlich’s pen, and one from Abyss-San.

At Ishinomaki Where Matsuo Basho Once Wrote a Poem

Finally the twisted roadbed drains
and the daily floodtides at
Ishinomaki dry out.
The sky unmists itself and
loss upon loss begins to
feel like company.
Nothing touches. Nights are brittle and soft,
ink scraped smooth.
To the south Fukushima Daiichi blazes. Flames
we can’t see. Sixty-six years ago
two other seacoast towns vanished.
I stick my forearm out
in moonlight. Looking seaward
my skin burns.

Abyss-San’s Curry Recipe

Sauté cloves, bay leaves, fenugreek, chili peppers, cardamom,
     curry leaf, and garlic in mustard oil.
Add sliced onion, turmeric, coriander, and cumin.
Add chopped potatoes and carrots, then tomatoes.
Rinse China beans and lentils, then add in with salt.
Add enough water to cover. Cover and cook for one hour or
     more, or until beans are soft.
Make an equally large pot of rice with wheat berries.
Fry Aju hing seeds and add to the curry at the end. Serve.
Eat with gratitude.

Learn more about Gretel Ehrlich’s Facing the Wave and browse other titles by Gretel Ehrlich.

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John Updike (1932-2009) delighted us during his lifetime with the variety of his gifts—as novelist, literary critic, poet, and also as a keen commentator on the art scene. In the fall, Always Looking: Essays on Art, appeared, collecting his final considerations of certain highlights of Western art over the last two hundred years—from the landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church to the steely sculptural worlds of Richard Serra, from the extravagances of Klimt to the Pop of Oldenburg and Lichtenstein. Today’s poem brings us this American master of word and image reflecting on the trajectory of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian.

Piet

How strange to see an arrow-straight career!
Trees, the attempt to do the branches justice
in honest Dutch style, led him, twig by twig,
into the net of the rectilinear,
of crosses and dashes and then thick frames
for colors prime and pure as chalice jewels,
panels of heaven blazing between girders;
he believed the world could be sublimated.

Things and scenes no longer troubled him;
a square tipped onto its corner was all
he needed grant the cockeyed real until
Manhattan greeted his exile with jazz,
with boogie-woogie and a grid of streets
that proved his dream to be (bull’s-eye!) the fact.

Download a printable version of the broadside of this poem here or by clicking the image at the top of the post.

Learn more about Americana and Always Looking, and browse other titles by John Updike.

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Franz Wright’s recent Kindertotenwald is a dark wood the poet journeys through in illuminating short narratives like the one below.

Goodbye

Each day I woke as it started to get dark and the pain came. Month
after month of this—who knows when I got well, the way you do,
whether you like it or not. With dawn now, risen from the rampage
of sleep, I am walking in the Lincoln woods. A single bird is
loudly singing. And I walk here as I always have, as though from
tall room to room in a more or less infinite house where the owner’s
not home but is watching me somehow, observing my behavior,
from behind the two-way mirror of appearances, I suppose,
and listening, somewhat critically, to what I am thinking. Not too,
however. At certain moments I could swear there is even a sense of
being liked, as sunlight changes swiftly, leaving, leaving and arriving
again. A bird is chirping bitterly, as if these words were meant
for me, as if their intent was within me, and will not speak. Nothing
is left me of you.

Learn more about Franz Wright’s Kindertotenwald and browse other titles by Franz Wright.

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Raymond Carver (1938-1988), was a poet before he was celebrated as a writer of short stories. Here is “Eagles,” from his 1985 collection Where Water Comes Together with Other Water.

Eagles

It was a sixteen-inch ling cod that the eagle
dropped near our feet
at the top of Bagley Creek canyon,
at the edge of the green woods.
Puncture marks in the sides of the fish
where the bird gripped with its talons!
That and a piece torn out of the fish’s back.
Like an old painting recalled,
or an ancient memory coming back,
that eagle flew with the fish from the Strait
of Juan de Fuca up the canyon to where
the woods begin, and we stood watching.
It lost the fish above our heads,
dropped for it, missed it, and soared on
over the valley where wind beats all day.
We watched it keep going until it was
a speck, then gone. I picked up
the fish. That miraculous ling cod.
Came home from the walk and—
why the hell not?—cooked it
lightly in oil and ate it
with boiled potatoes and peas and biscuits.
Over dinner, talking about eagles
and an older, fiercer order of things.

Learn more about Raymond Carver’s Book Title and browse other titles by Raymond Carver.

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…and oh, hey, another Cavafy audio bonus arrives today.