Category: language

It is spring again, spring so astonishingly familiar: so why is poetry choking on itself? The tree outside my window is committing plagiarism for the twentieth year in a row, adding green leaves to green leaves. The flowers of the cherry tree are no different from the first cherry tree; the same smell as yesterday permeates the air. And—though old people say this is tedious—my sister is kissing someone under the same tree where I used to kiss, ?endlessly plagiarizing the first kiss. I could still tell you about the grasses, all the grasses that sprouted from seeds faithfully and persistently, the same, the exact same grass as months ago. The world is not afraid to ?plagiarize when making new life, and always equally astonishing and monotonous in its stubbornness is death. Why then condemn poems of love, why blame them for their lack of shame and their primitive, chaotic groans of pleasure, faithfully replicated for centuries, indifferent to who reads them?

It is spring again, Halina Po?wiatowska, Translated from the Polish by Karolina Zapal & Ryan Mihaly

my heart is an autocrat
ach! how it runs rampant
obscuring the world

it silences the fountains
and flies up to the eighth floor
quicker than a pigeon

then from the parapet
it gazes for hours
delighting in tiny people
basking in its greatness

my heart is an autocrat, Halina Po?wiatowska, Translated from the Polish by Karolina Zapal & Ryan Mihaly

Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying; 
My dog and I are old, too old for roving. 
Man, whose young passion sets the spindrift flying, 
Is soon too lame to march, too cold for loving. 
I take the book and gather to the fire, 
Turning old yellow leaves; minute by minute 
The clock ticks to my heart. A withered wire, 
Moves a thin ghost of music in the spinet. 
I cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander 
Your cornland, nor your hill-land, nor your valleys 
Ever again, nor share the battle yonder 
Where the young knight the broken squadron rallies. 
Only stay quiet while my mind remembers 
The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers. 
Beauty, have pity! for the strong have power, 
The rich their wealth, the beautiful their grace, 
Summer of man its sunlight and its flower, 
Spring-time of man all April in a face. 
Only, as in the jostling in the Strand, 
Where the mob thrusts or loiters or is loud, 
The beggar with the saucer in his hand 
Asks only a penny from the passing crowd, 
So, from this glittering world with all its fashion, 
Its fire, and play of men, its stir, its march, 
Let me have wisdom, Beauty, wisdom and passion, 
Bread to the soul, rain where the summers parch. 
Give me but these, and, though the darkness close, 
Even the night will blossom as the rose. 

On Growing Old, John Edward Masefield

Zadie Smith on what art is for. (New York Review)

“Its distance from the prerogatives of the powerful is precisely where its force of resistance lies. And if Forster could insist on something like this vision of art in the wreckage of World War II, then that is the very least I can do now.

[…]

I am on the wrong side of history and always will be, along with any artist who reserves the right to make art for her own sake, for the sake of art itself, and for the sake of her fellow humans.”

Diminishing chords
Linger in the ear
dissolve into ether
Taking Love and melancholy
Ingredients
for alchemy
To return to
this world

Sun Ra Ethos, Voice Porter

The xx, Infinity.

[Robert Creeley] in Contemporary Poets: “I write to realize the world as one has come to live in it, thus to give testament. I write to move in words, a human delight. I write when no other act is possible.” Asked about “good” poems, Creeley, who had written in the introduction to Best American Poetry 2002 that the poem is “that place we are finally safe in” where “understanding is not a requirement. You don’t have to know why. Being there is the one requirement,” responded, “If one only wrote ‘good’ poems, what a dreary world it would be.” (Poetry Foundation)

I like to find
what’s not found
at once, but lies

within something of another nature,
in repose, distinct.
Gull feathers of glass, hidden

in white pulp: the bones of squid
which I pull out and lay
blade by blade on the draining board—

   tapered as if for swiftness, to pierce   
   the heart, but fragile, substance
   belying design.               Or a fruit, mamey,

cased in rough brown peel, the flesh
rose-amber, and the seed:
the seed a stone of wood, carved and

polished, walnut-colored, formed
like a brazilnut, but large,
large enough to fill
the hungry palm of a hand.

I like the juicy stem of grass that grows
within the coarser leaf folded round,
and the butteryellow glow
in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory
opens blue and cool on a hot morning.

Pleasures, Denise Levertov

I dreamt last night
the fright was over, that
the dust came, and then water,
and women and men, together
again, and all was quiet
in the dim moon’s light.

A paean of such patience—
laughing, laughing at me,
and the days extend over
the earth’s great cover,
grass, trees, and flower-
ing season, for no clear reason.

For No Clear Reason, Robert Creeley

What
has happened
makes

the world.
Live
on the edge,

looking.

Here, Robert Creeley