Another one from N. Scott Momaday - it’s so rare to get really good haiku in English, and these are such pristine little moments.
- Lakdhas Wrikkamramashina, Sri Lankan poet
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Avenue A
by Frank O’Hara
We hardly ever see the moon any more so no wonder it’s so beautiful when we look up suddenly and there it is gliding broken-faced over the bridges brilliantly coursing, soft, and a cool wind fans your hair over your forehead and your memories of Red Grooms’ locomotive landscape I want some bourbon/you want some oranges/I love the leather jacket Norman gave me and the corduroy coat David gave you, it is more mysterious than spring, the El Greco heavens breaking open and then reassembling like lions in a vast tragic veldt that is far from our small selves and our temporally united passions in the cathedral of Januaries everything is too comprehensible these are my delicate and caressing poems I suppose there will be more of those others to come, as in the past so many! but for now the moon is revealing itself like a pearl to my equally naked heart
loreofcardigan reblogged
This is just to say
I have eaten
the spiders that were in my cave
and which you were probably counting for statistical purposes
Forgive me I am an outlier adn should not have been counted
reIatedIy Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics featuring 55 poets - some of whom were never pubIished before- is sIated to come out March 2013 and i am s o excited im so excited y'aII shouId keep it on your watch iist
here's a poem by Joy Ladin, incIuded in the coIIection
The World at Your Feet
What is man that you are mindful of him... laying the world at his feet? — Psalm 8
Eden eyes you from afar. Waterbirds Flick their white-tipped wings
Shyly as they skim The paradise ashiver
In the river’s ripples: palm and eucalyptus, Animals eager to receive their names,
Sheep and oxen, wild beasts, all the birds of heaven. The Garden that’s longed for you
From the instant longing split you Colors like a jilted lover, flashing
The iridescent eyes of peacocks, brushing your brow With willow fingertips,
While you, who long to lose yourself In the world that longs to take you
Where God is imperative to blossom And thirst for the knowledge of sorrow
Becomes the sorrow of the knowledge There was no need to thirst,
Find yourself With the world at your feet
Choosing again To betray her.
loreofcardigan reblogged
The Cathedral - Kofi Awoonor
On this dirty patch a tree once stood shedding incense on the infant corn: its boughs stretched across a heaven brightened by the last fires of a tribe. They sent surveyors and builders who cut that tree planting in its place A huge senseless cathedral of doom.
im trying to run Black poets this month if i can consistently remember Kofi Awoonor - with his colleague Kofi Anyidoho is considered one of the greatest moderns poets of Ghana today & is strongly rooted in Ewe poetic tradition
loreofcardigan reblogged
Foreign Letters!
I’m going to be changing things up a bit and for the next week the poems that I will run will deal with FOREIGN LANGUAGES. Poems dealing with learning another language, English from the perspective of another language, translations, &c will all be considered. In case I run out please do say your favorite!
ive got eight queued up right now we can do this (i didn't realize how many white dudes were in this genre??? freal if you know any by nonnative English speakers do send it in bc wow)
loreofcardigan reblogged
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26 Day Challenge: Poetry Edition
A champion of pretending to do 30 day challenges and then getting bored (but not until after I’ve bored everyone else first), I have two observations to make:
- It is really fucking hard to do one of those things everyday
- None of them are about poetry
With those gaping flaws in everyone else’s memes dutifully and smugly pointed out, I present the 26 Day Poetry Challenge:
Day A: One of your favorite poems Day B: A poem you relate to Day C: A poem more people should read Day D: A poem by your favorite poet Day E: A poem from your favorite book of poetry Day F: A free verse poem Day G: A poem with meter Day H: A well-known poem you’ve never liked Day I: A poem you’ve read in class Day J: A poem you’ve analyzed Day K: A poem about anger Day L: A poem about love Day M: A poem about heartbreak Day N: A poem about strength Day O: A poem that grew on you Day P: A poem you wrote yourself Day Q: A queer poem Day R: A poem by a poet you discovered less than a year ago Day S: A poem that you have memorized Day T: A villanelle Day U: An elegy Day V: A sonnet (any kind) Day W: A prose poem Day X: A poem that reminds you of someone Day Y: Song lyrics that count as a poem Day Z: A poem you wish you could have written
This has the advantage of being totally ridiculous and also ambiguous as to when you actually have to post any of poems.
a challenge for me! thank you
I've been looking for a poem that starts out "to be a little sick" and I swear it's a real poem but i can't seem to find it anywhere, perplexing.
Hippos on Holiday--Billy Collins
is not really the title of a movie but if it was I would be sure to see it. I love their short legs and big heads, the whole hippo look. Hundreds of them would frolic in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river, and I would eat my popcorn in the dark of a neighborhood theater. When they opened their enormous mouths lined with big stubby teeth I would drink my enormous Coke. I would be both in my seat and in the water playing with the hippos, which is the way it is with a truly great movie. Only a mean-spirited reviewer would ask on holiday from what?
Piet Hein
Actually let me tell you about him because he only improves through context. Piet Hein was a Danish scientist who was a member of the Danish resistance movement during the Nazi regime in Denmark. His little poems, or grooks, were veiled protests against the occupation : masked enough to get past the censors, clear enough to be understood by the Danish citizenry.
Here is his first:
CONSOLATION GROOK
Losing one glove is certainly painful, but nothing compared to the pain, of losing one, throwing away the other, and finding the first one again.
The Danish had lost their freedom, but should not lose their morality. Even outside their immediate context, they are charming little poems.
A Reproof
In view of your manner of spending your days I hope you may learn, before ending them, that the effort you spend on defending your ways could be better spent on amending them.
A Word of Encouragement
Stomach-ache can be a curse; heart-ache may be even worse; so thank Heaven on your knees if you've got but one of these.
What Love Is Like
Love is like a pineapple, sweet and undefinable.
ON PROBLEMS
--Piet Hein
Our choicest plans have fallen through, our airiest castles tumbled over, because of lines we neatly drew and later neatly stumbled over.
loreofcardigan reblogged
dear samantha
i’m sorry
we have to get a divorce
i know that seems like an odd way to start a love letter but let me explain:
it’s not you
it sure as hell isn’t me
it’s just human beings don’t love as well as insects do
i love you.. far too much to let what we have be ruined by the failings of our species
i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night
i know you would never DO anything, you never do but..
i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night
did you know that when a female fly accepts the pheromones put off by a male fly, it re-writes her brain, destroys the receptors that receive pheromones, sensing the change, the male fly does the same. when two flies love each other they do it so hard, they will never love anything else ever again. if either one of them dies before procreation can happen both sets of genetic code are lost forever. now that… is dedication.
after Elizabeth and i broke up we spent three days dividing everything we had bought together
like if i knew what pots were mine like if i knew which drapes were mine somehow the pain would go away
this is not true
after two praying mantises mate, the nervous system of the male begins to shut down
while he still has control over his motor functions
he flops onto his back, exposing his soft underbelly up to his lover like a gift
she then proceeds to lovingly dice him into tiny cubes
spooning every morsel into her mouth
she wastes nothing
even the exoskeleton goes
she does this so that once their children are born she has something to regurgitate to feed them
now that.. is selflessness
i could never do that for you
so i have a new plan
i’m gonna leave you now
i’m gonna spend the rest of my life committing petty injustices
i hope you do the same
i will jay walk at every opportunity
i will steal things i could easily afford
i will be rude to strangers
i hope you do the same
i hope reincarnation is real
i hope our petty crimes are enough to cause us to be reborn as lesser creatures
i hope we are reborn as flies
so that we can love each other as hard as we were meant to.
Jared Singer, An Entomologist’s Last Love Letter (via colporteur)
Wasn't feeling this poem at first but the last stanza caught me. Could be a Mountain Goats song!
loreofcardigan reblogged
The White House
Your door is shut against my tightened face, And I am sharp as steel with discontent; But I possess the courage and the grace To bear my anger proudly and unbent. The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet, A chafing savage, down the decent street; And passion rends my vitals as I pass, Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass. Oh, I must search for wisdom every hour, Deep in my wrathful bosom sore and raw, And find in it the superhuman power To hold me to the letter of your law! Oh, I must keep my heart inviolate Against the potent poison of your hate. - Claude McKay
loreofcardigan reblogged
byzantiums-deactivated20130215
And I think in the end this was the question that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach, the Greek ships at the ready, the sea invisible beyond the serene harbour, the future lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking it could be controlled. He should have said I have nothing, I am at your mercy. - The Empty Glass, Louise Gluck.
Long Afternoons Adam Zagajewski (Translated by Clare Cavanagh) Those were the long afternoons when poetry left me. The river flowed patiently, nudging lazy boats to sea. Long afternoons, the coast of ivory. Shadows lounged in the streets, haughty manikins in shopfronts stared at me with bold and hostile eyes. Professors left their schools with vacant faces, as if the Iliad had finally done them in. Evening papers brought disturbing news, but nothing happened, no one hurried. There was no one in the windows, you weren't there; even nuns seemed ashamed of their lives. Those were the long afternoons when poetry vanished and I was left with the city's opaque demon, like a poor traveler stranded outside the Gare du Nord with his bulging suitcase wrapped in twine and September's black rain falling. Oh, tell me how to cure myself of irony, the gaze that sees but doesn't penetrate; tell me how to cure myself of silence.
