Favourite Pomes

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Wallace Stevens received a national book award in 1951
and spoke of the ‘modern poet’

” … we can’t compare modern poetry with the Lady of the Lake
any more than we can compare Eisenhower with Agamemnon.
A modern poet is nothing more than a person of the present,
finding his own thought and feeling in the thought and feeling
of other people – through his own thought and feeling.
What he derives from people he returns to people.”

Wallace Stevens
The Poems of Our Climate

I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations – one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

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Marianne Moore

Saint Nicholas,

might I if you can find it, be given
a chameleon with a tail
that curls like a watch spring; and vertical
on the body – including the face – pale
tiger-stripes, about seven;
(the melanin in the skin
having been shaded from the sun by thin
bars; the spinal dome
beaded along the ridge
as if it were platinum).

If you can find no striped chameleon,
might I have a dress or suit-
I guess you have heard of it- of qivuit* ?
and to wear with it, a taslon shirt, the drip-dry fruit
of research second to none;
sewn, I hope, by Excello;
as for buttons to keep down the collar points, no.
The shirt could be white-
and be “worn before six”,
either in daylight or at night.

But don’t give me, if I can’t have the dress,
a trip to Greenland, or grim
trip to the moon. The moon should come here. Let him
make the trip down, spread on my dark floor some dim
marvel, and if a success
that I stoop to pick up and wear,
I could ask nothing more. A thing yet more rare
though, and different,
would be this: Hans von Marees’
St. Hubert, kneeling with head bent,

form erect- in velvet, tense with restraint-
hand hanging down: the horse, free.
Not the original, of course. Give me
a postcard of the scene- huntsman and divinity-
hunt-mad Hubert startled into a saint
by a stag with a figure entined.
But why tell you what you must have divined ?
Saint Nicholas, O Santa Claus,
would it not be the most
prized gift that ever was?

~
~
*qivuit —

To wear the arctic fox
you have to kill it. Wear
qivuit-the underwool of the arctic ox-
pulled off it like a sweater;
your coat is warm; your conscience, better.

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Thomas Campion (1567-1620)
I Care Not for These Ladies

I care not for these ladies,
That must be wooed and prayed:
Give me kind Amaryllis,
The wanton country maid.
Nature art disdaineth,
Her beauty is her own.
Her when we court and kiss,
She cries, “Forsooth, let go!”
But when we come where comfort is,
She never will say no.

If I love Amaryllis,
She gives me fruit and flowers:
But if we love these ladies,
We must give golden showers.
Give them gold, that sell love,
Give me the nut-brown lass,
Who, when we court and kiss,
She cries, “Forsooth, let go!”
But when we come where comfort is,
She never will say no.

These ladies must have pillows,
And beds by strangers wrought;
Give me a bower of willows,
Of moss and leaves unbought,
And fresh Amaryllis,
With milk and honey fed;
Who, when we court and kiss,
She cries, “Forsooth, let go!”
But when we come where comfort is,
She never will say no.

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A Youth in Haste
by: Callimachus (c. 310-240 B.C.)
translated by H. W. Tytler

A Youth, in haste, to Mitylene came,
And anxious, thus reveal’d his am’rous flame
To Pittacus the wife; O sacred Sire,
For two fair nymphs I burn with equal fire,
One lovely maid in rank and wealth like me,
But one superior, and of high degree.
Since both return my love, and each invites
To celebrate with her the nuptial rites,
Perplex’d with doubts, for sage advice I come:
Whom shall I wed? ‘Tis you must fix my doom.
So spake th’ impatient youth; th’ attentive sage
Rais’d the support of his declining age,
An ancient staff; and pointing to the ground
Where sportive striplings lash’d their tops around
With eager strokes; let yonder boys, he cry’d,
Solve the dispute, and your long doubts decide.
The youth drew nigh, and listen’d with surprize,
Whilst from the laughing crowd these words arise,
“Let equal tops with equal tops contend.”
The boys prevail’d, and soon the contest end.
The youth departing shun’d the wealthy dame,
And chose th’ inferior maid to quench his flame.

Go thou, my friend, obey the sage, and lead
An equal beauty to thy nuptial bed.

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Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84 BCE – 54BCE)

Catallus lived intensely, he lived the high life, becoming a member
of the neoteric, or “new,” poets. Aesthetically radical (though politically
conservative), they followed an aesthetic programme explicitly opposed
to the heroic grandeur of epic, favouring instead the small-scale, exquisite
technique of the Alexandrian poet-scholar Callimachus.

And he didn’t hold back on delicacy or anything really …
.
.
.
Written by Catullus
Translated from the Latin by Michael G. Donkin
(notes courtesy Brooklynrail)

Aurelius and Furius: little cocksuckers
I’ll fuck you up the ass
and stuff your mouths!
You who think
since my poems are delicate I’m less than chaste.
It’s well known that a poet who is devoted need not
be upstanding in his verses.
It’s clear that my lines are charming, witty.
Then what of it if they’re a tad soft
a bit shameless at times
so long as my readers get turned on?
Mind you I’m not talking about healthy boys, but hairy
old geezers who can’t get it up
by standard methods.
Yet you still think because
I’ve spoken of a good many kisses
I’m somehow less than a man?
Yeah, I’ll fuck you up the ass
and stuff it in your mouths.

‘
‘
Catullus referred to his lover, Clodia Metelli as Lesbia
(not the Sapphic meaning)

Lesbia, I am mad:
my brain is entirely warped

by this project of adoring
and having you

and now it flies into fits
of hatred at the mere thought of your

doing well, and at the same time
it can’t help but seek what

is unimaginable–
your affection. This it will go on

hunting for, even if it
means my total and utter annihilation.

‘
‘
poor boy

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W.B Yeats wrote this sonnet in 1887 when he was 22.
It was published in the Irish Monthly in September
and was included in a larger piece, The Wanderings of Oisin
which he completed the same year; and he was still known
as Willie Yeats.

She who dwelt among the sycamores
W.B. Yeats

A little boy outside the sycamore wood
Saw on the wood’s edge gleam an ash grey feather;
A kid, held by one soft white ear for teather
Trotted beside him in a playful mood
A little boy inside the sycamore wood.
Followed a ringdove’s ash-grey gleam of feather;
Noon wrapt the trees in veils of violet weather,
And on tip-toe the winds a whispering stood.
Deep in the woodland pause they, the six feet,
Lapped in the lemon daffodils; a bee
In the long grass – four eyes drooping low – a seat
Of moss, a maiden weaving. Singeth she
“I am love Lady Quietness, my sweet,
And on this loom I weave thy destiny”.

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Sweet Daddy
by Patricia Smith

62. You would have been 62.
I would have given you a Rooselvelt Road
kinda time, an all-night jam in a
twine time joint, where you could have
taken over the mike
and crooned a couple.

The place be all blue light
and JB air
and big-legged women
giggling at the way
you spit tobacco into the sound system,
showing up some dime-store howler
with his pink car
pulled right up to the door outside.

You would have been 62.
And the smoke would have bounced
right off the top of your head,
like good preachin’.
I can see you now,
twirling those thin hips,
growling ’bout if it wasn’t for bad luck
you wouldn’t have no luck at all.
I said,
wasn’t for bad luck,
no luck at all.

Nobody ever accused you
of walking the paradise line.
You could suck Luckies
and line your mind with rubbing alcohol
if that’s what the night called for,
but Lord, you could cry foul
while B.B. growled Lucille from the jukebox;
you could dance like killing roaches
and kiss the downsouth ladies
on fatback mouths. Ooooweee, they’d say,
that sweet man sho’ know how deep my well goes.
And I bet you did, daddy,
I bet you did.

But hey, here’s to just another number.
To a man who wrote poems on the back
of cocktail napkins and brought them home
to his daughter who’d written her rhymes
under blankets.
Here’s to a strain on the caseload.
Here’s to the fat bullet
that left its warm chamber
to find you.
Here’s to the miracles
that spilled from your head
and melted into the air
like jazz.

The carpet had to be destroyed.
And your collected works
on aging, yellowed twists of napkin
can’t bring you back.
B.B. wail and blue Lucille
can’t bring you back.
A daughter who grew to write screams
can’t bring you back.

But a room
just like this one,
which suddenly seems to fill
with the dread odors of whiskey and smoke,
can bring you here
as close as my breathing.

But the moment is hollow.
It stinks.
It stinks sweet.

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Transcendentalism
by Lucia Perillo

The professor stabbed his chest with his hands curled like forks
before coughing up the question
that had dogged him since he first read Emerson:
Why am I “I”? Like musk oxen we hunkered
while his lecture drifted against us like snow.
If we could, we would have turned our backs into the wind.

I felt bad about his class’s being such a snoozefest, though peaceful too,
a quiet little interlude from everyone outside
rooting up the corpse of literature
for being too Caucasian. There was a simple answer
to my own question (how come no one loved me,
stomping on the pedals of my little bicycle):

I was insufferable. So, too, was Emerson I bet,
though I liked If the red slayer think he slays—
the professor drew a giant eyeball to depict the Over-soul.
Then he read a chapter from his own book:
naptime.
He didn’t care if our heads tipped forward on their stalks.

When spring came, he even threw us a picnic in his yard
where dogwood bloomed despite a few last
dirty bergs of snow. He was a wounded animal
being chased across the tundra by those wolves,
the postmodernists. At any moment
you expected to see blood come dripping through his clothes.

And I am I who never understood his question,
though he let me climb to take a seat
aboard the wooden scow he’d been building in the shade
of thirty-odd years. How I ever rowed it
from his yard, into my life—remains a mystery.
The work is hard because the eyeball’s heavy, riding in the bow.
~
~

Lucia Perillo, “Transcendentalism” from Inseminating the Elephant.
Copyright © 2009 by Lucia Perillo.

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High Windows
by Philip Larkin

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

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Hip-Hop Ghazal
by Patricia Smith

Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips,
decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.

As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,
inhaling bassline, cracking backbone and singing thru hips.

Like something boneless, we glide silent, seeping ‘tween floorboards,
wrapping around the hims, and ooh wee, clinging like glue hips.

Engines grinding, rotating, smokin’, gotta pull back some.
Natural minds are lost at the mere sight of ringing true hips.

Gotta love us girls, just struttin’ down Manhattan streets
killing the menfolk with a dose of that stinging view. Hips.

Crying ’bout getting old—Patricia, you need to get up off
what God gave you. Say a prayer and start slinging. Cue hips.

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Bird-Witted
Marianne Moore

With innocent wide penguin eyes, three
large fledgling mockingbirds below
the pussy-willow tree,
stand in a row,
wings touching, feebly solemn,
till they see
their no longer larger
mother bringing
something which will partially
feed one of them.

Toward the high-keyed intermittent squeak
of broken carriage springs, made by
the three similar, meek-
coated bird’s-eye
freckled forms she comes; and when
from the beak
of one, the still living
beetle has dropped
out, she picks it up and puts
it in again.

Standing in the shade till they have dressed
their thickly filamented, pale
pussy-willow-surfaced
coats, they spread tail
and wings, showing one by one,
the modest
white stripe lengthwise on the
tail and crosswise
underneath the wing, and the
accordion

is closed again. What delightful note
with rapid unexpected flute
sounds leaping from the throat
of the astute
grown bird, comes back to one from
the remote
unenergetic sun
lit air before
the brood was here ? How harsh
the bird’s voice has become.

A piebald cat observing them,
is slowly creeping toward the trim
trio on the tree stem.
Unused to him
the three make room-uneasy
new problem.
A dangling foot that missed
its grasp, is raised
and finds the twig on which it
planned to perch. The

parent darting down, nerved by what chills
the blood, and by hope rewarded –
of toil-since nothing fills
squeaking unfed
mouths, wages deadly combat,
and half kills
with bayonet beak and
cruel wings, the
intellectual cautious-
ly creeping cat.
.
.
.
First published 1936
The precise indenting of the 2nd, 4th, 7th & 8th lines
of each stanza cannot be shown because the forum
does not allow it, yet.

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A Cold Spring
Elizabeth Bishop

A cold spring:
the violet was flawed on the lawn.
For two weeks or more the trees hesitated;
the little leaves waited,
carefully indicating their characteristics.
Finally a grave green dust
settled over your big and aimless hills.
One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine,
on the side of one a calf was born.
The mother stopped lowing
and took a long time eating the after-birth,
a wretched flag,
but the calf got up promptly
and seemed inclined to feel gay.

The next day
was much warmer.
Greenish-white dogwood infiltrated the wood,
each petal burned, apparently, by a cigarette-butt;
and the blurred redbud stood
beside it, motionless, but almost more
like movement than any placeable color.
Four deer practiced leaping over your fences.
The infant oak-leaves swung through the sober oak.
Song-sparrows were wound up for the summer,
and in the maple the complementary cardinal
cracked a whip, and the sleeper awoke,
stretching miles of green limbs from the south.
In his cap the lilacs whitened,
then one day they fell like snow.
Now, in the evening,
a new moon comes.
The hills grow softer. Tufts of long grass show

where each cow-flop lies.
The bull-frogs are sounding,
slack strings plucked by heavy thumbs.
Beneath the light, against your white front door,
the smallest moths, like Chinese fans,
flatten themselves, silver and silver-gilt
over pale yellow, orange, or gray.
Now, from the thick grass, the fireflies
begin to rise:
up, then down, then up again:
lit on the ascending flight,
drifting simultaneously to the same height,
–exactly like the bubbles in champagne.
–Later on they rise much higher.
And your shadowy pastures will be able to offer
these particular glowing tributes
every evening now throughout the summer.

–
–
First published 1953 with a dedication to Jane Dewey, Maryland
and a quote:-

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring – Hopkins (GM)

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A famous Auden anecdote came from the time he was a teacher
of English to foreign students in the 1930’s when a Japanese
student translated the phrase “out of sight, out of mind” to
“invisible, insane” – Auden moved to the USA in 1939 and this
poem was written in 1941 but not published until December 2021
in the New York Review of Books.

W.H. Auden
a poem

We get the Dialectic fairly well,
How streams descending turn to trees that climb,
That what we are not we shall be in time,
Why some unlikes attract, all likes repel.
But is it up to creatures or their fate
To give the signal when to change a state?

Granted that we might possibly be great
And even be expected to get well
How can we know it is required by fate
As truths are forced on poets by a rhyme?
Ought we to rush upon our lives pell-mell?
Things have to happen at the proper time

And no two lives are keeping the same time,
As we grow old our years accelerate,
The pace of processes inside each cell
Alters profoundly when we feel unwell,
The motions of our protoplasmic slime
Can modify our whole idea of fate.

Nothing is unconditional but fate.
To grumble at it is a waste of time,
To fight it, the unpardonable crime.
Our hopes and fears must not grow out of date,
No region can include itself as well,
To judge our sentence is to live in hell.

Suppose it should turn out, though, that our bell
Has been in fact already rung by fate?
A calm demeanor is all very well
Provided we were listening at the time.
We have a shrewd suspicion we are late,
Our look of rapt attention just a mime,

That we have really come to like our grime,
And do not care, so far as one can tell,
For whom or for how long we are to wait.
Whatever we obey becomes our fate,
What snares the pretty little birds is time,
That what we are, we only are too well.

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Serhyi Zhadan is one of Ukraine’s best known poets and novelists,
who gathers crowds of thousands of people at his book launches and events.

[So I’ll talk about it]
by Serhiy Zhadan

So I’ll talk about it:
about the green eye of a demon in the colorful sky.
An eye that watches from the sidelines of a child’s sleep.
The eye of a misfit whose excitement replaces fear.
Everything started with music,
with scars left by songs
heard at fall weddings with other kids my age.
The adults who made music.
Adulthood defined by this—the ability to play music.
As if some new note, responsible for happiness,
appears in the voice,
as if this knack is innate in men:
to be both hunter and singer.
Music is the caramel breath of women,
tobacco-scented hair of men who gloomily
prepare for a knife-fight with the demon
who has just crashed the wedding.
Music beyond the cemetery wall.
Flowers that grow from women’s pockets,
schoolchildren who peek into the chambers of death.
The most beaten paths lead to the cemetery and water.
You hide only the most precious things in the soil—
the weapon that ripens with wrath,
porcelain hearts of parents that will chime
like the songs of a school choir.
I’ll talk about it—
about the wind instruments of anxiety,
about the wedding ceremony as memorable
as entering Jerusalem.
Set the broken psalmic rhythm of rain
beneath your heart.
Men that dance the way they quench
steppe-fire with their boots.
Women that hold onto their men in dance
like they don’t want to let them go to war.
Eastern Ukraine, the end of the second millennium.
The world is brimming with music and fire.
In the darkness flying fish and singing animals give voice.
In the meantime, almost everyone who got married then has died.
In the meantime, the parents of people my age have died.
In the meantime, most heroes have died.
The sky unfolds, as bitter as it is in Gogol’s novellas.
Echoing, the singing of people who gather the harvest.
Echoing, the music of those who cart stones from the field.
Echoing, it doesn’t stop.

translated by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin

[Tift]

Some verses by Patricia Smith from her 2021 book
Crowns: My Hair, My Soul, My Freedom

(It’s art upon our heads, a glory spill)

Nap Unleashed (a few chosen verses)
by Patricia Smith
.
.

Once we were slaves. Our hair was furious,
forever springing loose from plaits and bows,
rejecting homemade greases meant to tame
the wild and wiry bloom that snapped its bands
and leapt alive at every chance. At least
some part of us was running free, like flame
that hungers for a sky, like praying fixed
on someplace we knew heaven was. We sang
our songs but didn’t move our mouths, we burned
to black inside ourselves. With rivers as
our mirrors, we began to build a wall
between our stolen air and us. We snapped
our dresses to our throats, made sure our hair
was braided thick against the spit of men.

Hair braided thick against the spit of men,
we hurtled forth—for years, we mystified
the whisper-tressed, but listened when they said
that we were wrong, not white or silk enough,
and that we’d never be unless we walked
into the fire, succumbing to a hate
we’d hoarded for ourselves. Because they loved
their blemished daughters, mamas twisted knobs
on cranky ovens, conjured flame, and made
us sit on rusted, wobbling kitchen chairs
beneath the ironing comb that charred our necks,
beneath the lye that chewed at scalp and root,
and we endured that hurt, forgot the days
our chaos crown had bellowed, nap unleashed.
.
.
When we explode, we know ourselves again,
we shake our funky, liberated heads,
and raise our voices to the rafters—Do
not dare touch these crowns. And we are Accra,
and we are Alabama, Brooklyn, Watts,
and we are middle finger lifted toward
the seething witnesses to all this joy,
and we are Trinidad and Harlem, we
are bopping straight into the yesterday
we were, and straight into the history
we’ve made and straight into tomorrow with
our rampant naps so gleefully unchecked,
so unrestrained, entwined ’til we become
a single soul, yet none of us the same.

A single soul, yet none of us the same,
we are the only government we need—
our vivid, cocky crowns stunned in their tilt
and swirl, they devastate and irritate,
they be our gospel, be our calling card,
they be our halo, be the way we reach
for sky. The crown is ours to snip or dye
a hundred awkward hues, it’s ours to tuck
beneath a Sunday hat, to crimp and twist,
to scissor down to air, much like a man’s.
This hair is all our other breath. It’s art
upon our heads, a glory spill. It’s wild,
bewildering and sexy in its snarl,
it’s neon, razored, locked and knotted, looped

and razored, locked and neon, looped and not
the business of just anyone, our hair
is blatantly political, a staunch
and blaring tangle, glory in our names,
the gospel on our bobbing heads, it’s fierce—
and yes, still furious, still springing loose
from any peril set on silencing
its roar. You’ve underestimated us,
you didn’t know the muscularity of kink
was busily rebirthing us—it taught
us all the ways to mouth our names
with Serengeti tongues, it’s quarrelsome
and coiled, it’s all the things but always black

and coiled. This hair is all the things. But, black
and wily goddesses, we’ve always known
the powerfulness of wearing our own sky,
the lyric of the scar, we’ve always known
that even though they dared to call us slaves,
we never were. If only they had heard
the freedom on our heads, the jubilant
triumphant wail of all that hair, its rude
unbridled verb, they would have left us free
to rule our own damned selves, to live our sweet
and colored lives. Our hair is throat, is knife
against the throat, is song within the throat,
it’s how we rock and conquer every room,
our hair’s the funk, the scorch, Aretha’s growl
…
.

[Author]

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