i realize it's a bit daunting to just list people. honestly, i don't know much about poetry other than what i was exposed to in hs. i just want to check out some books and possibly learn a thing or two, just curious where a good starting point would be..
I'm a pretty big fan of e.e. cummings... here's a selection:
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands
Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
Great minds have sought you - lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorius,
One average mind - with one thought less, each year.
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
And takes strange gain away:
Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale or two,
Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
That might prove useful and yet never proves,
That never fits a corner or shows use,
Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
These are your riches, your great store; and yet
For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of different light and deep,
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that's quite your own.
    Yet this is you.
I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
if you are a fan of camile paglia (from sexual personae fame), she has a new anthology of poetry out: break blow burn. the requisite review:
From Publishers Weekly
The still-vocal critic of Sexual Personae, a book that drew on poetry and painting for its de-deconstructions of gender, checks in with an anthology of 43 poems, along with her own close readings of them. Her introduction offers a jumble of justifications for undertaking such a project (though she is "unsure whether the West's chaotic personalism can prevail against the totalizing creeds that menace it," she hopes it will), but the readings themselves reveal Paglia's fascination with poetry, which she likens "to addiction or to the euphoria of being in love." The book's first half presents canonical work that Paglia has found "most successful in the classroom" (Shakespeare, Blake, Dickinson, etc.). The second features mostly canonical modernist and confessional work (Stevens, Williams, Toomer, Roethke and Plath), with a few more recent pieces. Clocking in mostly at two to four pages, Paglia's readings sound a lot like classroom preambles to discussionâ€â€offering background, lingering over provocative lines, venturing provisional interpretations. Some of what she says comes off as grandiose (Roethke's " 'Cuttings' is a regrounding of modern English poetry in lost agrarian universals"), some as boilerplate, some as inspired. Though hit-and-miss, Paglia's picks and appraisals provide the requisite spark for jump-starting returns to poetry. (Apr. 1)
if you're just starting, things like the Waste Land and the Changing Light at Sandover are a bit much to chew on. Stevens is a good suggestion, but I'd steer you towards William Carlos Williams. You will probably remember the Red Wheel barrow from hs, but trust me there is so much more there as well. the "Srping and All" volume is near perfection, as is the book length poem Paterson. I'd also suggest Walt Whitman. From Williams and Whitman, follow the trajectory to George Oppen, William Bronk, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, John Ashberry, Octavio Paz
For more contemporary stuff, check out Douglas Messerli's anthology called "From This Side of the Century" from Sun&Moon Press. Great stuff there.
i love poems for architects!
it's a great collection, and has nice little illustrations as well!
if you get it, order it from stout books instead of amazon though!
-though perhaps not the best poetry , I ran across this on the library the other day but haven't got a chance to read it.
Welcome to Hotel Architecture- by roger Connah, Lebb. Woods seems to be connected w it, but not clear how.
here's an excerpt of the MiT review:
Using various styles and poetic approaches mimetic of the restless adventures, swerves, and hijacks of language and philosophy in architecture, Connah takes us on an eccentric hop, skip, and jump along the compound walls of architecture and eventually to the Hotel Architecture itself, where we witness a New Year's Eve symposium on December 31, 1999, that is truly carnivalesque. As we wander through the foyer to the Digital Lounge, where the DITTO conference is taking place, we hear some guests raising their glasses to Gin and Tectonica, others saying good-bye to the rhetoric of the last century, while others still cling to literary theory and philosophical thinness.
design geek girl already said e.e. cummings, but he is also my long-time favorite. he was also a painter.
who are you,little i
(five or six years old)
peering from some high
window;at the gold
of november sunset
(and feeling:that if day
has to become night
this is a beautiful way)
or this one:
n
OthI
n
g can
s
urPas
s
the m
y
SteR
y
of
s
tilLnes
s
or this one:
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing place
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and
changing everything carefully
spring is like a perhaps
Hand in the window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and
A spirit moved. John Harvard walked the yard,
The atom lay unsplit, the west unwon,
The books stood open and the gates unbarred.
The maps dreamt on like moondust. Nothing stirred.
The future was a verb in hibernation.
A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard.
Before the classic style, before the clapboard,
All through the small hours of an origin,
The books stood open and the gate unbarred.
Night passage of a migratory bird.
Wingflap. Gownflap. Like a homing pigeon
A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard.
Was that his soul (look) sped to its reward
By grace or works? A shooting star? An omen?
The books stood open and the gate unbarred.
Begin again where frosts and tests were hard.
Find yourself or founder. Here, imagine
A spirit moves, John Harvard walks the yard,
The books stand open and the gates unbarred.
As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon  don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon  you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind â€â€
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
FUCK FUCK SHIT DAMN FUCK !!! Robert Creeley dies without ever being poet laureate. DAMN DAMN DAMN the best poet of the last 50 years has died and the media is nowhere on this. Again I say: FUCK!
poetry is too personal, making this kind of question more meaningful to those who answer than the person who asked in the first place. it has to be something you find on your own. (wouldn't it be great if we identified our favorite architecture/architects this way, too?)
that said, the poets i've found and loved most include derek walcott, michael ondaatje, and - yes indeed - e.e. cummings.
The pot goes to glyphs. Smokety, how are you ever going to make it on celebrity poker if you play your hand that way? You should have said, "I see your Stafford and raise you a translation of Beowulf," and I would have had to call.
and from the prev. mentioned Hotel Architecture book, most of which is a bit more thoughfull- i might as well pull this bit, as it gives it's name to the book.
On a drab information highway, cool waves in its hair
Warm smell of architects, rising up through the air
Up ahead at the Diagonal, we saw the fragmenting signs
Our ideas grew heavy and site grew dim
We had to deconstruct the lines
There it stood in the lobby
Sounding its decision bell
Architecture thinking to itself
This could be heaven or this could be hell
Then it lit up its atrium and showed us the way
Seminars down the corridors
We thought it heard them say
Welcome to the hotel Architecture
Such a lovely place(such a lovely space)
Plenty of rooms at the Hotel architecture
Anytime of year, you can find it here
Any point to them
Architecture;s definitely twisted, knows where displacement ends
It;s got a lot of pretty pretty boys, that it calls friends
How it flickers in the courtyards, sweet discourse bends
Some deconstruct to remember, some deconstruct to forget
So I called up captain Frank
Please bring us our wine
But Frank said, we haven't had that spirit here since nineteen sixty-nine
And still those discourses are falling , from far away
Breaking up in the middle of the night
Just hearing themselves say
Welcome to the hotel Architecture
Such a lovely place(such a lovely space)
Such a lovely place,
Living it up at the Hotel Architecture\What a golden prize, given to alibis
Mirrors in the ceiling, the Perrier on ice
Frank said architecture's full of prisoners
Left to their own device.
And in the Legends chambers,
they gathered for the feast
Stabbing with their Art Pens
Just can't slay the beast
Last thing Architecture remembers
In the shuttle to DumDum
Had to find its passage back
to the following Forum
Relax said the Lightman
Architecture's programmed a reprieve.
You can check out anytime you like but you can never leave.
'tis safer to be that which we destroy,
then by destruction
dwell in doubtful joy'
remember that one from high school, just love some of it
Shakespeare , Macbeth
More of Elliot's Wasteland:
"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. '
I just love that.
This is a sidetrack, but I came across it tonight at the book store. Stephen King's Dark Tower series are great, imo, and I've waited many, many, many years for the final ones. Well, they've finally arrived! I think it's been mroe than 7 years.
Anyway, he used the Wasteland to base one of the books on, as well as at least one other poem on here. The way he incorporates poetry to dictate the story in the book is fantastic, imho. It sheds light on the poem and adds another dimension to the stories.
Alexie Sherman. 'Jack Kerouac of reservation life.'
Crazy Horse poetry doesn't pander to sensitive, liberal readers. Alexie's "Nature Poem" answers its epigraph - "If you're an Indian, why don't you write nature poetry?"â€â€with terse lines describing doomed Indian fire fighters caught in a burning stand of pines. You want earth poetry? This is all that Alexie will provide:
"she, who once was my sister
is now the dust
the soft edge of the earth"
from "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."
also wrote,
"The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven"
he is one of my favorite american contemporary poets.
Poetry
anyone want to offer some suggestions of people to read? thx!
wallace stevens + t.s. elliot
John Hejduk
Pablo Neruda
Seamus Heaney
Mark Turpin
Charles Bukowski
Adrienne Rich
Damn, there's just too many other good ones to list here. Just find a good book store and peruse for a couple of hours..........
Auden
Dylan Thomas
Rimbaud
W.S. Merwin
...............
There I go again. Happy reading.
i realize it's a bit daunting to just list people. honestly, i don't know much about poetry other than what i was exposed to in hs. i just want to check out some books and possibly learn a thing or two, just curious where a good starting point would be..
i would start with Palm at the End of the Mind by Stevens, and The Waste Land by Elliot
sylvia plath-the collosus
I'm a pretty big fan of e.e. cummings... here's a selection:
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands
-e.e. cummings
pound, even just for this:
Portrait d'une femme
Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
Great minds have sought you - lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorius,
One average mind - with one thought less, each year.
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
And takes strange gain away:
Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale or two,
Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
That might prove useful and yet never proves,
That never fits a corner or shows use,
Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
These are your riches, your great store; and yet
For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of different light and deep,
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that's quite your own.
    Yet this is you.
also milton, donne, borges
yeats, keats, frost, chaucer.
frost is sorta po-mo., chaucer lke coop himelblau , keats and yeats just happy to be writing.
I like Raymond Carver's poetry collections. Try "Where Water Meets With Other Water" and "Ultramarine"
THE CHANGING LIGHT AT SANDOVER
James Merrill
THE WASTE LAND at Quondam
http://www.quondam.com/06/0512.htm
http://www.quondam.com/06/0526.htm
The Waste Land
I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
.....
lot of good suggestions up there.
if you are a fan of camile paglia (from sexual personae fame), she has a new anthology of poetry out: break blow burn. the requisite review:
From Publishers Weekly
The still-vocal critic of Sexual Personae, a book that drew on poetry and painting for its de-deconstructions of gender, checks in with an anthology of 43 poems, along with her own close readings of them. Her introduction offers a jumble of justifications for undertaking such a project (though she is "unsure whether the West's chaotic personalism can prevail against the totalizing creeds that menace it," she hopes it will), but the readings themselves reveal Paglia's fascination with poetry, which she likens "to addiction or to the euphoria of being in love." The book's first half presents canonical work that Paglia has found "most successful in the classroom" (Shakespeare, Blake, Dickinson, etc.). The second features mostly canonical modernist and confessional work (Stevens, Williams, Toomer, Roethke and Plath), with a few more recent pieces. Clocking in mostly at two to four pages, Paglia's readings sound a lot like classroom preambles to discussionâ€â€offering background, lingering over provocative lines, venturing provisional interpretations. Some of what she says comes off as grandiose (Roethke's " 'Cuttings' is a regrounding of modern English poetry in lost agrarian universals"), some as boilerplate, some as inspired. Though hit-and-miss, Paglia's picks and appraisals provide the requisite spark for jump-starting returns to poetry. (Apr. 1)
i second james merrill- what a nutcase!
a poet friend of mine used to be obsessed with john ashberry
bob dylan
jay-z. that man is a poet.
if you're just starting, things like the Waste Land and the Changing Light at Sandover are a bit much to chew on. Stevens is a good suggestion, but I'd steer you towards William Carlos Williams. You will probably remember the Red Wheel barrow from hs, but trust me there is so much more there as well. the "Srping and All" volume is near perfection, as is the book length poem Paterson. I'd also suggest Walt Whitman. From Williams and Whitman, follow the trajectory to George Oppen, William Bronk, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, John Ashberry, Octavio Paz
For more contemporary stuff, check out Douglas Messerli's anthology called "From This Side of the Century" from Sun&Moon Press. Great stuff there.
also (i forgot earlier) - jill stoner, an architect teaching at u.c. berkeley, compiled an anthology of poetry last year: poems for architects.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0970973101/qid=1113052768/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/104-1344719-3761541?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
you guys are awesome. thank you so much for the suggestions.
i love poems for architects!
it's a great collection, and has nice little illustrations as well!
if you get it, order it from stout books instead of amazon though!
slouchin toward bethleham babeee
-though perhaps not the best poetry , I ran across this on the library the other day but haven't got a chance to read it.
Welcome to Hotel Architecture- by roger Connah, Lebb. Woods seems to be connected w it, but not clear how.
here's an excerpt of the MiT review:
Using various styles and poetic approaches mimetic of the restless adventures, swerves, and hijacks of language and philosophy in architecture, Connah takes us on an eccentric hop, skip, and jump along the compound walls of architecture and eventually to the Hotel Architecture itself, where we witness a New Year's Eve symposium on December 31, 1999, that is truly carnivalesque. As we wander through the foyer to the Digital Lounge, where the DITTO conference is taking place, we hear some guests raising their glasses to Gin and Tectonica, others saying good-bye to the rhetoric of the last century, while others still cling to literary theory and philosophical thinness.
Denise Levertov. All of it.
Many of those, and Jack Kerouac!
beat poets live, y'heard?
ha ha Im a goof. :P
design geek girl already said e.e. cummings, but he is also my long-time favorite. he was also a painter.
who are you,little i
(five or six years old)
peering from some high
window;at the gold
of november sunset
(and feeling:that if day
has to become night
this is a beautiful way)
or this one:
n
OthI
n
g can
s
urPas
s
the m
y
SteR
y
of
s
tilLnes
s
or this one:
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing place
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and
changing everything carefully
spring is like a perhaps
Hand in the window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and
without breaking anything.
in the room the women
comes and goes
talkin bout
vado retero.
anyone live in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did.
Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
(excerpt, e.e. cummings)
Paul Muldoon: The Annals of Chile.
Anne Carson: Men in the Off Hours.
Or Auden, who rhymes.
Seamus Heaney's "Villanelle For an Anniversary"
A spirit moved. John Harvard walked the yard,
The atom lay unsplit, the west unwon,
The books stood open and the gates unbarred.
The maps dreamt on like moondust. Nothing stirred.
The future was a verb in hibernation.
A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard.
Before the classic style, before the clapboard,
All through the small hours of an origin,
The books stood open and the gate unbarred.
Night passage of a migratory bird.
Wingflap. Gownflap. Like a homing pigeon
A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard.
Was that his soul (look) sped to its reward
By grace or works? A shooting star? An omen?
The books stood open and the gate unbarred.
Begin again where frosts and tests were hard.
Find yourself or founder. Here, imagine
A spirit moves, John Harvard walks the yard,
The books stand open and the gates unbarred.
I see your Heaney and raise you a Stafford:
You Reading This: Stop
snjr ... I fold :)
DON'T!
Go with C.P. Cavafy:
Ithaka (October 1910)
As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon  don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon  you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind â€â€
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.
[url=http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Philip_Larkin/4819]
Toads[/url]
ahhhh, I forgot: Mark Strand, Michael Palmer, and Galway Kinnell. All Brilliant. Kinnell's Book of Nightmares is one of the best books ever!
FUCK FUCK SHIT DAMN FUCK !!! Robert Creeley dies without ever being poet laureate. DAMN DAMN DAMN the best poet of the last 50 years has died and the media is nowhere on this. Again I say: FUCK!
poetry is too personal, making this kind of question more meaningful to those who answer than the person who asked in the first place. it has to be something you find on your own. (wouldn't it be great if we identified our favorite architecture/architects this way, too?)
that said, the poets i've found and loved most include derek walcott, michael ondaatje, and - yes indeed - e.e. cummings.
The pot goes to glyphs. Smokety, how are you ever going to make it on celebrity poker if you play your hand that way? You should have said, "I see your Stafford and raise you a translation of Beowulf," and I would have had to call.
Snjr ... Yes, my poker skills are pretty lame. How about this, "I see your Stafford, and raise you a book of Jewel's poems."
Then you would know, right then and there, that I was playing a losing hand.
Ha! Thanks snjr but I thought rhys saw and raised it by reversing into hopelessness. His/her html screwed up the delivery though.
Philip Larkin - Toads
Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.
Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts-
They don't end as paupers;
Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
they seem to like it.
Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually starves.
Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:
For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,
And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.
I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.
and from the prev. mentioned Hotel Architecture book, most of which is a bit more thoughfull- i might as well pull this bit, as it gives it's name to the book.
On a drab information highway, cool waves in its hair
Warm smell of architects, rising up through the air
Up ahead at the Diagonal, we saw the fragmenting signs
Our ideas grew heavy and site grew dim
We had to deconstruct the lines
There it stood in the lobby
Sounding its decision bell
Architecture thinking to itself
This could be heaven or this could be hell
Then it lit up its atrium and showed us the way
Seminars down the corridors
We thought it heard them say
Welcome to the hotel Architecture
Such a lovely place(such a lovely space)
Plenty of rooms at the Hotel architecture
Anytime of year, you can find it here
Any point to them
Architecture;s definitely twisted, knows where displacement ends
It;s got a lot of pretty pretty boys, that it calls friends
How it flickers in the courtyards, sweet discourse bends
Some deconstruct to remember, some deconstruct to forget
So I called up captain Frank
Please bring us our wine
But Frank said, we haven't had that spirit here since nineteen sixty-nine
And still those discourses are falling , from far away
Breaking up in the middle of the night
Just hearing themselves say
Welcome to the hotel Architecture
Such a lovely place(such a lovely space)
Such a lovely place,
Living it up at the Hotel Architecture\What a golden prize, given to alibis
Mirrors in the ceiling, the Perrier on ice
Frank said architecture's full of prisoners
Left to their own device.
And in the Legends chambers,
they gathered for the feast
Stabbing with their Art Pens
Just can't slay the beast
Last thing Architecture remembers
In the shuttle to DumDum
Had to find its passage back
to the following Forum
Relax said the Lightman
Architecture's programmed a reprieve.
You can check out anytime you like but you can never leave.
Actual Air by David Berman is my favorite. he is wonderful. His band is the Silver Jews, they are a good place to start for his poetry.
Charles Bukowski
Paul Bowles
'tis safer to be that which we destroy,
then by destruction
dwell in doubtful joy'
remember that one from high school, just love some of it
Shakespeare , Macbeth
More of Elliot's Wasteland:
"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. '
I just love that.
This is a sidetrack, but I came across it tonight at the book store. Stephen King's Dark Tower series are great, imo, and I've waited many, many, many years for the final ones. Well, they've finally arrived! I think it's been mroe than 7 years.
Anyway, he used the Wasteland to base one of the books on, as well as at least one other poem on here. The way he incorporates poetry to dictate the story in the book is fantastic, imho. It sheds light on the poem and adds another dimension to the stories.
Alexie Sherman. 'Jack Kerouac of reservation life.'
Crazy Horse poetry doesn't pander to sensitive, liberal readers. Alexie's "Nature Poem" answers its epigraph - "If you're an Indian, why don't you write nature poetry?"â€â€with terse lines describing doomed Indian fire fighters caught in a burning stand of pines. You want earth poetry? This is all that Alexie will provide:
"she, who once was my sister
is now the dust
the soft edge of the earth"
from "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."
also wrote,
"The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven"
he is one of my favorite american contemporary poets.
wish i had a slyvia plath
busted tooth and smile
cigarette ashes in her drink
the kind that goes out and sleeps 4 a week
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.