What is Poetry, by John Ashbery

The medieval town, with frieze
Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow

That came when we wanted it to snow?
Beautiful images? Trying to avoid

Ideas, as in this poem? But we
Go back to them as to a wife, leaving

The mistress we desire? Now they
Will have to believe it

As we believed it. In school
All the thought got combed out:

What was left was like a field.
Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.

Now open them on a thin vertical path.
It might give us--what?--some flowers soon?

What is Poetry, by John Ashbery
 

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by John Ashbery

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by John Ashbery
 

I shall use may anger to build a bridge

Suppose, for a moment, that you're angry, so angry that you want to hurt people badly, maybe even kill them, and you want to destroy whatever is theirs. That's how angry you are.

Now, suppose, instead, that you construct something - a school, a railway, a bridge - from your anger.

Imagine, moreover, that people come gathering, after your construction is through, and they dance without any self consciousness and with complete joy.

Imagine that!
 

Wet Casements, by John Ashbery

A Rainy Day in Avignon

 

When Eduard Raban, coming along the passage, walked into the
open doorway, he saw that it was raining. It was not raining much.
 

~Franz Kafka

"Wedding Preparations in the Country"
 

The concept is interesting: to see, as though reflected
In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through
Their own eyes. A digest of their correct impressions of
Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your
Ghostly transparent face. You in falbalas
Of some distant but not too distant era, the cosmetics,
The shoes perfectly pointed, drifting (how long you
Have been drifting; how long I have too for that matter)
Like a bottle-imp toward a surface which can never be approached,
Never pierced through into the timeless energy of a present
Which would have its own opinions on these matters,
Are an epistemological snapshot of the processes
That first mentioned your name at some crowded cocktail
Party long ago, and someone (not the person addressed)
Overheard it and carried that name around in his wallet
For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in
And out of it. I want that information very much today,

Can't have it, and this makes me angry.
I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that
Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling
Of dancing on a bridge. I shall at last see my complete face
Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge.

I shall keep to myself.
I shall not repeat others' comments about me.

 

Wet Casements, by John Ashbery

 

Garden (5) Petal

Garden (4) Chocolate

Garden (3) Painting

Garden (2) Song

Garden (1) Fragrance

The Shield of Achilles, by WH Auden

Simon Schama Recites WH Auden

Tom O'Bedlam Recites WH Auden

Jane Hirshfield Recites Jane Hirshfield

For a few days only,
the plum tree outside the window
shoulders perfection.
No matter the plums will be small,
eaten only by squirrels and jays.
I feast on the one thing, they on another,
the shoaling bees on a third.
What in this unpleated world isn’t someone’s seduction?
The boy playing his intricate horn in Mahler’s Fifth,
in the gaps between playing,
turns it and turns it, dismantles a section,
shakes from it the condensation
of human passage. He is perhaps twenty.
Later he takes his four bows, his face deepening red,
while a girl holds a viola’s spruce wood and maple
in one half-opened hand and looks at him hard.
Let others clap.
These two, their ears still ringing, hear nothing.
Not the shouts of bravo, bravo,
not the timpanic clamor inside their bodies.
As the plum’s blossoms do not hear the bee
nor taste themselves turned into storable honey
by that sumptuous disturbance.

French Horn, by Jane Hirshfield

The quiet opening
between fence strands
perhaps eighteen inches.

Antlers to hind hooves,
four feet off the ground,
the deer poured through it.

No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.

I don’t know how a stag turns
into a stream, an arc of water.
I have never felt such accurate envy.

Not of the deer—

To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.

The Supple Deer, by Jane Hirshfield
 

Jane Hirshfield Recites Tomas Tranströmer

2 am: moonlight. The train has stopped
out in the middle of the plain. Far away, points of light in a town,
flickering coldly at the horizon.

As when a man has gone into a dream so deep
he'll never remember having been there
when he comes back to his room.

As when someone has gone into an illness so deep
everything his days were becomes a few flickering points, a swarm,
cold and tiny at the horizon.

The train is standing quite still.
2 am: bright moonlight, few stars.

Tracks, by Tomas Tranströmer

Robin Fulton translated the original Tranströmer poem from Swedish to English (above), and is curiously different than the translation Hirshfield read.
 

Jane Hirshfield on the Craft of Poetry

As part of her Craft Talk on Transitions, Jane Hirshfield, author of "Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry," offers tips on 'keeping the poem alive.'

Keeping the poem alive is such a personal thing, not just for the poet but also for the reader.  It is when they somehow come together, in a mystic, literary vein, that poem comes alive.
 

Bono Recites Charles Bukowski

(image credit)

Ben Whishaw Recites John Keats

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

       Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

       And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

       So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel’s granary is full,

       And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,

       With anguish moist and fever-dew,

And on thy cheeks a fading rose

       Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,

       Full beautiful—a faery’s child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

       And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,

       And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

She looked at me as she did love,

       And made sweet moan

I set her on my pacing steed,

       And nothing else saw all day long,

For sidelong would she bend, and sing

       A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,

       And honey wild, and manna-dew,

And sure in language strange she said—

       ‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her Elfin grot,

       And there she wept and sighed full sore,

And there I shut her wild wild eyes

       With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,

       And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—

The latest dream I ever dreamt

       On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,

       Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci

       Thee hath in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

       With horrid warning gapèd wide,

And I awoke and found me here,

       On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,

       Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge is withered from the lake,

       And no birds sing.

La Belle Dame sans Merci:  A Ballad, by John Keats

 

Bill Murray Recites Wallace Stevens

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.

The Planet on the Table, by Wallace Stevens

A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts, by Wallace Stevens
 

(3) "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may"

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
   Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
   Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, 
   The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
   And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
   When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
   Times still succeed the former. 

Then be not coy, but use your time,
   And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
   You may forever tarry. 

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time, by Robert Herrick 

(2) "How can you describe poetry like American Bandstand?"

"P x I = G [perfection times importance equals greatness]. Excrement!"
 

(1) "You will contribute a verse"

Dead Poets Society is a wonderful film, obviously filled with a lot of references to English and American poetry. In this scene, John Keating (Robin Williams) teaches his pupils the reason for reading and writing poetry, quoting Whitman's Leaves of Grass:

O ME! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill'd with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew'd;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

Shape of my Heart

I exercise as a meditation –
For two-to-three hours, rigorous-to-quiet.

I do not need the music to distract me
From the exertion or the repetition.

I do not need the others in the gym.
I exercise for focusing myself –

To find another pocket of effort
When tissues of my strength begin to break,

To find a reservoir somewhere inside
With slips of oxygen when my lungs scream,

To know for sure what measure of a man
I am, and can be in the ‘red zone’ of

Adversity or pressure, tragedy,
To bring what short supply of blood I can

To parts of me in high demand for it,
To find the algorithm to deduce

And solve at last the quandary of time,
When intervals feel like eternity.

Shape of my Heart © Ron Villejo
 

Laundry

Realtime GPU 3D, Fractal, Generative, Videowal, by Daniel Brown

Hang it up on the rack –
One by one, carefully,
Each shirt and underwear.
You know what order it
Should be hung up, and how
It should be folded. You
May double up, and put
One piece on top another,
So you save space and time.
Remember that physics
Is secure, logical.
But poetry, not so –
Clothes-pin each piece, or else
A freak wind blows it off.

Laundry © Ron Villejo
 

Writing Poetry, this Month

Rushing River, by Alicia Dunn

How immersion is defined –
Commandeering of the mind

Shattering, from which the body reels –
How explosive really feels

Soul may know transcendence in
Rushing rivers with no sin

Writing Poetry, this Month © Ron Villejo