Monday, May 17th, 2004...10:15 am
Insert Your Poem Here
i’m in love with the poetry of Raymond Carver. it used to be lust but it’s blossomed into a full fledged long term relationship (unlike Charles Simic who i broke up with immediately after reading). my favorite poem appears in A New Path To The Waterfall, a collection of poems written shortly before his death.
Late Fragment
And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.
- Raymond Carver
i would love if you shared the same with me. i only ask that you please include the title and poet should anyone want to look the poet up later. oh and it’s would also be nice if it was a poem that you knew by heart because you loved it just that much.
5 Comments
May 17th, 2004 at 1:44 pm
OK, Kim, I’ll take the bait. At first I was thinking Bukowski, because he’s my big guy. Then I was thinking John Sinclair, because he’s the poet whose work I know the best. But ultimately, I picked a couple of other ones…
Longfellow’s “Skeleton in Armor” (http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/longfellow/12202) was the first poem that ever flipped my wig. I was maybe four or five. My great-grandma bought me this giant collection of poems that I still have. This piece was in there, and it had cool freaky drawing of a skeleton in armor that I found appealing. I made everyone read it to me all the time. I didn’t understand it then. Now I do, and I find it a little gross. But it’s totally heavy metal, and I dig that. It’s long…here are the first three stanzas:
Speak! speak I thou fearful guest
Who, with thy hollow breast
Still in rude armor drest,
Comest to daunt me!
Wrapt not in Eastern balms,
Bat with thy fleshless palms
Stretched, as if asking alms,
Why dost thou haunt me?”
Then, from those cavernous eyes
Pale flashes seemed to rise,
As when the Northern skies
Gleam in December;
And, like the water’s flow
Under December’s snow,
Came a dull voice of woe
From the heart’s chamber.
“I was a Viking old!
My deeds, though manifold,
No Skald in song has told,
No Saga taught thee!
Take heed, that in thy verse
Thou dost the tale rehearse,
Else dread a dead man’s curse;
For this I sought thee.
Next is Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,”(http://www.rooknet.com/beatpage/writers/ginsberg.html#sunflower) which was one of my introductions to the Beat writers. Like any rock ‘n’ roll writer, the Beats were important to my intellectual development and general worldview. I could have picked many others: Ferlenghetti, Burroughs, diPrima, etc. But Ginsberg is my favorite, and this was the first poem he read the first time I saw him. Again, it’s long, but here’s a slice that I think sums up my country it all its beauty and rot:
The grime was no man’s grime but death and human
locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad
skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black
mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuber-
ance of artificial worse-than-dirt–industrial–
modern–all that civilization spotting your
crazy golden crown–
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless
eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the
home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar
bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards
of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what
more could I name, the smoked ashes of some
cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the
milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs
sphincters of dynamos–all these
entangled in your mummied roots–and you there
standing before me in the sunset, all your glory
in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent
lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye
to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited
grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden
monthly breeze!
May 17th, 2004 at 9:34 pm
THE ONLY POEM
L. Cohen
This is the only poem
I can read
I am the only one
can write it
I didn’t kill myself
when things went wrong
I didn’t turn
to drugs or teaching
I tried to sleep
but when I couldn’t sleep
I learned to write
I learned to write
what might be read
one nights like this
by one like me
May 20th, 2004 at 9:39 am
“Howl” by Allen Ginsberg:
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war…‚Äù
And on and on, the most thrilling poem ever, in my opinion!
I used to remember the first twenty or thirty lines of the thing, but sadly those synapses have long since been reprogrammed as telephone numbers.
May 24th, 2004 at 12:31 pm
I never really got into poetry until I discovered this contemporary master of the written/spoken word. This poem means a great deal to me both professionally and personally:
What Teachers Make, or
You can always go to law school if things don’t work out
By Taylor Mali
He says the problem with teachers is, “What’s a kid going to learn
from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?”
He reminds the other dinner guests that it’s true what they say about
teachers:
Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.
I decide to bite my tongue instead of his
and resist the temptation to remind the dinner guests
that it’s also true what they say about lawyers.
Because we’re eating, after all, and this is polite company.
“I mean, you¬?re a teacher, Taylor,” he says.
“Be honest. What do you make?”
And I wish he hadn’t done that
(asked me to be honest)
because, you see, I have a policy
about honesty and ass-kicking:
if you ask for it, I have to let you have it.
You want to know what I make?
I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could.
I can make a C+ feel like a Congressional medal of honor
and an A- feel like a slap in the face.
How dare you waste my time with anything less than your very best.
I make kids sit through 40 minutes of study hall
in absolute silence. No, you may not work in groups.
No, you may not ask a question.
Why won’t I let you get a drink of water?
Because you’re not thirsty, you’re bored, that’s why.
I make parents tremble in fear when I call home:
I hope I haven’t called at a bad time,
I just wanted to talk to you about something Billy said today.
Billy said, “Leave the kid alone. I still cry sometimes, don’t you?”
And it was the noblest act of courage I have ever seen.
I make parents see their children for who they are
and what they can be.
You want to know what I make?
I make kids wonder,
I make them question.
I make them criticize.
I make them apologize and mean it.
I make them write.
I make them read, read, read.
I make them spell definitely beautiful, definitely beautiful, definitely
beautiful
over and over and over again until they will never misspell
either one of those words again.
I make them show all their work in math.
And hide it on their final drafts in English.
I make them understand that if you got this (brains)
then you follow this (heart) and if someone ever tries to judge you
by what you make, you give them this (the finger).
Let me break it down for you, so you know what I say is true:
I make a goddamn difference! What about you?
May 25th, 2004 at 6:49 am
Re: the poem above…greatest. line. ever.
I have a policy
about honesty and ass-kicking:
if you ask for it, I have to let you have it.
I want that on a sign on my desk.