Poetry. (1 Viewer)

[spin spin sugar]

pit your plum!

 

[sugared plum]

Milk my mind &
make me cream
drink me when you're ready


that's my favourite part

 

[Katgurl]

A few years ago i got a diary which was created by John Marsden, it was just a one year diary which was based on the Tomorrow series. It did however feature what i believe is known as the world's shortest poem (don't get cranky at me if i am wrong!)
as follows the poem ... "Goldfish"

Wet,
Pet.

 

[gloria*]

Originally posted by Katgurl
It did however feature what i believe is known as the world's shortest poem ...

Oh dude come on--

Muhammad Ali:


Me, we.






(It totally kills YOUR shortest discovered poem in the world. mwuhahahaha.)

 

[gloria*]

MEMORY OF FRANCE; Paul Celan.

Together with me recall: the sky of Paris, that giant autumn crocus...
We went shopping for hearts at the flower girl's booth:
they were blue and they opened up in the water.
It began to rain in our room,
and our neighbour came in, Monsieur Le Songe, a lean little man.
We played cards, I lost the irises of my eyes;
you lent me your hair, I lost it, he struck us down.
He left by the door, the rain followed him out.
We were dead and were able to breathe.

 

[Grey Council]

My Country, anyone? I like it.

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies -
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me!

The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops,
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold.
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

Maybe not that intellectually challenging, but i love the rhytm. Plus the meaning and the reason it was written for /context it was written in... hmm

Apart from that, I am the author of two poems. hehee, maybe not that good, but MY sweat went into em.

 

[sugared plum]

i want some angsty lj kevin lee poetry.

 

[gloria*]

Originally posted by sugared plum
i want some angsty lj kevin lee poetry.

Ohh hushhush or he'll die under it all before he ever surfaces crimson and famous and empty like the rest of them. In all truth I don't know if I'd be allowed to post any because it IS in journal form and thus perhaps not 'formal poetry' fit for publishing in any arena.

I'll email you some instead.

edit- Hasn't Celan's France poem totally convinced you to come with me now? Can't you just feel the irisless Parisian joy?

 

[Will_Sparky]

Ummm.... why hasen't anyone mentioned Shakesperes sonnets??!! Shall I compare thee to a summers day??!

 

[irene adler]

Tenebrae - Paul Celan

We are near, Lord,
near and at hand.

Handled already, Lord,
clawed and clawing as though
the body of each of us were
your body, Lord.

Pray, Lord,
pray to us,
we are near.

Wind-awry we went there,
went there to bend
over hollow and ditch.

To be watered we went there, Lord.

It was blood, it was
what you shed, Lord.

It gleamed.

It cast your image into our eyes, Lord.
Our eyes and our mouths are so open and empty, Lord.
We have drunk, Lord.
The blood and the image that was in the blood, Lord.

Pray, Lord.
We are near.

 

[gloria*]

Ah! You are a Celanian--

An excuse to post more.




Landscape with urn creatures.
Conversations
from smoke mouth to smoke mouth.

They eat:
those madhouse truffles, a chunk
of unburied poetry,
found a tongue and a tooth.

A tear rolls back into its eye.

The left-hand, orphaned
half of the pilgrim's
shell - they give it to you,
then they fettered you -
listening, floodlights the scene:

the clinker game against death
can begin.

(from Atemwende; 1967)






Over wine and lostness, over
the running-out of both:

I rode through the snow, do you hear,
I rode God into farness - nearness, he sang,
it was
our last ride over
the human hurdles.

They ducked when
they heard us above their heads, they
wrote, they
lied our whinnying
into one
of their be-imaged languages.

(From Die Niemandsrose; 1963) This is one of my favourites, well today it is anyway.

 

[irene adler]

I found it so hard to get hold of his poetry, especially translations. Wow, someone else who's even heard of him, another rarity.

O Little Root of a Dream - Celan

O little root of a dream
you hold me here
undermined by blood,
no longer visible to anyone,
property of death.

Curve a face
that there may be speech, of earth,
of ardor, of
things with eyes, even
here, where you read me blind,

even
here,
where you
refute me,
to the letter.


very fond of this one, but Fugue of Death will have to remain my fave.

 

[gloria*]

Paul Celan is my favourite poet.

& Yeah-- I ordered his books in through Abbey's in Sydney.

If you sleep with me I'll lend them to you.

 

[gloria*]

& hey-- do you speak German? because I have some qualms about the translations and I'm wondering if some of the sections have been taken out of context (i.e., politically in some of them. The assumption is too-often made that ALL of Celan's poems have political or even linguistic-related undertones, what with his hatred for the german language and whatnot and his label as a post-war poet.)

 

[irene adler]

Originally posted by gloria*
& hey-- do you speak German? because I have some qualms about the translations and I'm wondering if some of the sections have been taken out of context

unfortunately, no. I can order a watermelon, but that's about it. As far as I know, there aren't that many different translations available, so comparison isn't really possible. I know someone who read him both in german and translated, I'll ask if he's found that next time I see him. Although, most of his poetry does seem to be directly influenced by his survivor guilt, as if it was an outlet for him [that ultimately didn't work] making the understanding of the reader only secondary.

& oh, I've been stalking libraries trying to hunt down copies. darling, name a place and time and there's little I won't do for his books.

 

[Gregor Samsa]

Originally posted by Will_Sparky
Ummm.... why hasen't anyone mentioned Shakesperes sonnets??!! Shall I compare thee to a summers day??!

I mentioned Sonnet LX.

Yeats-The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.



Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I don't necessarily agree with the politics behind it, but it is beautifully written. (And 'Things Fall Apart' is famous as the title of an Achebe novel.)

 

[Serpentia]

Paradise Lost is good

I won't post it though lol, it would take up PAGES lol

My favourite poets

John Donne

meh I'll post more later

 

[picaresque]

hihi irene!

first memory of celan - reading black fugues (Fugue of Death actually - all that black milk is swimming through my spongey brain) on your folder. mmm - someone thought you had written it.

-

Requiem by Anna Akhmatova kills me over and over again, but it's too long for me to post in its entirety here, so I'll just post a few sections of it. (Also, I've found so many translations of it. Hmm...reading Russian.)

[PRELUDE]

It happened like this when only the dead
Were smiling, glad of their release,
That Leningrad hung around its prisons
Like a worthless emblem, flapping its piece.
Shrill and sharp, the steam-whistles sang
Short songs of farewell
To the ranks of convicted, demented by suffering,
As they, in regiments, walked along -
Stars of death stood over us
As innocent Russia squirmed
Under the blood-spattered boots and tyres
Of the black marias.

I

You were taken away at dawn. I followed you
As one does when a corpse is being removed.
Children were crying in the darkened house.
A candle flared, illuminating the Mother of God. . .
The cold of an icon was on your lips, a death-cold
sweat
On your brow - I will never forget this; I will gather

To wail with the wives of the murdered streltsy (1)
Inconsolably, beneath the Kremlin towers.
[1935. Autumn. Moscow]


V

For seventeen months I have been screaming,
Calling you home.
I've thrown myself at the feet of butchers
For you, my son and my horror.
Everything has become muddled forever -
I can no longer distinguish
Who is an animal, who a person, and how long
The wait can be for an execution.
There are now only dusty flowers,
The chinking of the thurible,
Tracks from somewhere into nowhere
And, staring me in the face
And threatening me with swift annihilation,
An enormous star.
[1939]


X
CRUCIFIXION

Weep not for me, mother.
I am alive in my grave.

1.
A choir of angels glorified the greatest hour,
The heavens melted into flames.
To his father he said, 'Why hast thou forsaken me!'
But to his mother, 'Weep not for me. . .'
[1940. Fontannyi Dom]

2.
Magdalena smote herself and wept,
The favourite disciple turned to stone,
But there, where the mother stood silent,
Not one person dared to look.
[1943. Tashkent]

 

[irene adler]

hey picaresque! <waves> you and your russians...

I know, didn't know whether to be flattered or indignant [on his behalf, of course]. I shall post short to balance your long ; a Celan poem for the month.

JANUARIED
into the thorn-covered
rock recess. (Get drunk
and call it
Paris.)

My shoulder frost-sealed;
silent
rubble owls perched on it;
letters between my toes;
certainty.

 

[picaresque]

mmm. well, i think he liked it so be flattered! andand he had never/ still hasn't (i didn't bother to enlighten him) heard of Celan.

Russian. now there's a language i would totally take up in uni. 'the russian winters are endless'...sounds delicious. snow, fur coats, revolutions. pity about the communist dictatorship and mad mad Stalin, eh? and i know you have a thing for Putin and he's 'alluring eyes and elfin face' or whatever -- but he wears nice suits, non?

mmm. not to be completely off-topic here.


Memory of Sun by A. Akhmatova

Memory of sun seeps from the heart.
Grass grows yellower.
Faintly if at all the early snowflakes
Hover, hover.

Water becoming ice is slowing in
The narrow channels.
Nothing at all will happen here again,
Will ever happen.

Against the sky the willow spreads a fan
The silk's torn off.
Maybe it's better I did not become
Your wife.

Memory of sun seeps from the heart.
What is it? -- Dark?
Perhaps! Winter will have occupied us
In the night.