Let's Have Some Fun At Famous Writers' Expense

So there's some nice dirty language in here, but you've been warned.

Famous Poems Abbreviated

X.J. Kennedy

1

Of man's first disobedience and its fruit
Scripture has told. No need to follow suit.

2

Once upon a midnight dreary,
Blue and lonesome, missed my dearie.
Would I find her? Any hope?
Quoth the raven six times, "Nope."

3

Whoosh! - hear the Sea of Faith's withdrawing roar?
So baby, let's make love tonight, not war.

4

Who will go drive with Fergus now?
You lazy cocks and cunts,
I thought I'd ask you anyhow.
Well don't all speak at once.

5

Whose woods these are I think I know.
Shall I just sack out in the snow
And freeze? Naaaa, guess I'd better go. 




I can't get enough X.J. He was one of the first poets I could enjoy for fun: he's bawdy, brash, and almost always highly entertaining. (For proof see "In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus One Day." Classic.)


But that 4th one, the naught one? I had no clue, so I had to look it up. I figured it was either Yeats or Heaney or maybe John Berryman. But I present it here for your edification.

Who Goes With Fergus?

W.B. Yeats

Who will go drive with Fergus now,
And pierce the deep wood's woven shade,
And dance upon the level shore?
Young man, lift up your russet brow,
And lift your tender eyelids, maid,
And brood on hopes and fear no more.
And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love's bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all dishevelled wandering stars.




I'll admit my Yeats knowledge is deficient. But this one seems like one of his earlier efforts, when he was still more romantic and less Imagistic. Sadly, most of my Yeats is "Leda and the Swan," the one about his girlfriend as an old lady watching the fire, and "The Second Coming." Time to remedy this. (Especially when X.J. tells me to.)

Book Technology

Searchlight

F.S. Flint

There has been no sound of guns,
no roar of exploding bombs;
but the darkness has an edge
that grits the nerves of the sleeper.


He awakens;
nothing disturbs the stillness,
save perhaps the light, slow flap,
once only, of the curtain
dim in the darkness.


Yet there is something else
that drags him from his bed;
and he stands in the darkness
with his feet cold against the floor
and the cold air round his ankles.
He does not know why,
but he goes to the window and sees
a beam of light, miles high,
dividing the night into two before him,
still, stark and throbbing.


The houses and gardens beneath
lie under the snow
quiet and tinged with purple.

There has been no sound of guns,

no roar of exploding bombs;

only that watchfulness hidden among the snow-covered houses,

and that great beam thrusting back into heaven

the light taken from it.

I found this in a book of Imagist poetry, a movement in the early 20th century that was one of the first signs of what we might call "modernist" literature. Pretty soon it fell into its own conventions, like any movement does, hardening and solidifying its revolution into a credo that stifled any heterodoxy. But it definitely had its reasons and its high points.

I started thinking about books tonight, about how much a book is worth. The Dover Thrift edition I found this in had a list price of $2. It doesn't seem like much, but this kind of stuff is free on the Internet. A quick Google search will show you the entire text of the book.

So is the book worth two bucks? Is this poem alone worth it? Especially when the web and e-readers seem to be all the rage, what is the point of an inefficient, wasteful, and worst of all, physical book? 

Kindles, Nooks and now the iPad get a lot of ink. It's digital ink, of course, I wouldn't purchase a newspaper if it had a brand-new "Calvin & Hobbes" Sunday comic. (That's what Digg is for.) But I can't see myself curling up with electronics or taking a device outside to fiddle with on a crisp February night. 

I'm a huge technology fan - it's my day job as well as a hobby. And I'm pretty intrigued by the iPad - if anything could make me forsake my love of paper and ink and glue and spine that's probably the ticket.

But what is poetry worth? 

For me, it's not just the individual poems. It can't be quantity - if that's all I cared about, then just grab the thickest Norton anthology you can find and be done with it. It's not even really quality - plenty of sites offer indexed, searchable databases of some of the finest verse the English language has ever produced. 

I appreciate the process of making a decision. An editor or author or compiler has to pick and choose a selection of poems to include in this limited physical space. Something always has to get left out, abridged, there may be alternate versions or revisions, inconsistencies between texts must be resolved, there's a context of other poems to both complement and offer contrast to whatever is being read. 

Sometimes a good introduction or biographical note gives that, other times it's as simple as the dust jacket giving you a sense of why this book is good or important or worth your money and time and interest. Once freed from a physical medium, the temptation to throw in everything and the kitchen sink becomes too great.

But with a book somebody has to be selective, be proactive and give a kind of larger meaning for their offering. At least until iBooks come out with a software upgrade that includes instant contextualization and a link to the Wikipedia entry.

Valentine's Day: One for the Exes

Old Love

Adelaide Crapsey

More dim than waning moon
Thy face, more faint
Than is the falling wind
Thy voice, yet do
Thine eyes most strangely glow,
Thou ghost... thou ghost.

Hammers and Nails

Carpentry

Ira Sadoff

It feels so good
hammering
the eyes of nails


the center of the house
I am holding up
a kind of power


like a bone in the fist,
someone who owns the world
he lives in - it is not


easy, it is not
what I have been 
with others, small


as the circle
in my eyes, lids
I have never opened.


This is a real house I live in, 
it keeps
my family close as


my breath, and like it
they move in and out
of me, all when I hold


this hammer, this hammer
in my hand is like an eye:
it breaks everything it sees.




I found this poem today while flipping through the books on the shelves. I really enjoy the unsentimentality, especially on the subject of home and family. Even in talented hands it can get mawkish fast.


Then there are the line breaks: rather than arbitrary and hip, they break up the rhythm and still add to the sense of the poem. I love the line "this hammer, this hammer" which ends one thought and begins another, but you still get the movement and feeling and weight in that single line. This one is a master class in caesura and enjambment (putting pauses at the ends of lines or letting a phrase spill over into the next line).


In addition to being some good writing, it puts me very much in mind of another poem that hit me like a haymaker sucker-punch when I was first falling in love with poetry.

Love Song: I and Thou

Alan Dugan

Nothing is plumb, level or square:
    the studs are bowed, the joists
are shaky by nature, no piece fits
    any other piece without a gap
or pinch, and bent nails
    dance all over the surfacing
like maggots. By Christ
    I am no carpenter. I built
the roof for myself, the walls
    for myself, the floors
for myself, and got 
    hung up in it myself. I
danced with a purple thumb
    at this house-warming, drunk
with my prime whiskey: rage.
    Oh I spat rage's nails
into the frame-up of my work:
    It held. It settled plumb.
level, solid, square and true
    for that one great moment. Then
it screamed and went on through,
    skewing as wrong the other way.
God damned it. This is hell,
    but I planned it I sawed it
I nailed it and I
    will live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm
  to the left-hand cross-piece but
I can't do everything myself.
  I need a hand to nail the right,
a help, a love, a you, a wife.




It's so muscular and masculine, but also fragile and shaky. It's earthy but metaphorical, with allusions to Jesus and Satan, with a little bit of Dante's lovers Francesca and Paolo.


But there's something about the rhymes, too. The slant-rhyme, the internal rhymes (God damned it. This is hell,/but I planned it.), it's all so tightly constructed but still ramshackle and thrown together. 


When I get ambitious, that's how I try to write. I just keep trying to imitate those constructions and architecture. Maybe even knock-off buildings are worthwhile.

Saturday Suck: Bad to Worse

Man, this is an unexpected bonanza: a good poet inspires a bad poet, the bad poet writes some terrible doggerel, said terribly poetry incites the Internet to some even worse writing (but excellent character assassination)!


The trouble starts with George Gordon, Lord Byron. Yes, that Little Poet Fontleroy had his foibles: anyone who rhymes "intellectual" with "henpecked-you-all" has got to open themselves up for some ribbing. 


But nobody deserves the kind of treatment he receives at the hands of one J. Gordon Coogler.

Byron

J. Gordon Coogler

Oh, thou immortal bard!
Men may condemn the song
That issued from thy heart sublime,
Yet alas! Its music sweet
Has left an echo that will sound
Thro’ the lone corridors of Time.


Thou immortal Byron!
Thy inspired genius
Let no man attempt to smother –
May all that was good within thee
Be attributed to Heaven,
All that was evil – to thy mother.




I love the ineptness of it all, and especially the puzzlingly contemptuous ending wherein all Byron's faults are laid at his mothers' feet.


But the killing blow comes from Naomie Christensen: you MUST read this post from her Poetry Breakdown blog. Some highlights:





Lord Byron is known for using his status to be sexually overt and a criminal... ["Who is that sexually overt criminal?!" "Oh, that's just Lord Byron, a man of status, keep going about your business." "Oh, I see, very well then."] 


Lord Byron was an accomplished man and he wrote many stories with uncomfortable topics that exploited women... [His topics exploited women? How dashed uncomfortable of them!] 


It is also rumored he murdered people and was a pedophile. [Any man who would allow himself to become a victim of rumors must be disreputable.]


Coogler seems to believe that carnal knowledge and expressing it is good. This guy is way too overjoyed by sexual impurity. [Man, we either need to bring in some JoBro-style purity bracelets or one of those Cullen kids, things are just getting way too impure up in this bidness.]


This poem lacks grammar and a definite interpretation. [As does that sentence: grammar is an agreed-upon set of rules governing the use of language. There's no inherent quantity of grammar that can be increased.]




But without a doubt the best part of the post is the following:




There too many grammatical errors and while poetic license is a worthwhile excuse, I believe he wrote it and it was published.




Wow, just overall fantastic. Ignoring grammatical rules (and a logical conclusion to the sentence) whilst wagging a finger at a poem's syntactical errors.


Plus so much sex, repression and recrimination flying around, it's really a wonder nobody's gotten pregnant and shotgun-married yet. Let's leave it at that, before things get any more Twilight-y in here.

Beast-Men, Boss Levels and the Impenetrable

Here's a weird one. I don't know if it's describing Gollum or a super-villain, Caliban or Rorschach. (Actually, I'm sure it's none of the above, but I'd love to pretend Elizabeth Bishop was a comic book geek in her spare time, importing the new FF title with the Kirby cover from NYC to South America.)

The Man-Moth

Elizabeth Bishop

          Here, above,
cracks in the buldings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to records in thermometers.


          But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.


          Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer's cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.


          Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.


          Each night he must
be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.


          If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It's all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee's sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you're not paying attention
he'll swallow it. However, if you watch, he'll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink. 




On a tangential note, I often listen to a movie podcast called Battleship Pretension. One of the hosts mentioned he saw quote difficult films endquote as like boss levels of video games, where every time you see the film you're trying to get past that point, beat that level. There are some movies I adore, I may have seen them a dozen times and still can't beat. But every time I enjoy trying. (They were discussing "Blade Runner" at the time, I think, but you could add "Memento" or "Vertigo" or "Chinatown" to that list just as easily.)


Sometimes these are the best poems, the ones you can't quite wrap your head around. Frankly, I don't ever want to unravel it completely, because it's the act of playing that I really enjoy. Reading it, puzzling it out, coming up with theories and counter-theories and getting to keep all the misreadings - that's where the good stuff is at. (If you think "LOST" is tough, try Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" - one of the hardest boss levels I've ever come up against.)


So hopefully, there's some good grist for the mill here. Any particular poems (or movies, or books)  you keep playing and can't beat?

Blue Light, Candy and the Power of Voice

One night in western Massachusetts we went out to a poetry open mic and saw this guy Dave Macpherson headline. He was quite good, sort of a mix of slam and free verse poetry. He's probably one of the most spellbinding poets I've ever heard, and I'm including the 10-disc Dylan Thomas set I was given.


The poem itself is pretty good, but the passion and vivid voice acting in his performance was what knocked it out of the park, the twists and turns of the narratives echoed in the rise and fall of inflection.


But I think the best part is the chapbook I bought from him that night: it's got what may be the best title of any book I've ever read. It's called "The Road to Hell Is Paved with Candy."

Blue Light

Dave Macpherson

1. She dances on the lip of the stage to the men below her.
The blue spot finds her and her skin becomes
The turquoise of a Caribbean reef.
The men, with their pointing dollar bills,
Can almost hear the crash of waves
And smell the saltwater forming on their brows.
She dos not see them.
She is movement and light.
She transcends the beer stains and cigarette butts.
Her thoughts are her own,
As she is bathed in a blue light.


2. He pulls his car to the side of the road,
He curses as he puts it in neutral,
And takes out his license and registration.
The flashing light now illuminates his glove compartment.
Any minute now, the trooper will emerge from his car,
And try to smell the three scotch and sodas he had at TJ's.
Where were his breath mints?
If he had his breath mints, he wouldn't lose his license.
The trooper is still in his car.
But he will come, and alter his life with a non-chalant tone,
While bathed in a blue light.


3. So, they hit me with this bright blue beam,
Right before they transported me to their mother ship.
I was just taking the garbage out like I do every Wednesday,
An the circle of light surrounded me.
I didn't know what they wanted. I still don't.
They probed, ya know. Treated me like meat.
Let me tell you, it was not a wonderful experience.
I ain't hanging out waiting for their return.
But in that first moment, I thought it was beautiful.
I thought I was beautiful.
I thought I had been allowed to change,
When I was bathed in the blue light.