Category: Today’s Pillar of Poetry (Page 2 of 7)

I took the summer off (my parents visited for five weeks) but I kept going through the poetry cards so we can finish the last few posts this year.

"Not knowing
The name of the tree,
I stood in the flood
Of its sweet smell.”

Matsuo Basho from “The Narrow Road to the Deep North”

Known to be the greatest of the Japanese haiku poets, Basho was influenced by Zen Buddhism and wanted miniature perfection in a poem. This required only seventeen syllables broken into sections of 5-7-5. In later years, he journeyed through Japan doing travel sketches tied together with his haiku. When translated, the poems lose their original syllable configuration.

“A poem is a city filled with streets and sewers
filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen,
filled with banality and booze,
filled with rain and thunder and periods of
drought, a poem is a city at war…”

“A Poem is a City” by Charles Bukowski

I love how these poems bump up against each other. Two travelers, two poems. The card talks about Bukowski's “pure, undiluted voice from the street, attached to no school, tradition, or ideology save that of day-to-day survival.”  The “unflinching honesty” of his poems dealt with bus terminals, boarding houses and racetracks. The movie Barfly was based on his writings. There's also a very cool database of his work.

"Like a clamorous flock of birds in alarm
All my memories descend and take form,
Descend through the yellow foliage of my heart
That watches its trunk of alder twist apart,
To the violet foil of the water of remorse
Which nearby runs its melancholy course…"

Paul Verlaine’s “The Nightingale” (a video and alternate translation)

The card says his credo was “music before all things” and he spent a life of rages, romantic obsessions, alienation, and prison time for shooting Arthur Rimbaud (see the movie Total Eclipse or Big Bang Poetry's review) because he was full of “inner turmoil.”

“He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The memory sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a cold dark day.”

“In Memory of W. B. Yeats” by W. H. Auden

Auden emigrated to America, the card said. This was my first clue (aside from the stats below) that this is an English deck.  Auden's famous saying, “poetry makes nothing happen” was misunderstood and what Auden meant was "that poetry had no hand in the evil events taking place in Europe at the time—the rise of fascism in Spain, Italy and Germany and the impending war." He meant instead that poetry was “a way of happening, a mouth.” If you understand that, let me know. I'm still having trouble with it.

“Things fall apart; the center 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 conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

“The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats

Ireland’s greatest literary figure, says the card. Yeats was a collector of folktales and legends, a senator and a self-styled oracle. This poem was his reaction to the Black and Tan War in Ireland where British troops came to quell an uprising.

“If I meet you suddenly, I can’t
speak—my tongue is broken;
a think flame runs under
my skin; seeing nothing,
hearing only my ears
drumming, I drip with sweat;
trembling shakes my body
and I turn paler than
dry grass…”

Fragment 2 of Sappho

Sappho was from the Greek island of Lesbos and was the aristocratic head of a poetry school. She was once as famous as Homer. She was allegedly bisexual and her love poems were “meant to be sung in the Mixolydian mode she invented.”  

“Call the roller of big cigars
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.”

From “The Emperor of Ice Cream” by Wallace Stevens

This was a jarring paring against Sappho! Stevens was an American modernist and insurance executive. “Stevens chose to lead a life of quiet middle-class conform in order to make room for his real vocation, poetry.” His first book was published when he was 43. He wrote that this poem had “something of the essential gaudiness of poetry…obviously not about ice cream.”

 Week stats:

1 black American female
2 black American males
8 white American females
9 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Austrian male
1 Chilean male
10 white English males
2 white English female
2 white French males
1 white Greek male
1 white Irish male
1 white Italian male
1 Japanese male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 500s BC poet
1 1300s poet
1 1500s poet
2 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
13 1800s poets
24 1900s poets

Continuing in 2017 to work through the Poet’s Corner card deck series. Getting toward the final third of the deck. Continue to be surprised by serendipity!

“If you can keep your head when all about you
   Are losing your and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
   But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
   Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
   And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise… ”

“If” by Rudyard Kipling.

I've just been talking about this poem on two blogs…like this week! And here it came up as the next card I pulled from the deck. Anyway, the card says Kipling was an English poet born in Bombay. He was an idealist authoritarian, a romantic imperialist. His style was plain, without irony. George Orwell called “If” the “finest example of ‘good bad poetry.’” And I don't know what that means.

“Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.”

Walt Whitman's “O Captain! My Captain!"

Whitman’s famous poem about the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865 which was also eulogized in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” The poem is about a captain guiding the national ship through the Civil War. Whitman would often see Lincoln walking down the street in New York City, and later Whitman gave popular lectures on Abraham Lincoln and recited this poem after the end of each lecture. By that time he claimed to hate the poem. He sounds like Cher of late. You may think that's pure silliness, but a hundred bucks he would have been a fan.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare

Aside from Shakespeare’s Pizza in Columbia, Missouri…is there any other Shakespeare in the whole wide world? Although the sonnet form was the most popular poetry form in Europe in the 15th and 16th century (the Petrarchan variety) , Shakespeare’s sonnets were only privately shared and became famous only in the past century. I did not know that. Thank you poetry cards.

 Week stats:

1 black American female
6 white American females
7 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Austrian male
1 Chilean male
9 white English males
2 white English female
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1500s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
12 1800s poets
16 1900s poets