Poetry

[madupont]

Very good. I have a batch to post over here from Random House(?) because they are celebrating poetry month but I haven't had a moment to read their selections. Plant watering and seedlings as the heat is early this year.

[FlyingVProd]

Atherosclesosis 
by T.L. Verley
 
 
The true love of which all seek
but seldom grab onto
The real stuff of which all speak
but seldom ever do
Above riches, reputation, and all of self
We need it like air
Yet it sits on the shelf
Our tender souls we won't share
Afraid to be hurt and won't take the time
It won't be your's this way
Nor will it be mine
Tis a futile game we play
We fake it with imposters in the beginning
In between what we convince ourselves counts
And we make believe we are living
While we are dying in large amounts
 
Learn young, hold out, and when it comes hold on
Make love the roots of all you do
Your tree of life will be beautiful and strong
And every phony that did not will wish they were you.

[madupont]

MY FATHERS, THE BALTIC

Low and gray, the sky
sinks into the sea.
Along the strand stones,
busted shells, bottle tops,
dimpled beer cans.
Something began here
centuries ago,
maybe a voyage,
a nameless disaster.
Young men set out
for those continents
beyond myth
while the women
waited and the sons
grew into other men.
Looking for a sign,
maybe an amulet
against storms, I kneel
on the damp sand
to find my own face
in a small black pool,
wide-eyed, alarmed.
My grandfather crossed
this sea in '04
and never returned,
so I've come alone
to thank creation
as he would never
for carrying him home
to work, age, defeat,
those blood brothers
faithful to the end.
Yusel Prisckulnick,
I bless your laughter
thrown in the wind's face,
your gall, your rages,
your abiding love
for money and all
it never bought,
for your cracked voice
that wakens in dreams
where you rest at last,
for all the sea taught
you and you taught me:
that the waves go out
and nothing comes back.

                                      from Knopf Poem a Day, by Philip Levine

[madupont]

Vera Pavlova                    A Remedy for Insomnia

                                 Not sheep coming down the hills,
                                 not cracks on the ceiling—
                                 count the ones you loved,
                                 the former tenants of dreams
                                 who would keep you awake,
                                 once meant the world to you,
                                 rocked you in their arms,
                                 those who loved you . . .
                                 You will fall asleep, by dawn, in tears.

Knopf poem a day
 

[FlyingVProd]

Nice Madame Dupont. 

Here is a poem that I wrote about Hollywood Blvd that I think you will like:



The Blvd
by T.L. Verley
 
 
People scared of each other
like everyone is a killer
Homeless, beaten, and not unlike a frightened animal
amongst the cream of the crop
an eighty thousand dollar horn honks at a man with no shoes
An angry fist raises to a lady who is doing no wrong
Three out of a thousand are not afraid to smile
A lady from thousands of miles away
struts beautiful legs and seems not afraid of anything
Another lady smiles and says "Hi"
A dude bums a smoke and outstretches a hand to shake
Autographs of the immortal in concrete
living in millions of minds
In between the desert and the sea
had Thomas Edison not been so greedy
this place might not exist
had others not wanted freedom away from him
this place might not exist
but it does
And people come from all over the world
to see reminants of their home-screen heroes
A hooker sells love because love for free pays no bills
was this her childhood dream
Is the empire crumbling
Why don't people smile at each other more
Why does some asshole bombard through traffic with his horn blowing
are everyone's rights not equal to his
If I were on the roof of a passing bus I would have pissed on his hood
Come on people we are not all killers
enjoy each other and embrace each other and love each other
I walk until my feet hurt
then I sit and watch
Cool place really
but it is all crumbling
Am I and are we

[madupont]

It's a good sketch with three or four explicit descriptives visually expressing an emotion or situation to build the full context.
I like it more with each re-reading.

[madupont]

FlyingVProd

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/04/11/arts/11dargis_CA2.html

[desdemona222b]

Does anyone know what happened to Pugetopolis?

[madupont]

Poets.net • View topic - Re: Confessional Poetry
Aug 28, 2008 ... cheers, puget. Last edited by pugetopolis on Thu Aug 28, 2008 4:34 pm, edited 1 time in total. ...

poetryinc.net/new/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=150&st=0&sk=t&... - Similar

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Actually, this wasn't the last spot; he was doing some experiments in what he referred to as "Cleave" with a group of poets publishing on-line together.

I wouldn't have known but every time it became difficult to get into "This" forum where we are posting at present, I would forget the "address" and go around in circles looking for the actual accurate web-site, and I would run into all sorts of his on-line activity that he never seemed to know would end up "on-line". He was a busy boy.  As you can see by the icon on this one which happens to be the photo of another poet back in the days when he was very much younger American poet. Louis Reznikoff? or, was it Zukofsky? I remember the face but that's about it.

Then Donotremove hipped me that I ought to just put my connection to the web-site on automatic, to come in and check out what was written here and see what I wanted to respond to or drop off.

At times, it appeared there was correspondence for job search contacts at academia's fringe.

The most recent noted but quite some time ago was going from Seattle and down the coast to California but he had always done that occasionally. I gather that is a fairly fast trip, speed rail; whereas I can't even find a fast connection to go to a family reunion that I want to attend. Which has me betwixt and between what route is out there and is the whole family affair worth the trip.

Ps. during the Polanski frou-frou, I posted at an outlet in the UK having an interesting discussion and ran into both names,  of another poster from here, and then also his. I was using a pseudonym.  Unfortunately, that pseudonym showed  up here in the membership and, which I highly resent because it makes it appear that someone was trying to pass themself off  by the identity on what I had written. I never went back.

What I learned yesterday, by odd chance, is that if you happen to mention a web-site even partially, it will end up on the pile/listing everything that ever mentions the place. Actually, I mean that I knew that but what I meant to say, when about to post someplace else yesterday, I learned that tracking or tracing of material can be  in the digital lettering, to protect the copyright of the publisher on-line. SO, IT IS INTERESTING, just how much "eavesdropping" goes on when people casually mention a web-site while they are corresponding by e-mail for instance or posting a site.

[Lhoffman]

Does anyone know what happened to Pugetopolis?

He does a lot of reading and blogging.

[Lhoffman]

Forty thousand hits on his blog, international audience.

[desdemona222b]

Hey, not trying to start another argument here.  Just wondering why he disappeared.

[FlyingVProd]

FlyingVProd

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/04/11/arts/11dargis_CA2.html

I love it Madame Dupont!!!! Those guys are great. I have a movie script that will get into Jack Nicholson's hands soon, a friend knows him.

Here is a link to a page with a little info on my script:

http://tinyurl.com/krrxk8

And also, I am going to publish a few poetry books soon, I have about 25 years worth of poetry in boxes and some of it is good.

[madupont]

  The Furrow

Did I think it would abide as it was forever
all that time ago the turned earth in the old garden
where I stood in spring remembering spring in another place
that had ceased to exist and the dug roots kept giving up
their black tokens their coins and bone buttons and shoe nails
made by hands and bits of plates as the thin clouds
of that season slipped past gray branches on which the early
white petals were catching their light and I thought I knew
something of age then my own age which had conveyed me
to there and the ages of the trees and the walls and houses
from before my coming and the age of the new seeds as I
set each one in the ground to begin to remember
what to become and the order in which to return
and even the other age into which I was passing
all the time while I was thinking of something different
 
                                       W.S. MERWIN

[madupont]

"I love my native land with such perverse affection!" cries Mikhail Lermontov in an enthusiastic entry to the Pocket Poets volume Russian Poets—a category that can’t help but win our own affection, with its characteristically intense, searingly truthful verse from poets born mostly in the 19th century (Blok, Akhmatova, Tolstoy, Mandelstam, Pushkin, to name a few), but also including work by Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) and Andrei Voznesensky, born in 1933. One section, entitled "The Muse," opens with Pasternak's definition of poetry—"It is a fully ripe whistle/ It is ice, shard on shard"—and contains a variety of poems on the subject of making verse, such as this one by Marina Tsvetayeva, translated by David McDuff.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  "Poems grow"

Poems grow in the same way as stars and roses,
Or beauty of no use to a family.
O all the wreaths and apotheoses
One answer: —from where has this come to me?

We sleep, and suddenly, moving through flagstones,
The celestial, four-petalled guest appears.
O world, grasp this! By the singer—in sleep—
          are opened
The stars' law, and the formula of the flowers.
 

Russian Poets, from Random House