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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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 Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 2:13 am |
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I now have Suttree.
I am going to read Suttree.
It was a toss between this, No Country, and All the Pretty Horses.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 2:23 am |
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There is a moonshaped rictus in the streetlamp's globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 2:32 am |
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| CubaLibre wrote: |
| Adi I think you will like McCarthy even more than most because of your poetical background. |
holy shit yes
Down there in grots of fallen light a cat transpires from stone to stone across the cobbles liquid black and sewn in rapid antipodes over the raindark street to vanish cat and countercat in the rifted works beyond.
McCarthy is giving me confidence.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Mon Oct 11, 2010 3:14 am |
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Dualwielding Dylan Thomas's portrait of the artist as a young dog and Galway Kinnell's A New Selected Poems. Both excellent.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Thu Nov 25, 2010 7:48 am |
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Reading Henry Hart's fantastic biography of one of my favorite poets, James Dickey: The World as a Lie.
A 1948 edition of Blake's Poetical Works that I got for my birthday.
Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, which is incredible. It does some of those things that can only possibly happen in the imagination through language. Top tier work. Also enjoying the mathematical set structuring of the chapter segments.
Rodney Jones's Elegy for the Southern Drawl which features one of my two favorite poems about penises. (The other is Sharon Olds' "The Pope's Penis.")
SACRAMENT FOR MY PENIS (Rodney Jones)
How do I approach it, bald as it is, dangling
Over the urinal to some golden expression
Of lemony bitterness, an old Trappist,
Blind in one eye, kneeling to his paternosters?
Is it mine? It never seemed to be mine.
It was old when I first saw it. A joke
Chaucer might have told but didn't.
A frumpish soldier slumped in a jeep
Above the caption Dejected Nazi colonel
Waits to be transported to POW camp.
Yet even now, in the spatulate dark,
Where it lies all day, secret as escape,
Sometimes it will leap of its own volition.
A young terrorist, sprung from prison
And bound for home, bent on sedition.
No, not that -- here was my religion -- look
Here, blue in the distances of my skin -- God
Flowers in this nerce. May it remain
Sovereign, inviolable, and unconfessed.
Honor most delicately this feverish guest.
Complementing that....
THE POPE'S PENIS (Sharon Olds)
It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat -- and at night
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2010 5:18 pm |
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| shrugtheironteacup wrote: |
| Adilegian wrote: |
| Reading Henry Hart's fantastic biography of one of my favorite poets, James Dickey: The World as a Lie. |
Now this has come in the mail and what have you done to me |
It is time to understand the demon and the monster shrug.
About 100 pages into Blake's poems, I find that his work ranges from boring to laughable to invaluable. His boring poems tend to anthropomorphise and expound upon abstract concepts (like Joy, Cruelty, Love, Mercy, and so on), and they fail largely because they lack compelling images as the center around which the poem's content and meter revolves.
His laughable poems are usually those whose light, simple, lyrical modes combine with subject matter that either is boring (and happiness usually turns out to be a boring subject matter) or just plain sucks. His often reliance on the repetition of specific words doesn't draw me into the poems either. Example:
| 'Laughing Song' wrote: |
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;
When the meadows laugh with lively green,
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene,
When Mary and Susan and Emily
With their sweet round mouths sing "Ha, ha he!"
When the painted birds laugh in the shade,
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread:
Come live, and be merry, and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of "Ha, ha, he!" |
Excuse me while I go vomit the crickets I ate for lunch. They are still laughing and that apparently isn't good for my digestion.
Blake's vision poems and dream poems, on the other hand, that make the act of dreaming (and hence the substance of dream imagination as kin to prophetic imagination) their subject are exquisite. The simplicity of Blake's standard meter risks becoming facile and cheesy in almost any other poems but these, in which the form and style grow larger (in the reader's feeling) than they actually are on the page. The style becomes sublime, affecting, and memorable in the same way that the simplicity of good fairy tale delivery or nursery rhymes become.
At its best, Blake's style conveys the sense of a recollection from childhood given new proportions with adult experience and the intrusion of a divine editor - where everything is of the same size, in memory, as it had been when the outlines of that memory had been sketched in childhood experience - and where those remembered figures are imbued with a consequential weight beyond what one can rightly expect to discover on earth. These are poems that probably need to exist.
Songs of Innocence are mostly boring though certain poems are affecting, usually those most anthologized (The Lamb, The Shepherd, Holy Thursday, and The Chimney Sweeper). Songs of Experience are better though, again, the ones I enjoyed were also those most anthologized with some exceptions (The Tiger, The Clod & the Pebble, A Poison Tree, The Angel, The Sick Rose). Exceptions are Earth's Answer and the first Little Girl Lost poem (as well as the connected poem Little Girl Found).
Poems from the Rossetti Manuscript (as the collection's named in my copy) are really getting further into visionary and imaginative territory in a way that excites me. For a while, I'd been worried that I wasted a birthday gift request on a poet whose work wasn't as vigorous as I'd remembered, but these poems are putting those concerns away. Here are a couple of the better visionary poems that I've come across there.
| 'I saw a Chapel all of Gold' wrote: |
I saw a chapel all of gold
That none did dare to enter in,
And many weeping stood without,
Weeping, mourning, worshipping.
I saw a serpent rise between
The white pillars of the door,
And he forc'd and forc'd and forc'd,
Down the golden hinges tore.
And along the pavement sweet,
Set with pearls and rubies bright,
All his slimy length he drew
Till upon the altar white
Vomiting his poison out
On the bread and on the wine.
So I turn'd into a sty
And laid me down among the swine. |
The description of the snake as "slimy" makes me slump my right shoulder and pinch down my brow, but the poem's movement through dream to personal revelation is so fantastic that it's all good. Also Blake uses repetition of a single word ("forc'd and forc'd and forc'd") in a much better way than he usually does. Blake will often repeat the same adjective twice in a row to communicate that he REALLY REALLY MEANS THAT ADJECTIVE, but the end effect is less of emphasis and more of sentimental overemphasis.
And, finally, this.
| 'I asked a Thief' wrote: |
I askèd a thief to steal me a peach:
He turnèd up his eyes.
I ask'd a lithe lady to lie her down:
Holy and meek, she cries.
As soon as I went
An Angel came:
He wink'd at the thief,
And smil'd at the dame;
And without one word said
Had a peach from the tree,
And still as a maid
Enjoy'd the lady. |
This poem saves the idea of a swashbuckling angel from John Travolta's portrayal in Michael, which was an okay movie, but the specificity and concreteness of the film medium brought the idea down into banality rather than preserving the strangeness of things angelic while also conveying the creature's worldliness. Beyond the fantastic elements, of course, there are hints at the moral ideals that underlie Blake's mythologizing -- a reveling in vigor and freedom as divine, particularly a vigor that recognizes itself in others and is holy despite kinship with people discarded as corrupt by conservative censure.
Looking forward to another hundred pages with more like these.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2010 6:06 pm |
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| shrugtheironteacup wrote: |
| drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead |
This is actually apt because I was telling Rudie just the other day that I want to play a William Blake themed cart racer.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Fri Dec 24, 2010 12:58 am |
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| CubaLibre wrote: |
| Everyone is an Eliot man or an Austen man. Sophisticated men choose Eliot. |
I've been finishing up Middlemarch after a ~4 month break. Working through these final 300 pages and, separately, writing some D&D materials for NPCs in a campaign, I find these character descriptions echoing the kind of metaphorical sprawl that I so love in Eliot's work. (I'm pretty sure that it's also good writing, which is why I'm not just cutting it all out for the sake of brevity.)
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Sat Dec 25, 2010 9:37 pm |
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What are you defining as floweriness? Expressive nuance? Polysyllables? It's kind of an empty accusation.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Sun Apr 10, 2011 3:24 am |
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Cleaned up today at my favorite used bookstore, McKay's Books in Chattanooga, TN:
Alnilam, James Dickey
Come Swiftly to Your Love: Love Poems of Ancient Egypt, trans. Ezra Pound and Noel Stock
Eugene Onegin, Pushkin
The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Gambler, Bobok, and A Nasty Story, Dostoyevsky
Democracy & Poetry, Robert Penn Warren
Goshawk, Antelope: Poems, Dave Smith
Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems, William Meredith
From Room to Room: Poems, Jane Kenyon
From Beowulf to Thomas Hardy: Vol. II, ed. Robert Schafer (1927)
The Golden Hind: Revised Edition, Lamson and Smith
Electric Light: Poems, Seamus Heaney
The Cure at Troy: a Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes, trans. Seamus Heaney
Midnight Was My Cry: Poems, Carolyn Kizer
My House: Poems, Nikki Giovanni
Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
Awwww yeah
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