The 'Share Some Poetry' Thread

Read Richmond Lattimore's translation of Homer's Iliad. Now that's real poetry. Isn't it strange how the oldest poem we have, is almost incalculably the greatest?

Poem "No Loser, No Weeper"

" I hate to lose something,"
then she bent her head
"even a dime, I wish I was dead.
I can't explain it. No more to be said.
Cept I hate to lose something."

"I lost a doll once and cried for a week.
She could open her eyes, and do all but speak.
I believe she was took, by some doll-snatching-
sneak
I tell you, I hate to lose something."

"A watch of mine once, got up and walked away.
It had twelve numbers on it and for the time of
day.
I'll never forget it and all I can say
Is I really hate to lose something."

"Now if I felt that way bout a watch and a toy,
What you think I feel bout my lover-boy?
I an't threatening you madam, but he is my
evening's joy.
And I mean I really hate to lose something."

harmless_little_f*** wrote:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

This is the Four Weddings and a Funeral Poem. Great poem!

HunterandHunted wrote:

T.S Eliot - 'The Waste Land' - edited by Ezra Pound - best version
.

Have you compared the 1922 edition of The Waste Land, first published in The Criterion, with manuscript examples of He Do The Police In Different Voices (pre-Pound)? Pound did a consummate editorial job on The Waste Land; the extent of his creative input, as an editor determining the themes and forms of the poem, is something readers will argue about, long after we're dead.

Also, Pound cut out some potentially troublesome sections, such as:


Full fathom five your Bleistein lies
Under the flatfish and the squids.

Graves' Disease in a dead Jew's eyes!
Where the crabs have eat the lids.

A Coney Island of the mind 29

And that's the way it always is and that's the way
it always ends and the fire and the rose are one
and always the same scene and always the same
subject right from the beginning like in the Bible
or The Sun Also Rises which begins Robert Cohn
was middleweight boxing champion of his class
but later we lost our balls and there we go again
there we are again there's the same old theme
and scene again with all the citizens and all
the characters all working up to it right from
the first and it looks like all they ever think of
is doing It and it doesn't matter much with who
half the time but the other half it matters more
than anything O the sweet love fevers yes and
there's always complications like maybe she has
no eyes for him or him no eyes for her or her no
eyes for her or him no eyes for him or something
or other stands in the way like his mother or
her father or someone like that but they go right
on trying to get it all the time like in Shakespeare
or The Waste Land or Proust remembering his Things
Past or wherever And there they all are struggling
toward each other or after each other like those
marble maidens on that Grecian Urn or on any market
street or merrygoround around and around they go
all hunting love and half the hungry time not even
knowing just what is really eating them like Robin
walking in her Nightwood streets although it isn't
quite as simple as all that as if all she really
needed was a good fivecent cigar oh no and those
who have not hunted will not recognize the hunting
poise and then the hawks that hover where the
heart is hid and the hungry horses crying and
the stone angels and heaven and hell and Yerma
with her blind breasts under her dress and then
Christopher Columbus sailing off in search and
Rudolph Valentine and Juliet and Romeo and John
Barrymore and Anna Livia and Abie's Irish Rose
and so Goodnight Sweet Prince all over again
with everyone and everybody laughing and crying
along wherever night and day winter and summer
spring and tomorrow like Anna Karenina lost in
the snow and the cry of hunters in a great wood
and the soldiers coming and Freud and Ulysses
always on their hungry travels after the same
hot grail like King Arthur and his nighttime knights
and everybody wondering where and how it will all
end like in the movies or in some nightmaze novel
yes as in a nightmaze Yes I said Yes I will and he
called me his Andalusian rose and I said Yes my
heart was going like mad and that's the way Ulysses
ends as everything always ends when that hunting
cock of flesh at last cries out and has his glory
moment God and then comes tumbling down the sound
of axes in the wood and the trees falling and down
it goes the sweet cock's sword so wilting in the
fair flesh fields away alone at last and loved
and lost and found upon a riverbank along a
riverrun right where it all began and so begins again

Pictures of the gone world 11

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing
all the time

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn't half so bad
if it isn't you

Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey to
with its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen
and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to


Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
'living it up'

Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling

mortician

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

Have you compared the 1922 edition of The Waste Land, first published in The Criterion, with manuscript examples of He Do The Police In Different Voices (pre-Pound)? Pound did a consummate editorial job on The Waste Land; the extent of his creative input, as an editor determining the themes and forms of the poem, is something readers will argue about, long after we're dead.

Also, Pound cut out some potentially troublesome sections, such as:


Full fathom five your Bleistein lies
Under the flatfish and the squids.

Graves' Disease in a dead Jew's eyes!
Where the crabs have eat the lids.

Haven't read the pre-Pound edition, but have it on good authority from many different sources that his edition is the leader in the market, so to speak - regardless of arguments over undue influence - but perhaps I shouldn't take that as a given...
But in turn it led me to true imagism/Vorticism and its makers - life in the kaleidoscope...lol.

'In A Station At The Metro'

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

- Ezra Pound

HunterandHunted wrote:

Haven't read the pre-Pound edition, but have it on good authority from many different sources that his edition is the leader in the market, so to speak - regardless of arguments over undue influence - but perhaps I shouldn't take that as a given...
But in turn it led me to true imagism/Vorticism and its makers - life in the kaleidoscope...lol.

'In A Station At The Metro'

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

- Ezra Pound

The poem above, and A River Merchant's Wife, A Letter (translated by Pound) are the ones I remember from him. A River Merchant's Wife, A Letter was my favorite poem for many years:

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fo-Sa.

September Song

born 19.6.32 - deported 24.9.42

Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
you were not. Not forgotten
or passed over at the proper time.

As estimated, you died. Things marched,
sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries.

(I have made
an elegy for myself it
is true)

September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

This is plenty. This is more than enough.