Baudelaire (& Thoreau) for a Lazy Monday Afternoon

Here's a little something for a lazy Monday afternoon:

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The Sky
Where'er he be, on water or on land,
---Under pale suns or climes that flames enfold;
One of Christ's own, or of Cythera's band,
---Shadowy beggar or Croesus rich with gold;

Citizen, peasant, student, tramp; whate'er
---His little brain may be, alive or dead;
Man knows the fear of mystery everywhere,
---And peeps, with trembling glances, overhead.

The heaven above! A strangling cavern wall;
The lighted ceiling of a music hall
Where every actor treads a bloody soil ―

The hermit's hope; the terror of the sot;
The sky: the black lid of the mighty pot
---Where the vast human generations boil!

---------------------------------------translated by James Huneker

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In addition to Mr. B's usual take on all things mundane, check out Magnapoets Japanese Form: there is some real high quality short work being done there. I've put a permanent link along the sidebar under blogs.

If you always wanted to see nature through the eyes of Henry David Thoreau and just haven't found the time, check out the May 18th posting on The Blog of Henry David Thoreau; it perfectly captures what's happening just outside many of our windows right now.

And if you don't believe me, just get out there and look!

best,
Don

Happy Birthday, Theodore Roethke

Today is the birthday of American poet Theodore Roethke. He wrote some incredibly resonant short poems, including My Papa's Waltz (← this is Roethke reading it) and Root Cellar. Here is another that might be thought of as a companion piece to Root Cellar.


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Cuttings

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?
I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones, I feel it --
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.

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Dark enough for ya? If ever there was a description of the process that is spring (along with Root Cellar), this is it.


best,
Don


Note: If you would like to receive the two current issues of Lilliput Review free (or have your current subscription extended two issues), just make a suggestion at the Near Perfect Books page. How about Roethke then, eh?

Yannis Ritsos and the New Blog Look

If you don't know about it already, make time to check out the blog Hints: The Poetry of Yannis Ritsos, it is a daily posting of the works of this magnificent Greek poet. Here is a poem from their post last yesterday:

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The Shadows of Birds: 42

42.
Discreet lights of avenues
beneath the trees
a bicycler talks
with a soldier
a drinking glass breaks
on the pavement
the orange juice sketches
a broad-shouldered angel
with one foot missing.

Athens—May 15, 1980

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Meanwhile, hope you like the new look of the blog. There were a number of reasons I changed, not the least of which was I was getting sick of the old color. More importantly, with a color background Blogger was not allowing me to indent individual lines of poems, so any poems with variously indented lines couldn't be used, which is a pretty big limitation. Here is an example of a poem from issue #146 of Lilliput that I would not have been able to print previously:



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field of sunflowers
---far as the eye can see
_____farther

Anne LB Davidson

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Before, no matter what I did with the formatting, it would have come out like this:


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field of sunflowers
far as the eye can see
farther

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Obviously, you can see in this case that this violates the poet's intent. Hence, the new look. The workaround I came up with is kind of goofy, but it appears to work in both Firefox and Explorer, so I'm good.


For now,
Don


Note: If you would like to receive the two current issues of Lilliput Review free, just make a suggestion at the Near Perfect Books page.

Dickinson, Yosano Akiko, and Basho

Cover art by Harland Ristau

I'm currently working on a couple of projects concerning Emily Dickinson which I'll probably be discussing in future postings. For the moment, for those who didn't see/hear it, I'd like to refer you to The Writer's Almanac for yesterday's rendition of "I shall keep singing!", which, like much of the best of her work, seems so simplistic on the surface but resonates like all get-out.

Over the past year and into the foreseeable future, I have and will be continuing to publish Dennis Maloney's translations of the work of my favorite tanka poet, Yosano Akiko. At least four new poems are forthcoming in the next two issues of Lilliput. In the meantime, here are a couple of older translations by Glenn Hughes and Yozan T. Iwasaki:

There are numberless steps
Up to my heart.
He climbed perhaps two or three.

Like my heart,
Which is waiting for you,
This bouquet of flowers will wither
Before tonight has passed.

The white iris
And the purple iris
Grow side by side in the pond,
Yet never open their hearts
To each other.

I've been perusing Basho and His Interpreters by Makoto Ueda, one of the Near Perfect Books of Poems list; the list has now grown to 28 items, with lots of folks taking advantage of the two free issues offer. In addition to being an all new translation of Basho's work, the poems are accompanied by extensive notes and commentaries which are very helpful in bridging the historical and cultural gaps for Westerners. Here are a few:

night . . . silently
in the moonlight, a worm
digs into a chestnut



in the seasonal rain
the crane's legs
have become shorter



with morning glories
a man eats breakfast
- that is what I am

Finally, before getting to this week's archive issue of Lillie, I'd like to mention that their is an excellent article/interview on/with Mary Oliver, in the Block Island Times. When asked to name her favorite poets, she said "Whitman, Whitman, Whitman!" I knew there was a reason I liked her: Whitman was my choice on the Near Perfect Books of Poems list.

This week's archive issue is #90, from July 1997, with a great cover by the late, very much missed Harland Ristau. Here's a couple of little gems that opened that issue:

The Wrong Path

One more mile again
another dew thunders falling
from the leaf's edge

Laura Bast-Russo

the way
is not
the map

John Viera

from Reroutings III

ID ____ RID ____ RIDE

Richard Kostelanetz

And, to close out, by the queen of the small press:

I Don't Want To Move

pillow that smells like skin
your fingers ----- light on
water in a Monet ----- that
will change before the
paint drys

Lyn Lifshin

best,
Don


Note: If you would like to receive the two current issues of Lilliput Review free, just make a suggestion at the Near Perfect Books page.

Country Joe McDonald and Basho

It's Country Joe McDonald's birthday. Here's a little something to commemorate it. Stick with it; after the annoying intro, it gets good, particularly "Who Am I."

And, from one of the Near Perfect Books of Poems, this selection from Basho and His Interpreters:

oh, nothing's happened to me!
yesterday has passed -
fugu soup

Basho

Homer Simpson's got nothing on Basho ...


best,
Don


PS If you would like to receive the two current issues of Lilliput Review free, just make a suggestion at the above Near Perfect Books link.

4 Poems: Kerouac, Bly, Orr, and Issa

Here are 4 poems, two by poets chosen from their books suggested for the Near Perfect Books of Poetry page. First, Jack Kerouac, from Book of Haikus:



Missing a kick
at the icebox door
It closed anyway

Jack Kerouac

Next, Robert Bly, from his first collection, Silence in the Snowy Fields:



"Taking The Hands"

Taking the hands of someone you love,
You see they are delicate cages . . .
Tiny birds are singing
In the secluded prairies
And the deep valleys of the hand.

Robert Bly

And here is Issa, who isn't on the list yet, but should be, in a Robert Hass translation:



All the time I Pray to Buddha

All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes.

Issa, translated by Robert Hass

Finally, poem-wise, a darkish little poem by Gregory Orr from the delightful collection Pocket Poems, edited by Paul Janeczko:



The Sweater

I will lose you. It is written
into this poem the way
the fisherman's wife knits
his death into the sweater.

Gregory Orr

And, finally, otherwise, another six titles have been added to the Near Perfect Books list: check it out.



best,
Don



PS If you would like to receive the two current issues of Lilliput Review free, just make a suggestion at the above Near Perfect Books link

Also, it was pointed out to me that I made a mistake listing the email address on the sidebars of both the blog and the homepage. The email, spelled out to avoid spam bots, is:

lilliput review at gmail dot com

Remove the spaces, replace at with@ and dot with . and you're good to go.

Poetry Follies for a Rainy Friday Afternoon

Lunch hour and it's another rainy Friday afternoon in Pittsburgh. As an antidote to all this damp, below is a neat little bit with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, the later doing his very best John Cleese homage. Thanks once again go to Jessa Crispin at Blog of Bookslut for pointing in this direction. Be forewarned: the language envelop is pushed here, so it may not be for the shy or easily flustered linguistically. Enjoy.

best,
Don