Hughlings Himwich

Where I first heard Robert Creeley

In 1966, I happened to be at Harvard at the time Robert Creeley was visiting. My sense of poetry forever changed that day.  Here is a full recording of that 1966 reading: http://hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom/listeningbooth/poets/creeley.cfm.  "A Form of Women" has never left me.


A Form of Women

I have come far enough
from where I was not before
to have seen the things
looking in at me from through the open door

and have walked tonight
by myself
to see the moonlight
and see it as trees

and shapes more fearful
because I feared
what I did not know
but have wanted to know.

My face is my own, I thought.
But you have seen it
turn into a thousand years.
I watched you cry.

I could not touch you.
I wanted very much to
touch you
but could not.

If it is dark
when this is given to you,
have care for its content
when the moon shines.

My face is my own.
My hands are my own.
My mouth is my own
but I am not.

Moon, moon,
when you leave me alone
all the darkness is
an utter blackness,

a pit of fear,
a stench,
hands unreasonable
never to touch.

But I love you.
Do you love me.
What to say
when you see me.

Billy Collins reading Introduction to Poetry

 

Introduction To Poetry
by Billy Collins (1941- )

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

 

Birdle Burble by Alan Watts

(for James Broughton)

 

I went out of mind and then came to my senses

By meeting a magpie who mixed up his tenses,

Who muddled distinctions of nouns and of verbs,

And insisted that logic is bad for the birds.

     With a poo-wee cluck and a chit, chit-chit;

     The grammar and meaning don't matter a bit.

 

The stars in their courses have no destination;

The train of events will arrive at no station; 

The inmost and ultimate Self of us all

Is dancing on nothing and having a ball.

      So with a chat for chit and with tat for tit,

      This will be that, and that will be It!

How To Be a Poet by Wendell Berry

How To Be a Poet
by Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

The end of the free will debate

The free will vs. determinism debate derives its relevance from dualistic thinking, i.e. that our conscious self is not the one driving the boat, as if there were on the one hand a consciousness that is ignorant of the source of its choices and on the other a brain that is purely mechanical and unconsciously drives our decisions. That argument presupposes that consciousness is something other than the natural unfolding of brain function. This notion of unfolding yields an organic and coherent understanding of how we make decisions. Consciousness is a dimension of a dynamic system, one that allows for self-correction and support for an organism’s fundamental integrity. That the dynamic system is deterministic says no more than that the unfolding of the brain is a natural process that realizes itself in awareness. It is one process, not two. How could it be otherwise? To move at last beyond such dualistic thinking allows us further to contemplate ourselves as an unfolding within a universal process -- as a wave that moves always at one with itself and the sea of which it is an expression.

A Halloween Offering: Goethe's Der Erlkönig

The Erlking by Albert Sterner, ca. 1910

For more information on this poem and for an English translation go to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Erlkönig

Download 21 Der Erlkönig, D. 328

performed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskrau & Gerald Moore

Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind;
Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm,
Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.

"Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?" —
"Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht?
Den Erlenkönig mit Kron und Schweif?" —
"Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif."

"Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir!
Gar schöne Spiele spiel' ich mit dir;
Manch' bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand,
Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand." —

"Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht,
Was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht?" —
"Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind;
In dürren Blättern säuselt der Wind." —

"Willst, feiner Knabe, du mit mir gehen?
Meine Töchter sollen dich warten schön;
Meine Töchter führen den nächtlichen Reihn,
Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein." —

"Mein Vater, mein Vater, und siehst du nicht dort
Erlkönigs Töchter am düstern Ort?" —
"Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh es genau:
Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau. —"

"Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt;
Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt." —
"Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt faßt er mich an!
Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan!" —

Dem Vater grauset's, er reitet geschwind,
Er hält in Armen das ächzende Kind,
Erreicht den Hof mit Müh' und Not;
In seinen Armen das Kind war tot.

Rilke on writing poetry when one is no longer a young man

Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simple emotions (one has emotions early enough)--they are experiences. For the sake of a simple poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else--); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,--and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labour, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very well blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

Excerpt from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

Aube by Rimbaud with audio file

Even if you do not know French, the audiofile below of Aube by Paul A. Mankin will deepen your appreciation of the poem. There are no translations of his poem that convey its beauty.

17 Arthur Rimbaud - Aube

AUBE from Illuminations (1875)

J'ai embrassé l'aube d'été.

Rien ne bougeait encore au front des palais. L'eau était mortre. Les camps d'ombres ne quittaient pas la route du bois. J'ai marché, réveillant les haleines vives et tièdes; et les pierries regardèrent, et les ailes se levèrent sans bruit.

La première enterprise fut, dans le sentier déjà empli de frais et blêmes éclats, une fleur qui me dit son nom.

Je ris au wasserfall blond qui s'échevela à travers les sapins: à la cime argentée je reconnus la déesse.

Alors je levai un à les voiles. Dans l'allée, en agitant les bras. Par la plaine, où je l'ai dénoncée au coq. A la grand'ville elle fuyait parmi les clochers et les dômes, et, courant comme un mendiant sur les quais de marbre, je la chassais.

En haut de la route, près d'un bois de lauriers. Je l'ai entourée avec ses voiles amassés, et j'ai senti un peu son immense corps. L'aube et l'enfant tombèrent au bas du bois.

Au réveil, il était midi.

**************************************************

DAWN from Illuminations (1875)

I embraced the summer dawn.

Nothing stirred on the face of the palaces. The water was still. Crowds of shadows lingered on the road to the woods. I walked, dreaming the warm, brisk winds, and precious stones looked on, and wings soared in silence.

The first venture, on the path already full of fresh and pale glitterings, was a flower who told me her name.

I laughed at the white waterfall dishevelled through the pine trees: at its silvery summit I recognized the goddess.

Then, one by one, I lifted her veils. In the pathway, waving my arms. In the open field, where I betrayed her to the cock. In the city she fled amid the steeples and the domes, and running like a beggar on the marble piers, I chased her.

At the top of the road, near a wood of laurels, I wrapped her in her mass of veils, and felt a little of her immense body. Dawn and the child fell at the edge of the woods.

When I awoke it was noon.

---Peter Y. Chou, WisdomPortal.com

— Above version based on the following translations:
— Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations
translated by Bertrand Mathieu
Boa Editions, Brockport, NY, 1979, pp. 32-33
— Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations
translated by Daniel Sloate
Guernica, Montreal, Canada, 1990, pp. 78-79
— Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and Illuminations
translated by Mark Treharne
J.M. Dent, London, 1998 (no page #)

James Dickey reading "Falling"

Reading:

audio: Download Falling1

print: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171431

Kabir: Except that it robs you of who you are

Except that it robs you of who you are,
What can you say about speech?
Inconceivable to live without,
And impossible to live with,
Speech diminishes you.
Speak with a wise man, there'll be
Much to learn; speak with a fool
All you get is prattle.
Strike a half-empty pot, and it'll make
A loud sound; strike one that is full,
Says Kabir, and hear the silence.

--Kabir (1440-1518)
translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

H. R. Hays: Montauk Shell Heap

Digging here in the clutter
Of clam and scallop shells, I sift the detritus,
Betraying like broken porcelain
The haunt of humanity . . . pathway
into time.

Here the dark dirt is
Rich in ancient death. The sunlight
Washes the hills heaped by glaciers.
In the curve of the shore
A fisherman rakes the same shelled nutrient
From the velvet ooze. The upright animal's
Needs change hardly at all -- food, a little
Love -- but to-day the flint
Grows a menacing edge. Old hunter, the tool,
The shell, filled your pragmatic eye, your world
Was rimmed by this blue shore, these hills.
Archaic realist, you are too close to us!

The legacy speaks for itself --
A few fragile bones,
The passionate dust of appetite and fear,
And a stone scraper that fits accurately
Into the palm of the hand.

H.R. Hays: The New York Public Library

Consolatio by Robert Creeley

What’s gone is gone.
What’s lost is lost.

What’s felt is pulse –
what’s mind, what’s home.

Who’s here, where’s there –
what’s patience now.

What thought of all,
why echo it.

Now to begin –
Why fear the end.

The Coming of Wisdom with Time: William Butler Yeats

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.

Linda Duncan: Midwife

Linda was a hospice nurse and poet and back in '83, when I lived in Oklahoma, she entrusted me with a sheaf of her poems. I have lost track of her. Perhaps if she is still of this world, she will find her way to this page. Or perhaps a friend who remembers her as I do: alive like spring, empathic, fiercely independent. I know that her last name changed both before and after '83. I heard one rumor of her violent death. May that not be true! Whatever the circumstances are she should be remembered for her special gift of midwifery as described here in one of her poems. The last face that many dying souls saw, the last caring touch they felt, the last radiance, was hers. I will post other poems of hers from time to time.

In the winter hours
I paced the lonely hall
Waiting for a birth (of sorts)
Within a dying fall.

Much of birthing's easy,
But some births,
they are hard,
Hard as the hickory nut
Whose sprout waits for the sun,
Hard as the knife within my breast
When grieving's on.

But midwives must keep birthing
new or dying souls,
A kind of birth it was that night,
And, Lord, the wind was cold.

The Secret of Oceans

We carry within us

the secret of oceans

swims in our

night, the deep

sky of our lust

for life, tongue

mouth kiss

skin breast

we rise

crying out

for the shore

to be born. 

"What the Sirens Sang" by Patrick Cook

What the Sirens Sang
>
> To H.H.
>
> Navigavit quidem non ut Palinurus, sed ut Ulysses: immo velut nempe Plato.
> — Sir Thomas More, Utopia
>
> Come, then O great Odysseus,
> Come, you man of many turns.
> Wisest of the Greeks is Odysseus,
> Well-skilled in arts of peace and war,
> A hero blown from windy plains of Troy.
> Crafter of the horse, craftiest of Greeks,
> Well-beloved of the wise goddess.
>
> Rest, then O great Odysseus,
> Rest here upon these rocks.
> Sail no more into rosy-fingered dawn,
> Our weary hero from the gates of Troy,
> Much buffeted on the sea, you suffer, Odysseus.
> From the unrelenting wrath of cruel Poseidon,
> Harsh master of this wine dark sea,
> You suffer long indignities.
> It is not right that such as you should suffer.
>
> Come, then O great Odysseus
> And we shall crown you with laurel
> And pour forth libations and
> You shall be King over
> These rocks and not over these alone,
> For we can grant dominion over all,
> Even over the churning sea of time.
> Come hither, come home.
> These rocks shall be Elysium for you.

                                       >

Violence by Gregory Djanikian

Sometimes it can't be avoided
even though you might decline
the invitation to step outside—
sometimes you are outside

maybe in the repose of your garden
among rose petal and fern, but the whole
unvarnished spectacle of do
before you're done unto unfolding
as spider devours beetle, beetle, aphid,
and the cat red in the tooth and claw.

No need to bring up bombs bursting
in synch or the rockets' red glare
or every laser fescue pointing out
all that's erasable, good-bye good-bye.

It's among school children now,
maybe even in your neighbor's house,
eating ravenously at his table,
agreeing with everything he says.

Inside, your daughter is locking
all the basement windows, your son
is drawing a truth machine to zap
the bad from the good, and when
your wife comes home to tell you
of a small injustice she's endured,
the arrow of your steely retribution
thwunks into a soft, imagined heart.

No one immune here, no one
merely a small flash in the pan:
everything hugely combustible.

In the garden, you're deadheading
lilies, the petals spiraling down
like crushed wings, and your fingers,
steeped in pulp, are turning yellow,
orange, incarnadine, damage
creating its own aesthetic,
painting itself on your skin.

And if anyone asked you now
you'd confess you're damage, too,
you're for wreckage of heart and bone
wrenching out the smallest penance.

Above you, purple bruising the edges
of the sky. Even the heavens.

In another moment, someone
might come looking for you,
touch you on the shoulder
and you'd flame up.

Nothing seems so improbable
as the world of a few minutes ago.

Here's the night full of stars.
Behind each one, the darkness
you can never see.

Outside City Lights

Thalassa by Louis MacNeice

Run out the boat, my broken comrades;
Let the old seaweed crack, the surge
Burgeon oblivious of the last
Embarkation of feckless men,
Let every adverse force converge --
Here we must needs embark again.

Run up the sail, my heartsick comrades;
Let each horizon tilt and lurch –
You know the worst; your wills are fickle,
Your values blurred, your hearts impure
And your past life a ruined church –
But let your poison be your cure.

Put out to sea, ignoble comrades,
Whose record shall be noble yet;
Butting through scarps of moving marble
The narwhal dares us to be free;
By a high star our course is set,
Our end is life. Put out to sea.

Gregory Corso

Gregory Corso, 1930-2001 by Robert Creeley Gregory Corso died last night (January 17), happily in his sleep in Minnesota. He had been ill for much of the past year but had recovered from time to time, saying that he'd got to the classic river but lacked the coin for Charon to carry him over. So he just dipped his toes in the water. In this time his daughter Sherry, a nurse, had been a godsend to him, securing him, steadying the ambiance, just minding the store with great love and clarity. He thought she should get Nurse of the Year recognition at the very least. There's no simple generalization to make of Gregory's life or poetry. There are all too many ways to displace the extraordinary presence and authority he was fact of. Last time we talked, he made the useful point that only a poet could say he or she was a poet -- only they knew. Whereas a philosopher, for instance, needed some other to say that that was what he or she was -- un(e) philosophe! -- poets themselves had to recognize and initiate their own condition. There are several quick websites that help recall him now. One gives a brief biography and discussion of a few of his poems: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/corso/corso.htm Another, more usefully affectionate, is taken from Ed Sanders' The Woodstock Journal. It was Lawrence Ferlinghetti who had suggested last summer that a spate of respects might help cheer Gregory in his illness -- and that they were certainly well merited: http://www.woodstockjournal.com/corso.html A third, which includes some previously noted, is The Museum of American Poetics. There's a 'streamable' video available there of Gregory reading at Naropa , if you can get the sound clearly: http://www.poetspath.com/corso.html Lots of us propose to be poets but who finally stakes all, or just takes all, as being that way? In my life time only Robert Duncan could be his equal in this way. It was honor indeed to have had his company. -- RC, Buffalo, January 18, 2001 See also: "Gregory Corso, a Candid-Voiced Beat Poet, Dies at 70" (New York Times) http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/19/national/19CORS.html The Whole Mess ... Almost I ran up six flights of stairs to my small furnished room opened the window and began throwing out those things most important in life First to go, Truth, squealing like a fink: "Don't! I'll tell awful things about you!" "Oh yeah? Well, I've nothing to hide ... OUT!" Then went God, glowering & whimpering in amazement: "It's not my fault! I'm not the cause of it all!" "OUT!" Then Love, cooing bribes: "You'll never know impotency! All the girls on Vogue covers, all yours!" I pushed her fat ass out and screamed: "You always end up a bummer!" I picked up Faith Hope Charity all three clinging together: "Without us you'll surely die!" "With you I'm going nuts! Goodbye!" Then Beauty ... ah, Beauty -- As I led her to the window I told her: "You I loved best in life ... but you're a killer; Beauty kills!" Not really meaning to drop her I immediately ran downstairs getting there just in time to catch her "You saved me!" she cried I put her down and told her: "Move on." Went back up those six flights went to the money there was no money to throw out. The only thing left in the room was Death hiding beneath the kitchen sink: "I'm not real!" It cried "I'm just a rumor spread by life ..." Laughing I threw it out, kitchen sink and all and suddenly realized Humor was all that was left -- All I could do with Humor was to say: "Out the window with the window!" Just an additional note with respect to Gregory Corso's sad death: "A wake here in NYC Tuesday aft & eve (January 23rd) on Bleeker Street, directly across from the house where he was born. Italian gov't gave permission for his ashes to be interred in the English cemetery in Rome with Shelley." -- RC

Gregory Corso: Protestant Cemetery Rome

Spirit
is life
it flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea.

Click on picture for larger image.

Sorting It Out by Philip Booth

At the table she used to sew at,
he uses his brass desk scissors
to cut up his shirt.
                            Not that the shirt
was that far gone: one ragged cuff,
one elbow through;
                              but here he is,
cutting away the collar
she long since turned.
                                 What gets to him finally,
using his scissors like a bright claw,
is prying buttons off:
                               after they've leapt,
spinning the floor, he bends
to retrieve both sizes:
                                he intends to
save them in some small box; he knows
he has reason to save; if only he knew
where a small box
                            used to be kept.

Philip Booth

---

July 9, 2007

Philip Booth, a Shy Poet Rooted in New England Life, Dead at  81

 

By ROJA HEYDARPOUR

   

Philip Booth, a poet known for his explorations of existence and New England in an intense, sparse style, died on July 2 in Hanover, N.H. He was 81 and had split his time between Hanover and Castine, Me., for many years.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said his daughter Carol Booth.

Mr. Booth wrote 10 books of poetry, including “The Islanders,” “Weathers and Edges,” “Letter From a Distant Land” and “Lifelines: Selected Poems 1950-1999.” He also wrote a book of essays about writing poetry called “Trying to Say It: Outlooks and Insights on How Poems Happen.” He received recognition and honors from many institutions, including Guggenheim, Rockefeller and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.

The sense of privacy that made poetry lovers appreciate Mr. Booth’s work ultimately cost him fame. He spent hours upon hours writing and revising in his room, Ms. Booth said, drawing material from deeper and deeper within his emotional landscape. He rarely traveled on book tours or did readings for large groups.

Stephen Dunn, a former student of Mr. Booth’s and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, wrote in an e-mail message after Mr. Booth’s death, “Booth’s quest was to deepen as opposed to range widely, and in that sense he was a poet of consciousness, even when his subject seemed to be the dailiness of Castine or the vagaries of sailing.”

Philip Edmund Booth was born in Hanover and spent most of his life there and in Castine, the city where his mother grew up and where he first learned to sail. He served in the Army Air Forces during World War II and married Margaret Tillman in 1946.

In addition to his wife, of Hanover, and his daughter Carol, of Amherst, Mass., Mr. Booth is survived by two other daughters, Margot, of Austin, Tex., and Robin, of Rowe, Mass.; and a sister, Lee Klunder, of Hartland, Vt.

He received his bachelor’s degree in English at Dartmouth, where he studied under Robert Frost, and a master’s degree in English at Columbia University. He later taught English at Bowdoin College and Wellesley College in the 1950s but spent the majority of his career at Syracuse University, where he was a professor, a poet in residence and a co-founder of the graduate program in creative writing.

In a poem called “First Lesson,” Mr. Booth wrote to a daughter:

As you float now, where I held you

and let go, remember when fear

cramps your heart what I told you:

lie gently and wide to the light-year

stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

 

A Codex by W.S. Merwin

It was a late book given up for lost
again and again with its bare sentences

at last and their lines that seemed transparent
revealing what had been here the whole way

the poems of daylight after the day
lying open after all on the table

without explanation or emphasis
like sounds left when the syllables have gone

clarifying the whole grammar of waiting
not removing one question from the air

or closing the story although single lights
were beginning by then above and below

while the long twilight deepened its silence
from sapphire through opal to Athena"s iris

until shadow covered the gray pages
the comet words the book of presences

after which there was little left to say
but then it was night and everything was known

                                                   (This poem appeared in NYR Vol. LIV, No. 12)

Protestant Cemetery Rome 2006