Thursday, 10 May 2012

• A Shout out and a Recommendation.

  @Awoolham has always been an inspiration to me since I started XWS and she was my fist victim—I mean candidate! I love Aye’s unique perspective and her brash honesty in her blogs. I admire her ability to appreciate poetry. In the last four years of undergrad I’ve struggled with poetry: do I love it or do I hate it? I hated it for the last four years, and I loved it before that, and now that I’m officially done (at least until I find out I don’t get to graduate) with my undergrad, I think I’m finally back to loving poetry. Only this time I have four years worth of books and education to help me appreciate others poetry in a way I never could before. I still read for the purpose of enjoyment and enlightenment, but perhaps now I can find inspiration and value in things I thought I hated the last four years. So I’ve begun reading one of my text books from my Sophomore year again, and I came across some poems I find particularly inspiring, and I thought I’d share them with you. I also like some of the author’s comments, so I thought I’d include those too in quotations.

   

  From A Book of Luminous Things by Czeslaw Milosz:

   

  “The secret of all art, also of poetry, is, thus, distance.”

  “Remembering, we move to that land of past time, yet now without our former passions: we do not strive for anything, we are not afraid of anything, we become an eye which perceives and finds details that had escaped our attention.”

  DAVID WAGONER

  THE AUTHOR OF AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY SKETCHES A BIRD, NOW EXTINCT

  When he walked through town, the wing-shot bird he’d hidden

  Inside his coat began to cry like a baby,

  High and plaintive and loud as the calls he’d heard

  While hunting it in the woods, and goodwives stared

  And scurried indoors to guard their own from harm.

   

  And the innkeeper and the goodmen in the tavern

  Asked him whether his child was sick, then laughed.

  Slapped knees, and laughed as he unswaddled his prize,

  His pride and burden: an ivory-billed woodpecker

  As big as a crow, still wailing and squealing.

   

  Upstairs, when he let it go in his workroom,

  It fell silent at last. He told at dinner

  How devoted masters of birds drawn from the life

  Must gather their flocks around them with a rifle

  And make them live forever inside books.

   

  Later, he found his bedspread covered with plaster

  And the bird clinging beside a hole in the wall

  Clear through to already-splintered weatherboards

  And the sky beyond. While he tied one of its legs

  To a table leg, it started wailing again.

   

  And went on wailing as if toward cypress groves

  While the artist drew and tinted on fine vellum

  Its red cockade, gray claws, and sepia eyes

  From which a white edge flowed to the lame wing

  Like light flying and ended there in blackness.

   

  He drew and studied for days, eating and dreaming

  Fitfully through the dancing and loud drumming

  Of an ivory bill that refused pecans and beetles,

  Chestnuts and sweet-sour fruit of magnolias,

  Riddling his table, slashing his fingers, wailing.

   

  He watched it die, he said, with great regret.

   

  “In a way, a poem is in one respect superior to a drawing, because it may follow a sequence of movements.”

   

  LI-YOUNG LEE

  IRISES

   

  I.

  In the night, in the wind, at the edge of the rain,

  I find five irises, and call them lovely.

  As if a woman, once, lay by them awhile,

  then woke, rose, went, the memory of hair

  lingers on their sweet tongues.

   

  I’d like to tear these petals with my teeth.

  I’d like to investigate these hairy selves,

  their beauty and indifference. They hold

  their breath all their lives

  and open, open.

   

                  2.

  We are not lovers, not brother and sister,

  though we drift hand in hand through a hall

  thrilling and burning as thought and desire

  expire, and, over this dream of life,

  this life of sleep, we waken dying—

  violet becoming blue, growing

  black, black—all that

  an iris ever prays,

  to be.

   

  “Poets have always been fascinated by the incomprehensible behavior of some creatures, for instance, the moth, which strives toward light and burns itself in the flame of a candle or kerosene lamp.”

  My response: We should probably focus on our own incomprehensible behavior.

   

  WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

  IN PRAISE OF SELF-DEPRECATION

   

  The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.

  Scruples are alien to the black panther.

  Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.

  The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.

   

  The self-critical jackal does not exist.

  The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly

  live as they live and are glad of it.

   

  The killer-whale’s heart weighs one hundred kilos

  but in other respects it is light.

   

  There is nothing more animal-like

  than a clear conscience

  on the third planet of the Sun.

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