anapoetics

kalanithi neruda

I asked him, "Can you breathe okay with my head on your chest like this?"
His answer was "It's the only way I know how to breathe."
(Lucy & Paul Kalanithi)

so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that my sleep shuts your eyes.
(Neruda)

ryan sharif

Where is is
when is is was?
(Kay Ryan)

Is as not
as never.
(Solmaz Sharif)

tranströmer stevens

Unmoving, the ant in the forest looks into
nothing.  And nothing is heard but the ticking
of dark greenery, nightlong the murmur deep
(Tomas Tranströmer, trans. May Swenson)

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
(Wallace Stevens)

kaminsky tranströmer

Townspeople
watch children but feel under the bare feet of their thoughts

the cold stone of the city.
(Ilya Kaminsky)

The city suspended in the spaciousness of noon.
Interment in simmering light.
(Tomas Tranströmer, trans. May Swenson)

davies ryan

"If you ask 'How many revisions are enough, when is it done?'—that is a resistance to revision.  ....  We fear new knowledge because it brings complication, and could change the whole story [poem] and make it feel like doneness is a lot farther away." (from Peter Ho Davies lecture, "The Revision Thing")

“If she says that it has a problem, I take it very seriously. She’ll say, There’s a gap here, there is something missing.  It makes me mad. I don’t like it. Who would? You think you’ve done something and you find out you haven’t done it.” (from Kay Ryan's Paris Review interview)

sappho plath

not one girl I think
who looks on the light of the sun
will ever have wisdom like this
(Sappho, trans. Anne Carson)

Let them astound his heart with their merit.
What girl ever flourished in such company?
(Plath)

tranströmer hirshfield

I’m carried in my shadow
like a violin
in its black case.
(Tranströmer, trans. Michael McGriff)

though day and night I wait for hunger
to find me its dark wood violin, inside its dark wood case.
(Hirshfield)

rilke rilke

I love reading poetry in translation, because you can be amazed by the same poem in a slightly different way again and again.

The translation on the left is by Babette Deutsch.

plath hofmann

                                                         The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars.
(Plath)

                                                    and I felt

the sun abandoning the window behind me
(Hofmann)

tierney rilke

I dream dreams now in which I do not appear.
(Brian Tierney)

Dreamer, it is I who am your dream.
(Rilke, trans. Babette Deutsch)

tierney cummings

to be counted
among the dynasties of the harvest,
& what the rain takes apart with its tiny hands
(Brian Tierney)

and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
(e.e. cummings)

mcgriff plath

I hear vines
growing up through the lake.
They reach for the moon
like the hair of the dead.
(McGriff)

 

A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;

Stars open among the lilies.
(Plath)

wilbur plath

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul   

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple   

As false dawn.

(Wilbur)

 

Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?

This is the silence of astounded souls.

(Plath)

lowell plath

All night I’ve held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive.
(Lowell)

And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.
(Plath)

Right now I am reading Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison (Knopf 2017).  The chapters all begin with lines from Lowell’s poems.  I’m less familiar with his work than with Plath’s, and I keep being reminded of her.  I love these lines from the same Lowell poem, and I hear still more echoes in Plath’s:

blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days’ white.

Jamison’s book on Lowell is longer than her other works; it goes into far more detail than anyone but the most avid Lowell fans will find interesting. So I’ve been skipping around in it.

lowell plath

if we leaned forward, and should dip a finger
into this river's momentary black flow,
infinite small stars would break like fish.
(Robert Lowell)

The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.
A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;

Stars open among the lilies.
(Sylvia Plath)

best poems

Somewhere, recently, I read this:

I run a personal blog series of the top 5 best short stories I’ve read online each month. This has helped me both with my own writing and my submissions to particular journals.

I can no longer remember where this came from, and I've searched for it with no luck, or I'd provide attribution and a link.  Anyway, I'm going to try this occasionally, with recent poems I've read online that struck me in some way.  I may do a post on an individual poem or a group of poems. 

Today, I enjoyed "The Weather in Here" by Allison Paster-Torres, just published in B O D Y.  On a first read I assumed that the speaker was male (an enlightened male who understood when "it was her turn/ to keep speaking"). On a second read I realized the speaker must be female, and the poem changed into a series of slightly different truths about intimacy and "distance." 

hillman strand

I work a lot from intuition. And I do like the look of handwriting, so I’ll copy the poem over and over to allow new material to enter. When it seems very far along I’ll put it on the computer, but not until then because I think the look of print gets people deranged into thinking that they’ve finished something.  It looks finished, and a printed poem looks as if it can’t be fiddled with. 
(Brenda Hillman)

When I read a poem in longhand, I’m hearing it. When I read it in typescript, I’m reading it. A poem can appear finished just because of the cleanness of the typescript, and I don’t want it to seem finished before it is. A poem has already been brought into the world to some extent when it’s typed. I feel more like an editor than a poet after that.
(Mark Strand)

from proofs and theories by louise glück

It seems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished.
All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective,
but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality,
is so much more vast than that which we do know. 
What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysteries.
The problem is to make a whole that does not forfeit that power.

***

When poems are difficult, it is often because their silences are complicated, hard to follow.
For me, the answer to such moments is not more language.

(Louise Glück)

"somewhere in between the works that I admire"

I work in a desperate collage method. I write in a journal and on a computer and in a desk journal. I then try to pull pieces of these writings together and see if they will talk to each other. If I’m lucky, I’ll also have an idea that I can read about or research that will somehow connect to the poem. If I can find something like that, then the poem can take shape.  (Judy Halebsky)

 

This resonates because finding "pieces of these writings" that "will talk to each other" is what I try to do too.  I have both of Judy Halebsky's books, thanks to my dear friend Linda Collins.  Judy is doing a reading this Sunday afternoon (8/7) in Oakland for Poetry Flash, at Diesel, A Bookstore. 

 

"devastate and startle"

"Be determined about improving your work ....
Collect friends (in book and human form) who support,
inspire, and challenge you." —Matthea Harvey

I collected a few more such (human) friends at the Napa Valley Writers' Conference last week.