This is the only poem
I can read
I am the only one
can write it
I didn’t kill myself
when things went wrong
I didn’t turn
to drugs or teaching
I tried to sleep
but when I couldn’t sleep
I learned to write
I learned to write
what might be read
on nights like this
by one like me
— Leonard Cohen
Posted in Leonard Cohen, Sleep
Finally I can breathe.
The dying geyser seethes
The retreating tide respires
I took you way down deep
Drank you to the bitter lees
Now the poison’s left the heart
And mist blows over the trees.
Below, the river scrambled like a goat
Dislodging stones. The mountain stamped its foot,
Shaking, as from a trance. And I was shut
With wads of sound into a sudden quiet.I thought the thunder had unsettled heaven;
All was so still. And yet the sky was cloven
By flame that left the air cold and engraven.
I waited for the word that was not given,Pent up into a region of pure force,
Made subject to the pressure of the stars;
I saw the angels lifted like pale straws;
I could not stand before those winnowing eyesAnd fell, until I found the world again.
Now I lack grace to tell what I have seen;
For though the head frames words the tongue has none.
And who will prove the surgeon to this stone?
— Geoffrey Hill
Posted in Geoffrey Hill
Do not act out words. Never act out words. Never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. Never close your eyes and jerk your head to one side when you talk about death. Do not fix your burning eyes on me when you speak about love. If you want to impress me when you speak about love put your hand in your pocket or under your dress and play with yourself. If ambition and the hunger for applause have driven you to speak about love you should learn how to do it without disgracing yourself or the material (…) The poem is nothing but information. It is the Constitution of the inner country. If you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. You are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest kind of appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. Think of the words as science, not as art. They are a report. You are speaking before a meeting of the Explorers’ Club of the National Geographic Society. These people know all the risks of mountain climbing. They honour you by taking this for granted. If you rub their faces in it that is an insult to their hospitality.
*
The finest poetry creates its own place of power through words. It does so by itself, not through somebody selling the words. The words in the best poems don’t need any more than speaking. You don’t have to put emotion into them. What you have to do is to hear their strangeness and, within the strangeness, to hear the emotion in them, the whole odd electric experience vibrating as in a diaphragm. The diaphragm is all you really need. You could practically whisper poems like prayers. Their words will fall into the silence of the transformed space like a meteor shower.
Posted in George Szirtes, Leonard Cohen, Poetry
In the haze your image
Trembled; it troubled
And eluded me: mistakenly
I said, ‘Good God!’The name of the Lord — a large bird —
Flew from my breast.
In front: a swirl of mist.
Behind: the empty cage.
— Osip Mandelshtam
Posted in Osip Mandelshtam, Poetry, Religion
He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.
— Robert Graves
Posted in Poetry, Robert Graves
You can tell a lot about a person from how they sleep: how hard or easy it is for them, where they can sleep, what they look like when they sleep, how they wake up. I never told you the thoughts I had when, after we’d made love, unable to sleep as I knew I would be in that unfamiliar room, with this still unfamiliar woman beside me, I looked at you sleeping so prettily, your mouth slightly open, your face trusting sleep.
If we look at a person, we are bound in a short space of time to say what a horrible, what an unbearable person. If we look at Nature, we are bound to say, what a horrible what an unbearable Nature. If we look at something artificial — it doesn’t matter what the artificiality is — we are bound to say in a short space of time what an unbearable artificiality. If we are out walking, we even say after the shortest space of time, what an unbearable walk, just as when we are running we say what an unbearable run, just as when we are standing still, what an unbearable standing still, just as when we are thinking what an unbearable process of thinking. If we meet someone, we think within the shortest space of time, what an unbearable meeting. If we go on a journey, we say to ourselves, after the shortest space of time, what an unbearable journey, what unbearable weather, we say, says Oehler, no matter what the weather is like, if we think about any sort of weather at all. If our intellect is keen, if our thinking is the most ruthless and the most lucid, says Oehler, we are bound after the shortest space of time to say of everything that it is unbearable and horrible. There is no doubt that the art lies in bearing what is unbearable and in not feeling that what is horrible is something horrible. Of course we have to label this art the most difficult of all. The art of existing against the facts, says Oehler, is the most difficult, the art that is the most difficult.
Posted in Thomas Bernhard
Nervously, and without any real need whatever, Franny pushed back her hair with one hand. ‘I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while — just once in a while — there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time! But there never is! You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge. You hardly ever even hear the word “wisdom” mentioned! Do you want to hear something funny? Do you want to hear something really funny? In almost four years of college — and this is the absolute truth — in almost four years of college, the only time I can remember ever even hearing the expression “wise man” being used was in my freshman year, in Political Science! And do you know how it was used? It was used in reference to some nice old poopy elder statesman who’d made a fortune in the stock market and gone to Washington to be an adviser to President Roosevelt. Honestly, now! Four years of college, almost! I’m not saying that happens to everybody, but I just get so upset when I think about it I could die.’
— J.D Salinger, Franny and Zooey
Posted in J.D. Salinger, Religion
In his canvas bag, the pair
of skates could’ve been a valentine.It’s February. I slice across the rink
thinking of blood oranges:
the squeeze, his hands,
the clockwise rotation of the juicer.He follows my motion on ice
the way I know he’ll follow me home.And again, I’m angry as only
an other woman can be angry
when her last triple salchow
of the day ends in a fall, a bruise.His thin figure in the bleachers
chips my concentration.Like a head cold. Fruit pulp.
That stubborn clog in the drain.
Posted in Arlene Ang, Poetry
