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Declan MacManus
Sep 1, 2011

damn i'm really in this bitch

Poems are way cool and come in all different shapes and sizes. The one unifying factor for poetry is that every culture in the world has it and that no one ever seems to know how to teach it in school. It's also the rare form of writing that isn't dominated by dudes

Some cool poems that you probably read in high school and should give another shot:
-We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks
-Howl by Allen Ginsburg
-I Sing the Body Electric by Walt Whitman
-the red wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams
-Nikki-Rosa by Nikki Giovanni
-The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot

A list of influential or otherwise accessible poets to get started on:
-T.S. Eliot
-John Donne
-Emily Dickinson
-Walt Whitman
-Seamus Haney
-Dylan Thomas
-Isaac Rosenberg
-Matsuo Basho
-Kobayashi Issa

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Stravinsky
May 31, 2011

Robert Frost is the Thomas Kinkade of american poetry.

Declan MacManus
Sep 1, 2011

damn i'm really in this bitch

Stravinsky posted:

Robert Frost is the Thomas Kinkade of american poetry.

He is garbage and his poo poo is only popular because it's easy to understand and broad enough to apply to anything.

FactsAreUseless
Feb 16, 2011

One of my favorite poets is Richard Hugo, who's hugely important in northwestern poetry. His collection "What Thou Lovest Well Remains American" is a classic. He mostly writes about small western towns, and his poems mostly focus on themes of poverty and the rural working class. A good example of his work: Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg.

For more contemporary poetry with a similar American history focus, there's Gabrielle Calvocoressi. She's fairly new, but has already received several awards. Her collection The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart is excellent, especially "At the Adult Drive-In," a multi-part poem that appears throughout the collection.

For women poets I also like Cate Marvin, especially her collection Fragment of the Head of a Queen. I don't know a whole lot else about her, I just read the collection.

On the subject of women poets, I've always liked Anne Sexton, a contemporary of Sylvia Plath. I prefer her work to Plath's, but she tends to get overlooked because of Plath. Her best-known poem is "For My Lover, Returning To His Wife.

Stravinsky
May 31, 2011

What are peoples opinions in regards to translations of poetry. I always have been wary of anything that was not originally written in English because poetry hinges on word choice. Especially so if you have a situation where a word does not really have a companion word in the language your translating to.

Poutling
Dec 26, 2005

spacebunny to the rescue

Declan MacManus posted:

Poems are way cool and come in all different shapes and sizes. The one unifying factor for poetry is that every culture in the world has it and that no one ever seems to know how to teach it in school. It's also the rare form of writing that isn't dominated by dudes

Some cool poems that you probably read in high school and should give another shot:
-We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks
-Howl by Allen Ginsburg
-I Sing the Body Electric by Walt Whitman
-the red wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams
-Nikki-Rosa by Nikki Giovanni
-The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot

A list of influential or otherwise accessible poets to get started on:
-T.S. Eliot
-John Donne
-Emily Dickinson
-Walt Whitman
-Seamus Haney
-Dylan Thomas
-Isaac Rosenberg
-Matsuo Basho
-Kobayashi Issa

That list is pretty western-centric with 2 Japanese haiku guys thrown in at the end. I would add at least Pablo Neruda and Rainer Maria Rilke to the list, and maybe Cavafy and Czeslaw Milosz.

Stravinsky posted:

What are peoples opinions in regards to translations of poetry. I always have been wary of anything that was not originally written in English because poetry hinges on word choice. Especially so if you have a situation where a word does not really have a companion word in the language your translating to.


You read a lot of world lit in fiction and I think you hit the same issues that you would there that you would in poetry. I hear this is especially true for Japanese literature where the kanji chosen can sometimes have 2 or 3 different meanings and can add layers to a passage that are not easily translated into English. I think the key is to find the right translator who can capture not only the direct translation but the spirit of the poem. Translating itself is an art form.

Declan MacManus
Sep 1, 2011

damn i'm really in this bitch

Poutling posted:

That list is pretty western-centric with 2 Japanese haiku guys thrown in at the end. I would add at least Pablo Neruda and Rainer Maria Rilke to the list, and maybe Cavafy and Czeslaw Milosz.

That is entirely fair. In my defense, I was mostly gearing it towards Western audiences, but Neruda is a pretty gross omission on my part. :)

Poutling posted:

You read a lot of world lit in fiction and I think you hit the same issues that you would there that you would in poetry. I hear this is especially true for Japanese literature where the kanji chosen can sometimes have 2 or 3 different meanings and can add layers to a passage that are not easily translated into English. I think the key is to find the right translator who can capture not only the direct translation but the spirit of the poem. Translating itself is an art form.

As long as they're not doing an Ezra Pound style hackjob I think there's artistic merit to a translation but it becomes a separate work, filtered through the eyes of a translator. Something neat I saw in a translation of Nahuatl poetry was that they included a glossary of Nahuatl terms with a few different definitions for each so that the reader was empowered to make their own translation. It would be a shame to miss out on poems written in another language, though.

Sharkie
Feb 4, 2013

by Fluffdaddy
I really like Wallace Stevens. I could read Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird every day and see something new in it each time -- it's almost like a set of tarot cards, vivid images you can tease meanings out of. He's able to draw unsettling and beautiful things out of daily life, like in The Emperor of Ice Cream, though I think his diction can be a little strained at his worser moments. He was also a full-time insurance executive, which is cool.

FactsAreUseless posted:

I've always liked Anne Sexton, a contemporary of Sylvia Plath. I prefer her work to Plath's, but she tends to get overlooked because of Plath. Her best-known poem is "For My Lover, Returning To His Wife.

Yes! Although I have to pace myself with her because her poetry is just so raw. I like A Story for Rose on the Midnight Flight to Boston

Stravinsky posted:

Robert Frost is the Thomas Kinkade of american poetry.

Eh, I'm not his biggest fan or anything, but there's usually a bit more going on there than he's popularly given credit for. I wouldn't say Design is particularly Kinkadesque.

Walh Hara
May 11, 2012

Stravinsky posted:

What are peoples opinions in regards to translations of poetry. I always have been wary of anything that was not originally written in English because poetry hinges on word choice. Especially so if you have a situation where a word does not really have a companion word in the language your translating to.

In addition, what are peoples opinion in regards to reading poetry not in your mother language? More concrete, are there English authors/poems that are more friendly towards/readable for people who have English as second language? Seems to me there is a difference in being fluent enough that you can understand nobels compaired to being fluent enough to really understand poetry.

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound

Stravinsky posted:

What are peoples opinions in regards to translations of poetry. I always have been wary of anything that was not originally written in English because poetry hinges on word choice. Especially so if you have a situation where a word does not really have a companion word in the language your translating to.

It takes a poet approximately as skilled in the "to" language as the original writer was in the "from" language. Ednay St. Vincent Millay has a lot of interesting thoughts on the subject in her introduction to her translation of Fleurs du Mal:

quote:

To translate poetry into prose, no matter how faithfully and even subtly the words are reproduced, is to betray the poem. To translate formal stanzas into free verse, free verse into rhymed couplets, is to fail the foreign poet in a very important way.

With most poets, the shape of the poem is not an extraneous attribute of it: the poem could not conceivably have been written in any other form. When the image of the poem first rises before the suddenly quieted and intensely agitated person who is to write it, its shadowy bulk is already dimly outlines; it is rhymed or unrhymed; it is trimeter, tetrameter, or pentameter'; it is free verse, a sonnet, an epic, an ode, a five-act play. To many poets, the physical character of their poem, its rhythm, its rhyme, its music, the way it looks on the page, is quite as important as the thing they wish to say; to some it is vastly more important. To translate the poetry of E.E. Cummings into the rhymed alexandrines of Molière, would be to do Mr. Cummings no service.

Yet this is precisely the sort of thing which is done in a majority of instances when poetry is translated from one language to another. The translator takes the poem, no matter what its form may be, and forces it into the meter and form to which he is most accustomed, the one in which he writes most easily. There are notable exceptions (John Payne and W.J. Robertson, for example, both of whom have translated into alexandrines and managed them very skillfully). But for the most part the translator -- and no wonder -- give himself every possible help and advantage at the outset; a French poet translating verse, no matter what its metrical scheme may be, into French, will, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, translate it into alexandrines; an English poet will translate alexandrines into pentameter. In Les Fleurs du Mal there are only two poems in lines of ten syllables -- Le Léthé, which opens this collection, and Le Portrait, which appears further on.


.. . . When George Dillon wrote me that he was translating some of Les Fleurs du Mal into English verse, and that he was using in every instance the meter and the form used by Baudelaire in the original poem, I was very much interested; this had always seemed to me the only way to go about such a task. It is true that the translator, who is hard put to it enough in any case to transpose a poem from one language into another without strangling it in the process, here takes upon himself an added burden; but he is more than rewarded when he finds that his translation, when read aloud directly after the original, echoes the original, that it is still, in some miraculous way, the same poem, although its words are in a different language. One impertinence at least, of the many impertinences almost necessarily involved in re-writing another person's poem, has not been committed: the poem has been pretty roughly handled, possibly, but its anatomy at least is still intact.

http://hectocotylus.blogspot.com/2009/06/edna-st-vincent-millay-baudelaire.html

Her translation(s) are good enough that I've had my copy of that collection deliberately stolen by a friend of mine, so that's probably a good sign. For an example from her translation, check the link here: http://fleursdumal.org/poem/129, the one listing George Dillon as author. When you compare the version keeping the original meter with the various other translations that didn't the difference is really striking.

I also really like the Black Marigolds collection of translated Asian poetry by E. Powys Mathers (quoted in Steinbeck's Cannery Row; Powys Mathers is also the translator of the Mardrus and Mathers edition of the complete, four-volume Arabian Nights). Mathers was a really interesting translator who sometimes invented his original sources out of whole cloth as an excuse to sell his own poetry as coming from a foreign land, but Black Marigolds is an actual (though somewhat free) translation of the Indian Chaurapanchasika.


http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/bilhana/bil01.htm

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Feb 13, 2014

Declan MacManus
Sep 1, 2011

damn i'm really in this bitch

Walh Hara posted:

In addition, what are peoples opinion in regards to reading poetry not in your mother language? More concrete, are there English authors/poems that are more friendly towards/readable for people who have English as second language? Seems to me there is a difference in being fluent enough that you can understand nobels compaired to being fluent enough to really understand poetry.

It's tough because I'd say the majority of poetry relies upon cultural cues and context along with the implicit meanings of words and statements. That and the ambiguity of language informs a lot of it (and is why poetry is so difficult) and that's really hard to transcend. That being said, I think imagery translates well, so poets like Dickinson, Robert Lowell, some Stephen Crane stuff, and Sharon Olds might be a good place to start. What kind of poetry/poems are you into?

Yorkshire Pudding
Nov 24, 2006



I have always loved reading and knew I wanted to study literature since I was a teenager. I loved the classics but could never get into poetry. Although I always excelled at reading in High School I just thought I never "got" poetry. It wasn't until I took an introductory poetry class in college that I really fell in love with it. I started reading lots of Blake, Tennyson, Burns, and Wordsworth. I spent basically my entire Junior year of college writing about Philip Larkin and since my college has the largest collection of W.B. Yeats work I ended up doing a lot of research papers about him.

I haven't been reading a lot lately, mostly because I'm overseas and for some reason I don't like to read poetry on my e-reader, but when I get back I think I'm going to start collecting books. I was visiting my brother-in-law's home last summer and his family has a big ranch with this guesthouse filled with antiques, and I happened upon a collection of all of Shakespeare's works in these tiny books that were published in the mid 19th century and I've been hounding him about letting me buy them.

I think the most important advice I ever got was from my intro poetry professor who suggested that I only read poetry in quiet, private places so that I am able to read it out loud. That single piece of advice made all the difference between enjoying poetry and just reading it because it was assigned.

Declan MacManus
Sep 1, 2011

damn i'm really in this bitch

Poetry is all about the rhythm. I recommend going to a poetry reading (as dull as that might sound on paper) just to get a feel for the breadth of cadences possible in verse. Most song lyrics would be pretty dumb if you only ever read them on a page (although many of them are still very dumb).

Yiggy
Sep 12, 2004

"Imagination is not enough. You have to have knowledge too, and an experience of the oddity of life."

Stravinsky posted:

What are peoples opinions in regards to translations of poetry. I always have been wary of anything that was not originally written in English because poetry hinges on word choice. Especially so if you have a situation where a word does not really have a companion word in the language your translating to.

It depends on the kind of poetry I suppose. How simple or contrived the form is, etc. Didactic poetry loses a lot of its charm, but a lot of ecstatic poetry I think holds up really well, in part because its more about the image and the ecstatic feeling than imparting a message in an aesthetically pleasing way. I tend to agree with you on the issue of word choice, and so the super literary poetry that depends on language from a higher register and dense allusions is naturally going to translate poorly, but some forms of poetry go out of their way to emphasize simple language and concrete imagery. I think Haiku translates well for this reason, as the whole culture of it tends towards simplicity. Ghazals can also be effective in this regard, since the format has the potential to be so succinct and more encapsulated that it naturally leaves less space for confusion.

Yiggy fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Feb 17, 2014

Stravinsky
May 31, 2011

Sharkie posted:

Eh, I'm not his biggest fan or anything, but there's usually a bit more going on there than he's popularly given credit for. I wouldn't say Design is particularly Kinkadesque.

I decided maybe I have not given Mr. Frost his fair shake, so I bought a small collection of some of his poems. It is The Road Not Taken and Other Poems put out by Dover Thrift Editions. If you wanted to join me on my journey of rediscovering and finding out why Frost is a considered a darling of American poetry you can buy it here from Amazon.

I just got my copy in today so expect some insightful commentary on it soon! :dukedog:

Stravinsky fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Feb 17, 2014

Stravinsky
May 31, 2011

I just could not wait and dove right on in!

As we can see in my picture below, the first poem is the well known The Road Not Taken. Here we can see Frost's mastery of the english words in conveying a very simple image and storyline. Even though it is super simple most peopple gently caress this poem up. Key lines include:

Then took the other, as just as fair

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.


I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:


and

took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


Most people read this and just go, oh he chose the one most have not chosen and it really affected him in a philosophical way. Those people did not really read the poem very closely at all. Look at the lines I picked out. He clearly states that both were the same and just as trodden upon as the other. What he is saying is that he will lie later on in life and say that he took the road (an actual or metaphoricle) most people have not taken and how it directly changed him. Once again we can really say that Frost is a true poet worthy to be read again and again.

Stravinsky
May 31, 2011

One more before I run off. Sorry for the mess, I needed to eat something before heading off and well you know what the say: Time is money.


Here we have Old Man's Winter Night, Patch Of Old Snow , and In The Home Stretch.

Old Man's Winter Night deals in themes of isolation and death. The old man goes about his house not remembering why he is doing so and even worse not even remembering who he was! He eventually goes outside, looks at the moon and decides he was a light for no one but himself. He accepts his isolation and attempts sleep. One can easily imply that the old man dies in his sleep. Frost talks about how no one can fill anyplace (house,countryside, etc.) on thier own thus driving home the theme of isolation. Poor old man.

Patch of Old Snow is about a patch of old snow. A perfect picture of it, you can almost see it in ones own mind. I got shivers thinking about trying to reach out my hand and touching it.

In The Home Stretch. Ever felt not at home in your own home? This starts with a women(!possible feminism trigger warning you guys!) who is pretty unhappy about where she is at that point of time. She imagines washing dish after dish as she grows old and withers away. She moved with her husband to the country and it does not feel like hom to her. She does not admit that she is unhappy with the house. The husband is also slightly apprehensive about thier new home. The look for little ways to feel better, like pointing out how the stove fits just so snuggly. In the end the feel isolated and abandoned in the wilderness left to thier fate. But its not an ending nor is it a begginning for them, but rather as the wife has put it, there are only middles. Really makes you think.

CestMoi
Sep 16, 2011

Stravinsky posted:

I just could not wait and dove right on in!

As we can see in my picture below, the first poem is the well known The Road Not Taken. Here we can see Frost's mastery of the english words in conveying a very simple image and storyline. Even though it is super simple most peopple gently caress this poem up. Key lines include:

Then took the other, as just as fair

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.


I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:


and

took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


Most people read this and just go, oh he chose the one most have not chosen and it really affected him in a philosophical way. Those people did not really read the poem very closely at all. Look at the lines I picked out. He clearly states that both were the same and just as trodden upon as the other. What he is saying is that he will lie later on in life and say that he took the road (an actual or metaphoricle) most people have not taken and how it directly changed him. Once again we can really say that Frost is a true poet worthy to be read again and again.



Lol.

CestMoi
Sep 16, 2011

Re; translations, I read The Conference of the Birds by Farid Attar pretty recently and while it was really good and had some great footnotes explaining every cultural/religious reference, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was just missing something by not being a 12th century Persian Sufi mystic. It just loses a lot of the punch that really great poems have when you are separated by however many degrees from the actual circumstances the poem was written in.

Juaguocio
Jun 5, 2005

Oh, David...
I spent a semester translating Beowulf, and came away with tremendous respect for the folks who undertake such things. I haven't seen a translation that really captures the feeling of the Old English, though I do like Seamus Heaney's version.

Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter has written a number of interesting pieces on translation. I haven't yet read Le Ton beau de Marot, which explicitly deals with the translation of poetry, but several of his other books examine the subject as well. In Surfaces and Essences, his recent work on analogy, Hofstadter contends that translation can't be a purely mechanical exercise because of the fundamental differences in the mechanics of languages. Everyday phrases in one language may have no counterpart in another, so a certain degree of creativity is necessary to fill in the gaps with analogous constructs.

Yiggy
Sep 12, 2004

"Imagination is not enough. You have to have knowledge too, and an experience of the oddity of life."
I haven't read Farid Attar yet, but generally Sufi poetry is almost always playing on the same theme of separation and longing for unity with God/the Absolute/insert your own metaphor. Specifically an imminent conception of the divine, rather than a personality bearing, transcendent conception of God standing aside and above us. Conceptually understanding this doesn't necessarily impart a visceral feel and ear for it. That said, if you're interested in digging into that kind of stuff some more it can help to read that sort of poetry in other contexts as it pops up again and again in many different cultures. In truth, while the Sufis are among the best at that kind of poetry, they're really drawing from a much longer tradition pouring out of Indian culture and religion, which leaked heavily into Sufi thought and mysticism. They perfected the genre, arguably, but they didn't create it.

That said, a common way to wander into a deeper feeling and understanding of what they're getting at is to explore the more abstract, higher spiritual meanings through the more mundane metaphor it is generally expressed through: the relationship between two lovers. If you want to stick to Sufi's, Rumi is great for this.

As I said though, sometimes it helps to get to the same place from different cultures. The much more modern Rabindranath Tagore explores these themes heavily in his own poetry and in the poetry of other great bhakti poets such as Kabir, which he has done some translations of. In Indian culture, this theme is characterized in the arts as a type of feeling that they're trying to evoke, which they call the Sringara Rasa.

Tagore as translated by W.B. Yeats posted:

From Gitanjali

XX (20)

On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying, and I knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded.

Only now and again a sadness fell upon me, and I started up from my dream and felt a sweet trace of a strange fragrance in the south wind.

That vague sweetness made my heart ache with longing and it seemed to me that is was the eager breath of the summer seeking for its completion.

I knew not then that it was no near, that it was mine, and that this perfect sweetness had blossomed in the depth of my own heart.

To come even closer to home culturally speaking, you can find this kind of poetry in the West though it tends to be less common and falls quite a bit short of the standard Sufis set. It works in some Christian contexts but not in others, where there is a stronger resistance to imminent conceptions of the divine. The transcendentalists tried to play on these themes, but some of them were pretty bad at it. Dickinson went to this place a lot in her poetry. Another that I really like though was Jones Very, who had an intense period writing this sort of stuff before his inner light went out, so to speak.

Jones Very posted:


The Silent

There is a sighing in the wood,
A murmur in the beating wave,
The heart has never understood
To tell in words the thoughts they gave.

Yet oft it feels an answering tone,
When wandering on the lonely shore;
And could the lips its voice make known,
'Twould sound as does the ocean's roar.

And oft beneath the wind swept pine,
Some chord is struck the strain to swell;
Nor sounds nor language can define,
'Tis not for words or sounds to tell.

'Tis all unheard, that Silent Voice,
Whose goings forth, unknown to all,
Bids bending reed and bird rejoice,
And fills with music nature's hall.

And in the speechless human heart
It speaks, where'er man's feet have trod;
Beyond the lip's deceitful art,
To tell of Him, the Unseen God.

For my money though its hard to beat Rumi, Sufi poet par excellence. His range extends to exploring this through the seemingly ultra mundane situation of spurned love and separated lovers...

Rumi posted:

Every day, this pain. Either you're numb
or you don't understand love.
I write out my love story.
You see the writing, but you don't read it.

To a higher register exploration of unity with an imminent divine...

Rumi posted:

You come closer, though you never left.
Water flows, and the stream stays full.
You are a bag of musk. We are the fragrance.
Is musk ever separated from its scent?

Sharkie
Feb 4, 2013

by Fluffdaddy

Stravinsky posted:

Patch of Old Snow is about a patch of old snow. A perfect picture of it, you can almost see it in ones own mind. I got shivers thinking about trying to reach out my hand and touching it.

I know this is sarcasm, but your criticism seems to be "this poem just describes a thing" so I guess you're just not a fan of Imagism. For what it's worth, the text of the poem is:

A Patch of Old Snow

There's a patch of old snow in a corner
That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain
Had brought to rest.

It is speckled with grime as if
Small print overspread it,
The news of a day I've forgotten --
If I ever read it.


And I don't think you need to be a professional critic to see, as I said, "there's... a bit more going on there." The poem isn't "about" a patch of snow, it's about not recognizing the value of something until after it's been destroyed. The grime, and the fact that the snow is just a "patch," is what brings his attention to the snow. But this grime is the "small print" that makes it resemble a newspaper, bringing "news of a day" the speaker has forgotten, or perhaps not even read -- the grime is what makes it "readable" as a metaphorical object. What day could this be referring to? Perhaps the time in which the snow covered everything...which the speaker doesn't describe, perhaps because he didn't notice it (read it)?

The speaker only seems to notice the snow when it's mostly gone and ruined.

Like I said, I'm not his biggest fan, and I'm not claiming this is some revelatory masterpiece, but I don't think my judgement was particularly controversial, either.

Sharkie fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Feb 18, 2014

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010

Poutling posted:

I think the key is to find the right translator who can capture not only the direct translation but the spirit of the poem. Translating itself is an art form.
John Ashbery's translations of Rimbaud are absolutely wonderful. I never really understood Illuminations until I saw what Ashbery did with it. It takes a great poet to translate great poetry.

Stravinsky
May 31, 2011

Sharkie posted:

I know this is sarcasm, but your criticism seems to be "this poem just describes a thing" so I guess you're just not a fan of Imagism. For what it's worth, the text of the poem is:

A Patch of Old Snow

There's a patch of old snow in a corner
That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain
Had brought to rest.

It is speckled with grime as if
Small print overspread it,
The news of a day I've forgotten --
If I ever read it.


And I don't think you need to be a professional critic to see, as I said, "there's... a bit more going on there." The poem isn't "about" a patch of snow, it's about not recognizing the value of something until after it's been destroyed. The grime, and the fact that the snow is just a "patch," is what brings his attention to the snow. But this grime is the "small print" that makes it resemble a newspaper, bringing "news of a day" the speaker has forgotten, or perhaps not even read -- the grime is what makes it "readable" as a metaphorical object. What day could this be referring to? Perhaps the time in which the snow covered everything...which the speaker doesn't describe, perhaps because he didn't notice it (read it)?

The speaker only seems to notice the snow when it's mostly gone and ruined.

Like I said, I'm not his biggest fan, and I'm not claiming this is some revelatory masterpiece, but I don't think my judgement was particularly controversial, either.

I am never sarcastic nor do I joke. Thank you for your insight into this one. I never once pondered upon the transmutable and temporal nature that is easily observable in nature. I really hope you will follow along with me and help guide me when I stray as I rediscover Robert Frost. And boy am I glad your here because I need some help with the next section.

Stravinsky
May 31, 2011

I had a hard time understanding these two so I went through them and made some notes. This way I could pick them apart piece by piece and really dig deep into Frost's works here. I could be a little off base so if anyone who has a better grasp on Mr. Frost's complex works could please let me know just where I strayed I would be very thankful. Thank you in gameboyadvanced!

Stravinsky
May 31, 2011

In other poetry news, I also read former New Jersey poet laureate and also former living person Amiri Baraka. While he is no Robert Frost, I really do appreciate Baraka's in your face confrontational attitude. The fact that he was even made a poet laureate for any place is amazing in and of itself and I am really not surprised that some people were a little uneasy about that.

Stravinsky fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Feb 18, 2014

Sharkie
Feb 4, 2013

by Fluffdaddy

SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

John Ashbery's translations of Rimbaud are absolutely wonderful. I never really understood Illuminations until I saw what Ashbery did with it. It takes a great poet to translate great poetry.

Do you like Ashberry's own poems? I also really like his translation of Illuminations but don't know where to start with his poetry, though it seems like I'd be interested in it.

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010

Sharkie posted:

Do you like Ashberry's own poems? I also really like his translation of Illuminations but don't know where to start with his poetry, though it seems like I'd be interested in it.
I love them, but they are some of the least accessible poems I've ever read. Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror took at least three readings and some extra background material on Ashbery before it started opening up to me. Once it did, I was blown away and genuinely moved and couldn't stop reading it for weeks. It's a drat puzzle box that only rewards the very patient, but rewards them richly.

I think that's why he's so controversial: a lot of people have only done surface readings and think it's pretentious crap.

Mr. Squishy
Mar 22, 2010

A country where you can always get richer.
I like the one where he lists rivers.

Stravinsky
May 31, 2011

CestMoi posted:

Re; translations, I read The Conference of the Birds by Farid Attar pretty recently and while it was really good and had some great footnotes explaining every cultural/religious reference, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was just missing something by not being a 12th century Persian Sufi mystic. It just loses a lot of the punch that really great poems have when you are separated by however many degrees from the actual circumstances the poem was written in.

Who's translation/copy did you read? I have this on my poo poo to read list and I figure the more footnotes and explanations I get the better because I'm not a whirling dervish.

CestMoi
Sep 16, 2011

Stravinsky posted:

Who's translation/copy did you read? I have this on my poo poo to read list and I figure the more footnotes and explanations I get the better because I'm not a whirling dervish.

I went for the Penguin Classics version. It has footnotes explaining all the references and puns you wouldn't pick up on not being Persian and also has a section at the back with paragraph biographies of everyone namedropped throughout the poem. It's actually a pretty good way to pick up some really basic knowledge of Islam if you don't have any already.

Dr Scoofles
Dec 6, 2004

Juaguocio posted:

I spent a semester translating Beowulf, and came away with tremendous respect for the folks who undertake such things. I haven't seen a translation that really captures the feeling of the Old English, though I do like Seamus Heaney's version.

I don't read Old English so well but I do go in for Middle English Poetry and I am fascinated by the choices modern translators make. I am deeply fond of a poem called Pearl, it's about intense grief, a crisis of faith and the gradual acceptance of suffering. It's highly alliterative and when read out loud it's like somebody banging an anguished fist on your chest.

I playned my perle þat þer watz penned
Wyth fyrce skyllez þat faste faȝt.
Þaȝ kynde of Krist me comfort kenned,
My wreched wylle in wo ay wraȝte.
I felle vpon þat floury flaȝt,
Suche odour to my hernez schot;
I slode vpon a slepyng-slaȝte
On þat precious perle withouten spot.


If I had to choose I would say my favourite modern translation is by Jane Draycott.

Caught in the chill grasp of grief I stood
in that place clasping my hands, seized
by the grip on my heart of longing and loss.
Though reason told me to be still
I mourned for my poor imprisoned pearl
with all the fury and force of a quarrel.
The comfort of Christ called out to me
but still I wrestled in wilful sorrow.
Then the power and perfume of those flowers
filled up my head and felled me, slipped me
into sudden sleep in the place
where she lay beneath me. My girl.


She communicates sadness and suffering well, but for me she cannot capture the fury nor the desperation so apparent in the original Middle English. I can totally see how she is consciously putting forward the alliteration, but it seems so wishy washy. I also think she goes on a bit too much, in the Middle English the poet gives vent to a sudden outburst, whereas the modern translation goes on way too long.

The thing is, I can point out where a modern translation doesn't quite get it right for me, but hell, I'll be damned if I can imagine a better way to do it!

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound
Yeah, I was thinking about posting some Old English poetry but it seemed like the thread was trending more modern. I absolutely *love* that stuff. It's not too hard to teach yourself the pronunciations -- it takes a few weeks of practice and study but it's not anywhere near as utterly alien as it appears when you first look at a pagefull of "hwaet"'s. The anglo-saxon poets paid attention to the sound of what they were saying in a way modern poetry tends to drift away from.

Dr Scoofles
Dec 6, 2004

Yes, totally! I always read out loud when I come to Middle English, it's just to cool not to. My mum is Scottish but I was raised in England, however, when I read ME poetry I sound super Scottish. Old English is totally on my 'to do' list. I have a book called From Old English to Standard English which was recommended to me as a good teach yourself guide, but what I actually need to do is sit down and actually read some OE. I don't suppose you OE types can recommend some good introductory poetry?

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound
There's only so much of it. There's The Wanderer, Caedmon's Hymn, and Beowulf and a few other scraps, mostly biblical. The Boethius translation, I suppose? That's one reason it's so easy to learn -- you can read all of it in a few weeks of dedicated study, with time to practice pronunciation while you read. I haven't actually read the Pearl Poet but my understanding is it's far closer to old English than, say, Chaucer is, just because Chaucer happened to be writing in the London dialect that modern standardized English was mostly heavily influenced by.

As far as actually learning OE, the textbook I & my wife both used was Millward's Biography of the English Language and it was a useful introduction but it still might be hard to get the "ear" for the pronunciations right without actually listening to some recordings. It's useful for learning what the old-style letters correspond to and so forth though. Once you figure out what the letters stand for, reading the stuff is no harder than piecing together a latin passage out of modern roots, and from there the next step is getting the sound right. I mean, you won't turn yourself into the next Tolkien or anything but it's not hard to get enough for a basic appreciation.

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Feb 20, 2014

Declan MacManus
Sep 1, 2011

damn i'm really in this bitch

Stravinsky posted:

In other poetry news, I also read former New Jersey poet laureate and also former living person Amiri Baraka. While he is no Robert Frost, I really do appreciate Baraka's in your face confrontational attitude. The fact that he was even made a poet laureate for any place is amazing in and of itself and I am really not surprised that some people were a little uneasy about that.



PYF Poet Laureates



quote:

Cherrylog Road

Off Highway 106
At Cherrylog Road I entered
The ’34 Ford without wheels,
Smothered in kudzu,
With a seat pulled out to run
Corn whiskey down from the hills,


And then from the other side
Crept into an Essex
With a rumble seat of red leather
And then out again, aboard
A blue Chevrolet, releasing
The rust from its other color,


Reared up on three building blocks.
None had the same body heat;
I changed with them inward, toward
The weedy heart of the junkyard,
For I knew that Doris Holbrook
Would escape from her father at noon


And would come from the farm
To seek parts owned by the sun
Among the abandoned chassis,
Sitting in each in turn
As I did, leaning forward
As in a wild stock-car race


In the parking lot of the dead.
Time after time, I climbed in
And out the other side, like
An envoy or movie star
Met at the station by crickets.
A radiator cap raised its head,


Become a real toad or a kingsnake
As I neared the hub of the yard,
Passing through many states,
Many lives, to reach
Some grandmother’s long Pierce-Arrow
Sending platters of blindness forth


From its nickel hubcaps
And spilling its tender upholstery
On sleepy roaches,
The glass panel in between
Lady and colored driver
Not all the way broken out,


The back-seat phone
Still on its hook.
I got in as though to exclaim,
“Let us go to the orphan asylum,
John; I have some old toys
For children who say their prayers.”


I popped with sweat as I thought
I heard Doris Holbrook scrape
Like a mouse in the southern-state sun
That was eating the paint in blisters
From a hundred car tops and hoods.
She was tapping like code,


Loosening the screws,
Carrying off headlights,
Sparkplugs, bumpers,
Cracked mirrors and gear-knobs,
Getting ready, already,
To go back with something to show


Other than her lips’ new trembling
I would hold to me soon, soon,
Where I sat in the ripped back seat
Talking over the interphone,
Praying for Doris Holbrook
To come from her father’s farm


And to get back there
With no trace of me on her face
To be seen by her red-haired father
Who would change, in the squalling barn,
Her back’s pale skin with a strop,
Then lay for me


In a bootlegger’s roasting car
With a string-triggered I2-gauge shotgun
To blast the breath from the air.
Not cut by the jagged windshields,
Through the acres of wrecks she came
With a wrench in her hand,


Through dust where the blacksnake dies
Of boredom, and the beetle knows
The compost has no more life.
Someone outside would have seen
The oldest car's door inexplicably
Close from within:


I held her and held her and held her,
Convoyed at terrific speed
By the stalled, dreaming traffic around us,
So the blacksnake, stiff
With inaction, curved back
Into life, and hunted the mouse


With deadly overexcitement,
The beetles reclaimed their field
As we clung, glued together,
With the hooks of the seat springs
Working through to catch us red-handed
Amidst the gray breathless batting


That burst from the seat at our backs.
We left by separate doors
Into the changed, other bodies
Of cars, she down Cherrylog Road
And I to my motorcycle
Parked like the soul of the junkyard


Restored, a bicycle fleshed
With power, and tore off
Up Highway 106, continually
Drunk on the wind in my mouth,
Wringing the handlebar for speed,
Wild to be wreckage forever.

Kind of reminds me of Eugenides for some reason but not in a good way

Juaguocio
Jun 5, 2005

Oh, David...

Dr Scoofles posted:

Yes, totally! I always read out loud when I come to Middle English, it's just to cool not to. My mum is Scottish but I was raised in England, however, when I read ME poetry I sound super Scottish. Old English is totally on my 'to do' list. I have a book called From Old English to Standard English which was recommended to me as a good teach yourself guide, but what I actually need to do is sit down and actually read some OE. I don't suppose you OE types can recommend some good introductory poetry?
The Exeter Book riddles are a nice introduction. They're short little verses of the "what am I?" variety, whose intended answers range from mundane objects to hilarious double entendres:

quote:

Ic eom wunderlicu wiht, wifum on hyhte
neahbuendum nyt; nægum sceþþe
burgsittendra, nymthe bonan anum.
Staþol min is steapheah, stonde ic on bedde
neoðan ruh nathwær. Neþeð hwilum
ful cyrtenu ceorles dohtor
modwlonc meowle, þæt heo on mec gripe
ræseð mec on reodne, reafath min heafod
fegeð mec on fæsten. Feleþ sona
mines gemotes, seo þe mec nearwað
wif wundenlocc. Wæt bið þæt eage.

quote:

(I am a wondrous creature, a joy to women,
useful to neighbors; not any citizens
do I injure, except my slayer.
Very high is my foundation. I stand in a bed,
hair underneath somewhere. Sometimes ventures
a fully beautiful churl's daughter,
licentious maid, that she grabs onto me,
rushes me to the redness, ravages my head,
fixes me in confinement. She soon feels
my meeting, she who forced me in,
the curly-haired woman. Wet is her eye.)
Answer: An onion. Get your mind out of the gutter.

The introductory OE class that I took used Hasenfratz and Jambeck's Reading Old English as its text, which I've since learned is riddled with errors. The method it uses for teaching OE grammar is much friendlier than the more scholarly works, however, so it could still be a useful book when cross-referenced with a more comprehensive book like Mitchell and Robinson's Guide To Old English or Klaeber's Beowulf.

Dr Scoofles
Dec 6, 2004

Juaguocio posted:

The Exeter Book riddles are a nice introduction. They're short little verses of the "what am I?" variety, whose intended answers range from mundane objects to hilarious double entendres:


Answer: An onion. Get your mind out of the gutter.

The introductory OE class that I took used Hasenfratz and Jambeck's Reading Old English as its text, which I've since learned is riddled with errors. The method it uses for teaching OE grammar is much friendlier than the more scholarly works, however, so it could still be a useful book when cross-referenced with a more comprehensive book like Mitchell and Robinson's Guide To Old English or Klaeber's Beowulf.

Haha, very cool! Thanks for the recommendations. The nice thing is some of the Old English there is familiar, I guess Middle English is gateway poetry to the hard stiff!

CestMoi
Sep 16, 2011

I got some T.S Eliot poems because I'd never read them before and The Wasteland is pretty drat deece. I'm now trying to overcome my gag reflex against writing in books so I can write down all the cool things I like and look fun and interesting in coffee shops.

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Declan MacManus
Sep 1, 2011

damn i'm really in this bitch

CestMoi posted:

I got some T.S Eliot poems because I'd never read them before and The Wasteland is pretty drat deece. I'm now trying to overcome my gag reflex against writing in books so I can write down all the cool things I like and look fun and interesting in coffee shops.

I have a lot of sperg book nerd friends that will buy two copies of a text: one for marking up and one for leaving pristine.

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