We present this work in honor of the poet’s 105th birthday.
Margaret Avison Canadian 1918 – 2007
The dervish dancer on the smoking steppes Unscrolled, into the level lava-cool Of Romish twilight, baleful hieroglyphs That had been civic architecture, The sculptured utterances of the Schools.
The Vikings rode the tasseled sea: Over their shoulders, running towards their boats, They had seen the lurking matriarchal wolves, Ducked their bright foreheads from the iron laurels Of a dark Scandinavian destiny, And chosen, rather, to be dwarfed to pawns Of the broad sulking sea.
And Lampman, when he prowled the Gatineau: Were the white vinegar of northern rivers, The stain of punkwood in chill evening air, The luminous nowhere past the gloomy hills, Were these his April cave— Sought as the first men, when the bright release Of sun filled them with sudden self-disdain At bone-heaps, rotting pelts, muraled adventures, Sought a more primitive nakedness?
The cave-men, Lampman, Lief, the dancing dervish, Envied the fleering wolf his secret circuit; But knew their doom to propagate, create, Their wild salvation wrapt within that white Burst of pure art whose only promise was Ferocity in them, thudding its dense Distracting rhythms down their haunted years.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 80th birthday.
Louise Glück American b. 1943
In the first version, Persephone is taken from her mother and the goddess of the earth punishes the earth—this is consistent with what we know of human behavior,
that human beings take profound satisfaction in doing harm, particularly unconscious harm:
we may call this negative creation.
Persephone’s initial sojourn in hell continues to be pawed over by scholars who dispute the sensations of the virgin:
did she cooperate in her rape, or was she drugged, violated against her will, as happens so often now to modern girls.
As is well known, the return of the beloved does not correct the loss of the beloved: Persephone
returns home stained with red juice like a character in Hawthorne—
I am not certain I will keep this word: is earth “home” to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably, in the bed of the god? Is she at home nowhere? Is she a born wanderer, in other words an existential replica of her own mother, less hamstrung by ideas of causality?
You are allowed to like no one, you know. The characters are not people. They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.
Three parts: just as the soul is divided, ego, superego, id. Likewise
the three levels of the known world, a kind of diagram that separates heaven from earth from hell.
You must ask yourself: where is it snowing?
White of forgetfulness, of desecration—
It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says
Persephone is having sex in hell. Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know what winter is, only that she is what causes it.
She is lying in the bed of Hades. What is in her mind? Is she afraid? Has something blotted out the idea of mind?
She does know the earth is run by mothers, this much is certain. She also knows she is not what is called a girl any longer. Regarding incarceration, she believes
she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.
The terrible reunions in store for her will take up the rest of her life. When the passion for expiation is chronic, fierce, you do not choose the way you live. You do not live; you are not allowed to die.
You drift between earth and death which seem, finally, strangely alike. Scholars tell us
that there is no point in knowing what you want when the forces contending over you could kill you.
White of forgetfulness, white of safety—
They say there is a rift in the human soul which was not constructed to belong entirely to life. Earth
asks us to deny this rift, a threat disguised as suggestion— as we have seen in the tale of Persephone which should be read
as an argument between the mother and the lover— the daughter is just meat.
When death confronts her, she has never seen the meadow without the daisies. Suddenly she is no longer singing her maidenly songs about her mother’s beauty and fecundity. Where the rift is, the break is.
Song of the earth, song of the mythic vision of eternal life—
My soul shattered with the strain of trying to belong to earth—
What will you do, when it is your turn in the field with the god?
We present this work in honor of the 35th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Oktay Rıfat Horozcu Turkish 1914 – 1988
He died – he doesn’t know he died, his two hands lie by his side. They’ll carry him away, nor can he say, ‘I won’t go!’ He couldn’t even give thanks to the friends who bore his coffin.
Imperious despot, insolent in strife, Lover of ruin, enemy of life! You mock the anguish of an impotent land Whose people’s blood has stained your tyrant hand, And desecrate the magic of this earth, sowing your thorns, to bring despair to birth,
Patience! Let not the Spring delude you now, The morning light, the skies’ unclouded brow; Fear gathers in the broad horizon’s murk Where winds are rising, and deep thunders lurk; When the weak weeps, receive him not with scorn— Who soweth thorns, shall not his flesh be torn?
Wait! Where you thought to reap the lives of men, The flowers of hope, never to bloom again, Where you have soaked the furrows’ heart with blood, Drenched them with tears, until they overflowed, A gale of flame shall suddenly consume, A bloody torrent sweep you to your doom!
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 105th birthday.
Spike Milligan Irish 1918 – 2002
On the Ning Nang Nong Where the Cows go Bong! and the monkeys all say BOO! There’s a Nong Nang Ning Where the trees go Ping! And the tea pots jibber jabber joo. On the Nong Ning Nang All the mice go Clang And you just can’t catch ’em when they do! So its Ning Nang Nong Cows go Bong! Nong Nang Ning Trees go ping Nong Ning Nang The mice go Clang What a noisy place to belong is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!!
We present this work in honor of Dr. Ambdekar Jayanti.
Amrita Pritam Indian 1919 – 2005
There were two kingdoms only: the first of them threw out both him and me. The second we abandoned.
Under a bare sky I for a long time soaked in the rain of my body, he for a long time rotted in the rain of his.
Then like a poison he drank the fondness of the years. He held my hand with a trembling hand. “Come, let’s have a roof over our heads awhile. Look, further on ahead, there between truth and falsehood, a little empty space.”
We present this work in honor of the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death.
José Gorostiza Mexican 1901 – 1973
Filled with myself, walled up in my skin by an inapprehensible god that is stifling me, deceived perhaps by his radiant atmosphere of light that hides my drained conscience, my wings broken into splinters of air, my listless groping through the mire; filled with myself—gorged—I discover my essence in the astonished image of water, that is only an unwithering cascade, a tumbling of angels fallen of their own accord in pure delight, that has nothing but a whitened face half sunken, already, like an agonized laugh in the thin sheets of the cloud and the mournful canticles of the sea— more aftertaste of salt or cumulus whiteness than lonely haste of foam pursued. Nevertheless—oh paradox—constrained by the rigor of the glass that clarifies it, the water takes shape. In the glass it sits, sinks deep and builds, attains a bitter age of silences and the graceful repose of a child smiling in death, that deflowers a beyond of disbanded birds. In the crystal snare that strangles it, there, as in the water of a mirror, it recognizes itself; bound there, drop with drop, the trope of foam withered in its throat. What intense nakedness of water, what water so strongly water, is dreaming in its iridescent sphere, already singing a thirst for rigid ice! But what a provident glass—also— that swells like a star ripe with grain, that flames in heroic promise like a heart inhabited by happiness, and that punctually yields up to the water a round transparent flower, a missile eye that attains heights and a window to luminous cries over that smoldering liberty oppressed by white fetters!
Poets Corner 