Korean Job Discussion Forums

[ddeubel]

Thanks for that song and yes, I'll download some of his stuff. Funny, I grew up in a sort of free for all hippie commune and one of the guys there was a long haired, always pony tailed fiddle/guitar player called Greg Brown. I don't think it is the same guy but maybe? My parents tell me, he went back home after the Carter amnesty.

I've only read Oppen a few times, will have to look him up. I'm hungry for that sort of thing these days.

Dylan and Do not go gentle into that good night and his Green fuse, are classics. Meant to be voiced, sung. He didn't have many equal in the modern ode category. Also when it came to the bottle. I want to add, sexual prowess but the housewives of East Hampton really were silent on this issue.

One short one, from another guy who got me into Chinese poetry, Ezra Pound. Brought to memory by the mention of Oppen.

[faster]

I'm a big Pound fan; it's about time his rep. got rehabilitated. He did, after all, renounce his Antisemitism late in life.

[Omkara]

Met Gary Snyder today-got a recommendation on a meditation book from him.

He spoke about Pound to the group--but I missed the gist (I was late.)

The guitar could well have been named after him. Hippies dig his stuff.

[merlot]

The World Is a Beautiful Place
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing
all the time

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn't half bad
if it isn't you

Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey to
with its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen

and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to

Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
'living it up'
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician

[faster]

Theater of Operations

[Legerdemain]

I. Alan Sidris: Garcia and the Dead. Identification of Zarathustra. ~Pangaea
II. Transubstantiation: Lacanian Paean to Moloch, via Partch. ~Atlantis
III. "My daughter's wedding..." Waning influence of gesture, hero, invective; but contains intimations of transcendence. ~Americas

[Helicoidal Confluence]

IV. Stockhausen/Blount, Sirius/Saturn. Shuddering, wincing. Ill luck.
V. Cunningham/Braxton. The whispers.
VI. Djuna Barnes, Bison Dele, Milford Graves.
VII. The secret permeating an epoch; the grimace of lucidity.

[Maltempi Agglomeration]

VIII. She fructifies the perjuries of a memory. Dreams, farmers.
IX. The foyer. The segment. (Two fetishes of the Corn Ring)
X. Her pursuers circle wagons. The public refutation.
XI. Her aversion (Cf. Manual, Ward IV). "Everything's Canceled. Zero."

[Capricious Servant]

XII. Ovid Uman; "the Benedicent Affabulation." Finance and facial paralysis.
XIII. Tarkovsky. He builds things American poets don't build.

[Limitations Machine]

XIV. Rose like exhalations, "lacking a sense of the ridiculous, a question of training."
XV. Passage from heresy, Spinoza abetting.
XVI. Wayful overtures toward Meaning, deviations from tangible Quality, and repeated
gestures becoming engraved with news of the perpetual first/last war.

[Unsolicited Prebuttal]

XVII. Ray Davis: Brute luck and a synchrony. Running the risk of hiding what's essential. L'Inutil Precauzione
XVIII. The thumb of mercy, the sign of revealing, serifs of an unreadable legend. Hissing, emanating. To the last
shot in.
IXX. Dan Reynolds, Don Brown, Tim Bradley: Initiatory journeys. "Radiant nodes and clusters." She makes friends
- she hasn't got time.
XX. Pidgin Valence/Harmar's Humiliation/Ajtys. She opens a weird map.

-Marvin Gardens

[gypsyfish]

Whenever I have a friend or student who says they don't understand or like poetry, I refer them to this.

Western Wind

Anonymous (written circa 1500!)

Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!


I've been reading the WW1 poets lately. They illuminate better than any anchorman. Too bad, George W. hasn't read them.

The Last Laugh

Wilfred Owen

'O Jesus Christ! I'm hit,' he said; and died.
Whether he vainly cursed, or prayed indeed,
The Bullets chirped - 'In vain! vain! vain!'
Machine-guns chuckled, 'Tut-tut! Tut-tut!'
And the Big Gun guffawed.


Another sighed, - 'O Mother, Mother! Dad!'
Then smiled, at nothing, childlike, being dead.
And the lofty Shrapnel-cloud
Leisurely gestured, - 'Fool!'
And the falling splinters tittered.


'My Love!' one moaned. Love-languid seemed his mood,
Till, slowly lowered, his whole face kissed the mud.
And the Bayonets' long teeth grinned;
Rabbles of Shells hooted and groaned;
And the Gas hissed.


And something lighter:

The Sniffle

Ogden Nash

In spite of her sniffle,
Isabel's chiffle.
Some girls with a sniffle
Would be weepy and tiffle;
They would look awful,
Like a rained-on waffle,
But Isabel's chiffle
In spite of her sniffle.
Her nose is more red
With a cold in her head,
But then, to be sure,
Her eyes are bluer.
Some girls with a snuffle,
Their tempers are uffle,
But when Isabel's snivelly
She's snivelly civilly,
And when she is snuffly
She's perfectly luffly.


and

The Termite

Some primal termite knocked on wood
And tasted it, and found it good!
And that is why your Cousin May
Fell through the parlor floor today.

[Woland]

[jajdude]

[JMO]

[alistaircandlin]

Probably not one of his best, but nice and short. I love the line 'where can we live but days?'
Typical Larkin: droll, detached and cynical but probably quite profound too ... at some level.
He's asking a massive universal question in the first stanza but the tone is so flat and stoical. It's like anti-poetry!
Then in the second stanza, the image of the priest and doctor running in their long coats. But who are they running to? The dying man or the madman?
This poem has a kind of knowing wink, or sly smile.

Days

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.



Philip Larkin 1964.

[kermo]

Billy Collins, actual Poet Laureate, wrote this poem, which my sister read to me. It was much better to hear it, so here's a link where you can hear the poet himself reading (hopefully your computer cooperates):
He's at 00:25:20
http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/2005/12/31/index.shtml

If it doesn't work, here's the poem:
(this is Mother's Day GOLD, by the way.)

[lastat06513]

Forgotten Heroes.

As I somberly walk along this grassy plain,
I view the graves of my countrymen who were slain,
These were brave, young men who fought valiantly until they die,
With only a lone white stone to mark where they lie,
Many are lost as the years go by,
Only the sound of the silent wind
Would heed their lonely and desperate cries,
But fear not, ol' lost souls of the past,
I wear green to ensure your spirit will always last,
So now I salute with pride as I walk along these rows,
Buried in eternal columns are these forgotten heroes.

[Yes]

this poem (see below) is one of my favorites. sylvia plath's "the moon and the yew tree" and franz wright's "the only animal" (you can find both of those easily on the net) are 2 more. as for analysis, i once read someone (charles simic?) say that a poem is a soul giving language to its distress. i'm moved by people who write about immense distress articulately, unflinchingly, and magically. i think all 3 of these poems are examples of that kind of work. isn't this one terrifying and gorgeous and devastating?




A Woman Driving a Stake Into the Ground at Midnight
by Frank Stanford


God, I have not forgotten you
For sending all my children into your old ice boxes.

I remember that goat
You let them follow with a compass,
Those wooden wheels you let them roll
And break their first silence on.

I watched those beautiful kites you let them glide,
Their hearts all balls of string.

When they were young and unfucked
And old friends with the moon
Spreading its cream over their lips
As they slept, you came in
The window with the light
Like a cat on their necks.

You leave
When you want, the dark honey
Of their breath you store
In the catacombs of your lungs.

Alone and licked, their dreams
All rat-bitten and full of fever,
They remember your words,
Droppings on the white sheets.

Where are the dead?
In my arms, their panties pulled high,
Their eyes and teeth all small and even.

I remember your sadness, too.
A pan of wash water.
I threw it out in the chicken yard each evening.

I wanted my love to be an orchard,
Rows of thornless berries.
I wanted my love
To be death for the suffering.

Like you, I knew a woman once.
She was carrying a child.
One night she cut it
Out like a vine
With her husband's razor.

I didn't want you
To forget my love
Is a dark and rotten fruit on the ground,
A deathbed for your dreams,
And I don't know you, now,
Your sadness or your mark
On everything we bury.

[swetepete]

'the Death of the Ball Turret Gunner'

From my mother's sleep I fell into the state,
And I hunched in its belly til my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from my dream of life,
I woke to black flak and nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.


Randall Jarrell

[soju pizza]