posts tagged "poetry"

From this distance he can see that the man
is not Jack Gilbert. And he is not yet himself.
Being himself would not be better than being Gilbert.
Only Gilbert is more than Gilbert. Failure is better
than success in the same way that this poem
is still getting at something as it descends
into parody, elegy, and palimpsest at once.
We die and are put into the earth forever
is a line directly stolen from Gilbert’s “Tear It Down.”
Putting it in this poem means neither success
nor failure nor larceny. People need to read it
even if its magnitude of beauty is too difficult
for people. When I spoke with Jack on the telephone
to invite him to my university the next fall, he mostly
wanted to talk about my Italian name, to ask about
my poems. He wanted to know what I wanted
from poetry. I said I’d like to say something
to someone born two hundred years from now.
I think he approved, or I may have just heard
his enormously generous spirit smiling.
After his summer in Greece with Linda,
he could not remember ever having talked to me,
told my colleague who called to make travel arrangements
that he had never heard of our university.
Today the woman I love rejected my artificial soul.
What is it we want from poetry? When Jack Gilbert
and I have been put into the earth forever,
what will it mean if someone reads “Tear It Down” or
“Years and Years and Years Later”? Is there still time
to insist? Let my heart be feral, too wild for every
woman I love. This poem, Jack, is as helpless
as crushed birds, and still I say with you, nevertheless.
-Dan Albergotti, “Years and Years and Years Later”

"But what or where to recover
what is not love
too simply.

I saw her
and behind her there were
flowers, and behind them
nothing.”
-Robert Creeley, from “The Rhyme"

"Lewis’ mother says we’re snobs, we think only about poetry”
-Bernadette Mayer, from “Midwinter Day"

"The only protection
against death
was to love solitude.”
-Brenda Hillman, from “Saguaro"

"We make up a different language for poetry
And for the heart—ungrammatical.”
-Jack Spicer, from “Transformations II"

How do you bury a poet?

Surely not
how they buried Baudelaire
thrown in with his parents
like an infant death.

It stretches
to a ghastly irony
Pasternak’s remark
that poets should remain
children.

Do poets really want to trade
the lingering savour
of experience
for guileless eyes?

There’s something
repulsive
about an empty fresh
adult face.

Such baby faces
can be seen in uniform
or with a foot
on a slaughtered tiger.

They can be capable
of anything
or a long lullaby
of nothing.

I want to exhume Baudelaire
and give him his own
magnificent mercurial vault.

From one angle
an arching ebony cat.
From another
sneering black marble
spleen.

No poet
dead or alive
should rot
with their parents.


-Dorothy Porter, “Charles Baudelaire’s Grave”

"where flowers crack rocks in their defiant love for the light.”
-Jimmy Santiago Baca, from “It Would Be Neat If With The New Year"

"Some vertical gesture then, the way that anger
Or desire can rip a life apart,

Some wound of color.”
-Robert Hass, from “Time and Materials"

Already one day has detached itself from all the rest up ahead.
It has my photograph in its soft pocket.
It wants to carry my breath into the past in its bag of wind.

I write poems to unite myself, to do penance and disappear
Through the upper-right-hand corner of things, to say grace.

-Charles Wright, "Reunion"

"The poem acts like a salve for the wound of loneliness”
-Matthew Birdsall’s description of James Tate’s poem “Flight"