[Dear to my soul,...] by Henry Constable

Dear to my soul, then leave me not forsaken!
     Fly not! my heart within thy bosom sleepeth:
Even from my self and sense I have betaken
     Me unto thee for whom my spirit weepeth;
And on the shore of that salt teary sea,
     Couched in a bed of unseen seeming pleasure,
Where in imaginary thoughts thy fair self lay,
     But being waked, robbed of my life’s best treasure,
I call the heavens, air, earth, and seas to hear
     My love, my truth, and black disdained estate;
Beating the rocks with bellowings of despair,
     Which still with plaints my words reverberate;
          Sighing, ‘Alas, what shall become of me?’
          Whilst Echo cries, ‘What shall become of me?’


Everyman's Book of English Love Poems, ed. by John Hadfield (London, Melbourne, Toronto: J M Dent & Sons, 1980), 54.

The Sirens: An Ode by Laurence Binyon [extract]

The Sirens: An Ode

PRELUDE

I REMEMBER a night of my youth, I remember a night

Soundless!

The earth and the sea were a shadow, but over me opened

Heaven into uttermost heaven, and height into height

Boundless

With stars, with stars, with stars.

I remember the dew on my face, I remember the mingled

Homely smell of grass and unearthly beauty

Out of the ends of the air and the unscaled darkness

Poured in a rain, in a river,

Into my marrow,—thro' all the veins of delight

Poured into me.

O the divine solitude, the intoxicating silence!

I was a spirit unregioned, worthy of them;

I, even I, was a creature of infinite flight,

Born to be free.

In the midst of the worlds, as they moved, I moved with them all,

A sense and a joy; I was hidden, and yet they were nigh;

For they came to me as lovers,

Those stars from on high.

Thus as my whole soul drank of the star-thrilled air,

I felt more than heard, like a whisper

Invading me out of immensity, hinted, haunting

Sound

Of waves, of waves, of waves.

And I felt in the blood of my flesh to the roots of my hair,

That it sought me, a mind in the muteness:

In the midst of the worlds I trembled,

I in the night a mortal

Found!

What was I?   What was I?   Nothing

But a Moment, aware

Of the ruins of Time!

Yet a memory of memories awaking, I marvelled from where,

Out of shadows unshapen within me, and dust under dust,

From burial of realms and of ages, and darkness astir

In the roots of the hungering forest, the ancientest lair,

Rose to claim

This my body, the sap of its veins and its secret to share;

To emerge with the star-watching eyes of the venturer, Man.

And my body was brimmed with its meaning; it knew whence it came,

For I was the word on Earth's lips

That she needed to name.

But tell me, I cried, O whispering, troubling waves,

Tell me, O journeying wildernesses of stars,

Why do you near me & choose me? Whither would you lure me,

The earth-child?

To be brimmed with desire overflowing the bounds of the world,

To be wingless & stretched on a longing that boundlessly craves,

Who has known not this, in the bloom of a midnight marvelling

Earth-exiled?

But thus to be sought from afar by phantom waves,

In the still of the night to be neared by stooping stars,

As if all immensity sought for a home in the mind

At its core,

This draws my dark being up from its secret caves,

And the flesh is no longer a home, nor can comforting Earth

Shelter me more.

I am known to the Unknown; chosen, charmed, endangered:

I flow to a music ocean-wild and starry,

And feel within me, for this mortality's answer,

Sea without shore.

Laurence Binyon, The Sirens: An Ode (London: Macmillan & Co., 1925), 1-3.

Hunting by Norman Mailer

men who go out to kill deer

    hope to find in the blood

    of the new dead

the poems of my flesh

    said the deer in the forest

Norman Mailer, Deaths For The Ladies (and other disasters) (London: Andre Deutsch, 1962), no pagination.

Melancholy by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Melancholy. A Fragment.

Stretch'd on a mouldered Abbey's broadest wall,

Where ruining ivies propped the ruins steep—

Her folded arms wrapping her tattered pall,

Had Melancholy mused herself to sleep.

The fern was pressed beneath her hair,

The dark green Adder's Tongue was there;

And still as past the flagging sea-gale weak,

The long lank leaf bowed fluttering o'er her cheek.

That pallid cheek was flushed: her eager look

Beamed eloquent in slumber ! Inly wrought,

Imperfect sounds her moving lips forsook,

And her bent forehead work'd with troubled thought.

Strange was the dream——

Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Richard Garnett (London: George Routledge & Sons), 175.

Complaint: About a lady good and dead by Jules Laforgue

Complaint:

About a lady good and dead

She fled along the avenue;

I followed, magnetized!

Her eyes were saying, ‘Alas, I knew

You recognized me too!’

I followed, magnetized!

Ingenuous mouth, regretful eyes;

Oh, why did I recognize

That loyal dream of you?

Lips so pure, but old her eyes;

A white carnation veined too blue!

Oh, nothing, of course, but a stillborn prize,

Far too dead to be true.

Sleep, carnation veined too blue,

Human life somehow survives

Without, defunct now, you.

I’ll fast at home for this surprise!

True, she was no one I knew.

Patrick Caulfield: The Poems of Jules Laforgue, trans. by Patricia Terry (London: The Southbank Centre, 1995), 18.

Deep in the Quiet Wood by James Weldon Johnson

Deep in the Quiet Wood

Are you bowed down in heart?

Do you but hear the clashing discord and the din of life?

Then come away, come to the peaceful wood.

Here bathe your soul in silence. Listen! Now,

From out the palpitating solitude

Do you not catch, yet faint, elusive strains?

They are above, around, within you, everywhere.

Silently listen! Clear, and still more clear, they come.

They bubble up in rippling notes, and swell in singing tones.

Now let your soul run the whole gamut of the wondrous scale

Until, responsive to the tonic chord,

It touches the diapason of God’s grand cathedral organ,

Filling earth for you with heavenly peace

And holy harmonies.

James Weldon Johnson, Saint Peter Relates an Incident (New York, London, Victoria, Toronto, Auckland: Penguin Books, 1993), 52.

My City by James Weldon Johnson

My City

When I come down to sleep death’s endless night,

The threshold of the unknown dark to cross,

What to me then will be the keenest loss,

When this bright world blurs on my fading sight?

Will it be that no more I shall see the trees

Or smell the flowers or hear the singing birds

Or watch the flashing streams or patient herds?

No. I am sure it will be none of these.

But, ah! Manhattan’s sights and sounds, her smells,

Her crowds, her throbbing force, the thrill that comes

From being of her part, her subtle spells,

Her shining towers, her avenues, her slums—

Oh God! the stark, unutterable pity,

To be dead, and never again behold my city.

James Weldon Johnson, Saint Peter Relates an Incident (New York, London, Victoria, Toronto, Auckland: Penguin Books, 1993), 37.

Life by James Weldon Johnson

Life

Out of the infinite sea of eternity

To climb, and for an instant stand

Upon an island speck of time.

From an impassible peace of the darkness

To wake, and blink at the garish light

Through one short space of fretfulness.

James Weldon Johnson, Saint Peter Relates an Incident (New York, London, Victoria, Toronto, Auckland: Penguin Books, 1993), 39.

Give Me a Red Breast and a Song by Theodore Best

Give Me a Red Breast and a Song

I have sung down branches

to their sticky booby-traps.

Near things with bald wings

felt serenaded.

I have sung by the roundabout

in the middle of the night.

The lamplight was lamplight.

Nobody told me.

I have sung in gardens at hoses.

I have noted the cold of the flat black grass.

They say I am a territorial beast.

I have eaten from a fat-ball

hanging on a cherry tree.

Through those squares of hard air

what was watching?

I have eaten the beetle

crawling on my lookout.

A green spot’s appeared there –

shiny, like a beetle.

I have eaten a white knotted worm.

I have learnt not to turn from the whisker-claw.

They say I am a territorial beast.

Sometimes things look at me

like we belong together.

Show me a red breast

not a soft beak.

Others throw sticks at me

or screech like the whisker-claw.

All this is usable

for a nest in the wind.

I have harried green rubber in flowerbeds.

I have wrestled the edges of silver.

They say I am a territorial beast.

Though I fear the wind stopping

and a death in the dead grass,

breast upward, head downward,

neck awry,

I know only this:

that my voice is as big

as the one bush it’s filled.

One song,

and all manner of life sees a nesting place.

UEA Creative Writing Anthology 2010: Poetry (Norwich: Egg Box Publishing, 2010), 10-1.

Socrates by Jack Spicer

Socrates

Because they accused me of poems

That did not disturb the young

They gave me a pair of glasses

Filled with tincture of hemlock.

Because the young accused me

Of Piles, horseradish, and bad dreams

They gave me three days

To burn down the city. What dialogues

(If they had let me)

Could I have held with both of my enemies.

Jack Spicer, my vocabulary did this to me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 179.

A Book of Music by Jack Spicer

A Book of Music

Coming to an end, the lovers

Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where

Did it end? There is no telling. No love is

Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves’ boundaries

From which two can emerge exhausted, no long goodbye

Like death.

Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length

Of coiled rope

Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths

Its endings.

But, you will say, we loved

And some parts of us loved

And the rest of us will remain

Two persons. Yes,

Poetry ends like a rope.

Jack Spicer, my vocabulary did this to me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 178.

Thing Language by Jack Spicer

THING LANGUAGE

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises

Tougher than anything.

No one listens to poetry. The ocean

Does not mean to be listened to. A drop

Or crash of water. It means

Nothing.

It

Is bread and butter

Pepper and salt. The death

That young men hope for. Aimlessly

It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No

One listens to poetry.

Jack Spicer, my vocabulary did this to me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 373.

The Garden of Exquisite Silence by Kristin Dimitrova

The Garden of Exquisite Silence

The white statues arch their necks,

keeping their empty marble gazes

bolted.

It is closed,

this door to the sculptor’s hand

when the stone still

scraped the dust off its face.

Behind each statue’s forehead

there is a message.

If you look for an answer,

you break the head.

If you keep the head safe,

you do not get anywhere.

If you break the hand,

you may still not get an answer.

Decide faster.

Kristin Dimitrova, My Life in Squares (Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books, 2010), 74.

The Architectress by Kristin Dimitrova

The Architectress

The architectress carries blueprints.

Only the slab is poured. The walls

are transparent and rise from everywhere

strictly according to layout.

The architectress has spread the blueprints

on the nonexistent windowsill,

leafs through them for mistakes,

then leans and looks through a window

no less transparent.

The architectress (technically)

doesn't exist.

Which makes the house good enough

and practically finished.

Kristin Dimitrova, My Life in Squares (Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books, 2010), 28.

The Three Lady Beggars at the Book Premiere by Kristin Dimitrova

The Three Lady Beggars at the Book Premiere

We all know each other, more or less.

                 We listen to the reading author

                 with attention.

No one knows the three

                 grey old women

                 in the audience.

When we hear the long awaited ‘help yourself, please’

                 the three grey ladies

                 hurry to the buffet.

We turn our heads away from them.

                 Their rotten smell reminds us

                 of our exit-fee.

They advance without noticing us.

                 Beggars regard the others not as people

                 but as territory.

The three have no place among us.

                 We talk of literature,

                 we will not fill our stomachs with the cheese rolls

                 and we step back squeamishly

                 from the reeking gash into a world

                 that gapes at our cheese rolls,

                 and has neither read, nor heard of literature.

We search for meaning. We came here

                 to treat people to books;

                 part of the meaning came –

to claim our cheese rolls.

Kristin Dimitrova, My Life in Squares (Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books, 2010), 16.

Tree by Udo Degener

l  e  a  f

l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f b i r d l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f

l  e  a  f

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

s  a  w

w o o d

w o o d

wortBILD: Visuelle Poesie in der DDR, Guillermo Deisler and Jörg Kowalski, eds. (Halle, Leipzig: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1990), 54. My translation.

The Twist in the River by Katherine Pierpoint

The Twist in the River

At the clear, beer-coloured and bubbleshot twist in the river –

Every stone a speckled egg spawned in that deep lap,

Every pockmarked, pitted pebble a planet, blindly seeing through its own evolution –

The shallows, and the tall air, are filled with sound and light.

This part of the river expects to be seen, for it has drawn you there,

And the trees, selfless, introduce the sky into your love for the water.

If this place were a person, it would be making up a paper hat while humming –

Entirely self-contained, absorbed yet radiant –

A family moment, appearing normal until years later in retrospect,

When its depth are fully felt, beyond blunt experience.

Underwater, the light thickens slightly but never sets

And the river runs through its own fingers, careless.

Katherine Pierpoint, Truffle Beds (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 1.

Osmosis by Katherine Pierpoint

Osmosis

The water is to swimmer as a kiss

Placed on a closed but moving eye.

And swimmer is to water

As a ghost to a claiming room.

The swimmer – suspended, flickering –

Parts the soft walls in the thickened realm

Of an element not entirely owned;

A bladder of heavy air,

Embodied; and yet boneless.

Katherine Pierpoint, Truffle Beds (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 47.

‘Adjectives’: the Novel; the Movie by Roy Fisher

‘Adjectives’: the Novel; the Movie

        Basil Bunting: ‘Adjectives drain nouns’

Defending more than defensive. Ill-equipped, formal,

            luxurious. Defending.

Generous, invasive, status-conscious. Anxious, generous.

Shallow, acquisitive, kitted out, entertaining.

Ill-tended, ill-fed, worn: stale tending to foul.

Grimly, well-organised, obvious. Drunk.

Questing, Attentive. Reserved. Contained

Roy Fisher, Standard Midland (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2010), 35.

Dancing Neanderthal by Roy Fisher

Dancing Neanderthal

Stronger muscles than ours;

Sharper tools –

Could speak?

Possibly.

Write?

Didn’t. Unless with sharp stones

they incised their skins

that would die with them, observing

the ban on lasting records.

Traffic in symbols? Paint on rocks?

Couldn’t?

Didn’t. May have been foresight and hard taboo

to stop themselves inventing

religion, football or flags. Our world’s ways of life

keep strong by prohibitions; and they may just have been

better than us at that, as they no doubt were

at contemplating extinction.

They could have danced?

All night, with that much muscle.

Sung?

No reason why not.

Hard wired to diatonic?

Roy Fisher, Standard Midland (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2010), 32-3.

On Spare Land by Roy Fisher

On Spare Land

Wormwood

rank grass

kids’ dens: the entire

little essay.

Commons without commoners

the Unadopted. A footpath worn

from corner to corner. Wormwood.

And how at the edge the hoardings

paralyse words high up

in the common air.

John Cage

on a bland enough midwestern

campus:

              – use random means

to set coordinates then

hang around at the intersection

all day if need be. There’ll

be something to interest you!

Roy Fisher, Standard Midland (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2010), 13.

Past Time by Harvey Shapiro

PAST TIME

               I believe we came together

               Out of ignorance not love,

               Both being shy and hunted in the city.

               In the hot summer, touching each other,

               Amazed at how love could come

               Like a waterfall, with frightening force

               And bruising sleep. Waking at noon,

               Touching each other for direction,

               Out of ignorance not love.

Richard Kostelanetz, Possibilities of Poetry: An Anthology of American Contemporaries (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1970), 344.

Automatic World by Philip Lamantia

AUTOMATIC WORLD

The sun has drowned

virgins are no more

there is no need for understanding

but there is so much to see

So come with me

down the boulevard

of crawling veins

Don’t be afraid

blood is cheap!

A paradise song?

A dirty song?

A love sonnet?

Scream it out!

Then we’ll have the human walls

tumbling down to meet our march

into the raw-meat city!

The velvet robes are strewn

across the landscape

We step upon the sidewalk

that goes up and down

up to the clouds

down to the starving people

Don’t ask me what to do!

Keep on going

we’ll end up somewhere fast

on the moon perhaps!

Rainbow guns are dancing

in front of the movie queens

Everyone is laughing

flying dying

never knowing when to rest

never knowing when to eat

And the fountains come falling

out of her thistle-covered breasts

and the dogs are happy

and the clowns are knifing

and the ballerinas are eating stone

O the mirror-like dirt

of freshly spilt blood

trickling down the walls

the walls that reach the stars!

O the flock of sheep

breaking their flesh open

with bones sucked

from the brothels!

O the grave of bats

sailing through shops

with the violent hands!

When will these come?

When will these go?

The sun is riding into your eye

virgins are bursting

from under my flaming palms

and we are slowly floating away

Richard Kostelanetz, Possibilities of Poetry: An Anthology of American Contemporaries (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1970), 246-7.