Last September, our guest author Susan Morrow posted here her translations of Egyptian poetry ancient (Invocation to a Scribe) and modern (The Song of Baramhat) .
Soon thereafter the site 100 Best Poems picked up Morrow's translation of the Ancient Egyptian poem Invocation to a Scribe and presented it as a contemporary Egyptian poem by the 20th Century Egyptian poet Salah Jahin. This is a mistake and a misattribution, and as the site has not responded to our requests for a correction, we are correcting it here.
On page 276-277 of The Dawning Moon of the Mind (Susan Brind Morrow, The Dawning Moon of The Mind, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) Morrow published her translations of these two Egyptian poems.
The first is an excerpt from her translation of Song of Baramhat by Salah Jahin, the uncle of an old friend of Morrow's, Egyptian novelist Hossam Fahr, who recently retired as head of Arabic translation at the United Nations. Hossam brought Jahin’s work to Morrow's attention in the 1980s, and she published her translation of his poem, Song(s) of Baramhat, in The Seneca Review in 1986. You can find here translations in her post here.
The second poem is Morrow's translation of the well known secular Egyptian New Kingdom poem Invocation to a Scribe. The original hieroglyphic poem is on Chester Beatty Papyrus IV in the British Museum. This hieroglyphic poem has also been translated elsewhere (by Miriam Lichtheim in Ancient Egyptian Literature V. II The New Kingdom, p.175-178, P. Chester Beatty IV = P. British Museum 10684; Sir Alan Gardiner, Hieratic Papyri, 1. p. 38-39; Schott, Liebeslieder p. 155-157; John Wilson, ANET, 431-432).
Morrow's original work on this hieroglyphic translation is with her papers in the Sowell Collection.
-- sdh
PS. I have shared this post with the editors of 100 Best Poems. Fingers crossed that this time they'll make the correction.
Aza Pace’s poems appear in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, Tupelo Quarterly, Crazyhorse (now swamp pink), New Ohio Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is the winner of two Academy of American Poets University Prizes and an Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston and a PhD from the University of North Texas.
From this week's Barron's (7/31/23) comes "Land of the Share Class, Home of the Braves" by Andrew Bary in which we learn that Warren Buffett is a big believer in Liberty Sirius XM (LSXMK) "with a 20% stake" and that Buffett "is said to play the Siriusly Sinatra station in his Cadillac." Sounds like a buy recommendation to us, and how pleasant to picture Buffett driving a Cadillac, not a Mercedes. It's more evidence that Warren Buffett, "the Warren Beatty of finance," means what he says when he says "don't bet against America."
<<< John never insisted on being the sole poet you were allowed to admire. Not long after he sent Three Poems he embarked on a mission clearly designed to improve my library. Freely Espousing arrived, by James Schuyler, followed by the recently published Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. To these he soon added Hebdomeros, Hesiod, and Raymond Queneau. If you hadn’t majored in literature, as I hadn’t, John’s erudition was thrilling and his eagerness to share it, a revelation.
Gradually I discovered he did not know everything. He was rather a snob about classic American literature—he once admitted this—which must qualify as a blind spot when you think of it, since the man who could write “Daffy Duck in Hollywood” was enthralled by American comics, old movies, and popular culture. But when I ventured to say how cool it was that he actually grew up by blue Ontario’s shore he didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. I had to explain that this was the title of the grand poem in which Walt Whitman summons the poets of the American future; so his being born and raised on that very shore made it seem Whitman had John in mind. At this he didn’t sneer, but said nothing. Years later he took to reading Whitman and claimed that perhaps he’d been influenced after all.
But Whitman or no, there are numerous lakes and shorelines to be found in John’s poems, and a persuasive list of examples to demonstrate how Rochester and its environs once lent their climate to his work. His poem “The Chateau Hardware” is in effect a greeting card from the place that formed him. Anyone who has lived beneath the gray skies of Rochester can acknowledge the truth of the opening line, “It was always November there.” I loved this poem the moment I read it, a feeling that was intensified when John pointed out from the car the location on Monroe Avenue of the mundane hardware store that provided the allusive title. In the rush of time, both the store and its sign—Chateau Hardware—were gone. >>>
<<< . . .a copy of Three Poems arrived in the mail. Reading it, I must have held my breath from the first sentence to the last. If poetry should be as well written as prose then here was proof that the secret was to write it asif it were prose. Here was language in the shape of a quest, language that had detached utility from the great quests of the 1960s and employed it as a means to continue in the wake of their defeat. It was a way to go on without hope, but without losing the feeling of hope. >>>
Now listen here and you listen good Don't you dare go around using that Expression it's not my first rodeo! I hate that expression and it's been Cropping up like the kudzu plant so If you want to use an expression You'd best say the jury is still out or That's a horse of a different color or Katie bar the door like if the dentist Wants to take your teeth out you say Katie bar the door or say Jesus Christ Or Christ Jesus which is six of one or Half a dozen of the other and bull riders Didn't used to wear football helmets.
Four introductions to poetry readings given by birthday boy John Ashbery.
. . .. with John everything seems significant. "Mountain ash mindlessly dropping its berries" is one phrase in which he consciously puts himself in a line by punning on his name. The adverb makes quite a difference. When Ashbery says "ashtray" it means ashtray and maybe something else as well. -- DL
Against brutal Creon, doll establishes fugitive greatness. His internal justice, knowledge law mean nothing, only piety. Questing revenge, she triumphs, uttering virginal wounds extravagant, yearning’s zenith.
The Judith Wright Poetry Prize was established in 2007 by Overland magazine, one of Australia’s more inspired quarterlies and among the nation’s best homes for poetry, as an annual award recognizing new and emerging poets. In 2021, Overland published Groundswell: The Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2007-2020, an anthology which collected not only the winning poems (including the runners up), but also a selection of poems written by the winning poets since they were honored by the prize. Edited by Overland’s poetry editor, Toby Fitch, Groundswell is perhaps the best chronicle of the state of Australian poetry over the past 14 years you’re likely to find, mapping its fashions and trajectory through the work of a number of innovative voices.
2015’s winning poem “alkaway” by Ella O’Keefe grabs you with the sheer charisma of its opening line “a punchline flies business class”—how could anyone resist reading what comes next? But there is more than mere surface charm to the line: when it comes to jokes and their punchlines, we speak of their success in terms of “landing.” This joke, still in flight, remains hanging in the balance. It also occupies a place of privilege, flying not in coach but “business class,” which brings up the question of the role of humor in our society more generally, and comedians in particular, many of whom feel they are entitled to say the un-sayable, that their punchlines, no matter where they land, deserve to travel in a certain amount of comfort and be received with immunity.
What follows is a series of surprising images and phrases juxtaposed against one another, which, as the award judges note, address a range of themes “from high capitalism, health fads, technology and the law, to the domestic, cohabitation, indifference and the refuse of human consumption”, but throughout the poem the privilege of distance (how we can remove ourselves, or be removed, from what we say, see or do) seems to lurk disturbingly in the background.
Ella O’Keefe’s first collection of poems Slowlier was published by Cordite in 2020. She currently teaches at Deakin University, where she was awarded her thesis which discussed the poetry and critical writing of Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Barbara Guest.
alkaway
a punchline flies business class
towards vague archipelagos
in the deepening Pacific
I find glassy petrol spots the size of 5-cent pieces
refracting intervals of the day
thrushy embers in mornings overturn
woken by shapeless violence
your body returned
from sleep’s legal trip
quilling into the afternoon
discovering ‘the therapeutic power of water’
while wasp-shaped helicopters
spotlight the oval – but when?
(in violet enamel
when bees were discovered)
after filtering the whole house
cohabited refuse goes archaeological
turncoat, Georgic pink
bread bag (garment)
elastic calendar as in
day-shaped moments between yawns
time-check:
pearling three o’clock clicks to
night without dusk
floating floor
live improv set in the big suburb
replica village reality effect
the bodice sits over the body
know this well already, cf. ‘it mimics nature to filter’
On August 1, Graywolf will publish Roger Reeves’ Dark Days: Fugitive Essays. This is a gift of a book written by a poet with searing intelligence, whose escape into language—OutKast and Sun Ra, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Zora Neal Hurston, and Richard Wright—center his thinking about America’s troubled history. Reeves celebrate the playfulness of Black speech while also examining its silences. There is the silencing that comes through erasure, but also the sacred silence of the ”hush harbor” where enslaved people came together to worship in secret. When Reeves agrees to give a reading at the McLeod Plantation in South Carolina, he finds himself drawn to a ginhouse where enslaved children, too young to work the fields, were charged with pulling hot bricks out of a kiln. He finds tiny fingerprints in the bricks that alert him to the fact that these children had to pull out bricks with their bare hands, certainly having burned them. The tenderness with which Reeves tries to resist putting his own fingertips in the brick’s prints is worth the whole book—a metaphor for empathy and the limitations and terror we feel going back in history. Dark Days builds with essays that are astonishing in their revelations as well as their forms. In an epistolary essay “Letters to Michael Brown,” Reeves gives us a series of correspondence from 2015 to 2022. In the last such letter, he writes:
Michael, I thought of you when my daughter confessed her fear of being shot. Did you have that fear? Had you sensed your death as a boy, worried that you wouldn’t make it past twenty. As a boy, I had no expectation of living past twenty….
“Instructions for the Underground” is a list of imperatives that gains its power though simple variation that compound into complexities. Here are just a few examples:
IN THE UNDERGROUND, EAT WELL….
LOVE WHAT YOU COULDN’T LOVE OUT THERE….
BE AS ANCIENT AS YOU WANT TO BE…
Reeves’ appreciation for the necessity of the hush/the underground makes his readers rethink all our chatter, our speaking up. Silence is no longer prized in our age of outrage. He writes that “silence gets mischaracterized as passive, as noninvolvement, as capitulating to subjugation.” And later, “I wonder if our loquaciousness isn’t sinking us further into exploitation, a further fashioning of our bodies and pain as commodity…” In Dark Days Reeves contemplates the silence, the introspection necessary for eloquent responses to our increasingly frightening world.
Six Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, Op. 143a (1973) 1. My poems (3:26) 2. Such tenderness (3:53) 3. Hamlet's dialogue with his conscience (3:23) 4. The Poet and the Tsar (1:40) 5. No, the drum beat (3:28) 6. To Anna Akhmatova (6:09) Ortrun Wenkel, contralto Concertgebouw Orchestra Bernard Haitink, cond.
Marina Tsvetaeva
Of course, DS could never have composed such a work during the Stalin years.
Tsvetaeva -- born in 1892 -- lived a life of such intense tragedy, that her poems provide Shostakovich with a built-in template for his greatest theme -- suffering.
She lived through the Revolution and the subsequent famine, but placed her daughter in a state orphanage in 1919, where the girl starved to death.
She left Russia in '22, moving about Europe; Paris-Berlin-Prague until moving back to Moscow in '39. Then her husband and daughter were arrested on espionage charges; her husband was executed.
Two years later, Tsvetaeva committed suicide.
**
1. My Poems
To my poems, written so early that I didn't even know then that I was a poet; that took flight, like spray from a fountain, like sparks from a rocket; that burst in, like little devils, into a temple filled with sleep and incense . . . to my poems of youth and death -- unread poems! -- carelessly scattered in the dust of shops (where no one has ever bought them!) . . . To my poems, as to previous wines, their time will come!
2. Such tenderness
Where does such tenderness come from? These are not the first curls I have stroked, and lips I have known that were darker than yours. Stars have shone and dimmed again (where does this tenderness come from?) eyes have shone and dimmed again so close to my own eyes. Songs that were greater than this have I heard in the darkness of the night (where does this tenderness come from?) on the very breast of the singer. Where does this tenderness come from? And what to do with it, sly boy, passing stranger, with those eyelashes (how long they are!)?
3. Hamlet's dialogue with his conscience
She's at the bottom in the mud and weeds . . . She sought sleep there, but there's no sleep there either! But I loved her; forty thousand brothers could not make up my sum! Hamlet! She's at the bottom, in the mud: the mud! . . . And the last wreath has floated up past the logs on the river bank . . . But I loved her; forty thousand brothers . . . Less, though, than a single lover. She's at the bottom, in the mud. But I loved her . . .
4. The Poet and the Tsar
In the unearthly, hall of the Tsars: who's this proud one carved in marble? So magnificent, adorned with gold? The wretched gendarme Of Pushkin's glory. He harrassed the writer, clipped the manuscript. The land of Poland he butchered like an animal. Take a good look! Don't forget! The poet-killer Tsar Nicholas the First!
5. No, the drum beat
No, the drum beat before the grieving troops, when we buried our leader; like the teeth of the Tsar over the dead poet drumming the roll of honour. Such great honour that for his closest friends there's no room. At his head, his feet, to right and to left -- arms down their seams -- the chests and ugly mugs of the police. Isn't it strange -- even on the quietest of beds to be supervised like a naughty little boy? Whatever, whatever, whatever could surpass such honour. This honour's too much! "Look my country," he cries: "how despite what they say, the monarch prizes the poet!" With honours -- honours -- honours -- supreme honours -- honours -- to hell with it! Who, then -- like thieves with a crony who's been shot -- did they carry out? Some traitor? No. From the courtyard they carried the wisest man in Russia.
6. To Anna Akhmatova
O muse of weeping, the most beautiful of muses! O wild fiend of the white night! You spread a black blizzard over Russia, and your howling pierces us like arrows. And we shy away, and a hollow whisper a hundred thousand-fold -- swears to you. Anna Akhmatova! This name is a great sigh, falling into a nameless depth. We are crowned by this -- that we tread the same earth as you, that the sky above us is the same! And he who has been wounded by your mortal fate departs already immortal to his deathbed. The domes burn in my singing city, and the blind wanderer praises the Holy Saviour . . . And I make a gift to you of my city of bells, Akhmatova! And of my heart as well.
Waiting is one of Judaism's great themes As when Abraham waited to be the father Of a great nation which God promised him Or he also waited to be the father of a child Both of which finally happened but only when He was an old man with a long white beard. Or what about how the Jews waited for Moses to come down from Mount Sinai?
You might think we're also just waiting for Moshiach but it's not like John Milton said You also serve when you only stand and wait. You should expedite Moshiach whether it's by Philanthropy like a humongous concert hall or Cancer hospital or by not stepping on an ant.
Thomas O’Grady is the author of two books of poems, What Really Matters and Delivering the News, both published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in the distinguished Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series. Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he was Director of Irish Studies from 1984 to 2019 and a member of the Creative Writing faculty, he is currently Scholar-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. He divides his time between and among the banks of the mighty St. Joe River in South Bend, a converted rumrunners bunkhouse in Adamsville, Rhode Island, and the south shore of his native Prince Edward Island (Canada).
<<< Harvard had a kind of indifference to its Americanness then [postwar years]: Europe was still everything, Cambridge and Oxford were the colleges, Britain was the culture. American bounty was ignored. Four Mark Rothko murals hung until they were battered and faded in the dining room of Holyoke Center, a large and absurdly ugly brutalist building just off Harvard Square; now they’re in the Fogg Museum, which at the time had a great collection of 19th-century American painting—Winslow Homers, George Innesses, Frederic Edwin Churches—all rolled up in the attic. Harvard had an indifference to its wealth, too, which was substantial but somehow assumed. My friend Roger Rosenblatt studied literature at Harvard and got fellowship after fellowship. But eventually there was a fellowship he needed that wasn’t going to come through. One of Roger’s instructors said to him, apologetically, “Well, Rog, looks like you’ll have to dip into capital.” It was assumed a Harvard student would have capital to dip into.
The undergraduate houses in those days were class based, on the model of Oxford and Cambridge. Eliot House was for the upper class, the place for boys from Groton or St. Paul’s. If you’d been to Andover or Exeter, it was Lowell House. People from New York City public schools, the few there were, went to Adams House. Winthrop House was far away by the river and for the lower classes. It was like a map of the class structure, but it wasn’t axiomatic. For example, FDR had also lived in Adams House, though that was earlier, and so had John Reed, who is buried in Red Square. Alan Graubard, a very Jewish friend of mine, lived in Eliot House and was called “Mr. Israel” by his house master, John H. Finley Jr., a classicist descended from prominent Episcopalian ministers and public servants. Finley used the nickname not to be unkind—he was a friendly man—but probably in desperation at forgetting Alan’s name. >>>
<<< Harvard’s 300 years of Protestant inheritance was in its last, most overripe stages [circa 1960]. The old forms were increasingly minoritarian; most of the culture was actually decadent. A young man, part of a group that used to go down to New York to see Andy Warhol, died the first or second year I was there from a drug overdose. But it wasn’t the kind of thing you ever talked about. Eventually, though, the rumors of rampant marijuana use in the houses became so loud even the masters had to hear them.
A distinguished sociologist, George Homans, and I were appointed to investigate these rumors [o drug use] in Kirkland House. We knew that they were true before we even started and George said, “We’re going to have to tell Charles very gently.” He was referring to master of Kirkland, Charles Taylor, an undistinguished professor of history and man of a passing era we both liked. We went into the master’s office for tea, biscuits, and sherry, like they used to serve at Harvard, and before we could say anything he proclaimed: “If I find out that there is marijuana [he pronounced it with the j] in this house, I will cut my throat.” That brought us both up short, so George took over. He began, and began, and began again, and finally the master, who could see what was coming but needed a lifeline, said, “You’re not going to tell me, are you, that so and so does pot?” >>>
Peretz is the former publisher of The New Republic.
Bob Hershon (pictured here, with Elizabeth Swados, prior to their reading at KGB Bar last Monday evening), has been selecting our Sunday poems from Hanging Loose. Photo credit: Star Black
This poem by Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel appeared first in Hanging Loose 47 in 1985 and later in her book, A Primer for Buford.
WRITING POETRY ON NEW PAPER
Rich alluring this sudden change seems sinful too free and easy for a Dustbowl Woman
I must walk carefully on good paper one word at a time feeling my way down a new path not yet realizing
there are no inky crossouts no roadblocks of junk mail flyers to slow my pen
-- Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel
I wish I had the time and space to tell you the whole remarkable story of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. Luckily, there’s an excellent website that will supply her biography and let you read some of her poems. In fact, you can hear Wilma reading some of her work in her clear, no-nonsense fashion: digital.library.okstate.edu/mcdaniel/index.htm
In brief, Wilma was born in Oklahoma in 1918 to a poor farming family that became still poorer in the Dustbowl of the Thirties. In 1936, the McDaniels joined the army of 0Okies who headed to California, desperately seeking work. Wilma remained a farm laborer all her working life. She died at age 88, in 2007.
Her story is not very different from thousands of others except that some time in her early teens, Wilma began writing poems. She wrote about family and friends and – that rare subject in American poetry – work. All kinds of work, from picking fruit to repairing old machinery to running a tiny store, all the occupations that keep small rural towns going. At some point, her poems began appearing in church newsletters and local papers. And then, years later, somehow she connected to the poetry community and began publishing in literary magazines.
We first heard of her from a California poet named John Oliver Simon, who encouraged her to send work to us. We loved her writing right from the start and she appeared in the magazine with great regularity. We went on to publish four full collections of her work, but we weren’t alone; she published many books with small local presses. In her last years, her reputation grew steadily. Universities took note of her great talent and special history and began teaching her work. National Geographic called her a national treasure. She was named poet laureate of Tulare County.
Poetry didn’t make her rich, of course, and the frugal habits of a lifetime remained with her always. When an envelope arrived from Wilma, I’d shake out the contents. There would be, say, ten poems, all written in black ink, on the backs of religious flyers, on the insides of flattened cereal boxes, on the unused spaces of junk mail, all carefully trimmed to the size of the poem, so she could save the unused portions.
At one point, I sent her a ream of 24# white bond paper and I waited to see what she’d do with 500 sheets of virgin stock. Months went by and the poems continued to arrive on scraps of cardboard and newsprint. Then, just when I was about to ask her whether she’d ever received the package, she sent Writing Poetry on New Paper.
-- Robert Hershon
-- "Nice poem, but the back story is even better." -- Terence Winch
In December 2007, the late Paul Violi (left) read the entries for our BEST AMERICAN POETRY challenge # 2. We repost the results today, Paul's birthday.
THE CHALLENGE (devised by David Lehman):
When deciphered, this anagram
HIT THE LUMP OF RICH SEAL
represents the title of a book of poems by a past guest editor of The Best American Poetry. Solve the puzzle, then write a two-stanza acrostic poem in which the first letters of the lines spell out the name of that poet. Deadline: Midnight, December 31, 2007.
Our judge, Paul Violi, has chosen a first-place winner and two runners up.
All entries were judged blind; the names of the authors were not revealed until after the verdicts were rendered.
First Place: Penelope’s Shield by Frank Osen
PENELOPE’S SHIELD
Laughing Boy returns, and the dog drops dead. Odysseus, did you think I wouldn’t know? Under this shroud I’ve borne more absences than yours. So what, if summer shared our golden bed? Every winter wears the same disguise.
Growth and loss loom longer with me, now— urging weaves both ways, casting my work in the sun’s or fire’s light— knit with disciplined undoing.
-- Frank Osen
Runners Up: “As the Underworld Turns” by Sally Cook and “Lo Mein Palace: Here I Come” by Michael Quattrone
AS THE UNDERWORLD TURNS
Like her sis, Persephone On fair Adonis set her sights. Underworld talk had it that she Interfered with sister’s rights. So, old Zeus ruled there’d be seasons! Earth’s year went, two-thirds, to ladies.
Goodness knows, Zeus had his reasons -- Life stayed sweet in the Cyclades. Under, next to Hades’ furies Cabbage and anemones, Kissed to life, were blessed by Ceres
-- Sally Cook
Lo Mein Palace, Here I Come!
Lo Mein Palace, here I come! Out the door I spot Louise, who smiles until I glance at her clavicle, etc.— into the elevator, through the lobby, sex never tasted as sweet & sour as the egg roll dreams I'm hatching in the cab
grinding down, down a Second Avenue stand still, licking my lips like some addled scavenger, until the neon serenade: Wonton! Tsingtao! Chopstick! It's a wonder I get anything in my mouth. Kate orders Kung Pao extra spicy, and I nearly faint.
-- Michael Quattrone
Honorable mention: Angela Ball, Barbara G.S. Hagerty, Andrea Selch, Terence Winch, David Yezzi.
After the national fanfare died down, the quintuplets grew up protected from further exploitation in the safety and privacy that state funds and public donations ensured.But, inevitably, they had to enter the real world.On their eighteenth birthday they went to work as tellers in the same bank, my bank, the National Bank of Westchester. The first time I walked in and saw them behind the counter my heart skipped a beat:Veronica, Vanessa, Vivian, Next Teller Please, Valerie, Vicki.With their dark complexions, ruffled white blouses and full red lips -- like petals from a mythical flower, like the tens they plucked from their tills, they were identical down to the last curlicue.All I could think was that it would take a lifetime to explain this moment, an eternity to explain a lifetime.All I could say was, "Marvelous, incombustibly marvelous!"Words that echoed down the line as people from all walks of life couldn't help but agree.Behind his desk smiled B. Yourgrau, Manager, assured that another customer had found the answer to all his banking needs.
-- Paul Violi [photographed above with Star Black at KGB Bar 1998] Happy birthday, Paul.
Next week—on July 25th—Penguin will release Terrance Hayes’s Watch Your Language. The book is series of fantastic essays about the last century of American poetry. Including graphs, artwork, multiple choice quizzes, tarot cards, a boardgame, Hayes’s own poems for context, and biography framed by epistolatory gestures, Watch Your Language is a hybrid wonder. From personal experiences to poetry scholarship, Hayes makes timelines of poetry history and influence. Festooned in the book are biographies of poets (many Black), some iconic and some completely new to me, introduced by birth year as they would be in an encyclopedia. Of particular interest is his work on Gwendolyn Brooks and Wanda Coleman and their influence on him and poets of Hayes’s generation. Observations from his boyhood in South Carolina to a poetry conference in Shanghai right before Trump was elected (and Hayes would soon begin his American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin) to Cave Canem workshops, Hayes takes us on a journey of what it is like to be a Black American poet now. Embedded through the book are a series of 255 questions, such as “What if every day you ask questions of yourself in poetry?” and “Did you know Ezra Pound met Emmett Till’s father in prison?” and “Is Robert Lowell or Wallace Stevens the whitest poet in the canon?” Watch Your Language is inventive, thought-provoking, and pure joy.
Maria! Maria! Maria! Open up. It’s cold out here, and the streets are scary.
No? Would you rather see me freeze, whipped by the wind, stripped, my skull devoid of my teeth?
Maria, look! I’m shivering! I’m shaking! and the rain is pelting the pavement, pelting all of us, beggars, junkies, winos, bums, like tears from the eyes of the drainpipe waterfall.
And thus the rain licked our feet all of us except for the fatsos stuffed with goose liver and with an apple in their mouths riding in the back seats of expensive carriages.
*
Maria! Open up. The mob is breathing down my neck. Look, they’re attacking my eyes with hatpins!
I’m in.
Maria, I want you to ignore whatever they say about me I may have kissed a thousand girls but you’re this madman’s favorite, for I’ll gladly admit I’m a mad man, mad about you.
Maria, I’d love it if you and I took off all our clothes and lay, naked and shameless, or scared, if you prefer, in bed.
Let me kiss you on the mouth. On this May day come live with me in the April of my heart.
Maria! Poets write sonnets to the souls of their lovers, but I am every inch a man and I want your body as much as a devout Christian beseeches the Lord to “give us this day our daily bread.”
Maria, I confess I’m afraid I’ll forget your name as a poet is afraid he’ll forget le mot juste which he has looked for all his life, the word born in a night to perish in a night, while the soul glowed in rays of light.
Maria, I promise you I will love your body as much as a wounded veteran loves his one remaining leg.
No? Why no? But you say no.
Damn.
So once again I’ll have to carry my heart away as a dog nurses the paw that was crushed by a train.
-- English version by David Lehman
[click here for a section from part II of "The Cloud in Trousers"]
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later to the greatness of Teddy Wilson "After You've Gone" on the piano in the corner of the bedroom as I enter in the dark