Philip's comments (member since Oct 21, 2007)

Philip's comments from the ¡ POETRY ! group.

This is both outrageous and chilling. I bought my copy of I'm the Man Who Loves You more than a year ago, and it was easy to find and buy through Amazon then. It is a collection of very significant art, 'adult' and 'provocative' merely in those words' true meanings. This is horrible news.

Good news, Ruth! Odd that Solstice doesn't just publish in June and December though ...

That is great, Jerry, thank you.

I love this line:

And there was endlessness.

These are marvelous choices, Ruth, all of them. I especially like the Atwood and the Neruda. Man oh man.

Rochelle, I think that whichever post you are responding to, the system will put it in chronological order depending on when it was submitted. So sometimes people give a clue the number of the post if there's been intervening comment - so in your case - the original post or #1 above.

... "at night."

Amazing, thanks for posting this.

God that is beautiful, Ruth. I for one find twilight and the sending of blue to black a time of wonder, though I am well aware that others dislike the loss of light and all that it portends.

That slanting late-afternoon light that Kenyon makes shine in the first lines is the first signal I love to see.

Check out the February newsletter sent by email from Goodreads ...

Speaking of Addonizio, I love the final couplet of her DANCE:

moving through all your true and beautiful lives
while the real one pales.

from her collection What Is This Thing Called Love? (2004)

I agree, Leslie, -- or to be a little safer with our bosses, Rinabeana or any of us could quote the first lines and see whether our tormenter would make the connection:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light ...


Might confuse 'em anyway ...

Thanks for all these wonderful poems, everybody.

Mandy -- the Stafford poem The Story ... strikes me this time around not just on its most literal level, where I think I have read it before, but as a comment on how we, each of us, needs perhaps to seek and work to find our own true selves. And to believe in our own self-constructions without benefit of others, even of our families.

Jerry -- thanks for another serious laugh with Basic.

Ruth -- I love the Clampitt, had never read it before that I can recall. The ocean not just keeping and balancing accounts, but in effect ingesting and absorbing everything in a constant and eternal digestion as an image of the process of life itself. I'm thinking of these lines in particular:

The process
goes on forever: they came from sand,
they go back to gravel,
along with treasuries ...

Yes, the Smithville poem unfolds the parent's dilemma quite well. Thanks for the links Kee.

Sweetness
By Stephen Dunn

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet ....

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

A friend sent me this one recently:

Scars

They tell how it was, and how time
came along, and how it happened
again and again. They tell
the slant life takes when it turns
and slashes your face as a friend.

Any wound is real. In church
a woman lets the sun find
her cheek, and we see the lesson:
there are years in that book; there are sorrows
a choir can't reach when they sing.

Rows of children lift their faces of promise,
places where the scars will be.

- William Stafford

Rinabeana and all, on Kim Addonizio, I posted a thread on her amazing poem "Prayer" back in November.

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show_grou...

Here's another wonderful friendship poem, one that I didn't know before finding it on the very rich poetry blog referenced upthread (#40) by rinabeana. It's not in the Lowell collection I have (edited by Honor Moore).

To a Friend
By Amy Lowell

I ask but one thing of you, only one,
That always you will be my dream of you;
That never shall I wake to find untrue
All this I have believed and rested on,
Forever vanished, like a vision gone
Out into the night. Alas, how few
There are who strike in us a chord we knew
Existed, but so seldom heard its tone
We tremble at the half-forgotten sound.
The world is full of rude awakenings
And heaven-born castles shattered to the ground,
Yet still our human longing vainly clings
To a belief in beauty through all wrongs.
O stay your hand, and leave my heart its songs!

God I love Addonizio, including Spill, thanks for posting. All the clever turns of turning and starting and finishing and in the end remembering.

Rinabeana, I really like the Millay poem "To a Friend Estranged from Me." Thanks for posting it!

This Nye poem speaks to me very powerfully, thanks.

Personally, I do like the poem. I especially like the notion that we will likely be better off dead than revivified. I found the comparative informality of the middle dialogue (in contrast with the start and end) funny and thus appropriate.

I agree with Ruth that the capitalization of every line breaks the rhythm of your words, and cause the reader to pause too much.