POETRY SWAP MEET: Poetry we don't usually know about, or?

WELCOME TO POETRY SWAP MEET!  Where poetry you might never have seen and the poets who wrote them are posted by members, or you show & tell us!

And greetings to members of the Deep!  This is Jade, in case it’s your first meet!  

I’ve started a forum as a place for members to post favorite works that they have grown up with.  Or recently discovered; of an obscure poet’s verse, practically unknown. Or found in a book - in the $2 bin at a local flea market. And anyone in between, famous or otherwise. Of every genre, except extreme content, sorry.

This is a forum of reference & learning, growth & discovery; so it’s for all of us, whether novice or experienced.  One poem per post (multiple posts are fine, just be sure to breathe once in a while), please, and comments by posters & posties *coff* is a good thing.  Be constructive, play nice & share - respect at all times.

For those members who have said are here to enjoy the poetry of others but don’t write as a rule; you don’t need to be a poet for this:

Just be familiar with, and an avid reader of, poetry from books and from online. Help unearth literary  gems from every era, even from around the world.  

That also means poetry in other languages. Just provide a translation in English alongside in your post.  Again, one poem per post, please.

This is not a competition, or a challenge.  It’s not for members to post poems of any form/style that’s written by them, or any other onsite DU members. There are always plenty of forums, competitions & challenges for that.

This is to show members’ personally selected works from published poets of the past and the present. To share and help enlighten those of us who want to know how it is and was done before any of us knew how.  Of where to look, and who to look for.

If you know, but don’t have actual book(s), since they seem to be fading relics, then chances are you’ll find the poet/ poem through a search engine online. How ironic. The dinosaurs of hard bound & paperbacks; have we justified the means of their demise?  Alas, please - that’s for another forum, another day.

I’ll start with a few choices, and not necessarily always well-known or familiar. Have you any idea the gems that await? I’m keen to read what members might refer the rest of us to. So let’s relax & enjoy!

Update: Please do not use links in the forum thread.  Simply add a brief bio “blurb” in your own words (not mandatory) when posting a poem. Thank you.

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

Charles Bukowski, who, in 1959 published his first of 45 books, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, was born in Germany, moved to Los Angeles with his family at age 3, and died in San Pedro, California of leukemia.


Eat Your Heart Out

I’ve come by, she says, to tell you
that this is it.  I’m not kidding,
it’s over, this is it.
I sit on the couch watching her arrange
her long red hair before my bedroom
mirror.
she pulls her hair up and
piles it on top of her head-
she lets her eyes look at
my eyes-
then she drops her hair and
lets it fall down in front of her face.
we go to bed and I hold her
speechlessly from the back
my arm around her neck
I touch her wrists and hands
feel up to
her elbows
no further
she gets up.
this is it, she says,
this will do. well,
I’m going.
I get up and walk her
to the door
just as she leaves
she says,
I want you to buy me
some high-heeled shoes
with tall thin spikes,
black high-heeled shoes.
no, I want them
red.
I watch her walk down the cement walk
under the trees
she walks alright and
as the poinsettias drip in the sun
I close the door.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Born in Coventry, UK; Brunette Coleman was a pseudonym used by the poet and writer Philip (Arthur) Larkin. In 1943, towards the end of his time as an undergraduate at St John's College, Oxford, he wrote several works of fiction, verse and critical commentary under that name.



Afternoons

Summer is fading:
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering
The new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
Young mothers assemble
At swing and sandpit
Setting free their children.

Behind them, at intervals,
Stand husbands in skilled trades,
An estateful of washing,
And the albums, lettered
Our Wedding, lying
Near the television:
Before them, the wind
Is ruining their courting-places

That are still courting-places
(But the lovers are all in school),
And their children, so intent on
Finding more unripe acorns,
Expect to be taken home.
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

Winner of a Nobel Prize in Literature, Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, better known by his pen name and, later, legal name Pablo Neruda, was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician.



One-Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII*

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,  
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:  
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,  
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries  
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,  
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose  
from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,  
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,  
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,  
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.


*This is one of two translations from the poet’s original in Spanish that I know, and this is the one I decided to show.

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

Charles Bukowski, who, in 1959 published his first of 45 books, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, was born in Germany, moved to Los Angeles with his family at age 3, and died in San Pedro, California of leukemia.


Death Wants More Death

death wants more death, and its webs are full:
I remember my father's garage, how child-like
I would brush the corpses of flies
from the windows they thought were escape-
their sticky, ugly, vibrant bodies
shouting like dumb crazy dogs against the glass
only to spin and flit
in that second larger than hell or heaven
onto the edge of the ledge,
and then the spider from his dank hole
nervous and exposed
the puff of body swelling
hanging there
not really quite knowing,
and then knowing-
something sending it down its string,
the wet web,
toward the weak shield of buzzing,
the pulsing;
a last desperate moving hair-leg
there against the glass
there alive in the sun,
spun in white;
and almost like love:
the closing over,
the first hushed spider-sucking:
filling its sack
upon this thing that lived;
crouching there upon its back
drawing its certain blood
as the world goes by outside
and my temples scream
and I hurl the broom against them:
the spider dull with spider-anger
still thinking of its prey
and waving an amazed broken leg;
the fly very still,
a dirty speck stranded to straw;
I shake the killer loose
and he walks lame and peeved
towards some dark corner
but I intercept his dawdling
his crawling like some broken hero,
and the straws smash his legs
now waving
above his head
and looking
looking for the enemy
and somewhat valiant,
dying without apparent pain
simply crawling backward
piece by piece
leaving nothing there
until at last the red gut sack
splashes
its secrets,
and I run child-like
with God's anger a step behind,
back to simple sunlight,
wondering
as the world goes by
with curled smile
if anyone else
saw or sensed my crime

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Born in Coventry, UK; Brunette Coleman was a pseudonym used by the poet and writer Philip (Arthur) Larkin. In 1943, towards the end of his time as an undergraduate at St John's College, Oxford, he wrote several works of fiction, verse and critical commentary under that name.


No Road

Since we agreed to let the road between us
Fall to disuse,
And bricked our gates up, planted trees to screen us,
And turned all time's eroding agents loose,
Silence, and space, and strangers - our neglect
Has not had much effect.

Leaves drift unswept, perhaps; grass creeps unmown;
No other change.
So clear it stands, so little overgrown,
Walking that way tonight would not seem strange,
And still would be allowed. A little longer,
And time would be the stronger,

Drafting a world where no such road will run
From you to me;
To watch that world come up like a cold sun,
Rewarding others, is my liberty.
Not to prevent it is my will's fulfillment.
Willing it, my ailment.

June Dywer

Afternoon

Do anything you please but do not drone
Away the middle hours until you drowse
Into a random slump of flesh and bone
Slave sworn to siesta by the heat.  Go browse
Among the forest fans or in the groves'
Tremendous shades of shelter so the breeze
May bring about the second wind that moves
A lapsing lung to liven by degrees.
And should you raise a ripple on the lake
The melting mountain pools - no smoother time,
Or happily divine its spring to slake
A rising thirst - no fountain more sublime!
Where sip the satin strands the scented showers
One may suspect a secret of such powers.

Edwin Denby

ADJOINING ENTRANCES TO OFFICE
BUILDINGS IN RENAISSANCE STYLES

Post factum our fate is causally blue-printed
To palliate its ridiculous immensity,
Our architecture also instead of demented
Is viewed as a function of our own density.

The solemn face of a banker at breakfast
Smiles at his wife (and at his girlfriend at the office)
As this sweet stone pastry set in the jambpost
Curls back (devoted) from the building's orifice.

But the lines go on forever like us
And the screwy angle to the pavement is the same,
A few words make a longer hush
We touch each other, and a name, a name.

(Dinginess, insanity, immensity, and use
Are the lozenge projected from the square of these views.)



Edwin Orr Denby (February 4, 1903 – July 12, 1983) was an American writer of dance criticism, poetry, and a novel,[1] but is perhaps now best known for his work with Orson Welles in translating and adapting the 1851 French comedy The Italian Straw Hat to the American stage in 1936 in the form of the farce Horse Eats Hat.

Robinson, Una, and Haig

Robinson Jeffers 1887 - 1962

The House Dog's Grave (Haig, an English bulldog)

I've changed my ways a little; I cannot now
Run with you in the evenings along the shore,
Except in a kind of dream; and you, if you dream a moment,
You see me there.

So leave awhile the paw-marks on the front door
Where I used to scratch to go out or in,
And you'd soon open; leave on the kitchen floor
The marks of my drinking-pan.

I cannot lie by your fire as I used to do
On the warm stone,
Nor at the foot of your bed; no, all the night through
I lie alone.

But your kind thought has laid me less than six feet
Outside your window where firelight so often plays,
And where you sit to read--and I fear often grieving for me--
Every night your lamplight lies on my place.

You, man and woman, live so long, it is hard
To think of you ever dying
A little dog would get tired, living so long.
I hope that when you are lying

Under the ground like me your lives will appear
As good and joyful as mine.
No, dear, that's too much hope: you are not so well cared for
As I have been.

And never have known the passionate undivided
Fidelities that I knew.
Your minds are perhaps too active, too many-sided. . . .
But to me you were true.

You were never masters, but friends. I was your friend.
I loved you well, and was loved. Deep love endures
To the end and far past the end. If this is my end,
I am not lonely. I am not afraid. I am still yours.


Robinson Jeffers, 1941

Federico García Lorca 1898 - 1936

"Born near Granada in Fuente Vaqueros, Spain, to a prosperous farm owner and a pianist, prominent 20th-century Spanish poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca studied law at at the University of Granada before relocating to Madrid in 1919 to focus on his writing. In Madrid he joined a group of avant-garde artists that included Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel. The group, collectively known as the “Generation of ’27,” introduced Lorca to Surrealism, a movement that would greatly influence his writing..." Poetry Foundation bio


Despedida

Si muero,
dejad el balcón abierto.

El niño come naranjas.
(Desde mi balcón lo veo).

El segador siega el trigo.
(Desde mi balcón lo siento).

¡Si muero,
dejad el balcón abierto!


Farewell

If I die,
leave the balcony doors open.

A boy eats oranges.
(From my balcony, I see him.)

The reaper reaps the wheat.
(From my balcony, I’m sorry to hear him.)

If I die,
leave the balcony doors open!

Anne Sexton (1928-1974)

Suffering from depression, Sexton published her first book of poetry, “To Bedlam and Part Way Back”, in 1960. In 1967, she won the Pulitzer Prize and the Shelley Memorial Prize for her poetry collection “Live or Die”.



Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

Eugénio de Andrade (1923-2005)

Portuguese poet and translator Eugénio de Andrade was born José Fontinhas in Póvoa de Atalaia, Portugal. After his parents separated, the poet moved with his mother to Lisbon and then Coimbra. Influenced by surrealist thought, ancient Greek poetry, and Japanese haiku, Andrade wrote spare, concrete, lyric poems celebrating the body and the natural world with elemental precision.

GOATS
( translated from the Portuguese )

Wherever the earth is crag and scrub, the goats are there—the black ones, girlishly skipping, leaping their little leaps from rock to rock. I’ve loved their nerve and frisk since I was small.

Once my grandfather gave me one of my own. He showed me how I could serve myself when I got hungry, from the full-feeling bags there like warmish wineskins, where I’d let my hands linger some before bringing my mouth close, so the milk wouldn’t go to waste on my face, my neck, even my naked chest, which did happen sometimes, who knows if on purpose, my mind dwelling all the while on the savory-smelling vulvazinha. I called her Maltesa; she was my horse; I could almost say she was my first woman.

Love this thread...so here's my 50 cents - 10 pence - half a shekel

Ono no Komachi (c. 825—c. 900) was a famous Japanese waka poet, one of the Rokkasen—the Six best Waka poets of the early Heian period. She was noted as a rare beauty; Komachi is a symbol of a beautiful woman in Japan. She is also numbered as one of the Thirty-six Poetry Immortals. ........if you've never heard of the 36 then please have a squizz on google.


Was I Lost - Poem by Ono no Komachi:

Was I lost in thoughts of love
When I closed my eyes? He
Appeared, and
Had I known it for a dream
I would not have awakened.


Annnnnd........

My Favorite Translation of The Song of Amairgen, the ancient mystical poem uttered by Amairgen Glanglun, the legendary bard, as he first stepped foot upon the land of Ireland, on the shores of Kenmare Bay.


I am Wind on Sea,
I am Ocean-wave,
I am Roar of Sea,
I am Stag of Seven Tines,
I am a Hawk on a Cliff,
I am shining tear of the Sun,
I am Fairest among Herbs,
I am Boar for Boldness,
I am Salmon in Pool,
I am a Lake on a Plain,
I am a Hill of Poetry,
I am a Word of Skill,
I am the Point of a Weapon (that pours forth
combat),
I am God who fashions Fire for a Head.
Who knows the secrets of the
Unhewn Dolmen?
Who (but I) announces the Ages of the Moon?
Who (but I) know the place where falleth
the Sunset?
Who calls the Cattle from the House of Tethra?
On whom do the cattle of Tethra smile?
Who is the troop, the god who fashions edges
in a fortress of gangrene?
(I am) a Song on a Spear,
an Enchantments of Wind.

William Blake 1757 - 1827

The Tyger

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Billy Collins (b. 1941)

William James Collins, born in Manhattan, NYC, known as Billy Collins, is an American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003.

Purity

My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,
weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.
This is how I go about it:
I take a fresh pot of tea into my studio and close the door.
Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile
as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only
a white shirt, a pair of pants and a pot of cold tea.

Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.
I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.
I do this so that what I write will be pure,
completely rinsed of the carnal,
uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.

Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them
on a small table near the window.
I do not want to hear their ancient rhythms
when I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat.

Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.
I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.

I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.
I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.
Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.

In this condition I write extraordinary love poems,
most of them exploiting the connection between sex and
   death.

I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe
where there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting.

After a spell of this I remove my penis too.
Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.
Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.
Now I write only about death, most classical of themes
in language light as the air between my ribs.

Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.
I replace my organs and slip back into my flesh
and clothes.  Then I back the car out of the garage
and speed through woods on winding country roads,
passing stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds,
all perfectly arranged like words in a famous sonnet.