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

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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.

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry.


The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Jim Morrison  1943-1971

Lead singer for the Los Angeles, The Doors

An American Prayer

Do you know the warm progress under the stars?
Do you know we exist?
Have you forgotten the keys to the kingdom?
Have you been born yet, and are you alive?

Let's reinvent the gods, all the myths of the ages
Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests
Have you forgotten the lessons of the ancient war?

We need great golden copulations

The fathers are cackling in trees of the forest
Our mother is dead in the sea

Do you know we are being lead to slaughter by placid admirals
And that fat slow generals are getting obscene on young blood?

Do you know we are ruled by T.V.?

The moon is a dry blood beast
Guerrilla bands are rolling numbers
In the next block of green vine
Amassing for warfare on innocent herdsman who are just dying

O' great creator of being, grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives

The moths and atheists are doubly divine and dying

We live, we die, and death not ends it

Journey we more into the Nightmare
Cling to life our passioned flower
Cling to Cunts & Cocks of despair

We got our final vision by clap
Columbus's groin got filled with green death
I touched her thigh and death smiled

We have assembled inside this ancient and insane theatre
To propagate our lust for life and flee the swarming wisdom of the streets

The barns are stormed
The windows kept
And only one of all the rest to dance and save us with the divine mockery of words

Music inflames temperament

When the true King's murderers are allowed to roam free
A 1000 Magicians arise in the land

Where are the feasts we are promised?
Where is the wine, The new wine, dying on the vine?

Hepcat61 said:Jim Morrison  1943-1971

Lead singer for the Los Angeles, The Doors

American Prayer


And THAT - I tell people - is the difference between POETRY and LYRICS.

Thank you, Geoffrey.

So wierd my copy of “Wilderness” just came in the mail today. I lost it long ago and just ordered it Saturday. He’s always been one of my greatest inspirations. His writing his stage presence all perfection.

Ken said:...He’s [Jim Morrison] always been one of my greatest inspirations. His writing his stage presence all perfection.

Thank you for your words, Ken!  I was overjoyed when Geoff posted Jim’s poem.  So much so, I gave him the color photo to pair with it.

I hope you’ll be posting again some time, my Friend.

I actually have a favorite of mine from wilderness I was going to post

Jim Morrison

The form is a plane above
the earth, A soldier bails
out, leaving his entrails
fluttering, billowing, Scoop'd
down, windy midwife, wrench'd
by the world from her rich
belly, my metal mother,
ripped cord, down & frozen.
Following pilot the eye of
the plane; "Great Eye of Night"
God on a windscreen, wind-
scream, wormwind
Trailing.

   (& hide among women
      like a toothless bird)

Burned by air
Burned bad by light
in the

      [gun shot]

O Wow
he's shot
& the scarlet news
  (hoarse mute confusion
   of the witness crowd)


Airport.
Messenger in the form of a soldier.
Green wool. He stood there,
off the plane.
A new truth, too horrible to bear.
There was no record of it
anywhere in the ancient signs
or symbols.
People looked at each other,
in the mirror, their children's
eyes.
Why had it come.
There was no escape from
it anywhere.
A truth too horrible to name.
Only a loose puking moan
could frame its dark interiors.
Only a few could look upon
its face w/ calm.
Most of the people fell instantly
under its dark terror.
They looked to the calm ones
but saw only a green
military coat.
Repent!
None of the old Things worked.

(I’m unsure but I have always read this together so here they are)

GARY SNYDER - b.1930

"Gary Snyder began his career in the 1950s as a noted member of the “Beat Generation,” though he has since explored a wide range of social and spiritual matters in both poetry and prose. Snyder’s work blends physical reality and precise observations of nature with inner insight received primarily through the practice of Zen Buddhism..."  from Poetry Foundation bio

Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout

Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain  
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.

I cannot remember things I once read  
A few friends, but they are in cities.  
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup  
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.

Wild Geese
Mary Oliver
Originally published in Dream Work in 1986.


You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
         love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountain and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Jim Morrison (con't)

Stoned Immaculate

I'll tell you this...
No eternal reward will forgive us now
For wasting the dawn

Back in those days everything was simpler and more confused
One summer night, going to the pier
I ran into two young girls
The blonde one was called Freedom
The dark one, Enterprise
We talked and they told me this story
Now listen to this...

I'll tell you about Texas radio and the big beat
Soft driven, slow and mad
Like some new language
Reaching your head with the cold, sudden fury of a divine messenger
Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of god
Wandering, wandering in hopeless night
Out here in the perimeter there are no stars
Out here we IS stoned
Immaculate

Nice!!! My absolute favorite piece by him!!

Mine as well!

Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry;

Gary Snyder (b. 1930)

...is an American man of letters. Perhaps best known as a poet, he is also an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. He has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology".


Cormorants
(a Haibun: a narrative with a haiku, senryu, or tanka after—this one ends with a tanka)

Dropping down rock ledges toward the breakers see a long flat
Point spiked with upright black cormorants and a few gulls grey
and white, rocks dabbed with threads and dribbles of bird-white.
“White writing” like Mark Tobey did—drawn in loops and splatters—
lime-rich droppings pointing back to the fishy waves.

Some rocks more decorated than others. A dark stink as the breeze
rises, whiffs of ammonia—stabs you in the back brain—the only
place once was on a fishing boat in the Gulf of Alaska—came
alongside sea lion rocks and the whole thing blew in our face and
whipped us with awful offal gassy blast.

Each bird-scholar has its own stone chair and the long full streaks
Below. Some rocks are unoccupied, unwritten.

Pelicans flap slow by. Cormorants fly clumsy—taking off from the
water, drag their toes in the waves, flap flap flap leaving scratch lines
in the froth until they get just barely up and never fly much higher.
Cormorants on a cliff launch out and fly downward till they drag
their toes and then gain height again. Underwater they are fast
as jets and full of grace.


Toes writing in water
rocks drawn with dribbles
scat incense in the wind
cormorants open their thin black wings
talk about art, lecture the
clouds of tiny fish