Top 100 or so Poems..."The Sonnets" by Ted Berrigan -- SONNET I

Our list of articles on the "Top 100 or so..." poems could not be considered complete (will never be complete, anyway) without this great work from poet Ted Berrigan.  Berrigan became one of the driving forces behind the 2nd Generation New York School of poets - counting as his peers such poetic luminaries as Anne Waldman, Ron Padgett, and his second wife, Alice Notley.

"The Sonnets" is a collection of "creatively assembled" sonnets reflecting Berrigan's own experimental technique -- the themes and content of which are emblematic of the accelerating and changing environment of the times (early 60's) - and widely considered an example of classic American poetry.

After accumulating a massive work of collected sonnets during a particularly creative span of time, Berrigan revisited these works, and then took a single line from each work, assembling them into newly constructed thematic partial sonnets of 6 lines each.  He then worked backwards through his works again, picking additional lines to create the body of work as it stands today - already having written the final couplet -- 77 individual sonnets exist using this innovative, creative approach.

We'll be publishing about 10 of these sonnets to represent this work in our blog; to begin with we present the first one, spearheading this unique creative process -- so please enjoy "The Sonnets: I".  As usual, commentary is more than welcome!

The Sonnets: I

By Ted Berrigan
 

His piercing pince-nez. Some dim frieze

Hands point to a dim frieze, in the dark night.

In the book of his music the corners have straightened:

Which owe their presence to our sleeping hands.

The ox-blood from the hands which play

For fire for warmth for hands for growth

Is there room in the room that you room in?

Upon his structured tomb:

Still they mean something. For the dance

And the architecture.

Weave among incidents

May be portentous to him

We are the sleeping fragments of his sky,

Wind giving presence to fragments.

 

-

Thomas Herr Poem -- "Pebbles and Stones"

 This is a love poem written a long time ago.

Pebbles and Stones

Driving,
I look through the windshield
And an image of you
Stands between me and the road ahead

Listening,
to Songs on the radio; songs
That must have been written for you
So I sing them
And you smile

Looking,
I notice people
From far away
I wonder if they're you.


Speaking,
I can't hear my words.
Or see the faces
That I'm talking to
My thoughts drift back to you.

Walking,
I look down
To the ground
Pebbles and Stones scattered
Seem to spell your name.

Like tea leaves in a cup

Reaching,
With my hand for a Pebble
I pick one up
And drop it in my pocket
So I can have a piece of you with me at all times.

Wherever I am
Whatever I do
I am always
Thinking of you
With a pebble in my pocket.

Top 100 or so Poems -- "Three Cantos: I" by Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound is one of the most remarkable characters in poetry - a legend, a true icon. Brilliant, genius, outspoken, political and radical - he spanned the entire 20th century as a central figure in 2 main areas - radical protest and the creation of the Modernist movement in Poetry, having edited, promoted, consulted, insulted, befriended and alienated such poetic giants as T.S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Yeats, HD, Gertrude Stein, Stravinsky, the Surrealists, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, and so on.

His own poetry was brilliant if not radically inconsistent with his demands upon the greats. His poetry exhibited the required characteristics of Modernist poetry including frugality with words, using words which convey the complex feelings behind the work in a very simple way...but often his poetry was peppered with his complex notions about War (the first peace activist), politics (an outspoken advocate of Benito Mussolini, which landed him in prison), economics (he was truly the first "Occupier" - study his views on business and compare them to what is going on TODAY).

His most ambitious work in poetry centered around his epic "Cantos" project - a book length poem.  The Cantos is a long poem consisting of nearly 120 sections, written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published (the first of which is included below) date from 1922 onwards. It is widely considered to be a very difficult read.

It should be noted though, that  "The Cantos" is considered to be one of the most significant works of modernist poetry in the 20th century.  So, difficult or not, I suggest simply reading a few sections at a time...don't think about the "big picture" (there really isn't any) and concentrate on obtaining the "big feel" only.  To help you get started, here is the original outline for "The Cantos" concept in a letter Pound wrote to his father in the 1920's where he stated that his plan was:

A. A. Live man goes down into world of dead.

C. B. 'The repeat in history.'

B. C. The 'magic moment' or moment of metamorphosis, bust through from quotidian into 'divine or permanent world.' Gods, etc.

 I don't really get the double alphabetized outline "A, B, C" reference, but remember he was a lunatic.  So, here is the first:

Three Cantos: I

By Ezra Pound

HANG it all, there can be but one Sordello!
But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks,
Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the thing’s an art-form,
Your Sordello, and that the modern world
Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in;	5
Say that I dump my catch, shiny and silvery
As fresh sardines flapping and slipping on the marginal cobbles?
(I stand before the booth, the speech; but the truth
Is inside this discourse—this booth is full of the marrow of wisdom.)
Give up th’ intaglio method.                     Tower by tower	10
Red-brown the rounded bases, and the plan
Follows the builder’s whim. Beaucaire’s slim gray
Leaps from the stubby base of Altaforte—
Mohammed’s windows, for the Alcazar
Has such a garden, split by a tame small stream.	15
The moat is ten yards wide, the inner court-yard
Half a-swim with mire.
Trunk hose?           There are not. The rough men swarm out
In robes that are half Roman, half like the Knave of Hearts;
And I discern your story:                 Peire Cardinal	20
Was half forerunner of Dante. Arnaut’s that trick
Of the unfinished address,
And half your dates are out, you mix your eras;
For that great font Sordello sat beside—
’Tis an immortal passage, but the font?—	25
Is some two centuries outside the picture.
Does it matter?           Not in the least. Ghosts move about me
Patched with histories. You had your business:
To set out so much thought, so much emotion;
To paint, more real than any dead Sordello,	30
The half or third of your intensest life
And call that third Sordello;
And you’ll say, “No, not your life,
He never showed himself.”
Is’t worth the evasion, what were the use	35
Of setting figures up and breathing life upon them,
Were ’t not our life, your life, my life, extended?
I walk Verona. (I am here in England.)
I see Can Grande. (Can see whom you will.)
You had one whole man?	40
And I have many fragments, less worth? Less worth?
Ah, had you quite my age, quite such a beastly and cantankerous age?
You had some basis, had some set belief.
Am I let preach? Has it a place in music?
I walk the airy street,	45
See the small cobbles flare with the poppy spoil.
’Tis your “great day,” the Corpus Domini,
And all my chosen and peninsular village
Has made one glorious blaze of all its lanes—
Oh, before I was up—with poppy flowers.	50
Mid-June: some old god eats the smoke, ’tis not the saints;
And up and out to the half-ruined chapel—
Not the old place at the height of the rocks,
But that splay, barn-like church the Renaissance
Had never quite got into trim again.	55
As well begin here. Began our Catullus:
“Home to sweet rest, and to the waves’ deep laughter,”
The laugh they wake amid the border rushes.
This is our home, the trees are full of laughter,
And the storms laugh loud, breaking the riven waves	60
On “north-most rocks”; and here the sunlight
Glints on the shaken waters, and the rain
Comes forth with delicate tread, walking from Isola Garda—
Lo soleils plovil,
As Arnaut had it in th’ inextricable song.	65
The very sun rains and a spatter of fire
Darts from the “Lydian” ripples; “locus undae,” as Catullus, “Lydiae,”
And the place is full of spirits.
Not lemures, not dark and shadowy ghosts,
But the ancient living, wood-white,	70
Smooth as the inner bark, and firm of aspect,
And all agleam with colors—no, not agleam,
But colored like the lake and like the olive leaves,
Glaukopos, clothed like the poppies, wearing golden greaves,
Light on the air.	75
Are they Etruscan gods?
The air is solid sunlight, apricus,
Sun-fed we dwell there (we in England now);
It’s your way of talk, we can be where we will be,
Sirmio serves my will better than your Asolo	80
Which I have never seen.                 Your “palace step”?
My stone seat was the Dogana’s curb,
And there were not “those girls,” there was one flare, one face.
’Twas all I ever saw, but it was real….
And I can no more say what shape it was …	85
But she was young, too young.                       True, it was Venice,
And at Florian’s and under the north arcade
I have seen other faces, and had my rolls for breakfast, for that matter;
So, for what it’s worth, I have the background.
And you had a background,	90
Watched “the soul,” Sordello’s soul,
And saw it lap up life, and swell and burst—
“Into the empyrean?”
So you worked out new form, the meditative,
Semi-dramatic, semi-epic story,	95
And we will say: What’s left for me to do?
Whom shall I conjure up; who’s my Sordello,
My pre-Daun Chaucer, pre-Boccacio,
As you have done pre-Dante?
Whom shall I hang my shimmering garment on;	100
Who wear my feathery mantle, hagoromo;
Whom set to dazzle the serious future ages?
Not Arnaut, not De Born, not Uc St. Circ who has writ out the stories.
Or shall I do your trick, the showman’s booth, Bob Browning,
Turned at my will into the Agora,	105
Or into the old theatre at Arles,
And set the lot, my visions, to confounding
The wits that have survived your damn’d Sordello?
(Or sulk and leave the word to novelists?)
What a hodge-podge you have made there!—	110
Zanze and swanzig, of all opprobrious rhymes!
And you turn off whenever it suits your fancy,
Now at Verona, now with the early Christians,
Or now a-gabbling of the “Tyrrhene whelk.”
“The lyre should animate but not mislead the pen”—	115
That’s Wordsworth, Mr. Browning. (What a phrase!—
That lyre, that pen, that bleating sheep, Will Wordsworth!)
That should have taught you avoid speech figurative
And set out your matter
As I do, in straight simple phrases:	120
Gods float in the azure air,
Bright gods, and Tuscan, back before dew was shed,
It is a world like Puvis’?                     Never so pale, my friend,
’Tis the first light—not half light—Panisks
And oak-girls and the Maenads	125
Have all the wood. Our olive Sirmio
Lies in its burnished mirror, and the Mounts Balde and Riva
Are alive with song, and all the leaves are full of voices.
“Non è fuggito.”                 “It is not gone.” Metastasio
Is right—we have that world about us,	130
And the clouds bow above the lake, and there are folk upon them
Going their windy ways, moving by Riva,
By the western shore, far as Lonato,
And the water is full of silvery almond-white swimmers,
The silvery water glazes the up-turned nipple.	135
How shall we start hence, how begin the progress?
Pace naif Ficinus, say when Hotep-Hotep
Was a king in Egypt—
When Atlas sat down with his astrolabe,
He, brother to Prometheus, physicist—	140
Say it was Moses’ birth-year?
Exult with Shang in squatness? The sea-monster
Bulges the squarish bronzes.
(Confucius later taught the world good manners,
Started with himself, built out perfection.)	145
With Egypt!
Daub out in blue of scarabs, and with that greeny turquoise?
Or with China, O Virgilio mio, and gray gradual steps
Lead up beneath flat sprays of heavy cedars,
Temple of teak wood, and the gilt-brown arches	150
Triple in tier, banners woven by wall,
Fine screens depicted, sea waves curled high,
Small boats with gods upon them,
Bright flame above the river! Kwannon
Footing a boat that’s but one lotus petal,	155
With some proud four-spread genius
Leading along, one hand upraised for gladness,
Saying, “Tis she, his friend, the mighty goddess! Paean!
Sing hymns ye reeds,             and all ye roots and herons and swans be glad,
Ye gardens of the nymphs put forth your flowers.”	160
What have I of this life,
Or even of Guido?
Sweet lie!—Was I there truly?
Did I knew Or San Michele?
Let’s believe it.	165
Believe the tomb he leapt was Julia Laeta’s?
Friend, I do not even—when he led that street charge—
I do not even know which sword he’d with him.
Sweet lie, “I lived!” Sweet lie, “I lived beside him.”
And now it’s all but truth and memory,	170
Dimmed only by the attritions of long time.
“But we forget not.”                     No, take it all for lies.
I have but smelt this life, a whiff of it—
The box of scented wood
Recalls cathedrals. And shall I claim;	175
Confuse my own phantastikon,
Or say the filmy shell that circumscribes me
Contains the actual sun;                       confuse the thing I see
With actual gods behind me?                           Are they gods behind me?
How many worlds we have! If Botticelli	180
Brings her ashore on that great cockle-shell—
His Venus (Simonetta?),
And Spring and Aufidus fill all the air
With their clear-outlined blossoms?
World enough. Behold, I say, she comes	185
“Apparelled like the spring, Graces her subjects,”
(That’s from Pericles).
Oh, we have worlds enough, and brave décors,
And from these like we guess a soul for man
And build him full of aery populations.	190
Mantegna a sterner line, and the new world about us:
Barred lights, great flares, new form, Picasso or Lewis.
If for a year man write to paint, and not to music—
O Casella! (To be continued)

Top 100 or so POEMS -- "The Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens

There are several poems by Wallace Stevens in our little anthology.  There are many poems by Wallace Stevens which are in the "Top Poetry" anthologies of others.  "The Snow Man" belongs in mine.

Poetry should not always be about form.  We really should read a poem with no interuption or outside stimuli; read it carefully.  Then, come to instant grips with the feelings that a work gives to you - what are you imagining and what are you feeling?

Then, look at the form.

This poem is a Stevens classic.  It seems to be an expression of Stevens' outward objective perspective of a winter scene to a relatively subjective emotional response (thinking of misery in the sound of the wind), to the final idea that the listener and the world itself are "nothing" apart from these perspectives.

Anyway, don't think too much.  Just enjoy the poem.  

The Snow Man
 
by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

TOP 100 or so POEMS -- "The Drunken Boat (Le Bateau Ivre)" by Arthur Rimbaud

French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) remains a poetic icon despite having a "career" as a poet which spanned a mere 5 years from ang 17 to age 21 or 22.  The reasons for his iconic stature are many but can be boiled down to the following points (like all opinions, subject to criticisim/argument):

• He was a literary and social rebel - abandoning traditions and all social acceptability in favor of transforming himself into a "seer" which would allow him to complete himself as a true poet. Reference his famous letter to Paul Verlaine (the "Letter of the Seer").
• He lived a wild visionary vagabond-like life spiced by absinthe and hashish - an early example of substance abuse as a fuel for inspiration, behavior and ultimate "seer experiences". 
• His poems were widely considered incendiary and of great romantic vision, written in a void and capitalizing on his restless, searching intellectual capacity and willingness to "experience rather than simply relate" (this is the "seer").  He dominated the "Decadent Movement" which was a precursor to what is "Surrealism" today.
• His life was highly unconventional and adventurous - including a homosexual affair with French Poet Paul Verlaine which stretched across two continents (France and UK) and ended in violence and gunshots.
• He was a major artistic influence on such 20th century icons as  Pablo Picasso, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Vladimir Nabokov, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Giannina Braschi, Léo Ferré, Henry Miller, Van Morrison and Jim Morrison - and the list goes on and on and on.

Regarding this poem -- "The Drunken Boat" takes it's place in our "Top 100 or so" list quite firmly and with confidence.  In fact, if we get that far, we would easily place it up towards the top of the list.  But that's not important; for Rimbaud helped to revolutionize poetry, changing the shape, need, visions possible and removing many of the constraints of the art form forever.

Archibald MacLeish has a famous quote about this poem: "Anyone who doubts that poetry can say what prose cannot has only to read the so-called Lettres du Voyant and 'Bateau Ivre' together. What is pretentious and adolescent in the Lettres is true in the poem—unanswerably true."

I found that interesting - tried it, liked it - and so I am also precursing the great poem "The Drunken Boat" with an excerpt from "Lettre du Voyant"(or "Letter of the Seer") to help you get the "big picture" - for there is a bigger picture here.  Enjoy

From "The Letter of the Seer" (a famous letter written Arthur Rimbaud as an introduction to poet Paul Verlaine):

"I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed – and the great learned one! – among men. – For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his own soul – which was rich to begin with – more than any other man! He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed"

The Drunken Boat

By Arthur Rimbaud
 

(Translated from the French By Wallace Fowlie)

 

As I was going down impassive Rivers,

I no longer felt myself guided by haulers:

Yelping redskins had taken them as targets

And had nailed them naked to colored stakes.

I was indifferent to all crews,

The bearer of Flemish wheat or English cottons

When with my haulers this uproar stopped

The Rivers let me go where I wanted.

Into the furious lashing of the tides

More heedless than children's brains the other winter

I ran! And loosened Peninsulas

Have not undergone a more triumphant hubbub

The storm blessed my sea vigils

Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves

That are called eternal rollers of victims,

Ten nights, without missing the stupid eye of the lighthouses!

Sweeter than the flesh of hard apples is to children

The green water penetrated my hull of fir

And washed me of spots of blue wine

And vomit, scattering rudder and grappling-hook

And from then on I bathed in the Poem

Of the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent,

Devouring the azure verses; where, like a pale elated

Piece of flotsam, a pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks;

Where, suddenly dyeing the blueness, delirium

And slow rhythms under the streaking of daylight,

Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres,

The bitter redness of love ferments!

I know the skies bursting with lightning, and the waterspouts

And the surf and the currents; I know the evening,

And dawn as exalted as a flock of doves

And at times I have seen what man thought he saw!

I have seen the low sun spotted with mystic horrors,

Lighting up, with long violet clots,

Resembling actors of very ancient dramas,

The waves rolling far off their quivering of shutters!

I have dreamed of the green night with dazzled snows

A kiss slowly rising to the eyes of the sea,

The circulation of unknown saps,

And the yellow and blue awakening of singing phosphorous!

I followed during pregnant months the swell,

Like hysterical cows, in its assault on the reefs,

Without dreaming that the luminous feet of the Marys

Could constrain the snout of the wheezing Oceans!

I struck against, you know, unbelievable Floridas

Mingling with flowers panthers' eyes and human

Skin! Rainbows stretched like bridal reins

Under the horizon of the seas to greenish herds!

I have seen enormous swamps ferment, fish-traps

Where a whole Leviathan rots in the rushes!

Avalanches of water in the midst of a calm,

And the distances cataracting toward the abyss!

Glaciers, suns of silver, nacreous waves, skies of embers!

Hideous strands at the end of brown gulfs

Where giant serpents devoured by bedbugs

Fall down from gnarled trees with black scent!

I should have liked to show children those sunfish

Of the blue wave, the fish of gold, the singing fish.

—Foam of flowers rocked my drifting

And ineffable winds winged me at times.

At times a martyr weary of poles and zones,

The sea, whose sob created my gentle roll,

Brought up to me her dark flowers with yellow suckers

And I remained, like a woman on her knees...

Resembling an island tossing on my sides the quarrels

And droppings of noisy birds with yellow eyes

And I sailed on, when through my fragile ropes

Drowned men sank backward to sleep!

Now I, a boat lost in the foliage of caves,

Thrown by the storm into the birdless air

I whose water-drunk carcass would not have been rescued

By the Monitors and the Hanseatic sailboats;

Free, smoking, topped with violet fog,

I who pierced the reddening sky like a wall,

Bearing, delicious jam for good poets

Lichens of sunlight and mucus of azure,

Who ran, spotted with small electric moons,

A wild plank, escorted by black seahorses,

When Julys beat down with blows of cudgels

The ultramarine skies with burning funnels;

I, who trembled, hearing at fifty leagues off

The moaning of the Behemoths in heat and the thick Maelstroms,

Eternal spinner of the blue immobility

I miss Europe with its ancient parapets!

I have seen sidereal archipelagos! and islands

Whose delirious skies are open to the sea-wanderer:

—Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep and exile yourself,

Million golden birds, o future Vigor? –

But, in truth, I have wept too much! Dawns are heartbreaking.

Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.

Acrid love has swollen me with intoxicating torpor

O let my keel burst! O let me go into the sea!

If I want a water of Europe, it is the black

Cold puddle where in the sweet-smelling twilight

A squatting child full of sadness releases

A boat as fragile as a May butterfly.

No longer can I, bathed in your languor, o waves,

Follow in the wake of the cotton boats,

Nor cross through the pride of flags and flames,

Nor swim under the terrible eyes of prison ships.