Top 100 or so Poems -- POEM OF THE DAY -- "A Girl" by Ezra Pound

December 2, 2011

A "best of" list of poems would definitely be incomplete without a couple by poetic icon Ezra Pound - drinker, perennial expatriate, socialist, influencer of many including Eliot, Cummings, William Carlos Williams - Pounds poetry defines the term Modernist.

This is one of my favorite Ezra Pound poems; because it is a consummate love poem - not in the tradition of the great lover Pablo Neruda, but in the tradition and using the imagery of the master, Ezra Pound.

btw, don't you love the mug shot ->

Enjoy.

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This is the first insertion of this weeks "Famous Poems" series! Our daily poems this week will feature more well-known poems from well-known and internationally recognized Poets, like the infamous Ezra Pound.

However famous these poems may be, however famous or infamous the poets are for this series, we will still be presenting you with poems that are - in the best eNOTHING tradition - just a little bit "off the wall".

This classic by Ezra Pound proves to be no exception...enjoy - and comment, Please!!!

A Girl

by Ezra Pound


The tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast-
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.

Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them.
A child - so high - you are,
And all this is folly to the world.

-

POEM OF THE DAY - "The Nakedness of Truth" by Paul Eluard

Written during the period in which he lost his wife to Salvaldor Dali and he contracted Tuberculosis - a 2nd time.  The picture of Eluard (right) was painted by Salvador Dali (one of his classics) some years later.

This is a poignant piece.

The Nakedness of Truth (I know it Well)

By Paul Eluard

Despair has no wings,
Nor has love,
No countenance:
They do not speak.
I do not stir,
I do not behold them,
I do not speak to them,
But I am as real as my love and my despair. 


-

POEM OF THE DAY -- "The Guitar" By Surrealist Federico Garcia Lorca

The Guitar


by Federico García Lorca


translated by Cola Franzen

The weeping of the guitar
begins.
The goblets of dawn
are smashed.
The weeping of the guitar
begins.
Useless
to silence it.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps monotonously
as water weeps
as the wind weeps
over snowfields.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps for distant
things.
Hot southern sands
yearning for white camellias.
Weeps arrow without target
evening without morning
and the first dead bird
on the branch.
Oh, guitar!
Heart mortally wounded
by five swords.

-

POEM OF THE DAY -- "Liberty" by Surrealist Paul Eluard

Here we are, day 4 in what has become "Surrealism Week" at eNothing - and really, what a beautiful journey into the Poetry, Art and Politics of the fantastic Surrealist period.  Paul Eluard, friend of Picasso, political outcast and disciple of Breton...with one of his most famous poems -- "Liberte" which was written while in hiding during the Nazi occupation of France.

By the way, the illustration of Eluard, right, is actually a portait of him by Salvadore Dali - his friend and the guy who stole his first wife from him.

And the book (see link below) featured is Capital of Pain - considered his first great work.

Liberty

By Paul Eluard


On my notebooks from school
On my desk and the trees
On the sand on the snow
I write your name

On every page read
On all the white sheets
Stone blood paper or ash
I write your name

On the golden images
On the soldier’s weapons
On the crowns of kings
I write your name

On the jungle the desert
The nests and the bushes
On the echo of childhood
I write your name

On the wonder of nights
On the white bread of days
On the seasons engaged
I write your name

On all my blue rags
On the pond mildewed sun
On the lake living moon
I write your name

On the fields the horizon
The wings of the birds
On the windmill of shadows
I write your name

On the foam of the clouds
On the sweat of the storm
On dark insipid rain
I write your name

On the glittering forms
On the bells of colour
On physical truth
I write your name

On the wakened paths
On the opened ways
On the scattered places
I write your name

On the lamp that gives light
On the lamp that is drowned
On my house reunited
I write your name

On the bisected fruit
Of my mirror and room
On my bed’s empty shell
I write your name

On my dog greedy tender
On his listening ears
On his awkward paws
I write your name

On the sill of my door
On familiar things
On the fire’s sacred stream
I write your name

On all flesh that’s in tune
On the brows of my friends
On each hand that extends
I write your name

On the glass of surprises
On lips that attend
High over the silence
I write your name

On my ravaged refuges
On my fallen lighthouses
On the walls of my boredom
I write your name

On passionless absence
On naked solitude
On the marches of death
I write your name

On health that’s regained
On danger that’s past
On hope without memories
I write your name

By the power of the word
I regain my life
I was born to know you
And to name you

LIBERTY

Top 100 or so Poems -- POEM OF THE DAY -- "Freedom of Love" by Andre Breton

12/8/2011

An anthology of the "Top 100 or so" works of poetry should include some work from the Surrealist Movement, and who better to represent the poetry of "Surrealism" - the major French movement of the 20th century - than the "founder" of the Surrealist Movement (and author of the Surrealist Manifesto) -- Andre Breton himself. The self-imposed Leader of the movement which included such luminaries as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and fellow poet Paul Eluard - provides us with several poems to choose from.

We've narrowed it down to two:

• Always for the First Time

• Freedom of Love
  

Always for the First Time might be the slightly more famous of the two poems; but in considering the context of this "Twitter Broadcast" - a heavy readership amongst Smartphone users, "Freedom of Love" takes you a bit deeper into the Surrealistic pillow - in a more comfortable manner.

An unusual presentation of the outpourings of the heart, and life, and love of his wife.

Enjoy.

Freedom of Love

By Andre Breton

(Translated from the French by Edouard Rodti)


My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone
My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing
With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest
My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof
And of steam on the panes
My wife with shoulders of champagne
And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice
My wife with wrists of matches
My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts
With fingers of mown hay
My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut
And of Midsummer Night
Of privet and of an angelfish nest
With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks
And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill
My wife with legs of flares
With the movements of clockwork and despair
My wife with calves of eldertree pith
My wife with feet of initials
With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking
My wife with a neck of unpearled barley
My wife with a throat of the valley of gold
Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent
With breasts of night
My wife with breasts of a marine molehill
My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible
With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew
My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days
With the belly of a gigantic claw
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of light
With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk
And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking
My wife with hips of a skiff
With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers
And of shafts of white peacock plumes
Of an insensible pendulum
My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My wife with buttocks of swans' backs
My wife with buttocks of spring
With the sex of an iris
My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus
My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat
My wife with a sex of mirror
My wife with eyes full of tears
With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle
My wife with savanna eyes
My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison
My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe
My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire




-

POEM OF THE DAY -- "Five Ways to Kill a Man" by Surrealist Andre Breton

Andre Breton is widely considered to be the principal founder of the
surrealist movement.  His interesting poems are very symbolic and abstract
in a fashion not unlike his contemporary artists who went on to make
surrealism the influential and keystone movement that it was.

Five Ways to Kill a Man is one of his self explanatory poems, really,
taken with an understanding that it was written after he was called up
to participate in WWI...

Enjoy this brilliant man.  Read this poem.  Look at his picture.  How many
of you - contemporary as you are - how many of you can relate to Andre
Breton?  Time passes but we are all connected.

Five Ways To Kill A Man

by Andre Breton


There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.

You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.

Or you can take a length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince, and a
castle to hold your banquet in.

Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
and some round hats made of steel.

In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation's scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and
land that no-one needs for several years.

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways
to kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat
is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

-

POEM OF THE DAY -- "Father" by Ted Kooser

Father

by Ted Kooser

Today you would be ninety-seven
if you had lived, and we would all be
miserable, you and your children,
driving from clinic to clinic,
an ancient fearful hypochondriac
and his fretful son and daughter,
asking directions, trying to read
the complicated, fading map of cures.
But with your dignity intact
you have been gone for twenty years,
and I am glad for all of us, although
I miss you every day—the heartbeat
under your necktie, the hand cupped
on the back of my neck, Old Spice
in the air, your voice delighted with stories.
On this day each year you loved to relate
that the moment of your birth
your mother glanced out the window
and saw lilacs in bloom. Well, today
lilacs are blooming in side yards
all over Iowa, still welcoming you.

-

POEM OF THE DAY -- "Screech Owl" by Ted Kooser

Here is the final POEM OF THE DAY post featuring this weeks poet, Poet Lauriate Ted Kooser.  "Screech Owl" is another of Mr. Koosers more famous poems, and is so typical of his accessibility and simple spiritual charm.  Most of Mr. Koosers poems are (1) simple brief stanza, and "Screech Owl" is no exception.

Share your thoughts on this one - can you see the owl?  Can you hear it?  Enjoy.

As with all of our featured Poets, we try to promote their more popular published works.  See the link below this and other Kooser Poem of the Day entries to order our recommended books from this author.

Screech Owl


by Ted Kooser

All night each reedy whinny
from a bird no bigger than a heart
flies out of a tall black pine
and, in a breath, is taken away
by the stars. Yet, with small hope
from the center of darkness
it calls out again and again.

-

POEM OF THE DAY -- "Tattoo" by U.S. Poet Lauriate Ted Kooser

In addition to being the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006, our Featured Poet this week, Ted Kooser, also won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2005 with his Poetry Work -- "Delights and Shadows". Ted's work is well known for it's clarity and fusing dissimilar objects or concepts - the result is usually something as beautiful as a fresh watercolor. Enjoy Tattoo, one of his more recognizable works!

I highly reccommend clicking on the link below and investing in "Delights and Shadows" - one of his most popular works.

Tattoo

By Ted Kooser

What once was meant to be a statement—
a dripping dagger held in the fist
of a shuddering heart—is now just a bruise
on a bony old shoulder, the spot
where vanity once punched him hard
and the ache lingered on. He looks like
someone you had to reckon with,
strong as a stallion, fast and ornery,
but on this chilly morning, as he walks
between the tables at a yard sale
with the sleeves of his tight black T-shirt
rolled up to show us who he was,
he is only another old man, picking up
broken tools and putting them back,
his heart gone soft and blue with stories.

-

POEM OF THE DAY -- "In January" by Ted Kooser

I love to read Ted Koosers poetry.  Pure and simple -- which is exactly what his poetry is.  In this particular poem, he captures the essence of Vietnam and a frozen city in the same poem.  His imagery is simple but you can't help your imagination...the word pictures are so vivid.  Enjoy Mr. Kooser!

In January 

by Ted Kooser

Only one cell in the frozen hive of night
is lit, or so it seems to us:
this Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers.
Laughter and talking, the tick of chopsticks.
Beyond the glass, the wintry city
creaks like an ancient wooden bridge.
A great wind rushes under all of us.
The bigger the window, the more it trembles. 

-

POEM OF THE DAY - "After Years" by Ted Kooser

Ted Kooser is a contemporary American Poet born and raised in Nebraska.  He's the author of more than 10 Poetry Collections and numerous fiction and non-fiction books...his open, easy style is very spiritual in nature - a delight to read - easy to understand - and Kooser is adept at using irony to capture and delight the reader.  Kooser was appointed the 13th U. S. Poet Laureate - the ultimate honor..

Enjoy this Kooser poem!

After Years  

by Ted Kooser

Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood on the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell. 

-

Followers Pick -- Pick our POEM OF THE DAY artist this week...

We love to bring you classic modern poems from contemporary and classic published poets...and we're really glad that you enjoy them.  It takes a lot of thought to carefully pick the poet, and then carefully pick 5 classic or "worthy" poems to publish daily on the blog, then broadcast the "POEM OF THE DAY" on Twitter - frequently enough to be noticed by our regulars as they go about their day.  The responses are fun to read, enlightening and really - very rewarding.

We'd like you all to pick our Poet of the week this week - this will be the featured poet for POEM OF THE DAY broadcasts...

So send in your "suggestions" via Twitter and/or the eNothing blog, and the poet with the most "suggestions" is the one which will be featured.  We will tabulate the results on Sunday night for Monday broadcast.

Thanks!