What is poetry?

From Kahlil Gibran's Sand and Foam:
=============
I am forever walking upon these shores,
Betwixt the sand and the foam.
The high tide will erase my foot-prints,
And the wind will blow away the foam.
But the sea and the shore will remain
Forever.

--
Should you sit upon a cloud you would not see the boundary line between one country and another, nor the boundary stone between a farm and a farm.

It is a pity you cannot sit upon a cloud.

Thanks! Very nice. It reminds me of these lines from Chinese (quoted before and probably wellknown by Alpha Centauri players):

We sit together, the mountain and I,
until only the mountain remains.

(Although, ofcourse, there's a slight difference in point of view, both have a strong spiritual connotation.)

Feel free to post more from Gibran.

The Sleeper in the Valley
It is a green hollow where a stream gurgles,
Crazily catching silver rags of itself on the grasses;
Where the sun shines from the proud mountain:
It is a little valley bubbling over with light.
A young soldier, open-mouthed, bare-headed,
With the nape of his neck bathed in cool blue cresses,
Sleeps; he is stretched out on the grass, under the sky,
Pale on his green bed where the light falls like rain.
His feet in the yellow flags, he lies sleeping. Smiling as
A sick child might smile, he is having a nap:
Cradle him warmly, Nature: he is cold.
No odour makes his nostrils quiver;
He sleeps in the sun, his hand on his breast
At peace. There are two red holes in his right side.
- As translated by Oliver Bernard: Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems (1962)


French version: Le Dormeur du Val

(Source: http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Sleeper.html)

More poems by Rimbaud:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/719774.html (also bilingual)

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1268

http://tkline.pgcc.net/PITBR/French/Rimbaud.htm (includes A Season in Hell and Illuminations)

Most of the poets quoted on the last 6 pages are now also in the index in post #1 (the Chinese poets aren't in yet, as I'm not yet finished with those).

Also, here's a link to a site that provides an outlet to poetic and other creativity, DeviantArt: http://www.deviantart.com/#catpath=literature&order=24

Its always nice to find this island of culture in the sea of insignificance that is the ot

You're welcome. To sign off for the day another classical Chinese poem:

À l'air de 'Ugly One'

As a youngster I had not learned the taste of pain
but gladly climbed hight towers,
but gladly climbed hight towers
and to write verse I always spoke of pain.

Today I've learned the taste of pain.
I want to speak but don't,
I want to speak but don't -
I only say: the air is cool, a very nice autumn.

Xin Qiji (1140-1207)


I'm not sure what tune 'Ugly One' represents; apparently it was a known song or tune in Xin's day.

I found this on the Guardian website. Based on this image (not suitable for those opposed to burnt out dead people)

A Cold Coming

I saw the charred Iraqi lean towards me from bomb-blasted screen,
his windscreen wiper like a pen ready to write down thoughts for men,

his windscreen wiper like a quill he's reaching for to make his will.
I saw the charred Iraqi lean like someone made of Plasticine

as though he'd stopped to ask the way and this is what I heard him say:
"Don't be afraid I've picked on you for this exclusive interview.

Isn't it your sort of poet's task to find words for this frightening mask?
If that gadget that you've got records words from such scorched vocal cords,

press RECORD before some dog devours me mid-monologue."
So I held the shaking microphone closer to the crumbling bone:

"I read the news of three wise men who left their sperm in nitrogen,
three foes of ours, three wise Marines with sample flasks and magazines,

three wise soldiers from Seattle who banked their sperm before the battle.
Did No 1 say: God be thanked I've got my precious semen banked.

And No 2: O praise the Lord my last best shot is safely stored.
And No 3: Praise be to God I left my wife my frozen wad?

So if their fate was to be gassed at least they thought their name would last,
and though cold corpses in Kuwait they could by proxy procreate.

Excuse a skull half roast, half bone for using such a scornful tone.
It may seem out of all proportion but I wish I'd taken their precaution.

They seemed the masters of their fate with wisely jarred ejaculate.
Was it a propaganda coup to make us think they'd cracked death too,

disinformation to defeat us with no post-mortem millilitres?
Symbolic billions in reserve made me, for one, lose heart and nerve.

On Saddam's pay we can't afford to go and get our semen stored.
Sad to say that such high tech's uncommon here. We're stuck with sex.

If you can conjure up and stretch your imagination (and not retch)
the image of me beside my wife closely clasped creating life . . ."

(I let the unfleshed skull unfold a story I'd been already told,
and idly tried to calculate the content of ejaculate:

the sperm in one ejaculation equals the whole Iraqi nation
times, roughly, let's say, 12.5 though .5's not now alive.

Let's say the sperms were an amount so many times the body count,
2,500 times at least (but let's wait till the toll's released!).

Whichever way Death seems outflanked by one tube of cold bloblings banked.
Poor bloblings, maybe you've been blessed with, of all fates possible, the best

according to Sophocles ie "the best of fates is not to be"
a philosophy that's maybe bleak for any but an ancient Greek

but difficult these days to escape when spoken to by such a shape.
When you see men brought to such states who wouldn't want that "best of fates"

or in the world of Cruise and Scud not go kryonic if he could,
spared the normal human doom of having made it through the womb?)

He heard my thoughts and stopped the spool: "I never thought life futile, fool!
Though all Hell began to drop I never wanted life to stop.

I was filled with such a yearning to stay in life as I was burning,
such a longing to be beside my wife in bed before I died,

and, most, to have engendered there a child untouched by war's despair.
So press RECORD! I want to reach the warring nations with my speech.

Don't look away! I know it's hard to keep regarding one so charred,
so disfigured by unfriendly fire and think it once burned with desire.

Though fire has flayed off half my features they once were like my fellow creatures',
till some screen-gazing crop-haired boy from Iowa or Illinois,

equipped by ingenious technophile put paid to my paternal smile
and made the face you see today an armature half-patched with clay,

an icon framed, a looking glass for devotees of 'kicking ass',
a mirror that returns the gaze of victors on their victory days

and in the end stares out the watcher who ducks behind his headline: GOTCHA!
or behind the flag-bedecked page 1 of the true to bold-type-setting SUN!

I doubt victorious Greeks let Hector join their feast as spoiling spectre,
and who'd want to sour the children's joy in Iowa or Illinois

Or ageing mothers overjoyed to find their babies weren't destroyed?
But cabs beflagged with SUN front pages don't help peace in future ages.

Stars and Stripes in sticky paws may sow the seeds for future wars.
Each Union Jack the kids now wave may lead them later to the grave.

But praise the Lord and raise the banner (excuse a skull's sarcastic manner!)
Desert Rat and Desert Stormer without the scars and (maybe) trauma,

the semen-bankers are all back to sire their children in their sack.
With seed sown straight from the sower dump second-hand spermatozoa!

Lie that you saw me and I smiled to see the soldier hug his child.
Lie and pretend that I excuse my bombing by B52s,

pretend I pardon and forgive that they still do and I don't live,
pretend they have the burnt man's blessing and then, maybe, I'm spared confessing

that only fire burnt out the shame of things I'd done in Saddam's name,
the deaths, the torture and the plunder the black clouds all of us are under.

Say that I'm smiling and excuse the Scuds we launched against the Jews.
Pretend I've got the imagination to see the world beyond one nation.

That's your job, poet, to pretend I want my foe to be my friend.
It's easier to find such words for this dumb mask like baked dogturds.

So lie and say the charred man smiled to see the soldier hug his child.
This gaping rictus once made glad a few old hearts back in Baghdad,

hearts growing older by the minute as each truck comes without me in it.
I've met you though, and had my say which you've got taped. Now go away."

I gazed at him and he gazed back staring right through me to Iraq.
Facing the way the charred man faced I saw the frozen phial of waste,

a test-tube frozen in the dark, crib and Kaaba, sacred Ark,
a pilgrimage of Cross and Crescent the chilled suspension of the Present.

Rainbows seven shades of black curved from Kuwait back to Iraq,
and instead of gold the frozen crock's crammed with Mankind on the rocks,

the congealed genie who won't thaw until the World renounces War,
cold spunk meticulously jarred never to be charrer or the charred,

a bottled Bethlehem of this come- curdling Cruise/Scud-cursed millennium.
I went. I pressed REWIND and PLAY and I heard the charred man say

Leopardi was the first foreign poet i read, and a collection of his poems was one of the first books i bought when i started being interested in literature

Lonely, oh so lonely
Only me here
Very depressing
End it all.

i hate.

I was reading some Charles Baudelaire today. Here's one of his later prose poems found in a collection called Paris Spleen:

Charles Baudelaire said:

At One O'Clock in the Morning

Alone, at last! Not a sound to be heard but the rumbling of some belated and decrepit cabs. For a few hours
we shall have silence, if not repose. At last the tyranny of the human face has disappeared, and I myself shall be the
only cause of my sufferings.
At last, then, I am allowed to refresh myself in a bath of darkness! First of all, a double turn of the lock. It
seems to me that this twist of the key will increase my solitude and fortify the barricades which at this instant
separate me from the world.
Horrible life! Horrible town! Let us recapitulate the day: seen several men of letters, one of whom asked me
whether one could go to Russia by a land route (no doubt he took Russia to be an island); disputed generously with
the editor of a review, who, to each of my objections, replied: 'We represent the cause of decent people,' which
implies that all the other newspapers are edited by scoundrels; greeted some twenty persons, with fifteen of whom I
am not acquainted; distributed handshakes in the same proportion, and this without having taken the precaution of
buying gloves; to kill time, during a shower, went to see an acrobat, who asked me to design for her the costume of a
Venustra; paid court to the director of a theatre, who, while dismissing me, said to me: 'Perhaps you would do well to
apply to Z------; he is the clumsiest, the stupidest and the most celebrated of my authors; together with him, perhaps,
you would get somewhere. Go to see him, and after that we'll see;' boasted (why?) of several vile actions which I
have never committed, and faint-heartedly denied some other misdeeds which I accomplished with joy, an error of
bravado, an offence against human respect; refused a friend an easy service, and gave a written recommendation to a
perfect clown; oh, isn't that enough?
Discontented with everyone and discontented with myself, I would gladly redeem myself and elate myself a
little in the silence and solitude of night. Souls of those I have loved, souls of those I have sung, strengthen me,
support me, rid me of lies and the corrupting vapours of the world; and you, O Lord God, grant me the grace to
produce a few good verses, which shall prove to myself that I am not the lowest of men, that I am not inferior to
those whom I despise.

Click to expand...

No Leopardi since i cannot find the poem i had read years ago, but here is some more Cavafy:

Hidden things

From all I did and all I said
let no one try to find out who I was.
An obstacle was there that changed the pattern
of my actions and the manner of my life.
An obstacle was often there
to stop me when I’d begin to speak.
From my most unnoticed actions,
my most veiled writing—
from these alone will I be understood.
But maybe it isn’t worth so much concern,
so much effort to discover who I really am.
Later, in a more perfect society,
someone else made just like me
is certain to appear and act freely.