What is poetry?

[Harbringer]

I raise you one Benjamin Peret

Making Feet and Hands:


Eye standing up eye lying down eye sitting

Why wander about between two hedges made of stair-rails while the ladders become soft
as new-born babes
as zouaves who lose their homeland with their shoes
Why raise one's arms towards the sky since the sky
has drowned itself without rhyme or reason
to pass the time and make its moustaches grow
Why does my eye sit down before going to bed
because saddles are making donkeys sore
and pencils break in the most unpredictable fashion
the whole time
except on stormy days
when they break into zigzags
and snowy days
when they tear their sweaters to pieces
But the spectacles the old tarnished spectacles
sing songs while gathering grass for cats
The cats follow the procession
carrying flags
flags and ensigns
The fish's tail crossing a beating heart
the throat regularly rising and falling to imitate the sea surrounding it
and the fish revolving about a ventilator
There are also hands
long white hands with nails of fresh greenery
and finger-joints of dew
swaying eyelashes looking at butterflies
saddened because the day made a mistake on the stairs
There are also sexes fresh as running water
which leap up and down in the valley
because they are touched by the sun
They have no beards but they have clear eyes
and they chase dragonflies
without caring what people will say

 

[Agent327]

Joy of Christ
----------------
(A Christmas carol)

People walk by windows
Shopping for dreams of happiness
O so familiar faces pass me by
Looking good and righteous
I just smile
And turn a corner
For mine is a different path
I tread alone and twist -
Step onto this thorny road
And sleep for evermore

In a bed of roses

 

[Agent327]

I raise you one Benjamin Peret

Do you have a reference for Peret? I could not find any...

 

[Harbringer]

Do you speak French?

 

[Agent327]

Less well than I can read it; I would consider it most interesting to have an original to look at.

 

[Harbringer]

Well im surprised you didn't get a French link for him then.....?

 

[Agent327]

I found a biographical link; I'm more interested in the poetry itself. (Which is what this thread should be about.) I just thought you might have more on Peret, seeing as you quoted one of his poems.

EDIT: Nevermind, I found this link http://www.benjamin-peret.org/. It quotes several originals here: http://www.benjamin-peret.org/extraits/la-poesie/.

 

[Harbringer]

Oh I have plenty young padawan, but I hate translating French to English, its borderline painful. Mayby tomorrow.

 

[Agent327]

I hate translating French to English, its borderline painful.

As it should be; just post an original if you will. (Any farourite maybe? If it's of any interest, I'd consider it a challenge to translate. I have some experience in that area and occasionally do it for fun - and practice -, old man.)

 

[Harbringer]

As it should be; just post an original if you will. (Any farourite maybe? If it's of any interest, I'd consider it a challenge to translate. I have some experience in that area and occasionally do it for fun - and practice -, old man.)

Bedtime now, but hands and feet is definately my favorite. Very meaningful.

 

[Agent327]

Alright then. Meanwhile some light verse:


Ité

Go, my songs, seek your praise from the young and from the intolerant,
move among the lovers of perfection alone.
Seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light
and take your wounds from it gladly.


Meditatio

When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs
I am compelled to conclude
that man is the superior animal.

When I consider the curious habits of man
I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.


The garden

En robe de parade
Samain

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
she walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
and she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anaemia.

And round about there is a rabble
of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
and is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion.

Ezra Pound

 

[Agent327]

To pick up on some questions raised earlier:

What is art? Poetry is art - hence this thread. What is poetry? Poetry is the oldest form of literature - in fact the earliest form of writing, apart from pictogrammatic and accounting "texts". Members will have seen Gilgamesh, whose epic is one of the oldest poems. The bible is full of it - it's written entirely in verses. "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God." The Iliad is the oldest Greek text, and it is another epic poem, as is the Odyssey.

Ofcourse the epic is just one poetic form; my purpose is to show poetry in all of its forms and to show it by poets great and small.

 

[Agent327]

Sonnet of the half

Living on the tropical side of Cancer
I belong to the equatorial gender
that, thought up from more moderate zones,
always knows two halves: two venerations

of woman and man: the double incantations
of beast and mind, juvenile century and old age;
and all the alternating conversions
of West or East, God or Walpurgisnacht.

Under the heart of heaven's zodiac
and deeply in love with everything the earth has to give,
I learned at an early age to inherit the halfness

of solar universe and dark cell,
to lead my existence to a dying
with death, with whom I live so badly.

G.J. Resink

 

[Agent327]

Some haiku; first a Japanese original by one of the masters of the genre:



Moromoro no
kokoro yanagi ni
makasu beshi

Basho(1644-1694)


Which translates to:


Everything, everything
which is in your heart to the willow(s)
you must yield


Another:


Wading women
planting rice; everything smudged
save their song

Raizan (1653-1716)


And a modern version:


Slowly serial
and in shifting sequences:
harmony in Glass

 

[Agent327]

Nike, goddess of victory
-------------------------------
Marathon
to me
is not
mere feat
the athletes repeat

Marathon
to me
is not
mere myth
of ancient Greek

Marathon
to me
is the site
where the Greeks stood
'gainst Persian foe

Marathon
to me
is a site
of battle
of blood and cries

Where, when evening falls
the phalanx stood -
like silvery cypress trees
- tall and proud

…and he cries
- before collapsing -
to his fellow Athenians:

Victory !

 

[Harbringer]

Mo Peret:

The blue eagle and the demon of the steppes
in the last cab in Berlin
Legitimate defence
of lost souls
the red mill at the beggars' school
awaits the poor student
With the housemaid Know huntsmen how to hunt on pay-day
Know huntsmen how to hunt
as papa speculates
with the smile
By the dagger the dagger the dagger
the tiger of the seas dreams of happiness
Avenged
The vestal virgin of the Ganges cries out Vanity
when the flesh succumbs
Stop look and listen
the famous turkey spends a day of pleasure
turning round in an enchanted circle
with the pluck of a lion
M'sieur the major
My Paris
my uncle from America
my heart and my legs
slaves of beauty
admire the conquests of Nora
while someone asks for a typewriter
for the black pirate
It is not possible
that a woman dressed as the Merry Widow
could become the wind's prey
because the millionairess Madame Sans-Gene
leads a wild existence
in another's skin
Her son was right
Patrol-leader 129 who wears an Italian straw-hat
and is the ace of jockeys
is abandoning a little adventuress
for a woman
It is the April-Moon which chases the buffalo
to Notre-Dame of Paris
Oh what a bore the indomitable man
with clear eyes
wishes to judge him by the law of the desert
but the lovers with children's souls have gone away
Ah what a lovely voyage

 

[Tomoyo]

This is one of my favorite bits of Latin poetry. My teacher loves it, and quite frankly, I can't blame her. Catullus 85, Odi et Amo:

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate [you] and I love [you]. Why do I do this, you might ask.
I don't know, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.

A bit loosely translated, by yours truly with the help of wiki, but otherwise it makes absolutely no sense.

Ooh, I remember reading that poem. Fewer students after this year will read it because they took it off the AP curriculum (or rather, they took the AP test off the.. world).

Reminded me of this one by Martial:

Non te amo, Sabidi, quare dicere possum nec,
Hoc dicere possum tantum, non te amo.

I do not like you, Sabidius. I can't say why.
I can only say this: I do not like you.

 

[Agent327]

Perhaps some more Martialis (and Horatius) later; right now it's time for

A coat

I made my song a coat
covered with embroideries
out of old mythologies
from heel to throat;
but the fools caught it,
wore it in the world's eyes
as though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it
for there's more enterprise
in walking naked.

W.B. Yeats (From Responsibilities and other poems, 1916)

 

[Fifty]

"Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative." H. Bloom

 

[Agent327]

That's one way of looking at it. Another is this:

Scripsi, rescripsit nil Naevia, non dabit ergo.
Sed puto quod scripsi legerat: ergo dabit.

Martialis, Epigrammata, Liber II, IX

In the translation of James Michie:

I wrote, she never replied: that goes on the debit side.
And yet I'm sure she read it: that I put down as credit.


Martialis, master of the epigram, is very evocative; yet he frequently omits any use of metaphore. In fact, most of his epigrams are very direct - as the modern definition of an epigram would have it.