(no subject)

[agata.livejournal.com]

For the young who want to Marge Piercy

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don't have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.'s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else's mannerisms

is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you're certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

Garden Abstract

[pablodrameda.livejournal.com]

The apple on its bough is her desire,--
Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.
She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.

And so she comes to dream herself the tree,
The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,
Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,
Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.
She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope
Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.


Hart Crane

The Helmet - A.F. Moritz

[glisse.livejournal.com]

The Helmet

The greatest twentieth-century work of art is not a poem or
a painting

but the steel helmet: so said some Nazi curator. And indeed the
German helmet

from World War II that I own does satisfy our obsession with
elegant design.

Its lines and volumes, simple yet intricate, and the way light
passes over it

as if it were a planet while the skull-hole is filled with
darkness: these

fulfil design’s one great promise or perception, that a thought,
even a life,

can express itself with beautiful inexplicitness, and there truly is
paradise:

the heaven of dynamic patterns and self-cancelled phrases where
all are equal.

Here is the example, unique for each who confronts it, of a mass-
produced,

ineffable and unsayable impression. Democracy, art for all. Who
has not seen

these helmets? Millions owned them. Tens of thousands took
them from the dead.

This one, for instance, I have from a relative, who received it from
a friend,

a Berber, one of the Free French, assigned with the Americans,
who taught him

the tools and techniques of modern war. But this man also loved
traditional means.

At night he used to take a serrated bayonet and pass through the
lines. In the darkness

nothing could be seen, so he felt for helmets: rough ones meant
the American army,

and he went farther. Smooth ones: he was among Germans and
started cutting throats.

This additional work he did for the pleasure of danger and skill,
hatred of the enemy,

and love of his foreign friends. A stoical man, with outbursts of
frantic exalted delight,

he went home after the war to a strict life in the desert south of
Marrakesh.

Now I’ve turned his helmet over on its back like a small-boy-
tortured turtle,

and I use it to plant flowers in: those shade-lovers I always call
"patience"

when I know impatiens is their name.


A.F. Moritz

America by Allen Ginsberg

[https://users.livejournal.com/pornographic-/]

Hi, I'm Jen and I'm new to this community.

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?

( Read more... )

(no subject)

[nosyparker.livejournal.com]

In honor of Percy Bysshe Shelley's birthday (at least, it's his birthday where I am), I present to you NOT Ozymandias, but my favorite poem of his....


Love's Philosophy

The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of Heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle -
Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high Heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea -
What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me?



Let us all pay homage to one of the great Byronic cocksmen. (Though I can't forgive him for cheating on Mary. That hound.)

Give Us Our Peace, Langston Hughes

[angabel.livejournal.com]

Give Us Our Peace

Give us a peace equal to the war
Or else our souls will be unsatisfied,
And we will wonder what we have fought for
And why the many died.

Give us a peace accepting every challenge--
The challenge of the poor, the black, of all denied,
The challenge of the vast colonial world
That long has had so little justice by its side.

Give us a peace that dares us to be wise.
Give us a peace that dares us to be strong.
Give us a peace that dares us still uphold
Throughout the peace our battle against wrong.

Give us a peace that is not cheaply used,
A peace that is no clever scheme,
A people's peace for which men can enthuse,
A peace that brings reality to our dream.

Give us a peace that will produce great schools--
As the war produced great armament,
A peace that will wipe out our slums--
As war wiped out our foes on evil bent.

Give us a peace that will enlist
A mighty army serving human kind,
Not just an army geared to kill,
But trained to keep the living mind.

An army trained to shape our common good
And bring about a world of brotherhood.

--Langston Hughes

(no subject)

[strangeidea.livejournal.com]

THE RING
by Diane Wakoski


I carry it on my keychain, which itself
is a big brass ring
large enough for my wrist,
holding keys for safe deposit box,
friends' apartments,
My house, office and faithless car.

I would like to wear it,
the only ornament on my plain body,
but it is a relic,
the husband gone to other wives,
and it could never be a symbol of sharing,
but like the gold it's made of, stands for possession, power,
the security of a throne.

So, on my keyring,
dull from resting in my dark purse,
it hangs, reminding me of failures, of beauty I once had,
of more ancient searches for an enchanted ring.

I understand, now, what that enchantment is, though.
It is being loved.
Or, conversely, loving so much that you feel loved.
And the ring hangs there
with my keys,
reminding me of failure.

This vain head full of roses,
crystal, bleeding lips,

a voice doomed to listen, forever,
to itself.

Music, when soft voices die...

[elizadarcy.livejournal.com]

On the occasion of Shelley's birth anniversary,


Music, When Soft Voices Die


Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Sweetly Erotic

[laughingbee.livejournal.com]

Last Gods by Galway Kinnell

She sits naked on a rock
a few yards out in the water.
He stands on the shore,
also naked, picking blueberries.
She calls. He turns. She opens
her legs showing him her great beauty,
and smiles, a bow of lips
seeming to tie together
the ends of the earth.
Splashing her image
to pieces, he wades out
and stands before her, sunk
to the anklebones in leaf-muck
and bottom-slime &emdash; the intimacy
of the visible world. He puts
a berry in its shirt of mist
into her mouth.
She swallows it. He puts in another.
She swallows it. Over the lake
two swallows whim, juke, jink,
and when one snatches
an insect they both whirl up
and exult. He is swollen
not with ichor but with blood.
She takes him and sucks him
more swollen. He kneels, open
the dark vertical smile
linking heaven with the underneath
and licks her smoothest flesh more smooth.
On top of the rock they join.
Somewhere a frog moans, a crow screams.
The hair on their bodies
startles up. They cry
in the tongue of the last gods,
who refused to go,
chose death, and shuddered
in joy and shattered pieces,
bequeathing their cries
into the human mouth.
Now in the lake
two faces float, looking up
at a great maternal pine whose branches
open in all directions
explaining everything.