Request for poems about pilots

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Greetings poetry fans! I'm doing research about early female pilots and aviators and it got me thinking about poems - so please give me your favourite poems about pilots, aviators or flying in general? Thanks muchly!


In the mean time have my favourite Catullus poem - it has absolutely nothing to do with flying but shows that human nature has not changed in the slightest since it was written nearly 2000 years ago:

Wonder not, Rufus, why none of the opposite sex
wishes to place her dainty thighs beneath you,
not even if you undermine her virtue with gifts of choice
silk or the enticement of a pellucid gem.
You are being hurt by an ugly rumour which asserts
that beneath your armpits dwells a ferocious goat.
This they fear, and no wonder; for it's a right rank
beast that no pretty girl will go to bed with.
So either get rid of this painful affront to the nostrils
or cease to wonder why the ladies flee.

Comments

[eugenetapdance.livejournal.com]

Oh man! If you can find a the book The Last Time That I Saw Amelia Earhart, I would recommend the title poem, which comes in ten parts, and is fantastic. It's by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. I think I'm spelling that right.

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Thankyou, I'll look out for that.

[toast-is-lovely.livejournal.com]

I sense a Lynx advertising op.

[wicked-sassy.livejournal.com]

Apropos of nothing, I love your icon.

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

I love your icon.

[wicked-sassy.livejournal.com]

Sassy icons for the win!

[teithiwr.livejournal.com]

Catullus, oh Catullus.


Also: your mood theme thing is a Dalek? Such coolness! :D

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

I love me some Catullus. XD The dalek mood theme is over here (http://www.tetrap.com/lj/dalek.html) if you want it.

[teithiwr.livejournal.com]

Ooh, thanks! I'll have to see about downloading that theme sometime. :)

(Also: your icon is another fantastic thing. :D)

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Everything's better with Daleks! Except Gallifrey.

[teithiwr.livejournal.com]

Trufax! Especially if they say EXTERMINATE.

[akavertigo.livejournal.com]

There's a wealth of flying poetry over yonder. (http://www.skygod.com/quotes/poetry.html) Happy hunting!

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[tears-of-nienna.livejournal.com]

Ohh yes! That is possibly my favorite one. "An Irish Airman Forsees his Death (http://www.bartleby.com/148/3.html)" also comes to mind.

PS: Why hello, OP! Fancy meeting you here. :D

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

*waves* I'm doing research for femgenficathon. I may have to take that icon too, for research of course. :D

[tears-of-nienna.livejournal.com]

I made that one (and this one, too, which is relevant! A little), so feel free! :D

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

You are an icon machiiiiine. Thanks!

It took me an embarrassingly long time to get the Catullus icon, I must admit.

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

I love how much fun the narrator is having, thanks for posting it.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lyra_b/]

That's the one I was going to suggest, as well. My late father was a pilot and he always loved that poem.

[teithiwr.livejournal.com]

Gorgeous! Especially

Up, up the long delirious, burning blue

- that's just wonderful.

Kind of depressing, the only one I thought of

[iatrogenicmyth.livejournal.com]

Full Flight

by Bob Hicok

I'm in a plane that will not be flown into a building.
It's a SAAB 340, seats 40, has two engines with propellers
is why I think of beanies, those hats that would spin
a young head into the clouds. The plane is red and loud
inside like it must be loud in the heart, red like fire
and fire engines and the woman two seats up and to the right
resembles one of the widows I saw on TV after the Towers
came down. It's her hair that I recognize, the fecundity of it
and the color and its obedience to an ideal, the shape
it was asked several hours ago to hold and has held, a kind
of wave that begins at the forehead and repeats with slight
variations all the way to the tips, as if she were water
and a pebble had been continuously dropped into the mouth
of her existence. We are eighteen thousand feet over America.
People are typing at their laps, blowing across the fog of coffee,
sleeping with their heads on the windows, on the pattern
of green fields and brown fields, streams and gas stations
and swimming pools, blue dots of aquamarine that suggest
we've domesticated the mirage. We had to kill someone,
I believe, when the metal bones burned and the top
fell through the bottom and a cloud made of dust and memos
and skin muscled across Manhattan. I remember feeling
I could finally touch a rifle, that some murders
are an illumination of ethics, that they act as a word,
a motion the brain requires for which there is
no syllable, no breath. The moment the planes had stopped,
when we were afraid of the sky, there was a pause
when we could have been perfectly American,
could have spent infinity dollars and thrown a million
bodies at finding the few, lasering our revenge
into a kind of love, the blood-hunger kept exact
and more convincing for its precision, an expression
of our belief that proximity is never the measure of guilt.
We've lived in the sky again for some years and today
on my lap these pictures from Iraq, naked bodies
stacked into a pyramid of ha-ha and the articles
about broomsticks up the ass and the limbs of children
turned into stubble, we are punch-drunk and getting even
with the sand, with the map, with oil, with ourselves
I think listening to the guys behind me. There's a problem
in Alpena with an inventory control system, some switches
are being counted twice, switches for what I don't know—
switches of humor, of faith—but the men are musical
in their jargon, both likely born in New Delhi
and probably Americans now, which is what the flesh
of this country has been, a grafted pulse, an inventory
of the world, and just as the idea of embrace
moves chemically into my blood, and I'm warmed
as if I've just taken a drink, a voice announces
we've begun our descent, and then I sense the falling.

Re: Kind of depressing, the only one I thought of

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting it; flying isn't all happiness and I haven't seen that one before.

[suspensionpoint.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I have nothing to offer for your request-- only a deep love of Catullus, which compels me to reply pointlessly. ;[ lmao.

In my Latin class, we had a running joke about how he would have been an unbeatable freestyle rapper in our times, pwning everyone in rap battles.
...OH, WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN.

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

I would have paid good money to see that! As it is I can't look at sparrows without giggling, and then he goes and writes something incredibly poignant like the poem about burying his brother. Catullus is a filthy schoolboy but he has deeps!

[moireach.livejournal.com]

(You've probably seen this, but I've always loved it because this was my dad's role in the Navy.)

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
by Randall Jarrell

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Nope, haven't seen that one, thanks for posting it!

[orange-fell.livejournal.com]

Who translated the Catullus? Thanks.

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

I got it from this site (http://www.poormojo.org/cgi-bin/gennie.pl?Poetry+212+bi), it doesn't say who translated it though.

[lightlack.livejournal.com]

Failing and Flying, Jack Gilbert: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177687

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Thanks, that's lovely.

[gh0stmeat.livejournal.com]

a bit of a stretch, and depressing, but i love love love margaret atwood's flying within your own body.

catallus sure was a swell fellow! props on your choice of poem. :)

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

That's a great poem, thanks for that!

Catullus was the first to convince me that Roman poetry is not boring, he's brilliant.

[with-rainfall.livejournal.com]

This is the second part of David Malouf's poem Flights; it's called "Spin", and it's the only one which deals with literal flying:

Spin - by David Malouf

A light plane loop-the-looping
over sallow hills, all
its rivets snugged in

and singing; its beaten thin
quicksilver skin beaded
with cloud-lick, its hollow

spaces a brimful hum,
the pressure inside
and out in an equilibrium

true as the laws
of this world allow, a new
nature in the nerve-ends

reached or recovered, in
the shallows of the skull,
and the tilt, as they right themselves,

of road fence, powerline,
horizon, a draft
of hte way things are and were

to be, the long view still
breathtaking as earth
bumped in after the spin.

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

That's lovely, thanks for posting it.