CruelestMonth.com

"Snow-Flakes"

The Academy of American Poets sent a very nice poem along with their season's greetings.  It's just too perfect; I hope they don't mind if I share it as well:

"Snow-Flakes"

Out of the bosom of the Air,
     Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
     Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
        Silent, and soft, and slow
        Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take
    Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
    In the white countenance confession,
        The troubled sky reveals
        The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,
    Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
    Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
        Now whispered and revealed
        To wood and field.

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Poems and Other Writings, Library of America, 2000.

As it so happened, Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage beyond the Sea by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1835) was the first book Harper ever published.

Preening

You may have gleaned from my posts that I'm learning French or, more accurately, that I'm enrolled in French classes.  Whether there has been any learning remains to be seen.  Happily, I find one of the best modes of instruction is reading French poetry.  (I mean, what do you know?)  Here's a poem from one of my favorite authors, Raymond Queneau.  See what you can understand (translation below).  (And it helps to read the original aloud with a rhee-di-kuh-lus Frauench aghsennt.)

“L’Espèce Humaine”

L’espèce humaine m’a donné
le droit d’être mortel
le devoir d’être civilisé
la conscience humaine
deux yeux qui d’ailleurs ne fonctionnent pas très bien
le nez au milieu du visage
deux pieds deux mains
le langage
l’espèce humaine m’a donné
mon père et ma mère
peut-être des frères on ne sait
des cousins à pelletées
et des arrière-grands-pères
l’espèce humaine m’a donné
ses trois facultés
le sentiment l’intelligence et la volonté
chaque chose de façon modérée
l’espèce humaine m’a donné
trente-deux dents un cœur un foie
d’autres viscères et dix doigts
l’espèce humaine m’a donné
de quoi se dire satisfait

"The Human Species"

The human species has given me
the right to be mortal

the duty to be civilized

a conscience

2 eyes that don't always function very well

a nose in the middle of my face

2 feet 2 hands

speech

the human species has given me

my father and mother

some brothers maybe who knows

a whole mess of cousins

and some great-grandfathers

the human species has given me

its 3 faculties

feeling intellect and will

each in moderation

32 teeth 10 fingers a liver

a heart and some other viscera

the human species has given me

what I'm supposed to be satisfied with

--translated by Teo Savory (The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry, edited by Paul Auster, 1984)

Now may be an opportune moment to mention exactly how I feel about the book above.  Go buy it!  The introduction is fantastic.  The translations were all crafted by leading literary figures of the 20th century.  The original poems are by the most impeccable French poets.  Plus the books looks très moderne, so people will think you are wicked smart.  That may not have been exactly how I feel, but it dances near enough to the truth.

Dylan Thomas: The Caedmon Collection

This from the backlist (2004) -- Dylan Thomas: The Caedmon Collection.  Introduced by Billy Collins from previously published LP liner notes.  I've been dabbling with recorded poetry the last few months, both listening and attempting to gather new readings, and it seemed like the thing to have.  According to Collins's introduction, here you'll find "a collection of top-drawer Dylan Thomas...the Caruso of the spoken word in peerless perfomance of his and other's works."  Those others include W.H. Auden, W.B. Yeats, Shakespeare, and, to my personal delight, Djuna Barnes.  He reads "Watchman, What of the Night?" a chapter from Barnes's exceptional work, Nightwood.  Below you'll find two audio excerpts:

Billy Collins's Introduction to Disc 1:
Download 01_a_childs_christmas_in_wales.wma

"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night":
Download 03_do_not_go_gentle_into_that_goodnight.wma

PW on Robert Hass

Here's the early word from PW on Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 by Robert Hass:

The first book in 10 years from former U.S. poet laureate Hass may be his best in 30: these new poems show a rare internal variety, even as they reflect his constant concerns.  One is human impact "on the planet at the century's end": a nine-part verse-essay addressed to the ancient Roman poet Lucretius sums up evolution, deplores global warming and says that "the earth needs a dream of restoration in which/ She dances and the birds just keep arriving."  Another concern is biography and memory, not so much Hass's own life as the lives of family and friends.  A poem about his sad father and alcoholic mother avoids self-pity by telling a finely paced story.  Hass also commemorates the late Polish Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, with whom he collaborated on translations; condemns war in harsh, stripped-down prose poems; explores achievement in visual art from Gerhard Richter to Vermeer; and turns in perfected, understated phrases on Japanese Buddhist models.  Through it all runs a rare skill with long sentences, a light touch, a wish to make claims not just on our ears but on our hearts, and a willingness to wait--few poets wait longer, it seems--for just the right word. (Oct.)

That's one of the most satisfying PW reviews I've ever read.  Here's a poem from the collection:

"Ezra Pound's Proposition"

Beauty is sexual, and sexuality
Is the fertility of the earth and the fertility
Of the earth is economics.  Though he is no recommendation
For poets on the subject of finance,
I thought of him in the thick heat
Of the Bangkok night.  Not more than fourteen, she saunters up to you
Outside the Shangri-la Hotel
And says, in plausible English,
"How about a party, big guy?"

Here is more or less how it works:
The World Bank arranges the credit and the dam
Floods three hundred villages, and the villagers find their way
To the city where their daughters melt into the teeming streets,
And the dam's great turbines, beautifully tooled
In Lund or Dresden or Detroit, financed
By Lazeres Freres in Paris or the Morgan Bank in New York,
Enabled by judicious gifts from Bechtel of San Francisco
Or Halliburton of Houston to the local political elite,
Spun by the force of rushing water,
Have become hives of shimmering silver
And, down river, they throw that bluish throb of light
Across her cheekbones and her lovely skin.

--from Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005

Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems

Some very handsome galleys have arrived for John Ashbery's Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, which selects from April Galleons (1987) to Where Shall I Wander (2005).  I wish I had an image to share with you, but none are yet available (to me, anyway).  As I have the tendency to do when a quantity of proofs come in, I'm giving some away.  The first three readers to e-mail CruelestMonthPoetry@yahoo.com will receive a galley.  If you've received a book from me recently, your response time shall be staggered by an as-of-now undisclosed amount of time.  This poem happens to fit today:

"Still Life With Stranger"

Come on, Ulrich, the great octagon
of the sky is passing over us.
Soon the world will have moved on.
Your love affair, what is it
but a tempest in a teapot?

But such storms exude strange
resonance: the power of the Almighty
reduced to its infinitesimal root
hangs like the chant of bees,
the milky drooping leaves of the birch
on a windless autumn day--

Call these phenomena or pinpoints,
remote as the glittering trash of heaven,
yet the monstrous frame remains,
filling up with regret, with straw,
or on another level with the quick grace
of the singing, falling snow.

You are good at persuading
them to sing with you.
Above you, horses graze forgetting
daylight inside the barn.

Creeper dangles against rock-face.
Pointed roofs bear witness.
The whole cast of characters is imaginary
now, but up ahead, in shadow, the past waits.

--from Hotel Lautrémont (1992)

*The galleys go to Damion, Steve, and Mary.  Thanks for writing in!

Time and Materials

Robert Hass's first book in ten years, Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005, will go on sale this October.  The galley back copy has this to say:

"Robert Hass's new poems are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world and the bafflement of the present moment in American culture.  This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise. Every new book by Robert Hass is a major event in poetry, and this beautiful collection is no exception."

Here's one of the shorter poems near the beginning of the collection:

"Winged and Acid Dark"

A sentence with "dappled shadow" in it.
Something not sayable
spurting from the morning silence,
secret as a thrush.

The other man, the officer, who brought onions
and wine and sacks of flour,
the major with the swollen knee,
wanted intelligent conversation afterward.
Having no choice, she provided that, too.

Potsdamerplatz, May 1945.

When the first one was through he pried her mouth open.
Bashō told Rensetsu to avoid sensational materials.
If the horror of the world were the truth of the world,
he said, there would be no one to say it
and no one to say it to.
I think he recommended describing the slightly frenzied
swarming of insects near a waterfall.

Pried her mouth open and spit in it.
We pass these things on,
probably, because we are what we can imagine.

Something not sayable in the morning silence.
The mind hungering after likenesses.  "Tender sky," etc.,
curves the swallows trace in air.

"Summer Night"

The moon dangling wet like a half-plucked eye
was bright for my friends bred in close avenues
of stone, and let us see too much.
The vast treeless field and huge wounded sky,
opposing each other like continents,
made us and our smoking fire quite irrelevant
between their eternal attitudes.
We knew we were intruders.  Worse.  Intruders
unnoticed and undespised.
      Through orchards of black weeds
with a sigh the river urged its silver flesh.
From their damp nests bull-frogs croaked
warnings, but to each other.
And occasional birds, in a private grudge,
flew noiselessly at the moon.
What could we do?  We ran naked into the river,
but our flesh insulted the thick slow water.
We tried to sit naked on the stones,
but they were cold and we soon dressed.
One squeezed a little human music from his box:
mostly it was lost in the grass
where one struggled in an ignorant embrace.
One argued with the slight old hills
and the goose-fleshed naked girls, I will not be old.
One, for his protest, registered a sexual groan.
And the girl in my arms
broke suddenly away, and shouted for us all,
Help!  Help!  I am alone.  But then all subtlety was
                                                         gone
and it was stupid to be obvious before the field and
                                                         sky,
experts in simplicity.  So we fled on the highways,
in our armoured cars, back to air-conditioned
                                                         homes.

From Let Us Compare Mythologies by Leonard Cohen.  On sale 5/29.

Pleasant surprises...

It looks like Millicent Bennett, Associate Editor for Ecco, not only edits poetry, she inspires it.  Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion recently chose the winners of their Spring Lyric Contest.  Fifteen poems, out of 2,000 entries, were read on-air March 31st.  One of these fifteen qualified to win a Sleep Number bed from Select Comfort and three-dozen roses.  Penned by her father Bruce Bennett, "For Millicent and Giovanni, Who are going to Need a Bed" made it into the final fifteen, but did not luck out when Grace, a ten-year-old from Long Island, NY, chose from a hat the recipient of the bed and roses.  Still, Mr. Bennett's villanelle made it a long way and with MIllicent's permission I've reproduced it here:

"For Millicent and Giovanni, Who are going to Need a Bed"

By Bruce Bennett

Mill and Joe will soon be wed.
I will write a poem for Spring
that may win for them a bed.

Theirs is news that should be spread:
Love is such a splendid thing!
Mill and Joe will soon be wed.

Words that bind them will be said.
They will kiss and they will cling.
I must win for them a bed,

Or they'll use the floor instead,
much more suited for a fling.
Mill and Joe will soon be wed,

Flowers flung and tears be shed.
They've already got a ring.
What if they don't have a bed?

Therefore let this poem be read.
May it like the sweet birds sing!
Mill and Joe will soon be wed.
Bless their union with a bed!

The podcast of Garrison reading the poem can be found here.  Advance to 19:03 and you'll be right on it.

***

Also, we're pleased to have been mentioned in "Online April is the Coolest Month" which appeared in PW today.

one thousand dollars

all of my knowledge about horse racing
told me that this was a sure bet.
I bet one thousand to win.
the horse had post one
at 6 furlongs.

the bell rang and they came
out of the gate.

my horse turned left
ran through the fence
fell down and
died
right there
at 7/5.

when I tell people this story
they don't say
anything.

sometimes there's nothing to say
about
death.

from The People Look Like Flowers At Last (2007) by Charles Bukowski

"Elegy of Fortinbras"

This poem was mentioned by one of our book winners.

"Elegy of Fortinbras"

          To C.M.

Now that we're alone we can talk prince man to man
though you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant
nothing but black sun with broken rays
I could never think of your hands without smiling
and now that they lie on the stone like fallen nests
they are as defenseless as before  The end is exactly this
The hands lie apart  The sword lies apart  The head apart
and the knight's feet in soft slippers

You will have a soldier's funeral without having been a soldier
the only ritual I am acquainted with a little
There will be no candles no singing only cannon-fuses and bursts
crepe dragged on the pavement helmets boots artillery horses drums
        drums I know nothing exquisite
those will be my manoeuvres before I start to rule
one has to take the city by the neck and shake it a bit

Anyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life
you believed in crystal notions not in human clay
always twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras
wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit
you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe

Now you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to
and you have peace  The rest is not silence but belongs to me
you chose the easier part an elegant thrust
but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching
with a cold apple in one's hand on a narrow chair
with a view of the ant-hill and the clock's dial

Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs  The night is born
a star named Hamlet  We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy

It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince

- Zbigniew Herbert, Study of the Object (1961)