"If I Were a Bird" by Lorine Niedecker

If I Were a Bird


I’d be a dainty contained cool
Greek figurette
on a morning shore —
H.D.

I’d flitter and feed and delouse myself
close to Williams’ house
and his kind eyes

I’d be a never-museumed tinted glass
breakable from the shelves of Marianne Moore.

On Stevens’ fictive sibilant hibiscus flower
I’d poise myself, a cuckoo, flamingo-pink.

I’d plunge the depths with Zukofsky
and all that means — stirred earth,
cut sky, organ-sounding, resounding
anew, anew.

I’d prick the sand in cunning, lean,
Cummings irony, a little drunk dead sober.
Man, that walk down the beach!

I’d sit on a quiet fence
and sing a quiet thing: sincere, sincere.
And that would be Reznikoff.


Source of the text - Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, pp. 130-131.

TJB: The aviary of influence. Images of 7 poets as if each of their poetries was a bird, each stanza parroting the style of the subject poet.

 

 

 

 

"On the Birth of Good & Evil During the Long Winter of '28" by Philip Levine

ON THE BIRTH OF GOOD & EVIL
DURING THE LONG WINTER
OF '28


When the streetcar stalled on Joy Road,
the conductor finished his coffee, puffed
into his overcoat, and went to phone in.
The Hungarian punch press operator wakened
alone, 7000 miles from home, pulled down
his orange cap and set out. If he saw
the winter birds scuffling in the cinders,
if he felt this was the dawn of a new day,
he didn't let on. Where the sidewalks
were unshovelled, he stamped on, raising
his galoshes a little higher with each step.
I came as close as I dared and could hear
only the little gasps as the cold entered
the stained refectory of the breath.
I could see by the way the blue tears squeezed
from the dark of the eyes, by the way
his moustache first dampened and then froze,
that as he turned down Dexter Boulevard,
he considered the hosts of the dead,
and nearest among them, his mother-in-law,
who darkened his table for twenty-seven years
and bruised his wakings. He considered how
before she went off in the winter of '27
she had knitted this cap, knitted so slowly
that Christmas came and went, and now he could
forgive her at last for the twin wool lappets
that closed perfectly on a tiny metal snap
beneath the chin and for making all of it orange.


Source of the text - Phillip Levine, New Selected Poems.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, p. 127.

TJB: Most mothers-in-law deserve a lyric like this, a heightened winter-cap narrative in which the speaker observes what can hardly be observed.

"About His Person" by Simon Armitage

About His Person



Five pounds fifty in change, exactly,
library card on its date of expiry.

A postcard, stamped,
unwritten, but franked,

a pocket-size diary slashed with a pencil
from March twenty-fourth to the first of April.

A brace of keys for a mortise lock,
an analogue watch, self-winding, stopped.

A final demand
in his own hand,

a rolled-up note of explanation
planted there like a spray carnation

but beheaded, in his fist.
A shopping list.

A giveaway photograph stashed in his wallet,
a keepsake banked in the heart of a locket.

No gold or silver,
but crowning one finger

a ring of white unweathered skin.
That was everything.


Source of the text – Simon Armitage, Kid. London: Faber and Faber, 1992, p.85.

TJB: Detective-lyric. The consonant-heavy rhythm & West Yorkshire slang charge this character-sketch-accomplished-by-observing-objects with life.

from "Beowulf," lines 3137-3182

Original Anglo-Saxon text:

Text as translated in modern English by Seamus Heaney:

The Geat people built a pyre for Beowulf,
stacked and decked it until it stood four-square,
hung with helmets, heavy war-shields
and shining armour, just as he had ordered.
Then his warriors laid him in the middle of it,
mourning a lord far-famed and beloved.
On a height they kindled the hugest of all
funeral fires; fumes of woodsmoke
billowed darkly up, the blaze roared
and drowned out their weeping, wind died down
and flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house,
burning it to the core. They were desconsolate
and wailed aloud for their lord's decease.
A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.

Then the Geat people began to construct
a mound on a headland, high and imposing,
a marker that sailors could see from far away,
and in ten days they had done the work.
It was their hero's memorial; what remained from the fire
they housed inside it, behind a wall
as worthy of him as their workmanship could make it.
And they buried torques in the barrow, and jewels
and a trove of such things as trespassing men
had once dared to drag from the hoard.
They let the ground keep that ancestral treasure,
gold under gravel, gone to earth,
as useless to men now as it ever was.
Then twelve warriors rode around the tomb,
chieftain's sons, champions in battle,
all of them distraught, chanting in dirges,
mourning his loss as a man and a king.
They extolled his heroic nature and exploits
and gave thanks for his greatness; which was the proper thing,
for a man should praise a prince whom he holds dear
and cherish his memory when that moment comes
when he has to be convoyed from his bodily home.
So the Geat people, his hearth companions,
sorrowed for the lord who had been laid low.
They said that of all the kings upon the earth
he was the man most gracious and fair-minded,
kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.

 
Source of the text - Seamus Heaney, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000, pp.210-213.

TJB: How to bury a hero. Epic of a people who did things the right way: burning, moundraising, mourning, poetry: all formal as well-wrought urns.

"Infinite Bliss" by Sharon Olds

Infinite Bliss


When I first saw snow cover the air
with its delicate hoofprints, I said I would never
live where it did not snow, and when
the first man tore his way into me,
and tore up the passageway,
and came to the small room, and pulled the
curtain aside that I might enter, I knew I could
never live apart from them
again, the strange race with their massive
bloodied hooves. Today we lay in our
small bedroom, dark gold with
reflected snow, and while the flakes climbed
delicately down the sky, you
came into me, pressing aside
the curtain, revealing the small room,
dark gold with reflected snow,
where we lay, and where you entered me and
pressed the curtain aside, revealing
the small room, dark gold with
reflected snow, where we lay.


Source of the text - Sharon Olds, Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, p. 7.

TJB: Horses, snow & sex: this lyric uses boldfaced metaphors & enacts a telescopic regression by repeating its terms room, curtain, gold, & snow.

 

 

 

 

from "Wild Peaches" by Elinor Wylie

from Wild Peaches

I

When the world turns completely upside down
You say we'll emigrate to the Eastern Shore
Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore;
We'll live among wild peach trees, miles from town.
You'll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown
Homespun, dyed butternut's dark gold colour.
Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor,
We'll swim in milk and honey till we drown.

The winter will be short, the summer long,
The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot,
Tasting of cider and of scuppernong;
All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all.
The squirrels in their silver fur will fall
Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot.


Source of the text - Elinor Wylie, Nets to Catch the Wind.  New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921, p. 12.

TJB: Edenist malarkey; paradise as a New England childhood. If it’s as great as the seductive lush-sentiment sounds, do we need to hunt squirrel?

Verse 14 from "Tao Te Ching" by Lao Tzu

14

Look, and it can't be seen.
Listen, and it can't be heard.
Reach, and it can't be grasped.

Above, it isn't bright.
Below, it isn't dark.
Seamless, unnamable,
it returns to the realm of nothing.
Form that includes all forms,
image without an image,
subtle, beyond all conception.

Approach it and there is no beginning;
follow it and there is no end.
You can't know it, but you can be it,
at ease in your own life.
Just realize where you come from:
this is the essence of wisdom.


Source of the text - Tao Te Ching: A New English Version, with Foreward and Notes, by Stephen Mitchell.  New York: Harper Perennial, 1988, p. 14.

TJB: Dualistic undefinable ‘it.’ Be it poem or not, these wisdom-verses built of opposed pairs permit higher truth but not knowledge thereof.

"Above Pate Valley" by Gary Snyder

Above Pate Valley


We finished clearing the last
Section of trail by noon,
High on the ridge-side
Two thousand feet above the creek
Reached the pass, went on
Beyond the white pine groves,
Granite shoulders, to a small
Green meadow watered by the snow,
Edged with Aspen — sun
Straight high and blazing
But the air was cool.
Ate a cold fried trout in the
Trembling shadows. I spied
A glitter, and found a flake
Black volcanic glass — obsidian —
By a flower. Hands and knees
Pushing the Bear grass, thousands
Of arrowhead leavings over a
Hundred yards. Not one good
Head, just razor flakes
On a hill snowed all but summer.
A land of fat summer deer,
They came to camp. On their
Own trails. I followed my own
Trail here. Picked up the cold-drill,
Pick, singlejack and sack
Of dynamite.
Ten thousand years.

 
Source of the text - Gary Snyder, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems.  Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2009.

TJB: This wilderness lyric, thick-detailed, skitters between paratactic fragments for narrative immediacy & plays with the pronouns We, I & They.

"Lullaby" by Joan Murray

Lullaby

Sleep, little architect. It is your mother's wish
That you should lave your eyes and hang them up in dreams.
Into the lowest sea swims the great sperm fish.
If I should rock you, the whole world would rock within my arms.

Your father is a greater architect than even you.
His structure falls between high Venus and far Mars.
He rubs the magic of the old and then peers through
The blueprint where lies the night, the plan the stars.

You will place mountains too, when you are grown.
The grass will not be so insignificant, the stone so dead.
You will spiral up the mansions we have sown.
Drop your lids, little architect. Admit the bats of wisdom into your head.


Source of the text - Joan Murray, Poems 1917-1942.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.

TJB: Babymaking music. Laconic-alexandrine, simple-seeming in syntax, & soft in vowel sounds, still, this song measures its conceit vs Genesis.

"The Locust," anonymous lyric

The Locust


What is a locust?
Its head, a grain of corn; its neck, the hinge of a knife;
Its horns, a bit of thread; its chest is smooth and burnished;
Its body is like a knife-handle;
Its hock, a saw; its spittle, ink;
Its underwings, clothing for the dead.
On the ground—it is laying eggs;
In flight—it is like the clouds.
Approaching the ground, it is rain glittering in the sun;
Lighting on a plant, it becomes a pair of scissors;
Walking, it becomes a razor;
Desolation walks with it.


Translated from the Malagasy [from Madagascar] by A. Marre and Willard R. Trask
 
Source of the text - Voices from Twentieth Century Africa: Griots and Towncriers, selected with an introduction by Chinweizu.  London: Faber and Faber, 1988.

TJB: Precious-vicious. This figure-chant describes, in the first half the features of & in the second half the actions of, a single locust.