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April is the cruelest month. Often the most rainy month of the year for our part of the world, April brings the showers that- as the saying goes- in may bring us flowers. It represents in part the suffering that one must go through in order to appreciate the good in the world. Of course in history there is always good and bad. This day in history, the 16th of April, has brought many good things, and bad as well. On the 16th of April in 1972, the Vietnam war was pushed farther into action by the historic “Nguyen Hue Offensive”. This bombing was initiated by North Vietnam, and prompted the American bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. The Vietnam war was an especially taxing war not only on the U.S. society and economy, but also on the Vietnam. There was a reported 220,000 casualties for South Vietnam, and 58,000 U.S. Casualties. The Vietnam war caused a rupture in both societies, and the United States population had one of the most significant societal uprisings of its history. Now to take a jump back in time, in 1945, with world war 2 wrapping up, the U.S army liberated a high security Nazi camp “Sonderlager”. During world war 2 and Vietnam more specifically, the culture exploded. People were speaking against the government, striving for world peace and standing up for their rights. The American culture of this time also spent a lot of their time experimenting with psychedelic drugs. On April 16th, 1943, Albert Hoffman discovered the psychedelic effects of LSD. On a different note, Ralph Waldo Ellison, an American writer and poet also had a significant impact on American culture. Ralph’s father died when he was only 3 years old and had hoped -he being a poet himself- that his son would grow to be a famous poet. His most notable work, “Invisible Man”, holds a similar theme of the culture of America around the Vietnam war. “Invisible Man” was actually Ellison’s only novel that was published during his lifetime, and won many awards such as the “National Book Award” in 1953, and Time magazines 100 best English-Language novels from 1923-2005. He died on April 16th, 1994 of pancreatic cancer. More recently, on April 16th 2007, the Virginia Tech Massacre took place. The Virginia Tech Massacre was recorded as the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. Seung-Hui Cho Killed 32 and injured 23 before committing suicide. Also, Ian MacKaye, the singer of two very influential and critically acclaimed rock and punk bands Fugazi and Minor threat, was born. Now the poem I chose to represent this day in history, is one by T.S. Eliot, entitled “The Wasteland”.

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering 5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 10
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie, 15
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, 20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock, 25
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. 30
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; 35
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, 40
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od’ und leer das Meer.

Love Compared

The poem I chose for this revision is entitled poem #55. It is Arabic, and as I’ve been discovering more and more Arabic poetry, I’ve grown to understand the poetic simplicity that they all contain. Usually they are short, but packed with a lot of meaning. Also, I’m sure that in the native language, they might carry different meanings. This poem in particular deals with a lover who compares his love to what another lover might give. “If he gives you a cloud, I will give you rain” All of the comparisons suggest that, if another lover gave her anything in particular, it will be simply bland and as it is. The writer’s love is what brings the action, or the magic to the situation. He compares a lantern, and the moonlight, a branch to trees. It is clear that the writer’s affection of this girl is clearly strong and pertinent. If someone were to give his love a ship, he will give the journey. Again, the poem is simple, but the message is very strong. 

Poem No.: 55

النص العربي: لا يوجد

I do not resemble your other lovers, my lady should another give you a cloud I give you rain Should he give you a lantern, I will give you the moon Should he give you a branch I will give you the trees And if another gives you a ship I shall give you the journey.

Like a true poet.

I’ve read John Keats before, in high school and also in my first year of college. He tends to write in phrases that seem legendary because of how perfectly odered the words are. The poem I’m looking at today, entitled “When I have Fears that I may Cease to be”, is actually not a love poem. Keats is known (to me at least) for writing a lot of love poems, so when he doesn’t it is usually something worth reading.

When I have fears that I may cease to be
     Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-piled boks, in charact’ry,
     Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain;
When I behld, upon the night’s starred face,
     Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
     Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when Ifeel, fair creature of an hour,
     That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the fairy power
     Of unreflecting love-then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
     Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

In this poem, Keats is worried about dying before he has a chance to completely expel all of the poetry and art from his brain. As he states in the first and second line, he is worried that he will perish before his “pen has gleaned my teeming brain”. What he means by that is that his brain is practically leaking with poetry and art, and he would be satisfied even if his pen would glean (barely scrape) his brain. Another one of his worries in this poem is that when he would die, his poetry will just sink into history unnoticed, as stated in his last two lines. “Of the wide world I stand alone, and think till love and fame to nothingness do sink”. He is concerned that all of the love and emotion he put into his poetry will just stay with him in his grave forever. The fact that he is able to write a poem about such a topic to me is great. It is a common concern for many poets I’m sure. The imagry he presents in this poem is also great. I can practically picture him on a shore of his “wide word”. In lines 5-8 he describes how he would observe all of the beauty of the night’s starred face, the starry sky, as he describes as “huuge cloudy symbols of a high romance”. He then continues to describe even the thought that he “might never live to trace” their immense beauty in his poetry. In the next two lines he writes about how when he feels that he couldn’t look upon the worlds beauty and greatness. As if he couldn’t stand the fact that he will one day die possibly before he were to finish or even glean upon all of his love of this beauty and wonder.

It all started with a kiss. -Original Poem

An original poem by me, I’ve decided to post it because, after all, it is my blog isn’t it? Read it outloud for its best sound. Thank you for any feedback in advance.

It all started with a kiss by Oozy Rat
—————————-
The pages are fine,
Until the last few…

They’re crumbled like
Nobody cared to hear the ending.
Or wanted to be perpetually stuck
In this limbo before the climax
Waiting for a deus ex machina

That they know of course, won’t come

The pages are fine,
Until the last few…

They’re broken like
There’s a need to feel pain
To wait, and anticipate
No feelings are held at all, as
They stream through your body slowly
Occasionally hitting an especially painful spot

The pages are fine,
Until the last few…

Where you can taste the
False hope still reaching,
Yearning for a release of tension
An embrace while you’re dreaming that’s too light
To feel but so hard to ignore, and as they say,
Once you have a taste you need the plate.

But yes,

The pages are fine.

Lined with crimson velvet, of course
With a ribbon tied around its case
In a strong, strangely delicate shell.
The contents are spread like
Some kind of gravel on marble encasing,
With the greatest anger,
And most beautiful hope and tears and
Wishes and dreams! Love and lust and

Cravings! Fears! Languid reaches,
Infinite lengths bottomless glasses of
Wine and beautifully ordered words
Describing the greatest most pure
Thoughts and feelings. Anticipation!
Reeling you in like a fish out of the most
Pressurised depths of the sea, relieved
To get out of that stinking shit hell where
You’re being pressed on by a thousand diminutive weights
And you finally feel free! Unininhibited and open to new adventures and life!

Oh! the pages are fine every one in every way you pray it doesn’t end here
You’d reek of excitement and eagerness turned from dread and fear!

 

Until the last few.
They’re crumbled like
Somebody grabbed at them in fear
Trying to rip them out before they could find out
What they already knew but couldn’t bare to hear.
Tears fall faster the longer you resist, and
Looking back fondly, I remember. It all started with a kiss.

Couldn’t have said it better myself

I seem to stumble upon these poems lately that say a lot using a little. It seems like those poems have a little more zen wisdom or they make more sense to read. Well anyhow, the poem I chose today is by Mary Oliver and is entitled “The Storm”. In the poem she writes about how in the winter, a storm comes and she sits outside observing her dog play in the new snow. The way she writes about it is simple, and it says something very complex through simple words that point out actions. The poem is about how the dog enjoys himself so much, and the “pleasures of his body”. She writes about innocent and simple pleasures, in an appropriately simple manner.

The Storm-

Now through the white orchard my little dog
        romps, breaking the new snow
        with wild feet.
Runnng here running there, excited,
        hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the whie snow is written upon
        in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentance, expressing
        the pleasures of the body in this world.

Oh, I could not have said it better
        myself.

In the second to last sentance, she describes in a rather poetic manner, how the dog’s outline and pattern in the snow is like a sentance written by his body. He is saying how great it is to live, to feel and to love just by being so absorbed in the beauty and simplistic fun of the snow. To me this poem is another great way to say somehting while saying very little at all. It describes all of the things about life that are natural, elemental, and beautiful in themselves.

More than words

I chose this poem entitled Languages as my most recent post because of a few reasons. For one, it is arabic, which was interesting to me. I stumbled upon this poem on the internet, and it struck me as simple but very poetic at the same time. 

                                                       Language 

Poem No.: 333

النص العربي: لا يوجد

When a man is in love how can he use old words? Should a woman desiring her lover lie down with grammarians and linguists? *** I said nothing to the woman I loved but gathered love’s adjectives into a suitcase and fled from all languages.

موقع أدب (adab.com)

The poem is about a man trying to write to his lover, but he can’t find the right words or the right way to say it perfectly. So he decides to not write it but instead show his love to her in another way. Although this is the point of the poem, the auhor embodies his message in poetry. Why? You could say that the poem does this perfectly by not doing anything at all. The poem relays a message perfectly by pointing out the abscence of the perfect way to say it. The first two lines summarize the poem perfectly. “When a man is in love, how can he use old words?” As if he is saying for each love there needs to be new words to describe the emotions and the love that is present. New adjectives, and grammer, as if love is it’s own language.

Young Love

The poem I chose to look at this time, was a poem about two young lovers and the authors observation on how true it seemed to be. It was an interesting love poem, because it is written from a third party perspective. The poem is entitled, Boulevard Du Montparnasse, and it is a poem by Mary Jo Salter.

Once, in a doorway in Paris, I saw
The most beautiful couple in the world.
They were each the single most beautiful thing in the world.
She would have been sixteen, perhaps; he twenty.
Their skin was the same shade of black: like a shiny Steinway.
And they stood there like the four-legged instrument
of a passion so grand one could barly imagine them
ever working, or eating, or reading a magazine.
Even they could hardly believe it.
Her hands gripped his belt loops, as they found each other’s eyes,
because beauty like this must be held onto,
could easily run away on the power
of his long, lean thighs; or the tiny feet of her laughter.
I thought: now I will write a poem,
set in a doorway in the Boulevard du Monparnasse,
in which the brutishness of time
rates only a mention; I will say simply
that if either one should ever love another,
a greater beauty shall not be the cause.

The poem is interesting because of the sole reason that Salter refers to love as a viewer. The way she describes the scene happening is precise and that also adds to it’s unique style. She describes with metaphors and similies how beautiful that this love appears. It appears to be pure, and true to her, and thats what inspired her to write it. I think that most people have seen this once or twice, two people sharing something that just is beautiful to observe. She ends he poem with the last two lines describing that if the two ever love again, it won’t be for that beauty and that connection that they shared, but instead for some other reason. She makes it seem like the love they shared was one of a kind and you don’t see often. Which I certainly can relate to, again, I’ve seen it before, and it’s obvious when it is a love like she described.

Seperation Anxiety

Today in class I stumbled upon a poem, that I hadn’t read in a while, but I feel I need to read again. It is called “A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning”. John Donne is the author, who I’m sure that most of the readers from  poetry class would recognize.

First off, the title of the poem will obviously tell a lot about it’s theme. “Forbidden Mourning” catches people immediately. It might invoke an anticipation of something to mourn, like death, or seperation. However the poem isn’t about death, it is acutally a love poem. One of his most famous works, Forbidden Mourning is highly regarded and also it is one of my favorite love poems.
AS virtuous men pass mildly away, 
    And whisper to their souls to go, 
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
    “Now his breath goes,” and some say, “No.”                     

So let us melt, and make no noise,                                       5
    No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
‘Twere profanation of our joys 
    To tell the laity our love. 

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears ;
    Men reckon what it did, and meant ;                              10
But trepidation of the spheres, 
    Though greater far, is innocent. 

Dull sublunary lovers’ love 
    —Whose soul is sense—cannot admit 
Of absence, ’cause it doth remove                                     15
    The thing which elemented it. 

But we by a love so much refined,
    That ourselves know not what it is, 
Inter-assurèd of the mind, 
    Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.                           20

Our two souls therefore, which are one, 
    Though I must go, endure not yet 
A breach, but an expansion, 
    Like gold to aery thinness beat. 

If they be two, they are two so                                          25
    As stiff twin compasses are two ; 
Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show 
    To move, but doth, if th’ other do. 

And though it in the centre sit, 
    Yet, when the other far doth roam,                                30
It leans, and hearkens after it, 
    And grows erect, as that comes home. 

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
    Like th’ other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,                                    35
    And makes me end where I begun.  

 After you read the poem it is easy to see what it is about. John is anticipating leaving his love, and anticipating the normal dread that would be associated with a long distance relationship, or even a period of time away from someone you love. To me this is a fairly common or normal topic that has to do with love, what really interests me about “Forbidden Mourning”, is how he immediately tells her (who he’s writing to) to “make no noise”, “no tear-floods” or “sigh tempests”. He doesn’t want her to mourn or be sad in any way. Basically after the first 10 lines, he uses metaphors to explain that no matter how far apart they are from each other, their love is deeper and covers all boundries. In lines 17-20 he tells about how “refined” the love is and how the distance is such a minor factor in their relationship. What really caught me about this poem was the metaphors, and his way of connecting previous ideas and themes. In the poem there were tons of references to a circle. In line 9 he mentions the earth, line 11 spheres (planets), and he also includes a metaphor at the end of the poem, which is what makes the poem really special. The metaphor is of a compass, as if she was the center of it, and he moves around her far or close, and will always make a perfect circle and end up back where he began. The closing lines are beautiful, and they really close up the poem perfectly. He makes the love so real, as if all of the mourn that lovers feel when they part is temporary or almost fake. He tries to explain that his love is more than this, it is refined, and no matter how far he parts, their love will be “inter-assured of the mind”. The poem is real, true, and beautiful! A great love poem.

No Regrets

Imagine death. No fun. No poetry.
No further arguments with relatives.
No work to do. No boring life to live.
Imagine, death: like making pottery
Or writing eulogies, it takes some skill
To do it passably. Like argument,
It needs resistance to be shaped against.
Like relatives you fight the urge to kill,
You know you won’t. Like work, there’s never less
Of it. Imagine: death is almost life.
Except it’s fascinating, like a knife.
You lose yourself just staring at the edge.
You lose yourself and suddenly you’re not
Alive, you’re dying and for fun you try
To write your eulogy. You tell some lies,
Pretend you’re wry and brave. Imagine that.

Rafael Campo properly titled a poem “The Next Poem Could be your Last”. It is obvious that it is about death, about the regrets you might have if you were to die, and you lived a life you didn’t find fulfilling. While it is about death, it is an inspirational poem.  Campo creates in this poem an image where one is writing his eulogy and pretends that he was wry and brave, while he wasn’t really in his life. This is saddening enough to inspire people to make the most out of their lives, make the most out of their creativity and talents. The fact that the next poem could be your last would certainly inspire you to make it the absolute best you could. In the first half of the poem, Campo asks the reader to imagine themselves dying. In this situation he points out that there would be no more poetry, no work, no arguments with relatives. He takes negative aspects, but makes you understand how you could appreciate them as something valuable, rather than a complaint about the way you live. This poem is particularly interesting to me, because of the analogies, metaphors and comparisons he makes. Comparing death to a knife is interesting. What is interesting about it is the similarities that he proposes, when you’re looking at the edge of a knife, how you could get lost in it, the same way that you could get lost thinking about loss, and your own death. Although it sounds like a very negative poem, it is positive. It gives you an optimistic look on how your life is now, and it also inspires you to create a grander life for yourself. Why settle for less when you only live one life?