“the low is reation”: comparative poetry · charles olson, the maximus poems (1969) (1962)...
TRANSCRIPT
“The Blow is Creation”:
Comparative Poetry
EN122: Modes of Reading University of Warwick
Dr. Jonathan Skinner
Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems (1969)
(1962)
1862
Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934)
(1962)
www.poetryfoundation.org
Bernadette Mayer, Sonnets (1989)
Bernadette Mayer, Sonnets (1989)
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd . . .
Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934)
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.
--Ezra Pound (1913)
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.
--Ezra Pound (1913)
Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934)
Woman Admiring Plum Blossoms at Night
Suzuki Harunobu18th Century
British Library
Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934)
Ezra Pound, "A Retrospect" - Including "A Few Dont's," Pavannes and Divagations (1918)
Imagism
“An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”
“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”
TS Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” The Sacred Wood (1921)
Free Union (excerpt)
My wife whose hair is a brush fireWhose thoughts are summer lightningWhose waist is an hourglassWhose waist is the waist of an otter caught in the teeth of a tigerWhose mouth is a bright cockade with the fragrance of a star of the first magnitudeWhose teeth leave prints like the tracks of white mice over snowWhose tongue is made out of amber and polished glassWhose tongue is a stabbed waferThe tongue of a doll with eyes that open and shutWhose tongue is an incredible stoneMy wife whose eyelashes are strokes in the handwriting of a childWhose eyebrows are nests of swallowsMy wife whose temples are the slate of greenhouse roofsWith steam on the windowsMy wife whose shoulders are champagneAre fountains that curl from the heads of dolphins over the iceMy wife whose wrists are matchesWhose fingers are raffles holding the ace of heartsWhose fingers are fresh cut hayMy wife with the armpits of martens and beech fruitAnd Midsummer Night
Andre Breton (1931)
Ronald Johnson, Songs of the Earth (1970)
Resources for poetry media:
PennSound
Lyrikline
Of Time and the Lineby Charles Bernstein (2010)
George Burns likes to insist that he alwaystakes the straight lines; the cigar in his mouthis a way of leaving space between thelines for a laugh. He weaves lines togetherby means of a picaresque narrative;not so Henny Youngman, whose lines are strict-ly paratactic. My father pushed aline of ladies' dresses—not down the streetin a pushcart but upstairs in a fact'ryoffice. My mother has been more concernedwith her hemline. Chairman Mao put forwardMaoist lines, but that's been abandoned (most-ly) for the East-West line of malarkeyso popular in these parts. The prestigeof the iambic line has recentlysuffered decline, since it's no longer soclear who “I” am, much less who you are. Whenmaking a line, better be double sure
what you're lining in & what you're liningout & which side of the line you're on; theworld is made up so (Adam didn't so muchname as delineate). Every poem's gota prosodic lining, some of which willunzip for summer wear. The lines of animaginary are inscribed on thesocial flesh by the knifepoint of history.Nowadays, you can often spot a workof poetry by whether it's in linesor no; if it's in prose, there's a good chanceit's a poem. While there is no lesson inthe line more useful than that of the pick-et line, the line that has caused the most ad-versity is the bloodline. In Russiaeveryone is worried about long lines;back in the USA, it's strictly soup-lines. “Take a chisel to write,” but for anactor a line's got to be cued. Or, asthey say in math, it takes two lines to makean angle but only one lime to makea Margarita.
M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! 2008
1962
Sonnet V (2007)Mahmoud Darwish (translated by Fady Joudah)
I touch you as a lonely violin touches the suburbs of the faraway placepatiently the river asks for its share of the drizzleand, bit by bit, a tomorrow passing in poems approachesso I carry faraway's land and it carries me on travel's road
On a mare made of your virtues, my soul weavesa natural sky made of your shadows, one chrysalis at a time.I am the son of what you do in the earth, son of my woundsthat have lit up the pomegranate blossoms in your closed-up gardens
Out of jasmine the night's blood streams white. Your perfume,my weakness and your secret, follows me like a snakebite. And your hairis a tent of wind autumn in color. I walk along with speechto the last of the words a bedouin told a pair of doves
I palpate you as a violin palpates the silk of the faraway timeand around me and you sprouts the grass of an ancient place—anew
“On this earth”-- Mahmoud Darwish (1986)
“Mother, the Great Stones Got to Move” (1995)Lorna Goodison
Mother, one stone is wedged across the hole in our history and sealed with blood wax.In this hole is our side of the story, exact figures,headcounts, burial artifacts, documents, lists, mapsshowing our way up through the stars; lockets of brasscontaining all textures of hair clippings.It is the half that has never been told,and some of us must tell it.
Mother, there is the stone on the hearts of some women and mensomething like an onyx, cabochon-cut,which hung on the wearer seeds bad dreams. Speaking for the smalldreamers of this earth, plagued with nightmares, yearningfor healing dreamswe want the stone to move.