Anthology - Poets A - B-D - E-I - J-L - M - N-S

 

Tadeusz Pióro

 

SOME METHODS OF CROWD CONTROL

 

The bells are ringing, shouldn’t we kneel?

As for me, I’m all for a pint,

let the children be taken shopping.

They need trousseaus, one and all,

before the war goes bust, said the minister,

making me blush and squirm

for an hour in front of the telly.

The landlady asked about dreams

and I told my first lie involving

three dogs and a swarm of bees.

My parents are very poor, they wrapped my body

in straw, then who knows what bliss

as long as we kill the mayor

who thinks we know nothing.

I spoke of my murky life and her eyes

responded in kind, as if there were no choice

between innocence and experience.

A hundred feelings pressed upon my heart.

 

So often is the enemy politically neutral

due to natural faithlessness and boredom

en route. Twice two makes death

and you talk of some route.

Impress your fellow travellers, dress smart,

don’t get wet, all the children will wave

and frighten flies away with their hats.

I spoke of death to the children

with an ease granted by profound conviction.

They did their best to go somewhere

and we all fit into the pantry

after a suitable interval.

That’s where only sinful books are read.

For fear of police raids, poets follow politicians,

making their lives into well-managed works of art,

encoded and hidden in any old glove. Couriers come

from the city regardless, men hang their rifles

on trees, young people play a game of flowers

trendy in the Dark Ages. I could have shot you like a fairy

princess in Venice, where Liszt

had his gloves chewed up by groupies,

and his shins, and trouser legs.

An Englishman salvaged the cufflinks,

but we are unsure what that means.

A handsome secretary with a cigarette

might know, but is sure never to tell

my father-in-law how attractive you are,

sleepless in suburban areas or large

plots of land known as graveyards,

where the dead are frequently buried

and village churches stand proximate.

So how is it a lover of Paris

ran for the boondocks?

Was it her mother or our last kiss?

Will it be fair, my son?

 

The road is bad and wet.

All drink together, curse and patrol.

There is silence behind closed doors.

No smoking, no soft radio moans,

no drumming of fingers on sills,

no Ronsard. Scare or wipe out.

Both our cannons are in danger.

 

The barmaid’s eyes dispatched me

to a small town ignored by novelists.

We arrived by train in moonlight,

emitting moral hints from spike-tips,

ashamed of the hour and that beastly bliss.

My second-in-command, a modest man

of seven acres, burdened by contraband

family, bombarded by things and allegories,

grew impatient with Homer as I read him.

Who are we reading for? Let’s meet

the actresses and pay their expenses.

Please, not today, they are too much moved,

they’d think we’re sleepwalking

and choose a gypsy life in New York City.

Harder to know why there is so much gold

underground, if you would just dig a little,

encouraging the young ones with your fingers?

Where do the police find their brains?

Blink three times if they suit you.

Privates and NCOs are to masturbate

in such situations, but we lack

the manpower to make sure they do

unflinchingly, and the buffeted, lip-smacking squirrels

making eyes at wild strawberries

never leave their sights.

 

Very funny, as long as we don’t leave

the graveyard, for there is nothing like nature

if you stay single and don’t panic.

A saner man would simply go to Paris.

Her dad played the guitar,

delivered flowers to police stations,

which is partly true, but some vases

were needlessly annihilated

in a matter of hours.

 

tr. the author

 

 

William Shakespeare

 

SONNET 106

 

When in the chronicle of wasted time

I see descriptions of the fairest wights,

And beauty making beautiful old rhyme,

In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,

Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best,

Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,

I see their antique pen would have expressed

Even such a beauty as you master now.

So all their praises are but prophecies

Of this our time, all you prefiguring;

And for they looked but with divining eyes,

They had not skill enough your worth to sing:

For we, which now behold these present days,

Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

 

 

 

 

Tamás Prágai

 

AN EMPTY MONTH

 

This is an empty month, between February and March,

something is out of joint

again and, all the time, something leaves me, red letter

calendar pages fall

out of it and bloody tampons, between February and March, it almost

steams of haste, to be back on the stage—

 

I remember the taste of your skin on my tongue, but a crying

man falls out of me, his back and shoulders burning,

might be a stuntman on escape practice

out of a house on fire that would collapse and be mud;

I still cannot wish you get off with someone else,

but that time is coming. Taste of blackberry and salted almonds,

 

the gutter is dripping, like our cry

under the excited, ticking roofs, that little snow

melts, smoked, disappeared

and fading away between February and March,

through the emptiest month, we are due to lack

all things, temperature rising, wet springtime—

 

the burning eyesight keeps on falling,

the eyesight that before was pure poetry, exaggerated vision,

now crashes on the pavement and turns out, empty

it is and always has been, bursts the transparent bubble with the ivy veins…

in and out is the same. You peel the dark bulb of the heart

in an empty room, among white tiles. A kind of freedom.

 

tr. the author

 

 

Attila Végh

 

I AM THE EVENING

 

I live among you, but I don’t care about you,

a ghost: swinging in your rooms,

I fall, hair in your soups,

I twist your trained words,

the world twists anywhere I go,

grinning I give the start signal

on the kitchen ski-slope,

I am the guard at all accidents,

I cry from all taps,

you pour out all babies with me,

my faint shade disappears wobbling

in the room of hopelessness,

and I never leave,

but neither come back in the evening,

because I am the evening,

burn all lights,

you won’t be eaten up by the furnished dawn,

pay all the electricity bills,

I will bring the bill of the night,

I leek out of the cracks of stories,

I melt through the walls of the obtained holiday,

because I am the evening,

a furious, faithless, strange dead body,

bells toll when I air the rooms,

the soul tolls that time,

when I watch TV, the fingers of

a garden oak knock on the window quietly,

yes, things still keep on changing a bit,

but calm down, my beloved ones,

the time is coming soon

when all things will be the same.

 

tr. Barbara Bércesi & Tamás Prágai

 

 

 

 

Tariel Chanturia

 

A DISAPPOINTED THOUGHT

 

A poem needs a heart. A poem needs a liver.

A poem needs a tear, and plenty of your blood.

A poem needs a leg. A poem needs a hand.

A poem needs a brain and a forehead as well.

A poem needs dollars. Roubles are also needed.

True poetry needs sex. And a poem comes next.

A poem needs fury. A poem needs a fist.

A poem needs Barbie for a granddaughter’s smile.

A poem needs wine, fruits and vitamins as well.

Plenty of sleepless nights and from time to time a nap.

A poem needs anger. A poem needs poison.

Centuries (a lot), and a couple of seconds.

Surely, at night—surely, at noon,

Devotion of somebody’s, devotion of yours.

A poem needs poetry. A poem needs candies.

A poem needs honesty.

A poem needs cedar. A poem needs oak.

A poem needs a heart and a bullet in that heart.

A poem needs a mountain. A poem needs a valley.

A poem needs a wife (sometimes a second wife).

A poem needs a breast and a dagger through that breast.

A long and quiet sleep. A dead mom’s lullaby—so sweet.

A poem needs sheep and a shepherd for that sheep.

 

I know what a poem needs,

Have no idea who needs a poem.

 

tr. Manana Dumbadze

 

 

Emily Dickinson

 

I DIED FOR BEAUTY, BUT WAS SCARCE

 

I died for beauty, but was scarce 

Adjusted in the tomb,

When one who died for truth was lain

In an adjoining room.

 

He questioned softly why I failed?

‘For beauty,’ I replied.

‘And I for truth,—the two are one;

We brethren are,’ he said.

 

And so, as kinsmen met a night,

We talked between the rooms,

Until the moss had reached our lips,

And covered up our names.

 

 

 

 

Timothy Donnelly

 

TO HIS DEBT

 

Where would I be without you, massive shadow

dressed in numbers, when without you there

 

behind me, I wouldn’t be myself. What wealth

could ever offer loyalty like yours, my measurement,

 

my history, my backdrop against which every

coffee and kerplunk, when all the giddy whoring

 

around abroad and after the more money money

wants is among the first things you prevent.

 

My phantom, my crevasse—my emphatically

unfunny hippopotamus, you take my last red cent

 

and drag it down into the muck of you, my

sassafras, my Timbuktu, you who put the kibosh

 

on fine dining and home theater, dentistry and work

my head into a lather, throw my ever-beaten

 

back against a mattress of intractable topography

and chew. Make death with me: my sugar

 

boat set loose on caustic indigo, my circumstance

dissolving, even then—how could solvency

 

hope to come between us, when even when I dream

I awaken in an unmarked pocket of the earth

 

without you there—there you are, supernaturally

redoubling over my shoulder like the living

 

wage I never make, but whose image I will always

cling to in the negative, hanged up by the feet

 

among the mineral about me famished like a bat

whose custom it is to make much of my neck.

 

 

Thomas Campion

 

THE CYPRESS CURTAIN OF THE NIGHT

 

The Cypress curtain of the night is spread,
And over all a silent dew is cast.
The weaker cares by sleep are conquered;
But I alone, with hideous grief, aghast,
In spite of Morpheus’ charms, a watch do keep
Over mine eyes, to banish careless sleep.

Yet oft my trembling eyes through faintness close,
And then the Map of hell before me stands,
Which Ghosts do see, and I am one of those
Ordained to pine in sorrow’s endless bands,
Since from my wretched soul all hopes are reft
,
And now no cause of life to me is left.

Grief, seize my soul, for that will still endure
When my crazed body is consumed and gone,
Bear it to thy black den, there keep it sure,
Where thou ten thousand souls dost tire upon.
But all do not afford such food to thee
As this poor one, the worser part of me.

 

 

 


Tsvetanka Elenkova

 

THE SPARK IN US

 

There is a wire between the thighs and palate. A wire on which the organs are hung like laundry. Trousers with their two legs, corsets, handkerchieves of various sizes. In a gust of wind the line comes undone and they all fall down. There is a wire that conducts electricity, and at each end a small tongue. Sometimes there’s a short circuit and the electricity board sends someone out. They open the door of the meter affixed to the wall, check the seals, you pay up. If you do not wish to pay, they lay your wire underground.

 

tr. Jonathan Dunne

 

 

C. P. Cavafy

 

ITHAKA

 

As you set out for Ithaka

hope the voyage is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians and Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians and Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

 

Hope the voyage is a long one.

May there be many a summer morning when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you come into harbors seen for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

 

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you are destined for.

But do not hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you are old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you have gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

 

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you would not have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

 

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

 

tr. Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard

 

 

 

 

Tua Forsström

 

THE SNOW WHIRLS OVER TENALA CHURCHYARD

 

The snow whirls over

Tenala churchyard

 

We light candles so that

the dead will be less

 

lonely, we believe they are

subject to the same laws

 

as ourselves. The lights twinkle restlessly:

perhaps the dead are longing for

 

company, we know nothing of

their doings, the snow whirls

 

The dead are silent as cotton.

A flock of thin children who

 

inaudibly take one step nearer

They look at us closely for a

 

moment: is it because they’ve

forgotten, or remember? The snow

 

whirls over Tenala churchyard

 

As when you fly in

over a city at night at

 

low altitude: the lights become

motorways, the headlamps of

 

the traffic, you arrive

from somewhere

 

Soon you are driving along a

road, one of the twinkling

 

lights in the whirling snow

 

tr. David McDuff

 

 

Jane Hirshfield

 

IT WAS LIKE THIS: YOU WERE HAPPY

 

It was like this:

you were happy, then you were sad,

then happy again, then not.

 

It went on.

You were innocent or you were guilty.

Actions were taken, or not.

 

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.

Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?

 

Now it is almost over.

 

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

 

It does this not in forgiveness—

between you, there is nothing to forgive—

but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment

he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

 

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

 

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you

or your days: they will be wrong,

they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,

all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

 

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,

you slept, you awakened.

Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

 

 

 

 

Uwe Kolbe

 

INGREDIENTS OF SLEEPLESSNESS

 

It was the gnat, I heard it.

And it was—didn’t the grass grow there

between two wars?

It was similar to the reason why I seriously left the city

for the first time.

And it was that love refused

to be as simple as a flick of the wrist,

beautiful like a word game,

funny and inexplicable, like the attacking

cat which, after the attack, continues

to walk elegantly, at a moderate pace, or

to clean itself, licking its paw with its tongue,

then stroking the back of its head with its wet paw,

with this inimitable care.

It was that the noise of my city

destroys the remains of the old plaster,

tips the last grey-brown

of the fire wall onto the monstrous lorry

that nearly ran me over yesterday.

It was that remnants of the former certainty

decomposed each other, the new one

remains private, the heavily pounding heart

—in our part of the world this is the result

of excessive consumption.

It was, you wake up and mumble,

will you close that window?

 

tr. Ramona Lofton

 

 

Wolfgang Hilbig

 

BERLIN: SUBLUNAR

 

Time has returned to Berlin

and impostors parade along Oranienburger Strasse

around midnight pointing at the sky: time

has returned from exile.

 

The whole city in the bonds of silver-gray magic

the full moon rolls: and we the marionettes of its light—

unrealities that brilliantly inform us.

We and the dead

                                strolling over shadow trenches

we grant each other immortality once more.

Oh this strong glowing dust among investment ruins

and what an April so briefly before the third millennium

we don’t want to go on counting

 

the green waters in the old buildings slowly burn away.

 

tr. Brian Currid

 

 

 

 

Valérie Rouzeau

 

*

 

    Where my father where behind the cloud above the crane that’s lifting loads up high to build a high-rise building?

    Where inside the murmur of the trees and people passing under trees who feel a drop of water sometimes falling on their hands?

    Where on the roof of the house with the turtle-doves and the rag doll that’s hopelessly lost?

    Where on the swing that’s swinging all on its own just brushing the weeds?

    Where it’s all oh where too high up there my father as you were ware ware?

 

tr. Susan Wicks

 

 

Stevie Smith, NOT WAVING BUT DROWNING

 

 

 

 

Valerio Magrelli

 

*

 

And what if these turns of the key
never ended?
And what if I were locked out
left turning the key my entire life?
And what if I lost the key?
I make copies of my keys
make copies of my copies
what I spend to multiply them
helps subtract from each its value,
my Valerio. In the verses’ profile
I reproduce
the keys’ toothed silhouette.

 

tr. Anthony Molino

 

 

Antonella Anedda

 

*

 

If I’ve written it’s for thought

because my thoughts are troubled about life

it’s for those happy beings

close in the evening shadow

for the evening which at a stroke

collapsed on the napes of necks

for every creature that backs away

pressing its spine against the railings

and for the waiting on the tide—without a cry—endless.

 

Write, I say to myself

and I write to press onwards more solitary into the enigma

because eyes disturb me

and the silence of footsteps is my own, mine the desert light

—light of the moorlands—

on the earth of the avenue.

 

Write because nothing is protected and the word wood

shakes more frailly than the wood itself, without branches of birds

because only courage can excavate

patience in the heights

until it takes the weight away

from the meadow’s black weight.

 

tr. Jamie McKendrick

 

 

 

 

Vasyl Makhno


A FESTIVAL OF POETRY


10 poets
listed in the program
recite their verses
before an audience of 10 perhaps 100

a symphony of languages resounds:
Ukrainian with its erotic shrieks of violin
the sounds of Arabic fluttering like linen cloth
the marching rhythms of German drums beating in your chest
the jazz trombone of English spitting out saliva
an oboe digesting in its stomach Spanish pronunciation
the gallant saxophone of French
arousing sexual fantasies in not quite nubile girls

there is no conductor
and the orchestra is at times off beat

the translations are hideous
for they were prepared in haste
the organizers as always are pressed for time

the other 10 poets who will read tomorrow
listen to those 10 who are reading today
they’re yawning and fatigued
thinking about beer and local girls
about the exchange rate
about those few poetesses who came to this festival
and are sorry to note that the age of women’s poetry
steadily approaches retirement age
and what can a woman write after menopause?

regrettably they do not invite as yet to festivals
the young Akhmatovas—Sylvia Plaths—Ana Blandianas—
obviously waiting for them to grow older
which does have a logic of its own

in the country hosting this festival
there is an economic crisis
therefore the hotel is swarming with cockroaches
and the ageing waitresses in the restaurants
elicit no particular interest

poets donate their books to other poets
knowing that no one will ever read them all
for it’s impossible to know all the languages of the world
therefore this ritual reminds one
of the conversation between the deaf and the blind
after the destruction of the Tower of Babel

oh, finally the last one on today’s program is reading

soon we’ll have supper

and a chance to talk about the kind of poetry
that offers no bait to the locals
because all of them are busy solving economic problems
via cell phones

the hall is gradually emptying
as some walk out for a smoke
others for a beer
still others to take a respite at the hotel

the black hole of poetry

is compressing from the number of verses
so as to swallow
—and this is the funniest of all—
the poetry itself
which lately has been serving only poets
just like those ageing waitresses in the restaurant
who have long ceased to be of interest to men

the formula of poetry
expresses that 10 + 10 = 0
though according to mathematicians zero is likely the most important number
in mathematical calculations

and its black hole contains enough energy
to swallow itself

like the dragon of mythology
that devours its own tail
forming with the shape of its body a magic circle

from which there is no escape

 

tr. Orest Popovych

 

 

Frank O’Hara, TO JOHN ASHBERY

 

 

 

 

Vincent Katz

 

STAR

 

I could never rise before

it was time for me to rise

 

though I constantly shot off

in my dream of rising

 

I held everything so close

it became fragile

 

A complete lunar eclipse

on my birthday

 

washes me with great

transformative energy

 

The moon is not greater

than Stella, who rose

 

brightest in my teaching

Stella smiles in her

 

offhand style, Luna

shies from encounter

 

a certain metric binds

them, most people are

 

nothing in comparison

We went to all the places

 

together. ‘I’m sorry. For

everything. Was that aloud?’

 

My life is like that class—

you will be there to help me

 

 

Frank O’Hara, A TRUE ACCOUNT OF TALKING TO THE SUN AT FIRE ISLAND

 

 

 

 

Yuri Andrukhovych

 

AND EVERYONE FUCKS YOU

 

The girls weren’t too pretty or graceful,

but one said to the other:

‘They offered me a job in the company.

Secretary—chief of department, computer skills required.

A hundred bucks a month—and everyone fucks you.’

 

A hundred bucks a month, I thought to myself.

And everyone fucks you.

Is it a plus or a minus, how to understand it? I wondered.

And in what sense, I thought to myself, in the literal

or maybe in the metaphorical?

And in which sense would it be more beautiful?

The literal? The metaphorical?

 

It gave me something to think about, and the train

rushed on and the wheels

tapped out stupidly

the one same thing the one same thing:

 

A hundred bucks a month!

And everyone fucks you!

A hundred bucks a month!

And everyone fucks you!

A hundred bucks a month!

And everyone fucks you!

 

tr. Sarah Luczaj

 

 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

 

SOMETIME DURING ETERNITY

 

Sometime during eternity

some guys show up

and one of them

who shows up real late

is a kind of carpenter

from some square-type place

like Galilee

and he starts wailing

and claiming he is hip

to who made heaven

and earth

and that the cat

who really laid it on us

is his Dad

And moreover

he adds

it’s all writ down

on some scroll-type parchments

which some henchmen

leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres

a long time ago

and which you won’t even find

for a coupla thousand years or so

or at least for

nineteen hundred and fortyseven

of them

to be exact

and even then

nobody really believes them

or me

for that matter

You’re hot

they tell him

And they cool him

They stretch him on the Tree to cool

And everybody after that

is always making models

of this Tree

with Him hung up

and always crooning His name

and calling Him to come down

and sit in

on their combo

as if he is THE king cat

who’s got to blow

or they can’t quite make it

Only he don’t come down

from His Tree

Him just hang there

on His Tree

looking real Petered out

and real cool

and also

according to a roundup

of late world news

from the usual unreliable sources

real dead

 

Photo: Imagine by Jonathan Dunne

 

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