Very short poems you like

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Lorca "Myself" (quoted by Lester Bangs in a review of Astral Weeks). Can't work out if this is just maudlin crap or not but in any case it moved me when I read it last night, stoned off my ass – the yearning for a (perhaps purely fantastical) purer, more imaginative soul, pre-life.

My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars,
to beg Christ the Lord
to give back the soul I had
of old, when I was a child,
ripened with legends,
with a feathered cap
and a wooden sword.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
You inspired me to dig out my Lorca book again Corpsey. I'd post more of his stuff in here but the translations do my head in. He's so good it's almost worth learning Spanish just to read him though.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
The one you posted there is just part of a slightly longer poem btw, which is a conversation between the poet and some children, who have just asked him where he's going on his poet's journey. There's something of Blake's Songs of Innocence/Experience in there, probably not a direct influence but definite similarities. Very beautiful poem.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Sometimes I think all the best poems are about what it is to be a poet. If I don't understand a poem I often assume it must be something about being a poet, and it starts to make sense.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
There once was a Bishop of Birmingham
who buggered the boys while confirmingem
All the gabbling of God
so excited his rod
that he pumped his episcopal spermingem

There once was a vicar of Tring's
who talked about God and such things
but his real desire
was a boy in the choir
with an arse like jelly on springs

---

Both of the above were told to me by a candidate for ordination at St Stephen's House, Oxford. It's interesting to reflect on how commonplace and unremarkable jokes about pederasty among clergymen and scout leaders used to be.
 

version

Well-known member

The Two-Headed Calf​

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.

Laura Gilpin
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Yeah, Imagiste. The New Directions collected poems might be a good investment actually, love all the stuff I've seen by her.
 

woops

is not like other people
There's a nice book by Richard aldington called a dream in the Luxembourg which is all about his love for a woman thought to be her
 

jenks

thread death
hd's stuff is variable in quality, the best stuff just perfectly pitched. The book Square Haunting has an excelelnt chapter on her and her entanglements with Pound and others,

I think Hulme is one of my favourite imagists

Autumn​

BY T. E. HULME
A touch of cold in the Autumn night—
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
hd's stuff is variable in quality, the best stuff just perfectly pitched. The book Square Haunting has an excelelnt chapter on her and her entanglements with Pound and others,
What H.D. have you read, jenks? I was reading some of these from Heliodora out loud to myself today (and gone back to some of the early Cantos) and was pretty blown away.

Modernists of this period doing Ancient Greece is like catnip to me.
I've read that Helen in Egypt is supposed to be one of her best apparently, but that's her later stuff and is a single epic poem I think.

Need to know before I splash some cash cos the New Directions collected only goes up to 1944 so it doesn't have have Helen in Egypt. Maybe I need both?
 
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jenks

thread death
What H.D. have you read, jenks? I was reading some of these from Heliodora out loud to myself today (and gone back to some of the early Cantos) and was pretty blown away.

Modernists of this period doing Ancient Greece is like catnip to me.
I've read that Helen in Egypt is supposed to be one of her best apparently, but that's her later stuff and is a single epic poem I think.

Need to know before I splash some cash cos the New Directions collected only goes up to 1944 so it doesn't have have Helen in Egypt. Maybe I need both?
That carcanet selection which has most of the good stuff in but only extracts of the later stuff. She’s great in that first flush of Pound’s Imagisme but kind becomes more erratic later.
the Francesca Wade book is worth investigating - essentially five women writers all lived Mecklenburgh Sq, some concurrently- and so the book is a linked biog of Woolf, Sayers, hd and two others.
 
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