Jeesh.  You'll only encourage him.

 


He's supposed to be practicing (or practising, or however on earth you lot spell it) this monstrosity (speaking of poetry depreciation):  http://www.aaroncassidy.com/music/purples.htm

The text includes a 'homophonic translation' (called Voile) of Rimbaud's Voyelles by the superb Canadian poet Christian Bök, from Eunoia (which ought to be required reading for poetry fans), in which the poem is translated into English based on the sound, rather than the meaning of the words.  Stunning stuff.  (The Bök book, that is, not my monstrosity.)

http://www.amazon.com/Eunoia-Christian-Bok/dp/1552450929

It also includes the world's worst English translation (thankfully, anonymous) of the Rimbaud, which I found on the internets, and the Rimbaud itself.

Here's a nice short one, t-p, by Wendy Cope.


An Unusual Cat Poem

My cat is dead
But I have decided not to make a big
tragedy out of it.

The verb (and associated forms) with an s, the noun with a c, is what I learnt in school. Same with licen[c/s]e...

Yes, that and La Chute d'Icare and a couple of other jollies. But instead I'm here posting, waiting for my coffee to splurt and listening to Graupner.

Ah, I was assuming that's because he wanted an s both at the end of the first note and the beginning of the second. Suppose we'd better clear that up then. Aaron?

George

I could mention Miss Curry... but...

Poetry - Let's talk about Poetry. Here's a favourite little snippet from that visionary loon, Whitman:

'I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?'

(All those 'And's!)

Late arrival to this thread but .....  Prayer before Birth by Louis MacNeice

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
   club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
  with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
     on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
   to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
      in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
   when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
     my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
       my life when they murder by means of my
         hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
    old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
       frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
         waves call me to folly and the desert calls
            me to doom and the beggar refuses
              my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
    come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
  humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
    would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
      one face, a thing, and against all those
         who would dissipate my entirety, would
           blow me like thistledown hither and
             thither or hither and thither
                like water held in the
                  hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

Oh you are clever aren't you!

It was set by the 19-year-old (I think) Lukas Foss in The Prairie. You might be able to guess who introduced me to it.

I think my favourite poem of all is this, from Housman's Last Poems. It reads like music, and I love his pessimism and the sense of time passing irredeemably.

Tell me not here, it needs not saying,
What tunes the enchantress plays
In aftermaths of soft September
Or under blanching mays,
For she and I were long acquainted
And I knew all her ways.

On russet floors, by waters idle
The pine lets fall its cone;
The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing
In leafy dells alone;
And traveller's joy beguiles in autumn
Hearts that have lost their own.

On acres of the seeded grasses
The changing burnish heaves;
Or marshalled under moons of harvest
Stand still all night the sheaves;
Or beeches strip in storms for winter
And stain the wind with leaves.

Possess, as I possessed a season
The countries I resign,
Where over elmy plains the highway
Would mount the hills and shine,
And full of shade the pillared forest
Would murmur and be mine.

For nature, heartless, witless nature,
Will neither care nor know
What stranger's feet may find the meadow
And trespass there and go,
Nor ask amid the dews of morning
If they are mine or no.


But then there are Shakespeare's Sonnets, and some (not all) of Auden's poems - "As I walked out one evening", for instance.