One of these is a poem. Can you figure out which one?
#1. Burroughs
by Robert Glück
fleshes his dirty rotten hunka tin I am right strapped into head electrodes he sticks a gun in teen age drug Harry S Truman decided to drop first I am right sequence repeat dim jerky far away smoke cop rat bares his yellow teet kicks in the door I am right survivors burned time and place he throws atom bomb knocks man to floor you are wrong you are wrong he was looking for are wrong Breaks through door I’m poli outside bar Hiroshima has strayed into Dillinger’s right is making a difficult decision right survivors burned mixed you child I am he kicks him into 1914 movie if you are gay I am right wrong executioner officer I am cop right enough you are I am right right wrong Pentagon dim jerky far away smoke.
I cut up his cut-ups, allegory of an allegory of an allegory of an allegory of a waterfall of mental curlicues whose new meaning is no meaning in extremity. Is a Burroughs to eat? I am timid, abstract, complete, light fever, timid. Barefoot, yells Hey Pop, got any more Dick Tracys? Burroughs am paying one wrecked penny for the pleasure he’s wreaking on some “boy”; shooting quarts of toxins, skin a welcome mat, body heroically disjunct Picasso (two profiles, left front high…). The stapled urge for self-protection that…Danger is a refuge from more danger. Don’t even know what a Burroughs is.
Manhattan Project, first atom bomb test, New Mexico 1945: Oppenheimer and his boys think the planet could go critical. Oppenheimer refigures, the probability remains, “What the hell.” So-and-so many blasts: radioactive sex causes untold genetic mutations. A carnival of giants, vile luminosity sheeting off their scales and exoskeletons, march out of that desert looking for something to eat. I don’t want to die but witness APPETITE and MURDER tread the vile luminous sand: ant spider Gila monster rattler wasp rat locust lizard grasshopper rabbit praying mantis crow ant spider wasp…The entire town of Soda Bluff stampedes down narrow canyons scattering funeral lights beneath their trembling feet. The destruction of today. Last men, mercenaries on the last patrol, eat rations with dog mouths, then fool around in caustic green dusk; they wear Mylar capes and copper-studded jockstraps. Bud’s withheld a basket musta weigh two pounds of fresh peaches. Bud squirms down with a deep sigh, odor of penetration, he says, “I want to be so embraced.” The last ant cold mandibles his thigh, a howl and spasms from Bud’s lifted body mean death. I send my own spear into the enormous insect eye shattering a thousand selves —point touched pinpoint brain, blue sparks, burning isolation, burning rubber, ant collapses, cold heap of old parts. The reason Bud dies, so that his orgasm stays beyond. I don’t wonder who I am, I wonder where I am—still, nothing to do now but kick back and wait for orders.
#2. At Tea
by Thomas Hardy
The kettle descants in a cozy drone,
And the young wife looks in her husband’s face,
And then at her guest’s, and shows in her own
Her sense that she fills an envied place;
And the visiting lady is all abloom,
And says there was never so sweet a room.
And the happy young housewife does not know
That the woman beside her was first his choice,
Till the fates ordained it could not be so. . . .
Betraying nothing in look or voice
The guest sits smiling and sips her tea,
And he throws her a stray glance yearningly.
mgoldberg says
Okay…. Hardy’s is a poem. Burrough’s is a thought experiment. He used to cut and paste his words out of newspapers, books, tabloids etc. Stream of consciousness I guess they called it. A heroin user, and not a very nice man who believed in nothing.
commonsense says
Poignancy was frequently found in Hardy’s considerable output of poetry. I remember one about two little boys, recently orphaned, who, at play, would no longer be under the caring, watchful, nurturing eye of their now-dead mother. Heart rending.
Buraq says
I like Thomas Hardy’s poetry – I studied it at University. I also like Hardy because it was said of him ‘that he didn’t believe in God, and hated Him for not existing.’ I am also an Atheist.
Anyway, the Hardy piece is a poem, but the first piece is an attempt by Burroughs to create a form of poetic language that takes us into virgin territory. Does it work? I kinda like it, but I’m old school. Hardy ticks all the boxes. I get the feeling Burroughs couldn’t care less if he ticks any boxes.
Istanbul_Chick says
Number two is a poem. Number one is typical, post-modern garbage. Valueless, vapid, and vulgar.
Hugh Fitzgerald says
Yes, a very great poet. English poetry went off the rails with Eliot and Pound, and the line of Hardy was muted for a while. But it’s back now. Or at least I like to think so.Another favorite of mine — and I suspect is, or will be, yours as well, is “Thoughts of Phena–At News of Her Death.”
A favorite fact about Hardy:he learned to ride a bicycle when he was 56 years old. A real bicycle, not a penny-fatrhing.
Hugh Fitzgerald says
Penny-farthing. Sorry.
Mick says
Roy Campbell, Auden, MacNeice wrote superbly in the 30s.
Boring lefties Spender and Day Lewis were on our syllabus. While anti Communist, pro Catholic bull fighter Campbell was ignored.
commonsense says
Ezra Pound’s poetry is, to me, and I daresay to many, unintelligible – opaque, intentionally obscure, hopelessly and sneeringly erudite, peppered with Greek insertions and God knows what else. He was a piece of Nazi, treasonous filth besides.
James Lincoln says
Agree, commonsense.
I prefer someone like Robert Frost.
commonsense says
James: While I haven’t read much poetry in recent years, I found the works of poets such as A.E. Houseman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edgar Lee Masters to be memorable, along with Hardy’s. I recommend Houseman’s small anthology, “A Shropshire Lad,” some poems from which were set to music by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. It’s a wonderful listening experience.
James Lincoln says
Thanks so much for the suggestions, commonsense.
I’ll check them out.
Hugh Fitzgerald says
Nabokov described Pound’s poetry as “pretentious nonsense.”
Achilles Fong of Harvard wrote an essay on Pound’s understanding of Chinese poetry, on which Pound prided himself, and said he had not the faintest idea of what he was talking about. The essay can be found in “On Translation,” edited by Reuben Brower.
As for his treasonous wartime broadcasts, Pound’s antisemitic rants were far more genocidal than has been made public.. How do I know this? Because years agoI met an elderly Italian who had been in Italy during the war and had been given tapes of his recordings.
Pound was, however, clever enough to avoid being tried for treason and given what Lord Haw Haw got.. Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who was one of the psychiatrists treating Pound at St. Elizabeth’s, wrote a book about Pound’s faking mental illness. Sorry, I forget the title of his excellent book..
Hugh Fitzgerald says
I must apologize – I wrote “Achilles Fong” when I should have written “Achilles Fang.” I misled myself, because Professor Fang”pronounced his name as “Fong.” He was married to a German lady. I wonder what language they spoke at home.
And I just remembered the title of Torrey’s book. It is “The Roots of Treason.”
Christopher Watson says
I’ve been trying to understand T S Eliot since university but have not yet done so. Seamus Heaney has always been a favourite because of his simplicity of style and the beauty of his words. A new discovery has been Elizabeth Bishop. Poetry is like a garden in summer, full of beautiful roses and simple daisies; some of the weeds are interesting too.
Hugh Fitzgerald says
I once interrupted Seamus Heaney as he was in the midst of composing a poem in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thus I can embarrassedly claim to be a twentieth-century Person from Porlock.
Here’s a good one:
Twice Shy
Her scarf à la Bardot,
In suede flats for the walk,
She came with me one evening
For air and friendly talk.
We crossed the quiet river,
Took the embankment walk.
Traffic holding its breath,
Sky a tense diaphragm:
Dusk hung like a backcloth
That shook where a swan swam,
Tremulous as a hawk
Hanging deadly, calm.
A vacuum of need
Collapsed each hunting heart
But tremulously we held
As hawk and prey apart,
Preserved classic decorum,
Deployed our talk with art.
Our Juvenilia
Had taught us both to wait,
Not to publish feeling
And regret it all too late –
Mushroom loves already
Had puffed and burst in hate.
So, chary and excited,
As a thrush linked on a hawk,
We thrilled to the March twilight
With nervous childish talk:
Still waters running deep
Along the embankment walk.
Mick says
An extract from Lapis Lazuli,, (1933) by WB Yeats, quoted by Robert Fisk in his superb essay on the Armenian ‘cleansing’:
On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,
Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilisations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;
His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again
Phil Copson says
WB Yeats “The Second Coming” has always seemed to be the poem best suited to the subject matter of Jihad Watch
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
…..And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”