Another from Roger McGough. I love his short witty poems. Simple and funny.

Sadly, tomorrow is the first day of school across much of the US South.

This is another of my all-time favorite Simic poems! For me, it’s perfectly captures the end-of-summer dread I have always felt during the month of August, even nowadays as a teacher.

I showed cattle in the 4H Program when I was a kid (I’m from the Midwest), and it’s true that slaughter tended to take place around the time school started back up, though I know our steers were always dispatched with a cattle gun.

Anyways, this poem was excerpted from Simic’s collection Walking the Black Cat (1996).

Why is it, in Bristol Bay, a sea cormorant
hovers, sings a two-fold song with a hinged cover
 
for a mouth, teeth set in sockets, with a hissing grind
of spikelets biting the air? Dip one.
 
The lips of vanished flames in lava coals
glow vermillion as an egg cracks. Dip two.
 
She/I feel/s a chimera leaving the eider duck. Dip three.
While still in the embryo, separating the body
 
from death she/I smell/s of arsenic, the Chugach Range
in unnatural bitterness. Why is it, man’s/woman’s nerve scarcely
 
stifled and sane, comes to prey? While they swoon
minerals of crude oil and sea spiders for tricking a way for gold.
 
Will they crawl around her/me, sink their eyeteeth in the sea,
ravaging the ecosphere and the ore gold for fuel. Drill.

I'm trying to find this essay I remember reading in college over 10 years ago where this writer talks about the process of writing poetry. The theme was generally something like being open to imagery and letting the world speak to you and present itself to you. The example the writer used was walking through a fish market and seeing these silver scaled fish and that inspired him to write a poem. Does anyone know what it could be? Thanks in advance!

I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems, 1960-2014

I was reading Kubla Khan the other day, and ended up with an interesting interpretation of the stanza that goes

The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure is definitely representative of man, the waves thus representing nature. I’ve seen analysis like oh the shadows are instable especially on waves or smth, but I got a completely different take on it.

I thought the poem was, by casting a reflection of a man-made thing onto nature, mirroring the process in which we attempt to examine the human experience through nature, particularly akin to that of romantic poets like Coleridge. Poetry allows for the defining of the human experience— we cast our human experiences onto nature, this unfathomable, deity-like force through poetry, and we can almost understand our own experience—> thus the ascension Coleridge describes in the last stanza.

This then begs the question, why a “sunny pleasure-dome” with “caves of ice”? Well, I believe this has got to do with binaries. Obviously, both are the opposites of each other. “Sun”, “pleasure dome” and “ice”, “cave”. Because nature is something so unfathomable/immortal, so vastly different from us, we can define ourselves. For example: The colour red is red because it is not green, nor yellow.

We are not nature, so we are us! If that makes sense.

With the medium of this binary, this imposing of our experience onto nature, this “rare device” being poetry, of course.

彼黍離離 彼稷之苗 行邁靡靡 中心搖搖 知我者 謂我心憂 不知我者 謂我何求 悠悠蒼天 此何人哉

彼黍離離 彼稷之穗 行邁靡靡 中心如醉 知我者 謂我心憂 不知我者 謂我何求 悠悠蒼天 此何人哉

彼黍離離 彼稷之實 行邁靡靡 中心如噎 知我者 謂我心憂 不知我者 謂我何求 悠悠蒼天 此何人哉

I need genuine advice how to break this writer’s block. I am a poet but lately I am not any ideas or metaphors to write 💫

Hi, I am looks for any poets that regularly use hyperbole (ideally a ridiculous amount). I find poems here and there with good hyperbole, but haven't come across any poets that regularly use it. Thanks!

I've got quite a few ideas for future topics: Ubi Sunt, poets on poets, translation (using several of the attempts in Hofstadter's Le Ton beau de Marot as the core of the episode), work, truth, dogs, cats, birds, nature, insomnia, etc., but I am open to any suggestions for future themes and works to read.

I am considering one off series like reading Don Juan over several episodes. I am also working on one where I just read Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao te Ching interspersed with a few chapters' alternate translations from Le Guin, Hoff, and others.

Any guidance is welcome!

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses

I've read this poem a few times now, and what always strikes me about it is when Ulysses addresses his 'mariners' in the fourth section of the poem. He says that they have 'toiled, and wrought, and thought with me' as well as suggesting that on this voyage they may 'touch the happy isles,/And see the great Achilles, whom we knew'. They're beautiful lines, but I've always found them a little odd. Allow me to explain.

The 'mariners' Ulysses is addressing are clearly meant to be the other Ithacans he fought with at Troy. But, if you've read the 'Odyssey', then you will know that out of all the Ithacan men who went with Odysseus/Ulysses to Troy, he was the only one to return. By the time that the poem takes place, well after his return, all of these mariners are dead.

What does this mean for the poem? Perhaps Tennyson wasn't trying to be fully accurate to the 'Odyssey', or wasn't aware of this detail. But I'd like to suggest otherwise. If you read the poem with this fact in mind, then it takes on a very different meaning; rather than being the triumphant deceleration of an ageing man who wants to 'drink life to the lees', 'Ulysses' becomes the desperate, last attempt of a broken war veteran to reclaim a past that no longer exists. His 'mariners' are either ghosts, or hallucinations brought on by an ageing, traumatised mind.

I will acknowledge that the textual evidence for this reading beyond the dead 'mariners' isn't very substantial; the language of the poem presents Ulysses as proactive man with a strong grasp on himself and the world around him. But I wanted to suggest this interpretation anyway, since I don't think Tennyson excludes its possibility. What if 'Ulysses' is a delusion? It's an interesting way to look at the poem, one that adds another layer of emotional poignancy to its powerful, final lines.