A second favo(u)rite poem to share with you

warty bliggens

the toad

Rob Halle
Wikimedia Commons

i met a toad

the other day by the name

of warty bliggens

he was sitting under

a toadstool

feeling contented

he explained that when the cosmos

was created

that toadstool was especially

planned for his personal

shelter from sun and rain

thought out and prepared

for him

do not tell me

said warty bliggens

that there is not a purpose

in the universe

the thought is blasphemy

a little more
conversation revealed
that warty bliggens
considers himself to be
the center of the said
universe
the earth exists
to grow toadstools for him to sit under
the sun to give him light
by day and the moon

Wikimedia Commons

and wheeling constellations

to make beautiful
the night for the sake of
warty bliggens

to what act of yours
do you impute
this interest on the part
of the creator
of the universe
i asked him
why is it that you
are so greatly favored

ask rather

said warty bliggens

what the universe

has done to deserve me

if i were a 

human being i would 

not laugh 

too complacently 

at poor warty bliggins 

for similar 

absurdities 

have only too often 

lodged in the crinkles 

of the human cerebrum 

by Archy,
a vers libre bard who would enjoy our imaginary garden

from the book Archy & Mehitabel

by Don Marquis (1878-1937)

Probably Don Marquis's most famous character, Archy is said, by his author, to have been a vers libre bard whose soul, when he died, transmigrated into the body of a cockroach.
This made it very difficult for the poet to write his free verse, which he had to do by using the author's typewriter at night. He would climb up onto the typewriter and jump down, head first, onto the letter he wanted, then climb back up the typewriter and repeat the process.
I have chosen this poem from the book Archy and Mehitabel because it first makes me laugh, then gives me to reflect on purpose in the universe, the theory of transmigration, the indestructibility of cockroaches and, of course, those "similar absurdities...lodged in the crinkles of the human cerebrum."

Posted for my second contribution to the Favo(u)rite Poems series. Thanks, Toads, it's been fun, and if you think I might have posted this same poem on a Monday a couple of years ago, you're probably right. The operative word for this series is favo(u)rite. —Kay

A toad's favo(u)rite poem ~ Song for Baby-O, Unborn

Diane di Prima

Greetings my muddy buddies!!

Izy here to dole out another generous helping of a Toad's Favo(u)rite Poem.  In our first installment, I had shared Allen Ginsberg's "America."  And, toads, anger not when I confess that I am bringing another beat poem to our landing page today.  

Diane di Prima is one of my favorite poets, and one whose work often goes unnoticed in the cold shadows of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and the lot of testosterone driven, politico poems that so often define our thoughts on what is beat and what is not.  

So today, we leave Allen and Jack and even good ole Uncle Bill behind and shine a spotlight on Diane di Prima.  An author of over 40 books, di Prima once explained her stance toward writing poems. mothering, being a buddhist, and living as, ‘Well, nobody’s done it quite this way before but fuck it, that’s what I’m doing, I’m going to risk it.’

And indeed, she does.  So, without further grandstanding or fan girl, hero worshipping, I bring you the uninterrupted work of my favorite poem: 



Song for Baby-O, Unborn by Diane di Prima

Sweetheart

when you break thru

you’ll find

a poet here

not quite what one would choose.

I won’t promise

you’ll never go hungry

or that you won’t be sad

on this gutted

breaking

globe

but I can show you

baby

enough to love

to break your heart

forever

A Toad's Favo(ur)ite: Rita Dove

"I believe even 5-year-olds can get something from a Shakespearean sonnet…as long as you DON’T tell them, ‘This is really hard.’”  -Rita Dove

Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio in 1952.  She received her B.A. from Miami University of Ohio in 1973 and her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1977. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995 and Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2004 to 2006.  She has received many academic and literary honors, including the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and the 1996 National Humanities Medal from President Clinton. In 2011, President Barack Obama presented Ms. Dove with the National Medal of Arts, which made her the only poet to have received both medals. 

Author of nine poetry collections, a book of short stories, a novel, essays, and a play, Rita Dove is currently Chair of Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia (where I, lolamouse, attended grad school!) She currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her husband, the writer Fred Viebahn. She has one adult daughter.  The Rita Dove HomePage has extensive biographical information as well as photos, readings, videos, and interviews. 

Rita Dove is one of my favourite poets, and I had a difficult time narrowing down her extensive writings to even a few of my very favourite poems.  Dove’s writing encompasses political, historical, and personal  themes. Although I find her writing quite accessible and forthright, I always come away with something new to think about or a new way of looking at the familiar. 

When I was a new mom, struggling with the demands of a difficult baby, Dove’s poem “Daystar” was an epiphany. It is from a collection of poems, Thomas and Beulah (1986) based on Dove’s grandparents. When I first read it, I felt that someone understood my mixed feelings about becoming a mother, the loss of privacy and identity that comes with having a child. I clipped that poem from our newspaper and kept it tucked in my dresser drawer to read whenever I felt overwhelmed and unappreciated. It is still there today.

Daystar

She wanted a little room for thinking:
but she saw diapers steaming on the line,
a doll slumped behind the door.

So she lugged a chair behind the garage
to sit out the children’s naps…

For complete poem, see link at Poet's Choice from the Washington Post, 1/23/2000

Here is a video of Rita Dove reading her poem:

Rita Dove reads 'Daystar' from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Another favourite poem, "Teach Us To Number Our Days," takes its title from Psalm 90 but speaks to cultural and political issues of today. It begins

In the old neighborhood, each funeral parlor

is more elaborate than the last.

The alleys smell of cops, pistols bumping their thighs,

each chamber steeled with a slim blue bullet…

For complete poem, see the Poetry Foundation website

    Rita Dove is quoted as saying, “I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on.” I think this is one of the reasons I love her poetry so much. She takes the personal and makes it universal and the universal and makes it personal. She is able to focus a light on those quotidian moments we all have and, with her words, elevate them to things of lasting beauty. Read and enjoy.

My Favorite Poem (2)

Hi readers, it's Fireblossom with my favorite poem #2. Actually, as I said last time, my very favorite poem is Emily Dickinson's "I Cannot Live With You", which has been my favorite since high school and has remained so. You can find it at my blog, any time; just click on the tab "my favorite poem." 

Last time, I featured Tennyson. This time, I want to share with you a poem from antiquity which, nonetheless, echoes my favorite Dickinson in some ways. I will also include another poem, still from antiquity, but several centuries newer, which I feel is just a parroting of the earlier poem. You decide.

Now then, the poem I want to to share my love of, with you. It's by Sappho.

He is almost a god, a man beside you,
enthralled by your talk, by your laughter.
Watching makes my heart beat fast
because, seeing little, I imagine much.
You put a fire in my cheeks.
Speech won't come. My ears ring.
Blind to all others, I sweat and I stammer.
I am a trembling thing, like grass,
an inch from dying.

More than five centuries later, Catullus wrote the following. Or did he? It sounds an awfully lot like Sappho, to me.

He is like a god,
he is greater than a god
sitting beside you listening
to your laughter. You make me crazy.
Seeing you, my Lesbia, takes my breath away.
My tongue freezes. My body
is filled with flames,
bells ring, and night invades my eyes.
Leisure, Catullus, is your curse.
You exult in it, the very thing
that brought down noble houses and great cities.

I like Sappho's ending better. It is echoed in Emily's ending to "I Cannot Live With You" in her words about "that white sustenance, despair." I find it interesting that Sappho likened herself to something as humble and insubstantial as a trembling blade of grass, dying, while Catullus went on about great cities. I always prefer the personal and the particular to the great and global in my poetry, partly because the personal portrays the universal more clearly. 

Someone said this about romantic love and creativity: love yes, longing yes, but the having is bad for the poetry. I hope you enjoyed Sappho's poem. 
_______

 

A Toad's Favo(u)rite Poem in October

Dylan Thomas is one of my all-time favourite poets. With more than half his collected work written during his late teens, he was a brilliantly gifted man of high passion and intensity, and this is clearly evident in his poetry. His language sings, his imagery is uniquely individual and his mastery of grammatical structure leaves me astounded every time I read one of his famous poems aloud. He described his technique in a letter:
Thomas describes his technique in a letter: "I make one image—though 'make' is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict."

bbc.co.uk

There are several poems I could have chosen for this post, among them Fern Hill and And death shall have no dominion, but I have selected my favourite favourite: Poem in October, in which he contemplates his October 27 birthday. It was first published in Deaths and Entrances in 1946. The complete poem can be read on the Poetry Foundation page, linked above, or you may like to listen to it being read by Dylan Thomas in the audio clip below, while I share a few excerpts here.

The poem begins with this stanza:

It was my thirtieth year to heaven

Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood   

      And the mussel pooled and the heron

                  Priested shore

            The morning beckon

With water praying and call of seagull and rook

And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall   

            Myself to set foot

                  That second

      In the still sleeping town and set forth.

 What strikes me, is the way the poet has introduced the reader to the setting of the poem through the sense of sound, rather than sight: 'Woke to hearing'. I also admire the turn of phrase he employs in the lines: 'And the mussel pooled and the heron/ Priested shore' where 'mussel pooled' and 'heron priested' become the descriptives of the 'shore'. The link between the heron as priest and the water praying infuses the whole scene with a sense of natural spirituality. 

Try reading these lines aloud to yourself (take a deep breath for all the run-on lines); feel the words and sounds roll from your lips and sing in your ears.

      A springful of larks in a rolling

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling   

      Blackbirds and the sun of October

                  Summery

            On the hill’s shoulder,

Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly   

Come in the morning where I wandered and listened   

            To the rain wringing

                  Wind blow cold

      In the wood faraway under me.

This, to me, is what poetry should be:

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s

Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother   

            Through the parables

                  Of sun light

      And the legends of the green chapels

      And the twice told fields of infancy

That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.   

      These were the woods the river and sea

                  Where a boy

            In the listening

Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy   

To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.

A Toad's Favo(u)rite~Richard Brautigan

Cover of In Watermelon Sugar, by Richard Brautigan; my scan

Hello, toads and toadettes, hedgewitch here. It's my turn to provide a favourite poem/poet, and this time it will be 20th Century American poet and writer Richard Brautigan (1935-1984.) Almost all his poetry is quite short, so I've selected several examples.

Brautigan wrote during the middle to end of the Beat era and the full onslaught of the 60's counterculture years with black humor and directness. His bio page at Poets.org, puts it this way: "Although Brautigan, whose work largely defies classification, is not properly considered a Beat writer, he shared the Beats' aversion to middle class values, commercialism, and conformity."

Brautigan had a difficult life, and wasn't with us long, but his poetry and short novels--which to me are long prose-poems--remain full of wry acceptance, hope and a sense of the flashing, absolute clarity that comes and goes, but always leaves something we need behind. Many of his collected poems can be found in The Pill Versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, first published in 1968 and still in print. He may be best known for his novella Trout Fishing in America, but his short poetry has a sad, childlike and clean feel well worth a read or reread. 

For those who'd like more on Brautigan, an excellent archive of facts, sidenotes and details as well as a bibliography of all his published works can be found at brautigan.net.

Cover art via wikipedia

Below are a few examples that are among my favourite poems:

Karma Repair Kit, Items 1-4

1.
Get enough food to eat,
and eat it.


2.
Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,
and sleep there.


3.
Reduce intellectual and emotional noise
until you arrive at the silence of yourself,
and listen to it. 

4.

© Copyright 1967 by Richard Brautigan,

from  All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
"Permission is granted to reprint any of these poems in magazines,
books and newspapers if they are given away free. " per brautigan.net

Hinged to Forgetfulness Like a Door

Hinged to forgetfulness
like a door,
she slowly closed out of
sight,
and she was the woman I loved,
but too many times she slept like
a mechanical deer in my caresses,
and I ached in the metal silence
of her dreams. 

 

© joyannjones

It was Your Idea to go to Bed with Her

Snowflaked as if by an invisible polar bear
---unlucky bastard,
you're sitting on the fender of her kisses
while she drives the car down into the
perfect center of ice.

~ both © 1970 by Richard Brautigan, from my purchased copy of Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt, Dell Publishing Co. Inc.

Lastly, for our resident victim of extreme haiku aversion--we all know who she is--I've included this one:

Haiku Ambulance


A piece of green pepper

   fell

off the wooden salad bowl:

   so what?

© Richard Brautigan, from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster.

Finally, for those who like the spoken word, here's a video set to Brautigan reading one of his poems, Gee You're So Beautiful It's Starting To Rain:

All poems and photographs reproduced in accordance with Fair Use principles.

A Toad's Favo(u)rite...The Prophet

(Khalil Gibran, photograph by Fred Holland Day, c. 1898. wiki commons)

Khalil Gibran, April 1913
Born	Jubran Khalil Jubran January 6, 1883 Bsharri, Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, Ottoman Syria(modern day Lebanon)
Died	April 10, 1931 (aged 48) New York City, United States
Occupation	Poet, painter, writer, philosopher,theologian, visual artist
Nationality	Lebanese
Genres	Poetry, parable, short story
Literary movement	Mahjar, New York Pen League
Notable work(s)	The Prophet, Broken Wings

The Prophet is a book of 26 prose poetry essays written in English by the Lebanese artist, philosopher and writer Kahlil Gibran.^[1] It was originally published in 1923 by Alfred A. Knopf. It is Gibran's best known work. The Prophet has been translated into over forty different languages^[2] and has never been out of print.<sup>[3] (Wikipedia)


A friend of mine that I hadn't seen since high school gave me this book, (probably about two years ago now), she moved back to our home state from living out west for about a decade.The book was a gift to her from a boyfriend in her senior year of high school...I had never heard of it before and she mentioned that she thought I'd like it and that she'd found an extra copy at the local free section at the transfer station AKA "The Mall." Ha! 

Any way...this collection is rich and deeply wise...it sits next to my copy of the Tao Te Ching because it feels similar in it's timeless wisdom.</sup>

It's the sort of writing that one might choose to digest in small portions...one can read it in a single sitting but in order to glean all the gems...little bites are best.

^{It's truly beautiful writing...}

^{Here's a section that I find magical:}

On Eating and Drinking
 Kahlil Gibran

Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light.
But since you must kill to eat, and rob the newly born of its mother's milk to quench your thirst, let it then be an act of worship.
And let your board stand an altar on which the pure and the innocent of forest and plain are sacrificed for that which is purer and still more innocent in man. 


When you kill a beast say to him in your heart,
"By the same power that slays you, I too am slain; and I too shall be consumed.
For the law that delivered you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand.
Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven." 


And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart,
"Your seeds shall live in my body,
And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart, 
And your fragrance shall be my breath,
And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons." 


And in the autumn, when you gather the grapes of your vineyards for the winepress, say in your heart,
"I too am a vineyard, and my fruit shall be gathered for the winepress,
And like new wine I shall be kept in eternal vessels."
And in winter, when you draw the wine, let there be in your heart a song for each cup;
And let there be in the song a remembrance for the autumn days, and for the vineyard, and for the winepress.... 

More here.

Thank you for joining me in this moment for favo(u)rites to reflect on the talented gift of this particular poet.