{ how it will happen, when. }

[delga]

The first time I read Jack Gilbert's The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart I stopped at A people / in northern India is dying out because their ancient / tongue has no words for endearment, shook myself, went back to the beginning and read very, very slowly, eating up each and every word. I normally read poetry quite quickly, like maybe it's a race to the finishing line, like maybe something is waiting for me there, and it's because I like to know if I'm going to like what I read. I always read poems at least twice. Something about a poem has to strike me if I post it here. But with the poems that do strike me hard, I have to go back and read them word for word for word, until every single one has weight.

O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, / as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.

--

Your first poem is probably from a nursery book. Your second is probably in school. But your first poem could be anywhere. Again, school; the ads on the London Underground; in a newspaper; as an addendum to someone's emo post on eljay. Your first poem will delight you unexpectedly. It will wake you. You may never find it. You may find it and never remember it. You may stumble over it and hate it, rip it apart word form for word form for an essay, loathe it, never want to see it again until it unceremoniously pops up again years later, and you realise that it is more than the sum of its parts.

I don't remember my first poem. I don't. I know that something switched in me during my A-levels. I think it was probably Plath, probably Daddy or Lady Lazarus. I know 'Ariel' was the first book of poetry I read cover to cover and back again. I know that it will stay with me.

Sue Hubbard's Eurydice is a tone that stays with me, an idea, where I remember no actual phrases but I remember the sensation. Paul Guest's Austria is all words, all desire. Richard Jackson's Antigone Today I have read so, so, so many times, and still I am lost in it. You have to stand clear of the briars of anger. / You have to wash revenge from your eyes.

There are others, better ones probably. Show them to me. I am experiencing a drought.

Comments

[odainath.livejournal.com]

Have you read Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs) by Algernon Charles Swinburne? That's pretty fantastic. A definite favourite of mine.

[atlashrugged.livejournal.com]

I think it would be futile for me to recommend anything as we seem to have pretty similar tastes and I doubt it'd be anything new. That being said, I have to think about it. It's 2am here and if I don't try to sleep, I never will.

I read everything fast just like you said. I speak fast too and whether that's a twin thing (we had to see a speech pathologist for a while) or a me thing, I don't know. As a result, I almost always read things more than once in case I missed something/something missed me.

I like poems when violence is displayed otherwise or when people's hands are birds. I like Greece and Egypt and women who are fierce even without a proper name. Poems about domesticity and people overcoming their pasts (at least on paper). I like poems about a person who drinks and smokes too much and is tangled with the wrong people because they don't know what to do without a war. I want to read something that's so great and so digs its claws into me that it's as if I'm remembering it instead of discovering it. I would like everything to be a poem, basically.

[daygloparker.livejournal.com]

I'm ashamed to say it, but: it took until sophomore year of college. John Donne's "Valediction FOrbidding Mourning," which is probably the best explanation for why I love that poem so much. I don't even know. It was a required literary theory class, and I was dreading it because I never "got" poetry, and there was just... something in the way our TA (it was taught by a grad student, not a prof) calmly broke down the metaphors and explained how to read a poem. Our assignment was to pick one word/phrase from it and write a two-page analysis; I did mine on the pun on "care less." I WAS HOOKED FOR LIFE. It was like someone flipped a switch in my brain.

[smittenly.livejournal.com]

I adore everything this post chooses to be! I admire your taste in poetry, so I don't think I have anything to suggest that you haven't seen before.

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was my not-quite first, but Jack Gilbert or Neruda were my true firsts. Richard Siken used to be trying too hard to me, but "Snow and Dirty Rain" spoke to the thoughts hiding within me, better or worse. Rumi and the Sufi poets' brevity that still reminds me to love life and be spiritual. And "Eurydice" is my favorite for reasons difficult to articulate, but every line has the ability to take my hand and lead me through to the end, waiting to climb into a new sense of being.

[fizzawrites.livejournal.com]

I just want to say, the way you appreciate poetry and actively search it out and SHARE IT WITH US, makes me super impressed, and proud, and hopeful the poetry switch will turn off in my head.