Got Poetry? »
Posted By gamahuche 8 months, 3 weeks ago in Arts & EntertainmentA few years ago, I started learning poetry by heart on a daily basis. I've now memorized about a hundred poems, some of them quite long - more than 2,000 lines in all, not including limericks and Bob Dylan lyrics. I recite them to myself while jogging along the Hudson River, quite loudly if no other joggers are within earshot. I do the same, but more quietly, while walking around Manhattan on errands - just another guy on an invisible cellphone.
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gamahuche
"I would rather be a square peg than fit in a pigeon hole" -
an essay which won me the "Lamb Essay Prize" at the Religious ...
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gamahuche8 months, 3 weeks ago
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I once spent a whole night reciting "Howl" to a bunch of VERY hairy sheep in 1958 - not the whole thing, though I'm sure it was in my luggage but there was no light anyway.
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I was hitch-hiking for the first time a considerable distance - London to Edinburgh, at Easter time, I foolishly opted for the shorter road, as night was coming on, which led across the moors and a bleak and unpopulated area.. Snuggling up with one of those hairy beasts might have been the best option but it was out of the question - though they obviously identified with their inner-beatnik and stayed pretty close around me, emitting more pong than heat.
When I first met Allen Ginsberg 26 years later I didn't tell him that story but I did prevail upon him to bless my new-born daughter with an OM. Alas the next time that he met her he couldn't deal - she had way too much little-girl energy by then for his taste.
Lots of reasons to recite poetry other than to keep warm!
Courtship is one, for example - French is very mellifluous:
J'aime le son du cor, le soir au fond des bois,
Soit qu'il chante les pleurs de la biche aux abois
Ou l'adieu du chasseur que l'echo faible acceuille
Et que le vent du nord porte de feuille en feuille.
Que de fois seul dans l'ombre a minuit demeure
J'ai souris de l'entendre - et plus souvent pleure.
Car je croyais ouir de ses bruits prophetiques
Qui precedaient la mort des Paladins antiques..
[Alfred de Vigny: I think its correct, except for a few misssing accents - that came from school and they asked me to leave rather early so that's an even longer time ago.]
Yeah!! Learn lots of poetry!!
One of nature's healthful aphrodisiacs.. -
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gamahuche8 months, 3 weeks ago
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Gary Snyder!
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Yes!!
I once discovered he was close by when I lived in MT and tried to persuade him over the phone, to give a reading in a Coffee House that I had just helped to inaugurate but alas he declined. I caught up with him a few years later at Green Gulch Zen Center at Muir Beach, and at least got to chat with him.
The first of his work that I read was '"Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems" and then "Earth Household"
Cold Mountain -Han Shan - has never been out of my consciousness ever since...
This is GS's translation of one of my favourites:
In my first thirty years of life
I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles.
Walked by rivers through deep green grass
Entered cities of boiling red dust.
Tried drugs, but couldn't make Immortal;
Read books and wrote poems on history.
Today I'm back at Cold Mountain:
I'll sleep by the creek and purify my ears.
______________
They are ALL right here:
http://www.hermetica.info/hanshan.htm
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gamahuche8 months, 3 weeks ago
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and here are Han Shan and Shih-Te
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http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/H/HanshanColdM/ind... -
tracy14Comment removed: Hard Banned
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Poulenc8 months, 3 weeks ago
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When I was younger I went to a summer "camp" where one was required to speak French all the time.
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When one was caught speaking English, one got a "mauvais point." Three of these meant you had to learn a poem by heart.
I learned a lot of French poetry that summer, a fact for which I've always been very grateful. -
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CRYMTYPHON8 months, 3 weeks ago
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Poetry ?
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It is the last refuge of a broken intellect.
Poetry is a disease injected into bored children,
who carry the virus forgotten in their system for years,
- until one day when their hearts are broken like bones under a hammer,
- until one day when they stare at one more endless
sunset,
- until one day when they look in the mirror and see
the shadows behind them,
- they burst into rhyme and sonnet,
sound and thunder of idiot words
from a soul that sees no single choice left in life,
except to speak the lines of whatever fool
will step next onto the mind's stage!
And it's so damned hard to get published too.
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