Happy National Poetry Day

This blog started out with conscientious intentions, aiming to publish regularly on the project and its various ins and outs. But what with this, that and a likely unnecessary amount of the other, that hasn't happened. Since we are entering our final year, however, now seems as good a time as any to make good on those intentions. So if for no other reason than it's useful to have an excuse to get that intended series of posts going, some of our favourite poems in honour of National Poetry Day.

Phil

I've gone for a Turkish poem: Güzel Havalar by Orhan Veli. I like it because it has a sense of joy in the everyday and the mundane, but with a cynical edge that stops it getting carried away into sentimentalism. It also sounds beautiful (especially when read by a master). To me, being in a foreign language, even one I use every day, helps me experience the language more as an object, "from the outside", increasing the impact of the tactile feel of the poem.

Güzel Havalar (Beautiful Weather)

Beni bu güzel havalar mahvetti,

Böyle havada istifa ettim

Evkaftaki memuriyetimden.

Tütüne böyle havada alıştım,

Böyle havada aşık oldum;

Eve ekmekle tuz götürmeyi

Böyle havalarda unuttum;

Şiir yazma hastalığım

Hep böyle havalarda nüksetti;

Beni bu güzel havalar mahvetti.

[This beautiful weather has destroyed me. It was in weather like this that I quit my job at the foundation. I got used to tobacco in weather like this. It was in weather like this that I fell in love. I forgot to bring home bread and salt in weather like this. My poetry-writing disease always recurred in weather like this. This beautiful weather has destroyed me.] 


Debbie

I can’t pin myself down to a favourite poem: there are so many, but I’ll go for W B Yeats and The Cloths of Heaven. I love its simplicity, the images of the ‘embroidered cloths’ and the ‘half light’ – but then I love the idea of spreading your dreams beneath someone’s feet – the vulnerability of that act – and the final line ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams’, suggesting the potential destruction of the reams, as fragile as the half-light.  It was also one of the first poems that made me love poetry.

The Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light;
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Mark

I've been profligate and gone for two: God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and The Emperor of Ice Cream by Wallace Stevens. I'll also take the liberty of being a little heretical and say I've never thought all that much of poetry. Never been entirely clear why anyone would choose poetry over prose, and there have been few poems to match the artful language of my favourite fictions and non-fictions. But there are always exceptions, and these are two. This is partly why I've chosen them, pieces that have been personally epiphanic. But they also do what I think great writing does: make mentally free with language, weaving ideas into semantic knot, building worlds in word; a syntax of thought. In Hopkins's case, no writer has ever worked so thoroughly to develop a unique metaphysics of language: it is his and his alone, writ in and between every word. For the Stevens poem, beyond the delight in word, image and rhythm, this does something I think few poems do: escape the weight of its describing. Supposedly about a funeral, the language could so easily have been submitted to the event, taking itself of value for what it describes. But this is all about the how, a transformation of something strange into something stranger, personal. So doing, it chimes and surmounts; and is free.

God’s Grandeur 

    The world is charged with the grandeur of God. 
        It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
        It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. 

    And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.


The Emperor of Ice Cream
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.