Two Lyric Geniuses

It's Friday. Time to watch somebody else work for a change, pun intended. First, the incomparable John Coltrane, with Eric Dolphy:





Plus, Derek Walcott's sublime Forty Acres.


best,
Don

Derek Walcott, Bill Deemer, and Some Near Perfect Books of Poems

As noted yesterday, there was more news than I could fit in one post. In particular, there is a truly beautiful poem in the May 15th New York Review of Books by Derek Walcott:



The Hulls Of White Yachts

The hulls of white yachts riding the orange water
of the marina at dusk, and, under their bowsprits the chuckle
of the chain in the stained sea; try to get there
before a green light winks from the mast and the foc'sle
blazes with glare, while dusk hangs in suspension
with crosstrees and ropes and a lilac-livid sky
with its beer stein of cloud froth touched by the sun,
as stars come out to watch the evening die.
In this orange hour the light reads like Dante,
three lines at a time, their symmetrical tension,
quiet bars rippling from the Paradiso
as a dinghy writes lines made by the scanty
metre of its oar strokes, and we, so
mesmerized can barely talk. Happier
than any man now is the one who sits drinking
wine with his lifelong companion under the winking
stars and the steady arc lamp at the end of the pier.



If ever there was a poem as painting, this is one; in addition, it is a poem to propel us onward through spring into summer. I haven't lived at the shore for 17 years and this whisked me back there as if it was yesterday. Although Lilliput is a mag dedicated to the short poem, Walcott's Omeros, a book length poem, comes highly recommended, indeed. This is just gorgeous work.

Here is a 2nd list of near perfect books of poems, sent along anonymously:


1. The Pill Versus the Springhill Mining Disaster by Richard Brautigan
2. Basho and His Interpreters by Makoto Ueda
3. Variations by Bill Deemer
4. Book of Haikus by Jack Kerouac


And a fine list it is. The one volume I was unfamiliar with was by Bill Deemer, who I was very happy to learn was published and is available from our friend Bob Arnold of Longhouse. While looking up info on Bill Deemer, I stumbled on an online collection of Twenty Poems. From that collection, the following beauty:



Ode

O little town, you are all America to me.
Two gas stations, one tavern, sunset the big event.
I'm glad the only traffic light always stops me.



So far, there have been two takers on the free subscription offer to Lilliput Review which ends next Thursday the 8th.

Hmn.

best,
Don

Derek Walcott & Robert Lowell

A quick Friday lunchtime post - ran across two poems today in separate sources that came together nicely. The first is Robert Lowell's The Public Garden, a meticulous poem, with finely detailed descriptions. Right smack in the middle, the following leapt out:


"And now the moon, earth's friend, that cared so much
For us, and cared so little, comes again -
Always a stranger!"



Now I generally hate personification in a poem, anthropromophizing in a Disneyesque way, so as I hit the end of the first line (fyi - it's in the middle of the poem), I was unimpressed to the point of putting the book aside and, then, boom, line two somehow straightens it all out and here is a little Eastern-like gem of wisdom that makes me thing of Basho.

How's that for a turnaround?

Here's an audio clip of Lowell reading The Public Garden and here's the text of the poem.

And then, via a blog feed, I ran into Derek Walcott's In Italy, published in the recent New Yorker, that, if anything, is even more precise than Lowell's fine delineation of autumn in a city park. Although there is no Eastern feel, the imagery and beauty share a kinship with Lowell's fine poem. Also, I was reminded of James Wright's beautiful poems of his experience of Italy.

Just one of those synchronistic seques of the mind (in time) that was too good not to share.

best,
Don