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I really like Tony Hoagland. He died last year. Two Trains Tony Hoagland Then there was that song called “Two Trains Running,” A Mississippi blues they play on late-night radio, that program after midnight called FM in the AM, –well, I always thought it was about trains. Then somebody told me it was about what a man and woman do under the covers of their bed, moving back and forth like slow pistons in a shiny black locomotive, the rods and valves trying to stay coordinated long enough that they will “get to the station” at the same time. And one of the trains goes out of sight into the mountain tunnel, but when they break back into the light the other train has somehow pulled ahead, the two trains running like that, side by side, first one and then the other, with the fierce white bursts of smoke puffing from their stacks, into a sky so sharp and blue you want to die. So then for a long time I thought the song was about sex. But then Mack told me that all train songs are really about Jesus, about how the second train is shadowing the first, so He walks in your footsteps and He watches you from behind, He is running with you, He is your brakeman and your engineer, your coolant and your coal, and He will catch you when you fall, and when you stall He will push you through the darkest mountain valley, up the steepest hill, and the rough chuff chuff of his fingers on the washboard and the harmonica woo woo is the long soul cry by which He pulls you through the bloody tunnel of the world. So then I thought the two trains song was a gospel song. Then I quit my job in Santa Fe and Sharon drove her spike heel through my heart and I got twelve years older and Dean moved away, and now I think the song might be about good-byes– because we are not even in the same time zone, or moving at the same speed, or perhaps even headed toward the same destination– forgodsakes, we are not even trains! What grief it is to love some people like your own blood, and then to see them simply disappear; to feel time bearing us away one boxcar at a time. And sometimes, sitting in my chair I can feel the absence stretching out in all directions– like the deaf, defoliated silence just after a train has thundered past the platform, just before the mindless birds begin to chirp again –and the wildflowers that grow beside the tracks wobble wildly on their little stems, then gradually grow still and stand motherless and vertical in the middle of everything.
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May 15, 2019 02:39
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Language Lesson 1976 Heather McHugh When Americans say a man takes liberties, they mean he’s gone too far. In Philadelphia today I saw a kid on a leash look mom-ward and announce his fondest wish: one bicentennial burger, hold the relish. Hold is forget, in American. On the courts of Philadelphia the rich prepare to serve, to fault. The language is a game as well, in which love can mean nothing, doubletalk mean lie. I’m saying doubletalk with me. I’m saying go so far the customs are untold. Make nothing without words, and let me be the one you never hold.
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Sep 5, 2019 07:45
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Eat The Rich posted:Hi. I'm new to poetry. What is everyone's favorite poetry books(collection??) ? Definitely go for an anthology at first, preferably a big one, then flip around till you find something you like and follow our from there. If you happen to like birds, Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds is a good collection.
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Sep 15, 2019 01:47
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Tree Goat posted:did anybody buy the newish english translation of the book of disquiet? is it good/better than the penguin classics one I did not. I have the penguin classics edition. Is there something wrong with it? I thought it was pretty good, though that book is depressing in a way few books are.
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Sep 15, 2019 01:49
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I just read an extremely interesting and quite good long narrative poem called "The Voyage of the Sable Venus" by Robin Coste Lewis. The deal with the poem is, it's entirely made up of the titles, catalog entries, and exhibit descriptions of Western artworks which include a depiction of a black woman from 38,000 BCE to the present day. The only thing I can compare is the work of Susan Howe or Anne Carson, who also write poems where history is present is surprising ways and which have a jaunty fractured style that mines every last connotation and etymological ambiguity out of each word. If you're interested in what really out-there but strangely grounded poetry looks like, this is it. (I like a lot of Howe's books but my favorite is Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, for Carson, Autobiography of Red is a fan fave but Glass, Irony, and God is more history-y, I think)
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Sep 16, 2019 03:56
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 01:11 |
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Zesty Mordant posted:I've been flipping open random pages to the robert creely collection i got from the library, because i've liked a few of his poems before, but so far, I'm not really feeling most of them. they're often just quick bizarre snippets that I can't understand on any level I used to like him when I was in high school but haven't really read him since then, as I recall most of the poems were lyrical, highly abstracted, mostly about ordinary things elevated through that abstraction, and bc of that always at least partially about the potential of language to represent & to refuse representation. also he only had one eye for some reason, like a bad rear end
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Dec 8, 2019 06:25
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