If formal verse can be likened to carving, free verse to modeling, then one might say that doggerel verse is like objet trouvés — the piece of driftwood that looks like a witch, the stone that has a profile. The writer of doggerel, as it were, takes any old words, rhythms and rhymes that come into his head, gives them a good shake and then throws them onto the page like dice where, lo and behold, contrary to all probability they make sense, not by law but by chance. Since the words appear to have no will of their own, but to be the puppets of chance, so will the things or persons to which they refer; hence the value of doggerel for a certain kind of satire.
W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand, from the FSG Poetry blog The Best Words in Their Best Order.
I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.’
Frank O’Hara, “Personism”

(Source: poets.org)

Let’s All Have a Poet’s Day

amiwithani:

Today’s delightful British-ism: “having a poet’s day” = leaving work at noon and spending the rest of the day drinking in a pub.

Oh those charming Brits.

This is just why Larkin is so attractive: he is smarter than we are and more widely read, and much, much funnier, yet fundamentally no better.
Michael Dirda in The New Criterion

We hope our friends in New York will join us tonight for a special National Poetry Month installment of the FSG Reading Series. Rowan Ricardo Phillips (The Ground) and Glyn Maxwell (One Thousand Nights and Counting) will read at the Russian Samovar. I’ve had the privilege of hearing Phillips read before, and I highly, highly recommend experiencing it live.

The Russian Samovar
256 W. 52nd St
7pm

(Facebook details) 

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Since it’s St. Patrick’s Day, I thought I’d share Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney reading his poem “Keeping Going.”

A few photos from the recent National Book Critics Circle Awards. The wine was flowing, the atmosphere convivial. Photography by David Shankbone.

Tim O’Reilly’s Advice: Read Rilke

During his SXSW Interactive talk, Andrew Mcafee asked Tim O’Reilly for his advice to young innovators. O’Reilly quoted the last stanza of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, reprinted below.

“The Man Watching” by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

(Robert Bly translation)

Walt Whitman’s manuscript page for his poem “A Death Sonnet for Custer,” 1876.

Walt Whitman’s manuscript page for his poem “A Death Sonnet for Custer,” 1876.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

One from the archives: Paul Muldoon reads Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” and then discusses why he’s drawn to this poem in particular.

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky reads Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses.” 

Also known as How to Read a Poem Aloud.

W. H. Auden was born on this day in 1907. Here’s the poet reading “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” (Part I).

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

>

Paul Muldoon is in a rock band. Not only that, but he has a Pixies and Radiohead producer working with him.

>

Lapham's Quarterly: "A Few Words About My Wife," from "Me" by Vladimir Mayakovsky

He’s too busy looking well-tailored, if you ask me.

laphamsquarterly:

Oh Mayakovsky, why won’t you love me?

nyrbclassics:

2.
A Few Words About My Wife

I have married the moon and she combs the water,
the beaches of uncharted seas.
She’s my lunar lady, she has long red hair
and she drives a herd of horses
through a screaming streak of stars!
She gets married every evening in a greasy garage
and she kisses all the pictures
on the newspaper stands.
Her pretty boy winks, he wraps
the Milky Way around her,
he gets glitter on his fingers
and stars all over his hands.
And what about me?
The yoke of your eyebrows brings buckets of water
from the cool cool wells of your eyes,
it douses my desire and the lake-silk shimmers
on the singing amber cello of your thighs.
I sink into boulevards! I drown
in desire for deserts of sand.
Don’t you recognize your baby?
It’s my poor little poem, she wears fishnet stockings
and she drinks in a bar
as empty as this barren land.

—from “Me” by Vladimir Mayakovsky, in The Stray Dog Cabaret, translated by Paul Schmidt

image

mydaguerreotypeboyfriend:

Vladimir Mayakovsky, Russian poet and author, in his early twenties.

We’re just taking a wild guess here, but Mayakovsky probably isn’t going to call you. Here are plenty of gentlemen who will. 

Happy V-Day, from MDB. 

“A Cooking Egg,” a T. S. Eliot poem from 1919, courtesy of Coterie and the newly digitized Modernist literary magazine archive.