Written by
Ted Kooser |
Only one cell in the frozen hive of night
is lit, or so it seems to us:
this Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers.
Laughter and talking, the tick of chopsticks.
Beyond the glass, the wintry city
creaks like an ancient wooden bridge.
A great wind rushes under all of us.
The bigger the window, the more it trembles.
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Written by
Denise Levertov |
Since I stroll in the woods more often
than on this frequented path, it's usually
trees I observe; but among fellow humans
what I like best is to see an old woman
fishing alone at the end of a jetty,
hours on end, plainly content.
The Russians mushroom-hunting after a rain
trail after themselves a world of red sarafans,
nightingales, samovars, stoves to sleep on
(though without doubt those are not
what they can remember).
Vietnamese families
fishing or simply sitting as close as they can
to the water, make me recall that lake in Hanoi
in the amber light, our first, jet-lagged evening,
peace in the war we had come to witness.
This woman engaged in her pleasure evokes
an entire culture, tenacious field-flower
growing itself among the rows of cotton
in red-earth country, under the feet
of mules and masters.
I see her
a barefoot child by a muddy river
learning her skill with the pole.
What battles
has she survived, what labors?
She's gathered up all the time in the world
--nothing else--and waits for scanty trophies,
complete in herself as a heron.
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Written by
Barry Tebb |
The Poetry School, The Poetry Book Society, The Poetry Business:
So much poetry about you’d think I’d want to shout, “Hurray, hurray,
Every day’s Poetry Day!” but I don’t and you don’t either-
You know its flim-flam on the ether, grants for Jack-the-lads
Of both sexes, poets who’ve never been seen in a little magazine
Then gone on to win the Oopla Prize and made baroque architecture
The subject of an O.
U.
lecture.
Seventy five pounds for a seminar on sensitivity in verse;
A hundred and fifty for an infinitely worse whole weekend of
‘Steps towards a personal fiction in post-modern diction’;
And the inevitable course anthology, eight pounds for eleven
Nameless poets Pascale Petit and Mimi Kahlvati carefully selected
From, well honestly! Who cares? God only knows how banal they’re
Bound to be.
Budding Roddy Lumsdens, (Has anyone read a Roddy
Lumsden
Poem?) “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” his first collection short-listed here and
there -
The sheer hype’s enough to put me off for life.
I still write at bus-stops and avoid competitions like the plague.
I’m not lucky that way, I’ve still to win a single literary prize.
Is there one for every day of the year? And as for James Kirkup,
My mentor of forty-odd years, his name evokes blank stares; but
Look him up in ‘Who’s Who’, countless OUP collections, the best-
ever
Version of Val?ry’s ‘Cimeti?re Marin’, translations from eleven
tongues
Including Vietnamese.
Is there nothing Jamie can do to please?
I help one poet to write and one to stay alive;
Please God help poor poets thrive.
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