Louis Zukofsky as Catullus

Now let's see how Zukofsky does it in his "breathed" version:

Miss her, Catullus? don't be so inept to rail

at what you see perish when perished is the case.

Full, sure once, candid the sunny days glowed, solace,

when you went about it as your girl would have it.

you loved her as no one else shall ever be loved.

Billowed in tumultuous joys and affianced,

why you would but will it, and your girl would have it.

Full, sure, very candid the sun's rays glowed solace.

Now she won't love you: you, too, don't be weak, tense, null,

squirming after she runs off to miss her for life.

Said as if you meant it: obsinate, obdurate.

Vale! puling girl. I'm Catullus, obdurate,

I don't require it and don't beg uninvited:

won't you be doleful when no one, no one! begs you,

scalded, every night. Why do you want to live now?

Now who will be with you?  Who'll see that you're lovely?

Whom will you love now and who will say that you're his?

Whom will you kiss? Whose morsel of lips will you bite?

But you, Catullus, your destiny's obdurate.

Here is the original Latin:

Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire,

et quod vides perisse perditum ducas.

fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles,

cum ventitabas quo puella ducebat

amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla.

ibi illa multa tum iocosa fiebant,

quae tu volebas nec puella nolebat.

fulsere vere candidi tibi soles.

nunc iam illa non vult: tu quoque, impotens, noli,

nec quae fugit sectare, nec miser vive,

sed obstinata mente perfer, obdura.

vale, puella. iam Catullus obsdurat,

nec te requiret nec rogabit invitam:

at tu dolebis, cum rogaberis nulla

scelesta, nocte, quae tibi manet vita?

quis nunc te adibit? cui videberis bella?

quem nunc amabis? cuius esse diceris?

quem basiabis? cui labella mordebis?

at tu, Catulle, destinatus obdura.

Louis Zukofsky as Catullus

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Catullus at Lesbia's (1865)

Here is a translation LZ made of Carmina VIII, 

the 22nd poem in his separate collection Anew published in 1946:

Miserable Catullus, stop being foolish

And admit it's over,

The sun shone on you those days

When your girl had you

When you gave it to her

              like nobody else ever will.

Everywhere together then, always at it

And you liked it and she can't say 

                                                she didn't

Yes, those days glowed.

Now she doesn't want it: why

                       should you, washed out

Want to. Don't trail her,

Don't eat yourself up alive,

Show some spunk, stand up

                                               and take it.  

So long, girl. Catullus

                                               can take it.

He won't bother you, he won't

                                               be bothered.

But you'll be, nights.

What do you want to live for?

Whom will you see?

Who'll say you're pretty?

Who'll give it to you now?

Whose name will you have?

Kiss what guy? bite whose

                                               lips?      

Come on Catullus, you can

                                               take it.   

Donald Justice

 

Crossing Kansas by Train

The telephone poles

Have been holding their

Arms out

A long time now

To birds

That will not

Settle there

But pass with

Strange cawings

Westward to

Where dark trees

Gather about a

Water hole this

Is Kansas the

Mountains start here

Just behind 

The closed eyes

Of a farmer's

Sons asleep

In their work clothes

Ted Berrigan

Poem in the Traditional Manner

Whenever Richard Gallup is dissevered,
Fathers and teachers, and daemons down under the sea, Audenesque Epithalamiums! She
Sends her driver home and she stays with me.

Match-Game etcetera! Bootleggers Barrel-assing chevrolets grow bold. I summon To myself sad silent thoughts,
Opulent, sinister, and cold.

Shall it be male or female in the tub?
And grawk go under, and grackle disappear, And high upon the Brooklyn Bridge alone, An ugly ogre masturbates by ear:

Of my darling, my darling, my pipe and my slippers, Something there is is benzedrine in bed:
And so, so Asiatic, Richard Gallup
Goes home, and gets his gat, and plugs his dad.

Dick Gallup

 Hey, Buster!

When I close my eyes I see a man in a brown suit
sitting in a hotel lobby in 1947 reading the morning
paper. His thoughts are private and probably
beside the point.

Many years later the clouds
still move from west to east and a hawk may
skim the tops of the trees far up the mountainside.

There is nothing to stop us from placing
objects on a table in the sunlight and painting
false shadows under them to confuse our friends,
if we have any—probably not, if we think that
much about confusing them.

                                                     Alas, in such terms
pronouns tend to lose their meaning; lack of
tension or current in between. Life becomes
all a dream, with a nasty kicker when we open
our eyes once more.

Mina Loy

 

Joyce's Ulysses

The Normal Monster

sings in the Green Sahara

 

The voice and offal

of the image of God

 

make Celtic noises

in these lyrical hells

 

Hurricanes

of reasoned musics

reap the uncensored earth

 

The loquent consciousness

of living things

pours in torrential languages

 

The elderly colloquists

the Spirit and the Flesh

are out of tongue

 

The Spirit

is impaled upon the phallus

 

Phoenix

of Irish fires

lighten the Occident

 

with Ireland's wings

flap pandemoniums

of Olympian prose

 

and satinize

the imperial Rose

of Gaelic perfumes —

England

the sadistic mother

embraces Erin

 

Master

of meteoric idiom

present

 

The word made flesh

and feeding upon itself

with erudite fangs

The sanguine

introspection of the womb

 

Don Juan

of Judea

upon a pilgrimage

to the Libido

 

The press

purring

its lullabies to sanity

 

Christ capitalized

scourging

incontrite usurers of destiny

in hole and corner temples

 

And hang

The soul's advertisements

outside the ecclesiast's Zoo

 

A gravid day

spawns

gutteral gargoyles

upon the Tower of Babel

 

Empyrean emporium

where the

rejector-recreator

Joyce

flashes the giant reflector

on the sub rosa

 

Charles Simic

 

Charles Simic

 

from The World Doesn't End

I ran into the poet Mark Strand on the street. He immediately challenged me by drinking a glass of wine while standing on his head. I was astonished. He didn't even spill a drop. It was one of the bottles Baudelaire stole from his stepfather the Ambassador in 1848. "Is this what is known as subjective reality?" I asked. Years ago this same Strand translated a famous Quechua poem about a man raising a fly with wings of gold in a green bottle, and now look at him!

         I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It's almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don't even have any clothes on.
         The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving good-by. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.

         Comedy of errors at an elegant downtown restaurant.
         The chair is really a table making fun of itself. The coat tree has just learned to tip waiters. A shoe is served a plate of black caviar.
         "My dear and most esteemed sir," says a potted palm to a mirror, "it is absolutely useless to excite yourself."

Frank Bidart

BIDART AT HOME IN CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, IN 2013. PHOTO © WEBB CHAPPELL PHOTOGRAPHY.

The War of Vaslav Nijinsky

God was silent.

                          Everything was SILENT.

I lay back down in the snow.

I wanted again to go to sleep, and die . . .

But my BODY did not want to die.
My BODY spoke to me:

There is no answer to your life.
You are insane; or evil.
 

Harry Matthews

Biographical note from An Anthology of New York Poets (1970)

Quiet Moon

(incorporating a poem by John Ashbery)

No comfort in the dead wind
And its loud philosophizing;
The glumly repeated eyelets
Tease me with hushed reproach,
And snores of my friends and lovers
Tell me “last night was just that.”
Ah, solitary night! Except for my goofball
Baby next to me — no snoring there, not yet,
But that won’t matter amid the irregular
Screams tomorrow morning. It’s weird how upsetting
Extreme calm can be; it won’t let you think:
The rumpus of natural silence, the frenzy
Of immobility, not like last night
When the woods burbled, and fire crackled
That is now still as a still photograph.
I still have to undress. What is goofball
Thinking — dreaming that his absent-minded Mama
Is humping his cradle? Surely something close to home.
I used to stare at that photograph for signs
But they pointed only to what had been, not to
Getting out of my lovely bed next morning, when the bells
Sing of the amusement park’s opening, or my going down
To redistribute my joy, even pretending to take
My schoolbook seriously, which I can barely see
Through my tears; also zipping up my mother’s back,
Waiting for the unknown person who will take me away.
Beloved Goofball! You fill in my voids.
You’d better like this place, with its firs and fish,
Not like my Manhattan where the only landscape’s in the sky
(And in worn municipal parks): before I was twenty
I never saw a redbud with its leafless purple flowers,
All that stuff out there adds up; you have to think,
Out there is better than the dream in your head,
Than the dreamers in the ministry of fear;
But don’t forget that we are a vulnerable lot
With death by slaughter, fire, or frost hanging over us,
About whom judgments will be made at high tables
To no doubt become our only trace.

December 9, 2013

Bruce Boone

from Century of Clouds

I like the bigness of things, their largeness. Dreaming my favorite dream I'mflyingabove an enchanted forest, arms stretched out wide. The trees are emerald green and the fields under me ordered in neat yellow squares. They shout and compete with each other for the splendor of it. High above me there's a clear sapphire sky. Oh the serenity! Now I shift the bones of my wrist and slightly turn. Facing the sun I begin my descent. In the years of friendship I see those I love in mosaic-like patterns, and me along with them. Who will ever know our names in a hundred years! We're like the catalogs of flora, and moving toward a brilliant future. Wave upon wave of collective life displaying ever new patterns. Like the stripes of sea bass; like the desert cactus in bloom after years of waiting. It's spring, and the acacias are beginning to carpet the streets with their yellow polleny fuzz. Patterns, designs, excesses I love. At night I look up to emptiness, and the Milky Way is a ribbon of distant faces turned outward, still asleep. Will they wake? At the institute last summer I dreamt for several nighrs about Fred's repeated anecdote. By sheer coincidence, he says, when three had come together, Sartre is the first to speak.'Three little men!' — and a smile to Picasso and Charlie Chaplin. I dream they're in a circle looking down, peering into and beyond something. But it's there at their feet. I wake up and laugh. I have to tell Fred this! He's so large, like the world. Everyone will enjoy my dream joke.

* > j< There's an explosion when I think these thoughts. Letelier is being blown up in his car by the agents of Chilean reaction. The sound of nearly silent bullets — and 9 black men are dead in Oakland from police assassination. Racism; poverty. Lives of women and gays oppressed in patriarchy. Daily violence done to workers. A workers' movement now bloody and sundered with wounds. These thoughts large and public, how to relate them to my life? How to link with experience and touches — only rarely — my past? To tell about desiring too. Perhaps beginning to tell you stories. Some important friendships, in between spaces as my life moves outward. Problems. Questions. •

Rob Halpern & Bruce Boone

Before I discovered Century of Clouds in the mid-1990s, this book was for me a vague rumor, a bit of hearsay associated with an equally vague literary movement called "New Narrative." I couldn't quite discern the shape of New Narrative with much clarity then, let alone grasp its history, but I had already apprenticed myself to it, albeit unwittingly.

by hungrily devouring Robert Gliick's classic, Jack the Modernist, and trying to imitate its sentences, its tone. Gliick's books led me to Boone's collection of short narratives, My Walk With Bob, published by Boone's and Gliick's own Black Star Series in 1979, and recently reissued by Ithuriel's Spear. Unlike Century of Clouds, which was impossible to find, My Walk With Bob would occasionally turn up on the "Gay and Lesbian" shelf at Community Thrift on Valencia Street, where I still buy copies whenever I find them for friends- With Jack the Modernist, My Walk With Bob offered me a set of values — even if I couldn't yet identify them — at once literary and social, combining the emotional intimacy of friendship with the intellectual commitment of critical theory, each stimulating and moderating the other's excesses. And as soon as I was able to identify Gliick with the"Bob" of Boone's title, I felt as though I had discovered an important piece of gossip, which drew me deeper into a still unnamable communion.

I

But nothing prepared meforthe revelation of Century of Clouds where the seduction of artifice and the rhetoric of critique yield a rare extravagance, which Boone marshals to create new possibilities of social fact. I found the book unexpectedly one day in 1995 while browsing the shelves of the James Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the then new San Francisco Public Library. The library's copy was for "reference use only," and while I considered smuggling it out of the building — convinced for a moment that I'd be recovering valuable evidence of a historical event otherwise impossible to prove (a thief in recovery, my acquisitiveness still expressed itself in delusional fantasies of "liberating" meaningful objects) — I decided instead to read it there, and I fell into the book as into a dream, my spine hard against the

wall as I slid to thefloorwhere I sat motionless, absorbed. Two hours later I emerged sensing the shape of a world — was it this world? — where writing and desire, friendship and critique, become one another equally and reciprocally to inform a politics. It was one of those life-changing reading experiences when you don't know exactly what's happening to you, but you know that you're never going to be the same. Even now, after having read Century of Clouds countless times, a trace of that experience remains, at once profoundly familiar, and still quite strange, a sign that the book has yet to exhaust its promise. Indeed, its affect keeps irrupting in a gray zone of unclassifiable feeling — that pink opaque between body and brain — just on the other side of codified emotion. 0\ Faithful to the imperatives of Gay Liberation, Century of Clauds arouses social desires and political demands, which can never be cleanly separated insofar as desire and politics penetrate one another at the root. While reading, I feel such pleasure, as well as an insistence that the world wake from its nightmare, and that it actually could, were we only to shake it hard enough. The spirited optimism of Boone's writing tempers the pessimism of its intellect, and that optimism is as infectious as a friend's joy. In Century of Clouds, writing, pleasure, gossip, scandal, and emotion writ large are full of radical possibilities. Friendship becomes the fundamental unit of political engagement, just as politics reveals its erotics, and storytelling communicates the relationship between them. In every one of Boone's sentences — which move so gracefully between perception and idea, ardor and action — you

Bruce Boone

BUDDIES IN SPACE

I love my man. On this piece of velvet
what’s pleasanter than twinkly lights.
In my absence I don’t compare hot breath.
The blistering limbs keep plastering our
walls. Against this determination are
three. The mind’s the body, spirit too.
Soul’s irreducible. A finishing with the
quest for mastery in the pumping of iron.
My wish is the gods grant you a long and
happy, Thor 3. This was to kiss, salute.
Same to you sincerely, Atem bar Akatan.
We grossly ignored the doubts I told him,
my plan to teach. Without resolves or
resources, I told him, these asteroids
continue to whirl. Where they have limbs,
our pride’s bolts. Look from that porthole.
The spears of light that are thrown down,
ache in. Boisterous freedom’s my
only delight. Be loving you too, true.
Emblazoned on the foreheads were stars.

Forrest Gander

Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants

 What many of us learned in high school about lichen— that it’s an indicator species for pollution (litmus, in fact, is derived from lichen), and that it’s the synergistic alliance of a fungus and algae or cyanobacteria— is largely true, but simplified. If lichen ecology has more to do with collaboration than competition, it’s nevertheless true that collaboration is transformative. With lichen, which may be more related to animals than plants, the original organisms are changed utterly in their compact. They can’t return to what they were. And according to Anne Pringle, one of the leading contemporary mycologists (with whom I had the lucky opportunity to collaborate), it may be that lichen do not, given sufficient nutrients, age. Anne and other contemporary biologists are saying that our sense of the inevitability of death may be determined by our mammalian orientation. Perhaps some forms of life have “theoretical immortality.” Lichen can reproduce asexually, and when they do, bits of both partners are dispersed together to establish in a new habitat. How long can the partners of a lineage continue to reproduce? No one knows. The thought of two things that merge, mutually altering each other, two things that, intermingled and interactive, become one thing that does not age, brings me to think of the nature of intimacy. Isn’t it often in our most intimate relations that we come to realize that our identity, all identity, is combinatory?

Forrest Gander

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 Ligature

When the strong drag of the boy’s adolescence pulls through them, the
family rises into thinness and begins to break like a wave.
 
You turned away when I kissed you, the woman says. Why?
 
Half-lidded days of early winter.
 
When he points toward the woman, the boy looks at his hand the way dogs
will.
 
The boy’s jaw sets. As though behind his teeth, into the soft flesh of his
throat, a new set of teeth were cutting through. A mouth for what?
 
Each of them adopts a private view. Arguments veer every which way, and
who can follow? A sequence of dark non sequiturs blows in.
 
When one, when one word, when the word suicide enters the room where
they are shouting, the system closes down, prematurely becalmed.
 
The man writes, I am not given a subject but am given to my subject. I
am inside it like a parasite.
 
He sees the woman’s face contract at the approach of other futures than the
one for which her face was prepared.
 
So they inhabit their bodies like music, for a given time. And yet he
continues to act as if there were times to come.
 
I just want you to go away, one of them screams.
 
Expressionless and flat as a tortilla, the afternoon moon over their house.
 
She calls the man to a corner in the basement. Those aren’t spider eggs, he
says, backing up. Those are its eyes.
 
When the encounter with the self is volcanic, nothing can follow.
 
Tearing open the cocoon to reveal itself, a boy within the family.
 
As if they were waiting. As if inside experience, bright with meaning,
there were another experience pendant, unnameable.

Barbara Guest

The View from Kandinsky's Window

An over-large pot of geraniums on the ledge
the curtains part
a view from Kandinsky’s window.

The park shows little concern with Kandinsky’s history
these particular buildings are brief about his early life
reflections of him seen from the window
are busy with preparations for exile
the relevance of the geranium color.

Partings, future projects
there are exceptional changes meant to occur
he will confront an axis, rearrange spatial decisions
the geranium disappears, so shall a person.

His apartment looking down on a Square
the last peek of Russia
an intimate one knowing equipment vanishes.

At Union Square the curtains are drawn
diagonals greet us, those curves and sharp city
verticals he taught us their residual movements,

The stroke of difficult white finds an exit
the canvas is clean, pure and violent
the rhythm of exile in its vein,

We have similar windows, balconies, scale,
degrees of ingress, door knobs daffodils
like Kandinsky’s view from his window
distance at the street end.

Barbara Guest

Santa Fe Trail

I go separately

The sweet knees of oxen have pressed a path for me

ghosts with ingots have burned their bare hands

it is the dungaree darkness with China stitched

where the westerly winds

and the traveler’s checks

the evensong of salesmen

the glistening paraphernalia of twin suitcases

where no one speaks English.

I go separately

It is the wind, the rubber wind

when we brush our teeth in the way station

a climate to beard. What forks these roads?

Who clammers o’er the twain?

What murmurs and rustles in the distance

in the white branches where the light is whipped

piercing at the crossing as into the dunes we simmer

and toss ourselves awhile the motor pants like a forest

where owls from their bandaged eyes send messages

to the Indian couple. Peaks have you heard?

I go separately

We have reached the arithmetics, are partially quenched

while it growls and hints in the lost trapper’s voice

She is coming toward us like a session of pines

in the wild wooden air where rabbits are frozen,

O mother of lakes and glaciers, save us gamblers

whose wagon is perilously rapt.