Poetry Table of Contents
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- Keats's Letters (Found Poems) from A Wordsworth Notebook
- Spliced (Aleatory) Romanticism: Link words from Romantic Poets to the words from modern and contemporary poets in chance correspondences from Romantic Presences, Spliced Romanticism, and A Wordsworth Notebook
- Poem on the Letter “A” (from William Wordsworth’s “The Triad,” 1828) from Wordsworth Day by Day
- Pilgrimage from Hampstead to Keats’s Grave, Rome, 1995 from Spliced Romanticism
Keats’s Letters (Found Poems)
from A Wordsworth Notebook
These kirkmen have done
Scotland harm—
they have
banished puns and laughing
and kissing. . . .
Were the fingers made to
squeeze a guinea or
a white hand?
Were the Lips
made to hold a
pen or a
kiss. . . ?
the world is very young
and in a verry [sic]
ignorant state
[7 July 1818]
If we compare the Passions to
different tons and
hogsheads of wines
in a wine cellar
--thus it is—
the poet
by one cup should know
the scope of any particular wine
without getting intoxicated.
This is the highest
exertion of Power, and
the next step is
to paint from
memory of
gone
self
storm
[annotation to Hazlitt on King Lear]
I
almost
wish
we were
butterflies
and
liv’d
but three
summer
days
[1 July 1819]
I think
I shall
be
among
the English
POETS after
my
death
2.
They do not know
what a women is
[14 October 1818]
every man
who can row his boat
and walk and talk
seems a different
being from
myself --
I
do not
feel
in this world. . .
an intellect
in splints
[30 September, 24 October 1820]
Talking of Pleasure,
this moment I was
writing
with one hand, and
with the other
holding to my
Mouth a Nectarine
-- good
- god
- how
- fine –
It went down soft
pulpy slushy,
oozy,
all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat
like a large
beatified
Strawberry.
I shall certainly breed.
[22 September 1819]
Spliced (Aleatory) Romanticism: Link words from Romantic Poets to the words from modern and contemporary poets in chance correspondences
from Romantic Presences, Spliced Romanticism, and A Wordsworth Notebook
Richly tinged
breathing on a stream
a washed
memory
(Coleridge and Lorine Niedecker)
Lizzie Porphyro
Rose blends
with violet
my overfevered wish
a southern home?
A putty-gray motel bedroom?
Enter heaven (sapphire heaven)
with clean
hands
(Keats and Robert Lowell)
I feel sweet passions
for Nature, and Human Life
they dug the earth in them
I spoke against God
I feel sweet passions
and spoke
(Wordsworth and Paul Celan)
Wedged destiny
easeful death
rich
mutiny
(Keats and Susan Howe)
a crowd, a host
poisonstilled
of golden
pensive
the vegetal
How good we had it!
But oft. . .
this despicable bedstead
shine dance
wandered
(Wordsworth and Paul Celan)
White simplicity
This pleasant tale is
What is “there is”
Ghost and jealous mother
A Poet’s death
Fruit ripening in stillness
The peach teaches thuds
(John Keats, Lyn Hejinian)
A man
worn
down by sickness:
Therefore we
build
and
build
(William Wordsworth, Paul Celan)
Spinning still
I let the incense grow cold
giving my body giving
idle since getting up
bedcovers tumbled
neglect neglect
spinning still
the rapid line of motion
the curtains down in the sun
earth rolling with visible motion
my body emaciated a prisoner
neglected endless staring
sweeping through the darkness
cliffs wheeling by me
(William Wordsworth, Li Ch’ing Chao)
along the silver of a morning raga
this dull and clodded earth
over inner structure of the Human Thing
touch ethereal along the river Rio Grande
(John Keats, Ed Dorn)
1.
holding
light with
shade
kill or cure
no irritable
reaching
America get real
(John Keats, Anne Waldman)
rivulets and beauty born murmuring
her face but who is she who
the hook moving in water
peeling onions in glade and bower
I sit with her on this calm heath
a Lady of my own who is she
something is moving
(William Wordsworth, Lucille Clifton)
trapped in a box of colors
sealed in rolled round
history a coffin
the touch of
(William Wordsworth, Adonis)
in thought War begins at any moment
love the brooks in a season of calm weather
The telephone rings
round the setting sun
Slavery, too deep for tears, is abolished.
tenderness
utterly
abolishes
the philosophic mind
the teeming meanest flower
eyes
are
mighty
waters
in thought
the colouring of mortality / is in the audience
central, original, a new born Day
(William Wordsworth, John Cage)
Speak against bonds, my songs,
Deriving thy light from Heaven
—untended watchfire—
Go, my songs, to those who have delicate lust,
The Tricksome Hermes is here.
(William Wordsworth, Ezra Pound)
Poem on the Letter “A” (from William Wordsworth’s “The Triad,” 1828)
from Wordsworth Day by Day
(first, lines 34-51 from “The Triad,” a playful poem about his daughter Dora and her friends Edith Southey and Sara Coleridge)
“Fear not this constraining measure!
Drawn by a poetic spell,
Lucida! From domes of pleasure,
Or from cottage-sprinkled dell,
Come to regions solitary,
Where the eagle builds her aery,
Above the hermit’s long-forsaken cell!”
--She comes!—behold
That Figure, like a ship with silver sail!
Nearer she draws—a breeze uplifts her veil---
Upon her coming wait
As pure a sunshine and as soft a gale
As e’er, on herbage covering earthly mould,
Tempted the bird of Juno to unfold
His richest splendour, when his veering gait
And every motion of his starry train
Seem governed by a strain
Of music, audible to him alone.—
Poem on the Letter “A”
Triad
Naiad Dryad
Dora
Sara Lucida
MAY
fancy
pathless
command
(hand in hand)
coral Ida
interweavings waving:
earth and sea
measure aery
starry
Lady
near
fair tear
day
archer
heavenly day
hath Majesty
A canopy
vainly
lagging
shades sang
raftered
delicate
dance
ungarlanded
breathed
Idolian
Thracian
arch audacity
primal
aim
star vague
Daughter
as faery clapping
Last
skylark’s
gladness a float.
Dawn fair page a hand
azure
angels
all fragrance
Pilgrimage from Hampstead to Keats’s Grave, Rome, 1995
from Spliced Romanticism
The following suite of poems charts a pilgrimage by a North American to Keats’s grave in the year of the poet’s 200th birthday. Many poets (and countless other persons since the time of his death) have made a similar journey, following Shelley’s urging: “Go thou to Rome.” My pilgrimage, it must be confessed, was contrived, constructed: having seen the grave and the room in Rome several times previously, I decided, nevertheless (Catullus’s “tamen”) to go to Rome and observe and write as a pilgrim. Now I have done what—among others—Christina Rossetti, Alice Meynell, and Oscar Wilde have done. But I could not write my experience as they or most other pilgrims did: I found that neither my feelings nor my sense of poetic form nor my sense of Keats were elegiac enough to match theirs; the pilgrimage was confusing—I did not even know if I wanted to go straight to Rome or first to Recanati, home of Romantic Leopardi—I was initially disappointed at not fitting myself into the genre of pilgrimage and eulogy, but slowly confusion, having been accepted, led to an openness to sound and sight and. . .an unexpected constellation of poems. I turned to a more open (and perhaps “American”) form in order to transform my confusion into poetic play, a feature of Keats’s poetry often overlooked. Indeed, it is precisely the element of play that the elegiac tradition of both reading and honoring Keats has often squeezed out. My poems come together as a series of de-familiarizing combinations, correspondences, and metonyms that praise Keats by reconfiguring him and the conventional images of the pilgrim.
While constructing the pilgrimage, I thought of Catullus’s beautiful elegy to his recently dead brother, Carmen 101 (“multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus”), focusing my confusion on that strange line-opening: “ nunc tamen interea” (now nevertheless meanwhile), which expresses (along with “nequiquam,” in vain) the sense of urgency, skepticism, impotence, and hope; the simultaneous uselessness and necessity of the task of speaking to the dead (“mutam cinerem,” mute ash) in their permanent silence; the juxtaposition of the eternity of death with the utter immediacy of the speech (Catullus saying that his poem is wet with his tears). His poem further came home to me (on Italian soil) when I encountered on the pilgrimage Ugo Foscolo’s “In Morte del Fratello Giovanni” (1803), with its extensive verbal recastings, including the mute ash, of Carmen 101: Catullus, Foscolo, Keats.
N.B.—The “infant plum-tree” in poem I refers to the recent replacement of the tree in Hampstead under which Keats reputedly composed the “Ode to a Nightingale.” Poems II and IV verbally echo Catullus and Foscolo.
I. The Moon: Hampstead—Rome
- Nightingale, Keats Grove
infant plum-tree
poor
stick
late November twilight
belted to a post in
low
foliage
drowned
electric
saw threading the voice
of birds
crescent
glancing down
cat
staring on garden
path
- Staring the full length of the Piazza di Spagna to the house of his dying, I remember that one day Keats revolted against his Roman food.
Imagine
window
muffled flurry
arms
white gown
food flying
gravy drops
spoon
meat
face
arms
fly
—moon shedding in violet sky—
like Auden’s
Breugel’s
falling Icarus
tossed from
arms sky legs
in frame’s lower right
a poet
dripping
away
- Enoteca: Roma
o
vintage full
Barolo 1978
Pecorino
fresh bread from
Trasteverequeen-moon
winkingwine rhyme Keats
bubbling from
stone
graveplot
II. Go Thou to Rome
Meanwhile
now
I arrive
now Roma
through many
lands I
come
and people
over seas
meanwhile
neverthe-
less in vain
I arrive
accept
from me
peoples and
seas
these (mute ash)
gifts
in vain I arrive
not in Recanati home
of
humpback Leopardi and
“these hidden
hills”
to see you (taken),
sitting by your stone,
I will
No more
fly
to the wrong
poet
III. Recoveries (from Keats)
sleeves wet with morning
I floated through
dusk and hail
with your lips
footing your paths
Hermes, a cricket, sings
The Feverish Poet:
word
and thirst
are one
wedged destiny
easeful death rich
mutiny
a sleeping maid
catches
shapes of light
enlivening
eternal book
over a precipice
IV. Grave Nevertheless: stretching my palms out to you while 175 drowsy years numb finger tips, I sit by your stone watching cats laze. You other people! traveling here and there, give back his bones to the breast of his sad mother!
IV. Graves of Shelley and Keats
water writ Keats
eternally
Shelley rich
frozen alive
Pompeii-strange
pearl
eyes
knees
still
springing
Severn’s full palate
Keats’s broken lyre
whose palate fine?
o nameless stone!
V. “A Vowelled Undersong” (from the acrostic on the marble plaque by the grave)
Each meek cheek:
Seeks Keats
Deeds Sleep
K-K-Keats
beA sacred name
in vainhonoured slaughter
mourner’s water
drops
not
fallenoft
heroes tribute writethough
so
some
such
dazzling
epitaph
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