The lawyer i work for at my summer job is a brilliant and very literary guy. He makes me realize how little i really learned in school about literature and poetry. He can recite T.S. Eliot and Keats from memory; it's quite impressive. But he has a Masters in English, which i don't have.

Today we had a long conversation about art and poetry and he mentioned that he loved Wordsworth. i said that the only poem i remembered by Wordsworth was one about London, which i discovered while i lived there for a short time. He said "oh yes, the sonnet 'Composed on Westminster Bridge'" i said, "um yah, that one." He then recited it from memory.

Way to make me feel uneducated, dude.

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Posted by: annika at 01:31 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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Here's a cute one by Jenny Joseph (b. 1932):

Warning

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn´t go, and doesn´t suit me,
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we´ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I´m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people´s gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes to keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We will have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old and start to wear purple.

Posted by: annika at 10:21 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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[Dreadfully sorry about the tardiness thing. Finals you know.]

A Ginsberg poem has been overdue for quite some time. Here's one that references Ken Kesey: beat author, champion wrestler, CIA guinea pig, author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and a man who arguably inspired today's rave scene with his Electric Kool Aid Acid Tests of the mid-sixties, which in turn launched the careers of Tom Wolfe and The Grateful Dead.

Here's how his friend, Allen Ginsberg, described one of Kesey's infamous get-togethers in 1965:

First Party at Ken Kesey's with Hell's Angels

Cool black night thru redwoods
cars parked outside in shade
behind the gate, stars dim above
the ravine, a fire burning by the side
porch and a few tired souls hunched over
in black leather jackets. In the huge
wooden house, a yellow chandelier
at 3 A.M. the blast of loudspeakers
hi-fi Rolling Stones Ray Charles Beatles
Jumping Joe Jackson and twenty youths
dancing to the vibration thru the floor,
a little weed in the bathroom, girls in scarlet
tights, one muscular smooth skinned man
sweating dancing for hours, beer cans
bent littering the yard, a hanged man
sculpture dangling from a high creek branch,
children sleeping softly in their bedroom bunks.
And 4 police cars parked outside the painted
gate, red lights revolving in the leaves.

More poetry: Steve celebrates his new OS with a little Blake.

Posted by: annika at 08:16 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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This 1992 poem by Jo Shapcott makes me want to open my refrigerator and apologize.

Vegetable Love

I´d like to say the fridge
was clean, but look at the rusty
streaks down the back wall
and the dusty brown pools
underneath the salad crisper.

And this is where I´ve lived
the past two weeks, since I was pulled
from the vegetable garden.
I´m wild for him: I want to stay crunchy
enough to madden his hard palate and his tongue,
every sensitive part inside his mouth.
But almost hour by hour now, it seems,
I can feel my outer leaves losing resistance,
as oxygen leaks in, water leaks out
and the same tendency creeps further
and further towards my heart.

Down here there´s not much action,
just me and another, even limper, lettuce
and half an onion. The door opens so many,
so many times a day, but he never opens
the salad drawer where I´m curled in a corner.

There´s an awful lot of meat. Strange cuts:
whole limbs with their grubby hair,
wings and thighs of large birds,
claws and beaks. New juice
gathers pungency as it rolls down
through the smelly strata of the refrigerator,
and drips on to our fading heads.

The thermostat is kept as low as it will go,
and when the weather changes
for the worse, what´s nearest
to the bottom of the fridge starts to freeze.
Three times we´ve had cold snaps,
and I´ve felt the terrifying pain
as ice crystals formed at my fringes.

Insulation isn´t everything in here:
you´ve got to relax into the cold,
let it in at every pore. It´s proper
for food preservation. But I heat up
again at the thought of him,
at the thought of mixing into one juice
with his saliva, of passing down his throat
and being ingested with the rest
into his body cells where I´ll learn
by osmosis another lovely version
of curl, then shrivel, then open again to desire.

Posted by: annika at 07:38 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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