Archive for the "Literature; poetry" Category

E.E. Cummings

I recently got The Spoken Arts Treasury Of 100 Modern American Poets and it’s so interesting to hear poets reciting their own work. I’m absolutely heartbroken by Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus because it seems to me she’s on the verge of crying, I adore Anne Sexton’s dramatic voice, got excited by hearing Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg made me laugh. But oh, I’ve set myself up for one of my biggest disappointments to date, too: E.E. Cummings recitals are mind-boggling dreadful! He seems to be reading an eulogy in a pastor-like way. Whenever I’d read an E.E. Cummings poem I always heard the words dancing cheerfully. I’d always thought that such experimental poems must have a positive tone and especially the themes he choose call for unexpected ups and lows in one’s voice but Cummings goes about reading his work in one dreary tone. Ugh! It’s disgusting to hear for me. Hear for yourselves:

E.E. cummings • maggie and milly and molly and may

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

How can he recite a poem with such images of sweet childhood in that way? Gah!

Sylvia’s Death by Anne Sexton

for Sylvia

O Sylvia, Sylvia,
with a dead box of stones and spoons,

with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in a tiny playroom,

with your mouth into the sheet,
into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,

(Sylvia, Sylvia
where did you go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about rasing potatoes
and keeping bees?)

what did you stand by,
just how did you lie down into?

Thief –
how did you crawl into,

crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,

the death we said we both outgrew,
the one we wore on our skinny breasts,

the one we talked of so often each time
we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,

the death that talked of analysts and cures,
the death that talked like brides with plots,

the death we drank to,
the motives and the quiet deed?

(In Boston
the dying
ride in cabs,
yes death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)

O Sylvia, I remember the sleepy drummer
who beat on our eyes with an old story,

how we wanted to let him come
like a sadist or a New York fairy

to do his job,
a necessity, a window in a wall or a crib,

and since that time he waited
under our heart, our cupboard,

and I see now that we store him up
year after year, old suicides

and I know at the news of your death
a terrible taste for it, like salt,

(And me,
me too.
And now, Sylvia,
you again
with death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)

And I say only
with my arms stretched out into that stone place,

what is your death
but an old belonging,

a mole that fell out
of one of your poems?

(O friend,
while the moon’s bad,
and the king’s gone,
and the queen’s at her wit’s end
the bar fly ought to sing!)

O tiny mother,
you too!
O funny duchess!
O blonde thing!

Nocturne, Virginia Hamilton Adair

Draw the hour
dark as a bruise

where neon shopfronts
jerk and implore

on-off, arrow-arrow
enter me, like any whore.

On streets of soot and stain
the first brushes of rain

daub jewels and holocausts
through violet exhausts

and the wet deepens like a dream
while souls in stereo

ferry the black and fiery stream.

It’s depressing to find out that none of her books are available in this city (or maybe I just haven’t found them?) because I quite like this. I’m curious towards her other poems.