On the metro to work, I've been reading Amy Clampitt's second collection, What the Light Was Like. Clampitt was an intense poet who published five collections, her first one at the age of 63 ( http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/44 ) Tasty, very tasty, but not afraid to be cerebral, not at all. Shades of Marianne Moore. I type below two poems from that collection.
(About linebreaks, btw: I have a friend who has a nice trick. He keeps a paper below each line as he reads a poem, so he can see the line by itself and try to guess how the next one will turn. It's a good way to learn the integrity of the line, to see the strength of a line by itself, and I've adopted the practice myself. It works remarkably with Clampitt's poems-- of course you'd have to print out the poem first...) WITNESS An ordinary evening in Wisconsin seen from a Greyhound bus--mute aisles of merchandise the sole inhabitants of the half-darkened Five and Ten, the tables of the single lit cafe awash with unarticulated pathos, the surface membrane of the inadvertently transparent instant when no one is looking: outside town the barns, their red gone dark with sundown, withhold the shudder of a warped terrain-- the castle rocks above, tree-clogged ravines already submarine with nightfall, flocks (like dark sheep) of toehold junipers, the lucent arms of birches : purity without a mirror, other than a mind bound elsewhere, to tell how it looks. A BAROQUE SUNBURST struck through such a dome as might await a groaning Michelangelo, finding only alders and barnacles and herring gulls at their usual squabbles, sheds on the cove's voluted silver the aloof skin tones of a Crivelli angel: a region, a weather and a point of view as yet unsettled, save for the lighthouse like a Venetian campanile, from whose nightlong reflected angelus you might suppose the coast of Maine had Europe on the brain or in its bones, as though it were a kind of sickness. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. Make Yahoo! your home page http://us.click.yahoo.com/dpRU5A/wUILAA/yQLSAA/yqIolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -- You are encouraged to post poetry, respond critically to the poems circulated and participate in discussions. To post, email your message to [email protected] OR post online at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTPoets/post/ Tell friends to subscribe to ZESTPoets by sending a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED], OR, if they have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTPoets/join/ ---theZESTcommunity-------------- [1] ZESTCurrent: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCurrent/ [2] ZESTEconomics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTEconomics/ [3] ZESTGlobal: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/ [4] ZESTMedia: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTMedia/ [5] ZESTPoets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTPoets/ [6] ZESTCaste: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/ [7] ZESTAlternative: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTAlternative/ [8] TalkZEST: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TalkZEST/ --- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTPoets/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
