Two Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli poems translated by Mike Stocks

Kiddiwinkies

Just listen to a mother talking crap:
the brat she drops has barely hit the ground
before she's bragging he's the best around,
and if you disagree you get a slap.

He knows who's who, his gifts run deep, he's full
of talk, he's right as rain, he stands apart---
he's lovely as a finished work of art
and packed with wonders, is this miracle!

In fact he'll be an ugly little monkey,
a stupid, floppy, whining, greedy critter
a dribbling stinking scabby nappy-shitter.

To mum, the gruntings of this tit-mad junkie
surpass the sweet songs of a West End name.
The mothers of this world are all the same.


The Life of Man

Nine months in a bog, then swaddling clothes
and sloppy kisses, rashes, big round tears,
a baby harness, baby walker, bows,
short trousers and a cap for several years,

and then begin the agonies of school,
the ABC, the pox, the six of the best,
the poo-poo in the pants, the ridicule,
the chilblains, measles, fevers on the chest;

then works arrives, the daily slog, the rent,
the fasts, the stretch inside, the government,
the hospitals, the debts to pay, the fucks...

The chaser to it all, on God's say-so,
(after summer's sun and winter's snow)
is death, and after death comes hell---life sucks.

Roberto Bolano poem

RESURRECTION

Poetry slips into dreams
like a diver in a lake.
Poetry, braver than anyone,
slips in and sinks
like lead
through a lake infinite as Loch Ness
or tragic and turbid as Lake Balaton.
Consider it from below:
a diver
innocent
covered in feathers
of will.
Poetry slips into dreams
like a diver who's dead
in the eyes of God.

Three pictures of Mandelstam

Ernest Fenollosa

Thus in all poetry a word is like a sun, with its corona and chromosphere; words crowd upon words, and enwrap each other in their luminous envelopes until sentences become clear, continuous light-bands.

My list of 20 poetry books that made me first fall in love with poetry

In one of Ron Silliman's recent links updates there was a posting for the above. Since looking at that I have found myself mentally compiling a list. Here it is (in no order, although the order tends to be fairly close to the order in which I read them, the first one I was 16 or 17):

-Dante "Inferno"
-Jim Carroll "Fear of Dreaming"
-Allen Ginsberg "Howl"
-Allen Ginsberg "Kaddish"
-Lawrence Ferlinghetti "A Coney Island of the Mind"
-Lawrence Ferlinghetti "A Far Rockaway of the Heart"
-Arthur Rimbaud "Illuminations"
-Arthur Rimbaud "A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat"
-Mina Loy "The Lost Lunar Baedeker"
-"Complete Poems of Hart Crane"
-Bob Kaufman "Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness"
-Gregory Corso "Long Live Man"
-"Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas"
-Federico Garcia Lorca "Poet in New York"
-Guillaume Apollinaire "Alcools"
-Andre Breton "Earthlight"
-"Selected Poems of Rene Char"
-"Selected Poems of Pierre Reverdy"
-"Collected Poems of Stephane Mallarme"
- Octavio Paz "Draft of Shadows"

I feel cheated. There are at least ten more books I can think of right off the top of my head that should be on here. The fact is that whenever I read a "miracle in words" I fall in love with poetry again.

Samuel Vasquez

To write poetry is to begin beyond all knowledge. One paints to see, one writes to hear. "One paints to know what painting is", one writes poetry to know what poetry is. The storyteller writes about what he knows, the poet writes to know. Poetry is the most extreme experience of language, and the requirement of maximum yield from the word takes place at the frontier where there is a tear in language itself.

Samuel Vasquez

Imagination is not an avoidance of reality. Imagination is a responsible (and committed) re-entry into reality, and in that re-entry the poet adds his poem to pre-existing reality making the poem a reality in itself.