Literary Poetry Nominations • January 2015

[sun surfer]

Happy new year; I hope 2015 harbingers great things for us all!

Help us select what the MR Literary Club will read for January.

The nominations will run for four days until 5 January. Then, a separate voting poll will begin where the month's selection will be decided.


The category for this month is:

Poetry


In order for a work to be included in the poll it needs four nominations - the original nomination plus three supporting.

Each participant has four nominations to use. You can nominate a new work for consideration or you can support (second, third or fourth) a work that has already been nominated by another person.

To nominate a work just post a message with your nomination. If you are the first to nominate a work, it's always nice to provide an abstract to the work so others may consider their level of interest.


What is literature for the purposes of this club? A superior work of lasting merit that enriches the mind. Often it is important, challenging, critically acclaimed. It may be from ancient times to today; it may be from anywhere in the world; it may be obscure or famous, short or long; it may be a story, a novel, a play, a poem, an essay or another written form. If you are unsure if a work would be considered literature, just ask!


The floor is now open!

*

Nominations now closed. Final nominations:


Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth - Fully nominated

Spoiler:

In favour- fantasyfan, Bookpossum, Billi, Bookworm_Girl


1798


From fantasyfan:

This was the trailblazing poetry anthology that ushered in the Romantic Literary movement in England and initiated what some regard as the greatest explosion of great poetry in the language. It includes Coleridge's justly famous "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Wordsworth's profound "Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey"--both remarkable masterpieces.

It is available free from Project Gutenberg.

Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot - Fully nominated

Spoiler:

In favour- Bookpossum, Billi, fantasyfan, Bookworm_Girl


From Kobo:

Four Quartets is the culminating achievement of T.S. Eliot's career as a poet. While containing some of the most musical and unforgettable passages in twentieth-century poetry, its four parts, 'Burnt Norton', 'East Coker', 'The Dry Salvages' and 'Little Gidding', present a rigorous meditation on the spiritual, philosophical and personal themes which preoccupied the author. It was the way in which a private voice was heard to speak for the concerns of an entire generation, in the midst of war and doubt, that confirmed it as an enduring masterpiece.


From Bookpossum:

Not very long (about 35 pages in my paper copy) but very deep and immensely rewarding. For those who do not know this work, here is a small sample from The Dry Salvages:

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes - Fully nominated

Spoiler:

In favour- paola, Bookpossum, sun surfer, desertblues


From paola:

Ted Hughes Birthday Letters: these are the letters written "to" Silvia Plath after her death.

Pass Thru Fire: The Collected Lyrics by Lou Reed - Fully nominated

Spoiler:

In favour- Hamlet53, sun surfer, Billi, desertblues


Kindle edition link.


From Amazon:

Containing a body of work that spans more than three decades, Pass Thru Fire is a stunning collection of the lyrics of an American original. Through his many incarnations-from proto punk to glam rocker to elder statesman of the avant garde-Lou Reed’s work has maintained an undeniable vividness and raw beauty, fueled by precise character studies and rendered with an admirable shot of moral ambiguity. Beginning with his formative days in the Velvet Underground and continuing through his remarkable solo career-albums like Transformer, Berlin, New York, Magic and Loss, and Ecstasy-Pass Thru Fire is crucial to an appreciation of Lou Reed, not only as a consummate underground musician, but as one of the truly significant poets of our time.

Canto General by Pablo Neruda - Fully nominated

Spoiler:

In favour- Billi, desertblues, sun surfer, Hamlet53


Canto General by Pablo Neruda (or parts of it)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Neruda

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems by Michael Ondaatje - 3

Spoiler:

In favour- ccowie, sun surfer, Hamlet53


From Amazon:

Michael Ondaatje's sprawling sequence of verse interspersed with poetic prose exposes the persona poem as one of poetry's surest paths to honesty. Through unsettlingly precise detail and unsentimental empathy, the character of Billy the Kid is recreated-and revisited-in all its brutality and splendor. Ondaatje's unflinching commitment to honesty yields a persona that is as vibrant and realized as possible, resulting in a series of confessions that range from disturbing to revelatory.

The image, consistently startling, graphic and discomforting, carries the speaker through the entire sequence. Whereas most imagery depends on the eye for effect, Ondaatje utilizes all five senses throughout the book. We taste wine "so fine/it was like drinking ether," we feel Pat Garret's "oiled rifle" against Maxwell's cheek and hear it fire beside his ear, "leaving a powder scar on Maxwell's face that stayed with him all his life." We smell the smoke in Garret's shirt and taste the nicotine in his mouth. At times, the stunned silence of Ondaatje's unremitting narrative conjures a hush so palpable that we can "listen to deep buried veins in our palms." It doesn't take long for The Collected Works of Billy the Kid to immerse the reader in its own unique world, accessible now only through words and photographs.

Most memorable, though, are the intensely graphic images that sprout from the page throughout the book. The chicken digging for a vein in the dying Gregory's neck, the warts in Billy the Kid's throat "breaking through veins like pieces of long glass tubing," the blood caked in Tom O'Folliard's "hair, arms, shoulders, everywhere." All these paint an unmistakable landscape of a bleak and desolate New Mexico in the 1880's, a scene so haunted that even "the sun turned into a pair of hands" and pulled out hairs from Billy the Kid's head which, we're told later, is "smaller than a rat." Not one potentially enlivening detail is overlooked; not one square inch of landscape or action escapes the reader's view.

Ondaatje's ambitious project demonstrates that the recipe for great writing is precise detail compounded by believable emotion, a recipe he follows to the letter. Ondaatje executes these two devices so effectively at times that a kind of piercing, revelatory insight emerges periodically. Magical disclosures such as the characterization of Pat Garrett as one who "became frightened of flowers because they grew so slowly he couldn't tell what they planned to do," help to fully realize both the character of Billy the Kid and the times in which he lived, and establish Ondaatje's book as perhaps one of the greatest attempts at persona poetry in the 20th century.

[fantasyfan]

I'll go with a poetry anthology I proposed two years ago. I nominate Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (1798) by Coleridge and Wordsworth.

This was the trailblazing poetry anthology that ushered in the Romantic Literary movement in England and initiated what some regard as the greatest explosion of great poetry in the language. It includes Coleridge's justly famous "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Wordsworth's profound "Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey"--both remarkable masterpieces.

It is available free from Project Gutenberg.

[Bookpossum]

I'll second Lyrical Ballads.

I would like to nominate T S Eliot's Four Quartets. From Kobo:

Four Quartets is the culminating achievement of T.S. Eliot's career as a poet. While containing some of the most musical and unforgettable passages in twentieth-century poetry, its four parts, 'Burnt Norton', 'East Coker', 'The Dry Salvages' and 'Little Gidding', present a rigorous meditation on the spiritual, philosophical and personal themes which preoccupied the author. It was the way in which a private voice was heard to speak for the concerns of an entire generation, in the midst of war and doubt, that confirmed it as an enduring masterpiece.

Not very long (about 35 pages in my paper copy) but very deep and immensely rewarding. For those who do not know this work, here is a small sample from The Dry Salvages:

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

[Billi]

I third Lyrical Ballads and second Four Quartets

[fantasyfan]

I'll third Four Quartets

[Bookworm_Girl]

I will fourth Lyrical Ballads and also fourth Four Quartets.

[desertblues]

A happy New Year to all!
I see that the two nominations, of fantasyfan and Bookpossum, have four votes now, so there is nothing for me to vote on.....

I hope to come up with something before the 5th of january. I'll give you some insight in my quest till now

Spoiler:

As for poetry; in my heart, I would like to examine the great epic poems in this worlds history. A short account of my (so far fruitless) search for a contribution to the poetry of this month's selection for the Literary Book club of Mobile Read.

At first I thought of the great Journey to the West, the Mahabharata, Beowulf and so on. For practical reasons this won’t work…..too long or too recently brought forward, as is the case in the Chanson of Roland.
Then I had a look at the medieval poetry of Europe, for example the story of Reynard The Fox, a satire on contemporary (medieval) society, but this is also too long.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/...eynard-The-Fox
http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=340003
Next the famous Nibelungen Lied, the 12th century tale of the dragon slayer Siegfried, which I can strongly recommend for anyone who has the time to read it. Wagner, the great composer, wrote a cycle of four operas around this epic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibelungenlied
http://www.authorama.com/nibelungenlied-1.html

For the next modern poets I can’t seem to find an (affordable) (e)book:
In the Netherlands there are some great modern poets, for example Lucebert who is known as the great poet/painter of the international Cobra movement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucebert
And there is Leo Vroman, a Dutchman and famous hematologist/poet who emigrates to the USA and becomes an American citizen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Vroman
One of the African poets I admire is the South African Ingrid Jonker (1933-1965), who wrote in Afrikaans but is widely translated. She wrote the beautiful Black Butterflies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Jonker
And the Chilean Pablo Neruda. I had the opportunity to visit one of his houses in Chili and that gave me some valuable insights in his poetry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Neruda

I will keep on searching……

[paola]

I am really all over the place, still only half way through the Noli and with Under fire to be even picked up... and until mid February it looks quite messy (building works at home, which obviously take longer than expected etc etc). Yet I will venture with a nomination, Ted Hughes Birthday Letters: these are the letters written "to" Silvia Plath after her death. Is this desperately romantic, or cynical, or what? I do not know, but I always wanted to read them, though never managed to do this.

Not my favorite category I'll admit. So, as Monty Python often said, now for something completely different, Pass Thru Fire: The Collected Lyrics by Lou Reed.

Kindle edition link.


From Amazon:

Containing a body of work that spans more than three decades, Pass Thru Fire is a stunning collection of the lyrics of an American original. Through his many incarnations-from proto punk to glam rocker to elder statesman of the avant garde-Lou Reed’s work has maintained an undeniable vividness and raw beauty, fueled by precise character studies and rendered with an admirable shot of moral ambiguity. Beginning with his formative days in the Velvet Underground and continuing through his remarkable solo career-albums like Transformer, Berlin, New York, Magic and Loss, and Ecstasy-Pass Thru Fire is crucial to an appreciation of Lou Reed, not only as a consummate underground musician, but as one of the truly significant poets of our time.

No offense taken if objections are raised that this is not a literary work.

[Bookpossum]

I second Birthday Letters - something I have been meaning to read for a while, so thanks Paola!

Hamlet, after a quick look at the link you gave, I have to say that for me it doesn't qualify as literature. (That may well be because it's not my area of music, so I'm probably biased!)

[sun surfer]

I'll third Birthday Letters.

In looking at the goodreads editions for Lyrical Ballads, I noticed that different versions are very different in length ranging from under 100 pages to over 500. Maybe someone can enlighten us as to why but if this does win we might all want to make sure we're getting the same version.

Very interesting nomination Hamlet. In a way it's weird that we all mostly only know about each other through our reading interests, but I like the Velvet Underground and was actually on a Warhol mini-kick in 2014 from another source which led me to watch Chelsea Girls that featured Nico who fronted with the Velvet Underground some (and of course Warhol was also very associated with the band itself) and that got me back into listening to a bunch of their stuff that I hadn't before even though I've always liked them - Pale Blue Eyes I've always really liked; also Venus in Furs and Reed's Walk on the Wild Side, and one of my all-time favourites is Reed's Perfect Day - and so last year I heard a lot of their other more obscure stuff. I lived close by the Chelsea Hotel for a very short while but way after its heyday unfortunately. Anyway, this book is 600 pages long according to Amazon! I don't know if the book counts as literature and I don't expect it to win but I'll second it in solidarity.

Originally Posted by sun surfer

I'll third Birthday Letters.

In looking at the goodreads editions for Lyrical Ballads, I noticed that different versions are very different in length ranging from under 100 pages to over 500. Maybe someone can enlighten us as to why but if this does win we might all want to make sure we're getting the same version.

Very interesting nomination Hamlet. In a way it's weird that we all mostly only know about each other through our reading interests, but I like the Velvet Underground and was actually on a Warhol mini-kick in 2014 from another source which led me to watch Chelsea Girls that featured Nico who fronted with the Velvet Underground some (and of course Warhol was also very associated with the band itself) and that got me back into listening to a bunch of their stuff that I hadn't before even though I've always liked them - Pale Blue Eyes I've always really liked; also Venus in Furs and Reed's Walk on the Wild Side, and one of my all-time favourites is Reed's Perfect Day - and so last year I heard a lot of their other more obscure stuff. I lived close by the Chelsea Hotel for a very short while but way after its heyday unfortunately. Anyway, this book is 600 pages long according to Amazon! I don't know if the book counts as literature and I don't expect it to win but I'll second it in solidarity.

Thanks. I doubt it will win myself. I never had the chance to see the VU, but did see Lou Reed once as a solo artist. Yeah, the band started out as the house band for The Factory. Nico was listed as chanteuse on The Velvet Underground & Nico album.

[Bookpossum]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

I'll third Birthday Letters.

In looking at the goodreads editions for Lyrical Ballads, I noticed that different versions are very different in length ranging from under 100 pages to over 500. Maybe someone can enlighten us as to why but if this does win we might all want to make sure we're getting the same version.

fantasyfan nominated the original 1798 edition, which is free on Project Gutenberg. Looking at my e-book which I downloaded last time it was nominated, it is 151 pages long.

Over to fantasyfan on which edition he wants to nominate.

[Billi]

I third Pass Thru Fire: The Collected Lyrics by Lou Reed.

[desertblues]

I'll fourth Birthday Letters and Pass Thru Fire.....