2011 POETRY SELECTIONS
“London” by William Blake, 1794
“Chicago” by Carl Sandburg, 1916
“The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats, 1920
“Above the City” by James Laughlin, 1947
“United Fruit Co.” by Pablo Neruda, 1950
“A Supermarket in California” by Allen Ginsberg, 1955
“Bukit Timah, Singapore” by Lee Tzu Pheng, 1980
“Nothing’s Changed” by Tatamkhulu Afrika, 1990
“November in the Former DDR” by Tomas Tranströmer, 1997
“London”, 1794 William Blake (1757-1827) Watch an animated reading of the poem here
I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow, A mark in every face I meet, Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man, 5 In every Infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear:
How the Chimney-sweeper's cry Every blackning Church appalls, 10 And the hapless Soldier's sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most, thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlot’s curse Blasts the new born Infant's tear, 15 And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
“Chicago”, 1916 Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) Watch a Poetry Out Loud reading of the poem here
Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders: 5
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to 10 kill again.
And they tell me that you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who 15 sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on 20 job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded, 25 Shoveling, Wrecking, Planning, Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with 30 white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle, 35
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing! Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of
Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog 40 Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation
“The Second Coming”, 19201 William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) Watch an animated reading of the poem here
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart, the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 5 The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 10 The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 15 Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 20 And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
1 In 1920, the poem was published in The Dial with alternate lines: (13) “Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;” and (17) “Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.”
“Above the City”, 1947 James Laughlin (1914-1997)
You know our office on the 18th floor of the Salmon Tower looks
right out on the
Empire State and it just happened 5 we were there finishing up some
late invoices on
a new book that Saturday morning when a bomber roared through the 10
mist and crashed
flames poured from the windows into the drifting clouds and sirens
screamed down in 15
the streets below it was unearthly but you know the strangest thing
we realized that 20
none of us were much surprised be- cause we'd always known that those
two paragons of progress sooner or later would per- 25 form before our eyes this demon-
stration of their true relationship.
“United Fruit Co.”, 1950 Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) Watch the 1981 Belgium concert version of the poem, sung in Spanish, here
When the trumpet sounded, everything on earth was prepared and Jehovah distributed the world to Coca Cola Inc., Anaconda, Ford Motors and other entities: 5 The Fruit Company Inc. reserved the juiciest for itself, the central coast of my land, the sweet waist of America.
It re-baptized the lands 10 "Banana Republics" and on the sleeping dead, on the restless heroes who'd conquered greatness, liberty and flags, 15 it founded a comic opera: it alienated free wills, gave crowns of Caesar as gifts, unsheathed jealousy, attracted the dictatorship of the flies, 20 Trujillo flies, Tachos flies, Carías flies, Martínez flies, Ubico flies, flies soppy with humble blood and marmalade drunken flies that buzz 25 around common graves, circus flies, learned flies adept at tyranny.
With the bloodthirsty flies came the Fruit Company, 30 amassed coffee and fruit in ships which put to sea like overloaded trays with the treasures from our sunken lands.
Meanwhile, the Indians fall 35 into the sugared depths of the harbors and are buried in the morning mists; a corpse rolls, a thing without name, a discarded number, 40 a bunch of rotten fruit thrown on the garbage heap.
“A Supermarket in California”, 1955 Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) Listen to Ginsberg’s reading of it here
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full 5 of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price 10 bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier. 15
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights
out in the houses, we'll both be lonely. 20
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?25
“Bukit Timah, Singapore”, 1980 Lee Tzu Pheng (b. 1946)
This highway I know, the only way into the city where the muddy canal goes These are the sides of coarse grasses where the schoolboys stumble in early morning 5 wet-staining their white shoes.
This is the way the city is fed men, machines, flushed out of their short dreams and suburban holes 10 to churn down this waiting gullet. They flow endlessly this way from dawn, before sky opens, to the narrow glare of noon and evening’s slow closing. 15
Under the steaming morning, ambition flashes by in a new car: the reluctant salesman faced with another day of selling his pride hunches over the lambretta, swerving 20 from old farmer with fruit-heavy basket. The women back from market remark that this monsoon will be bad for the price of vegetables: their loitering children, too small for school, 25 learn the value of five cents, ten cents, from hunger and these market days.
All morning the tired buses whine their monotonous route, drag from stop to stop, 30 disgorge schoolchildren, pale-faced clerks, long-suffering civil servants, pretty office girls, to feed the megalopolitan appetite.
This highway I know, 35 the only way out of the city: the same highway under the moon, the same people under the sea-green of lamps newly turned on at evening.
One day there will be tall buildings 40 here, where the green trees reach for the narrow canal. The holes where the restless sleepers are will be neat, boxed up in ten-stories. Life will be orderly, comfortable, 45 exciting, occasionally, at the new nightclubs.
I wonder what that old farmer would say if he lived to come this way
“Nothing’s Changed”, c. 1990 Tatamkhulu Afrika (1920-2002) Watch an interview about life in District Six, Cape Town, South Africa here
Small round hard stones click under my heels, seeding grasses thrust bearded seeds into trouser cuffs, cans, 5 trodden on, crunch in tall, purple-flowering, amiable weeds.
District Six. No board says it is: 10 but my feet know, and my hands, and the skin about my bones, and the soft labouring of my lungs, and the hot, white, inwards turning 15 anger of my eyes.
Brash with glass, name flaring like a flag, it squats in the grass and weeds, 20 incipient Port Jackson trees: new, up-market, haute cuisine, guard at the gatepost, whites only inn.
No sign says it is: 25 but we know where we belong.
I press my nose to the clear panes, know, before I see them, there will be crushed ice white glass, 30 linen falls, the single rose.
Down the road, working man’s café sells bunny chows. 35 Take it with you, eat it at a plastic table’s top, wipe your fingers on your jeans, spit a little on the floor: it’s in the bone. 40
I back from the glass, boy again, leaving small mean O of small mean mouth. 45 Hands burn for a stone, a bomb, to shiver down the glass. Nothing’s changed.
“November in the Former DDR”, 1997 Tomas Tranströmer (b. 1931) Translated by Robin Fulton Watch Tranströmer receive the Lifetime Recognition Award here
The almighty cyclop’s-eye clouded over and the grass shook itself in the coal dust.
Beaten black and blue by the night’s dreams we board the train that stops at every station 5 and lays eggs.
Almost silent, The clang of the church bells’ buckets fetching water. And someone’s inexorable cough 10 scolding everything and everyone.
A stone idol moves its lips: it’s the city. Ruled by iron-hard misunderstandings among kiosk attendants butchers 15 metal-workers naval officers iron-hard misunderstandings, academics!
How sore my eyes are! They’ve been reading by the faint glimmer of the glow-worm lamps. 20
November offers caramels of granite. Unpredictable! Like world history laughing at the wrong place.
But we hear the clang 25 of the church bells’ buckets fetching water every Wednesday —is it Wednesday?— so much for our Sundays!
