Seeing It Out With Good Friends

A Song for New Year's Eve * William Cullen Bryant
Stay yet, my friends, a moment stay— Stay till the good old year, So long companion of our way, Shakes hands, and leaves us here. Oh stay, oh stay, One little hour, and then away. The year, whose hopes were high and strong, Has now no hopes to wake; Yet one hour more of jest and song For his familiar sake. Oh stay, oh stay, One mirthful hour, and then away. The kindly year, his liberal hands Have lavished all his store. And shall we turn from where he stands, Because he gives no more? Oh stay, oh stay, One grateful hour, and then away. Days brightly came and calmly went, While yet he was our guest; How cheerfully the week was spent! How sweet the seventh day's rest! Oh stay, oh stay, One golden hour, and then away. Dear friends were with us, some who sleep Beneath the coffin-lid: What pleasant memories we keep Of all they said and did! Oh stay, oh stay, One tender hour, and then away. Even while we sing, he smiles his last, And leaves our sphere behind. The good old year is with the past; Oh be the new as kind! Oh stay, oh stay, One parting strain, and then away. -more from William Cullen Bryant

To My Faithful Readers...

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People of the Year

To the Garbage Collectors in Bloomington, Indiana, the First Pickup of the New Year

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Philip Appleman

(the way bed is in winter, like an aproned lap,

like furry mittens,

like childhood crouching under tables)

The Ninth Day of Xmas, in the morning black

outside our window: clattering cans, the whir

of a hopper, shouts, a whistle, move on ...

I see them in my warm imagination

the way I’ll see them later in the cold,

heaving the huge cans and running

(running!) to the next house on the street.

My vestiges of muscle stir

uneasily in their percale cocoon:

what moves those men out there, what

drives them running to the next house and the next?

Halfway back to dream, I speculate:

The Social Weal? “Let’s make good old

Bloomington a cleaner place

to live in—right, men? Hup, tha!”

Healthy Competition? “Come on, boys,

let’s burn up that route today and beat those dudes

on truck thirteen!”

Enlightened Self-Interest? “Another can,

another dollar—don’t slow down, Mac, I’m puttin’

three kids through Princeton?”

Or something else?

Terror?

A half hour later, dawn comes edging over

Clark Street: layers of color, laid out like

a flattened rainbow—red, then yellow, green,

and over that the black-and-blue of night

still hanging on. Clark Street maples wave

their silhouettes against the red, and through

the twiggy trees, I see a solid chunk

of garbage truck, and stick-figures of men,

like windup toys, tossing little cans—

and running.

All day they’ll go like that, till dark again,

and all day, people fussing at their desks,

at hot stoves, at machines, will jettison

tin cans, bare evergreens, damp Kleenex, all

things that are Caesar’s.

O garbage men,

the New Year greets you like the Old;

after this first run you too may rest

in beds like great warm aproned laps

and know that people everywhere have faith:

putting from them all things of this world,

they confidently bide your second coming.

 

-Explore more poetry from Philip Appleman

On Our Reflection of The Year





New Year's Poem

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Margaret Avison

The Christmas twigs crispen and needles rattle

Along the window-ledge.

A solitary pearl

Shed from the necklace spilled at last week’s party

Lies in the suety, snow-luminous plainness

Of morning, on the window-ledge beside them.

And all the furniture that circled stately

And hospitable when these rooms were brimmed

With perfumes, furs, and black-and-silver

Crisscross of seasonal conversation, lapses

Into its previous largeness.

I remember

Anne’s rose-sweet gravity, and the stiff grave

Where cold so little can contain;

I mark the queer delightful skull and crossbones

Starlings and sparrows left, taking the crust,

And the long loop of winter wind

Smoothing its arc from dark Arcturus down

To the bricked corner of the drifted courtyard,

And the still window-ledge.

Gentle and just pleasure

It is, being human, to have won from space

This unchill, habitable interior

Which mirrors quietly the light

Of the snow, and the new year.

-from Always Now,
 Vol I



Goodbye, Old Friend

The Old Year   * John Clare
The Old Year's gone away To nothingness and night: We cannot find him all the day Nor hear him in the night: He left no footstep, mark or place In either shade or sun: The last year he'd a neighbour's face, In this he's known by none. All nothing everywhere: Mists we on mornings see Have more of substance when they're here And more of form than he. He was a friend by every fire, In every cot and hall-- A guest to every heart's desire, And now he's nought at all. Old papers thrown away, Old garments cast aside, The talk of yesterday, Are things identified; But time once torn away No voices can recall: The eve of New Year's Day Left the Old Year lost to all. -Explore More Of John Clare

Les Mis...



 

 

 

It was so good I can't even talk about it. It was beyond analysis....

 

 Just amazing!

 

Poetry Points:

10/10

 

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Target, Ice Cream, and Oh Yeah...

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To The Year -

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Your Very Own Manuscript...

Let No Man

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Jorge Luis Borges

Let no one reduce to tears or reproach
This statement of the mastery of God,
Who, with magnificent irony, gave
Me at once both books and night

Of this city of books He pronounced rulers
These lightless eyes, who can only
Peruse in libraries of dreams
The insensible paragraphs that yield

With every new dawn. Vainly does the day
Lavish on them its infinite books,
Arduous as the arduous manuscripts
Which at Alexandria did perish.

Of hunger and thirst (a Greek story tells us)
Dies a king amidst fountains and gardens;
I aimlessly weary at the confines
Of this tall and deep blind library.

Encyclopedias, atlases, the East
And the West, centuries, dynasties
Symbols, cosmos and cosmogonies
Do walls proffer, but pointlessly.

Slow in my shadow, I the hollow shade
Explore with my indecisive cane;
To think I had imagined Paradise
In the form of such a library.

Something, certainly not termed
Fate, rules on such things;
Another had received in blurry
Afternoons both books and shadow.

Wandering through these slow corridors
I often feel with a vague and sacred dread
That I am another, the dead one, who must
Have trodden the same steps at the same time.

Which of the two is now writing this poem
Of a plural I and of a single shadow?
How important is the word that names me
If the anathema is one and indivisible?

Groussac or Borges, I see this darling
World deform and extinguish
To a pale, uncertain ash
Resembling sleep and oblivion

-Explore More of Jorge Luis Borges

On Resolve...

This year The Poetrycooker has Three New Year's Resolutions...

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1. To smile at least once at everyone I see - every day.
2. To do all things with passion and bravery.
3. To actively take part in my own happiness and  to be willing to admit that it is okay to do that.
4. To inspire these three things in others.

So, those are my resolutions...what are yours?

Just Them Take You There -

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What's In Your Heaven?

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“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

Because You're Beautiful.

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On Your Wonder

Acrobat *  Elise Paschen
The night you were conceived we balanced underneath a tent, amazed at the air-marveler, who, hand-over-hand, seized the stars, then braved the line to carry home a big-top souvenir umbrella. Earth-bound a year, you dare gravity, sliding from the couch to table. Mornings, on tiptoe, stretching fingers, you grab Saturn, Venus and the moons raining down from the sky of ceiling. -Explore more of Elsie Paschen Elise Paschen, with her mother Maria Tallchief

On The Moment You Realize...

Not the Song, but After

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Nicholas Friedman

 

Now everywhere the pageantry of youth

is on display:

The squeal of bike chains spinning through the gray

plays fugue to puddle-froth;

The punctual blitz of hyacinths in April

ushers spring

with lavender dripped from the upturned wing

of wind-swept Gabriel.

A youngish pair walks wired at the arms—

she casually ribbing

him, he lightly brushing her breast, jibbing

their step to spare the worms

stranded along the road. Too soon, their laughter

rises and goes

drifting toward silence. And now the young man knows

love’s not the song, but after—

like the mute, remembered chorus of the rain

that stains the walk

long after falling, or the lifeless stalk

still hoisting its head of grain.

Uneasy now, she loosens from his hand.

Their dark familiars

stare back, reflected by the passing cars,

with speechless reprimand.

Before the chill, each chartered hell grows hotter,

yet every burn

will teach him how to run—and how to turn

her wine back into water.

 

-from PN Review
Subscribe Here

 

 

On Originality

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On The Things We Did This Year...

 

 

A Good Year Down *    by Jeni Olin
New York will not accept me at this weight & Mothers of the disappeared don’t come ‘round Here anymore. I said you’re housekeeping aren’t you With Lipton tea stains & the Establishment Seriously attracted. He said: No I’m turning down the beds. Now it’s my turn In bed with a beautiful American rage Like brunettes with night sweats. My love Semiprecious & stoned In the shoulder season we hold on Though I am dismal & have no dope Siphoned off behind pink Easter I fake an optimism Just to breathe—Just thinking of him for once & The Wandering Jew that ate my sunshine But I know flowers like Zorro was my dad Those garlands of thin hissing lasers So with the “sexy isotherms Of semiotics” we meet again at the Kiev To check chemistry. They bring the lights Down on those cherry pies & like cryogenics It sorta works. This time my love The salt doll of night egging us on Straight to the zeppelin mooring With she-has-a-bit-of-the-neardamned-in-her- Like-when-a-cloud-dies construed as Well, all right, I’ve seen worse.  More Olin on Amazon

A Clean Slate Coming

In Memoriam, [Ring out, wild bells]   * Lord Alfred Tennyson
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind. Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws. Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes But ring the fuller minstrel in. Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good. Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be.  -Explre More ALT Products on Amazon

Just Close Your Eyes And. . .



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Watch it Instantly on Amazon

Turbo

 

Looks like it's going to be another winner for Dreamworks...

 

 If the studio makes good on the promise  made in this adorable tralier- the race between Dreamworks uber-rival Pixar is on again!

 

 

 

Across the Sky

I only just found out that Adrienne Rich died in March. She is has always been one of my favorite poets. This post is for her.

Planetarium

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Adrienne Rich

Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750—1848)
astronomer, sister of William; and others.

 

A woman in the shape of a monster

a monster in the shape of a woman

the skies are full of them

a woman ‘in the snow

among the Clocks and instruments

or measuring the ground with poles’

in her 98 years to discover

8 comets

she whom the moon ruled

like us

levitating into the night sky

riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there

doing penance for impetuousness

ribs chilled

in those spaces of the mind

An eye,

‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’

from the mad webs of Uranusborg

encountering the NOVA

every impulse of light exploding

from the core

as life flies out of us

Tycho whispering at last

‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’

What we see, we see

and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain

and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar

heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse

pouring in from Taurus

I am bombarded yet I stand

I have been standing all my life in the

direct path of a battery of signals

the most accurately transmitted most

untranslatable language in the universe

I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-

luted that a light wave could take 15

years to travel through me And has

taken I am an instrument in the shape

of a woman trying to translate pulsations

into images for the relief of the body

and the reconstruction of the mind.

 

-from The Fact of a Doorframe

On Making It There

New Year

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Bei Dao

 

Translated By David Hinton and Yanbing Chen

 

 

a child carrying flowers walks toward the new year

a conductor tattooing darkness

listens to the shortest pause

hurry a lion into the cage of music

hurry stone to masquerade as a recluse

moving in parallel nights

who's the visitor? when the days all

tip from nests and fly down roads

the book of failure grows boundless and deep

each and every moment's a shortcut

I follow it through the meaning of the East

returning home, closing death's door

-from Landscape Over Zero

On Pulling a Wake

 

Bridge & Swimmer

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Forrest Gander

Our eye goes past the hieroglyphic tree to the swimmer

carving a wake in the water. And almost to the railroad bridge

from which the swimmer might have dived. Then, as though

come to the end of its tether,

our gaze returns, pulling toward the blemish

on the surface of the print. An L-shaped chemical dribble,

it sabotages the scene’s transparence

and siphons off its easy appeal.

At the same time, the blemish

joins together the realms

of seer and swimmer

in our experience of plunging

into and out of the image.

-from Eye Against Eye

Introducing Chloé!

This is an Chloé, (she's an asterisk). Chloé is our resident tour guide here at The Poetrycooker and on our new page - Chloé's World, she will be sharing some of our favorite places from around the web!

Did you know that Chloé has made an appearance in nearly every post since The Poetrycooker started back in September 2011? I think it's time she got her own page, don't you?

Chloé has a pretty cool trick up her sleeve -  click on her anytime she appears and and she will direct you to the source for each piece of material!

 

Let's Trip Out

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On The Fearful Ending

Thomas Hardy wrote "The Darkling Thrush" on December 30, 1900 to express his feelings about the close of the nineteenth century. The Darkling Thrush * Thomas Hardy
I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter's dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires. The land's sharp features seemed to be The Century's corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I. At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware. -Explore More of Thomas Hardy

On the Closing of a Year

Burning the Old Year

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Naomi Shihab Nye

 

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,

lists of vegetables, partial poems.

Orange swirling flame of days,

so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.

I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,

only the things I didn’t do

crackle after the blazing dies.

 

-from Words Under The Words

Because You're Going To Make It

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You're Not Alone

Psalm * by Jonah Winter
Emptying the trash, going to sleep at night, just daring to speak in any language to anyone: Our prayers are answered, even if the words we say are just dreamt-of admissions of love to strangers, unsent letters shoved away, forgotten, at dawn, like street lights turned off as the sky begins to gray above the black fields-- all of this is being written down somewhere. See. Even that ladder leaning up against the barn wants to make you feel better. See how easily the dew collects on its white slats, the way the morning hardly breathes? See that man who drinks himself to sleep, how his face is pressed against the kitchen table-- see how the light from his kitchen shines through the window of the old farmhouse? Somebody sees that light.  -from Amnesia

Before You Look...

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“A glance leaves an imprint on anything it's dwelt on.”
 
 

― Joseph Brodsky

Merry Christmas my Loves!

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Caroling! Caroling!

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Watch Elf Right Now On Amazon