6.29.16

I'm feeling rather depressed and cynical as of late, and was looking for some other expressions of disillusionment and disappointment. I looked for this, and as when you are seeking something you find it everywhere I was not disappointed in that respect. Enter Philip Larkin. Borrowing the words of poetryfoundation.org, "McClatchy notes Larkin wrote "in clipped, lucid stanzas, about the failures and remorse of age, about stunted lives and spoiled desires." 

MCMXIV

Phillip Larkin



Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring:
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat’s restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word – the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

This one came to me via email, the part that hits me hardest is "Big ideas get me nowhere". I also like how the end dangles sans answers. 

Breaking Spring

Matt Heart

seems like a good way to say
I spent all last week feeling helpless
and talking about it in terms of not being

Why can’t compassion change our lives
even half so completely as a suicide bomber,
or half so immediately as a natural disaster

Big ideas get me nowhere, so
the fact that breaking spring feels better
than cracking up is at least a start

toward a walk through Washington Park,
its trees in pink blossom, its white-yellow-purple
Tomorrow I will talk about Frankenstein

in bed and then I will talk about it with people
who are sleeping I will say that it’s a book
about artistic responsibility I will

say it’s alive It’s alive And some number
of eyes will stare back at me without believing
any of it matters, or without believing

it matters for them And what can I say
to convince them I have only my love
to recommend it beyond what it already is

My suspect credibility upon the rockets
of birds, the soft parts of people, the oceans’
inevitable, cyclical weeping Who has time
for poetry has more time than they deserve

If anyone has suggestions for searching for poetry based on topic that doesn't involve the troves of amateur post-your-own sites out there, I'd love to know it. Often I have a hankering for something to echo a specific emotion but have no idea how to find it.