LOVE POEMS OF CATULLUS ~

 

92 / 

Always, getting on my nerves,

always, making me look like a fool.

For all that, all her stubborn chatter,

the woman loves me.

How do I know?  Well, I see

that I do

          exactly the same

                                 myself:

I damn her, with all my heart,

yet, for the life of me, I love her.

translated by Cid Corman

_____________________

Love Poems of Catullus

beautiful poems translated by many

edited by Tynan Kogane

New Directions, 2023

New Directions Books

RE-READING LYLE GLAZIER ~

" You be Harry Glazier's boy, bean't ye?"

 

Sugaring Off

Easter vacation

  he tramps the Gutter Road

      from Gramp's to Uncle Maurice's

  where the whole family's sugaring

Lynn and Orman and Calvin

  trip metal caps off buckets

      under spiles

  draining the sugar bush

Merle bossing the gathering,

  tub slewing, team

      straining, bobsled runners

  grating on a ledge

Perry shoves another slab

  in the firebox

     "a gallon to the barrel, boys,

  get a move on!"

      Maurice tips the dipper, testing

In the kitchen Aunt Pluma

  boils down a batch for

      fancy sugar cakes:

  stars, hearts, scaled fish

Loyce and Thelma spoon snow

  from a dishpan into ie pie plates

      the thick glaze pulls at the fork

  "a little goes a long ways"

_________________________

Lyle Glazier

Prefatory Lyrics

Coffee House Press, 1991

___________________________________

It was the poet and editor Cid Corman

who had the great ear and tenacity to

promote, publish and persevere

so many fine back country poets —

be it Gary Snyder's early book of poems

Riprap, or Lorine Niedecker's entire workbook,

Theodore Enslin's musical memory, and gone into

the bushes forgotten Lyle Glazier's tramps in the sugar bush,

and this is a mere touching of the Corman radiance.

So few could restore that moment of lyrical movement

and visual care as Lyle Glazier works his tablet in

Prefatory Lyrics.

[ BA ]

KUSANO SHIMPEI ~

 

a while

gee. like trachoma.

what a lovely moon.

somewhere hereabouts fox is munching something eh.

zebra grass grows wild there. Qayloqay was little he got lost there you know.

no. whatever happened.

somehow he's still alive.

but.

but? every day at the brink alive somehow. nothing serious..

my but what a lovely moon huh.

oh.

that mountain what's behind it.

marshes mountains and ricefields. all the same.

beyond them?

more ricefields. fields. pear fields.

and beyond them?

way way beyond?

yes that's what i mean.

there's the sea. who was it. yuh. Qanimm.

they were boasting. the sea's a sky turned into a river.

then it must be also somehow blue huh.

even by day they say it's black. big & black alive.

good heavens!

the sand looks dazzling.

______________________________

frogs &.

others.

poems by Kusano Shimpei

translated from the Japanese by Cid Coman

& Kamaike Susumu

(Mushinsha / Grossman, 1969

When I was young, if I came upon a book published by

Mushinsha / Grossman – I had to own it. I bought each and

every one. That's how I came to read Frank Samperi, Cid Corman,

Will Petersen, Kusano Shimpei, Rene Char, Eric Sackheim et al.,

what could go wrong? Nothing did. The books were exquisite, an

extra minute or so was taken to enhance the design of the books, 

the feel of the books, the looks of the books, and the quality overall was

life changing. You know the little girl you once saw walking on a cloud

in the park with a book under her arm — a Mushinsha book, that was me. 

In 1969 when the Shimpei book was published, issued in a hefty 

stapled together slipcase, poet and translator Cid Corman performed 

a masterstroke, and was at the  height of his best years when he wasn’t peering 

around for fame and notoriety but sharpening his skills as a poet and a mover. 

His introductory prose here and translating prowess reads sword sharp. 

[ BA ]

RE-READING RENE CHAR ~

L E A V E S     O F     H YP N O S

a selection

translated by Cid Corman

I think of that army of cowards with their appe-

tites for dictatorship that will perhaps be seen

again in power, in this forgetful country, by

those who will survive this time of damned al-

gebra.

~

We are being torn apart between the avidity for

knowing and the despair of having known. The

goad will not renounce its sting and we our hope.

~

Act as primitive and forsee as a strategist.

~

To judge by the subsoil of the grass where a cou-

ple of crickets were singing last night, prenatal

life must have been very sweet.

~

Acquiescence kindles the face. Refusal gives it

beauty.

~

The poem's line of flight. It should be within the

power of each to feel.

~

Imagination, my child.

~

Eternity is hardly longer than life.

~

I think of the woman I love. Her face is suddenly

masked. The void is in its turn sick.

~

Get intelligence going without the help of ord-

nance maps.

~

We are like those toads who in the austere night

of the marshes call without seeing each other,

bending to their love cry all the fatality of the

universe.

~

One need not love men to be of real help to them.

Only desire to improve that expression in their

eyes when it lights upon others more impover-

ished than themselves, to prolong by a second any

pleasant moment of their lives. After this move

and each root treated, their breathing would

become calmer. Above all don't deprive them al-

together of these painful paths, after whose effort

follows the evidence of truth through tears and

fruit.

~

Horrible day! I was witness, some hundred meters

away, to the execution of B. I had only to press

the trigger of my Bren gun and he could have

been saved! We were on the heights overlooking

Cereste, arms enough to make the bushes creak

and at least equal in number to the SS. They un-

aware that we were there. To the eyes around me

everywhere begging for the signal to open fire I

answered no with my head . . . .The June sun

slipped a polar chill into my bones.

He fell as if he didn't make out his executioners

and so light it seemed to me, that the least breath

of wind could have lifted him from earth.

I didn't give the signal because this village had to

be spared at any price. What is a village? A village

like any other? Did he perhaps know at that ulti-

mate instant?

~

The time of enraged mountains and fantastic

friendship.

~

Accumulate, then distribute. Of the mirror of the

universe be the part that is densest, most useful

and least apparent.

~

Keep with respect to others what you have pro-

mised yourself alone. That is your contract.

~

Sing your iridescent thirst.

~

The fruit is blind. It's the tree that sees.

~

The people of the meadows enchant me. Their

frail and venom-free beauty I don't grow tired of

reciting to myself. The vole, the mole, dark

children lost in the chimera of the grass, the slow-

worm, child of glass, the cricket as docile as any,

the grasshopper that clicks and counts its linen,

the butterfly that stimulates intoxication and an-

noys the flowers with is silent hiccups, the ants

sobered by the great green expanse, and immedi-

ately overhead the meteor swallows. . . .

~

Grassland, you are the day's encasement.

~

Since the kiss in the mountains, time is guided on

the golden summer of her hands and the ivy

swerves.

~

Children accomplish this fond miracle of remain-

ing children and seeing through our eyes.

~

This is the hour when windows escape houses to

catch fire at the end of the world where our

world is going to dawn.

~

Are we doomed to being only the beginnings of

truth?

~

If life could only be a disappointed sleep. . . .

~

There are two ages for the poet: the age during

which poetry, in all regards, mistreats him, and

that when she lets herself be madly embraced.

But neither is wholly defined. And the second is

not sovereign.

~

Plunge into the unknown which cuts deep. Com-

pel yourself to whirl about.

~

There's no more question of the shepherd being

guide. Or so the politician, this new general far-

mer, has decided.

~

Formerly at the moment I got into bed, the idea

of a death for the time being in the bosom of

sleep proved pacifying, today I go to sleep to live

some hours.

~

All the virtue of the August sky, of our trusted

anguish, in the meteor's golden voice.

~

"My body was more immense than earth and of

it I knew only a very tiny part. I receive such

innumerable promises of felicity, from the bot-

tom of my soul, that I beg you to keep for us

alone your name."

~

In the depths of our darkness there is no one place

for Beauty. The whole place is for Beauty.

______________________________

A war had begun which, though most of his country was

soon occupied, occupied Rene Char still more. . . .He was

about 36 then, and the poetic journal he kept of and at

that time comes to us under the auspices of his Resistance

code-name, HYPNOS, the Greek divinity of Sleep.

I read this now during the Covid pandemic and much of it aloud

to the one I love as we travel around, truck and book in lap, and

what are these tears in my eyes?

No book like it on earth.

[BA]

_________________

Rene Char

Leaves of Hypnos

translated from the French by Cid Corman

Mushinsha/Grossman, 1973

RE-READING L I V I N G D Y I N G ~

The Blessing



At the temple

on the hill

a slat from an

old crate requiring



visitors to

dress properly

(not in underwear)

for this place



not to make noise

nor swipe the moss nor

litter the ground

nor loiter



We go — passing

plaques of Buddha

blessing us

for doing nothing.






________________________

Cid Corman
Livingdying
New Directions, 1970





The first book of Cid's I ever found and read and it remains to this day
one of my favorite books not only of Cid's but any poet. So skillfully chosen
and shaped by Corman, and fine tuned and designed and printed by the Stinehour Press.


[ BA ]

CID CORMAN and MIKE DOYLE 1967-1970 ~

R E A D      M E

Happy Birthday, tomorrow, Cid!