  Poetry
This week: Edited by: Stormy Lady  
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America, America! by Delmore Schwartz
I am a poet of the Hudson River and the heights above it,
the lights, the stars, and the bridges
I am also by self-appointment the laureate of the Atlantic
-of the peoples' hearts, crossing it
to new America.
I am burdened with the truck and chimera, hope,
acquired in the sweating sick-excited passage
in steerage, strange and estranged
Hence I must descry and describe the kingdom of emotion.
For I am a poet of the kindergarten (in the city)
and the cemetery (in the city)
And rapture and ragtime and also the secret city in the
heart and mind
This is the song of the natural city self in the 20th century.
It is true but only partly true that a city is a "tyranny of
numbers"
(This is the chant of the urban metropolitan and
metaphysical self
After the first two World Wars of the 20th century)
--- This is the city self, looking from window to lighted
window
When the squares and checks of faintly yellow light
Shine at night, upon a huge dim board and slab-like tombs,
Hiding many lives. It is the city consciousness
Which sees and says: more: more and more: always more.
Poem (Old man in the crystal morning after snow)
by Delmore Schwartz
Old man in the crystal morning after snow,
Your throat swathed in a muffler, your bent
Figure building the snow man which is meant
For the grandchild's target,
do you know
This fat cartoon, his eyes pocked in with coal
Nears you each time your breath smokes the air,
Lewdly grinning out of a private nightmare?
He is the white cold shadow of your soul.
You build his comic head, you place his comic hat;
Old age is not so serious, and I
By the window sad and watchful as a cat,
Build to this poem of old age and of snow,
And weep: you are my snow man and I know
I near you, you near him, all of us must die.
Delmore Schwartz was born on December 8, 1913, in Brooklyn New York. His parents Harry and Rose were Romanian immigrants. When Schwartz was about nine years old his parents devoiced. This upset Schwartz greatly and impacted him for the rest of his life. His childhood was a lonely and unhappy one. Although his home life was unsettled Schwartz was a gifted student and excelled in school. He graduated early and enrolled in Columbia University.
After studying at Columbia he attended the University of Wisconsin and then finally he graduated from New York University with a in philosophy, at the age of 22. Schwartz dove right into his writing after graduation. He published his first short story In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, in the Partisan Review, in 1937. His story was then added to other short stories and poems he had collected and published as a book with the same title In Dreams Begin Responsibilities in 1938. Schwartz then enrolled at Harvard to get an advanced degree in philosophy, but he never finished it. Instead he began his twelve year as a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer. He was later given an Assistant Professorship.
Schwartz became well-known as a Democratic Socialist upon his return to New York in 1947. He was also known for his drinking. His book of short stories The World is a Wedding was published in 1948. Over the next few years he took several different teaching positions at Bennington College and then at Kenyon College followed by Princeton University. In 1960 at the age of 47 Schwartz became the youngest poet to win the Bollingen Prize. In 1962, Schwartz began teaching a writing class at Syracuse University.
Schwartz spent the last year of his life pretty much alone. He spent a lot of his time drinking or sitting in parks trying to come up with ideas to write about. In July of 1966, while staying at a hotel to focus on his writing, Schwartz suffered a fatal heart attach in the lobby. Schwartz died on July 11, 1966.
All Night, All Night
by Delmore Schwartz
"I have been one acquainted with the night" - Robert Frost
Rode in the train all night, in the sick light. A bird
Flew parallel with a singular will. In daydream's moods and
attitudes
The other passengers slumped, dozed, slept, read,
Waiting, and waiting for place to be displaced
On the exact track of safety or the rack of accident.
Looked out at the night, unable to distinguish
Lights in the towns of passage from the yellow lights
Numb on the ceiling. And the bird flew parallel and still
As the train shot forth the straight line of its whistle,
Forward on the taut tracks, piercing empty, familiar --
The bored center of this vision and condition looked and
looked
Down through the slick pages of the magazine (seeking
The seen and the unseen) and his gaze fell down the well
Of the great darkness under the slick glitter,
And he was only one among eight million riders and
readers.
And all the while under his empty smile the shaking drum
Of the long determined passage passed through him
By his body mimicked and echoed. And then the train
Like a suddenly storming rain, began to rush and thresh--
The silent or passive night, pressing and impressing
The patients' foreheads with a tightening-like image
Of the rushing engine proceeded by a shaft of light
Piercing the dark, changing and transforming the silence
Into a violence of foam, sound, smoke and succession.
A bored child went to get a cup of water,
And crushed the cup because the water too was
Boring and merely boredom's struggle.
The child, returning, looked over the shoulder
Of a man reading until he annoyed the shoulder.
A fat woman yawned and felt the liquid drops
Drip down the fleece of many dinners.
And the bird flew parallel and parallel flew
The black pencil lines of telephone posts, crucified,
At regular intervals, post after post
Of thrice crossed, blue-belled, anonymous trees.
And then the bird cried as if to all of us:
0 your life, your lonely life
What have you ever done with it,
And done with the great gift of consciousness?
What will you ever do with your life before death's
knife
Provides the answer ultimate and appropriate?
As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,
Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feel the vast
Draft of the abyss sucking him down and down,
An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:
This is the way that night passes by, this
Is the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable
abyss.
Thank you all!
Stormy Lady
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The winner of "Stormy's poetry newsletter & contest" [ASR] is:
The Spanish moss still hangs
from the old cypress trees;
a forgotten friend draped
across arms of the forest.
From the old cypress trees
I climbed barefoot and boyish,
I beheld and ruled my kingdom
until evening fogs rolled in.
A forgotten friend draped
in the imaginative finery
of a king my mirror shows
as I remember Louisiana.
Across arms of the forest
I once spread like fire and fear.
Now I sit with memories
of Spanish moss and you.
Honorable mention:
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Poetry: July 08, 2009 Issue [#3152]
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