David Yezzi, The Dramatic Element.

David Yezzi, The Dramatic Element

excerpt:
The dramatic lyric tends to be a combination of Eliot’s second voice (the poet talking to an audience) and third voice (characters talking to each other). In such poems, the poet himself will often function as a character...

[ ask yourself first if you believe it to be the case that the new is new, or newly suggested unsuggested, or undone not yet done, and also if any absolute answers pertaining to the former are in any/someway valid, and then proceed if you'd like ]

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from The New Criterion

Eros

Andre Jordan: Resisting Sentimentality with Humor

[The dead girl by the beautiful Bartlett] by Joshua Beckman

Winter by Michael Earl Craig

Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence by Matthew Rohrer

McDonalds Is Impossible by Chelsea Martin

Mad Lib Elegy by Ben Lerner

Love Poems, et al via The Poetry Foundation

And just for fun:

György Ligeti - Poème Symphonique For 100 Metronomes

Gerard Manley Hopkins Cursive Rhythms

Linkety, linkety, link ...

American Poetry in the New Century, John Barr

Marjorie Perloff, from RADICAL ARTIFICE: "cage: chance: change"

Lives of the Poets: rodrigo Toscano, Jason Boog (labor and activism)

Beat America: What did we learn from Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac,

and Allen Ginsberg?, Aram Saroyan

Sound Poetry - A Survey, Steve McCaffery

The Great Greek Lyric Poets (Antiquity)

Greek Lyric

Alfred Lord Tennyson (Tradition)

Charles Baudelaire/Arthur Rimbaud

Rimbaud Illuminations

Federico Garcia Lorca (Deep Song)

Gacela of the Dark Death

Rene Char: Resistance in Every Way

Collected Poems of Rene Char

W.S. Merwin

Thanks, On the Subject of Poetry, Yesterday

Benjamin Saltman, The Deck

Neelofer (Contemporary Performance, British)

Street Magic, White Doves, plus more

Harry Owen (Contemporary Performance British)

Nibbling, Insecticide

The Morris Quinlan Experience

In the Beginning

I love you as certain dark things are loved ...

In anticipation of moving on to study the second Lyric Mode: Eros


LOVE SONNET XVII by Pablo Neruda

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

Pablo Neruda (1904 – 1973)

from Robert Motherwell's 'Elegy for the Spanish Republic' Series (mid-century)

Robert Motherwell, series paintings 'Elegy for the Spanish Republic'

Dylan Thomas published this poem in 1946 and in it, we can see the same linguistic disjunctions and manipulations that Valery says are really the charge of the poet who wishes his language to 'dance' as opposed to 'walk' like prose. We also see the same suspension of the natural, the futility of human thought and action, and the objectivity and lack of pathos in nature -- a throw back to the Naturalists at the turn of the century. But here we also see the poet writing the futile self, the self purposely making himself inert, impotent, calm in the face of rage. He will not 'blaspheme down the stations of the breath/With any further/Elegy of Innocence and youth.' Does nature, itself, become emblematic of mourning here? Is there a transitional event that allows the speaker to transcend what 'was' to what 'is' and does what 'is' have some consequence in the life, the attitude, the vitality of the speaker as he gropes to understand the world after this transition, after the elegaic event? There is, of course, 'the futility of the water' but doesn't this futility also reflect the futility of the speaker? Lodged in nature, do we finally see death as the way we become part of a continuum? Is the moment the speaker enters ' the round/Zion of the water bead/And the synagogue of corn' mark that moment where, contrary to the Naturalists, the 'I' exists within a subtle heaven of mundane, everyday things? And does the child, who resides now 'with the first dead' and who is 'Robed in the long friends, The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,/Secret by the unmourning water' find some absolute being-ness in this forever-ness of her death? Does this speaker appear trapped within the transitional moment, unable to move past it (as we've revisited in some of the work of Fritz Goldberg, Emanuel, Celan, and Char-- even Valery who speaks of the poet's power of manipulation within the context of the futility of that act) or is this speaker imagining the 'now' after transition and coming to understand the present as a post-lapsarian reality to which he must become accustomed, to which he needs to find his own way of living, and going on? Tell me about it ...