Walt Whitman Speaks!

Edison cylindar recording of (apparently) Whitman reading Whitman. I read on IMDB that Daniel Day-Lewis based his accent in Gangs of New York in part on recording(s) of Whitman (for that mid-19th-century native New York twang).

Sabbath Poem: The Lantern Out of Doors

"The Lantern Out of Doors" by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Sabbath Poem: The Poor Poet

"The Poor Poet", by Czeslaw Milosz. I spent way too long trying to find the Polish original, but no luck. I love the subversion in this poem: beauty emerging despite the poet's ill motives, the tension between cynicism and hope.

Sabbath Poem: Praise

"Praise", by R.S. Thomas.

Sabbath Poem - The Maneuver

"The Maneuver", by William Carlos Williams. From his Collected Poems (and bravo to New Directions for allowing Google Books to allow multipage previews when you search it!)

Sabbath Poem: La Palabra

"La Palabra", by Pablo Neruda. [Spanish text w/translation] I first read this in a bilengual edition of Fully Empowered. The last couplet stuck with me in Spanish from the start, but only lately have I been feeling confident enough in my skill to try memorizing the whole thing in the original. At present I've got about three-quarters done (one recitation every morning for about a month). Maybe another week or two and I'll be there. In the mean time, here's what I sound like reading it. I seem to have adopted a quasi-Argentine way of pronouncing my y's and ll's, even though most of the Spanish I hear is of the Mexican-influenced Univision Newscaster Standard.

Sabbath Poem: What We Need Is Here

I think I'll start a tradition of Sunday poetry recitations—largely from the sheaf of memory-poems I have clipped together hanging from a nail on my bedroom wall. I'll launch things, appropriately enough, with one of Wendell Berry's, "What We Need Is Here", from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997.

Spring, by Gerard Manley Hopkins

For the past few years I've had a sheaf of memory-poems kept by my dresser; I'll read/recite one every morning while I'm getting ready, sticking with each one till it's memorized. Here's one from a long time back (and coming late in the season—just a week and a half before the solstice):

SPRING

NOTHING is so beautiful as spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

[via Bartleby.com]

I'm hoping to include these memory-poems from time to time in the new nblinks incarnation. I probably should look around to see the exact legality of quoting full poems before I start busting out the Czeslaw Milosz or Seamus Heaney.