Song of Myself
Walt Whitman
I
I welcome and I sing to myself.
And what I claim, also want you to ascribe it,
for every atom belonging to me belongs to you too
to you.
Vague and invite my soul to wander.
Vague and lie down at will on earth,
to see a blade of summer grass.
My tongue, every molecule of my blood comes out of this
soil, this air.
I was born here of parents born here and whose parents
whose parents were born.
At thirty-seven years old, in perfect health,
I start to sing, wishing it to death.
To shut the creeds and schools,
to stand back a moment, aware of what they are and
without forgetting.
I toast to good and evil, let's talk to everyone,
to the unbridled nature with its original energy.
XXIV
I am Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
turbulent, carnivore, sensual, eating, drinking and procreating.
I'm not sentimental, not believing myself above
men and women or apart from them.
No more proud than humble.
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors of their hinges!
Whoever humbles himself to another, I humiliate me.
And nothing is done or said, but finally come back to me.
Through me, the inspiration comes.
Through me, comes the ordinary and landmark.
I speak the old original word, I make the sign
of democracy.
By God! Nothing accept that others can not admit
under the same conditions
There are voices in my throat silent millennia,
voices of countless generations of prisoners and slaves,
voices of thieves and decrepit, sick and desperate,
voices of ties between the stars, voices of matrices
paternal and sap,
voices of hatred: Voices from the corrupt, the inept,
the trivial, the mad and resentful;
vague voice-mist in the air, the voice of the beetles
rolling its ball of dung.
Through me forbidden voices emerge:
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veiled
opens,
indecent voices I clarified and transfigured.
I did not cover my mouth and put my finger on my lips.
He mingles with the same guts that in the
front or the heart.
Intercourse for me, is no more obscene than death.
I believe in the flesh and its appetites.
See, hear, touch, are miracles, every particle of my being is
a miracle
Divine am I inside and out,
and I make holy whatever I touch and everything it touches:
the smell of my armpits is so exquisite as that of a
prayer;
this head of mine is more than churches, bibles and
creeds.
If my worship is addressed with a preference for
thing will be to the extent of my own body, or to
some part of it.
You are not only stunning replica of me
it.
Grooves and wet land ye;
sign and plow men, all in me as
cultivated and tilled;
my blood are fertile, and your pale and dairy
the current enjoin in my life;
chest are another chest tightens, and my brain
are your occult convolutions;
washed hemp roots, timid lark's nest hidden
double eggs, are you;
fermented juice of apples, wheat fiber virile sun
generous, also are;
vapors that illuminate and darken ye my face;
sweat streams ye dew;
cosquilleáis winds gently rubbing against me
your pollen fertilizing,
vast areas of vigorous living branches of oak,
my fellow lovers wander, ye;
I have shaken hands, faces that I have kissed,
I narrow fellow creatures in my arms, you are
you.
I marvel at myself, so great is my being and
all things!
At every moment, what happens in penetrating me with joy.
Why bend my ankles? Where does my desire
smallest?
Why radiate friendship, and what causes the receipt?
When I climb the stairs of my house, I stop and I
Question: But is it real?
The vine that climbs through my window satisfies me more
that all the metaphysics of books.
Oh wonder of the dawn!
The faint light dilutes the immense diaphanous shadows.
The air is a treat for my tongue.
Fresh masses crossing oblique upward and
down quietly jump, jump innocent ooze,
from the mobile world.
Something I can not see barbed bristles libidinous.
Seas of bright juice flooded the celestial vault.
The earth and sky meet.
And this daily conjunction comes a challenge for the East
that sits on my head for a moment to say,
aggressive and mocking:
"Will you be the master of all this?"
(Trans. Concha Zardoya)
-------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------
EYE
Ezra Pound
Rest, Master, for we are tired,
tired, and we could feel the fingers of the wind
the eyelids close to us
wet weight of lead.
Rest, brother, for behold! The dawn!
Turned pale yellow flame
and slowly melt the wax.
Free us, for beautiful colors out there,
dyed green moss and flowers,
and coolness under the trees.
Deliver us, it seems
in this ever-flowing monotony
of ugly print marks,
black on white parchment.
Deliver us, because someone
whose smile is more profitable
all the old knowledge of your books,
and there we'd like to see.
-------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------
FRANCESCA
Ezra Pound
Emerges from the deep night
with flowers in your hands,
now emerge from a confused crowd,
a tumult of conversations that you round.
I saw you among the essential things,
angered me when your name pronounced
in ordinary places.
I wish the cold waves flooded my soul
and the world wither like a dead leaf
or that tooth sheath-de-lion, caught,
again to find you,
but alone.
-------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------
FUNERAL BLUES
W. H. Auden
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephones,
Disability, with a juicy bone, the dog barks,
Hush the pianos and with a muffled drumming,
Show coffin, let the mourners come closer.
The planes make circles, whining, about us,
Scribbling on the sky the message He is dead,
Put white ribbons around the necks of the pigeons
Let the traffic wardens carry black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and my West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My dawn, my midnight, my voice, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
Stars are not wanted now: apagadlas one by one;
Forget the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep the forest.
Well now you can in no way bring anything good.
Translation: Angel Manuel Gomez Sword
Source: The Dialogue of the Dogs
-------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------
MEETING
Conrad Aiken
Why do you contemplate? Why do you play? What do I look at you,
woman
I have to hurry to be with you again?
Why should I re-plumb your nothing abyssal
And draw nothing but pain?
Fixedly stare your eyes look watery, but there is no more
convinced
Now that some other time
That only two mirrors that reflect light from the
sky
That and nothing else.
And squeeze your body against my body as if he expected to open up
a gap
Directly to another area;
And I try to talk to you with words beyond me
word
In which all things are clear,
Until I sink exhausted once again your nothing abyssal
And the cool thing about me:
You, laughing and weeping in this quarter ridiculous
With your hand on my knee;
Crying because I think evil and miserable, and laughing
To find our love so strange;
With eyes fixed on each other one last hope,
blind and desperate,
That the world changes.
Src: The Power of the Word
-------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------
A SUPERMARKET IN CALIFORNIA
Allen Ginsberg
How I thought of you tonight, Walt Whitman,
he walked the streets, under trees,
with headache, absorbed in contemplation
of the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and purchase images
I entered the supermarket fruit, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Entire families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Handcuffs
in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!, and you García Lorca,
What were you doing there, along with watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old rags,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator, and
Boys watching the carnage.
I heard the questions they asked each of them:
Who killed the pork chops? What price the
bananas? Are you my Angel?
I walked alternately by the bright cells
cans following you, in my imagination pursued by the
police business.
Together we walked the corridors of our lonely open
fantasy, proving artichokes, enjoying each
of the frozen treats,
and without ever passing through the box.
Where are we going Walt Whitman? The doors will close
within an hour. Where does your beard points
tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of your odyssey at the supermarket
and I feel absurd.)
Do you walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights of the houses
went out, feel alone.
¿Stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
blue car beside the roads, road
to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old master
of value
Why did you have when Charon left America to promote
your boat and you came down to a steaming shore watching
it disappeared on the black water rafting
of Lethe?
(Trans. by W. Shand and A. Girri
Vito Acconci
Diane Ackerman
Mercedes de Acosta
Etel Adnan
Conrad Aiken
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Washington Allston
Sander Alners
Maya Angelou
Gloria Anzaldúa
John Ashbery
Wystan Hugh Auden
Emilie Autumn
James Avery
Amiri Baraka
Joel Barlow
Charles Baxter
Charles Bernstein (poeta)
John Berryman
Hakim Bey
Jacob Bigelow
Elizabeth Bishop
Jocelyn Brando
Giannina Braschi
Joseph Brodsky
William Cullen Bryant
Charles Bukowski
Carlos Bulosan
Carson Cistulli
Fred Chappell
Lucille Clifton
Hilda Conkling
Gregory Corso
Hart Crane
Robert Creeley
Countee Cullen
E. e. cummings
Guy Davenport
Joy Gresham
Maya Deren
Emily Dickinson
Thomas M. Disch
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Mills Fox Edgerton
Loren Eiseley
Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Maggie Estep
Dorothy Fields
James Dillet Freeman
Robert Frost
Generación beat
Barry Gifford
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Allen Ginsberg
John Giorno
Crispin Glover
Louise Glück
Alice Goodman
H.D.
Jim Harrison
Marsden Hartley
Robert Hass
Roald Hoffmann
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Edwin Honig
James Schuyler
Randall Jarrell
Denis Johnson
James Weldon Johnson
Erica Jong
Chester Kallman
Jack Kerouac
Francis Scott Key
Zahur Klemath Zapata
Akiane Kramarik
Maxine Kumin
Emma Lazarus
David Lehman
Denise Levertov
Vachel Lindsay
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Audre Lorde
Amy Lowell
James Russell Lowell
Robert Lowell
Charles Fletcher Lummis
Lydia Lunch
Thomas Lynch (poeta)
Thomas McEvilley
Archibald MacLeish
Gerard Malanga
Charles Martin
Edgar Lee Masters
Harry Mathews
Robert McAlmon
Adah Isaacs Menken
Thomas Merton
W.S. Merwin
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Joaquin Miller
Stephen Mitchell (traductor)
Marianne Moore
Cherríe Moraga
Ifti Nasim
Robert Nathan
Howard Nemerov
Leonard Nimoy
Frank O'Hara
Sharon Olds
Charles Olson
Frances Sargent Osgood
Otis O'Solomon
Thomas Nelson Page
Philip Levine
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Robert Pinsky
Sylvia Plath
Edgar Allan Poe
William Henry Leonard Poe
Ezra Pound
Diana Ramírez de Arellano
Kenneth Rexroth
Stan Rice
Adrienne Rich
Elizabeth Madox Roberts
Theodore Roethke
Henry Rollins
Kay Ryan
Carl Sandburg
Ed Sanders
Saul Williams
Dan Schneider (poeta)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Alan Seeger
Dr. Seuss
Otep Shamaya
Shel Silverstein
Clark Ashton Smith
Patti Smith
William Snodgrass
Gary Snyder
Solita Solano
Gertrude Stein
Wallace Stevens
Anne Stevenson
William Wetmore Story
Sahara Sunday Spain
Amber Tamblyn
James Tate
Henry S. Taylor
The Last Poets
William Irwin Thompson
Henry David Thoreau
Henry Timrod
Jeff Tweedy
Mark Van Doren
George Sylvester Viereck
William Thomas Walsh
Robert Penn Warren
Glenway Wescott
Phillis Wheatley
E. B. White
Sarah Helen Whitman
Walt Whitman
Richard Wilbur
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
John Edward Williams
Alexander Wilson
Gamel Woolsey
Elinor Wylie
