Here's a funny little poem by Les Murray, from the latest New Yorker.
The issue also contains a poem by Joni Mitchell. It shows that, while song lyrics are poems, they are not automatically good poems ...
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Poems
- An Accident and Two Coincidences (PDF)
- Campfire
- Classroom
- Distance
- Edge
- First Rain in Delhi
- Happening
- Highs in the Low Seventies
- Lace
- Mandolin
- Pipe Smoke
- River
- Romance
- Rummy's Player
- Strike
- Tambourine
- The Beekeeper
- The Director of Antiquities: A Photograph, 1953
- Thomas Hardy Listens to Louis Armstrong
- Those Who Wake at Night
- Yorick Sings
Translations of Poems
- A City Dweller (Réda)
- am my own zoo (Draesner)
- Chamber Heart (Duden)
- Five poems (Gräf)
- Graves (Sartorius)
- I shudder even now (Petri)
- in the year one, that was (Seiler)
- Ingeborg Bachmann Dies in Rome (Köhler)
- my birth year, sixty-three, that (Seiler)
- N. Crosses the Alps (Gräf)
- Responsorium (Duden)
- The Letter Scale (Réda)
6 comments:
That Les Murray poem is wonderful.
of course, i don't count myself among the most cynical, but if that amusing poem were written by John Jones it wouldn't be in the New Yorker.
The Joni Mitchell thing is weird. What's the idea of that? It isn't especially good poetry - are they just printing it as song lyrics, oder was?
Sarah, do you mean that the Murray poem would not be there, or the Mitchell?
Both perhaps.
I meant Murray, but even more certain the Joni Mitchell would not be there. Oder?
Not that I didn't like the Murray poem - it's terrific. I love humor in poetry. I'm just sure if a nobody sent it in, it would be pushed aside. I usually like the New Yorker poems, but there are so many really fabulous knock-your-socks off poems and poets writing, and the NYorker publishes the same people over and over. I wish they'd do something surprising once in a while, something thrilling...
I don't feel like the NY publishes the same people over and over, but with only two or three poems per issue, and with the submission volume they presumably get, it is disappointing how lame the poems often are (even those by "big names").
And the Mitchell is really inexcusable, in the end.
Inexcusable is the word! And I love Joni Mitchell.
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