Off the Shelf Archive ~June #2

The month slips by once again, and the archivist wakes up out of her heat induced coma long enough to realize it's time for a new Off the Shelf selection. This time, we're looking at a woman, from another but eerily similar time and another land, the modernist Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (pen name of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko.) Akhmatova (1889-1966) began writing before the Communist Revolution  and was a well-known lyric poet and free spirit when Stalin came to power. After the rise of Stalin she was one of the few artists of her generation who chose to stay and record the atrocities of that regime rather than emigrate, for which she paid a high price, her work banned for years. Her best known long poem is called Requiem, about this time of terrors.

I've picked three of her poems, all short, one for concept, Lot's Wife, one for language, Everything, and one for emotion, You Thought I Was that Type.

You can enjoy them all here, in the July Off The Shelf Archives. 

Thanks to Fireblossom for pointing me to this selection, and the good people at Poet's United, who profiled her recently.

Making room for Akhmatova is the previous selection, a fine poem by Ted Hughes entitled The Howling of Wolves, archived here in the main stream for a last perusal. As always, you may comment on either piece here as comments are disabled off the main page, and suggestions for next time are always welcome.

Last look at The Howling of Wolves, by Ted Hughes:

The Howling of Wolves

Is without world.

What are they dragging up and out on their long leashes of sound

That dissolve in the mid-air silence?

Then crying of a baby, in this forest of starving silences,

Brings the wolves running.

Tuning of a viola, in this forest delicate as an owl’s ear,

Brings the wolves running—brings the steel traps clashing

  and slavering.

The steel furred to keep it from cracking in the cold,

Their eyes that never learn how it has come about

That they must live like this,

That they must live

Innocence crept into minerals.

The wind sweeps through and the hunched wolf shivers.

It howls you cannot say whether out of agony or joy.

The earth is under its tongue,

A dead weight of darkness, trying to see through its eyes.

The wolf is living for the earth.

But the wolf is small, it comprehends little.

It goes to and fro, trailing its haunches and whimpering horribly.

It must feed its fur.

The night snows stars and the earth creaks.

by Ted Hughes

Image: Come Play with Me, by Tambako the Jaguar on flick'r

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Off The Shelf Archive ~ June

I know I'm not reading enough poetry when these archives stay so long untended. I'm glad therefor to have recently started a journey--odyssey might be a better word--through the massive compilation of an incredible life's work that is The Collected Poems of Ted Hughes. 

Almost 1200 pages of verse, the book is daunting in scope, yet pretty friendly on a page by page basis. Hughes first became prominent as a poet in the 1950's and was Poet Laureate of Britain from 1984 until his death in 1998. As I've just started dipping into this huge volume, I'm selecting from his earlier work a piece that particularly struck me called The Howling of Wolves, from the 1967 collection entitled Wodwo. 

You'll find it here in the   Off The Shelf Archives.

Hughes'  full bio is easily available online for more of the messy, painful details that seem to make up most great poets' lives, at The Poetry Foundation and many other sites. I don't include them here as I think they distract more than add in this case.

The previous Off the Shelf selection, two poems by Theodore Roethke, are moved below for a final perusal.

As always, feel free to comment on either post here, as comments are disabled off the main page,  and suggestions for the next selection are always welcome.

Here for their last dance on this site are Journey into the Interior, and Dolor, by Theodore Roethke:

Journey Into The Interior

In the long journey out of the self,
There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places
Where the shale slides dangerously
And the back wheels hang almost over the edge
At the sudden veering, the moment of turning.
Better to hug close, wary of rubble and falling stones.
The arroyo cracking the road, the wind-bitten buttes, the canyons,
Creeks swollen in midsummer from the flash-flood roaring into the narrow valley.
Reeds beaten flat by wind and rain,
Grey from the long winter, burnt at the base in late summer.
-- Or the path narrowing,
Winding upward toward the stream with its sharp stones,
The upland of alder and birchtrees,
Through the swamp alive with quicksand,
The way blocked at last by a fallen fir-tree,
The thickets darkening,
The ravines ugly.

by Theodore Roethke

Dolor

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces. 

by Theodore Roethke

Image: Mountain Roads, by othersides

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