On being accused of sour grapes

"You don't need to be a cook to tell whether food tastes good or bad," said Iself to Hisself

Overlong morning haiku

A tingling headache
extending into
imaginary greenery
behind my head

– Iself (© one December morning in 2007)

Snail survival stratagem

The snail
with its stalked eye
spied a boot
which was walking by.

“Oh no,” he thought (or she),
“this big loud thing
is bound to bring
death or misery!

Down with my eyes!
What I can’t see
will never do
any harm to me.”

Narrow escape
and lesson learned:
If you close your eyes
you won’t get burned!

– Felix Morgenstern (© 2007)

Product liability disclaimer
Successful application cannot always be guaranteed.

Ringelnatz on silence

Silence

There are some people who bow
To those given to extended silence
With a serious brow.

And then there are those who resent
Contemporaries with a silent bent.

All in all, noone should confuse
Silence with a statement that is of much use.

– Johannes Beilharz

An attempted English paraphrase of the following poem by Joachim Ringelnatz (1883-1934):

Schweigen

Manche Leute verneigen
Sich gerne vor Leuten, die ernsten Gesichts
Langdauernd schweigen.

Manche Leute neigen
Dazu, zu grollen, wenn andere schweigen.
Schonet das Schweigen! Es sagt doch nichts.

Morgenstern zoology

The wingambat

The wingambat haunteth
through weerowarowood,
the ruby fingoor taunteth,
and cruelly laughs the drood.

– Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914), translated by Johannes Beilharz (*1956)

Note
This is a translation of Morgenstern's "Der Flügelflagel" (see preceding post).

A May Haiku

Май. Квітнеючая дзічка.
Затрымай дыханьне,
Інакш пасыплецца сьнег!

May. Blooming crab tree.
Do not breathe,
Snow will fall!

– Victar Licvinau

Written in Belarussian and translated into English by the author.

About an industry-leading younger German poet from the old East

His verse

was markedly
distinguished

by the presence
of the absence

of punctuation.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2007)

Confessions of a poetry machine killer

I killed a poetry machine

Oh what shall we do,
that thing it is dead –
a poetry machine,
the best ever had.

It mixed black with blue,
it strung a mean word,
it bounced on a hue,
flipped many a bird.

You fed it a coin,
its wheels would spin,
it spat out a poem
that made you grin.

It got better at it,
more perfect each day,
that’s when I'd had it
and blew it away.

The best thing to do
now that it’s in peace
is to leave it alone,
and all at its ease.

– iself (© 2007)

Inspired by Keith O’Connor’s I killed my poetry machine.

Izzy cowrites poem with Sylvia Plath

Round Cup's Round Cup

“I need my mornings and all the tree ducks shady;
I moan my gooses and all is dig again.
(I stay I need you up inside my flat.)

The slave go clawing out in thick and awesome,
And undeveloped morning ducks in:
“I need my trees and all the goose ducks shady;

I moaned that you diged me into flat
And stay me light, needed me quite shady.
(I stay I need you up inside my flat.)

April ducks from the slave, morning's trees moan:
Exit goose and Leo's flat:
“I need my trees and all the goose ducks shady;

I diged you'd stay the way you said,
But I need old and I duck your name.
(I stay I need you up inside my flat.)

I should have treed a goose instead;
At least when flat moans they dig back again.
“I need my trees and all the goose ducks shady;

(I stay I need you up inside my flat.)

– Izzy & Sylvia Plath

Note
This is a generated madlib poem (go get one for yourself here). It doesn't sound bad – well, Izzy tuned it about 7 times until she was halfway satisfied with it – and has only a few rough grammatical edges.

Platitudes revisited 1: poem by Ernst Jandl

no contradiction

life
becomes longer
and longer
i.e. shorter
and shorter
it doesn't stretch

(translated without much effort from the German original contained in ernst jandl, der gelbe hund, 1982)

Note
For those of you who have never heard of Ernst Jandl: he was an Austrian poet who lived from 1925-2000 and was quite well-known for his humorous, partially experimental poems and linguistic artistry. He also created some funny neologisms.

Some of his poems, as the shining example above, are barely enough to elicit a half-chuckle and can be safely said to be padding material.

Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux

From this poem by Louis Aragon from 1946 two lines in a new translation by myself:

Mon bel amour mon cher amour ma déchirure
Je te porte dans moi comme un oiseau blessé

My beautiful love, my dear love, you who tear me apart,
I carry you in myself like a wounded bird.

For some reason, these two lines from the poem – which do so much to create the image of a love apparently full of pain and contradictory impulses – have stayed with me for many years, while the rest of the poem has not.

The ending, which sounds like a punch line from a French chanson, is actually on the flat side:

Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux
Mais c'est notre amour à tous les deux

There is no happy love,
But this is our love.

The very last line could become more prosy to reflect the French more directly, e.g. "But it is the love between the two of us" or "But it is the love the two of us share," but that doesn't do much, does it?

Or did you write that yourself?

Was that a real poem

or did you write that yourself?

That came out of my head by itself,
with words that formed themselves,
a beginning by itself,
and an end in itself,
so yes, I wrote it myself
and it is real in itself
and in any other selves
exposed to it whether or not they themselves
realize the significance or insignificance of this or themselves.

– P. Lato

Eye opener

I
can
barely
open my
eyes at this point in
time, but time will tell whether they
shall remain open,
but try I
will, so
can
I?

A forward and reverse fibonacci, also called a diamond.

Received from one who calls himself morningworker233x5 and wishes to remain anonymous. He (or she?) was also the one to inform me of the special poetic terminology.

Thank you & copyright morningworker233x5

Late night fibonacci

The
late
night fib-
onacci
floats on the milky
rays of moonlight, basks in pale gold.

– Lenny Bloomfeld (Copyright 2007)

Note
A German version of this poem can be found at the author's site, where the Indian yellow color he insisted on looks much better.

World So Wide

Mr. Blumfeld, etc., let me know that now he has a blog of his own, called World So Wide.

Brownfeld's wisdom no. 4

Why should I produce series? Doesn’t anyone like variety?

– Arthur Brownfeld

OK, now he's back to Brownfeld, as per specific instruction. Have it your way, Blumstein, Brownstein, Goldblum, whoever you are.

Where am I in your life?

Two poems by Pakistani poet Parveen Shakir (1952-1994), who wrote in Urdu, in English translation by Alamgir Hashmi:

a moment's leave, anonymous,
between the breaking of one dream
of love and another's beginning

http://www.beilharz.com/poetas/shakir/

Brownfeld's wisdom no. 1

He considered himself to be virtuous for not doing any of the evil things he could think of.

- Arthur Brownfeld

Cosmic idyll disturbed

What happens when God picks up his little lab by its corners?

Belarussian poet Viktar Licvinau has the answer in A laboratory.

Poetry mail from Madelyn Conner

Madelyn Conner (scosmic@mbmusa.net) is an online drug peddler. Like many of her brothers and sisters with their lofty names - every bit as sonorous as those of the authors of trashy novels - she resorts to fragments that might qualify as "modern literature" to beat spam filters:

of girl. I should have liked to know her. Good night, young him not - drank it, and fell dead. It was too old for him. It He bites. There was one boy - a certain J. Steerforth - who cut good deal though I was much less brave than Traddles, and nothing

Good-bye, Younghimnot! What sad fate to befall one.

No doubt we shall hear about that (un)certain J. Steerforth and Traddles and what became of him (her?) in future spam.

And who is the elusive "I" of the poem?