in the original languages:
Courtesy of Jackson West at Washington Square Arts
in English:
i Oh Poets, why sing of roses! Let them flower in your poems!
Listen!
In the beginning was the Word.
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The typewriter is holy
the poem is holy the voice is holy!
v Sing, O Orpheus! A tree grows in your ear!
“Tree! You can be a canoe! Or else you cannot!”
Here are swim-stick words you can use to scare away sharks
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence
The colors ripen on the weightless branch of time
x A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green
A word sits on the kitchen counter
Let the house be dead silent
Today is the world-pregnant day of judgment
Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’
xv We are entitled to die the way we want to die. Let the land
hide in an ear of wheat.
This poetry, I never know what I’m going to say
It’s the long story that never comes to an end.
To write into emptiness
It has always been this way.
xx The slightest pain hurts me, the slightest joy overwhelms
What you see here is colorful illusion... corpse, dust,
shadow, nothing.
Only the poet sells his soul to separate it from the body
that he loves
Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing.
The abyss doesn’t divide us. The abyss surrounds us.
xxv In the middle years of the journey through life
My task was to be a sower of eyes!
Grown old, do we hear silence splitting open
Whistle at the other end and let me sing it
And I can also rightly be quiet.
xxx The stones, the water, the sun speak
Of the stone I say, “It’s a stone.”
O Saints! Ye Divine Washermen!
Please listen as if I were a bubbling spring
If I had known it was a dream, I would never have wakened
xxxv A terrible beauty is born.
The prison cells say nothing, like an animal whose wound
bleeds inward...
When even my grave I remembered no more,
A brand from a brand is kindled and burned, and fire
from fire begotten
Night after night, I danced on dynamite
xl Every slam a finality
As for the hibiscus on the roadside — my horse ate it
Come, Hendecasyllables, one and all
Do not shatter my heart, learn to be still.
No one will write the final poem... what worries me is
the final dream
vl When I close the book, I open life
And to search for nothing, that was my intent
O poets! poets male and female, listen to the ruins!
Rinnzekete bee bee nnz krr müü?
What was was cool. What was it?
l Now, today, I shall sing beautifully for my friends’ pleasure.
the poets:
- Vincente Huidobro (Spanish, Chile)
- Beowulf (Old English)
- The Bible (The Gospel According to John, I:1, Hellenistic Greek)
- Allen Ginsberg (English, USA)
- Rainer Maria Rilke (German)
- Derek Walcott (English, St. Lucia)
- Aimé Césaire (French, Martinique)
- Tomas Tranströmer (Swedish)
- Vasko Popa (Serbian)
- Artur Rimbaud (French)
- James Tate (English, USA)
- Luo Incantation (Kenyan)
- Yehuda Amichai (Hebrew, Israel)
- Elizabeth Bishop (English, USA)
- Mahmoud Darwish (Arabic, Palestine)
- Jelaluddin Rumi (Farsi, Turkey)
- Carlos Drummond de Andrade (Portuguese, Brazil)
- Tu Fu (Chinese)
- Nora Marks Dauenhauer (Tlingit, Alaska)
- Alamanda (lenga d’oc, France)
- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Spanish, Mexico)
- Tomaz Salamun (Slovenian)
- William Shakespeare (English, Great Britain)
- Wislawa Szymborska (Polish)
- Dante Alighieri (Italian)
- Velimir Khlebnikov (Russian)
- Yang Lian (Chinese)
- Luhyia Riddle (Kenyan)
- Francis Ponge (French)
- Cecilia Vicuña (Spanish, Chile)
- Alberto Caeiro/Fernando Pessoa (Portuguese)
- Miribai (Hindi, India)
- Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnamese)
- Ono no Komachi (Japanese)
- William Butler Yeats (English, Ireland)
- Nazim Hikmet (Turkish)
- José Rizal (Tagalog, Philipines)
- The Poetic Edda (Old Norse)
- Ai (English, USA)
- Bob Kaufman (English, USA)
- Matsuo Basho (Japanese)
- Catullus (Latin)
- Anna Akhmatova (Russian)
- João Cabral de Melo Neto (Portuguese, Brazil)
- Pablo Neruda (Spanish, Chile)
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German)
- U Sam Oeur (Khmer, Cambodia)
- Kurt Schwitters (German)
- Amiri Baraka (English, USA)
- Sappho (Greek)
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