[New-Poetry] Fwd: Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems

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Subject: Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems


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 In the introduction to CONVERSATION PIECES: Poems That Talk to Other Poems, editors Kurt Brown and Harold Schechter write, "In much lyric poetry, as Helen Vendler observes, we are, in effect, listening to the voice of a solitary poet addressing someone unseen, 'someone not in the room'—a lover, a patron, a lost friend or family member. In the poems collected here, that invisible someone is another poet. As we read we can hear one artist talk back to another in admiration or exasperation, praise or mockery, gentle rebuke or bitter disagreement. The monologue is suddenly transformed into a dialogue, the solitary meditation into an impassioned debate, the soliloquy into a conversation conducted across space and time." The unusual and enriching collection they've compiled is made up of pairings like the one below, in which a contemporary poem by James Longenbach "answers" the 16th-century love complaint of Sir Thomas Wyatt. 





 "They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me Seek" 

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
    With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle tame and meek
    That now are wild and do not remember
    That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with continual change. 

Thank'd be fortune, it hath been otherwise
    Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
    When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
    And she caught me in her arms long and small,
Therewith all sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this? 

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
    But all is turned from my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
    And I have leave to go of her goodness,
    And she also to use new-fangleness.
But since that I so kindely am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved. 


Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42) 






Before Time 

On one or two occasions
It was different: she lingered 

At the window, turned—I was
Desirable because for a moment 

I was anybody. The distance
Seemed to disappear without us
Moving but more than what followed 

I remember the open window.
Taxis idling by the park.
Streetlights shining 

Through the hemlock and the usual sounds
Of traffic, shouts—all of it
Starkly present and at the same time 

Incomplete; as if a space I'd never
Wanted had been filled 

At the moment
I wanted it: branches 

Swirling at the window as
Her clothing dropped
To the floor. If I have chance 

To thank for this moment
I'd like to know what she deserved. 


James Longenbach (1959–) 

 





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"They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me Seek" excerpted from CONVERSATION PIECES. Copyright © 2007 by Everyman's Library. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

"Before Time" excerpted from CONVERSATION PIECES, originally appeared in FLEET RIVER by James Longenbach. Copyright © 2003 by The University of Chicago Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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