[New-Poetry] Re: Tracking the Elusive SoQ

[David Graham]

For some reason I'm not ready to investigate right now, the phrase  
"elusive SoQ" reminded me of this poem.

I confess I haven't been keeping up with the great SoQ-hunt much, and  
so don't even know if the Pope has officially inducted little JA into  
the school yet.  Still, "this poetry of mud" does make me smile.

Crazy Weather

It's this crazy weather we've been having:
Falling forward one minute, lying down the next
Among the loose grasses and soft, white, nameless flowers.
People have been making a garment out of it,
Stitching the white of lilacs together with lightning
At some anonymous crossroads. The sky calls
To the deaf earth. The proverbial disarray
Of morning corrects itself as you stand up.
You are wearing a text. The lines
Droop to your shoelaces and I shall never want or need
Any other literature than this poetry of mud
And ambitious reminiscences of times when it came easily
Through the then woods and ploughed fields and had
A simple unconscious dignity we can never hope to
Approximate now except in narrow ravines nobody
Will inspect where some late sample of the rare,
Uninteresting specimen might still be putting out shoots,for all we  
know.

--John Ashbery.  Houseboat Days. Penguin, 1977.



========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/academics/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/academics/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
==========================================



On Apr 15, 2007, at 4:27 AM, TheOldMole wrote:

> From Blogger Tom Morgan, a genealogy:
>
> Looking at the early (2003) posts on Silliman's Blog, I pieced  
> together a SoQ lineage. The unbroken chain looks something like  
> this: [post 1810*] William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, John  
> Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant,  
> Sidney Lanier, James Russell Lowell, Conrad Aiken, Archibald  
> MacLeish, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, James Merrill, Galway  
> Kinnell, James Wright, Robert Pinsky, and so forth. Robert Frost,  
> of course, should fit in here somewhere.
>
> http://inthebecomingundone.blogspot.com/2007/04/origins-of-soq.html

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