Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Poetry about the Body

    “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

SOURCE

“My relationship with my body has changed. I used to consider it as a servant who should obey, function, give pleasure. In sickness you realize that you are not the boss. It is the other way round.” — Federico Fellini

         

Midweek Motif ~ Poetry about the Body

How do we view the image of our body? Do we see it with the eye of the media / advertisement / anyone apart from our own self or is it I am seeing my own body?

The artists of both ancient and modern world paid great homage to the human body in their art and sculpture. No less, the modern writers, in their words.


Sing about this human body.

Here is Walt Whitman in his nine part poem I Sing the Body Electric:

1        

I sing the body electric, 

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, 

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, 

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul. 

               

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves? 

And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead? 

And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? 

And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul? 

2 

The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account, 

That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect. 

The expression of the face balks account, 

But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face, 

It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists, 

It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him, 

The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth, 

To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more, 

You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side. 

The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the contour of their shape downwards, 

The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls silently to and fro in the heave of the water, 

The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the horseman in his saddle, 

Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances, 

The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles, and their wives waiting, 

The female soothing a child, the farmer’s daughter in the garden or cow-yard, 

The young fellow hoeing corn, the sleigh-driver driving his six horses through the crowd, 

The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, good-natured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sun-down after work, 

The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance, 

The upper-hold and under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes; 

The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps, 

The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again, and the listening on the alert, 

The natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curv’d neck and the counting; 

Such-like I love—I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother’s breast with the little child, 

Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, count. 

                             (Rest of the poem is here)

Here are some links to some wonderful poetry on the theme:

Old Man Leaves Party by Mark Strand  

 My Mother’s Body by Marge Piercy

Anodyne by Yusef Komunyakaa

homage to my hips by Lucille Cliffton

Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community—

                (Next week Susan’s Midweek Motif will be ~ Psyche / Soul)

                                                    

                     

I Wish I'd Written This

Eating Poetry

By Mark Strand (1934 — 2014)

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

There is no happiness like mine.

I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.

Her eyes are sad

and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.

The light is dim.

The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,

their blond legs burn like brush.

The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.

When I get on my knees and lick her hand,

she screams.

I am a new man,

I snarl at her and bark,
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

This must have been one of Mark Strand's earliest published poems, as I seem to have loved it for a very long time now. I also remember him as having written excellent articles on poetry which helped me pass my university exams. But I didn't know the rest of his poetry.

He was an important American poet, who — as I'm sure many of you are aware — died six days ago. When I looked for a poem to use in paying tribute, I found that his work has a characteristic bleakness of mood. The Poetry Foundation refers to his "recurring theme of absence and negation". 

I think Eating Poetry must be one of his best-known works, often anthologised. If possible I'd have liked to give you something that was new to you, but this is the one I wish I'd written. I still adore it after all these years.

Wikipedia tells us:

Many of Strand's poems are nostalgic in tone, evoking the bays, fields, boats, and pines of his childhood on Prince Edward Island. Strand has been compared to Robert Bly in his use of surrealism, though he attributes the surreal elements in his poems to an admiration of the works of Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, and René Magritte. Strand's poems use plain and concrete language, usually without rhyme or meter. In a 1971 interview, Strand said, "I feel very much a part of a new international style that has a lot to do with plainness of diction, a certain reliance on surrealist techniques, and a strong narrative element."

All of which makes his poetry appeal to me in many ways, despite the tone. I remember in the past, when I was exploring some dark subjects in my own poetry, a reader saying to me, 'You must be a very sad person.' I was surprised. To me it seemed obvious that I had written the sadness out instead of holding on to it. Perhaps it was the same for Mark Strand; at any rate he doesn't seem to have been unduly miserable as a person.

He had a distinguished academic career, and served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress during1990-91. As well as a poet, he was an essayist, translator and editor. A painter in his youth, he also published books of art criticism. He won numerous major awards for his poetry, most notably the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. 

His poems are at PoemHunter and his Amazon page has his Collected Poems as well as many other volumes.

The Wikipedia article is rather slight, so I've linked his name, above, to the more comprehensive Poetry Foundation article. The New York Times obituary is, in some respects, even more illuminating. For instance it tells us that his interest in the visual arts was lifelong, and that for the last five years he had been making collages, using paper he made by hand. 

Poems and photos used in ‘I Wish I’d Written This’ remain the property of the copyright holders (usually their authors).