Looking for Poetry Poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Rafael Alberti and Songs from the Quechua

by STRAND, MARK

• ISBN13: 9780375709883
• ISBN10: 0375709886
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-02-26
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

A uniquely appealing collection that reflects the variety and richness of South American poetry. Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a native-born Brazilian, is universally recognized as the finest and most accessible modern Portugese-language poet and, along with Pablo Neruda, a poet of the common man, writing of home, family, friends, and love. Rafael Alberti--an elegist primarily--came to Argentina (where he wrote many of his poems) in exile from Spain during the Spanish Civil War. The effects of that experience wind through the poet's work in poems about the survival of the spirit in the face of personal and political tragedy. Looking for Poetry also contains the simple and haunting poems of the Quechua Indians.

Author Biography

Mark Strand is the author of nine books of poems, including <i>Blizzard of One</i>, winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize. He was the Poet Laureate of the United States in 1990, and currently teaches at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He lives in Chicago.

Table of Contents

Poems
Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Note to the Poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade	3	(2)
Seven-Sided Poem	5	(2)
In the Middle of the Road	7	(1)
Quadrille	8	(1)
The Onset of Love	9	(1)
Ballad of Love Through the Ages	10	(2)
Dawn	12	(2)
Don't Kill Yourself	14	(2)
Song of the Phantom Girl of Belo Horizonte	16	(3)
Boy Crying in the Night	19	(1)
The Dead in Frock Coats	20	(1)
Your Shoulders Hold Up the World	21	(1)
Souvenir of the Ancient World	22	(1)
Motionless Faces	23	(3)
Jose	26	(3)
The Dirty Hand	29	(3)
Looking for Poetry	32	(2)
In the Golden Age	34	(4)
Residue	38	(3)
Story of the Dress	41	(7)
The Elephant	48	(4)
Death in a Plane	52	(5)
Interpretation of December	57	(3)
An Ox Looks at Man	60	(1)
Song for a Young Girl's Album	61	(2)
Encounter	63	(5)
Songs from the Quechua
Note to the Quechua Poems	67	(1)
To This Song	68	(1)
The Butterfly Messenger	69	(1)
Pastoral	70	(1)
Song, From Ollantay	71	(2)
Lovely Woman	73	(1)
Crystalline River	74	(1)
The Grass Is Crying	75	(1)
My Mother Gave Me Life	76	(1)
Song	77	(2)
I Am Raising a Fly	79	(2)
War Song	81	(1)
When You Find Yourself Alone	82	(1)
Not Even Dew	83	(1)
The Fire I Started	84	(1)
Little Lizard	85	(1)
My Treasure	86	(1)
Going Away	87	(1)
In the Morning	88	(6)
Poems
Rafael Alberti
Note to the Poetry of Rafael Alberti	91	(3)
Song	94	(1)
Song	95	(1)
Song	96	(1)
Song	97	(1)
To Miss X, Buried in the West Wind	98	(3)
Swimmer	101	(2)
Platko	103	(3)
The Angel of Numbers	106	(1)
Song of the Luckless Angel	107	(1)
The Moldy Angel	108	(1)
The Angel of Ash	109	(1)
The Good Angel	110	(1)
The Avaricious Angel	111	(1)
The Good Angel	112	(1)
The Sleepwalking Angels	113	(2)
Three Memories of Heaven	115	(3)
The Angel of Sand	118	(1)
The Bad Moment	119	(1)
The Grade-School Angels	120	(1)
Living Snow	121	(1)
Invitation to the Harp	122	(2)
The False Angel	124	(2)
The Dead Angels	126	(2)
The Surviving Angel	128	(1)
They Have Gone	129	(1)
That Burning Horse in the Lost Forests	130	(3)
Two Children	133	(1)
Fragments of a Wish	134	(1)
That's the Way It Is	135	(1)
Charlie's Sad Date	136	(2)
Harold Lloyd, Student	138	(3)
Buster Keaton Looks in the Woods for His Love Who Is a Real Cow	141	(3)
On the Day of His Death by an Armed Hand	144	(1)
Metamorphosis of the Carnation	145	(4)
To Luis Cernuda: Looking for Southern Air in England	149	(2)
Going Back to a Birthday	151	(2)
Going Back Through Color	153	(1)
The Coming Back of Love in Bright Landscapes	154	(2)
The Coming Back of Love on the Sands	156	(1)
Facing the Spanish Coast	157	(2)
The Coming Back of an Assassinated Poet	159	(2)
The Coming Back of Vicente Aleixandre	161	(2)
Song	163	(1)
Ballad of What the Wind Said	164	(1)
Song	165	(1)
Song	166	(1)
Ballad of the Country Idlers	167	(2)
Ballad of the Lost Andalusian	169	(1)
Song	170	(1)
Song	171	(2)
Notes to Rafael Alberti	173

Excerpts

Introduction to the Poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Carlos Drummond de Andrade, one of the most revered Brazilian poets of the twentieth century, was born in 1902 in Itabira, a small mining town in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. He died in Rio de Janeiro in 1987. His poems are, for the most part, bittersweet evocations of a small-town childhood or, more emblematically, remorseful accounts of a lost world or simply discreet and sometimes ironic views of the way things are. Though they seem to concern themselves with the ubiquity of loss, they are often amusing. So easily do humor and seriousness coexist in Drummond's work that their unexpected harmony may account in part for his popularity. This harmony is evident even in his city poems, where the balance is tipped toward seriousness, and where the reader is made to feel that life is a forced march and all any of us can do is endure it. Even in these, despite their litanies of ills, one feels the presence of humor and of a forgiving lightness that reveals, at the least, the poet's unusual capacity for sympathizing.

Like other poets of his period, Drummond's poetic loyalty was with Modernism. This meant turning his back on the inflated rhetoric of Symbolism and Parnassianism and adopting a rhetoric of his own, one that was plainer, and flexible enough to respond to the rapid changes around him. In Brazil these changes had largely to do with the shift from the old agricultural aristocracy to the quickly growing industrial class. It is easy to witness in Drummond's poems these two worlds in conflict. It is just as easy to see that what the twentieth century demanded was not just severance from the past but an alarming and sometimes desperate need to keep up with the present.

Despite Drummond's aesthetic allegiance, he nevertheless held on to elements commonly associated with traditional lyric poetry. His most famous poem, "In the Middle of the Road," which first appeared in 1928, created an immediate sensation, some readers deeming it rubbish, others finding it stunningly original. What it ends up being is a very simple poem whose power depends on the incantatory repetition of the first line and the admission or promise that what it records will never be forgotten. It insists on the value of an event or an image that by any measure would be insignificant. It suggests that a poet should be responsible to all of what the world offers him. But, as in many Drummond poems, this one hangs in the balance between seriousness and humor. There is something outrageous about the claims this poem makes in its memorializing, and yet it enacts one of the central concerns of lyric poetry—to rescue from oblivion as much of our human experience as we can.


Seven Sided Poem

When I was born, one of those
crooked angels who live in shadow
said: Go on, Carlos, be gauche in life.

The houses look out on men
chasing after women.
If the afternoon were blue
there might be less desire.

The trolley passes full of legs:
white, black, yellow legs.
My God, my heart asks, why so many legs.
But my eyes
ask nothing.

The man behind the mustache
is serious, simple, and strong.
He hardly talks.
He has few and precious friends,
the man behind the glasses and the mustache.

My God, why hast Thou forsaken me.
Thou knewest I wasn't God
Thou knewest how weak I was.

World, wide world,
if my name were Harold
it might be a rhyme
but no answer.
World, wide world,
my heart is bigger
than you are.

I shouldn't tell you
but this moon
and this cognac
are hell on a person's feelings.



In the Middle of the Road

In the middle of the road there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
there was a stone
in the middle of the road there was a stone.

I'll never forget this event
in the lifetime of my tired eyes.
I'll never forget that in the middle of the road
there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
in the middle of the road there was a stone.



Quadrille

John loved Teresa who loved Raymond
who loved Mary who loved Jack who loved Lily
who didn't love anybody.
John went to the United States, Teresa to a convent
Raymond died in an accident, Mary became an old maid,
Jack committed suicide and Lily married J. Pinto Fernandez
who didn't figure into the story.

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Excerpted from Looking for Poetry: Poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Rafael Alberti and Songs from the Quechua
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.