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9780375709883

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

by
  • ISBN13:

    9780375709883

  • ISBN10:

    0375709886

  • Edition: 1st
  • Format: Paperback
  • Copyright: 2002-02-26
  • Publisher: Knopf
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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

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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.

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.

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