A Momentary Longing To Hear Sad Advice From One Long Dead
Who was my teacher at Harvard. Did not wear overcoat
Saying to me as we walked across the Yard
Cold brittle autumn is you should be wearing overcoat. I said
You are not wearing overcoat. He said,
You should do as I say not do as I do.
Just how American it was and how late Forties it was
Delmore, but not I, was probably aware. He quoted Finnegans Wake to me
In his New York apartment sitting on chair
Table directly in front of him. There did he write? I am wondering.
Look at this photograph said of his mother and father.
Coney Island. Do they look happy? He couldn't figure it out.
Believed Pogo to be at the limits of our culture.
Pogo. Walt Kelly must have read Joyce Delmore said.
Why don't you ask him?
Why don't you ask Walt Kelly if he read Finnegans Wake or not.
Your parents don't look happy but it is just a photograph.
Maybe they felt awkward posing for photographs.
Maybe it is just a bad photograph. Delmore is not listening
I want to hear him tell me something sad but however true.
Delmore in his tomb is sitting. People say yes everyone is dying
But here read this happy book on the subject. Not Delmore. Not that rueful man.
poem by Kenneth Koch
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Related quotes
We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.
Walt Kelly in Pogo
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Monuments And Melodies
My hands are trembling
And my eyes are on fire
And this house is crumbling
And I've been left out all the while
Yeah, yeah
You make me happy
You magnify my better half
You make me certain
Though all I have today is your photograph
My past is perilous
Each scar I wear sings
Monuments to where I have been
And melodies to wear I am going
Yeah, yeah
You make me happy
You magnify my better half
You make me certain
Though all I have today is your photograph
When will I see you again?
Still-life can only go so far
I need you in front of me
To say my name
Say it to me, say it to me
Say it to me, I want you the way you are
The way you are
Yeah, yeah
You make me happy
You magnify my better half
You make me certain
Though all I have today is your photograph
You make me happy
You make me happy
You make me happy
Oh
song performed by by Incubus
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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My Photograph
Of all the worldly goods I own,
Of all that I possess,
One photograph means more to me,
Much more than all the rest.
Who took this precious photograph
I couldn't really say;
I only know the subject is
More lovely than the day.
A face so radiant, so serene,
And known and loved so well;
This photograph I hold so dear,
I'd never give or sell.
True beauty comes from deep within,
It's something you can't buy;
It's captured on my photograph,
And cameras never lie.
It may be silly fancy,
And mock me if you will;
But when I choose to look at it
All time is standing still.
I know I'm looking at the past,
But I don't care, you see
My Mother's eyes are filled with love,
And looking right at me.
Written Nov 1994
poem by John Carter Brown
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Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.
quote by Delmore Schwartz
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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My House
The image of the poets in the breeze
Canadian geese are flying above the trees
A mist is hanging gently on the lake
My house is very beautiful at night
My friend and teacher occupies a spare room
Hes dead, at peace at last the wandering jew
Other friends had put stones on his grave
He was the first great man that I had ever met
Sylvia and I got out our ouija board
To dial a spirit, across the room it soared
We were happy and amazed at what we saw
Blazing stood the proud and regal name delmore
Delmore, I missed all your funny ways
I missed your jokes and the brilliant things you said
My dedalus to your bloom, was such a perfect wit
And to find you in my house makes things perfect
I really got a lucky life
My writing, my motorcycle and my wife
And to top it all off a spirit of pure poetry
Is living in this stone and wood house with me
The image of the poets in the breeze
Canadian geese are flying above the trees
A mist is hanging gently on the lake
Our house is very beautiful at night
Our house is very beautiful at night
Our house is very beautiful at night
Our house is very beautiful at night
song performed by by Lou Reed
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.
quote by Delmore Schwartz
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Even paranoids have real enemies.
quote by Delmore Schwartz
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years, but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. But as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind.
quote by Albert Einstein
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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All poets' wives have rotten lives Their husbands look at them like knives.
quote by Delmore Schwartz
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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What Curious Dresses All Men Wear
What curious dresses all men wear!
The walker you met in a brown study,
The President smug in rotogravure,
The mannequin, the bathing beauty.
The bubble-dancer, the deep-sea diver,
The bureaucrat, the adulterer,
Hide private parts which I disclose
To those who know what a poem knows.
poem by Delmore Schwartz
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Touchy Feely
Rosemarie DeWitt, Scoot McNairy, Ellen Page, Hans Altwies, Kate Bayley, Alycia Delmore
by Lynn Shelton from Touchy Feely (2013)
Submitted by Veronica Serbanoiu
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O Love, Sweet Animal
O Love, dark animal,
With your strangeness go
Like any freak or clown:
Appease tee child in her
Because she is alone
Many years ago
Terrified by a look
Which was not meant for her.
Brush your heavy fur
Against her, long and slow
Stare at her like a book,
Her interests being such
No one can look too much.
Tell her how you know
Nothing can be taken
Which has not been given:
For you time is forgiven:
Informed by hell and heaven
You are not mistaken
poem by Delmore Schwartz
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Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn.
quote by Delmore Schwartz
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Baudelaire
When I fall asleep, and even during sleep,
I hear, quite distinctly, voices speaking
Whole phrases, commonplace and trivial,
Having no relation to my affairs.
Dear Mother, is any time left to us
In which to be happy? My debts are immense.
My bank account is subject to the court’s judgment.
I know nothing. I cannot know anything.
I have lost the ability to make an effort.
But now as before my love for you increases.
You are always armed to stone me, always:
It is true. It dates from childhood.
For the first time in my long life
I am almost happy. The book, almost finished,
Almost seems good. It will endure, a monument
To my obsessions, my hatred, my disgust.
Debts and inquietude persist and weaken me.
Satan glides before me, saying sweetly:
“Rest for a day! You can rest and play today.
Tonight you will work.” When night comes,
My mind, terrified by the arrears,
Bored by sadness, paralyzed by impotence,
Promises: “Tomorrow: I will tomorrow.”
Tomorrow the same comedy enacts itself
With the same resolution, the same weakness.
I am sick of this life of furnished rooms.
I am sick of having colds and headaches:
You know my strange life. Every day brings
Its quota of wrath. You little know
A poet’s life, dear Mother: I must write poems,
The most fatiguing of occupations.
I am sad this morning. Do not reproach me.
I write from a café near the post office,
Amid the click of billiard balls, the clatter of dishes,
The pounding of my heart. I have been asked to write
“A History of Caricature.” I have been asked to write
“A History of Sculpture.” Shall I write a history
Of the caricatures of the sculptures of you in my heart?
Although it costs you countless agony,
Although you cannot believe it necessary,
And doubt that the sum is accurate,
Please send me money enough for at least three weeks.
poem by Delmore Schwartz
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Put off your imagination, as you put off your overcoat, when you enter the laboratory. Put it on again, as you put on your overcoat, when you leave.
quote by Claude Bernard
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Phoenix Lyrics
I
If nature is life, nature is death:
It is winter as it is spring:
Confusion is variety, variety
And confusion in everything
Make experience the true conclusion
Of all desire and opulence,
All satisfaction and poverty.
II
When a hundred years had passed nature seemed to man
a clock
Another century sank away and nature seemed a jungle
in a rock
And now that nature has become a ticking and hidden
bomb how we must mock
Newton, Democritus, the Deity
The heart's ingenuity and the mind's infinite
uncontrollable
insatiable curiosity.
III
Purple black cloud at sunset: it is late August
and the light begins to look cold, and as we look,
listen and look, we hear the first drums of autumn.
poem by Delmore Schwartz
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What Is To Be Given
What is to be given,
Is spirit, yet animal,
Colored, like heaven,
Blue, yellow, beautiful.
The blood is checkered by
So many stains and wishes,
Between it and the sky
You could not choose, for riches.
Yet let me now be careful
Not to give too much
To one so shy and fearful
For like a gun is touch.
poem by Delmore Schwartz
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I call that a scumhead.
James Joyce in Finnegans Wake
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Faust In Old Age
"Poet and veteran of childhood, look!
See in me the obscene, for you have love,
For you have hatred, you, you must be judge,
Deliver judgement, Delmore Schwartz.
Well-known wishes have been to war,
The vicious mouth has chewed the vine.
The patient crab beneath the shirt
Has charmed such interests as Indies meant.
For I have walked within and seen each sea,
The fish that flies, the broken burning bird,
Born again, beginning again, my breast!
Purple with persons like a tragic play.
For I have flown the cloud and fallen down,
Plucked Venus, sneering at her moan.
I took the train that takes away remorse;
I cast down every king like Socrates.
I knocked each nut to find the meat;
A worm was there and not a mint.
Metaphysicians could have told me this,
But each learns for himself, as in the kiss.
Polonius I poked, not him
To whom aspires spire and hymn,
Who succors children and the very poor;
I pierced the pompous Premier, not Jesus Christ,
I picked Polonius and Moby Dick,
the ego bloomed into an octopus.
Now come I to the exhausted West at last;
I know my vanity, my nothingness,
now I float will-less in despair's dead sea,
Every man my enemy.
Spontaneous, I have too much to say,
And what I say will no one not old see:
If we could love one another, it would be well.
But as it is, I am sorry for the whole world, myself
apart. My heart is full of memory and desire, and in
its last nervousness, there is pity for those I have
touched, but only hatred and contempt for myself."
poem by Delmore Schwartz
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Sonnet: The Ghosts Of James And Peirce In Harvard Yard
In memory of D. W. Prall
The ghosts of James and Peirce in Harvard Yard
At star-pierced midnight, after the chapel bell
(Episcopalian! palian! the ringing soared!)
Stare at me now as if they wish me well.
In the waking dream amid the trees which fall,
Bar and bough of shadow, by my shadow crossed,
They have not slept for long and they know all,
Know time's exhaustion and the spirit's cost.
"We studied the radiant sun, the star's pure seed:
Darkness is infinite! The blind can see
Hatred's necessity and love's grave need
Now that the poor are murdered across the sea,
And you are ignorant, who hear the bell;
Ignorant, you walk between heaven and hell."
poem by Delmore Schwartz
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