Remembrance by Pushkin

WHEN the loud day for men who sow and reap
Grows still and on the silence of the town
The unsubstantial veils of night and sleep,
The meed of day's labour, settle down,
Then for me in the stillness of the night
The wasting, watchful hours drag on their course,
And in the idle darkness comes the bite
Of all the burning serpents of remorse;
Dreams seethe; and fretful infelicities
Are swarming in my over-burdened soul,
And Memory before my wakeful eyes
With noiseless hand unwinds her lengthy scroll.
Then, as with loathing I peruse the years,
I tremble, and I curse my natal day,
Wail bitterly, and bitterly shed tears,
But cannot wash the woeful script away.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

Denis Diderot, On Dramatic Poetry (1758).

Last Poem by Ted Berrigan

Before I began life this time
I took a crash course in Counter-Intelligence
Once here I signed in, see name below, and added
Some words remembered from an earlier time,
"The intention of the organism is to survive."
My earliest, & happiest, memories pre-date WWII,
They involve a glass slipper & a helpless blue rose
In a slender blue single-rose vase: Mine
Was a story without a plot. The days of my years
Folded into one another, an easy fit, in which
I made money & spent it, learned to dance & forgot, gave
Blood, regained my poise, & verbalized myself a place
In Society. 101 St. Mark's Place, apt. 12A, NYC 10009
New York. Friends appeared & disappeared, or wigged out,
Or stayed; inspiring strangers sadly died; everyone
I ever knew aged tremendously, except me. I remained
Somewhere between 2 and 9 years old. But frequent
Reification of my own experiences delivered to me
Several new vocabularies, I loved that almost most of all.
I once had the honor of meeting Beckett & I dug him.
The pills kept me going, until now. Love, & work,
Were my great happinesses, that other people die the source
Of my great, terrible, & inarticulate one grief. In my time
I grew tall & huge of frame, obviously possessed
Of a disconnected head, I had a perfect heart. The end
Came quickly & completely without pain, one quiet night as I
Was sitting, writing, next to you in bed, words chosen randomly
From a tired brain, it, like them, suitable, & fitting.
Let none regret my end who called me friend.

Buddha on the Bounty by Ted Berrigan

for Merrill Gilfillan

'A little loving can solve a lot of things' 
She locates two spatial equivalents in 
The same time continuum. 'You are lovely. I 
am lame.' 'Now it's me.' 'If a man is in 
Solitude, the world is translated, my world 
& wings sprout from the shoulders of 'The Slave'' 
Yeah. I like the fiery butterfly puzzles 
Of this pilgrimage toward clarities 
Of great mud intelligence & feeling. 
'The Elephant is the wisest of all animals 
The only one who remembers his former lives 
& he remains motionless for long periods of time 
Meditating thereon.' I'm not here, now, 
& it is good, absence. 

The Role of Elegy by Mary Jo Bang

The role of elegy is

To put a death mask on tragedy,

A drape on the mirror.

To bow to the cultural

Debate over the aesthetization of sorrow,

Of loss, of the unbearable

Afterimage of the once material.

To look for an imagined

Consolidation of grief

So we can all be finished

Once and for all and genuinely shut up

The cabinet of genuine particulars.

Instead there’s the endless refrain

One hears replayed repeatedly

Through the just ajar door:

Some terrible mistake has been made.

What is elegy but the attempt

To rebreathe life

Into what the gone one once was

Before he grew to enormity.

Come on stage and be yourself,

The elegist says to the dead. Show them

Now—after the fact—

What you were meant to be:

The performer of a live song.

A shoe. Now bow.

What is left but this:

The compulsion to tell.

The transient distraction of ink on cloth

One scrubbed and scrubbed

But couldn’t make less.

Not them, not soon.

Each day, a new caption on the cartoon

Ending that simply cannot be.

One hears repeatedly, the role of elegy is.

How Beautiful by Mary Jo Bang

A personal lens: glass bending rays

That gave one that day’s news

Saying each and every day,

Just remember you are standing

On a planet that’s evolving.

How beautiful, she thought, what distance does

For water, the view from above or afar.

In last night’s dream, they were back again

At the beginning. She was a child

And he was a child.

A plane lit down and left her there.

Cold whitening the white sky whiter.

Then a scalpel cut her open for all the world

To be a sea.

foreword to Lobster Magazine Summer 1986 by Kevin McNamara MP

Brutally summarised, our thesis is this. Mrs Thatcher and Thatcherism grew out of a right wing network in this country with extensive links to the military-intelligence establishment. Her rise to power was the climax of a long campaign of by this network which included a protracted nationalisation campaign against the Labour and Liberal parties - chiefly the Labour party - during 1974 - 1976.