Sign up for April 2013 POEM-A-DAY (Knopf Poetry)
The Borzoi Reader April 2013 POEM-A-DAY
sign up at http://poem-a-day.knopfdoubleday.com/2013/03/05/
Dear Readers,
Since last April, we’ve gathered up some wonderful new poetry titles to share with you this spring, including Vladimir Nabokov’s Selected Poems, with an introduction by the Nabokov scholar Thomas Karshan and some works never before seen in English, translated from Russian by Dmitri Nabokov, the son of the writer.
We offer below Nabokov’s reflection on the arrival of poetic inspiration—a poem composed by him in English and first published in The New Yorker in 1944. In the spirit of Nabokov’s “leopards of words,” we’ll see you on April 1st.
The Knopf Poetry Team - http://poem-a-day.knopfdoubleday.com/2013/03/05/
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The Poem by Vladimir Nabokov 1944
Not the sunset poem you make when you think
aloud,
with its linden tree in India ink
and the telegraph wires across its pink
cloud;
not the mirror in you and her delicate bare
shoulder still glimmering there;
not the lyrical click of a pocket rhyme—
the tiny music that tells the time;
and not the pennies and weights on those
evening papers piled up in the rain;
not the cacodemons of carnal pain;
not the things you can say so much better in plain prose—
but the poem that hurtles from heights unknown
—when you wait for the splash of the stone
deep below, and grope for your pen,
and then comes the shiver, and then—
in the tangle of sounds, the leopards of words,
the leaflike insects, the eye-spotted birds
fuse and form a silent, intense,
mimetic pattern of perfect sense.
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