Poems for the Millennium
The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry
Volume One: From Fin-de-Siecle to Negritude
Edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris
T a b l e of C o n t e n t s


Forerunners


        Prologue to Forerunners

        William Blake
                "Obey thou the Words of the Inspired Man"

        Friedrich Holderlin
                In the Days of Socrates

        Elias Lonnrot
                From  The Kalevala

        Walt Whitman
                This Compost

        Charles Baudelaire
                Fuses I & II

        Emily Dickinson
                Fascicle 34  Poem 9

        Bald Mountain Zaum-Poems

        Gerard Manley Hopkins
                That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort
                of the  Resurrection

        Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautreamont
                From Maldoror

        Arthur Rimbaud
                From A Season In Hell

        After Bitahatini
                From The Night Chant

        Stephane Mallarme
                From Le Livre



A First Gallery



        Stephane Mallarme
                A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance

        C.P.  Cavafy
                Expecting The Barbarians
                Days of 1908
                And I Lounged and Lay on their Beds

        Adolf Wolfli
                Nostalgic Song for My Beloved

                from From the Cradle to the Graave, or, through
                working and sweating, suffering and hardship, even through
                prayer into damnation

                Match Factory at Chaami 1911

        Ruben Dario
                Far away and long ago
                To Roosevelt

        Paul Valery
                Crusoe

        Alfred Jarry
                The Passion of Christ Considered as an  Uphill
                Bicycle  Race

        Gertrude Stein
                From Tender Buttons
                A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson
                From  "Lifting Belly"

        Rainer Maria Rilke
                Death
                Tombs of the Hetaerae
                The First Duino Elegy

        Max Jacob
                1914
                From The Cock and the Pearl

        Andrey Bely
                From The Dramatic Symphony

        Guillaume Apollinaire
                Horse Calligram
                Zone
                A Phantom of Clouds
                The Little Car
                From Poems for Lou
                From Victoire

        Pablo Picasso
                A Bottle of Suze

        Franz Kafka
                Before the Law

        Mina Loy
                from Love Songs to Joannes
                Three Moments in Paris

        Dino Campana
                Genoa

        Fernando Pessoa
                "The startling reality of things"
                From Maritime Ode
                From Oblique Rain

        Ezra Pound
                Papyrus
                The Return
                Canto One

        Hagiwara Sakutaro
                Chair
                Spring Night
                Lover of Love
                So Terrifyingly Melancholy

        Blaise Cendrars
                The Great Fetishes
                From The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little
                Jeanne of France

        Marcel Duchamp
                The 1914 Box

        Giuseppe Ungaretti
                Three Poems
                        Morning
                        Soldiers
                        Babel
                The Rivers

        Pierre Reverdy
                Secret
                Flower Market
                Inn
                Squares

        Vicente Huidobro
                Ars Poetica
                Cow Boy
                Express




Futurisms


        Prologue to Futurism I

        Carlo Carra:
                Demonstration for Intervention in the War

        F.T. Marinetti
                FromThe Manifesto of Futurism
                Apres la Marne, Joffre visita le front en auto
                From Zang Tumb Tuuum
                Successively
                From The Variety Theatre Manifesto

        Four Sintesi
                Francesco Cangiullo : Detonation
                F.T. Marinetti: A Landscape Heard
                F.T. Marinetti: They are Coming
                Fortunato Depero: Colors

        Paolo Buzzi
                Finger-Nails

        Aldo Palazzeschi
                The Stranger
                Nuns Go Walking

        Prologue to Futurism II

        Vassily Kamensky
                Constantinople: Ferroconcrete Poem

        D. Burliuk, A. Kruchenykh, V. Mayakovsky, V. Khlebnikov
                From A Slap in the Face of Public Taste

        Velimir Khlebnikov
                Incantation by Laughter
                Four Poems
                From Zangezi

        Aleksei Kruchenykh
                Declaration of the Word as Such
                From Pomade
                From the Sahara to America

        Vladimir Mayakovsky
                Listen
                From A Cloud in Trousers
                Screaming My Head Off
                Mayakovsky's Suicide Note

        Anatol Stern
                Europa



Expressionism

        Prologue to Expressionism

        Wassily Kandinsky
                Sounds
                Chalk and Soot

        Else Lasker-Schuler
                Chronica
                Three Portraits
                        George Trakl
                        Georg Grosz
                        To the Barbarian:

        August Stramm
                Encounter
                Urdeath
                Battlefield

        Paul Klee
                The Wolf Speaks
                Poem
                A Friend
                The Happy One
                Poem

        Gottfried Benn
                Little Aster
                Lovely Childhood
                Cycle
                Man and Woman Go Through the Cancer Ward
                Night Cafe
                A Bunch of Drifter Sons Hollered

        Georg Trakl
                Sleep
                The Evening
                De Profundis
                Revelation and Decline




Dada

        Prologue to Dada

        Tristan Tzara
                Zurich Chronicle February 1916

        Hugo Ball
                The Sun
                From Flight Out of Time
                The Complete Sound-Poems of Hugo Ball

        Tristan Tzara
                Metal Coughdrops
                Chanson Dada
                From Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love

                The Great Lament of My Obscurity Three

        Richard Huelsenbeck
                "We Hardly"

        Richard Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janko, Tristan Tzara
                L'Amiral cherche une maison a louer

        Hans Arp
                Kaspar Is Dead
                People
                The Great Unrestrained Sadist
                The Man. The Woman

        Francis Picabia
                Spermal Chimney
                From Eunuch Unique
                Portrait de Tristan Tzara

        Marcel Duchamp
                Speculations
                SURcenSURE
                Cast Shadows

        Else von Freytag-Loringhoven
                Affectionate
                Holy Skirts

        Kurt Schwitters
                Desire
                Portrait of Herwath Walden
                Anna Blossom Has Wheels
                Murder Machine 43
                From Ur Sonata

        Theo van Doesburg
                Still Life: The Table
                Remembrance of the Founts of Night

        G. Ribemont-Dessaignes
                Artichokes

        Andre Breton
                The Mystery Corset

        Andre Breton & Philippe Soupault
                From The Magnetic Fields



A Second Gallery


        Wiliam Butler Yeats
                From A Vision  and The Second Coming

        Gertrude Stein
                Identity a Poem

        Rainer Maria Rilke
                The Eighth Duino Elegy

        Wallace Stevens
                Dance of the Macabre Mice
                Connoisseur of Chaos

        James Joyce
                From Ulysses

        William Carlos Williams
                The Locust Tree in Flower
                Paterson

        D.H. Lawrence
                Tortoise Shout

        Ezra Pound
                Canto 32
                Canto 51

        H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
                From Tribute to the Angels

        Marianne Moore
                Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns

        T.S. Eliot
                [The Waste Land]

        St.- John Perse
                From Anabasis

        Edith Sitwell
                From Facade
                Still Falls the Rain
                The Madwoman in the Park

        Osip Mandelstam
                From Tristia
                Whoever Finds a Horseshoe
                Poem No. 286 (On Stalin)
                The Charlie Chaplin Poem
                Last Poems

        Edith Sodergran
                Hell
                Vierge Moderne
                Instinct

        Cesar Vallejo
                From Trilce: IX, XXV, LXXV
                The Hungry Man's Wheel
                Telluric and Magnetic

        Vicente Huidobro
                From Altazor: Cantos I, VI, VII

        Jorge de Lima
                Distribution of Poetry
                Papa John
                The Enormous Hand
                Poem of Any Virgin

        J.V. Foix
                When I Sleep, Then I See Clearly

                I Arrived in That Town, Everyone Greeted Me, and I
                Recognized No One. When I Was Going to Read My Verses,
                the Devil, Hidden Behind a Tree, Called Out to Me
                Sarcastically and Filled My Hands with Newspaper
                Clippings

        Marina Tsvetayeva
                From "The Poem of the End"

        e.e. cummings
                No Thanks, No. 70
                Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal

        Lucian Blaga
                I will not Crush the World's Corolla of Wonders
                Psalm

        Jacob Glatshteyn
                To a Friend Who Wouldn't Bother to Strain His
                Noodleboard Because Even So It Is Hard to Go Hunting When
                Your Rifle Is Blunt and Love Is Soft As an Old  Blanket

        Eugenio Montale
                The Lemon Trees
                The Eel
                Little Testament

        Paul van Ostaijen
                The Murderers

        Hart Crane
                The Mango Tree
                The Circumstance
                O Carib Isle!

        Frederico Garcia Lorca
                Night Suite, for Piano & Poet's Voice
                Ode for Walt Whitman


Surrealism

        Prologue to Surrealism

        Andre Breton
                From Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)

        Robert Desnos
                Trance Event

        Language Event One

        Language Event Two

        Andre Breton
                A Man and Woman Absolutely White
                Free Union
                Poem-Object
                On The Road to San Romano
                Go-for-Broke

        Philippe Soupault
                Four Poems
                        Route
                        Life-Saving Medal
                        Sporting Goods
                        Sunday
                Comrade

        Louis Aragon
                Poem to Shout in the Ruins

        Benjamin Peret
                My Final Agonies
                Joan of Arc
                On All Fours

        Robert Desnos
                Cuckoo
                Midway
                Epitaph

        Tristan Tzara:
                Maison Aragon
                From The Approximate Man

        Gisele Prassinos
                Hair Tonic
                A Conversation

        Paul Eluard/Andre Breton
                From The Immaculate Conception

        Salvador Dali
                The Great Masturbator

        Max Ernst
                From The Hundred Headless Woman

        Antonin Artaud
                All Writing is Garbage
                The Spurt of Blood



"Objectivists"

        Prologue to "Objectivists"

        Ezra Pound
                Vortex.Pound.

        William Carlos Williams
                From Spring and All

        Louis Zukofsky
                From Poem beginning "The"

        George Oppen
                Discrete Series

        Charles Reznikoff
                Testimony

        Carl Rakosi
                A Journey Away

        Basil Bunting
                From The First Book of Odes
                        "Weeping oaks grieve, chestnuts raise"
                        Vestiges
                        The Orotava Road


Negritude

        Prologue to Negritude

        Aime Cesaire
                Macumba Word

        Aime Cesaire & Rene Depestre
                From Discourse on Colonialism

        Leopold Sedar Senghor
                Speech and Image: An African Tradition of the Surreal

                Taga for Mbaye Dyob
                Man and Beast
                The Kaya-Magan

        Leon Damas
                Just Like the Legend
                S.O.S.
                Hiccups

        Aime Cesaire
                From Notebookof a Return to the Native Land
                The Miraculous Weapons




A Third Gallery

        Anna Ahkmatova
                Requiem

        Nelly Sachs
                Chorus of the Dead
                Chorus of the Stars

        Hugh MacDiarmid
                From A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle

        David Jones

        Miyazawa Kenji
                Spring and the Ashura
                Daydreaming on the Trail
                Pictures of the Floating World

        Bertolt Brecht
                First Psalm (Posthumous)
                Three Fragments
                Alabama Song

        Melvin Tolson
                From The Harlem Gallery: Book I, the Curator

        Henri Michaux
                From Slices of Knowledge
                Tomorrow

        Francis Ponge
                The Oyster
                From The Sun Placed in the Abyss

        Wen Yiduo  (Wen I-to)
                Dead Water
                Miracle

        Vitezslav Nezval
                City with Towers
                Trap Door

        George Seferis
                The Poplar Leaf
                Mathios Paskalis Among the Roses
                Les Anges Sont Blancs

        Laura Riding
                Elegy in a Spider's Web

        Gyula Illyes
                A Winter Memory
                While the Record Plays

        Nazim Hikmet
                Letters from Chankiri Prison

        Langston Hughes
                From Montage of A Dream Deferred

        Carlos Drummond de Andrade
                The Dead in Frock Coats
                The Dirty Hand
                Motionless Faces

        Lorine Niedecker
                News
                Subliminal

        Nicolas Guillen
                Don't Know No English
                Sensemaya
                Wake  for Papa Montero
                Moon
                The Usurers
                From The Daily Daily

        Pablo Neruda
                Walkin' Around
                Sexual Water
                Only Death

        Louis Zukofsky
                From Songs of Degrees
                "A" 1

        Kenneth Rexroth
                From Prolegomena to a Theodicy

        Kusano Shimpei
                Birthday Party
                4 or 5 Tadpoles
                Skylarks and Fuji

        Gunnar Ekelof
                Like Ankle-Rings, This Music
                If You Ask Me
                Absentia Animi

        Rene Char
                From Leaves of Hypnos

        Roger Gilbert-Lecomte
                Preface or The Drama of Absence in an Eternal Heart

                The Son of the Bone Speaks
                Old Precept of the Dead World
                Wink

        Rene Daumal
                From Clavicles for a Great Poetic Game
                Persephone That is to Say Double Issue
                Short Revelation Concerning Death and Chaos

        Miklos Radnoti
                The Angel of  Dread
                Seventh Eclogue

        Yi Sang
                From Crow's-Eye-View
                Paper Memorial Stone
                Soyong Problems
                From Critical Condition

        Muriel Rukeyser
                The Dam

        Octavio Paz
                Hymn among the Ruins



A Book of Origins


        Prologue to Origins

        Confucius / Ezra Pound
                From The Great Digest

        Orpingalik  (Netsilik Eskimo / Inuit)
                "Songs are thoughts, sung out with the breath..."


        Arunta (Australia)
                Alcheringa Definitions

        Leopold Sedar Senghor
                LThe African image is not an image by equation..."


        Allama Prabhu (Kannada, India)
                For the Lord of Caves

        Clayton Eshleman
                Placements I

        Robert Duncan
                From "Rites of Participation"

        Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)
                From Why's/Wise

        Aborigine Sound Poem (Australia)

        Lily Events (Arnhem Land, Australia)

        From The Goulburn Island Cycle (Arnhem Land, Australia)

        Tristan Tzara
                From Poemes Negres
                        The Dance of the Greased Women
                        Tropical Winter

        Awotunde Aworinde
                From Ifa Suite in Praise of the Yoruba Oracle

        Aime Cesaire
                Ex-Voto for a Shipwreck

        Three for Bear

        Seven Songs & Song Pictures

        Richard Johnny John, Jerome Rothenberg, Ian Tyson
                 Songs from the Society of the Mystic Animals

        Simon Ortiz
                Telling About Coyote

        From Cantares Mexicanos

        Maria Sabina
                From The Midnight Velada

        The 13th Horse Song of Frank Mitchell

        From The I Ching
                The Marrying Maiden

        Jackson Mac Low
                Mani-Mani Gatha

        Ezra Pound
                Canto 49

        Charles Olson
                The Song of Ullikummi

        Armand Schwerner
                Tablet V

        From The Thunder, Perfect Mind

        Diane Di Prima
                From Loba

        Doc Reese
                Ol' Hannah

        Naftali Bacharach
                A Poem for the Sefirot as a Wheel of Light

        Jacques Gaffarel
                Celestial Alphabet Event

        Edmond Jabes
                from The Book of Questions