I have always been a sucker for the romantic poets of the nineteenth century, the more emo the better really, so I was very excited to hear the University of California Press has just released the third volume in their Poems for the Millennium series - Romantic & Postromantic Poetry. Editors Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson were in attendance at Books Inc. tonight to read selections from the book, assisted by a slew of local luminaries including Michael McClure and Michael Palmer. The latter Michael read a fabulously surreal dream poem by Christina Rossetti and referred to his renewed interest in the Pre-Raphaelites, which all in a flash reminded me of Christina's poem Echo:
Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.
O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.
Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.
The evening really had something for everyone, from familar love poetry by Robert Burns to Coleridge's ode to the urine in his chamber pot, and the new collection is similarly wide-ranging. I like how Rothenberg and Robinson have taken care to highlight the experimental side of the romantics while never forgetting the particular beauty of the poetry. This is art that compels the reader to feel, as Rilke puts it in the last line of the poem that concludes the book, "You must change your life."
