Louis Simpson
Louis Simpson Poems
A light is on in my father's study.
"Still up?" he says, and we are silent,
looking at the harbor lights,
listening to the surf
...
Trees in the old days used to stand
And shape a shady lane
Where lovers wandered hand in hand
Who came from Carentan.
...
Uncle Bob prayed over the groom:
"Let him establish Kingdom principles."
Aunt Shirley prayed for the bride:
"Father, I pray an anointing on her."
...
Once some people were visiting Chekhov.
While they made remarks about his genius
the Master fidgeted. Finally
...
Do not write. I am sad, and want my light put out.
Summers in your absence are as dark as a room.
I have closed my arms again. They must do without.
...
Whatever it is, it must have
A stomach that can digest
Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.
...
I dreamed that in a city dark as Paris
I stood alone in a deserted square.
The night was trembling with a violet
Expectancy. At the far edge it moved
...
In the clear light that confuses everything
Only you, dark laurel,
Shadow my house,
Lifting your arms in the anguish
...
I wake and feel the city trembling.
Yes, there is something unsettled in the air
And the earth is uncertain.
...
The man who married Magdalene
Had not forgiven her.
God might pardon every sin ...
Love is no pardoner.
...
My father in the night commanding No
Has work to do. Smoke issues from his lips;
He reads in silence.
The frogs are croaking and the street lamps glow.
...
On the lawn at the villa—
That's the way to start, eh, reader?
We know where we stand—somewhere expensive—
You and I imperturbes, as Walt would say,
...
Swing and sway with Sammy Kaye
Everyone at Lake Kearney had a nickname:
there was a Bumstead, a Tonto, a Tex,
and, from the slogan of a popular orchestra
...
Look! From my window there's a view
of city streets
where only lives as dry as tortoises
can crawl—the Gallapagos of desire.
...
A man stood in the laurel tree
Adjusting his hands and feet to the boughs.
He said, "Today I was breaking stones
On a mountain road in Asia,
...
A siren sang, and Europe turned away
From the high castle and the shepherd's crook.
Three caravels went sailing to Cathay
...
Vandergast to his neighbors—
the grinding of a garage door
and hiss of gravel in the driveway.
...
. . . life which does not give the preference to any other life, of any
previous period, which therefore prefers its own existence . . .
Ortega y Gasset
...
A man walks beside them
with a whip that he cracks.
The cart they draw is painted
with Saracens and Crusaders,
...
In my grandmother's house there was always chicken soup
And talk of the old country—mud and boards,
Poverty,
The snow falling down the necks of lovers.
...
Louis Simpson Biography
Born in Jamaica, West Indies, in 1923, Louis Simpson was the son of a lawyer of Scottish descent and a Russian mother. He immigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen, studied at Columbia University, then served in the Second World War with the 101st Airborne Division on active duty in France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany. After the war he continued his studies at Columbia and at the University of Paris. While living in France he published his first book of poems, The Arrivistes (1949), for which the poet and critic Randall Jarrell wrote of Simpson, “He is a surprisingly live poet: as you read him you forget for a moment that we are the ancient.” In the Spring 1997 issue of the Harvard Review, Simpson wrote: “It is the struggle to express the contemporary that makes poetry seem alive, and contemporary life can hardly be expressed in the forms used by poets four hundred years ago.” Simpson worked as an editor in a publishing house in New York, then earned a Ph.D. at Columbia and went on to teach at Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Simpson’s second collection of poems, Good News of Death and Other Poems was published in 1955 by Charles Scribner’s Sons (in Poets of Today, Vol. 2), followed by A Dream of Governors: Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1959) and At the End of the Open Road, Poems (1963), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Louis Simpson went on to publish more than eighteen books of original poetry, including Voices in the Distance: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2010); Struggling Times (BOA Editions, 2009); The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems, 1940-2001 (2003), which was a finalist for both the National Book Award in Poetry and the Griffin International Poetry Prize; Nombres et poussière; There You Are (Story Line, 1995); In the Room We Share (1990); Collected Poems (1988); People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949-83 (1983); The Best Hour of the Night (1983); Caviare at the Funeral (1980); Armidale (1979); Searching for the Ox (1976); Adventures of the Letter I (1971); and Selected Poems (1965). The poet Seamus Heaney called Simpson’s work “a touchstone for poetry," and wrote: “Louis Simpson has perfect pitch. His poems win us first by their drama, their ways of voicing our ways ... of making do with our lives. Then his intelligence cajoles us to the brink of a cliff of solitude and we step over into the buoyant element of true poetry.” The poet William Matthews wrote: “If Chekhov were an American poet alive now, his gentle and heart-breaking poems would read like these, and like these would release slowly, almost reluctantly, but certainly their fierce and balanced compassion.” In 1975 the publication of Three on the Tower (William Morrow), a study of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, brought Simpson wide acclaim as a literary critic. His other books of criticism include Ships Going Into the Blue: Essays and Notes on Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 1994), The Character of the Poet (1986), A Company of Poets (1981), and A Revolution in Taste: Studies of Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell (Macmillan, 1978). Simpson is also the author of a memoir, The King My Father’s Wreck (Story Line, 1995), and published a volume entitled Selected Prose in 1989. His Modern Poets of France: A Bilingual Anthology (Story Line Press) won the 1998 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. Among his many other honors are the Prix de Rome, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Medal for Excellence from Columbia University. Louis Simpson lived for many years in Setauket, New York, on the north shore of Long Island, near Stony Brook. He died on September 14, 2012.)
The Best Poem Of Louis Simpson
Working Late
A light is on in my father's study.
"Still up?" he says, and we are silent,
looking at the harbor lights,
listening to the surf
and the creak of coconut boughs.
He is working late on cases.
No impassioned speech! He argues from evidence,
actually pacing out and measuring,
while the fans revolving on the ceiling
winnow the true from the false.
Once he passed a brass curtain rod
through a head made out of plaster
and showed the jury the angle of fire--
where the murderer must have stood.
For years, all through my childhood,
if I opened a closet . . . bang!
There would be the dead man's head
with a black hole in the forehead.
All the arguing in the world
will not stay the moon.
She has come all the way from Russia
to gaze for a while in a mango tree
and light the wall of a veranda,
before resuming her interrupted journey
beyond the harbor and the lighthouse
at Port Royal, turning away
from land to the open sea.
Yet, nothing in nature changes, from that day to this,
she is still the mother of us all.
I can see the drifting offshore lights,
black posts where the pelicans brood.
And the light that used to shine
at night in my father's study
now shines as late in mine.
Louis Simpson Comments
My favourite poet. For me, the greatest poet that ever lived.
WOOOOOO LOUIS SIMPSON YEAH MAN! ! ! ! ! ! LOUUUUUUUUISSS GO DUDE YEAAAAAAAA
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Louis Simpson Popularity
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11/24/2024 8:14:13 AM # 1.0.0
The greatest poet ever. Searching For The Ox, As Birds Are Fitted To The Boughs, etc..