Category: Today’s Pillar of Poetry (Page 2 of 7)

Continuing in 2017 to work through the Poet’s Corner card deck series.

“Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.”

“Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats.

Along with P.B. Shelly, Keats was labelled “unabashedly lyrical and emotional” and were “easily parodied” for their “superhuman sensitivity” and were “celebrated by the young [and] reviled by the establishment critics.” Keats had a “fragile constitution” and was ridiculed for being “unmanly.” He died of consumption in Rome. Nothing on this card about his craft or reasons for his popularity. Harsh!

“Women and men (both dong and ding) summer autumn winter spring reaped their sowing and went their came sun moon stars rain”

From “anyone lived in a pretty how town” by e.e. cummings

Both similarly and alternatively described: Cummings was a “romantic iconoclast who vented his rage at the dehumanizing effects of modern civilization.” He “eschewed capitalization” and used “quirky typography, syntax and punctuation” that took on “ a coherent meaning all their own.”

Week stats:

1 black American female
6 white American females
6 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Austrian male
1 Chilean male
7 white English males
2 white English female
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
11 1800s poets
15 1900s poets

Continuing in 2017 to work through the Poet’s Corner card deck series.

“She has laughed as softly as she sighed.
      She has counted six and over,
Of a purse well filled, and a heart well tried—
     Oh each a worthy lover!
They ‘give her time’; for her soul must slip
     Where the world has set the grooving:
She will lie to one with her fair red lip–
  But love seeks truer loving.”

“A Woman’s Shortcomings” Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth was popular before she met Robert Browning and Edgar Allen Poe dedicated a book of verse to her. He called her “the noblest of your sex” which she seemed to find stupid, responding “Sir, you are the most discerning of yours.” She suffered a spinal injury at 15 and waited through three years of letters before agreeing to meet Robert Browning. This poem is described on the card as sardonic and the poet as before her time.

"Sports and gallantries, the stage,
  the arts, the antics of dancers,
The exuberant voices of music,
Have charm for children but lack
  nobility; it is bitter earnestness
That makes beauty; the mind
Knows, grown adult."

“Boats in a Fog” by Robinson Jeffers

An American poet who “celebrated strength, self-reliance and other heroic virtues, ” Jeffers lived at Hawk Tower in Carmel, California. Ghost Adventures visited the location a few years ago. I blogged about the episode. The card calls him “completely out of step with his times.” His epic, biblical poetry is “not only difficult to anthology but can also test a reader’s endurance.” He was also full of “antimodern rhetoric" and this poem is about classical arts vs “the vulgarities of contemporary popular culture.” Not too surprisingly, Jeffers became a recluse at the end of his life.

"Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Make weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

"Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The card quotes Edmund Gosse to say “ No living poet has ever held England…quite so long under his unbroken sway.” He experienced enormous fame and was Poet Laureate for 40 years, originally designated by Queen Victoria.

Week stats:

1 black American female
6 white American females
5 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Austrian male
1 Chilean male
6 white English males
2 white English female
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
10 1800s poets
14 1900s poets

Still working through the Poet’s Corner card deck series I found in Lititz, Pennsylvania, last summer. I'm actually enjoying the serendipity of selecting cards that correspond to poets and themes I'm finding in other poetry adventures. All three cards this week were unusual in that I guessed all their titles before flipping the cards over. 

And I had done a hellish thing,
And it would world ‘em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch! Said they, the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow!

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Coleridge was one of my favorite Romantic poets in college and I based one of my Mars poems on "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," (a poem that was cut before publication). Coleridge was the "thirteenth of thirteen children of a country vicar.” He wrote this poem when he was 26 about "spiritual restlessness." He was addicted to laudanum and opium. Had he not been, we would never have had this wonderful thing.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time–
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statute with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal…

“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath.

This is a good irony pulling this card. In our Difficult Book Reading Club we recently finished reading Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. Joan Didion is one of my favorite writers, especially depicting both Los Angeles and New York City. So as I was inspired then to read her newish biography by Tracy Daugherty, The Last Love Song, a huge tome that spent a good amount of time describing Didion's experience winning a scholarship to work as an intern at Vogue Magazine in the late 1950s. This story lead me to finally read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar because Plath had also won young-writer's internship to Mademoiselle Magazine around the same time. Plath’s novel documents her experience during that time. And reading that led me to start her collected poems, edited by her husband, poet Ted Hughes. This poetry card says she was a “gifted poet but a tortured soul" and that now she is primarily of interest to feminist scholars. Which leads us to…

"Inebriate of Air—am I—
And Debauchee of Dew—
Reeling—through endless summer days—
Form inns of Molten Blue—

No. 214 “I taste a liquor never brewed” by Emily Dickinson.

Secluded in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson was famously posthumously famous. Only 8 of her 1800 poems were published in her lifetime,  and none with her consent. She is cited, along with her contemporary Walt Whitman, (unknown to each other), as the founder of a truly American poetry. Many of her poems are a riddles of dashes, the card says,  “as if only half articulating” what she wanted to say. If you like Dickinson, the HarvardX course on her is very interesting. I've been wondering why many of their courses have shut down enrollment and if this was related to a recent lawsuit regarding accessibility in the online materials.

Week stats:

1 white American colonialist female
1 black American female
5 white American females
3 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Austrian male
1 Chilean male
5 white English males
1 white English female
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
8 1800s poets
12 1900s poets

Continuing to work through the Poet’s Corner card deck series. I was excited to find two similar photographs for these first two poets. Small thrills.

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!

“First Fig” by Edna St. Vincent Millay

This is her most famous poem and it captures the “willful irresponsibility of the time and place" which was "Bohemianism in New York during the 1920s.”

What care I if Skies are blue,
If God created Gnat and Gnu,
What care I if good God be
If he be not good to me?

“Egocentric” from Stevie Smith

She's writing about narcissism! It's the 21st Century topic! This English poet and novelist was known for her nonsense verse which attempted to work against the pompous or overly serious verse of sense, although providing some "serious underlying messages."

“Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ‘tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a cap the belly-ache.”

A.E. Houseman from “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff”     

This one is a good punctuation lesson. According to the card, Houseman experienced “enormous appeal” for his “idealized rustic vision” and his “insistence that poetry was more physical than intellectual.” He wrote primarily pastoral, rhymed and metered verse which “had a hypnotic quality that led itself to easy memorization.” The character of Terence was a regular and an alter ego in Housman poetry, a disguise for his love of his friend. He started writing after age 40, once the drama of his heartbreak and “emotional life” was over.

Week stats:

1 white American colonialist female
1 black American female
3 white American females
3 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Austrian male
1 Chilean male
4 white English males
1 white English female
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
6 1800s poets
11 1900s poets