Category: Today’s Pillar of Poetry (Page 3 of 8)

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

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

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies? And even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

“The First Elegy” from The Duino Elegies (1923), Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell

The elegies are named for Duino Castle on the Adriatic Sea. The card didn’t have much else about Rilke. Sad face.

Yes, I went to the city,
And there I did bitterly cry,
Men out of touch with the earth,
And with never a glance at the sky.
Oh, can’t hold the han’ of my love!
Can’t hold her pure little han’!

From “I Went to the City” by Kenneth Patchen.

Patchen was a poet and a painter. His idol was William Blake. He created many painted poems which he called “anticalligraphy” which were sometimes accompanied by jazz musicians.

And through the tremble of a sigh
May tremble through the story.
For “happy summer days” gone by,
And vanish’d summer glory—
It shall not touch, with breath of bale,
The pleasance of our fairy-tale.

From Lewis Caroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” preamble.

Carroll "wrote children’s literature that adults liked," much of it was poetry and puzzles. He was fond of “clever young girls” in the vein of Alice in Wonderland.

Week eight stats:

1 white American colonialist female
1 black American female
2 white American females
3 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Austrian male
1 Chilean male
3 white English males
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
8 1900s poets

One should always honor one's teachers, preferably before they pass away. You don't always make it.

I was fortunate to begin my undergraduate and graduate poetry workshops with two very strong poetry teachers in St. Louis, Missouri. Howard Schwartz was a master at teaching mechanics. In class we often debated poems word by word, even down to the advantages of using 'and' or 'the.' Steve Shreiner taught about feeling and persuasiveness and encouraged us to read other poets. I also had a big crush on him, which I vowed never to let happen again. And Steve Schreiner introduced me to the poet Tom Lux at a local reading Lux was giving. I never would have ended up at Sarah Lawrence College had I not heard those Tom Lux poems back then. They were funny and I wanted a teacher who was funny. Although I had some good classes with Jean Valentine, David Rivard and Joan Larkin, Tom Lux was the professor who sent me to Sarah Lawrence.

Thomas Lux passed away last week from cancer and many of his students have been posting tributes and commentary about what an important mentor he was to them, what an inspiring teacher and friend. In the mid 1990s, Lux was my "don" (or dedicated advisor) at Sarah Lawrence and I took two of his classes, a craft class and a workshop class. Lux had a larger-than-life presence. He was charismatic. His voice boomed during readings. He seemed comfortable in his own skin. He was the celebrity of the writing program. My friend and I called him poetry’s Daryl Hall. We loved to hear him recite the Refrigerator poem and we'd imitate lines of it to each other the way Tom read it: "because you do not eat / that which rips your heart with joy!"

And herein lies the rub for me because I've always had a hard time with celebrities. They walk around with such an impenetrable veneer, it makes one feel smaller. Tom's office at Sarah Lawrence was set up that way, too. It was a beautiful office, especially by the looks of the dives my other professors inhabited (basements were common). It was large and multi-textured, intellectual and full of stuff like Lux had lived a pirate's life. I scanned the New York Times photograph to the top left from a photocopy just to illustrate the scene: Tom in a large chair, his imposing shoulders and head towering over you as you sat uncomfortably in the lower chair. To be uncomfortable is a choice to be sure. But there it was.

I had a big blow up with Lux in that office. The fight wasn't even over poetry. It was over standards of behavior. He called me petty and another word which I can’t remember and can't believe now that I can’t remember as it was so upsetting to me at the time and I've carried that phrase around, ("petty and something"), like a big memorial gravestone all these years since. My eyes opened wide and I stood up to leave his office dramatically. He stopped me and we dialed the whole thing back into civility. He walked me from his office to Slonim Hall.  After that I knew I would never be one of his favorites.

But he told me my poems were brilliant, (whether they were or not), and he took the time to tell my family at graduation that I was a good poet, (I don't think they believed him), and the first time I ever had greens was as a party for the students up in his NYC apartment. He was like my difficult relative or the antagonistic mentor, the best kind of mentor probably, something you must push up against until it's gone. Despite the fact that I don't have the same connection to Tom Lux that other students had, despite all the drama at Sarah Lawrence, I've always been proud to have been one of his many doe-eyed students.

The obits

Thomas Lux, esteemed Georgia Tech teacher and poet (The Atlanta0-Journal Constitution)

Campus, Atlanta communities mourn the loss of Thomas Lux, director of Poetry@TECH (Georgia Tech)

Rest in Peace, Thomas Lux (1946–2017) (Poetry Foundation)

Sarah Lawrence College Mourns the Loss of Longtime Writing Faculty Member Tom Lux (Sarah Lawrence College)

Thomas Lux, 70, poet known for his generosity as a writer, teacher (The Boston Globe)

Renowned poet Thomas Lux, an Easthampton native, dies at 70 (MASS Live)

Remembering Thomas Lux (Technique)

Remembering a One-of-a-Kind Poet (The Atlantic)

The Old New York Times piece from which the photo above came: If Poetry Is Puzzling Who is to Blame?

So I'm still working through a deck of poetry cards I found in my parents house last year. This week randomness dealt out some good stuff:

It could not be dangerous to be living
   in a town like this, of simple people,
who have a steeple-jack placing danger
   signs by the church
while he is gliding the solid-
   pointed star, which on the steeple
stands for hope.

“The Steeple-Jack” by Marianne Moore

Moore was born in the outskirts of St. Louis, in Kirkwood, MO. She went to Bryn Mawr College and was a teacher and a librarian. She was also editor of The Dial and considered one of the modernist poets.

Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

“The World is Too Much With Us” by William Wordsworth

Wordsworth was a leader of English Romanticism movement, primarily a lyrical writer who believed specific experience served up universal meaning. He celebrated humanity, real language and this poem was his “recipe for  poetry as a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" and "emotion recollected in tranquility.’”

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will end the human war?

Allen Ginsberg from “America” 

Wow! So great to read this right now. The card calls Ginsberg’s “Howl” a “literary gauntlet hurled down” and calls this poem “a brutally funny indictment of the mechanized torture that awaits any sensitive soul caught like a rat in the consumer maze.” Hear Ginsberg read the poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orar-V3y5Sk.

Week seven stats:

1 white American colonialist female
1 black American female
2 white American females
3 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 Chilean male
2 white English males
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
5 1800s poets
7 1900s poets