An episode from 4/17/24: Tonight, I read a handful of poems on modern life—whatever “modern” might mean in words spanning the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. In many of the poems we hear the complaint of every age, that “the world has never been so bad.” In others, descriptions of the suburbs are enough, or of car culture, or of how we get our news or even begin to live with stories of atrocity and war. Some poems ask us to pay attention to the work and details of everyday life, others wonder if we shouldn’t look to past poets for wisdom and guidance. If a “modern” mindset means anything, it seems to mean proliferation and flux, a sense of not being settled. The poems I read are:
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021), “In Goya’s greatest scenes”
- Kathleen Jamie (1962- ), “The Way We Live”
- Laurie Sheck (1953- ), “Headlights”
- Derek Mahon (1941-2020), “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”
- Ted Kooser (1939- ), “Late February”
- Philip Larkin (1922-1985), “Here”
- Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), “New Mexican Mountain”
- T. E. Hulme (1883-1917), “Image”
- Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950), “Editor Whedon”
- Walt Whitman (1819-1892), “The blab of the pave”
- William Wordsworth (1770-1850), “London 1802”
- Mary Robinson (1758-1800), “A London Summer Morning”
- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), “A Description of the Morning”
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), “The queen, my lord, is dead”
- R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), “Suddenly”
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Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.
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