Poetry, History, Mythology
As an addition to my last post, here is George Orwell’s complete description of going down into the coal mines of northern England, taken from the second chapter of his 1937 book, The Road to Wigan Pier. The entire text of the book can be found here. *** When you go down a coal-mine it … Continue reading George Orwell in the Coal Mines
As usual, George Orwell says it better than anybody. Here he is in his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier, asking his readers not to give up using coal, but just to recognize whose labor is providing them with that coal. Nowadays I would only add to the coal miners all the people behind … Continue reading George Orwell & Empathy
Jung traveled with Freud and others to America in late September, 1909, and on the boat returning to Europe, he had a dream. Whatever you make of Jung’s overarching theories and scholarship, it always seems better to think of him more as a poet or mystic, and so his strength seems to lie in descriptions … Continue reading Jung’s Great Dream
Those Images What if I bade you leave The cavern of the mind? There’s better exercise In the sunlight and wind. I never bade you go To Moscow or to Rome. Renounce that drudgery, Call the Muses home. Seek those images That constitute the wild, The lion and the virgin, The harlot and the child. … Continue reading “The harlot and the child”: 2 Late Poems from W. B. Yeats
Here are excerpts from the last book of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude. Other excerpts are here. In one of these excursions, travelling then Through Wales on foot and with a youthful friend, I left Bethkelet’s huts at couching-time, And westward took my way to see the sun Rise from the top of Snowdon. Having reading … Continue reading Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 13: “The perfect image of a mighty mind, of one that feeds upon infinity”
Throughout the summer I hope to post my favorite bits from Wordworth’s 1805 Prelude. Book 12 continues his meditations in Book 11, which was titled “Imagination, How Impaired & Restored.” Other excerpts are here. Such benefit may souls of humblest frame Partake of, each in their degree; ’tis mine To speak of what myself … Continue reading Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 12: “making verse deal boldly with substantial things”
Excerpts from Book 11 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, which he calls “Imagination, How Impaired and Restored.” Other excerpts are here. Long time hath man’s unhappiness and guilt Defained us: with what dismal sights beset For the outward view, and inwardly oppressed With sorrow, disappointment, vexing thoughts, Confusion of the judgement, zeal decayed – And … Continue reading Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 11: “Habits of devoutest sympathy”
Excerpts from Book 10 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, where he concludes his story of being in France during the Revolution. Other excerpts are here. A poor mistaken and bewildered offering, Should to the breast of Nature have gone back, With all my resolutions, all my hopes, A poet only to myself, to men Useless, … Continue reading Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 10: “In the very world which is the world of all of us, the place in which, in the end, we find our happiness, or not at all “
The Maid’s Thought Why listen, even the water is sobbing for something. The west wind is dead, the waves Forget to hate the cliff, in the upland canyons Whole hillsides burst aglow With golden broom. Dear how it rained last month, And every pool was rimmed With sulphury pollen dust of the wakening pines. Now … Continue reading 5 Poems by Robinson Jeffers: “Lend me the stone strength of the past”
As an addition to my last post, here is George Orwell’s complete description of going down into the coal mines of northern England, taken from the second chapter of his 1937 book, The Road to Wigan Pier. The entire text of the book can be found here. *** When you go down a coal-mine it … Continue reading George Orwell in the Coal Mines
As usual, George Orwell says it better than anybody. Here he is in his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier, asking his readers not to give up using coal, but just to recognize whose labor is providing them with coal. Nowadays I would only add to the coal miner all the people behind all … Continue reading George Orwell & Empathy
One of the great jazz standards of Medieval & Renaissance art, here’s only a selection of all the depictions of St. Jerome: either studying indoors or out, with or without his lion or skull, probably translating the Bible as he goes, reading or writing always. A good excuse for artists to place him in contemporary … Continue reading Images: The Saint & the Lion
Excerpts from Book 9 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, where he begins his story of being in France during the Revolution. Other excerpts are here. ’Tis mine to tread The humbler province of plain history, And, without choice of circumstance, submissively Relate what I have heard. Book 9, 642-645 Oft then I said, And not … Continue reading Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 9: “I saw the revolutionary power toss like a ship at anchor”
Excerpts from Book 8 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, which he titles “Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind.” Other excerpts are here. With deep devotion, Nature, did I feel In that great city what I owed to thee: High thoughts of God and man, and love of man, Triumphant over all those loathsome … Continue reading Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 8: “A weight of ages did at once descend upon my heart”
Excerpts from Book 7 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, on his time living in London. Other excerpts are here. Above all, one thought Baffled my understanding, how men lived Even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still Strangers, and not knowing each other’s names. Book 7, 117-120 Shall I give way, Copying the … Continue reading Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 7: “This parliament of monsters”
Excerpts from Book 6 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, on his friendship with Coleridge. Other excerpts are here. There is no grief, no sorrow, no despair, No languor, no dejection, no dismay, No absence scarcely can there be, for those Who love as we do. Book 6, 253-256 I too have been a wanderer, but, … Continue reading Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 6: “No absence scarcely can there be, for those who love as we do.”
Back when I used to do a lot of readings, I would start out by sharing somebody else’s work, and I realize that I should do the equivalent of that with the release of my book of stories, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old. The person that comes to mind is the late William … Continue reading Speaking of Short Stories
Excerpts from Book 5 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, on his love for books. Other excerpts are here. And yet it seems That here, in memory of all … Continue reading Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 5: “Stirred to ecstasy by glittering verse”
Excerpts from Book 4 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, on his time home from college. Other excerpts are here. Why should I speak of what a thousand hearts Have felt, and every man alive can guess? Book 4: 33-34 Delighted did I take my place again At our domestic table; and, dear friend, Relating … Continue reading Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 4: “Need I say, dear friend, that to the brim my heart was full?”
Excerpts from Book 3 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, on his years at Cambridge. Other excerpts are here. Things they were which then I did not love, nor do I love them now: Such glory was but little sought by me, And little won. But it is right to say That even so early, from … Continue reading Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 3: “Unknown, unthought of, yet I was most rich”
Excerpts from Book 2 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude. Other excerpts are here. Thus the pride of strength And the vainglory of superior skill Were interfused with objects which subdued And tempered them, and gradually produced A quiet independence of heart. And to my friend who knows me I may add, Unapprehensive of reproof, that … Continue reading Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 2: “The self-sufficing power of solitude”
The Figured Wheel The figured wheel rolls through shopping malls and prisons, Over farms, small and immense, and the rotten little downtowns. Covered with symbols, it mills everything alive and grinds The remains of the dead in the cemeteries, in unmarked graves and oceans. Sluiced by salt water and fresh, by pure and contaminated rivers, … Continue reading Robert Pinsky, “The Figured Wheel”
Excerpts from Book 1 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude. Other excerpts are here. Time, place, and manners, these I seek, and these I find in plenteous store, but nowhere such As may be singled out with steady choice – No little band of yet remembered names Whom I, in perfect confidence, might hope To summon … Continue reading Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 1: “Invigorating thoughts from former years”
From the second of Virgil’s Georgics, translated by David Ferry: It’s spring that adorns the woods and groves with leaves; In spring the soil, desiring seed, is tumid, And then the omnipotent father god descends In showers from the sky and enters into The joyful bridal body of the earth, His greatness and her greatness … Continue reading “the shining days when the world was new”: Virgil Greets the Spring
Taken from John Richardson’s biographies of Picasso: Continue reading Images: Picasso Mostly in Pencil
The Austrian artist Egon Schiele’s bizarre and brutal self-portraits, many dating from before World War One, seem to presage all the carnage and atrocity and alienation that were to come. And even as the more famous artists from the period, and their perhaps “better” work still feels dated and rooted to the time they were … Continue reading Images: Egon Shiele Predicts the 20th Century
Crow’s Song about God Somebody is sitting Under the gatepost of heaven Under the lintel On which are written the words: “Forbidden to the living.” A knot of eyes, eyeholes, lifeless, in the life-shape A rooty old oak-stump, aground in the ooze Of some putrid estuary, Snaggy with amputations, His fingernails broken and bitten, His … Continue reading Ted Hughes – “Crow’s Song about God”
Some poetry can become so much a part of our own personal scripture that its status as “literature” is pretty much irrelevant. This is near the top for me: From “East Coker” I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in … Continue reading T. S. Eliot hits the highest notes
from 21 Love Poems: 1 Whenever in this city, screens flicker with pornography, with science-fiction vampires, victimized hirelings bending to the lash, we also have to walk . . . if simply as we walk through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties of our own neighborhoods. We need to grasp our lives inseparable from those … Continue reading Adrienne Rich: 4 Love Poems
Inscription for a Gravestone I am not dead, I have only become inhuman: That is to say, Undressed myself of laughable prides and infirmities, But not as a man Undresses to creep into bed, but like an athlete Stripping for the race. The delicate ravel of nerves that made me a measurer Of certain fictions … Continue reading 2 Poems by Robinson Jeffers that shoot straight into eternity
Six Young Men The celluloid of a photograph holds them well – Six young men, familiar to their friends. Four decades that have faded and ochre-tinged This photograph have not wrinkled the faces or the hands. Though their cocked hats are not now fashionable, Their shoes shine. One imparts an intimate smile, One chews a … Continue reading Ted Hughes: 2 War Poems
From childhood through old age: Continue reading Images: Dürer’s Self-Portraits
Emily Dickinson, #975 The Mountain sat upon the Plain In his tremendous Chair – His observation omnifold, His inquest, everywhere – The Seasons played around his knees Like Children round a sire – Grandfather of the Days is He Of Dawn, the Ancestor – Wallace Stevens, “How to Live. What to Do” Last evening the … Continue reading Emily Dickinson & Wallace Stevens Climb a Mountain
Here is how James Merrill begins his 560 page poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, published between 1976 and 1982; it being the record of his conversations with a Ouija board, & with the spirits of W. H. Auden & many many others: Admittedly I err by undertaking This in its present form. The baldest prose … Continue reading James Merrill: A Poem to Begin Things
#1142 The Props assist the House Until the House is built And then the Props withdraw And adequate, erect, The House support itself And cease to recollect The Augur and the Carpenter – Just such a retrospect Hath the perfected Life – A Past of Plank and Nail And slowness – then the scaffolds drop … Continue reading Emily Dickinson Affirms a Soul
Three different but marvelous ways of getting it done: Continue reading Images: 3 Impressionist Street Scenes
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever. The force that drives … Continue reading Dylan Thomas: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”
Paterson What do I want in these rooms papered with visions of money? How much can I make by cutting my hair? If I put new heels on my shoes, bathe my body reeking of masturbation and sweat, layer upon layer of excrement dried in employment bureaus, magazine hallways, statistical cubicles, factory stairways, cloakrooms of … Continue reading Allen Ginsberg, “Paterson”
“Out, Out – ” The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood, Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it. And from there those that lifted eyes could count Five mountain ranges one behind the other Under the sunset far into Vermont. And the saw … Continue reading Robert Frost: “Out, Out – ”
For anyone who has ever worked retail and customer service, you’ll recognize the look on the face of this barmaid from Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère: Continue reading Images: Manet Does Customer Service
My Grandmother’s Love Letters There are no stars tonight But those of memory. Yet how much room for memory there is In the loose girdle of soft rain. There is even room enough For the letters of my mother’s mother, Elizabeth, That have been pressed so long Into a corner of the roof That they … Continue reading Hart Crane: “My Grandmother’s Love Letters”
After finishing To the House of the Sun, a poem mostly reliant on translations of ancient poetry (and in some ways the book now feels like something I translated), I had to find my way back to English poetry. One way was through the Penguin anthologies of Renaissance, Metaphysical, Romantic and Victorian poetry. They included … Continue reading Mary Robinson’s Poem “A London Summer Morning”
Bobby Delano The labor to breathe that younger, rawer air: St. Mark’s last football game with Groton lost on the ice-crust, the sunlight gilding the golden polo coats of boys with country seats on the Upper Hudson. Why does that stale light stay? First Form hazing, first day being sent on errands by an oldboy, … Continue reading 3 Poems of Adolescent Love & Hazing by Robert Lowell
The Shampoo The still explosions on the rocks, the lichens, grow by spreading, gray, concentric shocks. They have arranged to meet the rings around the moon, although within our memories they have not changed. And since the heavens will attend as long on us, you’ve been, dear friend, precipitate and pragmatical; and look what happens. … Continue reading Elizabeth Bishop, “The Shampoo”
Back in the late nineties when a place called Borders Outlet still existed and Amazon was only a few years old, that was about the only store I could find – and afford – to buy brand new poetry books by that elusive species, The Poet Who Wasn’t Long Dead. Of all the books I … Continue reading Laurie Sheck’s poem “The Stockroom”
A young Seamus Heaney recalls a blacksmith from his boyhood, while a much older Seamus Heaney illustrates the sometimes excessive power of retributive force (he says he was inspired by the U. S. military response to 9/11) by the swinging of a sledgehammer. The Forge All I know is a door into the … Continue reading “All I know is a door into the dark”: 2 Poems by Seamus Heaney
While always a political poet in some way, Yeats shows at the end of his life where his priorities were, essentially with love & the occult. & amazing too to see how his use of rhyme, which went from the glittering ornamentation of his youth to the simplicity of these poems, is always stunning: … Continue reading “The harlot and the child”: 2 Late Poems from W. B. Yeats
Walt Whitman, early 1863, looking on the Civil War dead: A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim, As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless, As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent, … Continue reading Walt Whitman, “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim”
Here are some bits from Kafka’s Diaries, trying & failing to harmonize his writing life with his family and work life. All writers have been to some version of this, but few things are as heartbreaking as reading Kafka’s version of it. The first entry is one of the few moments of real elation he … Continue reading The Poet Speaks #14: Kafka Tries Again & Again
Here’s the twenty-third psalm of American poetry, & the place where Wallace Stevens brought so much of his complexity (despite his usual high-falutin title) to a stunning simplicity. It’s also a great love poem: Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour Light the first light of evening, as in a room In which we rest … Continue reading Wallace Stevens, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”
Even though I’ve never read a word of his poetry, John Berryman has been haunting me lately. Two friends who are also poets that I admire deeply have both praised his work, and recently I’ve come across remarks from a handful of Berryman’s peers, reflecting on his life and his suicide in 1972. Here are … Continue reading The Poet Speaks #13: Richard Wilbur & John Berryman: “The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him”
I’m stunned every time I read this: one of Wordsworth’s best short poems (& that’s saying something), & perhaps one of the great poems period: St. Paul’s Pressed with conflicting thoughts of love and fear I parted from thee, Friend! and took my way Through the great City, pacing with an eye Downcast, ear sleeping, … Continue reading Wordsworth & Eternity at St. Paul’s
If the Negro, or any other writer, is going to do what is expected of him, he’s lost the battle before the takes the field. I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance – but it must be acceptance on his own terms. Perhaps, … Continue reading The Poet Speaks #12: Ralph Ellison, Anthony Burgess, James Dickey
George Eliot, on empathy: The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies…. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. The only effect I … Continue reading The Poet Speaks #11: George Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Levine, Stephen King, Seamus Heaney: “struggling erring human creatures”
A random scattering, some barely aphorisms, from the first two volumes of the notebooks of Albert Camus. They are gold: One must not cut oneself off from the world. No one who lives in the sunlight makes a failure of his life. My whole effort, whatever the situation, misfortune or disillusion, must be to make … Continue reading The Poet Speaks #10: Albert Camus: “Dissolve in love”
On the supposed “difficulty” of his poetry: We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. … Continue reading The Poet Speaks #9: Geoffrey Hill, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill, Ursula K. Le Guin: “We are difficult”
As even “nerd culture” and all the rest just becomes another snobby fad and pop culture corner to hide in, Patti Smith suggests where the real “next” actually is, out of view completely:…when people ask me Who’s the new people?, well to me the new people are the unknown people. The new people that I … Continue reading The Poet Speaks #8: Patti Smith, Toni Morrison, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane: “I shall make every sacrifice toward that end”
At an antique store a few years ago, I spent $10 on an envelope of old photos. I love to imagine their stories, and thought others might too. And perhaps someone out there knows them? Click on the slideshow to begin: Continue reading Who are These Faces & What are Their Stories?
On why he turned from more specialized to more popular writing on science and culture: Because of that [the use of scientific knowledge in the making of atomic bombs] I wanted to be sure that what I had to say would not be confined to a small circle of specialists but would touch people where … Continue reading The Poet Speaks #7: Bronowski, Bloom, Munro, Gilbert, Trevor
Some great quotes from W. B. Yeats and William Blake, chosen almost at random from two good biographies of them; there are no doubt thousands more, & should you have other favorites, do add them in the comments: From a young W. B. Yeats: …my ever multiplying boxes of unsaleable MSS – work too strange … Continue reading The Poet Speaks #6: Yeats & Blake
I’m not sure who the equivalent is for you, but Albert Camus was one of the first authors I found outside of Stephen King and Dean Koontz. The high school teacher who introduced me to him also laid an egg it took years to get over: the apparently insurmountable gulf between “popular” and “serious” literature; … Continue reading Go Ahead and Fuck Up
On why he wrote about animals so much: I suppose because they were there at the beginning. Like parents. Since I spent my first seventeen or eighteen years constantly thinking about them more or less, they became a language – a symbolic language which is also the language of my whole life. It was not … Continue reading The Poet Speaks #5: Hughes, Auden, Hall, Pinsky, Collins
Flannery O’Connor responds to questions from academics and their students about her short stories: Week before last I went to Wesleyan and read “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” After it I went to one of the classes where I was asked questions. There were a couple of young teachers there and one of … Continue reading The Poet Speaks #4: O’Connor, Campbell, Merwin, Walcott, van Gogh
Should anyone tell you that the primary duty of art (and of life) is to be political, to constantly choose sides and to turn one another into mere categories and the most minute identities, here are a few replies by Jean Guéhenno, written while living in Nazi-Occupied Paris. All come from his Diary of the … Continue reading Art Must Be Political
Advice to aspiring poets: If you can, get out. Everything else in the world pays better. Everything else in the world costs less, not only in terms of money but in terms of damage to your life. Everything else in the world is more justly rewarded. If you can be happy doing something else, the … Continue reading The Poet Speaks #3: Snodgrass, Beethoven, Hollander, Kunitz, Milosz
Quotes from all over on art & creativity: [Leonardo] was always less concerned with the finishing of a picture than with its conception. His ideal would consist of imagining the picture and getting someone else to paint it: invention was what mattered most to him. Painting was above all “a thing of the mind.” As … Continue reading The Poet Speaks #2: Leonardo, Williams, Bishop, Meredith, Ashbery
A new series of quotes from everywhere on writing and creativity: I was in the Navy, and I worked at a shore station in New York. Late in ’44, I was assigned to CINPAC – the Commander-in-Chief Pacific Ocean – at Pearl Harbor, and when that command moved to the Marianas, to Guam, I went … Continue reading The Poet Speaks #1: Fitzgerald, Larkin, Paz, Lowell, Aiken
Originally posted on Underfoot Poetry:
Bermondsey Spaces By the corner forecourt of the Shell station the man eating ribs from a paper bag lets a crutch dangle on one elbow, as he picks his way through want and circumstance, under the gloaming, the overpass, beyond the river’s abstract mass. A light like fine quartz inside… Continue reading Daniel Bennett (6 Poems)
Originally posted on Underfoot Poetry:
Here are fourteen early poems from Ted Hughes, all of them from before the more well-known collections Wodwo and Crow. The powerful voices he gives to the animal and natural world, to history and mythology, to the experience of war, even to the theology of a sixteenth-century martyr burned at… Continue reading Early Ted Hughes (Forerunners)
Originally posted on Underfoot Poetry:
As Blue Fades Which defines you best, a creaking lid or the light-turned flower? The coffee’s steam or smoke wafting from your hand. Your bowls color my shelves; I touch them daily. Sound fills their bodies with memory. The lighter’s click invokes your name. And the stepping stones to nowhere,… Continue reading Robert Okaji (5 Poems)
Originally posted on Underfoot Poetry:
While I’d like to say that after Four Quartets, I don’t know of another long poem from the last century that’s meant as much to me as Allen Ginsberg’s elegy for his mother, Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg, 1894-1956. But it’s so powerful that even describing it as a poem seems… Continue reading Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” (Forerunners)
Originally posted on Underfoot Poetry:
Here’s Seamus Heaney, first talking about his poems on the bog bodies of Iron Age Europe, in Dennis O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones, and then the bog poems themselves, spanning three of his collections: Wintering Out, North, and District and Circle. Also, since I hope to do a post on the bog… Continue reading Heaney’s Bog Poems (Forerunners)
Originally posted on Underfoot Poetry:
Eden Park Meditation i How odd that the days lengthen; the hours braced against a brittle sun that sears the lip of ice at the base of the black oak. The ice and the sun are opaque and impenetrable, a sealed world. This world. The days don’t dwindle into… Continue reading Virginia Slachman: Eden Park Meditation
Not sure who the equivalent is for you, but Albert Camus was one of the first authors I found outside of Stephen King and Dean Koontz. The high school teacher who introduced me to him also laid an egg it took years to get over: the apparently insurmountable gulf between “popular” and “serious” literature; and … Continue reading Go Ahead and Fuck Up
Originally posted on Underfoot Poetry:
A hundred years ago, in June of 1917, the small Egoist Press in Bloomsbury, London, issued a book of poems by the American expatriate, T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations. Much like trying to read the Bible after a religious upbringing, it is almost impossible now to read especially… Continue reading Prufrock & Other Observations (Forerunners)
Originally posted on Underfoot Poetry:
Remember when poets made the cover of Time? It’s too bad the reputation of?Robinson Jeffers has pretty much disappeared; but read any of the following poems aloud and see if you don’t hear something brutal, beautiful, and essential. While he?seems to have staked his reputation on the longer narratives that… Continue reading Robinson Jeffers (Forerunners)
Originally posted on Underfoot Poetry:
Black Moon Season for walking out into white frost under the black moon. Feeling the grass bend, the cold enfold flesh, the dark draw closer. Scenting the wet earth, lying fallow: ice has its own smell. Tasting night on the tongue, cobwebby, thin, and the mouth’s own heat. Watching the… Continue reading Kitty Coles (6 Poems)
Originally posted on Underfoot Poetry:
“The Song of the Sea,” which comprises Exodus 15:1-18 and tells of the Israelites’ escape from Egypt via the Red Sea, is one of the oldest parts of the Bible. Explaining the early form of Hebrew in which it was written, James Kugel notes that the Hebrew prefix ha- (a… Continue reading The Song of the Sea (Forerunners)
Originally posted on Underfoot Poetry:
Documentary A woman in a documentary is frozen in my mind. She stands behind an asylum window and whispers in a foreign language. The subtitle below her reads, “Please let me out of here.” She is framed by the subtitle; framed by the edit of her portrayal. Finally, she is… Continue reading Michael McGill (5 Poems)
Originally posted on Underfoot Poetry:
Many thanks to David Cooke for contributing this week’s Forerunner, and it’s quite a treat. Below he has recorded a good portion of two Anglo-Saxon poems, “The Ruin” and “The Seafarer” in the original Old English. Also included is the original text, an English translation and, following “The Ruin,” David… Continue reading Anglo-Saxon Poetry (Forerunners)
To celebrate Walt Whitman’s birthday today, S4N Books is announcing their new series, Pocket Poems. It will feature classic long poems and books of poetry in small pocket-sized editions. The first three volumes are now available: the 1855 and 1892 editions of Whitman’s Song of Myself, and Alfred Tennyson’s elegy, In Memoriam. Future titles will … Continue reading New Poetry Series
Originally posted on Underfoot Poetry:
Boriska Snowmelt mangles gray potato fields, oxcarts rot & sink by dung heaps, & month after month the heaps rise— I don’t care. Again the sky is opaque. &, still, wizened, Andrei goes on painting icons. In one he gives Christ a cloak the color of earth. He hangs… Continue reading J. S. Belote (5 Poems)
Originally posted on Underfoot Poetry:
Gold Its lack of reaction has made it unique, that and the way it can magnetize fools: forty-niners, Midas, the futures mob— so gung ho, yet always dazzled by it, like urchins dreaming of gilded pavements. Locked in a vault, it validates paper. It’s what the rich cling to when… Continue reading David Cooke (6 Poems)
I’m happy to announce the launch of a new poetry blog I’ll be editing, Underfoot Poetry. It will include original, unpublished work from poets around the world, as well as a series I call Forerunners, featuring influential poetry from the past. The first installments of both are up right now: six new poems from the … Continue reading New Poetry Blog
Are poets today largely talking to themselves? Are many of them happy to do so, locked away in academia or whatever other cloister? Are the ones who want a wider public, and who want to take on larger subjects, just curating their shelf of books for future generations to find? I heard somewhere that after … Continue reading The State of Poetry Now?
Are these not three of the most amazing songs you’ve ever heard? Continue reading Are these not three of the most amazing songs you’ve ever heard?
Going through my computer the other day, I found the .pdfs of these classic book sets, and thought to post them here for whoever wants them: Frazer’s The Golden Bough, The Mythology of All Races, and Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Whatever their limitations now, they are still great resources. I … Continue reading Classic Jam Hits
Our love for certain books or movies or pieces of music are so intense that we like to imagine our preference for them rises to the level of objectivity. The wonderfully grouchy critic Harold Bloom, for instance, praises the poetry of Hart Crane to no end; but, just as effusively, he relates the memory of … Continue reading The Palace of Winds (rereading “The English Patient”)
There’s a sense that, eventually, somebody could have written much of the best of John Donne’s poetry. His tremendous blend of looseness (many of the poems can feel casually spoken) coupled with an almost impenetrable density and complexity, or his mixture of the erotic and humorous and newly-scientific in some of his love poetry, feel … Continue reading John Donne: Holy Sonnets & Good Friday
A recent article tells the astonishing story about theatre majors who were unable to act out flirting: “Accustomed to soliciting one another via text, and more used to hookups than dates, this verb was no longer a touchstone for college students, and ‘flirting’ did not elicit any specific physical or emotional behaviors (sustained eye contact, … Continue reading Early Yeats (12 Poems)
I would encourage anyone with an interest in poetry to check out the work of Daniel Paul Marshall. He has kindly allowed a handful of his poems to appear below, but many more are available at his website. Originally from England, he now lives on Jeju Island, Korea, where he runs a café and guesthouse … Continue reading Daniel Paul Marshall (6 Poems)
My recent post about Thomas Wolfe elicited a handful of comments like, “I loved to read him when I was young, but as I get older he no longer holds up.” My own versions of Wolfe are people like Hesse and Dostoevsky, but Kafka has remained one of those authors I latched onto in high … Continue reading Kafka’s Diaries
As an addition to my last post, here is George Orwell’s complete description of going down into the coal mines of northern England, taken from the second chapter of his 1937 book, The Road to Wigan Pier. The entire text of the book can be found here. *** When you go down a coal-mine it … Continue reading George Orwell in the Coal Mines
As usual, George Orwell says it better than anybody. Here he is in his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier, asking his readers not to give up using coal, but just to recognize whose labor is providing them with coal. Nowadays I would only add to the coal miner all the people behind all … Continue reading George Orwell & Empathy
On this anniversary of Thomas Wolfe’s death, I’m reminded that every few years I turn around and he’s there again. Whether in influencing Ferlinghetti or Kerouac, or anecdotes about his editor Maxwell Perkins trying to beat his holy mess novels into some more coherent shape, or just his own troubled life, Thomas Wolfe always shows … Continue reading Thomas Wolfe
The following essay was published in the New Criterion in February, 1993, and reflects a view of American poetry from at least the 1970s forward. It’s quite depressing to read this two decades later, since the status of poetry as a subculture can’t help but be worse than it was then, and worse in part … Continue reading The State of Poetry … in 1993
Talking with a friend about ancient Greece the other day reminded me of being in Athens back in 2007, and taking two days to wander through its National Archaeological Museum. The best part was all the faces, whether reliefs from numerous funeral stele, or the later busts of Roman emperors or other higher-ups. Nearly all … Continue reading A Gallery of Greeks & Romans
Perhaps because he embodied that rarest of combinations—the energy and enthusiasm of youth, and actual genius—there are few writers better at articulating the fire of creation than Hart Crane. The following selection from his letters carries Crane from his early twenties to a few years before he died at thirty-two: here is is writing The … Continue reading “I respond more to revelation”: Hart Crane on Fire
Last Friday, the great historian William H. McNeill died. I still have surprisingly endearing memories of reading his A World History one winter, in the middle crowded New York City Wendy’s, surrounded by high school kids just done with their day, his narrative silencing every one and every thing. And this year during a brief … Continue reading William H. McNeill – History as Myth
Here’s a nice anecdote told twice, first from some anonymous Irish source, and then Seamus Heaney’s version of it in verse. This was the first poem of Heaney’s I ever saw, back in high school when someone showed me the New York Times, perhaps when his book Seeing Things was reviewed there, or when he’d … Continue reading Ship in Air
For all those poets who feel guilty (or have been guilted) for not writing bad political poems—bad Brexit couplets, bad protest rants on racism, sexism, or Donald Trump poems that are as shitty as him—some advice from an aging Yeats is worth repeating: Those Images What if I bade you leave The cavern of … Continue reading A Bit of Late Yeats
from George Herbert’s poem, “The Flower”: And now in age I bud again, After so many deaths I live and write; I once more smell the dew and rain, And relish versing: O my only light, It cannot be That I am he On whom thy … Continue reading George Herbert, Getting Back Up
Here’s one of the great moments in poetry: Canto 27 of Dante’s Purgatorio, where Dante passes through the fire, and Virgil crowns him on their way up to the summit of Mount Purgatory. This taken from the translation of Allen Mandelbaum, and the Digital Dante site at Columbia University. *** Just as, there where its … Continue reading Dante, Through the Fire
Here’s a favorite, possibly apocryphal, story of Pablo Picasso (who lived in Paris during the German Occupation) and his great painting, Guernica. The exchange is almost too good to be true, and perhaps nobody but Picasso could have gotten away with it. Whenever volume four of John Richardson’s biography of Picasso is finally released, I’ll … Continue reading Picasso & the Gestapo
Here’s Seamus Heaney, first talking about his poems on the bog bodies of Iron Age Europe, in Dennis O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones, and then the bog poems themselves, spanning three of his collections: Wintering Out, North, and District and Circle. Also, since I hope to do a post on the bog bodies at some point, interested … Continue reading Heaney’s Bog Poems
I’d like to say that after Four Quartets, I don’t know of another long poem from the last century that’s meant as much to me as Allen Ginsberg’s elegy for his mother, Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg, 1894-1956. But it’s so powerful that even describing it as a poem seems silly: it really doesn’t matter what … Continue reading Allen Ginsberg, “Kaddish”
Here is one the my favorite moments from a writer’s life, followed by one of the saddest. Only seven months apart, they typify the pendulum of great highs and awful lows in Hart Crane’s life. Desperate to write, and giving in his letters as articulate a record of that burning desire as any writer I … Continue reading Hart Crane, High & Low
Here is W. B. Yeats, remembering some of his adult experiences with the occult and supernatural. All taken from his The Trembling of the Veil, collected in Autobiographies: When staying with Hyde in Roscommon, I had driven over to Lough Kay, hoping to find some local memory of the old story of Tumaus Costello, which … Continue reading Yeats Comes to the Occult
Here are a few pieces from seventeenth-century poet Henry Vaughan. Going through The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, the usual names stuck out, but Vaughan seemed to run past most of them. Trying to place him, he strikes me very nearly as a forerunner of William Blake in the visionary quality of his unexpected rhythms. … Continue reading Henry Vaughan – 5 Poems
It was nice to realize that two Italian writers who lived almost two thousand years apart appear to share the same tone and outlook on world events. Here are a few bits from the Roman historian Tacitus (in his Annal of Imperial Rome) and the more recent memoirist and novelist, Primo Levi (in his The … Continue reading Tacitus & Primo Levi
It has always seemed significant to me that, at the beginning of the first and the end of the last edition of his great book of poems, Walt Whitman gives us a long essay in prose. I thought to only give selections of them, but it is impossible to edit Whitman, to put a stopper … Continue reading Whitman Last
It has always seemed significant to me that, at the beginning of the first and the end of the last edition of his great book of poems, Walt Whitman gives us a long essay in prose. I thought to only give selections of them, but it is impossible to edit Whitman, to put a stopper … Continue reading Whitman First
Here’s W. B. Yeats recalling his earliest experiences of poetry: ….This may have come from the stable-boy, for he was my principal friend. He had a book of Orange rhymes, and the days when we read them together in the hay-loft gave me the pleasure of rhyme for the first time. Later on I can … Continue reading Yeats Discovers Poetry
Here’s Seamus Heaney talking about writing, from Dennis O’Driscoll’s book-length interview with him, Stepping Stones: On Inspiration On the week in May 1969 when he wrote “about forty poems”: It was a visitation, an onset, and as such, powerfully confirming. This you felt, was “it.” You had been initiated into the order of the inspired. … Continue reading Heaney on Writing
From that greatest of literary biographies, Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, here is the account of Joyce meeting Marcel Proust, only a few months before Proust’s death: On May 18, 1922, Sydney Schiff (“Stephen Hudson”), the English novelist whom Joyce had met a few times, invited him to a supper party for Stravinsky and Diaghilev following … Continue reading Joyce & Proust Meet
Is there anything better than T. S. Eliot talking about his debt to Dante? Here is the majority of his famous essay “What Dante Means to Me” (hence my own “What Eliot Means to Me”), which can be found in his collection of essays, To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings. The essay was originally … Continue reading T. S. Eliot on Dante
Reiner Stach, in the middle entry of his three volume biography of Franz Kafka, writes, “Anyone who studies bibliographies today will envy Kafka’s earliest readers, who knew very little about his life and could enjoy his work as literature and not as an accumulation of autobiographical codes.” (186) Stach’s biography (and its beautiful translation into … Continue reading The Unfinished Kafka
Here are some bits on writing, nature, and anonymous everyday life from Wallace Stevens, that quiet murmur of American poetry who may well outlast nearly everybody. The following are from his letters and journals, from 1898 to 1955, only a few months before his death at seventy-five. That a poet so technically isolated (and gladly … Continue reading Wallace Stevens, Intergalactic Planetary
Here are some of Seamus Heaney’s memories of reading, writing, and poetry, from earliest schooldays to university, all taken from Dennis O’Driscoll’s wonderful book-length interview with him, Stepping Stones. Yes, my memory of learning to read goes back to my first days in Anahorish School, the charts for the letters, the big-lettered reading books. But … Continue reading Heaney Comes to Poetry
(photo from the LG/WBY Heritage Trail) In the single-volume Autobiographies of W. B. Yeats, which collects all of Yeats’s autobiographical writings from throughout his life, the great Irish poet mentions the memoirs of one John O’Leary. O’Leary was apparently taking his good old time at it, writing “passages for his memoirs upon postcards and odd … Continue reading Yeats & Lady Gregory
Too much to choose from, but here’s some classic bits from James Joyce that are always worth keeping in mind: On Writing: “Don’t you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people … Continue reading Classic Joyce
In early January, 1924, the poet Hart Crane, twenty-four and basically broke, received a letter from his father offering to hire him into the family business. To a friend, Crane wrote, “Along comes a letter from my father this morning offering me a position with him as travelling salesman! This is unacceptable, of course, even … Continue reading Hart Crane to His Father
Jung traveled with Freud and others to America in late September, 1909, and on the boat returning to Europe, he had a dream. Whatever you make of Jung’s overarching theories and scholarship, it always seems better to think of him more as a poet or mystic, and so his strength seems to lie in descriptions … Continue reading Jung’s Great Dream
Here is a favorite bit from a youthful T. S. Eliot (he’s just turned thirty but that’s young to me now): after leaving America for England and abandoning the teaching job at Harvard his family was expecting of him, he made an unfortunate marriage and started a literary life of day job, essays and reviews, … Continue reading T. S. Eliot’s Sacred Wood
Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris, by Jean Guéhenno Guéhenno bio A selection from one of the best documents of occupation during wartime, and one of my favorite diaries of a writer: [Guéhenno, on how he was a pacifist after WWI, but not after WWII started] I … Continue reading Jean Guéhenno (Favorite Passages)
Albert Camus: Notebooks, 1935 – 1951 Volume 1: 1935-1942 What I mean is this: that one can, with no romanticism, feel nostalgic for lost poverty. A certain number of years lived without money are enough to create a whole sensibility. 3 It is in this life of poverty, among these vain or humble people, that … Continue reading Albert Camus, Notebooks (Favorite Passages)
Entries in the Anthology series organize my favorite anecdotes about artists, writers, and historical events, and are always being updated. While I love and depend on the exhaustive biography or study, in many ways the disconnected stories and fragments have been more important in my day-to-day living with art, literature and history. As such, nothing … Continue reading Hieronymus Bosch
Entries in the Anthology series organize my favorite anecdotes about artists, writers, and historical events, and are always being updated. While I love and depend on the exhaustive biography or study, in many ways the disconnected stories and fragments have been more important in my day-to-day living with art, literature and history. As such, nothing … Continue reading Albrecht Dürer
Entries in the Anthology series organize my favorite anecdotes about artists, writers, and historical events, and are always being updated. While I love and depend on the exhaustive biography or study, in many ways the disconnected stories and fragments have been more important in my day-to-day living with art, literature and history. As such, nothing … Continue reading Edward Hopper
I’ve relied on many translators and scholars in the writing of To the House of the Sun, and over the years I’ve been lucky enough to correspond with a few of them. Their specialties vary widely—Greek religion, Hinduism/Indo-European studies, Egyptology, Arthurian romance, etc.—and it seems that their enthusiasm and love for language, history, and religion … Continue reading Cyril Edwards (Interview)
(for Eliot’s essay “What Dante Means to Me,” go here) I. Late in life, T. S. Eliot hoped the essays of his that would last would be those “appreciations of individual authors,” saying he had written best “about writers who have influenced my own poetry.”[1] He had come a long way from the essays written … Continue reading What Eliot Means to Me
