Posts
2011-06-13
I know, what is it with me and woman poets? Especially the tortured, crazed, and suicidal ones? Not sure, but I go through these moods where I tend to go off and read along a given theme. This would be one of those times…Sexton, Millay, Dickinson, and now back to Plath. On a previous Poetry Monday I submitted her poem “Daddy” which I always find to be vivid and emotional, a bit of a window into that dark part of her psyche that lead to her suicide. This week I’m going with the no less vivid piece below that always puts me in mind of spending an afternoon on the porch during a hard rain. She starts out with the rook, wanders around the landscape, and then brings it all back together in the end. To me, it speaks of how the miraculous can flow from the ordinary. That and how sometimes we may need to redefine the miraculous. Of course I’m probably totally at right angles to what she was trying to get across, but I still love it.
2011-06-06
I read a blog post the other day referring to Emily Dickinson as “the fiery redheaded poet”. I found that odd, as I never thought of Dickinson of being all that fiery. Interesting and complex, yes. But not fiery….I think it’s the pictures of her with the bun thing going on. It’s hard to be fiery when you’re dressed up like a school marm.
maximus prime... autobot poet?
2011-06-06
Ok, Charles Olson wasn’t a robot. I just couldn’t keep my fingers off the keys. Olson spent the last ten years of his life writing the Maximus Poems; dying before finishing the project. I think that I would be happy if I could produce something even half as fine in my life time. The way he uses space on the page to build tension in the poem is as valuable as the words. That’s the lesson he taught me from beyond the grave.
2011-05-30
“War is not merely a political act, but also a political instrument, a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means.” –Carl von Clausewitz “There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.” –William Tecumseh Sherman Although they both are right, I find Sherman to be quite a bit more human. Yet even he manages to fall short because I think that war is one of those situations where words fail. We can call war “hell”, but does that really encompass the horror, agony, tragedy, and loss that war entails?
does writing poetry count as a superpower?
2011-05-23
Over the weekend I was having a poetry jones. Of course, all my books are packed away nice & tight (we’ve been trying to make the house look neater and more appealing in the chance that we actually get a move on with putting it on the market)… what was I thinking? I’m going to have to head to the storage place one day and dig out some poetry. I don’t have a lot of poetry books, maybe three dozen poets have made my hardcopy list over my lifetime. Those are the poets whom I keep close to me as if their works were some sort of force field against whatever worry or problem is trying to peck into my skull.