8 posts found
Making a poem with kindling is easy. Gather allusions and Pine needles. Of shed birch bark and bony driftwood Use the former. Metaphors are useful if they can Be snapped with one hand. We don't want sawdust or any Other artificial ingredients. Leave the coal in the ground. Keep the peat in the bog. When you feel the time is right And there is a gibbous moon, And you have assembled a party Of three or more, Away from trees...
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I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!) My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods, No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair, I have no chair, no church, no philosophy, I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange, But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooking you round the waist, My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and...
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Larry Levis brings raw emotion to his poetry; “To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill, Syracuse, New York, 1969” goes from zero to sixty in 3 seconds. Weather and the elements seem to have an agency of their own. We’re buffeted from cold blasts on a farm to an smelting plant somewhere, with blasts from a furnace rendering iron into molten goo. I linger on the wall of flame he saw as he ponder’s his father’s hatred of...
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Translated by Coleman Barks This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and...
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I would say time is divided into many rivers, but that’s probably from reading too much science fiction. Listen and learn. Time is divided into two rivers: one flows backward, devouring life already lived; the other moves forward with you exposing your life. For a single second they may be joined. Now. This is that moment, the drop of an instant that washes away the past. It is the present. It is in your hands. Racing, slipping, tumbling like a...
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An important theme of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is how we interpret what is handed down through tradition. In his early essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), he touches on this dynamism of how tradition becomes redefined with every new giant talent using a metaphor drawn from science. Twenty-odd years later, a series of four larger poems (each a quartet) emerged somewhat wider in scope than “The Wasteland” and more sophisticated: Burnt Norton (1936) East Coker (1939) The Dry...
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“Paterson” is a long poem written by American modernist poet William Carlos Williams and published in five parts between 1946 and 1951. Williams names the poem “Paterson,” as Patterson, NJ is where he lived and worked as a doctor. The poem is a sprawling and ambitious work that was published in four parts and tend in my reading to go from great (Book 1) to so-so (Book 2), and on downward in overal quality. Just a fragment from the first...
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The Poems of Philip Larkin show him to be one known for his introspective and often pessimistic view of the world. Here is a summary of some of his notable poems: “Be the Verse” Larkin’s most famous and controversial poem. It reflects on the negative impact of family and inheritance on individuals. The poem emphasizes the perpetuation of unhappiness and disappointment across generations. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They...
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