Poetry & Poets in Rags

Poetry & Poets in Rags

Might we "build up a gallery of visual inspirations" for Philip Larkins' poetry? That's the question our headliner supposes, how much did he write ekphrasically. And what is the greatest unread poem in the English language? That question is taken up in our third article. Why did Isaac Rosenberg "voluntarily return from the Cape Town sun to the mud and blood of the trenches?" Article #5 asks this question. And why do the British disparage prose poems? That's a question in the 7th article of the eleven in News at Eleven.

The results are in for April for the InterBoard Poetry Community's monthly poetry contest, thanks to esteemed judge Patricia Smith. Congratulations go to the poets and their online workshops: Sergio Lima Facchini and Poets.org for his first place poem "A Second Look at Creation"; Brenda Levy Tate and Criticalpoet.com for her poem "Spring Dance" which took second; and, for their tie at third, Mike LaForge also of Criticalpoet.com for his poem "Boy, Winter 2008" and Cherryl E. Garner and South Carolina Writers Workshop for her poem "18--Again".

Thanks for clicking in.

Yours,
Rus

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News at Eleven: I have a hunch that there's more

to be said of [Philip] Larkin's painterly eye, and wonder whether, by rereading the poems, we might build up a gallery of visual inspirations. Was he thinking of Louis Lassalle's Winter (another Christmas card) when he wrote Gathering Wood? Do the strikingly descriptive Dublinesque, Cut Grass or Home Is So Sad hang somewhere? There's nothing further in this archive to suggest it, but I can almost see them in their frames.

from The Sunday Times: Revealingly yours, Philip Larkin

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News at Eleven: You don't learn about these detailed realities

of [Primo] Levi's writing from the Cambridge Companion; the contributors' attachment to their own labels is such that they even describe "compassion and forgiveness" as "Christian virtues", a slur on the Hebrew Bible if ever I heard one. For them, an iron curtain has fallen between the "cultural" and the "religious", so they imagine Levi must be a double agent, engaged in "ironic rewriting of divine utterances in secular terms" (they do not mention what the point of his irony is), whereas, in fact, the Scriptures are already written in "secular terms", there being no other terms available even to God, supposing he wishes to speak with his creatures.

from The Times Literary Supplement: Dante, Primo Levi and the intertextualists

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News at Eleven: [Alexander] Pope happened upon a rich subject

that poets had hardly sampled. He took stupidity as his inspiration. Or, rather, he took a special kind of stupidity, which he called "Dulness". Dulness presides over the efforts of hack writers and bad poets. Dulness is promoted by vain patrons and ruthless publishers. Dulness is the literary spirit of Pope's age (but a capacity that flourishes in most ages). Dulness is lack of imagination, lack of talent, lack of taste. It produces the pedantry of the academic or the deadly learning of the scholarly critic.

from The Guardian: Darkness visible

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News at Eleven: Dylan [Thomas], conspicuously not a fighting man,

retained a chippiness with anyone who counted as a war hero (he'd had a punch-up with Caitlin's brother, a commando). [William] Killick was drunk. Tempers flew, insults were traded and there seems to have been a fight.

All might have calmed down, but 40 minutes later Killick marched up to the cottage where the Thomases were staying and sprayed the thin asbestos walls with machine-gun bullets, 'to put the wind up the buggers'. He then stormed into the house with a hand grenade, which he threatened to detonate. It was Dylan, unaccustomedly brave, who managed to persuade the anguished man to leave without doing any more damage.

from Telegraph: Life with Dylan and Caitlin Thomas

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News at Eleven: Developing weak lungs he [Isaac Rosenberg] went

to South Africa, where he enjoyed an affair with an actress: a previously unknown liasion uncovered by [Jean] Moorcroft Wilson's indefatigable research.

She has, however, not been able to solve one of the central mysteries of Rosenberg's life: why did he voluntarily return from the Cape Town sun to the mud and blood of the trenches?

from Telegraph: Isaac Rosenberg, the outsider's outsider

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News at Eleven: [Brian] Hall is a novelist,

and "Fall of Frost" arrives as the first fictional rendering of Frost's life. The book is billed as a novel, but this is only because it is speculative rather than veritable; it is more properly classified a vie romancée, a bio enhanced with the loosey-goosey methods of fiction.

from The New York Times: All the Difference

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News at Eleven: But if prose poems are so obviously great,

why exactly do the British disparage them?

"There are actually plenty of British who write them," [Gary] Young explained, "but they think of it as a French form."

Ah, there's the rub: the experimental French came up with the form!

from Santa Cruz Sentinel: Chris Watson, Bookends: The prose poem in California

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News at Eleven: Alice Oswald, herself a fine poet

(she won the TS Eliot prize in 2002), has selected the verse and also written a very lucid, useful and penetrating introduction (one wishes for more writing on poetry as good as this) which points out that [Sir Thomas] Wyatt was, in fact, part of a dying metrical tradition, whose poetry was misrepresented by his first editors: they cleaned up his verse, which was originally deliberately hesitant, into the more regularly iambic "riding line", the one which was so embedded in the national consciousness until teachers stopped making children learn poetry by heart. (I owe this insight to Clive James.)

from The Guardian: The private life of a courtier unmasked

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News at Eleven: "I assumed that since 100,000 people saw

me as the King of May, there wasn't any problem no matter what the government wanted to do," [Allen] Ginsberg said in an interview years later. "But I also realized I was now in a very dangerous position . . . I'd already had the experience of being grabbed and isolated in Havana, so I was really quite apprehensive and knew what was possible."

from The Prague Post: When poetry was king

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News at Eleven: A Mexican poet has been fined

about US$5 (¤3.25) for desecrating the country's flag by writing a poem about using it to wipe up urine and excrement.

Poet Sergio Witz Rodriguez published the poem in a magazine in the southern state of Campeche in 2000 and could have faced as many as four years in prison under a law protecting the flag and national insignia.

from International Herald-Tribune: Poet fined for insulting Mexican flag, calls ruling threat to free speech

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News at Eleven (Back Page): Boston University's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center

and the Poetry Society of America team up to celebrate the rich, wide-ranging voice of African-American poetry with an evening of readings. Introduced by Boston's inaugural poet laureate Sam Cornish, poets include a Pulitzer prize winner and several nominees and the founders of the poetry group Cave Canem, among many others.

from BUniverse: State of the Art

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Great Regulars: It doesn't declaim.

It doesn't announce or preach. It acknowledges the gaps, the unspoken truths that rest quietly, as if between the lines. Intimacy requires a degree of silence, a listening. The line-breaks in a poem stop us, briefly, to listen. Notice the first line of [Jeanne Walker's] "Nursing," that ends "you hold so still." We can feel ourselves holding still for a second before we go on to the next line.

from Fleda Brown: Traverse City Record Eagle: On Poetry: Pausing for Mother's Day

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Great Regulars: Frances Richey: Well, we disagreed

on the war itself. I felt that we shouldn't go into Iraq, and I was very critical of the current administration. And he felt that it was his duty to go and that it was the right thing to do.

And when I criticized the administration, I wasn't thinking that I was criticizing him. We had always debated about politics, and I didn't realize that when we were arguing, when he was so close to going into combat, that it was much more personal, that it hurt him when we argued.

from Jeffrey Brown: PBS: Newshour: Frances Richey's Poetry Speaks to Son's Role as Soldier

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Great Regulars: Here's an encore from Carrie Allison,

who recently contributed "Trying."

Bodies in Motion

By Carrie Allison

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Carrie on

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Growing Mick Jagger Lips
By Timothy Pettet

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: I can't get no . . .

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Another flood poem. Wet springs do this to us.

Another Woman with No Name

By Timothy Pettet

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: If it keeps on rainin' . . .

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Rain Taxi Nocturne
by Larry M. Schilb

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: 'Rain Taxi Nocturne'

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Electric Lions

By John Mark Eberhart

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Road trip

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By Larry M. Schilb

whose yard this is--Hell, I know,

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: 'Spring Frost'

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Great Regulars: If [Richard] Madox's diary had been a novel,

the author would have seen to it that the ingenious forms of encryption used to obscure the content would have been ways of enticing the reader to solve certain riddles, which would have been judiciously strewn around the text. But this is a genuine secret diary, which the author, a ship's chaplain, most emphatically does not want the commander of the flotilla, a certain Edward Fenton, to read.

from James Fenton: The Guardian: All at sea

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Great Regulars: In "The Violets," the speaker relates

a tale that accounts for there being no violets growing in a certain land. A traveler asks the locals, why there are no violets in the vicinity, and they responded that there used to be violets growing there but once upon a time the violets made the announcement that "Until some woman freely gives her lover / To another woman / We will fight in bloody scuffle."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Crane's 'The Wayfarer'

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Three days later after an apparent change-of-heart, the poet returned with a different kind of poetry which [Faris] Sanabani describes as "the most beautiful poetry I have ever seen." A poetry "that now condemned violence and promoted peace and tolerance."

[Amin] Al-Mashreqi says, "The Yemeni people are very sensitive to poetry--especially traditional poetry like this. If poetry contains the right ideas and is used in the right context, then people will respond to it because this is the heart of their culture."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Poetry against Terrorism

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Unlike the perfumed rose, the canker roses have only the outward beauty. They are not sought after because their beauty exists only in the outward appearance of their petals. They do not exude their inward beauty. The cankers "[d]ie to themselves."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 54

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The riddle remains a riddle, but it is instructive for language users, especially for poets: the use of "when" as an adverbial conjunction causes an ambiguity that should be revised by using a more specific term.

[Walt] Whitman, who is so savvy in most of his poetic language use, really fumbled it here by repeating the adverbial conjunction "when" four times, when he obviously means "after." It was, in fact, after he had heard the astronomer, after he had seen the numbers, after he has observed the charts, and after he heard the others applauding the lecturer that he grew "tired and sick" and decided the leave.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Whitman's Learn'd Astronomer

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Great Regulars: I am deeply saddened by the loss

of many lives and many more who have been injured in the catastrophic earthquake that struck Sichuan province of China. I would like to extend my deep sympathy and heartfelt condolences to those families who have been directly affected by the strong earthquake on 12 May 2008. I offer my prayers for those who have lost their lives and those injured in the quake.

from Tenzin Gyatso: The Office of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama: Media Release

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Great Regulars: If only what we hadn't intended

to say could be unsaid. But once heard, our words cannot be unheard. That's why it's wise to err on the side of accuracy--or kindness.

[Rainer Maria] Rilke is furious with his mouth, accusing it of seduction, but not grand seduction, only seduction in a small way that is "quickly insipid".

from Frieda Hughes: The Times: Monday Poem: Down at the mouth

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Great Regulars: by Paul Muldoon

When the Pie Was Opened

from Mick Imlah: The Times Literary Supplement: Poem of the Week: A new poem by Paul Muldoon

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Great Regulars: [Sarah] Harwell's frustration leads her

to examine how she implanted the daughter's clinginess since her own body seizes when the child finally "leaves to go/where I am not."

The form of the poem replicates the paradox of the situation. The first stanza has two end rhymes: rOll/fOld--a pattern of matching that devolves into deliberate half-matching and finally unmatching ends of lines: bEat/bEing; awAy/HAdes; waKes/blinKs.

from Mary Karr: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice

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Great Regulars: Poem: "We Collect Gull Feathers"

by Timothy Young from Building in Deeper Water © The Thousands Press.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: For the week of May 12, 2008

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Great Regulars: I have always enjoyed poems

that celebrate the small pleasures of life. Here Max Mendelsohn, age 12, of Weston, Massachusetts, tells us of the joy he finds i