whose work you think is under-appreciated.
about the way in which the soul faces disease and death: Whether with courage or with fear, the soul looks both forward and backward, with uncommon clarity at itself and at the world.
[Margaret Thatcher's] character which was seldom revealed in public, though one might add that the Eliot lines accord well with the seriousness of the address she gave to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, an address which was widely, and indeed wilfully, misinterpreted by many, but in truth offered evidence of how well she knew the Bible, and how deeply she had pondered her Christian faith. Nevertheless one wouldn't have guessed that Eliot was a favourite poet, though, if told this was the case, one would certainly have plumped for the Eliot of The Four Quartets rather than the Eliot of The Waste Land. or The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, the defeatism of which would surely have provoked the Lady's scorn.
of the last poem,"Homeward Orpheus" ("He knew it could not be done and he knew it could be") we realise this persona (echoing contradictions in Czeslaw Milosz's "Orpheus and Eurydice", "He knew he must have faith and he could not have faith"; "Unable to weep, he wept") is the ancient mythic lover-poet himself, whose contradictions play into those of Pluto, underworld king, the coldest, most distant planet, whose orbit is chaotic but is still the astrological ruler of obsession.
who shows up every now and then to guide them. Io--the nymph turned into a cow by Zeus, then maddened by Hera's gadfly--is the loveliest member of G's herd, a sexy musk ox:
Whitman and Wright Visit the Wheeling Middle School
appropriately enough, Poets in Unexpected Places.
they met--only of Tom [Waits], nobody else ever appeared. There's something loving about the photos. Anton says little about how he sees Tom. On principle, he wants the pictures to speak for themselves. But Tom is fulsome in his own strange way about Anton.
and all-around lightning rod--wrote a piece called "A Poem for Dzhokhar" and posted it on her website. The reaction has been predictable: Gawker called it "the worst poem of all time" and Palmer, a social media master, is acting like she doesn't understand what all the fuss is about.
on my mind, I'm letting go of the Portland School of Poets theme for a month and offer here instead a popular, great American poem more suited, I feel, to the emotion of the moment.
Perhaps that's why some poetry collections seem so right for spring. Whether sweet or searing, the season can shock with the force of the new. In a moment when a pall of glibness has descended over so much contemporary culture--including poetry--we need more than ever poets to jolt us back to life. Natalie Shapero's "No Object" and Natalie Diaz's "When My Brother Was an Aztec," both impressive first books, do that and more.
by Tom Chandler
of a play about ice fishing built around the poetry of Duluthian Louis Jenkins.
this week's Poetry Pairing matches "Nomad Exquisite" by Wallace Stevens with the City Room blog post, "A Career Bringing Natural History to Life" by James Barron.
by James Fenton
Red Dust Road is also one of the 20 titles to be given away, said that "World Book Night strips everything away to the bare essential: the good-hearted feeling of a book in your hand, a companion by your side, the best of friends on your road through life".
by Grace Paley
the Talmud acknowledges, that the Messiah will not arrive on Shabbat; and the sages are very reluctant to challenge what seems to be merely a folk belief, on the grounds that if so many Jews believe something, it stands a good chance of being true.
ordinary of things, and was envious, indeed, when I found this one by Michael McFee, who lives in North Carolina. How I wish I'd written it.
Along Lake Michigan
from that of her early collections, reflecting the perspective of an older poet. So this book does not simply present the heartbreak of a failed marriage. It shows how over time Olds comes "to look at love in a new way," moving beyond her initial hurt to a larger vision of forgiveness and even gratitude, and reclaiming herself as a loving spirit.
The American Marathon
for closer cooperation with the United States in the war on terror as a graduate student from Shenyang was named among those killed in Monday's Boston Marathon bombing.
'Thatcherism' acrostic
so often insists that he push the poetic boat out. Composing a two-part love-lyric that exposes contrasted psychological forces is a characteristically bold move, and, if not quite adding up to a dramatic monologue, this odd coupling seems to be a rather wonderful by-product of the genre.
of people who, in the minds of some, aren't supposed to believe. He's a poet--editor of Poetry magazine, a job he'll be leaving in June--a leading intellect, an artist. He's also facing cancer. He believes in God and, in My Bright Abyss, seeks to portray what that's like as of 2013 if you want to be an intelligent, aware, non-self-deluding, tough-minded, free-speaking person here and now.
You said one thing as a way of not saying something else.
If we deny this, we should not be surprised to find that "our purplish hearts/have stiffened and our limbs . . . have set themselves into the narrow shape/of our chores".
authority on aquatic microbiology, and worked on desalination and water purification projects around the world. He also established a laboratory to research the Sea of Galilee. In 2012 Berman won a Life Achievement award from the Israel Association for Aquatic Sciences.
Fr. [Mikiel] Fsadni was carrying research about Dominican friars in Malta and Prof. [Godfrey] Wettinger was carrying out research on slavery at the Notarial archives.
April 10th 1935, was the only director ever to have had four plays running in the West End at the same time.
Bryan [Heiser] was chair of Drake Music, a technology and music charity providing disabled musicians of all ages with routes into music. He was an active member of the Poetry Society, running a weekly poetry group in his house in Camden until, in 2005, we moved to Norfolk, where he embarked on a master's degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia.
and her love with so many, including her students and friends at The Center in Palos Park. Ruth taught poetry classes at The Center for 10 years beginning in 1996. She encouraged her students to write poems about things that touched them deeply. She read and critiqued each poem and offered suggestions and encouragement and praise.
the Ingrid Jonker Prize for his 1974 debut volume, Treading Water (David Philip), edited by Jack Cope. In 1978 he produced Gentlewoman with photographer Sigurd Olivier, which was at first banned in South Africa. Published by Grosset & Dunlap in New York and later by Don Nelson, it was a selection of poetry and images by two artists who shared a fascination with sex and seduction. Seconds Out (Bateleur Press) followed in 1983 and in 1987 he won the Thomas Pringle Prize for poetry, and his work has appeared in anthologies of South African poetry since.
of the time in a house overlooking a Pittsfield pond, won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in poetry yesterday. The winning book is Stag's Leap, a collection of poems about the breakup of her marriage more than a decade ago.
by Bonhams, is expected to sell for about $10,000 US at a May 8 auction in London, in part because of the Canadian's close association with 20th-century literature's most tragic marital meltdown: the split that consumed American poet Sylvia Plath and scarred her adulterous husband, Ted Hughes, later Britain's poet laureate.
loneliness occasionally I should think.
which is separate from meaning as communication, or so it seems to me.
Joseph Brodsky, translated from the Russian by Glyn Maxwell and Zakhar Ishov
more resonant for modern ears, he's tinkered in minor keys--the five-syllable Italian family name "Piccolomini," for instance, he has reduced to the four-syllable "Palladini"--and in major ones. As it is believed that Bertolt Brecht used "Wallenstein" as a model for his own war play, "Mother Courage and her Children," [Robert] Pinsky turned to a classic Brechtian technique, an alienation device, to create an alter ego for the play's hero that in the script he denotes as "Dead Wallenstein."
did not find in his protagonist [Charles Baudelaire] a paragon of existentialist engagement. You can open the book almost at random and find such judgments as: "he was nothing but a gaping wound;" "his bad faith went so deep that he was no longer master of it;" "he never progressed beyond the stage of childhood;" "He was an eternal minor, a middle-aged adolescent who lived in a constant state of rage and hatred, but under the vigilant and reassuring protection of others."
to an age in which poetry functioned as a common vehicle in the storyteller's trade, and they express a proud military patriotism. The collection is framed extensively: a foreword by Sen. John McCain (in which McCain says he "met John after the Son Tay raid in November of 1970" while in the Hanoi Hilton) is paired with an introduction by Borling himself; Borling also provides a brief epilogue and an afterword, as well as a glossary of terms.
Mr. Liao [Yiiwu] was transformed. He composed and recorded a poem of fury and frustration called "Massacre." He joined with friends to make a film called "Requiem"--to appease the souls of the dead.
to some very powerful people, who had shown they would stop at nothing to defend their interests. They had ousted his friend, Salvador Allende, from the presidency less than a fortnight earlier. Allende died in a coup that was as much about silencing dissident voices as bringing about regime change. Another voice, that of popular singer Víctor Jara, was cut off four days later. Neruda remained. He was perhaps the loudest. His face certainly the most recognisable worldwide. He was too dangerous.
of the fourteenth-century English poem Piers Plowman, a passage known as "The Field of Folk" (we refer to the assembled runners as a "field"--the word has long associations with human assemblies). It is a synoptic vision of all the people of the earth seen at the moment that most characterizes them, and seen for an instant--the way we see runners in a marathon, who have distilled themselves down to one legible characteristic that can be instantly processed by the crowds they pass. The poem is one of the great accounts of what it is like to see people en masse, sorted into vivid kinds and therefore ennobled--a little like a marathon. Here's the beginning of it:has a privileged mystique, a sense that it emerges from some higher realm than mere fact and analysis. The obvious mistake is to assume that 'creative' encompasses only fiction, poetry, theatre and cinema; there are countless great factual works of literature. Nevertheless, people see creation de novo as the summum bonum of writing (and are also easily-impressed by ill-digested Latin tags)."The Hill," by Joshua Mehigan with "Many Cemeteries Damaged, but Green-Wood Bore the Brunt of the Storm" by David W. Dunlap.
