Category Archives: poetry

poetry

Blow Up Your TV

I’m very lucky to have grown up with poetry from the crib. I have a few friends who write poetry and many more who reference poetry and poets in casual conversation. Poetry is not distant nor academic. (Lest you think we are the new Bloomsbury Group, we also talk about TV and the rest of modern culture.)

I found the following article thought-provoking (hat tip to Dangerousmeta):

Why Poetry Matters – ChronicleReview.com
By JAY PARINI

Poetry doesn’t matter to most people. They go about their business as usual, rarely consulting their Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Frost. One has to wonder if poetry has any place in the 21st century, when music videos and satellite television offer daunting competition for poems, which demand a good deal of attention and considerable analytic skills, as well as some knowledge of the traditions of poetry.

In the 19th century, poets like Scott, Byron, and Longfellow had huge audiences around the world. Their works were best sellers, and they were cultural heroes as well. But readers had few choices in those days. One imagines, perhaps falsely, that people actually liked poetry. …

I question much that Parini writes in his entire piece. I live in the 21st Century among poets and appreciators. I see poetry in many, diverse publications, including the infinite Web. Parini completely ignores “spoken word,” slams and rap. Our country, which pours money into violence and destruction, has crowned great poets laureate, though many people cannot name one.

Strangely, Parini goes on to blame poets for making poetry hard by demanding a level of literacy the populace once had (not really) but now lacks (also not true). He blames the poets, instead of society and education. In fact, he congratulates the Academical Village for “domesticating” poets. (Those same “hard” poets?) I can’t cogently respond to this portion of Parini’s essay because it scarcely makes sense to me.

To their credit, the domesticated poets grazing in English Departments surely have helped their students appreciate the deeper meanings in poetry. “Publish or perish” and conferences and competition do not necessarily produce popularly-known poets, but it’s a living, which is hard for a poet to come by — at least, as a poet. (Ironically, I am a poet who works for a university, but in a field not-often associated with poetry: I teach computer classes.)

Still, any academic worth his or her salt can toss off an essay replete with informed references worth pursuing. I enjoyed Parini’s compellation of ‘beware of poets’ references — those alone are worth reading. A Defence of Poetry, by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Frost’s “Education by Poetry” warrant more consideration.

In the end, thinking about poetry is a far better use of one’s mind than so many alternatives. I agree with Parini’s assertion that “poetry can make a difference in the lives of readers.” If only we gave a fraction more of our time to poetry — reading and writing — than we do to everything that is so ugly, cruel and mean. That’s a wish you won’t hear the self-serving bloviators bray to the numb mobs that hang on their invective. peace, mjh

poetry

Crusoe, by George Bilgere

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

Poem: “Crusoe” by George Bilgere, from The Good Kiss. © The University of Akron Press.

Crusoe

When you’ve been away from it long enough,
You begin to forget the country
Of couples, with all its strange customs
And mysterious ways. Those two
Over there, for instance: late thirties,
Attractive and well-dressed, reading
At the table, drinking some complicated
Coffee drink. They haven’t spoken
Or even looked at each other in thirty minutes,

But the big toe of her right foot, naked
In its sandal, sometimes grazes
The naked ankle bone of his left foot,

The faintest signal, a line thrown

Between two vessels as they cruise
Through this hour, this vacation, this life,
Through the thick novels they’re reading,
Her toe saying to his ankle,

Here’s to the whole improbable story
Of our meeting, of our life together
And the oceanic richness
Of our mingled narrative
With its complex past, with its hurts
And secret jokes, its dark closets
And delightful sexual quirks,
Its occasional doldrums, its vast
Future we have already peopled
With children. How safe we are

Compared to that man sitting across the room,
Marooned with his drink
And yellow notebook, trying to write
A way off his little island.

poetry

Happy Birthday, Robert Frost

The Writer’s Almanac – MARCH 21 – 27, 2005

It’s the birthday of poet Robert Frost, born in San Francisco (1874). His journalist father died of tuberculosis when young Robert was 11. His mother, who had $8 in the bank, had to take her young children back East and rely on the good will of the father’s family. Frost went off to Harvard, but dropped out when he learned that he might have TB. He became a poultry farmer, but had a run of bad luck: his son Elliot, not quite 4 years old, died of typhoid fever. Frost blamed himself for it; he said the death was like “murdering his own child.” Then, when the woman who owned the farm stopped by to see if she could collect some rent from him, she found chickens wandering everywhere, the house filthy, with dishes unwashed, and unswept floors. The next day she sent Frost an eviction letter. But then his mother-in-law stepped in and found his family a farm in southeastern New Hampshire, where they spent the next 11 years, during which he wrote many of his best poems. He wrote a friend later: “To a large extent the terrain of my poetry is the Derry landscape, the Derry farm. There was something about the experience which stayed in my mind, and was tapped for poetry in the years that came after.”

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poetry

“The Blue Blanket” by Sue Ellen Thompson

The Writer’s Almanac – MARCH 21 – 27, 2005

“The Blue Blanket” by Sue Ellen Thompson

Toward the end, my father argued
with my mother over everything: He wanted
her to eat again. He wanted her to take

her medicine. He wanted her
to live. He argued with her in their bed
at naptime. He was cold, he said,

tugging at the blanket tangled
in my mother’s wasted limbs. From the hall
outside their room I listened

as love, caught and fettered, howled
at its captors, gnawing at its own flesh
in its frenzy to escape. Then I entered

without knocking, freed the blanket
trapped between my mother’s knees and shook
it out once, high above

their bodies’ cursive. It floated
for a moment, blue as the Italian sky
into which my father flew his bombs

in 1943, blue as the hat I’d bought her
for the winter she would never live
to see. My father’s agitation eased,

my mother smiled up at me, her face
lucent with gratitude, as the blanket
sifted down on them like earth.