Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
“When all the others were away at Mass” by Seamus Heaney has been named Ireland’s best-loved poem from the past century.
Find it in this collection of Heaney’s poetry.
Poet Anne M. Doe Overstreet describes thinking about when she became a writer.
I come from a family that read hungrily and constantly; there was music—banjo to clarinet to piano—and hikes beside copper-colored ponds, beneath the huff and shrug of spruce at places like Peaks of Otter, reciting the names of deciduous trees. In between, stillness, time to reflect. And within that, Walter Farley’s novels and Webster’s Dictionary, the 1970 edition, I Capture the Castle and World Book Encyclopedia, which opened up the universe and made me hungry to understand why a Tennessee Walking Horse was what it was. But I cannot tease it apart, say, here I begin, here I turn my face toward a different tree line, moving from reader and listener to writer. It doesn’t begin. It doesn’t end.
I attended a reading of her poetry many months ago. I loved the sound of her words. You can read them for free through Noisetrade now, though leaving a tip would be kind. She’s a poet who rewards her audience with beautiful mystery and perhaps inspiration.
Poet Ezra Pound, whose hair launched a thousand conversations, planned a luncheon with his employer, William Butler Yeats, to serve a distinguished older poet, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a peacock at his manor. “The maneuverings of poets and literary people, jostling for fame behind the keyhole of glimpsed conviviality, is as old as Rome, older even; but Pound had a special gift for P.R.”
African-American poets write about nature from a perspective of working the land or engaging it personally. Poet Camille Dungy observes, “There is kind of this tradition to western nature poetry that is about objectification and idealization of the landscape. Kind of city boys writing about how lovely it would be to live in the country.” This isn’t how African-American poets think of the land as shown in 400 years of writing. (via Books, Inq.)
A U.S. Poet Laureate died last weekend. Philip Levine, a Detroit native, was the 18th U.S. Poet Laureate. He was caught in the rain one day when his neighbor noticed him.
Michael Bourne tells the story and a bit more. “The anger that filled him in his early years was of no use to him as a writer, he told me. ‘It was a huge hindrance because it meant I couldn’t write anything worth a damn about that work life,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t get that disinterestedness that’s often required. I couldn’t get Wordsworth’s tranquility. It took me until I was about 35 before I really wrote a poem that was about work.’”
“The Carol of Seven Signs,” by Walter Wangerin, Jr.
Don’t miss this.
Author N.D. Wilson has directed a short film of the Francis Thompson poem, “The Hound of Heaven.” Shadowlocked.com has part of an interview with Wilson on how everything came together.
So what’s it like adapting somebody else’s work as opposed to your own?
Well, honestly I’m far more comfortable adapting other people’s stuff than my own. And actually, in some ways, because I can be a stickler. I can be a stickler to try to stay true as I possibly can to their vision, when I’m adapting their stuff. But when I’m adapting my stuff, I don’t feel any loyalty at all to it. I feel complete and total authority to change whatever I want, whenever I want.
And so when I’m adapting C.S. Lewis or even trying to serve Francis Thompson, I felt like I could write an intro, like I could write an opening monologue for Propaganda, but I couldn’t bring myself to edit the poem. No matter how many people told me, “Well, surely you’re not going to do the whole poem”, it was like, “No, I’m gonna do the whole poem. I’m doing all of it.” Because I really wanted it to come through.
If I’m doing my own things, like I’m doing 100 Cupboards, I’m thinking, like, “Oh, wow, I can throw this part away, and do this other thing that I was going to have in the novel, and I needed to cut it for space, but now I can put it in. I can take things that ended up on the cutting room floor of my novel, and put them into the film.” And I feel completely at liberty to do that. And that’s dangerous.
Read more about the movie here.
“I fled him . . . in the mist of tears . . .
‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.’”
“There must thou wake perforce thy Doric quill,
‘Tis Fancy’s land to which thou sett’st thy feet;
Where still, ’tis said, the fairy people meet
Beneath each birken shade, on mead or hill.
There each trim lass that skims the milky store
To the swart tribes their creamy bowl allots;
By night they sip it round the cottage-door,
While airy minstrels warble jocund notes.”
From Wiliam Collins, “An Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland, Considered as the Subject of Poetry”