Category Archives: Poetry

Poetry

Haikus Superus

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This site delivers haiku found in the decisions written by Supreme Court justices. I love it.

Here, for example,

standard supplied gasoline

and oil to Signal.

(taken from Perkins v. Standard Oil Company of California (1969))

He, however, did

not obtain a warrant to

arrest respondent.

(from United States v. Johnson (1982))

The applicant must

pass the examination

prescribed by the Board.

(from Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, Inc (1976))

For how long a time

have you known it to be used

for these purposes?

(from Peters v. Hanson (1889)) (via Books, Inq.)

Authors, Poetry

The Joys of W. H. Auden

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“One of the joys of reading late Auden is the pleasure he takes in rare words used correctly,” Patrick Kurp reminds us. “Like his friend Dr. Oliver Sacks, he loved trolling the Oxford English Dictionary for good catches.” Catches like dapatical, for which you’ll have to read his post for context.

Alexander McCall Smith wrote a piece last year about the importance of Auden with a few personal anecdotes. “When I started to write novels set in Edinburgh, the characters in these books – unsurprisingly, perhaps – began to show an interest in Auden. In particular, Isabel Dalhousie, the central character in my Sunday Philosophy Club series, thought about Auden rather a lot – and quoted him, too. A couple of years after the first of these novels was published, I received a letter from his literary executor, Edward Mendelson, who is a professor of English at Columbia University in New York. . . . I then wrote Professor Mendelson into an Isabel Dalhousie novel, creating a scene in which he comes to Edinburgh to deliver a public lecture on the sense of neurotic guilt in Auden’s verse.”

Non-fiction, Poetry

A Great Poet’s Glossary

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A new, engaging resource for poets has come out this year. A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch is the reference work you would expect from the name and a readable commonplace-type book to boot. The interconnections between words and examples given for each term do not come from a dead literature professor collecting dust on tenure, but a poet who sounds as if he would be routinely in the running for favorite teacher.

The Washington Post says Hirsch “explains each term in clear, direct prose, often moving from a general definition to a layered explanation of how each term has evolved over time. Take, for example, the opening entry, abecedarian, which begins, ‘An alphabetical acrostic in which each line or stanza begins with a successive letter of the alphabet.’ Many readers have seen this ancient form but may not know that it was often employed for sacred texts. Hirsch explains this connection and highlights a psalm in the Bible as well as poems by St. Augustine and Chaucer within just a few lines.”

Hirsch is the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Authors, Poetry, Writing

Words: They’re What’s For Breakfast!

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  • Previous edited stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald are being released without the content edits. “Before these stories were bowdlerised, they contained antisemitic slurs, sexual innuendo, instances of drug use and drunkenness. They also contained profanity and mild blasphemy. The texts were scrubbed clean at the Post,” James West, general editor of the Cambridge edition of Fitzgerald’s work, said. He believes the stories make more sense without the tempered language. “One of the commonplaces of Fitzgerald criticism, for decades, has been that he avoided unpleasant topics and realistic language in his magazine fiction. We can see now that this was not altogether his choice.”
  • If Eskimos have 50 words for snow and 70 words for ice, do they experience these things more richly than the rest of us? Do their words shape their world? John H. McWhorter says not quite. We can think about concepts for which we have no words, and our world isn’t really shaped by our use of language. “…language has only a minor effect on cognition and no effect on a person’s view of the world—that is, in this case, how humans understand time, causality, color, space, and so forth.” Reports about studies that supposedly show the opposing view are exaggerated.
  • Crossway Books is throwing a sale in celebration of Crazy Busy winning Book of the Year.
  • The only measure of a writer is that you want to remember his words.
Poetry, Religion

Guite’s “Through the Gate”

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In his new collection, The Singing Bowl, poet Malcolm Guite offers this poem inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Through the Gate”

The GateBegin the song exactly where you are

For where you are contains where you have been

And holds the vision of your final sphere

And do not fear the memory of sin;

There is a light that heals, and, where it falls,

Transfigures and redeems the darkest stain

Into translucent colour. Loose the veils

And draw the curtains back, unbar the doors,

Of that dread threshold where your spirit fails,

The hopeless gate that holds in all the fears

That haunt your shadowed city, fling it wide

And open to the light that finds and fares …

Read the rest on the poet’s blog.

“My own poem,” Guite says, “is written in the conviction that that there is no depth or recess, no sin or secret, in me or in anyone, beyond the light of Christ, but we have to open the gate and let him come down to our depths, let his Light reveal and name and heal what we have hidden.”

Guite has written nine poems inspired from Dante’s great work.

Poetry

Poetry, Brutality In the News

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Austin Kleon shows us how he makes his newspaper marker poems. “Creativity is subtraction,” he demonstrates. I like this, but I think I lean toward more random, more crazy poetic expressions, like this dadaist poem I collected from the blogosphere of 2006.

“This bosses the suggests think Geographic

Washington dogg eu em gasolina

Companhia many book towards Down

Weman probably its USS Neverdock

To haven’t you’re difference am curriculum

first”

You can’t beat that, I tell you.

Also found in the news, much like the marker poems, is this blowback to an NYPD twitter campaign. They asked New Yorkers to post photos of #myNYPD. Did shots of smiles and helpful cops dominate the responses? No, they got more of takedowns and wrestling.

Poetry, Religion

Pilgrims’ Hymn by Stephen Paulus

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Pilgrim’s Hymn by Stephen Paulus

Even before we call on Your name

To ask You, O God,

When we seek for the words to glorify You,

You hear our prayer;

Unceasing love, O unceasing love,

Surpassing all we know.

Glory to the father,

and to the Son,

And to the Holy Spirit.

Even with darkness sealing us in,

We breathe Your name,

And through all the days that follow so fast,

We trust in You;

Endless Your grace, O endless Your grace,

Beyond all mortal dream.

Both now and forever,

And unto ages and ages,

Amen

Authors, Poetry

Poetry Reading with Aaron Belz

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April is poetry month, as I said before, and I learned late that the poet Aaron Belz was in my home town April 4. Here’s a video of his poetry reading in St. Elmo. Many of these poems are quite funny and contemporary. He even reads a poem he wrote the day before, which he slightly apologizes for. Belz got his undergrad at Covenant College, which is the Presbyterian (PCA) liberal arts college next to Chattanooga. He went on to get his Ph.D. at Saint Louis University and published several poems in several places. He pulls from common literary knowledge and daily life. His most recent book is Glitter Bomb: Poems.

Like I said, he’s funny. One of the poems read in the video goes:

“There is no I in team,

but there’s one in bitterness,

one in failure.”

He also offers a few remarkable palindromes at 13:40. Enjoy.