“and we live amongst
What lives amongst us”
Two lines from a poem called “Eulogy,” by Kevin Young.
Category Archives: Poetry
A Great Poet’s Glossary
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.
Words: They’re What’s For Breakfast!
- 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.
Guite’s “Through the Gate”
In his new collection, The Singing Bowl
Begin 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, Brutality In the News
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.
Pilgrims’ Hymn by Stephen Paulus
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
Poetry Reading with Aaron Belz
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.
A is for April is Poetry Month
This is remarkable–the start of the poem “On her having arrived”:
“He thickets in. He thickens. The AA
meeting ran late: he brandished a BB
gun and the cops were called. Shot ten CC’s
of something slowing in him….”
Poet Hannah Sanghee Park goes on like this for a few stanzas, throwing letters about like alphabet soup. Read the whole and get more of her work here. See this also: “The Same-Different” (via Aaron Belz)
My Bent Thoughts, like a Brittle Bow, Did Fly Asunder”
Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, vicar of Belmont & Pittington in Durham, England, and author of The Essential History of Christianity writes about how the poetry of George Herbert opened her up to Christ:
“Certainly the poems are unashamedly intelligent. They are an example of the metaphysical school of poetry, which deliberately piled metaphor upon metaphor, and drew those metaphors from the cutting edge of contemporary science and philosophy. They flatter the reader by assuming a breadth and depth of political, theological and scientific knowledge.”
The line quoted in the headline is from Herbert’s poem “Denial”.
My Bent Thoughts, like a Brittle Bow, Did Fly Asunder"
Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, vicar of Belmont & Pittington in Durham, England, and author of The Essential History of Christianity writes about how the poetry of George Herbert opened her up to Christ:
“Certainly the poems are unashamedly intelligent. They are an example of the metaphysical school of poetry, which deliberately piled metaphor upon metaphor, and drew those metaphors from the cutting edge of contemporary science and philosophy. They flatter the reader by assuming a breadth and depth of political, theological and scientific knowledge.”
The line quoted in the headline is from Herbert’s poem “Denial”.