Patrick Kurp writes about those single lines of beauty or clarity within otherwise unremarkable poems. He boils it down to this: “Art is the least democratic and most ruthless of masters. It doesn’t recognize sensitivity, fairness or anyone’s good intentions – writer’s, reader’s, critic’s. Nothing else, only the work, counts.”
Category Archives: Poetry
“See our espalier pear trees bowing out of shape”
Matthea Harvey writes in defenses of her overgrown garden.
Last night the apple trees shook and gave each lettuce a heart
Six hard red apples broke through the greenhouse glass and
Landed in the middle of those ever-so-slightly green leaves…
Bad Percy
At The Smart Set, Paula Marantz Cohen ponders what is laughingly known as the “character” of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley:
The exhibition “Shelley’s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Poet,” now at the New York Public Library, is the sort of exhibit that doesn’t necessarily tell you anything you didn’t already know about this poet’s short and messy life. What it does do, by virtue of placing the manuscripts and artifacts into a relatively confined space (the smallish gallery to the left of the main exhibition room on the ground floor of the Library), is give us the facts in a more concentrated and vivid way than we might otherwise receive them. The exhibit demonstrates, with dramatic succinctness, that Percy Bysshe Shelley and some of those he hung out with were pretty [expletive deleted] people.
I’ve always had it in for Shelley, Byron, and that whole set. There’s something about them that, for me, encapsulates the most obvious hypocrisy within (I won’t say of) liberalism—the kind of persons who justify lives of complete selfishness through the loud proclamation of principles which [they insist] promote the improvement of society as a whole. It’s the moral equivalent of “I gave at the office.”
I’m not saying that all, or even most, liberals are like this. I know there are many liberals who deny themselves in order to live consistently with their principles. It’s just that when conservatives get caught in this kind of behavior (and heaven knows they do) they tend to be discredited and to lose their jobs. Liberals get a slap on the wrist at most, and go on to write bestselling books, star in movies, or have long, powerful political careers.
Or [and] they get memorialized, like Shelley, as secular saints.
Tip: The American Culture
Like a Sparrow’s Swift Flight
It seems to me this present life, oh king,
compared to all the time we cannot see
is like a sparrow’s swift flight through a hall
where you are seated, feasting with your men
around a fire of a winter’s night:
the wind roars, snow and rain come down outside.
Flying in one door then out another
the sparrow will be safe from the foul weather
for the brief interval it is inside
but in an instant it is gone from sight
into the snow and darkness once again.
The longest human life is brief withal.
As to what comes before or after, we
cannot, with certitude, know anything.
Taken from “Exercises,” a poem by Bill Coyle
Czeslaw Milosz, “You Whose Name”
You whose name is aggressor and devourer.
Putrid and sultry, in fermentation.
You mash into pulp sages and prophets,
Criminals and heroes, indifferently.
My vocativus is useless.
You do not hear me, though I address you,
Yet I want to speak, for I am against you.
So what if you gulp me, I am not yours.
You overcome me with exhaustion and fever.
You blur my thought, which protests,
You roll over me, dull unconscious power.
The one who will overcome you is swift, armed:
Mind, spirit, maker, renewer.
He jousts with you in depths and on high,
Equestrian, winged, lofty, silver-scaled.
I have served him in the investiture of forms.
It’s not my concern what he will do with me.
A retinue advances in the sunlight by the lakes.
From white villages Easter bells resound.
“You Whose Name” by Czeslaw Milosz
Poetry of the World
Yesterday was World Poetry Day (somewhere). You probably knew this already. I had to learn by reading blogs (so sad). Crooked Timber celebrates here. (via Books, Inq.)
A Thousand Christmas Trees
Merry Christmas. Robert Frost’s pleasant holiday poem “Christmas Trees” is a good addition to your reader’s holiday.
The city had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the country;
When between whirls of snow not come to lie
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,
Yet did in country fashion in that there
He sat and waited till he drew us out
A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.
He proved to be the city come again
To look for something it had left behind
And could not do without and keep its Christmas.
He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods—the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
Writing Poems for Charity
Jen Campbell will be writing 100 poems this weekend in an effort to raise money for EEC International, which is researching a cure for Ectodermal dysplasia. Read about it, watch the video, and consider buying one of her poems on a postcard.
Poems on Violence
Tom Nolan quotes Philip Dacey on his poetic depiction of a poisoned Russian agent poisoned in “With or Without Milk”: “I drank a tea not made in front of me. / Beware tea brewed in ways you cannot see.”
“The poetry of violent death,” he says, “spans hundreds of years.” (via Books, Inq.)
Irony of Academic Distance
Mindy Withrow talks about Poet Billy Collins:
He delights in paradoxes. In “Table Talk,” a dinner companion “asked if anyone had ever considered / applying the paradoxes of Zeno to the maryrdom of St. Sebastian.” All during the meal, pondering Zeno’s theory that no moment ever really arrives but only draws closer by half, Collins “kept thinking of the arrows forever nearing / the pale, quivering flesh of St. Sebastian, / a fleet of them forever halving the tiny distances / to his body, tied to a post with rope, / even after the archers had packed it in and gone home.” But then he wryly observes that “my fork continued to arrive at my mouth / delivering morsels of asparagus and crusted fish.”