“Must the artist always be vulnerable to being pushed aside by manipulative phonies?” A poem and a little talk by John Tranter from the current issues of Poetry.
Category Archives: Poetry
The Warm Sincerity of Polish Carols
Carols are buried deep in Polish hearts and may reveal a distinctive beauty in Polish poetry. Cynthia Haven makes this connection when writing about the “Slavic Choral Concert Christmas in Kraków” at the Historic Hillside Club in Berkeley, California, quoting that great poet Czesław Miłosz on the charm and freshness of Polish carols. You can hear a snatch of them on this CD site.
Thanks to Patrick Kurp for this link and his additions to the topic and poem quotations.
"I Caught This Morning Morning’s Minion"
“The Windhover” by Gerard Manley Hopkins is the topic of this podcast, Poetry Off the Shelf, by the Poetry Foundation. It’s a good 11 minutes of poetry discussion, which perhaps you can’t get at the local pub.
"Speak the speech, I pray thee, trippingly on the tongue…"
I fell down in my obligation to link to yesterday’s stop on the Virtual Book Tour. But dry your tears—it’s right here, at Review From Here. (Can’t seem to find a permalink; if you’re reading this after time has passed, you may have to scroll down or search.)
Today’s stop is at The Story Behind the Book.
Joe Carter at The Evangelical Outpost links to a story, and posts a couple video clips, concerning the first American attempt to produce a Shakespeare play in the original accents of Shakespeare’s time. The point of the exercise seems to be, mainly, to demonstrate how much better the poetry rhymed back when it was written. Continue reading "Speak the speech, I pray thee, trippingly on the tongue…"
The Limits of Empathy
Carl Dennis has a new collection of poems, which the Buffalo News says emphasizes the limits of empathy, for better or worse. [via Poetry Foundation]
G.M. Hopkins "To His Watch"
MORTAL my mate, bearing my rock-a-heart
Warm beat with cold beat company, shall I
Earlier or you fail at our force, and lie
The ruins of, rifled, once a world of art?
The telling time our task is; time’s some part,
Not all, but we were framed to fail and die—
One spell and well that one. There, ah thereby
Is comfort’s carol of all or woe’s worst smart.
Field-flown, the departed day no morning brings
Saying ‘This was yours’ with her, but new one, worse,
And then that last and shortest…
"Beyond the utmost bounds of human thought"
“How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!”
Manly Poems, selected by the writers and readers of The Art of Manliness (via SB).
How Do You Find the Good Stuff?
Laura Miller of Salon.com says if the predictions of a wonderful world of self-publishing materialize, average readers will have a very large pile of poor writing to weed through. She describes reading The Slush Pile, that growing mound of unsolicited manuscripts that some publishers assign to an editorial peon.
Miller writes that we on the outside of publishing should fear what we don’t know: “Civilians who kvetch about the bad writing of Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer or any other hugely popular but critically disdained novelist can talk as much trash as they want about the supposedly low standards of traditional publishing. They haven’t seen the vast majority of what didn’t get published . . .”
In a world where any manuscript can be published and placed with online retailers, readers will suffer. Reading bad writing can hurt. “[I]nstead of picking up every new manuscript with an open mind and a tiny nibbling hope, you learn to expect the worst. Because almost every time, the worst is exactly what you’ll get.”
Natalie Merchant
Poet Natalie Merchant talks poetry and receives praise in this four part video.
Milosz' Poem: So Little
Czeslaw Milosz wrote this poem of death or perhaps the end of an experience:
“The white whale of the world
Hauled me down to its pit.”