Slate reports there’s strong evidence of an early romance in Emily Dickinson’s life. Not exactly a scandal, I think.
Hat tip: Townhall.
Category Archives: Poetry
The Real Question
“No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing…. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?” – Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Sorrow
O Sorrow!
Why dost borrow
Heart’s lightness from the merriment of May?—
A lover would not tread
A cowslip on the head,
Though he should dance from eve till peep of day—
Nor any drooping flower
Held sacred for thy bower,
Wherever he may sport himself and play.
To Sorrow
I bade good morrow,
And thought to leave her far away behind;
But cheerly, cheerly,
She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me, and so kind:
I would deceive her
And so leave her,
But ah! she is so constant and so kind.
Beneath my palm-trees, by the river side,
I sat a-weeping: in the whole world wide
There was no one to ask me why I wept,—
And so I kept
Brimming the water-lily cups with tears
Cold as my fears.
from Keats’ “Song of the Indian Maid”
Poet Laureate Kay Ryan
Our new poet laurate, Kay Ryan, learned at an early age that language was powerful.
Take, for example, the time when, alone with a group of adults, she described “my sixth-grade teacher’s bottom jiggling as she wrote on the blackboard.”
“I caused a woman to spit her milk across the table,” she recalls.
…
One who discovered her was the poet and critic Dana Gioia, now chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. In a 1998 essay in the Dark Horse literary magazine, Gioia noted “the unusual compression and density of Ryan’s work.” Like Emily Dickinson, Gioia wrote, Ryan “has found a way of exploring ideas without losing either the musical impulse or imaginative intensity necessary to lyric poetry.”
Today, Gioia calls Ryan simply “one of the finest poets writing in America,” adding that she has “the gift of being simultaneously very funny and very wise.”
Here’s a Ryan poem called “Death by Fruit.“
Kid’s stuff
A local children’s ministry is doing ads for a special outreach on the talk radio station to which I generally listen.
From what I know of the ministry, it’s a good one that does fine, much-needed work.
But I find their promotion very odd.
They’re raising funds to get kids backpacks and supplies for school. Their ad features a kid getting his stuff together at the start of the year. He finds out his mother hasn’t bought him a new backpack, and he pitches a fit, saying all the kids will laugh at him because he’s using last year’s backpack.
Maybe I’m a heartless jerk, but there are a lot of things in the world I worry about more than kids having to use the same backpack two years in a row. I got laughed at a whole lot when I was a kid, and I’d have been pretty relieved if it’d had only been a matter of derision of my school supplies.
I keep wondering if this is some kind of head-fake. I’m sure the people who carry on this ministry have to deal with kids whose parents are neglecting them due to drug use, or sexually abusing them, or pimping them out. I wonder if they’re doing this backpack thing because they’re afraid to tell about the real needs they have to try to fill.
But if that’s true, they’re being dishonest with their donors, which I hope would not be the case.
So I just don’t get it.
Speaking of school kids, it occurred to me to wonder whether anybody’s done a folklore study of children’s traditional poetry.
I don’t mean the stuff written for children, like A Child’s Garden of Verses or the books of Dr. Seuss.
I mean the stuff composed by children, who knows how long ago, and passed down through generations from kid to kid?
Poems like “I Think I’ll Go Eat Worms,” and “________ and __________, sittin’ in a tree,” and little girls’ jump rope rhymes. And parodies like, “Glory, glory, hallelujah, teacher hit me with a ruler.”
It seems to me this is an example of a purely oral tradition, still alive in our literate culture. I’d think much could be learned by tracking those poems over the years and generations, observing how they change and stay the same.
Maybe somebody’s done that. But I can’t find anything about it on the web.
Teaching Frost to Juveniles
“Fast fading words adown my shadowy page”
Emotion by Measure
“Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.” — Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) whose birthday is today.
Hardy also said, “Pessimism … is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child’s play.”
R.I.P., Joan Hunter Dunn
Finished another Koontz today—Hideaway. I’m not going to review it, because I’ve done so many Koontzes, but I’ll mention that I liked it a lot, yet found it hard to read. I liked the good characters so much that I didn’t want to see anything bad happen to them, so I actually resisted picking it up a few times, not wanting to know what happened next.
Joan Hunter Dunn died last week. She was the subject of the English poet John Betjeman’s most famous poem, “A Subaltern’s Love Song.” Betjeman asked her permission to use her name, and apparently they were only friends, not lovers.
The poem (I’ll confess I’ve never read it) is a wartime elegy to normal life and love in pre-war times.
Betjeman was a pupil of C. S. Lewis’ at Oxford. He never took his degree, and always blamed Lewis for not supporting him when he got into academic trouble. They were reconciled in later years, but never became friends.
Taxes in Verse
In answer to a mandate by the Surveyor of the Taxes
Sir, as your mandate did request,
I send you here a faithfu’ list,
O’ gudes an’ gear, an’ a’ my graith,
To which I’m clear to gi’e my aith. (R. Burns, “The Inventory”)
Do you remember when I fought
The bank and the courthouse ring,
For pocketing the interest on public funds?
And when I fought our leading citizens
For making the poor the pack-horses of the taxes?
And when I fought the water works
For stealing streets and raising rates? (E.L. Masters, “Harry Carey Goodhue”)
I du believe the people want
A tax on teas an’ coffees,
Thet nothin’ aint extravygunt,—
Purvidin’ I’m in office; . . .
I du believe in any plan
O’ levyin’ the taxes,
Ez long ez, like a lumberman,
I git jest wut I axes; (J.R. Lowell, “The Pious Editor’s Creed”)
That very morning
The Federal Judge, in the very next room
To the room where I took the oath,
Decided the constitution
Exempted Rhodes from paying taxes
For the water works of Spoon River! (E.L. Masters, “Ida Chicken”)
But each year, unawares,
He sent a sum for taxes due—
And fence repairs. (H.C. Stearns, “Reuben Roy”)
Someone, please tell me,
if you know, where does,
all the money go? (Mac McGovern, “Taxes”)
Tax not my sloth that I
Fold my arms beside the brook;
Each cloud that floated in the sky
Writes a letter in my book. (R.W. Emerson, “The Apology”)