What makes a poem right for a wedding? | Adam O'Riordan. Just hours after the announcement of Prince William and Kate Middleton's engagement, and the media frenzy that followed, a friend of mine told me that the nation's new obsession with all things nuptial was already making her queasy. If you're feeling the effects of wedding fever, spare a thought for those of us who've spent the past few months thinking of little other than weddings and the right words to frame the occasion. Over the past year I've been compiling When Love Speaks, a selection of lyrics, love poems, epithalamia (a handsome but disconcertingly formal word meaning simply a poem for a bride or bridegroom, from the Greek "thalamos" or "wedding chamber"). Fragments can be found in Sappho and Catullus, while John Donne is probably the poet we most readily associate with a genre which poets are still drawn to today. In an effort to avoid the cliche "happiness writes white", contemporary poets have shown themselves adept at capturing the strangeness of the wedding day.
Rules for Poets. Over the past few days, poet Thomas Sayers Ellis has posted “Ten Rules for Changing the Game of Poetry” to his Facebook profile. (The full list can be found here .) Ellis’s ten rules actually reveal a lot about the state of poetry today. Apparently it’s necessary to tell poets things like: “Don’t Publish for Publication’s Sake” and “A book of poetry is not a novel.”
(Though First Things readers know otherwise!) He does say some good things (like: “Young poets should practice integrity when acquiring blurbs”), but the list also contains a lot of poststructuralist mumbo-jumbo and downright silliness, like: “Every Time Writing Tries to Write You, Re-write It or Revise You.” Anyway, I’m not a poet, just a poor, parasitical critic, but Ellis’s list seems less like rules for “changing the game” and more like asking for overtime. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
(I know Marjorie Perloff has a good heart and all, but I really wish she hadn’t written that book on Rimbaud. 6. 7. National Poetry Day: unlock the mathematical secrets of verse. Charles Causley. Charles Stanley Causley, CBE, FRSL (24 August 1917 – 4 November 2003) was a Cornish poet, schoolmaster and writer. His work is noted for its simplicity and directness and for its associations with folklore, especially when linked to his native Cornwall. Life and work[edit] Former National School, Launceston, where Causley was both pupil and teacher Causley was born at Launceston in Cornwall and was educated there and in Peterborough. His father died in 1924 from long-standing injuries from the First World War. Causley had to leave school at 15 to earn money, working as an office boy during his early years. He served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, as a coder, an experience he later wrote about in a book of short stories, Hands to Dance and Skylark. Farewell, Aggie Weston, the Barracks, at Guz, Hang my tiddley suit on the door I'm sewn up neat in a canvas sheet And I shan't be home no more.
An intensely private person, he was nevertheless approachable. W. Books[edit] John Berryman, "Life, friends, is boring" Robert Lax. Robert Lax (November 30, 1915 – September 26, 2000) was an American poet, known in particular for his association with famed 20th century Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton. A third friend of his youth, whose work sheds light on both Lax and Merton, was Ad Reinhardt. During the latter period of his life, Lax resided on the island of Patmos, Greece. Considered by some to be a self-exiled hermit, he nonetheless welcomed visitors to his home on the island, but did nothing to court publicity or expand his literary career or reputation.
Life[edit] Born in Olean, New York November 30, 1915, to Sigmund and Rebecca Lax, he returned to that town only weeks before he died there in his sleep, September 26, 2000, at age 84. Lax attended Columbia University in New York City, where he studied with the poet and critic Mark Van Doren. He lived the last 35 years of his life in the Greek islands, most recently on Patmos. And in the beginning was love. Some of his poems, however, were whimsical: St. THESE POETS KNOW THE BOTTOM LINE Not many people in business feel an urge to write verse about their work. These do. Looking at the world with a poet's eye, they say, makes them better managers. - February 25, 1991.
THESE POETS KNOW THE BOTTOM LINE Not many people in business feel an urge to write verse about their work. These do. Looking at the world with a poet's eye, they say, makes them better managers. By Alan Farnham James Autry, Patricia Brown, Harry Newman Jr., Ralph Windle, Dana Gioia REPORTER ASSOCIATE William E. Sheeline (FORTUNE Magazine) – BUSINESS POETRY? Capturing all that on paper, of course, takes talent, work, and time.
-T plus 20 seconds Crackling, popping, bursting . . . roaring manmade thunder rocks the earth and sky around you . . . you are engulfed in an orgasm of life as man's wonder surges to her destiny and reaches for the hand of God . . . As she fades into the heavens, you wipe away a tear of pride . . . and inwardly chant . . . Unfortunate in some ways, this poem nonetheless expresses a sentiment lacking in the more polished poems that follow: crowing, own-horn-tooting, exultation. By JAMES AUTRY, 57, president, magazine group, Meredith Corp., from Love and Profit. The New Math of Poetry - The Chronicle Review. By David Alpaugh It's hard to figure out how much poetry is being published in America.
When I suggested to Michael Neff, founder of Web del Sol, that anyone can start an online journal for $100, he pointed out that anyone can start one via a blog for nothing. If current trends persist, the sheer amount of poetry "published" is likely to double, quadruple, "ten-tuple" in the decades ahead. Who is writing all this poetry? In quieter times, the art's only significant promoters were English professors who focused on reading poetry for its own sake. Today colleges across America have hundreds of programs devoted to teaching men and women how to actually write the stuff. Those in charge of undergraduate and M.F.A. programs have cast themselves in the role of poetry-writing cheerleaders who are busy assuring tens of thousands of students that they are talented poets who should expect their work not only to be published but to win awards as well.
The new math is stunning.
Poets to Read (two lists): UPDATED. Per a reader request: Fr. Philip's Modern/Contemporary [American] Poetry Recommendations! Modern (deceased) Hart Crane Robert Lowell Amy Clampitt (formal) Denise Levertov Louise Bogan Marianne Moore Wallace Stevens (difficult) Sylvia Plath James Wright Contemporary (living) John Ashbury (difficult) Louise Gluck Charles Wright Franz Wright (Catholic) Eric Pankey (Anglican) Robert Hass Mark Jarman (Christian) W. Great Mod/Cont Poets Who Aren't from the U.S.
Eavan Boland (Irish) Seamus Heaney (Irish) Rainer Maria Rilke (German) Charles Baudelaire (French) Octavio Paz (Mexican) Pablo Neruda (Chile) Anna Akhmatova (Russian) The Poetry Foundation has an excellent collection of poems searchable by author, subject, school, date, etc. NB. Follow HancAquam ------------> Meet the Bard -Times Online. Occasional Poetry and John Updike’s <em>Endpoint</em> That John Updike wrote poems as well as novels is news to few people who follow contemporary poetry. Before his death, a common view of Updike’s poetry was that it was light, entertaining stuff that he wrote to refresh himself after the serious work of fiction.
After his death, however, a number of critics have hailed it as the elephant in the room of contemporary American poetry. In his review of Endpoint for The New York Times , for example, Clive James writes that while Updike did not write much poetry, a single poem (“Bird Caught in My Deer Netting”) proves “that he not only had the whole tradition of English-language poetry in his head, he had the means to add to it.” For Michael Dirda of The Washington Post , Updike hits his “Mortal Mark” in the collection.
Critics tend to demonize the living and glorify the dead. There is a little bit of the latter going on in James’s review in particular. Updike’s Endpoint is full of the finite particulars of modern existence. An Interview With Jerry Williams. Jerry Williams was recently featured on Poet Hound for his anthology of poems titled It's Not You, It's Me: The Poetry of Breakup, published by The Overlook Press, and I have just finished reading a book of his own poems titled Admission, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. 1. Let's start with your anthology. You have an introduction that provides quite a few painful and embarrassing details about your relationships.
What made you decide to include some of those more intense moments in your introduction? A1: First of all, Paula, I would like to thank you for inviting me on your wonderful blog and for all the critical attention and support you've given both my books. 2. A2: Subconsciously, I must have been carrying the idea around for the last twenty years. 3. A3: I would say a little of both. 4. A4: I started out with a core group of poems and authors and, as I mentioned before, I like a certain kind of poem. 5. A5: I got to know the work of poets I'd never read before. 6. 7.