Poetry

Gin: Mother’s Milk or Hair Tonic?

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One thing always leads to another on the intertubes and this particular ravel started with my friend David Nice. David is a cultural critic and musicologist who maintains a wonderful blog –  I’ll Think of Something Later – where he writes about music and travel and culture and all the life in between.  In response … Read more

Clearing the Clutter

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These days find me busy clearing and chucking, sorting and sifting, storing and saving. Three truck loads of stuff cleared by the junk removers, hundreds of books donated to the Poughkeepsie Library and wardrobes full of clothing to the Salvation Army. And still there’s more. As I clear out the clutter and crap and treasure … Read more

Game of Swans

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A group of swans is a wedge when they’re in flight, likely because of the shape a group of swans takes in flight. And while we can call a group of swans a bevy, a herd, a game, or a flight, they can only be a bank when they’re on the ground. Merriam-Webster But there’s more:  a gaggle of swans  a whiteness of … Read more

For No Good Reason

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I love this poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. It’s a commentary on the fact that – even in the darkest times – simple acts of unexpected generosity and kindness have the capacity to remind us that not everything is bleak and hopeless even in a nasty, brutish, trumpian world. Optimistic Little Poem Now and then … Read more

Wordsworth on the Rail Trail

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There’s a drainage ditch runs alongside the rail trail where we often take our morning stroll. It runs with water after rain and provides an excellent damp environment for the cardinal flower (lobelia cardinalis). It’s a showy deep red spiky flower native to the US. Apparently most insects find it difficult to navigate the long … Read more

The Street of the Fruit Stalls

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Amazing how hard it sometimes can be to find things on the intertubes. There was a poem I remembered from my London teaching days and I tried every which way to find it. It was about fruit piled up in a market so I tried all kinds of variations on a search theme and came … Read more

The Pains of Parting and a Father Says Farewell

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Two quite different wartime farewells at Charing Cross Station: The first is from Vera Brittain on the eve of 1915: At Charing Cross, with half an hour to wait for the last train to Purley, we walked together up and down the platform. It was New Year’s Eve, a bright night with infinities of stars … Read more

Stroll, Soodle or Stroam

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Soodle – it means means to walk in a slow or leisurely manner; to stroll, saunter. With so many alternatives to the word ‘walk’ it seems superfluous to promote more. But “soodle” just seems so right especially for this time of the year when it takes effort to move at all when the heat is … Read more

New York City Through the Window: Poetry

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In 1975 the poet Allen Ginsberg was in hospital. At a later poetry reading he explained the causes in an introduction to a poem that he had written from his hospital bed.:  I got real angry and wound up sick in a hospital, for various karmic reasons, and woke up looking out the window, and … Read more

After great pain, a formal feeling comes

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It’s graduation season and across the land schools are saying goodbye to students and students are moving along and into the next phases of their lives. It’s all very heartwarming and etc. I usually couldn’t wait for them to be over.  All that dressing up and ceremony and sitting and waiting in uncomfortable chairs. At … Read more

Who was May Herschel Clarke?

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It started with a tweet from yesterday morning: So off to google where I found the same inaccurate one-line biography pretty much everywhere, including Wikipedia.  May Herschel-Clarke (1850–1950) was an English poet. She is chiefly known today for her Anti-War poems Nothing to Report and The Mother, the latter of which was published in 1917 as a direct response … Read more