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 and trove of decades, I…
It’s a late afternoon on a winter Saturday of my childhood. And that means the big Ferguson radio – the one that had the exotic place names on the dial – Hilversum, Strasbourg, Luxembourg, Limoges, Toulouse – is warmed up. The fire is lit, the coal scuttle is full and the kettle is on. And my father – who was…
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 it happens that somebody shouts…
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 tubular flowers so the cardinal…
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 up with nothing. I even…
Some left over words from another post and borrowed words not exactly put to music. Boundaries blur. The streetlamp a smudge. Steps behind you muffled. Stop. When you stop. The roots that clutch. Do they follow? Who is the figure in the window, watching? Nerves are bad tonight, yes bad. Just the street and the fog that dissolves and distorts.…
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 started taking notes on what…
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 to Rupert Brooke‘s famous poem The Soldier.…
I’ve been looking for a particular poem for a while now. When someone used the hashtag #SherlockPoems in a Twitter conversation I posted my inquiry. The poem I remember – but can’t find – is about a market stall heaped with glowing and colorful tropical fruits. It was used in a GSE exam paper sometime in the 1970’s. I didn’t…
Eighty years ago today – on January 26th, 1939 – the poet W.H.Auden – accompanied by his friend and sometime lover Christopher Isherwood – stepped off the boat and arrived in New York City. It wasn’t their first visit. They had spent two happy weeks in the city in 1938, arriving by train from Vancouver on their way back from…
Rain is no respecter of persons the snow doesn’t give a soft white damn Whom it touches -e.e. cummings, Viva, 27 51 Kinds of Snow 1. Zen-blissed Buddha snow silent, soft, fat flakes. 2. Born-again snow that melts into the baltering mountain torrent to baptize the redeemed of the river plains. 3.Episcopal surplice snow, of choirs and choristers. 4. Modest Methodist…
The Old Year The Old Year’s gone away To nothingness and night: We cannot find him all the day Nor hear him in the night: He left no footstep, mark or place In either shade or sun: The last year he’d a neighbour’s face, In this he’s known by none. All nothing everywhere: Mists we on mornings see Have more…
No snow where I am at the moment but here’s a poem to enjoy now and also tuck away to use on snowy days. And on the topic of words for snow and Eskimos it’s good to read about The Great Eskimo Words for Snow Hoax that’s been perpetrated on several generations of the educated. I was fed it in…
It was Clive Bennett who got me traveling down this particular track. He’s a real birder and maintains a wonderful blog – Art in Nature – where he writes of his adventures in the hedgerows and fields and where he celebrates birds and the artists who paint them. In a comment on a post about kennings he listed some wonderful…
Lament In December December’s come and all is dead; Weep, woods, for summer far has sped And leaves rot in the valley bed. Grey-blue and gaunt the oak-boughs spread Mourn through a mist their leafage shed. December, season of the dead! Brown-golden, scarlet, orange-red Autumn’s bright hues are faded, fled. December, season of the dead! Robert Graves For Robert Graves…