A Poet You Should Know

[Hippiepoet]

Each week I would like to focus on a famous poet, or maybe a not so famous one. I have a deep love for poetry. I started writing at the tender age of 10, after the death of my father, due to a long bout with cancer. Writing became therapy, a way to release myself. I remember my Mother giving me my first poetry book around that time and it was Selected Poems of Robert Frost (http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Poems-Robert-Frost/dp/0030120608/dreamindemon-20) by Robert Frost. I fell in love immediately with this honest, nature loving man who wrote much on New England. So even though Robert Frost is a well known poet. I would like to recognize him first, for he is my first poetic love. Anyone else want to feature a favorite poet, a poet that you think we Demon's should know of, or just a poet who's words deeply affected you, please post.

From Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frost)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b5/Robert_Frost_NYWTS.jpg/200px-Robert_Frost_NYWTS.jpg
Robert Frost(March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. His work frequently used themes from the early 1900s rural life in New England, using the setting toexamine complex social and philosophical themes. A popular and often-quoted poet, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes.

One of my favorites...

Mending Wall
by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'

[gprime]

Anybody who likes Frost should be thrilled with recent news (http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jZ-AcZgwwYTSWP-vealmGeVPF1iQD8V0RT1O0):


HANOVER, N.H. (AP) — Sixty years after New England poet Robert Frost sat down with Dartmouth College students for an off-the-record lecture, the four-time Pulitzer Prize winner's words to them are being published for the first time.


The transcript of the 1947 speech includes a candid question-and-answer session in which the poet suggests one way to take the world is "as a joke, take it humorously."


A transcript of the Oct. 23, 1947, speech — one of dozens he gave at the college — will be published later this month in the journal Literary Imagination. Transcripts of other lectures he gave at the Ivy League school in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s are also headed for print, thanks to a former undergrad who came across recordings of the talks and found out they'd never been heard beyond the campus.

[Hippiepoet]

Some pretty cool pictures I found.

A Robert Frost Exhibit
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/exhibit.htm

[Hippiepoet]

Thought I'd share this very poignant piece by President John F. Kennedy regarding Robert Frost. It is a wonderful read.

Feburary 1964
Poetry and Power
by John Fitzgerald Kennedy

"This day, devoted to the memory of Robert Frost, offers an opportunity for reflection which is prized by politicians as well as by others and even by poets. For Robert Frost was one of the granite figures of our time in America. He was supremely two things: an artist and an American. A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers.
In America our heroes have customarily run to men of large accomplishments. But today this college and country honor a man whose contribution was not to our size but to our spirit; not to our political beliefs but to our insight; not to our self-esteem but to our self-comprehension.
In honoring Robert Frost we therefore can pay honor to the deepest sources of our national strength. That strength takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant.
The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation's greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us. Our national strength matters; but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost.
He brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society. His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation.
"I have been," he wrote, "one acquainted with the night." And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair.
At bottom he held a deep faith in the spirit of man. And it is hardly an accident that Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself.
When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgement. The artists, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, "a lover's quarrel with the world." In pursuing his perceptions of reality he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role. If Robert Frost was much honored during his lifetime, it was because a good many preferred to ignore his darker truths. Yet, in retrospect, we see how the artist's fidelity has strengthened the fiber of our national life.
If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, make them aware that our nation falls short of its highest potential.
I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. And as Mr. MacLeigh once remarked of poets, "There is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style."
In free society art is not a weapon, and it does not belong to the sphere of polemics and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But in a democratic society the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist, is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost's hired man—the fate of having "nothing to look backward to with pride, And nothing to look forward to with hope."
I look forward to a great future for America—a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral strength, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.
I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our national environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.
I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.
I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all our citizens.
And I look forward to an American which commands respect throughout the world, not only for its strength but for its civilization as well.
And I look forward to a world which will be safe, not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction."

[Pirelli Jones]

Christopher "Kit" Marlowe (baptised 26 February 1564 – 30 May 1593) was an English dramatist, poet, and translator of the Elizabethan era. The foremost Elizabethan tragedian before William Shakespeare, he is known for his magnificent blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his own untimely death.

Marlowe had an interesting life, some say he was a spy and many say he was common rabble. He was a peer to Shakespeare and seems to be cast as the "Counter-Culture" version of Elizabethan times. This obviously drew me to his work.

They told us in College lit that Marlowe died in a bar fight, probably just to keep us kids engaged as the truth of his death as best we can tell was detailed in 1925

The facts only came to light in 1925 when the scholar Leslie Hotson discovered the coroner's report on Marlowe's death in the Public Record Office.[12] Marlowe had spent all day in a house (not a tavern, as is widely claimed, even in some biographies) in Deptford, owned by the widow Eleanor Bull, along with three men, Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley[13]. All three had been employed by the Walsinghams. Skeres and Poley had helped snare the conspirators in the Babington plot. Frizer was a servant of Thomas Walsingham. Witnesses testified that Frizer and Marlowe had earlier argued over the bill, exchanging "divers malicious words." Later, while Frizer was sitting at a table between the other two and Marlowe was lying behind him on a couch, Marlowe snatched Frizer's dagger and began attacking him. In the ensuing struggle, according to the coroner's report, Marlowe was accidentally stabbed above the right eye, killing him instantly. The jury concluded that Frizer acted in self-defence, and within a month he was pardoned. Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St. Nicholas, Deptford, on 1 June 1593.

And my favorite of his words from The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Come live with me and be my love,
and we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

[Hippiepoet]

Some links to Amazon for Christopher Marlowe books.

Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays (http://www.amazon.com/Christopher-Marlowe-Complete-Plays/dp/0140436332/dreamindemon-20)

The Complete Poems and Translations (http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Poems-Translations-Penguin-Classics/dp/0143104950/dreamindemon-20)

[Hippiepoet]

This week for my "Poet You Should Know" : Robert Hass. Why Robert? Well, he recently celebrated his birthday, which I discovered the other day doing the Notable Writer's Birthdays. His name caught my eye, so I checked out his poetry. I read numerous poems by him. One of my favorite poems; "Faint Music". I've copied and pasted below.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/images/poets/HassRobert.jpg

From Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hass)

Life:
Born in San Francisco, Hass is a California poet whose works are well-known for their West Coast subject and attitude. He grew up with an alcoholic mother and it was his older brother who encouraged him to dedicate himself to his writing. (His mother's alcoholism was a major topic in the 1996 poem collection, Sun Under Wood). Awe-struck by Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, among others in the 1950s Bay Area poetry scene, Hass entertained the idea of becoming a beatnik. Hass graduated from Marin Catholic High School in 1958. Hass was interested when the area became influenced by East Asian literary techniques, such as haiku.
Hass is currently married to the poet and antiwar activist Brenda Hillman, who teaches at St. Mary's College.

Career:
Hass graduated from St. Mary's College in Moraga, California in 1963, and received his MA and Ph.D. in English from Stanford University in 1965 and 1971 respectively. At Stanford he studied with the poet and critic Yvor Winters, whose ideas influenced his later writing and thinking. His Stanford classmates included the poets Robert Pinsky, John Matthias, and James McMichael. Hass taught literature and writing at the University at Buffalo in 1967. From 1971 to 1989, he taught at his alma mater St. Mary's, at which time he transferred to the faculty of University of California, Berkeley. He as been a visiting faculty member in the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop on several occasions.
From 1995-1997, during Hass's two terms as the US Poet Laureate (Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress), he became a well-known champion of literacy, poetry, and ecological awareness. He criss-crossed the country lecturing in places as diverse as corporate boardrooms and for civic groups, or as he has said, "places where poets don't go." Since his self-described "act of citizenship," he has written a weekly column on poetry in the Washington Post. He serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, is a trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize, and works actively for literacy and the environment.
Hass says that he admires beat poet Lew Welch's short poem "Raid Kills Bugs Dead". He commented in an archived online chat that "It's to the point." In Hass' opinion, the five most important poets of the last 50 years were Chilean Pablo Neruda, Peruvian Cesar Vallejo, and Polish poets Zbigniew Herbert, Nobel-winner Wislawa Szymborska, and Nobel-winner Czesław Miłosz.
While at Berkeley, Hass has translated the poetry of his fellow Berkeley professor and neighbor Czesław Miłosz as part of a team with Robert Pinsky and Miłosz.
In 1999, Hass appeared in Wildflowers, the debut film by director Melissa Painter. In the film, Hass plays The Poet, a writer who is dying of an unnamed chronic illness. Excerpts from his poetry are included in the script, primarily read by Hass and by actress Darryl Hannah

Published Poetry Works:
Field Guide (http://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Yale-Younger-Poets/dp/0300076339/dreamindemon-20)
Praise (http://www.amazon.com/Praise-Robert-Hass/dp/0880012420/dreamindemon-20)
Sun Under Wood (http://www.amazon.com/Human-Wishes-American-Poetry-Robert/dp/0880012129Human Wishes[/URL]
[URL="http://www.amazon.com/Sun-Under-Wood-Robert-Hass/dp/0880015578/dreamindemon-20)
Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 (http://www.amazon.com/Time-Materials-1997-2005-Robert-Hass/dp/0061349607/dreamindemon-20)
Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns, 1997-2000 (http://www.amazon.com/Now-Then-Choice-Columns-1997-2000/dp/1593761465/dreamindemon=)

Faint Music
by Robert Hass

Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.

When everything broken is broken,
and everything dead is dead,
and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,
and the heroine has studied her face and its defects
remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,
as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves
has lost its novelty and not released them,
and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,
watching the others go about their days—
likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears—
that self-love is the one weedy stalk
of every human blossoming, and understood,
therefore, why they had been, all their lives,
in such a fury to defend it, and that no one—
except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool
of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic
life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,
faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.

As in the story a friend told once about the time
he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him.
Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.
He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge,
the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon.
And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,”
that there was something faintly ridiculous about it.
No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch
he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass,
scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp
along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word
was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise
the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs,
and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up
on the girder like a child—the sun was going down
and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket
he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing
carefully, and drove home to an empty house.

There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties
hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed.
A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick
with rage and grief. He knew more or less
where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill.
They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears
in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,”
she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights,
a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay.
“You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?”
“Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now,
“I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while—
Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall—
and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more,
and go to sleep.
And he, he would play that scene
once only, once and a half, and tell himself
that he was going to carry it for a very long time
and that there was nothing he could do
but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened
to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark
cracking and curling as the cold came up.

It’s not the story though, not the friend
leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,”
which is the part of stories one never quite believes.
I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain
it must sometimes make a kind of singing.
And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps—
First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.

[Hippiepoet]

http://www.contemporarywriters.com/usr/images/author_pictures/patterson.jpg
Don Paterson (b. 1963) is an accomplished jazz musician as well as a poet which might partially account for the complex harmonies of his work. Born in Dundee, he left school to pursue a career in music, moving to London in 1984. At about this time he also began writing poetry. Stints in Brighton and Edinburgh followed as he developed his twin pursuits, forming the jazz-folk ensemble, Lammas, in the late 80s and publishing his first collection, Nil Nil, in 1993. This won the Forward Prize for the Best First Collection and secured him a place in the Poetry Society's 'New Generation Poets' promotion. Subsequent collections include God's Gift to Women and Landing Light, both recipients of the T. S. Eliot Prize. Paterson is currently poetry editor at Picador, teaches in the School of English at St Andrews University, and lives in Kirriemuir, Angus, with his partner and family.

Opposites attract in Paterson's work, his language switching from colloquial to erudite, from playful knowingness to naked lyricism, from Scots to English. All these tensions are held in place by a breathtaking technical skill: a Paterson poem reads like a score, is undeniably, though seemingly effortlessly, composed. This generates a sense of both division and unity: on the one hand many of his poems are acutely conscious of themselves as fiction, the narrator taking us into his confidence (which may or may not be a trick): "In short, this is where you get off, reader" ('Nil, Nil'). On the other hand his frequent use of interlocking rhyme maintains an aural unity which keeps the poems whole. So in the Arvon Prize-winning 'A Private Bottling', the distance between narrator and sleeping lover is traced in the fluctuating rhymes which sometimes appear as couplets, sometimes several lines apart. By contrast the beautiful poems to his children in Landing Light celebrate the closeness of the human bond: "I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever" ('Waking with Russell').

Paterson has spoken of his suspicion of poetry in performance, preferring to see the completed poem as autonomous. Certainly his use of alternative personas refuses any claim to an individual 'personality', however his sharp delivery adds a distinctive tang to the work, whoever's doing the talking.
http://tinyurl.com/2af9jx

Check out some of Don's books at Amazon.
Orpheus (http://www.amazon.com/Orpheus-Don-Paterson/dp/0571222706/dreamindemon-20)
Landing Light: Poems (http://www.amazon.com/Landing-Light-Poems-Don-Paterson/dp/1555974473/dreamindemon-20)
The Book of Shadows (http://www.amazon.com/Book-Shadows-Don-Paterson/dp/0330431846/dreamindemon-20)

Waking With Russell by Don Paterson

Whatever the difference is, it all began
the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers
and his four-day-old smile dawned on him again,
possessed him, till it would not fall or waver;
and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin
but his own smile, or one I'd rediscovered.
Dear son, I was mezzo del' cammin
and the true path was as lost to me as ever
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran.
See how the true gift never leaves the giver:
returned and redelivered, it rolled on
until the smile poured through us like a river.
How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men!
I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.

[Hippiepoet]

This week I am choosing a very well known poet to myself, Robert Hunter. I have been a fan of the Grateful Dead for years and Robert was one of the lyricists for the Grateful Dead. His poetry is fantastic, exuberant, and off the wall. It is sometimes sad, sometimes lonesome and many times quite psychedelic in feel. Mr. Hip bought me one of Robert's poetry books about 7 years ago I guess. I've been lucky enough to see him perform live once. He was wonderful. My fellow Demon's if you don't already know him, meet Mr. Robert Hunter.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/74/Robert_Hunter_at_Johnathan_Swifts_in_Cambridge%2C_ Massachusetts.jpg/220px-Robert_Hunter_at_Johnathan_Swifts_in_Cambridge%2C_ Massachusetts.jpg

Robert Hunter is an American lyricist, singer songwriter, and poet, best known for his association with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead.

He was born Robert Burns in San Luis Obispo, California. An early friend of Jerry Garcia, they played together in bluegrass bands (such as the Tub Thumpers) in the early sixties, with Hunter on mandolin and upright bass. They hung out in coffee shops, read poetry, learned about the Beat Movement, and were generally the hip teenagers of Palo Alto.

Around 1962, Hunter was an early volunteer test subject (along with Ken Kesey) for psychedelic chemicals at Stanford University's research covertly sponsored by the CIA in their MKULTRA program. He was paid to take LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline and report on his experiences, which were creatively formative for him: "Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist...and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell like (must I take you by the hand, every so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resoundingbells....By my faith if this be insanity, then for the love of God permit me to remain insane."

The first lyrics he wrote for the Grateful Dead were composed on LSD, and mailed to the band from Arizona: a suite that would later become "China Cat Sunflower"/"The Eleven" (these were originally performed together for a short time). China Cat Sunflower would later find a partner in I Know You Rider. After battling moderate drug addiction, he abandoned his Joycean/Western vision quest and joined his old friend's band, the Grateful Dead, on the first weekend in September 1967, at the small Rio Nido, California gigs. The association was at first informal, but began on an auspicious note, as that weekend he wrote the first verse of possibly his best known song, "Dark Star". It is perhaps not a coincidence that some Deadheads argue that the Rio Nido gigs were the first in which the band accessed the full power of their psychedelic improvisation style.

Hunter's relationship with the band grew, until he was officially a non-performing band member. When the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, Hunter was included as a band member, the only non-performer so honored.[1] The majority of the Grateful Dead's original songs are Hunter/Garcia collaborations, where Garcia composed the music, and Hunter wrote the lyrics. Garcia once described Hunter as "the band member who doesn't come out on stage with us." Hunter also collaborated as a lyricist with the other voices in the Dead, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, although over time Weir, the other principal songwriter besides Garcia, switched to using John Perry Barlow as a lyricist.

Hunter called 1970's "Friend of the Devil" the closest he and Garcia came to writing a classic song. Hunter's most-known line is What a long, strange trip it's been, from that year's "Truckin'". Perhaps the apex of Hunter's lyricism came with two suites written in the mid-1970s, "Help on the Way"/"Franklin's Tower" (1975) and "Terrapin Station" (1977).

In 1974 Hunter released the solo album Tales of the Great Rum Runners featuring himself as a singer songwriter. It was followed the next year by Tiger Rose. Neither attracted a large audience. Another of his solo efforts is the extremely rare recording Jack O' Roses, containing the extended version of "Terrapin Station Suite" (sans the non-Hunter "At A Siding") and a solo rendition of "Friend Of The Devil".
http://tinyurl.com/ywn2e7

A Box of Rain: Lyrics: 1965-1993 (http://www.amazon.com/Box-Rain-Lyrics-1965-1993/dp/B000H2MUDG/dreamindemon-20) by Robert Hunter (This is the book Mr. Hip gave me, and I absolutely love!)

A poem by Robert Hunter...one of my favorites. Jerry Garcia put music to this and the Grateful Dead performed this as a song.

Days Between

There were days
and there were days
and there were days between
Summer flies and August dies
the world grows dark and mean
Comes the shimmer of the moon
on black infested trees
the singing man is at his song
the holy on their knees
the reckless are out wrecking
the timid plead their pleas
No one knows much more of this
than anyone can see anyone can see

There were days
and there were days
and there were days besides
when phantom ships with phantom sails
set to sea on phantom tides
Comes the lightning of the sun
on bright unfocused eyes
the blue of yet another day
a springtime wet with sighs
a hopeful candle lingers
in the land of lullabies
where headless horsemen vanish
with wild and lonely cries lonely cries

There were days
and there were days
and there were days I know
when all we ever wanted
was to learn and love and grow
Once we grew into our shoes
we told them where to go
walked halfway around the world
on promise of the glow
stood upon a mountain top
walked barefoot in the snow
gave the best we had to give
how much we'll never know we'll never know

There were days
and there were days
and there were days between
polished like a golden bowl
the finest ever seen
Hearts of Summer held in trust
still tender, young and green
left on shelves collecting dust
not knowing what they mean
valentines of flesh and blood
as soft as velveteen
hoping love would not forsake
the days that lie between lie between

[Hippiepoet]

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/02/24/books/kleinzahler-190.jpg
"Robert Creeley (May 21, 1926 – March 30, 2005) was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo, and lived in Waldoboro, Maine, Buffalo, New York and Providence, Rhode Island, where he taught at Brown University. He was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, and was much beloved as a generous presence in many poets' lives."
http://tinyurl.com/2d22pj

"In Creeley’s poetry the bleakness often finds its expression in a tortured self-regard, an almost panicked need for engaging experience, usually interior experience, by enacting it in language, syllable by syllable, line by line. One often feels while reading his work that if there is any misstep, any syllable or stress put wrong, not only the poem but its maker will either go up in flames or disappear down a black crevasse. This is the drama of Creeley’s defining work, and that drama never feels calculated or inauthentic.

Creeley’s best work came early. This is not unusual. For example: Stevens’s “Harmonium,” Crane’s “White Buildings,” Frost’s “North of Boston,” Pound’s “Personae,” Eliot’s “Waste Land.” Creeley found his mature style by his mid-20s. His first significant collection, “For Love: Poems 1950-1960,” was published in 1962 by Scribner when Creeley was 36. It was, and remains, an extraordinary book; much of the poetry in the collection feels as bristling and nervy today as it must have felt 46 years ago. Up to that point, Creeley had been living what seems to have been a frantically peripatetic and shambolic existence. He moved back and forth between New Hampshire, where he worked on a chicken farm; Albuquerque; Black Mountain College; Majorca; Lambesc in the South of France; San Francisco; and Guatemala, scrambling for money, one wife or another and children in tow. He would presently be famous, at least among poets and readers of poetry. “For Love” sold some 47,000 copies, a figure almost unheard of for a serious book of poems, and challenging poems at that."
http://tinyurl.com/2aqad2

Selected Poems, 1945-2005 (http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Poems-1945-2005-Robert-Creeley/dp/0520251962/dreamindemon-20)
For Love: Poems 1950-1960 (http://www.amazon.com/Love-Poems-Nineteen-Fifty-Sixty/dp/0684717387/dreamindemon-20)

I Know A Man

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,--John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

[Hippiepoet]

Maya Angelou. I love her. I've been a fan of this courageous, poetic, woman for years. I am honored to spotlight her this week. Today is also Ms. Angelou's birthday.
http://www.mayaangelou.com/AngelouColor.jpg

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928. She grew up in St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas. She is an author, poet, historian, songwriter, playwright, dancer, stage and screen producer, director, performer, singer, and civil rights activist. She is best known for her autobiographical books: All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (http://www.amazon.com/Gods-Children-Need-Traveling-Shoes/dp/067973404X/dreamindemon-20) (1986), The Heart of a Woman (http://www.amazon.com/Heart-Woman-Maya-Angelou/dp/0553380095/dreamindemon-20) (1981), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (http://www.amazon.com/Singin-Swingin-Gettin-Merry-Christmas/dp/0679457771dreamindemon-20) (1976), Gather Together in My Name ( Gather Together in My Name dreamindemon-20) (1974), and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (http://www.amazon.com/Know-Why-Caged-Bird-Sings/dp/0553279378/dreamindemon-20)(1969), which was nominated for the National Book Award.

Among her volumes of poetry are A Brave and Startling Truth (http://www.amazon.com/Brave-Startling-Truth-Maya-Angelou/dp/0679449043/dreamindemon-20) (Random House, 1995), The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Collected-Poems-Maya-Angelou/dp/067942895X/dreamindemon-20) (1994), Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now (http://www.amazon.com/Wouldnt-Take-Nothing-Journey-Now/dp/0394223632dreamindemon-20) (1993), Now Sheba Sings the Song (http://www.amazon.com/Sheba-Sings-Song-Maya-Angelou/dp/0452271436/dreamindemon-20)(1987), I Shall Not Be Moved (http://www.amazon.com/Shall-Not-Be-Moved-Poems/dp/0679457089/dreamindemon-20) (1990), Shaker, Why Don't You Sing? (http://www.amazon.com/Shaker-Why-Dont-You-Sing/dp/0394521447/dreamindemon-20)(1983), Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (http://www.amazon.com/Pray-Wings-Are-Gonna-Well/dp/0679457070/dreamindemon-20) (1975), and Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (http://www.amazon.com/Just-Give-Drink-Water-Diiie/dp/0860682641/dreamindemon-20) (1971), which was nominated for the Pulitzer prize.

In 1959, at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou became the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. From 1961 to 1962 she was associate editor of The Arab Observer in Cairo, Egypt, the only English-language news weekly in the Middle East, and from 1964 to 1966 she was feature editor of the African Review in Accra, Ghana. She returned to the U.S. in 1974 and was appointed by Gerald Ford to the Bicentennial Commission and later by Jimmy Carter to the Commission for International Woman of the Year. She accepted a lifetime appointment in 1981 as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 1993, Angelou wrote and delivered a poem, "On The Pulse of the Morning," at the inauguration for President Bill Clinton at his request.

The first black woman director in Hollywood, Angelou has written, produced, directed, and starred in productions for stage, film, and television. In 1971, she wrote the original screenplay and musical score for the film Georgia, Georgia, and was both author and executive producer of a five-part television miniseries "Three Way Choice." She has also written and produced several prize-winning documentaries, including "Afro-Americans in the Arts," a PBS special for which she received the Golden Eagle Award. Maya Angelou was twice nominated for a Tony award for acting: once for her Broadway debut in Look Away (1973), and again for her performance in Roots (1977).

[Hippiepoet]

Matt Cook~ A Poet You Should Know.

I discovered Matt Cook since I've been working in the Literature threads. A couple of his poems I've featured in "Poem of the Day". His poetry definitely piqued my curiosity.
http://graphics.jsonline.com/graphics/mke/img/oct05/profile13_big.jpg

Matt Cook is 36 y/o and is an English Department Lecturer at Marquette University and a Poet. He received his Bachelor's degree in English and Master's in Creative Writing from UWM.

"There are few places in Milwaukee where you can talk openly about poetry - much less your own poetry - without attracting disbelieving stares. Comet Cafe on the east side is one of those exceptions.

But even here, Matt Cook worries about how he must seem to others as he rather loudly discusses his latest poetry collection.

"They probably thought I was pretentious," he said after the people in a neighboring booth have left.

A pompous poet? Not exactly.

Sure, he looks every bit the urban hipster in his black-rimmed glasses, plaid button-up shirt and Chuck Taylors. A touch of gray in his tousled black hair adds an air of literary sophistication. It's a fitting look for a college lecturer and Riverwest writer.

But don't confuse the (probably unintentional) shabby chic style with arty elitism.

"To claim that I suffer for my art would be ridiculous," he said, idly fumbling with the fork and knife. "If I didn't like what I was doing, I wouldn't be doing it. I'd be in the dry cleaning business or something."

The shirt laundering industry's loss was literature's gain, thanks to Cook's quirky and mordantly funny take on the human condition.

Cook looks at the world around him - usually from a coffee shop or bus window - and sees matchbooks, grilled cheese sandwiches and macaroni shells. He is endlessly fascinated by the seemingly mundane.

"I was once asked why I have so many poems taking place on a bus," he said. "I said, 'It's because I'm on the bus all the time.' You write about the world you know."

Sometimes, though, he's not sure if that's entirely a good thing.

"I try to avoid having a shtick," he said. "People want you to have a shtick because it's reductive. They can label. I have a problem with that. If I sense a shtick, I will try to resist that."

Cook, 36, has chronicled the local landscape since he started entering poetry slams at Y-Not II in the late 1980s. Back then, he was a UW-Milwaukee undergraduate headed for grad school at the same place. Since then, he's become more than just a local name.

He's had two poetry books published, including "Eavesdrop Soup," (http://www.amazon.com/Eavesdrop-Soup-Matt-Cook/dp/1933149000/dreamindemon-20) which was released earlier this year. His work has been included in an anthology put together by NPR's Garrison Keillor. Cook even wrote and performed a poem titled "Picabo Street" for a Nike commercial.

Occasionally, Cook contemplates branching out with his talents. But he always seems to come back to poetry.

"I tried to write a novel once," he said. "It didn't work. I don't think I have the patience for that."

One of his great successes was appearing in Bill Moyers' PBS documentary "The United States of Poetry." That program featured his poem "James Joyce," in which Cook professes a desire to throw dead batteries at cows rather than read the iconic Irish writer.

"That early stuff is more punk rock," he said. "That's a punk aesthetic to dismiss the accepted."

Now, Cook's poems lean more toward the reverential, such as when he marvels at a bus driver stopping for a squirrel in the street. One thing that has stayed the same is his skewed sense of humor.

"If it's not fun," he said, "I seriously doubt if it's worthwhile to keep."


http://www.mkeonline.com/story.asp?id=362308


nostalgia
I liked it back when shoe salesmen pretended to care
There was comfort in the false
kindness of shoe salesmen
Civilization was preferable when shoe salesmen pretended to care
Thanks for pretending to care!
Look at me, I'm nostalgic
for insincere shoe salesmen!
- Matt Cook

[Hippiepoet]

http://www.poets.org/images/authors/ACF1754.jpg
Alicia Suskin Ostriker (born November 11, 1937) is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry. Ostriker was born in Brooklyn, New York to David Suskin and Beatrice Linnick Suskin. Her mother read her Shakespeare, and Alicia began writing poems at an early age.

Ostriker holds a bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University (1959), and an M.A. (1961) and Ph.D. (1964) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her doctoral dissertation, on the work of William Blake, became her first book, Vision and Verse in William Blake (1965). She began her teaching career at Rutgers University in 1965 and has served as a professor of English there since 1972. In 1969 her first collection of poems, Songs, was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Her fourth book of poems, The Mother-Child Papers (1980), a feminist classic, was inspired by the birth of her son during the Vietnam War; throughout, she juxtaposes musings about motherhood with musings about war.

Ostriker's books of nonfiction explore many of the same themes manifest in her verse. They include Writing Like A Woman (1983), which explores the poems of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, H.D., May Swenson and Adrienne Rich, and The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (1994), which approaches the Torah with a midrashic sensibility.

Ostriker’s sixth collection of poems, The Imaginary Lover (1986), won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. The Crack in Everything (1996) was a National Book Award finalist, and won the Paterson Poetry Award and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award. The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998 was also a 1998 National Book Award finalist.

Ostriker’s most recent nonfiction book is Dancing at the Devil’s Party (2000), where she examines the work of poets from Walt Whitman to Maxine Kumin. Early in the introduction to the book, she disagrees with W. H. Auden’s assertion that poetry makes nothing happen. Poetry, Ostriker writes, "can tear at the heart with its claws, make the neural nets shiver, flood us with hope, despair, longing, ecstasy, love, anger, terror ”

Alicia is married to the noted astronomer Jeremiah Ostriker. She currently teaches poetry in New England College's Low-Residency MFA Program.

Books by this poet and writer....

The Volcano Sequence
The Little Space
psalm
by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

I am not lyric any more

I will not play the harp

for your pleasure



I will not make a joyful

noise to you, neither

will I lament



for I know you drink

lamentation, too,

like wine



so I dully repeat

you hurt me

I hate you



I pull my eyes away from the hills

I will not kill for you

I will never love you again



unless you ask me




Copyright © 2001 by Alicia Suskin Ostriker.

[Hippiepoet]

William Butler Yeats. Probably a poet most of you have heard of. Always a favorite of mine....

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ae/WBYeats1908.jpg/180px-WBYeats1908.jpg
Yeats photographed in Dublin 1908.

William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 - 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and English literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and together with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, and served as its chief during its early years. In 1923, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation;" and he was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers whose greatest works were completed after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).

Yeats was born and educated in Dublin, but spent his childhood in Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slowly paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the lyricism of the Pre-Raphaelite poets.

From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. Over the years Yeats adopted many different ideological positions, including, in the words of the critic Michael Valdez Moses, "those of radical nationalist, classical liberal, reactionary conservative and millenarian nihilist".

Style

W.B. Yeats is generally considered to be one of the twentieth century's key English-language poets. He can be considered a Symbolist poet in that he used allusive imagery and symbolic structures throughout his career. Yeats chooses words and puts them together so that in addition to a particular meaning they suggest other meanings that seem more significant. His use of symbols is usually something physical which is used both to be itself and to suggest other, perhaps immaterial, timeless qualities. Yet, unlike most modernists who experimented with free verse, Yeats was also a master of the traditional verse forms. The impact of modernism on his work can be seen in the increasing abandonment of the more conventionally poetic diction of his early work in favor of the more austere language and more direct approach to his themes that increasingly characterises the poetry and plays of his middle period, comprising the volumes In the Seven Woods, Responsibilities and The Green Helmet. His later poetry and plays are written in a more personal vein, and the works written in the last twenty years of his life include mention of his son and daughter, as well as meditations on the experience of growing old. In his poem, "The Circus Animals' Desertion", he describes the inspiration for these late works:

Now that my ladder's gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart

During 1929, he stayed at Thoor Ballylee, near Gort in County Galway (where Yeats had his summer home since 1919) for the last time. Much of the remainder of his life was lived outside of Ireland, although he did lease Riversdale house in the Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham in 1932. He wrote prolifically through his final years, and published poetry, plays, and prose. In 1938, he attended the Abbey for the final time to see the premier of his play Purgatory. His Autobiographies of William Butler Yeats was published that same year.

While Yeats's early poetry drew heavily on Irish myth and folklore, his later work was engaged with more contemporary issues, and his style underwent a dramatic transformation. His work can be divided into three general periods. The early poems are lushly pre-Raphaelite in tone, self-consciously ornate, and at times, according to unsympathetic critics, stilted. Yeats began by writing epic poems such as The Isle of Statues and The Wanderings of Oisin. After Oisin, he never attempted another long poem. His other early poems are lyrics on the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects. Yeats' middle period saw him abandon the pre-Raphaelite character of his early work and attempt to turn himself into a Landor-style social ironist. Critics who admire his middle work might characterize it as supple and muscular in its rhythms and sometimes harshly modernist, while others find these poems barren and weak in imaginative power. Yeats' later work found new imaginative inspiration in the mystical system he began to work out for himself under the influence of spiritualism. In many ways, this poetry is a return to the vision of his earlier work. The opposition between the worldly-minded man of the sword and the spiritually-minded man of God, the theme of The Wanderings of Oisin, is reproduced in A Dialogue Between Self and Soul.

Some critics claim that Yeats spanned the transition from the nineteenth century into twentieth-century modernism in poetry much as Pablo Picasso did in painting. Others question whether late Yeats really has much in common with modernists of the Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot variety. Modernists read the well-known poem "The Second Coming" as a dirge for the decline of European civilization in the mode of Eliot, but later critics have pointed out that this poem is an expression of Yeats' apocalyptic mystical theories, and thus the expression of a mind shaped by the 1890s. His most important collections of poetry started with The Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914). In imagery, Yeats's poetry became sparer, more powerful as he grew older. The Tower (1928), The Winding Stairs (1929), and New Poems (1938) contained some of the most potent images in twentieth-century poetry; his Last Poems are conceded by most to be amongst his best.

Yeats's mystical inclinations, informed by Hindu Theosophical beliefs and the occult, formed much of the basis of his late poetry, which some critics have judged as lacking in intellectual credibility. W. H. Auden criticizes his late stage as the "deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India". The metaphysics of Yeats's late works must be read in relation to his system of esoteric fundamentalities in A Vision (1925).[63]

His 1920 poem, "The Second Coming" is one of the most potent sources of imagery about the twentieth century.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

For the anti-democratic Yeats, 'the beast' referred to the traditional ruling classes of Europe, who were unable to protect the traditional culture of Europe from materialistic mass movements. The concluding lines refer to Yeats' belief that history was cyclic, and that his age represented the end of the cycle that began with the rise of Christianity.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

http://tinyurl.com/3ebsjt


The Sorrow of Love
by W. B. Yeats

The quarrel of the sparrows in the eaves,
The full round moon and the star-laden sky,
And the loud song of the ever-singing leaves,
Had hid away earth's old and weary cry.

And then you came with those red mournful lips,
And with you came the whole of the world's tears,
And all the sorrows of her labouring ships,
And all the burden of her myriad years.

And now the sparrows warring in the eaves,
The curd-pale moon, the white stars in the sky,
And the loud chaunting of the unquiet leaves
Are shaken with earth's old and weary cry.


The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. 1

[Hippiepoet]

Admittedly I was not familiar with Charles Simic's work (other than remembering after reviewing his books on Amazon, that he'd recently celebrated a birthday and was listed in the Notable Writers Thread). I was working on the Best Seller Lists from the New York Times and happened upon the following article....and I am so glad I did.

"To open one of Charles Simic’s collections of poetry — this is, incredibly, his 19th — is to enter with renewed delight an instantly familiar neighborhood. Delight may not be the first word you’d associate with his shabby rooming houses, seedy movie theaters, empty restaurants on lonely side streets, dusty stores about to go out of business, bare trees. But if the scenery comes out of Edward Hopper, complete with the aura of loneliness and of ordinary things made strange by odd slants of light, the people who live there are nothing like Hopper’s doughy American depressives. They’re characters from Eastern European folk tales or Kafka, boiling with energy, nicely poised between the comic and the sinister and prone to metamorphosis: an opera singer keeps “a monkey dressed in baby clothes,” a woman “turned into a black cat / and I ran after you on all fours.” Even Grandmother — and Simic’s poems are full of grandmothers — “knitted / With a ball of black yarn.” The fun — and Simic’s poetry is nothing if not amusing — comes from the way he puts together the whimsical, the earthy, the banal and the transcendent. There are a lot of chickens in his poems and a lot of angels, too.

The mingling of American and Eastern European motifs gives Simic’s poetry a kind of natural, effortless surrealism, but it’s also plain autobiography. Born in Belgrade, Simic grew up during World War II and its Stalinist aftermath. (“By the time my brother was born and he and my mother had come home from the clinic, I was in the business of selling gunpowder,” he has written. “Many of us kids had stashes of ammunition, which we collected during the street fighting.”) He emigrated to Chicago at 16 and had a knockabout rebellious youth there and in New York. No wonder the safety and comfort and self-confidence of his adopted country don’t quite ring true for him. As he writes in “Listen”:

Everything about you,
My life, is both
Make-believe and real.
We are a couple
Working the night shift
In a bomb factory. ...
One can hear a fire engine
In the distance,
But not the cries for help,

Just the silence
Growing deeper
At the sight of a small child
Leaping out of a window
With its nightclothes on fire.

The speaker in that poem lives an American life, but without American innocence: he may have a job in the bomb factory, but as a survivor of war he knows it’s not just another workplace.

The estrangement from place, from the present moment, is part of a more general sense of estrangement between the self and its circumstances — “you, my life” — and between the self and, well, the self. Is it related to the fact that from the start Simic wrote in English, his second language, while drinking deeply from poetry in Serbo-Croatian (he’s translated Vasko Popa and Ivan Lalic) and in French? Simic’s poems are full of abrupt moments, mistaken identities and roads not taken, a sense of other selves one might have been: “The last time anyone saw me alive: / I was either wearing dark glasses / And reading the Bible on the subway, / Or crossing the street and laughing to myself.” In our era of wars and disasters and uprooted populations, someone else might be wearing your life like a suit — or you his.

Among contemporary poets, Simic, now 70, is not only one of the most prolific but also one of the most distinctive, accessible and enjoyable — the commonplace critique of contemporary poetry as dull, obscure and lacking in individuality definitely does not apply. He’s received every imaginable prize; he’s currently poet laureate. Just about the only thing critics complain of is that his style has shown relatively little development over the years. That’s true, although in the last decade or so his poems seem to me to have become shorter, simpler, less manic. But is it a fault to keep your style? If you’ve got a great thing going, why mess with it? Consider the title poem of “That Little Something”: “The likelihood of ever finding it is small. / It’s like being accosted by a woman / And asked to help her look for a pearl / She lost right here in the street.”

This poem has his characteristic ingredients, and they are as fresh as ever: Something rare and beautiful that’s missing, a chance comic encounter that feels vaguely aggressive and deceptive (“She could be making it all up”), and in which, despite its apparent slightness, the poet finds himself entangled forever.

And why, years later, do you still,
Off and on, cast your eyes to the ground
As you hurry to some appointment
Where you are now certain to arrive late?


Charles Simic,(born May 9, 1938 in Belgrade, Serbia) is a Serbian-American poet and the 15th Poet Laureate of the United States. He is co-Poetry Editor of the Paris Review. Simic is the 2007 recipient of the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. This $100,000 (US) prize recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.
http://tinyurl.com/5pbjbh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simic

That Little Something

The World Doesn't End

[Hippiepoet]

I apologize for being behind. (internet troubles...blah, blah, blah).....

One of my favorite writers/poets since high school has been William Shakespeare. I am totally in love with many of his sonnets. I remember a few and thinking damn, how fucking romantic is this guy? Some of the most beautiful poetry and prose came from this man. This man that had such a wonderful flow of words......

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a2/Shakespeare.jpg/200px-Shakespeare.jpg

William Shakespeare, (baptised 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.

Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.

Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognized as Shakespeare's.

Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.

Poems

In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare published two narrative poems on erotic themes, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton. In Venus and Adonis, an innocent Adonis rejects the sexual advances of Venus; while in The Rape of Lucrece, the virtuous wife Lucrece is raped by the lustful Tarquin. Influenced by Ovid's Metamorphoses, the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that result from uncontrolled lust. Both proved popular and were often reprinted during Shakespeare's lifetime. A third narrative poem, A Lover's Complaint, in which a young woman laments her seduction by a persuasive suitor, was printed in the first edition of the Sonnets in 1609. Most scholars now accept that Shakespeare wrote A Lover's Complaint. Critics consider that its fine qualities are marred by leaden effects. The Phoenix and the Turtle, printed in Robert Chester's 1601 Love's Martyr, mourns the deaths of the legendary phoenix and his lover, the faithful turtle dove. In 1599, two early drafts of sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, published under Shakespeare's name but without his permission.

Sonnets



"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate..."

Lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18.

Published in 1609, the Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works to be printed. Scholars are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets was composed, but evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a private readership. Even before the two unauthorized sonnets appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, Francis Meres had referred in 1598 to Shakespeare's "sugared Sonnets among his private friends". Few analysts believe that the published collection follows Shakespeare's intended sequence. He seems to have planned two contrasting series: one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion (the "dark lady"), and one about conflicted love for a fair young man (the "fair youth"). It remains unclear if these figures represent real individuals, or if the authorial "I" who addresses them represents Shakespeare himself, though Wordsworth believed that with the sonnets "Shakespeare unlocked his heart". The 1609 edition was dedicated to a "Mr. W.H.", credited as "the only begetter" of the poems. It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare himself or by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, whose initials appear at the foot of the dedication page; nor is it known who Mr. W.H. was, despite numerous theories, or whether Shakespeare even authorized the publication. Critics praise the Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death, and time.

http://tinyurl.com/2yz32a

Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Twelve Plays by Shakespeare


Sonnet 46
XLVI.

Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war
How to divide the conquest of thy sight;
Mine eye my heart thy picture's sight would bar,
My heart mine eye the freedom of that right.
My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie--
A closet never pierced with crystal eyes--
But the defendant doth that plea deny
And says in him thy fair appearance lies.
To 'cide this title is impanneled
A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart,
And by their verdict is determined
The clear eye's moiety and the dear heart's part:
As thus; mine eye's due is thy outward part,
And my heart's right thy inward love of heart.

[nurseronda]

We must all be having internet troubles. I can't log on at times, could be the horrible weather we have been having here. :pout:

[Hippiepoet]

http://www.poets.org/images/authors/ebbrowni.jpg
Ms Browning....her sonnets can melt the hardest heart, me thinks....

Elizabeth Barrett, an English poet of the Romantic Movement, was born in 1806 at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England. The oldest of twelve children, Elizabeth was the first in her family born in England in over two hundred years. For centuries, the Barrett family, who were part Creole, had lived in Jamaica, where they owned sugar plantations and relied on slave labor. Elizabeth's father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, chose to raise his family in England, while his fortune grew in Jamaica. Educated at home, Elizabeth apparently had read passages from Paradise Lost and a number of Shakespearean plays, among other great works, before the age of ten. By her twelfth year she had written her first "epic" poem, which consisted of four books of rhyming couplets. Two years later, Elizabeth developed a lung ailment that plagued her for the rest of her life. Doctors began treating her with morphine, which she would take until her death. While saddling a pony when she was fifteen, Elizabeth also suffered a spinal injury. Despite her ailments, her education continued to flourish. Throughout her teenage years, Elizabeth taught herself Hebrew so that she could read the Old Testament; her interests later turned to Greek studies. Accompanying her appetite for the classics was a passionate enthusiasm for her Christian faith. She became active in the Bible and Missionary Societies of her church.

In 1826 Elizabeth anonymously published her collection An Essay on Mind and Other Poems. Two years later, her mother passed away. The slow abolition of slavery in England and mismanagement of the plantations depleted the Barrett's income, and in 1832, Elizabeth's father sold his rural estate at a public auction. He moved his family to a coastal town and rented cottages for the next three years, before settling permanently in London. While living on the sea coast, Elizabeth published her translation of Prometheus Bound (1833), by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus.

Gaining notoriety for her work in the 1830's, Elizabeth continued to live in her father's London house under his tyrannical rule. He began sending Elizabeth's younger siblings to Jamaica to help with the family's estates. Elizabeth bitterly opposed slavery and did not want her siblings sent away. During this time, she wrote The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838), expressing Christian sentiments in the form of classical Greek tragedy. Due to her weakening disposition she was forced to spend a year at the sea of Torquay accompanied by her brother Edward, whom she referred to as "Bro." He drowned later that year while sailing at Torquay and Elizabeth returned home emotionally broken, becoming an invalid and a recluse. She spent the next five years in her bedroom at her father's home. She continued writing, however, and in 1844 produced a collection entitled simply Poems. This volume gained the attention of poet Robert Browning, whose work Elizabeth had praised in one of her poems, and he wrote her a letter.

Elizabeth and Robert, who was six years her junior, exchanged 574 letters over the next twenty months. Immortalized in 1930 in the play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolf Besier (1878-1942), their romance was bitterly opposed by her father, who did not want any of his children to marry. In 1846, the couple eloped and settled in Florence, Italy, where Elizabeth's health improved and she bore a son, Robert Wideman Browning. Her father never spoke to her again. Elizabeth's Sonnets from the Portuguese, dedicated to her husband and written in secret before her marriage, was published in 1850. Critics generally consider the Sonnets—one of the most widely known collections of love lyrics in English—to be her best work. Admirers have compared her imagery to Shakespeare and her use of the Italian form to Petrarch.

Political and social themes embody Elizabeth's later work. She expressed her intense sympathy for the struggle for the unification of Italy in Casa Guidi Windows (1848-51) and Poems Before Congress (1860). In 1857 Browning published her verse novel Aurora Leigh, which portrays male domination of a woman. In her poetry she also addressed the oppression of the Italians by the Austrians, the child labor mines and mills of England, and slavery, among other social injustices. Although this decreased her popularity, Elizabeth was heard and recognized around Europe.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in Florence on June 29, 1861.



When our two souls... (Sonnet 22)
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

When our two souls stand up erect and strong,
Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,
Until the lengthening wings break into fire
At either curvèd point,—what bitter wrong
Can the earth do to us, that we should not long
Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher,
The angels would press on us and aspire
To drop some golden orb of perfect song
Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay
Rather on earth, Belovèd,—where the unfit
Contrarious moods of men recoil away
And isolate pure spirits, and permit
A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.


Sonnets from the Portuguese

Selected Poems

:hippie:

[Nell]

I love Sonnets. I had a boyfriend in high school who used to quote them to me. That smart boy got into my pants.:laugh:

[Hippiepoet]

You'll find Mr. X.J. Kennedy in the "Notable Writers Born Today" thread and in today's "Poem of the Day" thread as well. So since it is the man's birthday and I do so enjoy his silly humor aimed at children, but even big kids like me enjoy reading him so....I thought I'd feature him today.
http://www.thehypertexts.com/images/X.%20J.%20Kennedy%20Picture.jpg

He was born "Joseph Charles Kennedy" — known to friends as Joe — but not wishing to share a name with Joseph P. Kennedy (of the famous Kennedy's) added an "X" to his first name.

Kennedy attended Seton Hall (BS, 1950) and Columbia University (MA, 1951). After serving for four years as an enlisted journalist with the U.S. Navy's Atlantic Fleet, he studied at the Sorbonne from 1955 to 56, and spent the next six years pursuing a graduate degree in English at the University of Michigan but did not complete his Ph.D. He met his future wife Dorothy Mintzlaff while there; she received her Master's degree in English from the University of Michigan in 1956 and completed coursework there toward her doctorate.

Kennedy taught English at the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Tufts University (1963–78), with visiting professorships at Wellesley, UC-Irvine, and Leeds. He became a freelance writer in 1978.

In the early 1970s he and his wife Dorothy co-edited the influential journal, Counter/Measures, a precursor in the New Formalist movement to The Reaper and The Formalist. He served as poetry editor of The Paris Review, and his poetry has been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Hudson Review.

Kennedy is most recognized for his light verse, and was the first recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Michael Braude Award for Light Verse. His first book, Nude Descending a Staircase, won the 1961 Lamont Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets, and his dozens of books have won numerous awards and honors, including Guggenheim and National Arts Council fellowships, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine, and a Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry (in 1985 for Cross Ties: Selected Poems), the 1969/70 Shelley Memorial Award, the Golden Rose of the New England Poetry Club, honorary degrees from Lawrence and Adelphi Universities and Westfield State College. Kennedy received the National Council of Teachers of English Year 2000 Award for Excellence in Children's Poetry. He received the 2004 Poets' Prize for his most recent work, The Lords of Misrule: Poems 1992&nspace;2002.

Kennedy is also widely known for his "Brats" series of dark children's poetry books, his translation of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, and Tygers of Wrath, an anthology of angry verse. With his wife Dorothy M. Kennedy and scholar Jane E. Aaron, he is the editor of The Bedford Reader, a collegiate literature textbook also popular for teaching to the AP English Language and Composition test.

X. J. Kennedy and his wife Dorothy, who have five children and six grandchildren, live in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Not a silly poem....but a great one just the same....



Nude Descending a Staircase

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh ---
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.

One-woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.

Copyright © 1960, 1961 by Doubleday Co.