"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations

"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti


[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]


Thursday, November 22, 2012

R.E. Slater - Rebirth (a poem)



 

Rebirth
by R.E. Slater

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved




Photo Credit: Song Bird Art



( For context to poem see link )





Saturday, November 17, 2012

Richard Wilbur - Two Voices in a Meadow (Milkweed, Stone)

Two Voices in a Meadow by Richard Wilbur


1. A MILKWEED
 
Anonymous as cherubs
Over the crib of God,
White seeds are floating
Out of my burst pod.
What power had I
Before I learned to yield?
Shatter me, great wind:
I shall possess the field.
 
 
 
2. A STONE
 
As casual as cow-dung
Under the crib of God,
I lie where chance would have me,
Up to the ears in sod.
Why should I move? To move
Befits a light desire.
The sill of Heaven would founder,
Did such as I aspire.
 
- Richard Wilber
 
 
 
About the Author
 
Richard Purdy Wilbur is an American poet and literary translator. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and again in 1989.
 
Biography & Additional Poems - http://www.poemhunter.com/richard-wilbur/biography/ 
 
 
 
Review: "Hermeneutics exercise"
 
by Peter J. Leithart
Friday, November 16, 2012, 12:49 PM
 
Richard Wilbur’s “A Milkweed” has been haunting me all week. It’s a useful exercise in interpretation: Short, accessible, memorable, and profound. What is the poem “about”?
 
As meta-poetry: The poem is about the poem and the power of poetry. The great wind is also the spirit of poetic inspiration, by which Wilbur bursts open the milkweed so that the seeds posses the field of my mind – if I yield. From here on out, every time I see milkweed, it’ll burst out anew.
 
[But at another level I think its about] a plant in a field, whose seed pod is burst so that the plant reproduces. From the first line, though, we have hints of something bigger. It’s a manger scene, God in his crib with cherubs hovering over. Does Wilbur know that there are cherubs over the ark of the covenant? Even if he doesn’t, the milkweed takes us immediately beyond itself to the event that for Christians marks the center of history – the Word of God made baby flesh.
 
Why anonymous? This seems to anticipate the end of the poem, where the milkweed possesses the field. The silent seeds float away, they seem not to make a name for themselves. Yet they triumph.
 
But what is like cherubs over the crib of God? Grammatically, the answer is the “white seeds.” A troop of milkweed seeds moves through the air like angel hosts. It’s an arresting image, but it’s more than imagery. Watching milkweed seeds in the air, we are like the shepherds to whom myriads of angels sing to announce the coming of God in swaddling clothes. In Wilbur’s imagination, the milkweed bursts out to become more than a milkweed. Perhaps it’s only a bit too grand to call it a cosmology.
 
Can we push the analogy: If the white seeds are the anonymous cherubs, is the broken pod the crib of God? Is there a hint of the later story of the cribbed God, a touch almost too light to be felt concerning the later breaking of the pod of flesh to release a host of seeds? Is the crib of God a seed in the ground that dies to make much fruit? Or is the pod the earthy flesh in which God comes?
 
The milkweed speaks – or is it the poet? Does it matter? Who or whatever he is, the speaker of the second stanza reflects on the power of yielding, which appears to be nearly the only power available. Yielding has to be learned. It does not come naturally; it is nurture not nature to yield. The pod wants to stand firm, protect its vulnerable seeds, resist the great wind. Yielding seems to be a renunciation of power. But the speaker suggests the opposite, and we again, it seems, see the passing shadow of a cross.
 
If you yield, you get shattered. But Wilbur, channeling Donne (“Batter my heart”), invites the shattering. Only the shattering will release the cherub host. Only by being shattered will the milkweed reproduce. It’s the great wind that shatters: Does Wilbur know the etymologies of wind and spirit in Greek, Hebrew, and other languages? I think we can safely assume so. The great wind is the Great Spirit, a Spirit of shattering, to which everything must yield, or be destroyed.
 
And those that do yield possess the field. That is, fill the field: Milkweed is, after all, a weed, and weeds are notoriously fecund. But “possess” is also “own,” and with “the field,” possess is also “win.” There has been no hint of battle (or perhaps a slight hint in “power”), but there is a victory. Anonymous cherub seeds, released by the wind from the pod-crib, form a triumphant army.
 
So: A “cosmology”; also an “eschatology” and a “theory” of poetry. All in eight simple lines. It’s nearly miraculous.
 
 
 

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Trumbull Stickney - "Mnemosyne" (poem)

Mnemosyne

It's autumn in the country I remember.
How warm a wind blew here about the ways!
And shadows on the hillside lay to slumber
During the long sun-sweetened summer-days.
 
It's cold abroad the country I remember.
 
The swallows veering skimmed the golden grain
At midday with a wing aslant and limber;
And yellow cattle browsed upon the plain.
 
It 's empty down the country I remember.
 
I had a sister lovely in my sight:
Her hair was dark, her eyes were very sombre;
We sang together in the woods at night.
 
It's lonely in the country I remember.
 
The babble of our children fills my ears,
And on our hearth I stare the perished ember
To flames that show all starry thro' my tears.
 
It's dark about the country I remember.
 
There are the mountains where I lived. The path
Is slushed with cattle-tracks and fallen timber,
The stumps are twisted by the tempests' wrath.
 
But that I knew these places are my own,
I'd ask how came such wretchedness to cumber
The earth, and I to people it alone.
 
It rains across the country I remember.


- Trumbull Stickney, 1874-1904


 

Trumbull Stickney - "Song" (poem)

Song

A bud has burst on the upper bough
(The linnet sang in my heart today);
I know where the pale green grasses show
By a tiny runnel, off the way,
And the earth is wet.
(A cuckoo said in my brain: “Not yet.”)
 
I nabbed the fly in a briar rose
(The linnet to-day in my heart did sing);
Last night, my head tucked under my wing,
I dreamed of a green moon-moth that glows
Thro’ ferns of June.
(A cuckoo said in my brain: “So soon?”)
 
Good-bye, for the pretty leaves are down
(The linnet sang in my heart today);
The last gold bit of upland’s mown,
And most of summer has blown away
Thro’ the garden gate.
(A cuckoo said in my brain: “Too late.”)


- Trumbull Stickney, 1874-1904


"Song" Notes
  • a linnet is melodious songbird finch
  • a runnel is a narrow watercourse
  • a gold bit mown is a field of hay


Analysis
by Peter @ Vukutu
 
Joe Stickney (1874-1904) was a student of George Santayana at Harvard and later friends with him and with Henry Adams in Paris, where Stickney received the first doctorate of letters from the Sorbonne given to an American. Adams wrote of him: ”[in Paris one could] totter about with Joe Stickney, talking Greek philosophy or recent poetry” (The Education, p. 1088) and, “Bay Lodge and Joe Stickney had given birth to the wholly new and original party of Conservative Christian Anarchists, to restore true poetry under the inspiration of the Gotterdammerung.” (The Education, p. 1090).
 
Stickney traveled in Europe and then taught Greek at Harvard, before dying suddenly of a brain tumour. Stickney’s poetry has an elegaic, autumnal feel about it, a sense of loss; it is writing from the end of an era, rather than from the start of one, as is Pounds’ or Eliot’s. Here is “Song“, written in 1902, and very appropriate for the season we in the northern hemisphere are now in.


References
The Complete Poems of Trumbull Stickney -
 
Select Poems by Poem Hunter -
 
A More Complete Listing by Poem Hunter (.pdf) -
 
Select Poems by Poetry Foundation -
 
 
Biography (from Wikipedia)
 
Joseph Trumbull Stickney (June 20, 1874 РOctober 11, 1904) was an American classical scholar and poet. His style has been characterised[by whom?] as fin de si̬cle and he is known[by whom?] for his sonnets in particular.
 
He was born in Geneva[1] and spent much of his early life in Europe. He attended Harvard University from 1891, when he became editor of the Harvard Monthly and a member of Signet society, to 1895, when he graduated magna cum laude. He then studied for seven years in Paris, taking a doctorate at the Sorbonne. He wrote there two dissertations, a Latin one on the Venetian humanist Ermolao Barbaro, and the other on Les Sentences dans la Poésie Grecque. His was the first American docteur ès lettres.
 
He then published a first book of verse Dramatic Verses (1902) and took a position as Instructor in Classics at Harvard (1903), but died in Boston of a brain tumour a year later.[2] Stickney belongs to the number of Harvard poets (or the Harvard Pessimists) who died young, such as Thomas Parker Sanborn, George Cabot Lodge, Philip Henry Savage and Hugh McCulloch.

Poetic Works
 
 

Trumbull Stickney

Biography(from the Poetry Foundation)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/trumbull-Stickney

Trumbull Stickney
1874–1904

Trumbull Stickney is best remembered as a promising young poet and scholar who died before his work could fully mature. As William Payne described his poems in a 1906 review for Dial: "Promise rather than fulfillment is the mark of this work as a whole, for it reveals Stickney as still groping for a distinctive manner rather than as having reached a definitive expression of his powers." A brilliant scholar and enthusiastic poet, Stickney died at the age of thirty, just as he was beginning to achieve a unique poetic voice. His friends and admirers have since mined his brief works to find what might have been, but often his poems reveal only the "promise" Payne found in 1906.

Joseph Trumbull Stickney was born in Geneva, Switzerland on June 20, 1874. His parents, Austin and Harriet Trumbull Stickney, were of impressive lineage and impressive schooling: Austin was a classics professor at Trinity College, and Harriet was a descendent of the colonial governor Jonathan Trumbull. Stickney was raised as befitted the child of such learned and lettered kin. He traveled widely, and apart from some brief studies at Walton Lodge and New York's Cutler's school, was taught entirely by his father. After this thorough, cosmopolitan education, Stickney matriculated at Harvard where he bore out the promise invested in him; he was the first freshman to be elected to the editorial board at the Harvard Monthly. Though Stickney published his verses in various college journals, his social circle was centered at the Monthly. There, he met George Cabot Lodge and William Vaughn Moody—two writers who would later edit one of Stickney's posthumous verse collections. Much of Stickney's undergraduate poetry was published in the pages of the Monthly, as well as some criticism of his beloved Greek literature.

Throughout his career, Stickney seems to have felt torn between his academic and literary passions. Nonetheless, after achieving his A.B. (magna cum laude) in 1895, Stickney pursued his studies at the Sorbonne, composing two theses, one a biography of Ermolao Barbaro and one a study of the gnomic elements of Greek poetry. His studies seemed not to nourish him, however; when George Cabot Lodge visited Stickney in 1895-96, he commented that Stickney seemed in "mute not cheerful despair." While in school, Stickney struggled to reconcile his divided interests. While hacking away at the profession he had resigned himself to pursue, he continued to write poetry, notably his long poem "Kalypso" (later published in Dramatic Verses, 1902). Though he planned to publish his work, he felt he was as yet unready, that his work "ha[d] too much thought," according to Michele J. Leggott in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

His work from this period suggests that he was attempting to rectify that failing. For example, a sonnet written in 1895 called "Cologne Cathedral" shows a shift from the cerebral, antique lines of his early work toward sensual evocations: "Prayer carved the sable flowers; a choral spun / Rose-windows in the aisle; and music stayed / So silken-long by arch and colonnade / That the lines trembled out and followed on[.]" In this passage, Stickney describes the relationship between song and architecture in a fresh way: rather than focusing on the immortality of verse compared to marble monuments, Stickney shows how the visual world can be created by the aural world. "Prayer carved the sable flowers," he writes, suggesting that spiritually infused words can shape the solid world.

Many of Stickney's poems from this period relate to an affair he may have had between 1896 and 1899. (After Stickney's death, his family destroyed all letters relating to unseemly love affairs or requests for funding, so his romantic life will forever be private.) As these lines from poems of that period suggest, however, Stickney became focused on the despair of love: "I heard a dead leaf run. It crossed / My way. For dark I could not see. / It rattled crisp and thin with frost / Out to the lea." By the time the affair ended in 1899, however, Stickney had composed much of his first volume of poetry—but he was unable to find a publisher for it. He wrote despondently to his sister, according to Leggott, "with some resignation I put off the hope of my life. Bay [George Cabot] Lodge publishes a novel and another volume this year." The "hope of [Stickney's] life" did not have to wait long, however: by 1902, he located a publisher for his verses: Charles E. Goodspeed in Boston.

The volume, Dramatic Verses, includes many of Stickney's poems from his Paris days, as well as some work written earlier. In Reference Guide to American Literature, Earl Rovit wrote of this early work that "Stickney's tempered musicality sustains the conventional form structures, raising these poems above the level of similar lamentations that the Mauve Decade manufactured in wholesale lots." One year later, Stickney graduated from the Sorbonne, thus becoming the first American to win the prestigious Doctorat es Lettres there. He took a brief tour of Greece—"a sort of bacchanal," as he described it, according to Leggott—before returning to an academic post at Harvard.

His life as an instructor proved as unfulfilling as his life as a student, however. As quoted by Leggott, he wrote to Henry Adams in 1903: "You refer to the last thing excavated on classic soil, my own torso. It proves not to be an antique at all, but a work of a New England sculptor who was wrecked in a dory off the Peloponnesian Coast. On being presented to Harvard University, it was found the torso had convulsions and couldn't be kept in place. So it is being packed for further travel."

Not only was Stickney unhappy in his work, but he also began to experience terrible headaches as well as periodic "blind spells." He continued to teach and write, but on October 11, 1904 he died of a brain tumor. Like some other poets who have died young, Stickney produced some of his best works in the months leading up to his death. One late fragment, "Sir, say no more," hints tantalizingly at what future was lost when Stickney died: "Sir, say no more. / Within me 'tis as if / The green and climbing eyesight of a cat / Crawled near my mind's poor birds." Like many poets who died young, too, Stickney found his greatest fame after death. His friends Lodge and Moony soon published an edition of his collected poetry, in which critics recognized a "romantic and wistful temper."

Later readers of Stickney's poetry similarly found his work intriguing. Stickney was praised by such notables as Conrad Aiken, William Rose Benet, Louis Untermeyer, Allen Tate, Mark Van Doren, W. H. Auden, Oscar Williams, and John Hollander. Hollander, writing for the New York Times Book Section, suggested that "his work appears more central than ever.... The interest is not in style, but in the grasp of the visionary moment." As a writer for The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry in English remarked, "Stickney was steeped in Greek thought and literature, yet his poems exhibit a curiously tortured modern sensibility." Indeed, he has become in some ways representative of his period. As Rovit wrote, "he exhibited a cultural impulse that was later followed more extensively by writers like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot." Stickney's poetry shows glimmers of what it might have become: intellectually intense, given to emotional plunges, rhythmically daring. His few verses offer the raw elements of a finely balanced poetic gift, but those elements are, as Payne noted, "promise rather than fulfillment."

Career

Instructor of Greek at Harvard University, 1903-04. Writer.

Bibliography
  • Dramatic Verses, Charles E. Goodspeed (Boston), 1902.
  • Les Sentences dans la Poesie Grecque d'Homere a Euripedes, Societe Nouvelle de Librairie et d'Edition (Paris), 1903.
  • De Hermolai Barbari vita atque ingenio dissertationem, Societe Nouvelle de Librairie et d'Edition, 1903.
  • The Poems of Trumbull Stickney, edited by George Cabot Lodge, William Vaughn Moody, and John Ellerton Lodge, Houghton (Boston), 1905.
  • Homage to Trumbull Stickney: Poems, edited by James Reeves and Sean Haldane, Heinemann (London), 1968.
  • The Poems of Trumbull Stickney, edited by Amberys R. Whittle, Farrar, Straus (New York City), 1972.
Other
  • (Translator with Sylvain Levi) Bhagavad-Gita, Librairie d'Amerique et d'Orient (Paris), 1938.
Contributor to Harvard Monthly.
 
Further Reading
 
Books
  • Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, HarperCollins, 1991.
  • Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 54: American Poets, 1880-1945, Third Series, Gale, 1987.
  • Gale, Robert, The Gay Nineties in America, Greenwood Press, 1992.
  • Modern American Literature, St. James, 1999.
  • The Oxford Companion to American Literature, Oxford University Press, 1995.
  • The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, Oxford University Press, 1994.
  • Reference Guide to American Literature, St. James, 1994.
Periodicals
  • Dial, July 16, 1903.
  • New York Times, July 16, 1972, p. 5.

 

Monday, November 5, 2012

R.E. Slater - Autumn Memories (a collection of Haiku-like poems)




Autumn Memories
by R.E. Slater


Green leaves fell hard
One sunny frosted morning
When all was death and quiet.

* * *

A large leafed tree stood proud
Late in the rising autumn sun
Then quickly became undressed.

* * *

The morning quiet was loud
But not as loud as nearby tree
Exploding leaves into the ground.

* * *

By the hundreds the leaves fell
Without air to hold them up
Falling noisily to the ground below.

* * *

One frosted, chilly morning
I stood breathless to watch
The sudden death of autumn.

* * *

When all was peace and wonder
I laid me down in leafy bed
Resting in pillowed content.

* * *

Dead leaves crunched under my step
The woodland did not stop nor care
Nor did I – filled with its brilliance.

* * *

Hunters once were here
And now were gone
And life spread round-and-round.

* * *

Youth was once all I had -
Before the wonders of fall
The improbable beauty of winter.

* * *

Hickory nuts rested in a battered pail
Freshly picked from the cold ground
While grandma chattered in delight.

* * *

Dark shadows crossed the hillocks
Dimming autumn’s lingering lights
Orange moonrise brought all back.

* * *

My chilly breath like a chimney stack
Lifted and rose into the autumn airs
On friendship’s many dappled wings.

* * *

The red tractor’s large black tires
Were muddy and packed tight –
Dad did not care and went to bed.

* * *

We left in early morning’s cold darks
Carrying heavy guns in small hands
Watching wet dogs sniff and run.

* * *

The cotton band uniform held the cold
Wet winter rain pressed against my skin
Brightly stepping to drums and bugles!

* * *

Autumn sunrise met autumn sunset
Orangish yellows blazed dusky reds
Not one day ended as it began.

* * *

Autumn days warm the soul
Autumn evenings clear the head
Decay and rot sweetly fill the air.

* * *

The clasp of cold autumn air
Pulls at my jacket’s warm collar
Lifts my face to its breath.


- R.E. Slater
November 5 & 19, 2012;
March 3, 2014


@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved