Month: March 2017

Still working through the Poet’s Corner card deck series I found in Lititz, Pennsylvania, last summer. I'm actually enjoying the serendipity of selecting cards that correspond to poets and themes I'm finding in other poetry adventures. All three cards this week were unusual in that I guessed all their titles before flipping the cards over. 

And I had done a hellish thing,
And it would world ‘em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch! Said they, the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow!

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Coleridge was one of my favorite Romantic poets in college and I based one of my Mars poems on "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," (a poem that was cut before publication). Coleridge was the "thirteenth of thirteen children of a country vicar.” He wrote this poem when he was 26 about "spiritual restlessness." He was addicted to laudanum and opium. Had he not been, we would never have had this wonderful thing.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time–
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statute with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal…

“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath.

This is a good irony pulling this card. In our Difficult Book Reading Club we recently finished reading Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. Joan Didion is one of my favorite writers, especially depicting both Los Angeles and New York City. So as I was inspired then to read her newish biography by Tracy Daugherty, The Last Love Song, a huge tome that spent a good amount of time describing Didion's experience winning a scholarship to work as an intern at Vogue Magazine in the late 1950s. This story lead me to finally read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar because Plath had also won young-writer's internship to Mademoiselle Magazine around the same time. Plath’s novel documents her experience during that time. And reading that led me to start her collected poems, edited by her husband, poet Ted Hughes. This poetry card says she was a “gifted poet but a tortured soul" and that now she is primarily of interest to feminist scholars. Which leads us to…

"Inebriate of Air—am I—
And Debauchee of Dew—
Reeling—through endless summer days—
Form inns of Molten Blue—

No. 214 “I taste a liquor never brewed” by Emily Dickinson.

Secluded in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson was famously posthumously famous. Only 8 of her 1800 poems were published in her lifetime,  and none with her consent. She is cited, along with her contemporary Walt Whitman, (unknown to each other), as the founder of a truly American poetry. Many of her poems are a riddles of dashes, the card says,  “as if only half articulating” what she wanted to say. If you like Dickinson, the HarvardX course on her is very interesting. I've been wondering why many of their courses have shut down enrollment and if this was related to a recent lawsuit regarding accessibility in the online materials.

Week stats:

1 white American colonialist female
1 black American female
5 white American females
3 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Austrian male
1 Chilean male
5 white English males
1 white English female
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
8 1800s poets
12 1900s poets

Continuing to work through the Poet’s Corner card deck series. I was excited to find two similar photographs for these first two poets. Small thrills.

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!

“First Fig” by Edna St. Vincent Millay

This is her most famous poem and it captures the “willful irresponsibility of the time and place" which was "Bohemianism in New York during the 1920s.”

What care I if Skies are blue,
If God created Gnat and Gnu,
What care I if good God be
If he be not good to me?

“Egocentric” from Stevie Smith

She's writing about narcissism! It's the 21st Century topic! This English poet and novelist was known for her nonsense verse which attempted to work against the pompous or overly serious verse of sense, although providing some "serious underlying messages."

“Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ‘tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a cap the belly-ache.”

A.E. Houseman from “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff”     

This one is a good punctuation lesson. According to the card, Houseman experienced “enormous appeal” for his “idealized rustic vision” and his “insistence that poetry was more physical than intellectual.” He wrote primarily pastoral, rhymed and metered verse which “had a hypnotic quality that led itself to easy memorization.” The character of Terence was a regular and an alter ego in Housman poetry, a disguise for his love of his friend. He started writing after age 40, once the drama of his heartbreak and “emotional life” was over.

Week stats:

1 white American colonialist female
1 black American female
3 white American females
3 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Austrian male
1 Chilean male
4 white English males
1 white English female
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
6 1800s poets
11 1900s poets