July 11, 2012 The Poem Stuck in My Head D. H. Lawrence’s “Pomegranate” By Eli Mandel Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Sometimes in life you get yelled at. No matter your moral fiber, it can’t be avoided all the time. It happens in Marine Corps boot camp; it happens in rush-hour subway cars; it happens if your mother catches you reading Lady Chatterly’s Lover at an impressionable young age. But one place you don’t expect to get harangued, one place where the lid’s supposed to stay on the pot, is poetry. So cracking open D. H. Lawrence’s seemingly innocuous Birds, Beasts, Flowers is a bit of a shock. Lawrence is, of course, better known for his novels and short stories; verse can unleash in him an irritating Whitmanesque mania, an exhibitionist verbal autoeroticism. But that’s not the case here. You flip past the title page and the index to the first poem, “Pomegranate,” and before your eyes can adjust to the typeface, you’re in trouble. Big trouble: Read More
June 20, 2012 The Poem Stuck in My Head Frederick Seidel’s “Spin” By Andrew Sean Greer Photograph Mark Mahaney. Nothing suits me as well as the combination of sweet and sour. It explains my love of Thai food and women rockers who sing like robots about heartbreak. It also explains my love of Frederick Seidel’s poetry. Apparently it’s not to everyone’s taste; he has been called the “Darth Vader of American poetry” for such seemingly cruel lines as “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare.” Of course, that line is in a poem, “Climbing Everest,” about his own mortality, his own nakedness (a “train wreck”), and the coldness of those words allows the rest to work on us. And I suppose one must have a mind of winter, and been cold a long time, to write a poem about a dying dog: “Spin.” Which is the poem stuck in my head. A dog named Spinach died today. In her arms he died away. Injected with what killed him. Love is a cup that spilled him. Spilled all the Spin that filled him. Sunlight sealed and sent. Received and spent. Smiled and went. I make my creative-writing students memorize and recite poetry; I want to embed a few lines of precise language and meter in their brains, like a sleeper cell, to be activated when they are at a loss for imagery or words. To prove it can be done, I memorize a new poem every week. So you would think I’d have a multitude swimming around up there. But the one poem that always snakes its way up—intact—through the debris of memory is also the only poem that, when I recite it before my class, makes them break into tears. Read More
June 13, 2012 Poetry Watch: Dorothy Parker “Reads” By Sadie Stein We have long been intrigued, fascinated, and terrified by the ingenious work by the folks behind Poetry Reincarnations. While the reincarnated Walt Whitman and the Ruined Maid deserve mention, in honor of tonight’s Strand event, we bring you Dorothy Parker “reciting” “One Perfect Rose.”
May 22, 2012 On Poetry Hemingway on “The Lady Poets” By Sadie Stein Thanks to Tongue Journal and the Poetry Foundation for bringing us this fantastic bit of annotation! In November 1924, Ernest Hemingway published “The Lady Poets with Foot Notes” in Der Querschnitt. It’s a satirical poem full of lit-world in-jokes and allusions to female poets of the day, and Hemingway scholar Michael Reynolds has IDs them. The poetesses are: 1. Edna St. Vincent Millay 2. Aline Kilmer 3. Sara Teasdale 4. Zoe Akins 5. Lola Ridge 6. Amy Lowell The Poetry Foundation has more to say about all of them!
May 17, 2012 The Poem Stuck in My Head Edward Lear’s “The Dong with a Luminous Nose” By Sam Munson Edward Lear was born two hundred years ago this month. His reputation, which has outlived many others, rests largely on a book of limericks published when he was thirty-four and a single poem, appearing twenty-one years later, that begins (as you all know, or should): The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea In a beautiful pea-green boat They took some honey, and plenty of money Wrapped up in a five-pound note Read More
May 14, 2012 On Poetry At the Grave of Richard Hugo By Alice Bolin It is an indisputable fact that the memory of poet Richard Hugo haunts Missoula, Montana. This notion might first strike us as innocuous, obvious, falling within the simple domain of legacy. Thirty years after his death, he leaves equal endowments in Missoula, as the most important “Montana poet” and as a teacher of poetry: he was one of the first directors of the University of Montana’s renowned creative writing program and the author of a classic handbook on creative writing, The Triggering Town, that is filled with excellent, weird, and practical advice. Further related to the activity of haunting: Hugo’s poems famously concern places. He is known primarily as a regional poet, and many of his most famous poems are named for Montana towns or landmarks, like “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” “The Milltown Union Bar,” and “The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir.” One can use his book of collected poems, Making Certain It Goes On, as a guidebook to Montana’s bleakest and loveliest destinations; titles of his poems will lead you to Garnet ghost town, St. Ignatius, Turtle Lake, Wisdom, and Fort Benton, finally winding back to what was once Hugo’s actual address in Missoula, 2433 Agnes Street. When Hugo wrote a poem about a place, he made the place a part of himself, and now that he’s gone, a part of him remains in those places. Read More