I know I’ve grown old, because on my bookshelves I’ve replaced many of poets’ thin volumes with their Collected and Complete poems.
4.30.2021
4.29.2021
blameless
Never blame the language for the poem you could not realize.
4.28.2021
straight talk
The message to the workshop should be: No one is fucking around in here.
4.26.2021
make a verse of
Helen Bevington’s When Found, Make A Verse Of (Simon and Schuster, 1961)
I found reference to this book on the site Neglected Books. Intrigued by the
description, I bought a used copy (second printing) online. Helen Bevington was
an associate professor of English at Duke University, teaching alongside her husband,
Merle Bevington, whom she affectionately refers to as “B.” The book is a series
of brief encounters with books, with authors, about the people she’d met and
places visited.
After many of the vignettes she offers a poem, hence the
title, …Make A Verse Of. Her poetry is accomplished but clearly out
of synch with post WW II late-modernism of her times. Her gift is light verse, wry
verse, and touching sentiment never lapsing into banal sentimentality. He
poetry appeared in many leading periodicals like The New Yorker and The
Atlantic Monthly.
She is scholarly but with an easy erudition and the ability
to disclose what may have been overlooked. Helen Bevington is a genial guide
through the literary
byways of Robert Herrick, Dr. Johnson, Thoreau, Madame de Sévigné, and many
other literary figures.
A couple of samples:
The Poet as Singer
Yet in a golden
age, Pindar and Sappho sang. The Elizabethans were lyric poets in the true
sense: “to be sung to the lyre.” Campion’s lyre was a real one; it was a lute.
I have no idea whether he wrote the poems first and afterward set them to
music, or whether he added the words to existing songs. It may have made no
difference to him which came first. His words and notes, he said, were coupled
“lovingly together.”
Unlike our
modern poets, Campion remembered that, if a song is to be heard, he must trust
the rest of us to become singers, too:
All the songs are mine, if you express them well,
Otherwise
they are your own, Farewell.
[91]
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The Wisdom of William Morris
When I look at my own house, I think wistfully of the good sense that William Morris would teach me. He once said (in a lecture on “The Beauty of Life”),
I choose to believe that the advice rules out most gadgets. It meets Thoreau halfway in the matter of simplicity. It echoes the Greeks, whose possessions had both utility and grace. It mixes, as Horace said, the utile with the dulce.
Where, then, is the time and skill for the acquiring of beautiful saucepans, or of stirrings spoons to stir the soul?
[139]
4.24.2021
religious perpetuation
4.23.2021
post-facto poetics
4.22.2021
write clumsily
—Gregory Corso, “Some of My Beginning … And What I Feel Right Now,” Exiled Angel: A Study of the Work of Gregory Corso, ed. Gregory Stephenson (London: Hearing Eye, 1989), 87.
4.21.2021
4.20.2021
4.18.2021
phrase wary
4.17.2021
sing singular
4.16.2021
4.13.2021
now new
—David Hockney, interview with Mark Feeney, "David Hockney keeps seeking new avenues of exploration," Boston Globe (26 February 2006)
4.11.2021
the poem
4.10.2021
4.08.2021
things and whatnot
4.07.2021
typos r us
4.06.2021
too good for us
4.04.2021
repulsive and extreme
—Kay Ryan, “Inedible Melon,” Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose (Grove Press, 2020), 142.