Two Butterflies went out at Noon—
And waltzed above a Farm—
Then stepped straight through the Firmament
And rested on a Beam—
And then—together bore away
Upon a shining Sea—
Though never yet, in any Port—
Their coming mentioned—be—
If spoken by the distant Bird—
If met in Ether Sea
By Frigate, or by Merchantman—
No notice—was—to me—
Happy November!
Item 1 – Just in case we have another long break between posts, here is a link that will pass some time – The Longest Poem in the World courtesy of Twitter. It collects people’s tweets and splices them together in rhymed couplets, creating sometimes charming and always ephemeral results. Couplet of the moment:
Just stay positive and positive things will come…
were the but naked women and all the food at, hmmm???
Item 2 – American Life in Poetry. This is a weekly column written by p.otw.org favorite Ted Kooser. He features young and mostly unknown poets and couples it with a short musing of his own. A recent-ish column caught my eye due to the event it references.
It’s likely that if you found the original handwritten manuscript of T. S. Eliot’s groundbreaking poem, “The Waste Land,” you wouldn’t be able to trade it for a candy bar at the Quick Shop on your corner. Here’s a poem by David Lee Garrison of Ohio about how unsuccessfully classical music fits into a subway.
Bach in the DC Subway
As an experiment,
The Washington Post
asked a concert violinist—
wearing jeans, tennis shoes,
and a baseball cap—
to stand near a trash can
at rush hour in the subway
and play Bach
on a Stradivarius.
Partita No. 2 in D Minor
called out to commuters
like an ocean to waves,
sang to the station
about why we should bother
to live.A thousand people
streamed by. Seven of them
paused for a minute or so
and thirty-two dollars floated
into the open violin case.
A café hostess who drifted
over to the open door
each time she was free
said later that Bach
gave her peace,
and all the children,
all of them,
waded into the music
as if it were water,
listening until they had to be
rescued by parents
who had somewhere else to go.
and a video of Joshua Bell, the Bach-performing violinist in 2007.
(1:33)
read by Dylan Thomas. audio from salon.com.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
(1951)
(:59)
read by Robert Pinsky audio from The Slate Poetry Podcast.
Before the sixth day of the next new year,
Strange wonders in this kingdom shall appear:
Four kings shall be assembled in this isle,
Where they shall keep great tumult for awhile.
Many men then shall have an end of crosses,
And many likewise shall sustain great losses;
Many that now full joyful are and glad,
Shall at that time be sorrowful and sad;
Full many a Christian’s heart shall quake for fear,
The dreadful sound of trump when he shall hear.
Dead bones shall then be tumbled up and down,
In every city and in every town.
By day or night this tumult shall not cease,
Until an herald shall proclaim a peace;
An herald strange, the like was never born,
Whose very beard is flesh and mouth is horn.
The tendency is for viewers of this site to read for a while and pass on quietly – so it is rare I receive comments or thoughts on the postings or poems. But in the spirit of counteracting this trend I pose a question to readers both regular and not. Over the past two months a fair amount of traffic has come to poem.oftheweek.org due to searches for E.E. Cummings’ “as freedom is a breakfast food”. A month ago there were 60 unique hits on that page – certainly an oddity for potw.org. Why is this? The poem does not seem to have cropped up in the zeitgeist recently in any significant way that I have noticed. My hope is that one of these searchers will pause on this post to answer, but all readers are welcome to hypothesize (my current theory is that questions on the American high school AP English test may have centered around this poem, though I have have no verification).
NPR brings an interesting angle to the current economic discussion. Noting that while publishing is in a tailspin, poetry publishing is relatively sheltered, being used to living on scraps. So next time your parents flip out that you live on ramen noodles and scribble words on scraps of paper, you can gently remind them that they’ll be joining you soon enough.
The above site also provides a link to a Planet Money Haiku contest. I think my favorite is the following:
Technical writer
Moved to the Haiku Department –
Still paid by the word.
–Thomas Lanaghan
The site has been quiet recently – lots going on. But we certainly couldn’t let National Poetry Month pass us by. Since April has been so named it gives news organizations license to run their “special interest” pieces. We certainly could never hope (nor wish) to link to all of them, but you will find a few. And if over the course of the month you come across particular sites or stories of interest, please share them. Now read on for assorted and sundry links!
(3:32)
excerpt read by H.D. audio from Poetry Speaks: Expanded.
3
…
few were the words we said,
nor knew each other,
nor asked, are you Spirit?
are you sister? are you brother?
are you alive?
are you dead?
the harpers will sing forever
of how Achilles met Helen
among the shades,
but we were not, we are not shadows;
as we walk, heel and sole
leave our sandal-prints in the sand,
though the wounded heel treads lightly
and more lightly follow,
the purple sandals.
…
(1:04)
read by Paul Muldoon. audio from paulmuldoon.net
My father and mother, my brother and sister
and I, with uncle Pat, our dour best-loved uncle,
had set out that Sunday afternoon in July
in his broken-down Ford
not to visit some graveyard—one died of shingles,
one of fever, another’s knees turned to jelly—
but the brand-new roundabout at Ballygawley,
the first in mid-Ulster.
Uncle Pat was telling us how the B-Specials
had stopped him one night somewhere near Ballygawley
and smashed his bicycle
and made him sing the Sash and curse the Pope of Rome.
They held a pistol so hard against his forehead
there was still the mark of an O when he got home.
Against all odds, the feature returns. This will be playing a bit of catch-up, touching on some stories over the past couple of weeks.
Requiem
It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.— JOHN UPDIKE