April 24, 2008
Poetry Finders
Spoon River Anthology to memorize.
(Alternate source: Spoon River Anthology on Bartleby.com).
April 23, 2008
Poem Starters
"April is the Cruelest Month"
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
Biographical notes on T.S. Eliot
Hypertext and Audio of Eliot's The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock
Fragmentation in The Waste Land: Why T.S. Eliot Tears Down London Bridge
By Emily Hilligoss
Hypertext version of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" at The Prufrock Papers
"I hate to see that evening sun go down."
T. S. Eliot is said the best line of iambic pentameter in English was not in Shakespeare but in W. C. Handy's St. Louis Blues
Much of T.S. Eliot's poetry brings to mind the poems of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg
Wired for Books Interview with Allen Ginsberg
Howl: The Poem That Changed America
NPR : Revisiting Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' at 50
Allen Ginsberg - NYTimes Featured Author
States of Altering Consciousness
Ginsberg's COLLECTED POEMS 1947-1980 reviewed
Photographs from the Allen Ginsberg Trust
Read a poem a day selected by Billy Collins at Poetry 180
Today's Poem from Poetry Daily
"Poetry" By Marianne Moore
"This is Just to Say" By William Carlos Williams
Current Poet Laureate, Charles Simic - Poetry (Library of Congress)
It is difficult
to get the news from poems,
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
- W.C.Williams
Spoon River Anthology to memorize.
(Alternate source: Spoon River Anthology on Bartleby.com).
Magnetic Poetry
Make a Dadaist Poem
Make a Dadaist poem at CHANCE WORDS from MoMA.org's Red Studio
The eight-year global outburst known as Dada gets a landmark show in New York. MoMA's installation is another matter.
By Christopher Knight
LATimes Staff Writer
June 28, 2006
PDF version
April 03, 2008
Jackson Pollock
July 31, 2006
Tree Ghost
TREE GHOST
There's a rush, a rustle
among branches of a conifer,
& then mutable silence rushes in
like after a fight or making love.
The wings settle. The third eye
blindfolded. Hunger always speaks
the same language. Branches shudder
overhead, & the snowy owl's wingspan
seems to cool off the August night
with a breathing in & breathing out.
I close my eyes & can still see
the three untouched mice dead
along the afternoon footpath.
The screeching nest is ravenous.
The mother's claws grab a limb.
Now, what I know makes me look down
at the ground. I can almost feel
how the owl's beauty scared the mice
to death, how the shadow of her wings
was a god passing over the grass.
May 31, 2006
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost (1874–1963)
From Mountain Interval, 1920.
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 10
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. 15
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 20
May 20, 2006
Anecdote of the Jar
Anecdote of the Jar
by Wallace Stevens
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
The Antique Fruit Jar Hall of Fame and the Ball Canning Jar Timeline
May 18, 2006
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T.S. Eliot
Hypertext version of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" at The Prufrock Papers
Hypertext and Audio of Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
From The Hollow Men, 1925
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
Biographical notes on T.S. Eliot
Fragmentation in The Waste Land: Why T.S. Eliot Tears Down London Bridge
By Emily Hilligoss
April 14, 2006
How to read, and perhaps enjoy, very new poetry
Close Calls with Nonsense - By STEPHEN BURT in The Believer
April 05, 2006
Trees By Mark Haddon
Trees
They stand in parks and graveyards and gardens.
Some of them are taller than department stores,
yet they do not draw attention to themselves.
You will be fitting a heated towel rail one day
and see, through the louvre window,
a shoal of olive-green fish changing direction
in the air that swims above the little gardens.
Or you will wake at your aunt's cottage,
your sleep broken by a coal train on the empty hill
as the oaks roar in the wind off the channel.
Your kindness to animals, your skill at the clarinet,
these are accidental things.
We lost this game a long way back.
Look at you. You're reading poetry.
Outside the spring air is thick
with the seeds of their children.
- Mark Haddon
April 02, 2006
Cento Collage-poem
A cento is a collage-poem composed of lines lifted from other sources —
often, though not always, from great poets of the past. In Latin the word cento
means ‘‘patchwork,’’ and the verse form resembles a quilt of discrete lines
stitched together to make a whole. The word cento is also Italian for ‘‘one hundred,’’
and some mosaic poems consist of exactly 100 lines culled by one poet
from the work of another to pay tribute to him or her.
From These Fragments I Have Sewn
By David Lehman
NYTimes Book Review April 2, 2006
March 29, 2006
Power of Poetry
March 21, 2006
Hisaye Yamamoto
Hisaye Yamamoto, author of Seventeen Syllables, grew up at the Poston Relocation Center in Arizona.
Ansel Adams photographed the Manzanar Relocation Center near Independence, California.
February 06, 2006
Aethelred Eldridge reads William Blake's Milton
Aethelred Eldridge reads poetry of William Blake
"As a professor of art at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio since 1957, Aethelred has self-published thousands of his image/textual works with various technologies, including the hectograph, the mimeograph, and more recently, the photocopier... Larger works include earlier paintings and an expansive mural-in-progress that adorns an archway of Seigfred Hall on the OU campus. This black and white mural has been repainted several times since it first appeared in 1966...his class lectures are themselves works of art. He founded the Church of William Blake on his property outside of Athens near Mt. Nebo, a spiritualist mecca since the 1830's."
January 30, 2006
Break, Blow, Burn
Also by or about Camille Paglia -
A Poet Battles - And Breaks Free
Warrior for the Word
Crisis In The American Universities
January 28, 2006
Songs Inspired by Literature
Songs Inspired by Literature.
For example, Warren Zevon's My Ride's Here may have been inspired by Emily Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop For Death.
January 07, 2006
From Billy Collins
'The Trouble With Poetry' by Billy Collins
New York Times Book Review
By DAVID ORR
January 8, 2006