Tag Archives: Poetry

A Year in Books/Day 215: Ariel Poems by Sylvia Plath

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English: Digital image of Sylvia Plath's signature

English: Digital image of Sylvia Plath’s signature (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

  • Title: Ariel Poems by Sylvia Plath
  • Author: Sylvia Plath
  • Year Published: 1965 (HarperPerennial)
  • Year Purchased: 1994
  • Source: A bookstore in Tennessee.
  • About: Sylvia was a born writer. She wrote like a lioness: fearless, protective, maternal, bold, ruthless, nurturing, unapologetic. Published a couple of years after her suicide, her estranged husband, Ted Hughes, changed the make-up of Ariel by switching out twelve poems for those of his choosing; it took 39 years for this to be righted. This is the altered edition. No matter, the poems are stunning. My favourites change with the seasons, my mood, my age. They are chameleons, different with each reading. They should, at that, be read aloud. Adding a voice tips the alchemical balance anew. If you haven’t read Plath’s poems in a while, try again. She isn’t just for moody teenage girls. I promise.
  • Motivation: I was young, very young. I bought this slim volume on a road trip to Tennessee. It was autumn, the leaves were falling. I wore a lot of plaid dresses and flat shoes, good for twirling around in the crisp mountain air. The season was a perfect accompaniment for her fierce lamentations and burning clarity, a like-minded companion for the turmoil of my heart.
  • Times Read: Multiple
  • Random Excerpt/Page 57: “I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me/With its yellow purses, its spiky armoury./I could not run without having to run forever./The white hive is snug as a virgin,/Selling off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming.”
  • Happiness Scale: 8

     

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 16th-22nd September

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  • Anne Bradstreet died on 9/16/1672. “Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.”
  • William Carlos Williams was born on 9/17/1883. “Life is valuable–when completed by the imagination. And then only.”
  • Upton Sinclair was born on 9/20/1878. “All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.”
  • Stevie Smith was born on 9/20/1902. “My Muse sits forlorn/She wishes she had not been born/She sits in the cold/No word she says is ever told.”
  • Babette Deutsch was born on 9/22/1895. She graduated from Barnard College in 1917.
  • Mary Roberts Rinehart died on 9/22/1958. “Men deceive themselves; they look back on the children who were once themselves, and attempt to reconstruct them. But they can no longer think like the child…”

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[All images are in the Public Domain and are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]

 

Daily Diversion #43: Dying is an Art*

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I took the day off from writing…

Dying is an art.

Dying is an art.

to play with skeletons and drink hard cider. See you tomorrow!

*”Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I’ve a call.”-Sylvia Plath 

A Year in Books/Day 209: Lives of the Poets

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  • Title: Lives of the Poets
  • Author: Michael Schmidt
  • Year Published: 1998 (A Phoenix Paperback)
  • Year Purchased: 2004/2005
  • Source: Barnes & Noble clearance rack
  • About: Michael Schmidt takes approximately 1000 pages to cover more than 250 poets, briskly but rigorously dissecting their lives, influences, historical circumstances, and professional interconnections. Mapping out seven centuries of poetic genealogy is a gargantuan task, but Lives of the Poets is a surprisingly quick read, and as riveting as most of its subjects’ creations.
  • Motivation: The title + poets + biographies=bliss. Surprised?
  • Times Read: Cover-to-cover-1/Excerpts-Multiple
  • Random Excerpt/Page 11: “Poems swim free of their age, but it’s hard to think of a single poem that swims entirely free of its medium, not just language but language used in the particular ways that are poetry. Even the most pathenogenetic-seeming poem has a pedigree. The poet may not know precisely a line’s or a stanza’s parents; indeed, may not be interested in finding out. Yet as readers of poetry we can come to know more about a poem than the poet does and know it more fully.”
  • Happiness Scale: 8

[News] Putting a Face to the Poet: Is This Emily Dickinson?

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According to experts, the answer is yes. It’s only the second known image of the poet, and the first showing her as an adult. ‘Tis a big deal, no?                                                                                                                                                                  Still No New Pynchon Photo, but Here’s Emily Dickinson-The New York Times

Emily Dickinson gets a new look in recovered photograph-The Guardian

 

 

 

Daily Diversion #38: The Gladdest Thing Under the Sun*

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Although hundreds of trees spread across the distant horizon like ink blots, the park adjacent to my flat is the only true green spot in this industrial neighborhood.

Pretty flowers near the old workhouse wall that dissects my neighborhood.

Pretty flowers and plants near the old workhouse wall that dissects my neighborhood.

I’m partial to the rust and dust and accumulated dirt, the graffiti and old buildings that litter the CW. The flowers are bright and perky, but they’ll die in service to the coming season. I like the good bones of the stone and brick structures, even if the edges are crumbly. They last, even if they are a bit shabby.

*I will be the gladdest thing/Under the sun!/I will touch a hundred flowers/And not pick one”-Edna St. Vincent Millay, Afternoon on a Hill