<p>alu–interesting point of view. One I never thought of, but I believe it has merit. </p>
<p>Like so many things in our ADD modern world, poetry doesn’t take the time to unfold over pages read by firelight, but comes to the point quickly and sharply, the knife thrust in to the hilt. Then…</p>
<p>Hey, wanna go bike riding?</p>
<p>Alumother, I’d have you in a bookclub. I like opinionated people who question authority however. </p>
<p>Have you read any modern epic poetry like Katzantzakis’s Odyssey or John Barr’s Grace? </p>
<p>I do like poetry, but don’t read a lot because it seems like too much work much of the time. I’m a novel person - I need plot and characters. With a few exceptions I generally find short stories frustrating. Too much like eating candy. I just want them to be longer and more filling.</p>
<p>Just when you think you cyber-know a gal, she tosses in a smoke bomb.</p>
<p>Say what? Ignore short poetry because it isn’t painful enough? <em>cyber image makes whirring noises as it recalculates Alum</em></p>
<p>cheers: Your mode of expression is a poetry all its own. I always enjoy it.</p>
<p>alu: Be in my book club any old day, and read poetry with me and decry it! Gets my blood running.</p>
<p>No. Short poetry gives an undeserved twinge of pain from its shortness. To me. </p>
<p>And for those who say well poetry can be funny etc. Sure. But any good poetry is beautiful. And beauty to me, as it leaves, is sad.</p>
<p>So I like a long piece of language, giving me time to settle in, to argue with it, to live with it, to surrender to it, to disdain it - however it may be.</p>
<p>I don’t like things that mess with my heart without paying their dues. Perhaps that’s closer to the Alu you thought you knew?</p>
<p>Book club in the Alley. That way by the time it’s my turn to say something I will be gibbering drunk and no one will know what point I am trying to make:).</p>
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<p>I think it’s the other way around. Their brevity doesn’t give them poignancy so much as having achieved poignancy they can get away with being brief. It’s certainly possible to create a brief poem that fails to be poignant. </p>
<p>The goal of being brief that short poetry or short stories impose forces the author to choose words with economy and power to achieve the desired effect.</p>
<p>Having said that, I like long narrative stuff too.</p>
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<p>This one is rather straightforward, yet thought provoking.</p>
<p>Poetry is suited to thoughts of death. And love lost.</p>
<p>William Shakespeare. My 9th grade English teacher made us read this. I never forgot it. </p>
<p>That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.</p>
<p>It is also true that structured poetic forms cause me far less sorrow than free verse.</p>
<p>My father can’t listen to Puccini.</p>
<p>Here’s a short joyful one:</p>
<p>Love After Love, by Derek Wolcott </p>
<p>The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome, </p>
<p>and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you </p>
<p>all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, </p>
<p>the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.</p>
<p>I break into tears and chills after “and say, sit here. Eat.”</p>
<p>I think I am like one of those people who is so allergic to peanuts they die on airplanes that serve snacks.</p>
<p>Tears and chills, me too! </p>
<p>I have some poems that would lay you out. I spent my whole midlife crisis reading poetry and weeping.</p>
<p>PS and exercizing like a hamster on a wheel for sanity.</p>
<p>Gretel in Darkness
Louise Gluck
This is the world we wanted. All who would have seen us dead
Are dead. I hear the witch’s cry
Break in the moonlight through a sheet of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas…</p>
<p>Now, far from women’s arms
And memory of women, in our father’s hut
We sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
From this house, and it is years.</p>
<p>No one remembers. Even you, my brother.
Summer afternoons you look at me as though you meant
To leave, as though it never happened. But I killed for you.
I see armed firs, the spires of that gleaming kiln come back, come back–</p>
<p>Nights I turn to you to hold me but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
Hiss in the stillness, Hansel we are there still, and it is real, real,
That black forest, and the fire in earnest.</p>
<p>I would post Louise Gluck’s “Tributaries” but I am concerned about Alu breaking into loud sobs at her desk and totally freaking out all the geeky guys she works with.</p>
<p>THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATE</p>
<p>I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations - one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.</p>
<p>II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.</p>
<p>III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.</p>
<p>“In bitterness delight.” So if we sob…</p>
<p>SBmom: I know this is one of your favorites.</p>
<p>SBMom-- Love after Love was really cool. Alu–I enjoy a good performance of Shakespeare’s work, but have always had problems reading him…always needed the Cliff Notes. I have a poem inside my being that will be written some day. I’ll keep reading and maybe get inspired to let it out.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/books/04howl.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/books/04howl.html</a></p>
<p>Article about “Howl”, which I cited above, and its social and historical value in today’s Times.</p>
<p>Here’s my S’s favorite from a childhood poetry anthology. What fun it was to read aloud! I’m convinced it inspired his water-balloon missile phase.</p>
<p>George
-Hilaire Belloc</p>
<p>When George’s Grandmamma was told
That George had been as good as gold,
She promised in the afternoon
To buy him an Immense BALLOON.
And so she did; but when it came,
It got into the candle flame,
And being of a dangerous sort
Exploded with a loud report!
The lights went out! The windows broke!
The room was filled with reeking smoke.
And in the darkness shrieks and yells
Were mingled with electric bells,
And falling masonry and groans,
And crunching, as of broken bones,
And dreadful shrieks, when, worst of all,
The house itself began to fall!
It tottered, shuddering to and fro,
Then crashed into the street below-
Which happened to be Savile Row.
When help arrived, among the dead
Were Cousin Mary, Little Fred,
The Footmen (both of them), the Groom,
The man that cleaned the Billiard-Room,
The Chaplain, and the Still-Room Maid.
And I am dreadfully afraid
That Monsieur Champignon, the Chef,
Will now be permanently deaf-
And both his aides are much the same;
While George, who was in part to blame,
Received, you will regret to hear,
A nasty lump behind the ear.
The moral is that little boys
Should not be given dangerous toys. </p>
<p>And one of my favorites, from the same anthology:</p>
<p>I, Too
-Langston Hughes</p>
<p>I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed
I, too, am America.</p>
<p>This was my S’s favorite when he was 2 (I can’t remember the title or author):</p>
<p>Beneath a blue umbrella, a mellon seller sat,
Selling yellow mellons, succulent and fat.</p>
<p>A huge and hungry hippo
Made the mellon seller mad,
When he swallowed all the mellons
That the mellon seller had!</p>
<p>So here is Tributaries. Oddly, when someone just states the loss baldly, I don’t weep. This poem tells some strong and not very often told truths. But the people here are facing their sorrows. It’s the commas in poetry that usually cause me to cry. The sentence fragments. Those things not realized.</p>
<p><a href=“Tributaries | The New Yorker”>Tributaries | The New Yorker;
<p>I wish I had spent my midlife crisis reading poetry, weeping, and exercising. Fairly benign, all things considered, but still not unexamined.</p>
<p>One of my favorites: </p>
<p>The Lake Isle Of Innisfree</p>
<p>William Butler Yeats</p>
<p>I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.</p>
<p>And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of linnet’s wings.</p>
<p>I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.</p>