2011 03 01

92Almanac — Martial b.~40; Bernardo Accolti d.1536; Thomas Campion d.1620; George Herbert d.1633; Fyodor Sologub b.1863; Tristan Corbière d.1875; Basil Bunting b.1900; Ian Mudie b.1911; Robert Lowell b.1917; Richard Wilbur b.1921; Dino Campana d.1932; Uładzimir Žyłka d.1933; Gabriele d’Annunzio d.1938; Tom Clark b.1941; Robert Hass b.1941; John Wieners d.2002

Two Hours a Week for Poetry — “A poetry teacher asked a student what he was reading. ‘Nothing,’ the student answered. ‘But if you only write poetry and never read it, you’ll never develop,’ the teacher said in astonishment. ‘No, man,’ the student responded candidly, ‘I’ve only got two hours a week for poetry, and it takes me all that time to write.’ Despite this, the student had the ambition to become a great poet.”
          — “The Flywheel,” by Bas Kwakman
                 (translated by Michele Hutchison),
                 in Blueprints: Bringing Poetry into Communities,
                 edited by Katharine Coles [Poetry Foundation]

Leaps and Landscapes Entered by Reading, each both silently and aloud —

1. Apple Blossoms — William Wilsey Martin [Black Cat Poems] Added to my spring set.
2. Via a recommendation in a comment (-thanks-), Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota — James Wright [Poetry Foundation^♠] Which I’ll remember to the zoo subset of my collection of animal poems.
3. A Meeting — Wendell Berry [End of Life] “It is I who have changed, / grown strange to what I was.”
4. From last year: Dancing ♫ — Ed Galing [Rattle^♥] “we got nuthin for our dancing / and it wasn’t very pretty” – yet we get something out of it that is.
5. What Isn’t Mine — Jill Alexander Essbaum [E-Verse Radio] “A couple // Of someones / Who used to be in love.” Either. Or.
6. Gone ♫ — Ronald Wallace [The Writer’s Almanac^♠] “the little rituals that keep complete // numbness at bay” – like this. and this. and this…
7. Two poems: (1) Money Talks; and (2) Win — Rae Armantrout [Poetry Daily^♠] “It works for me.” Me too.
8. The Applicant [4] — Uljana Wolf [Verse Daily^♠] “Should’ve left / them a foretaste of the whole / amalgam.” Or intructions on how to swallow the one.
9. Catching up from last year: The Incredible Corpse Dormitory ♫ — Donna Vorreyer [qarrtsiluni^♥] Perfectly structured, with the walls shifting present to past setting a strong foundation, then with all the fine work moving through those walls quite effectively.
10. Map of a Border — Cindy St. John [No Tell Motel^♠] “a map/gun is a false sense of stability” – interchangeably so.
11. The House — Richard Wilbur [Poets.org^♠] “Is she now there, wherever there may be?” Who might hope to find out?
12. Yet Do I Marvel — Countee Cullen [Poetry Foundation^♠] “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!”
13. Rain on Tin ♫ — Rodney Jones [Poetry Foundation^♠] “A simple radiance, it requires no discipline.”
14. Hush — David St. John [Poetry Out Loud^♠] “As you / Cry out, as if calling to a father you conjure / In the paling light, the voice rises, instead, in me.” Not as an echo.
15. From the vault: Under Milk Wood (excerpt) — Dylan Thomas [3quarksdaily] “Cross your heart, then? / Cross my heart.” As hearts should be.
16. Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit — Wallace Stevens [Poem of the Day] “It is the human that is the alien, / The human that has no cousin in the moon.”
17. From the vault: One Hour to Madness and Joy — Walt Whitman [Everyday Poems] “(What is this that frees me so in storms? / What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)”
18. From the vault: Blow, Bugle, Blow ♫ — Alfred Tennyson [Poetry Moment]
19. Earth’s Answer — William Blake [Representative Poetry Online] “Does spring hide its joy / When buds and blossoms grow?” Some years, yes?
20. Something About — P J Kavanagh [Poetry Archive]
21. The Dark Stag — Isabella Valancy Crawford [Poetry In Voice] Added to our critters subset.
22. Jimmy’s Place — Gary Geddes [Canadian Poetry Online] Also added to our critters subset.
23. Lines — Thomas Lovell Beddoes [Black Cat Poems] ” so we go / Placing ourselves among the unconceived / And the old ghosts”
24. Buffalo Commons — Tim Murphy [Lilt]
25. Meditation Over Prairie ♫ — John Casteen [From the Fishouse] “If you don’t hear from me, everything’s fine.” And if you didn’t hear me say so, ignore this entirely.
26. She walks in Beauty — George Gordon, Lord Byron; with reading by Bill Berkson ♫ [Poets on Poets] “A mind at peace with all below, / A heart whose love is innocent!”
27. The Kalevala: ◄ Rune I. Birth of Wainamoinen. ► — Elias Lönnrot (translated by John Martin Crawford) [Wikisource]
28. Modern Love: ◄ XVIII [“Here Jack and Tom are paired with Moll and Meg.”] ► — George Meredith [Wikisource] “‘Tis true that when we trace its source, ’tis beer.” Where many a love’s conceived.
29. Sonnets from the Portuguese: ◄ XXIV [“Let the world’s sharpness like a clasping knife”] ► — Elizabeth Barrett Browning [Wikisource] “And let us hear no sound of human strife / After the click of the shutting”
30. In Memoriam A. H. H.: ◄ XXVIII [“The time draws near the birth of Christ”] ► — Alfred, Lord Tennyson [Wikisource] “They bring me sorrow touch’d with joy, / The merry merry bells of Yule.”
31. ◄ Sonnet LX [“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore”] ► — William Shakespeare [EServer Poetry Collection] “And yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand / Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.”
32. The Joy of the Drop: ◄ Ghazal 15 [“Those faces of death I see sometimes”] ► — Mirza Ghalib (translated by Jim Yagmin) – “We made breaking the pattern a pattern of living”
33. ◄ Lusty May ► — [Anonymous] [The Oxford Book of English Verse]
34. ◄ Thanatopsis ► — William Cullen Bryant [Yale Book of American Verse] “Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch / About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.”
35. Introduction to Poetry ► — Billy Collins [Poetry 180] Eh, it just needed a little discipline. No harm done.
36. A Boy’s Will: ◄ Reluctance ► — Robert Frost [Wikisource] “I have come by the highway home, / And lo, it is ended.”
37. Introduction (to Songs of Experience) — William Blake [Poem of the Week (Sarah E. Smith)] “Hear the voice of the Bard!” Still do, Bill. Always will.
38. The History of Poetry — Mark Strand [Poetry 365] “Everything shines with the same blue light / That filled our sleep moments before”
39. Sonnet: Autumn — Richard Garcia [Poetry Foundation^♠]
40. Coupling constellations — Catherine Cafferty [Ink Node] “I dream of the canoe rocking, arms / a tilted windmill, yet word is I’m working / little.” You hadn’t heard?
41. Epigram 1.19 — Martial (b.3/1/~40) (translated by Elizabeth Duke) [Marshall University Department of Classics]
42. My Sweetest Lesbia — Thomas Campion (d.3/1/1620) [Luminarium]
43. A Dialogue-Anthem — George Herbert (d.3/1/1633) [Luminarium] “I shall be one day better than before; / Thou so much worse, that thou shalt be no more.” Who gets the last word.
44. Three poems: (1) [Bloom you who are blooming]; (2) [My tiresome lamp is lit up]; and (3) [Defeat your joy] — Fyodor Sologub (b.3/1/1863) (translated by Alex Cigale) [Anthology of Russian Minimalist and Miniature Poems]
45. At Briggflatts meetinghouse (1975) — Basil Bunting (b.3/1/1900) [Jacket^♥]
46. Snake — Ian Mudie (b.3/1/1911) [Old Poetry] Added to our reptiles subset.
47. Six poems: (1) The Public Garden; (2) Memories of West Street and Lepke; (3) Mr. Edwards and the Spider; (4) For the Union Dead (also posted today at The Best American Poetry); (5) Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts; and (6) Stars — Robert Lowell (b.3/1/1917) [Poets of Cambridge, USA]
48. Parable — Richard Wilbur (b.3/1/1921) [The Writer’s Almanac^♠] “For glory lay wherever he might turn.” Quixotic vision.
49. Autumn Garden — Dino Campana (d.3/1/1932) (translated by A.Z. Foreman) [Poems Found in Translation] “Where statues in glum sunset loom, immortal, / She is present, and appears.”
50. All — Tom Clark (b.3/1/1941) [Jacket^♥] “No longer here to live, / simply to snatch another breath.”
51. Heroic Simile — Robert Hass (b.3/1/1941) [Poets.org^♠] “A hero, dying, / gives off stillness to the air.”
52. Stone Girl — John Wieners (d.3/1/2002) [Electronic Poetry Center]
53. The Bitter, True Taste of the Human Heart ♫ — Alex Cigale [qarrtsiluni^♥] “I am confident that the human mind / can know nothing with greater certainty.”
54. A Primer of the Daily Round — Howard Nemerov [Poets.org^♠] “just now to remember A / Peeling an apple somewhere far away.” Best place to go to peel it.
55. August — Jenny Browne [Pecan Grove Press] “The air should need permission to sit / this still.” Not that it will ever seek after it.
56. Two prose poems: (1) Nimbostratus; (2) The Winter Months — Laton Carter [Caffeine Destiny^♥]
57. Sequins are not stars — Tony Mancus [Open Letters Monthly]”The pitiful birds / drifting round indoors, startle / at mirrors and thud against the window.”
58. Chancellor of Shadows — Lance Larsen [Orion magazine] Added to the zoo subset of my collection of animal poems.
59. Private Equity — Sophie Cabot Black [The New Yorker] “To draw out more than what is put in.”
60. Hidden — William L. Alton [BigCityLit] “There are some things / better left unsaid, / but love isn’t one of them.”
61. Let Us Cross the Water — Nathan S. Jones [Verse]
62. GBH — Jonathan Asser [Magma^♥]
63. Freeway — Susan Adams [Great Works]
64. Three poems from Apparition Poems: (1) #1345; (2) #1476; and (3) #1480 — Adam Fieled [Jacket^♥]
65. The Great Famine — Sorley MacLean [Asheville Poetry Review^♥]
66. More reading and re-archiving from the Internet Archive: Two poems: (1) Form (added to our collection of villanelles); and (2) Listowel Haiku — Maeve O’Sullivan [Electric Acorn^♥]
67. Flood Song ♫ — Michael Marberry [Linebreak] “We have a mind for expert rage.”
68. The Price You Pay, My Beautiful Wife — Bernardine Evaristo [Valparaiso Poetry Review^♥] “Was my punishment to come?” Sure, why not.
69. Thangara — Cobbin Dale [Words Without Borders]
70. Home Again, Home Again — Marilyn L. Taylor [American Life in Poetry^♠] Seems like they never left.
71. Poem About Heaven ♫ — David Blair [Slate] “…sure, we are going there.” Promise?
72. Mind — Richard Wilbur [The Best American Poetry] “The mind is like a bat.”
73. Summer Storm ♫ — Edward Byrne [Whale Sound] “each word lost like the black surface of that little / lake now hidden behind his shut window shades.”
74. And among those re-read today from the stack I read and listed a month ago here: The Will of Life — Abu al-Qasim al-Shabi [Arabic Literature (in English)] Worth re-reading continuously.
75. What Good Am I? — Bob Dylan [Bob Dylan] “And I just turn my back while you silently die / What good am I?”