2011 02 26

88Almanac — Christopher Marlowe bap.1564; Mary Leapor b.1722; Victor Hugo b.1802; Sam Walter Foss d.1911; George Barker b.1913; Clark Coolidge b.1939; Richmond Lattimore d.1984

“My overall point is that the leaps and landscapes we enter through reading are every bit as real as actual locales and travels.” – Dickinson and St. Theresa of Avila, by Joe Weil | the the poetry blog

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

1. The Spring — Thomas Carew [Poet’s Corner] Added to my spring set.
2. Peculiar Crimes ♫ — Laurie Blauner [Rattle^♥] “I trust the destitute, after all, they have / nothing to lose.”
3. Nothing But Death — Pablo Neruda (translated by Robert Bly) [E-Verse Radio]
4. Cohoes Falls — Stephen Sturgeon [E-Verse Radio] Jealous – I’ve never had a titled dream.
5. The Club Manager ♫ — Dave Morrison [The Writer’s Almanac^♠]
6. Lemon — Danielle Cadena Deulen [Poetry Daily^♠]
7. Love and the Eye — Laura Newbern [Verse Daily^♠]
8. Read from the vault: The King’s Shilling ♫ — Clive Birnie [qarrtsiluni^♥] “Touch it first, she said, / and it protects you from the pox.”
9. Read from the vault: Blind Love — Jennifer Michael Hecht [No Tell Motel^♠]
10. Calamus [In Paths Untrodden] — Walt Whitman [Poets.org^♠] “To tell the secret of my nights and days, / To celebrate the need of comrades.”
11. On another day not counted at the PF, exploring: Numbers — Mary Cornish [Poetry Foundation^♠] They don’t mean what they’re oft mistaken to mean.
12. And from the vault: Portrait of an Old Woman on the College Tavern Wall ♫ — Anne Sexton [Poetry Foundation^♠]
13. The Other Side of This World — Calvin Forbes [Poetry Out Loud^♠] “Is everything in its place except me?”
14. Junk — Richard Wilbur [3quarksdaily] Unfortunately, the sentiment expressed by Maryann’s comment doesn’t seem shared by all poetry sources, in some cases even some you’d think would care.
15. Words When We Need Them — Naomi Shihab Nye [Poem of the Day] “We could still say.”
16. Lucy — Oliver Wendell Holmes [Everyday Poems]
17. The Chimney Sweeper: When my mother died I was very young — William Blake [Representative Poetry Online] “So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.”
18. Considering the Snail — Thom Gunn [Poetry Archive] Doubling the number of mollusk poems I’ve collected so far.
19. Light Shining Out of Darkness — William Cowper [Poetry In Voice] “Blind unbelief is sure to err” … at least as sure as blind belief is.
20. Tale of the Stolen Penis — Jennifer Footman [Canadian Poetry Online] Has me wondering why this one’s not on poetry recital contest lists. After all, anyone who can recite this one well to an audience is a sure-fire public speaker and good at their poetry as well.
21. Dancing with the Devil — Conner Bassett [Black Cat Poems] It’s those two left cloven hooves that kill you, though.
22. Lady Pu-abi — Kevin Andrew Murphy [Lilt]
23. Libretto ♫ — Jennifer Kwon Dobbs [From the Fishouse] “Have I the right / To scabs picked off for pink underneath, little shutters opened to let in air, / The pure music. It is raw in there.”
24. No Coward Soul is Mine — Emily Brontë; with reading by Fanny Howe ♫ [Poets on Poets] “No coward soul is mine, / No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere”
25. Modern Love: ◄ XV [“I think she sleeps: it must be sleep, when low”] ► — George Meredith [Wikisource]
26. Sonnets from the Portuguese: ◄ XXI [“Say over again, and yet once over again”] ► — Elizabeth Barrett Browning [Wikisource] “Say thou dost love me, love me, love me…”
27. In Memoriam A. H. H.: ◄ XXV [“I know that this was Life, the track”] ► — Alfred, Lord Tennyson [Wikisource] “I loved the weight I had to bear, / Because it needed help of Love”
28. ◄ Sonnet LVII [“Being your slave what should I do but tend”] ► — William Shakespeare [EServer Poetry Collection] “I have no precious time at all to spend; / Nor services to do till you require.”
29. The Joy of the Drop: ◄ Ghazal 12 [“Not the blossom of song not the veil of music”] ► — Mirza Ghalib – “I am a fragment sounding the dawn / you are the walls of my every echo”
30. ◄ The Night is Near Gone ► — Alexander Montgomerie [The Oxford Book of English Verse]
31. ◄ Connecticut ► — Fitz-Greene Halleck [Yale Book of American Verse]
32. The Raven and Other Poems: ◄ Song ► — Edgar Allan Poe [Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore] “The world all love before thee”
33. A Boy’s Will: ◄ A Line-Storm Song ► — Robert Frost [Wikisource]
34. We Did Not Make Ourselves — Michael Dickman [Poem of the Week (Sarah E. Smith)] “Carefully stacking up everything I made next to everything I ruined”
35. Last Supper — Whit Griffin [Poetry 365] “‘I just wish I knew what she / had been preparing.'” A poem . . .
36. Sonnet: Resident by Mistra — Richmond Lattimore (d.2/26/1984) [Surprised by Time] One by a preeminent classic scholar.
37. The Anactoria Poem — Sappho (edited by Richard Lattimore) [Poets.org^♠] Remembering socials at Lattimore’s is as good a time as any to open a set for sapphics.
38. Ten poems: (1) Settled in August; (2) Besides Being Overheard; (3) Not Reptiles; (4) A Spot of Frazzle and Then; (5) Traced Red Dot; (6) An Undue Blather; (7) Icing at the Corners; (8) The Plush of a Negative Cat; (9) End Gone Flat; and (10) A Dutiful Hardness — Clark Coolidge (b.2/26/1939) [Jacket]
39. Pacific Sonnets (1944): V — George Barker (b.2/26/1913) [Emerging from Absence: An Archive of Japan in English-Language Verse] Another to add to the sonnet set.
40. The Calf Path ♫ — Sam Walter Foss (d.2/26/1911) [The Writer’s Almanac^♠] “And many men wound in and out, / And dodged and turned and bent about, / And uttered words of righteous wrath / Because ’twas such a crooked path”
41. Tomorrow, At Dawn — Victor Hugo (b.2/26/1802) [Old Poetry]
42. Strephon to Celia – A Modern Love Letter — Mary Leapor (b.2/26/1722) [Poet’s Corner]
43. Accurs’d be he that first invented war! — Christopher Marlowe (bap.2/26/1564) [Wikisource]
44. And although we read this one less than a fortnight ago, the anniversary of the poet’s baptism isn’t a bad time to have it pass my desk again, particularly coming through with an audio reading: The Passionate Shepherd to His Love ♫ — Christopher Marlowe [Poetry Moment]
45. The Dinky Bird — Eugene Field [Glen Avalon Poetry Collection]
46. A Map of Verona — Henry Reed [The Poetry of Henry Reed] “And a shining smile of snowfall, late in Spring” – but keep it there, as we’ve already been smiled at like that enough this year.
47. Return of the Prodigal — Charles Wright [The New Yorker] Spring’s been any bit as prodigal this year.
48. With Out — Marc Rahe [Ink Node]
49. Sunday shuts down — Rachel Barenblat [Pecan Grove Press] “fragrance remains / after resilience has gone”
50. Six poems: (1) MonoLogical Poem #1; (2) MonoLogical Poem #2; (3) MonoLogical Poem #4; (4) MonoLogical Poem #5; (5) MonoLogical Poem #13; and (6) All About You — Durs Grünbein (translated by Michael Hofmann) [Grand Street Magazine^♥]
51. Eliane — Millicent Bell [Partisan Review^♥] “It should not have been allowed, she said.”
52. Color Theory — Bethany Carlson [Memorious^♥]
53. Photo Prayer — Karen Kelsay [14 by 14^♥] And about the poems still being written then….
54. Nietszche and the Graceful — Michael Harmon [The Raintown Review^♥] “he had a madman say the words // that made the faithful bend their knees”
55. Rainwalking — Melanie Henderson [Drunken Boat^♥]
56. Sad Little Breathing Machine — Matthea Harvey [Verse]
57. Ford Malibu — Pauline Suett Barbieri [Magma Poetry^♥]
58. overture and beginners — Angela Gardner [Great Works] “Still we attempt to direct the eye”
59. Four poems from “Notes from The Dustbowl”: (1) Note #12; (2) Note #29; (3) Note #42; and (4) Note #50 — Jim Goar [Jacket^♥]
60. The Welsh Language — Bobi Jones (translated by Joseph P. Clancy) [Asheville Poetry Review^♥] “And every pain is her pain, every weakness her weakness.”
61. More reading and re-archiving from the Internet Archive: Haiku — Lewis Sanders [Electric Acorn^♥] Headed toward an April set.
62. From the vault: A Brown Trout — Chris Caldemeyer [Leveler] “To know instants—as / infant molecules / suspended between / limitations.”
63. From the vault: Let the Day Perish — Cate Marvin [The Chronicle of Higher Education] “I was merely asking to be put into your employ.”
64. From the vault: American history ♫ — Bob Hicok [Linebreak] “How fresh life feels, / without the encumbrance of life.”
65. Love Poem as Eye Examination — Victoria Chang [The Missouri Review^♥]
66. Two poems: (1) Iran, 1981; and (2) Feeding — Andrea Scott [Web Conjunctions]
67. From the vault: The New Materials (Commuter Train) — Rachel Abramowitz [Painted Bride Quarterly^♥]
68. From the vault: Chiroptera — J.P. Dancing Bear [Valparaiso Poetry Review^♥] “And some shaper of religion gave other wings / to a devil—leather, mammalian smooth.”
69. From the vault: Fragment — C.K. Williams [Slate] “having known, I always will know this torn, singular voice”
70. From the vault: Prepare for Peoplery — Christie Ann Reynolds [Thethe Poetry Blog] “I was in that well too. “
71. At the Gardenia’s Entrance — Fawzi Karim (with Anthony Howell, after a translation by Abbas Kadhim) [Guardian] “After the war, it folded, got forgotten.”
72. From the vault: Two poems: (1) The Gipsy Camp (added to my miscellaneous sonnets subset); and (2) The Hoar Frost Lodges on Every Tree — John Clare [Guardian]
73. From the vault: Two poems: (1) Letter to a French Novelist; and (2) The Demon Goes To Kill Death — Edwin Morgan [The Times Literary Supplement] “I can take blizzards, I can take stench. / I will never rest till I have found her.”
74. From the vault: College tour — David M. Katz [The New Criterion^♥] Sent over to my pantoum set.
75. From the vault: Everyone’s Ex-Girlfriend — Sarah Heller [The Best American Poetry] “And then the distracted look.”
76. And among those re-read today from the stack I read and listed a month ago here: All Times and All Tenses in this Moment — Mary Szybist [Poets.org^♠]
77. 4th Time Around — Bob Dylan [Bob Dylan] “‘Everybody must give something back / For something they get'”