Song Selection

Music has always spoken to the human condition because it is poetry to a tune. I like this song because it is simple and heartbreaking. It also tells a vivid story -- one you have no trouble "seeing" when you hear it:

Sometime Around Midnight

And it starts, sometime around midnight.
Or at least that’s when you lose yourself
for a minute or two --
As you stand under the bar lights,
And the band plays some song
about forgetting yourself for a while.
And the piano’s this melancholy soundtrack to her smile.
And that white dress she’s wearing
you haven’t seen her for a while.

But you know that she’s watching:
She’s laughing, she’s turning,
She’s holding her tonic like a cross.
The room’s suddenly spinning,
She walks up and asks how you are.
So you can smell her perfume.
You can see her lying naked in your arms.

So there’s a change in your emotions.
And all these memories come rushing
like feral waves to your mind,
Of the curl of your bodies,
like two perfect circles entwined.
And you feel hopeless and homeless
and lost in the haze of the wine.

Then she leaves with someone you don’t know.
But she makes sure you saw her --
She looks right at you and bolts.
As she walks out the door,
your blood boiling
your stomach in ropes.
Oh and when your friends say,
“What is it? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Then you walk under the streetlights.
And you’re too drunk to notice
that everyone is staring at you.
You just don’t care what you look like,
the world is falling around you.

You just have to see her.
You just have to see her.
You just have to see her.
You just have to see her.
You just have to see her.
You know that she’ll break you in two.

--The Airborne Toxic Event

ee cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

For more information about ee cummings (and more of his poems),
visit his page on poets.org here.

Weekend Poetry

Today is another two-fer because I missed yesterday. So, two of a similar theme from Sara Teasdale:

After Love

There is no magic anymore,

We meet as other people do,

You work no miracle for me

Nor I for you.

You were the wind and I the sea --

There is no splendor anymore,

I have grown listless as the pool

Beside the shore.

But though the pool is safe from storm

And from the tide has found surcease,

It grows more bitter than the sea

For all its peace.

After Parting

Oh, I have sown my love so wide

That he will find it everywhere;

It will awake him in the night,

It will enfold him in the air.

I set my shadow in his sight

And I have winged it with desire,

That it may be a cloud by day,

And in the night a shaft of fire.

I actually really like both of these poems, because they are deceptively simple. There is a lot going on. I like the first one because the line lengths -- and the way they read -- make this poem sound as listless to me as the "pool" Teasdale describes. And the second poem sounds like a terribly elegant homage to stalking, really. It's sort of like reminding the erstwhile lover that he can run but cannot hide... If not for the title, it would be a really touching love poem.

Sara Teasdale was born in 1884 in St. Louis, MO. She was a sickly child, and by all accounts, unhappy in her life. Whether due to illness or unhappiness, she committed suicide in 1933. Sara Teasdale won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1918.

"The Primer"

I don't know anything about this author, but the poem is poignant and lovely....

The Primer

She said, I love you.

He said, Nothing. 


(As if there were just one 
of each word and the one 
who used it, used it up). 


In the history of language
the first obscenity was silence.

 

--Christina Davis

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Today's poem is actually a two-fer from Ms. Millay:

Love is not all; it is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,

Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink

and rise and sink and rise and sink again;

Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

Yet many a man is making friends with death

Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It may well be that in a difficult hour,

Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,

Or nagged by want past resolution's power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It well may be. I do not think I would.

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born February 22, 1892 in Maine. Encouraged by her mother, Millay began writing poetry at a very young age, and much of her early poetry was published in St. Nicholas, a popular children's magazine. However, she won immediate acclaim and attention with her poem, "Renascence," published in the anthology The Lyric Year, in 1912 when Millay was 20. It became the title poem for her first collection, published in 1917 (the same year she graduated from Vassar College), Renascence and Other Poems. This collection immediately established her as a force on the New York literary scene. Her further collections, along with her prose works, plays, short stories and essays, made her one of America's most celebrated poets.

Between 1917, when her first collection was published, and 1920, when her second was published, Edna St. Vincent Millay published 77 poems, 39 of which were sonnets (2 of those appear above). She also wrote and directed a play, published 8 prose pieces under a pseudonym, and wrote her second book. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923 for A Few Figs from Thistles and for 8 sonnets and "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver." Millay's volume of work alone is noteworthy; however, the work she was producing was stunning. Her command of the sonnet is something which has been commented on by several other, award-winning, poets: "She wrote some of the best sonnets of the century. She knew that this form was durable. She put into it her own immaculate perfections" (emphasis added -- Richard Eberhart). Her verse "stings the page".

"Undine"

The professor of a poetry writing class that I took said that great poetry should have "geography and furniture. If you fix your poem in a place, and give readers something solid to look to, you can successfully write about even the most abstract subjects." For my money, I think he was right.

The master of "geography and furniture" (in my opinion) is Seamus Heaney, an Irish contemporary poet and winner of the Noble Prize for Literature in 1995. His mastery of language is such that he can write a poem using a skunk as a simile for his wife, and having it turn out to be a love poem (a really sweet one, too).

I offer the following poem, though, as a great example of an "abstract" subject being made quite solid. An undine (UN-deen) is a water-sprite who cannot get soul unless they can get a human man to marry them...

Undine

He slashed the briars, shoveled up grey silt

To give me right of way in my own drains

And I ran quick for him, cleaned out my rust.

He halted, saw me finally disrobed,

Running clear, with apparent unconcern.

Then he walked by me. I rippled and I churned

Where ditches intersected near the river

Until he dug a spade deep in my flank

And took me to him. I swallowed his trench

Gratefully, dispersing myself for love

Down in his roots, climbing his brassy grain ---

But once he know my welcome, I alone

Could give him subtle increase and reflection.

He explored me so completely, each limb

Lost its cold freedom. Human, warmed to him.

There are so many things that could be said about this poem! Heaney takes the myth of the undine (something relatively abstract), and plunks it right down into the description of a farmer clearing out his ditch, offering both geography and furniture. Besides that, the words he uses are everyday -- common; yet, with skillful manipulation of metaphor, Heaney gives us the myth, gives us the personality of the water-sprite living in the ditch, gives us the outcome, and never uses a word that anyone would have to look up to understand! This is an entirely different point, but I LOVE that Heaney will stop one sentence and begin another within a single line of poetry. Few poets do that, and it is difficult to do it well; Heaney does it brilliantly. Each new sentence offers yet another metaphor and kind of moves the plot along, if you will, which is amazing. Seamus Heaney is kind of my poetic hero (in case you weren't getting that), and entirely worth looking into and reading.

National Poetry Month

I absolutely LOVE National Poetry Month, and couldn't wait to celebrate it here, on my blog dedicated to word nerdery. National Poetry Month was started in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets, and has been celebrated every April since. Activities have included poetry readings, open mic events, the "Favorite Poem Project", the "Poem in Your Pocket" Day, and bloggers sharing their favorites. The goals of National Poetry Month, as stated by the Academy can be seen here (along with further information about NPM): poets.org.

I will be posting daily poems here, and hope you will enjoy!