Poem In Your Pocket Day

Today is poem in your pocket day. The New York City Department of Education, in collaboration with the Office of the Mayor, Department of Cultural Affairs, City University of New York, and the New York Times, is co-sponsoring the fourth annual Poem In Your Pocket Day on Friday, April 28, 2006. New Yorkers are encouraged to carry a poem in their pocket and share it with friends, family, coworkers and classmates.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/poem/

Keep A Poem In Your Pocket
By Beatrice Schenk de Regniers

Keep a poem in your pocket
And a picture in your head
And you'll never feel lonely
At night when you're in bed.

The little poem will sing to you
The little picture bring to you
A dozen dreams to dance to you
At night when you're in bed.

So - -
Keep a picture in your pocket
And a poem in your head
And you'll never feel lonely
At night when you're in bed.

Here are 2 poems in my pocket today. I discovered this author through one of my students:


In the Night

I longed for companionship rather,
But my companions I always wished farther.
And now in the desolate night
I think only of the people I should like to bite.

Not Waving but Drowning
by Stevie Smith
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.


Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.



Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

From Collected Poems of Stevie Smith by Stevie Smith, published by New Directions Publishing Corp. Copyright © 1972 by Stevie Smith. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved. No part of this poem may be reproduced in any form without the written consent of the publisher.

Florence Margaret "Stevie" Smith was born in 1902 in Yorkshire, England. Her father left the family to join the North Sea Patrol when she was very young. At age three she moved with her sister and mother to the northern London suburb Palmers Green. This was her home until her death in 1971. Her mother died when she was a teenager and she and her sister lived with their spinster aunt, an important figure throughout her life, known as "The Lion." After high school she attended North London Collegiate School for Girls. She began as a secretary with the magazine publisher George Newnes and went on to be the private secretary to Sir Nevill Pearson and Sir Frank Newnes. She began writing poetry in her twenties while working at George Newnes. Her first book, Novel on Yellow Paper, was published in 1936 and drew heavily on her own life experience, examining the unrest in England during World War I. Her first collection of verse, A Good Time Was Had By All (1937), also contained rough sketches or doodles, which became characteristic of her work. These drawings have both a feeling of caprice and doom, and the poetry in the collection is stylistically typical of Smith as it conveys serious themes in a nursery rhyme structure.

While Smith's volatile attachment to the Church of England is evident in her poetry, death, her "gentle friend," is perhaps her most popular subject. Much of her inspiration came from theology and the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. She enjoyed reading Tennyson and Browning and read few contemporary poets in an attempt to keep her voice original and pure. Her style is unique in its combination of seemingly prosaic statements, variety of voices, playful meter, and deep sense of irony. Smith was officially recognized with the Chomondeley Award for Poetry in 1966 and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1969. Smith died of a brain tumor in 1971.

Paris in the Spring

Jack Gilbert, now in his eighties, writes verse that reveals his fierce ideals and provides us with a beautiful, sometimes stark view of what a life devoted to poetry has meant for him. "How Much of That Is Left in Me?" appears in his recent book, REFUSING HEAVEN, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Other poems from that book are featured in today's episode of the Knopf Poetry Podcast and in the downloadable broadside, designed by Abby Weintraub, using a photograph by Dale Satorsky.




How Much of That Is Left in Me?

Yearning inside the rejoicing. The heart's famine
within the spirit's joy. Waking up happy
and practicing discontent. Seeing the poverty
in the perfection, but still hungering
for its strictness. Thinking of
a Greek farmer in the orchard,
the white almond blossoms falling and falling
on him as he struggled with his wooden plow.
I remember the stark and precious winters in Paris.
Just after the war when everyone was poor and cold.
I walked hungry through the vacant streets at night
with the snow falling wordlessly in the dark like petals
on the last of the nineteenth century. Substantiality
seemed so near in the grand empty boulevards,
while the famous bronze bells told of time.
Stripping everything down until being was visible.
The ancient buildings and the Seine,
small stone bridges and regal fountains flourishing
in the emptiness. What fine provender in the want.
What freshness in me amid the loneliness.

Knopfpoetry.com

Christina Davis

The Primer
by Christina Davis

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 received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and her M.Phil. in Modernist Literature from the University of Oxford. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Jubilat, LIT, The May Anthologies (selected by Ted Hughes), New England Review, New Republic, Paris Review, and Provincetown Arts (selected by Susan Mitchell). She is the recipient of several residencies to Yaddo and MacDowell, as well as to the Valparaiso Foundation in Spain. Currently the Assistant Director of the NYU Creative Writing Program, she lives in the heart of Greenwich Village.

Happy Birthday April Girls

Always Marry An April Girl


Praise the spells and bless the charms,
I found April in my arms.
April golden, April cloudy,
Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;
April soft in flowered languor,
April cold with sudden anger,
Ever changing, ever true --
I love April, I love you.

Ogden Nash


http://www.aenet.org/poems/ognash1.htm

Ogden Nash (1902-1971) was raised in Savannah, Georgia, and other East Coast cities. His father's import-export business made it necessary for the family to move frequently. After completing his secondary education at St. George's School in Newport, Rhode Island, Nash attended Harvard for one year (1920-21). Dropping out of college for financial reasons, Nash took various positions teaching, selling bonds, and writing streetcar advertisements. In 1925, Nash took a position with Doubleday Page Publishers as an editor and a publicist, and published his first children's story, written with Joseph Alger, The Cricket of Carador (1925).


Still working at Doubleday, Nash collaborated with Christopher Morley to publish the comical Born in a Beer Garden or, She Troupes to Conquer: Sunday Ejaculations by Christopher Morley, Cleon Throckmorton, Ogden Nash and Certain of the Hoboken Ads, with a Commentary by Earnest Elmo Calkins (1930). Also in 1930, Nash published his first humorous poem "Spring Comes to Murray Hill" in the New Yorker.


After the Murray Hill poem, Nash's work began to appear in other periodicals and he was able to publish a collection of verse in 1931 with immense success. Hard Lines (1931) sold out seven printings in its first year and secured Nash in his role as a master of light and whimsical verse.


In 1932 he left Doubleday to work on staff at the New Yorker, but he soon quit the job to devote himself full-time to his writing. He went on to publish more than two dozen volumes of verse, as well as screenplays (none successfully produced), lyrics and scripts for theater, children's stories and various essays. Some of his better known titles include The Bad Parent's Garden of Verse (1936), I'm a Stranger Here Myself (1938), The Face is Familiar: the Selected Verses of Ogden Nash (1940), Parents Keep Out: Elderly Poems for Young Readers (1951), Custard the Dragon (1959), and Marriage Lines: Notes of a Student Husband (1963). His Broadway play, One Touch of Venus (1943), written with Kurt Weill and S.J. Perelman was a smashing success.


When he wasn't writing poems, Nash took time to appear on various radio game and comedy shows in the 1940s and to write scores for TV shows in the 1950s. He also engaged in extensive lecture tours around the United States and England.


In his personal life, he married Frances Rider Leonard in June of 1931 and had two daughters, Linell Chenault (Mrs. J. Marshall Smith), and Isabel Jackson (Mrs. Frederick Eberstadt). His marriage and his children proved to be a strong influence on his work. He received honorary degrees from New England College (1967), Adelphi (1961), and Franklin and Marshall (1962) and was elected to membership in many societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1965), American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (1943), and the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1950).


Ogden Nash continued to write, publish, tour, and lecture until very close to the end of his life on May 19, 1971.

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/research/fa/nash.bio.html

Happy Birthday, Will

Happy Birthday to the Baird born this day in 1564. Shakespeare was considered “low brow” in his time and would be surprised at his high position in literary culture today. Various conspiracy theories seek to prove that Shakespeare was not written by Shakespeare but by Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe or Edward de Vere the Earl of Oxford.

VI

Then let not winter's ragged hand deface,
In thee thy summer, ere thou be distilled:
Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
With beauty's treasure ere it be self-killed.
That use is not forbidden usury,
Which happies those that pay the willing loan;
That's for thy self to breed another thee,
Or ten times happier, be it ten for one;
Ten times thy self were happier than thou art,
If ten of thine ten times refigured thee:
Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart,
Leaving thee living in posterity?
Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair
To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir.

Sonnet 6 is an early sonnet written to Shakespeare’s male patron Henry Wriothesley the Earl of Southampton. Yes, the early sonnets were written to a man. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

CXXVII

In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame:
For since each hand hath put on Nature's power,
Fairing the foul with Art's false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Sland'ring creation with a false esteem:
Yet so they mourn becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says beauty should look so.

This is the first of the “Dark Lady” sonnets in which a mystery woman comes between Shakespeare and the Earl. Below is an expert of To The Virtuous Reader by Amelia Lanyer, a Renaissance feminist who compared the oppression of women to the persecution of Christ and wrote a piece defending Eve and explaining why Adam, not Eve, was to be blamed for eating the apple. It has been suggested by one scholar that Lanyer was Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, but this suggestion has been almost universally rejected.

…to be practised by evill dispo-
sed men, who forgetting they were borne of women, nourished (20)
of women, and that if it were not by the means of women, they
would be quite extinguished out of the world: and a finall ende
of them all, doe like Vipers deface the wombes wherein they
were bred, only to give way and utterance to their want of
discretion and goodnesse. Such as these, were they that disho- (25)
noured Christ his Apostles and Prophets, putting them to
shamefull deaths…

http://www.ic.arizona.edu/ic/mcbride/lanyer/lanyer.htm

In support of Shakespeare as the author of Shakespeare:
http://shakespeareauthorship.com/

For more on the conspiracy and proposed authors of Shakespeare:
http://www.bardweb.net/debates.html

Shakespeare’s sonnets:
http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/

Read all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnet one per day
http://www.sonnetaday.com/

Shakespeare’s Last Will and Testament in which the old romantic leaves his second best bed to his wife:

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/museum/item.asp?item_id=21

Earth Day/Kipling

The Song of the Women

How shall she know the worship we would do her?
The walls are high, and she is very far.
How shall the woman's message reach unto her
Above the tumult of the packed bazaar?
Free wind of March, against the lattice blowing,
Bear thou our thanks, lest she depart unknowing.

Go forth across the fields we may not roam in,
Go forth beyond the trees that rim the city,
To whatsoe'er fair place she hath her home in,
Who dowered us with walth of love and pity.
Out of our shadow pass, and seek her singing --
"I have no gifts but Love alone for bringing."

Say that we be a feeble folk who greet her,
But old in grief, and very wise in tears;
Say that we, being desolate, entreat her
That she forget us not in after years;
For we have seen the light, and it were grievous
To dim that dawning if our lady leave us.

By life that ebbed with none to stanch the failing
By Love's sad harvest garnered in the spring,
When Love in ignorance wept unavailing
O'er young buds dead before their blossoming;
By all the grey owl watched, the pale moon viewed,
In past grim years, declare our gratitude!

By hands uplifted to the Gods that heard not,
By fits that found no favor in their sight,
By faces bent above the babe that stirred not,
By nameless horrors of the stifling night;
By ills foredone, by peace her toils discover,
Bid Earth be good beneath and Heaven above her!

If she have sent her servants in our pain
If she have fought with Death and dulled his sword;
If she have given back our sick again.
And to the breast the wakling lips restored,
Is it a little thing that she has wrought?
Then Life and Death and Motherhood be nought.

Go forth, O wind, our message on thy wings,
And they shall hear thee pass and bid thee speed,
In reed-roofed hut, or white-walled home of kings,
Who have been helpen by ther in their need.
All spring shall give thee fragrance, and the wheat
Shall be a tasselled floorcloth to thy feet.

Haste, for our hearts are with thee, take no rest!
Loud-voiced ambassador, from sea to sea
Proclaim the blessing, mainfold, confessed.
Of those in darkness by her hand set free.
Then very softly to her presence move,
And whisper: "Lady, lo, they know and love!"

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in Bombay, but educated in England at the United Services College, Westward Ho, Bideford. In 1882 he returned to India, where he worked for Anglo-Indian newspapers. His literary career began with Departmental Ditties (1886), but subsequently he became chiefly known as a writer of short stories. A prolific writer, he achieved fame quickly. Kipling was the poet of the British Empire and its yeoman, the common soldier, whom he glorified in many of his works . He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907.
http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1907/kipling-bio.html

Since the first Earth Day in 1970 people around the world have sought to celebrate the planet through a variety of individual and community activities. But Earth Day is about more than observing the beauty and vitality of nature; it is also about renewing your commitment to saving our living planet.

http://www.worldwildlife.org/earthday/

Mr. Zadie Smith

The Bearhug
by Nick Laird

It’s not as if I’m intending on spending the rest of my life
doing this:
besuited, rebooted, filing to work, this poem a fishbone in
my briefcase.
The scaffolding clinging to St Paul’s is less urban ivy than
skin, peeling off.

A singular sprinkler shaking his head spits at the newsprint
of birdshit.
It’s going unread: Gooseberry Poptarts, stale wheaten
bread, Nutella and toothpaste.
An open-armed crane turns to embrace the aeroplanes
passing above.

I hadn’t the foggiest notion. Imagine: me, munching
cardboard and rubbish,
but that’s just what they meant when they said, Come in,
you’re dead-beat,
take the weight off your paws, you’re a big weary grizzly
with a hook through his mouth,

here, have some of this love.

Poets.org

Who is Nick Laird? As I walk to a bar in north London to meet him, I run everything I know about this man through my mind. I have seen the beautiful boy band face, gazing from the jacket of his debut novel Utterly Monkey. I have read the searing poetry - "Go home I haven't slept alone / In weeks and need to reach across / The sheets to find not warmth but loss." I know he is married to Zadie Smith. And I have heard that he hates journalists.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story
/0,6000,1475434,00.html

Meet Zadie Smith at:
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth257

When You Are Old-Yeats

The second verse of this poem was read at my wedding.

When You are Old
by W. B. Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;


How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;


And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

An Irish Poet born in 1865 Yeats was strongly influenced by Irish myth and folklore. This poem is believed to be for Yeats’ unrequited love, Maud Gonne, the Irish revolutionary. He was also influenced by Irish politics and the modern poet Ezra Pound, but Yeats continued to write in traditional verse forms. He had a life-long interest in mysticism and the occult, which was off-putting to some readers, but he remained uninhibited in advancing his idiosyncratic philosophy. He was appointed as an Irish Free State Senator in 1922. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and died in 1939 at the age of 73.

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/117

Yeats once lived in the London apartment where Sylvia Plath killed herself.

Elegy

What Came to Me
by Jane Kenyon

I took the last
dusty piece of china
out of the barrel.
It was your gravy boat,
with a hard, brown
drop of gravy still
on the porcelain lip.
I grieved for you then
as I never had before.

From: The Sorrow Psalms: A Book of Twentieth-Century Elegy

edited by Lynn Strongin

At their most mournful, with praise and love and raw emotion, poets throughout time have put their grief to paper. The elegy and its inherent drama---the inevitable struggle between love and death---are showcased in The Sorrow Psalms, a collection of twentieth-century elegies edited by poet Lynn Strongin.

Divided into five thematic sections, the elegies convey the impact of death and its aftermath; focus on the loss of family, lovers, and dear friends; contend with the loss of a child; deal with violent death; and seek to look beyond death to find some kind of resolution. The traditional stages of grieving---denial, anger, depression, and acceptance---are evident, either singly in the expression of one profound emotion or all at once, in these elegies. Strongin's introduction explains the origins of the elegy and its evolution through the twentieth century.

Jane Kenyon

Jane Kenyon was born in 1947 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in the midwest. She earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1970 and an M.A. in 1972. That same year, Kenyon married the poet Donald Hall, whom she had met while a student at the University of Michigan. With him she moved to Eagle Pond Farm in New Hampshire. During her lifetime Jane Kenyon published four books of poetry—Constance (1993), Let Evening Come (1990), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), and From Room to Room (1978)—and a book of translation, Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova (1985). In December 1993 she and Donald Hall were the subject of an Emmy Award-winning Bill Moyers documentary, "A Life Together." At the time of her death from leukemia, in April 1995, Jane Kenyon was New Hampshire's poet laureate. A fifth collection of Kenyon's poetry, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, was released in 1996, and in 1999, Graywolf Press issued A Hundred White Daffodils: Essays, Interviews, the Akhmatova Translations, Newspaper Columns, and One Poem.


poets.org

Watch Your Step in Istanbul

In Antigua
by Kerri Webster

"In Antigua I am famous. I am bathed in jasmine
and pressed with warm stones."
—Carnival Cruise ad in the New Yorker

In Albuquerque, on the other hand, I am infamous; children
throw stones and the elderly whisper behind their hands.
In Juneau, I am glacial, a cool blue where anyone can bathe
for a price. In Rio I am neither exalted nor defamed; I walk
the streets and nothing makes sense, voices garbled, something
about electricity, something about peonies and cheap wool.

In Prague I am as fabulous as Napoleon and everyone
knows it. They give me a horse and I tell them this horse
will be buried with me, I tell them I will call the horse either
Andromeda or Murphy and all applaud wildly. In Montreal
I am paler than I am in Toronto. In Istanbul I trip over cracks
in the sidewalk and no one rushes to take my elbow, to say
Miss or brew strong tea for a poultice. In Sydney they talk
about my arrival for days. I sit outside the opera house
waiting for miracles, and when none occur in a fortnight

it's Ecuador, where the old gods include the small scythes
of my fingernails in their rituals and I learn that anything
can ferment, given opportunity, given terra cotta. In Paris
I'm up all night. Off the Gold Coast, I marry a reverend
who swears that pelicans are god's birds and numbers them
fervently, meanwhile whistling. Near Bucharest I go all
invisible, also clammy, also way more earnest than I ever was
in Memphis. For three Sundays I wander skinny side streets
saying amphora, amphora.

Poets.org

An amphora is a Greek vase with two handles. See one at:
http://www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/viewone.asp?dep=13&viewmode
=0&item=56.171.38

Kerri Webster received her M.F.A. from Indiana University. Her poems have appeared recently in The Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Boston Review, and VOLT. Her chapbook, was selected by Carl Phillips as a winner of the Poetry Society of America's National Chapbook Competition was published in 2003. She is currently teaching poetry at Boise State University.

Happy Spring From Emily Dickinson

A light exists in spring
Not present on the year
At any other period.
When March is scarcely here

A color stands abroad
On solitary hills
That science cannot overtake,
But human nature feels.

It waits upon the lawn;
It shows the furthest tree
Upon the furthest slope we know;
It almost speaks to me.

Then, as horizons step,
Or noons report away,
Without the formula of sound,
It passes, and we stay:

A quality of loss
Affecting our content,
As trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a sacrament.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Around 1850 she started to write poetry and over the years experimented with a number of different styles and types of poem. She was very prolific, and wrote over 1800 poems; but was equally shy and solitary, and in her own lifetime only six of these were published. After her death her poems were brought out by her sister Lavinia, who edited three volumes between 1891 and 1896. Even then the task wasn't fully completed, and it wasn't until the 1950's that the job of bringing Dickinson's poetry to the world was essentially completed.

http://www.firstscience.com/SITE/poems/dickinson3.asp

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Closing Night's Nocturne
by Rowan Ricardo Phillips
From The New Republic 3/7/05

At the end of an excellent career
the moon combs her hair
for one final time
in the narrow, half-lit window.
Tomorrow, all of her
memorized lines
and muttered perfections,
all of her heights, will burn.
Nothing left but the lights
that for so long framed the face.
And then, too, slowly the lights
to cinder.
Wait for the curtain to rise
again. "The hours"--she said--
"the hours I have now."
Wait for the encore, wait the human bow.

Phillips is an Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University
http://naples.cc.sunysb.edu/CAS/englishweb2.nsf/pages/phillips

Kenneth Koch

In an essay called "On Reading Poetry," the late Kenneth Koch wrote:
Suppose you want to get an experience into words so that it is permanently there, as it would be in a painting—so that every time you read what you wrote, you reexperienced it. Suppose you want to say something so that it is right and beautiful—even though you may not understand exactly why. Or suppose words excite you—the way stone excites a sculptor—and inspire you to use them in a new way. And that for these or other reasons you like writing because of the way it makes you think or because of what it helps you to understand. These are some of the reasons poets write poetry.
Today's episode of the Knopf Poetry Podcast features Mark Strand reading Kenneth Koch's poem "Permanently."


Permanently

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

Each Sentence says one thing—for example, "Although it was a dark rainy
day when the Adjective walked by, I shall remember the pure and sweet
expression on her face until the day I perish from the green, effective
earth."
Or, "Will you please close the window, Andrew?"
Or, for example, "Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on the window sill
has changed color recently to a light yellow, due to the heat from the
boiler factory which exists nearby."

In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, "And! But!"
But the Adjective did not emerge.

As the Adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat—
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.

More info at:
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400044993

Time and Space and Poetry by Natasha Trethewey

Theories of Time and Space
by Natasha Trethewey

You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion – dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on a mangrove swamp – buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry – tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph – who you were –
will be waiting when you return

Hear Natasha Tretheway read her poems at the following Academy of American
Poets National Poetry Month event:

April 11
Michael Collier, Natasha Tretheway, and David Tucker
Co-sponsored by Houghton Mifflin and Poets House
Poets House, 72 Spring Street
New York, NY
7 p.m $5 general admission, free to Poets House and Academy members

Poetry.org

Poet Natasha Trethewey is a Professor at Emory. She was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. During the 2005-2006 academic year, Trethewey is the Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor of Documentary and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her third collection of poems, Native Guard, is forthcoming in March 2006 from Houghton Mifflin.

Read another poem by Natasha at http://www.creativewriting.emory.edu/faculty/trethewey.html

Another Workplace Poem

Quixotic Roar: A Non-Epic

By Cynthia Kuhn

These ivy-covered walls invite
serene contemplation; calm figures
glide hither and yon with books.

A sudden roar sweeps the stone
halls, and quiet scholars flee.

The elder, vicious in wild voice,
charges at the younger, who is
surprised to find herself
drawing a sword. She confronts
the violent stabs without flinching;
no tilting at windmills, this.
The sword is heavy, but she
is willing to use it. Invokes first
a verbal balm, a necessary
and temporary truce.

The elder retreats, tail twitching,
to wait for another victim.

The younger vows to remain
armed and dangerous.
It's medieval in here.


All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2004 @ Meow Power. No Reprint Without Permission

More poetry by Cynthia Kuhn at Meowpower.org

I could not find a bio on Cynthia...very mysterious.

Hey, Hey, We're The Monkey Poets

"If you have enough monkeys banging randomly on typewriters,
they will eventually type the works of William Shakespeare."

One of the Monkeys
by Nicholas Johnson

I'm one of the monkeys they've got typing
in a room full of monkeys. It's a play
Shakespeare wrote back in the old days
they want us to write again. So we're writing
a play we never read. They keep inviting
strangers to watch us and the strangers say:
"They wrote 'to be or nutti to be'!" They stay
too long if we write something exciting
but the bananas flow like wine. We know
it's a crazy, morbid, ranting play, a stew
full of murder, love, but with a noble feel.
Shocked, I see hack monkeys come and monkeys go.
One keeper killed my father. What should I do?
I'm watching him. My teeth are as sharp as steel.

Poets.org

NICK JOHNSON's new chapbook, Degrees of Freedom, is published by Bright Hill Press. A MacDowell Colony fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, and winner of The Lyric Recovery Festival Award 2000 at Carnegie Hall, he has published work in Rattapallax,, Pivot, American Poetry Review, Chance of a Ghost anthology, and elsewhere. Nick is Co-Founder and Senior Poetry Editor of Big City Lit (BigCityLit.com), an on-line literary magazine. He has taught creative writing for many years at the Payne Whitney Clinic and The Lighthouse in New York City.

http://wordworksdc.com.hosting.domaindirect.com/cafe_muse.html

It is frequently stated in books and articles on probability that if a succession of monkeys were set before a typewriter with limitless paper, eventually the complete works of Shakespeare would be repeated by chance. If there are 50 keys on the typewriter, the probability of the monkey getting Shakespeare correct is raised to the power of the number of characters (letters and spaces) in Shakespeare plus the adjustments of the typewriter needed for capitals and punctuation. On this basis the chance of the monkey typing the word 'Hamlet' correctly is one in 15,625,000,000, so to quote the probability of him typing the complete works involves a large number indeed.

http://www.probabilitytheory.info/topics/bridge_monkeys.htm

More Monkey business
http://www.careerbuilder.com/monk-e-mail/Default.aspx?siteid=sep
_google_supbowl&sc_extcmp=monkemail+monk+e+mail&cbRecursionCnt=
1&cbsid=8ece6c40ac4c437993e6991f3a97444b-198024200-WJ-2

Moran/Friedan

Daniel Thomas Moran
Suffolk County Poet Laureate

Never Cross a Woman
For Eileen

There she comes, as if from
nowhere, Betty Friedan,
the Mother of all wo-
man, The feminine my-
stic lobbying just-
ice with an upraised
fist, high priestess of
uterine actual-
ization. There she came in
a rusty old Ply
mouth daring as she must to
navigate the tight
spots; careening off of
the nice lady’s
new Beemer in the noon-
time bedlam of a Sag
Harbor summer and step-
ped out to the con-
frontation. The lady said,
“Save the speech, Betty. Who’s
going to pay for the god-
damned crease in my door? When
my husband sees this he’s going to kill
me.”

Daniel Thomas Moran was born in New York City on March 9, 1957. In 1962 his family moved to Massapequa on Long island… In 1987 he purchased a Dental practice on New York’s Shelter Island…In 1988 he gave his first public reading at the famed Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, NY along with a poet who would become one of his greatest influences, the late Dan Murray… Since 1997, Dr. Moran has been a Trustee to The Walt Whitman Birthplace Association in West Hills, NY where he founded The Long Island School of Poetry Series. He presently serves as The Birthplace’s Vice-President. He was appointed Suffolk County Poet Laureate in April, 2005. Street Press has just released The Light of the City and Sea, an anthology of Suffolk County Poets edited by Moran who believes this anthology represents the Long Island School of Poetry.

http://www.danielthomasmoran.net/index.html

http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-lfisle4682344apr02,0,2979111.
column?coll=ny-news-columnists

"Love" Poems by Dan Chiasson

These two offerings begin NATURAL HISTORY, a collection from Dan Chiasson that was published in October. I took two poetry classes with Chiasson at Stony Brook. He’s a young, up and coming poet. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was US Poet Laureate some day.

************************************

LOVE SONG (SMELT)

When I say 'you' in my poems, I mean you.
I know it’s weird: we barely met.
You must hear this all the time, being you.

That night we were at opposite ends of
the long table, after the pungent
Russian condiments, the carafes of tarragon vodka,

the chafing dishes full of boiled smelts
I was a little drunk: after you left,
I ate the last smelt off your dirty plate.


LOVE SONG (SYCAMORES)

Stop there, stop now, come no closer
I said, but you followed me anyway.
You made a bed for us in the woods.
There were sycamore boughs overhead.

Stop there. Stop now. I calculated that
the number of birds singing
on any given morning
was a function of the sycamores plus my hangover.

I said, Stop there, but you followed me
even when I tore our bed to pieces,
I did that, I brought anger into the bower
and the sycamores became menacing shoulders.

And the birds cried, scared, a little embarrassed.
And we paced back and forth, under
the menacing shoulders of the sycamores.
The birds made nests inside our heads.

When you held my fist between your two hands,
I pretended to be subdued. But then
I opened my fist easily
and scattered your strength all over the bower.

When you ran towards me, I said, Stop there,
stop now, you'll end up
in a stranger's life; and when you ran away
I said the same words over again, louder.


************************************

RELATED LINKS:

More about NATURAL HISTORY and Dan Chiasson:
http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/enI80JFi6Q0Wa0k1p0EQ

If you are subscriber to this mailing list, you'll receive poetry by e-mail every day of April.

New subscribers can sign up in The Knopf Poetry Center online:
http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/enI80JFi6Q0Wa0ecp0EA


************************************

from NATURAL HISTORY by Dan Chiasson. Copyright
c) 2005 by Dan Chiasson. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A.
Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part
of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in
writing from the publisher.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Happy Birthday Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was born April 7, 1770
Here's a sonnet by Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

It was with Coleridge that Wordsworth published the famous Lyrical Ballads in 1798. While the poems themselves are some of the most influential in Western literature, it is the preface to the second edition that remains one of the most important testaments to a poet's views on both his craft and his place in the world. In the preface Wordsworth writes on the need for "common speech" within poems and argues against the hierarchy of the period which valued epic poetry above the lyric.

complete bio at http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/296

a sad poem by Wordsworth at http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16085

Bronte, Stoic Soul

Emily Bronte doing double duty as a famous woman and a now a poet because I'm tired. Be a "chainless soul" this weekend.

The Old Stoic

Emily Brontë (1818–48)


RICHES I hold in light esteem,
And Love I laugh to scorn;
And lust of fame was but a dream
That vanish’d with the morn;

And if I pray, the only prayer 5
That moves my lips for me
Is, “Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty!”

Yes, as my swift days near their goal,
’T is all that I implore: 10
In life and death a chainless soul,
With courage to endure.

Newly Discovered Dr. Seuss Poem

A newly discovered Dr Seuss poem?

I Love My Job!

I love my job, I love the pay!
I love it more and more ach day.
I love my boss, she is the best!
I love her boss and all the rest.

I love my office and its location, I have to have to go on vacation
I love my furniture, drab and grey, and piles of paper that grow each day!
I think my job is really swell, there’s nothing else I love so well.
I love to work among my peers, I love their leers, and jeers, and sneers.
I love my computer and its software;
I hug it often though it won’t care. I love each program and every file.
I’d love them more if they worked a while.

I’m happy to be here. I am. I am.
I’m the happiest slave of the Firm, I am.
I love this work, I love these chores.
I love the meetings with the deadly bores.
I love my job – I’ll say it again – I even love those friendly men.
Those friendly men who’ve come today
In clean white coats to take me away!

Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known to the world as the beloved Dr. Seuss, was born in 1904 on Howard Street in Springfield, Massachusetts…His mother, Henrietta Seuss Geisel, often soothed her children to sleep by "chanting" rhymes remembered from her youth. Ted credited his mother with both his ability and desire to create the rhymes for which he became so well known…

Ted left Springfield as a teenager to attend Dartmouth College, where he became editor-in-chief of the Jack-O-Lantern, Dartmouth's humor magazine. Although his tenure as editor ended prematurely when Ted and his friends were caught throwing a drinking party, which was against the prohibition laws and school policy, he continued to contribute to the magazine, signing his work "Seuss." This is the first record of The Cat in the Hat the "Seuss" pseudonym, which was both Ted's middle name and his mother's maiden name.

To please his father, who wanted him to be a college professor, Ted went on to Oxford University in England after graduation. However, his academic studies bored him, and he decided to tour Europe instead. Oxford did provide him the opportunity to meet a classmate, Helen Palmer, who not only became his first wife, but also a children's author and book editor.

After returning to the United States, Ted began to pursue a career as a cartoonist. The Saturday Evening Post and other publications published some of his early pieces, but the bulk of Ted's activity during his early career was devoted to creating advertising campaigns for Standard Oil, which he did for more than 15 years.

As World War II approached, Ted's focus shifted, and he began contributing weekly political cartoons to PM magazine, a liberal publication…

Getting the first book that he both wrote and illustrated, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, published, however, required a great degree of persistence - it was rejected 27 times before being published by Vanguard Press…

At the time of his death on September 24, 1991, Ted had written and illustrated 44 children's books, including such all-time favorites as Green Eggs and Ham, Oh, the Places You'll Go, Fox in Socks, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. …

His honors included two Academy awards, two Emmy awards, a Peabody award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Full bio at: http://www.catinthehat.org/history.htm

One Word

One-Word Poem
By David Slavitt

Motherless.

Discussion questions.

1. Is this a joke? And, if so, is it a joke of the poet in which the editor of the magazine (or, later, the book publisher or the textbook writers) has conspired? Or is it a joke on the editors and publishers? Is the reader the audience of the poem?
2. It is regrettable not to have a mother. Is the purpose of the poem to convey an emotion to the reader? Does the poet suppose that this is the saddest word in the language? Do you agree or disagree? Can you suggest a sadder word?
3. The Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary gives an alternate meaning from nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australian slang as an intensifier, as in “stone motherless broke.” Can you assume that the poet knew this? Does this make for an ambiguity in the poem? Does this information change your emotional response?
4. If the assertion of the single word as a work of art is not a joke, then what could it mean? Is it a Dada-ist gesture, amusing and cheeky perhaps but with an underlying seriousness that the poet either invites or defies the reader to understand?
5. Even if the poet was merely fooling around, does that necessarily diminish the possible seriousness of the poem?
6. If we acknowledge that this is a work of art, can the author assert ownership? Is it possible to copyright a one-word poem?
7. In writing a one-word poem, the crucial decision must be which word to choose and to posit as a work of art. Do you think the poet spent a great deal of time picking this word? Or did he simply open a dictionary and let his fingers do the walking? Does that diminish the poem’s value? Or is it a kind of bibliomancy?
8. Should the word have been in quotes? Or is it quotes even without being in quotes? There is a period at the end of the poem. Would it change the meaning of the poem if there were an exclamation point? Or no punctuation at all? Would that be a different poem? Better or worse? Or would you like it more or less? (Are these different questions?)
9. You can almost certainly write—or “write”—a one-word poem. But it would be difficult for you to get it published—almost certainly more difficult now that this one has been published and staked its claim. Is the publication of a poem a part of the creative act? Had the poet written his poem and put it away in his desk drawer as Emily Dickinson used to do, would this make it a different poem?
10. Some poems we read and some that we particularly like, we memorize. You have already memorized this one. Do you like it better now? Or are the questions part of the poem, so that you have not yet memorized it? Will you, anyway? Do you need to memorize the questions verbatim, or is the idea enough?

----------------------------------------------
Sonnets on Love XIII
by Jean de Sponde
Translated by David R. Slavitt

"Give me a place to stand," Archimedes said,
"and I can move the world." Paradoxical, clever,
his remark which first explained the use of the lever
was an academic joke. But if that dead

sage could return to life, he would find a clear
demonstration of his idea, which is not
pure theory after all. That putative spot
exists in the love I feel for you, my dear.

What could be more immovable or stronger?
What becomes more and more secure, the longer
it is battered by inconstancy and the stress

we find in our lives? Here is that fine fixed point
from which to move a world that is out of joint,
as he could have done, had he known a love like this.

David R. Slavitt was born in White Plains, New York, in 1935, and educated at Andover, Yale, and Columbia University. A poet, translator, novelist, critic, and journalist, he is the author of more than seventy works of fiction, poetry, and poetry and drama in translation. …His honors include a Pennsylvania Council on Arts award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in translation, an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Rockefeller Foundation Artist's Residence. He lives in Philadelphia and is on the faculties of Bennington and Yale.

Poetry.org

Two From Wislawa Szymborska

What is National Poetry Month? National Poetry Month was established by the Academy of American Poets as a month-long, national celebration of poetry. The concept was to increase the attention paid-by individuals and the media—to the art of poetry, to living poets, to our poetic heritage, and to poetry books and magazines. In the end, we hoped to achieve an increase in the visibility, presence, and accessibility of poetry in our culture. National Poetry Month has been successful beyond all anticipation and has grown over the years into the largest literary celebration in the world.

More about Poetry Month at Poets.org

A Note
By Wislawa Szymborska


Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it's not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
and to keep on not knowing
something important.

From The New Yorker, November 28, 2005

Some Like Poetry
By Wislawa Szymborska

Some -
thus not all. Not even the majority of all but the minority.
Not counting schools, where one has to,
and the poets themselves,
there might be two people per thousand.

Like -
but one also likes chicken soup with noodles,
one likes compliments and the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes having the upper hand,
one likes stroking a dog.

Poetry -
but what is poetry.
Many shaky answers
have been given to this question.
But I don't know and don't know and hold on to it
like to a sustaining railing.

http://info-poland.buffalo.edu/classroom/szymborska/poetry.html


Ms. Wislawa Szymborska was born in Kornik in Western Poland on 2 July 1923. Since 1931 she has been living in Krakow, where during 1945-1948 she studied Polish Literature and Sociology at the Jagiellonian University. Szymborska made her début in March 1945 with a poem "Szukam slowa" (I am Looking for a Word) in the daily "Dziennik Polski".

During 1953-1981 she worked as poetry editor and columnist in the Kraków literary weekly "Zycie Literackie" …

Szymborska has published 16 collections of poetry and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996.

Nobel Prize Press Release and complete bio at:
http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1996/press.html

That Light One Find In Baby Pictures-Jay Hopler

That Light One Finds In Baby Pictures


1.
Being born is a shame---

But it’s not so bad, as journeys go. It’s not the worst one
We will ever have to make. It’s almost noon

And the light now clouded in the courtyard is
Like that light one finds in baby pictures: old

And pale and hurt---

2.
When all roads are low and lead to the same
Place, we call it fate and tell ourselves how

We were born to make the journey. Who’s
To say we weren’t?

3.
The clouded light has changed to rain.
The picture---no, the baby’s blurry.

4.
That’s me, the child playing in the sand with a pail
And shovel; in the background, my mother’s shadow

Is crawling across a soot-blackened collapse of brick
And timber, what might have been a bathhouse once.

The tide is coming in. Someone has written “HELL”
On its last standing wall.


From the New Yorker March 6, 2006

Read A Combustion of Plums by Hopler at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~glafemina/poetsintheirthirties2004archive/id35.html

Jay Hopler's work has appeared most recently, or is forthcoming, in The Iowa Review, The Journal, The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, The New Yorker, Pleiades and Xantippe. His book of poems, Green Squall, was chosen by Louise Glück as the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Green Squall will be published by Yale University Press in April 2006. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing/Poetry at University of South Florida.

http://www.pshares.org/authors/authordetails.cfm?prmauthorid=6515

Walking Home on an Early Spring Evening-David Young

Walking Home on an Early Spring Evening

Every microcosm needs its crow,
something to hang around and comment,
scavenge,
alight on highest branches.

Who hasn't seen the gnats,
the pollen grains that coat the windshield—
who hasn't heard the tree frogs?

In the long march that takes us all our life,
in and out of sleep, sun up, sun gone,
our aging back and forth, smiling and puzzled,
there come these times: you stop and look,

and fix on something unremarkable,
a parking lot or just a patch of sumac,
but it will flare and resonate

and you'll feel part of it for once,
you'll be a goldfinch hanging on a feeder,
you'll be a river system all in silver
etched on a frosty driveway, you'll

say "Folks, I think I made it this time,
I think this is my song." The crow lifts up,
its feathers shine and whisper,

its round black eye surveys indifferently
the world we've made
and then the one we haven't.

David Young is the author of nine previous books of poetry, including At the White Window (2000) and The Planet on the Desk: Selected and New Poems (1991). He is a well-known translator of the Chinese poets, and more recently of the poems of Petrarch and Eugenio Montale. A past winner of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships as well as a Pushcart Prize, Young is the Longman Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at Oberlin College and an editor of the prestigious Field Poetry Series at Oberlin College Press.

http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/catalog/results2.pperl?authorid=69055