the word studio notebook
- Here's the blog, The Gist.
- Here's my website, wordstudio.net.
- Here you can read my work.
- Here are my Haiku Year posts.
- Here's a random post.
Posts tagged poetry
Old Poems
Old poetry, in my life, comes in a few varieties. There’s, like, Gilgamesh and The Odyssey and Beowulf:
So blessed with abundance, brimming with joyance,
The warriors abided, till a certain one gan to
Dog them with deeds of direfullest malice,
A foe in the hall-building: this horrible stranger
Was Grendel entitled, the march-stepper famous
Who dwelt in the moor-fens, the marsh and the fastness;—Beowulf [via Gutenberg]
Next variety: the poems that predate us and our styles but not our language—or not quite. I’m thinking of poets like John Keats and Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, whose iceboxes we sometimes understand but whose hyphenated “may-bes” are antiquated enough to give their work a patina, however handsome.
Of the terrible doubt of appearances,
Of the uncertainty after all—that we may be deluded,
That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all,
That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only,
May-be the things I perceive—the animals, plants, men, hills,
shining and flowing waters,
The skies of day and night—colors, densities, forms—May-be these
are, (as doubtless they are,) only apparitions, and the real
something has yet to be known;—Walt Whitman, “Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances”
These are the poems in mid-transformation—the poems that reflect not just the moment their shutters snapped but the eras in which the cameras were made. Fog’s swallowing up some of them, more every day it seems, but we can make them out like figures in the woods against that fog.
Final variety: the poems of your own past. Maybe you wrote them. Maybe someone else wrote them and you loved them with a teenaged passion and the certainty that no one else could understand your love. Whatever. Point is, there they are, just as you left them, and there you are, no longer the same.
I found a folder of my old high-school poems today. These aren’t the ones I remember being proud of—tentatively proud, just learning how to walk on stilts—there were the ones I was proud of once but have since forgotten existed. These were poems from the other semester, when I thought I was good and I was making everything grandiose and serious and winking all at once. These are the poems that I thought were cute back then, who sat behind me in English junior year, who I was friendly with but not friends with, exactly. What were their names? I don’t recall. I put them back in my filing cabinet not five hours ago and I already do not recall.
These are the poems that make you realize that the poems don’t transmute at all. They stay the same. We change. We change shape, we change our minds, we change our standards and our expectations. We change our language and treasure different things. The patina’s on us, just like it’s on them.
Somewhere around here is a folder of the poems I wrote that I remember fondly—a couple of them won awards—and I’m afraid that one day soon I’ll find it.
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.”
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.”
“Memory is a poet, not an historian.”
On today’s show, poet Marie Howe.
969 notes (via nprfreshair & workman)
W.S. Merwin, from “The Love of October”
A child looking at ruins grows younger
but cold
and wants to wake to a new name
I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring(via leda-swanson)
163 notes (via scout & leda-swanson)
as if setting out for some unknown country
instead of the corner shop. I wanted
you to be sure, in case
this time - out of, say, 10,000 departures
I never made it back: although
after 50 years together, 2 countries,
3 children, and several former journeys
that would put this one to shame
you’d think there’d be no need to pause
on my own doorstep, suddenly afraid
of the distance between us, of your absolute beauty,
of the growing aloneness when I clicked the latch.”
265 notes (via scout & grammatolatry)
(Source: progressive.org)
396 notes (via scout & thebronzemedal)
A poem for day one of Google Buzz
Three Networks for the Twitter kings under the sky,
Seven for the Facebook lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Weblog Men doomed to die,
One for the Google on his non-evil throne,
In the Land of Internets where the Shadows lie.
One Network to rule them all, One Network to find them,
One Network to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Internets where the Shadows lie.
(via jaybushman)
