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Hey, people, do you know a poet called Alfred (may be "Albert") Tennyson? (19 century romantic poet).
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He clasps the crag with crooked hands: Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.
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The three favorites that come to mind are "Requisecat" (which concerns his younger sister who died as a child), "Everyday you play", and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," which is too bloody long to post. Beyond that I'm partial to Shakespeare's Sonnets as pretty much everyone is, I love Blake, and Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson and plenty of others too.
Requisecat by: Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)
Tread lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow. All her bright golden hair Tarnished with rust, She that was young and fair Fallen to dust.
Lily-like, white as snow, She hardly knew She was a woman, so Sweetly she grew.
Coffin-board, heavy stone, Lie on her breast; I vex my heart alone, She is at rest.
Peace, peace; she cannot hear Lyre or sonnet; All my life's buried here. Heap earth upon it.
"Every Day You Play" By Pablo Neruda
Every day you play with the light of the universe. Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water. You are more than this white head that I hold tightly as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.
You are like nobody since I love you. Let me spread you out among yellow garlands. Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south? Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window. The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish. Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them. The rain takes off her clothes.
The birds go by, fleeing. The wind. The wind. I can contend only against the power of men. The storm whirls dark leaves and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.
You are here. Oh, you do not run away. You will answer me to the last cry. Cling to me as though you were frightened. Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.
Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle, and even your breasts smell of it. While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.
How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me, my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running. So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes, and over our heads the gray light unwind in turning fans.
My words rained over you, stroking you. A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body. I go so far as to think that you own the universe. I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses. I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees
------------------------------------------------- I imagine thousands upon thousands of High School students and college freshmen have learned to dismiss poetry the second they read that modern piece for the first time. It's interesting and unusual, but it also is the type of piece that takes people that might be interested in poetry and makes poetry-haters out of them.
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Also love Cummings, the Brownings, and plenty of others including Frost. I haven't seen enough of Williamson's work to make a personal judgement beyond my loathing of, "The Red Wheel Barrow".
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*in a small voice* I like the red wheelbarrow.
I think of that poem whenever something big happens, and I realize my major memory of it is a rip in the wallpaper, or a curtain rod, or the seams in my vaulted ceiling. My memory of my first love, first time my heart was broken, and first major decision is of the beige drapes in his living room. I remember every word of the discussion, but running the back of my mind the entire time was the desperate need to straighten the curtain - to make the hooks equally spaced apart.
I picture WCW thinking of something huge, something big, something life changing, and staring at the window realizing that everything depended on the red wheelbarrow in his line of vision.
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Me too, kat! I've actually known several people who had been convinced they would never "get" poetry until they read some of WCW's stuff. Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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See, I've had the exact opposite reaction. Williams has really turned off most of the people I knew that were skeptical in the first place, particularly men. And that always made me irritable about the poem, the way it worked against the medium (in my view) winning converts among those disinterested in poetry by nature. In my experience it wins over people already inclined to want to learn more about poetry, people inclined to want to deconstruct anything and everything on the written page while ostracizing those that already perceive college literature and poetry to be elitist non-sense, and deconstructionists to be no better than the sommelier's that in the end can't tell the difference between a bottle of Chateau Latour and Charles Shaw Merlot when they're blind folded.
I don't dispute that his writing is highly original, it certainly is, but when I want to show people that poetry can be something special, that anyone and everyone can appreciate and enjoy reading, and writing, I steer clear of it. However, if anyone can get something as special as Katherine did out of that piece, than it certainly seems to house some special meaning that I'm missing and I’m the worse for that loss.
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rivka: Man! I had no idea. And here on this other board we've all been restricting ourselves to public domain works and only posting links to those that aren't. Really put a damper on that poetry-sharing thread, I tell you what.
graywolfe: I don't understand why you blame the poem for that.
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Anyway, here's my favourite Williams:
The Widow's Lament in Springtime by William Carlos Williams
Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year. Thirty-five years I lived with my husband. The plumtree is white today with masses of flowers. Masses of flowers load the cherry branches and color some bushes yellow and some red but the grief in my heart is stronger than they for though they were my joy formerly, today I notice them and turned away forgetting. Today my son told me that in the meadows, at the edge of the heavy woods in the distance, he saw trees of white flowers. I feel that I would like to go there and fall into those flowers and sink into the marsh near them.
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When I was in college, we had a day set aside for the poem. There wasn't a soul in the class that wasn't asleep at the switch within 15 minutes. It's a personal thing, in my experience, nearly everyone I knew, English Major or not, responded to it with a sense of dismissiveness. It certainly works for some, as this thread can attest too, but among the people I went to school with, it really turned people off. It came across as b.s., one step removed from the indictment by some, of Dylan, as an author of "word salad".
It's not my thing, at all, and didn't work for anyone that I knew until I noticed this thread, but I certainly appreciate people writing about it, which can help me to possibly figure out what I'm missing here.
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Btw, ae, that poem you just posted from Williams, that one is absolutely gorgeous. I love that poem.
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Is that addressed to me? Everything from the more modern writers like Elliot, Thomas, Frost and Williams, to Dickinson, the Brownings, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Milton and anything and everything else. I was an English Lit Major up through my first semester of my Junior year at Cal before I'd had enough and switched to History.
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So, out of interest, in what WAY did you study Eliot, Browning, and Dickenson that made them BORING?
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Nothing, I never said I found any of them boring, I merely mentioned that, "The Red Wheel Barrow," alienated a lot of students I knew, from poetry. I actually like the poets I mentioned a great deal, I never found any of them boring. I'm not following you at all Tom.
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graywolfe, to be frank, "The Red Wheel Barrow" doesn't do much for me either. I'm just puzzled as to why you'd blame the poem for turning people off poetry. If I wrote a bad poem and educators all over the world decided for some reason to teach it in schools, would it be my fault that students lose interest in reading other poems? Sounds a bit unfair to me.
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"When I was in college, we had a day set aside for the poem. There wasn't a soul in the class that wasn't asleep at the switch within 15 minutes."
Sorry. I interpreted this to mean that the souls involved were bored.
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No problem, I was referring to a specific experience with "The Red Wheel Barrow," misinterpretations happen, especially with my grammatically inept writing.
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"graywolfe, to be frank, "The Red Wheel Barrow" doesn't do much for me either. I'm just puzzled as to why you'd blame the poem for turning people off poetry. If I wrote a bad poem and educators all over the world decided for some reason to teach it in schools, would it be my fault that students lose interest in reading other poems? Sounds a bit unfair to me."
Nah, I don't think so, but I doubt you'd publish a poem, if you thought it sucked, right? I'm not defining the poem as garbage, that's not my place, I'm just saying that I loathed it, and that people I studied with did as well, both those who liked, and disliked poetry. You read Milton, or Elliot, or Frost, or Neruda, or some Sonnets from Shakespeare, if you read the Romantics, or if you read Emily Dickinson, or Keats, their work can immediately speak to you, even if you don't particularly enjoy it, or understand it. For a newbie to poetry, some fourteen year old kid, or even a college Freshmen that wasn't very exposed to it, those men and women will really open your eyes, with the beauty, with the meter, with the incredible expressiveness of each line. But, "The Red Wheel Barrow," even with it's originality, and mystery, still struck many, and will strike many as a seeming poet's joke at the expense of deconsctrutionists, like something Twain might have done to have a laugh at people who took him a bit too seriously. Unfortunately it did turn a lot of people I know off of poetry. But hey, maybe I'm very nearly the only one, maybe it's just me and my little cabal of anti-"Red Wheel Barrow" fanatics that dislike the poem to such a degree. Either way, it doesn't matter much, I dislike the poem, and the impact it had on specific people I know, and what I perceive might be an impact it could have on others, but all in all, it's no huge deal, it just fits snuggly under the label of my most loathed poem. So noone else has a poem they've come to loathe?
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I wouldn't submit a poem of mine for publishing if I thought it sucked, yeah, but I doubt WCW thought "The Red Wheel Barrow" sucked, either. And indeed, suckage is in the mouth of the beholder; clearly some people love the poem.
But yeah, sure I have poems I loathe, and it'd be ridiculous to take issue with your having poems you loathe. I just think it's a bit unfair to loathe a poem due to its effect on other people rather than what you think of the poem per se. Not that I'm saying you wouldn't loathe it anyway. . . but as you say, it's no big deal.
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I've got no problem with that, and I think I pointed out that I merely speak for me, and my fellow English Majors who couldn't stand the poem. I disliked it for itself, and for the others it impacted in a negative way. It's two redeeming feature (for me) are that it has a certain mystery to it in trying to get at William's intentions, and it does a very nice job at suggesting the importance of details, and of the importance of portraying every day things in life, in one's own art. That is interesting. However, beyond that, there's nothing about it that remotely interests me, unlike the poem from Williams that you provided, which is deeply interesting to me, hugely expressive, and moving, and quite beautiful.
Of course this is merely my personal reaction and response to this piece of poetry, no more, no less.
quote: Hmm... once again we need more Canadian content...
There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The arctic trails have secret tales That would make your blood run cold; The northern lights have seen queer sights But the queerest they ever did see, Was that night on the marge of Lake Labarge I cremated Sam McGee.
Why you dirty rotten stinking theiving scum Bob! Canadian, humph... Of all the nerve... if you'd said "northern content" or "Yukon content" or even "Yukon Territory content" then hey, fine, I can appreciate any of those, I've got really good friends who live on Lake Laberge. But as an Alaskan I,... Canadian, Argh! Robert Service was not a Canadian! To give him the title of American would be almost an indignity- and he was one! *endeth rant*
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Canadian, humph... Of all the nerve... if you'd said "northern content" or "Yukon content" or even "Yukon Territory content" then hey, fine, I can appreciate any of those, I've got really good friends who live on Lake Laberge. But as an Alaskan I,... Canadian, Argh! Robert Service was not a Canadian! To give him the title of American would be almost an indignity- and he was one! ![[Grumble]](graemlins/grumble.gif)
