Poetry Friday: James Hearst

An Atticus pick this week, and a lovely one:

In April
by James Hearst

This I saw on an April day:
Warm rain spilt from a sun-lined cloud,
A sky-flung wave of gold at evening,
....
(Read the whole poem here, at Poets.org.)

~~~~~

The Poetry Friday round up is at Teaching Authors.

Poetry Friday: "A bird’s cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind...."

When I muse aloud, "What should I post for Poetry Friday?" I can usually count on Atticus to suggest some Wallace Stevens. I've actually posted a fair amount about Stevens, as I find him pretty fascinating, so when Atticus said, "How about 'Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself'?" I said, "You're a genius."

Without further ado, here is the genius of my husband, Wallace Stevens, and spring:

Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself 
by Wallace Stevens

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

(Read the whole thing here, at The Poetry Foundation.)

~~~~~

The wonderful Amy Ludwig VanDerwater has the round up today at The Poem Farm.

Poetry Friday: I'm Sorry, Atticus, I Just Can't Do It

At least not very well. Not today.

Given that we were recently in Florida, and given that Wallace Stevens has always been one of Atticus's favorite poets, and given that it is Poetry Friday, Atticus suggested that I post a Stevens poem, "O Florida, Venereal Soil" and he suggested that I do it "without groping after some epistemological objective categorizing of the deeply subjective reactions reflected in the verse."

Gee, do I do that?

He went on to say, quoting John Keats, "In other words, 'be capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason....'"

But, um, I always do that irritable reaching. I thought he found it endearing. And I so often do it on Poetry Fridays.

But not always, really. Right? I am highly qualified to live in uncertainty, mystery and doubt. I'm a Catholic. It doesn't get more mysterious than that. And I sometimes post just the poem, sans any torturous reflection on my part: such as here and here and here and here and here and here. (Methinks I protest too much?)

I am capable, as William Hurt said in this clip, of just letting art flow over me. 

But, I can't post about Wallace Stevens -- I can't even think about Wallace Stevens -- without thinking. Long and hard, about a number of things. His life as both insurance executive and poet is fodder for scrutiny, and that's before we even get to his body of work. He was an interesting, perplexing human being. And I can't think about Florida, and travel, and real life vs. vacations, and how randomly we all seem to land in various geographical areas without that sparking some reflection.

And of course, all of that leads to a new stream of thought: Stevens isn't alone as poetry-writing insurance executive. The 13th U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser had the same Paper-Pusher-By-Day-Deep-Thinker-By-Night existence (though they are obviously extremely different types of poets). And that brings me to the poem posted at The Writer's Almanac today -- Kooser's "So This Is Nebraska" ... and that means I've gone full circle from Nebraska to Florida and home again.

Not only that, but on today's Writer's Almanac page, there is also a mention of the birthday of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and that brings me to a quote from The Little Prince: "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

And if I believe that, I must be capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts ... and I am capable of that. Just not, clearly, capable of posting a Wallace Stevens poem without saying something. And nothing.

And, sadly, now, I'm thinking I should've just posted some Keats.

Maybe next week.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Poetry Friday round up is at Paper Tigers.

St. Patrick's Guest Post

(from Atticus):

In keeping with tradition, here's a little Joyce to read along with your green milk or Guinness or Smithwick's or Jameson's, whatever time zone you're in:

April 16. Away! Away!

The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone—come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.

April 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

-- from Joyce, of course 

Poetry Friday

Some days it seems as if Atticus and I are in a race to The Writer's Almanac. He beat me to this one the other day, suggesting it for Poetry Friday. I am in complete agreement.

Revival 
by Luci Shaw

March. I am beginning
to anticipate a thaw. Early mornings
the earth, old unbeliever, is still crusted with frost
where the moles have nosed up their
cold castings, and the ground cover
in shadow under the cedars hasn't softened
for months, fogs layering their slow, complicated ice
...

(Read the rest here, at The Writer's Almanac.)

~~~~~

Poetry will be gathered in today at Gathering Books.

Poetry Friday

Another Atticus pick this week. A pairing, really. He says:

"'The Lark Ascending' by George Meredith was the inspiration for the piece by Ralph Vaughan Williams of the same name, which should be listened to while the poem is read ... just a suggestion.... "

I'm taking his suggestion. So, start up the music:



and then click over to the poem, found here. Mix and savor.

May your Friday -- and your National Poetry Month (it begins today) -- ascend into something beautiful.

*****


The round up is at The Poem Farm.

Poetry Friday: An Atticus Hibernian Pick

Because I was too busy yesterday to get a second St. Patrick's day post up using Atticus' pick of the day, I'm using it now. Thus, a multi-tasking poem from Marianne Moore. It works for St. Patrick's Day, for Poetry Friday, for wit, aching irony, and the bit of genetic memory that I feel for all things North Atlantic.

Some of my favorite stanzas are below, and you can find the entire poem here, at Poets.org.


Spenser's Ireland
by Marianne Moore

has not altered; --
a place as kind as it is green,
the greenest place I've never seen.

... Outwitting
the fairies, befriending the furies,
whoever again
and again says, "I'll never give in," never sees

that you're not free
until you've been made captive by
supreme belief,

... like the purple-coral fuchsia-tree's. Eire--
the guillemot
so neat and the hen
of the heath and the
linnet spinet-sweet-bespeak relentlessness? Then

they are to me
like enchanted Earl Gerald who
changed himself into a stag, to
a great green-eyed cat of
the mountain. Discommodity makes
them invisible; they've dis-
appeared. The Irish say your trouble is their
trouble and your
joy their joy? I wish
I could believe it;
I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish.

~~~~~

The Poetry Friday round up is at A Wrung Sponge.

Poetry Friday ... Summer with Atticus

 Summer with Atticus goes something like this:


1. We experience a period of what my friend Sally calls "mini retirement." Sally's married to a teacher. She knows what it's like to suddenly have her husband around the house more often than usual. And how it feels to be extremely grateful for the privilege while simultaneously struggling to reorder a routine. She knows what it's like to tell herself to just shut up about where he tends to leave the salt shaker.

2. Adjustment period ends quickly. Everyone is happy.  Who cares where the salt shaker is?

3. Atticus takes over meal planning and cooking for a couple of months.

4. If I were the kind of person who jumps up and down and claps, I would do so at this point. You know how I feel about cooking. I'm figuratively jumping up and down right now.

5. Atticus is, at this very moment, out buying donuts from the new donut shop in town for the girls.  They've been wanting to try it. I keep saying, "Oh, yeah.  We need to do that. We'll get there soon ...." whereas Atticus actually goes out and buys the donuts.

6. He selects this moving piece from Robert Frost for Poetry Friday:

Two Look at Two
by Robert Frost

Love and forgetting might have carried them
A little further up the mountain side
With night so near, but not much further up.
They must have halted soon in any case
With thoughts of a path back, how rough it was
With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;
When they were halted by a tumbled wall
With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,
Spending what onward impulse they still had
In One last look the way they must not go,
On up the failing path, where, if a stone
Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;
No footstep moved it. 'This is all,' they sighed,
Good-night to woods.' But not so; there was more.
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall, as near the wall as they.
She saw them in their field, they her in hers.
The difficulty of seeing what stood still,
Like some up-ended boulder split in two,
Was in her clouded eyes; they saw no fear there.
She seemed to think that two thus they were safe.

(Read the whole poem here.)

I do love Robert Frost (as evidenced by the number of times he's been invited over for Poetry Friday.) 

I do love summer.

And I do truly, madly, deeply love that man I call Atticus.

You'll find the Poetry Friday round up at The Art of Irreverence.

Hibernian Guest Post from Atticus, part dó

Atticus here again to do another St. Patrick's Day guest post.

I'm going with a short passage from Dubliners again, this time from "Araby." (Karen rightly rejected a not-so-family-friendly passage from Ulysses. Hey, it's her blog. If I had printed the nixed passage here, Scott Peterson would never again ask, "Why you got no blog?") In this passage, the poor, deluded protagonist describes the intensity of his adoration for Mangan's hypnotic sister:

One evening I went into the back drawing-room in which the priest had died. It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds. Some distant lamp or lighted window gleamed below me. I was thankful that I could see so little. All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: "O love! O love!" many times.

Kaboom. At times reading Joyce is like a deep pull on a rich, cool mug of Guinness. One is forced into the contemplation that except for love there may be nothing better this side of heaven. God bless Sir Arthur, and God bless all of you on this St Patrick's Day.

A question for my male readers

I'm doing a scientific survey.

Do men eat cookie dough?

Inquiring feminine Edmisten minds want to know.

Atticus insists that it's a purely chromosomal phenomenon. He says the cookie dough gene is carried on the second X chromosome along with the genes for calling houses "cute" and saying, "Let's meet for lunch!"

Let us know, guys.

Hibernian Guest Blog

Hi, Atticus here guest blogging. For Poetry Friday and in honor of St. Patrick's, I've decided to add this passage from James Joyce's masterpiece "The Dead," maybe the finest short story in the English language. You'll find the entire piece in Dubliners, a collection of stories all constructed around epiphanic moments in the the lives of their protagonists. You may also wish to see the movie. It was John Huston's last picture, and it is very good:

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.