Poetry

During National Poetry Month 2010, we noticed lots of poets with typewriters going out in their local communities, from Seattle to New York to Miami to San Francisco, offering poems written to order on the spot. Since then, we’ve seen poetry on demand offers springing up in more cities across the country:

• Jacqueline Suskin has turned her portable typewriter into a Poem Store in Arcata, California and will also do poems commissioned online, “Your Subject, Your Price.”
• Kathleen Rooney, Dave Landsberger, and Eric Plattner do Poems While You Wait at markets and festivals around Chicago on their Royal Quiet DeLuxe, Smith Corona Sterling, and Remington DeLuxe Model 5 typewriters.
• Elizabeth Howard takes her Olivetti to the local Harvest Festival in Stratford, Connecticut to create personalized Demand Poetry.
• Bill Keys offered “Poems About Anyone or Anything” on the street in Pa’ia, Maui (where he was called “a hippie bard for the new millennium”), and has since moved back to Boulder, Colorado, where he does Poems While You Wait.
• A group of Atlanta poets have offered Free Poems on Demand as “a subversive literary performance of exquisite proportions” at baseball games, street fairs, art galleries and book festivals.
• Tristan Bennett types Fresh Poetry on the streets of New Orleans.
• Chris Vitiello appeared at last year’s 100,000 Poets for Change event in Durham, North Carolina as “the Poetry Fox,” writing custom poems on request for all comers.
• Living Poetry in the Triangle of North Carolina (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill) sponsors regular Poetry on Demand challenge nights for their member poets and a Poetry on Demand booth at SPARKcon, the annual local arts festival.
• Charlotte Matthews of Charlottesville, Virginia shows up at the local farmer’s market on Saturday mornings at a booth offering “Poems To Go: Fresh.”

We’ve plumped up our anthology of classic love poems for Valentine’s Day this year, so you’re sure to find a great poem to declare your heart to the one you love. Here are the new additions:

• “Air and Angels, ” by John Donne (1633)

  Twice or thrice had I lov’d thee,
  Before I knew thy face or name;
  So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
  Angels affect us oft, and worshipp’d be....



• “To Anthea Who May Command Him Anything, ” by Robert Herrick (1648)

  Bid me to live, and I will live
     Thy protestant to be;
  Or bid me love, and I will give
     A loving heart to thee....



• “Answer to a Child’s Question, ” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1802)

  ....he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he—
  ‘I love my Love, and my Love loves me!’



• “Love’s Philosophy, ” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819)

  ....the sunlight clasps the earth
     And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
  What is all this sweet work worth
     If thou kiss not me?



• “I Do Not Love Thee, ” by Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton (1829)

  I do not love thee!—no! I do not love thee!
  And yet when thou art absent I am sad;
     And envy even the bright blue sky above thee,
  Whose quiet stars may see thee and be glad....



• “A Birthday, ” by Christina Rossetti (1861)

  My heart is like a singing bird
     Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;
  My heart is like an apple-tree
     Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;...



• “In Excelsis, ” by Amy Lowell (1922)

  You—you—
  Your shadow is sunlight on a plate of silver;
  Your footsteps, the seeding-place of lilies;
  Your hands moving, a chime of bells across a windless air....



• “To Earthward, ” by Robert Frost (1923)

  Love at the lips was touch
  As sweet as I could bear;
  And once that seemed too much;
  I lived on air....

Amy Lowell was born in Massachusetts 138 years ago today, and in her honor we have selected a few choice poems to add to our Lowell library:

• A sonnet of tortured love, “A Fixed Idea,” first published in Poetry magazine in 1910
• Her Imagist aphorism “A Lover,” dating to 1917
• An elegy for the beautiful world broken by war, “September, 1918”
• Her singular distilled image of the sun-struck and stunned lover, “Carrefour”

More on Amy Lowell:
Amy Lowell, “Mother of Us All”
The Politics of Modernist Poetics: Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell and Imagism
Biographical profile of Amy Lowell
Poems by Amy Lowell in our library
“Amy Lowell,” biographical poem by Joan Joffe Hall

Today marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of James Mercer Langston Hughes, the unofficial poet laureate of Black American life and culture, a radical democrat at the center of the Harlem Renaissance, lyrical poet incorporating the traditions of Black music—jazz and blues—in his poems, humorous storyteller, political activist and playwright, passionate advocate of African American pride, civil rights and artistic freedom. What more fitting way to mark the beginning of Black History Month than to read some of his best-loved poems:

• “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921)
• “The Weary Blues” (1921)
• “Harlem” (1951)

Years ago, in gathering our anthology of Classic Love Poems for Valentine’s Day, we focused on straightforward declarations of love, poems of seduction and promise, celebrating the beauties and virtues of the beloved and forging the love-bond between two people. But of course, this leaves out the many great love poems of other kinds, the poems of unrequited or forbidden or lost love. For example, from Robert Burns we chose his best-known “Song—A Red, Red Rose” and left out his despairing farewell between two lovers who cannot stay together, “Ae Fond Kiss.”

We’d like to expand our collection to include the best of these “other” kinds of love poems, with your help, Dear Readers. Please visit our collection of readers’ favorite love poems and tell us about yours, especially if it’s a poem about lost or forbidden love.

It’s Burns Night, and the Scottish bard’s poems are being declaimed all over the world. Scottish first minister Alex Salmond naturally chose this date to launch his government’s “consultation” on a 2014 referendum on Scottish independence from the United Kingdom, quoting from Burns’ great “hymn to equality,” “A Man’s a Man for a’ That.” Burns was also quoted by many of the Scottish MPs who spoke following Salmond’s announcement, and while they were talking in Edinburgh, MP Eleanor Laing and Prime Minister David Cameron traded their own Burns quotations in the English Parliament in London, during Prime Minister’s questions:

from The Scotsman:
“Scottish independence: MPs gripped by the question: was Rabbie Burns a Nat or a Unionist?,” by David Maddox
“A battle emerged in Westminster yesterday over which argument in the independence debate Scotland’s Bard Rabbie Burns would have supported as both sides tried to claim him as their own.... it was clear that, in an appeal to Scottish sentiment, both wanted a signifcant figure from Scotland’s past to help boost their support.... The day after SNP First Minister Alex Salmond declared in a major speech in London that Burns was a ‘great Nationalist and Internationalist,’ Conservative Scottish MP Eleanor Laing declared that he was a Unionist.”

In the meantime, Scots not so wrapped up in the political implications of Burns’ poems have been polled for their favorites for this Burns Night:

from EdinburghGuide.com:
Tam o’Shanter Tops Survey of Favourite Burns Poems
“Tonight, Scots around the world celebrate the birth of Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns 227 years ago, feeding spirit and mind with a traditional Scottish meal of haggis, tatties, and neeps (washed down with a dram or two) and poetry. The words of the customary ‘Address to A Haggis,’ written in 1786, will be recited at dinner tables from Cardiff to Canada and Melbourne to Mexico City. While treating poems like a horse race adds little to one’s appreciation, it’s interesting to note that a recent poll found ‘Tam o’Shanter’ (which features a racing horse) was Scotland’s favourite poem by the ‘ploughman poet’ for Burns Night.”

Other favorite Burns poems ranked in this Scottish survey were, in order:

• “A Man’s a Man for a’ that”
• “Address to A Haggis”
• “My Luve’s like a Red, Red Rose”

More on Robert Burns
Biographical Profile of Burns
Library: Poems by Burns

James Franco played him in Howl in 2010... Now Daniel Radcliffe, who grew up in front of the world in the eight Harry Potter films, will take on the role of Allen Ginsberg in a new movie, Kill Your Darlings, which tells the story of the murder committed by Lucien Carr, who was at the center of the web of Beat generation friendships that connected Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs. Like Franco, Radcliffe has poetic affinities and aspirations (he even published a few poems under a pseudonym in 2009), and he believes he can portray the Beat poet at 19. We shall see... the movie comes out next year.

More films about poets and poetry

More on Allen Ginsberg:
Allen Ginsberg, Beat American Buddha Bard, by Bob Holman
Our profile of Ginsberg
The Bard His Own Self: Allen Ginsberg says “That’s all Goodnight”
Encounters with Allen Ginsberg, by Bart Plantenga

On Ginsberg’s poetry:
Allen Ginsberg’s American Sentences, an introduction to his variation on haiku
Chorus of Poets Gather for “Howl” Celebration: the 50th anniversary, an account by Teresa Conboy
You can read the poem in print or listen to it on the Internet—but you won't hear it on the radio—“Howl” (October 2007)
Hear Ginsberg’s first “Howl”—1956 recording discovered at Reed College (February 2008)
Ginsberg Howls on Indiefeed (Feburary 2009)
Howl (noun). Howl (verb). Howl, the poem heard round the world (April 2009)

A poem can contain a dangerous power—certainly some governments see poems as threats to their authority, and through the centuries many poets have been rebels, agitators and advocates—in their poems as well as their political acts. In the past few years, we’ve seen a Burmese poet sent to jail for his acrostic poem complaining about the country’s military leader, and the Nobel Peace Prize given to Liu Xiaobo, Chinese poet and democracy activist serving an 11-year prison sentence for “subversion.” Today the trend continues, with news of yet another poet arrested in China for publishing a poem urging people to make their voices heard:

It’s time
It’s time, Chinese people!
It’s time,
The square is ours,
The feet are ours,
It’s time to use our feet to go to the square and make a choice.

More Notes on Activist Poets: From One Laureate to the Next: Who Do the Public Poets Speak For? (2011)
Outspoken Poets in the Old and New Chinas (2011)
W.S. Merwin the New American Poet Laureate (2010)
Poems of Provocation and Witness in a D.C. Festival (2008)
Ginsberg & Whitman: America’s rebel poets a century apart (2006)

Crafting the lines to be carved on a tombstone, distilling the essence of a life into a brief final statement is an innately poetic task, one that has often fallen to the poets among us. Browsing through our library of classic poems, you will discover quite a few “epitaph poems.” They may be elegies or memoirs brief enough to be etched on someone’s grave, like Ben Jonson’s “On My First Son,” a farewell to his eldest son who died of the plague at the age of seven, or Aphra Behn’s “Epitaph on the Tombstone of a Child, the Last of Seven that Died Before.” Or the epitaph may be spun out far beyond the confines of an actual tombstone into a meditation on the nature of poetry and life, like William Wordsworth’s “A Poet’s Epitaph.” And of course many poets have chosen to write their own epitaphs, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Louis Stevenson and William Butler Yeats.

Being the first month of a new year, January may not seem the right time to you, dear readers, to be thinking on life’s endings. But it’s also the dead of winter—and do you know how many poets’s lives ended in the month of January? At least four, according to our friend Ed Moran—Joseph Brodsky, T.S. Eliot, Hyam Plutzik, and William Butler Yeats. Moran has explored the interconnections between the poems and epitaphs of these four in his new article for your midwinter reading pleasure: “Nothing Can Be Done, But Something Can Be Said.”

More on Poets’ Burials and Epitaphs
“Has Lorca's Final Resting Place Been Found at Last?” (2011)
“Shrines to Ted and Sylvia” (2010)
“Poe Properly Buried, 160 Years Later” (2009)

Learn’t by Heart
When you find a poem you really love, you will want to carry it in your heart instead of a book. It’s not so hard to do: try our step-by-step to make the poem your very own.