I’ve never been a big Beatles fan; that whole phenomenon occurred a bit before my time. But I remember what happened on this day twenty-five years ago. I remember it as one of those mileposts along the way of my youth, like the day Reagan was shot, or the day we lost Challenger. I remember [...]

A bookend for the end of the month: another poem that I understand much better now than when I first read it:
The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
One way to observe National Poetry Month is to start a poetry reading group.

Rain
Edward Thomas
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
One way to observe National Poetry Month is to subscribe to the Academy of American [...]

Once upon a time, back when we were in school at Auburn, Wendy gave me a Sandra Boynton card that looked something like the one you see here. On its cover are animals arranged in four rows:

On the first row are a hippopotamus, a bird, and a pair of effiminate sheep. On the second row; [...]

Chicago
Carl Sandburg
            Hog Butcher for the World,
            Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
            Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
            Stormy, husky, brawling,
            City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I [...]

Here’s something I learned about through the Flickr blog: a fascinating experiment in poetry. Somehow, the result is disappointing, probably because it’s fairly bland compared to the art on all the preceding pages. Try it and see what you think.

Drones and Chants
Norman Finkelstein
In memory of Armand Schwerner
All night long they turned the wheels,
picked up the sound and passed it on
All night long we listened to the music,
all night there was thunder among the hills
All night and day the words were spoken,
each word inscribed and traced to its origin
All night and day the words were [...]

In back of the real
Allen Ginsberg
railroad yard in San Jose
              I wandered desolate
in front of a tank factory
              and sat on a bench
near the switchman’s shack.
A flower lay on the hay on
              the asphalt highway
—the dread hay flower
              I thought—It had a
brittle black stem and
              corolla of yellowish dirty
spikes like Jesus’ inchlong
              crown, and a sailed
dry center cotten tuft
              like a used [...]

I just love these short Japanese poems. This one also out of One Hundred More Poems From the Japanese:
The lower leaves of the trees
Tangle the sunset in dusk.
Awe spreads with
The summer twilight.
       -Sone No Yoshitada
One way to observe National Poetry Month is to start a commonplace book. I have a commonplace book – I keep it [...]

Last Saturday’s selections were from a volume of short poems translated from the Japanese by Kenneth Rexroth. Today three more Japanese translations, from a second volume called One Hundred More Poems From the Japanese, also translated by Rexroth:

On the Eastern horizon,
Dawn glows over
The fields, and when
I look back I see
The moon setting in the West.
       -Hitomaro
Everybody [...]

Night Picnic
Charles Simic
There was the sky, starless and vast–
Home of every one of our dark thoughts–
Its door open to more darkness.
And you, like a late door-to-door salesman,
With only your own beating heart
In the palm of your outstretched hand.
All things are imbued with God’s being–
She said in hushed tones
As if his ghost might overhear us–
The dark [...]

To My Father’s Houses
W. S. Merwin
Each of you must have looked like hope to him
once at least however long it lasted
he who claimed he saw hope in every grim
eyeless gray farmhouse uninhabited
on a back road and hope surely was needed
every time they were shown into the bare
resonant rooms of the manse provided
by his next church [...]