Month: July 2011

Happy Poetry Day!

Poetry day

from Wit of the staircase

When an Argentinean rugby team played the high school team at lunchtime, the English teachers had a poetry party.  All morning the librarians were busy inflating balloons and writing verses on them in vivid. We sat in a circle and read poems to each other, but when the deputy principal said “poetry is about words not ideas,” we argued.

A seventh former came and read something he’d just written, with a rhyming couplet at the end – “a shout out to my man Seamus Heaney.”

The rugby game went on long into fourth period, so I drifted into The Book of Clouds. I found Altocumulus, like a conjurer’s word and the glory effect is magic.

 

Tuesday Poem – by Wallace Stevens

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Today is my 31st birthday! 13 is a much more interesting number.

 
Tuesday Poem

Tuesday Poem – by Janet Frame

I take into my arms more than I can bear to hold

I take into my arms more than I can bear to hold
I am toppled by the world
a creation of ladders, pianos, stairs cut into the rock
a devouring world of teeth where even the common snail
eats the heart out of a forest
as you and I do, who are human, at night

yet still I take into my arms more than I can bear to hold



From The Goose Bath Poems, Vintage 2006



I think of this poem often and at times also feel ‘toppled by the world.’ Every day brings good and bad news that overwhelms; emotions that take me by surprise; sights of wonder, beauty, scale. Shedding light and putting into perspective: we are so small, so potent.


Tuesday Poem