kamiel79

Most obscure poet

I google "most obscure poet" and I find poets whose obscurity has become a brand A certain mr. Puce from a town named Truth and Consequences was engaged in wordplay A lady wrote three poems a day by the time when she was eighty the boxes had reached the ceiling Meanwhile, a child knows obscurity ...

Op de fiets

Om mijn verblijf in Nederland glansrijker te doen voorkomen dan het is heb ik mijn zinnen gezet op het maken van een bescheiden fietstocht, maar de simpele mededeling dat ik een rondje midden Nederland en velo ging doen in de kou van februari stuitte op ongeloof, verbazing en tenslotte respect. De bescheidenheid moest ik er ...

These figures moving in my rhyme, Who are they? Death and Death's dog, Time. - N. Scott Momaday

Two Strangers

How much peace is in an evening walk of two near strangers at the bay when they hold hands and gently talk even if their peace - has gone away How much truth lies there, for a little while when of human needs the most divine between a thoughtful nod and then a smile is ...

Reading: Adultery at forty by Donald Hall

Donald Hall (b. 1928) is another celebrated American poet. Hall “has lived deeply within the New England ethos of plain living and high thinking, and he has done so with a sense of humor and eros.” He had lost his wife, Jane Kenyon to leukemia in 1994, with whom he lived a happy and harmonious poet's ...

Reading: In The Small Hours by Wole Soyinka

Nigerian Yorùbá playwright, novelist and poet Wole Soyinka (b. 1934) received the Nobel Prize in 1986 as the first representative of a 'new English literature' emerged in the former colonies. He is also a political activist who spent 22 months in prison basically for trying to avert the Nigerian civil war, in the sixties. I ...

Reading: Don Juan in Amsterdam by Daryl Hine

Today I honor another master of words, Daryl Hine (1936-2012). We was a remarkably gifted poet whose language has been praised as exceptional. He studies the classics and philosophy, and that clearly influenced his poetic eye. Ormbsby says it better: Hines is "a poet in whom an almost irresistible exuberance of language brims to the ...

Reading: Zebra by C.K. Williams

The great American poet C.K. Williams (1947-2015) writes in characteristically very long lines. He was a very engaged poet, for example with the nuclear disaster at Three Miles Island in Tar. He earned many awards and honors (National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize). I read a seemingly simple poem called Zebra: Zebra Kids once carried tin ...

Reading: Bat Cave by Eleanor Wilner

Eleanor Wilner (b. 1937) has a clear poetic vision that she has expressed in many publications. She once said that "our culture has made us shallow and dreamless by inculcating the myth that the individual is defined and set apart by his or her own personal experience." She is happy that poetry eludes attempts at ...