kamiel79

Reading: A motel in the hotel of time by Dale Houstman

Dale Houstman is an extraordinary poet from America and I am his friend on the Internet. Today, I want to read a poem from his collection 'A dangerous vacation'. There is a lot of extraordinary stuff but I stick to a not so long poem that has an enigmatic metaphor as a title: A motel ...

Be Farecul When You Ross The Croad

You learn very fast now. Lately, we have been playing "lettertjes omdraaien", exchange letters in words. Even though you don't really get the concept of spelling yet and how several letters make up a word (it is interesting that this mental apparatus is apparently rather complicated; letters are an abstraction, the unit of our language ...

Reading: After Love by Sara Teasdale

Today I discover a short gem written by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), who wrote a lot of love poetry and committed suicide at the age of 48. I came across this timeless poem about passion:

Reading: My Madonna by Robert W. Service

Robert W. Service (1874-1958) was known as the bard of Yukon, because a lot of his poetry was inspired by his time as a cowboy in Canada. He is also a war poet, having been a reporter of the Balkan war of 1912-13 and an ambulance driver during World War One. I read a funny ...

Blackfacepalm

Nog even over Zw. Piet, de donkere slavendrijver die het Nederlandsche volk rond Sinterklaas opzweept tot een ieder jaar groteskere dans om een racistisch stereotype, een festijn dat anno domini 2017 in het Friese Dokkum plaatsvindt, waar in 754 de ijverige gristelijke missionaris Bonifatius op 80-jarige leeftijd werd vermoord, omdat de Friesen hun Germaanse traditie ...

Reading: The Reckoning by Theodore Roethke

Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), a sickly boy who transformed into a bear of a man with father issues, was according to many critics the greatest of the American poets. While browsing a collection of his poetry on the Internet, I stumbled upon a poem about reckoning. I understand from his biography that he sought for redemption ...

Reading: Sad steps by Philip Larkin

I browsed a digital collection of Larkin (1922-1985) to get an idea of his poetry. Returning appears to be the theme of aging, or in the words of this biography, "A sense that life is a finite prelude to oblivion underlies many of Larkin's poems". The man himself said "Deprivation is for me what daffodils ...

Jotie

De Vlaamse kranten melden ophef over het gebeente van een alom geliefde knuffeljunk-poëet: in het dorp Oudenaarde wil de gemeente af van het graf van de eeuwigjonge alfabeet. 'T is maar een doodgesnoven dichter zei een ambtenaar. Bijna was Vlaams erfgoed door de barbaren leeggeroofd, bijna kregen de geestdoden het voor elkaar. Maar een weldoener ...

Reading: Attack by Siegfried Sassoon

Famed British war poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) from a family that was called the "Rothschilds of the east", wrote acclaimd poetry about the trenches of the first world war, so we put the fellow in our anthology. Later in life, he converted to catholicism, a mental swift that also produced some poetic residu, albeit not ...