Poetry

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 ...
Reading: February by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) is an acclaimed Canadian novelist who also writes poetry, that I find quite accessible. I plucked 'February' from the interwebs: February Winter. Time to eat fat and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat, a black fur sausage with yellow Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries to ...
Reading: Larksong by Douglas Dunn
Today I read Scottish poet Douglas Dunn (b. 1942) avoided draft in Vietnam by returning to Britain, where he worked in a library with Philip Larkin. He is said to be a reflective rather than a reactive poet. I read a compact and intriguing poem about a lark (laverock in Scottish): Larksong A laverock in ...
poetry is easy: make something out of nothing
poetry is easy: make something out of nothing to begin with, here is nothing, hiding somewhere in the o on your way to kindergarten you carry a pink umbrella, an antique lampshade, a fairytale turtle under which you are invisible and I think you wink to the man in the traffic light to go green ...
Reading: Lives by Derek Mahon
We travel to Northern Ireland. Derek Mahan (b. 1941)'s poetry has been compared to Louis MacNeice and W.D. Auden. Some critics have called it 'too controlled'. I found this poem worth reading, with an attribution to yet another famous Irish poet: Lives (for Seamus Heaney) First time out I was a torc of gold And ...