Posts tagged poetry
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.
Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don’t read, your writing is going to suck.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
John Updike (1932-2009) delighted us during his lifetime with the variety of his gifts—as novelist, literary critic, poet, and also as a keen commentator on the art scene. In the fall, Always Looking: Essays on Art, appeared, collecting his final considerations of certain highlights of Western art over the last two hundred years—from the landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church to the steely sculptural worlds of Richard Serra, from the extravagances of Klimt to the Pop of Oldenburg and Lichtenstein. Today’s poem brings us this American master of word and image reflecting on the trajectory of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian.
Piet
How strange to see an arrow-straight career!
Trees, the attempt to do the branches justice
in honest Dutch style, led him, twig by twig,
into the net of the rectilinear,
of crosses and dashes and then thick frames
for colors prime and pure as chalice jewels,
panels of heaven blazing between girders;
he believed the world could be sublimated.
Things and scenes no longer troubled him;
a square tipped onto its corner was all
he needed grant the cockeyed real until
Manhattan greeted his exile with jazz,
with boogie-woogie and a grid of streets
that proved his dream to be (bull’s-eye!) the fact.Download a printable version of the broadside of this poem here or by clicking the image at the top of the post.
Learn more about Americana and Always Looking, and browse other titles by John Updike.
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i
In view of the fading animals
the proliferation of sewers and fears
the sea clogging, the air
nearing extinctionwe should be kind, we should
take warning, we should forgive each otherInstead we are opposite, we
touch as though attacking,the gifts we bring
even in good faith maybe
warp in our hands to
implements, to manoeuvres
iiPut down the target of me
you guard inside your binoculars,
in turn I will surrenderthis aerial photograph
(your vulnerable
sections marked in red)
I have found so usefulSee, we are alone in
the dormant field, the snow
that cannot be eaten or captured
iiiHere there are no armies
here there is no moneyIt is cold and getting colder,
We need each others’
breathing, warmth, surviving
is the only war
we can afford, staywalking with me, there is almost
time / if we can only
make it as far asthe (possibly) last summer
April is National Poetry Month. Celebrate by reading a few lines, or whole works. Cheers.
Lust For Lascaux: Speaking American by Bob Hicok
When he learned I’m a poet he asked if I knew
this other poet. We don’t all know each other,
I told him as he informed me she likes cheese
similes. Love is like cheese, time is like cheese,
cheese is surprisingly like cheese. Then I said
I know this poet and he went, see. “He went, see”
means he…
A Portrait of the English Major as a Young Woman: “Cut” by Sylvia Plathfor Susan O'Neill Roe What a thrill ----My...
“Cut” by Sylvia Plath
for Susan O'Neill Roe What a thrill ---- My thumb instead of an onion. The top quite gone Except for a sort of hinge Of skin, A flap like a hat, Dead white. Then that red plush. Little pilgrim, The Indian's axed your scalp. Your turkey wattle Carpet rolls Straight from the...
If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.
Happy birthday, Robert Frost: Asked at his 80th birthday party (in 1954) about the most important thing he had learned about life, Robert Frost had this to say: “In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on. In all the confusions of today, with all our troubles … with politicians and people slinging the word fear around, all of us become discouraged … tempted to say this is the end, the finish. But life — it goes on. It always has. It always will. Don’t forget that.”
Frost’s comments were published in the L.A. Times on Sept. 5, 1954. You can read them in full here (the slider at the top right of the page allows you to zoom).
I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder
Will you come and sit with me?
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death
Perhaps the world can teach us
as when everything seems dead
but later proves to be alive.
Love? Be it man. Be it woman.
It must be a wave you want to glide in on,
give your body to it, give your laugh to it,
give, when the gravelly sand takes you,
your tears to the land. To love another is something
like prayer and can’t be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
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All the quotes on this site are marked with the author's name, except those marked with TBV; those quotes are my own.
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