Apr 19
MeredithPoetry, Reading, Writing guest blogger, Lizzy Gary, national poetry month, so much poetry to love
Today’s guest blogger is Lizzy Gary, an all-around amazing woman who also happens to be Avelino’s mom. Lizzy has been a writer in the corporate communications world her entire career. In her downtime, she’s a voracious reader, currently making her way through the Pulitzer fiction winners from the past 30 years. Her kids credit her with their appreciation for DIY creativity, and for their love of the written word. I hope you’ll enjoy her look into the wonder of the “Jabberwocky” and the staying power of poetry.
I am a bit intimidated by what and who has gone before me on this guest blog. But, as my kids know, I’m usually game to try something new, so here goes.
I definitely come at this from a layman’s perspective, because I have always been pretty much afraid of poetry. I can remember my first exposures to poetry, and my questioning, dumbstruck, help-me-I-don’t-understand reaction. I was heavy into Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, had made it through all of the Beverly Cleary books and loved Henry and Ribsy, and I read every book about John F. Kennedy that I could find. Poetry? Give me a break.
Then, in the fifth grade, my excellent teacher Mrs. Seay read “Jabberwocky” to us. Over and over. It was wonderful. At first reading, I was right there with my typical questioning, dumbstruck, help-me-I-don’t-understand shaking of the head. But there was something else. A smile? Yes, a smile! The words were funny. The poem was funny. The image was funny. Poetry did this? Lewis Carroll imagined a tale and then imagined the words to tell the tale? I was flabbergasted. “Jabberwocky” was fun. And after my initial reluctance, understanding began to creep in. Oh, I don’t pretend to understand Lewis any better than the next guy, or Alice, but I did begin to see that despite the nonsense, the story was there—the poem had meaning. I got it!!
Now, when I stand in uffish thought, or when I spot a vorpal sword in the Salvation Army store, I am reminded of the delight I discovered in poetry and in the Jabberwock. Oh, and I’m reminded of the most outstanding recitation of “Jabberwocky” I have ever had the privilege of hearing. And I am so pleased to share that with you now.
Think of it. Lewis Carroll wrote the first draft of the first stanza in the mid-1800s. And 125 years later, Jim Henson’s characters were reciting, interpreting, portraying the characters and action of the poem. This is mind boggling to me—that a young man wrote a nonsensical poem 150 years ago, and I’m blogging about it tonight. I am SO ready to create something that people will be doing whatever they’ll be doing about fantastic writing in 150 more years.
Some of my and my children’s best memories are of the Muppet Show—it was required watching when they were growing up. This coming together of the nonsense of Lewis Carroll , the imagination of Jim Henson, and the structure of poetry—it makes me smile. Actually, I’ve gotten all mimsy thinking about it again.
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Apr 19
MeredithPoetry, Reading, Writing Claudia Emerson, figuring out just what exactly it is that i like, G.C. Waldrep, Jennifer Boyden, Marge Piercy, national poetry month, Nick Flynn, the poet as reader, threads coming loose must be woven back together
I don’t supposed you’d find it surprising to know that I’ve been reading a lot of poetry this month. It’s been quite lovely, the chore I set myself this April to read and read and read some more poems.
In the midst of grad school and work and teaching, reading of any kind (other than the assigned kind) has felt rather fractured, shoved into the few moments I can grab before I go to sleep. That has meant that prose has been slow going, and poems were read sporadically, one at a time. In fact, I haven’t had a regular time set aside for reading poetry since 2007. I must admit, it’s embarrassing to type that.
So, the happy confluence of April and my new commute via light rail have given me new will and opportunity to dedicate time to poetry, entire books of it. In the last two weeks alone I’ve made my way through five books and started a sixth. My initial euphoria at this immersion in verse was wild, and I have loved each of the books I’ve read (at least a little and often a lot).
Today, as I was thumbing through some volumes at the bookstore (trying to replenish my stock), I realized I wasn’t sure I knew how to describe what kind of poetry I like, not in any coherent, brief way, but I was certain that it is something I (and anyone, really, who reads any kind of thing, should be able to do). So I got it into my head that I would take a look at what I’ve read recently to try to begin to suss it out.
This is surely a study that could go on for years, but even a summary glance found some trends, such as my enthusiasm for unexpected, even downright odd, descriptions that somehow wind up feeling spot on, like this phrase from “I’d Have Presented a Cup of Water of My Own Small Ax,” by Jennifer Boyden: “The shoes of rising spoons of heat.” Or this one from “Father Outside” by Nick Flynn: “My father is ink falling // in tiny blossoms.” And also this one from “Against the Madness of Crowds” by G.C. Waldrep: “The rose of each lung blooms inside.”
I am also terribly fond of anything having to do with flight, like this line from “Waxwing” by Claudia Emerson: “For weeks we lived / with the sound of wings.” And also this line from “Shadows of the Burning” by Marge Piercy: “the midges swarming / in the humid air like a nebula.” As an extension of that, I have a particular fascination with birds and space, both of which are present in the aforementioned lines.
And, then, of course, I find a mix of high and low language to be absolutely sublime. Take a look at this line from “Ago” by Nick Flynn: “I don’t understand / the patience this takes, or anything / about the light-years between stars.” Or this one from “Tropic of Cancer” by G.C. Waldrep: “I steady the prow of your bones, make you feel normal. / There’s a splinter of glass in your pale eye.” I love the way certain poets are able to shift from language that is conversational into rich, full imagery and diction.
In trying to draw those connections between the poets I’ve read recently, I realized how deeply connected they have become in my mind, how they’ve begun to form a constellation of images and references that I will study and turn over in my mind as I practice my own writing.
Coming up tomorrow: I’m excited to announce that our next guest blogger, Lizzy Gary, is coming up tomorrow. She’ll be taking a look at the timelessness of poetry, so be sure to stop by!
Apr 17
MeredithPoetry, Reading, Uncategorized, Writing Happy bedfellows, national poetry month, Nick Flynn, Octavio Paz, poetry is the bestest!
First, an apology for not posting yesterday. We we’re busy welcoming family from out of town, which turned into a bit of a comedy of flerrors when their flight was diverted to Dulles due to weather and we wound up doing crosswords in the airport for a few hours. But even though I wasn’t writing about poetry, I was thinking about it (and I hope this post will make up for my absence).
Case in point: we made a brief stop in the airport Borders to kill some time. I poked around a bit, perusing the new arrivals and bargain books, when I realized that although they had sections for fiction, history, business, children, young adult, mystery, science fiction, and even graphic novels, there wasn’t any poetry to be found. I don’t suppose that’s all that surprising, but it got me to thinking about the way poetry is sidelined, left for expansive bookstores where a shelf of poetry can be shoved to the side or the smaller bookstores that make it their mission to fill the absence felt in major chains.
I know I’ve talked about it before this month, but I think that absence of poetry says a lot about our culture. Poetry is a medium of emotion, of awe, of raw observation, of formal experimentation. We (and I say we because I am as guilty of this as anyone) seek things that are interpreted for us, we look for stories that make emotions familiar or easy to digest. We want to be entertained, and we want it to be easy. Poetry doesn’t do that for us. Poetry asks us to interpret for ourselves, to be willing to be amazed.
With that in mind, I want to look at two poems today. The first is Octavio Paz’s “Pedestrian.” The second is Nick Flynn’s “Flood.” I see in them a dialogue, a mutual exploration of the way so many of us shy away from the grit, the core of life.
First, in “Pedestrian,” we get the image of a man walking, on a day like any other: “He walked among the crowds / on the Boulevard Sebasto, / thinking about things.”
Instantly, we are given something we can all connect to–we have been that man, lost in thought about work, about the errands we need to run, alone among the crowd. Then Paz stops the man, makes him wait at a red light, gives him a moment to notice things, to look up and see that “over / the gray roofs, silver / among the brown birds, / a fish flew.”
More than anything this is a moment crafted for awe, for amazement, for curiosity and questioning. But the man, the reader’s surrogate, does what we all would do, is too be drawn away again as the light turns green and he steps into the street, shaking his head, he wonders “what he’d been thinking.” He dismisses this amazing, crazy thing, knows it to be impossible. He doesn’t even bother to muse on the odd twist in his day, how the fish, even if it is only a trick of his imagination, is something worth noting.
Conversely, in his poem “Flood,” Nick Flynn actively embraces the strange, the curious, invites his reader along with him as the speaker of his poem experiences it for them. That speaker describes the titular flood, the detritus of a disaster as it drifts by while he seeks ever-higher ground.
In doing so, he recalls that “In grade school I heard / clouds could weight three tons & I wondered // why they didn’t all just fall to the ground.” He continues in a similar line of thinking as he tells us “I study rain, each drop shaped / like a comet, ten million of them, as if a galaxy // had exploded above us.”
What I love about Flynn’s poem is that he finds beauty and mystery in a flood, the kind of thing most see only as disaster and destruction. His speaker is the opposite of Paz’s pedestrian, caught up in the whorl of everyday and perfectly happy to stay there.
That’s why I love poetry. Because there is enough every day to go around, because it is far too easy to get caught up in the mundane, because we are taught throughout our lives to be logical and to explain away the extraordinary. With poetry, read or written, we find a chance to escape that way of thinking. So I say three cheers for the extraordinary.
Apr 15
AvelinoPoetry Avelino Maestas, guest blogger, Jimmy Santiago Baca, national poetry month, New Mexico, poetry and social change
Today’s guest blogger is one of my favorite people in the world, Avelino Maestas. I was happily surprised when he agreed to get in on the poetry blogging this month, and I think you’ll enjoy his insights into New Mexican poet Jimmy Santiago Baca and his unique perspective on poetry in general. Enjoy!
Meredith and I were recently discussing the subtle differences between her high-school education and mine. We’re both pretty smart, but in talking about the past we learned that there were more classes available to me than to her—I took AP Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Computer Science, History, American Government and, of course, English. I took four years of English in high school, and tested out of the entry-level stuff in college.
And you know, there was no poetry.
Sure there were some sprinkles here and there, but it was all old. Like, Beowulf old. Poetry was never something I sought out either, much to my detriment. Even still, today, I’m a non-fiction guy.
But I love me some Jimmy Santiago Baca.
Six years ago I was sitting at a desk at WNMU, where I was the editor for the student newspaper. I was reading some blog post or another, and the author had included a snippet of ”A Daily Joy to Be Alive.”
I continually find myself in the ruins
of new beginnings,
uncoiling the rope of my life
to descend ever deeper into unknown abysses,
tying my heart into a knot
round a tree or boulder,
to insure I have something that will hold me,
that will not let me fall.
I was hooked, and it’s easy to understand why. Here was a man born in New Mexico, who wrote about such familiar subjects: food and family, friends going their separate ways, the impact of water on life in the Southwest.
As I’ve grown older, my appreciation for Baca’s poetry has grown as well. I’ve come to better understand the struggles that led him to explore poetry in the first place. And I’ve learned how powerful poetry can be in swaying the hearts and minds of others. A photograph may be worth a thousand words, but a few well-written words from a unique perspective can paint an incredible picture. Poetry connects the reader to the writer in ways that no other medium can approach. Its capacity to engender empathy is unmatched, and its ability to pull the heartstrings is the basis for every song we’ve ever loved.
So, I wanted to share with you “Immigrants In Our Own Land,” a wonderful example of Baca pulling the reader out of her comfort zone to examine something deeper.
My cell is crisscrossed with laundry lines,
my T-shirts, boxer shorts, socks and pants are drying.
Just like it used to be in my neighborhood:
from all the tenements laundry hung window to window.
Across the way Joey is sticking his hands
through the bars to hand Felipe a cigarette,
men are hollering back and forth cell to cell,
saying their sinks don’t work,
or somebody downstairs hollers angrily
about a toilet overflowing,
or that the heaters don’t work.
The imagery in Baca’s poetry astounds me, and at times, belittles me. He’s so good at transporting you somewhere, at subtly whisking you away and planting you in his shoes. And then the subtlety ends:
But in the end, some will just sit around
talking about how good the old world was.
Some of the younger ones will become gangsters.
Some will die and others will go on living
without a soul, a future, or a reason to live.
Some will make it out of here with hate in their eyes,
but so very few make it out of here as human
as they came in, they leave wondering what good they are now
as they look at their hands so long away from their tools,
as they look at themselves, so long gone from their families,
so long gone from life itself, so many things have changed.
Since I met Meredith, I’ve learned more and more about poetry. I love to read her poems, and I love when she reads those that she finds interesting or moving. Sometimes I’ll sneak a book away from her collection and expand my horizons. But I’ll always view poetry through the prism of social change, and its ability to bridge the distances that separate us from one another.
Apr 14
MeredithPoetry, Reading Jane Kenyon, keeping poetry present, lunch pail full of poems, national poetry month, poetry in your pocket
Today was Poem in Your Pocket Day. I love the idea behind this–though I must admit I feel like every day ought to mean a poem in my pocket–so I thought over the poems and poets I’ve been reading and settled on the perfect one.
Of late, I’ve been enamored of Jane Kenyon. I can’t do her justice in a small space, so I’ll be writing a full blog on her later, but today I just want to consider pocket poems. To mark the day, I carried Kenyon’s poem “Things” around with me.
I chose this poem because I love the intense focus on tiny details, like the sound of a pebble kicked into the leaves by a hen: “Never in eternity the same sound– / a small stone falling on a red leaf.”
I’m also envious of the way Kenyon uses such tiny details as a path to expanse, as she writes “the juncture of twig and branch / scarred with lichen, is a gate / we might enter, singing.” It is as though she looks through a pinhole and sees the universe.
There’s a certain contentment in Kenyon’s work, an acceptance of the way things are, birth and decay, life passing into death. She writes of things “simply lasting, then / failing to last.” But unlike many of us, who would do anything possible to avoid that failure to last, Kenyon knows that “into light all things / must fall, glad at last to have fallen.
It seemed fitting, then, to take this poem, this pinhole with an infinite view, and fold it up into my pocket, to carry those well-crafted words with me. It was a reminder of what poetry is and can be, a reminder that even the simplest language can become something profound.
Most importantly, it’s a reminder to keep poetry present. So do just that. Pick a poem, one that amazes you, one that sings to you, one that you don’t want to let go. Then keep it in your pocket or, failing that, tuck it in your purse, your wallet, or even your bra. Just keep it.
Apr 13
MeredithPoetry, Reading, Uncategorized, Writing i'd rather be jumping in puddles, national poetry month, poetry out of nothing challenge, red rainboots, yay poems!
As promised, I have my first Poetry Out of Nothing Challenge poem to share with you today. When I was pre-writing yesterday’s post, I found myself noticing small things in each day–the man behind me at the stoplight, rapping his heart out; the girl walking to the light rail in her bright red galoshes; the exquisite taste of a lemon cake where the sweet of the icing meets the tart of the citrus. These are not, at first glance, the things of literary greatness. And yet they are, in their way, infinitely poetic.
So that’s where I started: the details. Specifically the details of my drive to and from work–that man singing, the way I feel as I sit stranded at a red light, the inevitable panicky feeling of running late. It should be said that I’m an awful commuter. It’s not that I mind getting up and going to work, it’s the drive to get there. I have road rage, I want to smash traffic signals, and, being as my car is locked in 1993 (i.e. tinny radio and broken tape player), I’m a perennial channel surfer who often comes down with a terrible case of the irksome pop song earworm. All this adds up to lots of awful singing interspersed with howls of fury and well-chosen hand gestures.
As I made notes about my commute and sat with them for awhile, I found in them what I believe to be those shared experiences that I hope others may recognize from their own lives: the ruts, figurative and literal, that we wear into our minds and landscapes each day. The surprising things that can come out of the routine. The ebb and flow of frustration around tiny inconveniences.
I know this may not be a great poem, but it fits where I’m at right now, and so I let it be my guide, let it help me synthesize the repetitive motion of the work-a-day world with all its successes and, yes, stresses. I hope you’ll enjoy it.
Commuter
It is
hands on
the wheel,
wheels on
the pavement,
circular motion
of a day.
He is
the man behind
me spittin’
rhymes like no one
is watching,
but
I am.
That is,
if my blood
doesn’t boil
over, foot hovering
above the accelerator,
because,
thing is,
when given
control of my own
destiny, I am
never
on time.
~Meredith Purvis
****Poetry Out of Nothing Challenge Update****
1. The deadline has been extended to April 27, 2011.
2. There are now prizes! Yay, prizes! I’ll be creating a page with general info about the challenge and details about the prizes, so keep an eye out for that today or tomorrow.
3. Winners will be determined by popular vote. I’ll figure out the voting process and pass that info along as soon as I have it.
Apr 12
MeredithPoetry, Reading, Writing build a poem from your very own day, dorianne laux, kim addonizio, national poetry month, poetry from nothing challenge, The Poet's Companion, watch it grow before your eyes!
I’ve been thinking about where poems come from. I’ve also been reading The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, a book by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux. As I’ve been pondering the genesis of poetry and wondering how to offer new or less frequent readers a way in to it, an idea began to form in my head. I suppose I owe Addonizio and Laux a substantial thanks for their clarity of vision and success in creating a “how-to” of sorts, because that is what took my wisp of inspiration and gave it form. But first, let me explain what I mean about Addonizio and Laux.
They introduce their book with an affirmation of that old intro to creative writing adage “write what you know,” but quickly acknowledge that such words almost always fall on deaf, or disbelieving, ears. We doubt ourselves, they say, because we believe our lives are too ordinary for art, that we cannot tackle the big questions in life. And then those brilliant women take that worn out bit of advice and reshape it, make it useful:
“The trick is to find out what we know, challenge what we know, own what we know, and then give it away in language: I love my brother, I hate winter, I always lose my keys . . . Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone’s . . . don’t wait for something to happen before you begin to write; pay attention to the world around you, right now. That’s what poets do.”
Which brings me back to my plan. Drum roll, please! I’m challenging myself and my readers to pay attention to the world around us, our daily lives, right now, and to use that to make poetry. More clearly: join me in the ” Poetry Out of Nothing” challenge. Over the next week, pay attention to the things you do each day, whether they are routine or unusual. Then turn that into a poem.
If you’ve never written a poem, don’t let that stop you. Start at the beginning. Take a few moments when you wake up or on your lunch break or just before you go to bed to jot down some thoughts, a journal entry of sorts. Let it sit for a day, then come back to it and flesh it out, write it up in paragraph form.
Then start molding that paragraph–throw in some line and stanza breaks. Don’t stress out about where they go–decide to put them every fourth word and every third line, or just put some in whenever it feels right. This challenge isn’t about writing great poetry that will change the world or be remembered throughout the ages. It’s about finding a way into poetry and using it as a way (one of many) to observe and synthesize our lives, as a way to communicate with this whole wide world full of people going through things not unlike what we’re going through ourselves.
But here’s where the real challenge comes in: once you’ve built your poem, I want you to send it to me. Then I’ll share them here, on the blog throughout the rest of poetry month. Some guidelines:
- Try to keep your poem at or below twenty lines (for the sake of space), or, if you can’t, then excerpt a sample of about that length
- Give your poem a title (The thing new poems most wish is a title)
- Send your poem to me (within the body of the email–no attachments) at halfstartsandtrailoffs [at] gmail.com
- Please make your subject line “Poetry Out of Nothing Submission”
- The challenge deadline is Wednesday, April 27, 2011.
- If you’d like to share your poem, but want to do it anonymously, just make a note of it in your email
- If you’ve got questions or concerns or crazy harebrained schemes, send them my way at halfstartsandtrailoffs [at] gmail.com.
I hope you’ll take up this challenge–I’ll be doing it myself and, in fact, have already started. I’ll share my first Poem Out of Nothing (the nothing of my morning commute, in fact) tomorrow, so keep an eye out.
**UPDATE, 1:01 p.m.**
Further reflection has led me to some expansions of this challenge:
1. Do you know what would make this challenge even better? If you could vote for your favorite poem. Know what would be even cooler than that? If there were prizes for the winners! I am in the process of trying to secure some prizes so that we can do that. Stay tuned for an update.
2. If I get enough submissions, I’ll pull them all together in a chapbook. Poems, prizes AND publications? This is all just too much!
**ANOTHER UPDATE, 11:42 a.m., 4-13-11**
Instead of feeling arbitrarily boxed in by the month of April, I’m going to extend the challenge deadline to Wednesday, April 27. If necessary, I’ll continue to post poems into early May, because, let’s be honest, why should we stop celebrating this wonderful stuff just because the calendar flips from April to May? I’ve corrected the deadline listed above, as well.
Apr 11
MeredithBookmaking, Poetry, Reading, Uncategorized, Writing a window into poetry, bookiness, Christina Gay, guest blogger, Jenny O'Grady, national poetry month, the bluest bird
I’m thrilled to introduce today’s guest blogger, Christina Gay. Christina is a crafter, marshmallow-maker, Marion Winik’s webmistresses, and the managing editor of Passager. She lives with her husband in the Pen Lucy community of Baltimore. She makes the most amazing cards and books–they are stunning in their beauty, craftsmanship, and innovation. I was so pleased when she told me that not only would she blog for us, she would be looking at how she turns poems into books. And so, without further ado…
When Meredith asked me to guest blog, I went back and forth in my head trying to pick a favorite poem to talk about. Of course, it took days, and I never settled on one. But then I thought, Why not talk about how I interpret poems, which is to make them into books.
I’m focusing on a collaborative project by myself and poet Jenny O’Grady. Jenny shared this wonderful poem with me as part of my FaceBook Poem Project, where I ask friends to share something they wrote with me and I make a mini-book interpretation of it.
When I start on a new poem/book, I first live with the poem for a little bit, trying not to over-interpret it. By the second or third reading, I usually have pretty good image of how I want to book to be. It’s not always an easy decision; I just try to keep it simple and go with my gut. One poem could have many books: it’s all about the bookmaker’s immediate interpretation. That excites me: you can experience the same poem in so many different ways. This book that I made with “Bluebird” by Jenny O’Grady is a good example of this (poem published here with permission from the author and for your reading pleasure only).
Bluebird
you escaped on horseback
the cotton of your hospital gown
unsnapped and
flying behind you,
the laces cringing, retaining
the shape
of your captivity
you trusted the mare
pushed your face into
her mane and
let your mind skip
ahead to now
~Jenny O’Grady
When Jenny shared this poem with me, she mentioned that although the title is “Bluebird”, that fact has little to do with the actual poem. For me, this poem is about the window and the thoughts and images it inspires. So for the physical shape of the book I made a classic four-pane window (of course there is plastic “glass” in the windows), attaching a small bluebird to the inside of the back cover. Although I try to stay away from such literalness, I used blue for the covers, because blue always seems to me to be the color of memory. As for the bluebird, the beauty of its blue is only matched by the reddish-orange of its breast. It was that color that inspired the type color.
In lieu of actual letterpressing, I “stamped” the text onto the pages. This is fairly simple to do, and I hope others will do it as well: print your page (reversed) onto acetate or some kind of plastic at the “best” setting on your ink jet printer, and then use a bone folder to rub the ink onto the page. This is easier than it might sound, and the emotional payoff is huge!
Because part of bookmaking is presentation, I bound the book with the piano-hinge method so that it can be opened fully. I love this poem, and have found a true personal connection to it. And now I can hold it in my hand, and see it through the windows. A true privilege.
I hope this will inspire you to make a book, either with your own work or someone else’s. And if you’d like to collaborate in making a book, please contact me through my blog. Thank you, Meredith, for this opportunity!
Apr 10
MeredithPoetry, Reading, Uncategorized, Writing brooks, ginsberg, Half a league to the golden shovel in a red wheelbarrow or a straw hut and babies in the tomatoes or perhaps that black shoe, komunyakaa, national poetry month, plath, tennyson, the poetry archive, the sounds of poetry, williams
I read once, I wish I could remember where, that poetry, when written, is only half finished. That the true art in poetry comes from the exchange between writer and reader, and, in fact, is most complete when the poetry is read out loud. Perhaps it was the same place or perhaps another where I first learned the idea that poetry is a physical art, an art of the body; that more than pen on paper it is the air in the lung, the vibrations in the vocal chords that are the tools of this art.
I believe those two things, and I know that they are most true when they meet in the reader moving from silent review of the words to a full bodied declamation. Only then can the rhythms and the sounds truly be discovered, only then can the music of poetry be heard.
So today, I wanted to share with you some poetry recordings. I do, I think, aspire to bring you newer or lesser known authors, partly because I fear I can say nothing of value on the great and most well-studied of writers, but also because there are so many wonderful poets out there, and it is my hope to help you discover some of them. But, for today, it seems most appropriate to offer up some poems or poets you may well have heard of, but perhaps never heard aloud. Most of these come from The Poetry Archive, a fantastic non-profit.
Half a league, half a league, half a league onward: Alfred Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade”
I love his full, sonorous voice, the scratch and pop of the recording.
Seven at the golden shovel: Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool”
This poem is a staple in lower-level English courses, where teachers struggle to show students the beauty and validity of poetry. The first time I heard Brooks read this, it was as if I had come across an entirely new poem. The lilt and pause make this.
So much depends upon: William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”
This is a short poem, and so Williams’ reading of it is even more crucial–how he draws out some words, lavishing them with breath, and clips, staccato, through others.
Unbelievable faith in water: Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Instructions on Building Straw Huts”
I love the rolling rhythm Komunyakaa brings to this poem. In fact, I think I could happily listen to him reading just about anything.
Babies in the tomatoes: Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California”
This is perhaps my favorite poem of all. It is one I memorized, reciting it slowly to myself. Then I heard Ginsberg reading it, and I let him teach me how it should be read.
You do not do, you do not do: Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”
It is simple: you cannot know this poem until you hear Plath read it–her arch, expressive voice, the emotion she laces the words with, full to bursting, but tightly controlled.
A quick look ahead: I’m so looking forward to tomorrow, when Christina Gay will be our guest blogger. She’ll be taking a look at what it means to turn a poem into an art book.
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