Archive for the 'Poetry' Category

Blogpost in October: 100 Years to Heaven

dylanOne hundred years ago today, in a back room on the second floor of a middle class row home in the Welsh city of Swansea, Dylan Thomas issued his first demand for the world’s attention. His cries, I feel sure, struck onlookers as both profoundly expressive and infuriatingly difficult to understand. It was a schtick he spent 39 years refining.

I believe that Thomas at his best was the finest lyric poet ever to write in English, and at his worst a pretentious windbag. The best is more than ample compensation for the worst. At age 12, he won a prize for a poem he’d submitted to a children’s magazine, and as an adult he kept a copy of that poem, cut from the magazine, pasted to his bathroom mirror. Only after he died did some literary detective discover that Thomas had plagiarized the poem. But before he was out of his teens, he wrote the superb and brilliantly original “I See the Boys of Summer”, which I am quite sure nobody else could have conceived or executed.

Because this is Thomas’s birthday, and because every blogger is entitled to an occasional bit of self-indulgence (how else could you explain Bob Murphy’s karaoke posts?), I present here a recital of the best of Thomas’s several birthday poems. For balance, you’ll find below the cut a recital of Thomas’s finest death poem (no, it’s not “Do Not Go Gentle”), and two more of my favorites on the recurrent Thomas themes of birth and the passage of time.

(Related: My 90th/96th birthday appreciation.)

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Blogpost in October

dylant

If Dylan Thomas hadn’t drunk himself to death in 1953, he might be celebrating his ninety-sixth birthday today, perhaps with a successor to the grand and glorious poem he wrote to celebrate his thirtieth.

He left us with a small number of poems so heart-wrenching that I cannot read them, even for the two hundredth time, without all of the symptoms of an emotional crisis. Take In Country Sleep, where a father reassures his daughter that she has nothing to fear from fairy tale villains—but only from the Thief who comes in multiple guises to take her faith and ultimately to leave her “naked and forsaken to grieve he will not come”. In Country Sleep was a standard bedtime poem in our house, and my daughter soon learned to anticipate “the part where Daddy cries”.

Then there’s the prose. Nobody is better at nostalgia and grief for time’s relentlessness:

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On Darwin’s 200th

Our reader Jeff Poggi sent me a sonnet he wrote in honor of Darwin’s 200’th birthday, and kindly allowed me to reproduce it here. How many hidden Darwin references can you spot?

On Darwin’s 200th
by
Jeff Poggi

Charles much under winter gray knew life
Would be back, be full, be gullible, need
Life. If inches crept by like miles rife
With their own history, then just a seed
Or stone therein would tell the story of
All this earth–all. He can’t let it be, sees
The earth make new earth, sees new stars above
Reflected, fits royal needs while he flees
Into his life in these new waters, lands.
Home in his garden he takes walks and writes,
Suffers loss most dear and is forced to hand
To them who will not hear what sorely smites
Their hallowed place, their no less hallowed birth—
From such simple forms we populate the earth.
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This is Just to Say…

William Carlos Williams is a really bad roommate and I’m tired of sharing an apartment with him.  

A hat tip to my buddy Rosa, with hat tips once and twice removed to Tim Pierce and Doctor Memory.

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As Much As Direction

Let us please learn new words that mean as much as direction: wife.

That single cryptic line is the complete text of a poem by Richard Brautigan that I first read almost forty years ago. I still don’t quite get it, but for some reason it’s always struck me as hauntingly beautiful. And, following a momentous weekend, it feels like the right thing to post today.

Edited to add: Apparently this post was as cryptic as the poem. One commenter writes:

You make it sound like you would like to get married but have not taken all necessary steps.

In fact, I took all the necessary steps this weekend. It was a lovely wedding.

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