Yesterday was the fiftieth birthday of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poemsand I missed it!
In my defense, I was at an all day retreat for work, but still… Lunch Poems! A fantastic, witty little collection of one of the New York School’s greats (second only to Ashberry, I would say, but it’s pretty close and Ashberry has benefited by a significantly longer and still vibrant career).
British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy closed out the 2013-2014 poetry season at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
A witty and warm reader, her style expressed her love of doing poetry readings and her love of the role of poetry ambassador.
I purchased (and asked her to sign) a collection of love poems entitled Rapture. They’re not really just love poems, but chronicle a love affair. Many poems are in correspondence with the sonnet and other traditional forms, with hints of rhyme, without every actually tipping into formalism. It makes for a nice combination of the contemporary, while still referencing the traditional. In fact, she made a great, off hand remark about the sonnet being so ideal for love poems and that being why so many of them are sonnet-like. The sonnet, she declared, is the “little black dress of poetry.”
No.
Not it was not.
This article says otherwise, but it’s a bit of a weak cup of tea (though, in the author’s defense, he’s not given much of a word count to make his case).
No one is asking a writer who submitting an article to the American Conservative to make a fierce case for the Marxian tinged politics of Andre Breton, but it’s more than a little disingenuous the way that surrealism has been dismissed artistically.
He starts by taking a very narrow view of surrealism. So narrow, that it is entirely limited to those who lived entirely by the strictures of Breton. By that definition, the following individuals were not surrealist: Salvador Dali, Rene Char, and the later works (after, say Capital of Pain) of Paul Eluard. This is a very narrow view of the surrealist practice.
And his use of American artists from the mid-century as an example of the… inadequacy?… of surrealism is irritating. I expect artists to appropriate and oedipally reject their predecessors, but that’s not a sign of their predecessors failure. By that metric, the impressionists were a failure because Matisse and Picasso weren’t painting in the style of Monet, but appropriating portions of his style and rejecting others. That’s not failure; that’s life.
I was so excited: I had been wanting to visit the Providence Athenaeum for several years (I can’t remember how I heard about it, but it was so obviously cool, it was the first thing on my list of ‘must see things’ when we planned our trip to Providence).
First appearances were a little disappointing. Not much different than a decent library in a pleasant, if minor, Carnegie building.
But then I saw the bust of H.P. Lovecraft and went downstairs and saw the high backed reading chairs, nineteenth century looking settee, reading nooks in the windows, bookcases filled with poetry and plays reaching up and onward, racks of magazines, wooden spindles holding newspapers, tables marked ‘reserved for readers,’ and the whole thing done up like a classic English gentleman’s club (which is not, I repeat NOT, a synonym for strip club, in this particular case, but something more like the sitting where half the action in the old PBS Sherlock Holmes series took place – the one with Jeremy Brett that actually took place in Victorian England).
I sat in a table in the corner and read from the poetry of George Meredith and later from Bernard Berenson’s learned dilettante writings on Renaissance paintings. Later, I pulled down a book, Rudiments of Colours and Colouring by Fields, and opened up to the table of contents and there, on page seventy-one, was a chapter on chrome yellow – the very same color after which was named my favorite Aldous Huxley novel!
It’s true – it’s hard to like Cyclops.
You can deny workers raises and give that money to CEOs instead, but in Cali, that could cost you.
Fools! Children do not need to know poetry!
In case you had no idea what I did for a living, I worked on these two organizing campaigns.
Paper is still the best (for in depth comprehension, anyway).
the coffee philosopher 