Today is so-called "black friday" -- perhaps no more fitting time on so many levels can be found for this week's poem. It is both a kind of warped satirical nursery rhyme for adults and a treatise of social criticism. MacNeice's "Bagpipe Music" dates from 1937.
Bagpipes, like some politicians, are full of hot air. And so this re-make of MacNeice's "Bagpipe Music" appropriately refers to Ronnie, presumably Ronald Reagan. The song was part of their album The Janngling Man (1990).
NO, W.H. Auden (1907-1973) did not famously ask if poetry could make anything happen, rather he bluntly stated, in his elegy for W.B. Yeats that "Poetry makes nothing happen." But since then, everyone else has been asking that question. Can poetry change anything? In an interview with Richard Crossman just a few months before he died, Auden said: "Nothing I wrote prevented one Jew from being gassed or stalled the war for five seconds." Yet, in the midst of the fray of the 1930s, no one recorded it better than Auden, with important poems concerning the rise of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, and the beginning of World War II.
The text of the poem, published in Another Time (1940) is still under copyright, and can be found on poets.org.
Dylan Thomas reads the poem.
The Johnson presidential campaign famously used two lines from the poem in a 1964 advertisement
If you want to learn more about Auden, why not follow Langdon Hammer's class?
As time went on, Auden felt his poem included too much moralizing, and chose not to include it in later collections of his poems, but his readers were too attached to the text to allow it to be forgotten.
Poetry may not stop wars, but it is an essential component of the human spirit, and may actually help people to cope and retain their sanity in trying times.
It's rather the perfect Halloween Poem: Death takes you out on a romantic ride, or so it seems at first glance. Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" is a brilliant composition in six stanzas of decreation. For a reliable text of the poem, see Poets.org
(https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/because-i-could-not-stop-death-479).
Dickinson rarely gave titles to the poems that she inscribed into her own hand-crafted and hand-sewn notebooks, and this is no exception, but over time, first lines have provided titles. You will notice that Dickinson's favorite punctuation mark appears to be the dash, and it has taken a century for her editors to respect her own punctuation. Was that because she was a woman?
So it is helpful to check any published version of a Dickinson text against her own handwriting. It is now possible to do that on-line through the Emily Dickinson archive: http://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/235752
One of the most exciting things about the religious poet George Herbert (1593-1633), who was also an Anglican priest, is that he was appreciated by all the different religious groups of his period. His great critic (and editor) Helen Wilcox has argued that Herbert deliberately took a mediating stance to help promote more peaceful relations among the religious factions of the period.
Although many of Herbert's poems are deceptively simplistic looking on a first reading, they stand the test of repeated readings and reveal hidden complexities when you spend time with them.
'The Altar' is a wonderful example of this. It is an emblem poem, and people are usually keen to observe an altar, a pillar, a cup, or the letter I when they look at the poem. Of course deep religious meanings and the notion of sacrifice are contained within the words of the poem. But there is also a discourse about art that generates new meaning, and one revealing trick is to count the times you can spell art in the poem, frontwards, backwards and sideways, using letters within words such as altar, heart, part, etc.
This week's poem can best be explored using your colored pencils. It is recommended that you print out a copy of the poem and start circling repeated words in different colors. It is a bit like a complex puzzle you will try to take apart: you will probably need to read through the poem six or seven times before you locate every word that is repeated. These repetitions help create the music, in a poem that does not rely on end line rhymes. The poem is under copyright, so find it on poets.org. For those whose first language is not English, and even for native English speakers, the vocabulary may be a bit challenging. Look up the words, so that you can perceive the meanings.
It is hard to discern which talent was the more mastered by Ivor Gurney, musical composition or poetry. What is certain is that the experience of fighting in the Battle of the Somme and of being in the trenches with limited resources for musical composition led him to intense poetic creativity. He sent letters home to his friend, musicologist Marion Scott, recording French words he learns, the slang of war-time, and manuscripts of his poems. He arrived in France in May 1916, was wounded in the shoulder spring 1917, then gassed at Saint-Julien in September 1917, after which he was discharged.
This poem, composed in 1925 in a mental hospital, vividly recalls the trenches, possibly with the experience of hearing records being played by the enemy at night. It includes the poet's deeper wish that the enemies could serenade each other instead of shoot each other.
Serenade
It was after the Somme, our line was quieter,
Wires mended, neither side daring attacker
Or aggressor to be—the guns equal, the wires a thick hedge,
When there sounded, (O past days for ever confounded!)
The tune of Schubert which belonged to days mathematical,
Effort of spirit bearing fruit worthy, actual.
The gramophone for an hour was my quiet’s mocker,
Until I cried, ‘Give us ‘‘Heldenleben’’, ‘‘Heldenleben’’,’
The Gloucesters cried out ‘Strauss is our favorite wir haben
Sich geliebt’. So silence fell, Aubers’ front slept,
And the sentries an unsentimental silence kept.
True, the size of the rum ration was still a shocker
But at last over Aubers the majesty of the dawn’s veil swept.
One of the aspects of war that the poem makes allusion to is the "rum ration" in the penultimate line: soldiers where given something alcoholic to drink before going over the top, so a large ration of alcohol might indicate a difficult battle. But the rum ration could also refer to the small size and poor quality of food served to the troops.
Take a few minutes to listen to one of Gurney's musical compositions.
Links
Tim Kendall, "Ivor Gurney and the poets of the First World War," OUP Blog (October 14, 2013).
This poem has been going viral on social media around the United States for the past two weeks, and then it was published here:
The Black Lives Matter movement and people all across the United States review their basics with this "I, too, sing America," which the New York Times printed over the entire back page of the paper on September 22, 2016. When Hughes recites the poem, he changes the line "They'll see how beautiful I am" to "They'll see how beautiful we are," and this is not only to avoid bragging about his own looks. He is emphasizing that the "I" of the poem is not only his private I —in fact the speaker of the poem may be the poet or may be "the darker brother"—but is also a collective we. The "I" represents all people of color.
On some level, this poem is a prophecy that Hughes optimistically writes during the Harlem Renaissance (the poem was first published in a magazine in 1925, and then was part of his first book of poems, The Weary Blues, published in1926). In today's United States, the prophecy has been fulfilled with a second term of President Barack Obama, and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. on September 24, 2016. However, the flip side of that coin is that the poem is still a "dream deferred" for a number African Americans.
Links
Langston Hughes, "I, Too" text of the poem at Poetry Foundation (with related content).
David Ward, "What Langston Hughes' 'I, Too' Tells Us About America's Past and Present" on Langston Hughes at Smithsonian.com (September 22, 2016).
Sligo today is the home of the Yeats summer school. When W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) was a boy and young man it was a family place, associated with different relatives, and surrounded with exceptional landscapes. His family left Sligo for London before he was ten years old, but he returned there for vacations and it left a considerable influence on his poetry.
The poem "The Second Coming" was first published in 1919, several years after the Easter Uprising in Dublin (see his "Easter 1916"), and in the wake of the carnage of the First World War. It seems to describe a modernist apocalypse
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
This poem of twenty-two lines could hardly be more famous than it is today. A century after its first publication, many phrases from the poem have entered common parlance. Some versions of the poem have a line break before the last five lines of the poem.
Nick Tabor describes how this poem has been quoted throughout the twentieth century in "No Slouch" Paris Review (April 7, 2015). And here's one example of what he's talking about:
A short 25 minute length lecture on the poem by an anonymous professor at Saint Ignatius College (the lecture is good, I wish the professor could receive some credit for it) :
Roy Foster speaks about the second volume of his biography of Yeats, in an hour or so (April 2014).
Ronan McDonald, from the University of New South Wales, lecturing on Yeats, Ireland, and the Modern World in 2011, at the ANU Centre for European Studies. A good introduction to Yeats and Irish poetry in 45 minutes.
This week's poem of the week is no longer under United States copyright, having been first published over 100 years ago.
But instead of reproducing the whole text here, it would be more fun for you to see the text as it was first printed in 1914, in the Chicago magazine Poetry, edited by Harriet Monroe. The Poetry Foundation website, which today provides on-line archives of the magazine, has evolved from a century of publication of Poetry and generous financial support. They also host a favorite poetry project, to which you will find a link below.
This interpretation of the poem also does it justice, though not all of the illustrations are from Chicago.
Of course, to get the full impact of this poem you need to remember what Chicago in 1914 was like. The population of the city had exploded during the prior century (from 4000 people approximately in 1840 to well over 1,000,000 in 1890), and the waves of new immigrants kept coming. For men, manual labor was relatively easy to find: in the stockyards, on the railroads, in the steel mills. Luckily, for the wives and children of these immigrants, there were some prominent citizens of Chicago with a social conscience—they tended to gravitate around Hull House, founded by Jane Addams and Helen Gates Starr in 1889 (for more on Jane Addams, consult links here, http://tothatsameoldplace.blogspot.fr/search?q=Hull+house). This was the city that reversed the flow of water in the Chicago River in 1900, to avoid having further epidemics of typhoid and cholera.
Learn a bit more about Carl Sandburg by consulting the following links:
Carol Rumens already writes a weekly column on poetry for the Guardian, and this new blog effort makes no pretense of trying to steal her show, which is, on the contrary, most warmly recommended.
Here, instead, will be poems that go to class with me, once a week, and are given exposure to all the French students I teach, from first year college students to students at Master Level. There is still no reason why they should not also consult the interesting analyses of Carol Rumens.
Poem of the Week #1: Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool"
First things first: it probably looks like no poem you ever saw before. It does not look like a sonnet, it does not look like a ballad. You will notice that it has a subtitle that suggests the name of the bar where the action takes place, "Seven at the Golden Shovel". Since the full text of the poem is under copyright, here is a link to poets.org where you can read the text in full, and also hear it recited by the poet herself, with a number of interesting comments.
You will notice that the poet's recitation syncopates the rhythm, making this short poem sound like a jazz poem. If jazz, it is probably bebop—that more angry and rebellious genre. The two-line stanzas almost all end with the same word, "We" coming after a period, creating a very unified rhyme scheme. In fact lines 1-6 could also be described as rhyming couplets. But there are also numerous internal line rhymes: cool/school (lines 1-2), late/straight (3-4), sin/gin (5-6), June/soon (7-8).
All but the first and last lines contain only three words, and all the words of the poem are monosyllabic. Line one begins and ends with the same word (as a figure of speech, this is called epanalepsis). The sentences are simple sentences. The first one "We real cool" is agrammatical in that the verb "are" was omitted. The reader understands that the lack of education is perceptible in the language of these youths. All the other sentences have a verb and direct object (lines 2, 5, 6, 7) or verb and adverb (lines 3, 4, 8). The poet is able to give added punch to line seven because of the ambiguity surrounding the word jazz as she mentions in the recording (and that is also quite clever because the origin of the word jazz is indeed ambiguous). The month of June being also a traditional time for school testing, it seems that the speakers (the "we" in the poem) are also saying that they do not worry about tests.
Gwendolyn Brooks recalled that the inspiration for the poem came when she passed a pool hall and was surprised to find school-aged youths present there on a school day. This happened in her neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. The poem implies that the poet was worried that by skipping school these youths were digging their own graves. The shovel of the name of the bar could come in handy if they "die soon" as the end of the poem suggests. It is hard to realize, when one is in school, that life passes so rapidly. But perhaps Brooks was also concerned about the age at which young people who neglect their education die — or to put it differently, this poem might be considered a precursor to the Black Lives Matter movement. Brooks herself was a prominent artist in the Black Arts movement of the 1960s.
anticucho, n.
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OED Word of the Day: anticucho, n. In Peruvian and Bolivian cookery: a
marinated piece of meat (typically beef heart), grilled on a skewer; a dish
of this.
A real sense of purpose: Life of the Day
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Today's biography from the Oxford DNB: *T'Serclaes, Baroness Elizabeth
Blackall de* [*née *Elizabeth Blackall Shapter; *other married name *Elizabeth
Blac...
Poetry workshop: Skin
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Rachael Boast discovers some ingenious responses to this month's exercise,
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The six poems I settled on for a detailed respo...
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Patty Nash
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*Patty Nash's *first book, *Walden Pond*, was published with Thirdhand
Books in August 2024. Her poems have appeared in *The Paris Review*, the *Washingto...
Poem of the week: Scallop Shell by Grace Schulman
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An emblem of medieval pilgrimage gains fresh resonance in a more recent
time of plague
*Scallop Shell*
See them at low tide,
scallop shells glittering o...
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Reading Peter Schjeldahl Peter Schjeldahl builds paragraphs. Possibly no
other critic now writing in English has such a strong sense of what that
unit of...
THE HIVE: when books get declined
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Firstly, I apologise for not being able to change titles listed in the
sidebar. I've managed to get locked out of my blogger acount, but still
have access ...
JOI web cam Dominatrix
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Glad and Proud to be English Working Class
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Matthew Bannister reminds listeners on BBC Radio 4's Last Word program (July
8 and 10, 2016) that Sir Geoffrey Hill said he was "glad and proud to have
bee...
John McAuliffe on Adam Crothers' 'A Fit Against'
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*A Fit Against* by Adam Crothers
The left hand knows what the right rear leg wants.
The centaur’s cento splices Black Beauty and Frankenstein.
He likes t...
Missel-Child shortlisted for Seamus Heaney Prize
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I’m delighted to announce that my poetry collection Missel-Child is one of
the five titles shortlisted for this year’s Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry
priz...
Live Poetry This Week
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A few live poetry events for this week, across the UK:Thursday: In Bath, at
the BRLSI, Rebecca Goss and Jackie Wills, 8pm start.... Thursday: London's
Bang...
PhD Boot Camp 2 Hours ($59)
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If you ever wanted to know what it’s like to be behind a real lecture
podium and instruct a room full of undergrads with flair and panache, this
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Gay Male Poetry Post Identity Politics, Part Five
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I am now posting the last of the presentations from my AWP panel on gay
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Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec teaches English at the University of Caen in Normandy. She is co-editor of "La poésie de Geoffrey Hill et la modernité" (L'Harmattan, 2007), "Selected Poems from Modernism to Now" (CSP, 2012), "Poetry & Religion: Figures of the Sacred" (Peter Lang, 2013), "European Voices in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats and Geoffrey Hill" (Peter Lang, 2015).
Her research interests include Contemporary Poetry, British and American Literature, especially Literature in conjunction with Memory, History, Religion, and War.
