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Canadian Pennies, the Nation of Texas and a poem
April is National Poetry Month. All sorts of organizations, schools, and institutions have all sorts of things planned to bring poetry into American life. But I heard a pretty cool one on March 30, a...
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A goddess’s eyes, a museum’s treasures, and the fall of civilizations
The old man laughed indulgently, holding in check a deeper, more explosive delight. “Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed. All great countries are...
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Sunday Music: Leonard Cohen Old Ideas
His voice is unmistakeable, his lyrics are second to none. And I’m not talking Dylan here. For nearly as long as Dylan has, Leonard Cohen has been creating incomparable songs–songs that deal with...
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Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert Burns and My Father
Hugh MacDiarmid Hugh MacDiarmid times 4 No’ wan in fifty kens a wurd Burns wrote But misapplied is a’body’s property And gin there was his like alive the day They’d be the last a kennin’ haund to gi’e–...
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“Before the World was Made”
“The Yale philosopher Shelly Kagan … manages to raise some interesting and subtle concerns about …notions relating to the question of what’s really bad about death, including this one: Why do we regard...
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Poetry on TV: The Song of Lunch by Christopher Reid
Farewell to long lunches and other boozy pursuits! Hail to the new age of the desk potato, … Sometimes, though, a man needs to go out on the rampage, throw conscientious time-keeping to the winds, kill...
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A footnote on The Sugar Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner
Despite my misgivings, I plowed ahead and finished The Sugar Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner. My original appraisal was unchanged. I felt it was infantile, too enamored with its own cleverness, and...
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“Love Poem” by John Frederick Nims…all the toys of the world would break.
Love Poem (by John Frederick Nims) John Frederick Nims (1913-1999) My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases, At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring, Whose palms are bulls in china, burs...
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Northern California and Ireland, sea lions and selkies, and a powerful poem
I am not the first to make the comparison between the Pacific Coast Highway in Northern California and Ireland. But that doesn’t make it any less true. It is a magnificent landscape, full of crashing...
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Book Review: Eyes, Stones by Elana Bell
Eyes, Stones–Elana Bell’s first collection of poetry and the winner of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award–is an extraordinary feat of poetry and clear-mindedness. Each of these 40 small poems are dense...
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Baseball Poetry: “The Pitcher” by Robert Francis
Satchel Paige–a true poet I gave my students a poem today and asked them to wriggle around inside it and tell me everything they found in there. The poem I gave them was “The Pitcher” by Robert...
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Quote of the Week #24: October 13, 2013
Georges Simenonillustration 2013 by jpbohannon “If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put poetry in everything, necessarily.” Georges Simenon
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Billy Collins … and how to think better of poetry
Billy Collins The other night I went to see the poet Billy Collins deliver a lecture. It was a pretty fancy event–I’d been given the tickets– held in the beautiful Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center in...
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Quote 47: “Poetry is above all…” Adrienne Rich
“Concentration”illustration 2015 by jpbohannon “Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship with everything in the universe.”...
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Video Poem #2: “To a woman watching Desk Set while making mushroom soup”
I saw a friend of mine whom I rarely see anymore. We used to work closely together and were in each others’ company continually throughout the workday. I had an office next to hers, a class across the...
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Video Poem #3: “Ca’ the Yowes” by Robert Burns
Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes By Robert Burns Ca’ the yowes to the knowes, Ca’ them wha the heather grows Ca’ them wha the burnie rows, My bonie dearie. Hark! the mavis’ evening sang Sounding Cluden’s...
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Quote #55: “With one kiss…” Pablo Neruda
Portrait of Pablo Neruda by Andrea Ventura “With one kiss, you will know all that I haven’t said.” Pablo Neruda (En un beso, sabrás todo lo que he callado)
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Rumi on Figs
Figs The Ripe Fig Now that you live here in my chest, anywhere we sit is a mountaintop. And those other images, which have enchanted people like porcelain dolls from China, which have made men and...
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Quote #71: “Poetry … milks the unconscious.”— Anne Sexton
Self Portrait by Anne Sexton “Poetry, after all, milks the unconscious.” Anne Sexton
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Seeing Things and then “Seeing Things”
“Fish” by jpbohannon, 2017 One of Seamus Heaney’s later collections of poetry was entitled Seeing Things, and indeed the Irish poet was a master of detailed observation. His career was built on seeing...
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