A poet is a lazy philosopher - K. Choi, lazy poet
Month: December 2017
Reading: This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams
Something light and exhilarating today. William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was a New York poet important voice of modernism and symbolism, who was celebrated by Ginsberg and the Beats for his accessibility. For our growing anthology, I read what is probably the most famous post-it note of American culture: This is just to say I have ...
Tableau I
, in which we are all gummy bears
competing with each other
on the birthday table of a child
who has yet to be diagnosed colorblind
Reading: Winged And Acid Dark by Robert Hass
Robert Hass (b. 1941) is another famous American poet who served as Poet Laureate of that immense country and won a Pulitzer prize. I read one of his poems today that I think is representative. In other words: vintage Hass: Winged and acid dark A sentence with "dappled shadow" in it. Something not sayable spurting ...
Icecream
in my country, everybody can eat icecream with wholeness in it world leaders rub nuclear shoulders for it, spiders feel secure in their web with some fly carcasses but it is warming everywhere and I am afraid of the others who restrict everything what if I want to dance on harvest day? what if I ...
Math
Dear Miru, Your calculating is improving and you actually like it. We play with numbers together. Two times ten is twenty. Six plus five is eleven. Ten minus 2 equals eight. It is all very playful. You learn how to figure out calculations by making drawings of dots, lines, squares on the whiteboard. You don't ...
Reading: Anthem for doomed youth by Wilfred Owen
English war poetry from the trenches. After Sassoon I read a poem from the pen of remarkable Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), one great poor soul from the culled generation of World War I: Anthem for doomed youth What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? ____Only the monstrous anger of the guns. ____Only the stuttering rifles' ...
Reading: Résumé by Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) has lead a tempestuous life with several marriages, some suicides attempt and employment by Vanity Fair. One of her collections is called 'enough rope' and I can't supress a sinister feeling. However, she stayed alive and became a productive screenwriter and poet. I sample a very short piece here, because short verse ...
Reading: Taking off Emily Dickinson’s clothes by Billy Collins
Billy Collins (b. 1941) is 'the most popular poet of America' according to some. He was poet laureate of the US several times and won a prize or something for the America's funniest home poetry - he manages to tell a good joke without destroying the poetic wager. I fell in love with this poet, ...
Reading: A motel in the hotel of time by Dale Houstman
Dale Houstman is an extraordinary poet from America and I am his friend on the Internet. Today, I want to read a poem from his collection 'A dangerous vacation'. There is a lot of extraordinary stuff but I stick to a not so long poem that has an enigmatic metaphor as a title: A motel ...
Be Farecul When You Ross The Croad
You learn very fast now. Lately, we have been playing "lettertjes omdraaien", exchange letters in words. Even though you don't really get the concept of spelling yet and how several letters make up a word (it is interesting that this mental apparatus is apparently rather complicated; letters are an abstraction, the unit of our language ...
Reading: After Love by Sara Teasdale
Today I discover a short gem written by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), who wrote a lot of love poetry and committed suicide at the age of 48. I came across this timeless poem about passion:
Reading: My Madonna by Robert W. Service
Robert W. Service (1874-1958) was known as the bard of Yukon, because a lot of his poetry was inspired by his time as a cowboy in Canada. He is also a war poet, having been a reporter of the Balkan war of 1912-13 and an ambulance driver during World War One. I read a funny ...
Reading: The Reckoning by Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), a sickly boy who transformed into a bear of a man with father issues, was according to many critics the greatest of the American poets. While browsing a collection of his poetry on the Internet, I stumbled upon a poem about reckoning. I understand from his biography that he sought for redemption ...
Reading: Sad steps by Philip Larkin
I browsed a digital collection of Larkin (1922-1985) to get an idea of his poetry. Returning appears to be the theme of aging, or in the words of this biography, "A sense that life is a finite prelude to oblivion underlies many of Larkin's poems". The man himself said "Deprivation is for me what daffodils ...
Reading: Attack by Siegfried Sassoon
Famed British war poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) from a family that was called the "Rothschilds of the east", wrote acclaimd poetry about the trenches of the first world war, so we put the fellow in our anthology. Later in life, he converted to catholicism, a mental swift that also produced some poetic residu, albeit not ...