your grave is paid until the end of the decade when a yellow bulldozer comes rolling on the churchyard gravel somebody is paid to do this, paid. it won’t take long, they are discreet your stone becomes the pavement on which children meet or some guy commits a heinous crime and your memory is strung …
Polish poet Bronisław Maj (b. 1953) is celebrated as one of the finest poets of his generation and recepient of some reputable literary prizes (almost no author biography on the Internet fails to mention the Prizes). I found a short verse in a translation by Katarzyna Kietlinska and David Malcolm: No one, everyone No one …
William Stafford (1914-1993) was a very prolific American writer who was born in Kansas and died in Oregon. From his many works I selected, with the help of Szeslaw Milosz, a short observation about traveling: Vacation One scene as I bow to pour her coffee:– ____Three Indians in the scouring drouth ____huddle at the grave scooped in …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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’ …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Chinese poet Wen Yiduo (1899-1946) was assassinated by the Kuomintang. According to many, he was an important figure in Chinese intellectual life. He “Wen never resolved the conflicts that existed within him: The elitist and the proletarian, the scholar and the activist, the traditionalist and the innovator, the personal man and the public man, fought …
Paul Valéry (1971-1945) I found a short poem in a remarkable translation by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody: The Faux Death Humble, tender, against the charming tomb, ______Unfeeling monument That out of shadows, leavings, offered love ______Conjures your weary grace, I fall, dying against you, dying — Yet, No sooner fallen across the low grave Whose lawn littered …
