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Posts for Tag: poetry

Walt Whitman's Birthday

He's almost 200! What? You were expecting When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed?

For a much more reverent mashup of Whitman, NASA, and Sagan, try this

via Brain Pickings

Comments aren't ready yet, so I'll just add this in the body of the post: don't miss this fan letter to Walt Whitman at Explore: May my right-hand wither if I don’t tell the world before another week, what one woman thinks of you.

More for poetry month

Billed as an East Village poetry walk, the project, “Passing Stranger,” is a site-specific audio tour that guides listeners through the history of the neighborhood’s interconnected writers and shakers, with interviews, archival recordings and recitations of poems. Narrated by the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, with music by John Zorn, it is a literary and geographic keepsake, a portrait of a bohemian community that still resounds.

On April 15, it will officially make its debut with a reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, the last stop on the tour, but the guide is already available as a free MP3 at eastvillagepoetrywalk.org. Listeners can download it and stroll through the tour anytime (or just imagine the sights mentioned from their couches).

The project, supported by the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, was five years and more than 40 drafts in the making, whittled from nearly 100 hours of tape, Mr. Malinovski, a freelance radio producer, said. The idea came to him when he first moved to the city, and lived in the East Village. He read Daniel Kane’s “All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s,” and walked around, envisioning the Beats and the generations of New York School poets who followed. A map began to form, and a natural chronicle.

In today's edition, The New York Times tells a wonderful story of a walking tour through the East Side focusing on the writers of New York. The usual suspects are there—Ginsberg and Kerouac—but William Burroughs, Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, and LeRoi Jones find their way into the piece. The real surprise for me is the opening—Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, was once buried in New York City! I've gone out of my way to visit sites associated with Antonin Dvorak, Bela Bartok, and William Dean Howells, but this is a pilgrimage I've yet to make.

Love Is a Stranger

Kabir Helminski presents his translations of 44 poems by Jelaluddin Rumi. Here is one about questing.

Search the Darkness

Sit with your friends; don't go back to sleep.
Don't sink like a fish to the bottom of the sea.

Surge like an ocean,
don't scatter yourself like a storm.

Life's waters flow from darkness.
Search the darkness, don't run from it.

Night travelers are full of light,
and you are, too; don't leave this companionship.

Be a wakeful candle in a golden dish,
don’t slip in the dirt like quicksilver.

The moon appears for night travelers,
be watchful when the moon is full.

 

 

 

 

 

 

via spiritualityandpractice.com

Frederic Brussat shares a nice selection from Rumi at his site. I should have noted the beginning of (and my excitement for) Poetry Month yesterday.

Produce by Debra Allberry | The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Produce

by Debra Allberry

Walking Distance) -->

No mountains or ocean, but we had orchards
in northwestern Ohio, roadside stands
telling what time of summer: strawberries,
corn, apples---and festivals to parade
the crops, a Cherry Queen, a Sauerkraut Dance.
Somebody would block off a street in town,
put up beer tents and a tilt-a-whirl.

Our first jobs were picking berries.
We'd ride out early in the back of a pickup---
kids my age, and migrants, and old men
we called bums in sour flannel shirts
smash-stained with blueberries, blackberries,
raspberries. Every fall we'd see them
stumbling along the tracks, leaving town.

Vacationland, the signs said, from here to Lake Erie.
When relatives drove up we took them to see
The Blue Hole, a fenced-in bottomless pit
of water we paid to toss pennies into---

or Prehistoric Forest, where, issued machine guns,
we rode a toy train among life-sized replicas
of brontosaurus and triceratops.

In winter the beanfield behind our house
would freeze over, and I would skate across it
alone late evenings, sometimes tripping
over stubble frozen above the ice.
In spring the fields turned up arrowheads, bones.
Those slow-pacing glaciers left it clean and flat here,
scraping away or pushing underground what was before them.

via writersalmanac.publicradio.org

From The Writer's Almanac. A nice piece, and especially nice if you're from Ohio and can really feel these places and this lyric resonating.

From Denise Levertov: A Clearing

What lies at the end of enticing country driveways, curving off among trees? Often only a car graveyard, a house-trailer, a trashy bungalow. But this one, for once, brings you through the shade of its green tunnel to a paradise of cedars, of lawns mown but not too closely, of iris, moss, fern, rivers of stone rounded by sea or stream, of a wooden unassertive large-windowed house. The big trees enclose an expanse of sky, trees and sky together protect the clearing. One is sheltered here from the assaultive world as if escaped from it, and yet once arrived, is given (oneself and others being a part of that world) a generous welcome.                                   It's paradise as a paradigm for how to live on earth, how to be private and open quiet and richly eloquent. Everything man-made here was truly made by the hands of those who live here, of those who live with what they have made. It took time, and is growing still because it's alive. It is paradise, and paradise is a kind of poem; it has a poem's characteristics: inspiration; starting with the given; unexpected harmonies; revelations. It's rare among the worlds one finds at the end of enticing driveways.