D a l l a s

The Golden Age

Well, to continue my poetry kick, I was at B&N a week ago and found a new anthology of Spanish poems, called The Golden Age: Poems of the Spanish Renaissance.  It caught my attention because it is an area I know little about.  Translated by Edith Grossman, who did the recent Don Quixote translation, put this books together.  There is even an intro by Billy Collins.  It is a slim volume though at 192 pages, I would like something a little heftier.

One thing I do really like about it is that the Spanish is on one page, with the translation on the facing page.  That is something I wish would be done more often with translating poetry.  You can retain and enjoy the sound and musicality of the original, even if you don't know the language.  I definately will be adding this to my collection when it comes in a paperback.

Hardy the Poet

In the recent New Yorker there is an article about Thomas Hardy.  This poem, "To Sincerity," referred to in the article, unexpectedly stuck me.  So nice and compact, yet bursting with energy and thought.  I've never read any Hardy poetry before, only his novel The Mayor of Casterbridge in high school.  I going to pick up his poems and delve.

Life may be sad past saying,
Its greens for ever graying,
Its faiths to dust decaying;

And youth may have foreknown it,
And riper seasons shown it,
But custom cries: "Disown it:

"Say ye rejoice, though greiving,
Believe, while unbelieving,
Behold, without perceiving!"

The Future of Poetry

In the past couple of months, my interest in poetry has developed beyond my own expectations, somewhat surprising myself.  This partly stemmed from the recent English classes I've taken, and over last summer I was picking up the occassional poem to read.  Then something happened, I'm not quite sure what, but poetry has become a intense passion lately.  So, I'll have much to talk about this new journey.

This brings me to the recent essay "American Poetry in the New Century" by John Barr, the president of Poetry Foundation, originally published in the Sept 2006 issue of Poetry Magazine.

As I read his thoughts, I found them quite provocative and agreeable to my own sensibility.  The essay has also caused a minor stir in the poetry world, pissing off quite a few poets.  In addressing contemporary poetry John Barr basically says that it is tired and lacks the ability to address the audience.  Here are a few excerpts:

A new poetry becomes necessary not because we want one, but because the way poets have learned to write no longer captures the way things are, how things have changed. Reality outgrows the art form: the art form is no longer equal to the reality around it.

The need for something new is evident. Contemporary poetry's striking absence from the public dialogues of our day, from the high school classroom, from bookstores, and from mainstream media, is evidence of a people in whose mind poetry is missing and unmissed.

I think the responsibilities of the public to poetry are nil. No one should read poetry because they are supposed to. That's like listening to tony music that puts you to sleep when no one is looking. How often do you go to the movies out of a sense of duty? Rather, I think the responsibilities are all on the part of poetry to its public.

Poetry needs to find its public again, and address it. Poets can help accomplish this by bearing in mind the influences of how they live on what they write, and of what they write on how their readers live.

"To have great poets, there must be great audiences too," Whitman said, and then he wrote for them. Groundbreaking new art comes when artists make a changed assumption about their relationship to their audience, talk to their readers in a new way, and assume they will understand.

So, does poetry matter to anyone out there anymore?

"London" by William Blake

I thought I would post the occassional paper from school.  I would be interested in what could make them better for furture developement.  This one is from a recent English course.

London

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every black'ning Church appals,
And the hopeless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down palace walls

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infant's tear
And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.

    “London” by William Blake is a lyric ballad that pushes up against the boundaries of the form, expressing the tension, sounds, and meanings of a degenerate city.  The poem is in four quatrains in iambic tetrameter, with a basic rhyme scheme starting a/b/a/b.  The poem, originally published in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, show the reader a dark and sad city, a large subject to tackle, and attempts to contain it in a traditional ballad form.  This helps illustrates the tension in the poem’s voice, expressing sounds and anger that escapes beyond the boundaries of the poem itself.  As Peter Ackroyd remarked, “Blake’s insistence upon tight rhymes and forms is a way of suggesting the limits of the medium he is employing,” (Ackroyd 141).  These limits of form help to express the limits and restrictions of London.