Y’all seemed to enjoy my “liveblogging” of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, so here’s something similar. Follow along, if you can, as I reveal the labyrinthine thought processes of a totally clueless poetry reader (i.e., me).
Read more on In which Bookworm attempts to interpret a poem…
Where does the time go? I missed last week so I thought I’d make it up with two this time. And as promised, I’m going to try out Marianne Moore on y’all.
I’ve been struggling over the collected poems of Marianne Moore. Is it just me? Or is a six-line poem supposed to take an hour or longer to understand? I’m still working on it and hopefully by next week I’ll have found one that I can make head or tail of. In the meantime, here’s another old favorite of mine. From T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:
Here’s another one from Carl Sandburg (I promise someone else next week). I’m sharing this one in order to cheer myself up after a night where Daniel woke me up four? five? times requesting slight adjustments of his blankets and kisses on invisible boo-boos. I really like this one — poignance and happiness all wrapped up together.
We don’t exactly have a house full of poetry here. In fact, what we’ve got here is slim pickin’s. From our upstairs bookshelves I had a choice of two: War Poems by Siegfried Sassoon or Harvest Poems by Carl Sandburg. Hmm, war or harvest? I went with the harvest.
Brought to mind after the morning spent with Lena: we cleaned her room top-to-bottom, reminiscing over stuff from long ago, particularly remembering when she was four and she and I, just the two of us, got on a plane and flew to California for my cousin’s wedding. I bought her a Beany Baby unicorn while we were stopped over in the Las Vegas airport. It was white with a pink mane and tail.
Last year I don’t believe I went public with any of my New Year’s resolutions — oh, wait a second, quick search through my archives reveals that yes, I did. Last year I resolved to read The Atlantic Monthly cover-to-cover every month. Um. I read a few of ‘em. And I will continue to subscribe. But I have a better idea for this year’s resolution. This year? I’m going to read poetry. Not exclusively, of course. But I’m going to read some. As opposed to reading none, which has been my habit up until now. In fact, I think I will hop onto the Poetry Thursday bandwagon. Do you think I can do 52 posts? I’m going to try. Starting today.
