Prompt: Travel

Odysseus on the road

Our June issue will be about travel. It seems appropriate for that time when school ends, and travel and vacations usually increase.

Travel is a very old theme for poets. Ancient writers like Homer didn’t treat travel as leisure or self-improvement in the modern sense. In works like The Odyssey, travel is fate-driven, dangerous, and morally revealing. It is something that happens to you as much as something you choose. Travel was not leisure but an ordeal. Odysseus journeys and longs to return home, facing storms, monsters, and the wrath of Poseidon. It is a test of survival rather than comfort.

Each stop becomes a moral trial because Homer's travel reveals character under pressure. Central to his journey is nostos — the drive to return home. Travel also means entering the unknown. Travel shapes identity, and Odysseus defines himself by recounting his adventures and turning experience into reputation.

In modern poetry, the best travel poems don’t just describe travel but interrogate it from different angles. "Ithaka" by C. P. Cavafy interrogates Odysseus' travels.

"As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery...."

The poem makes me think of a well-worn adage about travel of all kinds: "The journey matters more than the destination."

Perhaps your personal journeys are not as mythic. Perhaps your travel doesn't ead to wisdom. In "Questions of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop, she seems to be asking, "Why do we travel at all?" It is a poem that debates itself.

"...Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there... No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

"The Journey of the Magi" by T. S. Eliot takes a very famous journey and is somewhere between Cavafy and Bishop. Travel transforms you, but at a cost. It is more about the aftermath than the actual experience of traveling.

"...We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death."

I chose as the main model for this call for submissions "Traveling Through the Dark" by William Stafford, from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems, because our poetic travel does not require going very far from home or for very long. Here, travel forces moral confrontation. In this concrete situation, there is ethical weight. His focus is on a single moment rather than the whole trip. This travel is grounded in a specific, dramatic action, not abstraction.

You might begin by selecting one trip and asking: Why did I go? What did it do to me? What did I face there? Was it worth it?

Your travel poem can contain the breadth of an Odyssey or be as specific as a stop on a drive not far from home.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: May 31, 2026

William Stafford (1914–1993) was an American poet known for his quiet, contemplative voice and his belief that writing should be a daily, attentive practice.

Born in Hutchinson, Kansas, he grew up during the Great Depression, an experience that shaped his sensitivity to ordinary lives and moral choices. A committed pacifist, he declared himself a conscientious objector during World War II, working in civilian public service camps. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and spent most of his career teaching at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon.

He published his first major collection, Traveling Through the Dark (1962), at age 48. The book won the National Book Award and established his reputation for spare, plainspoken poems that carry ethical weight. The title poem, one of his most anthologized, reflects his characteristic blend of narrative clarity and moral tension. His essays on writing are collected in Writing the Australian Crawl (1978). He was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate (then titled Consultant in Poetry) in 1970.

Stafford continued publishing until his death in 1993, famously writing a poem the morning he passed away.

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Prompt: Party

Last month's prompt with all its quotes and allusions to other poets was like flipping through my copy of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. I played with that prompt and I did page through that old anthology. T.S. Eliot caught my attention. he was an important poet for me in my undergraduate days. I loved the puzzles and allusions in his lines. I like it less today. But his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is still one I love and some lines are deep in my memory.It was first published in 1915 and later included as the title poem in his collection Prufrock and Other Observations.

The poem is a dramatic monologue whose speaker relays the anxieties and preoccupations of his inner life, and his romantic hesitations and regrets. It is considered one of the defining works of modernism. That literary movement had writers experimenting with form and plumbing the depths of alienation, isolation, and the confusion of life at the turn of the 20th century.

Though Eliot’s poem is less about external events and more about inner drama, rereading it this past week, I saw in my marginalia that I imagined myself walking with Eliot to a party. December is a month of parties. I saw myself walking through town to a party where "the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo." Sounds like a good literary party.

The poem is a dramatic monologue where middle-aged Prufrock wanders the streets. The party is just a moment. And it is a moment surrounded by anxieties, indecision, and fear of rejection. That also fits into some parties I wandered into in my youth!

Our call for submissions this month is for poems about a party. We can be going to the party, at the party, leaving or just remembering a party. It's a story, a narrative, perhaps an inner monologue. But where is the meaning in this party?

Prufrock wanders through fog, smoke, cheap hotels, restaurants and a party. (though my notes seem to doubt that there even was a party.) And he is fearful about his thinning hair, aging body, and inadequacy. He doesn't know if he even dares to “disturb the universe.” He thinks “there will be time” for decisions, revisions, and to confess his feelings to a woman. He knows he is “not Prince Hamlet” but a minor character. Poor J. Alfred. He should have gone to a party and had some fun. (And why is the poem a "love song?")

Read the entire poem

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Thomas Stearns (T.S.) Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and became a British subject in 1927. He is the author of the groundbreaking poem, The Waste Land, the brilliant Four Quartets, and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (which is the basis for the musical Cats!), along with numerous other poems, prose, and plays.
Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.
T.S. Eliot died in 1965 in London, England, and is buried in Westminster Abbey.
You can browse all his books on Amazon, and buy his Collected Poems, but you can also get his complete works on Kindle for free. 

 

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Prompt: Metonymy and Synecdoche

Image by M. Maggs

This month we are looking at two famous poets and two similar and often confused literary terms.

Carl Sandburg was born in 1878 and died in 1967. He was a very American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as a major figure in contemporary literature, especially for his poetry, including Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920). He enjoyed broad appeal as a poet in his day, perhaps because his plain language and the breadth of his experiences connected him with so many strands of American life.

I was introduced to Sandburg in school with some of his most anthologized poems, including "Fog" which we use as a model for this prompt.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri and was a contemporary of Sandburg, though they are not very similar (and I suspect they were not friends). He moved to England and became a British subject in 1927. He wrote widely from The Waste Land and Four Quartets to Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (which was the basis of the Broadway show Cats) as well as prose, and works of drama. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. T.S. Eliot died in 1965.

I first encountered Eliot in college. As much as I had liked Sandburg's simple poems, I fell under the spell of Eliot and the idea that poetry should be complex and not easily understood on that first reading. My college copy of Four Quartets is full of margin notes about things I had to research to understand.

My taste in poetry and my own poetry today is probably closer to Sandburg than Eliot. It might seem that pairing them is unlikely but this month we are doing that by figurative language and one image.

Figurative language is essential in poetry. Ezra Pound said that his fear with modern poetry that it was becoming "prose with line breaks." He was not a fan of narrative poetry that could be read like prose with complete sentences and little or no figurative language.

Metonymy is often confused with synecdoche. These literary devices are similar but can be differentiated. 

Synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part of something is used to signify the whole. To ask for someone’s “hand” in marriage of course means to ask the whole person. "Boots on the ground" signifies soldiers. When they ask at checkout "Paper or plastic?" they mean the type of bag made from that material. The "stars and stripes" signifies the entire U.S. flag. "Suits" can mean people in business. "All hands on deck, I see a sails" uses two synecdoches.

Metonymy is a figure of speech in which one word is used to replace another to which it is closely linked, but, unlike synecdoche, it is not a part of the word or idea it represents.

Shakespeare writes “lend me your ears,” and "ears” are not meants as a synecdoche for people but as a substitute for “attention.” “O, for a draught of vintage!” write Keats’s in “Ode to Nightingale,” with “vintage” standing in for “wine.”  A very metonymy-heavy sentence is "The press got wind that the feds were investigating management in Hollywood.

In our two model poems - Sandburg's short poem "Fog" and an excerpt (stanza 3) from Eliot's long poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" - the poets use metonymy and also use the same image of a personified (or cat-ified) fog.

For our April prompt, we ask you to write a poem based on a central image that uses metonymy. If you wrote a poem about "cradle to grave" you would have a double metonymy. If you decide the central image needs to be a synecdoche - perhaps about your "lead foot" - that's also fine.

You might even want to consider building upon these poets' use of fog since it can also mean, figuratively, unable to think clearly as in "she was foggy with sleep" or indistinctly expressed, as in "Exactly what Eliot meant is still foggy."

    

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Spring and All

Spring slipped into place yesterday morning. Did you feel it? Perhaps not, since there is a good chance that where you are now doesn't look or feel like spring. In my neighborhood, it still looks like winter but for a few buds on trees or shoots poking out of the muddy ground. Of course, you might be south of me and it looks like summer, or far north where winter still reigns. Still, the universe tells us that in the Northern Hemisphere will begin on March 20 and ends on June 20 and by that last day of spring, it will probably look and feel like summer here. 

In William Carlos Williams' poem, "Spring and All," the opening is rather ominous. 

By the road to the contagious hospital

under the surge of the blue

mottled clouds driven from the

northeast—a cold wind.

Williams wrote the poem not long after T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," was published. Eliot's poem also opens with a not-so-favorable view of early spring.

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Eliot goes on to use an image of winter that is not typical: 

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

When we brought my first son home from the hospital, it was the first day of spring and the daffodils, crocuses, and wood hyacinths were covered with snow.  Spring is a fickled season.

In literature and mythology, spring usually concerns themes of rebirth and renewal with symbols from the season. Spring also refers to love, hope, youth and growth. The seasonal symbolism for this period may also allude to religious celebrations such as Passover or Easter.

The Vernal Equinox: "vernal" translates to “new” or “fresh” and equinox comes from the Latin aequus (equal) and nox (night). The time of daylight between sunrise and sunset has been growing slightly longer each day since the Winter Solstice in December. Of course, we messed with the celestial plan last weekend with Daylight Saving Time.

I still try to mark the vernal equinox as it has been seen for centuries as a turning point. It is not the only turning point, but daylight does defeat darkness, and that is a reason to celebrate.

Soon, I hope the only things like snowfall here will be the storm of blossoms from cherry and other spring-blooming trees.

A version of this post first appeared at Weekends in Paradelle.  

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Prompt: Time Passes

A Copernican calendar based on the Sun's movement through the seasons

Humans have many time-keeping traditions. Our calendars track the movement of the Sun or the Moon. You could have a celestial calendar that tracked the movement of the stars.

I suspect that some people might track the year based on the changing seasons. You might personally mark the new year on your birthday. After 40 years of teaching, it is difficult for me to not feel that September starts a new year. The way we mark time throughout a day or year is often personal despite the larger time-keeping that is supposed to organize time for us.

When I mentioned to another poet that I was thinking about using a writing prompt about keeping time, she said: "You mean like in music?" That was a natural way to view my prompt for her because she is a musician.

In Walt Whitman's "To Think of Time," his thoughts turn to questions all of us have had at some point.

To think of time—of all that retrospection!
To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward!

Have you guess'd you yourself would not continue?
Have you dreaded these earth-beetles?
Have you fear'd the future would be nothing to you?

Is to-day nothing? Is the beginningless past nothing?

In our model poem for this prompt titled "Time Passes," Joy Ladin personifies Time which seems to have as much trouble dealing with itself as we have dealing with it. I love that while the other three dimensions are sleeping, Time is sweating it out in the middle of the night and feeling lost.

Time too is afraid of passing, is riddled with holes
through which time feels itself leaking...
Time has lost every picture of itself as a child.
Now time is old, leathery and slow.
Can’t sneak up on anyone anymore...

All of our attempts to control time ultimately fail. Even the best calendars and clocks are off at some point. Laura Kasischke has a poem titled "The Time Machine" which suggests that long-wished-for-ability to go back or forward in time to somehow change the present.

My mother begged me: Please, please, study
stenography...
Without it
I would have no future, and this
is the future that was lost in time to me...

When I first read T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," the image that stayed with me was of measuring a life with coffee spoons.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

This month, we ask you to write a poem that measures the passing of time using some personal metric that may only be useful or relevant to you.

Deadline for submissions: February (Leap Year!) 29, 2020

Visit our website at poetsonline.org

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Allusions to 'The Wasteland'

As an undergrad, I was quite enamored by the poetry of T.S. Eliot. It started with Prufrock and "The Wasteland" and led me to The Four Quartets.  I was in love with all the allusions to other poems, mythology etc. It impressed me. It was a puzzle.

I'm not as enamored by poetry that is a puzzle as I used to be, but I still admire Eliot's poetry.

There continue to be allusions to Eliot in pop culture, especially in music - Genesis, Manic Street Preachers, Arcade Fire and Bob Dylan are all artists that have used Eliot's poetry in their lyrics.

Bob Dylan references "The Waste Land" with the line “in the wasteland of your mind” from “When The Night Comes Falling from the Sky” and in his “Desolation Row” he has “Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain’s tower” - probably over the edits Pound made to the poem.

Via Open Culture, I found a clip of Dylan riffing on "The Waste Land" on his Theme Time Radio Hour show that he did about ten years ago.




After listening to that, you might to hear the real thing read by Tom himself. He's not a great reader, but he does pronounce words and break lines as he intended them to be.





When I read "The Wasteland" in college I read it with a woman classmate that I was also enamored with, and one of things we shared was poetry. She was also into astrology and she really liked this section of the poem.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days. 

April Is

In "The Waste Land," T.S. Eliot wrote:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

But I think you should think of April as National Humor Month as well as being National Poetry Month.

Why not save get your dull roots out of the spring pain and rain and save time by combining both of those celebrations by reading (or listening) to some humorous poetry. You might want to start with some  Billy Collins.

Prompt: Dark Places

The Angel Gabriel Appearing to Zacharias by William Blake

The past two months, I have lost four people from my life. Two were old enough that people would say they had a good, long life. Two were old but still young enough that everyone felt their,lives had been cut short.

Friends tell me that I am never without something to say. Choose your adjective depending on how that talkative person feels in your world - chatty, loquacious, garrulous, voluble, conversational, communicative. But often when someone I know dies, words fail me, and the closer I feel to that person, the greater the failure of words to come.

As poets or readers of poetry, we often turn to other poets' words for consolation.

A few years ago, Edward Hirsch published a book of poems called Gabriel: A Poem  about his adopted son who died at age 22 in 2011.

This was his “reckless boy” who had a troubled life. Hirsch said  “There’s something really unnatural about losing a child, and there’s something unnatural about having to write an elegy for your child, but I felt that I wanted people to know what he was like.”

I bought the book two years ago and have never been able to read more than a few pages at a time. The opening lines - "The funeral director opened the coffin / And there he was alone / From the waist up” - stopped me on first reading.

The poem consists of more than 700 three-line stanzas. It has a rushing feel without punctuation of momentum sometimes out of control. That is an odd form for an elegy which I generally think of as being as slow as some heavy organ music in a cathedral.

His poem is roughly chronological and begins with the happiness of the adoption and the energy of youth.

With so much energy he was like a wound top,
He could almost fly a kite when there was no wind.

And then comes multiple diagnoses and the various/ Specialists who plagued us with help” and the ineffective drugs.

The population of his feelings
Could not be governed
By the authorities.

And finally, the looking back, the what-ifs and doubts.

Maybe we were too hard on him/ Maybe we were too soft. 

That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves. 

I will not forgive you
Indifferent God
Until you give me back my son.

Hirsch's poem is too long - and probably too difficult - to use for this prompt, but we have no shortage of poems of lamentation and other topics that go into dark places to consider.

February is our coldest month in much of the Northern Hemisphere​ and no doubt the season is also driving this prompt for me.

"Darkness" by Lord Byron (George Gordon) opens with lines that have always seemed to explain that feeling of waking up in a dark place, even if the sun was shining. Whether that darkness comes from a loss or a darkness in ourselves.

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,

Byron’s poem was literally inspired in part by a “year without a summer,” 1816, that was caused by the clouds of ash from the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. Many people interpreted it as the end of the world. Byron took this sense of apocalypse to express a pessimism about nature.

Turning the pages in a thick anthology, I also reread TS Eliot’s "East Coker." This meditation on mortality is the third section of his Four Quartets.

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

The Londoners of the poem seem to live in his Waste Land, a place landscaped by war.  They are forced to enter the darkness of the unlit underground stations to escape the nightly air raids.

A more modern poem by Stanley Kunitz that I have always been affected by is "The Portrait" which begins:

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.

For this February prompt, we go to dark places. Those places can be real and quite  literally dark, or imagined and dark in the many figurative ways we use that word. The darkness of night, of death, depression, lamentation and loss is different and the same. We don't want to go to these dark places, but, especially as writers, we do go there. Going there might not be a choice, but sometimes we put ourselves there.

Keep a light nearby and a hand on the wall for support and walk carefully.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: February 29, 2016

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In 2014, Ron Charles interviewed Ed Hirsch for “The Life of a Poet” series and Hirsch talked about Gabriel, though he would not read from it.

Taylor Swift Or T. S. Eliot?

Let us go then, you and I / knew you were trouble when you walked in.

A friend sent me a link to one of those online quizzes. "It's about poetry," she said, "I figured you'd like it."

It is called "Who Said It: Taylor Swift Or T. S. Eliot?"

Yes, it gives you a line and you have to identify the author - T.S. or the other T.S.

Pretty easy, right?   I mean T.S. Eliot is a really famous and serious dead male poet. And Taylor Swift is a really famous living female singer/songwriter. (She does have an an author page on Amazon too. In fact, she has things in almost every department. She is an industry. No sign of any T.S. Eliot pens or t-shirts.)

You'd be surprised how tricky the quiz can be.

The first three lines in the quiz are:

"I am glad you have a cat."

"Hold tight, hold tight."

"You are the music, while the music lasts."

We know Eliot had his cat poems.  The second line could be anyone.  The third... is that music word in there to make us think of Taylor?

Do you dare to try?

Go to http://www.buzzfeed.com/jenniferschaffer/who-said-it-taylor-swift-or-t-s-eliot

Visualizing Eliot's Prufrock

Not everyone is fan of moving art from from mode or medium to another. Take any Shakespeare or beloved novel made into a film and you will find plenty of criticism.

So, I am sure that there will be critics of a comic book version of a great poems Comic artist Julian Peters (who has already adapted Poe, Keats, and Rimbaud) now is completing a graphic version of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” He revealed the first nine pages on his site recently.

“Prufrock” begins with an epigraph from Dante's Inferno and the comic translates Eliot's quotes from Greek and other languages.

From Dante's poor tortured soul trapped in the eight circle, we move through Prufrock's own little emotional circle.

via the great Open Culture website, here are some related links

• “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Read by Anthony Hopkins and Eliot Himself
• T.S. Eliot Reads His  “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
• Hear Gertrude Stein Read Works Inspired by Matisse, Picasso, and T.S. Eliot (1934)

All images © Julian Peters – info@jpeterscomics.com

Ash Wednesday

Looking at the calendar this past weekend, I realized that Ash Wednesday was this week. Though I have religious attachments to that day, the first thing I thought of was the poem by that name by T.S. Eliot.

I was a serious reader of Eliot (Is there really any other kind?) as a college student. I loved the poems and I loved the puzzle of the poems - the allusions I needed to uncover, the Greek or Latin that needed translation. It all seemed terribly intellectual to me at the time.

Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" was first published in April 1930 (though parts were published earlier in other forms).

It opens with the lines:

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things

It was the first long poem he wrote after his conversion to Anglicanism, and it deals with the conflict within when someone who has lacked faith acquires it.

It is often referred to as his "conversion poem." It takes some inspiration from Dante's Purgatorio - spiritual emptiness to hope for salvation.

As serious as his poems are, this poem and some of the later ones are actually more casual, and melodic than his early work.


In the Western Christian calendar, Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent and occurs forty-six days (forty days not counting Sundays) before Easter.

It is a moveable feast, falling on a different date each year because it is dependent on the date of Easter. It can occur as early as February 4 or as late as March 10th.

Ash Wednesday gets its name from the practice of placing ashes on the foreheads of the faithful in the shape of a cross as a sign of repentance.

The ashes used are gathered after the Palm Crosses from the previous year's Palm Sunday are burned.

I was told as a child that you left the ashes there until they wore off. The priest, as I recall, would say: "Remember, that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return." In the Roman Catholic Church in which I was raised, ashes are sacramentals (not sacraments) and could be given to anyone who wished to receive them even if they didn't belong to the church.


As a child, we observed fasting, abstinence from meat, and repentance. As an Anglican, Eliot would also have observed fasting and the contemplation of one's "transgressions."

It really surprised when I was older to realize that Ash Wednesday, being the first day of Lent, comes the day after Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) which is the last day of the Carnival season.

Eliot's riddling wordplay in the poem, such as this section in part five, made me wonder if he wasn't playing some intellectual prank on me.

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

It's still an interesting poem to read, though it does not hold the appeal it once did to me. The riddles push me away as a reader now. My notes in the margin seem so academic.

Perhaps, it was part of my religious training - masses in Latin as a child - that made me think that this ultimate knowledge was supposed to be hard to obtain, difficult to understand, a kind of puzzle.

It's what puts off many people about poetry. Why doesn't it just say what it wants me to hear?

I don't believe that poetry should be so difficult for us to understand. I believe that we have been working at it all of our lives.

Translation

My grandparents would speak Slovak
to my father, the aunts and the uncles
at our Sunday dinners in Newark
when they didn’t want us to know.
In those days, the priest spoke Latin.
The mystery of the faith.
The boys on the #42 bus spoke Spanish
and laughed, looking in my direction.
I knew a few words.
The waiter at the Chinese restaurant
translates my order into words
that I will never know.
This is the poet’s job -
and the reader’s.
We have been in training
all our lives.

Ken Ronkowitz

T.S. Eliot Reading "The Waste Land"

T.S. Eliot reading "The Waste Land." Nothing much visually, but interesting to hear the poet reading.

It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century."



The title alludes to the wounding of the Fisher King and the subsequent sterility of his lands.

• "The Waste Land" on Bartleby.com
• Exploring the poem
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_waste_land