July Poets

Here are some poems by poets born in July.
Celebrate them by reading their words.
 

“For My People” by Margaret Walker (July 7, 1915)

“Nothing Twice” by Wisława Szymborska (July 2, 1923)

“The Song of Despair” by Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904)

“Sonnet” by Alice Dunbar-Nelson (July 19, 1875)

“Alcove” by John Ashbery (July 28, 1927)

“The Layers” by Stanley Kunitz (July 29, 1905)

“I Am Bound, I Am Bound, For A Distant Shore” by Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817)

“Poem for One Little Girl Blue” by June Jordan (July 12, 1817)

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Enter Winter

Stonehenge on a Winter Solstice

The Winter Solstice has just slipped into place and it may look and feel like winter where you are now or it may be the start of summer if you are in the Southern Hemisphere.

In years past, I have usually posted something about winter and poetry. Around the start of December, my analytics usually show that people search and find posts and prompts about winter. So, this year I'm going to start the season with this anthology post of past winter posts.

Do you ever have a mind of winter? I posted once about that idea and Wallace Steven's poem "The Snow Man"

I have created mini-winter poem anthologies too. I posted a few winter poems by Mary Oliver and others in 2016 and some poems to move you into winter on the solstice.   

There are some thoughts on winter by Williams, Thoreau and Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson's poem about the snow that never drifts - which I will admit to still not quite figuring out, though I enjoy rereading it.

I think I have written more than once about Robert Frost's solstice when he stopped in the woods to watch the snow fall. That is one of the best-known American poems. I found it interesting that he sat down to write it on a warm June day.   

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

Somehow winter haiku always seems very appropriate to the season - spare and quiet like the day after a snowstorm.  

You should not forget in this time when some people, due to holidays, the new year, and Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) fall into a depression that tending your inner garden in winter can be aided by reading and writing poems.    

You can browse all my posts about winter at my tag for"winter."

I hope you have a good winter season filled with health, joy, and poetry.

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Christmas Poems

Image by Willgard Krause from Pixabay

If you haven't completely overdosed on Chritsmas by now, here are some poems of the season and day from The Poetry Foundation.

They range from "Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas" by Henry Livingston

’Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the house,

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

to the anonymous "The Twelve Days of Christmas"

The first day of Christmas,

My true love sent to me

A partridge in a pear tree.

and into Yeats' "The Magi"

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,

In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones

Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky

With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,

And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,

And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,

Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

and a whole group of contemporary takes on the season, such as Mary Jo Salter's "Advent."

...on her Advent calendar.   

She takes it from the mantel   

and coaxes one fingertip

under the perforation,   

as if her future hinges

on not tearing off the flap...

And when the day and season is over, we have "December 26" by Kenn Nesbitt who provides his "list / of everything / that Santa Claus / forgot to bring." 

And Jane Kenyon's "Taking Down the Tree" reminds me of my own family's tradition of doing that on Twelfth Night.

By suppertime all that remains is the scent

of balsam fir. If it's darkness

we're having, let it be extravagant.

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February Words

I was looking through some February poems and it was rather depressing. Most of them were filled with rather grim winter images.

"Afternoon In February" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow starts out like this:

The day is ending,
The night is descending;
The marsh is frozen,
The river dead.

and I didn't want to go further.

Things are not much better in "February: The Boy Breughel" by Norman Dubie with its deadly nature imagery.

The birches stand in their beggar's row:
Each poor tree
Has had its wrists nearly
Torn from the clear sleeves of bone,
These icy trees
Are hanging by their thumbs...

And a fox crosses through snow
Down a hill; then, he runs,
He has overcome something white
Beside a white bush, he shakes
It twice, and as he turns
For the woods, the blood in the snow

There's only a brief line of hope because those poor tortured birch trees are "Under a sun / That will begin to heal them soon."

The only hopeful February poems I cam across concerned themselves with thinking beyond February.

Jane Kenyon was looking ahead in her "February: Thinking of Flowers"

Now wind torments the field,
Turning the white surface back
On itself, back and back on itself,
Like an animal licking a wound.

Nothing but white the air, the light;
Only one brown milkweed pod
Bobbing in the gully, smallest
Brown boat on the immense tide.

A single green sprouting thing
Would restore me...

Then think of the tall delphinium,
Swaying, or the bee when it comes
To the tongue of the burgundy lily.

I saw my first green sprouting things - crocuses and the tops of daffodils - this past week. It is a hopeful thing.

And Ted Kooser in his poem "Late February" must also have been thinking on one of those early warm days when:

...by mid-afternoon
the snow is no more
than a washing
strewn over the yards,
the bedding rolled in knots
and leaking water,
the white shirts lying
under the evergreens.

But it's a brief respite from winter, a false spring and:

by five o'clock
the chill of sundown,
darkness, the blue TVs
flashing like storms
in the picture windows,
the yards gone gray,
the wet dogs barking
at nothing.

And in his final lines, those hopeful green things of early spring take an unexpected and horrible turn.

Far off
across the cornfields
staked for streets and sewers,
the body of a farmer
missing since fall
will show up
in his garden tomorrow,
as unexpected
as a tulip

Oh February, "month of despair" as Margaret Atwood describes it "with a skewered heart in the centre," you need some optimism.

I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You're the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

 Yes!

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New Year's Inspiration

If you think of the new year as an opportunity to reflect and set goals for the future, then the Academy of American Poets suggests these 10 poems for inspiration.

1. “Time to be the fine line of light” by Carrie Fountain
2. “When I Rise Up” by Georgia Douglas Johnson
3. “These Poems” by June Jordan
4. “The Leash” by Ada Limón
5. “The Penitent” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
6. “Assured” by Alexander Posey
7. “The Dream” by Lola Ridge
8. from “Elegy in Joy” by Muriel Rukeyser
9. "The Call of the Open" by Percy Bysshe Shelley
10. “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith

Summer School Poetry Class

You might not have taken an AP (Advanced Placement) English course in high school, but on the website edsitement.neh.gov you can "study" 21 Poems for AP Literature and Composition. These are poems frequently taught in AP English Lit and Composition classes. 

For each of the twenty-one poems, there are resources including audio clips and video, primary source documents and photographs, timelines, and, of course, poems.

For example, Robert Frost's “Mending Wall” is one selection, and the site offers The Poem, About this Poem from the Poetry Foundation, On “Mending Wall” from Modern American Poetry, a lesson "Mending Wall": A Marriage of Poetic Form and Content, and more about Robert Frost from Voices and Visions.

School is closed for the summer, but some AP students are assigned summer reading and might be assigned some of these poems. Well, here is some help from the teacher's file cabinet. And for the rest of us, we can do some summer school and not have to worry about tests, homework, or grades.

The poems:  

Matthew Arnold: “Dover Beach

Elizabeth Bishop: “In the Waiting Room”

Gwendolyn Brooks: “We Real Cool”

Robert Browning: “My Last Duchess”

Emily Dickinson: “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” (124)

John Donne: “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”

T.S. Eliot: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Carolyn Forché: “The Colonel”

Robert Frost: “Mending Wall”

Robert Hayden: “Those Winter Sundays”

Langston Hughes: “Let America Be America Again”

John Keats: “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Andrew Marvell: “To His Coy Mistress”

Wilfred Owen: “Dulce et Decorum Est”

John Crowe Ransom: “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter”

William Shakespeare: Sonnets

Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Ozymandias”

Wallace Stevens: “Sunday Morning”

Dylan Thomas: “Do not go gentle into that good night”

William Carlos Williams: “Danse Russe”

William Butler Yeats: “The Second Coming”

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.

Getting the Daily News from Poems

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

   —  William Carlos Williams


I am still writing my poem a day for 2014, and some people have taken on a poem a day for National Poetry Month. But if you don't feel you can write every day, you can certainly read a poem a day. And reading poetry is an important part of becoming a poet too.

Some people use the daily poem at The Writers Almanac or at Poetry Daily.

The Academy of American Poets is another source. They have a new design for their Poem-a-Day and they will now be syndicating Poem-a-Day. This means that the new, previously unpublished poems we are publishing during the week will be available to editors at a wide range of newspapers, news websites, and magazines.

Get out the news in poems!

You might also want to celebrate the month with a donation to Poem-A-Day or help support Poetry Daily or support the Writers Almanac.

Christmas Light

via the writersalmanac.publicradio.org

Christmas Light


When everyone had gone
I sat in the library
With the small silent tree,
She and I alone.
How softly she shone!

And for the first time then
For the first time this year,
I felt reborn again,
I knew love's presence near.

Love distant, love detached
And strangely without weight,
Was with me in the night
When everyone had gone
And the garland of pure light
Stayed on, stayed on.

by May Sarton, from May Sarton, Collected Poems, 1930-1993

December, Outdoors

John Updike's poetry is often overlooked in favor of his novels and short stories. It is often noted that his fiction is "poetic" and rich in its use of language. But the poems don't get much attention.

Updike wrote some witty, light verse and liked to play with words and language in his poetry. But he also wrote a good number of solid poems.

I like this one which was posted on the writersalmanac.publicradio.org site this month.

holding the dunes, originally uploaded by Ken Ronkowitz.

December, Outdoors

Clouds like fish shedding scales are stretched
thin above Salem. The calm cold sea
accepts the sun as an equal, a match:
the horizon a truce, the air all still.
Sun, but no shadows somehow, the trees
ideally deleafed, a contemplative gray
that ushers into the woods (in summer
crammed with undergrowth) sheer space.

How fortunate it is to move about
without impediment, Nature having
no case to make, no special weather to plead,
unlike some storm-obsessed old symphonist.
The day is piano; I see buds so subtle
they know, though fat, that this is no time to bloom.

by John Updike, from Endpoint and Other Poems

Cherry Blossom Mind

Most people don't think of Northern New Jersey as cherry blossom country. Washington D.C. is the one that gets all the attention this time of year. But Essex County was actually the first county park system created in the United States and it has some impressive landscapes that were designed by the landscape architecture firm of Frederick Law Olmsted.

Essex County's  Branch Brook Park was conceived by Frederick Law Olmsted (the most famous parks designer of his time - Central Park in NYC is his) and Calvert Vaux in 1867, designed by the Olmsted Brothers firm between 1898 and 1938, and saw its first cherry tree planted in 1927. The park is listed on both the National and New Jersey State Registers of Historic Places.

I grew up a few miles from the park and worked near the park for some time, so I have seen the cherry blossoms many times and they continue to be inspiring.

Between our two lives
there is also the life of
the cherry blossom


A lovely spring night
suddenly vanished while we
viewed cherry blossoms


Kannon's tiled temple
roof floats far away in clouds
of cherry blossoms


Basho

Cherry blossoms - and other spring blossoms like plum and peach - are very much a part of poetry, especially haiku. Appearing on seemingly dead branches, they are often symbolic of spring. I some poetry, they are the almost unnoticed flowering of enlightenment or Buddha-mind.

They are what follows the winter that is more associated with meditation, spiritual practice and isolation.

In the cherry blossom's shade
there's no such thing
as a stranger.

Issa

In the shade of enlightenment, separation from those people and things around you is gone.

Western poetry also uses the cherry blossom.


Loveliest of Trees

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A. E. Housman

Narrow Road to the Interior: And Other Writings by Basho
Basho: The Complete Haiku





A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems: The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman

NJ NOTE

Sunday, April 18 will be Bloomfest at the very pink Branch Brook Park with Japanese cultural demonstrations, children's activities, live music, a crafter's marketplace, food, and more - all free, 11am to 5pm. Most activities take place around the Essex County Cherry Blossom Welcome Center.   http://essexnjblooms.org/CherryBlossoms.aspx

Poems For Summer

The Academy of American Poets has selected a group of poems for summer. I was reading through them yesterday and selected a few to link to here.

• A Green Crab's Shell by Mark Doty   
• Vacation by Rita Dove 
• Insect Life of Florida by Lynda Hull
• Ground Swell by Mark Jarman 
• Fishing on the Susquehanna in July by Billy Collins 
• They'll spend the summer by Joshua Beckman
• Summer Holiday by Robinson Jeffers 
• Rhode Island by William Meredith
• Fat Southern Men in Summer Suits by Liam Rector
• Bed in Summer by Robert Louis Stevenson
• June Light by Richard Wilbur

See the entire list