Buying-parmesan-and-baby-spinach day, writing-about-Lermontov day, making-lemon-tea-for-a-sick-eighth-grader day, scrubbing-said-sick-eighth-grader's-vomit-poisoned-bedroom day, braising-pork-loin-in-milk day. Note how the venial intersects with the transcendent, at least as regards the mysterious workings of the human digestive system. (I'm not sure how Lermontov fits into this metaphor, but maybe I'll work out a link.)
In the anthology I have advanced from the Romantics to the Victorians; and I was just offered a gig in April that involves giving a reading of Szymborska poems. That will be a pleasure. Sometimes I think poets don't get enough chances to perform the work of the poets they love. It would be a joy and a lesson to hold those words in my mouth and then to share them with other people. Maybe someday someone will let me do a full-length public reading of Poems That Changed My Life. Already I am cogitating a list.
Also, this makes me want to teach a class titled Poems That Changed Your Life. Or maybe just put out a collection box labeled "Insert poem that changed your life here. Must include 2-paragraph explanation of when, why, how. Be cogent, and don't maunder. Overreactions are appropriate, if supported by scintillating grammar. No quoting anyone but yourself and the poem."
4 comments:
Please consider taping your Szymborska reading; it would be wonderful to hear more of her work. Her translator was on NewsHourArtBeat yesterday and closed the interview with a poem.
Dawn, for our gathering at Lisbon, I formally request you share poems that you love as well as your own. =)
And re: poems that changed my life...Keats: "When I Have Fears" comes to my mind readily.
And how does one braise pork loin in milk?
Thanks...C
OK, I'll bite, though this one will sound odd: I wandered into the middle school library one day in 7th grade and randomly pulled a book of poetry off the shelf. It opened to Blake's 'Jerusalem' and the words might have been written in fire; they jolted me, the sound and the exhortation of them, the imagery too though I don't think it was the meaning I primarily responded to. I'm still not sure why, but I needed those words, so I wrote them down in my neatest script and carried them with me in my wallet for years, past college as I recall, re-reading them to get the sound of them back into my mouth and eyes. I didn't know it was an anthem till 'Chariots of Fire' came out [and then I had to see it four times in the theatre]. My first convocation when I got to Westover they sang it [they always do] and I felt I'd come home.
I had an early Blake conversion also: 6 years old and my father reading "The Tyger" aloud to me. Suddenly I knew what a poem was.
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