“Get off,” my wife says — but the pug
Just looks at her and doesn’t move.
He’s lying in his favorite spot
Beside his master on the couch.

“Off,” she says — the dog just stares;
He could win a test of wills
But when she moves to pick him up
He concedes defeat and jumps.

“I want to sit there,” she explains.
He looks at her, he looks at me
Then jumps up from the other side,
Lying down across my lap

Sideways, facing down his foe
As if to say “Your move.”

[Heath] Ledger’s ex-fiancée Michelle Williams and their two year old daughter Matilda flew from a film set in Sweden to their home in Brooklyn following the tragedy. . . .

Her father Larry Williams said: “It has just broken everybody’s heart in my family. I think Tennyson got it right in the poem he described someone as having died at a young age but burning the candles at both ends. And oh what a beautiful flame he made. That was Heath.

“The saddest thing is his daughter whom he just loved dearly. The Tennyson poem is just so true. His years were few but he left a beautiful legacy.”

— Daily Mail

Okay . . . Tennyson?!

Tennyson did write In Memoriam A.H.H. about a friend who died young, but the candle poem was written by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light!

He mentions Tennyson twice, in case you missed it the first time. I’m quotin’ Tennyson here! The first and last time anyone will be interested in anything this man has to say and instead of going down in history as a Tennyson scholar, he’ll be remembered as a puffed-up phony . . .

And often you asked me,
“What is the use of knowing the evil in the world?”
I am out of your way now, Spoon River,
Choose your own good and call it good.
For I could never make you see
That no one knows what is good
Who knows not what is evil;
And no one knows what is true
Who knows not what is false.

— Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology, “Seth Compton”

‘Now it might be a very romantic sight to some chaps, a light burning in a tower window. I knew a poem about a thing like that once. Forgot it now, though. I was no end of a one for poetry when I was a kid — love and all that. Castle towers came in quite a lot. Funny how one grows out of that kind of thing.’

— Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

I am reminded of the lines from “The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.

FIGHT ON!

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

[Read more . . .]

My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand

[Read more . . .]

“The Gift” by Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.

[Read more . . .]

“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold

[Read more . . .]

“In Dreams” by Kim Addonizio

After eighteen years there’s no real grief left
for the man who was my father.

[Read more . . .]

If poetry is reduced to an algebraic equation with one meaning, and only a teacher has the meaning, and you can’t figure it out without the teacher, it’s no fun. And when you become an adult, when you see a poem in The New Yorker, you’ll turn the page and look for a cartoon. You’ll say, ‘I don’t have to work for a good grade anymore.’

— Ted Kooser

• Icarus by Edward Field
• Icarus by Christine Hemp
• Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams
• Musee des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden
• To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph by Anne Sexton
• Waiting for Icarus by Muriel Rukeyser

My son was asked to memorize “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost for a 6th grade assignment:

Continue reading Dark, Ironic Frost

I look forward to taking my son out trick-or-treating every year. I have lots of Halloween memories, mostly happy, some sad . . .

One year — he was in kindergarten or 1st grade, I can’t remember which — I took him out and he was so excited, running from house to house . . .

Continue reading Happy Halloween

I think about things that might have been and never were.
The treatise on Saxon myths that Bede omitted to write.
The inconceivable work that Dante may have glimpsed
As soon as he corrected the Comedy’s last verse.
History without two afternoons: that of the hemlock, that of the Cross.
History without Helen’s face.
Man without the eyes that have granted us the moon.
Over three Gettysburg days, the victory of the South.
The love we never shared.
The vast empire the Vikings declined to found.
The globe without the wheel, or without the rose.
John Donne’s judgment of Shakespeare.
The Unicorn’s other horn.
The fabled Irish bird which alights in two places at once.
The child I never had.

— Jorge Luis Borges, “Things that might have been”

[Ed. Note: The unusual spellings are from the original source.]

If I could live again my life,
In the next - I’ll try,
- to make more mistakes,
I won’t try to be so perfect,
I’ll be more relaxed,
I’ll be more full - than I am now,
In fact, I’ll take fewer things seriously,
I’ll be less hygenic,
I’ll take more risks,
I’ll take more trips,
I’ll watch more sunsets,
I’ll climb more mountains,
I’ll swim more rivers,
I’ll go to more places - I’ve never been,
I’ll eat more ice creams and less (lime) beans,
I’ll have more real problems - and less imaginary ones, I was one of those people who live prudent and prolific lives - each minute of his life, Offcourse that I had moments of joy - but,
 if I could go back I’ll try to have only good moments,

If you don’t know - thats what life is made of,
Don’t lose the now!

I was one of those who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, without a hot-water bottle,
 and without an umberella and without a parachute,

If I could live again - I will travel light,
If I could live again - I’ll try to work bare feet at the beginning of spring till   the end of autumn, I’ll ride more carts,
I’ll watch more sunrises and play with more children,
If I have the life to live - but now I am 85, - and I know that I am dying …

— Jorge Luis Borges, “Instants”

On this date in 1884, the cornerstone was laid for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. (We got the statue for free — the pedestal we had to pay for.)

One of the most historic fundraisers was the Pedestal Art Loan Exhibition, to which Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and others donated manuscripts for auction.

Emma Lazarus donated a poem called “The New Colossus,” which sold for $1,500, but was mostly forgotten until 1945, when it was inscribed over the main entrance at the base of the statue.

Continue reading This Date in History

A loyal subject of these second-rate years,
I proudly admit that my finest ideas
are second-rate, and may the future take them
as trophies of my struggle against suffocation.
I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out
which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

— Joseph Brodsky, “I Sit By The Window”

On this date in 1775, the first shots in the Revolutionary War were fired at Lexington and Concord . . .

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, are sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heros dare
To die and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nobody has ever measured, even the poets, how much a heart can hold. . . . When one really can’t stand anymore, the limits are transgressed, and one thing has become another; poetry registers itself on the hospital charts, and heart-break has to be taken care of.

— Zelda Fitzgerald

On this date in 1948, she and eight other patients died in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, NC. Because they had been locked in their rooms for the night, the patients were unable to escape the flames.

What do you seek, so pensive and silent?
What do you need, Camerado?
Dear son! do you think it is love?

— Walt Whitman, “Starting from Paumanok”

For after all Humboldt did what poets in crass America are supposed to do. He chased ruin and death even harder than he had chased women. He blew his talent and his health and reached home, the grave, in a dusty slide. He plowed himself under. Okay. So did Edgar Allan Poe, picked out of the Baltimore gutter. And Hart Crane over the side of a ship. And Jarrell falling in front of a car. And poor John Berryman jumping from a bridge. For some reason this awfulness is peculiarly appreciated by business and technological America. The country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets’ testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can’t perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, “If I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn’t get through this either. Look at those good and tender and soft men, the best of us. They succumbed, poor loonies.”

— Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift