Sometimes I feel really old . . . I’m not getting any younger I’m not getting any smarter I’m not getting any healthier Sometimes I feel like 45 would be a pretty good age to die . . . Related Links “Men at Forty” by Donald Justice Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Poetry
I Sit By The Window
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” Read more →
Concord Hymn
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 Read more →
Zelda Fitzgerald
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. Read more →
Happy Valentine’s Day
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” Read more →
Dead Poets
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… Read more →
Small Consolations
Who possesses the wherewithal for labor or love without small consolations? Who can live? — Jeredith Merrin, “Downtown Diner” Read more →
The Way We Are Living
The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life. — Seamus Heaney, “Elegy” Read more →
Fun With Obituaries
Several ordinary life stories, if told in rapid succession, tend to make life look far more pointless than it really is, probably. — Kurt Vonnegut Is that a fact? Let’s try it and see! Here are some excerpts from this week’s obituaries in the Irvine World News: Read more →
Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson was born on this date in 1830. Happy Birthday, Emily! I died for beauty, but was scarce Adjusted in the tomb, When one who died for truth was lain In an adjoining room. He questioned softly why I failed? “For beauty,” I replied. “And I for truth,—the two are one; We brethren are,” he said. And so, as kinsmen met a night, We talked between the rooms, Until the moss had reached our lips, And covered up our names. Let’s party! Read more →
So Much Trash
On this date in 1851, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick was published. The book, considered by modern scholars to be one of the great American novels, was dismissed by Melville’s contemporaries and belittled by reviewers as “so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature.” Melville took bad reviews pretty hard and gave up writing fiction a few years later. He died in New York on September 28, 1891, at the age of 72, almost completely forgotten. Read more →
That is You
The earth keeps some vibration going There in your heart, and that is you. — Edgar Lee Masters, “Fiddler Jones” There’s a balance to be struck between providing a kid with some direction in his life, and thinking that he should like certain things because I like them, or dislike certain things because I don’t like them, or that he should do things a certain way because that’s the way I would do them, the danger being that even though my way is, of course, the best way, the way he does it is what makes him him . . . Read more →
Wrought by Prayer
I have lived my life, and that which I have done May He within Himself make pure! but thou, If thou shouldst never see my face again, Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of. — Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Morte d’Arthur” Tennyson has said that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, but he has wisely refrained from saying whether they are good things or bad things. It might perhaps be as well if the world were to dream of, or even become wide awake to some of the things that are being wrought by prayer. — Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh Read more →
Introducing a 10-Year-Old to Poetry
Me: (reading aloud from syllabus for UC Irvine Young Writers class, in which my kid is enrolled) “We are going to be doing a variety of activities, including a facade poem, a four season poem, journal writing, and a memory snapshot story.” Him: Poems blow. Read more →
Yowzah!
O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me in defiance of the world! O to return to paradise! O bashful and feminine! O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of a determin’d man! — Walt Whitman, “One Hour to Madness and Joy” Read more →
Youth
A boy’s will is the wind’s will And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “My Lost Youth” That’s a beautiful verse to me — not just what it says but the tempo of it . . . try reading it aloud and you’ll notice that you really need to slow down when you get to “long, long thoughts.” I have a boy of my own now, and I can also tell you that a boy’s heart is simple and pure, and just by asking him does he want to play some catch or something, you can make him the happiest person in the world . . . Read more →
Useless and Pointless Knowledge
Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain That could hold you, dear lady, from going insane That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain Of your useless and pointless knowledge. — Bob Dylan, “Tombstone Blues” “I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while–just once in a while–there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time!” — J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of heaven in twenty centuries Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust. — T.S. Eliot, “The Rock” Read more →
“As I Walked Out One Evening” by W.H. Auden
As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. [Read more . . .] Read more →
Classic Review
Fortunately, however, the chief damage done will be to the author himself, who thus dishonors his own physical nature; for imperfect though the race is, it still remains so much purer than the stained and distorted reflection of its animalism in Leaves of Grass, that the book cannot attain to any very wide influence. — Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1882 Read more →