A poet can bring the darnedest things to life.
Want the big word? anthropomorphic
Read the full post on my new website:
Showing posts with label Language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Language. Show all posts
Monday, November 14, 2016
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Another poet heard from (part 7)
My review of Rosemerry Wahtola
Trommer’s “Inner Eden,” a vital hope for the kinder world we long for….
Read the full post on my new website:
Thursday, November 10, 2016
The poet sees stones and bones….
My poetry is about particulars, the
right words, and the rhyming and the chiming of the bells….
Read the full post on my new website:
Sunday, November 6, 2016
The art of R. S. Thomas
My reflection on the artful poetry of
R. S. Thomas points directly to a small truth, in the case of sunrise blooming
in a small field
Read the full post on my new website:
Friday, November 4, 2016
Looking for the special words
A review of a minor poem
from Emily Dickinson, with a line that really taps the tuning fork in my head
Read the full post on my new website:
Thursday, November 3, 2016
Silences in the desert
Ozymandias was a king who had the wrong
ideas about posterity. Percy Shelley’s famous poem says just about all of it,
and I have a couple thoughts….
Read the full post on my new website:
Tuesday, November 1, 2016
dancing in the night
I see poetry in dancing shadows on the
wall. I watched this “jittering dance of light and dark,” until the poem was
clear to me.
Read the full post on my new website:
Tuesday, October 25, 2016
Sunday, October 16, 2016
A run for it
River
talk
roil, run, in jumbling eddies,
in dervish currents,
in mute frenzy,
potent, puissant, dominante,
roll
on, you burly river.
Copyright
© Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
Published
December 2015 in Northern Stars Magazine
Friday, October 7, 2016
Finches everywhere
The harbor, in the mind’s eye,
finches everywhere, hoptoe beggars,
clouds visiting,
ice cream boxes with white tops….
Breezes, toujours,
now zephyr,
now lamb,
now colt,
skimming irresistible airs….
Nearly all is just that far away,
vaguest sounds,
l’eau, sur mer, surtout,
motion, in little speeds….
There are others, chance greetings,
face to face….
Hello.
G’day.
Ailo.
Sir.
Me.
Madame.
You.
A moment to gaze at you, between us,
gazing, always,
hunger, rapture, dream keeping,
aye, we are dream keepers,
with books,
belles livres,
we arm ourselves for solitude,
but coolly close them,
to open for each other….
Toll the hour, careless of the day,
sounds in seeming silence,
faint ends of words drift across the bay,
with birdsong raveling out….
The birds sing “today!”
and we murmur “yesterday,”
and tomorrow’s languid wing rises up, unseen,
and sweetly pushes down a twirl,
one smoothly eddied fan of lightest air,
to chase the changing shadows
where we stood awhile….
At Cambridge Beaches, Bermuda
1993
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Sunday, September 18, 2016
Not exactly a beach book....
I am particularly strong on urging
every single person to make a best effort every day to do what’s at the top of
his or her TO DO list.
So when I found out that Dr. Toby
Wilkinson, an Egyptologist at Clare College, Cambridge, has published a
translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics intended for a mass audience, my first
thought was “Go for it, Toby!”
Now I’m having second thoughts. Roughly
a couple million books are published every year. The books in my personal
collection are stacked higher than my head along a wall in the basement. I
haven’t read all of them yet. I think I’m going to pass on Writings from Ancient Egypt.
Here are a few excerpts, courtesy of
TheGuardian.com
Letters
written by a farmer called Heqanakht date from 1930BC but reflect modern
concerns, from land management to grain quality. He writes to his steward: “Be
extra dutiful in cultivating. Watch out that my barley-seed is guarded.”
Turning
to domestic matters, he sends greetings to his son Sneferu, his “pride and joy,
a thousand times, a million times”, and urges the steward to stop the housemaid
bullying his wife: “You are the one who lets her do bad things to my wife …
Enough of it!”
Other
texts include the Tempest Stela. While official inscriptions generally portray
an ideal view of society, this records a cataclysmic thunderstorm: “It was dark
in the west and the sky was filled with storm clouds without [end and thunder]
more than the noise of a crowd … The irrigated land had been deluged, the
buildings cast down, the chapels destroyed … total destruction.”
 |
| from kingscrossexpress.wordpress.com |
If you were thinking maybe it would be
something like “Downton Abbey,” or maybe Fifty
Shades of Grey, or maybe “The Simpsons” with cats and pyramids, think again….
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
Friday, September 2, 2016
"Many waters cannot quench love."
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
(1850-1894)
Scottish novelist, poet, all-purpose
writer
Stevenson is famous for Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
St. Ives is unmistakable 19th century
prose, through and through—Stevenson's oeuvre is fastidiously lush, precise,
sophisticated, with deeply contextual character development and dialogue that
leaves me breathless with anticipation for more. Did I mention that I'm a fan
of 19th century prose?
There is a love interest, of course. It
involves a prim but worldly Scottish maiden and the eponymous French prisoner,
a nobleman whose service to Napoleon has ended in captivity in Edinburgh.
Stevenson allows le prisonnier, M. le Vicomte de St. Ives, to
confidently speculate on his prospects with the lady: "Many waters cannot
quench love."
Indeed. Read St. Ives to get the whole story.
Copyright © Richard Carl
Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Monday, August 29, 2016
First black poet in America
The earliest known poem attributed to a
black poet in America is “The Bars Fight,” an account of a shootout between Abenaki
Indians and English colonists in Deerfield, MA, in 1746.
"The Bars Fight" is compactly rhymed
and matter-of-fact—it memorializes five colonists and two Indians who died in
the Abenaki attack on August 25, 1746, in Deerfield, at the time a small town
on the colonial frontier.
The poet was Lucy Terry Prince, an
African woman who had been enslaved as a child. Later in her life she resumed being a
free woman, married, raised a family and became a minor celebrity based on her glib
and forthright capacity for storytelling and expressing herself in public. Lucy was a literate woman who may have composed her poem and recited it orally—it first
appeared in print in 1819 in the published version of a lecture, only two years
before she died.
The poem survives in a recognizable
iambic tetrameter format. It can’t be determined how much of the written
version preserves the author’s original words, but we may presume it is largely
accurate because Lucy’s verbal talents were well known and widely recognized,
and we can speculate that many people heard her personal recitation. The poem’s
title refers to the location of the fighting: a meadow in Deerfield then known
as “The Bars.”
The
Bars Fight
 |
| Lucy Terry Prince |
August, twas the twenty-fifth,
Seventeen houndred forty-six,
The Indians did in ambush lay,
Some very valiant men to slay
Twas nigh unto Sam Dickinson's mill,
The Indians there five men did kill.
The names of whom I'll not leave out,
Samuel Allen like a hero foute,
And though he was so brave and bold,
His face no more shall we behold.
Eleazer Hawks was killed outright,
Before he had time to fight,
Before he did the Indians see,
Was shot and killed immediately.
Oliver Amsden he was slain,
Which caused his friends much grief pain.
Simeon Amsden they found dead
Not many rods from Oliver's head.
Adonijah Gillett, we do hear,
Did lose his life which was so dear.
John Sadler fled across the water,
And thus escaped the dreadful slaughter.
Eunice Allen see the Indians comeing
And hoped to save herself by running:
And had not her petticoats stopt her,
The awful creatures had not cotched her,
Not tommyhawked her on the head,
And left her on the ground for dead.
Young Samuel Allen, Oh! lack-a-day!
Was taken and carried to Canada.
Seventeen houndred forty-six,
The Indians did in ambush lay,
Some very valiant men to slay
Twas nigh unto Sam Dickinson's mill,
The Indians there five men did kill.
The names of whom I'll not leave out,
Samuel Allen like a hero foute,
And though he was so brave and bold,
His face no more shall we behold.
Eleazer Hawks was killed outright,
Before he had time to fight,
Before he did the Indians see,
Was shot and killed immediately.
Oliver Amsden he was slain,
Which caused his friends much grief pain.
Simeon Amsden they found dead
Not many rods from Oliver's head.
Adonijah Gillett, we do hear,
Did lose his life which was so dear.
John Sadler fled across the water,
And thus escaped the dreadful slaughter.
Eunice Allen see the Indians comeing
And hoped to save herself by running:
And had not her petticoats stopt her,
The awful creatures had not cotched her,
Not tommyhawked her on the head,
And left her on the ground for dead.
Young Samuel Allen, Oh! lack-a-day!
Was taken and carried to Canada.
By Lucy Terry Prince (c. 1730-1821)
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
Saturday, August 27, 2016
Patient questions….
Some poems have several layers of
impact, tempting the reader to think deeper on the first re-read, and deeper
still on the next….
I noticed this poem by David Whyte. It
seemed to be ordinary enough as I skimmed through it, but it snared me in the
end, it bids for lavish, lush reflection and opens a couple windows for gazing
at some things we often don’t see clearly enough or think about clearly enough.
“…requests…beginning to lead
everywhere…” is a tempting gambit, and “…questions that have patiently waited
for you…” is a warming invitation to step into the cold shower of reality.
I think the poem has excesses of
language that diminish its essence, but the evidence of the right words is all there.
Here’s an excerpt, see the entire poem
in the Australia Times Poetry Magazine.
…Requests
to stop what
you are doing
right now,
and
to stop what
you are doing
right now,
and
to
stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life…
that can make
or unmake
a life…
From “Sometimes” by David Whyte © David Whyte and Many Rivers Press
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
Perspective
Standing
still on the old tracks,
alone,
you
can’t stop staring at the rails
and
you can’t tell if you’re looking ahead
or
looking to the past….
Can
you see a new dream out there?
….or
maybe it’s the way back
to
something you didn’t want to leave….
Maybe
it’s different if you’re not alone.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
Thursday, August 11, 2016
Taking a bite….
I read poetry regularly, and occasionally I find a poem that speaks to
me.
More often, in an otherwise medium offering, I stop short in wonderment
when I read the remarkably, brashly beautiful high-quality phrase or image that
makes me say, as my fellow poetic truth seeker Mike likes to say, “I wish I’d
written that!”
Here’s an example:
The "Whispers" poetry website offered “Summer Music” by David Austin, a
brief paean to a morning bird whose “…happy chatter...has no winter in it…”
How simply lovely that is, a luscious insight, proof of the potential
magic in ordinary but well-ordered words.
Thanks for that one, David.
Always good to taste the best bite of the apple.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
Monday, August 8, 2016
She's four, she said it...
Listening to the kids….
They won’t remember, but I will….
This post has been moved to
my website:
Tuesday, July 5, 2016
This, too, shall pass….
One
feels lost in the darkness of imperfect memory—
the haggard mind struggles to eclipse the image,
clinging defensively to the comfort, the contrast,
the brilliant contrast that separates the nightmare from reality.
Copyright © Richard
Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Sunday, June 12, 2016
“…somewhere hot…”
Book review: A Pirate Looks at Fifty
Jimmy Buffett (b. 1946)
Ballantine Books, New York, 1998
Full disclosure: I’m not a Parrothead,
but I’m related by blood and marriage to gen-you-wine Buffett fans, so I take
the liberty of using familiar language, even though “the king of somewhere hot”
has never seen me and isn’t likely to in this earthly paradise….
A
Pirate Looks at Fifty is a
memoir-ish book by Himself, written almost 20 years ago, I spotted it in the
local library’s discarded book sale bin and I did the right thing.
Seems to me, for starters, no one
should ever discard a book full of Jimmy Buffett stuff, he’s just so much in
love with life and he is a magnet for vicarious attention, I dare you to read Pirate without getting at least a
fleeting urge to head for the islands and see the world through Jimmy’s eyes.
You don’t even have to read the whole
book (I confess, I didn’t), just read as much as gets the juices flowing and
then get on with your regular life, and you can dip into it again any time you
want. Buffett’s music and Buffett’s style are a buffet—grab what you want, anytime,
sing along as the spirit moves, and go back for more whenever….
You don’t even have to like margaritas to get the full, slobbering, belly laugh, hijinksed, hot damn but mucho mellow effect when you sing along with Jimmy about the Mexican cutie and the lost shaker of salt.
I dare you not to sing a couple verses and the refrain right now, you have to, really….
Copyright © Richard Carl
Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Friday, June 10, 2016
Delight
Indian pudding,
never forget your first taste....
first taste is the best.
Copyright © Richard Carl
Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
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