Linda Sue Grimes's Blog

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes

The Irish Independent announces that poet Seamus Haney has been awarded the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize of €15,000, about $20,000 US. The prize was presented by Eliot’s widow, Valerie, January 15, 2007, at a ceremony in London.

Heaney’s poetry collection District and Circle beat out competitors Simon Armitage and Paul Muldoon. The chair of this year’s judges panel, Sean O’Brien, said of Heaney’s collection, "Seamus Heaney's 'District and Circle' is a commanding, exhilarating work. In an outstandingly strong field, this was an exceptional collection of poems."

Heaney did not attend the ceremony, because he has been experiencing poor health, so poet Bernard O’Donoghue read some of Heaney’s poems. District and Circle brings Heaney’s poetry publications to an even dozen.

About Heaney’s most recent collection, Poet Laureate Andrew Motion concluded that these poems exude "the undiminished freshness of his response to time-honoured things.” The New York Times claimed that District and Circle "brims with lovely evocations, reconstructions, restorations."

Sion Hamilton, poetry buyer at Foyles bookshop, gave some insight about the importance of this prize: "The TS Eliot prize has become a highly prestigious literary award. It seems almost incredible that Heaney has never won before. Winning the prize really affirms a poet's standing. Even though it is awarded to a particular title, it reflects on all the hard work the poet has put in over the years."

Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, and twice he has been awarded Whitbread Book of the Year Award: first for his collection The Spirit Level and for his translation of Beowulf. He was a finalist for the T .S. Eliot award in 2001 for his book, Electric Light.

Heaney was born to a Roman Catholic family on April 13, 1939, in Northern Ireland at Mossbawn, his family’s farmhouse, northwest of Belfast. He is the oldest of nine siblings. While attending a boarding school in Derry, Heaney’s four-year-old brother was killed in a car crash. The following is one of two poems Heaney wrote on this subject:

Mid-Term Break

• I sat all morning in the college sick bay
• Counting bells knelling classes to a close,
• At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

• In the porch I met my father crying—
• He had always taken funerals in his stride—
• And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

• The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
• When I came in, and I was embarrassed
• By old men standing up to shake my hand

• And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"
• Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
• Away at school, as my mother held my hand

• In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
• At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
• With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

• Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
• And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
• For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

• Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple,
• He lay in the four foot box as in a cot.
• No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

• A four foot box, a foot for every year.

This poem demonstrates the power of Heaney’s work, even better than all the prizes his has won and continues to win. The poet has also been honored with numerous professorships, and in 1984, he was offered the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University.

From 1989 and 1994 he served a poetry professor at Oxford, and then again at Harvard in 1997 he was honored with the position, Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence.

Between stints at universities, Seamus Heaney lives in Dublin.

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes

I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;

And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

All I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the seagulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife;

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,

And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trip's over.

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes

Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” has been misread even by well-educated professionals. Jeff Greenberg, Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona, offers a typical example of the misreading Roethke’s innocent drama of father and son roughhousing. In the professor’s lecture, titled “The impact of violence on our children: Some insights from Becker and the cinema,” he states the following which introduces Roethke’s poem: “Perhaps most uniquely disturbing is when our security base turns on us, conveying inconsistent values and unpredictable behaviors, and inflicting emotional and physical pain; how then does a child sustain equanimity? Even if brutal and deeply disturbed, the parent is typically still the only basis of security the child knows. Theodore Roethke expresses this problem eloquently.”

The professor could not be further from the truth, but fortunately, he says no more about the poem, allowing his mischaracterization to say it all. Contrary to the Professor Greenberg’s misreading, Theodore Roethke’s poem expresses love between a father and son in a roughhousing session that the adult speaker in the poem looking back chooses to metaphorically dramatize as a “waltz.” If the event portrayed in the poem resulted in “emotional and physical pain,” it is unlikely that the adult speaker would have allowed his readers to interpret the event as a special time when the father and son “romped until the pans / Slid from the kitchen shelf,” and then the father “waltzed me [the son] off to bed / Still clinging to your [the father’s] shirt.”

“Romped” is too playful a word for an emotionally and physically traumatized adult to use in looking back at a childhood event. And if the father were actually beating and abusing the child in an alcoholic rage, the child would not be clinging the father’s shirt, he would be trying to run away from him.

The time designations of the poem make it clear that the father and son did this kind of “waltzing” often. It was not just one session that the speaker is recounting. Notice he says, “Such waltzing was not easy.” The gerund “waltzing” signals that every time they engaged in this “dance,” the son was challenged to keep up with the father’s movements. The child enjoys this waltz not being easy, or else it would have become boring. The father challenged the boy to keep up with him as they “romped” around the kitchen making those pans slide off the shelf.

Also, if the session were one of abuse and beating by a drunken brute, the mother would have taken a more active rôle than just frowning. The mother does not even speak, signaling that she is only mildly annoyed by this masculine ritual. There are no indications that the father is abusive to either the child or the mother or any other members of the family. The poem reveals only a speaker who is an adult looking back at a playful time he spent with his father. The alcohol breath, the dirty hands, the clumsy romping, and beating time on the boy’s head are all just innocent challenging features that comprise the metaphor of the waltz, that so impressed the boy that as an adult he dramatizes the event so we can enjoy his challenging dance along with him and his family.

For a thorough analysis of “My Papa’s Waltz,” please see my article, “Roethke’s 'My Papa’s Waltz'.”

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes

Where the Mind is Without Fear

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection:

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

—from Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore

Analysis

Consisting of one sentence, Tagore’s simple prayer for his country, India, prior to her gaining independence from Britain, has become one of the most quoted poem/prayers by political activists. The universality of this prayer allows it to transcend both time and space, as all great poetry does.

The first seven lines consist of adverb clauses that denote a condition portrayed by a metaphor of place, “where the mind is without fear, “where knowledge is free,” etc. Until we read the last line, we do not know the exact reference of this place, but we do realize that it is a place where many wonderful qualities exist: fearlessness, knowledge, unity, truth, useful work, reason, and progress.

Then after depicting all these useful qualities, in the main clause of the sentence the speaker names that condition, that metaphoric place as “that heaven of freedom” and asks the “Father,” i.e. God, to allow his country to arrive there or “awake” to the realization that she must strive to achieve the ability to demonstrate all these wonderful qualities.

Other Tagore Articles

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes

Of course, it still does, and because of that more recent “day of fire,” September 11, 2001, as noted by our current commander-in-chief, President George W. Bush, it stings the memory all the more.

Such days of unfathomable horror motivate poets to express their musings. Poet/professor Walt McDonald’s poem, “The Winter They Bombed Pearl Harbor,” subtly invokes the Pearl Harbor attack as almost an after-thought. But throughout the poem, we catch images that suddenly propel us from that family farm setting into the heart of war; one such image is “the roar and buzz of steel and mosquitoes,” and another is “lobbing frozen dirt clods like grenades.” And of course, the last stanza that brazenly inserts “Pearl Harbor bombed” and “the fall of Bataan” promising that war would not be lost, because the speaker’s father had enlisted.

If Walt McDonald fears too much patriotism, Marty Lewinter does not. Also, a professor as well as versifier, Lewinter offers poems that are quite literal and anything but subtle. Then there is “Pearl Harbor Day” by Irvin L. Rozier, not exactly a polished poem, but nevertheless, its sentiment is understandable. Other poems that commemorate the Pearl Harbor attack: “Pearl Harbor TO 911: Everlasting Changes,” by Ralph Maduike; “Pearl Harbor is its Name” and “USS Arizona Memorial: To Honor our Dead” on the web site Poetry for Veterans; “Always Remember” by John Chaffey, and “Surprised Infamy” by Roger Hancock.

Linda Brown’s poem, “Pearl Harbor’s Child” dismisses any notion of patriotism, sentiment, or raw emotion, except as she is able to muster for own self-grieving. Her first stanza goes, “I was born a week after Pearl Harbor / into a crib with an air raid siren. / It wailed nightly from the elm outside / until I went rigid as a hypnotist's steel board, / too scared--even in my mother's arms--to cry.” And then we’re treated to her being moved from one location to the other, until finally her speaker throws up her hands and says what else but a poet could such poor frightened devil have become.

All of the poems mentioned here are at various stages of accomplishment: some of the poets are merely gushing forth sentiment, not well crafted verse, just expressions of raw emotion. Still they are worth considering as we look back into history and reflect on events that will always elicit raw emotion.

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes

• To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
• One clover, and a bee,
• And revery.
• The revery alone will do,
• If bees are few.

Analysis

This little poem expresses Dickinson’s continuing love affair with the spiritual level of being. She begins by claiming that to make a physically large item, “a prairie,” all one needs is two small physical items, “a clover and one bee.”

Then she qualifies that by saying, “One clover, and a bee / And revery”; then she qualifies that claim further, by saying if you don’t have one of those physical components, “bees,” (and by implication, the clover as well), then you can still make the prairie by revery alone.

“Revery” means dream, thought, extended concentration on any subject, or even day-dreaming wherein the mind is allowed to roam free over the landscape of unlimited expansion, but to the speaker in this poem, “revery” is more like meditation which results in a true vision.

The speaker’s power of revery demonstrates an advanced achievement, far beyond ordinary day-dreaming or cogitation. Ultimately, this speaker is claiming that without any physical objects at all, the mind of one advanced in the art of revery can produce any object that mind desires.

Other Dickinson poems that focus on a similar themes are #632 “The Brain is wider than the sky,” #670 “One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted,” #674 “The Soul that hath a Guest,” and many others.

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes

Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, primarily for his prose translations of his book called Gitanjali, Bengali for “song offerings.”

The following is an excerpt, Gitanjali poem #7:

My song has put off her adornments. She has no pride of dress and decoration. Ornaments would mar our union. They would come between thee and me. Their jingling would drown thy whispers. My poet's vanity dies in shame before thy sight. O Master Poet, I have sat down at thy feet. Only let me make my life simple and straight like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.

This poem demonstrates a humble charm: it is a prayer to open the poet’s heart to the Divine Beloved—“Master Poet”—without unneeded words and gestures. A vain poet produces ego-centered poetry, but this poet/devotee wants to be open to the simple humility of truth that only the Divine Beloved can offer his soul. As the Irish poet W. B. Yeats has said, these songs grow out of a culture in which art and religion are the same, so it is not surprising that we find our offerer of songs speaking to God in song after song, as is the case in #7. And the last line in song #7 is a subtle allusion to Bhagavan Krishna. According the great yogi/poet, Paramahansa Yogananda, "Krishna is shown in Hindu art with a flute; on it he plays the enrapturing song that recalls to their true home the human souls wandering in delusion."

Rabindranath Tagore, in addition to being an accomplished poet, essayist, playwright, and novelist, is also remembered as an educator, who founded Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan, West Bengal. Tagore exemplifies a Renaissance man, skilled in many fields of endeavor—including, of course, spiritual poetry.

For more about Tagore, please see my article Rabindranath Tagore.

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes

Here are the poll results “Poetry and You” with the question, “Which statement best describes your experience with poetry?”

• I love it and read everything I can about it. (54.84%)
• I hate it and avoid it always. (3.23%)
• I've never really tried to read poetry. (6.45%)
• I'm taking a course about poetry, but I'm not enjoying it. (6.45%)
• I write poetry but never read it. (29.03%)

The results are quite positive with over half the respondents saying they love it and read everything they can about it. Too bad about the three percent that are totally missing out. I always wonder about people who hate things that they know nothing about. On the other hand, maybe that’s the only way hate is possible, because when you really learn about something, you can always find something about it to like.

To those folks who’ve have never really tried to read poetry, I say, welcome aboard, you’ve come to the right place. And the poor souls stuck in a class, forced to study and not enjoying it—well maybe by the end of the course, you will discover that your position has changed. At least, that’s what we hope for.

And while the percentage shrank since I wrote in an earlier blog about the topic, still over a quarter of the responders belong to that odd group that writes poetry but never reads it. I’ll bet you folks think that “a poem can mean anything you want it to mean.” I also image you write things like “I put my shoes on my head / and go to town / waiting for blue lilies to / mingle with the / frogs on the dashboard / of my mind…”

Thank you--all who took time to respond to the poll. Please check out the next poll, and then expect another analysis after it is complete. Ain't poetry fun???

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes

Dylan Thomas fans have the great fortune to be able to enjoy a web site dedicated to Wales's favorite poet, adminsitered by the poet's son, Aeronwy. Information about Thomas is just a few clicks away. The site includes the following: Chronology, Works by Dylan Thomas, Bibliography, Dylan Thomas Collection, Talks and lectures, Dylan Thomas enquiry form, Dylan and Caitlin's friends and contemporaries, and other links to informative pages.

Of course, Dylan Thomas's most widely anthologized and most studied poem is "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." In my article, Dylan Thomas' 'Do Not Go Gentle', I offer an analysis of and commentary about this poem.

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes

To read Tennyson's "The Eagle"

Analysis

This poem is just a simple poem about an eagle. In the first stanza the eagle sits perched up on some high mountain crag in some deserted area, and in the second stanza he suddenly swoops down in flight. That's really all there is to it as far a subject matter goes. However, the significance of the poem is the interesting way Tennyson communicates that experience of the eagle through the poetic devices: crooked hands, ring'd with the azure world, wrinkled sea, like a thunderbolt, etc. Notice the interesting contrast between the two stanzas: in the first the eagle is sitting still, and in the second one he is in flight.

There is nothing in this poem to suggest that Tennyson is making a religious, philosophical, or political statement.

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes

Personal Experience

When I was a senior in high school (1963-64), the opportunity opened for seniors to take creative writing instead of English literature. A number of us choose to do that. Actually, the class was probably about 30 of our total number of 76. The creative writing class was taught by the same teacher who had the previous year taught American history, and that year was this teacher’s first year at our school. That he was able to talk the administration into letting him teach creative writing is testimony to this man’s powers of persuasion. He was a poet himself and also taught English.

The English literature teacher had taught at our school for over thirty years, and she was an excellent teacher. I had in been in her sophomore English class and junior English, which focused on American literature.

But I chose to take the creative writing option instead of English literature, and over the years, I have regretted that choice. If I had taken the creative writing in addition to the English literature class, I would have received a much better education. Instead, by taking the creative writing, I missed out on learning about valuable foundations such as Beowulf, Shakespeare, and other important British literature.

At first I thought it didn’t matter too much, because I was very interested in foreign languages, and I considered becoming a teacher of Spanish, Latin, or French. It turns out that I became of teacher of German, but my interest in poetry soon returned, and I returned to writing poetry.

As I engaged my interests in creating poetry, I realized that my knowledge of literature was deficient. So I returned to graduate school to complete a degree in English. And after finishing the MA and PhD in English, I had finally caught up. I actually chose British literature as my concentration area for my PhD. Still, if I had just taken the English literature as a senior in high school, I would have been ahead of the game.

Poets and Traditional Literature

Poets need a good foundation in literature. It behooves young students to take all the literature courses they can, if they discover they have an interest and talent for writing.

Right now, on the poll, Poetry and You, I ask the question, “Which statement best describes your experience with poetry?” More than one-third of the responders have chosen the answer, “I write poetry but never read it.” That is too bad. I imagine their creations would demonstrate their lack of expertise and skill with literature. It’s difficult to imagine how one could acquire skill in an endeavor that one never observes. Imagine a musician who plays music but never listens to any, or a surgeon who has never observed other surgeons at work.

The good news reflected in the poll is that 44% of the responders claim to love poetry and read all they can about it. I hope more writers come from that group than the other.

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes

John Tyler was president of the United States from 1841-1845. When he was happy, he wrote poetry, according to his biographer Robert Seager. Tyler married when in office and wrote his poem, "Sweet Lady, Awake!" to his wife while they were on their honeymoon.

The Poetry web site at the Library of Congress also features videos of such poets as Langston Hughes.

The site announces upcoming event such as Maxine Kumin & Wesley McNair Nov. 9, 2006

Poetry reading, and Poetry at Noon Nov. 14, 2006 Deliciious poems about food.

For more information about this fascinating site, please see my article Poetry at the Library of Congress.

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes

"Childhood" by Frances Cornford

1. I used to think that grown-up people chose
2. To have stiff backs and wrinkles round their nose,
3. And veins like small fat snakes on either hand,
4. On purpose to be grand.
5. Till through the banister I watched one day
6. My great-aunt Etty's friend who was going away,
7. And how her onyx beads had come unstrung.
8. I saw her grope to find them as they rolled;
9. And then I knew that she was helplessly old,
10. As I was helplessly young.

Analysis

The speaker of this poem is looking back on an occasion in her life when she first realized that both young and old people are helpless against the aging process. In lines 1-4, she tells us that she used to think grown-ups "chose" those physical defects that marked them as old, but the speaker also thought they chose them "to be grand." This thought indicates that the speaker was very young, since she thought stiff backs, wrinkles, and veined hands were "grand." (I secretly wish the poet had chosen a different word from "grand," one that truly reflected her meaning; I suspect she settled on grand to rime with hand.)

The lines 6-10 contain the reason for the speaker's changed opinion about aging grown-ups. She had told us that she used to believe that the grown-ups "chose" those aging qualities until she observed her great-aunt's friend groping helplessly for her beads. The speaker realizes that it is not likely a person would choose to have such difficulty just retrieving some loose beads, so she then realizes that they probably don't choose those visible physical defects either. This observation led the speaker to change her perspective: the adults were just helpless as they acquired those old-age characteristics, and their helplessness paralleled her own, the helplessness of being young.

The rime scheme in this poem is AA, BB, CC, DE, ED. An interesting rime scheme, but as I mentioned earlier, I believe the rime scheme interferes with meaning. Take "wrinkles round their nose," for example; wrinkles usually form around the eyes and mouth. Even in a very old person, wrinkles are seldom noticeable around the nose. In line six the friend "is going away"; while "away" provides a nice rime with "day," it is vague. Perhaps the speaker wants us to infer that the friend was dying, but "going away" does not clearly convey that message.

"Childhood" is still an interesting poem, allowing us one speaker's observation about how a young person relates to the aging process.

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes

Please visit Whitman's "A Noiseless Patient Spider" to read the poem.

Commentary

Whitman’s brief ten-line poem exemplifies an idea he had jotted down in his notebook: "small in theme yet has it the sweep of the universe." —from Walt Whitman's Notebook page 19 LOC #94

In the first verse paragraph, the speaker of the poem creates a little drama as he recounts his experience of watching a spider trying to find a place to spin its web. We see the spider positioned alone on some object which the speaker chooses not to identify but merely calls a “little promontory.”

He tells us that the spider was exploring the vast space around him by throwing out the thread-like material that spiders use to spin webs: “It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself.” He sees the spider do this many times throwing, throwing each thread out of itself, and it continues this activity for a long while.

In the second verse paragraph, the speaker directly addresses his own soul and compares it to the spider. Like the spider his soul is “surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space” and like the spider sending out his “filaments,” the speaker’s soul searches for a place to connect itself.

The spider is simply trying to find places to anchor its filaments so it can spin a web, but the speaker’s soul is searching for a lasting connection whether a friendship with another human being or more profoundly a connection with its Creator. Thus the poem can be considered “small in theme” in the first verse paragraph, yet contain a “sweep of the universe” in the second verse paragraph.

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes

Donald Hall, the current Poet Laureate of the United States, has made poetry his life. And like most poets, he has written numerous essays about poetry, including the state of poetry, the decline of poetry, and just generally how he feels about poetry.

One of his most famous poems is "My Son, My Executioner" which dramatizes the paradox of birth and death. He has published over twenty books of poetry and about that many in prose and children's books.

So this Poet Laureate can speak to poetry issues with some authority. And he has some definite ideas about what poets should do and how they should do it. Now as Poet Laureate he had a forum to influence the art and how it is perceived. It will be interesting to see exactly how he accomplishes the main purpose of the laureate position, that of promoting poetry.

See my article "Donald Hall on Ambition" to find out just what has to say about the proper relationship between poets and ambition.

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes

Earlier this month the University of Minnesota Libraries paid $775,000 for the manuscripts, correspondence, and personal papers of Robert Bly, native of Minnesota. A spokesman for the libraries, University of Minnesota Librarian Wendy Pradt Lougee, said, “Acquiring Robert Bly’s archive is really a coup for the University of Minnesota Libraries. Several other prominent libraries vied for the archive, but we are so pleased that we can keep his works and personal papers in his home state.”

This collection contains approximately 80,000 handwritten pages and a journal spanning 50 years. It also includes notebooks of Bly’s “morning poems” as well as numerous drafts of his “translations.” The archive also holds his many letters from writers such as James Wright, Donald Hall, and James Dickey. Any other material produced from now on will become part of this archive.

Allen Ginsberg’s personal archive brought a million dollars in 1994, bought by Stanford University.

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes

Analyzing, explicating, examining poems can be a challenge. But when you find a poem you truly enjoy, the challenge is worthwhile. Instead just thinking quietly about the joy the poem brings, if you ask yourself a series of questions about the poem, you might find that you enjoy the poem even more.

Three important question to begin with are: 1. Who is the speaker? 2. What is the dominant metaphor? 3. What are the dominant images?

If you can answer these questions with some detail, you'll find that you actually appreciate the poem even more. And you will also find that your respect for the poet deepens.

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes

Reading a poem is not like reading a newspaper article. We don't even read those two genres for the same purpose. We read newspapers to get information; we read poetry to get back experience.

Therefore, when we read a poem, we need to read it many times, slowly--unlike reading solely for information, when we read as fast as possible to get as much information as possible in as little time as possible.

Reading about poetry, then, is somewhere in the middle. Of course, we need to be acquainted with poem, so we must read the poem slowly and deliberately, but when we are reading to obtain information about the poem, we might speed up a bit. But also we might need to return to poem as we are reading about it.

To gain a solid appreciation of a poem, it is useful to first study the poem to decide what we think it is doing; then, if we have the good fortune to be able to read a commentary or analysis, or even a thorough explication, we get an extra opportunity to gain even deeper apprecaition.