Wed 1 Jun 2011
A new selection
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of poems has been selectimicated at my website.
poetry
Archived Posts from this Category
Tue 3 May 2011
Sprung poetry
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A new gathering of poetry has sprung up at my website.
Sat 2 Apr 2011
A new phalanx of poetry
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has marched onto my website and conquered the natives.
Fri 25 Mar 2011
When I was one and twenty
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Random quote of the day:
“To be a poet at twenty is to be twenty; to be a poet at forty is to be a poet.”
—Eugène Delacroix
Disclaimer:Â The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.
Fri 4 Mar 2011
A thoroughly modern poem from 1888
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Thanks to Lady Lavona’s Cabinet of Curiosities for sharing it on her blog.
Sisters of the Cross of Shame
by Dana Burnet (1888)
The Sisters of the Cross of Shame,
They smile along the night;
Their houses stand with shuttered souls
And painted eyes of light.
Their houses look with scarlet eyes
Upon a world of sin;
And every man cries, “Woe, alas!â€
And every man goes in.
The sober Senate meets at noon,
To pass the Woman’s Law,
The portly Churchmen vote to stem
The torrent with a straw.
The Sister of the Cross of Shame,
She smiles beneath her cloud—
(She does not laugh till ten o’clock,
And then she laughs too loud.)
And still she hears the throb of feet
Upon the scarlet stair,
And still she dons the cloak of shame
That is not hers to wear.
The sons of saintly women come
To kiss the Cross of Shame;
Before them, in another time,
Their worthy fathers came.…
And no man tells his son the truth,
Lest he should speak of sin;
And every man cries, “Woe, alas!â€
And every man goes in.
Wed 2 Mar 2011
A new glob of poetry
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has adhered to my website.
Mon 28 Feb 2011
Forgotten lives
Posted by PJ under memories, my poetry, poetry
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I’ve had a forced clean up campaign going—boxes and boxes of junk out in the garage that have sat there for five years, since I moved into this house. I went from a large one bedroom with a great deal of storage space to two rooms and what space I could steal from the main part of the house. I quickly ran out of storage and those boxes sat there, waiting to be purged, daunting me, mocking me. I don’t have the luxury of letting sleeping dogs lie anymore. We need room for medical supplies.
Some boxes are easy to go through, composed of knickknacks and paddywacks and papers and whatnots. Disposing of the stuff isn’t easy, but as I’m having to do this in a hurry, I’m purging some things and cramming the rest into any available space or on top of already-standing stuff in the house. It’s a horrid mess and will have to be gone through again and purged some more, but…that’s another trauma, somewhere down the line. I’ve got four xerox boxes of books in the back of my car waiting to be donated somewhere. There will be more.
Other boxes aren’t as easy to go through. When my moving date grew closer, I was just shoving things into boxes, mostly paperwork and god-knows, with the thought, “I’ll sort these later.” A pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later situation, and payment has come due. These boxes have to be gone through relatively slowly, sometimes paper by paper, to see which can be safely recycled, which should be kept, and which should be shredded. Often, out of an entire xerox-sized box full of paper, I’ll keep a stack maybe a half-inch high. You know that saying, “You have to write a million words of **** before you begin to write the good stuff”? Apparently, I thought you also had to print it out. Most of that exists on my hard drive so can be recycled (but what a waste of paper!).
Mostly, the sorting is tedious, but sometimes I land upon something that’s been lost for five years, or something that speaks to me from another time, almost another life.  Sometimes I run across things that only exists in longhand, that I’d completely forgotten about. Many are quite cringeworthy, but some are not bad, and even the ideas behind some of the cringey stuff still sparks my imagination. “I could work with this,” I say to myself, and lay these aside for another day’s consideration.
Sometimes, as I said, they almost seem to belong to another life. Like that horrible bout of chronic insomnia I went through for about three months back in the late 90s. It was entirely due to some medication I was taking because once I went off it, I returned to my usual cycle of sleep. I have always been a talented sleeper. It’s a sensual pleasure I revel in, so it was quite a foreign to be up at all hours and unable to nod off. What reminded me of this episode was a piece of notebook paper with a hand-scrawled poem on it. Not a great poem, but a great spark of memory:
Insomnia
Things dropping like things do
through the links in the chains of midnight
held fast but slipping away
by the link of the chains of midnight
drinking hot milk laced with vanilla
as I sit on the edge of my bed
so I can drink my rest
deep, deep, deep—
but only these chains bind me here
long past midnight
I used to sleep like a champion
now it takes so little to chase it
and I howl in my chains
like a dog in the night
cold and so alone, chained
to a stake in the yard
There was an actual dog who lived across the alley and a few doors down from my apartment. Sometimes the two of us would howl in unison, each in our lonely, sleepless vigils. It was odd to think of all that again.
It’s not that I’d forgotten this period in my life, but I really don’t think of it often. It was an aberration, so unlike my usual experience. I do get the occasional bout of sleepless, but not like that. I hope to never have another period like that. It’s a life I’d much rather not relive.
Thu 3 Feb 2011
Fluttering wings
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A new flight of poems has roosted at my website.
Fri 7 Jan 2011
Oh, sweet victory of love
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I have been searching for a certain poem for decades, ever since an English professor read it aloud in class in a freshman English class. He also handed out mimeographs of it (yes, I am old), but it was spread over two pages (though not a long poem, the print was BIG). Somehow, though I loved this poem with much loveness, I lost the second page and the last two stanzas. I only discovered this several years after the class when the poem came to mind and I went looking.
“No problem,” thinks I, “since the first page has the name of the poem and the poet. Love Poem by J. F. Nims should not be so hard to find.”
This was before the worldwide web, children, back in those misty days of low tech information retrieval. I went to the library and looked for a book of poetry by Nims. They had none. I even tried at the UCLA Research Library when I was there doing research for something else. They had a book! Alas, not the one containing Love Poem.
A few years later, once the internet really got cranking, I looked for Love Poem by J. F. Nims. Nothing. Oh, there were references to Mr. Nims (he edited Poetry magazine), but nothing on this poem. As if the poem never existed. But I remembered it, and I still had that pathetic half of a mimeographed poem. Periodically, when I thought of it, I’d put Mr. Nims’s name into Google. Still no Love Poem. I was not obsessive in my search, even if a bit obsessed.
And then today, I thought of the first line of the poem, the line that had remained with me all these years: “My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases…” So I plugged that into Google. And, lo, there it was! On Poemfinder.com! I had tried poem finder before, I’m sure of it, but clearly it must have been before June 9, 2009.
I’m not ashamed to say that I got misty-eyed when I read the complete poem once more. Maybe I should be, but I’m not. After all these years, I still love it. After all this build up, I hope it doesn’t disappoint you. Love Poem by J. F. Nims:
Mon 3 Jan 2011
A new host of poetry
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I was overcome by a mood of whimsy this month which I really should have tried harder to suppress, but…what the hell?
