rymenhild

villainny just posted her favorite poem, reminding me that poetry is just what I need on this dispiriting sleepless night. To be fair, I haven't tried to sleep yet. But I'm anxious about the state of academia and the state of the world, and I'm not relaxed enough to want to try.

I couldn't choose one favorite poem, so instead I provide links:

Marilyn Hacker - Rune of the Finland Woman
Marianne Moore - Sojourn in the Whale
Theodore Roethke - Once More, the Round

And last, from one of the darkest (and, occasionally, most unnecessarily gory) poems I know, a passage I find somehow hopeful:

Galway Kinnell, The Book of Nightmares (1971), VII.4.

And you yourself,
some impossible Tuesday
in the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out
among the black stones
of the field, in the rain,

and the stones saying
over their one word, ci-gicirct, ci-gicirct, ci-gicirct,

and the raindrops
hitting you on the fontanel
over and over, and you standing there
unable to let them in.

When feeding my Lemony Snicket obsession again yesterday, I noticed that one of the torn letters closing The Grim Grotto mentioned a place called the Galway Kennel. The Galway Kennel. If I had not known, from an offhand mention of Franz Wright, that Daniel Handler likes his modern-day poetry both obscure and sublime, I might possibly have fainted when I caught the reference. Galway Kinnell's Book of Nightmares is the single volume of poetry I love above all others. Once I read it aloud with muchabstracted, one summer day in northern Pennsylvania, in a parking lot off of the Appalachian Trail, accompanied by an African drum and the guest appearance of church bells, somewhere far off. Even without the drum and bells, the book sings; you should all listen to it.

The full text of The Book of Nightmares is available on the Web here.

--

Some links:

T is for Titus, whose victims were breaded.
angevin2 has Shakespeared (What? "Spear" is a verb) the Gashlycrumb Tinies.

Also, muchabstracted would probably be interested to know that ellen_kushner has an LJ, and prosewitch ought to see Neil Gaiman's review of Maria Tatar's new Brothers Grimm translation. genarti, look at how wonderful a community little_details is.

You people whose coolness I have promised to reveal to the world are all decidedly cool people, and I promise to tell everyone why in the next few days, but not tonight, as I want to get more work done at the moment.

If any of you happen to acquire time machines and travel to eighteenth century England, please tell the inhabitants, from me, that all writing of poetry between the years 1700 and 1800 should be outlawed on grounds of cruelty to readers. (Unless you meet an inhabitant by the name of William Blake, who of course does not count.)

( If you wish to encounter quality poetry, you had best seek some other poem now. Behind the cut lurk horrors like the word mossy-tinctured, brutally murdered fish, and painfully correct iambic pentameter. )

I warned you.