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SciFi Poetry

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:45:19 +0000

Here at About.com Poetry, we’re immersed in classic poems that compress history and link us to the experiences and understandings of the poets of many past times. Still, every so often lately I look up from my computer screen and find myself thinking, “We’ve lived into the future”—where speculation leaks into real life, and science fiction becomes everyday reality. And there are poems here, too!

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More Poems on the Spot

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 01:48:47 +0000

During National Poetry Month 2010, we noticed lots of poets with typewriters going out in their local communities, from Seattle to New York to Miami to San Francisco, offering poems written to order on the spot. Since then, we’ve seen poetry on demand offers springing up in more cities across the country:

Jacqueline Suskin has turned her portable typewriter into a Poem Store in Arcata, California and will also do poems commissioned online, “Your Subject, Your Price.”
Kathleen Rooney, Dave Landsberger, and Eric Plattner do Poems While You Wait at markets and festivals around Chicago on their Royal Quiet DeLuxe, Smith Corona Sterling, and Remington DeLuxe Model 5 typewriters.
Elizabeth Howard takes her Olivetti to the local Harvest Festival in Stratford, Connecticut to create personalized Demand Poetry.
Bill Keys offered “Poems About Anyone or Anything” on the street in Pa’ia, Maui (where he was called “a hippie bard for the new millennium”), and has since moved back to Boulder, Colorado, where he does Poems While You Wait.
A group of Atlanta poets have offered Free Poems on Demand as “a subversive literary performance of exquisite proportions” at baseball games, street fairs, art galleries and book festivals.
Tristan Bennett types Fresh Poetry on the streets of New Orleans.
Chris Vitiello appeared at last year’s 100,000 Poets for Change event in Durham, North Carolina as “the Poetry Fox,” writing custom poems on request for all comers.
Living Poetry in the Triangle of North Carolina (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill) sponsors regular Poetry on Demand challenge nights for their member poets and a Poetry on Demand booth at SPARKcon, the annual local arts festival.
Charlotte Matthews of Charlottesville, Virginia shows up at the local farmer’s market on Saturday mornings at a booth offering “Poems To Go: Fresh.”

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New Classics in Our Valentine’s Day Collection

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 22:53:56 +0000

We’ve plumped up our anthology of classic love poems for Valentine’s Day this year, so you’re sure to find a great poem to declare your heart to the one you love. Here are the new additions:

“Air and Angels, ” by John Donne (1633)
Twice or thrice had I lov’d thee,
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp’d be....

“To Anthea Who May Command Him Anything, ” by Robert Herrick (1648)
Bid me to live, and I will live
Thy protestant to be;
Or bid me love, and I will give
A loving heart to thee....

“Answer to a Child’s Question, ” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1802)
....he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he—
‘I love my Love, and my Love loves me!’

“Love’s Philosophy, ” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819)
....the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?

“I Do Not Love Thee, ” by Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton (1829)
I do not love thee!—no! I do not love thee!
And yet when thou art absent I am sad;
And envy even the bright blue sky above thee,
Whose quiet stars may see thee and be glad....

“A Birthday, ” by Christina Rossetti (1861)
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;...

“In Excelsis, ” by Amy Lowell (1922)
You—you—
Your shadow is sunlight on a plate of silver;
Your footsteps, the seeding-place of lilies;
Your hands moving, a chime of bells across a windless air....

“To Earthward, ” by Robert Frost (1923)
Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air....

Happy Birthday, Amy Lowell

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:25:50 +0000

Amy Lowell was born in Massachusetts 138 years ago today, and in her honor we have selected a few choice poems to add to our Lowell library:

A sonnet of tortured love, “A Fixed Idea,” first published in Poetry magazine in 1910
Her Imagist aphorism “A Lover,” dating to 1917
An elegy for the beautiful world broken by war, “September, 1918”
Her singular distilled image of the sun-struck and stunned lover, “Carrefour”

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Langston Hughes’ Birthday Opens Black History Month

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:55:37 +0000

Today marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of James Mercer Langston Hughes, the unofficial poet laureate of Black American life and culture, a radical democrat at the center of the Harlem Renaissance, lyrical poet incorporating the traditions of Black music—jazz and blues—in his poems, humorous storyteller, political activist and playwright, passionate advocate of African American pride, civil rights and artistic freedom. What more fitting way to mark the beginning of Black History Month than to read some of his best-loved poems:

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921)
“The Weary Blues” (1921)
“Harlem” (1951)

More on Langston Hughes:
Biographical Profile of Hughes
Books by Langston Hughes
A Trio of New Poems by Langston Hughes (2009)
Langston Hughes’ Home Brought Back to Artistic Life (2007)

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Love Poems All Kinds

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:33:53 +0000

Years ago, in gathering our anthology of Classic Love Poems for Valentine’s Day, we focused on straightforward declarations of love, poems of seduction and promise, celebrating the beauties and virtues of the beloved and forging the love-bond between two people. But of course, this leaves out the many great love poems of other kinds, the poems of unrequited or forbidden or lost love. For example, from Robert Burns we chose his best-known “Song—A Red, Red Rose” and left out his despairing farewell between two lovers who cannot stay together, “Ae Fond Kiss.”

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Burns Night: Quoting and Ranking Favorite Poems

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:40:09 +0000

It’s Burns Night, and the Scottish bard’s poems are being declaimed all over the world. Scottish first minister Alex Salmond naturally chose this date to launch his government’s “consultation” on a 2014 referendum on Scottish independence from the United Kingdom, quoting from Burns’ great “hymn to equality,” “A Man’s a Man for a’ That.” Burns was also quoted by many of the Scottish MPs who spoke following Salmond’s announcement, and while they were talking in Edinburgh, MP Eleanor Laing and Prime Minister David Cameron traded their own Burns quotations in the English Parliament in London, during Prime Minister’s questions:

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From Harry Potter to the American Buddha Bard

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 03:12:37 +0000

James Franco played him in Howl in 2010... Now Daniel Radcliffe, who grew up in front of the world in the eight Harry Potter films, will take on ...

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Another Poet Imprisoned for His Poem

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:01:37 +0000

A poem can contain a dangerous power—certainly some governments see poems as threats to their authority, and through the centuries many poets have been rebels, agitators and advocates—in their poems as well as their political acts. In the past few years, we’ve seen a Burmese poet sent to jail for his acrostic poem complaining about the country’s military leader, and the Nobel Peace Prize given to Liu Xiaobo, Chinese poet and democracy activist serving an 11-year prison sentence for “subversion.” Today the trend continues, with news of yet another poet arrested in China for publishing a poem urging people to make their voices heard:

It’s time
It’s time, Chinese people!
It’s time,
The square is ours,
The feet are ours,
It’s time to use our feet to go to the square and make a choice.

from The New York Times:
“Crackdown Continues on Activists in China,” by Michael Wines
“Zhu Yufu, 58, a writer and democracy advocate, was charged with subversion in Hangzhou for writing a poem that urged citizens to gather to defend their freedoms.... Mr. Zhu wrote the poem early last year, as uprisings in the Middle East led a small number of activists outside China to issue an Internet call for a ‘Jasmine Revolution.’”

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Poets’ Epitaphs

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:41:22 +0000

Crafting the lines to be carved on a tombstone, distilling the essence of a life into a brief final statement is an innately poetic task, one that has often fallen to the poets among us. Browsing through our library of classic poems, you will discover quite a few “epitaph poems.” They may be elegies or memoirs brief enough to be etched on someone’s grave, like Ben Jonson’s “On My First Son,” a farewell to his eldest son who died of the plague at the age of seven, or Aphra Behn’s “Epitaph on the Tombstone of a Child, the Last of Seven that Died Before.” Or the epitaph may be spun out far beyond the confines of an actual tombstone into a meditation on the nature of poetry and life, like William Wordsworth’s “A Poet’s Epitaph.” And of course many poets have chosen to write their own epitaphs, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Louis Stevenson and William Butler Yeats.

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