Silvester :)

So it's Silvester, so, while staying with Shakespeare, while staying with his master classes in metaphor, I'll stop posting from his darker plays.  In fact, I'm posting from Romeo and Juliet for today  :)

And then I'll go be miserable.  Because my daughter's insisting on miserableness for New Year's Eve.
_________________________________

From Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2

By William Shakespeare   

He jests at scars that never felt a wound.

Enter Juliet above at a window.

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!

Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,

Who is already sick and pale with grief

That thou her maid art far more fair than she.

Be not her maid, since she is envious.

Her vestal livery is but sick and green,

And none but fools do wear it. Cast it off.

It is my lady; O, it is my love!

O that she knew she were!

She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of that?

Her eye discourses; I will answer it.

I am too bold; 'tis not to me she speaks.

Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,

Having some business, do entreat her eyes

To twinkle in their spheres till they return.

What if her eyes were there, they in her head?

The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars

As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven

Would through the airy region stream so bright

That birds would sing and think it were not night.

See how she leans her cheek upon her hand!

O that I were a glove upon that hand,

That I might touch that cheek!

My kingdom for a horse

Because I, too, was unhorsed (though not at Bosworth Field, but indeed earlier this week in Berrien County), I'm posting the opening soliloquy of Richard III today.  Fortunately, I was not killed, but instead found a new horse two days later  :)
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From The Life and Death of Richard the Third, Act 1, Scene 1

By William Shakespeare

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;

Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;

Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,

Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;

And now, instead of mounting barded steeds

To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,

He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber

To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,

Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;

I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty

To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;

I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,

Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,

Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time

Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,

And that so lamely and unfashionable

That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;

Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,

Have no delight to pass away the time,

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun

And descant on mine own deformity:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,

By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,

To set my brother Clarence and the king

In deadly hate the one against the other:

And if King Edward be as true and just

As I am subtle, false and treacherous,

This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up,

About a prophecy, which says that 'G'

Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be.

Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here

Clarence comes.

On knives and daggers

I've never owned a dagger.  The closest thing I've ever had was this beautiful hunting knife that I used to keep in my car ... that is lying somewhere among the snows of Berrien County since Wednesday.

At any rate.  Here's Macbeth seeing a dagger:
__________________________________________

From Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 1

By William Shakespeare

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw.

Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;

And such an instrument I was to use.

Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,

Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,

And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,

Which was not so before. There's no such thing:

It is the bloody business which informs

Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one halfworld

Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates

Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder,

Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,

Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace.

With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design

Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,

Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear

Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,

And take the present horror from the time,

Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives:

Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

A bell rings

I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.

Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell

That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

Back already

So that was a short road trip:  All the way to Watervliet, Mich., which is all of 70 miles from Grand Rapids.  

And even that took two whole days.

But at least we're being all positive about it, as in:  New year, new car  :)  and, since we are back, I'll post some Shakespeare for the rest of this year.  Here, to start the series, is Gertrude's account of Ophelia's death:
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From Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 7

By William Shakespeare

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;

There with fantastic garlands did she come

Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.

There, on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds

Clamb'ring to hang, an envious sliver broke;

When down her weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;

And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;

Which time she chaunted snatches of old tunes;

As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and indu'd

Unto that element: but long it could not be

Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,

Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay

To muddy death.

Looking south (between the years)

By "between the years" (from the German "zwischen den Jahren") I mean the days between Christmas and New Year's Day.

My daughter and I were planning to go on a road trip for those days this year---driving south for three days (with no definite destination) and driving back during the next three days---but upon research (which is always a good idea before a road trip) we learnt that you can't drive south for three days starting at Grand Rapids, because you reach the Gulf of Mexico in 15 to 16 hours.  So now we are planning, instead, to drive to the Gulf shore in two days, to spend a day on the beach there, and to drive back during the following two days ...  We'll see  :)

So I probably won't be blogging for the rest of the week.  My last post before the trip is another poem that I absolutely loved upon re-reading Hart Crane's "Complete Poems":

___________________________

The Mango Tree

By Harold Hart Crane

     Let them return, saying you blush again for great Great-grandmother.  It's all like Christmas.

     When you sprouted Paradise a discard of chewing-gum took place.  Up jug to musical, hanging jug just gay spiders yoked you first,---silking of shadows good underdrawers for owls.

     First-plucked before and since the Flood, old hypnotisms wrench the golden boughs.  Leaves spatter dawn from emerald cloud-sprockets.  Fat final prophets with lean bandits crouch: and dusk is close

     under your noon,

     you Sun-heap, whose

ripe apple-lanterns gush history, recondite lightnings, irised.

     O mister Senor               

     missus Miss

     Mademoiselle

     with baskets

                          Maggy, come on              

Another beauty :)

Here's another poem of Hart Crane that I'm finding beautiful now:

___________________

By Nilus Once I Knew ...

By Harold Hart Crane

Some old Egyptian joke is in the air,

Dear lady---the poet said---release your hair;

Come, search the marshes for a friendly bed

Or let us bump heads in some lowly shed.

An old Egyptian jest has cramped the tape.

The keyboard no more offers an escape

From the sweet jeopardy of Anthony's plight:

You've overruled my typewriter tonight.

Decisive grammar given unto queens,---

An able text, more motion than machines

Have levers for,---stampede it with fresh type

From twenty alphabets---we're still unripe!

This hieroglyph is no dumb, deaf mistake.

It knows its way through India---tropic shake!

It's Titicaca till we've trod it through,

And then it pleads again, "I wish I knew".

Actually, new favorites

So it must be true that tastes change.  Not overnight in an revolutionary way, but over time in an evolutionary way, and I noticed this again when I posted Hart Crane's "Bacardi Spreads the Eagle's Wing" yesterday, and the best that I could come up with to write about it was that it was a tour de force that shows Hart Crane's mastery of form.

So instead of posting old favorites, I decided to read the book again and post pieces that I like a lot now  :)  such as this one:
______________________
---And Bees of Paradise

By Harold Hart Crane

I had come all the way here from the sea,
Yet met the wave again between your arms
Where cliff and citadel---all verily
dissolved within a sky of beacon forms---

Sea gardens lifted rainbow-wise through eyes
I found.

          Yes, tall, inseparably our days
Pass sunward.  We have walked the kindled skies
Inexorable and girded with your praise,

By the dove filled, and bees of paradise.

Old favorites

It's time to post my own personal favorites, the pieces I myself love best in Hart Crane's "Complete Poems"  :)  Look at his mastery of form in this short tour de force:
________________________________
Bacardi Spreads the Eagle's Wing

By Harold Hart Crane

"Pablo and Pedro, and black Serafin
Bought a launch last week.  It might as well
Have been made of---well, say paraffin,---
That thin and blistered ... just a rotten shell.

"Hell! out there among the barracudas
Their engine stalled.  No oars, and leaks
Oozing a-plenty.  They sat like baking Buddhas.
Luckily the Cayman schooner streaks

"By just in time, and lifts 'em high and dry ...
They're back now on that mulching job at Pepper's.
---Yes, patent-leather shoes hot enough to fry
Anyone but these native high-steppers!"

Poets and sonnets and Hart Crane

The sonnet was not the principal form of Hart Crane, but, for whatever reason, he tended to favor the sonnet when he addressed other poets.  "To Shakespeare", which I posted yesterday, is an example; here is another:
___________________
To Emily Dickinson

By Harold Hart Crane

You who desired so much---in vain to ask---
Yet fed your hunger like an endless task,
Dared dignify the labor, bless the quest---
Achieved that stillness ultimately best,

Being, of all, least sought for:  Emily, hear!
O Sweet, dead Silencer, most suddenly clear
When singing that eternity possessed
And plundered momently in every breast;

---Truly no flower yet withers in your hand.
The harvest you descried and understand
Needs more than wit to gather, love to bind.
Some reconcilement of remotest mind---

Leaves Ormus rubyless, and Ophir chill.
Else tears heap all within one clay-cold hill.

S for ...

No, the letter S doesn't stand for "Skip the blog".  I don't plan to randomly skip it for long stretches of time, such as two days in a row, but I was in the darkroom from 1 PM on Tuesday to 3 AM on Thursday---38 hours at a stretch, except for several short smoking breaks and one longer exam break---and, had I taken a blogging break as well on top of those, I probably wouldn't have managed to turn in my Photography portfolio on time.

But now it's Thursday evening, and I'm done with seven of my eight finals, and my students, in general, did well, I think  :)  so I checked MyAQ for my own grades, and saw:  Nothing.  None of my four final grades have been posted yet.  The four S's from the mid-term grades stared back at me from the screen.

Which got me thinking about the letter S.  My first thought was an unhappy one:  Maybe they're all S's for now because I'm done with S for seven finals, and they'll all change to E's as soon as I finish my E for eighth final tomorrow?

My second thought was scary again:  Maybe they're all S's for the snowstorm that's coming our way tonight  :(

On my third attempt, I managed to come up with S for Shakespeare, so I'm posting the S for sonnet that Hart Crane addressed to Shakespeare.  And then I'm going to my apartment to get some much-needed S for sleep.
____________________________
To Shakespeare

By Harold Hart Crane

Through torrid entrances, past icy poles
     A hand moves on the page!  Who shall again
Engrave such hazards as thy might controls---
     Conflicting, purposeful yet outcry vain
Of all our days, being pilot,---tempest, too!
     Sheets that mock lust and thorns that scribble hate
Are lifted from torn flesh with human rue,
     And laughter, burnished brighter than our fate
Thou wieldest with such tears that every faction
     Swears high in Hamlet's throat, and devils throng
Where angels beg for doom in ghast distraction
     ---And fail, both!  Yet Ariel holds his song:
     And that serenity that Prospero gains
     Is justice that has cancelled earthly chains.

The apples

I slept through the alarm this morning and woke up just 20 minutes before my first final  :(  I still don't feel completely awake.

So instead of actually looking through Hart Crane's "Complete Poems", I'm just posting the poem on the next page (after "My Grandmother's Love Letters") for today.  The fifth poem in "White Buildings".  Dedicated to an older artist friend of Hart Crane.  And beautiful (but you'll see that yourself):
_______________________________________
Sunday Morning Apples
  To William Sommer

By Harold Hart Crane

The leaves will fall again sometime and fill
The fleece of nature with those purposes
That are your rich and faithful strength of line.

But now there are challenges to spring
In that ripe nude with head
                                        reared
Into a realm of swords, her purple shadow
Bursting on the winter of the world
From whiteness that cries defiance to the snow.

A boy runs with a dog before the sun, straddling
Spontaneities that form their independent orbits,
Their own perennials of light
In the valley where you live
                                        (called Brandywine).

I have seen the apples there that toss you secrets,---
Beloved apples of seasonable madness
That feed your inquiries with aerial wine.
Put them again beside a pitcher with a knife,
And poise them full and ready for explosion---
The apples, Bill, the apples!

Love Letters

Next week being finals week, I think I'm going to stay with Hart Crane, because finals week always makes me want to sail to the Gulf of Mexico (and jump off the ship once I'm there).  In fact, I'll probably keep posting stuff by Hart Crane until I know my grades in all of the classes I'm taking this semester.

Here's the famous fourth poem in Hart Crane's first book ("White Buildings", published 1926):
_____________________________________
My Grandmother's Love Letters

By Harold Hart Crane

There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother's mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.

Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

And I ask myself:

"Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?"

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble.  And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

A prose rose

It's not prose that I'm posting today, but a prose poem.  This was published in the January 1933 issue of Poetry magazine, i.e. the year after Hart Crane died:
_______________________________

Havana Rose

By Harold Hart Crane

            Let us strip the desk for action, now we have a house in Mexico.  …  That night in Vera Cruz—verily for me “the True Cross”—let us remember the Doctor and my thoughts, my humble fond remembrances of the great bacteriologist.  …  The wind, that night, the clamor of incessant shutters, doors, and the watchman tiptoeing the successive patio balconies, trundling with a typical pistol, trying to muffle doors; and the pharos-shrine—the mid-wind midnight stroke of it, its milk-light regularity above my bath-partition through the lofty dusty glass.  Cortez—Cortez—his crumbled palace in the square; the typhus in a trap, the Doctor’s rat-trap.  Where?  Somewhere in Vera Cruz—to bring—to take—to mix—to ransom—to deduct—to cure.  …

            The rats played ring around the rosy (in their basement basinette).  The Doctor supposedly slept, supposedly in No. 35—thus in my wakeful watches at least—the lighthouse flashed … whirled … delayed, and struck—again, again.  Only the Mayans surely slept—whose references to typhus and whose records spurred the Doctor into something nigh those metaphysics that are typhoid plus, and had engaged him once before to death’s beyond and back again—antagonistic wills—into immunity.  Tact, horsemanship, courage, were germicides to him.  …

            Poets may not be doctors, but doctors are rare poets whose roses leap like rats—and too, when rats make rose nozzles of pink death around white teeth.  …

            And during the wait over dinner at La Diana, the Doctor had said—who was American also—“You cannot heed the negative, so might go on to  undeserved doom … must therefore loose yourself within a pattern’s mastery that you can conceive, that you can yield to—by which also you win and gain mastery and happiness which is your own from birth.”

Roses with driftwood and storms

I need to get on the highway right now, so I was planning to just post a photograph today---Ansel Adams' "Rose and Driftwood", which is truly amazing (see for yourself,  here's the link)---but I'm having difficulty displaying it on the blog, so I'm posting a poem by William Blake instead:
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The Sick Rose

By William Blake

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

A German rose

This afternoon I had what could be my last German class at Aquinas.  The Capstone class was cancelled for Spring; while the Theory of Translation class does count towards a German major, it is an all-language class (and Dr. Pichot teaches it in English).  Of course, I'll still take a 310 if and when Frau Gross teaches it (but 310 is offered irregularly), and I'll still take the Capstone class later when it is available (Spring 2015?), but for now, this is it.

So I of course wanted to post something in German today, and I decided to go with a celebrated poem by Goethe.  Here is Schubert's setting of it, sung by Fischer-Dieskau with Gerald Moore on the piano.  My favorite version, also with Gerald Moore on the piano, is sung by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf---I actually bought the CD and keep it in my car---but I didn't find it on YouTube today.

Here's the poem:
___________________

Heidenroeslein

Von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sah ein Knab' ein Roeslein stehn,
Roeslein auf der Heiden,
War so jung und morgenschoen,
Lief er schnell, es nah zu sehn,
Sah's mit vielen Freuden.
Roeslein, Roeslein, Roeslein rot,
Roeslein auf der Heiden.

Knabe sprach:  "Ich breche dich,
Roeslein auf der Heiden!"
Roeslein sprach:  "Ich steche dich,
Dass du ewig denkst an mich,
Und ich will's nicht leiden."
Roeslein, Roeslein, Roeslein rot,
Roeslein auf der Heiden.

Und der wilde Knabe brach

's Roeslein auf der Heiden;

Roeslein wehrte sich und stach,

Half ihr doch kein Weh und Ach,

Musst' es eben leiden.

Roeslein, Roeslein, Roeslein rot,
Roeslein auf der Heiden.

The several roses of Mr. Yeats

Cummings' "rosetree, rosetree", which I posted last time, is not one of my favorite poems (even though Cummings is one of my favorite poets), and I only posted it in order to provide a transition between last week and this week.

The poems I'm discussing today, however, are some of my favorite poems, and Yeats, of course, is one of my favorite poets.

Yeats' second book, published 1893, was called "The Rose", and the first poem in it---a dedication in verse---carries the title "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time" (and is printed entirely in italics).

For Yeats, the rose is a multivalent metaphor.  The fourth, fifth, and sixth poems of the book are called, respectively, "The Rose of the World", "The Rose of Peace", and "The Rose of Battle", and "rose" quite obviously has a different new meaning in each of these poems.

And this is not even restricted to this one early book.  The seventh poem in "Michael Robartes and the Dancer", published 1921, for example, is called "The Rose Tree", and in that poem "rose" means something completely different (and definitely something very different from Cummings' "rosetree").

But I'm not posting any of the above.  I only brought all that up in the hope that you may look up those beautiful poems :)

I'm also not posting the most famous poem in "The Rose", which would be "The Lake Isle of Innisfree", but here is an exquisite recording of it in Yeats' own voice.

I'm posting this brutal poem from "The Rose" that Jim discussed at length the first summer that I got into his class at the Workshop:
______________________

When You are Old

By W.B. Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Roses in December

Starting another theme week  :)  I'm posting stuff about roses this week.  And in order to connect this to last week's theme, I'm posting E.E. Cummings' poem "rosetree,rosetree" today.  This is the 90th poem in his 1958 book "95 poems", two poems before the sonnet "i carry your heart with me(i carry it in", which I posted last Monday:
______________________________
By E.E. Cummings

rosetree,rosetree
---you're a song to see:whose
all(you're a sight to sing)
poems are opening,
as if an earth was
playing at birthdays

each(a wish no
bigger than)in roguish
am of fragrance
dances a honeydunce;
whirling's a frantic
struts a pedantic

proud or humble,
equally they're welcome
---as if the humble proud
youngest bud testified
"giving(and giving
only)is living"

"worlds of prose mind
utterly beyond is
brief that how infinite
(deeply immediate
fleet and profound this)
beautiful kindness

sweet such(past can's
every can't)immensest
mysteries contradict
a deathful realm of fact
---by their precision
evolving vision

dreamtree,truthtree
tree of jubilee:with
aeons of(trivial
merely)existence,all
when may not measure
a now of your treasure

blithe each shameless
gaiety of blossom
---blissfully nonchalant
wise and each ignorant
gladness---unteaches
what despair preaches

myriad wonder
people of a person;
joyful your any new
(every more only you)
most emanation
creates creation

lovetree!least the
roses alive must three,must
four and(to quite become
nothing)five times,proclaim
fate isn't fatal
---a heart her each petal

Speaking without litotes

You use litotes when, instead of saying something directly, you say the negation of its opposite.  People do this all the time, for example, when A asks, "What's up?" and B answers, "Not much."  Without litotes, B would have answered:  "Little."

Here is another example, and this is from George Orwell:  "A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field."  Without the three litotes, that would have been:  "A black dog was chasing a small rabbit across a green field."  See how ridiculous that sounds with litotes?

So here is a last example, and this one is about what happened to me just yesterday night:  With litotes, I did not win the powerball, which wouldn't have been all that dramatic, but without litotes, I lost the powerball  :(  Sometimes, contemplating language can really get you depressed ...

Freedom!

So now we're done with blogging for our grades  :)  And not just for the semester, because Rob said he won't assign a blog to our Advanced Journalism class in Spring.

Which means I'm now blogging of my own free will, which means I'll be spending more time on the blog now (such as blogging during the weekend, which is what I'm doing today).  Of course, this is exactly what I needed:  Another time drain, on top of the Math, the German, the poetry, and the photography  :(  But I have already had some experience with myself, from which I know that it's no use trying to resist ...  On the other hand, at least I'll now get to skip the blog on days that are otherwise hard.

I'll stop for today with this poem, attributed to Dorothy Parker, that caught my eye when I was researching martinis on the internet earlier this afternoon:

I like to have a martini
Two, at the very most
Three, I'm under the table
Four, I'm under my host

And the typical poem

To end the week, here's a poem that would be considered typical of Cummings.  This is the 67th poem in his 1958 "95 Poems", the same book as the sonnet "i carry your heart with me(i carry it in" that I posted at the beginning of the week:
______________________

By E.E. Cummings

this little huge

-eyed per-
son(nea
-rly burs-

ting with the

in
-expressib-
le

num

-berlessn-
ess of her
selves)can't

u

-nderstan-
d my o
-nl-

y me

The required elements

Having posted sonnets on the first three days, I should probably shift now to other poems that are considered mandatory whenever Cummings' work is discussed.  This one is the 29th poem in his 1940 "50 Poems":

________________________

By E.E. Cummings

anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down)

spring summer autumn winter

he sang his didn't he danced his did.

Women and men(both little and small)

cared for anyone not at all

they sowed their isn't they reaped their same

sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few

and down they forgot as up they grew

autumn winter spring summer)

that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf

she laughed his joy she cried his grief

bird by snow and stir by still

anyone's any was all to her

someones married their everyones

laughed their cryings and did their dance

(sleep wake hope and then)they

said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon

(and only the snow can begin to explain

how children are apt to forget to remember

with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess

(and noone stooped to kiss his face) 

busy folk buried them side by side

little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep

and more by more they dream their sleep

noone and anyone earth by april

wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)

summer autumn winter spring

reaped their sowing and went their came

sun moon stars rain

Tetrameter sonnet

Okay, so if Cummings mostly wrote sonnets, but is mostly known for his more experimental work, then those few sonnets of his which are also widely known are exceptions (to the aforementioned fact), which suggests that those few sonnets may be exceptional.  What I posted yesterday, and also what I posted on Monday, are, in fact, widely known, as is the piece I'm posting today  :)  This one is the last sonnet in the 9-sonnet cycle "Sonnets---Realities" in Cummings' 1925 "& (AND)", and its lines are not the usual (for sonnets) pentameter, but mostly tetrameter.  Note also the rhyme scheme (and also the exhilarating use of alliteration, and also the British spelling):
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From Sonnets---Realities

By E.E. Cummings

IX

in making Marjorie god hurried
a boy's body on unsuspicious
legs of girl. his left hand quarried
the quartzlike face. his right slapped
the amusing big vital vicious
vegetable of her mouth.
Upon the whole he suddenly clapped
a tiny sunset of vermouth
-colour. Hair. he put between
her lips a moist mistake, whose fragrance hurls
me into tears,as the dusty new-
ness of her obsolete gaze begins to. lean....
a little against me, when for two
dollars i fill her hips with boys and girls

Cummings, contd.

Another sonnet.  This is the 6th of an 18-sonnet cycle called "Sonnets---Unrealities" from the second ("Chimneys") part of Cummings' 1922 "Tulips & Chimneys":
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From Sonnets—Unrealities 

VI

By E.E. Cummings

god gloats upon Her stunning flesh.  Upon

the reachings of Her green body among

unseen things, things obscene (Whose fingers young

the caving ages curiously con)

—but the lunge of Her hunger softly flung

over the gasping shores

                                    leaves his smile wan,

and his blood stopped hears in the frail anon

the shovings and the lovings of Her tongue.

god Is The Sea.  All terrors of his being

quake before this its hideous Work most old

Whose battening gesture prophecies a freeing

of ghostly chaos

                        in this dangerous night

through moaned space god worships God—

                                                                        (behold!

where chaste stars writhe captured in brightening fright)

Last week

I mean "last week" in two different senses:  First, I skipped the blog last week because I was mostly drunk in Chicago (drunk trying to get over how badly I was doing on the GDS exam); second, I found out in class today that this is going to be the last week we have to keep a blog.

Since I haven't done a week on a definite theme yet, I decided to do that for this week.  I have my copy of E.E. Cummings' Collected Poems here in my office (as opposed to most of my books, which are in boxes I still haven't unpacked after moving in August), so I'll do my theme week on that.

Contrary to the popular perception that Cummings was primarily an experimental poet, about two-thirds of all his poems are sonnets---the reason why I bought this book in the first place was that I wanted to learn from him how a sonnet works---so I'm posting a sonnet today.  This is the 92nd poem in his 1958 book "95 Poems":
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92

By E.E. Cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                                       i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

XOXOXO

It's Friday afternoon  :)  I still have to post something to this blog, but I'm on it with a sonnet:
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From Clearances 5

By Seamus Heaney

The cool that came off sheets just off the line
Made me think that damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

Culturally clueless

The first poem in "Seriously Funny" is by Frank O'Hara, and it contains an allusion that was new to me when I first read it earlier this week.

Now here is what happens every time I run into stuff that's new to me:  I make a mental note to myself that I must look it up, which of course I never can do right away, because I must leave for class or something---I am on my way to somewhere almost all of the time, that is just how my life is---and then I forget all about the mental note before actually getting to it.

And here's the second half of the story---and this also happens to me amazingly often---this morning I came across the exact same allusion (in this case, a name) in a completely unrelated context (in this case, in this article on Poetry News), upon which I finally looked it up.

That's why I spent some time this afternoon researching Lana Turner on the internet.

Here's the poem in question:
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Poem

By Frank O'Hara

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to a lot of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Quick question

Here are two lines of poetry in Urdu, and I'm linking every single word in both lines to its entry in a standard Urdu-English dictionary:

  tum mire paas hote ho goyaa
  jab ko'ii duusraa nahiiN hotaa

My question:  Does that make the lines intelligible to someone who doesn't speak Urdu?

The lines are famous btw  :)  they are by Maumin KhaaN "Maumin" ... here is AKhtarii Baa'ii singing a different famous Ghazal of Maumin.

Seriously Funny

Arrived in today's mail:  poetry anthology "Seriously Funny", edited by Barbara Hamby (the friend from whom I heard about the book studied with Barbara Hamby) and David Kirby.  I'm obviously spending my afternoon reading the book, and I'm loving it  :)  so for my blog today,  I'll just post a poem from this book (and then go back to reading):

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Dream Song 4

By John Berryman

Filling her compact & delicious body

with chicken paprika, she glanced at me

twice.

Fainting with interest, I hungered back

and only the fact of her husband & four other people

kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying

'You are the hottest one for years of night

Henry's dazed eyes 

have enjoyed, Brilliance.'  I advanced upon

(despairing) my spumoni.---Sir Bones:  is stuffed,

 de world, wif feeding girls.

---Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes

downcast ...  The slob beside her       feasts ...  What wonders is

she sitting on, over there?  

The restaurant buzzes.  She might as well be on Mars.

Where did it all go wrong?  There ought to be a law against Henry.

---Mr. Bones:  there is.

Almost 200 speeches

For those of us who are still looking for a speech for next week's homework, here are videos of Nobel lectures.  The texts of the lectures are posted as well (so we can easily get exact quotes).  The lectures are all long, but that's probably a good thing, because the paper has to be long too ...

Physics
Chemistry
Physiology or Medicine
Literature
Peace
Economics

I hope everybody has fun writing this thing.  I have never in my life liked writing such long papers  :(

On the road

I have to get on the highway in fifteen minutes, I'm driving to Ann Arbor to pick up my daughter for the weekend  :)  So today, I'm just posting another poem by Jim (my teacher at the Workshop):
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Orbit Obit

By James Galvin

From this far out in the orbit, everything
Is infinitesimal, and very clear,
Like the little trigger part of your ear
With a wisp of blond slacked behind it.

From this far out in the orbit, nothing
Is big or vague, like church, but the line in the sand
Keeps moving.  From this far out in the orbit your eyes
Are quatrocento islands of towers all

Atilt, where all the women go blind from making lace,
And all the men are fishermen who mend
Their nets each sunset, and sooner or later are lost at sea.
From this far out the Hemlock Society

Writes me a letter in which they offer to help
Me kill myself for a small contribution.
The line in the sand has passed me by.
From this far out in the orbit the tip of your tongue,

The white hush of your hip, your palm proffered to be licked,
The event horizon of your lower lip,
All good places to start and end,
Since no one ever mentioned going home.

Taking stock

Okay, after the Workshop announced next year's summer classes yesterday, I got thinking about my application, for which I need a manuscript of 10 to 12 new poems, postmark deadline March 1.  And March 1 next year is a Friday, and I don't always have time on days that aren't a Wednesday, so for me the postmark deadline is really February 27 ...  At any rate, I took inventory of what I have written this year so far, and I immediately became depressed:  As of today I have only one new poem that I could possibly use.  Other than that, I have one amazingly lame first draft for a second poem, one prose sketch for a third poem, one vague idea of a fourth poem, and nothing at all for the rest of my manuscript (except, of course, a solid wish to write more poetry).

In 2012, I ended up revising the last four poems of my manuscript during the late morning and the early afternoon of Wednesday, February 28, and I felt like a complete idiot when I mailed the manuscript later that same day.  Of course, I did feel blessed when, in spite of having been so irresponsible, I still got in, but it also made me think again that the poems would have been a lot better if I had worked a little more on them.

So this year I really, really want to work all year on my manuscript.

I want to have 15 to 20 good first drafts by the beginning of the Christmas break.

And I want to spend two months revising after that.

Three Sonnets (for three reasons)

I'm not posting three different sonnets, but one poem called "Three Sonnets"  :)  and there are three reasons why I am posting this poem today:

1.  It's such an exquisitely beautiful poem!,
2.  It's so true about my life!, and
3.  The Workshop updated their page for next summer!  Jim is again teaching the Poetry class during the special May session, and I'm going to try to get into his class for the third year in a row  :)  And this poem was written by Jim:
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Three Sonnets

By James Galvin

Where I live      distance is the primal fact   
The world is mostly      far away and small
Drifting along through cause and effect      like sleep  
As when the distance      unlikeliest of stems
Bears the unlikely      blossom of the wind  
Engendering our only weather      dry
Except in winter      pine trees live on snow  
So greedy      pulling down these drifts that bury  
The fences snap      the trunks of smaller trees  
If the forest wants      to go somewhere it spreads  
Like a prophecy      its snow before it  
Technology      a distant windy cause  
There is no philosophy      of death where I live  
Only philosophies      of suffering

Dark night

As in:  I'm hoping to work all night in the darkroom tonight, so I really only have enough time to post a four-liner, such as this one:
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Wuenschelrute

von Joseph von Eichendorff

Schlaeft ein Lied in allen Dingen,
Die da traeumen fort und fort,
Und die Welt hebt an zu singen,
Triffst du nur das Zauberwort.
_____________________________

But, because I also really love these poems  :)  I am also posting this slightly longer one:
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Mondnacht

Von Joseph von Eichendorff

Es war, als haett' der Himmel
Die Erde still gekuesst,
Dass sie im Blueten-Schimmer
Von ihm nun traeumen muesst'.

Die Luft ging durch die Felder,
Die Aehren wogten sacht,
Es rauschten leis die Waelder,
So sternklar war die Nacht.

Und meine Seele spannte
Weit ihre Fluegel aus,
Flog durch die stillen Lande,
Als floege sie nach Haus.

It's still Fall, so ...

It's still Fall, so I can still post this poem:
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Es lacht in dem steigenden Jahr dir

Von Stefan George

Es lacht in dem steigenden Jahr dir
der Duft aus dem Garten noch leis.
Flicht in dem flatternden Haar dir
Eppich und Ehrenpreis.

Die wehende Saat ist wie Gold noch,
vielleicht nicht so hoch mehr und reich.
Rosen begruessen dich hold noch,
ward auch ihr Glanz etwas bleich.

Verschweigen wir, was uns verwehrt ist;
geloben wir, gluecklich zu sein,
wenn auch nicht mehr uns beschert ist
als noch ein Rundgang zu zwein.

Looking at the bright side(s)

Example:  I overslept and had no time for breakfast this morning.  Bright side:  I got some much-needed extra sleep  :)

And I wasn't even hungry afterwards  :)  In the morning, there was cake in the lobby on my way to class, and there were two kinds of cake, so I had to eat one piece of each kind (you can't put two different kinds of food in front of me and ask me to pick one); in the afternoon, there was chocolate in my Comm class (thank you Marylou!); after classes, I walked across campus to the Registrar's office to turn in my registration card for Spring, and there they had cake again!  Probably to celebrate students who go register on the first day, a.k.a. me  :)

And this is the kind of stuff that keeps happening to me every single time I have to do something like skipping breakfast, which is why I can keep looking at the bright side of everything  :)

More stuff to feel bright about that happened today:  The last two volumes of compulsory reading for my Master's thesis---"Das deutsche Drama" in two volumes by Benno von Wiese---arrived in the mail (thank you, Barbara!).  I'm hoping to finish reading them before the semester is over and get started with writing the thesis over Christmas!

And still to come today:  Poetry slam during 7--9 PM at the Moose!  And I'm feeling awake enough to go watch it.  Because I got extra sleep this morning  :)

Overdoing it now :)

And I mean it in a good way  :)  It used to be that, on most occasions when I, for whatever reason, did not finish homework on time, class would get cancelled, thus letting me off the hook, and I would be thankful, etc.  Of course, it helped that I usually do finish stuff on time, but there have been cases (such as my German class last Thursday) where I really could use the break I got, and I have forever suspected that, at least in this one matter, I get preferential treatment from life  :)

Well, today there wasn't even any homework due at all for my Journalism class, but it got cancelled anyway  :)  But I, like Alfred P. Doolittle, can always use a little bit o' luck  :)  I looked long and hard at my two bottomless lists (one of things to do and another of things I'd like to do) and I decided that I could use the free extra 75 minutes to do some stuff ahead of time, which might open up some time down the road, such as for going to watch Werner Herzog's film when the Art Department shows it next Thursday evening ...  Now it's past 5:45 PM (the time when, if we had had class, class would have ended), so I'll post this now and go on to other stuff  :)

Herr K. ist zufrieden :)

Josef K. (in Kafka's "Prozess") is doomed (he doesn't even know of what he's being accused), just like we are doomed to winter for the next 8 months or so, but right now, at the end of a classes-free warm day (probably the last classes-free warm day of the year), I'm feeling good  :)  because, for the moment, I have tobacco, canned food, drink, and both kinds of coffee (the dark roasted, coarse ground real coffee for the french press in my apartment, and the vile instant coffee I must drink at my office), and my winter coat has been dry cleaned ...  Ideally, I'd have liked to get a haircut today as well, but I can't do that in the middle of classes (it distracts my students too much), so I already got my hair cut during October Break, and I'll just let it grow until it's after Finals Week, and I'll consider it a natural hat until then  :)  The one other thing I needed before winter was new boots, but I didn't want to waste any part of today driving across town to buy boots, so I'll just do that some other day, and, for this evening, I'll just go ahead and feel good already, like Herr K. managed to do in spite of being doomed, in spite of knowing that he was doomed.

Oh and I also filled out my application to next year's (German) summer school  :)  and---now that I come to think of it---that might be a large part of why I'm feeling good  :)  try it yourself and see?

Last chance Wednesday

For example:  I am almost out of tobacco (not that I have no more tobacco, but that I have no more unopened pouches).  On Tuesdays, I'm done with classes at 2:55 PM, and my office hours are over at 4:45 PM, and Buffalo Tobacco Traders only closes at 7 PM, so I was planning to get a new box of pouches after my office hours today, but at the end of my office hours, after I made one 'phone call about my Spring semester classes (because the offices close earlier than the tobacconist's) and read my e-mail and checked Facebook, the sun had already set!  It was barely 5:30 PM ... it was also cloudy, so I decided to not walk the few blocks today after all.  It feels really lame to drive everywhere with the car, so I'm now planning to get the tobacco tomorrow instead.

And that's just one example.  I have the unsettling feeling that, all semester long, I have had no time to do anything at all on days when I have had classes; as a result, every little thing that comes up during the week has to be done on the following Wednesday; as a result, I end up being really busy on Wednesdays as well!

And tomorrow is even worse than the normal busy Wednesday:  We're into November now, and there's snow in next week's weather forecast, so there's no telling whether Wednesday next week will still be suitable for walking.

I know that driving in the middle of winter is just as certain as taxes at the beginning of spring and death at the end of summer, but tomorrow might be my actual last chance of the year to get stuff done on foot.

New titles received :)

Mondays and Thursdays are brutal:  I teach back-to-back from 9:25 AM to 1:05 PM, take a class during 1:40--2:55 PM, keep office hours during 3:05--4:20 PM, then take another class during 4:30--5:45 PM.  And yet it's all light and easy on those Mondays and Thursdays when I have something concrete that I'm looking forward to doing after all of that.  For example, today was a good Monday, partly (but only partly) because of the addition of the following new arrivals to my daily reading list:

1.  Verfuehrungen.,  Roman von Marlene Streeruwitz;
2.  Der Spaziergang von Rostock nach Syrakus, Erzaehlung von Friedrich Christian Delius;
3.  Nonverbal Concomitants of Perceived and Intended Persuasiveness, by Albert Mehrabian and Martin Williams.

So:  Have a great evening, everyone, because I sure am having a great evening  :)

Hot language, cool school :)

My German summer school, deutsche Sommerschule am Pazifik (dSaP for short), just updated their website for next year!  Here's the link.

Everybody knows this much:  The German language is hot  :)  But you need to physically come to this particular summer school and see for yourself how much unbelievably hotter it gets in summer!

Back in Fall 2008, I researched summer German-language immersion programs in the USA, and this was the best one (in terms of quality, course offerings, history, etc.) by about 23.44 miles.  I came here as an undergraduate in 2009, and I liked it here so much that I have come back as a graduate student every single summer after that  :)

If you are an undergraduate, you can earn 12 quarter credits during the 5 weeks with a normal class load (and it is perfectly possible to do an overload) which will transfer to your College and count towards your German major (or German minor).  This is what I did in 2009 (I took 16 quarter credits that time).

If you already have a B.A. in German, an M.A. in German at this summer school takes 4--7 summers.  This is what I am doing now  :)

If you are a graduate student in German, you can earn 12 quarter credits with a normal class load (and it is perfectly possible to do an overload) which will transfer into and count towards the graduate program at your University.

If you work smart at the summer school, you can typically make about a whole year's worth of progress during the 5 weeks, no matter at what level you start  :)  Want to see some proof?  You'll get to prove this to yourself by taking the Goethe examinations towards the end of the 5 weeks!  Taking the exams is optional, but they encourage it by offering a huge discount (the Goethe exams are expensive) during the summer school  :)

And that's not even the half of it ...  But I'm not telling you any more!  Get here next year and see for yourself  :)

If you will have already had at least 2 years of German by next summer, apply now.  The recommendation letter doesn't need to say your German is perfect, the letter just needs to say you have the tenacity to go 5 weeks using no language other than German 24/7.

If you haven't had enough German yet, take some (more) German already.  It's worth taking those classes at your local College just so you can come to this summer school afterwards (in addition to all of the reasons you've already heard, of course).  Yes, it's that good  :)

Featherweight

So far, tomorrow's Comm 101 exam is thoroughly kicking my butt  :(  and I'm even about to give up on it and go home.  Accordingly, a really short poem is all I'm posting today, and the poem is not at all representative of my day ...  On the other hand, receiving the e-mail which contained the poem was the one highlight of my day  :)  The original poem is in Italian by Tonino Guerra, who died earlier this year, and this is a German translation:
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Die Feder

Ich erinnere mich nicht mehr den Tag und die Stunde
aber es war um Weihnachten da hab ich gesehen
wie eine Feder vom Glockenturm herabfiel:
Ich stand da und schaute in die Luft
als waere ich es, der da fliegt
und langsam langsam bin ich auf den Boden gekommen
leicht wie nie