Word: poem
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...butcher was a butcher. In 1933, when Stalin began preparing for his first Great Purge, Mandelstam did a wild and unheard-of thing. He wrote a poem about Stalin, and even read it to a group of literary friends. It began...
...Seeker" ("Die Suchende") is a poem of die Leidbseessene, the "woman possessed by sorrow," who serves as a metaphor for the nation of Israel. On first reading, it seems just too simple to be really good, but the subtlety of the poem only emerges after several exposures. The translation is almost totally literal, and thus loses some of the devices which make the original succeed. An effective alliteration ("die Wande der Wiiste wissen von Liebe") is lost in translation as "the walls of the desert know of love." The strict rendering into unwieldy English detracts immeasurably from the starkness...
...first section is somewhat unattractive at first glance. The opening poem. "Her and It." seems glib, rough, much too much like inferior e. e. cummings. Thus: "I fell in love with a girl. / O and a gash. / I'll bet she now has seven lousy children. / (I've three myself, one being off the record.)" This section celebrates Berryman's collegiate sexuality, makes ever so clear that he was Mark van Doren's prize pupil, and refers to Eliot as "Tom" and Joyce as "Jim." Berryman, of course, is noted for this sort of thing, the seeming arrogance which some...
...BERRYMAN of the middle period is the most appealing, perhaps because he is the most human. The third period is more introspective, almost Gothic. Leaving Cambridge, and growing older, he confronts his asylum days in "The Hell Poem." The immediate temptation is to compare this to Lowell's "Waking in the Blue," and Berryman suffers in contras. Whereas Lowell's great asylum poem is stark, blunt, terse, and brutal, Berryman's, though realistic, is somewhat verbose and not a little self-pitying. The degree of self examination throughout these poems is frightening, mirroring the mind of a man gone slightly...
When the funny man with the big round glasses comes bouncing into the classroom at Manhattan's P.S. 61, the sixth-graders burst into applause. "Hi there, poets," says Kenneth Koch. "How about a Christmas poem today?" He suggests all sorts of ideas: "Like what would the ocean do if it really cared about Christmas? Or the eagles, sparrows and robins-what would they do? The apes in in Africa, would they swing from the trees? Or Abraham Lincoln, would he shave his beard? The rain? The sun? And the people in Puerto Rico, or China...