Word: poem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sonorous--perhaps soporific. But aided by Roger Deakins' pristine camera work and the euphoric drone of Philip Glass's score, Scorsese devises a poem of textures and silences. Visions, nightmares and history blend in a tapestry as subtle as the Tibetans' gorgeous mandalas of sand. For some, Kundun will be a slog. For the open mind and eye, though, this is rapture in pictures...
After the communal carol "O Come, All Ye Faithful," associate conductor Constance DeFotis led the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum in the "Hymn to St. Cecilia" by Benjamin Britten. This piece takes its lyrics from a W.H. Auden poem of the same title; and like the poem, the music contains surprises and irregularities, yet maintains a lyric quality. True to the refrain, "Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions/ To all musicians, appear and inspire:/ Translated Daughter, come down and startle/ Composing mortals with immortal fire," it seemed that St. Cecilia had indeed come down to bless this performance, for the Collegium Musicum...
...some suspension of disbelief has to be employed on the reader's part as well. Why is such an incredible catch attracted to this quiet Midwestern boy? And why does she suddenly say yes, after so many enthusiastic no's? After reading the sweetly sentimental poem John wrote for their wedding, Alida falls into his arms, and he realizes "why men have written poems all these centuries--it is to impress a woman in hopes that she will sleep with you." It is as if Alida has suddenly thrown away her previous desires to live life fully as a single...
...different season, W.D. Snodgrass wrote a poem called "April Inventory," an ambling elegiac list consisting mostly of the things he had gladly failed at. His poem ends on the lines "There is a loveliness exists,/Preserves us, not for specialists." Specialists were the target of his complaint. The successful people around him had zeroed in on particular and limited interests and had been rewarded for the categories they had made of their lives, while he, in unsuccessful contrast, had flopped about and picked up a few scattered items of value, like loveliness...
...Description Without (a Sense of) Place," given as the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard's 1945 Commencement exercises, serves as a key example in which the context of a collection hinders comprehension. Life has halted around the outcome of the war in Europe. Stevens declines to address the issue at all; he muses on the nature of description. Poetry goes on. "The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work of imagination are two different things," Stevens had said in 1942, and from this "struggle with fact" hoped to distill some poignant truth. The Collected Poems...