Word: poem
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...front of about 600 people, Galbraith argued that "the age of imperialism is over," adding that "it is the unbounded and universal determination of people to govern themselves." Swenson read "Some Quadrangles," a poem about college that she had written especially for the proceedings...
...number of Hinckley's rambling verses to buttress its portrayal of the would-be killer as a tortured psychotic who cannot be held accountable for his actions. "[Pretend] you are Satan's long-lost illegitimate son/ a solitary weed among the carnations," Hinckley wrote in one poem, "a child without a home/ the loser of a one-man race." Another verse notes: "I have become what I wanted to be all along, a psychopathic poet...
...Alamos laboratory, he led-and occasionally pushed and shoved-an extraordinary gathering of the country's top minds in constructing the instrument that exploded atop a tower in the desert. When the test bomb detonated, he silently repeated to himself a line from the Bhagavad-Gita Hindu devotional poem: "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds...
...France, where he had served as an artilleryman during World War I, MacLeish spent five years among the expatriates of the Lost Generation, and from this came a number of rather conventional but polished lyrics. "A poem should be wordless/ As the flight of birds," ran the most celebrated one, "Ars Poetica." "A poem should not mean/ But be." But larger ideas were stirring. MacLeish went to Mexico to write the epic of Cortez, and Conquistador won him a Pulitzer for 1932. But by then there were other demands on his talent...
...poems are not self-indulgent, though-if anything, they indulge language and other human inventions. From folklore and wisdom to religions to the names of cities, Nyes continually moves from one or two small image to larger concepts. When she tries to move too quickly, the poems end anticlimactically, with a four or five line closing. Always, the message is that there is something bigger at the end of the reverie than what was there before, whether the poem started with rock or man or quetzal. It's easy to get carried away when dealing with large topics...