Word: poem
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Sometimes it seems a little like this Berryman poem I like, about the screen images of rats in childhood prison movies--where "the rats have grown up, mostly, and this is for real"--but usually it all seems civilized and ceremonious and pleasant. One of the articles that helped turn me fully against the war, I realized this year, was about how the Vietnamese were our time's Meursaults: like the people Camus tried to described, they had a faceless, irrational and overpowering enemy, and though they were not classical heroes they attained nobility by fighting oppression. Every day, hundreds...
There was also a poetry recital of sorts including the "shortest poem ever written on what it's like to be as great as Ali." "Me? Whee...
...mind. Hot in the smithy of Irish poetry, he began a new mode heavily influenced by modernist poets. His elongated narrative lines turned to the crisp, dry style of poets like Auden--nouns are used as verbs, sentences are elipsed and inverted. In the very earliest of these poems, Clarke subtly reveals a kind of tormented agnosticism, as in this poem about the crucifixion of Christ: An open mind disturbs the soul, And in disdain I turn my back Upon the sun that makes a show Of half the world, yet still deny The pain that lives within the past...
...poem, a bitter satire on the suppression in Irish newspapers of a Vatican study on dangers for missionaries in the remoter regions of the world, there are glimpses of an extremely clever man who must hide in too narrow topics: These scholars are modestly selective, Who say our nuns in Africa, Fearful of blackmen yelling 'Ya!', Tearing off starches, heavy drape, Can take an oral contraceptive, An hour or two before the rape, How will they know dread time or place. That leaves the soul still full of grace? Better to wear Dutch cap or wad And after their debauching...
Toward the end of his life Clarke once again wrote a long narrative poem based on old Irish myths and legends. In "The Healing of Mis" he turns an 18th century tale of a wild woman tamed by music and sex into a more graphic love poem of seduction. But no longer content with the ancient ways. Clarke adds the woman's dreams to reveal the hot flames of her mind...