Word: poem
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This week Engle's Poetry Workshop is commemorating the centennial of the publication of Flowers of Evil by 19th century French Poet Pierre-Charles Baudelaire. High point of the centennial: the publication of Homage to Baudelaire, a book of poems by workshop poets. "The way to praise a poet," Engle explains simply, "is to write a poem...
Trees Behind the Church. The letters show Joyce as a man drunk on language. He had the gift of tongues (just for fun, he dashed off translations of a poem by James Stephens in German, Latin, Norwegian, Italian and French). His view of himself was generally rueful, whether he was commenting on his physical "cowardice" or remarking on his "steely cheerfulness in what does not afflict me personally." He read hugely, but at times with so little discrimination that his head felt full of "pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and lots of glass picked up 'most everywhere...
...Richards' "The Ruin" is perhaps representative of the sly laughter which runs through much of Audience. Professor Richards' preoccupation is with words ("And words it is, not poets, make up poems./Our words, we say, but we are their's too/For words made man and may unmake again.") And he plays with them through every verse of his poem, using them with calculated elfin obstructiveness to make sure the reader sees nothing but ruins, to make sure that he senses mysteries but does not penetrate them...
While Audience's poetic whimsies represent the prevailing tone, the three most interesting poems are in a more serious vein. Arthur Freeman's two pieces remind one of the psychological narrative of Ford Madox Ford: the first one with its use of colors, the second with its mutely horror-stricken irony and its dramatic development. Freeman's contributions are by far the most sincere and effective ones in the issue. John Hollander's and Richard Howard's joint whirl into impressionism is the only other serious poem which need be taken seriously. Sandra Hochman's two poems, however, at least...
...tell, the reader must turn to an unlucky Jim-James Porter, irascible hero of John Osborne's play, Look Back in Anger (TIME, April 22). Look Back is a high-decibel three-act diatribe, mainly on mom, wife, God and country. Hero Jimmy has just written a poem called "The Cess Pool." His wife hovers over an ironing board-one of the endemic props of this school of social realism, together with dirty dishes and wet "nappies"' (diapers). At the slightest provocation Jimmy turns into a verbal epileptic, particularly concerning his wife -"When you see a woman...