Word: poemes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...junior year at Brooklyn College, Alfred met James Meagher, a poet who was a great inspiration to his writing. "In 1941, he sold a piano and started a magazine, The American Poet--with the grandiose idea that he could take any mass of writers and get one good poem, from children' jumping-rope rhymes to cerebral stuff. We got five hundred a week and only three of us to edit them . . . We had a sense that something great was going to happen, week after week, expecting a volley of applause . . . nothing would happen...
...began experimental things in forms, what I called 'involute rhymes'; you know, the sonnet seems somehow fancy now." Among many short poems, Alfred also contributed three odes on religious themes and has devoted himself mainly to longer poems ever since. "A poem usually takes me a few months, mostly elegies of people on my mind who keep coming back to me." The magazine folded in 1943 because Alfred and his friends had to enter the army...
During this period, Alfred began a long poem which would take twenty problems that people face in the world and voice them through twenty characters who travel the underworld. Then, representing the church, militant and triumphant, the theme would change to twenty saints who had solved the problems. Scaling down this ambitious project, Alfred published the work as Anunciation Rosary...
...poem concerns the pain experienced on losing close friends, transcribed to Mary's feelings at the crucifixion of her son. Alfred never dwells upon the morbid aspects of death, however. On occasion, he visits old women at a rest home in the area. "It's like a prison for them," he says. "One delightful women there the nurses consider 'silly' because she refuses candy and won't speak. When I realized she spoke French, she replied with a snort, 'I hate the stuff' and we had a fine conversation...
...last seen on Broadway in the 1890s; but the present revival, if a dubious choice, takes a daring form. Love's Labour is offered as an elegant Edwardian frolic, half satiric comedy, half court masque. Alexander Pope was told of his translation of the Iliad: "A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer." Perhaps the City Center should not call this Shakespeare; perhaps the audience even puts up with the play for the sake of the props. But in any case...