Word: poems
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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There are lots of poems, fat ones and skinny. I like Kenneth Koch's best. His are fat. He writes like a great bull, not afraid of going anywhere or being anything. The nicest poem is The Young Park. "Hands picked/On her blossoms./The young park was sad." In the park things become animals, and animals people, and the young park becomes a person, Young Park. Even the automobile club gets mislocated in the zoo. All because the poet becomes the park, and believes in it. "At night, when everything is yellow and green,/You too can come alive/If...
Some of the poems here are not clear. John Ashbury's Chinatown, for instance, is filled with small startling things--"when the firebug grated a lemon"--which only jounce; taken as a whole, the poem is dreamy and shapeless...
...wife, a gay, knowing, articulate lady who, through her radio and the books people bring her, keeps quite abreast of what's happening outside--in Montreal, New York and Cambridge. Though she has stopped writing for the Stanstead Journal, the county's weekly newspaper, she has completed a lyric poem and is blocking out in her mind a kindly and truthful book about the village, The Devil is in Us All! Considering the best-selling success of a recent, sensationalistic attempt by a young American marm, it would probably enjoy acclaim. When she isn't baking do-nuts or rolls...
...first time that a poem of Eliot's has been stretched a bit. It also happened with The Waste Land (433 lines) and its famed notes (217 lines). In the Sewanee Review, Eliot reveals: "When it came to print The Waste Land as a little book ... it was discovered that the poem was inconveniently short, so I set to work to expand the notes, in order to provide a few more pages of printed matter . . . They became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view today. I have sometimes thought of getting rid of these notes...
ILLUSTRATIONS FOR THE BIBLE, by Marc Chagall (Harcourt Brace; $25), is really a poem in etchings and lithographs (133 in all) to celebrate the myths and meanings of the Old Testament. The drawing is rough and bold, almost primitive, but intentionally so, to picture the time and to convey the responses of a driven people who found God in a harsh desert. Deliberate, also, are the Old Testament characters, made to look like medieval ghetto figures, and the animals that might have been drawn by cave dwellers to illustrate a great saga. These powerful, often dreamily tortuous drawings are full...