Word: poems
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...difficult moment comes when they disappear. You can?t demonize a man who lives in a hole. As we get on with the unglamorous business of rebuilding Iraq, we may miss the utility of having a bogeyman in Baghdad. That is the point of C.P. Cavafy?s wonderful poem ?Waiting for the Barbarians.? A city is on edge, nervous about a threat that, its people slowly realize, will never come. ?What?s going to happen to us without barbarians?? asks the narrator. ?They were, those people, a kind of solution...
...experience with old age into a “new phase of themes” in his late works. “He was 74 years old, dying from about five different things,” Vendler explained, recalling aloud some of his famous last lines from his poem “Circus Animals’ Desertion”: “…Now that my ladder’s gone,/ I must lie down where all the ladders start/in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart...
...offering free health checkups and medicine for all those living in the schistosomiasis-prone Yangtze River region, China slashed the number of victims to 2.5 million in 1975. By 1988, that had shrunk even further, to 400,000. So proud was the Great Helmsman that he wrote a poem, called "Sending Away the God of Plague," commemorating the People's Republic's fight against a tiny worm...
...Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District by Ben Katchor (Pantheon; 2000) Although Katchor's long-form "Jew of New York" better qualifies as a graphic novel, I prefer his collected strips in the "Julius Knipl" series. Freshly released in paperback, this third volume contains more of Katchor's picture-poem odes to non-existent urban districts and fantastical people like the radiator musician...
Ruth Stone’s poem continues, “I think when I wake in the morning/ that I have turned into her./ She hangs in the hall downstairs,/ a shadow with pulled threads./ I slip her over my arms, skin of a matron./ Where are you? I say to myself, to the orphaned body,/ and her coat says,/ Get your purse, have you got your keys?” Wrapped in the customs of this place as securely as a second-hand coat, it’s easy to adopt a Harvard worldview—to ask ourselves...