Word: poetes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last Spring The Crimson spoke with Allen Ginsberg, beatnik poet and social activist. The following are excerpts from that conversation...
Besides, Leopold (Gerard Depardieu), the town drunk who also happens to be the town innkeeper, creates all the melodramatic hubbub their little community can tolerate -- or a good movie requires. A poet manque as well as a sometime black marketeer, he has the manners of a thug and the soul of a romantic. When he is falsely accused of harboring the collaborator (and briefly jailed), his outrage, hugely comic but strangely blackened around the edges, is marvelous to behold...
Still, Memoirs is not all misanthropy and -ogyny. Amis gives a generous portrait of his shy, witty fellow Oxonian, the poet Philip Larkin, who like the author had to endure that most mannered of academic dons, Lord David Cecil. One sprightly chapter contains a mercilessly comic imitation of a lisping Cecil pointlessly beginning a lecture. ("When we say a man looks like a poet . . . dough mean . . . looks like Chauthah?") Cecil had the ill grace to flunk Amis for his B. Litt. thesis, but the author uncharacteristically lets bygones be. Perhaps it's too hard to stay angry with someone...
...Stalin was a hard drinker, and Khrushchev was known for making hasty decisions under the influence of alcohol. Brezhnev and his entourage loved nothing better than raising glasses and toasting "Na zdorovye ((to your health))." As vodka once fueled communist rule, so it has hastened its downfall. The American poet John Ciardi, who died in 1986, wrote prophetically about vodka...
...paying attention. Does Voltaire spin in his grave every time a Crimson editorial follows his "I do not agree with what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it" reasoning? I don't think Voltaire reads The Crimson. I'd bet even the poet who penned the camel ode would be willing to overlook my youthful indiscretion...