The Darkling Thrush

[fechtbuch.livejournal.com]

Last night's "poem in the pub" was The Darkling Thrush, by Thomas Hardy.

( I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray.... )

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe, by Elizabeth Alexander

[lianhanshee.livejournal.com]

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

"Every 'I' is a dramatic 'I'")
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I'm sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

- Elizabeth Alexander

poems about travel?

[watercolorroses.livejournal.com]

I'd like to request some poems about traveling - not anywhere in particular, but traveling as a journey.

Thanks!

Elizabeth Bishop, "Questions of Travel"

[stephe.livejournal.com]

watercolorroses asked for poems about travel. This is one of my favorites:


QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL
by Elizabeth Bishop


There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.
( Read more... )