From "Edward Field, Bohemian New York Poet, Dies at 102/His colloquial language, emotionality and gay topics brought him widespread praise, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and other literary honors" (NYT gift link).
I'd like to see that anthology. It seems that the book was "The Pocket Book of Verse: Great English and American Poems," which contained 249 poems by 77 poets:
There are inspirational poems like Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” and Richard Lovelace’s “To Althea, From Prison.”... There are inspirational passages from The Bible, like the famous Psalm 23.... There are poems about soldiers like Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” and Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and Sir Walter Scott’s “Soldier, Rest”.... There are escapist stories in poem form like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee” and Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman” and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”.... There are poems about what it is to be a man like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Grief” and Robert Burns’s “A Man’s a Man for A’That” and Rudyard Kipling’s “If”.... There are romantic poems like Shakespeare’s and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets and Wordsworth’s “Perfect Woman.” Here’s an excerpt:
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
A perfect Woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a Spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light.
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49 కామెంట్లు:
Don't really like poems - not enough numbers.
At least he didn't take out $50,000 in student loans to get a poetry degree from Columbia.
“Don't really like poems - not enough numbers.”
Not only numbers, there’s even some fairly advanced math:
The Kiss Precise
By Frederick Soddy
This poem was posted by Becky Jaffe on mathbabe.org. It is by a mathematician who proved the Kissing Circles Theorem, which states that if four circles are all tangent to each other, then they must intersect at six distinct points. Frederick Soddy wrote up his proof in the form of a poem, published in 1936 in Nature magazine.
For pairs of lips to kiss maybe
Involves no trigonometry.
This not so when four circles kiss
Each one the other three.
To bring this off the four must be
As three in one or one in three.
If one in three, beyond a doubt
Each gets three kisses from without.
If three in one, then is that one
Thrice kissed internally.
Four circles to the kissing come.
The smaller are the benter.
The bend is just the inverse of
The distance form the center.
Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb
There’s now no need for rule of thumb.
Since zero bend’s a dead straight line
And concave bends have minus sign,
The sum of the squares of all four bends
Is half the square of their sum.
To spy out spherical affairs
An oscular surveyor
Might find the task laborious,
The sphere is much the gayer,
And now besides the pair of pairs
A fifth sphere in the kissing shares.
Yet, signs and zero as before,
For each to kiss the other four
The square of the sum of all five bends
Is thrice the sum of their squares.
Q: Does "The Pocket Book of Verse: Great English and American Poems" contain any poems by American poet Wallace Stevens?
Grok: No, but he was still living at the time.
That's no excuse.
"Don't really like poems - not enough numbers."
I think that I shall never see
A poem as lovely as a 3.
"I read it over and over. I knew immediately that I was going to be a poet." Because I loved the poems and I'm crazy about beans and ramen...
was Mr Field ever a good enough poet, to get a Memorial Forest forest named after him?
I've hiked (and FISHED) in Joyce Kilmer's Memorial Forest in North Carolina, and it increased my respect for Trees (and, i guess, Poems)
"I knew immediately that I was going to be a poet."
“For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew”— That comes from Robert Frost 1939 essay "The Figure a Poem Makes"
Unlike English, Spanish has two words for knowing or to know.
So I asked ai, what kind of knowing was "I knew immediately..."?
ai: "That would be saber! When you say "I knew immediately...", you are talking about realizing a fact or having an innate piece of information about yourself.
In Spanish, when you use saber in the preterite (past) tense, its meaning actually shifts slightly from "to know" to "to find out" or "to realize" at a specific moment.
Your sentence would translate to: "Supe de inmediato que iba a ser poeta."
If you used conocer here (e.g., conocí), it would mean you met a poet or became familiar with a poet for the first time, which changes the entire meaning."
I definitely didn't know how I knew, but I knew.
When I hit the Joyce Kilmer Rest Area on the NJ Turnpike, I know I am not far from NYC....CC, JSM
"Captain, My Captain" is about soldiers???
Would be news for many.
It was written after Lincoln's assassination.
“ gilbar said...
was Mr Field ever a good enough poet, to get a Memorial Forest forest named after him?
I've hiked (and FISHED) in Joyce Kilmer's Memorial Forest in North Carolina, and it increased my respect for Trees (and, i guess, Poems)
9/7/26, 12:18 PM”
I was gonna go there but I chose the road less taken and ended on a Marine base in Cherry Point.
Credit to John Cleese for alerting me to English only having one word for knowing while other languages have two.
Sorry, I cannot find that video.
I’m a retired surveyor and had to learn enough trig to work with curves , arcs and tangents. I’m surprised I never came across that circle kissing porm above.
We may actually have had a copy of that around the house when I was growing up. The yellow 1950 paperback cover is very familiar, though I don't think I ever opened it up. The editor, Morris Speare, was a competitor of Louis Untermeyer and Oscar Williams, who didn't achieve the name recognition that they did back then.
Edward Field, not to be confused with Eugene Field and his Little Boy Blue. Edward Field's memoir, "The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag and Other Intimate Literary Portraits of the Bohemian Era" attracted some notice, and the novel he coauthored, "Village" or "The Villagers," with cameo appearances by Walt Whitman, Henry James, Mabel Dodge, and Edna St. Vincent Millay also sounds interesting.
While looking for a book online, I stumbled onto a site, Author’s Republic, that allows people to create and “self-publish” one’s own audiobooks. I had never heard of this, but it makes perfect sense that there would be something like that in this day and age.
/OT
Girls in modern society go for classical poetry
So to win them all one must quite with ease
Aeschylus and Euripides.
Smilin' Jack said .....
What about circles inside circles tangent each other?
If she says your behavior is heinous
Kick her right in the Coriolanus! CC, JSM
If you put your poetry to good music, it doesn't have to be good. It doesn't even have to make any sense, and it can still be great. It's magic.
Hey Bagoh, whuddya think of this one:
It looked extremely rocky for the Mudville 9 that day
The score stood 2 to 4 with but 1 inning left to play.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poets is the gold standard
Long ago I read his account of being gay in the USAAF, but never read his poetry, that I can recall.
RIP.
"Hey Bagoh, whuddya think of this one:"
Better, but I'm really looking for something where the poet gets in touch with the square roots of humanity, explores the exponents of existence, and strips down to the mean of variance that's integral to the calculus of our free will. Also, I like that symbol that looks like boobs. ∞
I've read a few poems
and felt as though the form somehow enhanced the text.
But it's been a long time
since I've encountered contemporary poetry
and come away satisfied.
Nothing in any of Philip Larkin's poems
couldn't have been said in prose on a message board.
This one is good.
"Steps" from Kostelanetz’s NUMBERS: Poems & Stories (1976)
1 2 3 4 5 6
6 7 8 9 10 11
11 12 13 14 15 16
16 17 18 19 20 21
21 22 23 24 25 26
26 27 28 29 30 31
Would still be better with some ∞.
Mary Cornish’s “Numbers”
I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans. I like the domesticity of addition—
add two cups of milk and stir—
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree. And multiplication's school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat. Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else's
garden now. There's an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune. And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining. Three boys beyond their mothers' call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn't anywhere you look.
Here's something you don't hear every day:
"I changed my mind."
I like poems now.
James Tate The Blue Booby
That's a beautiful poem, Bagoh. She's a great talent, mitigates the MFA blight. You might like some of the poems in Palladium, by Alice Fulton. Also some of the Metaphysical poets, who were in an age when math and science, art, love and religion were still intertwined.
Althouse, I have an original copy left, and there are reprints, but it's something to hold a copy that went to and came home from war. It's yours if you want it, but there are many floating around, as there were so many produced and cherished by soldiers. The American Red Cross Museum in DC is worth it.
Only buy old copies of the once-excellent Norton Anthologies. Don't subject yourself to any published after 1980ish.
He's pretty good. Icarus and WWII are excellent poems.
I have my father’s college literature book. It’s what was deemed suitable in 1939. Love it. Including “The Return of the Native.”
I like it too, Tina.
This one just happens to be right in front of me on my desk, gestating in its mother book for the whole 45 years I've owned it. Today I heard it crying, and opened the book to a small paper bookmark that's been there unseen all those years. The book is sweetly autographed by the author to me. It was a prize from a good friend in college who I've never heard from since. She was a gentle, soulful gift, maybe only possible in youth, maybe. This is not the bookmarked one, but a close neighbor of it with numbers.
"The poem was found written on a paper bag by Richard Brautigan in a laundromat in San Francisco. the author is unknown."
By accident, you put
Your money in my
Machine (#4)
By accident, I put
My money in another
Machine (#6)
On purpose, I put
Your clothes in the
empty machine full
Of water and no
Clothes
It was lonely.
"When psychology meets education
A terrible bullshit is born."
-- Robert Conquest (under the pseudonym Ted Pauker)
"A Grouchy Good Night the the Academic Year"
Now *that's* poetry!
Re: “interview for this obituary”
Lately I’ve read this a number of times (this/her/his), and never knew it was a thing. Guess I should prepare….
James Bond led me to Tennyson:
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
I am lukewarm toward most examples of poetry, but I am reminded of enjoying Carl Sandburg's poetry when I encountered it in high school.
I don't remember specific examples now, but I am left with the impression of vivid, eloquent portrayals of blue color works and experiences.
Naturally, when I got to college, I was told that Sandburg was all about penises and closeted homoeroticism.
Poetry is one of the many lives this human unfortunately could only taste and never indulge in, like learning music, cooking, drawing, painting, and a million others. If I could start over, I'd do everything differently. Not because this life was lacking or full of bad choices, but because the world is so wide with beauty and wonder, and I'd take big bites of everything I missed in a do-over.
Aristotle said philosophy begins in wonder: the sense that ordinary things are not as obvious as they look. Descartes called it the first of the passions—the one that makes us notice before we judge. Later writers link it to humility: wonder is what happens when certainty loosens and the world is allowed to be particular.
I like what the ancient philosopher Grok says about it:
"Wonder is the feeling that the world is larger, stranger, or more alive than your current map of it."
If you are riding the train to war, all you need is a “Compleate William Shakespeare.”
“I like what the ancient philosopher Grok says about it:
"Wonder is the feeling that the world is larger, stranger, or more alive than your current map of it."”
“The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we *can* suppose.” J. B. S. Haldane, 1927.
"I have always wanted to get into poetry but I just haven’t been able to. Does anyone have any suggestions for me?"
Hey Mongo, there's a series of limericks about Nantucket that might amuse you...
But seriously, as far as poetry goes, most of it is pretty stinky. The old Norton Anthologies had a lot of praiseworthy poetry and you might look for any kind of collections that focus on style rather than topic or category.
The best American poet is Robert Frost. His wordplay, rhythm, and storytelling is unparalleled. Some poets of his era like Moore, Pound, and Eliot wrote obscurities that you needed a degree in ancient civilizations and French literature to understand, but Frost's poetry can be read, understood, and appreciated by any laborer or high school dropout. I'm sure you've heard and read some of his stuff already, The Road Not Taken, Out Out-, The Mending Wall, Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening... How about Home Burial about a young couple who bury their dead child in the family plot located in their backyard?
Frost is the greatest and most American poet in our history. I like Emily Dickinson for her wordplay, imagination, and ideas. My only issue with Dickinson is most of her poems follow a very similar pattern and format which can get repetitive if you're consuming a book of it.
Every country around the world has poets and with a good translation those poems resound. Charles Baudelaire was a poet and writer in 19th century France who wrote beautifully about scandalous, dark, and macabre things, ugliness and old age, prostitutes and devilish priests, drugs and alcohol. Baudelaire's 'Paris Spleen' is not poetry per se, but a small booklet of little darkly poetic vignettes, scenes from the streets he describes with mischievous humor, wit, and feeling. He wrote a book of poems that he titled The Flowers Of Evil.
I once had a little paperback of Japanese poetry from the middle ages to the modern era. It had at least 3 poems about farting in it, and I've always kept that in mind whenever I hear writers/poets get all high-faluting and treat their trashy scribbling as if it is the work of some God.
The current or recent Poet Laureate of the USA is a guy named Billy Collins whose poems read like a kid in 5th grade wrote them. Obviously he has many fans, though I think he sucks, but he is really easy to read. I'd avoid his verse because his is the type of unimpressive spew that you read, shrug, and forget in two minutes. It doesn't make you appreciate poetry and it doesn't even rhyme!
Frost, Dickinson, Baudelaire. The work of those three poets are the most likely to please and impress someone who doesn't normally read poetry.
https://poets.org/poem/onset
https://allpoetry.com/poem/14327783-The-Albatross-by-Charles-Baudelaire
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56593/a-bird-came-down-the-walk-359
Poems are full of numbers, well, except for some stuff that most people probably would not consider poetry. What is iambic pentameter for example, but a numerical description of a line of poetry?
Mongo
Begin with an old anthology like the one for the soldiers so you can get a sense of what you like. Try Robert Frost, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson. Do not read any contemporaries, as they are not poets but rather sermonizers and scolds, incapable of even writing verse, let alone poetry. Free Verse? Say rather, the product of a proud group of illiterates while real poetry is "eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves."
"Do not read any contemporaries, as they are not poets but rather sermonizers and scolds, incapable of even writing verse,"
Sad but true.
"Find a respected institution, kill it, skin it, and wear its pelt and demand the same respect."
Maybe "hollow it out" is better.
To best understand poetry, memorize one poem. "If" is right for our time. "Not Waving But Drowning" is far easier and one of the better contemporary poems. "Falling," by James Dickey (more a poet than a novelist: one of the only writers I enjoyed passing some hours with) would be a challenge, but his underappreciated WWII and Korean War Air Force service and North Georgia poems are extraordinary.
One thing I like about poetry is that the best poets, both male and female, were like soldiers: fierce but disciplined, until recently, with exceptions of course. Josephbleu, for many years I kept The Compleate William Shakespeare in the tire well of my car trunk. You never know you need it when you also you need a tire jack.
I accepted early that I didn't have the chops to be a poet, which is far better than agonizing and wasting time. I spent years studying and teaching it, though, which was good enough. I still pull books off my shelf and was given scores of old volumes from a closing charity bookstore in a retirement area that reminded me how much a little bit of poetry was once part of everyone's life. Unless you're Welch, where it is still omnipresent.
Quoting "A Perfect Woman" in a post about a gay poet? Whaaat?
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