Earth tone table cloths
Naked trees, light family feuds
Uncork the cheap wine.
Category: Poems
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Great are yourself and myself,
We are just as good and bad as the oldest and youngest
or any,
What the best and worst did we could do,
What they felt..do we not feel it in ourselves?
What they wished..do we not wish the same?
Was Walt Whitman a stoic?
Parts of this poem make it seem so. I need to research his biography to learn more.
Follow up soon…
From: Leaves of Grass 150th Anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics), pg.156,157
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Great are the plunges and throes and triumphs and falls of democracy,
Great the reformers with their lapses and screams,
Great the daring and venture of sailors on new explorations.
A poem for sleepy eyes.
Who are the reformers?
From: Leaves of Grass 150th Anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics), pg.156
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Great is today, and beautiful,
It is good to live in this age….there never was any better.
From: Leaves of Grass 150th Anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics), pg.156
No better way to celebrate the last day of October than with Walt Whitman.
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I had to add this to my online common place book:
“Remember this, son, if you forget everything else. A poet is a musician who can’t sing. Words have to find a man’s mind before they can touch his heart, and some men’s minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly no matter how small or stubborn the mind of the man who listens.”
The Name of the Wind. Patrick Rothfuss. pg 106 -
Afternoon light ripened the valley
From: Another Life, by Derek Walcott. As read from Teju Cole’s essay Derek Walcott, from his collection of essays – Known and Strange Things.
I read this Derek Walcott line repeatedly. I admit I’d never heard of Walcott before reading Teju Cole’s essay.
With a few words Walcott took me to a mountain range.
I could see the orange and yellows wash across the shrubs. I watched the white and pink light flood over the granite.
I wanted to keep going back there.
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Great is liberty! Great is equality! I am their follower,
Helmsmen of nations, choose your craft....where you
sail I sail,
Yours is the muscle of life or death....your is the perfect
science....in you I have absolute faith.
From: Leaves of Grass 150th Anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics), pg.156
I didn’t imagine Walt Whitman being an optimistic poet. The first few lines of Great Are the Myths is all Walt admiring people and ideas with intensity.
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Thoughts from an amateur.
I’ve written before on how to to write a poem. Followed by how to truly write a poem – study Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook and then practice.
But reading a poem is a whole different pack of monkeys.
I developed this weird method to help me absorb the poems I read. It slows me down, so I don’t rocket through the lines. The aim is to bury the verses in my subconscious.
See if it works for you.
First I read the poem to myself. From the first verse to the last, all the way through.
Then I’ll read the poem from the end to the beginning. I read line by line, from the final verse, back up to the opener:
From Over the Fence, Emily Dickinson Reading it backwards is like reverse engineering. It helps me see the poem’s structure. How each verse builds up to the final one.
After that, I’ll read the poem beginning to end again, but this time out loud.
Reading out loud helps you find the poem’s rhythm. I’m sure there’s things like meter and tone involved as well, but I won’t pretend to know how.
Then I’ll read the poem in reverse order again. But this time in full blocks. Starting from the bottom of the poem to the top:
From Again his voice is at the door, Emily Dickinson
While reading I’ll keep a pencil close. If the poem rhymes I search for the rhyming pattern by underlining all the rhyming words.
From Again his voice is at the door, Emily Dickinson Once finished, I’ll log the date, author, and name of the poem in my steno book. Keeping a record gives me a sense of progress.
It’s a practice I stole the from director Steven Soderbergh who publishes a yearly log of what he’s watched, read, and listened to, on his site.
This how I read a poem. You may read a poem once and bin it. And that works too.
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I’m trying to get into Walt Whitman’s work. But I underestimated the length of his poems.
So, I’m starting with his shorter poems. And typing them out into smaller, manageable pieces.
Seeing what I can find.
Great are the myths….I too delight in them,
Great are Adam and Eve….I too look back and accept them;
Great the risen and fallen nations, and their poets, women, sages, inventors, rulers, warriors and priests.
Great Are the Myths, Leaves of Grass. Whitman, Walt -
Matchstick legs ignite
a Parisian son. Midfield
light illuminates.
Blaise Matuidi is my favorite midfielder to watch right now.
He doesn’t pirouette, or flash a thousand step-overs. You won’t see a croqueta, or metronome passing.
But his tackles, endless running, headers, and enthusasim for football gives an aging amateur midfielder an example to aspire to.
Floodlights and Goalposts 