Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Robert Frost on a Disused Graveyard



In A Disused Graveyard


The living come with grassy tread 
To read the gravestones on the hill; 
The graveyard draws the living still, 
But never anymore the dead. 
The verses in it say and say: 
"The ones who living come today 
To read the stones and go away 
Tomorrow dead will come to stay." 
So sure of death the marbles rhyme, 
Yet can't help marking all the time 
How no one dead will seem to come. 
What is it men are shrinking from? 
It would be easy to be clever 
And tell the stones: 
Men hate to die 
And have stopped dying now forever. 
I think they would believe the lie.

--Robert Frost

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Literary in Kentucky



There is so much happening in Kentucky. If interested, go here for a list of public events, readings, book signings, etc.

Here are some publications by Kentucky writers.

Wendell Berry on Telling the Truth as a Writer
Wendell Berry on Trees as Old Neighbors
Wendell Berry Do Not be Ashamed

Richard Taylor on In Praise of Sycamores



Friday, May 25, 2012

Indian Poetess Sarojini Naidu





The Bangle Sellers


Bangle sellers are we who bear
Our shining loads to the temple fair...
Who will buy these delicate, bright
Rainbow-tinted circles of light?
Lustrous tokens of radiant lives,
For happy daughters and happy wives.


Some are meet for a maiden's wrist,
Silver and blue as the mountain mist,
Some are flushed like the buds that dream
On the tranquil brow of a woodland stream,
Some are aglow wth the bloom that cleaves
To the limpid glory of new born leaves


Some are like fields of sunlit corn,
Meet for a bride on her bridal morn,
Some, like the flame of her marriage fire,
Or, rich with the hue of her heart's desire,
Tinkling, luminous, tender, and clear,
Like her bridal laughter and bridal tear.


 Some are purple and gold flecked grey
For she who has journeyed through life midway,
Whose hands have cherished, whose love has blest,
And cradled fair sons on her faithful breast,
And serves her household in fruitful pride,
And worships the gods at her husband's side.


--Sarojini Naidu

Thursday, May 24, 2012

A Richard Taylor Poem





Richard Taylor owns Poor Richard's Bookstore in Frankfort. Taylor earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Kentucky and a J.D. degree from Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville. He served as Kentucky's Poet Laureate from 1999-2000. He is the author of 5 books of poetry, two novels and several non-fiction books. Taylor presently teaches at Transylvania University in Lexington.

Having lived in Kentucky for more than 20 years (the longest I've lived in any one state or country), I have come to appreciate the images and nuances of Taylor's poetry.  My small farm had many sycamores, mostly along the lower range of my property where there was a creek.  Some were shapely and others were gnarly misfits, yet with the ubiquitous cedar, the sycamore comprises the distinctive Kentucky landscape.

The poem that follows speaks specifically of Kentucky, though all readers can appreciate Taylor's evocative language. Writing teachers will find questions about this poem here.



In Praise of Sycamores
    For David Orr (1942-1989)

Mention that tree around here
and you summon up Paul Sawyier
our local impressionist
whose creekscapes blaze with sycamores,
gaudy lemons and ochers
that burn in some eternal summer,
their broad leaves shimmering
above the placid nooks
of some angler's dream.


Cross-grained, unsplittable,
their wood makes butchers' blocks
and not much else
beyond nourishment for the eye-
a blue heaven for the artist.
Lugging only his paint kit, bedroll,
and a tin of nightcrawlers,
Sawyier vanished for days up Elkhorn Creek
to commit his gentle arsons,
constellations of briars starring
the worsteds above his scruffy boots.


Each sycamore is the product of place.
Elbowed by neighbors along the creek,
its crown is vase-shaped, almost modest,
its stem as columnar as swans.


But on open ground it spreads
in pearly tiers like antlers,
its twists and goose-necked  spirals
elegant as candelabra,
the trophy of some buried stag.
Winter's tree,
its bark is winter's flag,
an utterance of ice.


Unlike the cedar,
its architecture does not tame itself
to models, will not repeat.
Answering only to persuasions
of rainfall and light,
of soil and creekside rivals,
it persists
as a miscellany of upthrust limbs
whose scoured bark
gleaming brilliantly white
against the somber hills,
has tracings as precise and eloquent
 as veins on the anatomists's chart,
an embroidery that stitch for stitch
knits up the creek
with filigree and frill
to lend the valleys hereabout
some luster, some civility.


---Richard Taylor

From Five Kentucky Poets Laureate: An Anthology, p. 22; edited by Jane Gentry and Frederick Smock

Sunday, May 6, 2012

From the Oxford Book of Work

This made me laugh.




You Will Be Hearing From Us Shortly


 You feel adequate to the demands of this position?
 What qualities do you feel you
 Personally have to offer?
                                        Ah.

 Let us consider your application form.
 Your qualifications, though impressive, are
 Not, we must admit, precisely what
 We had in mind. Would you care
 To defend their relevance?
                                        Indeed.

 Now your age. Perhaps you feel able
 To make your own comment about that,
 Too? We are conscious ourselves
 Of the need for a candidate with precisely
 The right degree of immaturity.
                                        So glad we agree.

 And now a delicate matter: your looks.
 You do appreciate this work involves
 Contact with the actual public? Might they,
 Perhaps, find your appearance
 Disturbing?
                                        Quite so.

 And your accent. That is the way
 You have always spoken, is it? What
 Of your education? We mean, of course,
 Where were you educated?
                                And how
 Much of a handicap is that to you,
 Would you say?

                Married, children,
 We see. The usual dubious
 Desire to perpetuate what had better
 Not have happened at all. We do not
 Ask what domestic desires shimmer
 Behind that vaguely unsuitable address.

 And you were born--?
                                        Yes. Pity.

 So glad we agree.


--U.A. Fanthorpe