River Junction Poets 2007 Spring Performance

These videos were obtained from a recording made in May of 2007. The recording was made using equipment from Midland Community Television which is a public-access television station.

Jane Beal at The Poetry Place

The following was written by Jane Beal:

Poetry is passed from one generation to the next because it is taught.

In general, teaching gets a bad rap because it can be done and sadly, is often done in a way that sucks all life out of the subject. Hence the adage, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” and Walt Whitman’s poem, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”:

“When I heard the learn’d astronomer
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”

Yes, I must agree with Whitman: many times, seeing the stars with my own eyes is a much more beautiful and agreeable experience than listening to someone else drone on about them. But good teaching is not about lecturing, however much teachers or students may think we learn from lectures. Good teaching invites listeners to experience, for themselves, whatever is being taught. The teaching of poetry needs to be like that if it is to be real to the souls of young poets and lovers of poetry.

Simply put, people encounter poetry through teaching. Sometimes the teachers are professors or parents, books or songs. The world is full of poetry teachers! And people encounter poetry–they hear it, they read it–sometimes like a comforting grandparent or an old friend, sometimes like an new lover (so exciting!) who becomes a dear, familiar love with the passing of years, sometimes like a stranger passing by in the street. But poetry, unlike most strangers on city streets in America, actually wants to be known. Therefore, it must be shared. The good teaching of poetry is a way of sharing poetry that is deeply meaningful.

In the pages offered here, there are some invitations to poetry through teaching. Use them as you wish!

Excerpted from The Poetry Place accessed 7/30/08.

Here's hoping you will embrace poetry and make it part of your life.

Matthew Zapruder

The following interview is from the Chicago Postmodern Poetry website as seen on July 26, 2008. Here we have Matthew Zapruder talking about life, poetry and the pursuit of happiness.

General Questions

1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?

I grew up outside of Washington D.C., with no poetry anywhere near me. I never really knew what a poem was, or thought about making them, until I had written a few without any idea what I was doing. It was a long process for me to shed the received idea that politics and business are what's really "important," and that art is primarily for decoration or entertainment or some kind of vague edification. It took me well into my 20's to even start thinking of myself as a poet, and not until I was in my 30's did I finally stop feeling as if I really should be doing something else. Now I can't imagine my life without poetry, making it and reading it: it seems like the one constant uncorruptible grace among many many of the world's failures.
2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?
I've always loved music, especially rock and roll: I can't help but think that the spirit and structure of The Kinks, Led Zeppelin, Pavement, The Beatles, Guided By Voices, R.E.M., The Pixies, Neil Young, Public Enemy, Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, The Jam, Leonard Cohen, Will Oldham, Nick Drake, Nirvana, and all the other ways that I first and most often experienced the arrangement of words into something more than useful communication packages has influenced me more than anything else. Lately I listen to a ton of Wilco, Guided by Voices, Nina Nastasia, Vic Chesnutt, and Built to Spill, just to name a few. I think that the more confident I get as a poet, the more I'm able to incorporate the spirit of the music I love in an organic way into my poems, as opposed to just indie rock name dropping.
I've also been a musician for a long time -- I play lead guitar in a couple of bands, and love to contribute directly and without much conversation to the songs of writers I really respect (specifically Thane Thomsen of The Figments and Mark Mulcahy, formerly of Miracle Legion, now solo). When playing music, I think a lot about restraint, the primacy of the song, the relationship of the texture of the sounds coming out of the guitar to the notes I'm playing and the song in which they are appearing, and so on. I have no idea what that has to do with poetry, perhaps something.

Painting is another obsession, though I'm no expert. Right now I'm reading the journals of Eugene Delacroix. I'm particularly fascinated with artists like Cezanne, Kandinsky, and Van Gogh who operated on the borders between abstraction and representation. This seems profoundly related to poetry, which is a discipline that can never descend fully into abstraction or gesture, because words always (thankfully) mean something. I love to read what painters have to say about their work, as much as I like to look at their paintings (terrible, I know). I think that Van Gogh's letters are among the greatest works of literature ever written, and essential for artists, not to mention human beings.
3) When did you 'become' a poet, when did poet become part of your everyday life?
As I said, not until late. I began writing sporadically in my 20's, when I went to UC Berkeley to get a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures. I left after passing my exams and getting my Masters, in order to get an MFA in poetry at UMass Amherst. I suppose it was sometime during those years that I began to incorporate poetry into my everyday life, truly: the example of the poets James Tate and Dara Wier, who live poetry and let poetry live in them, was something it took me years to aspire to. Now I do the best I can.

I think when my first book came out, when I was 33, was when I finally felt comfortable calling myself a professional poet. Now I am revealed as the horrible bourgeois that I am. 4) How does your work with VERSE and your editing work effect your poetry?
I get to read a lot of amazing stuff, and also am exposed to a ton of crap. I think that I have learned the most from the relationships that I've developed with authors that we've published: some of them have become my best friends, and my everyday life as a poet is intimately intertwined with theirs. Often I think that's the biggest blessing that has come from starting Verse Press. Also, there is a terrific community of poets in Western Massachusetts (where the office of the press is: everyday operations are run by the poet Lori Shine, Managing Editor of the press), many of whom volunteer their time and energy without any compensation other than the occasional free book or pizza. I feel optimistic and happy when I'm around those folks, and see how much they care about poetry and the press: it makes me feel like we all have the ability to cultivate a little garden somewhere, and that not everything is tracts of fucked up commerce and bullshit.


5) What is your favorite food? As a child I used to ask my mother to make meatloaf for me on my birthday every year, whether out of love for it or spite for my siblings I cannot say.

6) Sports Team? or Activity?
The Boston Red Sox, the San Francisco Baseball Giants, the Washington Redskins. Sports talk radio. Playing guitar. Reading graphic novels. Listening to a baseball game on the radio. Driving by myself.
7) Vacation spot?
I love going to Ljubljana (Slovenia) to visit my poet friends, I feel so marvelously central European and hopeful to drink tea and beer by the canals in a country where their main central square is dominated by a statue of a poet, Preserin.

8) Curse word?
Bitchcakes, as in "You really went bitchcakes on that poor guy, didn't you?"

Craft Questions
1) How do you form a poem? Is poetry and organic or synthetic process for you?
In some ways in my mind those two terms mean something opposite: that is, organic being natural, synthetic being artificial. In which case I would say both, that is I often put things together in a deliberately artificial way (through collage, out of found materials and from my own journals and thoughts), until it starts to feel organic. I guess I feel like a poem should feel organic, with all the energy and destabilization of something that is clearly synthetic.

On the other hand I also think of the two terms as being sort of the same: that is, they both are terms that are talking about the quality of how things are constructed, or have come to be. A poem is something that's of primary interest because it's a made object: someone made it, yet it feels like a part of everything that has always existed. So both again. Hmmm.

2) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?
Sometimes I write in public places, like a cafe where there is talking and music, or someplace where there's a lot of movement. Other times I like to bang away on my manual typewriter (a Royal portable that belonged to my grandfather), because I love it as an object, in the same way that I love my guitars. So yes ambiance, rituals and habits are extremely important, mostly in terms of sound and texture, not visually: but I have a lot of them and am reasonably flexible about which ones I submit myself to, probably out of necessity, because I have an exceptionally peripatetic lifestyle.
3) In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall?
Hopefully, in some graceful region. Some of my poems are composed entirely of found language (for instance, my new book The Pajamaist has a lot of correctly and incorrectly attributed song lyrics, phrases heard in conversation or on the radio, and even an entire poem made of lines and phrases from two horoscopes of a particular day from a Chicago newspaper). Others are constructed of language that I find from various writings that I've done over days, months, hours. I think of myself more and more as a collagist (is that a word?), and make very little distinction among the materials I feel like I need to use at any given moment. Mainly I'm just grateful for whatever gives me that electric feeling of hey, all right, now here's something that has poetry in it, now let's get to work.
Learn more about Matthew Zapruder. Learn more about Wave Poetry which is the press that sprung from Verse Press.

Brian Spears on Zukofsky Bio

While I was browsing through poetry blogs I found this entry by Brian Spears. It was entered in his blog on Tuesday, July 22, 2008. I like that it is affable, honest, intelligent and informative.

Brian Spears:
Back in March [2008], I mentioned that I was reading Mark Scroggins's new biography of Louis Zukofsky, The Poem of a Life. Mark and his family came over to our home for a dinner party a couple of months ago and he saw that I'd only gotten a couple hundred pages in. He said "that's a respectable effort," which of course meant that I had to finish the thing. And I'm really glad I did.

Some personal background on my own poetic knowledge first, though. I came to poetry in a serious way when I was an undergrad, but for me that meant in my late 20s. I went to an undergraduate university where creative writing was barely a blip on the map--there was one poet, and he taught technical writing as often as he taught poetry workshop. Good guy, good poet, but very traditional, as was the entire faculty. Criticism wasn't big in the curriculum, but what we got was basically New Criticism. And when I went to Arkansas for my MFA, that really didn't change. My reading lists didn't even include Ginsburg, much less Oppen or Niedecker or Zukofsky. The whole tradition (and I think it's fair to call it a tradition now) of Objectivist and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry didn't even really exist as far as my education was concerned. I picked up a little in passing in my workshops with W.S. DiPiero when I was at Stanford, but that's it.

So I came to Mark's book fairly ignorant of this history and of the movement and poetry that Zukofsky helped build and create, and I not only found the book informative, I found it fascinating. I took a long time to read it because I was constantly having to digest new material and fit it in with what I didn't know about 20th century poetry. It's not only a fantastic biography, it's a terrific history book in general, even if I don't share the aesthetic of the subject of the book.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the book to me was the lengthy discussion of Zukofsky's formal considerations in his work. I'm not a formalist in the Tim Steele/Dana Gioia sense of the term, but I do tend to write in traditional meter and form, so I found it heartening to see that Zukofsky had that in mind when composing his poems, especially since he often made the forms he was working in more intricate, rather than finding ways to cheat. It has caused me to find ways to discipline my own writing in the weeks since I completed reading (this review has been in the works for a while now).

Which is not to say that I plan on following the poetic road Zukofsky blazed. It's just not my thing. My preference, both in reading and writing poetry, is to avoid the hermetic image. I want a poem to communicate something more than music or a frame for an idea to me. I want an emotional connection with the meaning in the poem, and I didn't find that in the selections that Mark quoted in this text. It's just a matter of personal taste. There were lots of times when Mark was explaining what was going on in a particular section of "A" and I just didn't see it, wasn't moved by the language.

That's not to say that I don't think Zukofsky did great work--this biography convinces me that he did, and anyone who can influence the path of poetry for a generation certainly had something major going on. It's just not my kind of poetry. Think of it as the clash between people who liked Swing and those who liked Be-bop. I appreciate both, but I prefer the latter. I appreciate Charles Olson, but I prefer James Merrill. The world of poetics is wide enough for all of us, I think.

Collaboration in Poetry

Often poetry is regarded as an individual effort, and even as one that benefits from solitude, for both the reader and for the writer. Obvious exceptions to this include Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Dante's Divine Comedy. We do, however, have examples of poets collaborating with each other in writing poems. Marvin Bell and William Stafford alternated with each other in sending poems to each other in the mail, one poem at a time. Each poet responded to the poem received by writing a new poem of his own which was then sent in the mail to continue the collaboration. They agreed on a time limit for each composition and stuck to it. In 1983 these poems were published in Boston by Godine under the title Segues.

More recently, Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton have written "Exquisite Corpse sonnets, sestinas, pantoums and villanelles" together. They have collaborated so much in writing together that they have articulated "ten commandments" for collaboration. Here they are:

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1. Thou shalt trust thy collaborator's art with thy whole heart.
2. Thou shalt trust thy collaborator's judgment with thy whole mind.
3. Thou shalt trust thy collaborator's integrity with thy whole spirit.
4. Honor thy own voice.
5. Honor thy collaborator's spouse.
6. Thou shalt not be an egotistical asshole.
7. Thou shalt not covet all the glory.
8. Thou shalt love the same foods as your collaborator.
9. Thou shalt eat and tire at the same time.
10. Above all, honor the muse.

These commandments are excerpted from an article which originally appeared in American Poet, the biannual journal of the Academy of American Poets. Copyright © 2006 by The Academy of American Poets. All rights reserved. To subscribe to American Poet, become a member online. The full article is available at Poets dot org (accessed 7/24/08).

Nothing to Say & Saying It: Why Poetry Matters

The following excerpts were selected by John Gallaher. With his permission, I've posted his post here. To see the original post at his blog, click on the title of this post.

Gallaher writes:
Thanks to Charles Jensen, I found an article, written by Jay Parini, titled “Why Poetry Matters.” I’ve excerpted the bits below that I liked.

What this essay reminds me of, is the general tendency of poetry that unifies the gesture, not the specific gestures that divide us. The specific gestures that divide us are important to note, and to argue over, because we really are all trying toward a unification with reality in our poems, and so noting where we think others are missing this union becomes a necessity. That said, a weak poem does much less damage to the world than a weak law. Just saying.

Anyway, the article doesn’t say anything that you haven’t heard before, I’m sure, but it’s good to be continually reminded, so here are some excerpts:

*

One tends to forget that poetry is wisdom. I was in Morocco recently, and a devout Muslim mentioned to me that the Prophet Muhammad, in his book of sayings, the Hadith, had said as much. But the Koran also teaches, I was told, that poets are dangerous, and that decent people should avoid them. That reminded me of Plato, who wished to ban all poets from his ideal republic because he thought they were liars. Reality, for Plato, was an intense, perfect world of ideas. The material world represents reflections of that ideal, always imperfect. Artistic representations of nature were thus at several removes from the ideal, hence suspicious.

But Plato also had other worries about poets. In the Republic, he complained that they tend to whip up the emotions of readers in unhelpful ways. They stir feelings of “lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure.” Poetry “feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up,” he said, while only the “hymns of the gods and praises of famous men” are worthy of readers. The law and reason are far better.

*

In “Education by Poetry” . . . Frost argued that an understanding of how poetry works is essential to the developing intellect. He went so far as to suggest that unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values, “you don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you.”

*

Poets . . . make large claims, and they are usually a bit exaggerated. In his “Defense of Poetry,” Shelley famously wrote: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” I prefer the twist on that offered by a later poet, George Oppen, who wrote: “Poets are the legislators of the unacknowledged world.”

The world of the poet is largely an interior world of the intellect and the emotions — where we mostly live, in fact. And poetry bolsters that interior realm. In a talk at Princeton University in 1942, when the world was aflame, Stevens reflected on the fact that the 20th century had become “so violent,” both physically and spiritually. He succinctly defined poetry as “a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pushing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of poetry, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.”

*

Auden noted when he wrote in his elegy for Yeats that “poetry makes nothing happen.” That is, it doesn’t shift the stock market or persuade dictators to stand down. It doesn’t usually send masses into the streets to protest a war or petition for economic justice. It works in quieter ways, shaping the interior space of readers, adding a range of subtlety to their thoughts, complicating the world for them.

[JG: I will jump in to interject here, the more interesting reading of “poetry makes nothing happen,” where the nothing is the nothing that is there, as Stevens writes, and as Kay Ryan plays with in “Nothing Ventured.”]

Emerson argues that the sheer physicality of words points us in directions that might be called “spiritual.” He puts forward three principles worth considering:

“Words are signs of natural facts.”

“Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.”

“Nature is the symbol of the spirit.”


http://chronicle.com/
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 54, Issue 42, Page B16

Nick Carbo AKA Secret Asian Man

Nick Carbo wrote this essay on Filipino poetry; the essay was published in the Encyclopedia of Modern Asia:

A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF PHILIPPINE POETRY


The history of Philippine poetry can be described in four major literary periods: Pre-Colonial (before 1521), Spanish Colonial (1521-1898), American Colonial (1898-1946), and Contemporary (1946-present). A strong indigenous oral tradition is interwoven with the Spanish and American colonial influences of culture and language. Poetry has been written in Tagalog (the national language) and in the 87 different regional dialects, as well as in the Castillian Spanish of Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega, and the American English of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain.

PRE-COLONIAL

An indigenous oral tradition of bugtong (riddles) and sawikain (proverbs) played a central part of community life in villages and settlements of pre-colonial Philippines. Short four line poems called tanaga evolved from these oral traditions. Each line contained seven or eight syllables and at the heart of the poem was a cryptic metaphor called a talinghaga. Popular folk musical verse was divided into several categories: the diona, talindao and auit (songs sung at home); indolanin and dolayanin (street songs); hila, soliranin and manigpasin (rowing songs); holohorlo and oyayi (cradle songs); ombayi (songs of sadness); omiguing (songs of tenderness); tagumpay (triumphant songs); dopayanin (boat songs); hiliriao (drinking songs); and diona (wedding songs). Through these verses the local history, politics, and culture was passed on from generation to generation. The most skilled poets would memorize epic cycles which took two to four days to recite during all night dramatic performances. Two examples of pre-colonial epics which survive today are Biag ni Lam-ang in Ilocano (a northern Luzon dialect) and Ibalon in Bicol (a southern Luzon dialect).

SPANISH COLONIAL

With arrival of the Spanish colonizers Ferdinand Magellan (1521) and Miguel Lopez de Legazpi (1571) came priests and their tradition of European Catholicism. Satanas (Satan) first appeared in Tagalog poetry and the Christian themes of sin, guilt, and retribution became central concerns of the native population. In 1610 Tomas PINPIN, a Filipino poet working for the Dominican printing press in Bataan, (a town outside Manila) wrote a book called Librong Pagaaralan nang manga Tagalog nang Uicang Castila (A Book in Which Tagalogs May Study the Spanish Language). In this book Pinpin inserted six auit (songs) which had alternating Spanish and Tagalog lines. This type of bilingual poetry was written by a group called the Ladino Poets. Metrical romances called awit or korido were also popular with the literary crowds. The most influential Tagalog romance of the period was the politically cryptic Florante at Laura (1838) written by Francisco BALTAZAR, also known as BALAGTAS (1788-1862). The first book of poetry written in Spanish by a Filipino was Pedro PATERNO’s (1858-1911) Sampaguitas y Poesias Varias (1880) which was printed in Spain. Paterno, along with Marcelo H. DEL PILAR (1850-1896), Jose RIZAL (1861-1896), and Isabelo DE LOS REYES (1864-1918) were literary and political figures living in Madrid called Ilustrados (enlightened ones) working to attain political freedoms for the natives back in the Philippines. The first Filipino female poet to attain outside recognition was Leona FLORENTINO (1849-1884) whose poems were exhibited in the Exposition Filipina in 1887 in Madrid and in the 1889 Exposition Internationale in Paris.

AMERICAN COLONIAL

In 1898 the American President William McKinley announced to the public that it was America’s moral duty to take possession of the Philippine Islands because the Filipinos had to be civilized, educated, and Christianized. After American soldiers “pacified” the native population during the Philippine American War (1899-1902), thousands of American teachers were sent throughout the archipelago to teach the Filipinos the English language. In just a few years English became the privileged form of expression for poets, prose writers, and dramatists. The earliest Filipino poems written in English were published in 1905 in Berkeley, CA in The Filipino Students’ Magazine which was edited by Pensionados (Philippine American government scholars). The first book of poetry written in English Azucena (1925) by Marcelo DE GRACIA CONCEPCION (1895-1954) was published in the U.S. by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press. The most influential Filipino poet Jose GARCIA VILLA (1908-1997) lived most of his adult life in New York City. His books are Have Come, Am Here (Viking Press, 1942), Volume Two (New Directions, 1949), Selected Poems and New (McDowell, Obolensky, 1958). Another early immigrant Filipino poet is Carlos BULOSAN (1911-1956) who published political poems in American magazines like The New Yorker, Poetry (edited by Harriet Monroe), and Saturday Evening Post. In Manila in 1940, the Commonwealth Literary Prize in English poetry was given to Rafael ZULUETA DA COSTA’s (1915-1990) Like the Molave and Other Poems. Native themes were well represented by local poets like Fernando Ma. GUERRERO (1873-1929), Lope K. SANTOS (1879-1965), Jose CORAZON DE JESUS (1896-1932), Amado V. HERNANDEZ 1903-1970), Alejandro G. ABADILLA (1904-1969), Angela MANALANG GLORIA (1907-1999), and Trinidad TARROSA SUBIDO (1912-1993).

CONTEMPORARY

The declaration of formal independence from America on 4 July1946 brought a sense of a new beginning to the people and poets of the Philippines. A generation of poets who studied in the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop in the University of Iowa in the 1950s— Bienvenido N. SANTOS (1911-1996), Ricaredo DEMETILLO (1920-1998), Dominador I. ILIO (1913-), and Edith TIEMPO (1919-)—came back to the Philippines with the literary ideals of the American New Criticism. The 1970s and 1980s proved to be a politically aware era for Filipino poets who were writing under the censorship of the dictatorial regime of Ferdinand Marcos (1965-1986). As a reaction to the 1983 assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr., a leading anti-Marcos politician, several poets formed a literary organization called PLAC (Philippine Literary Arts Council) to protest the abuses of the government. One of its leading founders was Alfred A. YUSON (1945-) whose neo-realist books of poems are Dream of Knives (1986) and Trading in Mermaids (1993). Current trends in Philippine poetry are best exemplified by the pyrotechnic imagination of Eileen R. TABIOS (1960-) whose book of poetry Beyond Life Sentences (1998) won the National Book award given by the Manila Book Critics Circle. Her poems incorporate the American precision of Marianne Moore, the experimental joie de vivre of Paul Valery, and the imagistic intensity of Pablo Neruda.

Nick Carbó

BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABAD, H. Gemino. (1999) A Habit of Shores: Filipino Poetry and Verse from English, 60’s to the 90’s. Quezon City, Philippines: University of the Philippines Press.
ABAD, H Gemino, and Edna Z. Manlapaz, eds (1989). Man of Earth: An Anthology of Filipino Poetry and Verse from English 1905 to the Mid-50’s. Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press.
CARBÓ, Nick, and Eileen Tabios, eds. (2000) Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
CARBÓ, Nick. (1996) Returning a Borrowed Tongue: An Anthology of Filipino and Filipino American Poetry. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press.

from Nick Carbo's blog accessed 7/21/08

Kay Ryan Poet Laureate

Kay Ryan is being selected as the next Poet Laureate. Read about it here in the New York Times.

Thistles

Thistles

by Ted Hughes

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
And crackle open under a blue-black pressure.

Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up

From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.
They are like pale hair and the gutterals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.

Then they grow grey like men.
Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.

"Thistles" by Ted Hughes from Collected Poems.© Faber & Faber. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

from The Writer's Almanac accessed 7/20/08

Learn more about Ted Hughes and get a second opinion at Ted Hughes.

This poem caught me immediately this morning. I'd never read Hughes' poem before, but years ago I wrote a poem that included thistles in a similie. I don't have the full poem, but the part with the thistles was as follows:

Let's visit again the nation of heroes

along the flooded Yangtze

where thistles thrive like prayers in noble hearts

acknowledging enough, enough and too much ...

I like the similie, but instead of 'noble' a word like 'stoic,' 'trusting' or 'naive' would be better. Maybe even 'innocent.' It's hard to put an adjective in there without implying some sort of judgment of the people there. But then, the 'nation of heroes' phrase has really already done that, hasn't it. Clearly this is the work of an inexperienced poet.

But back to Hughes' poem. Apparently thistles are regarded in the UK much as they are in the US. That is, they are weed-like nuisances that are better left marginalized at the sides of railroad tracks, highways and other places that don't get landscaped. And thistles are reputed to be rough to the touch, and their flowers are not as lovely as for instance roses, chrysanthemums, fleur-de-lys, etc. But they are hardy and, as Hughes points out, they keep coming back, much like weeds, despite our efforts to remove them from our landscapes. It is this 'background knowledge' of thistles that enables the success of this poem. Someone who doesn't know anything about thistles might wonder at the violence Hughes associates with the plant in this poem. What, for instance, is 'blue-black pressure,' and do the plants really 'crackle'? I like the notion of the cow eating the thistle. The mammal, a species much different than the plant, casually destroying the 'revengeful burst/Of resurrection', the 'grasped fistful/Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up' as it inexorably grazes its way through lunch - this could be elaborated on in a number of directions.

Swami Vivekananda

TO THE EARLY VIOLET


What though thy bed be frozen earth,
Thy cloak the chilling blast;
What though no mate to clear thy path,
Thy sky with gloom o'ercast --
What though of love itself doth fail,
Thy fragrance strewed in vain;
What though if bad o'er good prevail,
And vice o'er virtue reign --
Change not thy nature, gentle bloom,
Thou violet, sweet and pure,
But ever pour thy sweet perfume
Unasked, unstinted, sure !



Learn more about Swami Vivekananda.