A long winter and a wet spring are giving way to summer at last. Less than a week from the longest day of the year and it feels like season and weather are finally in sync.

Poets write about what they know and what they think about most. For a poet, for any writer, the thing we think most about is writing. That is why there are so many poems about writing and so many novels and short stories where the main character is a writer.

Here is a poem about writing… and spring.

Enjoy!

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The feature Hugh’s Journals has appeared here on Sundays. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.

It has been said that the job of a preacher is to “comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.” Read in light of this idea, one could probably divide all of Hugh’s typed-up pages into three volumes: pages to comfort, pages to dis-comfort, and pages to do both at the same time.

Today’s page from Hugh’s journals would go into the latter category. It is a reminder that we can often best serve where we are, doing what we are doing BUT doing it well and true and honestly.

A pastor is in a peculiar position. He or she is paid specifically to do “religious” work by members of a congregation or parish that earn their money doing “worldly” work. Or that is the way it seems from a worldly view. A religious view of this relationship would say that ALL are potentially doing the Lord’s work in what they do when they are working honestly and conscientiously and fairly doing their work.

This “rhyme” would have been comforting to some of Hugh’s congregants and dis-comforting to others. Just as it is now to those of us who read it today, depending on how honestly and conscientiously and fairly we are doing our own “work” and treating others.

As good a message today as it was when Hugh first heard it on the radio decades ago.

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poetry

A recent off-the-cuff comment I made reviewing Sandburg’s “The Hammer” got me thinking about essential poets, poets that must be read.

Yesterday I made for myself a quick list of  essential poets (in no particular order):

• Walt Whitman
• W.B. Yeats
• John Milton
• William Blake
• P.B. Shelley
• John Keats
• William Wordsworth
• Carl Sandburg
• W.H. Auden
• Ted Hughes
• Seamus Heaney
• T.S. Eliot
• Amy Lowell
• Ranier Maria Rilke
• Osip Mandelstam
• Robert Browning
• Emily Dickinson
• John Donne
• Robert Frost
• William Carlos Williams
• Wallace Stevens
• John Dryden
• George Herbert
• Andrew Marvell
• Robert Burns

Reviewing the list today, I see a number of holes (Victorians, Contemporary) but over all I think I am satisfied with the list.

What do you think? Who has been left off?

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A committed… and commit-able…  used-bookstore junkie, I always have my eye out not just for volumes of poetry, but also for old paperbacks with great covers. And though I usually read as much of the paperback books as I am able, it is purely for the sake of the cover art that I pick up the book. And art it is indeed…!

Here are some more covers with “dames” wearing red that would be hard to leave on a shelf.

Enjoy!

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A great stamp

Spring in the North Country remains gray and wet. Last week our youngest graduated high school and so between rain storms we celebrated this mundane milestone in the fashion dictated by North-Country suburban conformity: with an open house. There are more bewildering suburban conformities, but not many.

As things quiet down, I can return again to reading and writing… and to reviewing poetry.

Between rainstorms and domestic duties I pick up familiar volumes of poetry. Looking at lines and poems I first read, sometimes four decades ago. Carl Sandburg is one of the poets I have been making time for.

As I have said before,

Sandburg, a musician, understands “sound” as well as any poet. He also understand space, growing up as he did in the flat and open prairie of western Illinois. This is why he does the small poem so well which relies so heavily on the interplay between sound and space.

This poem “The Hammer” show this as well as any Sandburg poem.

Enjoy!

The Hammer

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

I have seen

The old gods go

And the new gods come

Repetition provides the sound-glue for this poem. Just two and a half small stanzas but there are four repetition pairs: gods-gods, day-day, year-year, idols-idols.

What is interesting is the way Sandburg then counter-balances this sound repetition with opposition: old vs. new,   fall vs. rise.

Why I like Sandburg so much as a poet, and why he is to me one of a handful of definitively “essential” poets, is that he can make the simple work so well. There is absolutely nothing in this poem that is what we are told poems must be or that poets must do. There is nothing particularly new or novel in language or images. There is nothing “cliche-busting” and/or intellectually clever. It does not “mine new metaphors” or “push the boundaries of language.”

It is “merely” simple, understandable,… and unforgettable!

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Gustave Caillebotte

The gray and rainy spring continues here in the North Country. Last autumn’s drought is at last a distant memory. Wetlands and lakes are where they should be. We are thankful for that, and yet….

Here is a small poem about our gray spring.

Enjoy!

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A committed… and commit-able…  used-bookstore junkie, I always have my eye out not just for volumes of poetry, but also for old paperbacks with great covers. And though I usually read as much of the paperback books as I am able, it is purely for the sake of the cover art that I pick up the book. And art it is indeed…!

Here are some Western covers with a Montana theme that would be hard to leave on a shelf. 

Enjoy!

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Nine Mile Creek Last Autumn

Spring in the North Country remains gray and rainy. A wet May has given over to a cool, wet June.

Last autumn’s drought seems like a mis-remembered dream. Lakes and wetlands are green again. Creeks are running fast again.

Here is a newer poem about the North Country.

Enjoy!

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A committed… and commit-able…  used-bookstore junkie, I always have my eye out not just for volumes of poetry, but also for old paperbacks with great covers. And though I usually read as much of the paperback books as I am able, it is purely for the sake of the cover art that I pick up the book. And art it is indeed…!

Here are some covers with “dames” wearing red that would be hard to leave on a shelf. 

Enjoy!

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Since all poems are love poems, you knew I would write another poem about typewriters. Here it is, with the inevitable “artistic” typos.

Enjoy!

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