Poem Titles In Quotes

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I don’t know why I’ve always been like this, why the smallest things make me ache inside. There’s a poem I read once, titled “The World Is Too Much with Us,” and I guess that is the best way to describe the feeling—the world is too much with me.
Erika L. Sánchez (I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter)
Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.
Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is. There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside. Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you'll get smart - to feed pigeons looking for handouts
Bob Dylan (Chronicles, Volume One)
About novel Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott. Q: What does the title "Imperfect Birds" mean? It's a line from a poem by Rumi. The line is "Each must enter the nest made by the other imperfect birds", and it's really about how these kind of scraggly, raggedy nests that are our lives are the sanctuary for other people to step into, and that if you want to see the divine, you really step into the absolute ordinary. When you're at your absolutely most lost and dejected ... where do you go? You go to the nests left by other imperfect birds, you find other people who've gone through it. You find the few people you can talk to about it. from Writer's Digest May/June 2010
Anne Lamott
Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis It was a dream I had last week And some kind of record seemed vital. I knew it wouldn't be much of a poem But I love the title.
Wendy Cope (Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis)
It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.
Sylvia Plath
The secret title of every good poem might be 'Tenderness
Galway Kinnell
There are moments in every relationship that define when two people start to fall in love. A first glance A first smile A first kiss A first fall… (I remove the Darth Vader house shoes from my satchel and look down at them.) You were wearing these during one of those moments. One of the moments I first started to fall in love with you. The way you gave me butterflies that morning Had absolutely nothing to do with anyone else, and everything to do with you. I was falling in love with you that morning because of you. (I take the next item out of the satchel. When I pull it out and look up, she brings her hands to her mouth in shock.) This ugly little gnome With his smug little grin… He's the reason I had an excuse to invite you into my house. Into my life. You took a lot of aggression out on him over those next few months. I would watch from my window as you would kick him over every time you walked by him. Poor little guy. You were so tenacious. That feisty, aggressive, strong-willed side of you…. The side of you that refused to take crap from this concrete gnome? The side of you that refused to take crap from me? I fell in love with that side of you because of you. (I set the gnome down on the stage and grab the CD) This is your favorite CD ‘Layken’s shit.’ Although now I know you intended for shit to be possessive, rather than descriptive. The banjo started playing through the speakers of your car and I immediately recognized my favorite band. Then when I realized it was your favorite band, too? The fact that these same lyrics inspired both of us? I fell in love with that about you. That had absolutely nothing to do with anyone else. I fell in love with that about you because of you. (I take a slip of paper out of the satchel and hold it up. When I look at her, I see Eddie slide her a napkin. I can’t tell from up here, but that can only mean she’s crying.) This is a receipt I kept. Only because the item I purchased that night was on the verge of ridiculous. Chocolate milk on the rocks? Who orders that? You were different, and you didn’t care. You were being you. A piece of me fell in love with you at that moment, because of you. This? (I hold up another sheet of paper.) This I didn’t really like so much. It’s the poem you wrote about me. The one you titled 'mean?' I don’t think I ever told you… but you made a zero. And then I kept it to remind myself of all the things I never want to be to you. (I pull her shirt from my bag. When I hold it into the light, I sigh into the microphone.) This is that ugly shirt you wear. It doesn’t really have anything to do with why I fell in love with you. I just saw it at your house and thought I’d steal it.
Colleen Hoover (Point of Retreat (Slammed, #2))
My dearest friend Abigail, These probably could be the last words I write to you and I may not live long enough to see your response but I truly have lived long enough to live forever in the hearts of my friends. I thought a lot about what I should write to you. I thought of giving you blessings and wishes for things of great value to happen to you in future; I thought of appreciating you for being the way you are; I thought to give sweet and lovely compliments for everything about you; I thought to write something in praise of your poems and prose; and I thought of extending my gratitude for being one of the very few sincerest friends I have ever had. But that is what all friends do and they only qualify to remain as a part of the bunch of our loosely connected memories and that's not what I can choose to be, I cannot choose to be lost somewhere in your memories. So I thought of something through which I hope you will remember me for a very long time. I decided to share some part of my story, of what led me here, the part we both have had in common. A past, which changed us and our perception of the world. A past, which shaped our future into an unknown yet exciting opportunity to revisit the lost thoughts and to break free from the libido of our lost dreams. A past, which questioned our whole past. My dear, when the moment of my past struck me, in its highest demonised form, I felt dead, like a dead-man walking in flesh without a soul, who had no reason to live any more. I no longer saw any meaning of life but then I saw no reason to die as well. I travelled to far away lands, running away from friends, family and everyone else and I confined myself to my thoughts, to my feelings and to myself. Hours, days, weeks and months passed and I waited for a moment of magic to happen, a turn of destiny, but nothing happened, nothing ever happens. I waited and I counted each moment of it, thinking about every moment of my life, the good and the bad ones. I then saw how powerful yet weak, bright yet dark, beautiful yet ugly, joyous yet grievous; is a one single moment. One moment makes the difference. Just a one moment. Such appears to be the extreme and undisputed power of a single moment. We live in a world of appearance, Abigail, where the reality lies beyond the appearances, and this is also only what appears to be such powerful when in actuality it is not. I realised that the power of the moment is not in the moment itself. The power, actually, is in us. Every single one of us has the power to make and shape our own moments. It is us who by feeling joyful, celebrate for a moment of success; and it is also us who by feeling saddened, cry and mourn over our losses. I, with all my heart and mind, now embrace this power which lies within us. I wish life offers you more time to make use of this power. Remember, we are our own griefs, my dear, we are our own happinesses and we are our own remedies. Take care! Love, Francis. Title: Letter to Abigail Scene: "Death-bed" Chapter: The Road To Awe
Huseyn Raza
Soft sunlight tall trees woodsmoke impressions summery cues tossed on this dainty patch of my recluse. ~ Poem Title VERS LIBÉRÉ, Tara Estacaan
Tara Estacaan
The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones. Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag, and even now as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay. Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised on the tip of your tongue, not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall, well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle. No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
Billy Collins
Perfection" Every oak will lose a leaf to the wind. Every star-thistle has a thorn. Every flower has a blemish. Every wave washes back upon itself. Every ocean embraces a storm. Every raindrop falls with precision. Every slithering snail leaves its silver trail. Every butterfly flies until its wings are torn. Every tree-frog is obligated to sing. Every sound has an echo in the canyon. Every pine drops its needles to the forest floor. Creation's whispered breath at dusk comes with a frost and leaves within dawn's faint mist, for all of existence remains perfect, adorned, with a dead sparrow on the ground. (Poem titled : 'Perfection' by R.H.Peat)
R.H. Peat
– Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.
Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
That small word “Force,” they make a barber's block, Ready to put on Meanings most strange and various, fit to shock Pupils of Newton.... The phrases of last century in this Linger to play tricks— Vis viva and Vis Mortua and Vis Acceleratrix:— Those long-nebbed words that to our text books still Cling by their titles, And from them creep, as entozoa will, Into our vitals. But see! Tait writes in lucid symbols clear One small equation; And Force becomes of Energy a mere Space-variation.
James Clerk Maxwell
Names sound nice because no one peeks behind the cover to see the sad face of a poem crying for meaning, while the name of the creator proudly smiles from the title.
Dejan Stojanovic (Serbian Satire and Aphorisms)
Most people made comments on how I was the strongest woman they knew. That was before the title wave of disaster hit my charmed life.
K.D. Emerson (Holiday Keepsakes: A Collection of Stories, Poems and Memories)
An Afternoon in the Stacks Closing the book, I find I have left my head inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound, words adjusting themselves to their meaning. Long passages open at successive pages. An echo, continuous from the title onward, hums behind me. From in here the world looms, a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences carved out when an author traveled and a reader kept the way open. When this book ends I will pull it inside-out like a sock and throw it back in the library. But the rumor of it will haunt all that follows in my life. A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move.
William Stafford (The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems)
Despite his title, the Secretary of the Interior was a shallow man. He was given to surfaces, not depths; to cortex, not medulla; to the puff, not the cream. He didn't understand the interior of anything: not the interior of a tenor sax solo, a painting or a poem; not the interior of an atom, a planet, a spider or his wife's body; not the interior, least of all, of his own heart and head.
Tom Robbins
Several years before Maya [Angelou] went home to heaven, she penned the poem popularly known as 'When Great Trees Fall,' but properly titled 'Ailey, Baldwin, Floyd, Killens, and Mayfield,' a lyrical ode she ends this way: And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly.... Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed. Her sentiments, so often repeated, powerfully sum up what loss does to the human heart, how it lowers our heads and deepens our sorrows, and yet how, in the end, it miraculously restores us. When great trees fall, we weep in unity with the forest--and we rejoice at the legacy that lingers.
Cicely Tyson (Just as I Am)
We both found much more truth in poems than in the rhetoric of those who write to flirt with the power of their time, or those who only speak the 'truth' once the word 'former' becomes attached to their job titles. We both believed that powerful writing is a combination of madness and reason, observation and courage.
Louis Yako
There’s a poem I read once, titled “The World Is Too Much with Us,” and I guess that is the best way to describe the feeling—the world is too much with me.
Erika L. Sánchez (I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter)
Sadness- just a mere disease, which keeps your soul, placed in your own haven, until you're in pieces! Verses from her poem titled as 'Sadness- an ethereal aura
Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal
That is how I feel: that finding one’s beloved is an “Astonishment,” to borrow the title of that Szymborska poem, because, cosmically speaking, there is so much time and space in which not to do so.
Kathryn Schulz (Lost & Found: A Memoir)
I really don't like art with a message, unless the message is crystal clear. If you have a message that really needs to be said, just fuckin' say it! Don't hide it in indecipherable lyrics... a sculpture, it's a play, the subtext... just fuckin' say it, 'cause the people who need to hear messages are dumb as shit--the masses of humanity are dumb as shit, and you're really just pandering to your friends. Say what the fuck you mean, just say it! Title the song 'eat more leafy greens'. 'Give a hoot, don't pollute' is as much message and art combined, 'cause I get that, it's a poem but I'm pretty sure you're saying 'don't pollute'. But if you have something... 'ooh, I have the cure for cancer...and I've hidden it in this Rubix cube!!' -- just fuckin' say it! - Before Turning the Gun on Himself [2012]
Doug Stanhope
ladies & gentlemen," the Professor began, "the Other Professor is so kind as to recite a Poem. The title of it is 'The Pig-Tale.' He never recited it before!" (General cheering among the guests.) "He will never recite it again!" (Frantic excitement, & wild cheering all down the hall, the Professor himself mounting the table in hot haste, to lead the cheering, & waving his spectacles in one hand & a spoon in the other.)
Lewis Carroll
Breathing Under Water,” a title taken from a telling poem by Carol Bieleck, r.s.c.j., which seemed to sum up so much of the common message. I quote it here in full:   “Breathing Under Water”   I built my house by the sea. Not on the sands, mind you; not on the shifting sand. And I built it of rock. A strong house by a strong sea. And we got well acquainted, the sea and I. Good neighbors. Not that we spoke much. We met in silences. Respectful, keeping our distance, but looking our thoughts across the fence of sand. Always, the fence of sand our barrier, always, the sand between.   And then one day, —and I still don’t know how it happened— the sea came. Without warning.   Without welcome, even Not sudden and swift, but a shifting across the sand like wine, less like the flow of water than the flow of blood. Slow, but coming. Slow, but flowing like an open wound. And I thought of flight and I thought of drowning and I thought of death. And while I thought the sea crept higher, till it reached my door. And I knew then, there was neither flight, nor death, nor drowning. That when the sea comes calling you stop being neighbors Well acquainted, friendly-at-a-distance, neighbors And you give your house for a coral castle, And you learn to breathe underwater.3
Richard Rohr (Breathing Underwater)
In return, he gave her a silk scarf with a reproduction of Cherry Blossoms at Night, by Katsushika Ōi, on it. The painting depicts a woman composing a poem on a slate in the foreground. The titular cherry blossoms are in the background, all but a few of them in deep shadow. Despite the title, the cherry blossoms are not the subject; it is a painting about the creative process—its solitude and the ways in which an artist, particularly a female one, is expected to disappear. The woman’s slate appears to be blank.
Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
13. “We survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets,” (this page) Angelou says of Black people. Do you think that this is true of all cultures? 14. The book title is a reference to a poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Why do you think that Angelou chose this title?
Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou's Autobiography, #1))
The life of a man of virtue and talent, who should die in his thirtieth year, is, with regard to his own feelings, longer than that of a miserable Priest-ridden slave, who dreams out a century of dulness. The one has perpetually cultivated his mental faculties, has rendered himself master of his thoughts, can abstract and generalize amid the lethargy of every-day business;--the other can slumber over the brightest moments of his being, and is unable to remember the happiest hour of his life. Perhaps the perishing ephemeron enjoys a longer life than the tortoise.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (Queen Mab, a Philosophical Poem, with Notes. [Reputed to Have Been Given by the Author to W. Francis. Wanting the Title-Leaf, Dedication and Part of the Last Leaf].)
Far from resenting these lessons, the pupil, to please his tutor, once composed a sheaf of poems, and though the verses were very obscene, Perry, who thought them nevertheless hilarious, had had the manuscript leather-bound in a prison shop and its title, Dirty Jokes, stamped in gold.
Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
Between the Gardening and the Cookery Comes the brief Poetry shelf; By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology Offers itself. Critical, and with nothing else to do, I scan the Contents page, Relieved to find the names are mostly new; No one my age. Like all strangers, they divide by sex: Landscape Near Parma Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex, So does Rilke and Buddha. “I travel, you see”, “I think” and “I can read’ These titles seem to say; But I Remember You, Love is My Creed, Poem for J., The ladies’ choice, discountenance my patter For several seconds; From somewhere in this (as in any) matter A moral beckons. Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart Or squash it flat? Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart; Girls aren’t like that. We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff Can get by without it. Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough; They write about it. And the awful way their poems lay them open Just doesn’t strike them. Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them. Deciding this, we can forget those times We stayed up half the night Chock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes, And couldn’t write.
Kingsley Amis
Pan, Echo, and the Satyr From the Greek of Moschus Published (without title) by Mrs. Shelley, "Posthumous Poems", 1824. There is a draft amongst the Hunt manuscripts. Pan loved his neighbour Echo—but that child Of Earth and Air pined for the Satyr leaping; The Satyr loved with wasting madness wild The bright nymph Lyda,—and so three went weeping. As Pan loved Echo, Echo loved the Satyr, The Satyr, Lyda; and so love consumed them.— And thus to each—which was a woful matter— To bear what they inflicted Justice doomed them; For, inasmuch as each might hate the lover, Each, loving, so was hated.—Ye that love not Be warned—in thought turn this example over, That when ye love, the like return ye prove not. NOTE: _6 so Hunt manuscript; thus 1824. _11 So 1824; This lesson timely in your thoughts turn over, The moral of this song in thought turn over (as alternatives) Hunt manuscript.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley)
(This is from a tribute poem to Ronnie James Dio: Former lead vocalist of the band Rainbow, Black Sabbath. This is written with all the titles of the hit songs of DIO. The titles are all in upper case) You can “CATCH THE RAINBOW” – “A RAINBOW IN THE DARK” Through “ROCK & ROLL CHILDREN” “HOLY DIVER” will lurk “BEFORE THE FALL” of “ELECTRA” “ALL THE FOOLS SAILED AWAY” “JESUS,MARY AND THE HOLY GHOST”- “LORD OF THE LAST DAY” “MASTER OF THE MOON” you are When my “ONE FOOT IN THE GRAVE” With our “BLACK”, “COLD FEET”, “MYSTERY” of “PAIN” you crave You’re “CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE”, “BETWEEN TWO HEARTS” When “HUNGRY FOR HEAVEN” “HUNTER OF THE HEART” hurts “FALLEN ANGELS” “FEED MY HEART” “FEVER DREAMS” “FEED MY HEAD” “I AM” “ANOTHER LIE” “AFTER ALL (THE DEAD)” Not “GUILTY” if you “HIDE IN THE RAINBOW’’ With your perfect “GUITAR SOLO” “DON’T TELL THE KIDS” to “DREAM EVIL” Don’t “GIVE HER THE GUN” to follow “DON’T TALK TO STRANGERS” Those “EVIL EYES” can see “LORD OF THE NIGHT” “MISTREATED”; “MY EYES” hate to fancy “SHAME ON THE NIGHT” “TURN UP THE NIGHT” Now it’s “TIME TO BURN” “TWISTED” “VOODOO” does “WALK ON WATER” And today its our turn “BLOOD FROM A STONE” “BORN ON THE SUN” I’m “BETTER IN THE DARK” “BREATHLESS” The “PRISONER OF PARADISE” you are! Forever you are deathless “SACRED HEART” “SHIVERS” Laying “NAKED IN THE RAIN” “THIS IS YOUR LIFE”- “ WILD ONE”! Your “GOLDEN RULES” we gain “IN DREAMS” “I SPEED AT NIGHT” I’m “LOSING MY INSANITY” “ANOTHER LIE”: “COMPUTER GOD” Your “HEAVEN AND HELL”- my vanity! By “KILLING THE DRAGON” “I COULD HAVE BEEN A DREAMER” I’m “THE LAST IN LINE” To “SCREAM” Like an “INVISIBLE” screamer Now that you are gone “THE END OF THE WORLD” is here “STRAIGHT THROUGH THE HEART” “PUSH” “JUST ANOTHER DAY” in fear “CHILDREN OF THE SEA” “ DYING IN AMERICA” Is it “DEATH BY LOVE”? “FACES IN THE WINDOW” looking for A “GYPSY” from above Dear “STARGAZER” from “STRANGE HIGHWAYS” Our love “HERE’S TO YOU” “WE ROCK” “ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD” The “OTHER WORLD” anew “ONE NIGHT IN THE CITY” with “NEON KNIGHTS” “THE EYES” “STAY OUT OF MY MIND” The “STARSTRUCK” “SUNSET SUPERMAN” Is what we long to find “THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING” Is the “INSTITUTIONAL MAN” “SHOOT SHOOT” to “TURN TO STONE” “WHEN A WOMAN CRIES” to plan To “STAND UP AND SHOUT” before “ THE KING OF ROCK AND ROLL” Though “GOD HATES HEAVY METAL” “EAT YOUR HEART OUT” to reach the goal. From the poem- Holy Dio: the Diver (A tribute to Ronnie James Dio)
Munia Khan
...but doth not the person who expends vast sums in the furniture of his house or the ornaments of his person, who consumes much time and employs great pains in dressing himself, or who thinks himself paid for self-denial, labour, or even villany, by a title or a ribbon, sacrifice as much to vanity as the poor wit who is desirous to read you his poem or his play?
Henry Fielding (Joseph Andrews (Dover Thrift Editions))
….unable to find a title for her last published novel, she wrote six lines which included her eventual title The Birds Fall Down. These lines were attributed to Conway Power (the name she generally appended to her poetry, even in her private notebooks), from a non-existent poem called ‘Guide to a Disturbed Planet.’ When the novel was published she had fun deflecting the enquiries of readers who wanted to know how to find the works of Conway Power. One was told a long story: Conway Power was a landowner in a remote area who had written thousands of poems and destroyed most of them. He had left some of them with her, given his property to a nephew, and gone abroad. ‘If I can trace the book (if there is a book) I’ll let you know.
Victoria Glendinning (Rebecca West : A Life)
On a spring day in 1988…a Massachusetts man who collected books about local history was rummaging through a bin in a New Hampshire antiques barn when something caught his eye. Beneath texts on fertilizers and farm machines lay a slim, worn pamphlet with tea-colored paper covers, titled Tamerlane and Other Poems, by an unnamed author identified simply as “a Bostonian.” He was fairly certain he had found something exceptional, paid the $15 price, and headed home, where Tamerlane would spend only one night. The next day, he contacted Sotheby’s, and they confirmed his suspicion that he had just made one of the most exciting book discoveries in years. The pamphlet was a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s first text, written when he was only fourteen years old, a find that fortune-seeking collectors have imagined happening upon probably more than they’d like to admit. The humble-looking, forty-page pamphlet was published in 1827 by Calvin F.S. Thomas, a relatively unknown Boston printer who specialized in apothecary labels, and its original price was about twelve cents. But this copy, looking good for its 161 years, most of which were probably spent languishing in one dusty attic box after another, would soon be auctioned for a staggering $198,000.
Allison Hoover Bartlett (The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession)
At some point, I realized that museums and libraries (in what I imagine must have been either a hard-won gesture of goodwill, or in order not to appear irrelevant) had removed many nineteenth-century historically specific markers--such as slave, colored, and Negro--from their titles or archives, and replaced these words instead with the sanitized, but perhaps equally vapid, African-American. In order to replace this historical erasure of slavery (however well intended), I re-erased the postmodern African-American, then changed those titles back. That is, I re-corrected the corrected horror in order to allow that original worry to stand. My intent was to explore and record not only the history of human thought, but also how normative and complicit artists, curators, and art institutions have been in participating in--if not creating--this history.
Robin Coste Lewis (Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems)
Watanabe-san and Sadie exchanged gifts. She brought him a pair of carved wooden Ichigo chopsticks that their Japanese distributor had had made to celebrate the release of the second Ichigo in Japan. In return, he gave her a silk scarf with a reproduction of Cherry Blossoms at Night, by Katsushika Ōi, on it. The painting depicts a woman composing a poem on a slate in the foreground. The titular cherry blossoms are in the background, all but a few of them in deep shadow. Despite the title, the cherry blossoms are not the subject; it is a painting about the creative process---its solitude and the ways in which an artist, particularly a female one, is expected to disappear. The woman's slate appears to be blank. "I know Hokusai is an inspiration for you," Watanabe-san said. "This is by Hokusai's daughter. Only a handful of her paintings survived, but I think she is even better than the father.
Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
The other gift — a book of poems, called, "The Cowardly Morning" — Waner put on Corinne's desk at the office, with a note saying, "This man is Coleridge and Blake and Rilke all in one, and more." She didn't pick up the book again until she was in bed, late that night. [...] The first poem was the title poem. This time Corinne read it through aloud. But still she didn't hear it. She read it through a third time, and heard some of it. She read it through a fourth time, and heard all of it. It was the poem containing the lines: 'Not wasteland, but a great inverted forest with all foliage underground.' As though it might be best to look immediately for shelter, Corinne had to put the book down. At any moment the apartment building seemed liable to lose its balance and topple across Fifth Avenue into Central Park. She waited. Gradually the deluge of truth and beauty abated. - The Inverted Forest (1947)
J.D. Salinger (The Complete Uncollected Stories)
I believe I was afraid…of not being worthy of you. I have spent weeks writing, scribbling my thoughts, reliving every moment we shared, and I saw…the happiness we shared when we were together. The gleam in your dark eyes when you saw me. And I realized…that is what it’s about, is it not? Those pieces of happiness are what matters. Not title or name. I write stories and poems of love and dreams coming true, but I did not allow myself to see it as something that could be real…not for me…but it was true…what we shared, and not only am I better for it, the world could be too.” “I am a better man because of you, Cas. Imagine what we could do together?” Cassius gasped…hoped. “Do you still want me, my prince?" “I have never wanted another the way I want you. There will never be another I love the way I love you.” Merrick raised his hand, cupped Cassius’s cheek. Cas nuzzled into him, closed his eyes, trembled when he felt Merrick’s lips touch his. They kissed slowly, deeply, reexploring each other. Cassius swallowed down Merrick’s moans and then fed him his own. And it was…perfect. When they pulled apart, Cassius led Merrick back to the rock. The sun kept the chill off as they climbed on together
Riley Hart (Ever After)
What appears in the former statue of Apollo, however, cannot simply be equated with the Olympian of the same name, who had to ensure light, contours, foreknowledge and security of form in his days of completeness. Rather, as the poem's title implies, he stands for something much older, something rising from prehistoric sources. He symbolizes a divine magma in which something of the first ordering force, as old as the world itself, becomes manifest. There is no doubt that memories of Rodin and his cyclopian work ethic had an effect on Rilke here. During his work with the great artist, he experienced what it means to work on the surfaces of bodies until they are nothing but a fabric of carefully shaped, luminous, almost seeing 'places'. A few years earlier, he had written of Rodin's sculptures that 'there were endless places, and none of them did not have something happening in them'. Each place is a point at which Apollo, the god of forms and surfaces, makes a visually intense and haptically palpable compromise with his older opponent Dionysus, the god of urges and currents. That this energized Apollo embodies a manifestation of Dionysus is indicated by the statement that the stone glistens 'like wild beasts' fur'.
Peter Sloterdijk (Du mußt dein Leben ändern)
He was excited by his generation's idealistic dreams of the future, and particularly enjoyed a fanciful poem written by one of his prep school classmates in 1906, titled “In 1999”: Father goes to the office In his new bi-aeroplane And talks by wireless telephone To Uncle John—in Spain Mother goes a-shopping She buys things more or less And has them sent home C.O.D. Via “Monorail Express.” Sister goes a-calling She stays here and there a while And discusses with her many friends The latest Martian style And when her calling list is through She finds a library nook And there with great enjoyment hears A new self-reading book.
Michael Capuzzo (Close to Shore: The Terrifying Shark Attacks of 1916)
Nature is cyclical. It curves and revolves, with little use for linear ways… Adrienne Rich’s 1977 poem “Natural Resources” unlocked the title of the book. “My heart is moved by all I cannot save,” she writes. Ours too- and by all that we can. The work at hand is hard and uncertain, yet we find our warrior spirits, charge ahead, and care for one another every step of the way. We will stumble as we chart this unmapped path; let’s forgive our fallibility, safeguard our empathy, and lead with kindness as we go. In more poignant words from Adrienne Rich: There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis)
The world spinning. AUTHOR’S NOTE PHILIPPE PETIT WALKED A TIGHTROPE WIRE between the World Trade Center towers on August 7, 1974. I have used his walk in this novel, but all the other events and characters in this work are fictional. I have taken liberties with Petit’s walk, while trying to remain true to the texture of the moment and its surroundings. Readers interested in Petit’s walk should go to his book To Reach the Clouds (Faber and Faber, 2002) for an intimate account. The photograph used on page 237 is by Vic DeLuca, Rex Images, August 7, 1974, copyright Rex USA. To both of these artists I’m deeply indebted. The title of this book comes from the Alfred, Lord Tennyson poem “Locksley Hall.” That in turn was heavily influenced by the “Mu’allaqat,” or the “Suspended Poems,” seven long Arabic poems written in the sixth century. Tennyson’s poem mentions “pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales,” and the “Mu’allaqat” asks, “Is there any hope that this desolation can bring me solace?” Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.
Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin)
The Golden Bough captured the imagination of many artists in the early twentieth century. Eliot, certainly, was immersed in it, discussing it familiarly in his graduate school papers and book reviews and constantly alluding to it in his art. The most straightforward advice he offers to readers of The Waste Land (given in the notes to the poem) is, in paraphrase, that any serious reader of the poem must take into consideration modern scholarship in myth and anthropology, especially Frazer Golden Bough and Jessie Weston From Ritual to Romance. The poet says that he is indebted to this scholarship for his title, his plan, his symbolism, and many of his references to ancient religion and society. His claim about the title, taken from the monomyth of Frazer and Weston, his claim about the symbolism, associated with the birth-death-rebirth cycles of the myths, and his claim about the miscellaneous undergirding references have been discussed by Grover Smith and other scholars. We wish to focus more on Eliot's claim about being indebted to Frazer for the plan of the poem. We believe it refers, at least in part, to Frazer's use of the comparative method and to his practice of assembling many perspectives and allowing these perspectives to make his point. It must be noted at once that Eliot was quite selective in his admiration of Frazer. For example, he did not admire Frazer's positivism. Frazer put his faith in science and celebrated what he called the evolution from magic to religion to science. Nor did Eliot share Frazer's conclusions. In his 1913 paper on the interpretation of primitive ritual, he says that Frazer's interpretations of specific myths (the myth of the dying god is his example) are almost certainly mistaken. But Eliot did admire Frazer's erudition and his increasingly nontheoretical presentation of many angles of vision which in themselves tend to generate an overarching abstract primitive vision. In 1924, on the occasion of the publication of a condensed edition of The Golden Bough, Eliot wrote a review in which he lauded Frazer for having "extended the consciousness of the human mind into as dark a backward and abysm of time as has yet been explored." Eliot argues that Frazer's importance for artists is in his exemplary withdrawal from speculation, his adoption of the absence of interpretation as a positive modus operandi.
Jewel Spears Brooker (Reading the Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation)
LOVE'S DIET To what a cumbersome unwieldiness And burdenous corpulence my love had grown, But that I did, to make it less, And keep it in proportion, Give it a diet, made it feed upon That which love worst endures, discretion. Above one sigh a day I allowed him not, Of which my fortune, and my faults had part; And if sometimes by stealth he got A she sigh from my mistress' heart, And thought to feast upon that, I let him see 'Twas neither very sound, nor meant to me. If he wrung from me a tear, I brined it so With scorn and shame, that him it nourished not; If he sucked hers, I let him know 'Twas not a tear which he had got; His drink was counterfeit, as was his meat; For eyes, which roll towards all, weep not, but sweat. Whatever he would dictate I writ that, But burnt her letters when she writ to me; And if that favour made him fat, I said, "If any title be Conveyed by this, ah! what doth it avail, To be the fortieth name in an entail?" Thus I reclaimed my buzzard love, to fly At what, and when, and how, and where I choose. Now negligent of sports I lie, And now, as other falconers use, I spring a mistress, swear, write, sigh, and weep; And the game killed, or lost, go talk or sleep.
John Donne (The Love Poems)
A VALEDICTION: OF THE BOOK I'll tell thee now (dear love) what thou shalt do To anger destiny, as she doth us; How I shall stay, though she eloign me thus, And how posterity shall know it too; How thine may out-endure Sibyl's glory, and obscure Her who from Pindar could allure, And her, through whose help Lucan is not lame, And her, whose book (they say) Homer did find, and name. Study our manuscripts, those myriads Of letters, which have past 'twixt thee and me; Thence write our annals, and in them will be To all whom love's subliming fire invades, Rule and example found; There the faith of any ground No schismatic will dare to wound, That sees, how Love this grace to us affords, To make, to keep, to use, to be these his records. This book, as long-lived as the elements, Or as the world's form, this all-graved tome In cypher writ, or new made idiom; We for Love's clergy only are instruments; When this book is made thus, Should again the ravenous Vandals and Goths invade us, Learning were safe; in this our universe, Schools might learn sciences, spheres music, angels verse. Here Love's divines—since all divinity Is love or wonder—may find all they seek, Whether abstract spiritual love they like, Their souls exhaled with what they do not see; Or, loth so to amuse Faith's infirmity, they choose Something which they may see and use; For, though mind be the heaven, where love doth sit, Beauty a convenient type may be to figure it. Here more than in their books may lawyers find, Both by what titles mistresses are ours, And how prerogative these states devours, Transferred from Love himself, to womankind; Who, though from heart and eyes, They exact great subsidies, Forsake him who on them relies; And for the cause, honour, or conscience give; Chimeras vain as they or their prerogative. Here statesmen, (or of them, they which can read) May of their occupation find the grounds; Love, and their art, alike it deadly wounds, If to consider what 'tis, one proceed. In both they do excel Who the present govern well, Whose weakness none doth, or dares tell; In this thy book, such will there something see, As in the Bible some can find out alchemy. Thus vent thy thoughts; abroad I'll study thee, As he removes far off, that great heights takes; How great love is, presence best trial makes, But absence tries how long this love will be; To take a latitude Sun, or stars, are fitliest viewed At their brightest, but to conclude Of longitudes, what other way have we, But to mark when and where the dark eclipses be?
John Donne (The Love Poems)
"Listen," he said, reaching for her wrist distractedly, eyes on the page of the book as he pulled her closer. Holding the Dark, the title read. By a poet named Melanie Cameron. Emeline leaned back against the shelves, watching him. " 'I didn't know it would go like this,' " he recited. " 'I didn't know I would find you in the dark...' " Emeline stared at his mouth, captivated by the cadence of his voice. His expression was hungry as he read on, as if he'd discovered some delicious secret and wanted to feed it to her. Like a ripe red strawberry dipped in chocolate. "When I lie against you with my eyes closed, I bring your body with me, into the darkness, I bring your whole body inside me. And in that darkness I know you so much better than hands and mouth can know, I know you, as though you were the darkness inside me." He glanced up from the page, fixing her in place with that same hungry gaze. Warmth pooled in her belly. "It's nice," she murmured. He raised an eyebrow. "Nice?" The corner of his mouth turned up as he lifted his hand, bracing it against the shelf beside her. She wrinkled her nose at him. "Pretty, then." "How about tender. And..." His eyes dropped to her mouth. "Intimate." There was the oddest feeling in Emeline's chest. Like a million tiny stars on the cusp of bursting. Sparks crackled in the air between them.
Kristen Ciccarelli (Edgewood)
IN JANUARY 1959 Police Chief Herbert Jenkins found a poem tacked to a bulletin board at his departmental headquarters. Tellingly, the anonymous author had titled it “The Plan of Improvement,” in sarcastic tribute to Mayor Hartsfield’s 1952 program for the city’s expansion and economic progress. The poem looked back over a decade of racial change and spoke volumes about the rising tide of white resentment. It began with a brief review of the origins of residential transition and quickly linked the desegregation of working-class neighborhoods to the desegregation of the public spaces surrounding them: Look my children and you shall see, The Plan of Improvement by William B. On a great civic venture we’re about to embark And we’ll start this one off at old Mozeley Park. White folks won’t mind losing homes they hold dear; (If it doesn’t take place on an election year) Before they have time to get over the shock, We’ll have that whole section—every square block. I’ll try something different for plan number two This time the city’s golf courses will do. They’ll mix in the Club House and then on the green I might get a write up in Life Magazine. And now comes the schools for plan number three To mix them in classrooms just fills me with glee; For I have a Grandson who someday I pray Will thank me for sending this culture his way. And for my finale, to do it up right, The buses, theatres and night spots so bright; Pools and restaurants will be mixed up at last And my Plan of Improvement will be going full blast. The sarcasm in the poem is unmistakable, of course, but so are the ways in which the author—either a policeman himself or a friend of one—clearly linked the city’s pursuit of “progress” with a litany of white losses. In the mind of the author, and countless other white Atlantans like him, the politics of progress was a zero-sum game in which every advance for civil rights meant an equal loss for whites.
Kevin M. Kruse (White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism)
The Gates of Eden,” as he called it that night, took us furthest out into the realm of the imagination, to a point beyond logic and reason. Like “It’s Alright, Ma,” the song mentions a book title in its first line, but the song is more reminiscent of the poems of William Blake (and, perhaps, of Blake’s disciple Ginsberg) than it is of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, vaunting the truth that lies in surreal imagery. After an almost impenetrable first verse, the song approaches themes that were becoming familiar to Dylan’s listeners. In Genesis, Eden is the paradise where Adam and Eve had direct communication with God. According to “Gates of Eden,” it is where truth resides, without bewitching illusions. And the song is basically a list, verse after verse, of the corrosive illusions that Dylan would sing about constantly from the mid-1960s on: illusions about obedience to authority; about false religions and idols (the “utopian hermit monks” riding on the golden calf); about possessions and desire; about sexual repression and conformity (embodied by “the gray flannel dwarf”); about high-toned intellectualism. None of these count for much or even exist inside the gates of Eden. The kicker comes in the final verse, where the singer talks of his lover telling him of her dreams without any attempt at interpretation—and that at times, the singer thinks that the only truth is that there is no truth outside the gates of Eden. It’s a familiar conundrum: If there is no truth, isn’t saying as much really an illusion, too, unless we are all in Eden? (“All Cretans are liars,” says the Cretan.) What makes that one truth so special? But the point, as the lover knows, is that outside of paradise, interpretation is futile. Don’t try to figure out what the song, or what any work of art, “really” means; the meaning is in the imagery itself; attempting to define it is to succumb to the illusion that truth can be reached through human logic. So Dylan’s song told us, as he took the measure in his lyrics of what had begun as the “New Vision,” two and a half miles up Broadway from Lincoln Center at Columbia, in the mid-1940s. Apart from Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso may have been the only people in Philharmonic Hall who got it. I
Sean Wilentz (Bob Dylan in America)
Cochise Jones always liked to play against your expectations of a song, to light the gloomy heart of a ballad with a Latin tempo and a sheen of vibrato, root out the hidden mournfulness, the ache of longing, in an up-tempo pop tune. Cochise’s six-minute outing on the opening track of Redbonin’ was a classic exercise in B-3 revisionism, turning a song inside out. It opened with big Gary King playing a fat, choogling bass line, sounding like the funky intro to some ghetto-themed sitcom of the seventies, and then Cochise Jones came in, the first four drawbars pulled all the way out, giving the Lloyd Webber melody a treatment that was not cheery so much as jittery, playing up the anxiety inherent in the song’s title, there being so many thousand possible ways to Love Him, so little time to choose among them. Cochise’s fingers skipped and darted as if the keys of the organ were the wicks of candles and he was trying to light all of them with a single match. Then, as Idris Muhammad settled into a rolling burlesque-hall bump and grind, and King fell into step beside him, Cochise began his vandalism in earnest, snapping off bright bunches of the melody and scattering it in handfuls, packing it with extra notes in giddy runs. He was ruining the song, rifling it, mocking it with an antic edge of joy. You might have thought, some critics felt, that the meaning or spirit of the original song meant no more to Cochise Jones than a poem means to a shark that is eating the poet. But somewhere around the three-minute mark, Cochise began to build, in ragged layers, out of a few repeated notes on top of a left-hand walking blues, a solo at once dense and rudimentary, hammering at it, the organ taking on a raw, vox humana hoarseness, the tune getting bluer and harder and nastier. Inside the perfectly miked Leslie amplifier, the treble horn whirled, and the drivers fired, and you heard the song as the admission of failure it truly was, a confession of ignorance and helplessness. And then in the last measures of the song, without warning, the patented Creed Taylor strings came in, mannered and restrained but not quite tasteful. A hint of syrup, a throb of the pathetic, in the face of which the drums and bass fell silent, so that in the end it was Cochise Jones and some rented violins, half a dozen mournful studio Jews, and then the strings fell silent, too, and it was just Mr. Jones, fading away, ending the track with the startling revelation that the song was an apology, an expression, such as only the blues could ever tender, of limitless regret.
Michael Chabon (Telegraph Avenue)
LIFE ON ITS EDGE' 'What the title reflects? It says about life's edge' 'Edge, where life has nothing, nothing to achieve. But wait is there, that it will gonna over in this believe' 'No power, no strength but there's just weakness, All attempts get fail and everything goes mess.' 'Power gets off even needed speckles for eye sight. No teeth are there, taste of buds even goes light' 'Shivering body, noddy head and even shivering hands, Preparing to settle at new but unknown land' 'No sound, silent life, people behave them rude, Hey youngsters, their lives are on edge and To be Continued! ' -Samar Sudha
Samar Sudha
This creative tension between wonderful and terrible is named so well by Gerard Manley Hopkins, as only poets can. Even the long title of his poem reveals his acceptance of the ever-changing flow of Heraclites and also his trust in the final outcome: “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.” Flesh fade, and mortal trash fall to the residuary worm; world's wildfire, leave but ash: In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Richard Rohr (Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life)
April is the cruelest month.' So begins T.S. Eliot’s 1922 masterpiece, a 434-line poem titled 'The Waste Land.' Until my employment as a trail maintenance worker, this had simply been a line on a page, albeit a line fraught with metaphorical import and potential. Now I saw it for what it was—a big fat lie—because Eliot grew up in St. Louis and no one forgets what a Missouri summer is like. If the Nobel laureate had been truthful with himself, the opening verse would start out, 'June’s a bitch.
Michael Gurnow (Nature's Housekeeper)
The title of the poem is: Heimweh (Homesick). The pervasive feeling expressed is of utter desolation, of wrenching pain felt by a person, who longs for every stone, bench, house - everything that was home. She felt that this poem put into words her own extreme longing for what used to be home. Then the letter continues: Nettchen, how long will this go on? How do you bear it? I have been here less than three months and I imagine that I will surely go out of my mind. Especially, in these unspeakably bright and white nights that overflow with longing. Sing sometimes, late at night, when you are alone: Poljushka4. Perhaps you will understand my frame of mind.
Pearl Fichman (Before Memories Fade)
One of the most important resiliencies for adoptive parents of toddlers is nurturing their own sense of humor and playfulness. Laughter is medicine for the soul; it serves a restorative function; it helps people keep their perspective; and it even enhances attachment. One of my most prized possessions is a poem my daughter wrote for Mother’s Day when she was 11. In her poem, titled, “Why I Love My Mother,” she describes me as having “laughing eyes filled with love.” I can’t think of a better compliment.
Mary Hopkins-Best (Toddler Adoption: The Weaver's Craft Revised Edition)
He stepped back, away from her. He shook his head in disbelief. “You know, I shouldn’t try to go out with career women. You’re all stricken. A guy can really tell what life has done to you. I do better with women who have part-time jobs.” “Oh, yes?” said Zoe. She had once read an article entitled “Professional Women and the Demographics of Grief.” Or no, it was a poem: If there were a lake, the moonlight would dance across it in conniptions. She remembered that line. But perhaps the title was “The Empty House: Aesthetics of Bareness.” Or maybe “Space Gypsies: Girls in Academe.” She had forgotten.
Lorrie Moore (Like Life)
Such is a community of inviolable immunity, protected from tampering or harpooning mutiny. Every better thinker’s impulse to shrink us (at the shoreline from our lifeblood’s deep pulse) uses disparaging scrutiny to sink us.
Kristen Henderson
in about 1950, Arendt gave a lecture with the enigmatic title "The Eggs Speak Up," explained by the epigraph she chose from "A War" by Randall Jarrell: There set out, slowly, for a Different World, At four, on winter mornings, different legs... You can't break eggs without making an omelette -That's what they tell the eggs. Jarrell had read in Origins that totalitarianism forged a "chain of fatality" - a chain of logical arguments - which threatens to "suppress men from the history of the human race." Jarrell's poem reads like a response to this sentence since it is about the necessity of interrupting this chain. With this epigraph, Arendt introduces her listeners to what she has to say.
Marie Luise Knott (Unlearning with Hannah Arendt)
Dante, as you might know, had originally titled his book The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, A Florentine by birth but not in character. The title Divine Comedy only came later, when the book became regarded as a masterpiece. It’s a work that can be approached in a thousand different ways, and over the centuries it has been,” he said, his voice gaining strength once he was on firm and familiar ground. “But what we’re going to focus on today is the use of natural imagery in the poem. And this Florentine edition which was recently donated to the Newberry collection—and which I think most of you have now seen in the central display case—is a particularly good way to do that.” He touched a button on the lectern’s electronic panel and the first image—an etching of a deep forest, with a lone figure, head bent, entering a narrow path—appeared on the screen. “ ‘In the middle of the journey of our life,’ ” he recited from memory, “ ‘I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.’ ” Looking up, he said, “With the possible exception of ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill,’ there is probably no line of poetry more famous and easily identifiable than that. And you will notice that right here, at the very start of the epic that is to follow, we have a glimpse of the natural world that is both realistic—Dante spends a terrible night in that wood—and metaphorical.” Turning to the etching, he elaborated on several of its most salient features, including the animals that animated its border—a leopard with a spotted coat, a lion, and a skulking wolf with distended jaws. “Confronted by these creatures, Dante pretty much turns tail and runs, until he bumps into a figure—who turns out of course to be the Roman poet Virgil—who offers to guide him ‘through an eternal place where thou shalt hear the hopeless shrieks, shalt see the ancient spirits in pain so that each calls for a second death.’ ” A new image flashed on the screen, of a wide river—Acheron with mobs of the dead huddled on its shores, and a shrouded Charon in the foreground, pointing with one bony finger at a long boat. It was a particularly well-done image and David noted several heads nodding with interest and a low hum of comments. He had thought there might be. This edition of the Divine Comedy was one of the most powerful he had ever seen, and he was making it his mission to find out who the illustrator had been. The title pages of the book had sustained such significant water and smoke damage that no names could be discerned. The book had also had to be intensively treated for mold, and many of the plates bore ineradicable green and blue spots the circumference of a pencil eraser.
Robert Masello (The Medusa Amulet)
Rage is properly the title of Homer's poem, and his audience may have known it by that name, not Iliad.
Jonathan Shay (Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character)
The Axolotl and the Ammocoete” may not sound like a promising title for verse: it refers to a salamander (axolotl) and a tadpole-like animal (ammocoete). But the idea expressed in the poem changed the field and defined research programs for decades.
Neil Shubin (Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA)
Phoenix He already Walked through my soul, it's where he learned to fly Now I'm getting used to being ignored in a purposeful way Although it hurts when my heart shakes out of solitude’s grace To find only a mirror willing to pull my embrace Sometimes a title is dragged through its whole story like an anchor the reader's mind uses to decode ashes in the strokes It places heavy crowns on delicate heads which form into it As frail necks hurt from not being allowed to swing away from your sight I've seen the rising from death by someone who truly thought they weren't coming back And I've seen love cast into chains unexpectedly in the simpler sense of the word To accept silence in response to sincere apologies To stand in pain at requests our hearts don't want to fulfill It's the issue we created by not separating our universes
Tavisha Sh (I tell myself, it's the enticing lull of the moon and her shadow)
THE GRANDEST, MOST eloquent evocation of Depression-era populism came from the Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg, whose 1936 offering was a book-length poem called The People, Yes. Aside from its iconic title, the work is almost completely forgotten today, a strange outlier amidst the last century’s highbrow taste in poetry. Sandburg’s verse is not abstract; it is not avant-garde. But let us put our cynicism aside for a moment. As the title suggests, The People, Yes was a full-throated celebration of ordinariness: the manners of the people, their dreams, their folly, their aspirations, and above all their speech, the “plain and irregular sounds and echoes from / the roar and whirl of street crowds, work gangs, sidewalk clamor,” as he wrote in the introduction. As with Ballad for Americans and so many other works of the time, there is a compulsive listing of identities, repeated efforts to name-check everyone. Sandburg gives us cantos that are lists of occupations, cantos made up of slang expressions and lines from folktales and popular jokes. There are strikers, angry farmers, tricksters, soldiers, armies, and, of course, a big fat rich guy, ordering others off his property. Naturally Sandburg attacks the elite, mocking the pretenses of aristocracy and reminding his Depression-era audience of something they knew all too well—that justice treats rich and poor differently. He reminds us that bank robbers go to prison but, if you’re a bank officer who loots the company, “all you have to do is start another bank.
Thomas Frank (The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy)
Many of the haiku poets gave their poems brief superscriptions that function like Ginsberg’s titles to create a context.
Robert Hass (A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry)
Forgetfulness" The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones. Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag, and even now as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay. Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised on the tip of your tongue or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle. No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
Billy Collins (Questions About Angels)
What if I were to begin an essay on spiritual matters by citing a poem that will not at first seem to you spiritual at all,” writes Anne Carson, in the title essay of her 2005 book Decreation.
Jia Tolentino (Trick Mirror)
Frost himself told and retold the story of writing his first poem. The poem, later published by The Independent, was titled, “My Butterfly.” He was just twenty years old. “I wrote it all in one go in the kitchen of our house on Tremont Street,” Frost said. “I locked the door and all the time I was working, Jeanie my sister tried to batter it down and get in.” And as he wrote that first poem, Frost recalls, he had a profound sense that “something was happening. It was like cutting along a nerve.
Stephen Cope (The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling)
Christians believe that God speaks through history; and only by knowing that history can we hope to interpret momentous events like the Japanese persecutions and the fall of the Asian churches. Yet Christians have systematically forgotten or ignored so very much of their history that it is scarcely surprising that they encounter only a deafening silence. Losing the ancient churches is one thing, but losing their memory and experience so utterly is a disaster scarcely less damaging. To break the silence, we need to recover those memories, to restore that history. To borrow the title of one of Charles Olson’s great poems: the chain of memory is resurrection.
Philip Jenkins (The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died)
indeed there are soul realities,” with “mein liebster” at a safe distance. “I have never had one at all like it, and I do not read things in the poets or anywhere that more than glance at it.” She could feel James Nathan’s thoughts “growing in my mind . . . your stronger organization has at times almost transfused mine.” There had been “moments when our minds were blended in one,” and this “unison” beat “like a heart within me.” She had given him Shelley to read, but there is “no poem like the poem we can make for ourselves”: “is it not by living such relations that we bring a new religion, establishing nobler freedom for all?” How hard Margaret worked to persuade herself—and James Nathan—of their disembodied “unison.” As she wrote in a Tribune essay that July, titled “Clairvoyance,” on the “wonderful powers” of the mind, “time and space” may yet be “annihilated” so that “lovers may be happy.” In late
Megan Marshall (Margaret Fuller: A New American Life: A Pulitzer Prize Winner)
In the Christmas season of 1822, Clement Clarke Moore, a prosperous New York scholar and landowner, wrote a series of verses in a lively anapestic rhythm for the amusement of his daughters.13 Legend has it that they were inspired by the portly figure of his fur-clad sleigh driver as he returned home from a shopping trip through the snowy streets. The poem appeared anonymously in the Troy Sentinel a year later under the title “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas”:
Gerry Bowler (Christmas in the Crosshairs: Two Thousand Years of Denouncing and Defending the World's Most Celebrated Holiday)
From kindergarten through senior year of high school, Evan attended Crossroads, an elite, coed private school in Santa Monica known for its progressive attitudes. Tuition at Crossroads runs north of $ 22,000 a year, and seemingly rises annually. Students address teachers by their first names, and classrooms are named after important historical figures, like Albert Einstein and George Mead, rather than numbered. The school devotes as significant a chunk of time to math and history as to Human Development, a curriculum meant to teach students maturity, tolerance, and confidence. Crossroads emphasizes creativity, personal communication, well-being, mental health, and the liberal arts. The school focuses on the arts much more than athletics; some of the school’s varsity games have fewer than a dozen spectators. 2 In 2005, when Evan was a high school freshman, Vanity Fair ran an exhaustive feature about the school titled “School for Cool.” 3 The school, named for Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” unsurprisingly attracts a large contingent of Hollywood types, counting among its alumni Emily and Zooey Deschanel, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jack Black, Kate Hudson, Jonah Hill, Michael Bay, Maya Rudolph, and Spencer Pratt. And that’s just the alumni—the parents of students fill out another page or two of who’s who A-listers. Actor Denzel Washington once served as the assistant eighth grade basketball coach, screenwriter Robert Towne spoke in a film class, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma talked shop with the school’s chamber orchestra.
Billy Gallagher (How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story)
Will You Be My Poetry (The Sonnet) You keep calling me a poet, I embrace the sentiment but not the title. I may have some power over words, But the words themselves are nothing valuable. It's the world behind the words that matters, A world where all walls collapse and wither. Once you wake up to that world, Save human, all other titles disappear. In that world of oneness you shall discover, My words are not the real poetry. My true poetry is your own humanness, I am but a reflection of your struggling humanity. So let's get rid of this poet and reader business! You be my poetry, I'll be your pages.
Abhijit Naskar (Giants in Jeans: 100 Sonnets of United Earth)
Her edition, though, did make two errors, acceptable at that time: as her mother had done before her, she imposed titles on untitled poems and she standardised punctuation, not grasping how vital Dickinson’s punctuation may be to the way we read her.
Lyndall Gordon (Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds)
The first volume of Dickinson poems, bound in white leather and published on 12 November 1890, was handled in just the way that had put the poet off publication during her lifetime: the editors had tampered with the inventive punctuation and off-rhymes of the volcano speaking through ‘buckled lips’. Words were changed ‘to make them smoother’ (as Mabel Todd put it) and dashes eliminated. There were trivialising titles like ‘With a Flower’, ‘Playmates’ and ‘Troubled about many things’.
Lyndall Gordon (Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds)
Pamphlets can consist of anything from around twelve to about thirty poems. They allow us to select and reject pieces, to space out main themes, to consider the dynamics of sub-sections or sequences, and to decide on opening and closing poems. Like individual poems, they require titles and possibly epigraphs, which makes us contemplate the most important impression we wish to give from this grouping of our work.
Linda Anderson (Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings)
D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review writes: "Sea Creatures and Poems: Plus Some Other Fish Rhymes illustrates the fun that poetry can embrace, providing a zany collection for all ages that is both ocean-focused and whimsical. The operative description for both poems and pictures is "silly," and the book fulfills this promise with a series of engaging observations that belay the usual staid approaches of too many poetry books. Art combined with poetry is "a delicious combination," as Richard Merritts reflects in the collection's introduction. The poems inspired the author to add illustrations which are just as whimsically touched...and, also, quite artistically rendered. These aren't demanding works. Take "Pompano Pompano Pompano," for example. Its very short observation concludes with an ironic twist after identifying the "flat fish from Florida" outside of its normal sea environment. Succinct? Yes. But the poem really...snags readers, landing a winning insight on both the pompano and its ultimate fate. Readers trawling for humor will find plenty in this book. Even the poetry titles present original, fun observations, as in "By Jove, I Hooked a Snook." Aside from its delightful observations, the poems represent diverse structures, from free verse to rhyme: "From the depths of the sea;/Came a fish that could be;/From a prison did flee;/Dressed in stripes, so you see..." From redfish and ahi to the anglers who long for them, Sea Creatures and Poems will appeal to a wide audience, especially those who do not view poetry as an opportunity for philosophical and psychological analysis alone. Its blend of natural history info, inviting color illustrations, and accompanying fun insights is recommended for those who fish to those who enjoy eating or studying them, as well as poetry lovers who will appreciate the very different approaches, poetic variety, and whimsical inspections within. Libraries catering to these audiences will want to include it in their collections, but Sea Creatures and Poems will prove a delightful choice for adults who seek to instill in the young an appreciation for poetry's capability for fun and its diverse structural representations.
D. Donovan, Senior Editor, Midwest Book Review
One of the more interesting things you'll notice in the entire history of poetry & poets, art & artists is those useless untalented individuals that call themselves " experts" or " critics" . The sad fact is that throughout that same history people actually were gullible and listened to them and bought their books or paintings. We no longer live in the age where poets were mass- read or rockstars but even now, in the 21st century we unfortunately must still deal with these ridiculous fops who merely give themselves these titles and use this as a tool to destroy or slander, debase or tear apart the works of other more talented poets so that their needy lackluster words will steal the other poets thunder and limelight to make themselves the center of attention. How pathetic is that? Very pathetic indeed. Hence ? We are far smarter than those who once fell for these self centered antics and we have thankfully made these manipulative con artists extinct. POETRY & ART is for EVERYBODY. From different countries, backgrounds and cultures. And the myth of experts or critics has finally been flushed down the toilet where they belong. Their words & voices now meaning what it was in the first place. NOTHING.
R.M. Engelhardt (WHERE THERE IS NO VISION POEMS 2020 R.M. ENGELHARDT)
There's a poem I read one, titled " The World Is Too Much With Us," and I guess that is the best way to describe the feeling--the world is too much with me.
Erika L. Sánchez (I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter)
I have often been struck by what many regard as the most haunting of C. S. Lewis’s poems—the sonnet titled “Reason,” probably written in the early 1920s. Lewis here contrasts the clarity and strength of reason (symbolised by Athene, the “maid” of the poem) with the warm darkness and creativity of the imagination (Demeter, the earth-mother). For Lewis, the big question is this: Is there anyone who can be “both maid and mother” to him?[180] Who indeed could achieve such a fusion, reconciling what many would see as polar opposites? At the intellectual level, Lewis was searching for a true marriage of reason and imagination—something that eluded him totally as a young man. It seemed to him then that his life of the mind was split into two disconnected hemispheres. “On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow ‘rationalism.’”[181] Lewis’s later discovery of the Christian faith offered him a synthesis of reason and imagination which he found persuasive and authentic till the end of his life.
Alister E. McGrath (C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet)
There was a man in Florence, a friar, Fra Savonarola, he induced all the people to think beauty was a sin. Some people think he was a magician and they fell under his spell for a season, they made fires in the streets and they threw in everything they liked, everything they had made or worked to buy, bolts of silk, and linen their mothers had embroidered for their marriage beds, books of poems written in the poet's hand, bonds and wills, rent-rolls, title deeds, dogs and cats, the shirts from their backs, the rings from their fingers, women their veils, and do you know what was worst, Johane – they threw in their mirrors. So then they couldn't see their faces and know how they were different from the beasts in the field and the creatures screaming on the pyre. And when they had melted their mirrors they went home to their empty houses, and lay on the floor because they had burned their beds, and when they got up next day they were aching from the hard floor and there was no table for their breakfast because they'd used the table to feed the bonfire, and no stool to sit on because they'd chopped it into splinters, and there was no bread to eat because the bakers had thrown into the flames the basins and the yeast and the flour and the scales. And you know the worst of it? They were sober. Last night they took their wine-skins …’ He turns his arm, in a mime of a man lobbing something into a fire. ‘So they were sober and their heads were clear, but they looked around and they had nothing to eat, nothing to drink and nothing to sit on.’ ‘But that wasn't the worst. You said the mirrors were the worst. Not to be able to look at yourself.’ ‘Yes. Well, so I think. I hope I can always look myself in the face. And you, Johane, you should always have a fine glass to see yourself. As you're a woman worth looking at.’ You
Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1))
Because there is a growing belief among the community of thinking beings that by 2050 men and women will be marrying human like robots. At that point, how Craig Raine will describe his experiences will be fascinating to know. And in my imagination I have already travelled with the Green Man into the future called 2075 and witnessed How humans will experience love in 2075. Because this science fiction novel navigates through the possibility of men and women falling in love with machines, without knowing they are robots imitating human emotions. Will you still dare to fall in love in 2075 or will you strive to tell the difference between a human lover and a robotic lover? Now it is your turn to join the Green Man on this exciting journey into 2075, where he will reveal to you what the world would look like in 2075, and take you on an excitingly epic journey with the protagonist, Saabir, who criss crosses the highways and all by ways of emotional trajectory in the midst of synthetic emotions and feelings that engulf him. To know more, travel with the Green Man via the science fiction titled, They Loved in 2075. With this anticipation I shall dream of you tonight and hope that you will be able to unlock the alien imagination within you, to realise the part of you that is from Heaven. If you have any doubts, here is the poem by ​​Craig Raine to make you a dreamer who while asleep is always awake in his/her subconscious state too. Because he/she has learned the art of having a rendezvous with the light that radiates through the universe, to eventually settle in a dreamer's eyes who dares to dream beyond the ordinary and the 3 dimensional reality. "A Martian Sends A Postcard Home” Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings and some are treasured for their markings-- they cause the eyes to melt or the body to shriek without pain. I have never seen one fly, but sometimes they perch on the hand. Mist is when the sky is tired of flight and rests its soft machine on the ground: then the world is dim and bookish like engravings under tissue paper Rain is when the earth is television. It has the properites of making colours darker. Model T is a room with the lock inside -- a key is turned to free the world for movement, so quick there is a film to watch for anything missed. But time is tied to the wrist or kept in a box, ticking with impatience. In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, that snores when you pick it up. If the ghost cries, they carry it to their lips and soothe it to sleep with sounds. And yet, they wake it up deliberately, by tickling with a finger. Only the young are allowed to suffer openly. Adults go to a punishment room with water but nothing to eat. They lock the door and suffer the noises alone. No one is exempt and everyone's pain has a different smell. At night, when all the colours die, they hide in pairs and read about themselves -- in colour, with their eyelids shut. Dedicated to you, the Green Man and Saabir who hails from 2075 and dares to love a real woman in 2075 because he loves her a lot!
Javid Ahmad Tak and Craig Raine
We are never to be impressed by Money, Degrees, Titles, Positions, or Followers but be impressed by Humility, True Love, Kindness, integrity, and generosity.
Shaila Touchton
She wrote you a poem,” said Barnaby. “Did she now?” asked the necromancer. He bent, gathering up shreds of paper. Sighed, and let the tatters fall again, drifting down like autumn leaves. “It’s titled ‘To My Dear Pente’.” “I assume, oh Marquise, that you will not be content till you have read it to me. So let’s hear, and have done.” Barnaby read aloud. “Die.” He paused, continued. “Die. Die. Die. Die. Die. Die. Die. Die. Die.” He stopped, turned several pages. “Die. Goes on and on. Just that.” “Well, it rhymes well,” observed Night-Creep.
Raymond St. Elmo (Barnaby the Wanderer)
Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Dedication Longfellow Poem Map of the Roman World AD 534
William Havelock (The Pillars of Herakles: A Novel of Belisarius (The Last of the Romans Book 4))
Carefully, I unwrapped a book of collected poems by Yeats. “Thank you. It’s beautiful.” I rubbed my fingers over the gray buckram and beveled edges, traced the title on the leather label. “It’ll be the perfect start for a library, Cussy Mary.” “Library,” I whispered, awed by his love of books.
Kim Michele Richardson (The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek)
Today, the work that is most associated with Weston's memory is one that she wrote when she was 70 years old. From Rituals to Romance, published in 1921, is Weston's best known work largely in part due to the fact that T.S. Eliot named it as one of his great sources and influences for his poem, The Waste Land. In a note in the work, Eliot wrote: Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge).
Jessie Laidlay Weston (From Ritual to Romance [with Biographical Introduction] (Cosimo Classics Mythology and Folklore))
In 1885, Carl Boberg, a twenty-six-year-old preacher, wrote a poem titled in Swedish, “O Store Gud.” Translated into English, it’s “O Great God.” Boberg had no thought of his poem’s becoming a hymn, so a few years later he was surprised to hear his poem sung to the tune of an old Swedish melody. A generation later, in the early 1920s, English missionaries Stuart Hine and his wife were ministering in Poland, where they learned the Russian version of Boberg’s poem sung to the Swedish melody. Later, Hine created English words for it and arranged the Swedish melody to fit. This is the hymn we now know as “How Great Thou Art.
William J. Petersen (The Complete Book of Hymns: Inspiring Stories about 600 Hymns and Praise Songs)
He had even written a poem about one, titled “OxyContin,” published in Annals of Internal Medicine: It might have been easier If OxyContin swallowed the mountains, and took The promises of tens of thousands of young lives Slowly, like ever-encroaching kudzu. Instead, It engulfed us, Gently as napalm Would a school-yard. Mama said As hard as it was to bury Papa after the top fell in the mine up Caney Creek, it was harder yet to find Sis that morning cold and blue, with a needle stuck up her arm. Top of her class, with nothing but promise ahead until hi-jacked by the torment of needle and spoon.
Beth Macy (Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America)
All roads in this mystical world tragically lead to death. Every personal narrative repeats the same rhetorical trope. Memento mori (‘remember that you must die’) and memento mortis (‘remember death’) are the Latin medieval designation of the theory and practice of reflecting on mortality, pondering the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits. The title to metaphysical poet John Donne’s poem Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris (‘Now, this Bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.’) expresses this sentiment of humankind’s painful morality and the interconnectedness of humanity. Remember death – that I must die – is my faithful traveling companion.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
Ben Jonson appears to be very uneasy about the lie. In the Folio’s central tribute, a long poem titled “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare,” he begins strangely, preoccupied with—of all things—Shakespeare’s name. Putting Shakespeare’s name in parentheses, he announces that he will not “draw envy” on it; that is, he will not praise Shakespeare’s name:
Elizabeth Winkler (Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature)
A GATE It originates at the detail, the hinge of the door to the museum. Not the landscape or the figure that might be art, might be a coin-collector, maybe both. How you’ve taken us to twenty such places in the name of teaching me. The titles were always better than their canvases, all that blank sincerity. Their voices— if voiced—would spiral up into sincerity, and I never liked a sound for what it signified. I lost you in the impressionists. Found the gate to the pleasure-garden behind the museum. There, I named no flowers, no birds. Let the world be a worse sketch, left untitled.
Brittany Cavallaro (Unhistorical: Poems (Akron Series in Poetry))
I have no control over my words, including the titles. Every time a title appears in my mind it sends a chill down my spine. The entire body shakes up in momentary tremor followed by the rush of an immense tranquility. And that's it! Right or not, that is the title. The same happens whenever I come up with a radical statement. Just like Ramanujan used to have visions of numbers, I have visions of words, that too, in the most socially relevant manner possible.
Abhijit Naskar (Ingan Impossible: Handbook of Hatebusting)
The title Voices of the Night originally was used by Mr. Longfellow for the poem Footsteps of Angels; then he gave it to the first collected volume of his poetry with special application to the group of eight poems following Prelude. Here it is confined to this group.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
I have found the title of the book as impossible to forget as the poems in it were impossible to remember.
Clive James (Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts)
ALI He was butterfly and bee. In the ring, he floated and stung. In 1967, Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Clay, refused to put on a uniform. “Got nothing against no Viet Cong,” he said. “Ain’t no Vietnamese ever called me nigger.” They called him a traitor. They sentenced him to a five-year jail term, and barred him from boxing. They stripped him of his title as champion of the world. The punishment became his trophy. By taking away his crown, they anointed him king. Years later, a few college students asked him to recite something. And for them he improvised the shortest poem in world literature: “Me, we.
Eduardo Galeano (Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone)
I was saddened by a poem I saw stuck up on the wall of an English reading and writing club that I visited. It was written by a 10-year-old girl, and was titled ‘Exams’. All exams are significant, And I am going to FAINT! For my poor mid-term scores Which drive grandma dizzy And make my grandpa crazy. My world is not fantasy, And my mind is in vacancy. My teachers are getting chilly, And thinking if I am silly. My classmate is not a bully Just making unfriendly raillery. I am so afraid of the terrible shouting And endless moaning. How I wish I have nubility, To improve my ability. From now on I get to know That life isn’t interesting And I must be hard-working.
Lucy Crehan (Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers)
Hillary’s 92-page senior thesis was entitled “THERE IS ONLY THE FIGHT … An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.”2 Hillary attributed her title to two lines from the second poem, “East Cokor,” in T.S. Eliot’s 1940 “Four Quartets,” that read: (1.) “There is only the fight to recover what has been lost,” and (2.) “And found and lost again and again.” In
Roger Stone (The Making of the President 2016: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution)
Byron wrote his shortest and most eloquent poem as a testament to a titled woman who had taken leave of her husband for a nine-month romp with him: Caroline Lamb, Goddamn.
William Manchester (The Last Lion: Visions of Glory 1874-1932)
The poem was called “Goblin Market,” and the book whose proof pages were on the desk was titled Goblin Market and Other Poems. Christina
Tim Powers (Hide Me Among the Graves)