. An Elegy: December, 1970 Edgar Bowers Almost four years, and, though I merely guess What happened, I can feel the minutes’ rush Settle like snow upon the breathless bed— And we who loved you, elsewhere, ignorant. From my deck, in the sun, I watch boys ride Complexities of wind and wet and wave: Pale […]
Eating Poetry (XXXII) – The Ecstasy of Unreasoning Happiness
. Patricia Hampl’s fine essay in the spring The American Scholar, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Essays From the Edge, surveys the background to Fitzgerald‘s “The Crack Up” essays, published in Esquire in 1936. She finds in the controversial product of Fitzgerald’s attempt to write himself back from personal and authorial oblivion a meeting point in consciousness between poetry and […]
Eating Poetry (XXXI) – “Poem #1”
. Tirui Getekian is a student at West Los Angeles College. From the spring 2012 issue of West. Poem #1 Sex is Eating cheese While jump-roping Love is Quickly square-dancing While breathing ammonia You are The butterfly that accidentally flew under my step one summer afternoon when I was young I am A wind-up doll […]
Eating Poetry (XXX) – “Every telling has a tailing”
. In 1929, James Joyce recorded this rendition of “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” from Finnegans Wake. It is one of only two recordings of Joyce reading from his work, after a a much more sonically primitive 1924 reading of an excerpt from Ulysses. This wonderful animation by savagecabbage offers subtitles to aide in deciphering Joyce’s luccious vocalization of an […]
Eating Poetry (XXVIII) – “I Depart from Materials”
“Camerado! This is no book; Who touches this touches a man.” When Walt Whitman‘s Leaves of Grass was published in its first edition in 1855, it was admired by some, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, and not so by others. Wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson, ” It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote ‘Leaves […]