Visits to this blog tend to go down on weekends, on holidays, and in the summer — so, congratulations if you’re reading this, you’ve managed to beat the crowds! America is a young country, but after a bit of a slow start, we’ve been meeting our quota for poets, and by now the record shows … Continue reading An Independence Day Double-Header: I Hear America Singing and I, Too
There’s another repeat author in this segment of our spring 2021 countdown of the most listened to and liked pieces here over the past three months. More than that, the number 4 and 3 positions are held by two installments drawn from the same poem, parts of my long serial performance of “The Waste Land” … Continue reading Spring 2021 Parlando Project Top Ten, numbers 4-2
For not the first time here, I need to travel in a roundabout way in time and place to get to today’s piece. Last post, I discussed how little survives of the work of the ancient Greek poet Sappho: only a small handful of more-or-less complete poems, the rest fragments (some as small as a … Continue reading Sappho LXXXII “Over the roofs the honey-coloured moon”
I think I’ve established that I like examining lesser-known Modernists, or even writers who weren’t always considered part of the Modernist movement. Now today I may cause a few literarily knowledgeable readers to throw up their hands and do a spit take. Why? Yes, today’s piece is a sonnet, but we should note that not … Continue reading The Subway
In the 8th century, in China, there was a poem written by a man whose name we now write in our alphabet as Du Fu.* It’s a short poem, 8 lines, and in it Du Fu addresses a friend, another Chinese poet of his time, Li Bai. Du Fu was able to compress a lot … Continue reading End of the Sky–A Doomscrolling Sonnet after Du Fu
We’re going to travel some ground today, so hang on, it’s a longish post. Today’s piece has an anonymous author. I’ll write a bit about what I can determine about it later on below, but a lot of the time when I write here of my encounter with the words I use as part of … Continue reading Truth Never Dies
I’ll often choose a piece to present here from an instant impression. I’ll be reading another blog, looking at a writer connected with something else I’m looking for, or paging through an anthology and there’ll be this poem that strikes me as more interesting than the one before or the next one after. Somewhere last … Continue reading The Poetry of a Root Crop
Heard this one? A Chinese poet, a shadow and the moon walk into a bar, and they order wine from a translator…Oh, that was last time, and Le Bai’s “Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon.” Well I promised I’d say a little bit more about translation in another post, as yesterday’s was already long enough. I’ve … Continue reading Translation for Poets and Other Monolinguals
Our last audio piece this month had American satirist Mark Twain pointing out incongruities in the longstanding trope of the tortured poetic genius who dashes off “weird, wild, incomprehensible poems with astonishing facility, and then gets booming drunk and sleeps in the gutter.” How far back does that trope go? Well at least to 8th … Continue reading Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon
What if you were to find out that a famous, much-loved poem was not a singleton, but that it was instead part of a pair? “The River Merchant’s Wife, A Letter” is perhaps the most famous Chinese poem in English, and it’s been widely anthologized since Ezra Pound published it in his 1915 collection of … Continue reading The River Merchant’s Wife, Another Letter
