It’s easy to figure T. S. Eliot as an English poet—after all, while his “Waste Land” spans history and cultures, its landscape is distinctly English and European—but he grew up in St. Louis Missouri, a middle-of-America river town. I promised you a different poem by a St. Louis poet last time, and so now we … Continue reading Teasdale’s Morning
Sara Teasdale wrote some of the saddest love poems I’ve ever read. Less-well remembered than she should be, for a time about 100 years ago Teasdale was the most popular and esteemed love poet in America. In 1918 she won the Pulitzer prize for a new collection of her poetry, labeled right there on the … Continue reading Sara Teasdale’s I Am Not Yours or the Love Song of Ernst Filsinger
When I look through an old anthology like Locke’s The New Negro from 1925, my eye is not just looking for the well-known work featured there, but to the ones that somehow got overlooked, and that’s how today’s piece “Escape” by lesser-known Black poet Georgia Douglas Johnson came to my attention. Unlike Countee Cullen from … Continue reading Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Escape
Each quarter I like to look at the pieces here that have received the most listens and likes. It’s time to look back at this year’s spring, and so I’ll be doing that this week. However, I once more need to report that it’s become increasingly hard for me to desire to create new pieces … Continue reading Spring 2020 Parlando Top Ten, numbers 10-8
I don’t plan ahead with this project much, which has it’s benefits and costs. Often one piece sort of kicks off the idea for the next one and so on. That was the case with doing my roll up of last year’s section of “The Waste Land” for National Poetry Month, and then following it … Continue reading I Have Loved Hours at Sea
Frances Cornford is a 20th century poet that is close to unknown in the United States, despite achieving some degree of success in Britain. She’s sometimes classed there as a “Georgian poet,”* a grouping that like the Imagists produced several contemporary anthologies in that century’s teens and twenties. It’s not a term used much in … Continue reading Missing
The cosmos says we need to get a leap year, and extra day, and yet we put it in February. It was a dozen degrees Fahrenheit this morning, and my bike ride back from breakfast was into an insistent north wind that explains to me that we’re in Minnesota and we’ll probably have a snowstorm … Continue reading February Twilight
I’ve largely put off considering the American Modernist poet Marianne Moore. Why? Largely a combination of difficulties in understanding her verse with an inability to appreciate her word-music. When I look at a Marianne Moore poem I’m usually struck by a combination of plain-spokenness with a knotted syntax that obscures the direction of her meaning. … Continue reading The Labors of Hercules
Tom Rapp is a singer-songwriter whose work I love, and whose 1972 joint setting of a Shakespeare and a Sara Teasdale poem is one of the inspirations for this project. Rapp had a favorite story about the earliest days of his overlooked career: while still a child he entered a talent contest in Minnesota. The … Continue reading The Little Ghost
Here’s another poem by the lesser-known American poet Genevieve Taggard. Taggard was sometimes classed with a group of woman poets of the first part of the 20th century, all of whom suffered from the rise in the 1920s of “High Modernism” that held that longer poems with elevated metaphors referencing prior literature and art were … Continue reading Endless Circle
