Continuing on with our countdown of the most liked and listened to audio pieces during this past summer here at the Parlando Project, today we’ll look at the pieces that came in 7 through 5 as we move up the list to the most popular piece. 7. The Hunter. Maybe, with Internet audiences, it’s the … Continue reading Summer 2018 Parlando Top Ten, Part Two
Our last poet, Margaret Widdemer seems to have done most of her adventuring in fantasy, but today’s poet, Elinor Wylie—well, she caused quite a scandal in the pre-WWI years. Widdemer may have dreamed of cavaliers and wearing leather in a traveling Romany wagon; but for Wylie, there’s biography! Elinor Wylie grew up in Washington D. … Continue reading Full Moon
OK, let’s reveal where the words from the last post, Poetry in Translation, came from and what I know about their context—but stick around, as this is going to relate back to those 20th Century theories about how poetry works. If you haven’t listened yet read and listened to Poetry in Translation, this would be … Continue reading Vegetables dream of responding to you
The place of short epigramic poetry in our culture, and just a touch of Percy Bysshe Shelley, combine in today’s piece. When people seek to stop the expansion of poetry in definition or in practice they will aim and fire at certain targets. If you look closely and slowly, you may see the bullet holes … Continue reading Shattered Visage
Obscurity in modernist poetry is a funny issue. What makes some writing hard to grasp, difficult to understand? Esoteric and little-known words like Wallace Stevens loved? Far-flung allusions to works in several languages like T. S. Eliot was prone to? Exploding normal written syntax and logical flow as Gertrude Stein did? Taking images into realms … Continue reading The Red Wheelbarrow
I was reminded of this poem, and Wallace Stevens in general, while writing about the 20 most anthologized modern American poems recently. It’s odd that I needed to be reminded of Stevens. His poems were always present in the anthologies of my school years, back in the last century, along with Frost (who I disliked … Continue reading The Emperor of Ice Cream
Here’s a list of poets and poems, along with the year they were written: OK, you probably already read the title of the post, so you know what they are. This list comes from an article I bookmarked this summer that intrigued me, and today I returned to it because I’m thinking a bit … Continue reading The Most Anthologized American Poems of the Modern Era
Edna St. Vincent Millay was another poet who offered little to the “New Criticism” critics who largely set the canon for the 20th Century, even though her career, which covered the first half of the 20th Century, ran almost exactly through the same time as Eliot, Frost, Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens, and … Continue reading Millay’s Sonnet 43
What a writer writes may come to mean something else to a reader, and what that reader thinks can change over time. Many years ago when I was a young student, I had a mixed reaction to the American poets of the first part of the 20th century. I liked some of things found in … Continue reading Stars Songs Faces
