#767 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Friday October 6)
Good morning,
FAVORITE POETRY
In response to my list of favorite books, Bruce Powell asks, “What about poetry?” Bruce’s list is as follows:
“Keats, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Milton, Dylan Thomas, Browning Family, Chaucer, TS Eliot (my favorite old-style antisemite), and of course, Frost, Whitman, Lazarus, Shakespeare and Marlowe.”
I would add a few modern poets to his list, like Mary Oliver, Maya Angelou, and Billy Collins.
New Jersey Digest offers an interesting article on seven young poets shaking up the literary world. I’ve read Louise Gluck’s poetry and Ocean Vuong’s novel but need to dig in on some of the others: https://thedigestonline.com/blogs/7-contemporary-poets-that-are-changing-the-literary-world/
Here is Louise Gluck’s most popular poem, about death, through the imagery of a flower:
THE WILD IRIS
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.
Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.
MUSIC
More on “city songs…” Michael Weisberg asks, “What about Billy Joel’s ‘New York State of Mind’ and ‘Say Goodbye to Hollywood’?”
How about it! In my short-lived piano career, learning this was the apex of my accomplishments. It is extraordinarily difficult, requiring a virtuosity, creative flow, and sense of ease and improvisation that I never had! Here is the link to Billy Joel and New York State of Mind
And, yes, I’ll have something to say about the House of Representatives on Monday.
Have a great weekend,
Glenn