Posts from the ‘Poetry’ Category
What is prosody? Prosody studies the music of language. Prosody studies sounds moving through time. Prosody is separate from semantics. It’s distinct from the meaning of the words that the sounds compose. Prosody isn’t the sound of language organized in lines, as is now sometimes supposed. The reason this definitional fallacy is important to […]
Read More
You were a pure shooter, a long shot. You were a star. Just another nobody boy, half-black, half-white, raised in a nowhere town, in a fractured home in middle America: a drunk father who worked twenty-five years for Clayton County, and a mother who loved you but was always too passive, it seemed, to truly […]
Read More
The sonnet as a poetic form is surprisingly slippery to define. Any human unlucky enough to have witnessed my interminable sonnet-definition revisions can, I think at bare minimum, attest to this. Normally, of course, the sonnet is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter rhyming in some alternating fashion. This is all well — right up […]
Read More
DEAD COW FARM An ancient saga tells us how In the beginning the First Cow (For nothing living yet had birth But Elemental Cow on earth) Began to lick cold stones and mud: Under her warm tongue flesh and blood Blossomed, a miracle to believe: And so was Adam born, and Eve. Here now is […]
Read More
Felix Randal the farrier, oh, is he dead then? my duty all ended, Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it, and some Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended? Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended Being anointed and all; […]
Read More
Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must Disappointment all I endeavour end? Wert thou my enemy, O thou my […]
Read More
Poems, unique among all literature, were for many centuries specifically meant to be learned by heart. They were meant to be memorized and then recited aloud. This is called the oral tradition of poetry, which in essence means holding literature in the mind and heart to then recite it. Thus we find in the oral […]
Read More
South of the border among the pluripresence of jellied heat, east of the setting sun, inNogales, Mexico, where this sort of thing can occur,you glimpse, twenty-five meters off the shoulder of the road, a Mexican woman who’s walkingalone: black-haired, slender, tall, her long arms sheathed in toffee-colored skin, her wet eyes friendly yet faintly mocking. She […]
Read More
Summer dies. The long days wane away. The heat in the sky melts like lead to liquid pools. The hills beyond are baked as white as clay. Now creep in the gentle autumn ghouls Trailing their silken shawls of a Lethe- an mist. Shadows warp, gourds enlarge. And now what is always there but not […]
Read More
He was one of the mellow, the soft-spoken, the tawny-haired — one who preferred to be alone. His name was Mark, a dishwasher at age 45. He was a drifter, a loner. He valued his freedom above all; dishwashing jobs he could always find. Our paths crossed and re-crossed at the Café Claire, where I […]
Read More
Did you know that John Keats pronounced his own name with such a thick Cockney accent that his friend Leigh Hunt nicknamed him “Junkets” — “Junkets” evidently being the way “John Keats” sounded coming out of Keats’s own mouth. On December 30th, 1816, Leigh Hunt challenged his twenty-one-year-old friend Junkets to a sonnet-writing contest. The […]
Read More
Summer dies, the long days wane away. The heat in the sky melts like lead to liquid pools. The hills beyond are as white as clay. Now creep in the gentle autumn ghouls, Trailing behind their silken shawls of Lethe- an mist. Shadows warp, gourds enlarge. And now what is always there but not Quite […]
Read More
My name is Kevin. I’m Kevin Mathew Haas. My last name does not rhyme with moss. It does not rhyme with floss. To say so makes me cross. Many regard me as the motherfucking boss and I do enjoy a little of the sauce. In fact, my last name — Haas — rhymes with […]
Read More
This was written by the late Ted Hughes, most famous, I think, for being the husband of Sylvia Plath: The pig lay on a barrow dead. It weighed, they said, as much as three men. Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes. Its trotters stuck straight out. Such weight and thick pink bulk Set in death […]
Read More
Summer dies, the long days wane away. The heat in the sky melts like lead to liquid pools. The hills beyond are as white as clay. Now creep in the gentle autumn ghouls, Trailing behind their silken shawls of Lethe- an mist. Shadows warp, gourds enlarge. And now what is always there but not Quite […]
Read More
(c)Ray Harvey 2011