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I had never heard of Hayden Carruth (1921-2008) until I read this poem this morning. Indeed, I wrongly assumed that Hayden was a woman. I now know that he was a prolific and successful American poet influenced by jazz and blues, a tenured professor, and poetry editor of Harper’s (a favourite magazine of mine) who lived for…
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I found this poem in Virginia Woolf’s (1882-1941) marvellous essay A Room of One’s Own. Some call it the best essay of the 20th century. Her topic is “women and fiction,” but she wanders widely and wonderfully. Her essay, which is based on a talk she gave at Girton College, Cambridge, is funny and much more enjoyable to…
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I came across this poem in H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness, a book by Ivan Illich published in 1986. Illich, a former Catholic priest and critic of industrial society, is the intellectual who has had the biggest impact on me. I heard him deliver a condemnation of modern medicine as a medical student in Edinburgh…
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I came across this poem in an anthology called Poems to Make Grown Men Cry. It’s a stupid title, leading the moderately well-known men who have selected the poems to mention tears without either conviction or credibility. Nevertheless, the selection of poems is wide and marvellous with both familiar and new poems, prompting me to order Poems…
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I came cross this poem in Harold Bloom’s The Best Poems in the English Language, a marvellous 963-page book that I bought in Garrison Keillor’s bookstore in Saint Paul and return to again and again. The poems are accompanied by Bloom’s thoughts on each poet, and his judgements are often severe. He has “not much…
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Francisco Gomez de Quevedo (1580-1645) was a Spanish nobleman, politician, and poet. He used the style conceptismo, which has been defined as “a brilliant flash of wit expressed in pithy or epigrammatic style.” Conceptismo uses rapid rhythm, directness, simple vocabulary, witty metaphors, and wordplay. Multiple meanings are conveyed concisely. The style can be philosophical, satirical,…
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I had never heard of Elinor Wylie (1895-1928), but I stumbled across her and this poem because she follows on from Ezra Pound in Harold Bloom’s The Best Poems of the English Language, having been born in the same year as Pound. Wylie, who was “obsessed with Shelley,” was a popular Jazz Age poet who…
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At school between 1963 and 1970 I heard a reading from the Bible five days a week in school assembly. Now I rarely hear readings from the Bible, only at weddings and funerals, but I hear phrases from the Bible every day in ordinary speech. There are many Bibles, each of them a political as…
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I’ve just finished reading At the Loch of the Green Corrie by Andrew Greig, and much of the book is a tribute from a young poet to an older poet, Norman MacCaig (1910-1996). MacCaig loved to talk, drink whiskey, smoke, joke, fish, laugh, and be with friends. Greig praises the simplicity, directness, and intensity of…
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Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004), the Polish-American poet, won the Nobel prize for literature in 1980. Growing up in Poland and surviving the German occupation, he later moved to the United States. He wrote mostly in Polish. I have brushed up against his poetry, reading his poems in anthologies, and copying one, Eyes, into my files, but…
A Cairn of Poems 