Status Updates From Poem For the Day Two

Poliotics
In our time the destiny of man presents
its meaning in political terms —
Thomas Mann

W.B. Yeats
(June 13th 1865 — January 28th 1939)

...Pablo Neruda, who organized a writers' conference in Madrid when the city was besieged by the Falangists in 1937, recollected in his memoirs that Yeats, by then too old to travel to the bomb-blasted city, nonetheless "rallied to the defence of the Spanish Republic".

I, Too

Langston Hughes
(February 1st 1902 — May 22nd 1967)

...Upon leaving for Africa, Hughes discarded all his books except for Leaves of Grass: "I had no intention of throwing that one away", he said.
Hughes' death was caused by prolonged heart and kidney trouble. He never married, nor had any children.

The Rain

Robert Creeley
(May 21st 1926 — )

Creeley taught at Black Mountain College in the 1950s and now teaches at Brown University. His art has no impulse to enclose itself in the literary solely, or to move apart from the common terms of the given world.

English poet Thomas Spratt died May 20th 1713

Thomas Wyatt,imprisoned in the Tower of London along with five other suspected lovers of Anne Boleyn, watched her execution on May 19th 1536. He was later released and rusticated.

From The Buráiyát of Omar Khayyám
of Naishapur

Edward Fitzgerald
(March 31st 1809 — June 14th 1883)

Edward Fitzgerald was introduced to Omar Khayyám's poetry by his friend Edward Cowell in May 19857, and set about translating 75 of the quatrains that summer. The first edition of his version of the Rubáiyaát was published in March 1859.

Why Brownlee left

Paul Muldoon
(June 20th 1951 — )

... His latest collection is Moy Sand and Gravel. Muldon moved to the United States in 1983 and is currently Howard Clark Professor of Humanities at Princeton University, where he lives with his wife and two children.

Song

Adrienne Rich
(May 16th 1929 — )

In her introduction to the anthology, Best American Poetry (1996), Rich writes that she wants "poems good enough to eat, to crunch between the teeth, to feel their juices bursting under the tongue, unmicrowavable poems".

Alexis Kagame, Rwandan poet and Roman Catholic Priest, born May 15th 1`912.

Thankyou Note

Dannie Abse
(September 22nd 1923 — )

Dannie Abse writes: "The years have proved that the best and most decisive thing I have ever done was to choose Joan Mercer (as she as known then) to be mh wife. so it's hardly surprising that ion the evening road I would write a thankyou note addressed to her. I do hope the poem is less soppy than the above confession."

Skeins o Geese

Kathleen Jamie
(May 13th 1962 — )

Jamie was born in Renfrewshire in Scotland. She received an Eric Gregory award when she was just 18 and has since published four collections of poetry, including the highly acclaimed The Queen of Sheba (1994) and Jizzen (1999). Her Selected poems. Mr and Mrs Scotland are Dead: Poems 1980-1994 was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2002.

Nonsense poet Edward Lear born May 12th 1812

From The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

...

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be:
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
...

T. S. Eliot
(September 26th 1888 — January 4th 1965)

German Expressionist Fritz Unnah, dramatist, poet and novelist, born in Koblenz May 10th 1885

From The Rape of Lucrece
Lines 135 - 154

...

So that in venturing ill we leave to be
The things we are for that which we expect;
And this ambitious foul infirmity,
In having much, torments us with defect
Of that we have; so then we do neglect
The thing we have, and , all for want of wit,
Make something nothing bb augmenting it.

William Shakespeare
(April 23d 1564 — A[ril 234d 1616)

Badly-Chosen Lover

Rosemary Tonks
(1932 — )

... "My subject is city life." she wrote, "with its sofas, hotel corridors, cinemas, underworlds, cardboard suitcases, self-willed buses, banknots, soapy bathrooms, newspaper-filled parks; and its anguish, it enraged excitement, its great lonely joys.."

Since her conversion to evangelical Christianity in the early 1970s, Tonks has all but disappeared.

Never the Time and the Place

Robert Browning
(May 7th 1812 — December 12th 1889)

For much of his life, Browning's achievements were eclipsed by those of his wife. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was advocated as Wordsworth's successor to the Poet Laureateship and her verse novel, Aurora Leigh, proved a best-seller; his own work, meanwhile, garnered only moderate praise.

From Joy's Loveliest Ocean

Rabindranath Tagore
(May 6th 18t62 — August 7th 1941)

translated by Joe /winter

This is Song 9f rom Tagore's Gitanjali (Song Offerings), a collection first published in England in 1912, with Tagore's own English translations, In his introduction to this first limited edition, W. B. Yeats wrote: "I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days ... r

On May 5th 1846, Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Browing to say "I have been drawn back into life by your means, and for you"

The Transmutation

Edwin Muir
(May 15th 1887 — January 3rd 1959)

In 1950 Edwin Muir declared 'Transmutation' to be "among the Sonnets I like best".

Death

Thomas Hood
(May 23rd 1799 — May 3rd 1845)

... This was exaggerated by lifelong heart problems. Edgar Allan Poe once said of him: 'his peculiar genius was the result of vivid Fancy impelled by Hypochondriasis".
Hood was no stranger to death, losing his father and brother at age 12, then his mother, child and sister, all by the age of 32.

Jean Jules Vernal, to whom Eliot dedicated 'Prufrock', died May 2nd 1915 during the Gallipoli Campaign, having "performed his duties with courage and devotion."

since feeling is first

E. E. Cummings
(October 14th 1894 — September 3rd 1962)

Cummings' recovery was assisted by Marion Morehouse, an actress and model o immense beauty, whom he met in the summer of 1932. Their friendship blossomed into love and became the basis for a richly fulfilling relationship that lasted the rest of Cummings' life.

The Icing Hand

Tony Harrioson
(April 30th 1937 – )

Tony Harrison writes: "This poem both remembers and mourns my father and also celebrates his creativity, his skill at icing wedding cakes and other iced confectionery, and his philosophical attitude to their immediate destruction. My hand that writes the poem about my father's icing hand, is also 'icing' as I grow older and stand on the shore of my death...

The God Abandons Antony

C. P. Cavafy
(April 29th 1863 — April 29th 19330

translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

... He lived with his mother up until her death, in seclusion from the literary world, and wrote prolifically.

Felix Randal

Gerard Manley Hopkins
(July 28th 1844 — June 8th 1889)

.... After his ordination, the works of Hopkings began to focus on "inscaping the heart", the expression usedto render the wide range of responses to God that he observed among those for whom he cared; he would write of the 'heart fine' of a cheery beggar ('A Cheery Beggar', 1879) or the 'heavenlier heart' of Felix ?Randal.

Ralph Waldo Emerson died April 27th 1882

I rose — because He sank

Emily Dickinson
(December 10th 1830 — May 15th 1886)

But she also gave a full account of her life: "You ask of my Companions Hill [sic]— Sir—and the Sundown—and a Dog—large as myself, that my Father bought me — They are better than Beings because they know — but do not tell — and the noise in the Pool, at Noon — excels my Piano ,.. I have a Brother and Sister — ...

The Ideal

James Fenton
(April 25th 1949 — )

... As a freelance reporter working in Southeast Asia, he documented periods of momentous political change such as the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the fall of Saigon. He was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize following the publication of Children of Exile: Poems, 1968-84 and from 1994-1999 served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.

From Litany to the Holy Spirit

Robert Herrick
(August ? 1591 — October 15th 1674)

... In 1628 he was nominated to the vicarage of Dean Prior, and spent the next 18 yers confined to "dull Devonshire" as he called it, bemoaning his dislocation from the literary and social scene in London, but drawing consolation from his books, especially the Bible and Latin verse as well as his many household pets and fiercely ...