Status Updates From Poem For the Day Two

Fatal interview XLVII

Ednas St Vincent Millay
(February 22nd 1882 — October 19th 1950)

...In the myth, Endymion chooses to sleep forever, remaining deathless and ageless, while Selene visits him nightly, eventually bearing him a total of 50 daughters.
Millay and Dillon lived together in Paris during the winter and spring of 1932, although Millay was still married to Eugen Jan Boissevain.

Touch

Gunn fell in love with an American man while at Cambridge University and followed him to the US. It is this relationship which informs his first unmetred verse poem, 'Touch', the title poem of his 1967 collection, which saw Gunn writing with greater risk and freedom.

Thom Gunn
(August 29th `1929 — )

Johann W. von Goethe born in Frankfurt August 28th 1749

The Linen Industry

Michael Longley
(July 27th 1939 — )

Michale Longley read Classics at Trinity College, Dublin and then taught in schools in England and Ireland. His collection The Weather in Japan (2000) won the T.S. Eliot prize and the Hawthornden prize, and he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2001. He and his wife, the critic Edna Longley, live and work in Belfast.

The Mirabeau Bridge

Guillaume Apollinaire
(August 26th 1880 — November 9th 1918)

translated by W. S. Merlin

Christened Guglielo de Kostrowitzky, Apollinaire changed his name following a visit to the Apollinariskirche at Remagen in the Rhineland when he was 21. He later befriended Picasso and Max Jacob in Paris, and became closely involved with contemporaneous art movements, coining the term 'Sur-réalisme'.

Praise in Summer

Richard Wilbur
(March 1st 1921 — )

.... He returned from the war to assemble his first collection of poems The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (which included 'Praise in Summer'); it was published when Wilbur was just 26. Many critics were mystified by the apparent optimism of Wilbur's poetry, and he has been criticized for failing to write a poetry that bears witness to suffering.

I Am the Great Sun
(from a Normandy crucifix of 1632)

Charles Causley
(August 24th 1917 —)

...He has continued to write prolifically since then, and is particularly admired for his children's poetry. Though unfashionable with literary critics, Causley had remained one of the most popular poets writing in English.

A Lyric Afterwards

Tom Paulin
(January 25th 1949 — )

His latest book is The Invasion Handbook, the first instalment of an epic poem about the Second World War. He is a regular panellist on the BBC show Late Review.

Dorothy Parker born in West End, New Jersey, August 22nd 1893. On her 70th birthday in 1963, she declared, "If I had any decency I'd be dead. Most of my friends are."

Dark August

Derek Walcott
(January 23rd 1930 — )

When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, Walcott chose cigarettes as his luxury, Joyce's Ulysses as his one book, and a mix of music that included Bob Marley, Paul Simon and several Calypso artists. Walcott and Simon are friends, and they famously collaborated on the (not altogether successful) 1997 musical, The Capeman.

Saul Tchemichowsky, poet, born in Crimea August 20th 1874

Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man

...
Also, about sins of omission there is one particularly painful lack of beauty,
Namely, it isn't as though it had been a riotous red-letter day or night
every time you neglected to do your duty;
You didn't get a wicked forbidden thrill
Every time you let a policy lapse or forget to pay a bill;


Ogden Nash
(August 19th 1902 — May 9th 1971)

...From there, he wrote to his friend Sidney Colvin, in 1891, about the people around him, including his wife Fanny, and "Ratke, a German cook, good — and Germanly bad; he don't make my kitchen". The latter is a reference to the first line of the second stanza in the poem above.

Wilfred Scawen Blunt English writer and poet, born August 17th, 1843

Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote on August 16th 1870 of his visit to see Emily Dickinson: "I never was with anyone who drains my nerve power so"

An Hour With Thee

Sir Walter Scott
(August 15th 1771 — September 21st 1832)

...His greatest success was the verse novel The Lady in the Lake, and he was at the height of his fame in the early 1800's. He declined the offer of the laureateship in 1813, so Robert Southey took up the post instead.

Everything Changes

Bertolt Brecht
(February 10th 1898 — August 14th 1956)

translated by John Willett

...Brecht's friends — including Karl Korsch, a leader of the German Communist party in the 1920s, and various members of the Dadaist group — were influential in developing his own vehemently anti-bourgeois attitudes.

Grief

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(March 6th 1806 — June 29th 1861)

Her poetry from this period is filled with images of death and angels, and from this time on she wore only black. Finally, in January 1841, she accepted her friend's offer of a spaniel pup to help her in her grief: the famous 'Flush' of her poem of the same name.

Poet Laureate Robert Southey born August 12th 1774

Hugh MacDiarmid born in Longholm August 11th 1892.

The Flea

...

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
In what could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou
Find'st not thy self nor me the weaker now;
'Tis true; then learn how false fears be:
Just so much honour, when though yields to me,
...

John Donne
(C. June 1572 — March 31t 1631)

Blackfriars theatre in London was leased for 21 years by Shakespeare and his colleagues, August 9th 1608.

Wilfred Own wrote to his mother from Craiglockhart hospital on August 8th 1917: "At present I am a sick man in hospital at night; a poet for quarter of an hour after breakfast."

Life's honouring-deeds we start and do not do —

Life's honouring-deeds we start and do not do —
I know, I know that these are counted too.
the flowers that do not come to flower
but drop to earth and lose their power.
the rivers that run dry in desert, never to renew,
I know, I know that these are counted too,

...

Ragindranath Tagore
(May 6th 1861 — August 7th 1941)

If I were loved, as I desire to be

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
(August 6th 1809 — October 6th 1892)

...Tennyson was not deemed financially secure enough to marry, Emily doubted his religious steadfastness, and his brother's marriage to Emily's sister had proved disastrous. Although fraught — the wedding dress and cake arrived too late for the wedding —

Flying Crooked

Robert Graves
(July 24th 1895 — December 7th 1985)

On August 5th the Times made good their mistake, announcing that Graves had in fact survived. He later claimed "the joke contributed greatly to my recovery, The people with whom I had been on the worst terms during my life wrote the most enthusiastic condolences to my parents."

Shelley born in Field Place, near Horsham, August 4th 1792.

The Dead

Rupert Brooke
(August 3rd 1887 — April 23rd 1915)

...He was the second of three brothers: his elder brother, Dick, died in 1907, and his younger, Alfred, was killed in action at Loos in June 1915. Rupert himself died of acute blood poisoning — contracted from an infected insect bite on his lip — whilst on the Greek island of Skyros the same year.

Exchanges

Ernest Dowson
(August 2nd 1867 — February 2=3rd 1900)

Dowson was born in Kent, and educated at Oxford, though he left without taking a degree. In the 1890's he joined the Rhymers' club and contributed poems to the periodicals The Yellow Book and The Savoy. Following the death of both his parents, he wandered aimlessly between England, France and Ireland.