Judi’s Reviews > Poem For the Day Two > Status Update

Tlhis is what I want most of all

Osip Mandelstam
(January 15th 1891 — December 27th 1938)

translated by James Greene

...Mandelstam had been back in Moscow for just a year when he was arrested again in May 1938 for 'counter-revolutionary' activities, ostensibly poems criticizing Stalin, and sentenced to five years in a labour camp.

In Paris in a Loud Dark Winter

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(March 24th 1919 — )

Ferlinghetti studied poetry at the Sorbonne in Paris before joining the Beats in San Francisco. He established the now famous City Lights bookshop, which published the landmark Pocket Poets series, including Allen Ginsberg's Howl, for which Ferlinghetti was tried on obscenity charges.

The Gods Do Not Consent

Fernando Pessoa
(June 13th 1888 — November 30th 1935)

In a postscript to a letter of January 13th 1935, Pessoa wrote of his belief in "the experience of various degrees of spirituality, becoming more rarified until we arrive at a Supreme Being ... I do not believe in a direct communication with God".

On January 12th 1795, Burns scandalised Mrs Dunlop by writing of the execution of King Louis and Queen Marie-Antonette of France: "What is there in the delivering over a perjured Blockhead & an unprincipled Prostitute into the hands of the hangman..."

The Self-Unseeing

On January 11th, 1804, the Sussex Examiner reported that William Blake was acquitted of sedition and assault, having said 'Damn the king and damn his soldiers:

Thomas Hardy
(June 2nd 1840 — January 11th 1928)

From Sonnets from the Portuguese
VII

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(March 6th 18067 — June 29th 1861)

...But Browning was undeterred: his visit was the fulfillment of many months of waiting and longing. He meticulously logged the date and duration of this and every subsequent visit and was delighted to discover that his weekly visits were having a restorative effect on Barrett's health.

I Leave This at Your Ear

W. S. Graham
(November 19th 1918 — January 9th 1986)

The title of Graham's third collection, 2ND Poems (1945) , was a coded dedication "To Nessie Dunsmuir'.

Against Extremity

Charles Tomlinson
(January 8th; 1927 —)

."What I was advocating when this form of excess was at its height, was the need for a human balance and a suspicion of the ego which had played such a self-regarding role in the drama. ..

The Ball Poem

John Berryman
(October 25th 1914 — January 7th 1972)

John Berryman was born John Alleyn Smith Jr. His father shot himself when John was 12, and his mother hastily remarried Mr Berryman just two months later. From his early life it would seem, Berryman wa 'afflicted by a sense of L O S S' as his alter ego Henry would later claim in The Dream Songs.

His Pilgrimage

Sir Walter Raleigh
(c. 1552 — October er 29th 1618)

... He remained there for 12 years, during which time he wrote prodigiously and produced, amongst other works, The History of the World. The first volume reaching only as far as 130 BC, In the preface he thanked his enemy for incarcerating him: "For had it been otherwise, I should hardly have had the leisure, to have made myself a fool in print."