April Means National Poetry Month!

Most people think of April as the month when the cold, blustery, snowy days of winter lapse into warm, sunny spring.  I’m as ready as anyone else for a little vitamin D, but to me April also means something else.  April is National Poetry Month!

National Poetry Month is a huge celebration of poems and poets and there’s no better way to kick things off than by writing a little poetry yourself!

The library has lots of resources to help you get started.  From books of poetry to books on how to write poetry, check out these titles.

To help you get your creative juices flowing, read these group poems by the Eighth Graders at Pittsburgh Classical Academy.

Remember to check out the writing workshops happening around town at CLP libraries and don’t forget to enter your masterpiece in the Ralph Munn contest!

Brooke-CLP, South Side

Ancient philosophers with dangerous ideas! Lucretius and De Rerum Natura

For the last four months, I  very slowly was reading through one book of poetry. Admittedly, this is a long book, comprised of six smaller “books” (or chapters, if you will), and I wanted to take my time and not rush through it.

De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things was written by a poet-scientist-philosopher by the name of Lucretius, sometime in the 1st century BC. Very little is known about Lucretius: when exactly he was born, when he died,  when he wrote the poem, who exactly he wrote it for, etc. etc.  What we do know from his writing is that he was a disciple of the philosopher Epicurus. You may know him by the word that was derived from his name/philosophy – epicurean, meaning “fond of or adapted to luxury or indulgence in sensual pleasures; having luxurious tastes or habits, especially in eating and drinking.” (Also the inspiration for recipe-aggregator Epicurious)

Only a bit of what Epicurus wrote remains in the world, which makes De Rerum Natura extra important. Even more important is that it’s beautiful to read, and still moving as a piece of writing. While Lucretius explains the way the world is made of atoms, how that relates to the soul, and now-wacky theories about how the sun rising comes from a collection of “fire seeds” and how earthquakes are caused by collapsing caves on the inside of the Earth, he’s also paying close attention to metaphor and language, and making it something that one would want to read.

In fact, the original discovery of the manuscript of De Rerum Natura was made by chance, and a re-discovery in much the same way led to its reader, Stephen Greenblatt, writing a book on how he was affected and why the ideas in the poem are still important. That book is called The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, and this is some of what Greenblatt has to say about Lucretius

“Lucretius, who was born about a century before Christ, was emphatically not our contemporary. He thought that worms were spontaneously generated from wet soil, that earthquakes were the result of winds caught in underground caverns, that the sun circled the earth. But, at its heart, “On the Nature of Things” persuasively laid out what seemed to be a strikingly modern understanding of the world.” -  from an interview in The New Yorker.

“It’s a theory of everything. That is its glory and perhaps its absurdity. It tried to say what the nature of everything was.

And it had at its center an ancient idea, wasn’t invented by the poet, but actually by philosophers before him. But the whole theory was, in effect, lost, except for this poem. And the theory is that the world consists of an infinite number of tiny particles.

The ancient Greeks called them the things that can’t be broken up, and the word for that was atoms. …these were dangerous ideas, especially as Christianity took hold.” – from PBS

Why would his ideas be dangerous? Because they went against established (or what were beginning to be established) religious ideas – “. …Epicurus taught that all things were made of atoms, including the human soul, which was consequently as mortal as the body. He taught that though the gods exist, in a blissful state to be imitated by mortals, they neither created the physical world nor intervened in it. The clear aim of these teachings, together with the injunctions to avoid public life and cultivate moderate pleasure, was the elimination of all anxiety regarding human life and all fear of death and the supernatural. Little wonder that both the Roman political establishment and later the Christian church regarded Epicureanism as a dangerous threat.” – from Poetry.com

But don’t take my word for it – sample some of De Rerum Natura‘s wonderfully dour explanations of death, from Anthony Esolen’s really great translation:

“And now, so crippled is our age, that the earth,
Worn out by labor, scarce makes tiny creatures–
Which once made all, gave birth to giant beasts.
For I find it hard to believe that a golden cord
From heaven let living things down into the fields,
Or they were made by the stone-splashing waves of the sea;
The same earth gendered then that now gives food.
What’s more, at first she made, of her own prompting,
The glossy corn and the glad vine for us mortals,
And gave, of her own, sweet offspring and glad pasture.
Yet these now hardly grow for all our work:
We sweat our oxen thin and the strength of our farmhands
We crush; for our fields the plow is not enough.
So full of labor and so spare of birth!

Now the old plowman shakes his head and sighs
That all of his hard work has come to nothing,
Compares the present days to days gone by
And over and over touts his father’s luck.
Disheartened, the planter of stooped and shriveled vines
Curses this bent of our age, and rattles on
With his reproach: our elders, full of reverence,
managed to live with ease in narrow bounds,
With much less acreage to a man; he doesn’t
Grasp that, slowly, wasting away, all things
Go to the tomb, worn out by the long years.” (II, 1149-1173)

Don’t want to read the whole thing? Check out an illustrated excerpt in The graphic canon. Volume 1 : from the epic of Gilgamesh to Shakespeare to Dangerous liaisons, edited by Russ Kick.

 

- Tessa, CLP – East Liberty

Poetry On Wednesday: Winter Stars

My father once broke a man’s hand
Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor.

That’s how Larry Levis opens up the poem “Winter Stars”.  One of the more gripping opening lines of a poem, it’s also maybe not what you’d expect from a poem so entitled.  Perhaps “Winter Stars” called to your mind a meditation on the quiet stillness of nature, as in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”.  While Levis doesn’t talk, as Frost does, of “the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake”, he does explore some of his own conceptions of having “miles to go” before he sleeps.  “Winter Stars”, after all, about Levis’s father, and specifically his father’s dying.

Welcome to Poetry on Wednesday!

The memory that happens in “Winter Stars” takes place in California, another blow to the wintry preconceptions to which the title might lead you, and it explores a memory Levis has of his father.  Levis often writes about California and his conflicted relationship with his dad (another powerhouse of a poem on the same subject in the same collection is “Though His Name is Infinite, My Father is Asleep”). These were subjects that Levis often wrote about – for a good overview of his themes, the Poetry Foundation has something here.

But there is winter in this poem, and not just literal winter.

There’s the winter of death, as when Levis notes that: ” Something  / Inside him is slowly taking back / Every word it ever gave him” and then describes for us the shutting-down city of the mind in night-quiet, lonely detail.

And there’s the forever winter of starlight, some it reaching us after the stars have already, themselves died, “Like laughter that has found a final, silent shape / On a black sky. It means everything / It cannot say. Look, it’s empty out there, & cold. “

To me, it’s a poem about how useless words can feel in life when dealing with a someone whose actions you don’t understand, and how differently useless words can feel in the face of death.  Beautiful and depressing, right?  On the other hand, poetry–words–are what can help us console ourselves when we have to get through grief, and poems are a wonderful way to write about the people who have been important to us (living or dead).  Is this too depressing a poem for the dark days of the year?  I will tell you that the last line turns it around a little bit. But I won’t spoil it for you — go read it for yourself.  And check out more of Larry Levis from the library. You can even hear him read some of his own work thanks to the Academy of American Poets Audio Archive.

-Tessa, CLP – East Liberty

POW: Zachary Schomburg

Last time in my POW post I talked about poems using thee and thy. Today I’m going more modern… I’m going to discuss a poet we don’t  have in the library catalog.  Just because I love his stuff so much that I can’t not share it. (Don’t worry, though, I”ll give you links to his stuff and readalikes for books you CAN find in the library).

If you’re a fan of surreal images, repetitions of phrases, reimaginings of the lives of historical figures, and mysterious vagueness, you may also like Zachary Schomburg as much as I do.  Two separate friends urged me to read his book Scary, No Scary.  So I did.  It was filled with simple language, little stories that were funny and, yes, scary.

 

He does a good job of explaining why he writes poetry (and what attracts me to his work) in this interview from Oregon Live’s blog:

“Mostly I want my poems to generate their own energy through confusion. I want my poems to confuse the reader. Not a confusion in a cognitive or narrative sense, but in an emotional sense.

In one of my poems in particular, a bear mauls a young performer on stage, which makes me laugh. It’s a bit absurd and unusual. But when she has to pick up all her pieces and put herself back together in front of the audience, we feel bad for laughing. We’re hyper-aware of our emotional choices.”

Here’s a video Schomburg made for one of his poems, entitled Your Limbs Will be Torn Off in a Farm Accident:

All of them are here.

The poet that Schomburg reminds me of most is Russell Edson.  He also writes little surreal, funny vignettes.  His bio on the Poetry Foundation site quotes fellow poet Donald Hall as saying of Edson’s work: “It’s fanciful, it’s even funny—but his humor carries discomfort with it, like all serious humor.” Edson’s preferred poetic form is the prose poem.

Schomburg, in this interview for How a Poem Happens, cites his influences for Scary, No Scary as

“some French poets, Breton, Eluard, Reverdy, Char. And I was reading Graham Foust. It looks like a Foust poem, if you blur your eyes a bit. And Simic and Tate and Mary Ruefle. And I remember listening to a lot of Neutral Milk Hotel, Beirut, Magnetic Fields, Smiths, and Richard Buckner (and Godspeed, like I said earlier) that summer.”

Simic is Charles Simic, former Poet Laureate, and another occasional writer of prose poems. Interestingly enough (not really), one of the first books of poetry I read was Hotel Insomnia by Simic.

available at the library!

As it happens, Schomburg has written some prose poems, such as The Last President of  a Dark Country, published in La Petite Zine. And these 2 poems, from the DIAGRAM.

There’s something about the prose poem that takes you into the moment and spins you out to so many absurd possibilities. That’s why I like reading prose poetry – I am also the type of person who likes hearing about other people’s dreams.  Check out some of these books or read some of Schomburg’s work online, and see if you are too!

-Tessa, CLP East Liberty