I hesitate to blog about poetry for much the same reason that hesitate to blog about sports: I don't know a great deal about either, and know that I have readers who know lots about both. I know enough to enjoy them, though I'd have to give poetry the edge over hockey.
A month or so ago, Mme Q challenged her readers to post a poem, any poem, preferably one we knew well. This was very thought provoking for me, as it led me to realize that while I've memorized lots of lines from poems, there are very few that I can recite in their entirety - and for me, at least, poetry just HAS to be read out loud.
Probably every teenaged girl of a certain intellectual bent goes through a Sylva Plath phase; certainly I did. A few years ago someone wrote a piece for the New Yorker which pointed this out and claimed that her poetry loses most of its power if read after the age of thirty or so. I confess that I don't pull out my complete Sylvia Plath as often as I do my T.S. Eliot, but I still find her lines and verses very, well, powerful in their images.
"I made a fire; being tired
Of the white fists of old
Letters and their death rattle
When I came too close to the wastebasket.
What did they know that I didn't?"
Morning Edition played an interview with Frieda Hughes, Plath's daughter, this morning. A complete edition of the Ariel poems is being issued, including twelve poems that Ted Hughes edited out when they were first published. Hughes Interview Hughes seems to have wonderful sense of peace about having a mother whom the world associates with angst and suicide.
Oh, and CFP -- I think IU should pick a football coach and keep him (are there are female football coaches) around for twenty years. If more effort were put into attracting fans through making the experience fun, more fans would attend, but as all efforts are now concentrated on bringing as much money as possible from the out-of-town spectators...
Words Written: four hundred and six, plus a lot of commas fixed
Lessons Graded: thirty-one
1 comment:
Lemming:
Looks like you had a productive day...lots of words written, papers graded, and you are commenting about football!
Next thing I know, you will be hanging around bars all day Sunday and also until 12:30 AM on Monday nights, trying to root on the football team you have money bet on to victory...I predict football addiction for you by next season.
You might be surprised how much fun IU football could become if they would just win a few games! I think that the biggest reason they let their coach go was money from low attendance/lack of ticket sales. Sports are big business, plain and simple, and once you can get past that, many of the coaching decisions make sense, at least from a business standpoint. I am not sure that is the way things should be, but it is just a harsh reality.
How else was Bobby knight able to stay as long as he did, with all the crap he dealt out to people???? HE WON, and did it consistently. It was surprising how quickly people got tired of his ranting and crap when he started losing towards the end of his career at IU. I don't think it was a coincidence that he was fired after he had had several 'bad' seasons int e won los column.
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