Pen Pals: T.S. Eliot and...Groucho Marx?

Indeed.

From a piece in Intelligent Life...

Yet one day in 1961 Groucho received in the mail a note from none other than Eliot himself. Expressing his admiration for the comedian, Eliot asked him for an autographed portrait. A shocked Groucho sent back a studio photograph of himself, only to receive a second note from the icon of modern poetry requesting instead a picture of the iconic Groucho, sporting a moustache and holding a cigar. A second photograph was sent out and a happy Eliot wrote to thank Groucho: “This is to let you know that your portrait has arrived and has given me great joy and will soon appear in its frame on my wall with other famous friends such as W.B. Yeats and Paul Valery.” Groucho had asked for a portrait of Eliot in return, and the latter happily enclosed one. Then the famously morose poet, characterised by Siefgried Sassoon as having “cold-storaged humanity” and by Ottoline Morrell as “the undertaker”, finished with a joke. “P.S.” he wrote. “I like cigars too but there isn’t any cigar in my portrait either.” Well, sort of a joke.

Eliot’s attraction to Groucho might come as a surprise—it certainly did to Groucho—but there had always been signs of his own buried antic disposition. For one thing, in his early expatriate days in London, he grew fond of wearing pale green powder on his face, occasionally accompanied by lipstick. For another, he expressed great enthusiasm for the defecation scene in “Ulysses” that had appalled Virginia Woolf. V.S. Pritchett described Eliot as “a company of actors inside one suit, each one twitting the others.” One thinks of the twitting Marx Brothers packed into that small stateroom in “A Night at the Opera”.

Happy Birthday, Statue of Liberty

To celebrate - write a poem.

Romance Blooms at Occupy Wall Street

Poems about the romantic repercussoins of the demostrations were "found" this month in the Missed Connectoins section of Craig's List.

From a piece in the New York Times...

You are a Cop

I was only visiting the city

during the protest

was with my mom

in Time Square

we chatted about why

I was visiting

and where I was from.

I wanted to ask you

for your number

for a good last hoorah before I left...

but I chicken out.

The Art of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes's life together inspired some of the most brilliant poetry of the last century. But Sylvia was also an accomplished artist. Frieda Hughes reveals the stories behind her mother's exquisite drawings in the Guardian.

From the piece...

On 2 November, an exhibition of my mother Sylvia Plath's pen- and-ink drawings opens at the Mayor Gallery in Cork Street in London. These pictures were given to me by my father, the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, who died on 28 October 1998. But they were not my only legacy from my parents, if genetic make-up has anything to do with our inclinations; I have the frequently conflicted desire to write poetry and to draw and paint also. While my parents chose to direct their primary energies into writing, despite their ability as artists, I have found it impossible to do one without the other.

Although my mother is known primarily for her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar and her poetry – particularly her last collection, Ariel, published posthumously in 1965 following her suicide on 11 February 1963 – her passion for art permeated her short life. Her early letters and diary notes and poems were often heavily decorated, and she hoped that her drawings would illustrate the articles and stories that she wrote for publication.

Emily Dickinson - Master Baker

It's true. Make some of her coconut cake for yourself.

When You're Strange

Should we consider Jim Morrison, rock’s Bozo Dionysus, a real poet?

The question is pondered by the Poetry Foundation.

From the piece...

But the Lizard King is not dead.

Although it may not shock that Doors music is still popular, what might surprise is that Jim Morrison’s poetry still has an audience. As I write this, the remastered CD of An American Prayer, a Jim Morrison spoken-word album posthumously released in 1978, sits at number one on Amazon’s “Music > Miscellaneous > Poetry, Spoken Word & Interviews” chart, ahead of Jim Carroll and Alcoholics Anonymous and neck-and-neck with Tom Waits. Morrison’s collections of poetry continue to sell, too. Two of his three poetry titles reside semipermanently on Amazon’s poetry best-seller list—Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison, Volume 1 (#26) and The Lords and the New Creatures (#40)—sitting alongside Allen Ginsberg, Mary Oliver, and Tupac Shakur, and ahead of Eliot, Frost, Poe, and Bishop.

This is irritating to serious poetry people. But maybe there is something to Morrison’s poetry beyond the laughs. Maybe it’s time we considered him to be something beyond the “Bozo Dionysus” Lester Bangs saw him as. Maybe it’s time we accepted him as a bona fide American poet.

Favorite Poems about Movies

The list, care of Flavorwire.

From said list...

“Chaplinesque” by Hart Crane

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

Haunted by Homer

Alice Oswald thinks The Iliad has been turned into a public school poem that glamorises war. So she has rewritten it – with the foot soldiers as heroes.

From a piece in the Guardian...

"I've always felt, with The Iliad, a real frustration that it's read wrong," Oswald says. "That it's turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes – it's become a cliched, British empire part of our culture. Every translation you pick up is so romantically involved with the main story that the ordinariness of Homer, which I love so much – the poem's amazing background of peculiar, real people, just being themselves – is almost invisible." In her version, the absence of the monolithic main characters leaves the histories of the footsoldiers who died in their shadows exposed and gleaming, like rocks at low tide.

What's more, Oswald says, Homer is anything but a diversion: her poetry has been haunted by his for as long as she's been writing. She first encountered him at grammar school, in snatches and snippets at O-level, and then through The Odyssey in the sixth form. "I completely fell in love with it," she says. "I asked if I could forget about the rest of the syllabus and just do Homer, and amazingly, my teacher said yes. After I left school, I spent my year off reading The Iliad, which was almost better. Shockingly good."

20 American Poems Every Child Should Know

The list, care of Accredited Online Colleges.

Bruce Lee - Poet

Indeed!

From an article on The Rumpus...

It’s hard not to hear Japanese haiku master Kobayashi Issa in Lee’s voice in the poem “Night Rain”

Sadness broods
over the world
I fear to walk in my garden,
lest I see
a pair of butterflies
disporting in the sun
among the flowers.

Or the traces of Korean poet Yun Dong-ju in “Boating on Lake Washington”

When the clouds float past the moon,
I see them floating in the lake,
And I feel as though I were rowing in the sky.
Suddenly I thought of you—mirrored in my heart.

I suppose it’s not too surprising that the man who taught Steve McQueen martial arts and then went out for chilidogs and milkshakes with him was a poet, but the depth and complexity of his poetry is. Take, for example, the poem “All Streams Flowing East or West” which follows the life cycle of a drop of water cinematically, accompanying the reader as the droplet descends a mountain, rolls over pebbles, nestles into a stream, settles into the ocean, grows into a wave, hammers into rocks only to finish “And with the final thrust the sun/ Throws wave upon the shore/ The jellyfish in weariness/ Nestles in a pool.” I don’t know if I can get over the image of a weary jellyfish, let alone it coming from the dude who sat on a hood of a car with Steve McQueen eating cylindrical meats in quite possibly the most American image this article will see.

Swedish Poet Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Congratulations, Tomas Transtromer.

Allegro


After a black day, I play Haydn,

and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.

The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

The sound says that freedom exists

and someone pays no tax to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets

and act like a man who is calm about it all.

I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:

“We do not surrender. But want peace.”

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;

rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

The rocks roll straight through the house

but every pane of glass is still whole.

Fall Poetry Sampler

Thanks, Poetry Foundation!

November Night
By Adelaide Crapsey

Listen. .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.

There's Space in the Living Room for Poetry

In "Happy, Snappy, Sappy," Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) discusses poetry.

From the piece on the Poetry Foundation site...

If you were to walk into my living room on some weekend night, that would be creepy. But before I stood up alarmed and demanded to know what you were doing there, you would see me in a big black leather chair that, I’ve been told, is too big for the room. I’d be all dressed up, and reading poetry.

I’ve never had any of the problems with poetry that most people do, i.e., that it’s boring and/or incomprehensible. A voracious reader, I spent my childhood reading things for adults, and learned early to find peace in the stasis of literature. Having read The Rainbow at fourteen (I’d heard D.H. Lawrence was dirty), a Robert Hass poem feels action-packed. And as far as comprehension goes, I find poetry actually has very little mystery compared to anything else. Just this morning at the bus stop, a little electronic sign told me my bus was arriving in two minutes, then one minute, then “arriving,” although the street remained empty. Then it was gone. I’d missed a bus that had never arrived. Not a phrase in The Tennis Court Oath can touch that for sheer befuddlement.

My problem with poetry was when to read it—for pleasure, I mean. I know how to read poetry when studying it (Donne out loud in my dorm room, for instance, with my college girlfriend feigning interest); I know how to read it when trying to write it (I ripped off so much of the collected Bishop that she really should have been awarded the 1992 Connecticut Student Poet Prize instead of, ahem, me); and I know how to read it when I’m reviewing it (in three long sittings at my local bar, with bourbon deliciously swaying my critical opinions). When I’m Lemony Snicket, I most surely know how to read Les fleurs du mal to tatters while writing thirteen books about terrible things happening to orphans I named Baudelaire in what the French call hommage. But, until a few years ago, I was having trouble figuring out when to read poetry when I just wanted to read.

15 Wonderful Songs Inspired by Poets

The list, care of Flavorwire.

Here's one by M. Ward based on William Blake's poetry...

Poe at Auction

Booktryst marvels in the coming Sotheby's auction.

From the piece...

A first edition, first printing, first issue of Poe's Tales (1845) in the original wrappers is the first star to shine. In miraculous condition, it is estimated to sell for $200,000 - $250,000. It's the pits when the pendulum swings so high but copies in this condition are beyond scarce. The Behrman copy, the last to come even close, exhibited loss at head of spine, an old repair along the front joint, the rear joint was partly split, it showed some soiling, possessed a chip to the upper blank margin of the Contents leaf, with pages 57-64 displaying a few chips from careless opening, sold at Christie's New York, June 12, 2008 for $110,000. Condition, the imp of the perverse in book collecting, remains everything. The serious and seriously monied Poe collector is sure to be bitten by the gold bug.

Tales was originally issued in a print run of at least 1500 copies but in three variants (bound in cloth, wrappers, and bound together with The Raven and Other Poems) so it is difficult to ascertain just how many copies in wrappers were originally released. What we do know is that there are perhaps only six copies in the full original wrappers extant. This, the Litchfield copy, appears to be the best surviving copy. The last time it came to auction was in 1990 when it sold at Sotheby's for a mere $45,000. What a difference twenty-one years makes.

Upon its original publication it sold for 50¢. What a difference 166 years makes. Poe's royalty was 8¢ per copy in whichever format. He earned at least $120 but probably not much more. Not much difference 166 years makes to the average writer today.

The Poetry of 9/11 and Its Aftermath

The Poetry Foundation discusses it.

From the piece...

The events of 9/11 occasioned a tremendous outpouring of poetry; people in New York taped poems on windows, wheatpasted them on posts, and shared them by hand. In Curtis Fox's words, "poetry was suddenly everywhere in the city." Outside the immediate radius of what became known as "ground zero," aided by email, listserves, websites, and, later, blogs, thousands of people also shared poems they loved, and poems they had written. By February, 2002, over 25,000 poems written in response to 9/11 had been published on poems.com alone. Three years later, the number of poems there had more than doubled.

Often invisible in American culture, poetry suddenly became relevant, even-and perhaps dangerously-useful. People turned to poems when other forms failed to give shape to their feelings. Some of these poems, certainly, employed the language of faith, a faith that has often been mobilized as a weapon of grievance. Some were desperately angry, in the way Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)" promises to put a "boot in the ass" of those that "messed" with the U.S. of A. In Cleveland, I recall hearing some rather salty Osama limericks involving his mama.

Of course, poems that take on subjects as public and iconic as the attacks of September 11th risk not only devolving into cliché and hysterical jingoism, but also, even when most well-meaning, perpetuating the violence of terror, and the violence of grievance and revenge, as mass media did by endlessly replaying images of the planes exploding into the World Trade Center towers. Likewise, when we read enough 9/11 poems, we become awash in falling people, planes described as birds, flaming towers of Babel, ash and angels, angels and ash. The mythic nature of this attack, this disaster-echoing everything from the tower of Babel to the fall of Icarus-is undeniable, and the acts of heroism and the brute loss of so many makes it difficult to find adequate words, even for our most accomplished poets.

Poems are a Form of Texting

Carol Ann Duffy, for the Guardian, thinks all this texting that kids do is a good thing. It'll make them poets.

From the piece...

Hardly a week goes by without a warning about how educationally detrimental it is for children to spend hours of every day screen-gazing and message-sending. But now there's a note of dissent – from the poet laureate, no less, who says she believes texting is an ideal springboard to good poetry-writing.

"The poem is a form of texting ... it's the original text," says Carol Ann Duffy. "It's a perfecting of a feeling in language – it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is. We've got to realise that the Facebook generation is the future – and, oddly enough, poetry is the perfect form for them. It's a kind of time capsule – it allows feelings and ideas to travel big distances in a very condensed form."

Duffy, who became Britain's first female poet laureate in 2009, is passionate about the teaching of poetry in school. She believes there's a myth that poetry is considered "difficult" or "complicated" by teachers – but says that's simply not borne out by what's really going on in the nation's classrooms, where poetry is enjoying a major revival. "The poem is the literary form of the 21st century," she says. "It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language ... it's language as play." Just, one might say, as text messaging is language at play.

e.e. cummings on a stamp?

Yes! And many more poets in 2012 as well.

From a piece on the Poetry Foundation site...

The United States Post Office is honoring ten poets with their very own postage stamps! Yes, the visages of Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, E. E. Cummings, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams are to grace all your Cablevision bills. And they’re priced at “forever,” too!

In honor of the preview launch, USPS is encouraging folks to share their favorite poem at their Facebook page. Didn’t know they had one? Neither did we, but what a grand idea.

Rosie O'Donnell - Poet

The Frisky highlights eight celebrity poets, here.

Young Ada Lovelace