An Orthodox akathist hymn

From Glory to God for All Things.

This is poetry, and more than poetry ... although perhaps it is irreverent to speak of such an inspired hymn as merely poetry.

Still nauseating after all these years

Amiri Baraka.

Via poetryfoundation.org ... a site with a generous archive of poetry (see their "Poetry Tool"), but elsewhere in the site, we see an unfortunate tendency to promote ... well, the most charitable description would be "cacophonous communards of cultural catastrophe."

Charles Simic

New US poet laureate.

His bio, and links to some of his poems.

A confession: He's not my favorite poet.

Cummings
from his letters

there once was a cuntry of owe
such lofty ideals that no
man ever could mension
(imagine the tention)
what might have offended jane dough

Cummings

whatever's merely wilful,
and not miraculous
(be never it so skilful)
must wither fail and cease
--but better than to grow
beauty knows no

their goal(in calm and fury:
through joy and anguish)who've
made her,outglory glory
the little while they live--
unless by your thinking
forever's long

let beauty touch a blunder
(called life)we die to breathe,
itself becomes her wonder
--and wonderful is death;
but more,the older he's
the younger she's

A salutary reflection

On repentance and procrastination. From St Augustine. At the Daily Eudemon.

Requiescat
by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Tread lightly, she is near
    Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
    The daisies grow.

All her bright golden hair
    Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
    Fallen to dust.

Lily-like, white as snow,
    She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
    Sweetly she grew.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,
    Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone,
    She is at rest.

Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
    Lyre or sonnet,
All my life's buried here,
    Heap earth upon it.

Too busy to blog

I've been doing two things:

1. Reading Fred Reed columns.

2. Waiting for October.

I'm with Rudy on that last point

An Onion article worth reading.

Seamus Heaney
from the first of the "Glanmore Sonnets"

Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense
And I am quickened with a redolence
Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.
Wait then ... Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons,
My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.
The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.

Cummings

when the proficient poison of sure sleep
bereaves us of our slow tranquillities

and He without Whose favour nothing is
(being of men called Love)upward doth leap
from the mute hugeness of depriving deep

with thunder of those hungering wings of His,

into the lucent and large signories
—i shall not smile,beloved;i shall not weep:

when from the less-than-whiteness of thy face
(whose eyes inherit vacancy)will time
extract his inconsiderable doom,
when these thy lips beautifully embrace
nothing
              and when thy bashful hands assume

silence beyond the mystery of rhyme

Back to poetry!

Meredith of For Keats' Sake! searches for the perfect line.

A few of my candidates:

She moved in circles, and those circles moved (Roethke)

She sang beyond the genius of the sea (Stevens)

A fasted will marauding through the body (Heaney)

The sundering ultimate kingdom of genesis' thunder (Dylan Thomas, see below)

e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle (Dante)

benignamente d'umiltà vestuta (Dante)

Le vierge, le vivace, et le bel aujourd'hui (Mallarmé)

How wrong they are in always being right (Auden)

one's not half two. It's two are halves of one (Cummings)

And night is all a settlement of snow (Wilbur)

(I don't know if I should include such masterful single lines as "upon" by William Carlos Williams, or "satis-" by Robert Creeley ... )