Recalling ...

Recalling a conversation with a follower of this blog who objected to my having called a sequence of five prose-poems "alternative sonnets," I note with a degree of satisfaction that the 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) gave one of his prose-poems (from his book Illuminations) the title of "Sonnet." It is the second section of this poem, "Jeunesse."

Dylan Thomas reading

"Poem on His Birthday":

It wasn't Fifth Avenue!

It was Seventy-sixth and Broadway!

Quotation of note

Infrarub should not harm him but it doesn't lend a ball player luster exactly.

Marianne Moore, tweaking Roger Maris for appearing in a commercial. From The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (Penguin, 1987), p. 687

A harsh review

of the Best American Poetry series, and particularly of its latest (2009) installment. Here.

It looks as if it's going to be nothing but gratuitous invective as one begins reading the review, but as one proceeds, one begins to perceive justice in the reviewer's complaints.

W. S. Merwin

has just been appointed the new US poet laureate. A bio from poets.org.

(I must confess, I always found his work a bit difficult to sink my teeth into, if I may speak thus. I find it a little thin and slippery. I am semi-convinced, though, that the fault is mine as a reader and not Merwin's as a poet. Perhaps I should look at his work with greater patience.)

Here is Merwin's "In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year."

Phrase in my head in the aftermath of a dream when I woke up this morning

"Syntax, my sinful queen!"