Category: Poetry
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Philip Larkin on Death
David Rieff, son of Susan Sontag, writes movingly of her mother's love of life and her refusal to accept extinction in Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir (Simon and Shuster, 2008). Her attitude and his is close to the one expressed by Philip Larkin in the following poem which displays Larkin's power…
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A Death Poem for Year’s End
As another year slips away, a year that saw the passing of John Updike, here is a fine poem of his to celebrate or mourn the waning days of ought-nine: Perfection Wasted And another regrettable thing about deathis the ceasing of your own brand of magic,which took a whole life to develop and market ——the…
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Good Advice from John Ciardi
Poet John Ciardi (pronounced Chyar-dee, emphasis on first syllable, not See-ar-dee) was born in 1916 and died in 1986. A brilliant line of his sticks with me, though I cannot recall where he said it, and Mr. Google didn't help: "Never send a poem on a prose errand." Tattoo that onto your forearms, you would-be poets.…
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Salvation Through Art? Comments on Some Aphorisms of Wallace Stevens
Herewith, comments on some aphorisms of Wallace Stevens from Adagia, aphorisms that sum up much of the aesthetic attitude I am concerned to oppose. (To be precise: I am out to oppose it in its imperialistic ambitions; I have nothing against art properly chastened and subordinated to the ultimate dominatrix, Philosophia.) I have bolded Wallace's…
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For My Divorced Friends
A little poem by Dorothy Parker: Comment Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,A medley of extemporanea;And love is a thing that can never go wrong;And I am Marie of Roumania. (From the front matter of Joseph Epstein, Divorced in America: Marriage in an Age of Possibility, E. P. Dutton, 1974.)
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Saturday Night at the Oldies
Something different this week: Sylvia Plath, Daddy.