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http://gracefulwellbeing.blogspot.com
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Made Graceful - … things are never that simple … This is from ‘The Bestiary of Marianne Moore’ found in The Uses of Literature: Essays by Italo Calvino, translated by Patr...3 hours ago
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The Managed Heart: Emotional Labor and the Psychological Cost of Ambivalence - What are you unwilling to feel? This is one of the most brutal, most clarifying questions in life, answering which requires great courage and great vulnera...22 hours ago
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The Easy Life on Cruise Control - Life is so damn easy for me. I don’t have to plan for the future because Evangelical preachers say Armageddon is coming. Until then, conservative politici...1 week ago
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Barbara Sabol and Erica Reid named 2024 Ohio Poets of the Year - The Ohio Poetry Day Association has selected *Barbara Sabol* and *Erica Reid* as our 2024 Ohio Poets of the Year. Congratulations to these two amazing wr...4 weeks ago
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Stay away from the pool - My mother & I were visiting a friend of hers who was living in an apartment complex that I regarded at the time as positively palatial, what for the commun...1 year ago
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In Memory of Ed Ochester, Poet & Editor, RIP - We have asked Ed Ochester (above) to edit our Sunday poetry pages for the next few months. Here is one of Ed's poems: March of the Penguins The editor of N...1 year ago
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Big day today with the publication of my While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems. It contains all of my books, plus a very large new section and a long memoir. You can find it at https://www.amazon.com/While-Undertaker-Sleeps-Peter-Johnson/dp/1952335590/ref=sr_1_1?crid=342C90A7P3DZE&keywords=While+the+Undertaker+Sleeps&qid=1685616911&sprefix=while+the+undertaker+sleeps%2Caps%2C147&sr=8-1 - The post Big day today with the publication of my While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems. It contains all of my books, plus a very la...1 year ago
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“In spite of all the learned have said ...” - Philip Freneau Philip Freneau (1752-1852) was a journalist and poet in the early years our country was forming. And, oh, by the way, I once wrote an under...3 years ago
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Lit Youngstown Hosts Heather Dobbins & Barbara Sabol - I closing in on scheduling Lit Youngstown's 2021 First Wednesday Readers Series, and we're soon hosting the last reading of 2020. It's one of the many...3 years ago
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Jason Tandon - Born in Hartford, CT in 1975, Jason Tandon is the author of four books of poetry, including *The Actual World*, *Quality of Life*, and *Give Over the Hec...4 years ago
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Announcing the 7th Annual Self-Published E-Book Awards Winners - Congratulations to the winners of the 6th Annual Self-Published E-Book Awards! Grand Prize Steel Hand, Cold Heart by Rachel Menard (rachelm...4 years ago
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Balance is important in design - Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis Theme natoque penatibus et magnis dis ...5 years ago
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How to Be a Tree out now - it’s here! https://zaphos.itch.io/how-to-be-a-tree Advertisements5 years ago
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the dance of conquest is going to have to wait | museum of memory - . [image: Refugee, Tzasac, Guatemala, 83 | by Marcelo Montecino] *Refugee, Tsazac, Guatemala, 83*: photo by Marcelo Montecino, 6 September 2014 [image: R...6 years ago
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Feeding therapy FINALLY!! - There is so much to catch up on and yet so little. I have noticed that the last year has felt like an inward journey and so telling a story hasn’t fe...6 years ago
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Let Yourself Be Awesome: On Overcoming Disappointment - On Saturday, I completed my first 12-mile run since 2005, and I aced it. My overall pace was 8:02 per mile, but the final two miles were in 7:44 and 7:49--...7 years ago
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Voices in Italian Americana reviews Paola Corso’s “The Laundress Catches Her Breath” - Paola Corso’s poems about women’s work and lives bring to life an intimate and fragile world without a hint of sentimentality. Take “Step by Step with the ...7 years ago
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One year gone ... - *Meeting Mark Mothersbaugh* Today marks one year as editor of *Fresh Water *for me. Man-o-man, what a ride it has been. Despite the intensity of the job, o...7 years ago
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I'm still here - Just posting here to let anyone know (whoever is still dropping by from time to time) that I still haven't disappeared, I've just been spending time away f...8 years ago
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2015 Mini Gift Guide - A mini last-minute gift guide...it's been quite some time since I've posted. But I love the holidays so much and sharing gifts that I think would be great ...8 years ago
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In a Landscape - The Playlist - John Cage, “In a Landscape” Bob Dylan, “My Back Pages” Neil Young, “Ambulance Blues” The Twilight Zone Theme Babylon 5 Theme Simon & Garfunkel, “Richard Co...10 years ago
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13 comments:
And I chose the one less ravishing...
and that has made all the difference
But too, there was the third...
The one who always walks beside
In the fog, there, in
The ice mist...
The ravishing are like flames -- you bask in their warmth, marvel that it is as beautiful from a distance as it is up close, but, importantly, you never touch. It is one of those words, I think, where all the definitions, verbal & adjectival apply equally and simultaneously.
Funny to think of those lines like that!
I have a few cracker barrel reminiscences of Robot Frost. Old, crusty, more than a bit cranky, snowy-haired, black-hearted... the poet we knew and loved.
The roads were all snowed in, so he could not take any of them.
He told a story about Cal Lowell. Cal was drunk... lying on the floor, pouring drinks on himself, muttering about his stigmata... RF said, Get up right now Cal!
Cal got up... and grabbed RF by the necktie, shoved him against a wall and demanded, "Who's a better poet, me or Dick Wilbur!?"
And one more.
RF to young po-persons:
"So, who do you think is the best poet, then?"
(We were supposed to say: "you, Mr. Frost".)
I said: Ezra Pound.
(He had been regaling us with derisive Ezra Pound-in-the-bathtub-in-London anecdotes.)
Frosty fury, barely contained. And then gleeful: "If that is so, then recite one poem by Ezra Pound!"
Me, dwarf-triumphant: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd..."
The Not Mender of Fences and Not Taker of Roads, cantankerous, displeased, interrupting: "No! That one's only two lines! Too easy!"
I love that, Brad. Ravishing, like flames.
What a funny story, Tom. And yes, the apparitions, a perfect answer. I love it!
As to Ezra, his picture was stolen from the library by the Jewish student group- when I was at Hamilton--and prominently displayed so that you could see it in a student's room when you were walking by at night. It was such a funny thing. All the excitement about the missing Ezra who was in plain sight.
Don't go down the road less traveled, especially not with a glass Xmas tree on your shoulder.
Funny! I love it.
TC, the story about Frost and Lowell brings to mind something I read once, years ago -- I can't recall the source of the story at the moment -- that when James Dickey was told the news that John Berryman had committed suicide, Dickey was reported to have said, "That means I'm the greatest living American poet."
Nin, that's a great story about the Pound picture. At on the Hamilton campus, no less.
Lyle, I'm very sorry to report that the Dickey anecdote rings all too true.
It's always been nasty at the top, up there in the aethereal infernal imperial regions of Am-Po.
I spent an evening in his company, once.
His tales of his Korean War firebombing exploits (which had featured prominently in his poetry) were told with pride and relish.
One could not overcome the mental picture of the victims, aflame, dying.
He was at that time a top exec at Coca Cola, out of Atlanta.
We discussed poetry just a bit. I hazarded that I had been reading Donald Allen's New American Poets anthology, just out from Grove Press.
"Not a god-dayyum thing in theyah worth the paper it's printed on," opined Mr Dickey.
He then bethought himself.
"Except maybe one prose poem by that theyah Robert Duncan. And he's a day-yum fairy!"
This was at a party, which I was attending with a female companion of the time. A tough no-nonsense young woman from the Bronx. Once Mr Dickey had poured a number of drinks into himself, he took a fancy to her. And when she then went to the upper storey of the house to use the bathroom, our heroic poet firebomber padded up the stairs after her.
And soon after, down she came, followed by a suddenly rather chastened, sheepish-looking firebomber.
I enquired what had gone on up there.
"Oh, nothing much. He followed me up, shoved me down on the coats in the bedroom..." (this was midwinter, there must have been quite a pleasant pile of coats, perhaps much as the pillow-pile in a Turkish harem).
"And?"
"And I kneed him in the groin."
(I guess you might say: that was a Woman Not Taken.)
Yes, I have a comparable Dickey story to tell, one my parents laughed about. I have it in a mini essay form, too much for this blog.
As Eleanor put it, so many of our so-called friends were intolerable.
Well, I'd never have dared call that great American hero a friend, exactly...
By the by, forgot to mention the deflated sad-sack firebomber's unintentional comic punch line to the above story.
Keep in mind the woman in question was no more than a quarter his size.
(And what she really said was not "groin" but "balls" -- to give her accuracy due credit.)
Anyway, he schlumpfs all woebegone down those stairs, looks about himself as confusedly as a bear whose honeycomb has been stolen right out of his paws, and laments:
"Theyat lil gal shore doan lahk me!"
TC, that's a great (and, sadly, a horrific) story about Dickey.
I read an interview with Dickey once, years ago (I think it was in one of those books of New York Quarterly "craft" interviews of years back), in which Dickey said at one point that often when he wrote a poem, he would start by imagining the worst possible thing that might happen to a person in some circumstance or other, and he would start building a narrative from that.
Something tells me he didn't write about the encounter on the coatpile...
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