|
Thirteen Ways Of
Listening To The Songbirds
Emily
Dickinson Leaving Her Poetry Workshop
Her hand on the chill ivory
doorknob,
The sunlight like a summons on the table
—Hungers clamoring from the rooms
below—
She would climb back up to it when she was able.
W.B. Yeats
Watches Oliver St. John Gogarty
Donate a Pair
of Swans to the Liffey
A pair of swans! Extravagance
afloat
On the slow morning waters of the Liffey.
Gogarty's old enough by now to know
One emblem will suffice for anybody.
The Constant Symbol: Interior
Decoration at Thoor Ballylee
The erudite want to wax symbolic
On the color of the walls, and it could be true.
The trouble is, when George went in to buy the
paint
In Gort, the only color on the shelves was blue.
The Range of Frost's Affections
"Robert Frost didn't love
many people,"
Says the critic from his Sunday morning corner.
Tell that to Marjorie, whose hand he drew from
her heart
To his and back when Death forgot to warn her.
In Praise of
Dissatisfaction
Richard Eberhart told me Robert
Frost
Would walk out in the woods, compose a verse,
And be so happy he'd forget about it.
Would that he'd misplaced a comma! Things could
be worse.
Wallace Stevens Welcomes John
Crowe Ransom to Hartford
Wallace Stevens ushered John
Crowe Ransom
And his dog back on the New Haven Line.
It was time for tea, and he feared the dog
Might pee on the palm at the end of his mind.
James Merrill Remembers
Elizabeth Bishop's Tact
"Her house guest was brought
up short in the doorway.
She'd come to quick tears over a glass of Irish.
'Don't worry, Jos�, (she switched to Portugese)
It's all right, I'm only crying in English.'
"
The End of Genius
Randall Jarrell laid The Kiss of
Understanding
On his fellows, leaving every one a handle.
"I felt I'd been run over but not
hurt,"
Said one. If only that were true of Randall.
On a Sentence in an Irish Republican Paper
"The trouble is not the
Provisionals
But the Benedict Kielys of the world."
Said your friend Sean White, "To think there
might
be more
Than one of you is what makes my short
hairs curl."
Side by Side
Richard Wilbur lived next door in
Key West
To his excellent friend John Ciardi.
They traded palindromes and love. Please God
The both of them may sup with Thomas Hardy.
Journey to the Interior
James Wright sent his free verse
clear to Minnesota,
Then took its advice, as was his habit.
But as for his late late exquisite sonnets,
He croaked through his throat-hole, "Don't
show them
to Robert."
Winter's Lease: The English and Irish Laureates
at Ease
Ted Hughes was a sidelong,
grateful, hulking guest
That winter in the Heaneys' Cambridge lease.
When offered a Guinness or some "rough"
red wine,
He said, "I'll take the rough red, Seamus.
Please."
Seamus Heaney
Responds to the Charge that He Switches
from Powers to Bushmills on Crossing the Border
"This train is rumbling
north and north of the Boyne.
Friends and enemies, I need a word at the ready.
But what they say about me is a lie.
The line that I'm on serves nothing but
Paddy."
|
Gibbons Ruark's
essay, 