Category: poetry
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My Friend Monty
I have a poet friend in North Hollywood named Monty who says he’d kill a small domestic animal if that’s what it took to get the exact word in an exact line. He likes to make sweeping statements like that, though, when I visited him recently, his dog Rvr wasn’t around—yes, Rvr. When he’d rescued…
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Madness, Poetry, and Choosing Not to Die
Robert Lowell wrote those two lines in his poem “Night Sweats.” It’s one of my faves (the full poem is below). It’s a love poem, about a man who suffers mental illness, and his wife, who keeps him alive. It’s a brutal poem. Lowell suffered from manic depression. These days, people say “manic depression,” and…
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Our Demons and Our Words
1. Poetry born out of horror has a rough go of it. Some of the things we do to one another are so damaging, it’s near-impossible to wrap words around them. Yet, poets try, and sometimes they even succeed. But behind one poem that works, there might be a couple dozen that failed. Sometimes I…
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“F**k You, Death.”
We’ve been reading about Death in Robert Frost’s and Emily Dickinson’s poems. They’ve both got different voices, and different “angles” on dying. Now we have our friend, Dylan Thomas, the scotch-slugging, chain-smoking Welsh poet who gives us a little advice on facing our own death. “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” is one…
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Emily’s Fly
We’re reading Emily Dickinson now, some of her greatest hits (she had tons). Emily was a poet from the 19th century, from Massachusetts, who wrote like, I don’t know, ten billion poems and stuffed them in drawers, cabinets, under her bed; I picture her entire house wallpapered in them. Only a handful were published in…