Category: Poetry

April is Poetry Month

paraphernalia’s poetry brooch
Paraphernalia’s poetry brooch		 Today is the first day of National Poetry Month in the US. Their website has a state-by-state calendar of events, they’ll email you a poem every day this month, and this year there’s a great poster with a quote from T. S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: Do I dare / Disturb the universe?
While there are lots of blogs and websites devoted to poetry, one I especially like is Poem of the Week — here’s a recent post:

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
Wallace Stevens

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Book Collecting: Warwick Press

A Flowing printed by Warwick PressFor my birthday this year I got another letterpress printed poetry chapbook for my collection. It’s one I saw at the Codex Foundation Book Fair, from Warwick Press. Peter Fallon’s poem “A Flowering” starts

They were not on the maps.
Notes of their known habitats
recorded nothing here
or hereabouts.

and is about looking for evidence of bears on walks in the woods. It’s beautifully printed, with small bear tracks across the bottom of the page and cover.

Giveaway: i prefer pi

pi_day.jpg

Pi (π) is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi is celebrated every year by math and number enthusiasts around the world this coming Saturday, March 14th.
And what does π have to do with book arts or letterpress or type, you might ask? The first book I printed letterpress was a small artist’s book with Wislawa Szymborska‘s whimsical poem “Pi,” which juxtaposes the finite, impermanent world with the familiar never-ending sequence 3.1415926535… In my book the first 200 or so digits of Pi dance across the pages, starting on the cover and skating off the back.
In a toast to numbers and letterpress, I’m giving away a copy of my book. Just put a comment on this post by Sunday March 15th, and mention your favorite book with a number in the title or a number theme. I’ll pick a random name from the comments and announce the winner on Monday March 16th. My friend Richard, who suggested this question, told me his answers would be Life of Pi and A Tale of Two Cities.
You can read Szymborska’s poem, which begins “The admirable number pi: three point one four one.“, here. There’s an official (!) web site for Pi day with all sorts of fun facts and quotes and pointers to YouTube videos. And here’s a link to my book.

Poetry and Valentine’s Day

Oh Child by Tony FitzpatrickSeveral years ago, in a fit of self-improvement, I subscribed to Poetry Magazine. They were having a 1/2-off sale, so I figured for $17, how could I go wrong? There’s not just poetry, but commentary, many letters to the editor, and even artwork (and the font face and layout are beautiful.) Granted some of the poetry and the nitpicking in the letters are unintelligible to me, but every issue has at least one thing I read and return to again.
The Feb 2009 issue has a section of collages by Tony Fitzpatrick (see on the right). Fitzpatrick is both a collage artist and poet, and he often includes his poetry in his artwork. The introduction to the collages in Poetry quotes Fitzpatrick:

“We love in poetry but, unfortunately, we live in prose. Sometimes the two are not congruent. What we remember of love is usually a fiction. What we aspire to is haiku: short, sweet, perfect.”

The Poetry Magazine website has a selection of love poems celebrating Valentine’s Day both to read and listen to. From the current issue, my favorite is a very black love poem, an anti-Valentine, if you will, by Kim Addonizio called Weaponry. But more in keeping with the spirit of the day is this one, by Stephen Dunn

Connubial

Because with alarming accuracy
she’d been identifying patterns
I was unaware of—this tic, that
tendency, like the way I’ve mastered
the language of intimacy
in order to conceal how I felt—

I knew I was in danger
of being terribly understood.

Calligrams & Word Clouds

David Esslemont’s My Fellow CitizensThere was a post the other day on the Book Arts email list about David Esslemont’s book My Fellow Citizens, a series of calligrams — a printed text where the typeface or the layout has a special significance — to illustrate President Obama’s inaugural address. Esslemont analyzed the word frequency in the speech, then used various ink colors and text sizes to weight the words — words used most often (nation — 11 times, new — 11 times, America — 10 times ) are large and red, the next frequency groupings are drawn in smaller blue letters and finally black ink is used for all the rest. To the left is a detail of one calligram.
This got me thinking about word clouds — a computer generated visual depiction of a text — that use font size and color to depict the frequency of words in a given text. I’ve seen “tag clouds” on lots of blogs, the idea is to give a quick summary of that particular blog. As luck would have it, that same day I visited the blog of a friend of my Mom’s, with a link to Wordle — a site that generates a word cloud from text you provide. I found the text of Obama’s speech and got this cloud:

Obama’s accpetance speech as a word cloud

Apparently word clouds have been used a lot to look at speeches — this blog has a post called “Word Cloud Analysis of Obama’s Inaugural Speech Compared to Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Lincoln’s.” (My most glaring observation looking at them is that Bush used the word “Freedom” in his speech an enormous number of times!)
I wonder if the clouds would be useful to understand poetry? On Wordle, someone made and posted a cloud of e.e. cummings “anyone lived in a pretty how town” — cloud below followed by text of the poem. Doesn’t help me, maybe because cummings’ word play is lost (“he sang his didn’t he danced his did”) but then again it’s only one example… Let me know what you discover with them!

Anyone lived in a pretty how town word cloud

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.

Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed (but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone’s any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
with by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men (both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

— e. e. cummings