ケイ・ライアン「ホーム・ツー・ルースト」（朗読）
Kay Ryan reading “Home to Roost”
About Ryan’s work, J. D. McClatchy has said: “Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes. She is an anomaly in today’s literary culture: as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost” (Quoted here).
ケイ・ライアン（１９４５年生まれ）は２００８年にアメリカの議会堂図書館に国の桂冠詩人に指定された。ライアンの詩は、ユーモアに溢れていながら、エミリー・ディキンソンのように繊細な世界を引き出す。
In celebration of National Poetry Month
ロビンソン・ジェファーズ (1887-1962) はアメリカの天才的な詩人と言われ、環境保護主義者として知られている。作品はカリフォルニアの海岸の美しさを唱えながら、社会の発展に対して批判的な立場をよく取る。
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)
Jeffers brought enormous learning in literature, religion, philosophy, languages, myth, and sciences to his poetry. One of his favorite themes was the intense, rugged beauty of the landscape in opposition to the degraded and introverted condition of modern man. Strongly influenced by Nietzsche’s concepts of individualism, Jeffers believed that human beings had developed an insanely self-centered view of the world, and felt passionately that we must learn to have greater respect for the rest of creation. (From the Academy of American Poets’ biography of Jeffers)
Carmel Point by Robinson Jeffers
The extraordinary patience of things! This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses— How beautiful when we first beheld it, Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs; No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing, Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads— Now the spoiler has come: does it care? Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide That swells and in time will ebb, and all Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty Lives in the very grain of the granite, Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
In honor of National Poetry Month 2012
アメリカの現代詩の父ワルト・ホイットマン（1819-1892）の眼鏡
The glasses of Walt Whitman (1819-1892), father of modern American poetry
Back in style?
Courtesy of poetsorg.
In honor of National Poetry Month 2012
アメリカの現代詩の母、エミリー・ディキンソンの『植物標本集』より
ディキンソンは生前は全く無名であったが、1700篇以上残した作品はアメリカの現代詩の出発点とされている。詩を封筒や屑紙に書くことが毎日の戯れだったが、その他に自分の庭に植物を育つことが熱心だった。『植物標本集』にそれぞれの植物を集めたので、十九世紀のアメリカの植物を研究するために、貴重な資料になっている。
From Emily Dickinson: Herbarium
In honor of National Poetry Month 2012
Courtesy Boston Public Library and poetsorg
In commemoration of National Poetry Month 2012, I will be posting some poetry-related content, including photos, videos, sound files, and poems each day. Please follow or click here!
2012 Poster for National Poetry Month from the Academy of American Poets
Design: Chin-Yee Lai
The 2012 poster features the line “…wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life” from U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine’s poem “Our Valley.”
Each April, the Academy of American Poets creates and distributes—for free—almost 200,000 copies of the current National Poetry Month posters to U.S. schools, libraries, bookstores, and community centers to help promote the month-long celebration and to increase poetry awareness. Click on the image for a larger and more detailed version.
Adrienne Rich reads “What Kind of Times Are These”
This film was part of the Poetry Everywhere project airing on public television. Produced by David Grubin Productions and WGBH Boston, in association with the Poetry Foundation. Filmed at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. For more information, visit http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/poetryeverywhere/.
Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)
Today, America lost one of its most epoch-making poets. Adrienne Rich was a feminist, humaniatrian, and deeply caring writer who helped change what it meant to be poet in the modern world while opening the possibilities of language to new, daring directions.
From “Diving into the Wreck”
I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters. This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body.
For the complete poem, plus an audio file of Adrienne Rich reading her this poem in the year 2009, click here.
Thoreau’s Cove, Lake Walden, Concord, Mass (1908) Library of Congress
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
Henry David Thoreau (Walden and Other Writings)
| — | Poems of Emily Dickinson |
This 1953 animated adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” filled with its eerie angles, dark shadows, glaring intensity, and fragmentary narration utterly terrified me when I saw it on TV when I was around ten years old. It gave me nightmares for days, and yet I tuned into the same channel that had showed it over and over, hoping to see it again! When I found it again on YouTube, I was astounded at how vividly I had remembered it for all of these years!
One of the shots that lodged in my ten-year old memory most was the final hand that suddenly appears in the frame of the screen, pressing up against the door of the prison cell. This little touch puts the viewer in the position of the confined madman, who is looking out of his cell. I probably had never encountered that filmic technique before, and I found it terrifying that the director could force the viewer into certain positions, especially ones as scary as being locked away as a madman!
According to the comments from the person who posted on YouTube, it was the first cartoon to be X-rated, for adults only, in Great Britain under the British Board of Film Censors classification system. Despite my hopes to see this again, I never did see it on TV again. I wonder if there weren’t too many complaints from parents, who found it too frightening and intense for a kid’s channel.
