poet of the month

Poet of the Month: William Wordsworth

For Poetry Month, we chose an old favorite for poet of the month: William Wordsworth.

Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 –April 23, 1850) is one of the most important English Romantic poets. Critics consider Lyrical Ballads (1798), a collection by Wordsworth and fellow poet Samuel Coleridge, to be the publication that began the Romantic era in poetry.

Wordsworth and his Romantic contemporaries valued emotional experience over logic and reason, breaking with the values of the English Enlightenment. Poems like “The Daffodils” and “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” have become classics because of their eloquent expression of the author’s personal experiences, close observation of nature, and evocative emotional content.

Wordsworth defined good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and though these spontaneous feelings inspired many of his works, the quality of his poems shows that they were written with care. He began writing an epic poem about his life at age 28, and worked on it for the rest of his life. It was published as The Prelude after his death in 1850, and was dedicated to his contemporary and collaborator, Samuel Coleridge.

In the Classroom:

1. Have students research the fruitful but complicated relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge and use it to fuel a discussion of literary friendship. What can they make of the differences between “Tintern Abbey” and “Kubla Khan,” for example?

2. Some of Wordsworth’s language won’t be accessible to some students, but in his day Wordsworth strove for clear, everyday speech. Use a few lines from his “Preface to “Lyrical Ballads” to talk about how language changes. Ask students to think of examples of common language today that might sound “stuffy” in 100 years.

3. Have students use Poetry Foundation’s great collection of flower poems to find a poem to compare with “Daffodils.” Have students compare their descriptions of nature, the poets’ responses to nature, and the emotional content (or lack thereof) of the poems.

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blog-photo Cecilia Seiter is an associate editor at Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Poet of the Month: Robert Lowell

Born in Boston on March 1, 1917, Robert Lowell was the son of prominent New England parents. Lowell attended Harvard, Kenyon College, and Louisiana State University, where he studied with literary and critical giants like John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and Allen Tate. In his twenties, Lowell converted from Episcopalianism to Catholicism. Though he later left the Church, his strong religious beliefs during this period deeply influenced his early work.

From 1947-1948 he served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the precursor position to the Poet Laureate). Lowell maintained a lifelong interest in history and politics—an interest that shows up in his work—and was a vigorous opponent of the Vietnam War. (During World War II, he had been jailed for conscientious objection.) His life was also dominated by emotional and marital instability—Lowell married three times—and he struggled with alcoholism. Lowell died of a heart attack in 1977 at the age of 60.

Lowell’s work is famously varied. His early books, Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary’s Castle, were written under the influence of the New Critics with whom Lowell had studied. They display Lowell’s considerable skill in writing in traditional forms. He is most famous, however, for his 1959 book Life Studies, which was a departure from his earlier writing, and from the sort of writing that was most prominent in the world of poetry at the time. Lowell wrote loosely, without adherence to conventions, and incorporated autobiographical events heavily into his poetry. This volume is considered to have begun “confessional poetry” and altered the course of modern poetry.

A. O. Scott argues for Lowell’s enduring importance in his review of Lowell’s recently published Collected Poems:

Lowell’s story, of heretical, Promethean ambition dragged to earth and chastened, has struck a number of critics over the years as overly melodramatic, and Lowell, since his death, has been somewhat overshadowed by less self-aggrandizing contemporaries like Elizabeth Bishop or Frank O’Hara, who neither made inordinate claims for the authority of poetry nor a big fuss when those claims proved to be untenable.

They left behind bodies of work, whereas Lowell, like Yeats and Milton and very few others, left behind the monumental narrative of a career, which may well, curiously enough, be remembered longer than any single poem he wrote. It is the entirety of that story—the saga of an audacious maker struggling with the raw materials of history, personality, and language—that gives so many of the poems their aura of courage and pathos.

Curious readers can find numerous online resources on Lowell’s life and poetry. The American Academy of Poets features a brief bio, along with a guide to confessional poetry, an overview of Lowell’s Life Studies, and numerous poems by Lowell, including recordings of Lowell reading “Skunk Hour” and “The Public Garden.” The Poetry Foundation features an extensive bio and bibliography, along with numerous poems by Lowell, as well as articles discussing his work. Recordings on the site include one of Helen Vendler discussing Lowell, one of Troy Jollimore talking about “Skunk Hour,” and one focused on “July in Washington” and politics. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux recently published Words in the Air, the complete letters between Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. (Readers interested in the relationship between these two major twentieth-century poets can read Helen Vendler’s incisive review of the volume in The New York Review of Books.) Lowell’s Paris Review interview, conducted by Frederick Seidel, is available online.

Happy Birthday, Robert Lowell!

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Andrew Flynn is an editorial assistant at Bedford/St. Martin’s. He graduated from Columbia in 2008, with a BA in history and philosophy. Before coming to Bedford he interned at the Paris Review.

Poet of the Month: Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

Audre Lorde, born on February 18th, 1934, was just as admirable for her activism as for her poetry. Indeed for Lorde the two were inextricably connected.

A native New Yorker born to Grenadian parents, Lorde attended high school and college in Manhattan. As a child she dropped the “y” from her given first name, “Audrey”, because she liked the symmetry between the “e” endings of her first and last names. What poet wouldn’t do the same?

Starting in the 1960’s, Lorde became a civil rights activist. However, as a black lesbian woman, she struggled with racism in the feminist community, sexism in the black community, and heterosexism and homophobia everywhere. Her essays urge her readers to stop fearing the differences between individuals—the fear leads to exclusion, and one group almost inevitably declares itself superior to the other.

In the late 1970s, Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer. In 1980 she published The Cancer Journals, a nonfiction memoir of her cancer experience. She also co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in the same year. In 1991, she was named poet laureate of New York state. She continued to write poetry and essays until her death from cancer in 1992.

You can read Lorde’s essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider on Google Books.

Listen to a 1977 clip of her reading “A Song for Many Movements” at Poets.org.

The Poetry Foundation has a biography and full text of eleven of Lorde’s poems.

Lorde’s poems and life can show students that not all poets are on a Search for Truth, or trying to Create Beauty, or Express their Innermost Feelings. Sometimes these pursuits are abstract to students: what do they have to do with the real world? Why should anyone study them?

Audre Lorde used her search for truth, and the beauty of language, and her personal experience, to tell people about injustice and try to change American society.

As she said to poet Mari Evans in “Conversations with Audre Lorde,”

“So the question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. I can’t say it is an either/or position…I loved poetry and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.”

Happy Birthday, Audre Lorde!

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.

Poet of the Month: Louis Zukofsky

As Guy Davenport once put it, Louis Zukofsky, our January poet of the month, is a “poet’s poet’s poet.” Though he stands as a central figure in the development of modern poetry, he hasn’t achieved the widespread recognition of Eliot or Pound or many of the other Modernists, though poets and graduate students may know and appreciate his work.

Born on January 23, 1904, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Russian immigrants, Zukofsky’s first exposure to English literature was in Yiddish translation. He attended Columbia University where he worked on student literary publications and, in 1924, received a master’s degree in English. A devotee of Ezra Pound, he corresponded with the poet who was impressed by Zukofsky’s early work. In fact, it was through Pound that Zukofsky got his first big break into the poetry world: Pound convinced the editor of Poetry to let Zukofsky guest-edit an issue.

In editing the issue of Poetry, as well as a subsequent anthology, Zukofsky was credited with creating the Objectivist movement. (The Objectivism of second-generation Modernists, not the Objectivism of Ayn Rand.) More a sympathetic cast of mind than a defined school of poetry, Objectivism sought to treat the poem as an object, breaking up the normal patterns of speech by conscious fragmentation. Much in the mold of Ezra Pound, Objectivists were also concerned with incorporating history into their works. Thus it’s not surprising that Zukofsky’s own poetry is often obscure, intellectual, and rife with allusions.

Zukofsky published forty-nine books in his literary career—ranging from fiction to poetry to criticism—but undoubtedly his major accomplishment was his 800-page poem “A,” an eclectic mix of personal reflection and historical allusion. He worked on this epic project throughout his life.

“A“ is Zukofsky’s masterwork but was only published in full and made widely available in 1979, a year after his death. It includes twenty-four sections—one for each hour of the day—and is what poet and critic Dan Chaisson called “a mélange of styles and forms, from Poundian free verse to Italian canzoni.”

Chaisson writes of the all-encompassing nature of A: “Zukofsky’s life was unusually directed toward the poem that was unusually open to absorbing it; you cannot talk about Zukofsky the man without talking about the poem that collected, to an extent few writers have ever attempted, the history of one person’s perception of experience, from Bach to Watts, from Spinoza to Kennedy.”

We’d love to offer you a sample of Zukofsky’s work here on our blog, but the strict copyright interpretation of Zukofsky’s son makes that impossible. We encourage you to take a trip to your local library to check out his poetry in book form, or browse the many online sources.

Poets.org has a biography with a link on the Objectivists. The Poetry Foundation’s Web site includes a lengthy bio and bibliography along with a number of links to audio recordings on Zukofsky.

The Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY Buffalo offers links to a large number of critical and academic resources, and Z-Site is a thorough companion to Zukofsky’s work…in case you should find any of it confusing. For those dying for more, Mark Scroggins has written the authoritative Zukofsky biography.

Happy Birthday, Louis Zukofsky!

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Poet of the Month: Rainer Maria Rilke

“Now the hour bends down and touches me
with its clear, metallic ring;
my senses tremble. The feeling forms: I can—
and I grasp the malleable day.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Book of Hours, as translated by Edward Snow

This is approximately how I felt as I settled in to write my post this morning. Rainer Maria Rilke is Teaching Poetry’s Poet of the Month for December. Friday is the 134th anniversary of his birth in 1875, and December 29 is the 83rd anniversary of his death in 1926.

Born in Prague, René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke had an unhappy childhood. Until he was old enough to attend school, his mother dressed him in girls’ clothes and treated him as a daughter, possibly because her first child, a daughter, died at only one week old. Rilke’s parents sent him to military school at the age of nine, hoping he would become an officer and improve the family’s place in society. Although Rilke was drawn to the glorious aspects of the military and war stories, he was more interested in becoming a poet than an officer. Even as a child, Rilke showed an interest in reading and writing poetry, which followed him to military school and beyond to university studies in Prague and Munich. He published his first volume of poetry, Leben und Lieder (Life and Songs), at his own expense in 1894.

René became Rainer at the suggestion of Lou Andreas-Salomé, an intelligent and influential woman whom Rilke met and fell in love with in Munich. Her marriage to Carl Friedrich Andreas did not stop Rilke from traveling with her (twice) on long trips to Russia and continuing their affair until 1900. In 1902 Rilke came to Paris with his wife, the sculptress Clara Westhoff, to write a book about Rodin. Rilke was always interested in the visual arts, having studied art in Prague and Munich and developed a practice of art criticism. After meeting and studying Rodin, Rilke eventually became his secretary and helped promote Rodin’s sculpture in Europe. Rodin encouraged him to write every day about anything that caught his attention instead of waiting for inspiration to strike. Rilke also loved Cézanne’s paintings, particularly the still lifes. They expressed an intensity that Rilke had tried to capture when describing a single object in poetry—seeing the object fully, knowing it completely, and capturing its essence in one short, well-crafted poem.

Throughout his career, Rilke consorted with intellectuals and aristocrats, though not always well; he was prone to anxiety and melancholy, became ill often, and was rarely happy in one place for long. He was not always liked, but required patronage to continue his writing. One of his patrons was Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis; she welcomed him to Duino castle where he began the Duenieser Elegien (Duino Elegies) in 1912. They were not completed until 1923, due to the First World War and Rilke’s poor health and emotional state. Rilke also published Die Sonnete an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus) in 1923, just three years before his death from leukemia. These two works are his most famous, and widely considered to be the height of his poetic achievements.

Today, The Rainer Maria Rilke Foundation (est. 1986) hosts a museum, lectures, and celebrations of Rilke at the Maison de Courten in Sierre, Switzerland, the town where Rilke spent the last five years of his life (before you start planning your trip, be aware that their Web site is only in French and German). Much of Rilke’s poetry is available online in German and in English. The quality of the English translations varies, particularly online where anyone can offer a translation. It’s worth it to look up and compare a few translations, both for the sake of judging the poem fairly and for the sheer linguistic fun of it. The Poetry Foundation has several Rilke poems in English and some interesting articles considering Rilke and his poetry.

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.

Poet of the Month: Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds‘s confessional poems have been hailed as paragons of honesty and denounced as pornography; they have made her one of the most popular and celebrated poets working today.

Happy birthday, Sharon!

A native of Berkeley, California, where she was born on November 19, 1942, Olds received a doctrinaire Calvinist upbringing, and her reaction against that repressive world was integral to the development of her particularly confessional style of poetry. Olds completed her undergraduate education at Stanford and received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia, writing a dissertation on Emerson’s poetry.

At 37, Olds published her first collection of poetry, Satan Says, which won the first San Francisco Poetry Centre Award. Since then Olds has published eight more books and volume of selected poems. Her work has garnered critical acclaim—The Dead and the Living was the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1984 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Father was a National Book Award finalist and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.

Her straightforward style has garnered Olds a reputation for accessibility, and popularity has followed on the heels of critical acclaim. The poems featured on Poets.org and the Poetry Foundation’s Web site highlight her intelligence, style, and recurring themes: sex, social politics, and family history.

A long-time instructor in NYU’s MFA program, Olds looms large in the landscape of American poetry. While she’s a popular teacher and guest reader, criticism of her work has been polarized. Adam Kirsch writing in The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry argues that Olds’s work “written directly out of the trivia of her life” serves only to console: “Olds’s poems are everything that testimony should be: sincere, resounding, unambiguous, consolatory. But art has other demands, and these, most of the time, she does not even want to meet.”

But, what Kirsch sees as vice, poet Peter Redgrove calls virtue: “I cannot praise [her poetry] enough. It seems to me not only faultless, but it also deals effortlessly with urgent subjects that are left out of so much contemporary poetry. Every poem is a wonder—strong, actual, unsentimental and without bullshit—in a world glowing with solid reality.”

The curious reader can find a wealth of resources on Olds around the Web. In addition to the links above, readers can investigate these interviews with Olds and numerous videos of her readings.

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Wallace Stevens, Poet of the Month

Wallace Stevens was born on October 2, 1879—130 years ago—and led what seemed, on the surface, a rather ordinary life.

Educated at Harvard, he became a lawyer and spent his life practicing law, eventually becoming vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co. While leading the daily life of a lawyer, Stevens produced some of the most important American poetry written in the twentieth century—composing lines in his head while walking to work in the morning and writing them down at night. Like composer Charles Ives, Wallace Stevens happily joined work and art, turning down a professorship at Harvard to remain at his firm. Widespread recognition came late, just a year before Stevens’s death in 1955, when his Collected Poems was published.

The Poetry Foundation’s biography summarizes Stevens’s talents: “an extraordinary vocabulary, a flair for memorable phrasing, an accomplished sense of imagery, and the ability to both lampoon and philosophize.” Stevens is frequently regarded as a difficult poet—his poems are opaque and philosophical, his images whimsical, his language complex—but the visceral power of his words is on display in his recordings of his poems, like this one of “To the One of Fictive Music” (with some creative animation):

(See also recordings of Stevens’s poems here and here, as well as these two clips from a documentary.)

Though appreciation of Stevens’s poetry was a long time coming, it is now near universal. Stevens’s Selected Poems, recently published by Knopf, has garnered a lot of attention and occasioned reassertions of Stevens’s place in the pantheon of modern poetry. “[W]hen we hear the sound of Stevens in poems by subsequent poets,” James Longenbach writes in The Nation, “it is most often the music of austerity, at once worldly and otherworldly, that we hear.”

Reviewing the book in the Times, Helen Vendler makes the case for Stevens as the poet of our age:

Stevens’s conscience made him confront the chief issues of his era: the waning of religion, the indifferent nature of the physical universe, the theories of Marxism and socialist realism, the effects of the Depression, the uncertainties of philosophical knowledge, and the possibility of a profound American culture, present and future. Others treated those issues, but very few of them possessed Stevens’s intuitive sense of both the intimate and the sublime, articulated in verse of unprecedented invention, phrased in a marked style we now call “Stevensian” (as we would say “Keatsian” or “Yeatsian”). In the end, he arrived at a firm sense of a universe dignified by human endeavor but surrounded always—as in the magnificent sequence “The Auroras of Autumn”—by the “innocent” creations and destructions within the universe of which he is part.

Happy 130th, Wallace Stevens!

Activity

1. As noted above, Stevens was unique in his ability write great poems while achieving success in the legal world. Why is this so rare? Are poets opposed to work? Consider some poems that deal with the mundane world of work—perhaps “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Gray or “The Unknown Citizen” by Auden—and discuss how the poets conceive of this work as related to their craft.

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Kay Ryan, Poet of the Month

by Andrew Flynn

Kay Ryan, the US Poet Laureate, turns 64 today.

Ryan is not a household name—not even a poet’s household name until quite recently—and her journey to the Library of Congress does not follow the course of a typical literary career. “It feels very unlikely,” Ryan told Charlie Rose in an interview last November. “I hadn’t ever expected this to happen to me.”

She grew up the daughter of an oil-well driller in the San Joaquin Valley in the 40s and 50s, in a working-class culture that did not welcome the pretensions of poetry. Her adult life has been spent teaching writing—but not of the MFA variety. Since the 1970s she’s taught remedial English classes at the College of Marin, her local community college. She lives in a house she shingled herself, is an avid runner, and has never taken a creative writing class. Carol Adair, Ryan’s fellow teacher at Marin and longtime partner, died earlier this year. Ryan wrote about their relationship and marriage in Salon.

Ryan’s success came later in life. Her early works attracted little notice. The first published essay on Ryan’s work appeared little more than a decade ago—but its author, poet and critic, Dana Gioia, proclaimed her achievements in no uncertain terms. “Over the past five years,” Gioia begins, “no new poet has so deeply impressed me with her imaginative flair or originality as Kay Ryan.” Gioia, who became Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, also became a champion of Ryan’s poetry. The last ten years have marked a rise to prominence for Ryan, with highlights including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2001, the eminent Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2004, and appointment as Poet Laureate of the United States in 2008.

It only takes one poem to show Ryan’s unique style. Her poems are short, sometimes funny, almost always accessible, yet rich and complex. Analyzing the internal wordplay of “Paired Things,” Dana Gioia picked out the hallmarks of a Ryan poem: “dense figurative language, varied diction, internal rhyme, the interrogative mode, and playful, which elusively alternates between iambic and unmetered lines.”

Paired Things

So many paired things seem odd.
Who ever would have dreamed
the broad winged raven of despair
would quit the air and go
bandylegged upon the ground, a common crow?

“[C]lown suitcase” is her own description of her poetry. “[T]he clown flips open the suitcase and pulls out a ton of stuff,” she said in her Paris Review interview. “A poem is an empty suitcase that you can never quit emptying.” She’s balked at Gioia’s Dickinson comparison—“[H]ow would you like to be compared to God?”

Adam Kirsch wrote in praise of Ryan’s appointment as Poet Laureate, commending her “diffidence and self-sufficiency” and her “dark vision and metaphysical scope,” offering an incisive reading of Ryan’s poem “Chop”:

Here are the short lines, plain diction, and buried assonances—”sharp/chop,” “step/stamp”—that define Ms. Ryan’s verse. But once you ponder the miniature allegory of “Chop,” that homely music starts to look desperately ironic. For Ms. Ryan’s bird is an emblem of man in his arrogant mortality.

Something similar could be said about much of Ryan’s work.

The Library of Congress has aggregated the wealth of resources about Ryan available on the Internet, including essays, interviews, and recordings of readings. If you’ve never read Kay Ryan before, she’s worth discovering. If you don’t read much poetry, she’s still discoverable.

Activity:
Kay Ryan is noted for her frequent use of recombinant, or internal, rhyme. (See, for instance, “four-oared” and “afford” in “Turtle.”) How is the effect of internal rhymes different than traditional, end-of-the-line rhymes? Why does Ryan seem to use internal rhyme in “Turtle”? For example, how does internal rhyme add emphasis to certain images or change meaning?

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