Poetry Session devoted to Women Poets – Aug 11, 2018

Collage of Women Poets recited

A magnificent group of women poets was featured at the reading: 4 English, 7 Americans, and 1 each from Peru and Russia. That KumKum's birthday fell on the date chosen was by design to give an extra piquancy to the occasion.

Hemjit, KumKum, Priya

The attendance was a record; it is not possible to accommodate more readers in the time allotted, and we had to curtail the free-form discussion, which is always interesting since it brings out the readers’ reactions, and furnishes curious knowledge about the poets and their exploits.

Devika, Saras, Kavita

There is a line of thinking that examines the poet's works, the words that will outlast and overshadow the life, and accords it pre-eminence. The life and the experiences, the raw material from which the poetry springs, is set aside as having little importance in appreciating it.  However, in many cases, realising the highly condensed nature of poetic expression, the words themselves will not offer a meaningful reading without the context of the poet's life and the occasion that gave rise to the poem. That is why the poet's life is presented in brief as an introduction.

Geetha, Hemjit, KumKum, Priya, Thommo

At the end there was a felicitation with sandwiches, sandesh, and cake to wish KumKum for her birthday.

Kavita, Zakia, KumKum cutting the cake, Priya.

Here is the group at the end of the session, wreathed in smiles –

(standing) Preeti, Devika, Geetha, Kavita, Saras, KumKum, Zakia, Priya (sitting) Joe, Hemjit, Thommo

Full Account and Record of the Session devoted to Women Poets

Aug 11, 2018

Present: Geetha, Kavita, Shoba, Saras, KumKum, Zakia, Joe, Hemjit, Thommo, Priya, Preeti, Devika

Virtually Present: Gopa, Pamela

Absent: Sunil

The date for the next reading was set before:

Thu Sep 20, 2018 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

It was proposed and accepted that at the next session on Poetry, in October 2018, readers should present poets in translation.

Here below are some further pictures on KumKum's birthday celebration.

1. Pamela
She chose to read the poem titled Poetry by Marianne Moore, who was a modernist American poet, translator, and editor. “Her poetry is noted for formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit. She was born on Nov 15, 1887 and died on Feb 5, 1972. 

Marianne Moore - ‘I am tempted simply to call her our greatest modern poet’ John Ashbery once said of her

Marianne Moore wrote with the freedom characteristic of other modernist poets, often incorporating quotes from other sources into the text. Yet her use of language was always extraordinary, extraordinarily condensed and precise. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the Bollingen prize, the National Book Award for poetry, and the Robert Frost medal.

There was so much criticism regarding this poem, Poetry, that she tried to revise it and she compressed it to just 3 lines in 1957, and then reverted to the original version, with some changes. The revision took place over a period of five decades. There are certain lines in this poem which I liked and so I chose it.”

Pamela reading the poem Poetry

It is interesting to hear a modern poet say
                                          we
  
    do not admire what
   
    we cannot understand.

Marianne Moore seems to assert two qualities that poetry should have to capture attention: it must be raw, and it must be genuine. Whatever that means.

2. Gopa
Gopa first wished happy birthday to KumKum. She said she was glad to be back attending KRG, albeit virtually. Gopa chose 3 short poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay. She was an American poet and playwright born in 1892. The feminism she was known for in her early years was reflected in her writings. She later became an active pacifist. However, she supported the Allied forces during the wartime, writing against the occupation of the Nazis during WWII. She was one of the most successful and respected poets of America in the 1920s, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, and the Robert Frost medal in 1943.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

“The first poem I am going to read is the last one in my selection. It is a sonnet in the Italian style. Millay was known for being one of the most skilful sonnet-writers of the 20th century. I hope Joe will explain the Italian form of sonnets during the discussion.

The sonnet, Time does not bring relief, was written in 1917. Millay finds she is not able to move away from her grief. Though time has moved on it has not healed her grief. Two lines from this sonnet –
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;   
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;

describe the pain she is unable to forget.

The second poem, The Penitent, which is actually the first one in the list was written in 1920 during her early feminist period. I like the way the words flow in this poem – it is my type of poem, rhyme and rhythm. A penitent is supposed to reflect and seek penance. The words Millay uses are ‘weeping’ and ‘praying to God’, but try as she might she cannot feel any remorse for her transgressions, and eventually decides it is well to carry on being herself and what she believes in.

The last poem, Song of a Second April, was written in 1921. Millay is watching the scenes of spring in earlyApril, the same scene she had seen a year ago: the melting snow, the early blooming flowers, the sound of repairs in the farmhouses, woodpeckers in the woods, and sheep on the hillsides. She sees, and yet does not see, the sights of that lovely spring day in April. The sight that her eyes wish for she knows she will not see again. The sadness of deep personal loss overshadows the beauty of the day.”

So here are the three poems.

Gopa voice file reading 3 poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay

Joe took up Gopa's referral (despite KumKum's haste for lack of time) and proceeded briefly to explain the Italian form of sonnet which originated in the 13th century. The famous poet associated with sonnets in Italy is Petrarch in the 14th century. From Italy it spread to Spain, France and England in the 16th century. The Petrarchan form consists of an octave rhymed abba abba and a sestet rhymed cde cde or cdc dcd. With its profusion of rhymes with the same ending, this form is suited for Latinate languages, but would be difficult to accomplish in English, though Milton and Wordsworth have done so. And it is also the form Millay has used in Time does not bring relief. More common in English is the Elizabethan sonnet form, adopted by Shakespeare, which consists of 3 quatrains and a couplet abab cdcd efef gg.

Joe also referred to the master work of Vikram Seth, his first novel, The Golden Gate, in which he narrates a luminous story set in Silicon Valley written entirely in sonnets; 590 of them in iambic tetrameter, with the rhyme scheme following the abab ccdd effe gg pattern of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. It was inspired by Charles Johnston's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which Seth chanced upon when he was an Economics PhD student at Stanford University.

3. Hemjit

Hemjit

Anne  Brontë, the youngest of the Brontës, died at the young age of twenty-nine. Though overshadowed by her sisters Charlotte and Emily, her novels Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildlife Hall showed great promise. Unlike her elder sisters her novels were more rooted in realism, and she tackled fearlessly social issues like alcoholism, adultery in a way that shocked the Victorians. She worked as a governess for some time to support herself. In recent years, with the growing interest in women authors, her personality and her works are being re-appraised and she is gaining recognition as a major literary figure in her own right. 

Anne  Brontë

A recent review accords her the importance she deserves for her novel Agnes Grey, and asserts her claim as a strong feminist author. Her heroine in the novel wishes “to go out into the world; to act for myself; to exercise my unused faculties; to try my own unknown powers.” That's as clear a declaration of women's rights as any articulated in the twentieth century.

A 2-hour long fascinating film was made in 2016 titled, To Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters. It was produced by BBC1 for a TV audience in UK and shown on Masterpeice Theater on the Public Broadcasting System in USA. “You wouldn’t think that three girls closeted in this parsonage on a windy hillside in Yorkshire would turn out to write novels with such depth and such insight as they did,” says actor Jonathan Pryce, who acted as Patrick Bronte, the father.

The poem Power Of Love, is about a soul stricken with despair. It has come to the point where even death would be welcome:

When, from nights of restless tossing,

Days of gloom and pining care,

Pain and weakness, still increasing,

Seem to whisper 'Death is near,'

And I almost bid him welcome,

Knowing he would bring release, 

But in her mind she feels the reproof of another person who is watching over her and giving her strength. That resuscitates her:

Roused to newborn strength and courage,

Pain and grief, I cast away,

Health and life, I keenly follow,

Mighty Death is held at bay.

Anne recorded with deep conviction her moods, feelings, and anxieties during the various stages of her life; so much so that her poems are referred to as her emotional biography. Her poems centred around loneliness, home-sickness, religion and love. 

4. Geetha

Geetha

Sylvia Plath (1932 –1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Born in Boston, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, a women's college at the University of Cambridge, before receiving acclaim as a poet and writer. She married a fellow poet, the Englishman Ted Hughes, in 1956. He was Poet Laureate of the UK from 1984 to 1998. They lived together in the United States and then in England. They had two children, Frieda and Nicholas, before separating in 1962. 

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes on their honeymoon in Paris

Nicholas died by suicide in his home in Alaska on 16 March 2009 after suffering from depression. Frieda is a poet and painter. She has published seven children's books and four poetry collections and has had many exhibitions.

Sylvia Plath US Stamp

Plath was of Austrian descent and depressed for most of her adult life, and was treated multiple times with electroconvulsive therapy. She committed suicide in 1963. She is known for her collections of poetry –The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel and also for The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death. In 1982, she won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously for The Collected Poems.

Mirror is a short, two-stanza poem written in 1961. Sylvia Plath was living in England with her fellow poet and husband, Ted Hughes, and she had already given birth to their first child, Frieda. This was a stressful time for Plath. As a first-time mother, she was on the way toward fulfilling her love for her partner, but deep inside she dreaded the idea of ever growing old and settling down.

As a teenager, she wrote in her journal:

Somehow I have to keep and hold the rapture of being seventeen. Every day is so precious. I feel infinitely sad at the thought of all this time melting farther and farther away from me as I grow older.

And again, later:

I am afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day–spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote.

Mirror is an exploration of this uncertain self and was probably influenced by an earlier poem by the poet James Merrill by the same title.

Sylvia Plath's poem has her hallmark stamp of powerful language, sharp imagery and dark undertones. It has an unusual syntax, with no obvious rhyme or meter and an astute use of enjambment. Mirror is a personification poem of great depth.

Joe added an anecdote about the famous party in Cambridge when they met for the first time. As Ted Hughes kissed her neck, Sylvia Plath bit down hard on his cheek until the blood started flowing. Later, both wrote poems  recalling that night.

5. KumKum

KumKum

KumKum gave this introduction: “Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets From the Portuguese is one of my favourite books of poems. Like many others, I too as a young woman, was gifted this slim volume of 44 sonnets from an admirer.

It is definitely her best work; they are considered among the best love sonnets in English of all time. The beauty and the perfection of sonnet number 43 (How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.) results in it often being credited mistakenly to Shakespeare. The sonnets reflect her love and adoration for her husband, the poet Robert Browning. Elizabeth did not want them to be published thinking they were too personal, but in Robert’s opinion they were the best sonnets since William Shakespeare. They finally got published as if they were sonnets translated from Portuguese, which nicely coincided with the nickname, ‘My little Portuguese’,  by which Robert Browning addressed her.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth was born on March 6, 1806 in England; she died in Florence on June 29, 1861. Robert Browning in January 1845 wrote a letter which began, ‘I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett.’ Robert Browning's budding courtship developed through subsequent visits and the 600 odd letters they exchanged before marrying twenty months later in Sep 1846. It remains one of the most captivating love stories which includes a thrilling elopement. The marriage brought many joys and fulfilment to the life of Elizabeth's otherwise drab and retired life of a paralytic, dominated by her father. However, the letters stopped as they never lived apart after marrying. 

Sonnets From the Portuguese is still cherished as a gift among lovers; it is a hot-selling item for Valentine's Day. There are countless editions and it will, I suppose, never be out of print.”

A final point. Her sonnets are in iambic pentameters but follow the Petrarchan scheme of rhyming, an octave and a sestet: abba abba cdc dcd.

6. Joe

Joe

Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) ranks among the Big Four of Russian poetry in the 20th century with Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and Boris Pasternak. She wrote over 2,000 poems, many in the lyrical mode and was quite disciplined in the forms she used (even inventing new ones).

She was born in Moscow where father was a professor of art history and founded the Museum of Fine Arts. Her mother, Mariya, was a talented concert pianist. The family travelled a great deal and Tsvetaeva attended schools at Lausanne in Switzerland, Germany, and later studied History at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Tsvetaeva was early to write verse. By age 18 she came out with a collection printed with her own money called Evening Album. The poet Nikolai Gumilyov (1886-1921) gave it a favourable review.

Tsvetaeva married Sergei Efron two years later, and they had two daughters and a son. Another collection Magic Lantern was notable for its fluent handling of techniques. Around this time Tsvetaeva had an affair with a woman poet and opera librettist, Sofia Párnok (1885-1933). This stimulated a cycle of poems called Girlfriend. 

Tsvetaeva had another affair with Konstantin Borisovich Rodzevich (1895-1988), an ex-Red Army officer. All her relationships gave rise duly to sheaves of poems. Rodzevich was captured by the White Army and fled to Prague, where he graduated as a lawyer. He lived to a ripe old age and labelled his affair with Tsvetaeva as ‘un grand amour’. 

Marina Tsvetaeva

The 1917 Revolution trapped Tsvetaeva in Moscow for five years. During the resulting famine one of her daughters, Irina, died of starvation. Poems between 1917 and 1921 under the title The Demesne of the Swans appeared posthumously in 1957.

Tsvetaeva's poetry reveal many influences including techniques of the major symbolist poets. She was fascinated by Akhmatova's poetry, but put her on a higher plane. Tsvetaeva wrote six plays in verse and many narrative poems, including The Tsar Maiden (pub. 1922). 

In 1922 Tsvetaeva emigrated with her family to Berlin, where she rejoined her husband Sergei Efron. She went on to Prague, beginning a highly productive period in her life – she published five collections of verse and a number of narrative poems, plays, and essays. She adopted the idea of the poet as a rebel and an outcast.

Marina Tsvetaeva life journey map showing places in Europe she visited or stayed - click to enlarge

In 1925 the family settled in Paris. Tsvetaeva's collection Craft (1923) was published in Berlin. In Prague she wrote The Poem of the End (1924), dealing with her parting from Rodzevich. After reading it Pasternak wrote to Tsvetaeva, that it “draws its readers to its world like tragedy” and praised her as an artist of extraordinary talent. 

By the 1930s Tsvetaeva’s poems could no longer be printed in the Soviet Union. Hence, she published in émigré journals in Berlin, Paris and Prague. Sometimes her essays were printed in a radically abbreviated form. In 1926 she launched an attack on the Russian émigré establishment as well and that made publication all but impossible.

Marina Tsvetaeva Statue, Moscow - sculpted by Nina Matveeva for a small square next to 9 Borisoglebsky Lane in the general Arbat region of Moscow

The last collection published during her lifetime, called After Russia, appeared in 1928. The imprint of 100 numbered copies, were sold by special subscription. In Paris the family lived in poverty, the income coming almost entirely from her writings. When her husband started to work for the Soviet security service NKVD, the Russian community of Paris turned against her. She switched to prose for a living. To earn extra, she also produced short stories, memoirs and critical articles.

Marina Tsvetaeva closeup

In exile Tsvetaeva became isolated. She returned to the Soviet Union in 1938 in utter poverty, where her son and her husband, Sergei Efron, already lived. He was executed and her daughter was sent to a labour camp. Tsvetaeva was shunned and left without recourse to a publisher. When Nazi Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, Tsvetaeva was evacuated with her son to the small provincial town of Yelabuga in Tatarstan, about 1,000 km east of Moscow.  There, condemned to work as a dishwasher, she hanged herself on August 31, 1941. 

Boris Pasternak admired Tsvetaeva's work and said: “The greatest recognition and reevaluation of all awaits Tsvetaeva, the outstanding poet of the twentieth century.” 

Joe read four short poems addressed to people the poet knew: Sofia Párnok, Osip Mandelstam, Konstantin Rodzevich, and Rilke. Her life reads like a fascinating novel studded with raw experiences; an account in The New Yorker is highly recommended for reading when you have an hour or more to devote.

7. Thommo

Thommo

Florence Earle Coates (1850 – 1927) was born in Philadelphia. She was the granddaughter of abolitionist and philanthropist Thomas Earle. She gained notoriety both at home and abroad for her poetical works – nearly 300 of which were published in literary magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's Magazine, The Literary Digest, Lippincott's, The Century Magazine, and Harper's. Many of her poems were set to music by composers. 

She studied in New England and later at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Paris. She also studied music in Brussels under noted instructors of the time. 

Florence Earle Coates 

Her first husband died after 5 years and two years later she married Edward Horner Coates, a businessman, financier and patron of the arts. The Coates' often spent their summer months in the Adirondacks, where they maintained Camp Elsinore – their summer camp. There they entertained friends such as Otis Skinner, Anna Roosevelt Cowles (sister of  Theodore Roosevelt) and Alice Roosevelt, who was Theodore Roosevelt's daughter. Many of Mrs. Coates' nature poems were inspired by the flora and fauna of the Adirondack Mountains. The word comes from Rontaks, meaning ‘tree eaters’. In the Mohawk language, Adirondack means porcupine, an animal that may eat tree bark.

Literary and social critic Matthew Arnold both encouraged and inspired Florence Coates. They first met at the home of Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate. Florence was a ninth generation descendant of Pilgrim Father John Howland. 

In the first poem, Better to Die, Coates exalts a life of sacrifice and giving to others Merely to live is nothing, she says; the aim should be to live nobly. In the ending lines of successive stanzas she asserts:

And they win life who life for others give.

...

They are as gods, who life to others give!

The second poem, Last Night I Dreamed, recounts a dream in which the face of an enemy softens and no longer seems to invoke hate; the dreamer remembers the closeness that once existed between them and their easy conversations:

And I forgot, in converse glad,

⁠The bitterness since then,

And nearer to my thought you seemed—

⁠Dearer—than other men;

The teaching is that hate does not sit well in the human soul.

The third poem, Why Did You Go?, is a pitiable lament for one who has gone to the oblivion of death. The anxious question wells up:

                            why did you go?

⁠Did you not know

That life is better than death

Since the inexorable fate has befallen a dear person, the poet calls out (‘O my sweet!’) for permission to follow

And drink of dark Lethe, your prison to share!

8. Priya

Priya

Jane Kenyon (1947 – 1995) was an American poet and translator. Her work is often characterised as simple, spare, and emotionally resonant. Kenyon was the second wife of poet, editor, and critic Donald Hall who made her the subject of many of his poems. There is an eloquent reading by Donald Hall on youtube of a few of her poems after she died; he reads with grace and power and the reading transforms into a fine narrative of their close relationship.

Kenyon was born in 1947 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in the Midwest. She earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1970 and an M.A. in 1972. She won a Hopwood Award at Michigan. Also, while a student at the University of Michigan, Kenyon met the poet Donald Hall; though he was some nineteen years her senior, she married him in 1972, and they moved to Eagle Pond Farm, his ancestral home in Wilmot, New Hampshire. Kenyon was New Hampshire's poet laureate when she died on April 22, 1995 from leukaemia.

Jane Kenyon

Four collections of Kenyon's poems were published during her lifetime: Constance (1993), Let Evening Come (1990), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), and From Room to Room (1978). She spent some years translating the poems of Anna Akhmatova from Russian into English (published as Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, 1985), and she championed translation as an important art at which every poet should try hiser hand. When she died, she was working on editing Otherwise: New and Selected Poems. In 2004, Ausable Press published Letters to Jane, a compilation of letters written by the poet Hayden Carruth to Kenyon in the year between her diagnosis and her death.

Kenyon's poems are filled with rural images: light streaming through a hayloft, shorn winter fields. She wrote frequently about wrestling with depression, which plagued her throughout her adult life. 

The essays collected in A Hundred White Daffodils reveal the important role church came to play in her life once she and Hall moved to Eagle Pond Farm. However, two visits to India in the early 1990s led to a crisis of faith, as Hall (in introductions to her books and in his own memoirs), has described.

Her poem Let Evening Come was featured in the film In Her Shoes, in a scene where the character played by Cameron Diaz reads the poem (as well as the well-know poem, One Art by Elizabeth Bishop) to a blind nursing home resident. Having it out with Melancholy has been read by Amanda Palmer on the literary website Brain Pickings.

(This biography has been taken from the Wikipedia entry for Jane Kenyon)

The first poem, Biscuit, is a reward to a dog. Kenyon writes:

He asks for bread, expects 

bread, and I in my power 

might have given him a stone.

It is an evident reference to the gospel verse Mathew 7:9

Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?

Priya may not mind my inserting a whole poem of Jane Kenyon which I loved upon reading:

Otherwise

I got out of bed

on two strong legs.

It might have been

otherwise. I ate

cereal, sweet

milk, ripe, flawless

peach. It might

have been otherwise.

I took the dog uphill

to the birch wood.

All morning I did

the work I love.

At noon I lay down

with my mate. It might

have been otherwise.

We ate dinner together

at a table with silver

candlesticks. It might

have been otherwise.

I slept in a bed

in a room with paintings

on the walls, and

planned another day

just like this day.

But one day, I know,

it will be otherwise.

The fragments Bottles, Suggestions From A Friend and Often are parts of a poem titled Having it Out with Melancholy. She describes her struggle with depression and the brief moments of happiness she felt when taking a Monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) called Nardil, a powerful anti-depressant. 

Jane Kenyon as translator of Anna Akhmatova liked the precision and beautiful clarity of the Russian poet’s images. Here is No. 11 from the volume Twenty Poems:

We walk along the hard crest of the snowdrift

toward my white, mysterious house,

both of us so quiet,

keeping the silence as we go along.

And sweeter even than the singing of songs

is this dream, now becoming real:

the swaying of branches brushed aside

and the faint ringing of your spurs.

9. Zakia

Zakia

Mary Oliver was born in 1935 in Maple Heights, Ohio. Her verse focuses on the quiet of occurrences of nature: industrious hummingbirds, egrets, motionless ponds, “lean owls / hunkering with their lamp-eyes.” Oliver’s poetry has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award. Reviewing Dream Work (1986) for the Nation, critic Alicia Ostriker numbered Oliver among America’s finest poets, one as “visionary as Emerson.”

Mary Oliver 

She attended Ohio State University and Vassar College, but took no degree. Oliver was deeply influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay and briefly lived in Millay’s home, helping her sister organise Millay’s papers. She met her long-time partner, Molly Malone Cook and the couple moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts. The surrounding Cape Cod landscape has had a marked influence on Oliver’s work. Oliver’s poetry is firmly rooted in place and the Romantic nature tradition. Her work received early critical attention; American Primitive (1983), her fifth book, won the Pulitzer Prize. Critics have commended Oliver’s “distinctive voice and vision.” 

Mary Oliver (R) with partner Molly Malone Cook

Dream Work (1986) continues Oliver’s search to “understand both the wonder and pain of nature” In the LA Times critic’s words. She is “among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey,” according to the poet Alicia Ostriker. 

The transition from engaging the natural world to engaging more personal realms is also evident in New and Selected Poems (1992), which won the National Book Award. Oliver summed up her desire for amazement in her poem When Death Comes from the collection New and Selected Poems: 

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life 

I was a bride married to amazement. 

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

Oliver continues her celebration of the natural world in later collections. Critics have compared Oliver to other great American lyric poets and celebrators of nature, including Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Muir, and Walt Whitman. Her familiarity with the natural world has an uncomplicated, nineteenth-century feeling. 

A prolific writer of both poetry and prose, Oliver publishes a new collection every year or two. Mary Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College, Vermont, until 2001. 

The poem, Wild Geese, selected by Zakia pays tribute to the unspoilt nature of wild animals who do not know sin or guilt, but do what comes naturally to them, whether it is flying south for winter, or nesting and mating, foraging, honking their unmelodious cry, or simply strutting around. But does the advocacy of unrepentance sit well with humans, who perform mean acts in the course of an ordinary day at the office, are quite ready to shirk their responsibility, and when tempted are apt to stray far off the narrow road? Further on Mary Oliver suggests the world of the wilderness is calling:

Meanwhile the world goes on.

...

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again

...

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese,

Canada Geese headed south for winter

One cannot end without paying tribute to her two outstanding books for teaching Poetry: A Poetry Handbook and Rules for the Dance, are used widely in writing programs. She is an acclaimed reader of poetry and has read in practically every state, as well as in foreign countries. She has led workshops at various colleges and universities, and held residencies at Case Western Reserve University, Bucknell University, University of Cincinnati, and Sweet Briar College. You can read more about her works and activities at http://maryoliver.beacon.org/

Here is a saying of hers:

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

And if you have time read this further article on Mary Oliver from The New Yorker.

10. Preeti

Preeti

Dorothy Parker was born on August 22, 1893, to J. Henry and Elizabeth Rothschild, at their summer home in West End, New Jersey. Growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, her childhood was an unhappy one. Both her mother and step-mother died when she was young; her uncle, Martin Rothschild, went down on the Titanic in 1912; and her father died the following year. Young Dorothy attended a Catholic grammar school, and later a finishing school in Morristown, NJ. Her formal education abruptly ended when she was 14.

In 1914, Dorothy sold her first poem to Vanity Fair. At age 22, she took an editorial job at Vogue. She tells of this experience, “After my father died there wasn't any money. I had to work, you see, and Mr. Crowninshield, God rest his soul, paid twelve dollars for a small verse of mine and gave me a job at ten dollars a week. Well, I thought I was Edith Sitwell.”

About her work at Vogue she said, “I wrote captions. "This little pink dress will win you a beau," that sort of thing.” She wrote poems for newspapers and magazines, and in 1917 she joined Vanity Fair, taking over from P.G. Wodehouse as drama critic. She lost the job after she panned three plays in succession whose producers had influence with the magazine. That same year she married a stockbroker, Edwin P. Parker. But the marriage was tempestuous, and the couple divorced in 1928, but she retained the surname for the rest of her life.

Dorothy Parker US Stamp

In 1919, Parker became a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, a sparkling informal gathering of leading writers who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel. Their “Vicious Circle” included Robert Benchley, Harpo Marx, George S. Kaufman, and Edna Ferber. The group was known for its scathing wit and intellectual commentary which can be witnessed in this documentary. Their talents were smart talk, wit, and style; their skill was playing with the language. 

Parker commented on the Algonquin in her Paris Review interview: “I wasn't there very often—it cost too much. Others went. Kaufman was there. I guess he was sort of funny. Mr. Benchley and Mr. Sherwood went when they had a nickel. Franklin P. Adams, whose column was widely read by people who wanted to write, would sit in occasionally. And Harold Ross, the New Yorker editor. He was a professional lunatic, but I don't know if he was a great man. He had a profound ignorance. On one of Mr. Benchley's manuscripts he wrote in the margin opposite ‘Andromache,’ ‘Who he?’ Mr. Benchley wrote back, ‘You keep out of this.’ The only one with stature who came to the Round Table was Heywood Broun.” 

In 1922, Parker published her first short story, Such a Pretty Little Picture, for Smart Set. When the New Yorker debuted in 1925, Parker was listed on the editorial board. Over the years, she contributed poetry, fiction and book reviews as the “Constant Reader.” She was a natural wit. Once given the word horticulture and asked to make a sentence, she responded: 

You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think. 

Being quite a tippler, she was advised temperance by her conservative lady friends and told that the only way to cure her fondness for drink would be to subject herelf to a frontal lobotomy; back came her repartee —

I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy! 

She also wrote this little ditty:

I like to have a martini,

Two at the very most.

After three I'm under the table,

And by four I'm under my host.

Parker had only contempt for the eager reception accorded her wit. “Why, it got so bad,” she had said bitterly, “that they began to laugh before I opened my mouth.” Her humour, according to a critic, was a “coupling of brilliant social commentary with a mind of devastating inventiveness.” Parker’s first collection of poetry, Enough Rope, was published in 1926, and was a bestseller. Her two subsequent collections were Sunset Gun in 1928 and Death and Taxes in 1931. Her collected fiction came out in 1930 as Laments for the Living.

During the 1920s, Parker traveled to Europe several times. She befriended Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, socialites Gerald and Sarah Murphy, and contributed articles to the New Yorker and Life. While her work was successful and she was well-regarded for her wit and conversational abilities, she suffered from depression and alcoholism and attempted suicide.

In 1929, she won the O. Henry Award for her autobiographical short story Big Blonde. She produced short fiction in the early 1930s, and also began writing drama reviews for the New Yorker. In 1934, Parker married actor-writer Alan Campbell in New Mexico; the couple relocated to Los Angeles and became a highly paid screenwriting team. They laboured for MGM and Paramount on mostly forgettable features, the highlight being an Academy Award nomination for A Star Is Born in 1937. They divorced in 1947, and remarried in 1950.

Parker, who became a socialist in 1927 when she became involved in the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, was called before the House on Un-American Activities in 1955. She pleaded the Fifth Amendment so as not to incriminate herself.

Parker was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1959 and was a visiting professor at California State College in Los Angeles in 1963. That same year, her husband died of an overdose. On June 6, 1967, Parker was found dead of a heart attack in a New York City hotel at age 73. A firm believer in civil rights, she bequeathed her literary estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Upon his assassination some months later, the estate was turned over to the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

This brief biography is lifted in the main from the Academy of American Poets with a couple of additions.

The first poem Purposely Ungrammtical Love Song, has these words

There's many to tell me what you are,

And never a lie to all they say.

which remind one of sonnet 138 of WS

When my love swears that she is made of truth

I do believe her, though I know she lies, 

The second poem is called Second Love. It's a warning to the man who kisses her inattentively, that the lips she kisses back with may be meant for another!

Your god defer the day I tell you this:

My lad, my lad, it is not you I kiss!

In the third poem, The Little Old Lady In Lavender Silk, the poet imagines herself as a biddy of seventy-seven, ripe with experience, being asked to give an accounting of her life. [Incidentally, ‘simoom’, meaning ‘a hot dry violent dust-laden wind from Asian and African deserts’ is the recherché word she has reached out for to rhyme with ‘bloom’.] She says in her youth

By the aid of some local Don Juan

I fell into the habit of love.

and learned

There was nothing more fun than a man!

And though she has had ups and downs, in the seniority of her life she reiterates:

       regret is no part of my plan,

And I think (if my memory's faithful)

There was nothing more fun than a man!

11. Saras

Saras

Marge Piercy wrote 19 volumes of poems and 17 novels. One of the novels is a feminist classic, Woman on the Edge of Time. She has also written a memoir called Sleeping with Cats. 

The first poem, The birthday of the world, challenges herself and asks what she has done for the freedom of others and herself.  

As these freedoms are pared,

sliced and diced, where

have I spoken out? Who

have I tried to move? 

Marge Piercy

In India at the present time we are beset by assaults on 

• freedom of speech, 
• the freedom to protest peacefully without the police clamping down, 
• the freedom to assemble as citizens, and 
• the all-important freedom of writing without self-censorship for fear of giving offence and having death threats hurled at authors.

The poet armed only with words and the courage to speak them openly, says

Give me weapons

of minute destruction. Let

my words turn into sparks.

The second poem, Colors passing through us, celebrates colours

orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs

Orange Butterfly Weed With Monarch Butterfly, Asclepias tuberosa

yellow as dandelions by the highway

Yellow dandelions by a highway

green

as a frog on a lily pad twanging,

Frog on a lily pad

Blue as cornflowers, delphiniums,

Cornflower

Delphiniums

The third poem, To be of use, signals the importance of being useful in the world at ordinary chores that are needed to keep life going. The poet lauds such steadfast people:

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

– because 

The work of the world is common as mud.

Marge Piercy was born March 31, 1936 in Detroit into a family that had been affected by the Depression. Her maternal grandmother, Hannah, of whom Piercy was particularly fond, was born in a Lithuanian shtetl (a typical old Jewish village formerly found in Eastern Europe),  as the daughter of a rabbi. “Grandmother Hannah was a great storyteller. She and my mother told many of the same stories, but always the stories came out differently.” She was raised a Jew by her grandmother and her mother and has remained one.

Piercy credits her mother with making her a poet. The mother read voraciously and encouraged her daughter to do the same. She urged her to observe sharply and remember. However, they were not really in harmony until very late in her mother’s life. Piercy was much closer to her mother than to her father, who died in 1985.

Piercy had rheumatic fever in childhood and went from being a pretty and healthy child into a skeletal creature with blue skin given to fainting. At seventeen she won a scholarship to the University of Michigan and became the first person in her family to attend college. She did okay in studies but found other aspects of college life painful.

She did not fit any image of what women were supposed to be like. Her sexuality and ambitions marked her out. She won university awards for writing. A further award also allowed her to go to France upon graduation. She finished with an M.A. from Northwestern on a fellowship.

Piercy went to France with her first husband. His expectations of conventional sex roles in marriage, combined with his inability to take her writing seriously, caused her to leave him. 

Afterwards Piercy lived in Chicago, trying to learn the craft of poetry and how to write the kind of fiction she had in mind, but could not yet produce on paper. She supported herself with part-time jobs and was involved in the civil rights movement.

She remembers those years in Chicago as the hardest of her adult life. As a writer, she was entirely invisible. She wrote novel after novel but could not get them published. Piercy wanted to write feminist fiction about working class people.

In 1962, she got married again, this time to a computer scientist. The second marriage was totally unconventional and in many ways wasn’t a marriage at all. It was an open relationship and often other people lived with them. They had serious involvements that were sometimes rewarding and sometimes ghastly. They first lived in Cambridge, then in San Francisco. Eventually, they returned to the East coast and lived in Boston. 

At that time they were both becoming upset about the war in Vietnam. Piercy began going back and forth to Ann Arbor frequently as it was there that The VOICE chapter had been started. It was the beginning of SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. She always continued to write but only when not involved in political  organising. She wrote Dance the Eagle to Sleep that way.

In the spring of 1965, they moved to Brooklyn. In 1967, she became an organizer with the SDS regional office in New York.

Her health deteriorated. The movement was split. Piercy was involved in the women’s movement, organizing groups and writing articles, but her husband felt alienated and bored.

In 1971 they moved to Cape Cod. They had little notion of what it would be like to live year round on the Cape, having never lived anywhere but in the center of cities. They bought land in the town of Wellfleet and had a simple house built. Piercy began Small changes and the Tarot poems, Laying down the tower. She regained her creativity.

She began gardening at that point. She loved grubbing in the dirt; growing fruit, vegetable, herbs and flowers. Over the years that she has lived on the Cape, she has been politically centered in Boston. Her marital relationship was really over by 1976 but disentangling it emotionally and officially took years.

Piercy’s poetry changed after moving to the Cape. She now has a sense of herself as part of the landscape and part of the web of living beings. She travels a great deal here and abroad, giving readings, workshops and lectures.

Piercy knew her current husband, Ira Wood, for six years before they married in 1982. One gift Wood has given her is that warm place of support. In the last fifteen years, she has become involved in Jewish renewal.

Piercy has always celebrated whatever she could find to celebrate. In her poetry she gives thanks and blesses the gift of writing, not because it is easy, but because it is so absorbing and exciting a labour. If she can make her living too as a writer she will consider herself lucky.

A quote from Marge Piercy:

Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.

The above biography was lifted from her website and condensed:

https://margepiercy.com/about-marge/biography/

12. Kavita

Kavita

Kavita deferred to Devika to introduce Charlotte Brontë, whom she too had chosen, merely noting that Charlotte was far better known as the novelist who wrote Jane Eyre. The poem Life was published in 1846 under Brontë’s pen name, Currer Bell. It was under this name that she published, along with her two sisters, Anne and Emily, (who wrote as Acton and Ellis Bell) Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. 

In this poem Charlotte wants to be optimistic about life, even when it is dark, for the clouds of gloom are all transient, she says. By the time the second stanza comes around there are only sunny clouds flitting by and  enjoyment beckons. The last stanza is full of resounding encouragement. Hope swells to overcome despair, and it buoys the reader out of the depths when shee is in the dumps, says the poet. All this sounds a little too hortatory, like those messages in Hallmark greeting cards.

13. Devika

Devika

Devika said she did not know Charlotte Brontë wrote poetry, since her knowledge came from reading the famous novel which particularly appeals to women readers, Jane Eyre. All the literary Brontë sisters wrote poetry, and all died young. Charlotte was the eldest of the three famous Brontë sisters whose novels have become standards of English literature. Her death at the age of 39 may have been on account of pneumonia and dehydration, but the case is not simple, as this article shows. 

In The Wood, the poem chosen by Devika, a woman is going with her husband on some clandestine and dangerous mission and they stop awhile in a forest in Normandy, across the English Channel.  She wants an equal part in the mission, sharing the danger with him on equal terms. While resting she says she is happy at the possibility of sharing a worthy cause with her husband, and desires only that 

Now I have my natural part

Of action with adventure blent

She feels “as born again”. There is a loving complicity with her soldier husband and the woman wishes to show him by deeds that he ought to trust her courage and strength both at land and sea. The poem is long, and Devika read only a few stanzas, to save time.

Charlotte Brontë was born on April 21, 1816 in Thornton, Yorkshire, England, the third of six children, to Patrick Brontë (known as ‘Patrick Brunty’), an Irish Anglican clergyman, and his wife, Maria Branwell. In April 1820 the family moved a few miles to Haworth, a remote town on the Yorkshire moors, where Patrick had been appointed Curate for life. This is where the Brontë children would spend most of their lives. 

Maria Branwell Brontë died from cancer on 15 September 1821, leaving five daughters and a son to the care of her spinster sister. In August 1824 Charlotte, along with her sisters Emily, Maria, and Elizabeth, was sent to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire, a new school for the daughters of clergymen without means; this was the school she would describe as Lowood School in Jane Eyre. The school was a horrific experience for the girls and conditions were appalling. They were regularly deprived of food, beaten by teachers and humiliated for the slightest error. 

The school was unheated and the pupils slept two to a bed for warmth. Seven pupils died in a typhus epidemic that swept the school and all four of the Brontë girls became very ill – Maria and Elizabeth dying of tuberculosis in 1825. Her experiences at the school deeply affected Brontë – her health never recovered and she immortalised the cruel and brutal treatment in her novel, Jane Eyre. Following the tragedy, their father withdrew his daughters from the school.



After her father began to suffer from a lung disorder, Charlotte was sent to complete her education at Roe Head school in Mirfield from 1831 to 1832. The school was extremely small with only ten pupils; the top floor was completely unused and believed to be haunted by the ghost of a young lady dressed in silk. This story fascinated Brontë and was the inspiration for Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre.


Brontë left the school after a few years, however she returned in 1835 to take up a position as a teacher, and used her wages to pay for Emily and Anne to be taught at the school. However, teaching did not appeal to Brontë and in 1838 she left Roe Head to become a governess to the Sidgewick family – this was partly from a sense of adventure and a desire to see the world, and partly from financial necessity. 

Charlotte became pregnant soon after her wedding, but her health declined rapidly.  She died, with her unborn child, on 31 March 1855, aged 38.

THE POEMS

1. Hemjit - poem by Anne Brontë (1820 – 1849)

Power Of Love

Love, indeed thy strength is mighty

Thus, alone, such strife to bear --

Three 'gainst one, and never ceasing --

Death, and Madness, and Despair! 

'Tis not my own strength has saved me;

Health, and hope, and fortitude,

But for love, had long since failed me;

Heart and soul had sunk subdued.

Often, in my wild impatience,

I have lost my trust in Heaven,

And my soul has tossed and struggled,

Like a vessel tempest-driven;

But the voice of my beloved

In my ear has seemed to say --

'O, be patient if thou lov'st me!'

And the storm has passed away.

When outworn with weary thinking,

Sight and thought were waxing dim,

And my mind began to wander,

And my brain began to swim,

Then those hands outstretched to save me

Seemed to call me back again --

Those dark eyes did so implore me

To resume my reason's reign,

That I could not but remember

How her hopes were fixed on me,

And, with one determined effort,

Rose, and shook my spirit free.

When hope leaves my weary spirit --

All the power to hold it gone --

That loved voice so loudly prays me,

'For my sake, keep hoping on,'

That, at once my strength renewing,

Though Despair had crushed me down,

I can burst his bonds asunder,

And defy his deadliest frown.

When, from nights of restless tossing,

Days of gloom and pining care,

Pain and weakness, still increasing,

Seem to whisper 'Death is near,'

And I almost bid him welcome,

Knowing he would bring release,

Weary of this restless struggle --

Longing to repose in peace,

Then a glance of fond reproval

Bids such selfish longings flee

And a voice of matchless music

Murmurs 'Cherish life for me!'

Roused to newborn strength and courage,

Pain and grief, I cast away,

Health and life, I keenly follow,

Mighty Death is held at bay.

Yes, my love, I will be patient!

Firm and bold my heart shall be:

Fear not -- though this life is dreary,

I can bear it well for thee.

Let our foes still rain upon me

Cruel wrongs and taunting scorn;

'Tis for thee their hate pursues me,

And for thee, it shall be borne!

2. Shoba - poem by Gabriela Mistral (1889 – 1957)

Decalogue Of The Artist

I.  You shall love beauty, which is the shadow of God upon the universe.

II.  There is no godless art.  Though you do not worship any Creator, still you affirm Him by creating as He does.

III. You shall not let beauty be a bait for the senses, but rather, a sustenance given to the soul.

IV.  You shall never use beauty as a pretext for luxury or vanity, but as a practice of spirit.

V.  You shall not seek beauty in carnivals or fairs, nor hawk your work there, for beauty is virginal 

and not found in spectacle.

VI.  Beauty shall move from your heart into song, and it is you who shall be the first to be purified.

VII.  The beauty you create shall be also known as mercy, and it shall console the hearts of men.

VIII.  You shall bring forth your work as one brings forth a son: from the blood of your own heart.

IX.  Beauty shall not be a sedative, but a strong wine that inflames you to act, for if you stop being a simple man or woman, you will also stop being an artist.

X.  Each act of creation shall leave you humble, for it was never as great as your own dream, and always inferior to that greatest dream of God: Nature.

(Translated from Spanish by Paul Weinfield, © 2014)

3. Geetha - poem by Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963)

Mirror 

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful ‚

The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

4. KumKum - Sonnets 14 & 22 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 – 1861)

Sonnet #14

If thou must love me, let it be for nought

Except for love’s sake only.  Do not say

“I love her for her smile—her look—her way

Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought

That falls in well with mine, and certes brought

A sense of pleasant ease on such a day”—

For these things in themselves, Belovëd, may

Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought,

May be unwrought so.  Neither love me for

Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry,—

A creature might forget to weep, who bore

Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!

But love me for love’s sake, that evermore

Thou may’st love on, through love’s eternity.

Sonnet # 22

When our two souls stand up erect and strong,

Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,

Until the lengthening wings break into fire

At either curvëd point,—what bitter wrong

Can the earth do to us, that we should not long

Be here contented?  Think!  In mounting higher,

The angels would press on us and aspire

To drop some golden orb of perfect song

Into our deep, dear silence.  Let us stay

Rather on earth, Belovëd,—where the unfit

Contrarious moods of men recoil away

And isolate pure spirits, and permit

A place to stand and love in for a day,

With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.

5. Pamela - poem by Marianne Moore (1887 – 1972)

Poetry

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond

      all this fiddle.

   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one

      discovers that there is in

   it after all, a place for the genuine.

      Hands that can grasp, eyes

      that can dilate, hair that can rise

         if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because

      they are

   useful; when they become so derivative as to become

      unintelligible, the

   same thing may be said for all of us—that we

      do not admire what

      we cannot understand. The bat,

         holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless

      wolf under

   a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse

      that feels a flea, the base-

   ball fan, the statistician—case after case

      could be cited did

      one wish it; nor is it valid

         to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must

      make a distinction

   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets,

      the result is not poetry,

   nor till the autocrats among us can be

     “literalists of

      the imagination”—above

         insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them,

      shall we have

   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—

   the raw material of poetry in

      all its rawness, and

      that which is on the other hand,

         genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

6. Joe - 4 poems by Marina Tsvetaeva (1892 – 1941)

From  Girlfriend for Sofia Parnok

Beneath this caressing, plush blanket 

I call up yesterday's dream. 

What was it? Whose was the victory? 

Who was defeated? 

As I think it over again and again 

I keep trying to find 

the words for what happened: 

Was it love?

Who was the hunter? Who the prey? 

The roles reverse. 

What does the Siberian tiger 

understand as he purrs? 

Who in our duel of wills 

was left holding a bauble? 

Was it your heart — or mine 

flew off at a gallop? 

And, after all, what did happen? 

Something desired — or regretted? 

I can't decide if I won 

or if I was conquered … 

23 October 1914  

A poem for Rilke after this death

Do you ever — think about me, I wonder? 

What do you feel now, what is it like up there? 

How was your first sight of the Universe, 

a last vision of the whole planet — 

which must include this poet remaining in it, 

not yet ashes, still a spirit in a body — 

seen from however many miles stretch 

from Creation to eternity, far above 

the Mediterranean in its crystal saucer — 

where else would you look, leaning out 

with your elbows on the edge of your box seat 

if not on this poet, with her many griefs…11 

No one has taken anything away (To Osip Mandelstam)

No one has taken anything away — 

there is even a sweetness for me in being apart. 

I kiss you now across the many 

hundreds of miles that separate us. 

I know: our gifts are unequal, which is 

why my voice is — quiet, for the first time. 

What can my untutored verse 

matter to you, a young Derzhavin? 

For your terrible flight I give you blessing. 

Fly, then, young eagle! You 

have stared into the sun without blinking. 

Can my young gaze be too heavy for you? 

No one has ever stared more 

tenderly or more fixedly after you... 

I kiss you — across hundreds of 

separating years. 

1916 

(Gavrila Derzhavin was a classical poet of 18th century Russia, esteemed even before Pushkin)

An Attempt at Jealousy, written after a chance encounter with her lover Rodzevich and his newly acquired fiancée, in 1924: 

How's your life with the other one— 

Easier?—A stroke of the oar!— 

Like the coastline 

Does it take long for the memory to recede

Of me, a floating island 

(In the sky—not on the waters!) 

Souls, souls! you should be sisters, 

Never lovers—you! 

How's your life with an ordinary 

Woman? Without deities? 

Now that you've dethroned your 

Queen

(Having stepped down yourself). 

* * * 

How’s your life with goods 

From the market? Is the price steep? 

After Carrara marble 

How’s your life with plaster 

Dust? (From a solid block was hewn 

A god—and smashed to bits!) 

life with one of a 

hundred-thousand —

You, who have known Lilith! 

Are you sated with the newest thing 

From the market? Having cooled to 

magic, 

How’s your life with an earthly 

Woman, without a sixth 

Sense? Well, let's hear it: are you 

No? In a shallow bottomless pit— 

How’s your life, my darling? Harder 

than, 

Just like, mine with another man? 

(Translated by Barbara Heldt.) 

7. Thommo - 3 poems by Florence Earle Coates (1850 – 1927)

1. Better to Die

Better to die, where gallant men are dying,

    Than to live on with them that basely fly;

Better to fall, the soulless Fates defying,

Than unassailed to wander vainly, trying

    To turn one's face from an accusing sky!

Days matter not, nor years to the undaunted;

    To live is nothing, – but to nobly live!

The poorest visions of the honor-haunted

Are better worth than pleasure-masks enchanted,

    And they win life who life for others give.

The planets in their watchful course behold them –

    To live is nothing, – but to nobly live! –

For though the Earth with mother-hands remold them,

Though Ocean in his billowy arms enfold them,

    They are as gods, who life to others give!

2. Last Night I Dreamed

Last night I dreamed, mine enemy,

⁠That you were at my side,

As in the days e'er coldness came

⁠Our spirits to divide.

You smiled again with cordial eyes

⁠And simple heart elate,

As in the happy olden time

⁠That nothing knew of hate,

And I forgot, in converse glad,

⁠The bitterness since then,

And nearer to my thought you seemed—

⁠Dearer—than other men;

For memory, with softened touch

⁠Of pity, that caressed,

Made every kindness glow more bright,—

⁠And blotted out the rest.

Last night from dreams, mine enemy,

⁠I woke in tears, and knew

The soul, apart from mortal strife,

⁠Has naught with hate to do.

3. Why Did You Go?

DEATH called,—but why did you go?

⁠Did you not know

That life is better than death,

That snatches the breath

Out of joy?—that love is better than death?

⁠Did you not understand

⁠How guarded the Land

Where death leads?—that howe'er the heart yearn,

One may never return

⁠From the gloom

Of that dwelling-place lone that doth hold and entomb?

⁠O my sweet!

Might I follow your feet,—

Afar from the sun and the bloom-scented air,

⁠I would open once more

⁠The inexorable door,

And drink of dark Lethe, your prison to share!

8. Priya - some poems by Jane Kenyon (1947 – 1995)

1. Biscuit

The dog has cleaned his bowl 

and his reward is a biscuit, 

which I put in his mouth 

like a priest offering the host. 




I can't bear that trusting face! 

He asks for bread, expects 

bread, and I in my power 

might have given him a stone.

Having it Out with Melancholy

          If many remedies are prescribed

          for an illness, you may be certain

          that the illness has no cure.

                              A. P. CHEKHOV

                             The Cherry Orchard

2. Bottles

Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin, 

Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax, 

Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft. 

The coated ones smell sweet or have 

no smell; the powdery ones smell 

like the chemistry lab at school 

that made me hold my breath.

3. Suggestion From A Friend

You wouldn’t be so depressed

if you really believed in God.

4. Often 

Often I go to bed as soon after dinner 

as seems adult

(I mean I try to wait for dark)

in order to push away 

from the massive pain in sleep’s 

frail wicker coracle.

5. Woman, Why are you weeping? 

One morning after the Crucifixion, Mary Magdalene came to see the body of Christ. She found the stone rolled away from an empty tomb. Two figures dressed in white asked her, "Woman, why are you weeping?"

"Because," she replied, "they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him."


1.Returned from long travel, I sit

in the familiar, sun-streaked pew, waiting

for the bread and wine of holy Communion.

The old comfort does not rise in me, only

apathy and bafflement.

                                India, with her ceaseless

bells and fire, her crows calling stridently

all night; India with her sandalwood

smoke, and graceful gods, many-headed and many-

armed, has taken away the one who blessed

and kept me.

            The thing is done, as surely

as if my luggage had been stolen from the train.




Men and women with faces as calm as lakes at dusk

have taken away my Lord, and I don't know

where to find him.

2.What is Brahman? I don't know Brahman.

I don't know saccidandana, the bliss

of the absolute and unknowable.

I only know that I have lost the Lord

in whose image I was made.


Whom shall I thank for this pear,

sweet and white? Food is God, prasadam,

God's mercy. But who is this God?

The one who is not this, not that?

The absurdity of all religious forms

breaks over me, as the absurdity of language

made me feel faint the day I heard friends

giving commands to their neighbor's dog

in Spanish.... At first I laughed,

but then I became frightened.

                             *

3.They have taken away my Lord, a person

whose life I held inside me. I saw him

heal, and teach, and eat among sinners.

I saw him break the sabbath to make a higher

sabbath. I saw him lose his temper.


I knew his anguish when he called, "I thirst!,"

and received vinegar to drink. The Bible

does not say it, but I am sure he turned

his head away. Not long after he cried, "My God,

my God, why have you forsaken me?,"

I watched him reveal himself risen

to Magdalene with a single word: "Mary!"

It was my habit to speak to him. His goodness

perfumed my life. I loved the Lord, he heard

my cry, and he loved me as his own.




4.Rajiv did not weep. He did not cover

his face with his hands when we rowed past

the dead body of a newborn nudging the grassy

banks at Benares -- close by a snake

rearing up, and a cast-off garland of flowers.

He explained. When a family are too poor

to cremate their dead, they bring the body

here, and slip it into the waters of the Ganges

and Yamuna Rivers.

                                Perhaps the child was dead

at birth; perhaps it had the misfortune

to be born a girl. The mother may have walked

two days with her baby's body to this place

where Gandhi's ashes once struck the waves

with a sound like gravel being scuffed

over the edge of a bridge.

"What shall we do about this?" I asked

my God, who even then was leaving me. The reply

was scorching wind, lapping of water, pull

of the black oarsmen on the oars.... 

9. Preeti - 3 poems by Dorothy Parker (1893 – 1967)

Purposely Ungrammatical Love Song 

There's many and many, and not so far,

Is willing to dry my tears away;

There's many to tell me what you are,

And never a lie to all they say.

It's little the good to hide my head,

It's never the use to bar my door;

There's many as counts the tears I shed,

There's mourning hearts for my heart is

There's honester eyes than your blue eyes,

There's better a mile than such as you.

But when did I say that I was wise,

And when did I hope that you were true?

Second Love

"So surely is she mine," you say, and turn

Your quick and steady mind to harder things-

To bills and bonds and talk of what men earn-

And whistle up the stair, of evenings.

And do you see a dream behind my eyes,

Or ask a simple question twice of me-

"Thus women are," you say; for men are wise

And tolerant, in their security.

How shall I count the midnights I have known

When calm you turn to me, nor feel me start,

To find my easy lips upon your own

And know my breast beneath your rhythmic heart.

Your god defer the day I tell you this:

My lad, my lad, it is not you I kiss!

The Little Old Lady In Lavender Silk

I was seventy-seven, come August,

I shall shortly be losing my bloom;

I've experienced zephyr and raw gust

And (symbolical) flood and simoom.

When you come to this time of abatement,

To this passing from Summer to Fall,

It is manners to issue a statement

As to what you got out of it all.

So I'll say, though reflection unnerves me

And pronouncements I dodge as I can,

That I think (if my memory serves me)

There was nothing more fun than a man!

In my youth, when the crescent was too wan

To embarrass with beams from above,

By the aid of some local Don Juan

I fell into the habit of love.

And I learned how to kiss and be merry- an

Education left better unsung.

My neglect of the waters Pierian

Was a scandal, when Grandma was young.

Though the shabby unbalanced the splendid,

And the bitter outmeasured the sweet,

I should certainly do as I then did,

Were I given the chance to repeat.

For contrition is hollow and wraithful,

And regret is no part of my plan,

And I think (if my memory's faithful)

There was nothing more fun than a man!

The Whistling Girl 

Back of my back, they talk of me,

Gabble and honk and hiss;

Let them batten, and let them be-

Me, I can sing them this:

"Better to shiver beneath the stars,

Head on a faithless breast,

Than peer at the night through rusted bars,

And share an irksome rest.

"Better to see the dawn come up,

Along of a trifling one,

Than set a steady man's cloth and cup

And pray the day be done.

"Better be left by twenty dears

Than lie in a loveless bed;

Better a loaf that's wet with tears

Than cold, unsalted bread."

Back of my back, they wag their chins,

Whinny and bleat and sigh;

But better a heart a-bloom with sins

Than hearts gone yellow and dry!

10. Zakia - a poem by Mary Oliver (1935 – )

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

11. Saras - 3 poems by Marge Piercy (1936 – )

The birthday of the world

On the birthday of the world

I begin to contemplate

what I have done and left

undone, but this year

not so much rebuilding

of my perennially damaged

psyche, shoring up eroding

friendships, digging out

stumps of old resentments

that refuse to rot on their own.

No, this year I want to call

myself to task for what

I have done and not done

for peace. How much have

I dared in opposition?

How much have I put

on the line for freedom?

For mine and others?

As these freedoms are pared,

sliced and diced, where

have I spoken out? Who

have I tried to move? In

this holy season, I stand

self-convicted of sloth

in a time when lies choke

the mind and rhetoric

bends reason to slithering

choking pythons. Here

I stand before the gates

opening, the fire dazzling

my eyes, and as I approach

what judges me, I judge

myself. Give me weapons

of minute destruction. Let

my words turn into sparks.

Colors passing through us

Purple as tulips in May, mauve

into lush velvet, purple

as the stain blackberries leave

on the lips, on the hands,

the purple of ripe grapes

sunlit and warm as flesh.

Every day I will give you a color,

like a new flower in a bud vase

on your desk. Every day

I will paint you, as women

color each other with henna

on hands and on feet.

Red as henna, as cinnamon,

as coals after the fire is banked,

the cardinal in the feeder,

the roses tumbling on the arbor

their weight bending the wood

the red of the syrup I make from petals.

Orange as the perfumed fruit

hanging their globes on the glossy tree,

orange as pumpkins in the field,

orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs

who come to eat it, orange as my

cat running lithe through the high grass.

Yellow as a goat’s wise and wicked eyes,

yellow as a hill of daffodils,

yellow as dandelions by the highway,

yellow as butter and egg yolks,

yellow as a school bus stopping you,

yellow as a slicker in a downpour.

Here is my bouquet, here is a sing

song of all the things you make

me think of, here is oblique

praise for the height and depth

of you and the width too.

Here is my box of new crayons at your feet.

Green as mint jelly, green

as a frog on a lily pad twanging,

the green of cos lettuce upright

about to bolt into opulent towers,

green as Grand Chartreuse in a clear

glass, green as wine bottles.

Blue as cornflowers, delphiniums,

bachelors’ buttons. Blue as Roquefort,

blue as Saga. Blue as still water.

Blue as the eyes of a Siamese cat.

Blue as shadows on new snow, as a spring

azure sipping from a puddle on the blacktop.

Cobalt as the midnight sky

when day has gone without a trace

and we lie in each other’s arms

eyes shut and fingers open

and all the colors of the world

pass through our bodies like strings of fire.

To be of use

The people I love the best

jump into work head first

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,

the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

12. Kavita -  poem by Charlotte Brontë (1816 – 1855)

Life

Life, believe, is not a dream

So dark as sages say;

Oft a little morning rain

Foretells a pleasant day.

Sometimes there are clouds of gloom,

But these are transient all;

If the shower will make the roses bloom,

O why lament its fall?

Rapidly, merrily,

Life’s sunny hours flit by,

Gratefully, cheerily

Enjoy them as they fly!

What though Death at times steps in,

And calls our Best away?

What though sorrow seems to win,

O’er hope, a heavy sway?

Yet Hope again elastic springs,

Unconquered, though she fell;

Still buoyant are her golden wings,

Still strong to bear us well.

Manfully, fearlessly,

The day of trial bear,

For gloriously, victoriously,

Can courage quell despair!

13. Devika -  poem by Charlotte Brontë (1816 – 1855)

The Wood

BUT two miles more, and then we rest!

Well, there is still an hour of day,

And long the brightness of the West

Will light us on our devious way;

Sit then, awhile, here in this wood--

So total is the solitude,

We safely may delay.

These massive roots afford a seat,

Which seems for weary travellers made.

There rest. The air is soft and sweet

In this sequestered forest glade,

And there are scents of flowers around,

The evening dew draws from the ground;

How soothingly they spread!

Yes; I was tired, but not at heart;

No--that beats full of sweet content,

For now I have my natural part

Of action with adventure blent;

Cast forth on the wide world with thee,

And all my once waste energy

To weighty purpose bent.

Yet--sayst thou, spies around us roam,

Our aims are termed conspiracy?

Haply, no more our English home

An anchorage for us may be?

That there is risk our mutual blood

May redden in some lonely wood

The knife of treachery?

Sayst thou, that where we lodge each night,

In each lone farm, or lonelier hall

Of Norman Peer--ere morning light

Suspicion must as duly fall,

As day returns--such vigilance

Presides and watches over France,

Such rigour governs all?

I fear not, William; dost thou fear?

So that the knife does not divide,

It may be ever hovering near:

I could not tremble at thy side,

And strenuous love--like mine for thee--

Is buckler strong 'gainst treachery,

And turns its stab aside.

I am resolved that thou shalt learn

To trust my strength as I trust thine;

I am resolved our souls shall burn

With equal, steady, mingling shine;

Part of the field is conquered now,

Our lives in the same channel flow,

Along the self-same line;

And while no groaning storm is heard,

Thou seem'st content it should be so,

But soon as comes a warning word

Of danger--straight thine anxious brow

Bends over me a mournful shade,

As doubting if my powers are made

To ford the floods of woe.

Know, then it is my spirit swells,

And drinks, with eager joy, the air

Of freedom--where at last it dwells,

Chartered, a common task to share

With thee, and then it stirs alert,

And pants to learn what menaced hurt

Demands for thee its care.

Remember, I have crossed the deep,

And stood with thee on deck, to gaze

On waves that rose in threatening heap,

While stagnant lay a heavy haze,

Dimly confusing sea with sky,

And baffling, even, the pilot's eye,

Intent to thread the maze--

Of rocks, on Bretagne's dangerous coast,

And find a way to steer our band

To the one point obscure, which lost,

Flung us, as victims, on the strand;--

All, elsewhere, gleamed the Gallic sword,

And not a wherry could be moored

Along the guarded land.

I feared not then--I fear not now;

The interest of each stirring scene

Wakes a new sense, a welcome glow,

In every nerve and bounding vein ;

Alike on turbid Channel sea,

Or in still wood of Normandy,

I feel as born again.

The rain descended that wild morn

When, anchoring in the cove at last,

Our band, all weary and forlorn

Ashore, like wave-worn sailors, cast--

Sought for a sheltering roof in vain,

And scarce could scanty food obtain

To break their morning fast.

Thou didst thy crust with me divide,

Thou didst thy cloak around me fold;

And, sitting silent by thy side,

I ate the bread in peace untold:

Given kindly from thy hand, 'twas sweet

As costly fare or princely treat

On royal plate of gold.

Sharp blew the sleet upon my face,

And, rising wild, the gusty wind

Drove on those thundering waves apace,

Our crew so late had left behind;

But, spite of frozen shower and storm,

So close to thee, my heart beat warm,

And tranquil slept my mind.

So now--nor foot-sore nor opprest

With walking all this August day,

I taste a heaven in this brief rest,

This gipsy-halt beside the way.

England's wild flowers are fair to view,

Like balm is England's summer dew

Like gold her sunset ray.

But the white violets, growing here,

Are sweeter than I yet have seen,

And ne'er did dew so pure and clear

Distil on forest mosses green,

As now, called forth by summer heat,

Perfumes our cool and fresh retreat--

These fragrant limes between.

That sunset! Look beneath the boughs,

Over the copse--beyond the hills;

How soft, yet deep and warm it glows,

And heaven with rich suffusion fills;

With hues where still the opal's tint,

Its gleam of prisoned fire is blent,

Where flame through azure thrills!

Depart we now--for fast will fade

That solemn splendour of decline,

And deep must be the after-shade

As stars alone to-night will shine;

No moon is destined--pale--to gaze

On such a day's vast Phoenix blaze,

A day in fires decayed!

There--hand-in-hand we tread again

The mazes of this varying wood,

And soon, amid a cultured plain,

Girt in with fertile solitude,

We shall our resting-place descry,

Marked by one roof-tree, towering high

Above a farmstead rude.

Refreshed, erelong, with rustic fare,

We'll seek a couch of dreamless ease;

Courage will guard thy heart from fear,

And Love give mine divinest peace:

To-morrow brings more dangerous toil,

And through its conflict and turmoil

We'll pass, as God shall please.

(1846)

15. Gopa -  3 poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1952)

The Penitent

I had a little Sorrow, 

Born of a little Sin, 

I found a room all damp with gloom 

And shut us all within; 

And, "Little Sorrow, weep," said I, 

"And, Little Sin, pray God to die, 

And I upon the floor will lie 

And think how bad I've been!" 

Alas for pious planning — 

It mattered not a whit! 

As far as gloom went in that room, 

The lamp might have been lit! 

My Little Sorrow would not weep, 

My Little Sin would go to sleep — 

To save my soul I could not keep 

My graceless mind on it! 

So up I got in anger, 

And took a book I had, 

And put a ribbon on my hair 

To please a passing lad. 

And, "One thing there's no getting by — 

I've been a wicked girl," said I; 

"But if I can't be sorry, why, 

I might as well be glad!" 

Song of a Second April

April this year, not otherwise

   Than April of a year ago,

Is full of whispers, full of sighs,

   Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;

   Hepaticas that pleased you so

Are here again, and butterflies.

There rings a hammering all day,

   And shingles lie about the doors;

In orchards near and far away

   The grey wood-pecker taps and bores;

   The men are merry at their chores,

And children earnest at their play.

The larger streams run still and deep,

   Noisy and swift the small brooks run

Among the mullein stalks the sheep

   Go up the hillside in the sun,

   Pensively,—only you are gone,

You that alone I cared to keep.

Time does not bring relief    (Sonnet II)

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied   

Who told me time would ease me of my pain!   

I miss him in the weeping of the rain;   

I want him at the shrinking of the tide;

The old snows melt from every mountain-side,   

And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;   

But last year’s bitter loving must remain

Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.   

There are a hundred places where I fear   

To go,—so with his memory they brim.   

And entering with relief some quiet place   

Where never fell his foot or shone his face   

I say, “There is no memory of him here!”   

And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

Time does not bring relief    (Sonnet II)

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied   

Who told me time would ease me of my pain!   

I miss him in the weeping of the rain;   

I want him at the shrinking of the tide;

The old snows melt from every mountain-side,   

And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;   

But last year’s bitter loving must remain

Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.   

There are a hundred places where I fear   

To go,—so with his memory they brim.   

And entering with relief some quiet place   

Where never fell his foot or shone his face   

I say, “There is no memory of him here!”   

And so stand stricken, so remembering him.