Words

Sylvia Plath

Axes

After whose stroke the wood rings,

And the echoes!

Echoes traveling

Off from the center like horses.
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The sap

Wells like tears, like the

Water striving

To re-establish its mirror

Over the rock
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That drops and turns,

A white skull,

Eaten by weedy greens.

Years later I

Encounter them on the road—-
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Words dry and riderless,

The indefatigable hoof-taps.

While

From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars

Govern a life.
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Poetry pharmacy set to open in Shropshire

The Emergency Poet, Deborah Alma, plans to dispense literary first aid from a shop in Bishop’s Castle

Alison Flood

Following in the hallowed footsteps of Milton, who wrote in 1671 that “apt words have power to swage / The tumours of a troubled mind / And are as balm to festered wounds”, the poet Deborah Alma is preparing to open the UK’s first poetry pharmacy. Here, instead of sleeping pills and multivitamins, customers will be offered prescriptions of Derek Walcott and Elizabeth Bishop.
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Alma, who as the “Emergency Poet” has prescribed poems as cures from the back of a 1970s ambulance for the last six years, is now setting up a permanent outlet in a shop at Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire. An old Edwardian ironmonger’s, it still has the original fixtures and fittings, and, together with her partner, the TS Eliot prize-shortlisted poet James Sheard, Alma is preparing to turn it into a haven “to help ease a variety of maladies with the soothing therapy of Poetry”.
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Dressed in a white coat and stethoscope, Alma says she was invited to appear as the Emergency Poet at “schools, hospitals and festivals all over the place, but I’m a middle-aged woman and I’m getting a bit old for driving around”. She first noticed the shop on Bishop’s Castle High Street two years ago. “It’s got all the original shelves, drawers, the oak counter; it’s beautiful and I thought: ‘Wow, that would make a fantastic poetry pharmacy!’ Two years later, we’ve done it and got a mortgage,” she says.
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From “As I Walked Out One Evening”

By W. H. Auden

“In the burrows of the Nightmare
 Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
 And coughs when you would kiss.
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“In headaches and in worry
 Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
 Tomorrow or today.
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“Into many a green valley
 Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
 And the diver’s brilliant bow.
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“O plunge your hands in water,
 Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
 And wonder what you’ve missed.
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“The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
 The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the teacup opens
 A lane to the land of the dead.
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Wielded by a Wizard

Seamus Perry

Selected Poems and Prose by Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy.

Quite a few of Shelley’s contemporaries came to the view that he wasn’t all there – the inhabitants of Marlow, for example, who were treated to the recurrent spectacle of a disgraceful young radical poet returning distractedly to his cottage after long scrambles in the woods. ‘He was the most interesting figure I ever saw,’ a child witness recalled later in life, still much struck. ‘His steps were often hurried, and sometimes he was rather fantastically arrayed … on his head would be a wreath of what in Marlow we call “old man’s beard” and wild flowers intermixed; at these times he seemed quite absorbed, and he dashed along regardless of all he met or passed.’ Not all the neighbours thought so admiringly of him, needless to say; and his poetry too would find detractors as well as admirers, dividing opinion over the next two hundred years with comical extremity. William Hazlitt, although notionally on the same side in the big political questions of the day, was pugnaciously uncharmed by the cast of mind that he discerned in Shelley’s dashing about, and anticipated a whole school of criticism: ‘There is no caput mortuum of worn-out thread-bare experience to serve as a ballast to his mind; it is all volatile intellectual salt of tartar, that refuses to combine its evanescent, inflammable essence with any thing solid or any thing lasting.’ But others found this odd sense of irreality more winning, or at least arresting. Getting to know him for the first time, his future sister-in-law reported delightedly that Shelley behaved ‘just as if he were Adam in Paradise before his fall’, and she was not alone in finding in him an innocence of the world that lay about him.
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Homage

Stephen Dunn

From:

One Hundred Poems That Capture the Meaning of Joy

Christian Wiman’s new anthology brings together an admirable range of meditations on an emotion whose place in the world today can seem uncertain.

ADRIANNA SMITH

In his new anthology, Joy: 100 Poems, the writer Christian Wiman takes readers through the ostensible ordinariness of life and reveals the extraordinary. “We ate, and talked, and went to bed, / And slept. It was a miracle,” Donald Hall writes in “Summer Kitchen.” Through a luminous array of poetry and prose, Wiman captures joy in contemporary contexts. These works span from the 20th century to the present day, and as a result, the real, the specific, and the familiar shine through: “She’s slicing ripe white peaches / into the Tony the Tiger bowl,” Sarah Lindsay describes in “Small Moth.”
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Wiman’s anthology is a reminder that if the news can bring people closer to the suffering of others, literature can bring people closer to the intensities of those experiences. This collection is a study of one of these intensities, namely joy, which Wiman knows is a close bedfellow with sorrow. As he explains in his deeply informed and beautiful introduction, the word joy alone can make writers and readers apprehensive: How can one speak of that feeling at a moment when it seems that anger, confusion, and pain are everywhere?

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To Sleep

John Keats

O soft embalmer of the still midnight,

Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,

Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,

Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:

O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close

In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,

Or wait the ‘Amen,’ ere thy poppy throws

Around my bed its lulling charities.

Then save me, or the passed day will shine

Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,—

Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords

Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;

Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,

And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.
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Listen to Benjamin Britten’s Serenade Op. 31: 6, inspired by this poem

When song lyrics become literature

BY JUDE ROGERS

What happens to a song lyric when it lands on the page? It becomes oddly silent but also not silent. Ghosts of its usual rhythms lie at the beginnings and ends of its lines. The blank space around it seems weirdly disconcerting, like white noise.
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This happens, of course, because a song lyric isn’t poetry. A poem exists between pages of paper, bound by its own internal logic. A lyric arrives from the wider world, laden with decades of meaning and remembered melody, and is unmoored violently and suddenly from its bearings. It is also presented for the reader’s eye – which implies an act of choice – not the listener’s ear. The ear could have heard an unforgettable lyric quite by chance on an otherwise ordinary morning. This serendipity disappears in print, although we still hunt for magic within these new leaves.

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The Dream

by Lola Ridge

I have a dream

to fill the golden sheath

of a remembered day….

(Air

heavy and massed and blue

as the vapor of opium…

domes

fired in sulphurous mist…

sea

quiescent as a gray seal…

and the emerging sun

spurting up gold

over Sydney, smoke-pale, rising out of the bay….)

But the day is an up-turned cup

and its sun a junk of red iron

guttering in sluggish-green water –

where shall I pour my dream?

On Philip Levine, the Workingman’s Poet

By Paul Berman

The late Philip Levine was officially appointed Poet Laureate of the United States in 2011, but I prefer to think of him as the once and enduring Poet Laureate of something smaller, which is a particular and narrow strand of thought and emotion, old and traditional in American literature, and not widely understood. His broad narrative themes are, of course, industrial and proletarian. He sings of Detroit from its days of auto-factory glory:.

A winter Tuesday, the city pouring fire,

Ford Rouge sulfurs the sun, Cadillac, Lincoln,

Chevy gray …

And he is the poet of workaday exhaustion and routine:

Under the blue

hesitant light another day

at Automotive

in the city of dreams ….

He seethes at the oppressive realities of factory life, and sometimes he waves an angry fist, which might lead you to suppose that, in bourgeois and snobby America, he must have been and must still be a major provocateur. But America is not really so bourgeois and snobby. Songs of Labor was Whittier’s book title in 1850. Proletarianism in poetry has always been the height of American respectability. I will grant that over the years it has sometimes been odd to discover Levine’s horny-handed odes to the nightshift laid out like pastries in the creamy columns of The New Yorker. But The New Yorker has never been as prissy as its page layout might lead you to suppose.

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