Tag Archives: Poetry

Inhuman Indifference

Posted on May 8, 2017 by Lee

When Kenneth Rexroth heard Dylan Thomas had died, he wrote a poem. He wrote about who he blamed for the poet’s death: and he finds fault with us, with society. He uses “You” in the poem, addressing all of us. … Continue reading →

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Where Cows Are More Real Than Policemen

Posted on April 20, 2017 by Lee

Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote a poem about a dog. This dog is a “real realist,” which means he looks up and down and smells with his nose and asks questions and doesn’t have any smart answers. “Dog” is a poem about … Continue reading →

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Beat Freedom

Posted on December 12, 2016 by Lee

Gregory Corso’s Variations on a Generation, exploring what it means to be “beat.” First it’s about how to write poetry: beat writers use “spontaneity ‘bop prosody’ surreal-real images jumps beats cool measures long rapidic vowels, long long lines, and, the … Continue reading →

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Salut Au Monde!

Posted on October 23, 2016 by Lee

Walt Whitman was a writer of light and vision. He invites us to see: cloud-topped mountains, great lakes and rivers, the oceans and those who sail on the ocean, the many different countries of the earth and the people that … Continue reading →

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Notes on Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Lee

Allen Ginsberg gives us picture after picture of the lost minds, “the best minds of my generation”, images of entire lives lived and lived out and used up, flashes of light and life like the images in Whitman, who also … Continue reading →

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The Very Last Love in the World

Posted on August 8, 2016 by Lee

Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “The Backbone Flute” is a poem about desire, the mystery of where desires come from, and how they can fade and be forgotten. And it’s about the suffering of an artist, a poet, whose desires seem too wide … Continue reading →

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Sunflowers in the Sunset

Posted on June 21, 2016 by Lee

“We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we’re golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our own … Continue reading →

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Notes on “Who Be Kind To” by Allen Ginsberg

Posted on October 15, 2015 by Lee

“Who Be Kind To” by Allen Ginsberg: a meditation on the importance of kindness, and what it means to be kind. Kindness is important because every individual is “one and perishable”. Vulnerable. To recognise yourself as one and perishable is … Continue reading →

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“This is realism”: Lessons from Poetry

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Lee

Langdon Hammer describes the stone that Yeats’s fisherman sits on (in the poem “The Fisherman”) as “resistant” and “non-ideal, that is, real”. This equation of “non-ideal” with its common meaning of “imperfect” (as in “my new flat isn’t ideal…”), while … Continue reading →

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