I learn so much from you. Thank you for that. Your intelligence subdues my frustration with the important issues we share. You draw great conversations with comments I read and consider. I look so forward to the days ahead, when justice prevails. Yes I have faith.
I grew up until I was ten, in Rutherford. Dr. Williams son was my brother's peditrican. I didn't discover his poetry until I was in high school, in another town, and then, as now, it congers up the images of the town, the railroad track underpass, the dowtown of Park Avenue. I remember a house with a chicken coop along Meadow Road (now Rt. 17) and can see much of what he wrote about in his poems and novels in my mind's eye, in the way I can't with any other writer. When I was 20, I took a job at the big bank on Park Ave, the week his beloved wife, Flossie died. While working there, I got to meet his grandaughter Ericka, and son Paul as bank customers - Rutherford is a really small town. He was huge influence on how I think and observe my surroundings.
So much depends upon - everything we see. The quiet in the house at night when we come in. The roses in the rain (my personal favorite poem). Everything we see and observe in life, including sharing those observations with others. That is how we keep clinging to sanity in the face of politics and war. Those frieght trains in the air...
Dear Mary, I studied ancient Greek in college so am familiar with Homer. I just wanted to compliment you on including the exquisite Homeric-like excerpt of Louise Glück which, let’s admit it, says it all.
Oh dear Goddess, that stupid red wheelbarrow poem. We spent SO much time explicating that damn thing in my college freshman English lit class that I wrote a pseudo-intellectual 'essay' for my friends reading all kinds of nonsense into it including Williams's alleged sexual fetishes (which I completely made up) to parody our professor's over-interpretation.
as a longtime English major, only slightly short of a PhD, who specialized in Modern Poetry, I would (if I could) declare a moratorium on "studying" the Red Wheelbarrow poem. 0or at least recognize that the poem occurs in (that is to say, is a mere piece of) an extremely High Modernist sequence of verse and prose called "Spring and All." I don't think it was ever intended to be an object of study in and of itself. so good for you, GSL.
I'm curious about the sexual fetishes you invented.
once in a class, we were doing "By the Road to the Contagious Hospital" (also, as I recall, a part of "Spring and All") and it was actually Spring (gorgeous day) and as I read the poem, it occurred to me that someone could read a lot of sex into it. so I raised my hand and said "oh wow, it's all about FUCKING." I then explicated the whole thing in those terms. my professor, the great Karl Kalkoff, was actually sorta bemused without being pissed off.
fun. gotta have some fun in grad school.
I'm sad about Louise Gluck and what shitty luck...you win a million bucks and three years later, you're dead. good poet, though...I remember reading a sequence of poems while I was waiting to get my muffler replaced. they all seemed aimed at my heart, and not in a good way. I'd like to say this made me a better person, but it probably didn't.
I no longer have it. I seem to recall suggesting Willliams had repressed homosexual tendencies and that the white chickens referred to his thing for zoophilia. I remember something else I said but it's extremely politically incorrect today. Now that I think about it, I think I deliberately threw it away because it's kind of embarrassing today - not so in 1981.
ahhh crap...I'd typed out a really nice reply, only to have it vanish in that Substack way. oh well.
it DOES sound like you sure went OUT there in your paper. I'd actually love to see what's so "extremely politically incorrect" you wrote back then. I bet it ain't that bad. in my case, the use of my favorite four-letter word has gotten me in terrible trouble, so I get it.
if WCW had any repressed homosexual tendencies, he repressed them extremely well, since he was a prodigious womanizer (I know, I know...overcompensation or whatever). actually, I've known people who were his friends and THEY talked about his womanizing. they also approached him with extreme reverence, so...
what I DO think WCW was repressing was a lot of rage over the fact that his pals were all in Europe, writing poetry and having all kinds of nasty fun like crazy while he had to be a writer in his spare time (of course, his best buddy, Ezra Pound, ended up having so much nasty fun he almost ended up in front of a US firing squad.
but you only made my original point more clearly. I maintain that this is NOT a poem for an "Introduction to Poetry" course. it just looks it.
Well let's just say when you're 18 and you've never been seriously sexually assaulted, some things seemed funnier back then. When you're older and wiser (and still not critically assaulted) you cringe when you read the shit you wrote decades ago. It wasn't the only thing I pitched when I digitized my life a few years ago, and most of what I did was simply due to being godawful. Although I did save my very worst short story to my best friend in high school because she loved it so much. I don't know why. It was this really stupid story about people turning into giant funguses lol. It wasn't offensive, just so bad even Ed Wood turned down the screenplay rights. I was a teenager when I wrote it.
I kept the one about the guy consumed by giant leeches, based on actual giant leeches in the Amazon. Although they're like maybe a foot long at the most, and I stuck with the science 😁
If WCW didn't have as much fun as his friends, he wasn't trying hard enough. Or maybe he was jyst too busy laying every woman in America. Excuse me, I'd better go ask my mother if Dad was my real daddy! 😆😆😆
Just what we need this week, watching horror and horrible revenge, a scenario where, twice again, innocent women and children are terrorized and murdered by men addicted to thoughtless violence.
Thank you for this Mary. In times of great angst (present-day/week a scary example), poetry can be a soothing cathartic that diverts our thinking away from anger or pain onto a higher level... a much needed salve for some of us. So glad you share your streams of consciousness with us. Take good care.
Since the arts are always a comfort during difficult times, I thought I’d share this beautiful essay that Dan Rather published today (for those who don’t subscribe to his Substack). It’s about Leonard Bernstein and includes some clips from his great performances. It ties his life story into the unbearable events of this week and ends with words of hope.
Michael, I have to admit that it brought me to tears as well. It’s one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, and that particular performance was a masterpiece. And watching Mr. Bernstein conduct it was, well, beyond words.
Indeed, Dan is always a must-read for me (as is Mary)... he, like Mary, is an enlightened empath that understands the soul's need for diversions and focus on higher thought in troubled times.
Your term, “enlightened empath,” is one of the best descriptions of Dan Rather I’ve ever heard. I grew up watching him report the news because he was a fixture in our household. It was not until he started publishing on Substack all these years later that I began to realize his true depth and wisdom.
I learn so much from you. Thank you for that. Your intelligence subdues my frustration with the important issues we share. You draw great conversations with comments I read and consider. I look so forward to the days ahead, when justice prevails. Yes I have faith.
And I count indictments to go to sleep.
“What do we have to appease the great forces"
An inspirational question, causing a brainstorming of my part.
1) It should never be any force greater than the force of Law or of hhumanity (excluding forces of nature which are acts of God);
2) It must not be any appeasement of Man by Man, but rather a relational exercise of the dictum of law.
Unfortunately, human nature has never been perfect, but we can redress it to bring about, the ideal relations between people of different forces.
I grew up until I was ten, in Rutherford. Dr. Williams son was my brother's peditrican. I didn't discover his poetry until I was in high school, in another town, and then, as now, it congers up the images of the town, the railroad track underpass, the dowtown of Park Avenue. I remember a house with a chicken coop along Meadow Road (now Rt. 17) and can see much of what he wrote about in his poems and novels in my mind's eye, in the way I can't with any other writer. When I was 20, I took a job at the big bank on Park Ave, the week his beloved wife, Flossie died. While working there, I got to meet his grandaughter Ericka, and son Paul as bank customers - Rutherford is a really small town. He was huge influence on how I think and observe my surroundings.
So much depends upon - everything we see. The quiet in the house at night when we come in. The roses in the rain (my personal favorite poem). Everything we see and observe in life, including sharing those observations with others. That is how we keep clinging to sanity in the face of politics and war. Those frieght trains in the air...
The level of beauty intensifies my 3rd EYE. Thanks!
Wow! I don’t see my favorite poet William Carlos Williams quoted often. And that’s my favorite poem!
AH, Perhaps part of my WHY/THANK YOU experience.
This is so appropriate. Thank you very much for sharing.
Dear Mary, I studied ancient Greek in college so am familiar with Homer. I just wanted to compliment you on including the exquisite Homeric-like excerpt of Louise Glück which, let’s admit it, says it all.
So much depends...
Oh dear Goddess, that stupid red wheelbarrow poem. We spent SO much time explicating that damn thing in my college freshman English lit class that I wrote a pseudo-intellectual 'essay' for my friends reading all kinds of nonsense into it including Williams's alleged sexual fetishes (which I completely made up) to parody our professor's over-interpretation.
as a longtime English major, only slightly short of a PhD, who specialized in Modern Poetry, I would (if I could) declare a moratorium on "studying" the Red Wheelbarrow poem. 0or at least recognize that the poem occurs in (that is to say, is a mere piece of) an extremely High Modernist sequence of verse and prose called "Spring and All." I don't think it was ever intended to be an object of study in and of itself. so good for you, GSL.
I'm curious about the sexual fetishes you invented.
once in a class, we were doing "By the Road to the Contagious Hospital" (also, as I recall, a part of "Spring and All") and it was actually Spring (gorgeous day) and as I read the poem, it occurred to me that someone could read a lot of sex into it. so I raised my hand and said "oh wow, it's all about FUCKING." I then explicated the whole thing in those terms. my professor, the great Karl Kalkoff, was actually sorta bemused without being pissed off.
fun. gotta have some fun in grad school.
I'm sad about Louise Gluck and what shitty luck...you win a million bucks and three years later, you're dead. good poet, though...I remember reading a sequence of poems while I was waiting to get my muffler replaced. they all seemed aimed at my heart, and not in a good way. I'd like to say this made me a better person, but it probably didn't.
I no longer have it. I seem to recall suggesting Willliams had repressed homosexual tendencies and that the white chickens referred to his thing for zoophilia. I remember something else I said but it's extremely politically incorrect today. Now that I think about it, I think I deliberately threw it away because it's kind of embarrassing today - not so in 1981.
ahhh crap...I'd typed out a really nice reply, only to have it vanish in that Substack way. oh well.
it DOES sound like you sure went OUT there in your paper. I'd actually love to see what's so "extremely politically incorrect" you wrote back then. I bet it ain't that bad. in my case, the use of my favorite four-letter word has gotten me in terrible trouble, so I get it.
if WCW had any repressed homosexual tendencies, he repressed them extremely well, since he was a prodigious womanizer (I know, I know...overcompensation or whatever). actually, I've known people who were his friends and THEY talked about his womanizing. they also approached him with extreme reverence, so...
what I DO think WCW was repressing was a lot of rage over the fact that his pals were all in Europe, writing poetry and having all kinds of nasty fun like crazy while he had to be a writer in his spare time (of course, his best buddy, Ezra Pound, ended up having so much nasty fun he almost ended up in front of a US firing squad.
but you only made my original point more clearly. I maintain that this is NOT a poem for an "Introduction to Poetry" course. it just looks it.
Well let's just say when you're 18 and you've never been seriously sexually assaulted, some things seemed funnier back then. When you're older and wiser (and still not critically assaulted) you cringe when you read the shit you wrote decades ago. It wasn't the only thing I pitched when I digitized my life a few years ago, and most of what I did was simply due to being godawful. Although I did save my very worst short story to my best friend in high school because she loved it so much. I don't know why. It was this really stupid story about people turning into giant funguses lol. It wasn't offensive, just so bad even Ed Wood turned down the screenplay rights. I was a teenager when I wrote it.
I kept the one about the guy consumed by giant leeches, based on actual giant leeches in the Amazon. Although they're like maybe a foot long at the most, and I stuck with the science 😁
If WCW didn't have as much fun as his friends, he wasn't trying hard enough. Or maybe he was jyst too busy laying every woman in America. Excuse me, I'd better go ask my mother if Dad was my real daddy! 😆😆😆
RIP, Louise Gluck. 🙏🏻
Love your 'expressions' of solace for the soul!! Luv U!
Just what we need this week, watching horror and horrible revenge, a scenario where, twice again, innocent women and children are terrorized and murdered by men addicted to thoughtless violence.
Patriarchy is THE Problem!
a tad facile, dontcha think?
I'm still enjoying the Mozart that Mary sent us last week.
Thank you Mary this poem is very fitting.
Thank you for this Mary. In times of great angst (present-day/week a scary example), poetry can be a soothing cathartic that diverts our thinking away from anger or pain onto a higher level... a much needed salve for some of us. So glad you share your streams of consciousness with us. Take good care.
Thank you, Marc Bergeron.
Since the arts are always a comfort during difficult times, I thought I’d share this beautiful essay that Dan Rather published today (for those who don’t subscribe to his Substack). It’s about Leonard Bernstein and includes some clips from his great performances. It ties his life story into the unbearable events of this week and ends with words of hope.
https://open.substack.com/pub/steady/p/beethoven-and-bernstein?r=2vk1c6&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Thank you so much. That "Ode to Joy/Freedom" had me in tears for a half-hour straight.
Michael, I have to admit that it brought me to tears as well. It’s one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, and that particular performance was a masterpiece. And watching Mr. Bernstein conduct it was, well, beyond words.
Indeed, Dan is always a must-read for me (as is Mary)... he, like Mary, is an enlightened empath that understands the soul's need for diversions and focus on higher thought in troubled times.
Your term, “enlightened empath,” is one of the best descriptions of Dan Rather I’ve ever heard. I grew up watching him report the news because he was a fixture in our household. It was not until he started publishing on Substack all these years later that I began to realize his true depth and wisdom.
Also, thank you Mary. ❤️