by Richard Subber | Apr 24, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Reflections
it’s not the last obscenity…
Book review:
Aging: An Apprenticeship
Nan Narboe, ed.
Portland, OR: Red Notebook Press, 2018
286 pages
Narboe creates a handy and wide-ranging collection of reflections on the art, science, and humanity of the aging process. More than 50 authors tell it like they think it is, for folks nearing the increasingly ordinary age of 50, and for folks in their 50s, 60s, 70s , 80s, and 90s and beyond. If you’re not in one of those groups, you will be sooner than you think.
Of course, the explicit premise of most of the authors in Aging: An Apprenticeship is that life can be good (or not), aging happens to everyone, and dying is the end game.
Gloria Steinem’s contribution is on point, completely tolerable, and instructive. She says:
“After all, we are communal creatures who must mirror each other to know who we are. Every living thing ages and dies, yet humans seem to be the only species that thinks about aging and thinks about dying. Surely, we are meant to use this ability, especially in a country that suffers so much from concealing aging and dying as if they were the last obscenities.”
For Aging: An Apprenticeship, Narboe collects essays that range from whimsical to doggone serious. Each author offers a very personal argument that aging and dying are 100% natural.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
–
Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Apr 22, 2025 | Human Nature, My poetry, Poetry
the dusty baby seats…
Baby seats
I’m eating breakfast
in a room
half-filled with old folks,
they need four score of candles
on the birthday cake,
they remember old, old songs,
sometimes all the words,
they’ve lost the dearest ones
they married,
they blubber and laugh
when the grandkids come,
and they slowly eat their breakfast
with old friends,
and they never see
the dusty baby seats
that fill a tidy corner
and wait for the generation
that will happily use them.
September 19, 2024
* * * * * *
My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
–
In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Apr 15, 2025 | Books, Joys of reading, Language, My poetry, Poetry
the boolies mimed…
ronday vue
It was time for a furling gat,
the mossty boys all wore a hat,
they rumbled when the clepsys chimed,
they crumbled when the boolies mimed,
and on their way they ratlinged fine
and mortled as they kept in line.
The mook they made was loud and blam,
the dancing was appoint, and skram,
chandilling as they jamped each step,
so trilling as they klamped each rep,
their ronday lasted all the night,
at morning they were flamp and skite.
October 22, 2024
I’m learning from my friend Mike…
* * * * * *
My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
How does a poem end?
“Finis,” my thoughts (my poem)
–
Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Apr 12, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
Say “repine” a couple times…
I read lots of poetry—colonial, classic American, modern—and I don’t find much that I like.
I’m a bit puzzled by this. I think hard about what I like and dislike about poetry, especially my own poetry. I confess my sincere failure to discern anything meaningful in the kind of poetry I classify as “obscure,” you know, the wayward romp through disconnected words and disjoint images, and the wanton disregard of verb tense/pronoun antecedents/subject and verb relationships/sentence structure—I think you may have seen this kind of stuff:
“Sky falls cloud sheep bray at starry islands in my hoping
are them my lost love I step around the dog poo….”
I just rapped that out. It doesn’t make me proud.
I’m trying to get to the point:
I’ve read a bit of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). Longfellow was a lyric poet who tried his hand at free verse, although much of his work is constrained to the often stultifying shackle of line after line and page after page of rhyme. Longfellow wrote at length. I confess I can’t make myself keep turning the pages to read “Evangeline” and “The Song of Hiawatha.” I do understand that this fashion of poetry was written and enjoyed before the successive advents of radio, TV, Sony Walkman, the internet, and social media. I guess reading a poem for an hour or so was more doable in the 19th century.
Longfellow does offer something to me in his more bite-size poetry. He was a capable wordsmith and he dreamed out images and insights and perspectives that appeal to me, and even nudge my sometime muse to wakefulness.
In “Snow-Flakes” he placidly described a snowfall:
“Out of the bosom of the Air,
…The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.
This is the poem of the air…”
In “The Rainy Day” he said something we all know:
“…Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.”
Thus, in Longfellow, something of poetry.
Admit it, we don’t use “repine” often enough in our casual conversations.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Financier
Theodore Dreiser’s villain…
–
Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Apr 10, 2025 | Language, Poetry, Tidbits
poetry can be rain…
“One evening in the maize-field…to amuse myself,
I spoke to the field laborers, who were mostly quite young,
in Swaheli [sic] verse. There was no sense in the verse,
it was made for the sake of rhyme…
They were quick to understand that the meaning of poetry
is of no consequence,
and they did not question the thesis of the verse,
but waited eagerly for the rhyme, and laughed at it when it came….
As they had become used to the idea of poetry, they begged:
‘Speak again. Speak like rain.’ ”
quote from Out of Africa, pp. 285-286
Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) (1885-1962)
New York: The Modern Library, 1937, 1992
399 pages
* * * * * *
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
–
Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Apr 8, 2025 | Books, My poetry, Poetry, Reflections, Tidbits
blinking, not blinking…
Owning the trail
The sun was high,
the patient rays
striped the forest floor,
tree tops swayed enough
to nudge the shadows,
a bird sang half a song
way down the hill,
an angry squirrel
sailed across the trail
and stared at me,
he didn’t blink.
I walked the next turn,
and stared without blinking,
an eight-point buck
looked back at me,
he stood still
as his woman and kid
rambled across the path
and disappeared
in the hydrangea,
he didn’t budge,
he seemed to be daring me
to make a move.
He showed no fear,
he owned the trail,
I was the stranger with two legs,
I looked at him for moments,
I faced him moments more
as I shuffled back
around the turn,
and shambled from his world.
The sun was high,
the shadows trembled,
I walked away through empty woods.
February 6, 2025
* * * * * *
My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
* * * * * *
