Book review: An Anthology of the New England Poets

Book review: An Anthology of the New England Poets

by | Jan 20, 2018 | Book reviews, Books, Poetry

“…a parcel of vain strivings…”

 

 

Book review:

An Anthology

   of the New England Poets:

    From Colonial Times

    to the Present Day

 

Edited by Louis Untermeyer, New York: Random House, 1948 

 

A hearty sampling of nearly 35 American poets, spanning 340 years. Louis Untermeyer is a first-class editor, offering rich biographical sketches of each poet.

For the beginning student of American poetry, this is a heady introduction. If you already know something about poetry, you can dive deep.

The big names are included, of course: Frost, Longfellow, Millay, Dickinson, Thoreau, Holmes, Whittier, Emerson.

The other selected poets offer a variety of voices and sensitivities and styles.

Untermeyer does first class service as editor, with a biography of each poet and a reference framework of his/her times. For my taste, the sketches of many of the poets were more informative and appealing than their works.

Untermeyer doesn’t presume to rate the poets in Anthology. He offers a well-informed understanding of the evolution and expression of poetry among New England writers.

Here’s a morsel:

“I am a parcel of vain strivings tied

      By a chance bond together,

   Dangling this way and that…”

From “I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied” by Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), written in 1841

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.

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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”
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Forget about Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Dracula is a really scary book, really…

by Bram Stoker

click here

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The poetic art of Grace Butcher

The poetic art of Grace Butcher

by | Nov 14, 2017 | Book reviews, Books, Poetry, Reviews of other poets

Find an audience,

     and read out loud…

 

 

Grace Butcher’s poems

   beg to be read aloud.

 

They are narrative and artful. She writes about familiar sights and experiences, and infuses them with exceptional imagery and insight.

Indeed, “the best words in the best order.” (I’m sure Coleridge doesn’t mind being quoted endlessly…)

Butcher has a delicate touch as she strokes the fabulous effulgence of her imagination, and explores her sensitivities to life and people around her.

These are worth your time:

Child, House, World

Hiram Poetry Review Supplement No. 12, 1991

 

Deer in the Mall

Self-published by Grace Butcher

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.

 

O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi”

“…two foolish children…”

click here

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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”
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Poets talk about poetry

Poets talk about poetry

by | Oct 24, 2017 | Books, Human Nature, Language, Poetry, Reflections, Reviews of other poets

…no fractured, disjoint,

       inchoate grab-bags

               of words…

 

 

“A poem…begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong,

                                 a homesickness, a lovesickness…” 

 

Robert Lee Frost  (1874-1963)

in his 1916 letter to Louis Untermeyer (1885-1977)

 

Frost and Untermeyer exchanged letters (imagine!) for almost 50 years. I’m pretty sure every single one of them involved more than 140 characters and spaces…think about it, when you’re actually scribbling, you don’t have to “write” a space…

There are, I guess, about a million or so ways, more or less, to define “poetry.” In 1827 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) offered his “homely definition” of poetry: “the best words in the best order.” Sometimes I think poetry is the manifestation of lust for the right words.

I have this lust in my heart.

I am a poet, a writer, a teacher, a moralist, a historian, and an unflinching student of human nature. Some things I’d rather not know, but I’m stuck with knowing them. I think a lot. I strive to express truth and give context—both rational and emotional—to reality.

I think words can be pictures, and lovely songs, and bodacious scents, and private flavors, and early morning caresses that wake each part of me, one at a time. I know some of those words, and, from time to time, I write some of them.

Here’s a final thought for consideration: Coleridge also advised (1832) that “…if every verse is not poetry, it [should be], at least, good sense.” That makes good sense to me. I have no tolerance for some poets’ work that is merely a fractured, disjoint, inchoate grab-bag of words. A largely random collection of words is not likely to be a poem. I like to read (and write) a beginning, and an end, and some really meaty sweetie stuff in the middle.

Coleridge’s 1827 definition of poetry is from Specimens of the Table Talk of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written by Henry Nelson Coleridge and published in 1835.

Louis Untermeyer was an American poet, anthologist, critic, and editor. He was appointed the 14th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1961.

 

For example, read The Poetry of Robert Frost, available on Amazon

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A glimpse of the millennial dawn…

witness to the vital song of the sea…(a poem)

click here

My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.

​
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”

​

 

Book review: Shantung Compound

They didn’t care much

      about each other…

by Langdon Gilkey

click here

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A silent sea?

A silent sea?

by | Sep 3, 2017 | Language, My poetry, Poetry, Reflections

…something more to say…

 

 

Listen

 

Surf sounds, chansons de mer,

the breaking rollers,

mellowed crunch of wave on wave,

the drumroll of eternal tides.                           

 

There is no silent sea, we think…

 

…consider a sheltered beach,

in the lee of a baffling sand bar,

sea-spawned shoal,

mediator for sea and shore,

muffler of the surf,

tamper of the bursting breakers,                           

damper of the singing of the sea,

guardian of truth about

   the vastly silent blue water.

 

September 16, 2015

Published:

February 2017 in my first book of poems, Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups, available on Amazon

December 18, 2016, in The Australia Times Poetry

March 2, 2016, in Whispers

January 21, 2017, in Creative Inspirations

 

I felt the sounds of the modest surf wash up to me. I was sitting almost alone on First Encounter Beach in Eastham, Cape Cod. I happened to imagine that only the tiniest element of the ocean makes all this noise, and that nearly all of the blue water on our planet rises and falls in magnificent silence nearly all the time. I’ve been at sea only once. I don’t recall noticing this aspect of the bounding main—the social sounds of the cruise ship made it impossible to hear silence. I wasn’t thinking about the cruise as I sat on the high sand on the Cape. I was thinking that the sea may have more to say. I was listening.

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My poems. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.

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”

​

The Reader (Der Vorleser)

Not just a rehash of WWII…

by Bernhard Schlink

click here

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Rick Subber

Rick Subber

My first book of poems, Writing Rainbows, is available on Amazon.

I am a poet, a writer, an editor, a teacher, a moralist, a historian, a grandfather, and an unflinching student of human nature. I try to use the right words to create poems that have clarity and character. I do freelance editing and offer my services as a writing coach--I have repeat clients in the U.S., Australia and Italy. In my professional career I was a reporter/editor/research manager/strategic planning manager. I've been in love with my wife for 49 years.

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A poet is a “maker”

A poet is a “maker”

by | Jul 9, 2017 | Book reviews, Books, History, Poetry

No such thing as a “long poem”…

 

“Poem” has its etymological root in a Greek verb meaning “to make,” thus a poem is something made. A more detailed description of poetry has been elusive for more than a couple thousand years.

A somewhat bountiful book on this subject is Classic Writings on Poetry, edited by Dr. William Harmon.

From his Introduction:

“…In none of [these] documents is poetry as such distinguished very crisply from prose…(1)

Poetry resists absolute definitions…Rhyme, for example, has been an incidental blemish of prose in many literatures, especially those of classical antiquity…in time, however, in the poetry of Europe, rhyme turned into an ornament so important that ‘rhyme’ itself virtually came to mean ‘poem’…”

 

Before that happened, “…during the Middle Ages…rhymed accentual verse was introduced for certain religious texts set to music, but rhyme was so alien to true poetry, according to many conservatives, that such texts were called ‘proses.’ “(2)

Notebook Pixabay

For the record: Harmon notes that an “old-fashioned” poem, or “verse,” like “Adeste Fideles,” does not rhyme either in Latin or in English.

 

 

I am fully intrigued by reflecting on the distinction between prose and poetry. To be sure, I’m not yet prepared to offer any compelling commentary on that point, except to say that I’m in complete agreement with Edgar Allan Poe in believing that brevity has something to do with it.

In his “The Poetic Principle,” Poe makes this view very clear:

“I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, ‘a long poem,’ is simply a flat contradiction in terms.

“I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement…That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length. After the lapse of half an hour, at the very utmost, it flags—fails—a revulsion ensues—and then the poem is, in effect, and in fact, no longer such.”

 

It takes just about a minute to read this post.

‘nuff said.

 

(1) Harmon, p. xii

(2) Ibid., p. x

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A glimpse of the millennial dawn…

a witness to the song of the sea…(a poem)

click here

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.

​​
As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 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”
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Puppy space

Puppy space

by | Jul 7, 2017 | My poetry, Poetry, Reflections, Reviews of other poets

Some puppy space isn’t the best place…

 

A while ago I read a poem that put a golf ball in my throat.

If ever in your life you have felt love, then you have your armor that may keep you safe when you read it.

Wesley McNair writes about a puppy on a chain who cries when he strains into the collar at the periphery of his circular, desolate space:

 

“…Soon,

 when there is no grass left in it

 and he understands it is all he has,

 he will snarl and bark whenever

 he senses a threat to it.

 Who would believe this small

 sorrow could lead to such fury

 no one would ever come near him?”

 

Do you have such a puppy space in your life? Can you stop barking?

Can you bring a friend inside the circle? Can you slip the collar?

 

Poem copyright ©2010 by Wesley McNair, “The Puppy,” from Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems, (David R. Godine, 2010). Posted by permission on www.PoetryFoundation.org

…and another thing:

I can tell you that the “puppy space” theme recurs in poetry, as in:

 

“…a junkyard puppy learns quickly how to dream…”

From “Luke’s Junkyard Song” by Mary Oliver

 

Mary Oliver’s intuitive lines moved me to offer my own empathic intuition about the careless degradation of a dog’s world view from inside a forgotten fence:

 

One dog’s world

 

The fence is cruel, you understand,

it stops him short

   but does not bar his gaze,

it is the edge of his patrol,

each day he takes those last steps forward

   at a random spot,

and then, again, beyond that rusting truck,

and then, again, those last stiff steps

   to another well-worn station at the fence

      that makes his junkyard a prison.

 

The fence is cruel, you understand,

its wire links hide nothing

   of the lively concourse and the duck-filled river,

the shipping docks and the tandem rail lines

   outside his world.

 

The fence tempts his eye each day

   to see a new future a few steps away,

to see another world he cannot understand.

This fence is his faux frontier,

more harsh because so near,

a lure with no reward,

a circle with no end, no beginning,

no escape…

 

He learned too soon to dream of getting through…

 

November 10, 2016

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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.

A poet is a “maker”

…and it doesn’t have to rhyme…

click here

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​My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 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”

 

 

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