by Richard Subber | Aug 26, 2023 | My poetry, Poetry, Reflections
…when “far away” means “down”
Bird brain
Her world gets bigger as she rises.
Does that robin know that she’s flying?
Does the creature know
that flight once was not foreseeable?
Does she dream a fantasy
about walking around the track?
Does she give up on the dream,
thinking “these skinny legs will never make it?”
Does avian awe intrude
in her vista when she’s airborne?
What’s it like when
“far away” means “down”?
Does she wonder what “falling” means?
Can she imagine a world
in which “flapping” and “useless”
do not have joint meaning?
Does she hide a smile
when she comforts the chick
who hesitates to make the first jump?
May 24, 2023
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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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”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | Jun 17, 2023 | History, Human Nature, Reflections, Theater and play reviews
…a perfection of evil…
Movie review:
Conspiracy
The Wannsee Conference in Hitler’s Germany, January 1942
Starring Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, Colin Firth (2001)
Here’s the short version: watching Conspiracy is like drinking molten lead.
Conspiracy is an almost flawless portrayal of naked evil being done by powerful men, each of whom has lost or abandoned his moral compass.
It is dry, withering, completely transparent, all too believable—not merely because we know it’s all true. We know that there are powerful men and women alive today who are willing to do blasphemously wrong things like killing 6 million Jews.
Conspiracy dramatizes the Wannsee Conference that first officially articulated the Final Solution for the Jews of Europe: the Holocaust.
Stanley Tucci as SS Major Adolph Eichmann, Kenneth Branagh as Hitler’s Chief of Security Reinhard Heydrich, Colin Firth as Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (a lawyer who wrote the racist Nuremberg Laws), and 12 others show how it was probably done—almost without passion—around a long conference table in a manor house outside Berlin. One of the participants failed to destroy his copy of the minutes. This surviving document was used in the post-WWII Nuremberg Trials.
Conspiracy is frightening, horrifying, and disgusting. It is a perfection of the evil that men can do.
The antidote for watching it is simple: do a good thing every day.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Comanche Empire
the other story of the American West…
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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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by Richard Subber | Jan 16, 2023 | My poetry, Poetry, Reflections
a short time to be in love…
I forgot to get a card…
It’s not about the candles and the cake,
it’s not about singing
the same old song anymore,
it’s not about the date anymore,
not an event,
not a stopping place—
it’s another reminder that a year
is a long time to live,
and a short time to be in love,
it’s a marker on the trail,
and the trail is rising,
and the mountains are behind us,
and the oceans, yes, and many mysteries…
Just ahead, the path turns again, as always,
and we do not see much of the morrow,
and naught of the waiting tomorrows,
but we see the coming of our latter days,
and we can sing yesterday’s songs
at each new dawn,
and sing them again and again and again,
and add new words at each new sunset…
May 8, 2017
I confess, I didn’t forget to get a card—I couldn’t find a card that I wanted to give. You can guess whose birthday I was celebrating. I decided to write a birthday poem that doesn’t actually mention “birthday” and skips all the smarmy stuff and doesn’t bother with the “you’re only as old as you feel” stuff and the “omigawd, how many candles are on your cake?” stuff. A birthday is a day in our lives. We celebrate our lives together. Every day.
My poem “I forgot to get a card…” was published in my fifth collection of 53 poems, My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems. You can buy it on Amazon (paperback and Kindle), or get it free in Kindle Unlimited (search for “Richard Carl Subber”).
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
A poet is a “maker”
…and it doesn’t have to rhyme…
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many waters: more poems with 53 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”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | Jan 11, 2023 | Books, Reflections, Tidbits
“The beginning is always today.”
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)
Today started when you woke up. Think about beginnings.
Thanks to my trusted advisor for this one.
Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), and by the way, if you’ve only watched the movie, you don’t know the Frankenstein story. Read the book.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
–
many waters: more poems with 53 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”
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by Richard Subber | Jul 30, 2021 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Reflections
Learn to think about being old…
Book review:
Old Friends
by Tracy Kidder (b1945)
Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993
352 pages
Tracy Kidder is an old friend, and I welcome any opportunity to read something he wrote. There is vigor and bitter reality and calm truth and pulsing delight in his stories.
Whatever your age, try Old Friends. You’re going to be someone’s old friend, sooner or later. You can learn to think about how it’s going to be.
Like Kidder’s other books, Old Friends is in its own category. Nevertheless, it has themes you’ll find in his other books. It contains some kinds of the loneliness expressed in Strength in What Remains (2009), and it echoes some of the humanity that pervades Among Schoolchildren (1989).
You’ll be surprised as you get to know Lou and Joe and the others.
They’re like people you already know, and like real people you’re going to get to know.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 52 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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by Richard Subber | 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 right words in the right 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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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.
My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 52 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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