I can’t remember my dad calling me a sissy, but he definitely told me not to be a sissy. I secretly (or not so secretly) liked all the sissy things. We had a hunting dog named Sissy. Really: Sissy. My father nicknamed my sister: Sissy. Still, he says, “How’s Sissy?” and calls her Sissy when she goes home to visit him. Belinda (Sissy) is one of the toughest people I know. My sissy (sister) has kicked someone’s ass, which isn’t sissy- ish, I guess, though I want to redefine sissy into something fabulous, tough, tender, “sissy- tough.” Drag queens are damn tough and sissies. I’m pretty fucking tough and a big, big sissy, too. And kind. Tough and kind and happy: a sissy.
About the Poem
Aaron Smith explains his poem: “As a queer person, I’ve had the word ‘sissy’ leveled against me as an insult. In this sonnet, I challenged myself to use the word ‘sissy’ as the ending word for each line in an attempt to reclaim the word, celebrate it, redefine it—as I say in the poem—as something ‘fabulous, tough, tender.’ I also wanted to celebrate drag queens. RuPaul [Andre Charles] is a national treasure.”
I’ve posted this poem before, and it is always one of those poems that really speaks to me. Like Smith, my dad never called me a sissy, but I heard more than once, “Don’t be a sissy.” I remember when I was in grammar school, all the boys played flag football at recess. I had no interest in playing football, so I spent recess with my friends, all the girls. My dad came to pick me up from school one day (recess was at the end of the day), and he noticed that I was not playing football with the rest of the boys. He told me that I had to play with the boys and “not be such a sissy.” So, from then on, when he would pick me up at school, I’d have to play flag football.
Years ago, I read a book, Mississippi Sissy. The book is a memoir by Kevin Sessums, a celebrity journalist who as the Amazon description says, “grew up scaring other children, hiding terrible secrets, pretending to be Arlene Frances and running wild in the South.” As he grew up in Forest, Mississippi, befriended by the family maid, Mattie May, he became a young man who turned the word “sissy” on its head, just as his mother taught him. In Jackson, he is befriended by Eudora Welty and journalist Frank Hains, but when Hains is brutally murdered in his antebellum mansion, Kevin’s long road north towards celebrity begins. In his memoir, Kevin Sessums brings to life the pungent American south of the 1960s and the world of the strange little boy who grew there.
There are words that haunt me because of the pain they caused me growing up: sissy, queer, faggot (fag), etc. I know many gay men use these as empowering words, such as Sessum and Smith do in their writing. Others celebrate their sexuality and gender non-conformity. As the poem says, “Drag queens are damn tough and sissies.” But it’s not just drag queens that are celebrating gender non-conformity. Many of us live our lives these days without the fear of being called a “sissy.” Though, there are still many like me who continue to care what others think. It’s difficult for us to break free from the traditional gender roles that were forced on us when we were young. Maybe more of us should realize that we are “pretty fucking tough and a big, big sissy, too. And kind. Tough and kind and happy: a sissy.”
About the Poet
Aaron Smith has an MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh.
Smith is the author of three books of poetry: Primer (University of Pittsburgh Press); Appetite (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); and Blue on Blue Ground (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. His other awards include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Mass Cultural Council.
Smith is an associate professor of creative writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Out of the mid-wood’s twilight Into the meadow’s dawn, Ivory limbed and brown-eyed, Flashes my Faun!
He skips through the copses singing, And his shadow dances along, And I know not which I should follow, Shadow or song!
O Hunter, snare me his shadow! O Nightingale, catch me his strain! Else moonstruck with music and madness I track him in vain!
About The Poem
“In the Forest” appears in the “Uncollected Poems” (1876–1893) section of the volume Poems, with The Ballad of Reading Gaol, published in 1909 by Methuen & Company. During the 1890s, Wilde faced three criminal and civil trials due to his relationship with the poet Lord Alfred Douglas. In March 1946, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse published the article “Oscar Wilde’s Poetry as Art History” by American poet Edouard Roditi, who wrote: “The evolution of Wilde’s descriptive style in his poetry, from the museum-piece ornateness of his earlier works to the simpler and more delicate art of his more mature poems, was accompanied, moreover, by an analogous evolution of his poetry’s intellectual content, from the discussion of general problems of politics, ethics or esthetics to a greater attention to personal impressions or to the elucidation of particular problems of the poet’s life, such as his temptations and moral conflicts. […] Wilde proved his ability to compose, had he but dared, a body of poems, on themes of sin, suffering and remorse, which might have been the Fleurs du Mal of English literature, with much of Baudelaire’s concise quality as opposed to Swinburne’s vagueness.”
About the Poet
Oscar Wilde, born in Dublin, Ireland, on October 16, 1854, was a playwright and poet. His first book of poetry, Ravenna (T. Shrimpton and Son, 1878) won the Newdigate Prize. Wilde won more acclaim for his plays, particularly An Ideal Husband (L. Smithers, 1899) and The Importance of Being Earnest (E. Matthews and John Lane, 1899). He died in Paris on November 30, 1900.
You are a nobody until another man leaves a note under your wiper: I like your hair, clothes, car—call me! Late May, I brush pink Crepe Myrtle blossoms from the hood of my car. Again spring factors into our fever. Would this affair leave any room for error? What if I only want him to hum me a lullaby. To rest in the nets of our own preferences. I think of women I’ve loved who, near the end, made love to me solely for the endorphins. Praise be to those bodies lit with magic. I pulse my wipers, sweep away pollen from the windshield glass to allow the radar detector to detect. In the prim light of spring I drive home alone along the river’s tight curves where it bends like handwritten words. On the radio, a foreign love song some men sing to rise.
About the Poet
Christopher Salerno was born on June 13, 1975, in Somerville, New Jersey. He received an MA from East Carolina University and an MFA from Bennington College.
Salerno is the author of Sun & Urn (University of Georgia Press, 2017), winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize; ATM (Georgetown Review Press, 2014), winner of the Georgetown Review Poetry Prize; Minimum Heroic (Mississippi Review Press, 2010), winner of the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize; and Whirligig (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006).
In the judge’s citation for the Georgetown Review Poetry Prize, D. A. Powell writes, “Salerno rifles through our empty wallets to show how much we’re missing. These poems are mystical transactions of body and soul, as dark as Faust and as illuminating.”
Salerno has also received a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He currently serves as an editor at Saturnalia Books and teaches at William Paterson University. He lives in Caldwell, New Jersey.
The night was made for rest and sleep, For winds that softly sigh; It was not made for grief and tears; So then why do I cry?
The wind that blows through leafy trees Is soft and warm and sweet; For me the night is a gracious cloak To hide my soul’s defeat.
Just one dark hour of shaken depths, Of bitter black despair— Another day will find me brave, And not afraid to dare.
About the Poet
Clarissa Scott Delany was born Clarissa Mae Scott in Tuskegee, Alabama. She was the daughter of Emmet Jay Scott, secretary to Booker T. Washington and special advisor on African American affairs to President Woodrow Wilson, and Elenor Baker Scott. She attended Bradford Academy in Massachusetts and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley College in 1923. This accomplishment landed her a cover article in TheCrisis magazine in June 1923.
Delany gathered frequently with other young Black people in Boston at the Literary Guild. Claude McKay was among the institution’s featured speakers. She traveled to France and Germany and later published the essay “A Golden Afternoon in Germany,” inspired by this period, in Opportunity magazine. Delany then moved to Washington, D.C., and taught at Dunbar High School until 1926. While there, she joined the Saturday Nighters Club, a salon hosted by Georgia Douglas Johnson.
Delany entered her poem “Solace” in a contest hosted by Opportunity. She tied for fourth place, and the poem was eventually anthologized, alongside her other poems, “Joy” and “The Mask,” in Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets of the Twenties (Harper & Brothers, 1927). Some of her other poems were also anthologized in Arna Bontemps’s and Langston Hughes’s The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949 (Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1949).
Delany later moved to New York City, where she became a social worker and the director of the Joint Committee on the Negro Child Study. She published findings on delinquency and child neglect among Black children. She died at twenty-six of kidney disease.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments; love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand’ring bark Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come. Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom: If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
About the Poem
Along with Sonnets 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) and 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”), Sonnet 116 is one of the most famous sonnets. Traditionally, this sonnet has been almost universally read as a sonnet of praise or triumph to ideal and eternal love, with which all readers could easily identify, adding their own dream of perfection to what they found within it, modern criticism makes it possible to look beneath the idealism and to see some hints of a world which is perhaps slightly more disturbed than the poet pretends. In the first place it is important to see that the sonnet belongs in the sequence of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Sonnet 116 is sandwiched between three sonnets which discuss the philosophical question of how love deceives a person’s eyes, mind, and judgement. Sonnet 116 is then followed by four others which attempt to excuse the poet’s own unfaithfulness and betrayal of the beloved.
Most scholars thought agree that Sonnet 116 is about love in its most ideal form. The poet praises the glories of lovers who have come to each other freely and enter into a relationship based on trust and understanding. The first four lines reveal the poet’s pleasure in love that is constant and strong and will not “alter when it alteration finds.” The following lines proclaim that true love is indeed an “ever-fix’d mark” which will survive any crisis. In lines 7-8, the poet claims that we may be able to measure love to some degree but does not mean we fully understand it. Love’s actual worth cannot be known and remains a mystery. The remaining lines of the third quatrain (9-12), reaffirm the perfect nature of love that is unshakeable throughout time and remains so “ev’n to the edge of doom,” i.e., death. In the final couplet, the poet declares that, if he is mistaken about the constant, unmovable nature of perfect love, then he must take back all his writings on love, truth, and faith. Moreover, he adds that, if he has in fact judged love inappropriately, no man has ever really loved, in the ideal sense that the poet professes.
As every blossom fades
and all youth sinks into old age,
so every life’s design, each flower of wisdom,
attains its prime and cannot last forever.
The heart must submit itself courageously
to life’s call without a hint of grief,
A magic dwells in each beginning,
protecting us, telling us how to live.
High purposed we shall traverse realm on realm,
cleaving to none as to a home,
the world of spirit wishes not to fetter us
but raise us higher, step by step.
Scarce in some safe accustomed sphere of life
have we establish a house, then we grow lax;
only he who is ready to journey forth
can throw old habits off.
Maybe death’s hour too will send us out new-born towards undreamed-lands, maybe life’s call to us will never find an end Courage my heart, take leave and fare thee well.
Stufen By Hermann Hesse
Wie jede Blüte welkt und jede Jugend
Dem Alter weicht, blüht jede Lebensstufe,
Blüht jede Weisheit auch und jede Tugend
Zu ihrer Zeit und darf nicht ewig dauern.
Es muß das Herz bei jedem Lebensrufe
Bereit zum Abschied sein und Neubeginne,
Um sich in Tapferkeit und ohne Trauern
In andre, neue Bindungen zu geben.
Und jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne,
Der uns beschützt und der uns hilft, zu leben.
Wir sollen heiter Raum um Raum durchschreiten
An keinem wie an einer Heimat hängen,
Der Weltgeist will nicht fesseln uns und engen,
Er will uns Stuf’ um Stufe heben, weiten.
Kaum sind wir heimisch einem Lebenskreise
Und traulich eingewohnt, so droht Erschlaffen,
Nur wer bereit zu Aufbruch ist und Reise,
Mag lähmender Gewöhnung sich entraffen.
Es wird vielleicht auch noch die Todesstunde Uns neuen Räumen jung entgegen senden Des Lebens Ruf an uns wird niemals enden… Wohlan denn, Herz, nimm Abschied und gesunde!
About the Poem
Hermann Hesse wrote “Stufen” in 1941. You may be familiar with Hesse’s novels Siddhartha or Steppenwolf, which revolve around the inner transformations of their characters, a theme that is also found in Hesse’s shorter works. “Stufen”, or “Steps” (also translated as “Stages”), reads like the themes in his novels edited down to a single poem. But like most poetry, it’s not written in simple and direct language. You’ll probably find new meaning in lines each time you read the poem and understand them differently each time. There are numerous translations of the poem, and this one was translated line by line. Often translations of poems either try to simply translate the words, others try to keep it in the original poetic form, and others try more to capture the theme of the poem than translate word for work. I don’t often use translated poems, because native speakers of the language often find fault with the translation.
About the Poet
Hermann Hesse (born July 2, 1877, Calw, Germany—died August 9, 1962, Montagnola, Switzerland) was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. His best-known works include Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, each of which explores an individual’s search for authenticity, self-knowledge, and spirituality. His characters attempt to break out of the established modes of civilization so as to find an essential spirit and identity.
He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.
How calmly does the orange branch Observe the sky begin to blanch Without a cry, without a prayer, With no betrayal of despair,
Sometime while night obscures the tree The zenith of its life will be Gone past forever, and from thence A second history will commence.
A chronicle no longer gold, A bargaining with mist and mould, And finally the broken stem The plummeting to earth; and then
An intercourse not well designed For beings of a golden kind Whose native green must arch above The earth’s obscene, corrupting love.
And still the ripe fruit and the branch Observe the sky begin to blanch Without a cry, without a prayer, With no betrayal of despair.
O Courage, could you not as well Select a second place to dwell, Not only in that golden tree But in the frightened heart of me?
Nearly 30 years ago while I was still in high school, I was attending a summer honors program at the University of Alabama. (It was a momentous summer in many ways, but those are stories for another time.) We took three college classes along with other summer students at Alabama, and every week, we had to attend several honors seminars. One of those seminars was about Tennessee Williams.
The next week, we were taken by bus down to Montgomery to see Williams’s play “The Night of the Iguana” at the Alabama Shakespeare FestivaL. I’ve seen many plays and musicals at ASF, and while not all of the plays were great (I always found the plays that were part of their Southern Writers Series to be godawful), they were all very well produced. I was awed by “The Night of the Iguana” because they made it rain onstage. This might not sound that impressive to everyone, but I always thought it was one of the coolest things.
If you are not familiar with “The Night of the Iguana,” the play portrays the story of Reverend Shannon, a defrocked Episcopal clergyman gone astray, torn between his passions and his devotion, who leads a bus-load of middle-aged Baptist women on a religious-themed tour of the Mexican coast and comes to terms with past demons in re-evaluating his life.
Throughout the play, in a secondary story about a woman, Hannah, and her aging poet-grandfather, the grandfather attempts to finish a poem he feels will be his masterpiece. The poem comes at the end of the play when the grandfather recites his “last” poem while Hannah transcribes it for him. The grandfather dies a few moments later.
The poem represents Tennessee Williams’s poetic view of human nature and the human story. Williams wrote many flawed or tragic characters who might survive, adapt, or make significant change if they only had the courage and confidence that goes with that important quality. Tennessee Williams is not to everyone’s taste, but I have always greatly admired his writing. Of Mississippi literary figures, I consider Williams to be the greatest by far.
Self-Portrait as Combination Taco Bell / Pizza Hut / KFC By Aaron Tyler Hand
the unholy trinity of suburban late-night salvation barring seemingly endless options of worship
bean burrito breadsticks and mashed potatoes or a soft taco pan pizza and a buttered biscuit
an unimaginable combination of food flavors for people not ready to go home to their parents
and yet none of the options feel quite right so maybe I should call it Self-Portrait as idling
in a drive-thru with your friends crammed across the sunken bench seats avoiding
the glow of the check engine light with black tape pressed with a precision unseen anywhere else
in their lives as a fractured voice says don’t worry take your time and order whenever you’re ready
from behind a menu backlit like the window inside of a confessional booth as the hands
of the driver open up like a collection basket for the wadded-up bills and loose change
that slowly stack up as the years go by and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be
in this analogy but I know about masking warning signs and hearing out of tune
voices scream WE’RE THE KIDS WHO FEEL LIKE DEAD ENDS so instead I’ll call it Self-
Portrait as From Under the Cork Tree or maybe even Self-Portrait as whatever
album people listen to when they love their friends and still want to feel connected
to the grass walls of a teenage wasteland that they can’t help but run away from
About This Poem
“I love using poetry to capture the malaise of growing up in the suburbs. When you spend your life in a place that feels defined by its monotony, it’s hard to find a sense of personal identity that isn’t mass produced. In order to feel like you have any control over your life, you have to find the small rebellions that lead to a sense of belonging. That aimlessness and escapism is what I tried to capture in this poem.”—Aaron Tyler Hand
This poem was the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day yesterday. While I found the title intriguing, I found the scene it sets nostalgic. I did not grow up in the suburbs, but in rural Alabama;, however, when I was in undergraduate and graduate school, I remember the late nights of getting Taco Bell, though in graduate school, it was often Krystal’s, which was open 24 hours and a block from my first apartment.
The title itself made me think of probably what all of us thought the first time we saw a combination “Taco Bell / Pizza Hut / KFC”: fast food with a personality disorder. It does seem kind of lost in what it is trying to do. I usually only see Taco Bells and KFCs together these days, but it’s still an odd combination.
About the Poet
Aaron Tyler Hand (@airinhand) is a creative writer with an MFA from Texas State University. He has previously been published in San Antonio Express-News, Houston Chronicle, Faultline Journal, GASHER Journal, HASH Journal, Funicular Magazine, Meniscus, among others. In addition to his own creative writing pursuits, Aaron volunteers his time to the prison teaching non-profit Rough Draft and hosts the poetry podcast The Personhood Project.
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it
About the Poem
First published in a small magazine Love, “Having a Coke with You” was also included in the 1965 book Lunch Poems, which I mentioned a few weeks ago. It is a typically spontaneous O’Hara work, unconventional and open-hearted, dashed off with enthusiasm.
Frank O’Hara was known as ‘a poet among the painters’ because of his association with a group of New York artists, the abstract expressionists, with whom he collaborated for a number of years. A livewire and party animal, he worked as an assistant curator at MoMA. Though not prolific, his carefree style, which he termed ‘Personism’, went against the grain of tradition. He hated literary pretension and wanted his poetry to reflect his dynamic interest in and involvement with cutting-edge cultural activity. Manhattan, his stomping ground, was certainly full of that.
“Having A Coke With You” was written when O’Hara returned from a trip to Spain in April 1960 and focused on the intimate relationship between two people enjoying a drink and alludes to art and religion. It’s an unorthodox poem that contrasts a beautiful lover with fine art and saintliness. The poem celebrates the mundane and the present moment, contrasting it with the formalism of traditional art. It’s conversational tone and colloquial language differ from O’Hara’s previous poems, which were often more experimental and abstract. Compared to his earlier works, this poem showcases a shift towards simplicity and accessibility. O’Hara emphasizes the immediate and personal experience, rejecting the grand narratives and artistic conventions of the past. The poem also reflects the cultural shift of the post-war era, where artists sought to break away from traditional forms and engage with everyday life.
By praising the beauty and authenticity of everyday moments, “Having a Coke with You” challenges the notion that art must be monumental or grand to be meaningful. Instead, it asserts the value of the ordinary and the subjective experience.
About the Poet
On March 27, 1926, Frank (Francis Russell) O’Hara was born in Maryland. He grew up in Massachusetts, and later studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944. O’Hara then served in the South Pacific and Japan as a sonarman on the destroyer USS Nicholas during World War II.
Following the war, O’Hara studied at Harvard College, where he majored in music and worked on compositions and was deeply influenced by contemporary music, his first love, as well as visual art. He also wrote poetry at that time and read the work of Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.
While at Harvard, O’Hara met John Ashbery and soon began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. Despite his love for music, O’Hara changed his major and left Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English. He then attended graduate school at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and received his MA in 1951. That autumn, O’Hara moved into an apartment in New York. He was soon employed at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art and continued to write seriously.
O’Hara’s early work was considered both provocative and provoking. In 1952, his first volume of poetry, A City Winter, and Other Poems, attracted favorable attention; his essays on painting and sculpture and his reviews for ArtNews were considered brilliant. O’Hara became one of the most distinguished members of the New York School of poets*, which also included Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch.
O’Hara’s association with painters Larry Rivers, Jackson Pollock, and Jasper Johns, also leaders of the New York School, became a source of inspiration for his highly original poetry. He attempted to produce with words the effects these artists had created on canvas. In certain instances, he collaborated with the painters to make “poem-paintings,” paintings with word texts.
O’Hara’s most original volumes of verse, Meditations in an Emergency (1956) and Lunch Poems (1964), are impromptu lyrics, a jumble of witty talk, journalistic parodies, and surrealist imagery.
O’Hara continued working at the Museum of Modern Art throughout his life, curating exhibitions and writing introductions and catalogs for exhibits and tours. On July 25, 1966, while vacationing on Fire Island, Frank O’Hara was killed in a sand buggy accident. He was forty years old.
*About the New York School of Poetry
The New York School of poetry began around 1960 in New York City and included poets such as John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara. Heavily influenced by Surrealism and Modernism, the poetry of the New York School was serious but also ironic and incorporated an urban sensibility into much of the work. An excerpt from Ashbery’s poem “My Philosophy of Life” demonstrates this attitude:
Just when I thought there wasn’t room enough for another thought in my head, I had this great idea— call it a philosophy of life, if you will. Briefly, it involved living the way philosophers live, according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones?
Abstract Expressionist art was also a major influence, and the New York School poets had strong artistic and personal relationships with artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem DeKooning. Both O’Hara and James Schuyler worked at the Museum of Modern Art, and Guest, Ashbery, and Schuyler were critics for Art News. O’Hara also took inspiration from artists, entitling two poems “Joseph Cornell” and “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art.” O’Hara’s poem “Why I am Not a Painter” includes the lines “I am not a painter, I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.”
A second generation of New York School poets arose during the 1960s and included Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, and Joe Brainard. These poets were also influenced by art, and their work contained much of the same humor and collaborative spirit. Their scene grew up around downtown New York and was associated with the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, a poetry organization that started in the mid-1960s.
The New York School continues to influence poets writing today. Recently published books such as Daniel Kane’s All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s and David Lehman’s The Last-Avant Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets are important histories of this poetic movement that still captures readers today.
In that great journey of the stars through space About the mighty, all-directing Sun, The pallid, faithful Moon, has been the one Companion of the Earth. Her tender face, Pale with the swift, keen purpose of that race, Which at Time’s natal hour was first begun, Shines ever on her lover as they run And lights his orbit with her silvery smile. Sometimes such passionate love doth in her rise, Down from her beaten path she softly slips, And with her mantle veils the Sun’s bold eyes, Then in the gloaming finds her lover’s lips. While far and near the men our world call wise See only that the Sun is in eclipse.
About the Poet
Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born on November 5, 1850, in Johnstown Center, Wisconsin. She was a popular writer characterized mainly by her upbeat and optimistic poetry, though she was also an activist. Her poetry collections include Poems of Passion (W. B. Conkey Company, 1883) and Poems of Peace (Gay & Bird, 1906). She died in Connecticut on October 30, 1919.
Reflections on the Eclipse
Where I live in Vermont was in the path of totality for yesterday’s total eclipse. As the moon slowly moved over the sun blocking out its rays, the sky became darker. It was a truly awesome experience.
As I watched the eclipse, I was not only thinking about the beautiful strangeness that is a total eclipse, but I was also thinking about what a total eclipse would have been like for people in history who were not as knowledgeable about astronomy as we are today. It must have been terrifying, especially for people like the Ancient Egyptians or Inca who worshipped the Sun. There would have been religious leaders who better understood the cosmos, but for the average person who just watched as the sun slowly disappeared and day turned to night, it probably seemed like the end was near. Their relief as the sun reappeared in the sky must have come as a great relief, but I can see how many people with primitive knowledge would have believed this event foretold a great disaster.
Joe
The Closet Professor 