Edwin Arlington Robinson

Edwin Arlington Robinson was born in Head Tide, Maine in 1869. I first encountered his writing when my high school English teacher showed us his poem "Richard Cory" knowing that we were going to say "That's a song by Simon and Garfunkel." 

"Richard Cory" is a song written by Paul Simon in early 1965, and recorded by Simon and Garfunkel for their second studio album, Sounds of Silence, which probably everyone in my class in 1968 owned or had at least heard. It was much earlier a poem by Robinson. 

Our teacher asked us if we thought that Paul Simon had plagiarized the lyrics. (Plagiarism was a topic of discussion in that class recently.) We didn't think so and neither did our teacher who thought the use of the poem was "transformative" and so safe. 

We listened to the song and looked at the poem. Most of the class liked Simon's version better, but I remember thinking that he really owed it all to Robinson. 

I went to the library and borrowed a book of his poetry. (samples here) I remember liking "Miniver Cheevy" and "Mr. Flood's Party" because they were clear stories about people.

Richard Cory

by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Robinson lived in poverty and was an alcoholic until President Theodore Roosevelt read his book Children of the Night (1897). Roosevelt liked the poetry enough that he wrote a review of the book and found Robinson a job at the New York Customs Office, which saved Robinson’s life. It was a place where Herman Melville had also worked for a time. The job Robinson was given was a kind of grant as it was designed to give him as little work as possible so he could write. He received a stipend of $2,000 per year. 

Here are Paul Simon's lyrics:

They say that Richard Cory owns one half of this whole town

With political connections to spread his wealth around

Born into society, a banker's only child

He had everything a man could want, power, grace and style

But I work in his factory

And I curse the life I'm living

And I curse my poverty

And I wish that I could be

Oh, I wish that I could be

Oh, I wish that I could be Richard Cory

The papers print his pictures almost everywhere he goes

Richard Cory at the opera, Richard Cory at a show

And the rumor of his parties and the orgies on his yacht

Oh, he surely must be happy with everything he's got

But I, I work in his factory

And I curse the life I'm living

And I curse my poverty

And I wish that I could be

Oh, I wish that I could be

Oh, I wish that I could be Richard Cory

He freely gave to charity, he had the common touch

And they were grateful for his patronage and they thanked him very much

So my mind was filled with wonder when the evening headlines read

"Richard Cory went home last night and put a bullet through his head"

But I, I work in his factory

And I curse the life I'm living

And I curse my poverty

And I wish that I could be

Oh, I wish that I could be

Oh, I wish that I could be Richard Cory

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Amanda Gorman: A Young Poet Inspires

The popular media keeps reporting that "poetry is having a moment." That's odd to hear if you have been a fan of poetry or a poet yourself.  But now with a year of the COVID-19 pandemic and a crazy U.S. election year, protests about racial issues, it seems that more people are reading and writing poetry as a response.

Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, also gave poetry media attention and offered inspiration to new young people who had not written or read poetry before. Then, she appeared at the Super Bowl - an unusual place for a poetry reading, and an audience not known for attending poetry readings. 

Her inaugural poem, titled "The Hill We Climb," received a lot of praise. Her sudden rise to fame has also had its critics who point to her enormous presales for three upcoming books and her getting a modeling contract with IMG as not what we expect poets to do. There is also lots of marketing around Amanda.

It reminds me of when Billy Collins became a best-selling poet which is not usually the case for poetry books and poets. But Collins became our Poet Laureate and continues to be very popular and much more respected. We seem to want our poets to be humble, be teachers, and stay somewhat poor.

Amanda Gorman is not new to poetry. She was writing as a child and was named the Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles in 2014. She published her first poetry collection, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, in 2015. While studying sociology at Harvard University, she was named the first National Youth Poet Laureate in the United States.

Her chance to read at the inauguration came late. Dr. Jill Biden watched a reading Gorman gave at the Library of Congress just a few days before the event and asked if Gorman might read something for the inauguration. Amanda got the details on a Zoom call flew to Washington, D.C.

  

More on Amanda Gorman

• harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a35266445/amanda-gorman-poet-inauguration/
• www.theamandagorman.com
• twitter.com/theamandagorman
• instagram.com/amandascgorman
• facebook.com/theamandagorman

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Prompt: The Day After

Holidays, holy days, observances - global, national, and personal - have great significance. But what comes after?

In Susan Rothbard's poem, "February 15," she looks not at Valentine's Day but at the day after. What at first seems like a sad situation - unsold bouquets of roses - becomes a happy event.

February 15

Dozens of dozens of roses swaddled

in cellophane line the windows of Trader Joe’s.

I’ve come to buy eggs, bananas, a bottle

of seltzer, though I’ve thrown in more:

pretzels, Gouda, mix for a cake

I may never make. It’s winter—we live

from meal to meal, from fire to fire.

What pleasure we take is our solace

for all this cold, all this snow.

But today, at five, the sky is still blue

as the cashier offers me roses for free

and I walk to my car not minding the cold

so much. What a wonder it is to see shoppers

like me with cellophane poking from the tops

of their bags. We all want something for nothing,

we’re all bringing home roses. I imagine tonight

across the county: roses, roses, opening, opening.

by Susan Rothbard (from Birds of New Jersey, Broadkill Press, 2020)

In this cold, Valentine month, we will be writing about "the day after." What happens the day after Christmas, a birthday, the summer solstice, a birth, a death, Thanksgiving, a wedding? What happens on the day after Labor Day? (Here's one take on that day after)

Special days are sometimes special; sometimes they are not. But for this prompt, we're interested in the day after that day. Choose a day that appears on all our calendars, or appears only on your calendar.

Deadline for submissions: February 28, 2021

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Attention is the beginning of devotion

Mary Oliver published many books of poetry and is best known as a poet. But included in her 25 books is also prose and one of those is Upstream. It is a collection of essays about her relationship to the natural world, and how it influences her writing and reading.

In the title essay in that book, she describes getting lost in the woods as a child. You would expect her to have been fearful, but she says she had “the sense of going toward the source.”

“One tree is like another, but not too much. One tulip is like the next tulip, but not altogether.” 

The essay asks all of us to teach and show children how to notice the world. She suggests that we stand them in a creek and walk upstream, notice the sticks, rocks, leaves, flowers, and insects. All of those things seem silent, but they're not. You need to listen. Attention is the beginning of devotion. 

In a 2015 interview on the radio program On Being, Oliver talked about all this and especially how walking and writing in the woods saved her life.

One of her best-known poems is "Wild Geese." I can imagine her walking in the woods and hearing, then seeing those geese above her heading somewhere unknown. Listen to Mary Oliver read "Wild Geese." 

   

On Being Studios · "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver

  

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Prompt: Translation

Image by Oli Lynch from Pixabay

As a teacher, the poet John Ashbery gave as a prompt Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” in its original German for his non-German speaking students. He made it a translation exercise in which students sounded out the German words and wrote down English words resembling those sounds. They might have translated “sich hält und glänzt” as “sick halt and glance.” It would actually translate as "holds up and shines," but being correct in your translation was not the point. He didn't want students to focus on meaning and subject or try to crack the puzzle of the Rilke poem. The exercise was about sound and rhythm.

Their "translations" might have looked somewhat nonsensical but then they could try to find logic in this rough draft but maintain the original line breaks and stanzas.

We have selected for this prompt an unpublished poem that was written in English and used a translation app to put it into Portuguese and Latin. (see the translated poems here) They look quite different. We avoided more common Spanish, French and Italian versions in the hope that you might be less likely to know Latin or Portuguese and not be influenced by the words.

As with the Ashberry exercise, don't focus on being "correct." Don't cheat and run the poems through an app to put it into your native language! Choose one of the two translations. The goal is to focus on sound, meter and perhaps some similar cognates. The result will probably be a first draft that needs some logic applied to it. Revise but maintain the three stanzas and line breaks which will allow readers to see some of your path to the final poem.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: January 31, 2021

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Some Thoughts About Submissions

A quick post while we go through the final edits on poems submitted in December which will appear on Poets Online tomorrow. 

The site has always been primarily a one-man operation, but I have always had readers who help sort through submissions - particularly when I wonder if a poem addresses the prompt.

Some of these revolving and occasional readers (all poets themselves) also help format and correct typos and obvious mistakes in the poems they think should be published. Rarely, we send a poem back to the author and ask a question or suggest a change. 

I got an email from someone who has submitted and been published on the site several times who said, "I'm trying to figure out how you order the poems on the page. Best ones at the top - or is their [sic] no real order?" Since I assemble the new issue as poems are accepted, the order is often that of acceptance with the first poems accepted at the top. I certainly don't rank them. I will separate them so that several long or short poems aren't together or split apart similar poems sometimes.

A new reader of submissions asked me, with some exasperation, "Don't these people read the actual prompt and submission guidelines?" 

I told him that he can expect to see: poems that don't address the prompt at all (not even in their email subject line) or that tangentially address it (as if they added a few words to an existing poem so that it seemed to fit) and poems not formatted in the requested single spacing (which means he has to remove all those extra returns) or that did not make the title in all caps so that it was clearly the title (and wouldn't need to be retyped) or submissions of multiple poems, or misspellings and unintentional grammar errors ("Don't they have spell and grammar checkers on their computer?")

"If I was you, I would just reject those poems outright. That's what a lot of journals do, " he replied.

I don't usually reject poems for most of those reasons - but we all do appreciate submissions that follow the guidelines.

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Walking in Soseki's Snow Valley

Image: Kanenori

Snow Valley

by MUSŌ SOSEKI, translated by W. S. MERWIN AND SŌIKU SHIGEMATSU

Each drifting snowflake

             falls nowhere

                          but here and now

Under the settling flowers of ice

             the water is flowing

                          bright and clear

The cold stream

             splashes out

                          the Buddha’s words

Startling

             the stone tortoise

                          from its sleep

These poems in Narrative magazine are excerpted from Sun at Midnight: Poems and Letters (Copper Canyon Press), the first translation into English of the work of Muso Soseki.

Soseki was a thirteenth-century Zen roshi and founder of the rock garden. The poems are excellent reading for other poets, gardeners, and students of Zen.  

Musō Soseki (1275–1351), born ten years after Dante, became the most famous Zen monk of his time. He advised and taught several emperors, as well as more than thirteen thousand students. 

All on my own I’m happy

            in the unmapped landscape

                        inside the bottle

my only friend

            is this

                        wisteria cane

Last night

            we stayed up talking

                        so late

that I’m afraid

            I was overheard

                        by the empty sky

In his old age, Musō withdrew from court to devote himself to Buddha and to cultivate the Zen gardens for which he is remembered. At his death, he left behind an enormous body of poetry and prose. In honor of his profound influence on Japanese culture, he was renamed Musō Kokushi, “national Zen teacher,” by Emperor Go-Daigo.

Toki-no-Ge (Satori Poem)

Year after year

I dug in the earth

looking for the blue of heaven

only to feel

the pile of dirt

choking me

until once in the dead of night

I tripped on a broken brick

and kicked it into the air

and saw that without a thought

I had smashed the bones

of the empty sky

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