A Former Free Verse Poet and a Cat

Archy and Mehitabel (styled as archy and mehitabel since they couldn't use the shift key on the typewriter to make capital letters ) are two fictional characters created in 1916, by Don Marquis, a columnist for The Evening Sun newspaper in New York City. Archy is a cockroach. Mehitabel is an alley cat. The characters appeared in hundreds of humorous verses and short stories in Marquis’ daily column, "The Sun Dial". 

Don Marquis said that Archy the cockroach was a former free verse poet who "sees life from the underside now." Mehitabel was a friend with questionable morals. She said that she had been Cleopatra in one of her former lives.

His columns were humorous but also had social and political undertones. Archy said, "a louse i used to know told me that millionaires and bums tasted about alike to him.” 

Archy produced free-verse poems which I read in seventh grade when I discovered a book of them in my school library. I was not a big reader of poetry and I'm sure that most poetry people don't rank Archy's writing very highly, but I was attracted to the oddness of it and the satire.

Archy tried punctuation after being criticized for not using it and  I liked this poem's start:

say comma boss comma capital

i apostrophe m getting tired of

being joshed about my

punctuation period capital t followed by

he idea seems to be

that capital i apostrophe m

ignorant where punctuation

is concerned period capital n followed by

o such thing semi

colon

Both characters had been reincarnated at the low end of the social scale. They roamed the streets of New York City in that time between the world wars. Marquis wrote the columns with them for 10 years and then collected them in book form.

Archy used the newspaper boss' desk to write in the after hours.

i climbed upon my boss his desk

to type a flaming ballad

and there i found a heap grotesque

of socks and songs and salad

Read more about Don Marquis and read some of his work at donmarquis.com

 

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Tarot With Sylvia Plath

I saw a curious note online this month that a lot of about 50 items connected to poet Sylvia Plath brought in more than $1 million in London, according to auction house Sotheby’s. 

Some of the items up for sale included Sylvia's and her husband Ted Hughes’ gold wedding bands, which went for nearly $38,000. There were more than a dozen love letters from Plath to Hughes dating from early in their marriage. There was a family photo album. 

People also bid on some odd things like a set of family recipes and a rolling pin, two serving trays and a drinking cup. Those sold for a collective $43,130.

I thought the whole thing sounded rather offensive. Who had this stuff? It turns out the items were sold by Frieda Hughes, the daughter of Plath and Hughes.

I know that Sylvia Plath has an almost cultish following, so I understand the interest, but what do people do with these things?

Plath's writing is dark and often depicts mental illness and issues with the men in her life (fathers and husbands). Her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, and poems lead readers to assume they know about her inner life.

Sylvia was born in 1932 in Boston but spent much of her life in England after moving there in 1955 to attend the University of Cambridge as a Fulbright Scholar. She met poet Ted Hughes there and was married just four months later. Hughes began an affair with a family friend and the couple separated in 1962 and just seven months later, Sylvia committed suicide in the home she shared with her two children in London. 

She wrote most of the work that would make her famous in the short time between her separation from Ted and her suicide at age 30. Much of that writing was published posthumously. Ariel, her collection of poems dealing with mental illness, is the best known of her poetry. 

A more understandable item for the devotee might be a deck of French Tarot cards that belonged to Plath. That was the most expensive at $206,886. Ted introduced Sylvia to the occult and gave her the cards for her 24th birthday. The tarot did have an impact on her work. One example is her 1960 poem "The Hanging Man." 

I imagine someone with those cards tapping the deck, asking a question (to Sylvia?) and making a spread on the table and trying to feel a connection with her. 

      

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Prompt: Historical Intimacy

When I was in a weeklong poetry workshop with Billy Collins a chunk of years ago, he looked at a poem I was working on titled "Sex With Amelia Earhart." He said it reminded him of his poem "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes" (which appears in his collection Picnic, Lightning).

The two poems both have a title intended to give a little shock. Collins uses a lot of allusions to Emily's poems including well-known lines from them. His poem is more romantic and less sexual than mine, but I imagine both poems would gather around them the same criticisms: sensationalist and maybe even misogynist. I know that both of thought that and disagreed with those appraisals.

I think we both thought of them as love poems. Male poet imagines a romantic relationship with a female inspiration from the past.

In an interview on Fresh Air, Collins said "I mean, I actually at one point, when there were so many books out about speculating particularly on Emily Dickinson's sexuality, you know, was she lesbian, was she celibate, did she have an affair, I was driven actually by all of that curiosity and speculation to write a poem called "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes," in which I attempted, in a kind of playful way, to put the matter at rest by having sex with her."

I showed both poems to another poet, Kristin D'Agostino, and she suggested they might be a prompt here .

Create an intimacy between you and a historical person. Imagine a conversation or romantic encounter. "Intimacy" can occur at many levels. I did some searching online and it seems that some psychologist list four types of intimacies: emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical. Only one of those involves touching.

That is your prompt for this month. Choose your person. Select the type (types?) of itimacy. A conversation over coffee? A passionate weekend? So many possibilities.

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Deadline for submissions to our next issue: August 31, 2021

Please refer to our submission guidelines and look at our archive of more than two decades of prompts and poems.

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No More Email Updates

This blog uses the FollowByEmail widget from Feedburner.
Recently, the Feedburner team released a system update announcement, that the email subscription service will be discontinued in August 2021.
The feed will still continue to work for programs that read it BUT
the emails to subscribers will no longer be supported.

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Another Emily's Poetry

The only undisputed portrait of Emily is in a group portrait by her brother Branwell

I never joined the Brontë cult. I had to read Emily's Wuthering Heights and Charlotte's Jane Eyre for a class and they didn't capture me. I never read anything by Anne Brontë. But they have a cultish following and many screen versions of those books. The Brontë birthplace in Thornton is a place of pilgrimage and their later home, the parsonage at Haworth in Yorkshire is now the Brontë Parsonage Museum and gets hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

Today is the birthday of Emily Brontë, born in Thornton, Yorkshire, England, on this day in 1818. 

Her sisters were Anne and Charlotte and she had a brother, Branwell, who was an artist and poet. Emily's mother died when Emily was three, and the children were left mostly on their own. Somehow, they didn't get into trouble but were reading Shakespeare, Milton, and Virgil, playing the piano, and telling each other stories. 

All three Brontë sisters were writers and they published under male-sounding pseudonyms: Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell. Emily only produced one novel. Though well known now, it was not well-reviewed at the time as critics found Wuthering Heights "brutal and dark."

As far as we know, she wasn't writing about her own life in the novel. There is very little else that she wrote that remains and what we know of her mostly comes from what others said and wrote about her.. 

I don't immediately think of her as a poet but Charlotte discovered some of Emily's notebooks in 1845 and they were filled with poetry. Charlotte convinced both her sisters to self-publish their secret poetry as Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell in 1846. Reviews were only fair but one fan was another secret poet, Emily Dickinson, who requested that "No Coward Soul is Mine" be read at her funeral.

Like some characters in a 19th-century novel, Emily ended up caring for Branwell, who had become alcoholic and drug-addicted and had tuberculosis. She caught a cold at his funeral, refused all medical attention and died three months later.

Charlotte said that "No Coward Soul is Mine" was the last thing Emily ever wrote.

No coward soul is mine

No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere

I see Heaven's glories shine

And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear

O God within my breast

Almighty ever-present Deity

Life, that in me hast rest,

As I Undying Life, have power in Thee

Vain are the thousand creeds

That move men's hearts, unutterably vain,

Worthless as withered weeds

Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

To waken doubt in one

Holding so fast by thy infinity,

So surely anchored on

The steadfast rock of Immortality.

With wide-embracing love

Thy spirit animates eternal years

Pervades and broods above,

Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears

Though earth and moon were gone

And suns and universes ceased to be

And Thou wert left alone

Every Existence would exist in thee

There is not room for Death

Nor atom that his might could render void

Since thou art Being and Breath

And what thou art may never be destroyed.

  

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Literary Road Trips

The Road, by Johannes Plenio from Pexels

Do you make road trips? They are something I associate with school breaks and summer. Last summer was different with almost everyone sheltering at home, businesses and attractions still closed or people still hesitant about being out in the world. 

There were some "virtual road trips" as with virtual museum tours, as a possibility, but this summer road trips on an actual road seem to have returned. 

Have you ever done a literary road trip? I have written about literary "pilgrimages" that I have made to a writer's home or grave. Last summer, I made a road trip that went to multiple literary stops. Being based in the Northeast, the trip I planned headed north from my New Jersey home into New England as we worked our way to friends who summer in Maine. We have done this before, visiting the homes of Poe, Washington Irving, Mark Twain, Hemingway and others.

On our 2019 trip, our first stop on the way to Maine was to see Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Henry David Thoreau’s cabin at the pond is long gone but the 462-acre Walden Pond State Reservation can still give you a glimpse of how Thoreau’s cabin would have looked and the Thoreau Institute Library has Thoreau-related books, manuscripts, art, music, maps and correspondence.

Nearby, we visited the homes of Emerson, the Alcotts and the home of Nathaniel Hawthorne. We visited all their graves, mostly in the same cemetery. My wife dubbed this the "dead authors trip."

We went to Salem and did some obligatory witchcraft things, but we also visited the House of the Seven Gables. 

One of my favorite authors is Herman Melville, and his Arrowhead home is in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Though he was a native New Yorker, Melville moved his family to the Berkshires in 1850 and stayed there for 13 years. It was here where he wrote Moby-Dick gazing from his writing desk window at a distant mountain that somewhat resembles a whale. We didn't follow the Melville Trail to places Melville loved in the Berkshires, including Pontoosuc Lake, Balance Rock and Mount Greylock.

When Nathaniel Hawthorne moved into Hawthorne Cottage in nearby Lenox in 1850, Melville was writing Moby-Dick and Hawthorne wrote and published The House of Seven Gables. The two writers became friends for a short time. When Melville published Moby-Dick in 1851, he dedicated the book to Hawthorne, and took Hawthorne to lunch at The Little Red Inn in the Curtis Hotel (now a retirement community!) to celebrate.

We didn't get Springfield's Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum which seemed a bit too commercialized with its interactive exhibits, a recreated studio and outside sculpture garden of the author’s most famous characters. 

We visited Washington Irving's Sunnyside estate some years ago and spent a wonderful autumn weekend in that part of New York state. I didn't visit Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York which is the resting place of the Headless Horseman in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Irving lived out his last 25 years a bit south in Tarrytown, but he is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (along with Elizabeth Arden, Andrew Carnegie and William Rockefeller).

Sunnyside is in nearby Irvington. I grew up in another Irvington in New Jersey. My Jersey hometown had been called Camptown, as in the song "Camptown Races. But they wanted to shake off the religious "camp meetings" image and decided to rename the town for the popular author Washington Irving. He was invited to the new name launch. But he was a no-show. Oh well.

Another stop I have made is the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. He moved there with his family and their new house was home until 1891. This is where he wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. While in town, we also visited Twain's neighbor at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Some people have asked me what I expect to find in these author homes. Ghosts? I don't have a good answer. I do like looking at their desks and books and papers. I liked imagining Melville gazing out his window at mountains that look a bit like a whale. I like looking out Hemingway's Key West window from his desk and wondering what story it might inspire. 

On my list is still Derry, New Hampshire to Robert Frost’s grandfather's farm which he purchased for his family who lived there for 11 years. The farm was often an inspiration for his poetry, especially in his first two books. Would I find any of his poetry inspiration there? Probably not. But I find inspiration everywhere, so I'm sure a visit would lead to poems, if only about visiting his farm.

Another stop on my list is one I have meant to visit for a long time. In Amherst, Massachusetts is the home of Emily Dickinson. The Emily Dickinson Museum includes the Homestead, Dickinson’s birthplace and home, and the Evergreens, home to Dickinson’s brother and his family. I imagine I might find a ghost and some poems floating here. I can't say why.

Emily Dickinson home in Amherst, The Evergreens

Another kind of literary road trip is featured in an article on openculture.com that talks about an interactive map that plots out the travels of road trip-filled books, some non-fiction, others fictionalized reality. 

If your road trip is still virtual, then you can follow a dozen books about cross-country travel, from Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012). You can map the authors’ routes and even put one over the other and track a writer’s descriptions of the places seen. 

Maybe you want to do a Beat Generation On the Road trip like Jack Kerouac from NYC to San Francisco with stops along the way in Denver and Mexico City. You could also follow Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters through California, Canada and Mexico, or a Wild hike or Steinbeck Travels with Charley. 

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Prompt: Ideal Day

My friend Laura Boss died this year. She was a poet who taught me many things. One thing that I love about her poetry is that there is often humor interspersed with seriousness. The first time I ever heard her read, I remember laughing. And now, though she has left us, I still hear her voice when I read her poems.

This prompt uses her poem, "Ideal Day,"(from her posthumous collection Family Promises 2021, NYQ Books)) which is a list of a number of possible ideal days for her. They are all-but-one impossibilities. (Had I known, I would have brought her a big box of Kit Kat candy bars and fulfilled that one ideal day.)

Her poem's ideals are serious. Her reality caveats for some of them are parenthetical, as her humor often was indicated, either by ( ) or by her voice.

Our prompt this month is a simple one - at least on the surface. What would be your ideal day? Is it a possibility or impossibility?

 Submission deadline July 30, 2021

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