DAILY BLOG
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In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I want to share a song featuring Louis Armstrong today I just recently discovered when it was played on my local Jazz station, KBEM Jazz88. Here is some information I found researching The Real Ambassadors and this song in particular. The Real Ambassadors is a jazz musical developed… Read more
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Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was an American poet, feminist, and lesbian activist. Her early poetry, which was greatly admired by W.H. Auden, was quite formal. However, as she struggled with the repressiveness of the 1950s and patriarchal society, she broke away from formalism to free verse. She is one of the few poets I can think… Read more
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Jane Hirshfield was born in 1953 in New York City. She is an ordained lay Zen Buddhist and a well-regarded translator; she is also one of my favorite contemporary poets. I have heard Hirshfield described as the poet of “presence.” Her work is often described as a bridge between the Western lyrical tradition and the meditative depth… Read more
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Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language. -Lucille Clifton Read more
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Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on November 25, 2011. On a cold November morning, I find myself dreaming already of spring. Winter used to seem merely a nuisance but as I have gotten older it has turned more and more into a… Read more
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At first blush, the marriage between Ovid, that most Latin of poets, and Ted Hughes would seem as unlikely a match as any you could imagine. Not in ability, of course, but in language and temperament. Hughes as a poet has always seemed to me one of the most earthy, physical, and Anglo-Saxon of all… Read more
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On Sunday, I posted and reviewed a poem by the Imagist Amy Lowell. Today, I am going to be “reviewing” a poem by my other favorite Imagist poet, Hilda Doolittle, who published under her initials, H.D. H.D. (1886–1961) was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to a wealthy family and attended Bryn Mawr. A true Bohemian, she… Read more
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Once again Trump/MAGA Fascism has murdered someone here in Minnesota: It is interesting how Minnesota and Minnesotans have been on the frontline of the long war against Fascism in this country since the Civil War. At Gettysburg, the 1st Minnesota captured the flag of the 28th Virginia Confederate Regiment. A symbol of victory of evil… Read more
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Poet Amy Lowell (1874–1925) was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. She is one of the poets most associated with the Imagist movement, along with H.D., Richard Aldington, and Ezra Pound. Imagism was a reactionary movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision, economy of language, and the use of sharp, concrete images. It stood in… Read more
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Though Marianne Moore (1887–1972) was born in Missouri, she became the quintessential New York City Modernist poet. The city and its “inhabitants” live in her poems, whether they be her beloved Bronx Bombers or a specific tree in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Over Christmas, Sue and I returned to NYC with my Minnesota daughter and son-in-law… Read more
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