On yet another February day late
in that month of unforgiving earth,
the irregular beating of junco wings,
I rest on a fallen rock, the slab electric
with the brutality of bone cold,
and the sun fights with clouds,
fights to spotlight me, and loses,
as I have been losing all of my life,
as I have been battling, element
against element with the best intentions. Continue reading “Merlin on the Road”
Author: ROMPoetry
The Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry is an interactive museum where the common person and poetry meld. ROMP is a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization.
Today, Remember Edna
I first encountered Edna St. Vincent Millay in an old high school literature textbook. Parked like a shiny convertible amongst the hearses of early twentieth century American literature, she called to me. Now granted “Renascence” wasn’t a horn-honking kind of poem, and it was certainly death-haunted, but it was written by a woman, one of only twenty at that, and it sang of possibilities.
High school textbooks, of course, would not publish some of Millay’s best works that came later, poems about sexuality, love, and longing, that were certainly ground-breaking topics for a female writer in the early twentieth century. She lived life on her own terms, had many affairs, was openly bi-sexual, went to jail for supporting Sacco and Vanzetti, and traveled extensively.
Today, February 22, in 1892, Millay was born. Her friends called her “Vincent.” Continue reading “Today, Remember Edna”
Everybody Needs Poetry
Ordinary Madness
Two friends of the museum, Johnny White and Brittanie Schneider (both excellent poets and artists–and I’m not biased, just because they are former students from my lost teaching years) made the latest poet chair for the museum. I love it, and I think you will, too.
Bukowski Chair Slide Show
We tried to capture the ordinary madness that Bukowski wrote of: the pounding of keys against the page until the ink is gone and it is nothing but a glorified hole puncher, the violence and drunk insanity, and aspirations of greatness cuckolded by reality.–Johnny White
The Cruelest Month: Coming Attractions
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
–T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
What to think of April? Is it the cruelest month? The “idiot, babbling and strewing flowers” as Millay called it? The time when the “shours soote” bathe “every veyne in swich licour” (the sweet showers bathe every plant vein in such liquid), as Chaucer spoke of? Well, it’s all of this and more with cummings’ goat-footed balloon-man whistling far and wee through the “puddle-wonderful” world. Continue reading “The Cruelest Month: Coming Attractions”
Holding Your Hand
We parked the truck and stepped out
Onto the road that used to be a highway
Of my childhood, winding through Mayes County
To the Grand River bluffs, where my mother
Said hobos made cave camps and where a train
Ran a solitary line amidst the blackjack
And sawbriar. I am holding your hand. Continue reading “Holding Your Hand”
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 