What are your earliest poetry memories? Mine seem to revolve around narrative poems. I particularly remember reading Longfellow’s “Evangeline” in junior high and getting to actually illustrate parts of it. I remember drawing Evangeline and thinking the situations in that very long poem were so far-away and unreal to me, and I tried to make her real by drawing her. To this day, I can picture the little white bonnet and apron I put on her and the long plain green dress, only a few wisps of her brown hair visible coming out of the bonnet. Continue reading “Story-Poems: Which Do You Like?”
Tag: chaucer
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”
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 