One of the unexpected highlights of last night’s Nomad Story Slam was actor Noni Lewis reciting The Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll and that got us thinking ….
Next Sunday night, April 5 at 7:30 we will host “Poems on a Sunday Night” streamed live to the Newton Nomadic Theater’s Facebook page.
Send your favorite poem to [email protected] no later than Thursday evening evening. We’ll recruit actors to read them – a different actor for each one, and we’ll give you an on-the-air shout out for your contribution.
Chicago
BY CARL SANDBURG
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
@Jack Leader – good one!
I don’t have a single favorite, only fond friends.
The Human Seasons
John Keats
Four Seasons fill the measure of the year;
There are four seasons in the mind of man:
He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear
Takes in all beauty with an easy span:
He has his Summer, when luxuriously
Spring’s honied cud of youthful thought he loves
To ruminate, and by such dreaming high
Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves
His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings
He furleth close; contented so to look
On mists in idleness—to let fair things
Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.
He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,
Or else he would forego his mortal nature.
@Mike Halle – a fine submission. Thanks
I have too many favorite poems….
This is one of my favorites. The two quotes are part of the poem, and I’ll track down the translation of the Pascal quote for folks. Of note is that William Meredith suffered a severe stroke in 1983 and suffered from expressive aphasia for years afterward, losing his ability to speak and write poetry. He slowly recovered with the help of his life partner, and later became the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and was a Poet Laureate of the Library of Congress.
To me, this is a poem of thanksgiving: for the wonder of life even after tragedy, for find someone who loves you to walk beside you through it all.
————————————-
Accidents of Birth
BY WILLIAM MEREDITH
Je vois les effroyables espaces de l’Univers qui m’enferment, et je me trouve attaché à un coin de cette vaste étendue, sans savoir pourquoi je suis plutôt en ce lieu qu’en un autre, ni pourquoi ce peu de temps qui m’est donné à vivre m’est assigné à ce point plutôt qu’à un autre de toute l’éternité qui m’a précédé, et de toute qui me suit.
—Pascal, Pensées sur la religion
The approach of a man’s life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive. The endless wonder of this meeting is what causes the mind, in its inward liberty of a frozen morning, to turn back and question and remember. The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here?
—Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House
Spared by a car or airplane crash or
cured of malignancy, people look
around with new eyes at a newly
praiseworthy world, blinking eyes like these.
For I’ve been brought back again from the
fine silt, the mud where our atoms lie
down for long naps. And I’ve also been
pardoned miraculously for years
by the lava of chance which runs down
the world’s gullies, silting us back.
Here I am, brought back, set up, not yet
happened away.
But it’s not this random
life only, throwing its sensual
astonishments upside down on
the bloody membranes behind my eyeballs,
not just me being here again, old
needer, looking for someone to need,
but you, up from the clay yourself,
as luck would have it, and inching
over the same little segment of earth-
ball, in the same little eon, to
meet in a room, alive in our skins,
and the whole galaxy gaping there
and the centuries whining like gnats—
you, to teach me to see it, to see
it with you, and to offer somebody
uncomprehending, impudent thanks.
Translation:
I see the terrifying spaces of the universe that enclose me, and I find myself attached to a corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am more in this place than in another, nor why this little time that is given me to live is assigned me at this point more than another out of all the eternity that has preceded me and out of all that will follow me.
THOUGHTS ON RELIGION
Pascal
Thanks Mr. ville
Since we’re going metaphysical this afternoon, I’ll respond with Thunderclap Newman’s words from the song “Accidents” …
Life is just a game
you fly a paper plane
and there is no end” –
I usually find that poetry offers an escape into a different world, shared by the author and me. However, there are a couple of historically relevant ditties I found.
According to “Philadelphia, Nurses, and the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918” by James F. Armstrong, RN, this rhyme was chanted by school children jumping rope during the Spanish Flu epidemic:
I had a little bird and its name was Enza
I opened the window and
in-flu-enza
Armstrong also writes, of the epidemic in Philadelphia:
‘By 4 October the University of Pennsylvania’s newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian reported 636 new cases and 139 deaths. The paper would continue to give a daily count throughout the epidemic.
On that day the board of health closed all schools, churches, theaters, and saloons. All citizens were ordered to wear gauze masks in public:
“Obey the laws
and wear the gauze
protect your jaws
from septic paws.”
‘Those daring not to wear masks were ridiculed by being called “slackers,” the worst epithet of the day, or were physically run off the streets. A sneeze or cough sent people scurrying.’
Read more here:
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/i/influenza/philadelphia-nurses-and-the-spanish-influenza-pandemic-of-1918.html
Winston Churchill wrote a poem about the Spanish Flu when he was only 15. You can read it here, it’s pretty grim:
https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/winston-churchill-the-influenza-poem.html
I like these verses, though:
Yet Father Neptune strove right well
To moderate this plague of Hell,
And thwart it in its course;
And though it passed the streak of brine
And penetrated this thin line,
It came with broken force.
For though it ravaged far and wide
Both village, town and countryside,
Its power to kill was o’er;
And with the favouring winds of Spring
(Blest is the time of which I sing)
It left our native shore
OK, not my “favorite” poem, per se. Actually, a snatch of dialogue from a movie that perhaps some Village14ers of a certain age might recall:
“Hey, Jeremy — must you always talk in rhyme?”
“If I spoke prose
You’d all find out
I don’t know
What I talk about!”
Good one
Since last Sunday we have been inundated with your poem choices and they are wonderfully eclectic – from wacky funny rhymes, to well known classics, to sublime but obscure stuff.
Meanwhile we’ve rounded up 20 great actors from the Boston area and around the country. Tonight we matched the poems to the actors and Sunday night it will all come together.
Tune in Sunday night at 7:30 PM at the Newton Nomadic Theater’s Facebook page for our first ever, free, live, Poems on a Sunday Night
Thanks for all the wonderful submissions and sorry if we didn’t get to yours last night. We ended up with a wealth of riches to choose from.
It was a great evening. If you missed it live, you can still see it here.