Virgil

I suppose most have heard the great Irish poet Seamus Heany passed away yesterday. Here's a little tribute.

The BBC obit seems to focus on the Catholic/Protestant conflicts that has consumed Ireland. I did not really see that side of his work, since I’m neither Irish nor British ethnicity. My appreciation of Heaney’s poetry really focused on his nature and rural life themes. Here’s a poem that highlights for me what makes his poetry unique and spectacular. In regard to the copywrite ...

I posted in my last blog Walt Whitman's poem "I Hear America Singing" and prendrelemick asked if such an America existed. Yes it did but he inspired me to write a parody poem of the new America as it exists today. Mind you this is a parody. While a certain bitterness I've been feeling with the state of my country lately spills over here, this is not a complete picture of what the country is like and it does not reflect what I truly feel. I am not this cynical. But hope you get a kick ...

In honor of the Fourth of July, here’s a poem by the most American of poets, our national poet, Walt Whitman, writing about what he writes best, the heart and wonder of America.

I Hear America Singing
by Walt Whitman

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready

...

I must tell the world about this recording. It’s a BBC production of T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, The Waste Land read by Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins. It is not only the best reading of The Waste Land that I have ever heard—and I’ve heard a few—but it might be the best reading of any poem of considerable length that I have ever heard. Run, don’t walk, to this BBC site and, not just listen to, right click and save the recording to your computer. I don’t know how long the BBC will keep this available ...

On Staten Island, cicadas only make their presence every seventeen years. I had no idea they were native to this place when I first moved here. I had heard of cicadas in poetry, but when I came across one on a page I read right over it as another of the million insects I had no real knowledge of. There is the ancient Greek myth of Tithonus, a musician who is granted eternal life by the Aphrodite but who forgets to give him eternal youth with eternal life, and so forever grows older and older ...

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