"The Machines Mourn the Passing of People" by Alicia E Stallings

A. E. Stallings

A. (Alicia) E. Stallings was born in 1968. She grew up in Decatur, GA, and was educated at the University of Georgia and Oxford University in classics. Her poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry (1994 & 2000) and has received numerous awards, including a Pushcart Prize (Pushcart Prize Anthology XXII), the 1997 Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry and the third annual James Dickey Prize from Five Points. She also serves as an editor for the Atlanta Review. A finalist for both the Yale Younger Series & Walt Whitman Award, her first poetry collection, Archaic Smile, was awarded the 1999 Richard Wilbur Award by Dana Gioia, and is published by the University of Evansville Press. She is currently at work on a verse translation of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. She resides in Athens, Greece with her husband, John Psaropoulos, editor of the Athens News.

"Yesterday" by W S Merwin

W. S. Merwin

William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City on September 30, 1927. He was raised in Union City, New Jersey and Scranton, Pennsylvania, as the son of a Presbyterian minister, and began writing hymns as a child. Merwin's mother had grown up an orphan, and later lost her brother and her first child; Merwin's father was raised in a hard and violent home. The grief from these tragedies, the inherited violence, and the surrounding poverty, run throughout Merwin's poetry, across a career that spans five decades.

Merwin attended Princeton University on a scholarship, where he was a classmate of Galway Kinnell, and studied poetry with the critic R. P. Blackmur, and his teaching assistant, John Berryman. After graduating in 1948, he spent an additional year at Princeton studying Romance language, a pursuit that would later lead to his prolific work as a translator of Latin, Spanish, and French poetry.

Merwin soon married his first wife, Dorothy Jeanne Ferry, and began writing verse plays and working as a tutor to the children of wealthy families. He traveled throughout Europe, and in 1950 took a position in Majorca, Spain as an instructor to the son of Robert Graves. While there, he met Dido Milroy, who he eventually married after ending his first marriage. His relationship with Dido became deeply influential, and helped propel him into literary circles and find work as a translator.

Merwin's first collection, A Mask for Janus (1952), was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The formal and ornate collection was praised by Auden for its technical virtuosity, and bore the influence both of Graves and the medieval poetry Merwin was translating, in its focus on classical imagery and myth.

After leaving Majorca, Merwin remained in Europe, living in London and the South of France for several years. In 1956, he received a fellowship from the Poets' Theater in Cambridge, MA, and moved back to the United States. While in Boston, he entered the circle of writers that surrounded Robert Lowell and decided to abandon his verse plays to concentrate on poetry, seeking a more American vernacular and turning inward, toward more introspective and personal subjects. At this time he also began experimenting with form and irregular metrics.

His books written during this time, Green with Beasts (1956) and The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), both demonstrate the beginning of a significant shift in style and perspective, which intensified in his later work. A New York Times review of The Drunk in the Furnace noted "the earthiness, the grittiness, the humane immediacy that informs the finest of these poems."

Merwin and Dido soon moved back to Europe, and lived in London and the South of France. They became close friends with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and witnessed the brutal collapse of their marriage and Plath's eventual suicide. In 1968, Merwin and Dido separated, and he began living for part of the year in New York.

In 1967, Merwin published the critically acclaimed volume, The Lice, followed by The Carrier of Ladders in 1970, both of which remain his most influential collections. Both books use classical legends as a means to explore personal and political themes, including his opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1971, Merwin received the Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of Ladders. In a letter to the New York Review of Books, he declared his intention to donate the $1000 prize to antiwar causes as protest, because of his objection to the war. Auden responded through his own letter that the Pulitzer judges were not a political party and had no ties to American foreign policy.

In 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaii to study with the Zen Buddhist master Robert Aitken. There he married Paula Schwartz in a Buddhist ceremony in 1983. Merwin settled in Maui, in a home that he helped design and build, surrounded by acres of tropical forest which he painstakingly restored after the land had been devastated and depleted after years of erosion, logging, and agriculture. The rigorous practice of Buddhism and passionate dedication to environmentalism that Merwin devoted himself to in Hawaii has profoundly influenced his later work, including his evocative renderings of the natural world in The Compass Flower (1977), Opening the Hand (1983), and The Rain in the Trees (1988), as well as The Folding Cliffs, a novel-in-verse drawing on the history and legends of Hawaii.

Over the course of his long career, Merwin has published over twenty books of poetry. His recent collections include The Shadow of Sirius which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize; Present Company (Copper Canyon, 2007); Migration: New & Selected Poems (2005) which won the 2005 National Book Award; The Pupil (2002); The River Sound (1999), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Flower and Hand: Poems 1977-1983 (1997); The Vixen (1996); and Travels (1993), which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

He has also published nearly twenty books of translation, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2004), Dante's Purgatorio (2000), and volumes by Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda. His numerous plays and books of prose include The Lost Upland (1992), his memoir of life in the south of France; Summer Doorways (2006), a memoir of his childhood, and The Book of Fables (2007), a collection of his short prose.

Merwin's honors include the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Bollingen Prize, a Ford Foundation grant, the Governor's Award for Literature of the State of Hawaii, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

He is a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and has served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. In 2010, Merwin was appointed the Library of Congress's seventeenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. He currently lives and works in Hawaii.

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/123

"My father moved through dooms of love" by E E Cummings (poetry reading)

E. E. Cummings (1894 - 1962)

American poet and painter who first attracted attention for his eccentric punctuation, but the commonly held belief that E.E. Cummings had his name legally changed to lowercase letters is erroneous – preferred to capitalize the initials of his name on book covers and in other material. Despite typographical eccentricity and devotion to the avant-garde, Cummings's themes are in many respect quite traditional. He often dealt with the antagonism between an individual and masses, but his style brought into his poems lightness and satirical tones. As an artist Cummings painted still-life pictures and landscapes to a professional level.
Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink.
(from 'Humanity i love you', 1925)

Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was a Harvard teacher and later a Unitarian minister. Cummings was educated at Cambridge High and Latin School, and from 1911 to 1916 he attended Harvard, where he met John Dos Passos. Cummings became an aesthete, he began to dress unconventionally, and dedicated himself to painting and literature. He graduated in 1915 with a major in classics.

With Dos Passos and others he published in 1917 Eight Harvard Poets. During the last years of World War I, he drove an ambulance in France. Indiscreet comments in the letters of a friend led to Cummings's arrest and incarceration in a French concentration camp at La Ferté-Macé. Later, he found out he had been accused of treason, but the charges were never proved. This experience gave basis for Cummings's only novel, The Enormous Room (1922), in which he drew acidly funny sketches of the jailers and sympathetic portraits of prisoners. It was followed by collections of verse, Tulips and Chimneys (1923), which contrasted the evils of war to the 'sweet spontaneous earth' and XLI Poems (1925). In the 1920s and1930s Cummings divided his time between Paris, where he studied art, and New York, where he had a child with a friend's wife.

In Paris Cummings met the poets Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, and Archibald MacLeish. His friends also included the philosopher A.J. Ayer, who had a short affair with his wife, Marion Morehouse. She was twelve years Cummings's junior, a former Ziegfield showgirl and one of the leading models of the age. Cummings's friendship with Ayer lasted over twenty-five years. Once Cummings took Ayer to see the legendary stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. "You walk on tightropes as if they lay on the ground," Cummings wrote in a birthday poem to Ayer, "and always, bird eyed, notice more than we notice you notice".

Cummings supported himself by painting portraits and writing for Vanity Fair. Throughout the 1920s, he contributed to The Dial, perhaps America's greatest literary journal. & (1925) and is 5 (1925), inspired by Apollinaire, were written in the poet's new style. The books presented his radical experiments with punctuation and typography, and he used lower letter cases in his own name. In 1930 he Cummings published a sixty-three page volume with no title. Grammatical anarchism, a modern extension of romanticism, was a both result of the poet's hostility to mass society and his attempt to find a new way to write on old subjects: "Since feeling is first / who pays any attention / to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you". (from 'since feling is first', 1926) In the line "mOOn Over tOwns mOOn" (1935), which showed the movement of the full moon, the letters became pictorial signs.

Cummings believed that modern mass society was a threat to individuals. "Progress is a comfortable disease," Cummings once wrote. He was interersted in cubism, and jazz, which had not became mass entertainment, and contemporary slang, an unorthodox form of language. In his poems Cummings often expressed his rebellious attitude towards religion, politics, and conformity. "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls / are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds / (also,with the church's protestant blessings / daughters,unscented shapeless spirited) they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead". (from 'the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls', 1923) But Cummings also celebrated the joy of life and the beauty of natural world, of which people have unluckily estranged themselves. "anyone lived in a pretty how town / (with up so floating many bells down) spring summer autumn winter / he sang his didn't he danced his did." (from 'anyone lived in a pretty how town', 1940)

In 1927 his play him was produced by the Provincetown Players in New York City. During these years he exhibited his paintings and drawings, but they failed to attract as much critical interest as his writings. Moreover, his ballet Tom, based on Uncle Tom's Cabin, was pronounced undancable, and fourteen publisher had politely turned down his new book, entitled 70 Poems. In 1931 Cummings travelled in the Soviet Union and recorded later his impressions in Eimi (1933), a version of Dante's descent into Hell, in which he saw the Russians as "undead." However, on leaving Russia he also translated Louis Aragon's Le Front Rouge, a poem influenced by Mayakovsky.

When Cummings did not find a publisher for 70 Poems, he got $300 from his mother and published the collection in 1935 under his own imprint, the Golden Eagle Press, but now entitle No Thanks.
------------NO
--------THANKS TO
T----------TO
-Farrar & Rinehart
-Simon & Schuster
--Coward–McCann
---Limited Editions
---Harcourt, Brace
----Random -House
---- Equinox Press
-----Smith & Haas
------Viking Press
-----------Knopf
-----------Dutton
----------Harper's
--------- Scribner's
-------Covici-Friede
(arranged in the form of a funeral urn in the dedication page of No Thanks)

From 1952 to 1953 Cummings was a professor at Harvard. His series of lectures were appeared under the title i: six nonlectures. In 1957 he received a special citation from the National Book Award Committee for Poems, 1923-1954, and in 1957 he won the Bollinger Prize. Cummings was married three times, first to Elaine Orr; the marriage ended in divorce in less than nine months. He then married Anne Minnerly Barton, they separated in 1932. The rest of his life Cummings shared with Marion Morehouse, a photographer and model, whom he met in 1933. They collaborated in 1962 in Marion Morehouse's photographic book, Adventures in Value. Cummings died of cerebral hemorrhage on September 3, 1962, in North Conway.
For further reading: The Magic-Maker by Charles Norman (1958); E.E. Cummings, the Art of His Poetry by N. Friedman (1960); E.E. Cummings and the Growth of a Writer by N. Friedman (1964); E.E. Cummings by B.A. Marks (1965); E.E. Cummings: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by N. Friedman (1972); E.E. Cummings, a Remembrance of Miracles by B.K. Dumas (1974); Dreams in a Mirror by Richard S. Kennedy (1979); Critical Essays on E.E. Cummings, ed. by G.H. Rotella (1984)

Selected works:
Eight Harvard Poets, 1917 (with others)
The Enourmous Room, 1922
Tulips and Chimneys, 1923
&, 1925
XLI Poems, 1925
is 5, 1926
him, 1927 (play)
by e e cummings, 1930 [published without a title]
CIOPW, 1931
W, 1931
Eimi, 1933
no thanks, 1935
Tom, 1935 (a ballet from H.E.B. Stowe's novel Uncle Toms Cabin)
One Over Twenty, 1937
Collected Poems, 1938
New Poems, 1938
50 Poems, 1940
1 x 1, 1944
Anthropos: The Future of Art, 1945
Santa Claus, 1946
Eimi, 1948
XAIPE, 1950
i, six nonlectures, 1953
Poems 1923-1954, 1954
95 Poems, 1958
A Miscellany, 1958
Adventures in Value: Fifty Photographs by Marion Morehouse, 1962
73 Poems. 1964
Fairy Tales, 1965
E.E. Cummings, a Miscellany Revised, 1965
A Miscellany Revised, 1965
Complete poems, 1968
Three Plays and a Ballet, 1968
Selected Letters of e e cummings, 1969
Complete Poems: 1913-1962, 1972
Poems 1905-1962, 1973
Uncollected Poems (1910-1962), 1981
1981; Etcetera: the Unpublished Poems of e e cummings, 1983
His Whist and Other Poems for Children, 1983
Complete Poems 1904-1962, 1994

http://kirjasto.sci.fi/cummings.htm

"Two Tramps in Mud Time" by Robert Frost (poetry reading)

Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874-1963), four-time Pulitzer Prize winning American poet, teacher and lecturer wrote many popular and oft-quoted poems including “After Apple-Picking”, “The Road Not Taken”, “Home Burial” and “Mending Wall”;

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”

At times bittersweet, sometimes ironic, or simply marveling at his surroundings, one can also see autobiographical details in Frost’s works; he suffered devastating losses in his life including the untimely deaths of his sister, two of his children and his wife. He knew the soul’s depths of psychic despair but was also capable of delighting in birch trees ‘loaded with ice a sunny winter morning’. While memorialising the rural landscape, vernacular, culture and people of New England in his traditional verse style, his poems also transcend the boundaries of time and place with metaphysical significance and modern exploration of human nature in all her beauty and contradictions. Though not without his critics, millions of readers the world over have found comfort and profound meaning in his poetry and he has influenced numerous other authors, poets, musicians, and playwrights into the 21st Century.

Robert Lee Frost (named after Southern General Robert E. Lee) was born on 26 March 1874 in San Francisco, California to Isabelle Moodie (1844-1900) teacher, and William Prescott Frost Jr. (1850-1885), teacher and journalist. San Francisco was a lively city full of citizens of Pioneering spirit, including Will who had ventured there from New Hampshire to seek his fortune as a journalist. He also started gambling and drinking, habits which left his family in dire financial straits when he died in 1885 after contracting tuberculosis. Honouring his last wishes to be buried in Lawrence, Massachusetts where he was born, Isabelle, Robert and his sister Jeanie Florence (1876-1929) made the long train journey across the country to the New England town. Isabelle took up teaching again to support her children.

With both parents as teachers, young Robert was early on exposed to the world of books and reading, studying such works as those by William Shakespeare and poets Robert Burns and William Wordsworth. He also formed a life-long love of nature, the great outdoors and rural countryside. After enrolling in Lawrence High School he was soon writing his own poems including “La Noche Triste” (1890) which was published in the school’s paper. He excelled in many subjects including history, botany, Latin and Greek, and played football, graduating at the head of his class. In 1892 he entered Dartmouth, the Ivy League College in Hanover, New Hampshire, but soon became disenchanted with the atmosphere of campus life. He then took on a series of jobs including teaching and working in a mill, all the while continuing to write poetry.


Frost got his first break as a poet in 1894 when the New York magazine Independent published “My Butterfly: An Elegy” for a stipend of $15. A year later a wish he had had for some time came true; on 19 December 1895 he married Elinor Miriam White (1872-1938), his co-valedictorian and sweetheart from school. They had gone separate ways upon graduation to attend college, and while Frost had left early, Elinor wanted to wait until she was finished before getting married. They would have six children together; sons Elliott (b.1896-1900) and Carol (1902-1940) and daughters Lesley (b.1899), Irma (b.1903), Marjorie (b.1905-1934), and Elinor Bettina (1907-1907).

The newlyweds continued to teach, which Frost always enjoyed, but the demanding schedule interfered with his writing. In 1897 he entered Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, though illness caused him to leave in 1899 before finishing his degree. Despite that, it was one of many institutions that would award him an honorary degree later on. The next ten years, the ‘Derry years’, were trying times for Frost with a growing family to support. In 1900 they moved to a farm bought by his paternal grandfather in Derry, New Hampshire to try poultry farming. The same year his son Elliot died of cholera. Frost suffered greatly from grief and guilt, and compounding this was the loss of his mother to cancer the same year. In 1907 Elinor Bettina died just one day after birth. But the farm was a peaceful and secluded setting and Frost enjoyed farming, tending to his orchard trees, chickens and various other chores. This period inspired such poems as “The Mending Wall” (written in England in 1913) and “Hyla Brook” (1906). The house built in the typical New England clapboard style is now a restored State Historical Landmark.

But it was soon time for a change. In 1911 he sold the farm and the Frosts set sail for England. Elinor was enthusiastic about traveling, even with four children, and they moved into a cottage in Beaconsfield, just outside of London. Then finally it happened; after writing poetry and trying to get noticed by publishers for over twenty years, Frost’s first collection of poetry A Boy’s Will was published in England in 1913 by a small London printer, David Nutt. American publisher Henry Holt printed it in 1915. Frost’s work was well-received and fellow poets Edward Thomas and Ezra Pound became friends, supporters, and helped promote his work. North of Boston (1914) followed. When World War I started the Frosts were back in New Hampshire, settling at their newly bought farm in Franconia in 1915. A year later Robert began teaching English at Amherst College. Mountain Interval was published in 1916 which contained many poems written at Franconia. He was also starting lecture tours for his ever-growing audience of avid readers.

In 1920, Frost bought ‘Stone House’ (now a museum) in South Shaftsbury, Vermont. There he wrote many of the poems contained in his fourth collection of poetry New Hampshire (1923) which won him the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923. It includes “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening”;
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

While he also farmed on the idyllic property with its breathtaking views of mountains and valleys, another project Frost undertook was the founding of the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College in Ripton, Vermont. After his son Carol married Lillian LaBatt (1905-1995) and his grandson Prescott arrived, he gave them Stone House to live in where Carol planted his thousand apple trees. Frost bought a second farm in Shaftsbury, “The Gulley”. At the height of his career, his next collection of poems West-running Brook (1928) was published just one year before another great loss of a loved one hit him; his sister Jeanie died.

By now Frost was a popular speaker and had a demanding schedule of which Elinor, acting as his secretary, organised for him, so he spent a fair bit of time traveling, though still maintaining an impressive output of poetry. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry a second time in 1931 for his Collected Poems (1930), and also in 1937 for A Further Range (1936), and yet again in 1943 for his collection A Witness Tree (1942). All his children were married and he spent much time with them and his grandchildren, though it was not long before the heavy blows of loss struck again; his beloved daughter Marjorie died in 1934 after the birth of her first child, and in 1938 Elinor died of a heart attack. In 1940 Carol committed suicide.

Leaving the Stone House and The Gulley behind, in 1939 Frost bought the Homer Noble Farm in Ripton, Vermont for his summer residence, located near the Bread Loaf School. He occupied the cabin on the property ‘Than smoke and mist who better could appraise, The kindred spirit of an inner haze?’ (“A Cabin in the Clearing”) while his friends and colleagues the Morrisons stayed in the main house. Collected Poems (1939) was followed by A Masque of Reason (play, 1945), Steeple Bush (1947), A Masque of Mercy (play, 1947), Complete Poems (1949), and In the Clearing (1962). At the Inauguration of American President John F. Kennedy on 20 January 1961, Frost recited his poem “The Gift Outright” (1942).

Robert Frost died on the 29th of January 1963 in Boston, Massachusetts. ‘Safe!, Now let the night be dark for all of me. Let the night be too dark for me to see, Into the future. Let what will be, be.’ (“Acceptance”) He lies buried in the family plot in the Old Bennington Cemetery behind the Old First Congregational Church near Shaftsbury, Vermont. His gravestone reads ‘I Had A Lover’s Quarrel With The World’.

Just nine months after Frost’s death, Kennedy gave a speech at Amherst College, singing Frosts’ praises and speaking on the importance of the Arts in America. Later he said;
“The death of Robert Frost leaves a vacancy in the American spirit....His death impoverishes us all; but he has bequeathed his Nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding.”

http://www.online-literature.com/frost/