April is nearly over. I cannot believe it's flown by so fast, and I have accomplished nothing I had planed to. I did write a little this month, even poetry, which makes me very happy. I have not yet decided if it is sharable yet. Probably not. I took a last minute train trip to see friends, with my head and heart tied in knots, still asleep after a marathon weekend of singing. I was inspired by them, by Penn station, by the sunshine. But I think things need a little work before anyone sees them, if I ever get to sharing. I am still reticent, but a friend's recent writing and sharing of his work inspires me.

There is also this list. I have read so few (27/100) I am ashamed!! Too much to get read these days!

The BBC apparently believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien I have only read it in part, still need to get around to finishing.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - Only Genesis, for class. I get bored every time I try,
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - I've read many plays and sonnets, but not everything. Performed a few, too.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - One book shy of the series.
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - I am backwards and read Dharma Bums, which is like a sequel
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - Why is this on here, when the complete works are listed? I know Hamlet is important, but so is King Lear
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Today was not a good day. My head is fogged and heavy and thoughts can only try to trudge through the muck to connect to each other and be completed. I can blame the weather, but it is other things I just don't want to think about tonight. So, instead, poetry!
But since I'm in a mood - Akhmatova. No nonsense. Acmeistic words.

Anna Akhmatova

When I Write Poems

Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, January 29, 2005
Corrected May-June 2008
Translated text via Poetry Lover's Page

When I’m embraced by airy inspiration,
I am a bridge between the sky and earth.
Of all what heart high-values in creation
I am a king, when breathing with a verse!

Just if my soul wishes it, my fairy,
I shall give you the peaceful coast band,
Where, with a hum, the pinky sea is carrying
The dreaming tide to reach the dreaming land.

I can do all, just trust in me: I’m mighty;
I have the roots for kindness and for love;
And if I want, from clouds and from the lightning
I’ll make a cover your sweet bed above.

And I can, dear, create a word such special,
That it would change laws of the whole world,
To call again its own celebration
And stop the sun from fall in the night cold.

I’m all another in my inspiration,
I am a bridge between the sky and earth.
Of all what heart high-values in creation
I am a king, when breathing with a verse!

(Couldn't find the Russian version online)

This one from here. Site did the trans. I'm too tired to translate it myself right now.


Все мы бражники здесь, блудницы,
Как невесело вместе нам!
На стенах цветы и птицы
Томятся по облакам.

Ты куришь черную трубку,
Так странен дымок над ней.
Я надела узкую юбку,
Чтоб казаться еще стройней.

Навсегда забиты окошки:
Что там, изморозь или гроза?
На глаза осторожной кошки
Похожи твои глаза.

О, как сердце мое тоскует!
Не смертного ль часа жду?
А та, что сейчас танцует,
Непременно будет в аду.

1 января 1913



***

We are all heavy-drinkers and whores,
What a joyless, miserable crowd!
There are flowers and birds on the walls
And the birds all pine for a cloud.

You are smoking your old black pipe,
And the smoke looks strange over it.
The skirt that I’m wearing feels tight,
But I hope that it makes me look fit.

What’s the weather – thunder or ice?
Here, the windows are all boarded shut.
I examine your face and your eyes
Have the look of a sly cautious cat.

Oh, what sadness I’m feeling inside!
Am I waiting for death’s solemn bell?
And that girl, who’s been dancing all night, -
She will surely end up in hell.

January 1, 1913

National Poetry Month

It's National Poetry Month! Yay! My grand scheme last year for posting favorite poems fell through quickly and mightily. I am not so foolish to make more silly promises this time around.

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~Leonard Cohen

      National Poetry month is one of those celebrations acknowledged only by poets, poet nerds, and a handful of eager high school English teachers. Many people dislike poetry after forcefully learning "Ode on Grecian Urn" and some flowery Blake they never understand, or cast it in the drawer of things 'too high-brow for me.' (Full confession: I love Blake AND 'Grecian Urn'. Yes, I'm a poetry nerd) I want to read to these people the simple beauty of Whitman, the joy of Silverstein, the stark bluntness of Akhmatova. But you can't win them all. As long as there are creative people writing poetry, and grateful people reading it, we will end up alright.
      For me, poetry is an escape to a world where rhythm and meter rule thoughts. Even dark words of war and sorrow open beacons of light on a drab reality. I like my declarations of love and wonder and sadness to exist somewhere between word and song. Paint my life in flowing rhythm of verse!
      I am, of course, markedly jealous of those writers capable great poetry, Covetous of their mastery of language. My pathetic attempts are plentiful, and heroically mediocre at the bet of times. Even as the editor of the high school lit magazine I could never get beyond bland. It has, admittedly, been a long time since I wrote any verse. I don't know if my cluttered mind can sit still long enough anymore. It takes time, and patience.

      The poster for National Poetry Month 2011 is in striking contrast to last year's graphic explosion. Instead the colors are more muted and font simple. The main content is from A work by Elizabeth Bishop, which makes me both happy and proud. Bishop is a Vassar graduate (Class of 1934) and one of our more famous Alumna. And though Vassar is not my alma mater, I sill feel a sense of pride and ownership here. I grew up in the shadows of its brick buildings, often playing and learning on the campus. I had never heard of, nor read, anything by Bishop before coming to work at Vassar. This is not very odd since I knew very little of American poetry at all. Here we have an art installation of benched inscribed with snippets of her work that line a winding path. Since learning of her I have read some of her poetry, though none of her prose. I enjoy her work. Her style is clean and flowing, but direct. I love that she described the places she traveled to, taking us there with her not just visually but emotionally. Though to the point, I feel like there is still a between the lines to read. It feels classic and contemporary all at once. I still no very little about her life, but at the moment I am satisfied with a sitting down occasionally with an anthology and learning about her through her writing.
      This year marks the 100th anniversary of her life, and she was our Poet Laureate at one point,so the quote on the poster is not random. It just so happens that it coincides with Vassar's sesquicentennial celebrations. I am sure that the administration is very proud. I would like to take the opportunity to share some Bishop here.

The Map
Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to life the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?

Teh shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.
Labrador's yellow, where the moony Eskimo
has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,
under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,
or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.
The names of seashore towns run out to the sea,
the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains
--the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.
These peninsulas take the water between the thumb and finger
like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.

Mapped water are more quiet that the land is,
lending the land their waves' own confirmation:
and Norway's hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
--What suits the character or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West.
More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.

~ from North and South, 1946

LINKS:
Elizabeth Bishop @ poets.org
Elizabeth Bishop wiki
National Poetry Month