A Poem A Day, Week Four Plus Two Days

Welcome to the end of National Poetry Month! I wound up reading hundreds of poems, I'd say at least three hundred, in this project of reading "one a day." Made me kind of miss being an English major, sitting in a classroom discussing them.



Living In The Body - Joyce Sutpen (Tuesday)
Maybe because I'm almost almost forty or because of dance and working out at the gym - which was a direct result of the car wreck - I'm much more attached to my body than I ever used to be.


The Iceberg Theory - Gerald Locklin (Wednesday)
Truth be told, iceberg is the only lettuce I really like. I've only met one other adult who will admit to liking it; a lot of people I know profess to hate it. Water, fiber, crunch: What's not to like?


The Walloping Window-Blind - Charles Edward Carryl (Thursday)
I've never seen this poem before. It sounds like Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, including the made-up words. What fun!


The Jabberwocky - Lewis Carroll (Friday)
When I was in eighth grade I played the Mock Turtle in a version of Alice In Wonderland that traveled from school to school. We might do two performances a day, sometimes on a stage and sometimes at one end of a classroom (one time we performed in a space that was eight feet long and six feet wide). At the end we performed this poem, reciting in unison and acting it out. In my Mock Turtle costume, I was part of the beast.


Sweater Weather: A Love Song to Language - Sharon Bryan (Saturday)
Another silly word poem.


Romeo And Juliet, Act II, Scene iii -William Shakespeare (Sunday)
Specifically the speech in which Juliet dreams about having sex with her new husband just before learning Romeo has been banished for murdering Tybalt. My favorite lines are

O, I have bought the mansion of a love,
But not possess'd it, and, though I am sold,
Not yet enjoy'd. . .

Whew!


Filling Station - Elizabeth Bishop (Monday)
While there are never any people around, this poem makes me think somehow of the gas pumps in front of the general store in Twin Lakes, Colorado.


The Snow Man - Wallace Stevens (Tuesday)
My Norton's calls Wallace "a third great imaginative force" since the deaths of Yeats and Eliot. I think I need more education, or at least more immersion, before I will be able to understand his poetry.


Tulip Field, MacLean Road, Skagit Valley - Sam Green (Wednesday)
Bink suggested I check out Washington State's Poet Laureate, who lives on an island neighboring her island. This is the only poem of his I could find online, and it makes me wish that I had had an interest is looking at flowers when I lived in the state.