Anne Sexton on Film

The work of Anne Sexton reveals struggles with loneliness and depression, but she went before the camera to read her poems "Her Kind" and "Menstruation at Forty."

The second set of clips is from a 1966 visit to Sexton's home after the release of her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Live or Die. She tells the camera crew her husband hates the way she reads poems, but I have to disagree with him. Perhaps the most charming part of the clip is when Sexton loses her composure and snaps at her dogs. "What'd you do, tape me screaming at the dog?" she grins.

A fourteen-minute video split into two parts - Sexton at home reading, talking about poetry and about her family. Most of the material is showed in public for the first time. Spanish subtitles.


Part 1




Part 2


From a page at The Atlantic collecting rare clips of authors including Orwell, Beckett, Pynchon, Fitzgerald and Anne Frank.

Someone forgot to tell the fish by Hal Judge

Someone forgot courtesy and politeness. Someone forgot to rinse off the weed killer. Someone forgot to turn off the billing software. Someone forgot to rent the crowd. Someone forgot to tell the owners of the 4 million cars sold in China. Someone forgot to bring the Zombie-Killing Manual. Someone forgot to tighten the sidestay shackle. Someone forgot to tell Rocky. Someone forgot to strap down

March by William Carlos Williams

March (Parts I and II)
by William Carlos Williams (from Sour Grapes, 1921)


I
Winter is long in this climate
and spring�a matter of a few days
only,�a flower or two picked
from mud or from among wet leaves
or at best against treacherous
bitterness of wind, and sky shining
teasingly, then closing in black
and sudden, with fierce jaws.

II
March,
you remind me of
the pyramids, our pyramids�
stript of the polished stone
that used to guard them!
March,
you are like Fra Angelico
at Fiesole, painting on plaster!

March,
you are like a band of
young poets that have not learned
the blessedness of warmth
(or have forgotten it).

At any rate�
I am moved to write poetry
for the warmth there is in it
and for the loneliness�
a poem that shall have you
in it March.


continue reading

He Has Superpowers by Daren Kamali

(for Munro te Whata)

He�s an unsung superhero
in the village

He can fly
breathe underwater
walk on hot lovo stones

No one knows his secret
except his soulmate
Duna
Grandmother Eel
who lives on the reef

He visits Duna on moonlit nights
when everyone is sound asleep
he swims out to sea

They talanoa about ancestors
and Vu
good and evil
ancient times

He wished he lived in those days
he would

Prompt: Chloe Yelena Miller and the Past, Present, and Future

 "I am in you and you in me.

If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

Eternity is in love with the creations of time."
- William Blake

Poets have used verb tenses to manipulate time in their poems. The English language has many verb tenses to choose from, and a poet is always deciding when she begins a poem which tense is the best (or correct) verb tense to use. Focusing on choosing the right tense and knowing how and when to shift verb tenses is a technique that can add immediacy, or introduce tension.

Tense is the grammaticalisation of time. The basics are often all you need: past, present, future. But sometimes we need, or we accidentally slip into, present perfect, past perfect, future perfect or use simple or progressive verb forms.

I don't want to be the language teacher here, because, ultimately, that's not the prompt or point. And I have found that grammar is an almost sure way to lose the interest of the student.  But, here's the lesson in brief:
                
Present      I run (simple) - I am running (progressive)
Past           I ran - I was running
Future       I will run  - I will be running
Present Perfect    I have run - I have been running
Past Perfect    I had run - I had been running
Future Perfect   I will have run -  I will have been running


First, here's a quick poetry and tenses lesson using William Blake's "The Tyger."

Why does he use "dare" and not "dared" or "dares"?

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Is Blake using the present subjunctive tense to bring the past into the reader's present?  I'm not sure, but I do know that he made a choice and it catches the ear and eye.

If you are familiar with with other languages, you know that some things about our English verb tenses are the same and other things are quite different.

For this month's prompt, you need to try a poem which very deliberately plays with tenses. It might play with time (as in the time traveling of past, present and future tenses) or it might play with the language of tenses changing (in English or other langueages).

Rather than create a verb tenses poem,

In the language the little boy spoke,
there was a promise the little boy broke.
In the letter the little boy sent,
there was a truth the little boy bent.

it would be far better to consider the bigger implications of Time and tense, as Chloe Yelena Miller does in her poem.

No Infinitive

We met in Esperanto, declared:                   Mi amas vin.

Which means (in case I forget):                    I love you.

We swam in the Sardinian sea, the water as blank
as your conjugations. I wear one piece of my two piece:
topless.

I will, first person future,
label these photos in our language
without a national body. The word
for our actions is not a noun.

Gender neutral, were we
heterosexual? The flexible
syntax translucent, nudity's definition.

I could pronounce (phonetics):                     You.

There were rules: The accent
is always on the next to last syllable.

It was carnival, a meatless (almost meaty) masked
party. Lent followed, we gave up
each other (reflexively).

by Chloe Yelena Miller

I like it right off that they met in Esperanto. Not a place, but a language, and a word that translates as "one who hopes." We could follow the thread of Esperanto's three tenses and three moods. Maybe your poem can work with the poetic and non-English jussive mood that is used for wishes and commands.

And her poem ends "reflexively" - a form that cause problems for English speakers learning a new language since this feature is practically absent in English. The literal reflexive means the agent is simultaneously the patient. That's grammar class talk meaning we do it to ourselves. How poetic is the reflexive: to enjoy oneself, hurt oneself, kill oneself, convince, deny or to encourage oneself.

Submissions for this prompt will be accepted through March 31, 2013.

"No Infinitive" is from Chloe Yelena Miller's new chapbook, Unrest (Finishing Line Press, 2013). Chloe teaches writing privately and online at Fairleigh Dickinson University and leads writing workshops at the Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. She blogs at ChloeYelenaMiller.blogspot.com.

"At Melville's Tomb" by Hart Crane

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.


And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.


Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,

Richard Wilbur

I like this quote from poet Richard Wilbur which I think is about one reason that many of us write.

"I would feel dead if I didn't have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry."

Richard Wilbur was born on this day, March 1, in New York City in 1921. His family included editors and journalists and he may have followed that career, but career decision were put off to serve in the infantry in World War II.

He did not write the soldier and battle poems that might have come from that experience. Instead, he wrote about the solitary, lonelier times of war. He said that he read Edgar Allan Poe in the trenches, and was more likely to write about a night spent peeling potatoes in the Army kitchen than about what it felt like to be on the front line.

His first book of poems, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems was published in 1947.

He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and again in 1989. A Chancellor Emeritus of The Academy of American Poets, Wilbur currently lives in Cummington, Massachusetts.

The Writer


In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

See the complete poem and hear it read by the author at  www.poets.org/

Collected Poems 1943-2004