Sunday's Mini-challenge: Thom Gunn

Hi everyone!  For my featured poet today, I am happy to showcase the work of Thom Gunn.

On August 29, 1929, Thom Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent, England, the older son of two journalists. His parents were divorced when the poet was ten years old, and his mother committed suicide while he was a teenager. Before her death, his mother had inspired a deep love of reading in him, including affection for the writings of Marlowe, Keats,Milton, and Tennyson, as well as several prose writers.

Before enrolling in Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1950, he spent two years in the national service and six months in Paris. In 1954, the year after his graduation, Gunn’s first poetry collection, Fighting Terms, was published. The book was instantly embraced by several critics, including John Press, who wrote, “This is one of the few volumes of postwar verse that all serious readers of poetry need to possess and to study.” Gunn relocated to San Francisco and held a one-year fellowship at Stanford University, where he studied with Yvor Winters.

Over the next few decades, he published several collections that were not as warmly received as his earliest work, including The Sense of Movement (1957), My Sad Captains(1961), Touch (1967), Moly (1971), To the Air (1974), Jack Straw’s Castle (1976), Selected Poems 1950-1975 (1979), and The Passages of Joy (1983).

During the 1970s and 80s, Gunn’s poems were marked by the poet’s personal experiences as he wrote more openly about his homosexuality and drug use. Many critics believed he was betraying his talents. But with the publication of The Man with Night Sweats in 1992, a collection memorializing his friends and loved ones who had fallen victim of the AIDS pandemic, critics were reminded of Gunn’s early promise. As Neil Powell wrote of the book, “Gunn restores poetry to a centrality it has often seemed close to losing, by dealing in the context of a specific human catastrophe with the great themes of life and death, coherently, intelligently, memorably. One could hardly ask for more.” Gunn received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the collection in 1993.

He went on to publish several more books of poetry in the United States and Britain, including Boss Cupid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), Frontiers of Gossip (1998), andCollected Poems (1994). He has also written several collections of essays, including The Occasions of Poetry(1982; U.S. edition, 1999).

Gunn’s honors include the Levinson Prize, an Arts Council of Great Britain Award, a Rockefeller Award, the W. H. Smith Award, the PEN (Los Angeles) Prize for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, the Forward Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations.

Thom Gunn died on April 25, 2004, in his home in San Francisco.

The Man with Night Sweats

BY THOM GUNN

I wake up cold, I who

Prospered through dreams of heat   

Wake to their residue,   

Sweat, and a clinging sheet.   

My flesh was its own shield:   

Where it was gashed, it healed.

I grew as I explored   

The body I could trust   

Even while I adored

The risk that made robust,

A world of wonders in

Each challenge to the skin.

I cannot but be sorry

The given shield was cracked,

My mind reduced to hurry,   

My flesh reduced and wrecked.

I have to change the bed,   

But catch myself instead

Stopped upright where I am   

Hugging my body to me   

As if to shield it from   

The pains that will go through me,

         

As if hands were enough   

To hold an avalanche off.

Tamer and Hawk

BY THOM GUNN

I thought I was so tough,

But gentled at your hands,

Cannot be quick enough

To fly for you and show

That when I go I go

At your commands.

Even in flight above

I am no longer free:

You seeled me with your love,

I am blind to other birds—

The habit of your words

Has hooded me.

As formerly, I wheel

I hover and I twist,

But only want the feel,

In my possessive thought,

Of catcher and of caught

Upon your wrist.

You but half civilize,

Taming me in this way.

Through having only eyes

For you I fear to lose,

I lose to keep, and choose

Tamer as prey.

Thom Gunn, "Tamer and Hawk" from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1995 by Thom Gunn.  Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

You can read more of his poems here.

The challenge is write a new poem or prose poem inspired by the title, verse or themes by Thom Gunn. I look forward to reading your work. Please visit and comment on the work of others.   And happy weekend to all !   Grace (aka Heaven)

PS.   This is my last post as a contributor for weekend challenges.   I thank you for participating in my prompts for the last 2 years.   

Sunday's Mini-Challenge: Judith Wright

Hi everyone! My featured poet today is a well-respected Australian poet, critic and short story writer, Judith Wright (1915-2000).Wright was also an uncompromising environmentalist and social activist campaigning for Aboriginal land rights. She believed that the poet should be concerned with national and social problems. At the age of 85, just before her death, she attended in Canberra at a march for reconciliation with Aboriginal people.

Judith Arundell Wright was born near Armidale, New South Wales, into an old and wealthy pastoral family.After her mother died in 1927, she was educated under her grandmother's supervision. At the age of 14 she was sent to New England Girls' School, where she found consolation from poetry and decided to become a poet. In 1934 she entered Sydney University. Wright studied philosophy, history, psychology and English, without taking a degree. 

When Wright was in her 20s, she started to became progressively deaf. At the age of 30 Wright met her lifelong partner, the unorthodox philosopher J.P. McKinney, 23 years her senior; they later married. 

Wright started to publish poems in the late 1930s in literary journals. As a poet she made her debut with The Moving Image (1946), in which she showed her technical excellence without burdens of fashionable trends. Most of the poems were written in wartime - in 'The Trains' Wright took the threat of the war in the Pacific as a subject. The main theme in the volume was the poet's awareness of time, death, and evil on a universal scale. With the following collections Wright gained a reputation as a wholly new voice in literature with a distinctly female perspective. The title poem from Woman to Man (1949) dealt with the sexual act from a woman's point of view. 'The Maker' paralleled the creation of a poem and the creation of a child. Several of her early poems such as 'Bullocky' and 'Woman to Man' became standard anthology pieces. Wright also wrote love poems to her husband. His death in 1966 and her increasing anxiety of the destruction of the natural environment brought more pessimistic undercurrents in her work. 

I praise the scoring drought, the flying dust 
the drying creek, the furious animal, 
that they oppose us still; 
that we are ruined by the thing we kill. 

Most of Wright's poetry was written in the mountains of southern Queensland. Protesting the political policies of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Premier of Queensland, Wright left her home state in the mid-1970s, and settled to a remote property near the heritage town of Braidwood, south of Canberra, where she wrote many of her later nature poems. 

Wright received several awards, including Grace Leven Prize (1950), Australia-Britannica Award (1964), Robert Frost Memorial Award (1977), Australian World Prize (1984), Queen's Medal for Poetry (1992). She had honorary degrees from several universities. In 1973-74 she was a member of Australia Council.

Woman to Man

The eyeless labourer in the night,
the selfless, shapeless seed I hold,
builds for its resurrection day---
silent and swift and deep from sight
foresees the unimagined light.

This is no child with a child's face;
this has no name to name it by;
yet you and I have known it well.
This is our hunter and our chase,
the third who lay in our embrace.

This is the strength that your arm knows,
the arc of flesh that is my breast,
the precise crystals of our eyes.
This is the blood's wild tree that grows
the intricate and folded rose.

This is the maker and the made;
this is the question and reply;
the blind head butting at the dark,
the blaze of light along the blade.
Oh hold me, for I am afraid.

Late Spring

The moon drained white by day 

lifts from the hill 

where the old pear-tree fallen in storm 

springs up in blossom still. 

Women believe in the moon: 

this branch I hold 

is not more white and still than she 

whose flower is ages old, 

and so I carry home 

flowers from the pear 

that makes such obstinate tokens still 

for fruit it cannot bear.

Bora Ring

The song is gone; the dance
is secret with the dancers in the earth,
the ritual useless, and the tribal story
lost in an alien tale.

Only the grass stands up
to mark the dancing-ring; the apple-gums
posture and mime a past corroboree,
murmur a broken chant.

The hunter is gone; the spear
is splintered underground; the painted bodies
a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot.
The nomad feet are still.

Only the rider's heart
halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid word
that fastens in the blood of the ancient curse,
the fear as old as Cain.

You can read more poems here.

The challenge is write a new poem or prose poem inspired by the title, verse or themes by Judith Wright. I look forward to reading your work. Please visit and comment on the work of others.   And happy weekend to all !   Grace (aka Heaven)

Sunday's Mini-Challenge: Paul Celan

Hi friends!  For my featured poet series, I am pleased to introduce you to the poems by Paul Celan.

Paul Antschel, who wrote under the pseudonym Paul Celan, was born in Czernovitz, in Romania, on November 23, 1920. The son of German-speaking Jews, Celan grew up speaking several languages, including Romanian, Russian, and French. He also understood Yiddish. He studied medicine in Paris in 1938, but returned to Romania shortly before the outbreak of World War II. His parents were deported and eventually died in Nazi labor camps; Celan himself was interned for eighteen months before escaping to the Red Army.

In 1945, he moved to Bucharest and became friends with many of the leading Romanian writers of the time. He worked as a reader in a publishing house and as a translator. He also began to publish his own poems and translations under a series of pseudonyms. In 1947 he settled on the pseudonym Celan—an anagram of Ancel, the Romanian form of his surname. He lived briefly in Vienna before settling in Paris in 1948 to study German philology and literature. He took his Licence des Lettres in 1950, and in 1952 he married the graphic artist Gisele de Lestrange. They had a son, Eric, in 1955.

Celan’s first book was published in 1947; it received very little critical attention. His second book, Mohn und Gedaechtnis(Poppy and Memory), however, garnered tremendous acclaim and helped to establish his reputation. Among his most well-known and often-anthologized poems from this time is “Fugue of Death.” The poem opens with the words “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening / we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night” and it goes on to offer a stark evocation of life in the Nazi death camps.

In 1959, Celan took a job as a reader in German Language and Literature at L’École Normal Superieure of the University of Paris, a position he would hold until his death in 1970. His poems from this period grew shorter, more fragmented and broken in their syntax and perceptions. In 1958, he was awarded the Bremen Literature Prize and in 1960 he received a Georg Buchner Prize.   During the 1960s he published more than six books of poetry and gained international fame. In addition to his own poems, he remained active as a translator, bringing out works from writers such as Henri Michaux and Rene Char. In 1970, Celan committed suicide. He is regarded as one of the most important poets to emerge from post-World War II Europe.

Fugue of Death

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at nightfall
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink it and drink it
we are digging a grave in the sky it is ample to lie there
A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden
 hair Margarete
he writes it and walks from the house the stars glitter he 
 whistles his dogs up
he whistles his Jews out and orders a grave to be dug in
 the earth
he commands us strike up for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you in the morning at noon we drink you at
 nightfall
drink you and drink you
A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden 
 hair Margarete
Your ashen hair Shulamith we are digging a grave in the
 sky it is
ample to lie there

Please continue reading here. 

An Eye, Open

Hours, May-colored, cool.

The no-more to be named, hot,

audible in the mouth.

No one's voice, again.

Aching depth of the eyeball:

the lid 

does not stand in its way, the lash

does not count what goes in.

The tear, half,

the sharper lens, movable, 

brings the images home to you.

Threadsuns

BY PAUL CELAN

TRANSLATED BY PIERRE JORIS

Threadsuns

above the grayblack wastes.

A tree-

high thought

grasps the light-tone: there are

still songs to sing beyond

mankind.

You can read more of his poems here.

The challenge is write a new poem or prose poem inspired by the title, verse or style by Paul Celan. I look forward to reading your work. Please visit and comment on the work of others.   And Happy Weekend to all !   Grace (aka Heaven)

Sunday's Mini-Challenge: Marilyn Chin

Hi everyone!  For our featured poet series, it is my pleasure to introduce you to the poetry of Marilyn Chin. 

She was born in Hong Kong but grew up in Oregon, in the U.S. Northwest. A noted anthologist, translator and educator as well as a poet and novelist, Chin’s work distills her experiences both as an Asian American and as a politically attuned woman. Her poetry is noted for its direct and often confrontational attitude. “The pains of cultural assimilation infuse her…poems,” wrote Contemporary Women Poets essayist Anne-Elizabeth Green, noting that in the collections Dwarf Bamboo(1987) and The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty (1994) “Chin struggles passionately and eloquently in the pull between the country left behind and America—the troubled landscape that is now home.” 

Photo credit: Niki Berg

Chin’s exploration of cultural assimilation often carries harsh political overtones. In her poem “How I Got That Name: An Essay on Assimilation,” from The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, she writes of her father’s seduction by Western culture and values: a “petty thug,” he “obsessed with a bombshell blonde/transliterated ‘Mei Ling’ to ‘Marilyn,’“ thus dooming his dark-haired daughter to bear for life the name of “some tragic white woman/swollen with gin and Nembutal.” Other poems reflect upon the scars borne by diverse Asian Americans, including women whose value as human beings has been reduced to their novelty as sex objects. She also deals with the fate of second-generation Asian Americans in poems like “I’m Ten, Have Lots of Friends, and Don’t Care,” included in her first collection of poems, Dwarf Bamboo. 

Marilyn Chin has won numerous awards and fellowships, including the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, the Paterson Prize and further fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Widely anthologized, her work was featured on Bill Moyers’s PBS series The Language of Life. Chin co-directs the MFA program at the University of San Diego, where she also teaches in the departments of English and Comparative Literature.

“Altar (#3)” from “Broken Chord Sequence”

BY MARILYN CHIN

Why cry over dried flowers?

They’re meant to be straw.

Why cry over miniature roses?

They’re meant to be small.

Why cry over Buddha’s hand citron?

Why cry over the hidden flower?

Why cry over Mother’s burnt forehead?

Her votive deathglow, her finest hour.

Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44)

by Marilyn Chin

The aeroplane is shaped like a bird
Or a giant mechanical penis

My father escorts my mother

From girlhood to unhappiness

A dragonfly has iridescent wings

Shorn, it’s a lowly pismire

Plucked of arms and legs

A throbbing red pepperpod

Baby, she’s a girl

Pinkly propped as a doll

Baby, she’s a pearl

An ulcer in the oyster of God

Cry little baby clam cry

The steam has opened your eyes

Your secret darkly hidden

The razor is sharpening the knife

Continue reading here. 

Twenty Five Haiku

By Marilyn Chin

A hundred red fire ants scouring, scouring the white peony

❖

Fallen plum blossoms return to the branch, you sleep, then

                 harden again

Continue reading the rest of the haiku  here.     Some additional poems are also here.

The challenge is write a new poem or prose poem inspired by the title, verse or style by Marilyn Chin.   I look forward to reading your work. Please visit and comment on the work of others.   And Happy Weekend to all !   Grace (aka Heaven)

Sunday's Mini-challenge: Jane Hirshfield

Hi everyone ~  My featured poet this month is the award winning American author, essayist and translator Jane Hirshfield.

Photo credit: Michael Lionheart

Jane Hirshfield is the author of several collections of verse, including Come, Thief(2011), After (2006), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize, and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Award, among others. Hirshfield has also translated the work of early women poets in collections such as The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (1990) and Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994). Inspired by both Eastern and Western traditions, Hirshfield’s work encompasses a huge range of influences. “Greek and Roman lyrics, the English sonnet, those foundation stones of American poetry Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, ‘modern’ poets from T. S. Eliotto Anna Akhmatova to C. P. Cavafy to Pablo Neruda—all have added something to my knowledge of what is possible in poetry,” Hirshfield explained to Contemporary Authors. Equally influential have been classical Chinese poets Tu Fu, Li Po, Wang Wei, and Han Shan; classical Japanese Heian-Era poets Komachi and Shikibu; and such lesser-known traditions as Eskimo and Nahuatl poetry.

Hirshfield published her first poem in 1973, shortly after graduating from Princeton as a member of the university’s first graduating class to include women. She put aside her writing for nearly eight years, however, to study at the San Francisco Zen Center. “I felt that I’d never make much of a poet if I didn’t know more than I knew at that time about what it means to be a human being,” Hirshfield once said. “I don’t think poetry is based just on poetry; it is based on a thoroughly lived life. And so I couldn’t just decide I was going to write no matter what; I first had to find out what it means to live.”

Hirshfield’s poetry works with short forms, spare lines, and careful imagery of natural and domestic settings. Her poems frequently hinge on a turning point or moment of insight. 

About her work, the poet Rosana Warren has said: Her poems appear simple, and are not. Her language, in its cleanliness and transparency, poses riddles of a quietly metaphysical nature...Clause by clause, image by image, in language at once mysterious and commonplace, Hirshfield’s poems clear a space for reflection and change. They invite ethical awareness, and establish a delicate balance.

Green-Striped Melons

BY JANE HIRSHFIELD

They lie

under stars in a field.

They lie under rain in a field.

Under sun.

Some people

are like this as well—

like a painting

hidden beneath another painting.

An unexpected weight

the sign of their ripeness.

For What Binds Us

BY JANE HIRSHFIELD

There are names for what binds us:

strong forces, weak forces.

Look around, you can see them:

the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,

nails rusting into the places they join,

joints dovetailed on their own weight.

The way things stay so solidly

wherever they've been set down—

and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back

across a wound, with a great vehemence,

more strong

than the simple, untested surface before.

There's a name for it on horses,

when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,

is proud of its wounds, wears them

as honors given out after battle,

small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other

see how it is like a

scar between their bodies,

stronger, darker, and proud;

how the black cord makes of them a single fabric

that nothing can tear or mend.

Sonoma Fire

BY JANE HIRSHFIELD

Large moon the deep orange of embers.  

Also the scent.

The griefs of others—beautiful, at a distance.

You can read more of her poems here and here.

The challenge is write a new poem or prose poem inspired by the title, verse or style by Jane Hirshfield.   I look forward to reading your work. Please visit and comment on the work of others.   And Happy Mother's Day to all !   Grace (aka Heaven)

Turning Pink

Hi everyone ~   In my part of the world, we are awaiting the pink cherry blooms in the park, and the winter chill to finally leave us.   I definitely have the pink color in my mind. Here's a list poem on pink I came across which I hope will spark some pink ideas for your pen.

Gloss of the Past

BY DAVID TRINIDAD

Pink Dawn, Aurora Pink, Misty Pink, Fresh Pink, Natural Pink, Country

Pink, Dusty Pink, Pussywillow Pink, Pink Heather, Pink Peony, Sunflower

Pink, Plum Pink, Peach of a Pink, Raspberry Pink, Watermelon Pink, Pink

Lemonade, Bikini Pink, Buoy Buoy Pink, Sea Shell Pink, Pebble Pink, Pink

Piper, Acapulco Pink, Tahiti Beach Pink, Sunny Pink, Hot Pink, Sizzling Pink,

Skinnydip Pink, Flesh Pink, Transparent Pink, Breezy Pink, Sheer Shiver

Pink, Polar Bare Pink, Pink Frost, Frosty Pink, Frost Me Pink, Frosted Pink,

Sugarpuff Pink, Ice Cream Pink, Lickety Pink, Pink Melba, Pink Whip,

Pinkermint, Sweet Young Pink, Little Girl Pink, Fragile Pink, Fainting Pink,

Helpless Pink, Tiny Timid Pink, Wink of Pink, Shadow of Pink, Tint of Pink,

Shimmer of Pink, Flicker of Pink, Pink Flash, E.S. Pink, Person-to-Person

Pink, City Pink, Penny Lane Pink, Pink Paisley, London Luv Pink, Pretty Pink,

Pastel Pink, Pinking Sheer, Pink Piqué, Pink Silk, Plush Pink, Lush Iced Pink,

Brandied Pink, Sheer Pink Champagne, Candlelight Pink, Fluffy Moth Pink,

Softsilver Pink, Pinkyring, Turn Pale Pink, A Little Pink, Pinker, Pinkety Pink,

Heart of Pink, Hug that Pink, Passionate Pink, Snuggle Pink, Pink-Glo!,

Happy-Go-Pink, Daredevil Pink, By Jupiter Pink, Stark Raving Pink, Viva La

Pink.

Our prompt today is to write a new poem or prose poem using the word pink in the title or verses.   Write in free verse or form, the choice is yours.  Here's wishing you all a good Saturday & happy weekend ~  Grace (aka Heaven)

Sunday's Mini-challenge: Wallace Stevens

Hi everyone ~  As part of my feature poet series, I am happy to showcase the work of Wallace Stevens, one of America's most respected poets.  

1879–1955

Wallace Stevens was a master stylist, employing an extraordinary vocabulary and a rigorous precision in crafting his poems. But he was also a philosopher of aesthetics, vigorously exploring the notion of poetry as the supreme fusion of the creative imagination and objective reality. Because of the extreme technical and thematic complexity of his work, Stevens was sometimes considered a willfully difficult poet. But he was also acknowledged as an eminent abstractionist and a provocative thinker, and that reputation has continued since his death. In 1975, for instance, noted literary critic Harold Bloom, whose writings on Stevens include the imposing Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, called him "the best and most representative American poet of our time." 

You can read more about his life here.    

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

BY WALLACE STEVENS

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,   

The only moving thing   

Was the eye of the blackbird.   

II

I was of three minds,   

Like a tree   

In which there are three blackbirds.   

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.   

It was a small part of the pantomime.   

IV

A man and a woman   

Are one.   

A man and a woman and a blackbird   

Are one.   

V

I do not know which to prefer,   

The beauty of inflections   

Or the beauty of innuendoes,   

The blackbird whistling   

Or just after.   

VI

Icicles filled the long window   

With barbaric glass.   

The shadow of the blackbird   

Crossed it, to and fro.   

The mood   

Traced in the shadow   

An indecipherable cause.   

VII

O thin men of Haddam,   

Why do you imagine golden birds?   

Do you not see how the blackbird   

Walks around the feet   

Of the women about you?   

VIII

I know noble accents   

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;   

But I know, too,   

That the blackbird is involved   

In what I know.   

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,   

It marked the edge   

Of one of many circles.   

Please continue reading here.

Our challenge is to write a new poem or prose poem inspired by a line, title, verse or style of Wallace Stevens.   I look forward to reading your work.   Please don't forget to visit and return the comments of your fellow poets.   Happy Sunday !  Grace (aka Heaven