BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: POETRY & POETS

Poetry is not the most important thing in life…I’d much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.”
                                Dylan Thomas
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EMILY DICKINSON’S FAVORITE LINE FROM SHAKESPEARE

“Her favorite quotation from Antony and Cleopatra, one of the few tags she does not distort for her own purpose – probably because this one serves her own purpose just as it stands – is a version of this problems of leavings: Antony says, as she reminds several of her correspondents, ‘take the hint/which my despair proclaims. Let that he left/which leaves itself.” Dickinson took the hint, proclaiming a perpetual departure. Forever leaving off, in order to get on: ‘Going is a drama/staying cannot confer.”

Richard Howard.  Paper Trail:  selected prose, 1965-2003
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004)

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A SHORT VERSE IN PRAISE OF THE IAMB

I love the naked Iamb
With all my will & wit.
I love the tuneful Iamb,
That’s the long and short of it.

LJP
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CATCH & RELEASE RHYMING

For me, I touched a thought, I know,
  Has tantalized me many times,
(Like turns of thread the spiders throw
   Mocking across our path) for rhymes
To catch and let go.

From Two in the Campagne by Robert Browning


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ROBERT BROWNING

Robert Browning
Was frequently seen frowning
While swallowing  one last chilled oyster.
Later he recited his “Soliloquy of the 
                          Spanish Cloister.”

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AMOS COTTLE—ENGLISH POET LAUREATE

“Oh, Amos Cottle –Phoebus, what a name
To fill the speaking trump of future fame!
Oh, Amos Cottle , for a moment think
What meagre profits spring from pen and ink!”

               Lord Byron

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ON AMOS SIMON COTTLE  (1766 - 1800)

“His principal work is Icelandic Poetry; or, The
 Edda of Saemund; translated into English verse, 
which was printed in 1797 with Robert Southey as 
a co-author.. It is not stated whether the translation 
is made from the original Icelandic or from a Latin 
version; it is not faithful nor vigorous. It is 
preceded by a critical introduction, and a poetical 
address from Southey to the author, which contains 
the panegyric of Mary Wollstonecraft, "who among 
women left no equal mind." (She died on 10 September 
1797, and Cottle's preface is dated 1 November.)”

from Amos Cottle | Penny's poetry pages Wiki - Fandom

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QUEEN VICTORIA’S FAVORITE POET

Adelaide Anne Procter (30 October 1825 – 2 February 1864)
 was an English poet and philanthropist.
Her literary career began when she was a teenager, 
her poems appearing in Charles Dickens's periodicals 
Household Words and All the Year Round, and later in 
feminist journals. Her charity work and her conversion 
to Roman Catholicism seem to have influenced her poetry,
 which deals with such subjects as homelessness, poverty,
 and fallen women, among whom she performed philanthropic 
work. Procter was the favourite poet of Queen Victoria.
 Coventry Patmore called her the most popular poet of 
the day, after Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Few modern critics 
have rated her work, but it is still thought significant 
for what it reveals about how Victorian women expressed otherwise repressed feelings.Procter never married. Her 
health suffered, possibly due to overwork, and she 
died of tuberculosis at the age of 38.

Wikipedia
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W.H. AUDEN AS POET-IN-RESIDENCE AT OXFORD

‘In The Hunting of the Snark, Lewis Carroll, a Christ Church don, wrote: ‘What I tell you three times is true.’ With Auden, also at Christ Church, it was the opposite. What Auden said three times you would begin to doubt, and when he said it a dozen times nobody cared anyway. Auden somewhere makes the distinction between being boring and being a bore. He was never boring – he was too extraordinary for that—but by the time he came back to live in Oxford he had become a bore.”
Alan Bennett in the Introduction to his play The Habit of Art (New York: Faber and Faber, 2009). The play is about 
Auden & Benjamin Britten collaborating on the 
opera Death in Venice.
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PACIFIC LIGHT
A documentary film about poet David Mason:
Free on:
https://vimeo.com/746745055 



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A SPEECH FROM THE HABIT OF ART, A PLAY
BY ALAN BENNETT

Auden: Poetry to me is as much a craft as an art
and I have always prided myself on being able to 
turn my hand to anything – a wedding hymn, a requiem,
 a loyal toast…No job too small. I would have been 
happy to have hung up a shingle in the street:
            “W.H. Auden, Poet

Published by Faber and Faber, 2009

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THE GREAT ESCAPE

Inside every poem like this one
Is a more profound one trying to escape.

Louis Phillips

THE GRAVESTONE OF JONATHAN SWIFT

ubi soeva indigation uleterius cor lacerare nequit

Poets frequently stand
Where vain indignation
No longer tears the heart,
Thinking like the rain
How reputations gather,
Then fall, mist rising
From landscapes 
Where heroes have fallen.
Silence, like the rain,
Touches every grass,
Every leaf, everything
That gets in its path.
Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral
Read the dates: 1667-1745.
63 years, mostly in Dublin.
I have been in Dublin
Less than a week. Dean Swift.
Rain has no biography.
It comes & goes, 
Not giving us a thought,
Completely free of satire.

Louis Phillips
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NEW BOOK OF POEMS BY LOUIS PHILLIPS

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CVQMXCXK