Sounding Snow – Brief Poems by Laura Gilpin

Laura Gilpin (October 10, 1950–February 15, 2007) was an American poet, nurse, and advocate for hospital reform. Born in Wisconsin, she was the daughter of Robert Crafton Gilpin and Bertha Burghard. She grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana and later attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree, and Columbia University, where she was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree. For some time she lived in New York City where she worked for the Teachers and Writers Collaborative and where she co-ordinated the poetry programme of the Henry Street Settlement. She also taught creative writing at the New York Public Library before becoming a registered nurse.

In 1976, Laura Gilpin was awarded the Walt Whitman Award by the Academy of American Poets for her first book of poetry, The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe (Doubleday, 1976). The judge was William Stafford who selected her collection from among 1,600 submissions and commented: The control pace, cumulative effect, frequent rockets of surprise in The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe make it a very appealing and admirable book. I like the sense of being accompanied page after page by the worthy company of an author who can have the audacity to rely on lines that are just right …

She was awarded a Writer’s Grant in 1981 from the National Endowment for the Arts. That same year she became a registered nurse having attained a Bachelor of Science in nursing from New York University. Her nursing career included paediatric nursing at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and adult oncology at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. In 1985, Laura Gilpin was invited to be a staff nurse on the original Planetree unit which has been described as a pioneering organization dedicated to humanizing patient care in hospitals. ( The name Planetree came from the type of tree under which Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, sat and taught; their goal is to reconnect with his holistic approach that addresses the patient’s body, mind, and spirit.) Laura Gilpin continued working with Planetree for more than twenty years, helping over one hundred hospitals to improve health care. She was eventually promoted to Planetree’s Director of Member Services and then Director of the Planetree Affiliate Network. She was joint editor, along with Susan Frampton and Patrick Charmel of the book Putting Patients First: Designing and Practicing Patient-Centered Care (Jossey-Bass, 2003) In 2004 Putting Patients First was named as Hamilton Book of the Year by the American College of Health Care Executives.

During the course of her nursing career, she continued to work on her poetry. She received a sabbatical in 2004 from Planetree to work on her second collection The Weight of a Soul (Sallie Randolph, 2008), which she completed shortly before her death. Acknowledging, in the foreword, the imminence of her death after a diagnosis of inoperable brain tumours, she wrote: Poetry has always been my persistent passion, my voice, my means of communication … Unfortunately death has become an unexpected deadline. At fifty-six, I have been diagnosed with two glioblastomas (brain tumors) which have restricted my ability to continue work. All my years as a poet and as a nurse are now woven together into becoming a patient. My images and metaphors from poetry, integrated into all I have learned as a nurse, are drawing me into the deepest role of being a patient. Since publishing my first book, The Hocus Pocus of the Universe, I have spent the last thirty years working on poems for my second book, The Weight of a Soul. Many of the poems I have included here bring together my own perspective as well as my experience as a nurse listening to patients faced with illness and death. I hope my years of poetry have provided enough insight.

Five and a half months after a diagnosis of multiple glioblastomas was made in September 2006, Laura Gilpin, 56 years old, died on Thursday, February 15, 2007, at her home in Fairhope, Alabama.

Photograph: Erika Flowers

 

THE TWO-HEADED CALF

Some poems go viral. After Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Ilya Kaminsky’s poem “We Lived Happily During the War” went viral. Similarly, after mass shootings and other tragedies in 2016, a poem called “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith went, as she put it “legit viral on Twitter.” Even earlier, in July 2013, a lengthy prose poem by Patricia Lockwood called The Rape Joke was posted by the current events website The Awl and quickly became a viral sensation as it was shared over 30,000 times on Facebook and retweeted over 2,400 times on Twitter. In its own quiet way, one poem by Laura Gilpin called The Two-Headed Calf has gone viral. On my own Tumblr site – Poem-Today – which has posted a poem a day since 2015, this poem has had far more interactions than any other poem I have posted, and that includes both the Patricia Lockwood poem and the Maggie Smith poem. It continues to appear regularly on internet sites as do images of art work inspired by the poem.  Online, the poem has become the subject of webcomics, fan art and memes  due to its emotional impact. Many have had tattoos inspired by the poem done on their bodies, responding to the text and to the image projected. The poem is brief and worth quoting in full.

The Two-Headed Calf

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.

It is not hard to understand why this short poem has gained such resonance and attracted so many readers. The poem is imaginative, intelligent, intricately paced and intriguing. Like the brief poems below, it conveys so much in such a short space. An interesting, detailed analysis of the poem from Dr Oliver Tearle is available on the Interesting Literature site. The success of this poem has, however, tended to take the focus away from the other poems of Laura Gilpin. She is far from being a “one-hit wonder.”

Photograph: Erika Flowers

THE POETRY OF LAURA GILPIN

Early reviewers of The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe recognized the talent on display. Writing in the Chicago Review – Vol. 30, No. 2 (Autumn, 1978) – Thomas A. Stumpf had this to say: Gilpin’s poems are most interesting for their modesty, their refusal to tell us too much or to speak too stridently. Though it violates all kinds of critical shibboleths to say this, the volume introduces us to a personality which we are convinced is Gilpin’s own, and which is subtle and unpredictable enough to be fascinating, to make us turn the page and want to read more, never really sated with what we have. It is a personality blessedly free from poses … The economy, one might even say severity, of imagery in the volume allows Gilpin to exercise the subtle modulations of tone which are her true strength. It also allows her to concentrate on a narrative or on a dramatic situation without interference from verbal fireworks or the extravagant emotions they beget. And, writing in the American Poetry Review – Vol. 8, No. 1 (January/February 1979) – Michael Heffernan commented: Laura Gilpin’s The Hocus Pocus of the Universe is … held together by a mysterious natural power, in this case a first rate poetic gift. Laura Gilpin’s kind of poetry is often referred to as deceptively simple, but there is  nothing deceptive about poems that are as plain-spoken and almost invariably on-the-mark as these are … A dissenting view was proposed by Suzanne Juhasz in a review in the Library Journal – 101, 22 (1976) – where she claimed Laura Gilpin attempts the precision of phrasing, vocabulary, tone, and rhythm that invests William Carlos Williams’s poetry with infinite resonance, but that she lacks an awareness of the complexity involved in such a gesture. But this is, I think, to misread the impulse behind the poems. Instead of seeking or embracing complexity, her poems embrace the simplicity of a low-key demotic far removed from the resonance and the rhetoric of William Carlos Williams. These are not simple poems, but they are written in a quasi-simple style. And they. have their own infinite resonance, one based on conjunctions and disjunctions as can be seen clearly in the brief poems selected below.

In the thirty years between the publication of her first and the publication of her second (posthumous) collection, Laura Gilpin continued to write poems in the same style and with the same subject matter – family, love, illness, death. The fact that this final volume (which contains most of the earlier poems and is, thereby, a collected poems) has not received the same recognition as the first collection is not a refection on its value as poetry. There are some wonderful poems here – in particular the title poem, The Weight of a Soul – but the book has no ambition to redefine the terms set by the first volume. There are more love poems, but mediated through a wry consciousness. Dinosaurs is one of the most unusual love poems I have read. They are at their best when they continue to be written in a relaxed, ambling style. Attempts at formality, as in an extremely cumbersome villanelle – Villanelle: Elegy for my Father – fail to cohere. What comes through most clearly in the best of these poems is a voice that is compassionate, concerned and clearly focused and one worthy of greater attention.

Photograph: Erika Flowers

SAMUEL BECKETT AND LAURA GILPIN

An unlikely alliance. And yet. Samuel Beckett is used for an epigraph to The Weight of a Soul: All poetry is prayer. But the full quotation is abridged, All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer. No less than Beckett, Laura Gilpin was not interested in paradigms of prosody. For her the poetry is in the clarity and the simplicity of the statement. While her innate optimism may run counter to Beckett’s innate pessimism, she recognizes, as does the dour yet witty Irishman, that poetry is prayer without the consolation of religious certainty. And there is more. A well-known quotation from Waiting for Godot reads They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more. Many of Laura Gilpin’s poems, early and late, take place astride a grave or concern themselves with those, mainly relatives and friends, who have gone into night once more. In part IV of Life After Death, the poem begins by asserting simply

The things I know:        
how the living go on living        
and how the dead go on living with them

Then the poem goes on to contemplate a dead tree inhabited by young rabbits inculcating the concluding message that could, without the simple underpinning, be considered too pat:

So that nothing is wasted in nature        
or in love.

Like Beckett, there is a constant awareness of the grave. And, like Beckett, there is an absence of morbidity or sentimentality. A late poem, The Moment, begins with a couple having an argument followed by make-up sex. While making love, the poet is momentarily interrupted by an ambulance passing by her apartment- the scream of the siren/the red light spattering/against our skin. For a moment, the moment of the title and the moment of recognition, she contemplates the world of the dying. Then the moment passes, love resumes and life begins again. Even when it came to her own impending death, as in the concluding poem, Death 2006, there is a simple acceptance, unsentimental and unafraid.

Another Beckett quotation, this one from Endgame, is apt. The end is in the beginning and yet you go on. Aware of how everything ends in death, Laura Gilpin’s poems continue to explore life. To reiterate that Beckett epigraph, All poetry is prayer. And, in a life devoted to concerns wider than the circumscribed world of poetry, she continued to exemplify a form of prayer that deserves a wider audience.

Photograph: Erika Flowers

Brief Poems by Laura Gilpin

My Grandmother’s Eighty-sixth Birthday 

The cake at my grandmother’s birthday party
was chocolate with white icing which is her 
favourite.

Although she could not blow out all the
candles, she said her wish had already
come true.

***

An Afternoon of Painting

And the artist, carrying
his watercolor, walks
home in the rain.

***

The Tomb of the Unborn Soldier

It is a  way of life for these women
who go each day to the cemeteries
carrying flowers and who return
empty-handed.

***

The Whole of It

I am as resilient as a robin’s egg
falling out of the nest
twenty feet above ground.

My one salvation
is the little boy across the street
who collects odds and ends.

***

Night Song

And when she
woke suddenly
in the empty room
crying mother, mother,

the moon, watching
at a distance, rose
over her bed
and stayed there
until she was
asleep.

***

Snow

Each flake of snow
so separate
so distinct

yet in the morning
the hillside is a
solid field of white.

***

Differences

Of the six kernels of corn I planted,
only four sprouted, and of these four,
only two survived, and of these two,
one is taller.

***

Laws of Physics

(Corollary to Coulomb’s Law)

If body (1) of mass (m 1) and charge (q 1)
is attracted to body (2) of mass (m 2) and charge (q 2)
and if body (2) is repelled by body (1)
and attracted to body (3),

which of them will have a date on Saturday night?

***

Seeing a Dog in the Rain

It is raining and there is a dog lying
in the gutter and the gutter is filling
with water because the sewer is clogged.

If the dog were alive he would be drowning
but as it is, the water is simply stroking
his fur.

***

Death

Time stops.
At last it is quiet enough
for me to go to sleep.

Time starts again,
I go on sleeping.

Photograph: Erika Flowers

LINKS

The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe on the Internet Archive Site

The Weight of a Soul on the Internet Archive Site

Putting Patients First on the Internet Archive Site

The Wikipedia page on Laura Gilpin

The Laura Gilpin page (with links to six poems) on the Best Poems site

A Summary and Analysis of Laura Gilpin’s Two-Headed Calf

Website of the Planetree Organization

Laura Gilpin obituary

Laura Gilpin gravestone in the Colony Cemetery in Fairhope, Alabama

Mountain Dreams – Brief Poems by Francis Harvey

Francis Harvey (13 April 1925 – 7 November 2014) was an Irish poet born in Belmore Street, Enniskillen in 1925. His Catholic mother eloped with his Protestant father Hamilton Harvey, who died when the young Frank Harvey was only six. His mother was from Ballyshannon in Donegal and she moved back there. Frank stayed on and completed his secondary education in Enniskillen. He went to University College, Dublin, where he studied medicine for a year. As his family needed him to be working, he went into the bank, which took him around Ireland, but mostly he was stationed in Donegal. 

His first poem, about potato-digging, was published when he was 16, in the Weekly Independent. Subsequently he published several short stories and had a number of his plays produced on stage and radio. His prize-winning play, Farewell to Every White Cascade, was broadcast on RTÉ in the 1960s and thereafter on the BBC and numerous radio stations around the world. He describes his introduction to writing: What made a writer of me really was I became a member of the library in the town I was born, in Enniskillen, the Carnegie Library, and I discovered Dickens and I discovered Thackeray. I discovered D.H. Lawrence and umpteen others. I began to read.

In the mid-1970s he left fiction and playwriting behind him and concentrated on poetry. His first collection, In the Light on the Stones, was published by Gallery Press in 1978. The following year he took early retirement from the Bank of Ireland where he was an assistant manager. Gallery Press also published his next collection, The Rainmakers (1988) while Dedalus published his four subsequent collections, The Boa Island Janus (1996), Making Space (2001) , Collected Poems (2007) and Donegal Haiku (2013).

His poem, Heron, won the 1989 Guardian and World Wildlife Fund poetry competition when Ted Hughes was judge. His work has also featured in publications such as The Spectator and The Irish Times. In the 1970s he won The Irish Times/Yeats Summer School prize. In 1990 he won a Peterloo Poets Prize and was a prizewinner in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition. 

 Francis Harvey died on 7th November 2014 at the age of 89.

DONEGAL HAIKU

Irish haiku, as I argue in my Dangerous Pavements post, with some assistance from Anatoly Kudryavitsky, editor of Shamrock Haiku Journal, is a distinctive form of haiku. While some poets, such as Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, have used the form fitfully, others, such as Paul Muldoon, have, in a ludic, almost ludicrous fashion, moulded it to their own playful applications. And then there is the sense of place. Many of the practitioners have composed haiku sequences devoted to particularly Irish locales: these include Michael Hartnett with his Inchicore Haiku, (Raven Arts Press, 1985); Pat Boran with his  Waveforms: Bull Island Haiku (Dedalus Press, 2015); and, of course, Francis Harvey. In his case this involves a heightened awareness of the flora and fauna of his native Donegal. There are, as can be seen in the poems below, sheep, dogs, cuckoos, blackbirds, crows, butterflies, flowers, mountains, strands, lakes and Mount Errigal, all as peculiarly Irish and as peculiarly local as the wind and the rain mentioned in the concluding haiku below.

Donegal Haiku is a collection of 122 haikus opening and closing with a single haiku on single pages while the rest of the book features three haikus arranged on each of sixty page spreads. The cover, designed and photographed by Francis Harvey’s daughter, Esther, depicts Mount Errigal in Donegal with an upturned image of Mount Fuji in Japan reflected in the water. (See image right.) The congruence between the Irish landscape and the Japanese form is explicitly acknowledged in the first haiku below.

Fellow Donegal poet Moya Cannon, in her introduction to his Collected Poems, describes Harvey as a “Bashō-like figure”. But there are distinct differences. While Bashō travelled widely and wrote of his travels, Harvey remained rooted to Donegal and its landscape. I love the landscape of Donegal …landscape does something for me. It turns me on…I’m more at home in the middle of a bog than I would be in the middle of a city … And I love looking at the shape of the land and the contours, sometimes the lovely sensuous contours that land has, like a human body …. a haunch or a breast …. I love that, and I like the roughnesses in the landscape in Donegal too … I need roughness, I need wildness. While there is some humour in Bashō’s work, the type of mordant humour found in the haiku of Francis Harvey reminds me more of the work of Kobayashi Issa. And there are, to the best of my knowledge, no frogs, Bashō-like or otherwise, in his poetry. Moya Canon is on surer ground when she compares his poems, rightly in my opinion, with the work of Scottish poet Norman MacCaig and Welsh poet R. S. Thomas.

IRISH POETS ON FRANCIS HARVEY

Brendan Kennelly: There is throughout a concern for craft and conciseness. The poems are, on the whole, lucid and warmhearted. There is an admirable variety of technique and theme. Above all there is the sense that the poet is content to explore his own world in all its limitation and potential. It is this note of quiet, unruffled integrity that makes the poetry of Francis Harvey such a pleasant reading experience.

Eamon Grennan: The poems of Francis Harvey lodge us deep inside a rural (south Donegal) landscape, the overlapping emotional and physical maps of which Harvey knows with startling, at times corrosive, intimacy. In the rinsed light of his minute observations a world is brought to vivid life, animated by compassion, understanding, and a tough grace of observation.

Moya Cannon: Francis Harvey has done for Donegal and, by extension, for the west of Ireland, what Norman McCaig (sic) did for Scotland and what R. S. Thomas did for Wales. He has accorded the landscapes of South Donegal and the people who have lived in them a dignity which has been stripped away as much, almost, by tourism as by earlier forms of invasion. This he has achieved with a naturalist’s passion for precision and with an utter lack of sentimentality …. Francis Harvey’s work combines the passion for precision of a naturalist and the yearning for grace of a poet, except for the fact that a passion for precision, for naming, is also part of the bedrock of poetry. In [his] poems there is a vivid sense of how we are all moving, “free but tethered, through time’s inexorable weathers.”

Nessa O’Mahony: The poetry book that I got greatest pleasure from in 2007 was the Collected Poems of Francis Harvey. Harvey is the ultimate landscape artist of Irish poetry; to read his poetry is to get a sense of a man growing up and becoming assimilated into nature, in particular the nature of West Donegal where he lives. The poems are full of precise, loving but utterly unsentimental description of this harsh country in which one manages to survive rather than thrive. Harvey has an uncanny ability to empathise with his subjects and to show that innate beauty and misery are intertwined in the solitary lives he depicts.

Brief Poems by Francis Harvey

Sleeping, I think of 
Errigal and Mount Fuji,
The shape of my dreams.

***

A butterfly sways
on a pink dunghill flower.
The beauty of roots.

***

Who prays at the graves
of the unbaptised children?
A sheep on its knees.

***

Something on my mind
and on the mountain I climb.
The weight of two clouds.

***

Not a breath of wind.
The vanity of clouds
in the lake’s mirror.

***

Woodhill. The cuckoo
calls and, more than the wind,
is holding its breath.

***

What did he taste when
he kissed the island girl’s lips?
The sweetness of salt.

***

Tell me who waits for
the lightening to strike more than
once in the same place.

***

Not a breath of wind.
The vanity of clouds
in the lake’s mirror.

***

The bluebells blossom.
A blackbird sings in the grove.
Swallows and poems.

***

You planted a tree.
I wrote a poem. What more
could anyone do?

***

Myself and two crows
by a frozen lake, silent.
Who will break the ice?

***

Myself and my dog
skirt a mountain to avoid
a man and his dog.

***

I watched him that day
take his last walk on the strand.
The tide was ebbing.

***

He was so obsessed
with death he began sending
mass cards to himself.

***

Five crows in a tree.
The wind ruffles their feathers.
The leaves of my book.

***

Snow on the mountain.
Crowsfeet and your first white hair.
The end of autumn.

***

The wind and the rain.
The wind and the rain again
and again. Ireland.

***

These brief poems are from Donegal Haiku published by Dedalus Press (2013). The cover design (and the colour image used on this page) are by the daughter of Francis Harvey, Esther.

LINKS

The Dedalus Press page for Donegal Haiku

The Dedalus Press page for Collected Poems

Kathleen McCracken reviews The Boa Island Janus (Dedalus Press, 1996) for  The Poetry Ireland Review

Macdara Woods reviews Making Space: New and Selected Poems (Dedalus Press, 2001) for The Poetry Ireland Review

Hugh McFadden reviews Collected Poems (Dedalus Press, 2001) for Books Ireland

Tom Hubbard reviews Collected Poems (Dedalus Press, 2007) for The Poetry Ireland Review

Donna L. Potts reviews Donegal Haiku (Dedalus Press, 2013) for New Hibernia Review

This Landscape’s Fierce Embrace: The Poetry of Francis Harvey, Edited by Donna L. Potts

An article on Francis Harvey in The Irish Times

A radio documentary commissioned by RTÉ lyric fm’s The Lyric Feature (first broadcast in 2014)

Australian Broadcasting Corporation documentary on Francis Harvey

The cover design of Donegal Haiku , published by Dedalus Press (2013), and the colour image used on this page, are both by the daughter of Francis Harvey, Esther.

Footy and Film – Brief Poems by Damian Balassone

Damian Balassone was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1972, the child of an Italian migrant family who had settled in the  working class suburb of Collingwood.  He graduated from Deakin University in 1994 and has worked variously as an itinerant fruit picker, a bean counter, and as a teacher.  His poems have appeared in a variety of Australian and international publications.  His first book Chime (Ginninderra Press, 2013, later reissued on Kindle) is a collection of song lyrics, ballads and narrative poems that span the width and breadth of the Australian continent.

Since the publication of Chime he has suffered from severe hearing loss, tinnitus and hyperacusis (hypersensitivity to everyday sounds) with obvious consequences to his headspace – hence, a propensity to focus on shorter works of poetry.  In doing so, he swapped the panoramic Australian landscape for what he calls pithy takes on popular culture, corporate duplicity and political wankery.  These short poems and epigrams later came to the attention of the acclaimed Australian poet Les Murray, who published a stack of them and described Balassone as a ‘virtuoso’.

During this period, Balassone released Strange Game in a Strange Land (Wilkinson Publishing, 2019), a collection of short, playful rhymes about the great and glorious game of Australian Rules Football.  Unexpectedly, the book met with some success in his homeland, acquiring national radio and television exposure, and selling several thousand copies.

His third book Love is a Weird Cat is forthcoming.  This collection contains more than 100 short poems and epigrams that have been published in venues such as The New York Times, The Australian, The Spectator, The Canberra Times, Light, Abridged, Cordite, Quadrant, First Things, Shot Glass Journal, Eureka Street, Arena, The American Bystander, Asses of Parnassus, Snakeskin, Better Than Starbucks, New Verse News, Daily Drunk Magazine, News Weekly and Lighten Up.  In addition to the epigrams, the book also includes many short prose-poems that combine arresting imagery with emotional impact.  

Damian Balassone’s poems have appeared in more than 100 publications, most notably in The New York Times, The Australian, The Canberra Times and The Spectator.

He now lives in Warrandyte, Victoria, an outer suburb of Melbourne.

FOOTY – POETRY AND AUSTRALIAN RULES FOOTBALL

Australian Rules Football (also called Aussie Rules, or footy) is a contact sport played between two teams on an oval field.  Goals are worth six points and the primary methods of moving the oval ball are by kicking, handballing and running with the ball.  The game features frequent physical contests, spectacular marking (i.e. catching the ball from a kick), fast movement and high scoring.  The sport has the highest spectator attendance and television viewership of all sports in Australia, while the Australian Football League (AFL) is the nation’s wealthiest sporting body.  The AFL Grand Final, held annually at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), is the second-highest-attended club championship event in the world (just behind cricket’s Indian Premier League).

Damian Balassone’s father became a regular follower of Collingwood Football Club. The young Damian attended footy matches as a boy in the 1980’s, often sitting on his father’s shoulders in the outer of Victoria Park as he began to follow enthusiastically, recognising a hero of sorts in a player named after the Marvel Comics character The Hulk. (He discusses his love of football in an interview with Barbie Robinson.) His second collection, Strange Game in a Strange Land, subtitled A Poetic Celebration of Australian Rules Football is a poetic response to Australian Rules Football in all its glorious incarnations, from the tip of Tasmania to the Tiwi Islands, from the opening bounce of the season through to the seagulls descending onto the G at the conclusion of the Big Dance in a quirky collection of quatrains and couplets.

Brief Poems by Damian Balassone

FOOTY POEMS

My Nonna

When I started playing Aussie Rules,
my nonna’s face turned red.
I asked her what the problem was,
and this is what she said:
‘An oval ball, an oval ground,
for men with oval heads.’

***

Retrieving the Footy from the Tree

I climb the neighbour’s back veranda
and shake their precious jacaranda
until I hear the thrilling sound
of leather landing on the ground.

***

The Half-Back Flankers

We strive to run the lines until 
the opposition breaks.
Imagination is the name 
we give to our mistakes.

***

All poems © Damian Balassone. Reprinted by permission of the author.

HOLLYWOOD POEMS

Hollywood Hair Cycle

I once had hair like Moses,
but now my mop is thinner.
I once was Charlton Heston,
but now I am Yul Brynner.

***

Airbrushed

The biopic refused to show
the mole of Marilyn Monroe.

***

At a Restaurant in Berlin, 1936

You asked the famous leader
to autograph your napkin.
You thought that he was Hitler.
He signed it ‘Charlie Chaplin’.

***

Antipodean Romeo

As stars light up the jacaranda,
he’s climbing up the back veranda.

***

Greta Garbo

Because you’ve been dehumanised by fame
you wanna go where no one knows your name.

***

These “Hollywood Poems” first appeared in the magazine Eureka Street.
All poems © Damian Balassone. Reprinted by permission of the author.

HEBREW COUPLETS

The Fall of Nebuchadnezzar

He once was king of Babylon…but now
he’s drenched in dew and frolics like a cow.

***

David and Bathsheba

He watched her bathe.
‘She’s mine,’ said Dave.

***

Jacob’s Lament

‘The problem with my brother Esau:
his friggin’ mood is like a seesaw.’

***

Samson On Delilah

‘Delilah took me by the hand
and led me to the Promised Land.
With just a wiggle of her hips,
she triggered my apocalypse.’

***

Advice from Jonah

‘If God is calling and you bail,
you might end up inside a whale.’

***

Garden of Eden

A multitude of monsters will be on the loose
if man and woman work out how to reproduce.

***

These “Hebrew Couplets” first appeared in the magazine The Footy Almanac.
All poems © Damian Balassone. Reprinted by permission of the author.

From THE ASSES OF PARNASSUS

Lord Byron on Twitter

I awoke one morning
and found myself cancelled.

***

The iMirror

To google
yourself
is the gravest of errors,
your screen is
replaced
by the mirror of terrors.

***

The Gambler

The gambler knows that if he somehow wins
it covers up a multitude of sins.

***

On Grandma’s 107th Birthday

I wonder if she’ll ever meet
her maker in the sky.
This lady just keeps keeping on.
She’s lost the will to die.

***

Carnival of Colours

At the carnival of colours
(though they’re trying not to show it)
all the poets want to be singers
and the singers want to be poets. 

***

These poems were first published on The Asses of Parnassus blog.
All poems © Damian Balassone. Reprinted by permission of the author.

From LIGHT POETRY

The Housewife’s Dream

Each day she craves
a different sin.
Today she dreamt
that she was in

The House of Mirth
in no apparel
with Colin Firth
and Colin Farrell.

***

Defrocked

I once abstained from sin,
but now I’ve had my fill.
I once was Benny Hinn,
but now I’m Benny Hill.

***

Papal Nation

Italians are a people of integrity
who celebrate a celibate celebrity.

***

Phrases

The phrase ‘white men can’t dance’ is harsh but fair
…unless of course your name is Fred Astaire.

***

The Christian Suitor

‘The sacred Song of Songs –
the Abrahamic Cupid –
decrees that you and I
should shag each other stupid.’

***

These poems were first published on the Light Poetry site.
All poems © Damian Balassone. Reprinted by permission of the author.

From LOVE IS A WEIRD CAT

Final year assembly

The children gather in the gym
to hear the last goodbye,
and through the skylight high above
they glimpse the summer sky.

***

Blind boy dreaming

A clique of corporate men
prepare to raid the earth again.

Despite their schemes,
the blind boy of the village dreams.

***

Love is a Weird Cat

Love is a weird cat
that sneaks up on you
when you’re lying on the couch
and brushes its soft fur
against your cold cheek,
before disappearing without a trace.

***

Cleopatra

She’s put an end to all my grand endeavours
and now my dreams are mummified forever.

***

Our Marriage Soundtrack

I think of our marriage quite often.
I think of the music as well.
It started with ‘Stairway to Heaven’
and ended with ‘Highway to Hell’.

***

Bathroom Wars

While stationed on the toilet seat of life, 
I’m told to get a move on by my wife.

***

The Old Preacher Retires

I leave the pulpit
with nothing left to prove.
I once moved mountains,
but now I cannot move.

***

The Bureaucrat

He served the republic with utter distinction.
His days in the office were memorable ones:
he covered the monsters with insect repellent
and shot the mosquitos with elephant guns. 

***

The Importance of Religion

Those who loathe religion 
are slow to contemplate 
that Lennon met McCartney 
at the church fête.

***

These poems are from Damian Balassone’s forthcoming collection, Love is a Weird Cat.
All poems © Damian Balassone. Reprinted by permission of the author.

LINKS

Chime

Strange Game in a Strange Land

Love is a Weird Cat

The Twitter (X) account of Damian Balassone

Damian Balassone’s website

Five longer poems by Damian Balassone on the Footy Almanac site

Links to poems and articles by Damian Balassone on the Muck Rack website

Barbie Robinson talks to Damian Balassone about Strange Game in a Strange Land for Living Arts Canberra

Children’s poetry video of Damian Balassone reading his poem “The Sportsman or the Scientist?”

All poems © Damian Balassone. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Dial Tone- Brief Poems by Peter Vertacnik

Peter Vertacnik was born in Saginaw, Michigan. He holds degrees in creative writing and English from The University of Florida, Texas Tech University and Penn State University. His poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in 32 Poems, Bad Lilies, The Cortland Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, The New Criterion, Phoebe, Plume, The Spectator (World), THINK, and Water~Stone Review. He was a finalist for the Donald Justice Poetry Prize in 2021.

His debut poetry collection, The Nature of Things Fragile, (Criterion Books, 2024) was the winner of the twenty-third New Criterion Poetry Prize, judged by George Bradley, Roger Kimball and Adam Kirsch. Established in 2000, the New Criterion Poetry Prize is awarded each year to a book-length manuscript of poems that pay close attention to form. The poems in this collection depict a world fraught with vulnerability and loss. Utilizing a wide range of  traditional and inventive poetic forms, including sonnets, villanelles, triolets, a sestina, epigrams, blank verse, and word-count, he confronts the illnesses and deaths of loved ones, the memories of old houses and towns left behind, and the vanishing of once-ubiquitous household items. It is a book of elegies, but also one of celebration.

He now lives in Jacksonville, Florida, where he works as an English instructor at the local Episcopal School, a co-educational college-preparatory school.

FORGOTTEN GOOD POEMS

Peter Vertacnik has curated Forgotten Good Poems on the Twitter (X) platform for many years. Calling it Just good poems the world seems to have forgotten (and should read) he has managed to introduce followers of the site to a very wide variety of poems that have, through time, slipped under the radar of many poetry readers. It has been a cosmopolitan selection, accompanied by clear images of individual poems by writers from a variety of backgrounds. He has done much to reignite an interest in poets who he feels, and I mostly agree with him, deserve a wider audience.

These poets come from a variety of backgrounds. There are American poets whose audience deserves to be wider, such as Fred Chappell, N. Scott Momaday and William H. Dickey. Canadian poets featured include Steven Heighton, Gwendolyn MacEwen and Charles Bruce. Irish poets Tom Duddy, John Hewitt and Gerard Fanning share a space with English poets Vernon Scannell, E. J. Scovell and Lawrence Sail. There are poets from Scotland (Maurice Lindsay) and Wales (Paul Henry and R. S. Thomas) as well as Australian poets (David Malouf and James McAuley) and the Jamaican poet Anthony McNeill.

An anthology winnowed from these selections would make an enticing collection.

ASSES OF PARNASSUS

All of the poems below first appeared in the Asses of Parnassus, a Tumblr-based blog devoted to short poems and edited by Canadian poet, Brooke Clark whose own collection of poems Ubanities (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2020) also contains many brief poems. These are poems, as Reader’s Guide below puts it, in the tradition of Martial, Herrick, Nims, Cope, Cunningham, a tradition that merges formal exactitude with concision and wit. The work of Martial, Herrick and Cunningham is featured in distinct posts on this site. The humorous and irreverent approach of the Asses of Parnassus site is illustrated with the Tumblr avatar (see image right), a detail of an etching – originally entitled Hasta su abuelo (And so was his grandfather) – from Los caprichos (The Caprices), a set of prints created by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya in 1797–1798. The poems chosen reflect, in a contemporary manner, Goya’s condemnation of the universal follies and foibles of the Spanish society in which he lived.

The Asses of Parnassus not only features a multitude of translations (in rhyme) from Greek and Latin authors, in particular plenty of rude, witty and scurrilous barbs from Martial and Catullus, but also promotes the work of many of the finest practitioners of the art of the epigram today, writers as diverse as Jerome Betts, Robin Helweg-Larsen, Bruce Bennett, David and Daniel Galef, Damian Balassone, Susan McLean, Alexandra Oliver and, of course, Peter Vertacnik.

Brief Poems by Peter Vertacnik

Conscience

Though you don’t hear me with your ears,
I speak as lucidly as mirrors.
My voice maintains a constant call,
Which most obey, but never all.

***

Concerning Pedestals

Our would-be leaders shift and whisper, nervous,
As their dead forebears topple in the street:
“Surely we’ve done nothing to deserve this.
Everyone’s free to grovel at our feet.”

***

Reader’s Guide

Some lines illuminate, dissect, or slam
(See Martial, Herrick, Nims, Cope, Cunningham).
Each forged for you—old, middle-aged, and younger—
In sharp, recurrent verse. Like pangs of hunger.

***

Standardized

Numb hours of teaching to the test,
And hours more of silent filling,
Filling of bubbles. A bored unrest
Of minds, compliant though not willing.

Seasonal Change

Each autumn now feels warmer,
And our maple’s leaves less bright
On the branch that scrapes the dormer,
Keeping me up at night.

***

Hyperopia

Youth’s hard to see, until we’ve seen it through.
Only old eyes can recognize what’s new.

***

“Why Are We Doing This?”

for my students

Each day you’ll grasp a little more,
Something you haven’t seen before.
And as new skills and knowledge link,
You’ll learn not what but how to think.

***

Accolade

What is the most sought poet’s prize?
That what you scan now with your eyes
Tomorrow you may memorize.

***

Dial Tone

Seems strange to miss this barren baritone
Once known to all, and by all overthrown;
To miss, whenever I pick up my phone
And make a call, the barely noticed drone
That spoke of reaching out, of being alone.

Final Illness

The medicines have ceased to make him stronger;
He takes them to stay weak a little longer.

***

Malpractice

“Of course one must be cleansed of mortal sin
In order to receive the Eucharist.”
Yet what humane physician would insist
Only the healed ingest his medicine?

***

Nomenclature

Though names may alter—graveyards, cemeteries,
Memorial parks—the function never varies.

***

Patient

He wasn’t dead; nor was he tougher.
What hadn’t killed him made him suffer.

***

American Medicine

Another pill: devised to heal,
Or coddle those afraid to feel?

***

All poems © Peter Vertacnik. Reprinted by permission of the author.
All poems first published on the Asses of Parnassus blog.

LINKS

The Peter Vertacnik website.

The Twitter (X) account of Peter Vertacnik.

Forgotten Good Poems.

The Asses of Parnassus blog.

Peter Vertacnik wins the twenty-third New Criterion Poetry Prize.

The Amazon page for The Nature of Things Fragile.

The Encounter Books page for The Nature of Things Fragile.

All poems © Peter Vertacnik. Reprinted by permission of the author.
All poems first published on the Asses of Parnassus blog.

Dog Tags – Brief Poems by R. L. Barth

R.L. Barth was born June 7, 1947 and grew up in Erlanger, Kentucky.  He can trace a long line of military history in his family and that tradition of service spurred him to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps. An early relative of his served in the Union Army after arriving in the U.S. from Germany, and other relatives served in WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. Barth enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1966 and served through 1969. During his tour of duty in Vietnam he was an assistant patrol leader and then patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion.  He was educated at Northern Kentucky State College and at Stanford University. For more than twenty years (1981-2004) he operated his own small poetry press, while writing, sometime teaching, and working as a bookseller. He has twice been a visiting poet at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  Among his poetry collections are Looking for Peace (1985), A Soldier’s Time (1988), Deeply Dug In (2003), and No Turning Back: The Battle of Dien Bien Phu (2016). Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems, (2021) is published through Broadstone Books in Frankfort, Kentucky. He has also edited The Selected Poems of Yvor Winters (1999), The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis (2000), and The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000).

He lives in northern Kentucky with his wife, Susan.

Poetry and the Vietnam War

R. L. Barth is a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War from Kentucky, and the war is nearly his exclusive subject, as these titles suggest: Deeply Dug In, Forced-Marching to the Styx: Vietnam War Poems, Small Arms Fire, Looking for Peace. Another collection, A Soldier’s Time, takes its title from a letter written by Dr. Johnson and quoted by Boswell in his Life: A soldier’s time is passed in distress and danger, or in idleness and corruption. During his time in Vietnam, Barth wasn’t writing poetry or keeping detailed journals of his experiences. Except for the odd letter home, he didn’t write while in combat. 

Arriving in Vietnam in 1968, Barth recalls the blistering heat and the bold stench. But there was beauty too: After the heat and the stench there was the beauty of the landscape – all these shades of green. He has described his work there:  I was Recon, which basically meant we would take a team of eight or ten people into the jungle, the mountains, and run Recon, then run back – just a cycle … As a result, I knew the jungle very well, and certainly knew what the mountains were like.

Barth has said that his poetry has two audiences: those who served in Vietnam, or some other combat arena, and those who haven’t served. I have always tried to write in such a way that the first audience would say, ‘Yes, he got that right; that’s how it was,’ … For the second audience, I hope that, even though they can never understand to the degree that a veteran can, they can get some sense of the experience, that something can resonate on a human level.

Asked why he has written about war almost exclusively for more than forty-five years, Barth said: To understand combat. And, I suppose, Vietnam.

Poetry after the War

When he returned from Vietnam, Barth attended Northern Kentucky State College (NKSC) in Covington – what is now Northern Kentucky University in Highland Heights. At that time, in 1969, much of the school’s student body was made up of secretaries, recent high school graduates and veterans of the G.I. Bill. I had the G.I. Bill and thought, ‘Why not college?’

It was there that Barth was introduced to a writer whose work would greatly impact his own. As an undergraduate, I started writing dreadful poems – free verse pieces of dreck. Junior year, I took literary criticism from Tom Zaniello. One of the textbooks was called, In Defense of Reason, by Yvor Winters. I was immediately taken.

As a result of his interest in the work of Yvor Winters, Barth was inspired to part ways with free verse and began writing formally. I’m reading Winters, thinking about the poetry I really like, thinking, ‘Why didn’t I see this before?’ I started writing the way I write now. After earning his undergraduate degree, Barth was selected as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, where Winters had taught until 1966. 

While in Stanford he met Helen Pinkerton, a poet and essayist, and the wife of Wesley Trimpi, who taught in Stanford’s English Department. Trimpi was an expert in English Renaissance lyric poetry and classical literature. Barth and Pinkerton lunched together and exchanged poems. He also came to know Winters’ widow, the poet and novelist, Janet Lewis, who asked him to edit Winters’ selected poems and letters as well as her own poems. It was a major production getting the letters – they were all over the country … And Winters himself had made a big point to ask people he wrote to destroy the letters. This correspondence included letters sent to leading names in literature, among them Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan, and Allen Tate. In 1999, with Barth as editor, The Selected Poems of Yvor Winters was published, followed by The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis, and The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, in 2000.

After finishing up at Stanford in 1979, Barth returned to Kentucky and established his own poetry press, but after 20 years he decided he had spent too much time on other people’s poems instead of his own. Once he focused on his own work, Barth published numerous poetry collections that include, Looking for Peace (1985), A Soldier’s Time (1988), Deeply Dug In (2003), and No Turning Back: The Battle of Dien Bien Phu (2016). 

Helen Pinkerton has praised his war poetry: His collections contain some of the finest poems ever written in English on the direct experience of modern war.  X. J. Kennedy has also praised his work: Barth’s best lines have a classical ring to them: it is as though Lucretius or Martial had been reincarnated in the uniform of the U. S. Marines. And Timothy Steele had this to say: R. L. Barth has done for the Vietnam war what Owen, Blunden and Sassoon did for World War I. He has borne moving and memorable witness to the tragedies of the conflict, and has done so in poems whose conscientious and clear-sighted craft does full justice to the seriousness of his subject.

Brief Poems by R. L. Barth

Small Arms Fire

Why not adjust? Forget this? Let it be? 
Because it’s truth. Because it’s history. 

***

One Way to Carry the Dead

A huge shell thundered; he was vaporized
And, close friends breathing near, internalized.

***

Epitaph

Tell them quite simply that we died
Thirsty, betrayed, and terrified.

***

War Debt

Survive or die, war holds one truth:
Marine, you will not have a youth.

***

Initial Confusion

A sergeant barked, “Your ass is Uncle’s!” though
It wasn’t clear if he meant Sam or Ho.”

***

Saigon: 16 VI. 1963

In chaos, judgement took on form and name:
The lotus flared; more men burned in your just flame.

***

Saigon: 30 IV. 1975

We lie here, trampled in the rout,
There was no razor’s edge, no doubt.

***

De Bello

The troops deploy. Above, the stars
Wheel over mankind’s little wars.
If there’s a deity, it’s Mars.

***

Epitaph for a Patrol Leader

The medals did not signify—
No more than his suntan—
Nor the promotions; simply say,
“He never lost a man.”

***

Movie Stars

Bob Hope, John Wayne, and Martha Raye
Were dupes who knew no other way;
Jane Fonda, too, whose Hanoi hitch
Epitomized protester kitsch.

***

Ambush

For thirteen months, death was familiar.
We knew its methods and the odds. Thus, war.
And yet, I never once saw dying eyes
That were not stunned or shattered by surprise.

***

Snowfall in Vietnam

Leaflets fill the sky.

(More monostich poems by R. L. Barth are available on the Slates – One Line Poems page.)

LINKS

Text of A soldier’s time : Vietnam war poems on the Internet Archive.

A preview of Deeply Dug In on Google Books.

The Scienter Books page on No Turning Back: The Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

The Broadstone Books page on Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems.

Patrick Kurp introduces some monostich poems.

Patrick Kurp on a poetry reading by R. L. Barth.

Francis Fike reviews No Turning Back: The Battle of Dien Bien Phu for Reformed Journal.

A review by Vicki Prichard of Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems in the Northern Kentucky Tribune.

A review by Clive Wilmer of Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems in the TLS.

A review by Bill McCloud of Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems in Books in Review published by Vietnam Veterans of America.

Goldfish Ponds – Brief Poems by Carol Snow

Carol Snow was born on Oct 18, 1949.

Her collections include Position Paper (Counterpath Press, 2016), Placed: Karesanui Poems (Counterpath Press, 2008), The Seventy Prepositions (University of California Press, 2004), For (University of California Press, 2000) and Artist and Model (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), winner of both the Poetry Center Book Award and the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature. Artist and Model was also selected by Robert Hass for the National Poetry Series. Billy Collins included her brief poem “Tour” (see below) in his 2003 anthology, Poetry 180.

Carol Snow’s award-winning poetry has been admired by many. When she published her first volume of poetry, Artist and Model, in 1989, poet Michael Palmer praised the complex music [Snow] forms from our simplest words and noted that she reflects on the struggle toward–and limits of–representation itself. . . . Artist and Model is a first book of singular poetic intelligence and attention. Her poetry has been celebrated as work of difficult beauty and brilliant, funny, subtle by Robert Hass who also said Her originality is to be puzzled—as artists should be—by the obvious. She is cunning, subtle, and she can write. She has been called delicate, and masterful by Cole Swenson. She has been praised for being ever restless, ever re-framing the frame of reference by the Boston Review. She has, according to Jorie Graham, been teaching us how brutally self-transforming a verbal action can be when undertaken in good faith and according to Fanny Howe she has a new and mesmerizing way of looking at things. Fanny Howe also describes Snow’s work as post-traumatic—half-seen, half-remembered, half-named—the event more than half gone…. Reviewing For on Amazon, John Isles writes: The language is tentative, edged with the cold stare of Experimental poetry, though it is a passionately lived and felt incarnation of the poet’s spiritual quest.

In 2002, she taught at the University of California–Berkeley as the Roberta Holloway poet-in-residence.

She lives in San Francisco, California.

Brief Poems by Carol Snow

WHAT COMFORT?

***

For K.

Then Kathy—”Is that mine?”—ran out to the crying in the yard.

***

Be Brief

“—necessitated, you know, by his impairments—”

***

At the Beach

But kept “—then threw back the shell.”

***

Elegy

And now that I can no longer…—no longer have to—visit him…

***

Breath As

tidal—ardor…fervor…horror…as moon…—

***

After

the — post- — after: “the readiness is all”

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 5, scene 2

***

POEM

Not thought, exactly: a refrain 
of thought.

***

Family

Not just S. but all of us, wanting
and exchanging wanting—“the strong force”—

***

In

the stones: their qualities in relation — ō — I mean to say — occurs;
like shock, occurs — is located

***

There was a moment

of blessing, calm.
Though it was a pause, a hiatus.

***

By the Pond: Reading

by the pond, the immediate –
breath – and then the text, and then the pond.

***

By the Pond: Quiet Breaths

in a still place. “Each next”
taking up a little of the spill.

***

By the Pond: Watching the goldfish

(why?)—the body passive,
small eye movements (as though in a dream)

***

Against

wouldn’t just anyone stiffen? — pressed — what must
   be a muzzle — instead of no — no

***

And another

“massacres of the innocents.”

And that there is a form
even for that.

***

But

built a skeleton of twigs — in such as this — constellation — animation
     technique: electrodes/sensors
strategically placed on the face, body — * — …of the matter

***

TOUR

Near a shrine in Japan he’d swept the path
and then placed camellia blossoms there.

Or—we had no way of knowing—he’d swept the path
between fallen camellias.

LINKS

Wikipedia page on Carol Snow

Carol Snow on the Creative Work Fund site

Carol Snow reading

Some poems on the Electronic Poetry Review site

Some poems on the All Poetry site

Brenda Hillman discusses the poem “News Of” by Carol Snow

Some extracts from The Seventy Prepositions: Poems

Poets.Org page on Carol Snow

Hornets – Brief Poems by Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson (1572-1637) was England’s first poet laureate. He is, arguably, the most versatile writer in the history of English poetry. Nobody has written about food and drink with the same gusto. Witness, for example, “Inviting a Friend to Supper”.  And there are few elegies as poignant as “On My First Sonne” written in 1603  following the death of his  son, Benjamin, at the age of seven. As Edmund Bolton put it in 1722, “I have never tasted English more to my liking, nor more smart, and put to the height of use in poetry, than in the vital, judicious, and most practicable language of Benjamin Jonson’s poems.” It is little wonder that he had such a devoted band of followers, the “sons of Ben”, those Cavalier poets who tried to emulate his style, poets as diverse as Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace and Sir John Suckling.

The Life

Jonson’s life was turbulent, tough and beset by numerous adversities. Born in London a month after his father’s death, he began work as a bricklayer apprenticed to his step-father. He joined the army and fought in Flanders where he killed an enemy soldier in single combat. On his return to England he worked as an actor during which time (in 1598) he killed a fellow actor with a rapier and only escaped hanging by pleading “benefit of clergy”.  He was quarrelsome, a mood probably exacerbated by heavy drinking. (According to John Aubrey, “Canarie was his beloved liquor.”) He was jailed for insulting the Scottish nation. He lived and wrote in the shadow of Shakespeare about whom he wrote his wonderful tribute, “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left Us“. He was constantly in debt and suffered several strokes in the 1620’s. Jonson died on 6 August 1637 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, with the inscription “O Rare Ben Johnson” (sic) set in the slab over his grave. The fact that he was buried in an upright position was an indication of his reduced circumstances at the time of his death, although it has also been written that he asked for a grave exactly 18 inches square from the monarch and received an upright grave to fit in the requested space

The Epigrams

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature does not think much of Jonson’s epigrams. Their tone is sniffy:

In his non-dramatic poetry, Jonson rarely attains high excellence. A large portion belongs to the class headed “miscellaneous” in collected editions, and is of interest rather for the information which it supplies as to his friends and patrons, and for its satirical pictures of contemporary life, than for any charm of verse. Few of the odes, epistles and epigrams show aught but careful writing, but there are also few that can be praised unreservedly or read with delight. The Epigrams (1616) are characteristically coarse; and some of the satirical sort recall the persons of his comedies; as those on alchemists, Lieutenant Shift, Court Worm, Sir Voluptuous Beast, or Lady Would Be.

Thom Gunn, in his selection from Jonson’s poetry, is much more astute and acute:

He is probably the best epigrammatist in English because he does not intend his statements to be light commendations or dismissals, but witticisms (however elegant) placed in the context of a society’s whole experience. Understanding them means taking them to heart, means – ultimately – acting on them.

It is true, as you can see below, that some of the epigrams are coarse, some are slight and some are nasty. But they are all governed by a wonderful sense of style.

I hope you like them.

 

 

Brief Poems by Ben Jonson

 

I. — TO THE READER.

PRAY thee, take care, that tak’st my book in hand,
To read it well—that is, to understand.

***

VI. — TO ALCHEMISTS.

If all you boast of your great art be true ;
Sure, willing poverty lives most in you.

***

X. — TO MY LORD IGNORANT.

Thou call’st me POET, as a term of shame ;
But I have my revenge made, in thy name.

***

XIX. — ON SIR COD THE PERFUMED.

That COD can get no widow, yet a knight,
I scent the cause : he wooes with an ill sprite.

***

XX. — TO THE SAME.

[SIR COD THE PERFUMED.]

The expense in odors, is a most vain sin,
Except thou could’st, sir Cod, wear them within.

***

XIX. — ON SIR VOLUPTUOUS BEAST.

Than his chaste wife though BEAST now know no more,
He’adulters still: his thoughts lie with a whore..

***

XXXIV. — OF DEATH.

He that fears death, or mourns it, in the just,
Shews of the Resurrection little trust.

***

XXXIX. — ON OLD COLT.

For all night-sins, with other wives unknown,
COLT now doth daily penance in his own.

***

XLVII. — TO SIR LUCKLESS WOO-ALL.

Sir LUCKLESS, troth, for luck’s sake pass by one ;
He that wooes every widow, will get none.

***

XLVIII. — ON MUNGRIL ESQUIRE.

His bought arms MUNG not liked ; for his first day
Of bearing them in field, he threw ’em away :
And hath no honor lost, our duellists say.

***

L. — TO SIR COD.

Leave, COD, tobacco-like, burnt gums to take,
Or fumy clysters, thy moist lungs to bake :
Arsenic would thee fit for society make.

***

LVII. — ON BAWDS AND USURERS.

If, as their ends, their fruits were so, the same,
Bawdry and Usury were one kind of game.

***

LXI. — TO FOOL, OR KNAVE.

Thy praise or dispraise is to me alike;
One doth not stroke me, nor the other strike.

***
LXIX. — TO PERTINAX COB.

COB, thou nor soldier, thief, nor fencer art,
Yet by the weapon liv’st! thou hast one good part.

***

LXXI. — ON COURT PARROT.

To pluck down mine, POLL sets up new wits still,
Still ’tis is luck to praise me ‘against his will.

***

LXXVIII. — TO HORNET.

HORNET, thou hast thy wife drest for the stall,
To draw thee custom: but herself gets all.

***

LXXXII. — ON CASHIERED CAPTAIN SURLY.

Surly’s old whore in her new silks doth swim:
He cast, yet keeps her well! No, she keeps him.

***

LXXXIII. — TO A FRIEND.

To put out the word, Whore, thou dost me wo,
Throughout my book, ‘Troth put out woman too.

***

C X V I I.  — ON GROIN.

Groin, come of age, his state sold out of hand
For his whore: Groin doth still occupy his land.

 

 

 

LINKS

 

The Wikipedia page on Ben Jonson.

The poems and plays of Ben Jonson

A collection of Ben Jonson epigrams.

Portraits of Ben Jonson from the National Portrait Gallery.

Images of Ben Jonson’s grave.