Stone Riley's Blog: Stone Riley's Shoebox - Posts Tagged "lincoln"
My Influential Poets
“Gettysburg Address” by Lincoln plus Shakespeare's plays are my great models while Dickinson is a fascinating kind of contrapuntal voice, like a Shakespeare character herself.
I became a lover of “Gettysburg Address” in the seventh grade of school, age 13 or 14, when I performed it for our little class during our Civil War history studies.
You understand, Lincoln wrote that poem after Shakespeare's plays, which I was already familiar with from movies on a classic movie program on TV. Of course the content of the plays went way over my head at that age, sitting there with ears and eyes and brain glued to our small gray TV screen in my family's home, but the lines were all spoken by fine actors and it seems the way to do it stuck.
Furthermore, this was personal. That was Houston in the age of jim crow racism and we in that school were classified as the superior “white”, which creates a lot of spiritual pain. Naturally, since Lincoln's piece is exactly about precisely that pain, and since it is perhaps the best piece of verse in modern English, that pain went into my performance in our little classroom and the intense power of peace and love that it had among us was a lesson to me.
So imagine my disgust and horror then, a few years later, when our high school literature lessons said the Shakespeare plays are, of course, great performance pieces but they are badly structured poems and, all in all, an uninteresting and inferior kind of poetry which we should not emulate. And, to make this matter even worse, there was not one single mention in my high school – not the slightest mention – that “Gettysburg Address” even is a poem.
Now, Dickinson came into my consciousness much later, around 2005, through Paglia's book of criticism that finally demonstrated the Belle's work to me. One particular visual image from Dickinson, that Paglia has shoved into my brain, looms very large: I see the poet staring out through broken glass. This seems of extreme importance to me, and it waits for its place to be found in my work.
I became a lover of “Gettysburg Address” in the seventh grade of school, age 13 or 14, when I performed it for our little class during our Civil War history studies.
You understand, Lincoln wrote that poem after Shakespeare's plays, which I was already familiar with from movies on a classic movie program on TV. Of course the content of the plays went way over my head at that age, sitting there with ears and eyes and brain glued to our small gray TV screen in my family's home, but the lines were all spoken by fine actors and it seems the way to do it stuck.
Furthermore, this was personal. That was Houston in the age of jim crow racism and we in that school were classified as the superior “white”, which creates a lot of spiritual pain. Naturally, since Lincoln's piece is exactly about precisely that pain, and since it is perhaps the best piece of verse in modern English, that pain went into my performance in our little classroom and the intense power of peace and love that it had among us was a lesson to me.
So imagine my disgust and horror then, a few years later, when our high school literature lessons said the Shakespeare plays are, of course, great performance pieces but they are badly structured poems and, all in all, an uninteresting and inferior kind of poetry which we should not emulate. And, to make this matter even worse, there was not one single mention in my high school – not the slightest mention – that “Gettysburg Address” even is a poem.
Now, Dickinson came into my consciousness much later, around 2005, through Paglia's book of criticism that finally demonstrated the Belle's work to me. One particular visual image from Dickinson, that Paglia has shoved into my brain, looms very large: I see the poet staring out through broken glass. This seems of extreme importance to me, and it waits for its place to be found in my work.
Stone Riley's Shoebox
A poet writing essays. Why the title? You know you keep a large size shoe box with all those creative ideas and suchlike stuff scribbled on the back of electric bill envelopes?
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