Guy Conner's Blog, page 5

Death Looms

Several years ago, I became interested in the cinquain, a deceptively simple verse form invented (or, rather refined) around a hundred years ago by a poet who died too young. The poet’s name was Adelaide Crapsey, and part of my interest was simply that my mother’s name was Adelaide, and I’d never known a poet by that name.

The talented Ms. Crapsey was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the brain at the age of 32, and died a few years later. All of her later work is focused on the idea of approach...

My Father’s Face

I wrote the first version of this poem around twenty years ago in San Antonio, Texas. My late wife, a city councilwoman at the tine, was attending a National League of Cities convention, and I had accompanied her.

My father and stepmother drove up for the day from their home in Kingsville, about 180 miles to the south. I hadn’t seen him for the best part of a year, and I was shocked by the change. True, he had grown more and more sedentary since he retired, but, despite some heart trouble, he...

Vietnam and Iraq

In 1966, I thought my life was over. I had just graduated from college with a degree in a subject I wasn’t interested in — Chemistry, and had determined that I wasn’t going to go to graduate school, at least not yet. I was caught in what seemed to me an unresolvable moral dilemma; on the one hand, I thought the Vietnam War was obscene and unsupportable; on the other hand, I thought I had a moral obligation to serve my country—a feeling that was surprisingly strong. Unsurprisingly, considering...

More Than Possible

“Politics is the art of the possible.”

The phrase, practically a cliché in political circles, is usually attributed to Otto von Bismarck , the Prussian politician who unified Germany in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. Bismarck, of course, said it in German : Die Politik ist die Lehre vom Möglichen. The word he used for”possible”, “Möglichen”, can have the connotation of “maximum possible”, which is very different from the usual American interpretation of the phrase: “You have to s...

Political Season

For the ordinary citizen, the political season is a short two month period from Labor Day to the November election day of an even-numbered year. Most ordinary civic-minded citizens of our democracy limit their interest to that brief expanse of time. Sadly, an ever-increasing number of our citizens don’t even have that much involvement..but that’s the subject of a different post.

For those of us who have an interest in influencing the selection of candidates we select to represent us, politic...

A is For Arnyx

It occurred to me that although I have posteda sample illustration from my book of verse for children, A is for Arnyx,I haven’t posted any examples of the verses themselves. Here are three of them, The first, The Arnyx, was also the first to be written. I made up the name “Arnyx” and was very surprised when I discovered, through the magic of the internet, that there are people named “Arnyx”, The second, The Frammis, was my first and only attempt at an original tongue-twister. The third, Th...

Variation on a Theme by Baudelaire

The following variation was written a few years later than the Variations I describe here. The theme it varies is from the “To the Reader” introduction to Les Fleurs du Mal, or rather from my translation of “To the Reader,” which I may share at some point.

It’s true, my friend, you have free will
And yet, you are a puppet still.
The Devil’s fingers pull your strings.
He makes you do disgusting things.
He leads you through the murk and mire
Nearer to eternal fire.
But, if you wish, you can es...

Peace March

In 1969, I was working for System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, in the job I wound up in after I was almost sent to Vietnam. (I’ll write about that and about the complicated mix on anti-war revulsion and sense of duty that I felt at the time in conjunction with a forthcoming poem). 1969 was the year I first felt free to publicly express my feelings about the war. For the previous two years, I had worked at Air Force facilities in Massachusetts and Florida. In an odd way, I had fulf...

Dealing with Death

I just reviewed this site…no less than six posted poems since January have to do in some way with death, which is strange, because as I grow older, and as I experience the deaths of others close to me, death has become a part of life. But when I was young, I was haunted by a pervasive fear of death. Either I dealt with it ironically, as here, or aggressively, as in the following verse from 1965:

I know you, Death, you cannot hide.
It’s most unseemly to be weak.
Come out – I shall be satisfied...

Palimpsest – a Sonnet

Someone asked me the other day if a poem I had marked as autobiographical was “true”. I replied that it was, like most autobiography, fiction based on a true story. The same holds true for the following verse. Here is its true story. I was standing behind a pretty woman named Barbara at work as she bent to get a drink from a water fountain. Unfortunately, she pressed the button too hard, and water squirted down the front of her blouse, soaking it. She immediately turned to me with a smile and...