Marly Youmans's Blog, page 29

November 30, 2016

Another poem at Autumn Sky

I've been seldom-seen in these airy rooms--lots of celebrations and time-consuming activities and also deadlines. But here's a little nibble:



Icarus, Icarus, Paratrooper

Homage to Charles Causley



Slung down from heaven, torn silks whipped

By precipitous wind, he tripped



From air and rammed the blasting sea




Read the whole poem here. And yes, I love the poems of the Cornish
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Published on November 30, 2016 06:48

November 12, 2016

Tea and poem

http://hubpages.com/games-hobbies/Ant...

Quite a week. I'm glad it is over. The hysteria still rages on social media and elsewhere, but maybe it's already time for a cup of tea and a poem.

Also in the week's worry, my family's ridge-top solar envelope home in Cullowhee was saved from the wildfires by bold and brave firefighters. I thank them for that and think of them every day as
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Published on November 12, 2016 06:45

November 11, 2016

Another Veterans Day

My father is at far right, standing.Blaine Corbin, the waist gunner, had just been killed by flak,so the crew of nine is now eight.


A Veterans Day post in memory of a 17-year-old Georgia sharecropper's boy who joined up with the Army Air Corps 91st Bomb Group and fought as tail gunner on the Incendiary Blonde during World War II...

Requiescat in pace, Hubert L. Youmans. You traveled a long
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Published on November 11, 2016 10:53

November 9, 2016

More on medieval prayer-nuts

Prayer Bead, 1500-1530, Mouth of Hell Mouth of Hell


Photo, The Globe and Mail: Ian LeFebvre



Not so long ago I wrote a group of poems for the Phoenicia Publishing anthology on the Annunciation, and then let publisher Elizabeth Adams pick what she liked best. One of the poems was about a medieval prayer-nut, and it appeared in John Wilson's Books and Culture.

Now there is some new research
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Published on November 09, 2016 14:10

November 1, 2016

All Saints Day

"They have all gone into the world of light" --Vaughan
Candles for the dead at York Minster.




A dash of the long-dead Henry Vaughan in honor of the day--

They are all gone into the world of light! 
And I alone sit ling’ring here; 
Their very memory is fair and bright, 
And my sad thoughts doth clear. 

It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast, 
Like stars upon some gloomy grove, 
Or those
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Published on November 01, 2016 13:25

October 30, 2016

All Hallows Eve

My daughter's pumpkin...

If you want to see the rest of the family pumpkins, you'll have to go here. There's the traditional and the poop-emoji pumpkin and one spewing seeds. Have a good All Hallows Eve and a wonderful All Saints Day.
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Published on October 30, 2016 21:00

October 29, 2016

Autumn skies

Phone snap taken during a ramble down from the Canadian border
through Saranac Lake and Lake Placid and the Cascades.




Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 

Conspiring with him how to load and bless 

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; 

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, 

   And fill all fruit with ripeness
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Published on October 29, 2016 08:36

October 27, 2016

Rerun: 4 Digby video poems from The Throne of Psyche

Mercer University Press, 2011,
in hardcover or paperback
Cover art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt




Carving pumpkins, herding cats and progeny, writing some tight small poems in a pause mid-novel: I've been empty of blog posts somehow, so please take this little homage to and appreciation of Paul as an apology. More anon.



Videos by UK-born Paul Digby, composer,
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Published on October 27, 2016 06:40

October 14, 2016

Touchstones and the Nobel kerfuffle

Muse reading a scroll by an open chest.
Attic red-figure lekythos, ca. 435-425 BC. From Boeotia.
Musée du Louvre. Public domain, Wikipedia.



Bob Dylan . . . can be read and should be read [italics mine], and is a great poet in the grand English poetic tradition. --Sara Danius, Nobel Permanent Secretary 

or 

There’s little that’s inherently controversial about praising words originally meant
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Published on October 14, 2016 07:58

October 10, 2016

Inaugural, redux

Remembering the 2013 challenge to write an inaugural poem from poets Richard Krawiec and Kay Stripling Byer, I rooted around for this poem. I find it curious to contemplate those older thoughts during this campaign, the most--shall we politely say lively?--lively and divisive American election since the campaign of 1828.

If you want to see the comments people made about the poem back in
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Published on October 10, 2016 09:31