David Anthony Sam's Blog, page 152

Poetry Quarterly has accepted my poem “In a New Land” for publication later this year

Poetry Quarterly has accepted my poem “In a New Land” for publication later this year

An excellent reading of Eliot’s Four Quartets

Dove Descending: A Journey Into T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets by Thomas Howard

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Thomas Howard apologizes regularly for the prosaism and reductiveness of his line-by-line reading of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. And he is correct that the poetry is much better and much more than his analysis. Yet great poets need great readers, as Whitman maintained. And it is wonderful as one reader to be in the room listening to another, deeply appreciate and erudite reader as he lives with one of the great poems of the last 100 years.

Howard clearly is of a mind with Eliot in terms of the religious assumptions and faith consistent with Anglo-Catholicism. That does not mean a reader of another faith, or no faith, cannot find power, meaning, and even solace in the poem or in Howard’s exegesis of it.

I recommend Dove Descending, not as any sort of substitute for reading and rereading the Quartets themselves, but as a great resource in helping inform and reveal the poetry.

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Three of my poems are now live online at the Mystic Blue Review

Three of my poems are now spotlighted online at the Mystic Blue Review:

“Morlocks”

“A Murder” after Rimbaud’s “Les corbeaux“

“Wind Becomes Eland”

They are also included in Issue #5 available HERE.

Note: The stanza breaks are not showing correctly in these poems. “Morlocks” and “A Murder” have 6 line stanzas, while Eland” has 5 line ones.

Thank you Editor, Alexa Findlay, for spotlighting these poems.

Facing the End of All Beginnings

 

Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have read and reread Eliot’s Four Quartets during 6 of my nearly 7 decades thus far, and still find them the best poetry he wrote and among the best of the 20th Century. It does not matter that I am not an Anglo-Catholic or even a Christian. I still find a solace here. His overt faith in Redemption doesn’t preclude him from facing the dark living to die we all face. He is merciless in his mercy. The words are dense and beautiful. The imagery powerful. There is a Buddhist quality to his Christianity, though for him the End is Eternal Life. I will reread again as I near the end of all my beginnings.

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Issue 5 of The Mystic Blue Review is now available online, including 3 of my poems.

Issue 5 of The Mystic Blue Review is now available online, including 3 of my poems. Thank you Editor-in-Chief Alexa Findlay.

Looking forward to teaching Creative Writing at Germanna Community College this Month

Classes start next week:

Farewell, Poet of Soul: Aretha Franklin, music’s ‘Queen of Soul,’ dies at 76 – The Washington Post

She was one of the most celebrated and influential singers in the history of American vernacular song, a defining interpreter through song of black pride and women’s liberation.

— Read on www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/aretha-franklin-musics-queen-of-soul-dies-at-76/2018/08/16/c35de4b8-9e9f-11e8-83d2-70203b8d7b44_story.html

The Mystic Blue Review will publish 3 of my poems in their 5th Issue.

The Mystic Blue Review will publish 3 of my poems in their 5th Issue.

My poem “Brittle Adoration” is available for reading online at The Flexible Persona.

My poem “Brittle Adoration” is available for reading online at The Flexible Persona.

This is from an unpublished collection of poems inspired by Rimbaud.

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again

“So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres–

Trying to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate – but there is no competition –

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

T. S. Eliot from East Coker