Status Updates From Poem For the Day Two

Luis de Camoes, Portugal's great national poet and author of the epic poem, Os Lusiadas, died in Lisbon June 10th 1580.

Simplify me when I'm dead

Keith Douglas
(January 24th 1920 — June 9th 1944)

Wounded by a land mine in 1943, Keith Douglas wrote from his hospital bed in Palestine in defence of his poetry: "I see no reason to be either musical or sonorous about things at present...I suppose I reflect the cynicism ... with which I view the world."

Darrion Domfort

Gerard Manley Hopkins
(July 28th 1844 — June 89th 1889)

...It is regarded as the first of Hopkins' series of so-called 'terrible sonnets', an epithet which refers to the inner despair and turmoil which gave rise to them.

My Enemies Have Sweet Voices

...

I was blind side to the gutter
when Merlin happened by
asking, 'Why do you lie
her bleeding?'
I answered him, 'Magician,
as a matter of a fact
I was jumping to conclusions
when one of them jumped back.'

...

Pete Morgan
(June 7th 1939 — )

Pierre Corneille, writer of 'Le Cid', born June 6th 1606

In the Desert
III

?Stephen Crane
(November 1at 1871 — Jne 5th 1900)

... As a war correspondent he covered the Greco-Turkish war before settling in England, where he befriended the writers H.G. Wells, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad and ricocheted between poverty and wild partying.

To Catherine Wordsworth 1808 —1812

William Wordsworth
(April 7th 1770 — April 23rd 1850)

In early June 1812, while William was in London and Mary on her way to visit relatives in Hereford, the Wordsworth children were in the care of their aunts at the family home in Grasmere. Catherine suffered a convulsion in the night and died the following morning.

The Truth the Dead Know
For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959,
and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Anne Sexton
(November 9th 1928 — October 4h 1974)

Anne Sexton was the third daughter born to Ralph and Mary Gray Staples Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts. Here father was a successful wool salesman and her mother the well-educated only child of adoring parents.

John Lehman, poet and publisher, born in Buckinghamshire June 2nd 1907

From in Memoriam A.H.H.
V

Alfred, Lort Tennyson
(August 6th 1809 — October 6th 1892)

Though this poem takes Arthur Hallam's funeral as its starting point, and Tennyson's sister Cecilia's marriage as its end, In Memoriam A.H.H. is not just a biographical poem. As Tennyson himself wrote to his friend James Knowles: "It is rather a cry of the whole human race than mine...

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

Walt Whitman
(May 31st 1819 — March 26th 1892)

In one anonymous self-review, Whitman described 'the poet' as one of "pure American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect, free from taint from top to toe, free forever from headaches and dyspepsia, full-blooded, six feet high, a good feeder, never once using medicine, drinking water only — a swimmer in the river or by the ...

Ode on Solitude

Alexander Pope
(May 21st 1688 — May 30th 1744)

... He never grew beyond 1.37m and was subject to violent headaches, which perhaps explains his reputation for irritability and hypersensitivity.

The Donkey

G. K. Cheterton
(May 29th 1874 — Jaune 14th 1936)

...Rudyard Kipling, having been sent the book by a friend, responded with the words: "I agree with you that there is any amount of promise in the work — and I think marriage will teach him a good deal too. It will be curious to see how he'll develop in a few years."

The Glass

Edwin Morgan
(April 27th 1920 — )

... He is also a skilled translator from an impressively wide range of languages. Morgan has translated a number of plays into Scots, including his prize-winning version of Racine's Phèdre, and has written his own drama, a trilogy about the life of Christ.

Ode on Melancholy

...

Shew dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
biding adieu; and aching Pleaure night,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
...

John Keats
(October 31st 1795 — February 23rd 1821)

Kid

Simon Armitage
(May 26th 1963 — )

Simon Armitage was born in 1963 in West Yorkshire. He has won numerous prizes for his nine collections of poetry, and is the author of the novel Little Green Man and the best-selling prose memoir All Points North. He is also a playwright, anthologist and song-lyricist, and has written extensively for television, radio, film and radio.

From What the Doctor Said

Raymond Carver
(May 25th 1938 — August 2nd 1988)

Carver finally gave up drinking in 1977: "I've had two lives. My second began on June 2nd 1977 when I quit drinking," he said. Carver did not write for almost a year, but felt too grateful for his new life to care much. He met the poet Tess Gallagher and thus began an intensely productive and happy relationship.

The Present

Michael Donaghy
(May 24h 1954 — )


Donaghy was born in the Bronx, New York and moved to Britain in 1985. His most recent collection, Conjure, won the Forward Prize; previous collections have won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He teaches at City University and Birkbeck College, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society for the Arts.

Poliotics
In our time the destiny of man presents
its meaning in political terms —
Thomas Mann

W.B. Yeats
(June 13th 1865 — January 28th 1939)

...Pablo Neruda, who organized a writers' conference in Madrid when the city was besieged by the Falangists in 1937, recollected in his memoirs that Yeats, by then too old to travel to the bomb-blasted city, nonetheless "rallied to the defence of the Spanish Republic".

I, Too

Langston Hughes
(February 1st 1902 — May 22nd 1967)

...Upon leaving for Africa, Hughes discarded all his books except for Leaves of Grass: "I had no intention of throwing that one away", he said.
Hughes' death was caused by prolonged heart and kidney trouble. He never married, nor had any children.

The Rain

Robert Creeley
(May 21st 1926 — )

Creeley taught at Black Mountain College in the 1950s and now teaches at Brown University. His art has no impulse to enclose itself in the literary solely, or to move apart from the common terms of the given world.

English poet Thomas Spratt died May 20th 1713

Thomas Wyatt,imprisoned in the Tower of London along with five other suspected lovers of Anne Boleyn, watched her execution on May 19th 1536. He was later released and rusticated.

From The Buráiyát of Omar Khayyám
of Naishapur

Edward Fitzgerald
(March 31st 1809 — June 14th 1883)

Edward Fitzgerald was introduced to Omar Khayyám's poetry by his friend Edward Cowell in May 19857, and set about translating 75 of the quatrains that summer. The first edition of his version of the Rubáiyaát was published in March 1859.

Why Brownlee left

Paul Muldoon
(June 20th 1951 — )

... His latest collection is Moy Sand and Gravel. Muldon moved to the United States in 1983 and is currently Howard Clark Professor of Humanities at Princeton University, where he lives with his wife and two children.

Song

Adrienne Rich
(May 16th 1929 — )

In her introduction to the anthology, Best American Poetry (1996), Rich writes that she wants "poems good enough to eat, to crunch between the teeth, to feel their juices bursting under the tongue, unmicrowavable poems".

Alexis Kagame, Rwandan poet and Roman Catholic Priest, born May 15th 1`912.

Thankyou Note

Dannie Abse
(September 22nd 1923 — )

Dannie Abse writes: "The years have proved that the best and most decisive thing I have ever done was to choose Joan Mercer (as she as known then) to be mh wife. so it's hardly surprising that ion the evening road I would write a thankyou note addressed to her. I do hope the poem is less soppy than the above confession."

Skeins o Geese

Kathleen Jamie
(May 13th 1962 — )

Jamie was born in Renfrewshire in Scotland. She received an Eric Gregory award when she was just 18 and has since published four collections of poetry, including the highly acclaimed The Queen of Sheba (1994) and Jizzen (1999). Her Selected poems. Mr and Mrs Scotland are Dead: Poems 1980-1994 was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2002.

Nonsense poet Edward Lear born May 12th 1812