From 18bis, a Brazilian design & motion graphics studio, comes this: a free interpretation of “The Me Bird,” a poem by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda. Writes 18bis, “The inspiration in the strata stencil technique helps conceptualize the repetition of layers as the past of our movements and actions. The frames depicted as jail and the past as a burden serve as the background for the story of a ballerina on a journey towards freedom. A diversified artistic experimentation recreates the tempest that connects bird and dancer.” It’s all pretty wonderful.
It should surprise few to learn that Abraham Lincoln wrote poetry. But this fact about his life is dwarfed by those events that defined his political legacy, and this is also no surprise. Nevertheless, in the midst of the current Lincoln revival, the man and the statesman, I think it’s fitting to attend to Abraham Lincoln the poet. Certainly scholars have read his poetry in relation to his skillful prose and oratory. But, on its own, this writing gives us insight into the sensitivity of Lincoln’s less public modes of expression.
Was he a great poet? Well, it appears that he had at least three phases—the first, a youthful one in his teens and early twenties when he produced some silly juvenelia, “a number of crude and satirical verses.” The most popular of these is called “Chronicles of Reuben,” a local satire Lincoln scholar Robert Bray describes as “a series of pseudo-biblical prose and verse pieces that are, out of their local Indiana context, so topical as to be neither funny nor comprehensible.” The piece, written in 1828 to avenge himself upon a rival Indiana family, apparently had great effect on the neighbors, however. One of them, Joseph C. Richardson, claimed that the poem was “remembered here in Indiana in scraps better than the Bible.”
We have to credit frontier oral tradition for our knowledge of some of Lincoln’s more serious poems in his second phase, after he joined “a Kind of Poetical Society” in Illinois sometime between 1837–39. One neighbor, James Matheny, remembered the following worldly lines from a Lincoln poem called “On Seduction”:
Whatever Spiteful fools may Say—
Each jealous, ranting yelper—
No woman ever played the whore
Unless She had a man to help her.
If this is truly a stanza from Lincoln’s pen, the satirist is still very much in evidence—Swift could have written these lines—but the self-described “prairie lawyer” has grown philosophical and left the adolescent boundaries of local feuds and pranks.
His third, most serious phase begins when Lincoln returned to Indiana, after leaving Illinois briefly in an attempt to help Henry Clay’s failed presidential bid against James Polk. Lincoln called Indiana “as unpoetical as any spot of the earth,” and yet it serves as a subject for a poem completed in 1846 called “My Childhood Home I See Again.” (The image above is of the first six stanzas of this long poem in Lincoln’s handwriting. Click here to see the remaining pages). Here in the first two stanzas (below), you can see the cutting wit of the younger, more confident man give way to a kind of wistful nostalgia worthy of Wordsworth:
Lincoln-as-poet continued in this thoughtful, mature voice in the remaining years of his life, though never equaling the poetic output of 1846. Somewhat out of character, the final documented piece of poetry from Lincoln comes from July 19, 1863. Written in response to the North’s victory in Gettysburg, “Verse on Lee’s Invasion of the North” is a short piece of doggerel that sees him returning to satire, writing in the voice of “Gen. Lee”:
Gen. Lee’s invasion of the North written by himself—
In eighteen sixty three, with pomp,
and mighty swell,
Me and Jeff’s Confederacy, went
forth to sack Phil-del,
The Yankees they got arter us, and
giv us particular hell,
And we skedaddled back again,
And didn’t sack Phil-del.
Surely the poem was written in a hurry, and with jubilant, triumphal glee, but if this is the last we heard from Lincoln the poet, it might be a shame, though it would not blot out the literary skill of poems like “My Childhood Home I See Again” and others like “The Bear Hunt” and “To Rosa,” which you can read here.
But there’s more to this story; in 2004, a historian discovered an unsigned poem called “The Suicide’s Soliloquy”—published in the August 25, 1838 issue of the Sangamo Journal, a Springfield newspaper—and believed the former president to be the poet. In the video above, listen to a moody, dramatic reading of the poem:
It is not known with certainty if Lincoln wrote this poem, but scholarly consensus inclines heavily in that direction, given its stylistic similarity to his other work from this period. “The Suicide’s Soliloquy” is as passionate and morbid as any of Edgar Allen Poe’s verse, and betrays Lincoln’s characteristic melancholy in its stormiest and most Romantic guise. NPR has the full poem and the story of its discovery.
eBay prices for the album Gertrude Stein Reads Her Own Work range from $20 to $200. Vinyl purists, and Stein purists, may long for one of the still-sealed copies at the upper end of that range. The rest of us can enjoy hearing its recordings as mp3s, free on the internet courtesy of PennSound. These clips, recorded between 1934 and 1935 (which came out in album form in 1956) let you put yourself in the presence of the poet. Much of the work she reads aloud here comes inspired by observing other creative luminaries. The record’s producers included these homages along with a piece of an interview, variants of well-known poems such as “How She Bowed to Her Brother” (which often appears under the name “She Bowed to Her Brother”), and an excerpt from her novel The Making of Americans.
But to get straight into the textual substance, listen to “The Fifteenth of November… T.S. Eliot,” her portrait of her colleague in letters. Then hear her capturing a certain well-known painter in “If I Told Him: a Completed Portrait of Picasso.” And on painter Henri Matisse, she begins her remarks as follows: “One was quite certain that for a long part of his being one being living he had been trying to be certain that he was wrong in doing what he was doing and then when he could not come to be certain that he had been wrong in doing what he had been doing, when he had completely convinced himself that he would not come to be certain that he had been wrong in doing what he had been doing he was really certain then that he was a great one and he certainly was a great one.” If you feel proud of reading that whole sentence in one go, wait until you hear Stein speak it.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Want to know what’s going on the poetry world? Ask University of Pennsylvania professor Al Filreis. A national treasure for modern American poetry, Filreis serves as Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Director of UPenn’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, and Co-Director of the excellent poetry recording series and archive PennSound. He also teaches a Coursera massive open online course, “ModPo,” which has reached over 36,000 students, bringing his thirty years of seminar-style teaching experience to the masses. On top of all that, Filreis is the publisher of contemporary poetry webzine Jacket 2, which hosts a podcast called “PoemTalk.”
“PoemTalk” brings together poets, writers, and teachers to informally discuss a single poem. Like Filreis’ classes—in which he prefers lively discussions over long lectures—these seminar-like sessions involve a lot of friendly disagreement and serendipitous insights, with many pearls of poetic wisdom scattered throughout. The first episode of “PoemTalk” (above), from December 2007, took on William Carlos Williams’ fragmentary modernist provocation “Between Walls”:
Between Walls
the back wings
of the
hospital where
nothing
will grow lie
cinders
in which shine
the broken
pieces of a green
bottle
If you don’t see much in this little imagist exercise, you might just want to read it again, several times, after listening to Filreis, Saigon-born poet Linh Dinh, teacher and poet Randall Couch, and poet Jessica Lowenthal unpack the poem’s many resonances and reflections. (Or you might have had your fill by then). Williams’ approach was completely innovative, stripping all of the rhetorical excesses from American poetry, which suffered from a kind of Victorian hangover into the first decades of the twentieth century until those nasty modernists finished roughing it up. As the episode’s page points out, “‘Between Walls’ has had a huge influence on poetry and photography since its first publication in 1934.” Listen to the discussion above to find out why such a seemingly straightforwardly unsentimental, un-“poetic” piece of writing had such an impact.
Since this inaugural episode, “PoemTalk” has covered several dozen contemporary, living poets, as well as such notables as Ezra Pound, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Wallace Stevens. By the way, as an added bonus, all of the poems discussed on “PoemTalk” are available as audio recordings on PennSound, read by the poets themselves. Here’s Williams reading “Between Walls.”
“PoemTalk”’s most recent episode takes as its text Charles Alexander’s “Near or Random Acts.” You can listen through the website or subscribe on iTunes.
Of all American poets, almost no one looms larger than Walt Whitman. As I once heard an old poet acquaintance say, American poets don’t need Shakespeare and the Bible; we’ve got Dickinson and Whitman. Indeed, Whitman’s voice emerges from the past like some American Moses, showing the way forward, opening his arms to hold his fractious countrymen together. One can bloviate all day about Walt Whitman. He tends to have that effect. But even Whitman, he of the serpentine lines full of the cargo of the continent, stretching from left margin to right, ocean to ocean, could be relatively succinct, and even about his favorite subject, America. Take his poem “America” from 1888:
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.
Now, believe it or not, you can hear what may well be the voice of Walt Whitman, American Moses, emerging from the past to read the first four lines of “America,” from a wax cylinder recording above. Most likely captured in 1889 or 1890 by Thomas Edison, this reading was originally found on a cassette called “The Voice of the Poets,” discovered in a library by Whitman scholar Larry Don Griffin. The cassette, made in 1974 and including the voices of Edna St. Vincent Millay and William Carlos Williams, takes the Whitman audio from a 1951 NBC radio program, whose announcer, Leon Pearson, claims comes from a wax cylinder recording made in 1890.
Surprisingly, the ’74 cassette tape, which landed in libraries across the country, seemed to go unnoticed by scholars until Griffin mentioned it in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review in 1992. This mention sparked debate about the authenticity of the recording, and once scholarly debate is sparked, the fire can burn for decades, whole careers built on its embers. In this case, some scholars, including historian Allen Koenigsberg, argued that since no original wax cylinder has appeared, and mention of the recording in Edison’s correspondence is inconclusive, the provenance is suspect. Furthermore, Koenigsberg argued, the recording quality seems too good for the period. His conclusion comes backed by the analysis of audio experts. According to The Edisonian, a Rutger’s University Edison newsletter:
Analysts for both the Library of Congress and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives consulted on the case and agreed that the clarity of the recording was beyond what could be achieved in 1889 or 1890… the sound analysis along with the documentation difficulties led Koeningsberg to conclude that “the supposed Whitman recording is a fascinating fake.”
On the other side of this debate is the editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Ed Folsom, who presents his case in an article simply titled “The Whitman Recording,” in which he discusses problems with the Library of Congress analysis. Yet another partisan for authenticity, William Grimes—who covered the controversy for The New York Times points out that the voice sounds like what Whitman’s would have, and he makes a compelling argument that the poem would not at all be the obvious choice for a fake. Grimes cites unnamed “specialists in the history of the phonograph,” whom, he writes, “agree… that the possibility of outright fraud or a hoax is unlikely.”
And on it goes. No one can definitively settle the case, unless new evidence should come to light. With no intention of maligning Ed Folsom’s good faith, I can imagine the Whitman Quarterly editor wanting this to be true more than historian Koenigsberg and the LOC analysts. But I also want it to be Whitman, and so I’m glad to make an exuberant leap of American faith and think it’s him. From Edison wax cylinder recording, to radio broadcast, to cassette, to mp3, over more than a century of American poetry—it would be a perfectly Whitmanesque journey.
In the early morning hours of Monday, February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath brought food and drink into the bedroom of her two sleeping young children. She opened a window in their room and attached a note with her doctor’s name and phone number to a baby carriage in the hallway. She then went into the kitchen and sealed it off with tape and wet towels. She turned on the gas and put her head into the oven.
It was a sad ending for a woman who had struggled for much of her life with mental illness. She was 30 years old. But with the critical and popular success of Ariel, the posthumously published collection of poems written during the last months of her life, Plath’s suicide became one of the most mythologized events in the history of 20th century letters. The grim event of 50 years ago is inextricably bound up with Plath’s legacy as a poet.
In recognition of that fact, we mark the anniversary with a recording Plath made at the BBC studios in December, 1962, of one of her most celebrated poems–one she had only recently written, called “Lady Lazarus.” The version Plath reads contains two lines that were cut from the published poem. (You can open the text in a new window to read while you listen.) “Lady Lazarus” is a disturbing poem, with imagery from the Holocaust grafted onto personal–one might say narcissistic–revelations of suicidal obsession. The sinister, malevolent tone is especially chilling when you hear it in Plath’s own voice:
Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware.
Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.
French post-structuralist philosopher/sociologist Jean Baudrillard—usually identified with his postmodern theories of simulacra—is a little bit of a fringe figure in pop culture. Known to hip academic types and avant-garde-ists, he’s maybe the kind of thinker who gets name-dropped more than read (and he’s no easy read).
But in the audio clip above, Baudrillard reads to us, from his poetry no less, while backed by the swirling abstract sounds of The Chance Band, an all art-star ensemble featuring Tom Watson (of The Missingmen), George Hurley (of The Minutemen and fIREHOSE), Lynn Johnston, Dave Muller, Amy Stoll, and guest vocalist, theorist Allucquère Rosanne (“Sandy”) Stone. It’s an odd, one-time, assemblage of artists and thinkers UbuWeb describes as “unbelievable but true!”:
Recorded live as part of the Chance Festival at Whiskey Pete’s Casino in Stateline Nevada, 1996. You’ve never heard Baudrillard like this before! Music to read Nietzsche to.
Many a writer has said they write to save their lives. And many a writer has died by suicide. In few cases has the connection been so direct as in that of the poet Anne Sexton. Encouraged in 1957 by her therapist to write poetry to stave off her suicidal ideation, she eventually joined a group of mid-century “confessional” poets based in Boston—including Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath—whose personal pathos, family pain, and severe bouts of depression provided much of the material for their work. Despite Sexton’s tremendous career success at what began, more-or-less, as a hobby, she became overwhelmed by her illness and committed suicide in 1974.
There are those who wish to debate whether so-called “confessional poets” were truly tormented individuals or navel-gazing narcissists. This seems fair enough given the willing self-exposure of poets like Plath, Lowell, and Sexton, but it kind of misses the point; their losses and transgressions were as real, or not, as anyone’s, but we remember them, or should, for their writing. Instead I find it interesting to see their public selves as performances, whatever the autobiographical connections in the work. A former fashion model, Anne Sexton was particularly adept at self-presentation, and as her fame as a writer increased—she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 and a succession of grants and awards throughout the sixties—her poetry became less focused on the strictly personal, more on the cultural (she has become well-known, for example, for a sardonic, feminist perspective in such poems as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”). A good deal of her work was pure invention, despite the illusion of intimacy.
Nonetheless, the short, 1966 film “Anne Sexton at Home” (top, with Spanish subtitles, continued below) lets us engage in some voyeurism. It begins with Sexton’s irritation, as she’s interrupted by the dog. Then the film cuts away, the scene has changed, and she frankly acknowledges the poet’s voice as a “persona” (from the Greek for mask); her poems are “monsters,” into which she has “projected herself.” When we cut back again to the first scene, Sexton confidently reads her “Menstruation at Forty.” And we cut away again, and Sexton, her familiar cigarette never far away, riffs on “family & poetry” as her husband Alfred tries to avoid the camera. We see the poet with her daughter, their interactions playful (and also a little disturbing). Throughout it all Sexton performs, seemingly pleased and enjoying the camera’s attention.
In the last part of “Anne Sexton at Home” (above), the poet reads perhaps her most explicit work about her many suicide attempts, “Wanting to Die.” In a brief introduction, she says, “I can explain sex in a minute, but death, I can’t explain.” But the playfulness drains from her demeanor, as she comes to the final two stanzas:
Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,
leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.
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