Rose Lerner's Blog, page 44

Here's another one that's not about the poet's girlfriend at all; rather, it's a commentary on the folly of hyperbolic poetic comparison. And yet! It makes me swoon.
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Sonnet 130
by William Shakespeare
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts [...:]

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and [...:]

As promised in the first part of this post, ten of my favorite angry heroines. Warning: mild spoilers for all these books!
1. Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It meant so much to me that Mary was a bratty, unattractive little kid and she still got to blossom [...:]

Here's one that isn't a love poem at all. But it's about love, and while it's sort of gratuitously, melodramatically negative and cynical in the best Byron style, I think it captures something essential to the experience–that hatred and resentment you can only feel for someone you've been (or are) in a relationship with.
Childe [...:]

Could Have
by Wisława Szymborska
(translated from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh)
It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Nearer. Farther off.
It happened, but not to you.
You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. The left.
Because it was [...:]

I didn't do this on purpose, but here's another one that's more about the poet and his poetry than it is about his girlfriend. Why are there so many of these? Or do I just collect those without realizing it because I'm a writer? I still love it, regardless.
While digging through my [...:]

Here's one that, for me, conveys a deep sense of intimacy and affection. Do you think that has anything to do with it being written by a woman, or is that a coincidence?
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Madonna of the Evening Flowers
by Amy Lowell
All day long I have been working
Now I am tired.
I call: "Where are you?"
But there is [...:]

Did I say "every day"? Obviously I meant "every day unless I forget." Oops! Anyway, this has been one of my very favorite love poems for a long time, by one of my favorite poets. He was a Librarian of Congress, and quite cute:

It's funny, though–it's a beautiful, sexy poem, but [...:]

April is poetry month! In honor of that I'm going to be posting a poem about love every day through the month. Except for yesterday, because I forgot. (Most of them will be love poems, but not all.)
I want to hear what you think of them–whether you like them, whether [...:]

There's been a really interesting conversation going around about "unlikeable" heroines. I think it started over at Dear Author, and just yesterday a great post by Tracy Grant went up at History Hoydens. There was a quote in that that got me thinking:
"But more seriously, I think it [why anti-heroines are so intriguing:] [...:]