Marly Youmans's Blog, page 148

"Angel Entering a City," Graham Ward.
Graham can be found at his blog and website.
 If you go to his blog, you can find out that he
was a Boy Dalek. If you go to his website,
you will find many wonderful pictures.

This morning I wrote a poem, "The Angel from the Land of Sleep and Dream Bestows a Gift." Nothing terribly unusual about writing a poem, of course; a certain number of slightly mad

Gorse, Aberystwyth roofs and chimney pots, Cardigan Bay.



A glimpse of the roofline of The National Library of Wales,
where the Clive Hicks-Jenkins retrospective
in housed in The Gregynog Galley.



Aberystwyth roofs stepping down, down, down
to Cardigan Bay, with a view of the ring fort hill.



The ring fort again, and Cardigan Bay only a faint smudge.

When I think of Marly Youmans' work, the word that comes to mind is "magic." By this, I mean not only her language, but her evocation of mystery. Youmans' poems always seem utterly new and startlingly familiar. Moreover, she has admirable range in terms of subject matter and tone. While I tend to favor her poems about the mythological, Youmans shows astonishing skill, whatever the subject. She




Bassett neurologist Michael Miller says Vietnam's pediatric hospitals
should focus less on technology, and more on old-fashioned physical exams.
 Here, Miller examines a boy during a week-long humanitarian mission in March 2011.

ON CALL FOR CARE IN VIETNAM
Back to basics for Bassett neurologist in Southeast Asia

--Trang Ho, special correspondent
Source: Columbia Magazine March 2011
and

Because I do not have a picture of a golden nightingale,
I shall instead toss in some birds-of-paradise...
Siem Reap, Cambodia, Fall 2009

I am still enjoying Donald A. Stauffer's The Golden Nightingale: Essays on Some Principles of Poetry in the Lyrics of William Butler Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1949.) I love the way he used Yeats as a kind of lens to say larger things about poetry.

No matter how much the old beech raised up arms
against us, we could not help but laugh,
even when it boomed and whistled.



Little forests sprang up on the elephant's foot...



The wish bone of the giants.



The dryad drew the parrot into the tree
where it stayed, dimly visible from the outside.



Lithe Willendorf Venus. Not stone but tree.

Poet Jennifer Reeser and West Chester Poetry Conference
Director Kim Bridgford at a 90th birthday party for Richard Wilbur.
As he told me that his birthday was March 1, I hope he has had a long
Mad Hatter's tea party sort of celebration.  June 10, 2011, West Chester.

How does poetry delight us? To begin with the most inclusive reason, poetry delights us as a manifestation of energy. A poem is

Michael Miller, Sphinx, July 2006,
Μουσείο Ακρόπολης / Acropolis Museum





Here is a poem first published in Electric Velocipede and included in my new book, The Throne of Psyche (Mercer University Press, 2005.)  Before I wrote this poem, I was thinking about how most people simply can't read a great deal of art criticism any more--such prose being another unintended victim of Modernism and

A new edition from Philip Lee Williams.
The brand new paperback from the University of Georgia:
A Distant Flame, winner of The Michael Shaara Award.


I am back from the West Chester poetry conference and may post some pictures if  I ever find out what I did with my camera... Meanwhile, my longtime penpal Philip Lee Williams has posted the most generous and extravagant piece of praise about my

I am fresh back from the West Chester poetry conference (more about that later, when I am genuinely "fresh") and thinking about The House of Words again. This time I'm linking to an article by my former student Gary Dietz (the era when I taught is so very long ago that he is quite, quite grown up, a sparkling outside-the-box marketer and a marvelous single dad of Alexander) on his