Thursday Again...

I just keep telling myself if I can write this blog, I can have the Dublin Mudslide Ben & Jerry's in the freezer....Come on....


I've been sittin in this chair for hours...and can't come up with a worthy question, although there are many questions in my head.




What do all of these poets have in common?


It seems like they are all writing about life and their surroundings. I'm sure that is a common theme in poetry already, but these four poets, (Roethke, Bishop, Lowell, Brooks) do it in a very natural way. 


Two of my all time favorite Villanelles are by Roethke and Bishop.


~ The Waking by Theodore Roethke and One Art by Elizabeth Bishop ~


In The Waking, Roethke uses a masterful rhetoric to illustrate the tragic and beautiful cycle of life. Or at least that's how I read it. We sleep to wake, and wake to sleep, and it all happens very fast. I love how the words in this poem resonate and flow off each other to the very end.


In One Art, Bishop seems to poke fun at loss, which can be a hard thing to deal with, but it's no "disaster." I like to think of this poem as my mantra, because I struggle with loss on a daily basis (I'm sure we all do), and the more I can learn that it isn't the end of the world, the easier it is to deal with. She too uses rhetoric to make the reader think hard about the meaning. I think the second to last stanza is a good example of that. She doesn't literally lose 2 cities, 2 rivers and a continent, but if she did..it would not be a disaster. 


What is it about the human condition, that compels us to write about pain? 
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