Sunday Picnic

[alee_grrl]

Sunday, every Sunday, let's have a community picnic. It's probably been a long week, and it's lovely to have a few minutes to sit back and relax and enjoy some good conversation in a less formal space. Feel free to bring something for the Picnic Basket - a poem you liked this week, a thought you had or something you experienced, or even something completely unrelated to poetry whatsoever that you just feel like sharing. Just take a moment to say hello, and maybe have a bite to eat; no one is going anywhere fast, and the shade promises some relief from the everyday heat. Let’s get to know each other a bit better, here under the branches of the poet’s tree.

Comments

[lnhammer]

Let's see. This week, I continued marching through Home Book of Verse (1915), having gotten most of the way through part VI -- today included "The Eve of St. Agnes," "Locksley Hall," and "The Scholar Gipsy," along with the usual lumps of undistinuguished verse that one gets in an anthology this size (3600-odd pages in dead-tree format). Also read this week: Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1596), an Elizabethan erotic narrative by George Chapman (he of Keats's Homer, yes), plus started Alfred Noyes's Watchers of the Sky (1922, part one of The Torch Bearers), an book-length poem about astronomy.

---L.

[alee_grrl]

Sounds like some fascinating and fun reading.

[lnhammer]

I'm kinda dubious about the Noyes, actually -- it's very clean verse and he hasn't actually thrown up any of the usual "I'm a poet who only thinks he Gets Science!" blunders, but neither has he proven he does. It's smooth reading, though, which is a plus, and the opening frame (from his attending First Light at an observatory in Mexico) is nicely handled indeed. And potted biographies of Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, et al. should be worth something.

Will see how it goes.

---L.

[lnhammer]

Oh, and forgot to mention that the best stuff I read all week probably has to be Milton's "L'Allegro"/"Il Penseroso" doublet. Despite its many and manifold flaws. (No that is not redundant.)

---L.