 Poetry: October 14, 2015 Issue [#7264] |
  Poetry
This week: Howard Nemerov Edited by: Stormy Lady  
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A Spell before Winter
by Howard Nemerov
After the red leaf and the gold have gone,
Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rain
Bruised and discolored, when October's flame
Goes blue to guttering in the cusp, this land
Sinks deeper into silence, darker into shade.
There is a knowledge in the look of things,
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.
Now I can see certain simplicities
In the darkening rust and tarnish of the time,
And say over the certain simplicities,
The running water and the standing stone,
The yellow haze of the willow and the black
Smoke of the elm, the silver, silent light
Where suddenly, readying toward nightfall,
The sumac's candelabrum darkly flames.
And I speak to you now with the land's voice,
It is the cold, wild land that says to you
A knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things:
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.
The Makers
by Howard Nemerov
Who can remember back to the first poets,
The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus?
No one has remembered that far back
Or now considers, among the artifacts,
And bones and cantilevered inference
The past is made of, those first and greatest poets,
So lofty and disdainful of renown
They left us not a name to know them by.
They were the ones that in whatever tongue
Worded the world, that were the first to say
Star, water, stone, that said the visible
And made it bring invisibles to view
In wind and time and change, and in the mind
Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world
And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers
Of the city into the astonished sky.
They were the first great listeners, attuned
To interval, relationship, and scale,
The first to say above, beneath, beyond,
Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine,
Who having uttered vanished from the world
Leaving no memory but the marvelous
Magical elements, the breathing shapes
And stops of breath we build our Babels of.
On February 29th 1920, David and Gertrude Nemerov, welcome their son Howard Nemerov into the world. The couple lived in New York and own a department store. Nemerov grew up in a well to do family. He and his sister both displayed a passion for art at an early age. His sister leaned towards visual art while Neverov towards literature. Nemerov attended Society for Ethical Culture’s Fieldstone School in which he graduated in 1937. Upon graduation Nemerov enrolled at Harvard University. He graduated from Harvard in 1941 with a bachelor's degree.
After college Nemerov enlisted in the U.S Army Air Force where he served as a pilot during World War II. While serving his country he met and married his wife in 1944. After the war ended Nemerov and his wife returned to New York City. It was upon his return to New York that Nemerov started writing his first book, The Image and the Law published in 1947. Nemerov was hired as after the war to teach literature to veterans at the Hamilton College in New York. He published Guide to the Ruins in 1950 followed by The Salt Garden published in 1955. Nemerov teaching career took off and he went on to teach at several different colleges all while continuing his writing. Nemerov published prose The Homecoming Game in 1957 and Federigo: Or the Power of Love in 1954 along with his books and poetry.He published Mirrors and Windows in 1958 followed by The Blue Swallows in 1967 and a book of poetry, The Winter Lightning: Selected Poems in 1968.
In 1969 Nemerov moved to St. Louis and he started teaching at Washington University. While here he carried the title of Distinguished Poet in Residence from 1969 until his death in 1991. He published The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov in 1977, which won Nemerov the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize. He was chosen Poet Laureate of the United States in 1988. Nemerov continued writing and publishing with his last book of poetry being published in 1991, Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1991
Howard Nemerov died of cancer on July 5, 1991.
The Blue Swallows
by Howard Nemerov
Across the millstream below the bridge
Seven blue swallows divide the air
In shapes invisible and evanescent,
Kaleidoscopic beyond the mind’s
Or memory’s power to keep them there.
“History is where tensions were,”
“Form is the diagram of forces.”
Thus, helplessly, there on the bridge,
While gazing down upon those birds—
How strange, to be above the birds!—
Thus helplessly the mind in its brain
Weaves up relation’s spindrift web,
Seeing the swallows’ tails as nibs
Dipped in invisible ink, writing…
Poor mind, what would you have them write?
Some cabalistic history
Whose authorship you might ascribe
To God? to Nature? Ah, poor ghost,
You’ve capitalized your Self enough.
That villainous William of Occam
Cut out the feet from under that dream
Some seven centuries ago.
It’s taken that long for the mind
To waken, yawn and stretch, to see
With opened eyes emptied of speech
The real world where the spelling mind
Imposes with its grammar book
Unreal relations on the blue
Swallows. Perhaps when you will have
Fully awakened, I shall show you
A new thing: even the water
Flowing away beneath those birds
Will fail to reflect their flying forms,
And the eyes that see become as stones
Whence never tears shall fall again.
O swallows, swallows, poems are not
The point. Finding again the world,
That is the point, where loveliness
Adorns intelligible things
Because the mind’s eye lit the sun.
Thank you all!
Stormy Lady
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The winner of "Stormy's poetry newsletter & contest" [ASR] is:
It is midnight in the world of matter,
Winds of tests howl through the forest of faith,
Awakening the demon of dogma,
And rousing the ghoul of terrorism.
Near the center of this old growth forest,
Is a clearing surrounded by dead trees,
From these trees the creaking of death echoes,
While bats are disgorged from their hollow hearts.
A cauldron sits in this clearing's center,
Around it gathers the witches of doubt,
They stir its contents with ladles of fear,
While chanting the spells of war and chaos.
It is midnight in the world of matter,
In the forest of faith believers hide,
They huddle within man made palisades,
Fighting their gnawing doubts with logic,
While ignoring the voice of their spirits,
Telling them that a new day will soon dawn
Showering the forest with God's cleansing light.
Honorable mention:
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These are the rules:
1) You must use the words I give in a poem or prose with no limits on length.
2) The words can be in any order and anywhere throughout the poem and can be any form of the word.
3) All entries must be posted in your portfolio and you must post the link in this forum, "Stormy's poetry newsletter & contest" [ASR] by November 7, 2015.
4) The winner will get 3000 gift points and the poem will be displayed in this section of the newsletter the next time it is my turn to post (November 11, 2015)
The words are: eyes, reflect, marvelous, hues, wings, bridge, barren, grey
 Good luck to all
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