Tag: Christmas

different pictures of happiness

It’s that time of year when I start fulminating, inwardly or out loud, about DFS ads and the Family Merrie Christmas Ideal as perpetuated therein. I don’t know why it’s DFS in particular that gets the sharp end of my tongue—everyone’s at it—but there’s just something about those cosily-jumpered families laughing and snuggling on their spanking new sofas which gets my goat. The latest iteration has caused me, as it does every year, to think about families, the different shapes happiness can take, and the difference between loneliness and solitude. I like the way this poem by Minnie Bruce Pratt explores that difference (among other things). Here is ‘The Sound of One Fork‘.

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the whole business, lovers to monks

Ad execs must have had a tough time working out how to sell Christmas in this year of virtual life. (At least, I hope they have.) The Christmas fantasies of merrily-laughing families or snugly-jumpered framilies aren’t going to cut it for 2020. I’d like to offer you this poem as a sort of reality check, or an advert for the only thing which really serves us in times as trying as these. Here’s Hayden Carruth’s ‘An Apology for Using the Word ‘Heart’ in Too Many Poems‘. (If you click the arrow above the poem’s title, Garrison Keillor will read it to you. The poem starts at 1:52 but the rest of Keillor’s gentle ramble around matters cultural is interesting, too.)

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what did I know, what did I know…?

It’s a time of year when, in the West at least, we’re surrounded by images of families: usually shiny-haired and smiling ones, deployed in warm-jumpered rows on bouncy new sofas (“delivered in time for Christmas”) and sharing some ecstatic experience of shopping, gaming or no ordinary food. But it’s a poem about the ordinary extraordinariness of love which has been very much in my mind, in the last week or so, and not just because it’s cold. Here it is: Robert Hayden’s ‘Those Winter Sundays‘. (You can hear the poet himself read it here.)

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