Tag: Christmas

poetry appreciation

the whole business, lovers to monks

Dec 17, 2020 #2020, #care, #caring, #Carruth, #Christmas, #fantasy, #Hayden Carruth, #love, #loving, #pandemic, #reality, #sentiment, #sentimentality by Lucy Crispin

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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poetry appreciation, reflection

what did I know, what did I know…?

Dec 19, 2019 #child, #children, #Christmas, #families, #family, #father, #kind, #kindness, #love, #mother, #poem, #poetry, #Robert Hayden, #Those Winter Sundays by Lucy Crispin

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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