Tag: despair

poetry appreciation
poetry appreciation

the nadir experience

Feb 10, 2022 #accompaniment, #apostrophe, #be near me when my light is low, #despair, #grief, #hopeless, #hopelessness, #in memoriam ahh, #meaninglessness, #metre, #nihilism, #rhyme, #rhyme scheme, #Tennyson by Lucy Crispin

Needless to recount again my extreme enthusiasm for Tennyson’s In Memoriam AHH. For today’s “poem that helps” I offer you ‘Be near me when my light is low’, poem 50 out of In Mem‘s 131-poem length. It’s in the public domain, so the text is below; but if you want a laugh, you can listen to a computer read it here. It’s hilarious. For what it should sound like, try this one.

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poetry appreciation

ways to persist

Jan 28, 2022 #acceptance, #Bass, #courage, #despair, #determination, #difficulty, #Ellen Bass, #encourage, #endurance, #grief, #hope, #KBO, #loss, #persistence, #presence, #the thing is, #vulnerability, #weariness, #weary by Lucy Crispin

Lots of us find this time of year difficult at the best of times and, as we have noted before, these are not the best of times. So for the next while I want to share some poems which I find helpful. I would also be delighted to hear from you about poems which support you to carry on. (Drop me an email or comment below and we can have your poem in the column sometime soon.) But for today I want to share Ellen Bass’s ‘The Thing Is‘ which I find breathtakingly honest and stark and beautiful, and which definitely inspires me.

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poetry appreciation

come, poor Jackself

Jan 14, 2022 #compassion, #Crews, #despair, #fear, #generosity, #Gerard Manley Hopkins, #Hopkins, #James crews, #kindness, #my own heart let me have more pity on, #self care, #self-compassion by Lucy Crispin

My therapy practice would be a lot less busy if people really knew how right it is to be self-compassionate. So many of us can pay lip service to the notion of “put on your own oxygen mask first” while not truly believing it’s “allowed” or, actually, the long-term more altruistic thing to do (in that it helps you keep in a fit state to support others). So I love this poem—a recent discovery—which expresses that sense of unease about kindness to self. Here’s James Crews’ ‘Self-Compassion‘.

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poetry appreciation

an unlikely trio

Sep 3, 2020 #Advertising Space, #angels, #comfort, #despair, #Elvis, #Hughes, #inspiration, #lyricist, #lyrics, #Mary Oliver, #millennium, #nature, #Oliver, #opposites, #poem, #poetry, #Robbie Williams, #Roe-deer, #Ted Hughes, #the creative process, #vision, #Wild Geese, #writing by Lucy Crispin

It’s very often time for Mary Oliver, I find, though I know those who do not agree. For those readers, best pass by. Today I wanted to read ‘Wild Geese‘, so I am. I know most people have already read it. I know that (like other Oliver texts) it’s been plundered for Pinterest posts and self-help-seminar titles and many, many Inspirational Items (posters, mugs, t-shirts, who knows what). Still, its beauty and wisdom persist—just as the Mona Lisa survives being a jigsaw. So: enjoy ‘Wild Geese’ all over again (with the plus of hearing Oliver read it).

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poetry appreciation

encouragement

Aug 13, 2020 #courage, #covid 19 coronavirus, #despair, #Galway Kinnell, #hope, #pandemic, #persistence, #wait, #waiting by Lucy Crispin

I reckon lots of us are currently in need of encouragement to keep on keeping on. This poem, ‘Wait‘ by Galway Kinnell’, does it for me. I only discovered it recently but it’s already installed itself in my Emergency Lanterns anthology. Scroll down the linked page a bit to hear the poet reading it himself, and find the text underneath.

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poetry appreciation

triumph and honour

Jul 23, 2020 #decency, #despair, #honour, #If, #Kipling, #politics, #process, #product, #shame, #shamelessness, #solidarity, #The Second Coming, #To A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing, #triumph, #trust, #WB Yeats, #Yeats by Lucy Crispin

I was wondering why ‘To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing‘ swam to the surface this week. Then I sat down and thought about it and wondered no longer. A poem about shamelessness? about the difficulty of honour in a time when Might is Right? Hmm, not so difficult to fathom, perhaps, after all.

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poetry appreciation

bandaged moments

Jun 25, 2020 #despair, #Dickinson, #Emily Dickinson, #freedom, #hope, #horror, #imprisonment, #in this short life, #Pascal, #practical criticism, #religion, #soul, #The soul has bandaged moments by Lucy Crispin

I’m sure I’d read more Emily Dickinson if my Complete wasn’t roughly the size and shape of a large housebrick; tricky to read in the bath, y’know… Anyway, someone brought some ED to an online poetry share the other day, and it inspired me to strap on the wrist supports and spend some time with the housebrick. So many poems I could have brought, but today I choose number 360, which you can read here. (There’s an interesting article about Dickinson here at the Poetry Foundation, too.)

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poetry appreciation

feeding the cats

Jun 11, 2020 #agency, #and yet, #and yettishness, #apathy, #bad, #chaos, #Daffodil Ministry, #despair, #Fanthorpe, #Feeding the Cats, #good, #hope, #horror, #juxtaposition, #Rosie Bailey, #RV Bailey, #Tintern Abbey, #UA Fanthorpe, #Wordsworth, #zeugma by Lucy Crispin

For once I don’t need to send you off somewhere else on the interweb to read this week’s poem. It’s given in full here on the site, by kind permission of its author, R[osie] V Bailey (I’m trying to sound casual about that but really I’m rather proud and thrilled). I’ve been wanting to write about ‘Feeding the Cats’ for a while but it seems particularly right for right now. Here it is:

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poetry appreciation

there’s this mood, too

May 14, 2020 #anger, #angry, #corona virus, #Covid 19, #crisis, #despair, #fear, #fearful, #frightened, #future, #grief, #hopeless, #Merwin, #sad, #Separation, #war, #When the War is Over, #WS Merwin, #zeugma by Lucy Crispin

That extra time we’re supposed to be having at the moment, during which we relax, read, knit ourselves cunning new kitchens, all that lot… It hasn’t been like that for me. I seem to have spent a startling amount of time doing I know not what. But one of the things I have managed to achieve, which I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, is get hold of some WS Merwin.

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