Vertical, Poem by Linda Pastan

VERTICAL
by Linda Pastan

Perhaps the purpose
of leaves is to conceal
the verticality
of trees
which we notice
in December
as if for the first time:
row after row
of dark forms
yearning upwards.
And since we will be
horizontal ourselves
for so long,
let us now honor
the gods
of the vertical:
stalks of wheat
which to the ant
must seem as high
as these trees do to us,
silos and
telephone poles,
stalagmites
and skyscrapers.
But most of all
these winter oaks,
these soft-fleshed poplars,
this birch
whose bark is like
roughened skin
against which I lean
my chilled head,
not ready
to lie down.

“Vertical” is found in Linda Pastan‘s collection Traveling Light: Poems (© Norton, 2010).

Illustration: “Abstract Watercolor Painting of Brookings Lake in the Manistee National Forest of Michigan” by Rosemarie Seppala, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Loveliest of Trees, Poem by A.E. Housman

LOVELIEST OF TREES
by A.E. Housman (1859-1936)

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Illustration: “Cherry Blossoms,” watercolor by Hailey E. Herrera Art Journey, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Leafy Moments (A Baker’s Dozen), poem by Daniel McGinn

 LEAFY MOMENTS (A BAKER’S DOZEN)
by Daniel McGinn

I
I bought a tree online.
It arrived the next morning
fully equipped with leaves.
 
II
One week later
I received an e-mail
from one of the leaves
asking for more water.
 
III
This leaf
became a spokesleaf
for the others.
 
IV
The sun shines
through the window.
 
The leaf is green.
Light is warmth.
Alive is good.
 
V
The leaf is on the tree.
The tree is on the table.
Kermit is on the TV
strumming on the old banjo.
 
VI
My parakeet
cocks its head
and ponders the leaf.
The leaf
is shaped
like a feather.
               
VII
Take the tree outside.
Here comes the wind.
The leaf gets all excited
and starts wagging its tail.
 
VIII
Soil and roots are one.
Tree and leaf are one.
Sun and milk are one.
Breakfast for everybody!
 
IX
Evening shadows fall on the leaf.
 
X
A blackbird sleeps
on the windowsill;
in the blink of an eye
it opens its wings.
 
XI
The green leaf stands up
like an arrowhead.
All of its fountains
have turned into gold.
 
XII
Frost and window are one.
Stem and branch were one.
Leaf and air are one.
 
XIII
The leaf has leapt.
The room is full of circles.

 Photo: “Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides)” courtesy of arborday.org.

For Purity, poem by Larry D. Thomas

FOR PURITY
   in memory of Georgia O’Keeffe
by Larry D. Thomas

she dons jet-black
and takes her stance
before the canvas,
 
draping her heart
with the shadow
of a black cross.
 
She scours her mind
with cloudless
desert sky
 
and she waits
for the moon-like rising
of the flower,
 
the pelvis,
the cleansed,
sun-bleached skull.

“For Purity” appears in the collection Amazing Grace by Larry D. Thomas, Texas Review Press, 2001

PHOTO: Georgia O’Keeffe with painting, 1930, by Alfred Stieglitz, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Our First Post: June 24, 2012

Since we’re honoring THE GREAT GATSBY these days, let’s revisit the post that started it all — our first post from June 24, 2012…

To me, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the quintessential summer book. It chronicles the hot months of 1922, when the Great War was over and the Great Depression was yet to come. The 1920s were a blissful time when possibilities seemed limitless — and everyone seemed to be having fun (despite, or perhaps because of, Prohibition). These were the years when the cocktail was borne (to make the booze go farther), when women bobbed their hair and danced with abandon. It was The Jazz Age, as Fitzgerald called it — a name that stuck.

Every time I pick up The Great Gatsby -- and I’ve read the book perhaps a dozen times — I am drawn in and enraptured by the book’s poetry and romance. To quote the song Kiplinger plays: In the morning, In the evening, ain’t we got fun. Yes, Gatsby is great fun — even with its sad ending. The story seems fresh and real, even though it took place 90 years ago…

We all have a Gatsby in us — a hopeless romantic, an impossible dreamer who tries to hang onto the inner spark that makes life worth living. So pour yourself a lemonade (or something stronger), plop yourself in a lawn chaise, and dive into the greatest novel of all time. Happy Summer!

IL GRANDE GATSBY, Italian translation by Fernanda Pivano

IL GRANDE GATSBY
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Italian Translation 
by Fernanda Pivano

Opening lines in Italian:
Negli anni più vulnerabili della giovinezza, mio padre mi diede un consiglio che no mi

è mai più uscito di mente.

– Quando ti vien la voglia di criticare qualcuno — mi disse — ricordati che non tutti a questo mondo hanno avuto i vantaggi che hai avuto tu. 

In Inglese: 
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” 

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR, from Wikipedia: 

Fernanda Pivano (1917- 2009) was an Italian writer, journalist, translator and critic. Born in Genoa, as a teenager she moved with her family to Turin where she attended the Massimo D’Azeglio Lyceum. In 1941 she received a bachelor’s degree with a thesis on Herman Melville‘s Moby-Dick, which earned her a prize from the Center for American Studies in Rome. Her first translation, part of the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, was published in 1943, the same year she received a degree in philosophy.

In 1948, Pivano met Ernest Hemingway, resulting in an intense relationship of professional collaboration and friendship. The following year, Mondadori published her translation of A Farewell to Arms.

Throughout her professional life, Pivano contributed to the publication in Italy of significant American writers, from the icons of the Roaring Twenties, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and William Faulkner, through the writers of the 1960s (Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti), to young writers of recent decades, including Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace, Chuck Palahniuk and Jonathan Safran Foer. Pivano was also interested in African-American culture and published many Italian versions of Richard Wright‘s books. In 1980 and again in 1984, Pivano interviewed Charles Bukowski at his home in San Pedro, California. These interviews became the basis for her book, Charles Bukowski, Laughing with the Gods first published in the USA by Sun Dog Press in 2000.

Photo: Ernest Hemingway and Fernanda Pivano, 1949.

Gatsby Erasure Poem by james (w) moore

THE GREAT GATSBY
CHAPTER 5 ERASURE POEM
by james (w) moore

I was
a house on fire
the peninsula blazing with
thin glints Turning
it was lit
it was wild
all the sound
blew the wires and made the lights go
he winked
toward me
like the World’s Fair,
eyes absent.
to some,
too late.
we take a plunge
all
 
All
 
I said
“I don’t want to put you to
any trouble.”
“I don’t want
to put you to any trouble, you see.”
the day     to-morrow         a moment
with reluctance:
 
We both looked
ragged ended and darker

Copyright james (w) moore, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Visit james (w) moore, the self-described writer/director/actor/designer guy at his blog (jameswmoore.wordpress.com). His note on the above erasure poem reads, “if Baz Luhrmann can remix The Great Gatsby, then so can we.”

james (w) moore was one of 85 official remixers in Pulitzer Remix, a 2013 National Poetry Month initiative to create found poetry from the 85 Pulitzer Prize-winning works of fiction. Each poet posted one poem per day on the Pulitzer Remix website during the month of April, resulting in the creation of more than 2,500 poems by the project’s conclusion.

According to the Pulitzer Remix website:
Pulitzer Remix is sponsored by the Found Poetry Review, a literary journal dedicated exclusively to publishing found poetry. Found poems are the literary equivalents of collages, where words, phrases and lines from existing texts are refashioned into new poems. The genre includes centos*, erasure poetry, cut-up poetry, and other textual combinations.

Pulitzer Remix poets are challenged to create new works of poetry that vary in topic and theme from the original text, rather than merely regurgitating the novels in poetic form.

*Cento: A work of poetry  composed of verses or passages taken from other authors, placed  in a new form or order.

The Great Gatsby, Swedish Style

We continue our tribute to The Great Gatsby — our favorite novel and the reason we started this blog in June 2012 — with the cover from a Swedish edition of the book. In Sweden, F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s novel is called En Man Utan Skrupler, which translates as A Man Without Scruples.

I’m guessing that people in Sweden like to know something about a book before deciding to read it — and, I’ll admit, The Great Gatsby isn’t a descriptive title like, say, the Swedish blockbuster The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Set in 1922, The Great Gatsby tells the story of post-WWI America, the Roaring Twenties, when Prohibition —  a national ban on the sale, production, and transportation of alcohol, in effect from 1920-1933 — was the law of the land,  setting the stage for gangsters, bootleggers, and other nefarious types who were ready, willing, and able to give the people what they wanted.

While Jay Gatsby made his money through the illegal sale and transportation of alcohol, I’ve never thought of him as “a man without scruples.” That’s the point of the novel, isn’t it?  In the end, it was Daisy and Tom — the rich — who really had no scruples.

I did a search for quotes about “scruples” and found the following, which speaks to to Gatsby’s approximate time and place.

“The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece.

Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization.

Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else – and this was a frequent solution – they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere.”

MALCOLM COWLEY, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. 

El Gran Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

El Gran Gatsby (Opening lines in Spanish)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

En mi más temprana edad, alguna vez mi padre me dio un consejo que desde entonces hago dar vueltas en mi mente.

–Cuando sientas deseos de criticar a alguien — me dijo — recuerda tan sólo que no todos en el mundo tu vieron las ventajas que has tenido tú.

En Inglés: 
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” 

###

El Gran Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is available in many editions at Amazon’s Spanish site — with brisk sales for most versions (paperback, Kindle, and audiobook).

Great Gatsby Rap, Poem by Zander

GREAT GATSBY RAP
by Zander

The man Jay Gatsby
Only wants to be happy
Has the dream of an American
To have a wife, he’s a fan 
All he wants is Daisy
Just the thought of her makes him hazy
Longing for Green Light
Tom can only watch in spite
The new friend of Nick Carraway
Linking him and Daisy from across the bay
Luxurious Living in the Egg
Having lavish parties on the reg
Driving up in his Rolls Royce
Saying “old sport” with his voice
Having Daisy is his last hope
Without her he wouldn’t be able to cope
Always a man with a lot of time
Getting around with his buddy Wolfsheim
Some say he is a man of crime
Some say he bootlegs wine
Trying his luck in a love triangle
In the end all he could do was untangle
Shot by Mr. Wilson on a pool float
He then lay dead in a blood-filled moat
He leaves a legacy of a mysterious fellow
Who ended his life lying around mellow
This is the story of a man who was great
Who died in a pool with a life full of hate

###

“Great Gatsby” by Zander appears on teenlink.com (written by teens since 1989).