Tuesday, August 02, 2011

TUESDAY POEM


Tuesday Poem this week has at its hub The Wild Bees by Irish poet John Griffin. This week's editor, NZ poet Zireaux, introduces the poem with a rip roaring call to poets to use a richer and more varied vocabulary as John Griffin has. Here's a taste:

O peddlers of minimalism, hucksters of haiku, I request you keep your smokey spiritualism away from the hive. Can you not hear the growing clamor of the i-Clones, the Fad-Pads, the X-Cubes and MeTubes, the Factor Xs, the Super 3-D Cinema-Plexes? Why should we submit to the blog-fog, the vapors of vacancy (stay calm, my voice!), when language can reach -- or better, ridefly, however improbably, like Dante's Beatrice (Dante being the CGI animator of his day), to the place where Ra drops honey from the sun, on the powerful, jewel-encrusted Griffin-wings of language? 

How to resist that? And after you've read Griffin and Zireaux, try the posts by other poets in the Tuesday Poem sidebar - they include English poets fighting over the image of a woman in a field with gloves on (Belinda Holyer's blog), a poem on an entymologist and a poem by Sarah Jane Barnett called Greece that beautifully traces the movement of horses. And there's much much more.... Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost... 

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