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When I Was One and Twenty by A. E. Housman

Old Shrewsbruy Market in Shropshire County courtesy of Snowmanradio / Public Domain

“I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.”
A.E. Housman, Last Poems

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

– A.E. Housman

A. E. Housman by E. O. Hoppé from Google-hosted LIFE Photo Archive under the filename fd76be65c0baead9 / Public Domain

A. E. HOUSMAN (1859 – 1936) was an English classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems, A Shropshire Lad. When I Was One and Twenty is a part of that collection. Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems wistfully evoke the dooms and disappointments of youth in the English countryside. Their beauty, simplicity and distinctive imagery appealed strongly to Edwardian taste, and to many early 20th-century English composers both before and after the First World War. Through their song-settings, the poems became closely associated with that era, and with Shropshire itself.

Housman was one of the foremost classicists of his age and has been ranked as one of the greatest scholars who ever lived. He established his reputation publishing as a private scholar and, on the strength and quality of his work, was appointed Professor of Latin at University College London and then at the University of Cambridge. His editions of Juvenal, Manilius and Lucan are still considered authoritative.

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Recent in digital publications: 
* Four poems , I Am Not a Silent Poet
* From the Small Beginning, Entropy Magazine (Enclave, #Final Poems)(July 2019)
* Over His Morning Coffee, Front Porch Review (July 2019)
Upcoming in digital publications:
* The Damask Garden, In a Woman’s Voice (August 2019)

A busy though bed-bound poet, writer, former columnist and the former associate editor of a regional employment newspaper, my work has been featured widely in print and digital publications including: Levure littéraire, Ramingo’s Porch, Vita Brevis Literature, HerStry, Connotation Press, The Bar None Group, Salamander Cove, I Am Not a Silent Poet, Meta/ Phor(e) /Play, Woven Tale Press, The Compass Rose and California Woman. I run The Poet by Day, a curated info hub for poets and writers. I founded The Bardo Group/Beguines, a virtual literary community and publisher of The BeZine of which I am the founding and managing editor. Among others, I’ve been featured on The MethoBlog, on the Plumb Tree’s Wednesday Poet’s Corner, and several times as Second Light Live featured poet.

Email me at thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, reprint rights, or comissions.

“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.”  Lucille Clifton

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2019 U.S. Poets in Parks Artist-in-Residence: Steven Bellin-Oka

Poet Steven Bellin-Oka © Kenichi Oka

“My own work deals with cultural memory and how traumatic national events such as the Civil War are remembered, misremembered, reimagined, and reinterpreted by Americans living in later historical periods. As William Faulkner puts it in his novel Absalom, Absalom, ‘maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished.’ In other words, the past is never just the past—it co-exists with the present and shapes it, like double exposure on a piece of film.” Steven Bellin-Oka

The National Parks Arts Foundation (NPAF), the Poetry Foundation, the National Parks Service, and the Gettysburg Foundation announce Steve Bellin-Oka as the 2019 Poets in Parks Artist-in-Residence. Poets in Parks is a partnership expressly designed and curated to raise the profile of poetry as a vibrant and modern public art. Bellin-Oka is the second Poets in Parks resident. He will spend one month in residency at Gettysburg National Military Park with a $1,000 stipend.

Entrance to the Gettysburg National Park courtesy of Sallicio under CC BY-SA 3.0 license

“The beauty and variety of United States national parks provide fertile ground for growing dialogue around poetry, shared history, and art as a public service,” said Stephen Young, program director at the Poetry Foundation. “We’re excited to have Mr. Bellin-Oka continue these conversations as the new Poets in Parks resident. The relationship between the past in present in his work is well-suited to Gettysburg, where history is both commemorated and alive.”

Gettysburg and Beyond

The National Park Service’s cultural mandate to recognize and foster a democratic and participatory dialogue through the arts has never been more important. The current national debate about the representation and memorial of Civil War history provides an opportunity for education and discussion.

Bellin-Oka’s poems written during the residency will expand those conversations. He will begin his month-long residency at Gettysburg National Military Park in September, writing, leading workshops, and sharing his poetry in a public reading on October 11, 2019. After his residency, he will travel to Washington, D.C. and to the Poetry Foundation in Chicago in May, 2020 on a poetry tour with the first Poets in Parks resident, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejoa, a first generation Chicana born and raised in San Gabriel, California

A Poet Connected to the Past

A native of Baltimore, Maryland, Bellin-Oka grew up surrounded by Civil War battlefields; he takes the not-so-ghostly presences of history seriously, and intends to explore them during his time at Gettysburg.

He plans to write poems that imagine Abraham Lincoln preparing to give The Gettysburg Address, the experiences of soldiers on both sides, and new works in response to Civil War poems of the battlefield.

Bellin-Oka earned his MFA from the University of Virginia and his PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. He currently lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he is a 2019 Tulsa Artists Fellow, awarded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation. His debut collection, Instructions for Seeing a Ghost, won the 2019 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, and will be published by the University of North Texas Press in 2020.

RELATED:

Poems online by 2019 Poets in Parks Artist-in-Residence, Steven Bellin-Oka:

Poems online by 2017 Poets in Parks Artist-in-Resience, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejoa: 

This post complied courtesy of The Poetry Foundation, The National Parks Foundation, Wikipedia, and Steven Bellin-Oka’s and Xochitl-Julisa Bermejoa’s websites.

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The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience. The Poetry Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry through innovative literary prizes and programs.

You can follow The Poetry Foundation and Poetry on Facebook and Twitter.

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The National Parks Arts Foundation is a nonprofit organization offering artist-in-residence programs, museum in-loan programs, and workshops nationwide at a number of national parks. To apply to open programs, visit HERE. .

The Gettysburg Foundation is a non-profit philanthropic, educational organization operating in partnership with the National Park Service (NPS) to preserve Gettysburg National Military Park and the Eisenhower National Historic Site, and to educate the public about their significance.

ABOUT
Testimonials
Disclosure
Facebook
Twitter

Recent in digital publications: 
* Four poems , I Am Not a Silent Poet
* Remembering Mom, HerStry
* Three poems, Levure littéraire
Upcoming in digital publications:
* Over His Morning Coffee, Front Porch Review
* From the Small Beginning, Entropy Magazine (Enclave, #Final Poems)
* The Damask Rose Garden, In a Woman’s Voice

A mostly bed-bound poet, writer, former columnist and the former associate editor of a regional employment newspaper, my work has been featured widely in print and digital publications including: Ramingo’s Porch, Vita Brevis Literature, Connotation Press, The Bar None Group, Salamander Cove,I Am Not a Silent Poet, Meta/ Phor(e) /Play, The Compass Rose and California Woman. I run The Poet by Day, a curated info hub for poets and writers. I founded The Bardo Group/Beguines, a vitual literary community and publisher of The BeZine of which I am the founding and managing editor.

“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.”  Lucille Clifton

 

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Simon Armitage, New Poet Laureate, U.K.

Simon Armitage (b. 1963) English poet, playwright, novelist, and DJ. Photo courtesy of Alexander Williamson  under CC BY – 2.0 License

“It’s never going to be very mainstream. One reason is that poetry requires concentration, both on the part of the writer and the reader. But it’s kind of unkillable, poetry. It’s our most ancient artform and I think it’s more relevant today than ever, because it’s one person saying what they really believe.”  Simon Armitage

Last month saw poet, playwright, novelist, and DJ Simon Armitage‘s appointment as Poet Laureate, U.K. succeeding Scots poet Carol Ann Duffy. The term of the appointment is ten years.
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Productive and versital, Armitage’s poetry collections include Book of Matches (1993) and The Dead Sea Poems (1995). He has written two novels, Little Green Man (2001) and The White Stuff (2004), as well as All Points North (1998), a collection of essays on Northern England. He produced a dramatised version of Homer’s Odyssey (2006) and a collection of poetry entitled Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid (2006), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Many of Armitage’s poems appear in the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance GCSE syllabus for English Literature in the United Kingdom. These include Homecoming, Extract from Out of the Blue, November, Kid, Hitcher, and a selection of poems from Book of Matches, most notably of these Mother any distance…. His work also appears on CCEA’s GCSE English Literature course.

 

Armitage work is characterised by a dry Yorkshire wit combined with “an accessible, realist style and critical seriousness.” His translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2007), was adopted for the ninth edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and he was the narrator of a 2010 BBC documentary about the poem and its use of landscape.

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Armitage also writes for radio, television, film and stage. He is the author of five stage plays, including Mister Heracles, a version of Euripides‘ The Madness of Heracles. The Last Days of Troy premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe in June 2014. He was commissioned in 1996 by the National Theatre in London to write Eclipse for the National Connections series, a play inspired by the real-life disappearance of a girl in Hebden Bridge, and set at the time of the 1999 solar eclipse in Cornwall.

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Most recently Armitage wrote the libretto for an opera scored by Scottish composer Stuart MacRae, The Assassin Tree, based on a Greek myth recounted in The Golden Bough. The opera premiered at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival, Scotland, before moving to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London. Saturday Night (Century Films, BBC2, 1996): he wrote and narrated a fifty-minute poetic commentary to a documentary about night-life in Leeds, directed by Brian Hill. In 2010, Armitage walked the 264-mile Pennine Way, walking south from Scotland to Derbyshire. Along the route he stopped to give poetry readings, often in exchange for donations of money, food or accommodation, despite the rejection of the free life seen in his 1993 poem Hitcher, and has written a book about his journey, called Walking Home.

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He has received numerous awards for his poetry, including The Sunday Times Author of the Year, a Forward Prize, a Lannan Award, and an Ivor Novello Award for his song lyrics in the Channel 4 film Feltham Sings. Kid and Cloud Cuckoo Land were short-listed for the Whitbread poetry prize. The Dead Sea Poems was short-listed for the Whitbread, the Forward Poetry Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Universal Home Doctor was also short-listed for the T.S. Eliot. In 2000, he was the UK’s official Millennium Poet and went on to judge the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2010 Manchester Poetry Prize.

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In 2004, Armitage was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2010 Birthday Honours. He is a vice president of the Poetry Society and a patron of the Arvon Foundation.

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In 2007 Armitage  released an album of songs co-written with the musician Craig Smith, under the band name The Scaremongers.

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For the Stanza Stones Trail, which runs through 47 miles (76 km) of the Pennine region, Armitage composed six new poems. With the help of local expert Tom Lonsdale and letter-carver Pip Hall, the poems were carved into stones at secluded sites. A book, containing the poems and the accounts of Lonsdale and Hall, was produced as a record of that journey and was published by Enitharmon Press.

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In 2016 the arts program 14-18 NOW commissioned a series of poems by Simon Armitage as part of a five-year program of new artwork created specifically to mark the centenary of the First World War. The poems are a response to six aerial or panoramic photographs of battlefields from the archive of the Imperial War Museum in London. The poetry collection “Still” premiered at the Norfolk & Norwich Festival and has been published in partnership with Enitharmon Press.

“Prose fills a space, like a liquid poured in from the top, but poetry occupies it, arrays itself in formation, sets up camp and refuses to budge.” Simon Armitage, Walking Home: A Poet’s Journey

Simon Armitage Amazon Page U.K. HERE
Simon Armitage Amazon Page U.S. HERE
Schedule of upcoming events HERE
Armitage official website HERE

This post is courtesy of The Poetry Society, Wikipedia, Amazon, Armitage website, and my bookshelf
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The Poetry Society is the UK’s national organisation for poety.  It was founded in 1906 to promote a “more general recognitions and appreciation of poetry.”  Since then, it has grown into one of Britain’s most dynamic arts organisations, representing British poetry both nationally and internatonally with innovative education and commission programs and a packed calendar of performances, readings and competitions, the Poetry Society champions poetry for all ages.  It publishes the leading U.K. poetry magazine, The Poetry Review. The Poetry Society also runs the National Poetry Competitions, the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award and the youth performance poetry championship SLAMbassadors U.K.  The U.K. has been consistant in its support of poetry and poets through its Poet Laureate progam beginning in 1668 with John Dryden.
ABOUT
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Recent in digital publications: 
* Four poems , I Am Not a Silent Poet
* Remembering Mom, HerStry
* Three poems, Levure littéraire
Upcoming in digital publications:
Over His Morning Coffee, Front Porch Review
From the Small Beginning, Entropy Magazine (Enclave, #Final Poems)

A homebound writer, poet, and former columnist and associate editor of a regional employment newspaper, my work has been featured widely in print and digital publications including: Ramingo’s Porch, Vita Brevis Literature, Connotation Press, The Bar None Group, Salamander Cove, I Am Not a Silent Poet, The Compass Rose and California Woman. I run The Poet by Day, a curated info hub for poets and writers and am the founding/managing editor of The BeZine.

“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.”  Lucille Clifton

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CELEBRATING AMERICAN SHE-POETS (#37): 2019–2021 Young People’s Poet Laureate, Palestinian-American, Naomi Shihab Nye; “When did you stop being a poet?”

this photograph is of International Poet Naomi Shihab Nye at a book signing courtesy of Micahd under CC BY-SA 3.0

“Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer on its own.” Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye (نعومي شهاب ناي‎) (b. 1952) is a poet, novelist, essayist, anthologist and peacemaker. He father was a Palestinian; her mother, an American. She started writing when she was six-years-old. The breadth of her published work encompasses poetry, young-adult fiction, picture books, essays and novels. She calls herself a “wandering poet” but refers to San Antonio, Texas as home.

Habibi [recommended and not just for teens] is her 1997 young adult novel. It’s the semi-autobiographical story of fourteen-year-old Liyana Abboud and her family, her Arab father, American mother, and brother Rafik, who move from their home in St. Louis to Mr. Abboud’s native home of Palestine in the 1970s. It was named an American Library Association (ALA) Best Book for Young Adults, an ALA Notable Book, a New York Public Library Book for the Teens and a Texas Institute of Letters Best Book for Young Readers. It received the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, given annually to a children’s book that advances the causes of peace and social equality. Habibi deals with a range of themes including change, family values, war and peace, and love. “Habibi” is the Arabic for ‘beloved’.

“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, / you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”

Naomi says a visit to her grandmother in the West Bank village of Sinjil was a life-changing experience.

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt weakened in a broth.
What you held in your hand,
What you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before your learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
Like a shadow or a friend.

© Naomi Shahib Nye from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

You can listen to Naomi’s interview with Krista Tippet – including some background on this particular poem – HERE.

This year Naomi was named The Young People’s Poet Laureate, the first Arab-American to hold the position. The award is from the Poetry Foundation, among other things the publisher of Poetry. This is a $25,000 prize that celebrates a living writer in recognition of their devotion to writing exceptional poetry for young readers. The two-year-term laureateship promotes poetry to children and their families, teachers, and librarians.

Naomi Shihab Nye will serve from 2019 to 2021, aiming to bring poetry to geographically underserved, or rural communities through readings underwritten by the Poetry Foundation. In addition, every month during her tenure, which begins in August, she will recommend a new poetry book for young readers.

Nye is acclaimed as a children’s writer for her sensitivity and cultural awareness, such as in her book 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, published just after September 11, 2001, which invites readers to reflect and explore life as an Arab-American. Also acclaimed for her work for adults, Nye’s writing moves seamlessly between ages in a way that is accessible, warm, and sophisticated even for the youngest of readers. Her poetry collections for young adults include Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners and A Maze Me: Poems for Girls.

Naomi Nye is currently a professor of creative writing at Texas State University. She joins notable past winners of this award including Jack Prelutsky, Jacqueline Woodson, and most recently Margarita Engle.

If you are reading this post from an email subscription, you’ll like have to link through to the site to enjoy the delights of this video reading by Naomi of her poem, “When did you stop being a poet?”

This is charming and serves to remind us of how good we are at poetry when we are spontaneous and open to fancy, when we don’t try to write and edit at the same time. It reminds us too that like children, poets never stop being surprised by life. I love that Naomi’s little boy said, “Just think, no one has ever seen inside this peanut before.” Such is the wonder of childlike sensibility and vision.

Naomi’s Amazon Page U.S. is HERE.
Naomi’s Amazon Page U.K. is HERE.

This post compiled courtesy of Naomi Shihab Nye (which is not to imply I got permission – I hope sharing her work here falls under Fair Use), Wikipedia, Amazon, and Poetry Foundation.

ABOUT
Testimonials
Disclosure
Facebook
Twitter

Recent in digital publications: 
* Four poems , I Am Not a Silent Poet
* Remembering Mom, HerStry
* Three poems, Levure littéraire
Upcoming in digital publications:
“Over His Morning Coffee,” Front Porch Review

A homebound writer, poet, and former columnist and associate editor of a regional employment newspaper, my work has been featured widely in print and digital publications including: Ramingo’s Porch, Vita Brevis Literature, Connotation Press, The Bar None Group, Salamander Cove, I Am Not a Silent Poet, The Compass Rose and California Woman. I run The Poet by Day, an info hub for poets and writers and am the founding/managing editor of The BeZine.

“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.”  Lucille Clifton