Post Your Poetry and Poetry From Other Authors You Like!

Hey guys!
So basically this blog is here so that we can share some of the work we've been writing throughout this semester. As well, feel free to post poetry or clips of short stories that you like and find inspiring.

Lots of love,
Crotonia

John Cheever Is A God

John Cheever, aside from being a kick-ass fiction writer, also wrote in the preface to his collection of short stories a really interesting take on the process of becoming a writer:

The parturition of a writer, I think, unlike that of a painter, does not display any interesting alliances to his masters. In the growth of a writer one finds nothing like the early Jackson Pollock copies of the Sistine Chapel paintings with their interesting cross-references to Thomas Hart Benton. A writer can be seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to make love, and to eat his peas off a fork. He appears much alone and determined to instruct himself. Naive, provincial in my case, sometimes drunk, sometimes obtuse, almost always clumsy, even a selected display of one's early work will be a naked history of one's struggle to receive an education in economics and love.

(From The Stories of John Cheever)

-- posted by Ariel Shepherd Oppenheim

"Halley's Comet", by Norman Nicholson

My father saw it back in 1910,

The year King Edward died.

Above dark telegraph poles, above the high

Spiked Steepled of the Liberal Club, the white

Gas-lit dials of the Market Clock,

Beyond the wide

Sunset-glow cirrus of black-furnace smoke,

My father saw it fly

Its thirty-seven-million-mile-long kite

Across Black Combe's black sky.

And what of me,

Born four years too late?

Will I have the breath to wait

Till the long circuiting commercial traveller

Turns up at his due?

In 1986, aged seventy two,

Watery in the eyes and phlegmy in the flue,

And a bit bad tempered at so delayed a date,

Will I look out above whatever is left of the town--

The Liberal Club long closed  and the clock stopped,

And the chimneys smokeless above damped-down

Furnace fires? And then will I

At last have the chance to see it

With my own as well as my father's eyes,

And share his long-ago Edwardian surprise

At that high, silent jet, laying its bright trail

Across Black Combe's black sky?

(From the Norton Anthology of Poetry, Fourth Edition)

-- posted by Sophie Quinton