Thursday, January 24, 2008

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