Poets and Poems: Paul Mariani and "All That Will Be New"

The news has always been filled with what sells – bad news. But for more than two years, our steady news diet has been pandemic, riots, shootings, inflation, war and invasion, left-wing and right-wing extremism, hate crimes, immigration battles, and division. We sometimes feel we’re in the middle of a civil war in which few shots are being fired but the carnage is nonetheless terrible. 

In his ninth collection All That Will Be New, poet Paul Mariani expresses this sense of “it’s all coming apart,” this era he calls “Covid-killing time,” but he also finds reasons to hope. And he sometimes finds reasons to laugh, especially at himself.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Paul Mariani and “Ordinary Time”

Paul Mariani has given a new perspective on “ordinary time.”

In the liturgical calendar of the Roman Catholic Church, “ordinary time” is the period that falls outside the official holidays. It’s divided into two parts – from Christmas to Lent, and from Lent to Advent. Mariani uses the idea for the title of his latest collection of poetry, Ordinary Time. Instead of the period or periods that fall outside the official church holiday observances, he uses it to focus on what we might call “the rest of life.”

And what is the rest of life? Childhood and growing up. Parents. Grandchildren. Vacations and visits. What happened when his rough-and-tumble father learned Mariani was writing poetry. Discovering the madness of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Teachers. His young mother trying to drive a car in New York City. His mother reaching out to a young woman whose husband has just died in World War II Europe. What East 51^st Street in New York was like in the early 1940s, and how that world vanished.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens” by Paul Mariani

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) won two National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, along with the Bollingen Prize and the Frost Medal. He was one of the American poets who were considered the high priests of literary modernism, along with T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost. He was a presence in poetry for more than four decades and had an enormous impact on poetry’s substance and direction.

Literary studies of his poetry abound. Several biographies of Stevens were written in the 1980s and a few in the 1990s. Twenty years after the last major biography, Paul Mariani has published The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens.

Mariani is especially well-suited for the task. A poet himself, he has published seven collections of poetry and numerous non-fiction works. His biographies include William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (1981); Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (1990); Lost Puritan: The Life of Robert Lowell (1996); The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane (1999); and Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life (2008).

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph: Wallace Stevens late in life.