Poets and Poems: Mischa Willett and “The Elegy Beta”

Poet Mischa Willett is exploring the elegy. And more than exploring it, he’s modernizing it.

You reach a certain age, and you begin to understand why the elegy is an enduring poetic form. Its history stretches as far back as the Greeks and Romans. Typically associated with death and funerals, an elegy can be almost any poem that’s a serious reflection. Traditional elegies (think Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”) make full use of rhyming couplets. Contemporary elegies generally drop the rhyme, but they retain the concept of seriousness and solemnity.

The title poem in Willet’s new collection, The Elegy Beta, fits that contemporary understanding. 

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

Poe, Rilke, and Our Black Cat

Think Halloween, and what comes to mind (after tick-or-treat candy) are the big 3 icons of witches, pumpkins, and black cats. Mummies, skeletons, and zombies are more Johnny-come-latelys in the Halloween extravaganza. These days, witches have gone mainstream respectable, and Linus and Charlie Brown own the Great Pumpkin, and so the black cat is left to shoulder Halloween largely alone.

My family had a black cat, once. Actually, the cat had us. One day in the middle of winter the cat showed up in the neighborhood. She had a collar but no tags, and she looked healthy. The neighborhood children fed her potato chips and milk, guaranteeing it would hang around. My wife warned the children that, if they kept feeding it, the cat would never leave (not the best argument to make to a child).

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

Rilke’s “Prayers of a Young Poet”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is best known today for a rather slim volume entitled Letters to a Young Poet. The letters were published only after his death, by the man who had received them, a young military officer-in-training in Austria named Franz Kappus who had discovered his heart was in poetry rather than the military. Rilke was moved enough, perhaps by the similarities in his own life, that he exchanged a series of letters over a period of time.

Published in 1929 in German, and in 1934 (and again in 1945) in English, Rilke’s letters gained serious popularity beginning in the 1980s. Today, they remain almost required reading for anyone considering poetry as a vocation (or avocation). But more people have probably read his letters than his own poetry. A number of good translations and collections have been done, and his poetry is well worth reading.

And now Mark Burrows has translated a group of poems entitled Prayers of a Young Poet, an obvious play on the title of the collected letters. It’s an amazing collection, and Burrows, a scholar of medieval Christianity and poetry editor for the journal Spiritus -- adds new insight and understanding to both Rilke the man and his poetry.

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

Rilke on Christmas

I read Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) this past weekend, a new translation by Mark Harmon published in April. The small volume, celebrated over the decades for its statements about the importance of art, is a series of 10 letters written from 1903 to 1908 by Rilke to Franz Kappus, who was a young poet (19) in an Austrian military school who hated it as much as Rilke did when his father placed him in one at a young age.

Not having read them before, I was surprised to find they were about far more than poetry. One of them, dated December 23, 1903, included an admonition from Rilke to Kappus about celebrating Christmas, after first chiding him for his inability his claimed loss of faith, when Kappus may never have possessed God in the first place. Here’s what Rilke says:

“Is there anything that can take from you the hope of being one day in Him, at the farthest, the outermost?

“Celebrate Christmas, dear Mr. Kappus, with this devout feeling that it is precisely this fear of life that He needs from you in order to begin; these very days of your transition are perhaps the time when everything in you works upon Him, just as once before in childhood you worked breathlessly on Him. Be patient and without displeasure, and think that the least we can do is not make His becoming any more difficult for Him than the earth makes it for the spring when it chooses to come.

“And be cheerful and confident.”