I wrote recently about the one million check box site and how it became a collective craze. Will the fridge poetry site succeed it? Time will tell. Meanwhile take a few minutes to check it out and perhaps add your own poetic whimsy.
P.S. I am surprised the one million check boxes all got checked off. Crazier things have happened, I guess.
In reading this remembrance of a dear friend of Maria Popova, I was struck by this poem, You Can’t Have It All by Barbara Ras. It starts:
YOU CAN’T HAVE IT ALL
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.….
Click on the link and read the poem and the remembrance, too. May we all be remembered so well.
If you want to study that poem and think about poetry in general, I recommend you check this out. It really breaks down the poem, almost like you’re getting a lecture on it.
I recommend that whole site. There’s lot of study guides on things you may have studied in high school, or may not have. It’s never too late to read Yeats, or Shakespeare, or Eliot. If anything, it is better to study it later in life.
There is never a bad time to read the poetry of Mary Oliver, but Sunday afternoon seems like an especially good time. You may have some of her work already. If so, why not pull it down and savour it?
If you don’t have anything by hers, I recommend you look at this list put together by the good people at the Penn Book Center: 10 Best Mary Oliver Poems – PBC
You may have a favourite outside of these. As for me, it has two of my favorites, Wild Geese and The Summer Day. Go and enjoy. Happy Sunday to you.
P.S. I wrote this on her as well. Some good links in that post.
I’ve posted before on The very cool AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality) section of the New York Times. That time it was concerning their exploration of the Apollo 11 mission.
The folks at that section have done it again, this time with a poem from W.H. Auden titled Musée des Beaux Arts. It’s a beautiful poem, and simply reading it by yourself is a fine experience. But click here and immerse yourself into it, with the richness of analysis provided, and you will come away with a deeper level of understanding and appreciation of the work both of Auden and Brueghel.
You could do worse on a Sunday than read about Mary Oliver. Here’s four pieces on her from various parts of the Web:
I don’t have much to add other than that Mary Oliver is a fine person and her poetry is great and reading her and reading about her may make your life better. That’s all.
According to a post by Clive Thompson,
Recently, two scientists got interested in the poem, because they realized these two facts could be used to determine precisely what time of year Sappho wrote the poem.
The poem, the post, and the work the scientists did are all great. Highly recommended. (Click on the link to the post for more details.)
Smart People I Know 