You are currently browsing the daily archive for October 10th, 2007.
The mid-semester grading rush has ended, and I’ve turned again to the paper-cut-producing business of envelope-stuffing, an exercise which always makes me feel more productive. The end of the grading rush also means I have more time to spend with the material I’m teaching, which is a wonderful thing. Yesterday, we went over Catullus in my World Literature classes. A great many students thought Catullus was a whiner who should’ve gotten over it. I’d never really looked at things that way before, but, after our discussion, can definitely see their point. Still, with lines like “But why, why do you crucify love and yourself through the years?”, I can’t complain. And I’d forgotten how much I love this poem:
Come Lesbia, let us live and love,
nor give a damn what sour old men say.
The sun that sets may rise again
but when our light has sunk into the earth,
it is gone forever.
Give me a thousand kisses,
then a hundred, another thousand,
another hundred
and in one breath
still kiss another thousand,
another hundred.
O then with lips and bodies joined
many deep thousands;
confuse their number,
so that poor fools and cuckolds (envious
even now) shall never
learn our wealth and curse us
with their evil eyes.
Though I worry that I ruined it for my students by mentioning that lines 3-5 are the most common pick-up lines in all of literature.
I also had the opportunity of reading e.e. cumming’s version of the sparrow poem, which is wonderful but perhaps too naughty to post here.
In other words, folks, I’m finding my way back to poetry. This was largely inspired by the lovely time spent with one Mr. Ross White this weekend. It’s good to talk shop, every once in a while.
Now, if I could actually get down to the business of WRITING poetry …
Emma Bolden is the author of How To Recognize A Lady, a chapbook of poems published as part of Edge by Edge, the third in Toadlily Press' Quartet Series, and The Mariner's Wife, a chapbook published by Finishing Line Press. Her third chapbook, The Sad Epistles, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She was the recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers' Conference and was named a Finalist for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation/Poetry magazine. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in such journals as Prairie Schooner, the Indiana Review, Feminist Studies, The Journal, Redivider, The Greensboro Review, and Verse. Her manuscript was a semi-finalist for the Perugia Press Prize. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown College, where she also serves as the poetry editor of the Georgetown Review.
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