poetry month isn't over for another thirty-four minutes
I approve of all the Beethoven that’s going around the internet airways like an epidemic. An epidemic of AWESOME AND STRING QUARTETS.
Tonight in Korean class 선생님 corrected a future tense conjugation I’d done, explaining “you’ve got the rule right, but actually we don’t use it here because we don’t like to say the sound twice.” Guys, this is a language that breaks its own rules because it sounds better that way. I finally gave up all pretense at scholarly interest and scrawled “OH KOREA” in the margin of my workbook.
Since it’s again apartment-hunting time, here is a poem:
“Landowners”
From my rented attic with no earth
To call my own except the air-motes,
I malign the leaden perspective
Of identical gray brick houses,
Orange roof-tiles, orange chimney pots,
And see that first house, as if between
Mirrors, engendering a spectral
Corridor of inane replicas,
Flimsily peopled.
But landowners
Own their cabbage roots, a space of stars,
Indigenous peace. Such substance makes
My eyeful of reflections a ghost’s
Eyeful, which, envious, would define
Death as striking root on one land-tract;
Life, its own vaporous wayfarings.
(Sylvia Plath, 1956. p. 53 in The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, New York: 2008.)
Tonight in Korean class 선생님 corrected a future tense conjugation I’d done, explaining “you’ve got the rule right, but actually we don’t use it here because we don’t like to say the sound twice.” Guys, this is a language that breaks its own rules because it sounds better that way. I finally gave up all pretense at scholarly interest and scrawled “OH KOREA” in the margin of my workbook.
Since it’s again apartment-hunting time, here is a poem:
“Landowners”
From my rented attic with no earth
To call my own except the air-motes,
I malign the leaden perspective
Of identical gray brick houses,
Orange roof-tiles, orange chimney pots,
And see that first house, as if between
Mirrors, engendering a spectral
Corridor of inane replicas,
Flimsily peopled.
But landowners
Own their cabbage roots, a space of stars,
Indigenous peace. Such substance makes
My eyeful of reflections a ghost’s
Eyeful, which, envious, would define
Death as striking root on one land-tract;
Life, its own vaporous wayfarings.
(Sylvia Plath, 1956. p. 53 in The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, New York: 2008.)