Following yesterday's poem selection, A Man Said to the Universe by Stephen Crane, I considered posting something from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass that begins "A child said 'What is the grass?'", but it turns out I posted that as part of this series already, on April 2nd of last year. I toyed with posting a second Crane poem ("In the Desert"), ( Read more... )

Yesterday's poem, "It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free" was a form of sonnet by William Wordsworth. There was something about its feeling of calm - and its feeling of being somewhat alone, for all that the speaker in the poem addressed a young girl with whom he was walking - that reminded me of Robert Frost's poems "Mowing" and "The Tuft of ( Read more... )

Today would have been Robert Frost's birthday, in honor of which I am posting a short poem of his from the collection entitled West-Running Brook, of which I am the delighted owner of a first edition (as those of you who remember this post will recall). In fact, the reason I know my book is a first edition is directly related to today's poem, since ( Read more... )

Today, like yesterday, has dawned clear and bright - extremely bright, really, due to the snow glare ( Read more... )

I hope you're hungry for quotes today, because man, do I have a good assortment - and a couple are quite long.

On the importance of books First up, a little something I skimmed from Jeannine Atkins, who put up an excellent post discussing comments made by Sherman Alexie when she heard him speak last weekend. He was talking about why he feels it's ( Read more... )

More U.S. troops are being deployed. Again. And the stories of soldiers who have done multiple tours on active duty continue to mount, as do the stories of soldiers injured and killed while on active duty. And with the holidays coming, deployment must be much more difficult for families to endure - all those husbands, wives, children, parents, and ( Read more... )

It's Wednesday, which usually calls for a bit of Shakespeare around here, at least since June and Brush Up Your Shakespeare Month. And so, dear friends, this quote from The Life and Death of Richard II, which I've not yet read. (I know, I know - I shall get to it, I promise. But if you could only see my ridiculously ginormous TBR pile . . . )

' ( Read more... )

I was admiring the photographs that Robin has up at her blog - all those beautiful aspens turned yellow for fall. Of course, seeing a yellow wood such as that called Robert Frost to mind:

The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood ( Read more... )

What follows is a reprise of my first-ever Poetry Friday post from May 5th, 2006, a day on which I began the post "Yep, it's 'Poetry Friday' because an entire month of poetry posts just isn't enough." Only to find out that Kelly Herrold had just invented Poetry Friday a wee bit earlier (if memory serves, although I can no longer find her first PF ( Read more... )

As promised in my mid-day post, here are five more "unusual verbs", formed by taking the names of famous authors, then finding (and in some cases modifying slightly) quotes they wrote to define what their name would mean if used as a verb. And yes, I started this nonsense in response to a suggestion from writerjenn in the comments to yesterday's post about ( Read more... )