Something different this week. Fifty-three years ago tomorrow, Sylvia Plath attended a party at which W.H. Auden gave a reading. Using her own distinctive style, Plath described the great poet in her Journal.*

To set the scene, Plath was 20 years old, and a junior at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Auden was 46 years old and a visiting professor at Smith, although I don't know whether Plath took his class. 1953 was also the year that Auden moved in with his longtime companion, the poet Chester Kallman.

The party took place at the home of Sylvia Plath's English professor, 66 year old Elizabeth A. Drew. That semester, Plath was enrolled in Drew's Modern English Poetry class.

Finally, a bit of foreshadowing. Four months after this party, Plath would survive the first of her many suicide attempts. Despite missing a semester after her near overdose of sleeping pills, she graduated in 1955, summa cum laude. She would go on to study at Cambridge, meet and marry poet Ted Hughes, and the rest is history.

But here's what she thought of Auden:

April 27 [1953] - Listen and shut up, oh, ye of little faith. On one certain evening in a certain year 1953 a certain complex of pitched tensions, physiological urges, and mental dragonflies combined to fill one mortal imperfect Eve with a fierce full rightness, force and determination corresponding to the ecstasy experienced by the starving saint on the desert who feels the crackling cool drops of God on his tongue and sees the green angels sprouting up like dandelion greens, prolific and infinitely unexpected.

. . .

Tonight, spring, plural, fertile, offering up clean green leaf whorls to a soft moon covered with fuzz-fractured clouds, and god, the listening to Auden read in Drew's front living room, and vivid questioning, darting scintillant wit. My Plato! pedestrian I! And Drew, (exhuberant exquisitely frail intelligent Elizabeth) saying, "Now that is really difficult."

Auden tossing his big head back with a twist of wide ugly grinning lips, his sandy hair, his coarse tweedy brown jacket, his burlap-textured voice and the crackling brilliant utterances -- the naughty mischievous boy genius, and the inconsistent white hairless skin of his legs, and the short puffy stubbed fingers -- and the carpet slippers -- beer he drank, and smoked Lucky Strikes in a black holder, gesticulating with a white new cigarette in his hands, holding matches, talking in a gravelly incisive tone about how Caliban is the natural bestial projection, Ariel the creative imaginative, and all the intricate lyrical abstruosities of their love and cleavage, art and life, the mirror and the sea. God, god, the stature of the man. And next week, in trembling audacity, I approach him with a sheaf of poems. Oh, god, if this is life, half heard, glimpsed, smelled, with beer and cheese sandwiches and the god-eyed tall-minded ones, let me never go blind, or get shut off from the agony of learning, the horrible pain of trying to understand.

Tonight: the unforgettable snatching of toothpicks and olive pits from the tables of the ambrosial gods!

* The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath, pp. 179-180.

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Is there any subject that can't be examined by a poet? Here we have biology, in a Shakespearian sonnet by English poet John Masefield (1878–1967):

What am I, Life?

What am I, Life? A thing of watery halt
Held in cohesion by unresting cells,
Which work they know not why, which never halt,
Myself unwitting where their Master dwells
I do not bid them, yet they toil, they spin
A world which uses me as I use them;
Nor do I know which end or which begin
Nor which to praise, which pamper, which condemn.
So, like a marvel in a marvel set,
I answer to the vast, as wave by wave
The sea of air goes over, dry or wet,
Or the full moon comes swimming from her cave,
Or the great sun comes forth: this myriad I
Tingles, not knowing how, yet wondering why.

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You may remember the great KISS haiku contest of 2005. The winner of that contest was Cameron who used to have a blog called Way Off Base. Now he's blogging with his brother at Woody's Woundup.

Anyways, I once called Cameron "the Mark Russell of the Blogosphere." Of course nobody knows who Mark Russell is, so it's not much of a compliment, if it ever was one. But Cameron is still writing poetry, and I loved his latest one so much that I chose it for this week's selection.

On the Morning of A Day Off, A Little Wind and Rain

An old, missed friend wakes me up, politely
Tapping my window with soft fingers,
Whispering the new stories she has learned.
And IÂ’m all ears, warm under my blanket,
Sitting up with my back against the cool wall,
Listening, trying to find a rhythm
In her words, perpetually relieved
To never discern any noticeable pattern.
It would ruin the instance if I did;
Like hearing a drumbeat put to an aria.

ThereÂ’s no sorrow, no worsted gray buttoned up
Over the colorful promise of her mysteries.
Beneath my closed eyes, her words become
An intimate canvas primed and waiting for
Some improvised brush of . . .
Life, she taps on my window. Laughter. Love.
Each flurry of words brings me
Closer to new than I have been in years.

My windowÂ’s open; she enters on the breeze.
Such a scent she brings, clean and real,
The scent wild things know after the snows melt,
And with her comes the lush green certainty
Of something taking root in me,
Like a seed pushed into readied earth by
Some wise old farmer in the North Forty,
And I imagine that when my friend and I
Meet again in the spring, in a rambling conversation
About wild sprouts and raucous blooms,
IÂ’ll be glad then that I donÂ’t now close my window
Just to avoid her random, friendly kisses.

It doesnÂ’t rain enough in Southern California.

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Sheila is doing National Poetry Month the right way, at The Sheila Variations. Go over there and just keep scrolling. She's posted a few from some of my favorites: O'Hara, Bishop, Dickinson, and Oliver, along with some fantastic poetry that I hadn't been introduced to yet.

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In honor of April Fool's day, lets do something different.

Ever wonder what Vogon poetry really sounds like? Check out Rosie O'Donnell's blog. Here's a particularly bad selection from yesterday:

Journalism

so katie mcphee is linda ederish

yo yo dog
youuuu look sssssexyhottt grrreat job
i hate country music

does kenny rogers think
he looks better this way
alien from planet hollywood
almost didnt recognize him

i will reload the art movie
with a non i tune tune
I TUNES SUCK

i am 1/2 way thru
craig fergusons novel
i triple love it
confederacy of dunces
meets geek love
in a dave eggers universe
buy it

a lot of press
gma tomorrow
and i am done
odd
going in and out
of celebville
with an ez pass

there is much i miss
everything barbra
touring again
thank god
i live in a paralell universe
1 where noone spells write
ross the intern
jays colin

colin was 10
yr one
belted ethel merman
had me at hello

he now works for
R FAMILY VACATIONS
everytime i see his simle
i remember the magic

ryan seacrest just said
WITH ALL DUE RESPECT
to simon cowell

5 am
hair and make up
i am getting too old for this

CNN
there is a scary kid
talking to larry king
about internet porn

journalism in america

the ask ro
is highly addictive

Thanks to Victor, for the suggestion.

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