News that stays News | Susanne E. Hall http://susannehall.com Research, teaching, and writing by Susanne E. Hall Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:09:26 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.1 en Poem of Note: “December 9th” http://susannehall.com/2007/12/09/poem-of-note-december-9th/ http://susannehall.com/2007/12/09/poem-of-note-december-9th/#comments Sun, 09 Dec 2007 17:32:44 +0000 Susanne Hall http://susannehall.com/2007/12/09/poem-of-note-december-9th/ I can’t resist sharing Eileen Myles’s poem “December 9th.”  It’s a rumination on sharing a birthday with John Milton, and I happen to share that birthday with both Milton and Myles.  I’ve been lucky enough to see Myles read a couple of times in recent months, but I’ve never heard her read this older poem.  It begins:

I have the same

birthday as John

Milton.  Did

you know that?

So I don’t have to

write long poems about

heaven & hell–everything’s

been lost in my lifetime

& I’m usually blind drunk

and not so serious

either. However…

The poem goes on to make a plea to be comforted by others in one’s old age, a feeling that certainly sneaks in around the edges of each birthday celebration.

At this point in my life, however, being still relatively far from my dotage, I find the poem a tremendous relief.  By Myles’s logic, by virtue of my sharing a birthday with her, I can release myself from the imperative to be effortlessly charming and charismatic, and from writing simple yet fascinating essays and poems about my misadventures.  What a relief!

Happy Birthday Eileen!

[The rest of this poem can be found in Postmodern American Poetry. Ed. Paul Hoover, New York: Norton, 1994. 554.]

[Also, check out Myles's website at www.eileenmyles.com]

]]> http://susannehall.com/2007/12/09/poem-of-note-december-9th/feed/ Poem of Note: “Suicide of a Moderate Dictator” http://susannehall.com/2007/12/02/poem-of-note-suicide-of-a-moderate-dictator/ http://susannehall.com/2007/12/02/poem-of-note-suicide-of-a-moderate-dictator/#comments Mon, 03 Dec 2007 01:36:48 +0000 Susanne Hall http://susannehall.com/2007/12/02/poem-of-note-suicide-of-a-moderate-dictator/ The poem of note will be a poem that I have deemed noteworthy. Thus the name.Poems of note may be notable for numerous reasons, perhaps for their nimbleness, their newsworthiness, or their even their noxious qualities. Or for their horrible abuses of alliteration.Today’s PON, “Suicide of a Moderate Dictator” is from a recent collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s uncollected works, Edgar Allen Poe & the Jukebox.The poem caught my eye firstly because of its most excellent title. But I post it here because of my interest in mid-century poets’ relationships to mass media. The idea of language rubbing off from newsprint onto one’s fingers suggests a connection between the material world and the mediated world that the poem later underlines by suggesting that though it seems like headlines write themselves, they are actually written by the pedestrian acts of, well, pedestrians.I think that a Bishop poem makes a great first entry into this new blog, since the first research paper I ever wrote (in high school) was on Bishop, and it was notable in that it went over like a lead balloon with the teacher, which was something to which I was not accustomed. And so I submit for the record that I have proceeded to dedicate my intellectual life to the kind of study that produced the most underwhelmed reaction I ever got from a teacher. Luckily, things have improved since then.

]]> http://susannehall.com/2007/12/02/poem-of-note-suicide-of-a-moderate-dictator/feed/