A Day in Heaven, A Season in Hell

Yesterday I ventured over to the Poets House (they don't use an apostrophe in their name...for shame!) in Battery Park. If you haven't been there before, please don't go--it's a beautiful oasis of quiet and I don't want you to take up all the comfy seats.

The spacious new building, which houses countless volumes of poetry and acts as a literary center, is located just off River Terrace and has a view of the Hudson through its expansive wall of windows. It was founded in the '80s by the poet Stanley Kunitz, a man whose words I go back to quite often, and recently relocated from a small, converted apartment to this stately, modern (and eco-friendly!) place built especially for it.

Here's a video of actor (and poetry lover) Bill Murray reading poems to construction workers while they were building Poets House:


Aside from the free pin that reads, "Poetry Advocate," I took a few things from Poets House yesterday. Don't worry, I didn't steal any books, just their words. I visited three poets and I want to share a little bit about each.

First I browsed the complete collection of that sassy Queen of Light Verse, Dorothy Parker. Because Parker mainly wrote light verse, her poems are often mined for their cutesy quotes, losing their darker, pessimistic twists. The most interesting poem I came across is "Threnody." A threnody is usually a song written in memory of a dead person. I got goosebumps when I read these lines:

If there's one that rode away
What would I be missing?
Lips that taste of tears, they say,
Are the best for kissing.

I like not being able to decide if Parker is sweet or sour, and I enjoy feeling that these aspects of her poetry (and apparently her personality) can't be reconciled.

The second poet I turned to was Tina Chang, who is on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence, so I figured I'd do a little recon and become familiar with her work. She's also the first female Poet Laureate of Brooklyn and someone whose philosophy of working to demystify poetry, I sincerely admire.

I read her collection Half-Lit Houses and found her poems dream-like in the way that nostalgia for early childhood sometimes appears in our consciousness in semi-mythical forms. I can't find my favorite poem from the book, but if you feel like looking it up in the 4-D world, it's called "Giving the Girl."

The last poet I spent time with was Arthur Rimbaud. I read letters he'd written to friends, as well as the scandalous accounts of his relationship with the married-with-children poet Paul Verlaine. These were sexy times in Europe, and I'm mourning the fact that I couldn't be a poor poet in late 1800's Paris.

Sadly, after many separations and reunions, Verlaine shot his lover and finally went back to his family. Rimbaud's arm was injured in the shooting, but I think his heart suffered most. He returned to the hick town from whence he'd originally emerged and produced the long poem, "A Season in Hell." Hell hath no fury like a lover shot.

Here is a nugget I culled: "I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still."

Or maybe it was all that absinthe he was drinking?