“I do not belong to the Poets, but only to a low department of reporters, suburban men.” Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thomas Carlyle, 1838.
Emerson doesn’t display false modesty here, but a recognition of how exalted are the greatest poems. Since perfect excellence of expression is forever out of reach, one may as well get on with the work of reporting the news, to the best of one’s ability.
Then along comes Robert Frost, who judges Emerson’s “Uriel” to be “the greatest Western poem yet.” I can think of no company I’d rather keep than that of the low department of reporters, here in the superb suburb of the Berkshires.
Take your mind for a walk
Warning! Poems are made of lines of text that smart phones break into dumb fragments.
Poems by category:
Dave reads
Video is of a reading in 2019 at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA, to celebrate the publication of an anthology of poems by poets influenced by Donald Hall (1928-2018). Afterparty is my poem in it.
Chancing into a friendship with him in 2012, I enjoyed three visits at his storied Eagle Pond Farm, in Wilmot, NH plus a scant correspondence. Hall, who had been U.S. Poet Laureate in 2006-07, had so many correspondents that the USPO assigned him his own zip code! Read more >