All posts tagged: poem

A Poem by Nam Le: ‘​​​​​​​[36. Violence: Patri-confessional]’

A Poem by Nam Le: ‘​​​​​​​[36. Violence: Patri-confessional]’

Published by skeptic

Millennium Images / Gallery Stock February 25, 2024, 6 AM ET This poem has been excerpted from Nam Le’s new book, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. I buried my father in the great light,the corroded pink, burning the eye to see,launched him into dream commons, particularity,a new matter of time, him & his apologies. I buried our father under the great terebinth wherewe ploughed up the moss shine one last time &mother’s face was made newly easy, sloughedof all last trace of girlhood. And the earth reseeds. Source link

A Poem by W. H. Auden: ‘Preface’

A Poem by W. H. Auden: ‘Preface’

Published by skeptic

Miki Lowe for The Atlantic Published in The Atlantic in 1944 By W. H. Auden Illustrations by Miki Lowe February 21, 2024, 6 AM ET For much of his career, the poet W. H. Auden was known for writing fiercely political work. He critiqued capitalism, warned of fascism, and documented hunger, protest, war. He was deeply influenced by Marxism. And he was hugely successful. Yet in truth, he wasn’t always as certain as he appeared. “Auden was never comfortable in his role as poetic prophet to the British Left,” his biographer Edward Mendelson wrote. “He was often most divided when he sounded most committed.” Auden worried that his writing was “inflated,” preachy and inauthentic—and he doubted how much it really mattered anyway. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” he once famously said. In 1939, though, he moved from England to America; the next year, he joined the Episcopal Church and became passionately religious. He grappled with how to keep writing. “I cannot help feeling that a satisfactory theory of Art from the standpoint of the Christian faith …

Nine stories to read today

Nine stories to read today

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Plus: Many presidents wrote books. Were any of them any good? J.S. Johnston / Library of Congress / Corbis / VCG / Getty February 19, 2024, 11:32 AM ET This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Spend time with nine great recent stories, selected by our editors. Then explore some presidential history from the Atlantic archives. Your Reading List Illustration by Ben Hickey Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s Latest Fad By Tyler Austin Harper Americans who most reap the benefits of marriage are the same class who get to declare monogamy passé and boring. Read the article. Illustration by Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World’s Richest Country By Stephanie H. Murray Raising kids shouldn’t be this hard. Read the article. Illustration by James Hosking. Sources: Erica Lansner / Redux; Eric Cox / Reuters; Fine Art Images / Getty; JDC Archives; …

‘As with a poem, each patient is unique’: the cancer surgeon using poetry to help train doctors | Medical research

‘As with a poem, each patient is unique’: the cancer surgeon using poetry to help train doctors | Medical research

Published by skeptic

In an unremarkable lecture hall on a rainy Monday afternoon, Cândida Pereira is expounding passionately on the intricacies of a poem by the Portuguese politician-poet Vasco Graça Moura. Her classmates listen closely as the second-year university student enthuses about lyric form, poetic voice and Moura’s use of “perceptual imagery” and “sensual tone”. Nothing unusual for a standard poetry module, perhaps. Yet once the bell goes, Pereira will repack her well-thumbed poetry anthology and replace it with more prosaic textbooks on neuroanatomy and pharmacology. The 19-year-old is one of 20 or so trainee doctors at Porto University’s medical faculty taking a new elective course on the fundamentals of modern poetry. In today’s ever more transactional healthcare culture, the initiative signals a belief in the priority of people-centred care and old-fashioned notions of a doctor’s “bedside manner”. As the course creator João Luís Barreto Guimarães explains, poetry has a unique capacity to help students connect holistically with their future patients, as opposed to viewing them as a medical problem in need of fixing. Doctors often don’t have …

Love and death in the archives

Love and death in the archives

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Atlantic writers meditate on the twin drives of eros and thanatos. Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty. February 15, 2024, 1:02 PM ET This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here. When I think of death, I think of love. I am convinced that I’m not alone in this. The dying seem driven to meditate on love, and love suffuses the scene of an ideal death: lying in bed surrounded by family, reassured by the promise of enduring affection. Unsurprisingly, The Atlantic has featured numerous writings on love and death over its lifetime. Only three years after the magazine’s founding, Louisa May Alcott published a short story in which a wife’s suicide attempt catalyzes her husband’s transformation from a self-absorbed recluse to a sincere and adoring lover. The near-death occasion serves as a sort of warning of mortality, putting the story’s narrator in mind of the centrality of love. In 1882, the magazine featured “Love and Death,” a …

A Poem by Amy Gerstler: ‘The Marigold Sonnets’

A Poem by Amy Gerstler: ‘The Marigold Sonnets’

Published by skeptic

Christopher Anderson / Magnum January 24, 2024, 8:16 AM ET I. Today I’ll listen to whatever music Spotify has in mind.Concerto for Black Holes and Slime Molds by the Panty Sniffers?That algorithm knows me so well! I’ve pitched myself underthis magnolia tree, heart first, before I get lobbed anyplaceworse. No more of grandpa’s stuffed marlin glaring at mefrom the living-room wall, no more robocalls offeringto restructure debt never incurred, no more doomscrolling(for the moment.) I’ve retreated to the bosom of nature,where bird chirps whirr like sticks being fed into a woodchipper and magnolia leaves clatter into my lap like leatherwings. Mari has flown off to Mexico. She believes in UFOs.She wants to be called Marigold now, to leave her sad pastbehind and bask in the mysteries of sex and drugsand panhandling and side hustles and is that really so bad? II. It seems really bad, or at least alarming to me, thoughI, too, was a hot mess in my twenties, so long ago,in a different era and circumstance. I’m still a sunkenship riddled with eels. …

A Poem by Erica Funkhouser: ‘The Pianist Upstairs’

A Poem by Erica Funkhouser: ‘The Pianist Upstairs’

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Miki Lowe Published in The Atlantic in 2005 By Erica Funkhouser Illustrations by Miki Lowe January 21, 2024, 6 AM ET The poet Erica Funkhouser grew up on a farm in Massachusetts, and it was there—many times while wandering through the woods—that she grew enchanted by language. She loved the music of words, “the kind of clang of them together and the sound and the playfulness of them,” she later said in an interview. Throughout her career, she has continued to describe, joyfully, the natural world, “where all the discoveries, wondrous or desperate, come without names.” At some point, though, she also realized that writing can fail to capture real brutality. “The risks are innumerable: sentimentality, over-generalization, over-simplification, distortion, and preaching, to name a few,” she wrote in a 2005 essay on war poetry. The same year, she published “The Pianist Upstairs,” a poem in which she sounds exhausted, doubtful of the essential goodness of language or even of the possibility that art can heal much at all. Listening to her neighbor play the piano, …

Poem of the week: Stay by David Wheatley | Poetry

Poem of the week: Stay by David Wheatley | Poetry

Published by Sam

Stay 1 Baby of mine descendingfrom the nurse’s armsinto your mother’s likea heron approaching its nest 2 and unpacking its legsbaby born to a creepingautumn hungry for darkyou kick your heels in the gap 3 of light where dawn and duskrub backs in the troughof winter and son of minesilently mouth your name 4 with fluttering tongueafter so long in the pulsingtunnel all wallsare theatre curtains parting 5 between one breast and the nextyou defy with a fallen-limp fist the singlebedroom that is the world 6 and here is the tree whose shadowpassing over the bedwill trace like a blind man’shand your features and here 7 a single tear of milklining your cheek untilwhen I look away it isonly to reenter 8 the moment from the echoingshell of its promise and willit stay now you child arethe lamp and you are the genie David Wheatley’s new collection, Child Ballad, recalls the name and work of Francis James Child, the American editor of the 10-volume series The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, more often known as …

A Poem by Ruth Awad: ‘Reasons to Live’

A Poem by Ruth Awad: ‘Reasons to Live’

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Chien-Chi Chang / Magnum December 31, 2023, 8 AM ET Because if you can survivethe violet night, you can survive the next, and the fig tree will achewith sweetness for you in sunlight that arrives first at your window, quietly pawingeven when you can’t stand it, and you’ll heavy the whining floorboardsof the house you filled with animals as hurt and lost as you, and the bearded irises will formfully in their roots, their golden manes swaying with the want of spring—live, live, live, live!— one day you’ll put your hands in the earthand understand an afterlife isn’t promised, but the spray of scorpion grass keeps growing,and the dogs will sing their whole bodies in praise of you, and the redbuds will laydown their pink crowns, and the rivers will set their stones and ribbonsat your door if only you’ll let the worldsoften you with its touching. This poem has been excerpted from the collection You Are Here, edited by Ada Limón.   Source link

Poem of the week: Breadcrumbs for the Sparrows by Paul Bailey | Paul Bailey

Poem of the week: Breadcrumbs for the Sparrows by Paul Bailey | Paul Bailey

Published by skeptic

Rose He did not back awaywhen the first glowing someone in his lifeencompassed himin welcoming arms She told him to stop twitchingwhenever she enfolded him –I’m here, she said,in case you haven’t noticed Foresight He knew misfortune was on its waywhenever his mother saidYou have to laugh Exposé When his mother complainedabout the cost of carrotshe heard unleashed despair Missing His father called them his urchins,the sparrows who came to the yard each morningfor the breadcrumbs he scattered He longs to see sparrows again,those bustling, chirruping little birdspossessed of the obstinate powerof the songless Humorous If, when he’s dying,he’s nothing left to sayhe’ll feel bereft Conversing He wants to meet Anton Chekhovand drink champagne with himin Odesa They’ll stay happily silentuntil they toast the Widow Clicquotwith the last of the bottle Night He clutches the pillow before he sleeps,wanting warmth He’ll wake in the morning, he knows,embracing someone once embraceable There’s no end to their number now,the ones he cares to fondlebefore he vanishes The multifaceted English writer Paul Bailey, born in south London in …