John Dyer’s The Fleece is one of those works that few people read but everyone should.  Well, everyone should read it but it’s really hard to get copies.  Dyer was Welsh, and his family, being Welsh, knew a lot about sheep.   The Fleece is an epic–four volumes of blank verse–about sheep, published in 1757.   It’s […]

by James Still(1937) The spider puzzles his legs and rests his webOn aftergrass. No winds stir here to breakThe quiet design, nothing protests the weavingOf taut threads in a ladder of silk:He is clever, he is fastidious, and intricate;He is skilled with his cords of hate. Who can escape through the grass: The crane-flyQuivers its […]

by E.B. White The spider, dropping down from twig,Unfolds a plan of her devising,A thin premeditated rigTo use in rising. And all that journey down through space,In cool descent and loyal hearted,She spins a ladder to the placeFrom where she started. Thus I, gone forth as spiders doIn spider’s web a truth discerning,Attach one silken […]

Here he is again, making a splash in Slate this time, where James Longenbach reviews Muldoon’s latest book of poetry and mentions some of Muldoon’s essays (haven’t read any of it yet, myself–such a poor scholar these days).   Take a peek, and maybe it will make you fall for Muldoon like I have. I’ll intended […]

More Yeats, also from his earlier work.  I think he’s calling me a witch, here, but I don’t think I’ll bother to be offended. The Withering of the Boughs I cried when the moon was murmuring to the birds:"Let peewit call and curlew cry where they will,I long for your merry and tender and pitiful […]

So, I’m increasingly obsessed with poems and songs about fiber arts.  Of course I am.  But now I’m going to start posting them here, for my own enjoyment, no matter the protest.  And we’ll just go ahead and categorize them as "wool poems" because that’s much more elegant than "poems on wool, silk, linen, cashmere, […]

Originally posted by Rachel As is want to happen with dead poets every now and then, they found another early Sylvia Plath poem. Like most of her juvenilia, it doesn’t do much for me, but read the first paragraph of the introductory essay. It’s pretty righteous. Sing it sister! (Or brother–an author isn’t actually identified.)

All I know is a door into the dark.Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting; Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring, The unpredictable fantail of sparksOr hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.The anvil must be somewhere in the centre, Horned as a unicorn, at one end square, Set there immoveable: an altarWhere he […]

Originally posted by Rachel   Did I mention that the thing I miss most about school is structure? That I can get twice the reading done under the deadlines of a semester than I can in a full year of non-studenthood? All of this is to say, I am a bad, bad blogger. Lanea keeps […]

I know, we are bad bloggers and we’ve been neglecting dear Seamus.  The world got very fast.  But Rachel just told me that my boy Paul Muldoon is on the cover of Poets and Writers magazine.  Yayyyyy.  Go see, go see: his hat is quite stylish. Dear reader, you may not know of this particular […]