BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: POETS & POETRY #3

“There are no uninteresting people in the world,
says Yevtushenko in one of his best lyrics; everyone
carries around with him his first snow and his first
kiss it is not people who die but worlds.”
Edward Thomas. London Magazine (November 1967)
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ON BRAZIL’S FAMOUS POET
CARLOS DRUMMOND de ANDRADE &  CHARLIE CHAPLIN

“The figure of ‘Carlitos’ as Chaplin was known
in Brazil, offers perhaps the single key to 
Drummond’s poetics: the consummate artist who 
appears not to be an artist at all: the down-and-out 
clown who manages to stumble along life’s tightrope, 
forever nearly yet never quite falling off: ‘Carlos,
 go on! Be gauche in life!” Drummond tells himself 
in the opening line of his first book of poems, 
self-effacingly entitled Some Poetry.”

Thomas Colchie. Travelling in the Family: Selected
Poems Carlos Drummond de Andrade (New York:
Random House, 1986)
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ON A FAMOUS NURSERY RHYME

“Here we go round the mulberry bush
The mulberry bush
The mulberry bush
Here we go round the mulberry bush
On a cold and frosty morning

Although this rhyme likely started out using Bramble Bush (mulberries actually grow on trees), historian R. S. Duncan suggests this version came about at Wakefield Prison in England. The facility has been home to an extremely recognizable mulberry tree for centuries, and the theory goes that Victorian female prisoners used to dance around it and made up the rhyme to keep their kids amused. (Back then, men, women, and children were often confined together.) The tree eventually died in 2017, but it was replaced with a cutting from the original.”

from INTERESTING FACTS website (OCTOBER 1, 2022)

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“You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.”
     Mario Cuomo

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CHARLES SIMIC AND HIERONYMUS BOSCH

“’It was the love of…irreverence , as much as anything 
else, that started me in poetry,’ Simic has said, and 
he learned from Hieronymus Bosh that ‘there’s no joy 
like the one a truly outrageous image on the verge 
of blasphemy gives’”:

            An old man gave little Mary Magdalene
            A broken piece of a mirror.
            She hid in the church outhouse.
            When she got thirsty she licked
            The steam off the glass.

Adam Kirsch. The Modern Element (New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2008)

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DELMORE SCHWARTZ & THE POET AS SEER

“One of Delmore’s characteristic stances was this 
insistence on the poet as seer, a medium of truths 
whose power lay in their independence from the 
vicissitudes of common reality. His own aspiration 
was to remain indifferent to the merely visible,
 choosing like Joyce’s Dedalus, to comprehend life 
‘purified in and reprojected from the human imagination.”

James Atlas. Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an 
American Poet (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1977)


ABOUT COLLY CIBBER

"In his Book An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, 
he not only defended himself against personal attacks 
from such well-known figures as Johnson, Fielding, and 
Pope, but also produced one of the most important and indispensable accounts of a vital period in English 
theatrical history. Cibber accurately chronicles the
 plays, playwrights, and actors of the day in unstinting
 detail, affording theater lovers and historians an 
incomparable glimpse of the beginnings of modern theater.
 As an actor, manager, and playwright, Colley Cibber 
was among the most influential members of the London theater in the 18th century.”

From https://allpoetry.com/Colley-Cibber. All poetry.com is an important and useful site for\all lovers of poetry. I highly
recommend that readers go to it.
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ON COLLY CIBBER

Colly Cibber
Wrote lots of gibber-
ish & horror yet
Was named Poet Laureate.

LJP

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