And a little poetry humor...

I didn't expect to see Robert Pinsky hosting Stephen Colbert's metaphor match with Sean Penn on Thursday's Colbert Report. It was pretty funny.

A Good Day

I woke up with a hangover this morning, but the sunshine lured me out of bed. It was 81 degrees today! This after it being like the middle of February for most of the last few weeks.
I wrote a poem, one that doesn't particularly suck (it seems odd that, on the past two occasions of having hangovers, I've written poems that I'm happy with. What's up with that? Did I kill off the brain cells that were getting in the way of my poetic process?)
Anyway, then I went outside and tilled the soil for the garden, and D. and I planted the tomato and basil seedlings, and sowed the seeds for the cucumbers, lettuce and dill. Also, he put up a fence so the dog can be outside unsupervised now, without getting into mischief. And right now, he's making us boiled red potatoes with olive oil, sea salt and dill (I loves the dill), and my head will soon be aching less.
A good day.

The last word on Spring?

I came across this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay on another poet's blog, but here's a link to a copy on Poetry Archive:

"Spring" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I guess the answer to my question is no, because The Waste Land wasn't published until the year after Millay's collection Second April, available online in its entirety, appeared, and as unfashionable as it is to admit, I love The Waste Land. But notice the congruence of themes between this short and sweet number and that tortuous epic: a zeitgest of the cynical times, I guess, a time in which "signification" was everything, because it was still expected that there just might be something hiding around some corner, hope against hope, waiting to be signified. I guess it would be a relief to find out that there was nothing after all.

In any case, Millay's poem just seems to sum up the season so well in a 20th-century nutshell that it makes it that much harder for those who come after to say anything original about it.

What would a 21-century poem about Spring sound like? Many have been written and published. I've tried a bunch myself (none so far published.) But with any success? I dunno.

So yeah -- a daunting task, the April poem, but not one poets will give up very easily.