On a happier note...

It must be that time of year when poets get confused as to whether they should be skipping through the fields like Wordsworth or sticking their heads in the oven.
Even so-called moderate ones.

But here's a much Spring-ier poem from my old friend Rumi, via Coleman Barks:
What Was Told, That

Mark Strand

I saw him read at Politics & Prose last month, a tall man with a presence to match his voice, on the page and off. He signed my copy of Man and Camel.

Many of the poems he read displayed his dry, at times black, sense of humor. The following isn't one of those, though I still think it's lovely, if stark, like the landscape it describes.

My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer

Spring poem

A.R. Ammons: Eyesight

Antilamentation

It's been a while since I posted a poem (or a link to someone else's, that is) on here. We read this one in class last week.
Don't know what else to say about it, except that I just ordered one of her books.
By Dorianne Laux.

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.