Tuesday Poem this week has at its hub The Wild Bees by Irish poet John Griffin. This week's editor, NZ poet Zireaux, introduces the poem with a rip roaring call to poets to use a richer and more varied vocabulary as John Griffin has. Here's a taste:
O peddlers of minimalism, hucksters of haiku, I request you keep your smokey spiritualism away from the hive. Can you not hear the growing clamor of the i-Clones, the Fad-Pads, the X-Cubes and MeTubes, the Factor Xs, the Super 3-D Cinema-Plexes? Why should we submit to the blog-fog, the vapors of vacancy (stay calm, my voice!), when language can reach -- or better, ride, fly, however improbably, like Dante's Beatrice (Dante being the CGI animator of his day), to the place where Ra drops honey from the sun, on the powerful, jewel-encrusted Griffin-wings of language?
How to resist that? And after you've read Griffin and Zireaux, try the posts by other poets in the Tuesday Poem sidebar - they include English poets fighting over the image of a woman in a field with gloves on (Belinda Holyer's blog), a poem on an entymologist and a poem by Sarah Jane Barnett called Greece that beautifully traces the movement of horses. And there's much much more.... Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost...
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