Carleton Choices for 2014 National Poem in Your Pocket Day

Art and Art History | Classics | Communications | English | German | History | Mathematics | Library | MusicRussian | Religion | Sociology/Anthropology | Spanish | The Writing Program

Art and Art History Department

BathshebaRobert Tisdale

King David saw her beauty, desired her,valued her above his integrity. She had the power that allure bestows;he could give her wealth, an elevatedstate.   She holds his summons;knows his will.   Can she defy it?

How show her predicament in paint?How turn a story into one moment?The words, the letter she has readand looks away from, perplexed,conveys it all.   A crisis must bein her face to tell viewerswhat they know but now must see.

She knows what guilt adultery will entail. Her shame foretells decisions.Yet she knows not how David will achievehis goal to free her from her vows.

She sits in stillness; she shows no agony,she tears no hair, rends no garment.She looks downward towards  her servant;The moment we see might seem trivialbut King David’s  summons decides the future.How it is wrought we know; she has yetto feel its pain and their great dishonor.The story is in her face, her expression.Did I get it right?  Will you see her as I did?

From a collection of five poems by English Department Professor emeritus Robert Tisdale titled Rembrandt: Five Portraits.

Submitted by Alison Kettering for Art and Art History

Classics Department

Iliad 24.503-506: Priam asks Achilles to return the body of Hector for burial

ἀλλ᾽ αἰδεῖο θεοὺς Ἀχιλεῦ , αὐτόν τ᾽ ἐλέησονμνησάμενος σοῦ πατρός : ἐγὼ δ᾽ ἐλεεινότερός περ ,ἔτλην δ᾽ οἷ᾽ οὔ πώ τις ἐπιχθόνιος βροτὸς ἄλλος ,ἀνδρὸς παιδοφόνοιο ποτὶ στόμα χεῖρ᾽ ὀρέγεσθαι .

But respect the gods , Achilles, and pity methinking of your own father: I am more pi tiableand I have endured what no other mortal on earth has,to kiss the hand of the man who killed my son.

Aeneid 2.6-12 : Aeneas responds to Dido's request that he tell her about the fall of Troy

Quis talia fandoMyrmidonum Dolopumve aut duri miles Ulixitemperet a lacrimis? Et iam nox umida caelopraecipitat, suadentque cadentia sidera somnos.Sed si tantus amor casus cognoscere nostroset breviter Troiae supremum audire laborem,quamquam animus meminisse horret, luctuque refugit,incipiam.

Dryden's translation:

Not ev'n the hardest of our foes could hear,Nor stern Ulysses tell without a tear.And now the latter watch of wasting night,And setting stars, to kindly rest invite;But, since you take such int'rest in our woe,And Troy 's disastrous end desire to know,I will restrain my tears, and briefly tellWhat in our last and fatal night befell.

Submitted by Clara Hardy for Classics.

The Rows of Cold TreesYvor Winters

To be my own Messiah to theburning end. Can one endure theacrid, steeping darkness ofthe brain, which glitters and isdissipated? Night. The night iswinter and a dull man bending,muttering above a freezing pipe;and I, bent heavily on books; themountain iron in my sleep andringing; but the pipe has frozen, haired withunseen veins, and cold is on the eyelids: who canremedy this vision?I have walked uponthe streets between the trees that

grew unleaved from asphalt in a night ofsweating winter in distracted silence.I havewalked among the tombs--the rushing of the airin the rich pines above my head is that whichceaseth not nor stirreth whence it is:in this the sound of wind is like a flame.It was the dumb decision of themadness of my youth that left me withthis cold eye for the fact; that keeps mequiet, walking toward astinging end: I am alone,and, like the alligator cleaving timeless mud,among the blessed who have Latin names.

Submitted by Emma Burd, '15, for Classics.

Communications Department

You are tirede.e. cummings

You are tired,(I think)Of the always puzzle of living and doing;And so am I.

Come with me, then,And we'll leave it far and far away—(Only you and I, understand!)

You have played,(I think)And broke the toys you were fondest of,

And are a little tired now;Tired of things that break, and—Just tired.So am I.

But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight,And knock with a rose at the hopeless gate of your heart—Open to me!For I will show you the places Nobody knows,And, if you like,The perfect places of Sleep.

Ah, come with me!I'll blow you that wonderful bubble, the moon,That floats forever and a day;I'll sing you the jacinth songOf the probable stars;I will attempt the unstartled steppes of dream,Until I find the Only Flower,Which shall keep (I think) your little heartWhile the moon comes out of the sea.

Submitted by Kayla McGrady for Communications.

English Department

The Summer Dayby Mary Oliver

Who made the world?Who made the swan, and the black bear?Who made the grasshopper?This grasshopper, I mean—the one who has flung herself out of the grass,the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.I don't know exactly what a prayer is.I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,which is what I have been doing all day.Tell me, what else should I have done?Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?Tell me, what is it you plan to dowith your one wild and precious life?

Submitted by Susan Jaret McKinstry for English.

Whinlandsby Seamus Heaney

All year round the whinCan show a blossom or twoBut it's in full bloom now.As if the small yolk stain

From all the birds' eggs inAll the nests of the springWere spiked and hungEverywhere on bushes to ripen.

Hills oxidize gold.Above the smoulder of green shootAnd dross of dead thorns underfootThe blossoms scald.

Put a match underWhins, they go up of a sudden.They make no flame in the sunBut a fierce heat tremor

Yet incineration like thatOnly takes the thorn.The tough sticks don't burn,Remain like bone, charred horn.

Gilt, jaggy, springy, frilledThis stunted, dry richnessPersists on hills, near stone ditchesOver flintbed and battlefield.

Submitted by Constance Walker for English.

Phlebotinumby Stephen Kampa '05

Tonight I watch four men get shotOn primetime television: two for narkingOn partners, one for love, and one for parkingIn the wrong parking lot

At the wrong time. There follow fiftyMinutes of swift forensic kung fu movesThat culminate in evidence which provesThese geeks are pretty nifty,

Given that how they nab one crookIs by enhancing images they findReflected in his victim's eyes, a blindLuck clue in a last look

Caught by a nearby traffic cam(No chance); they snag another when they traceHis hairspray through their mystic databaseOf stylists on the lam

(This viewer ends up feeling fleeced);And as for the remaining perps, close shavesGrow closer till they wind up in their graves--Who most risked, counted least

On crime scene gurus also packingSerious heat and staminaceous bodsthat put them little lower than the gods(Plus, they get network backing).

My parents lap it up, half-viewingHalf-reading magazines that track the stars'Marriages, mansions, children, pooches, cars,And causes of undoing,

Reveling in some hard-earned restAt home behind their thick-bolted door.I've noticed, as they're aging, how much moreThey fear being dispossessed,

And I'd prefer to blame these showsWhere punks are always knocking off a strangerFor pocket change or fun--they posit dangerAs one fixed mark that grows

Only more common with the years--But Dad says, "Cops or sitcoms, take your pick.The comedies are worse, they're downright sick,"So he prefer his fears.

I found online (also unsafe)One word encompassing the farthestfetchedTechnologies that, in a pinch, are stretchedTo bring a kidnapped waif

Home and her kidnappers to trial,Saving both victim and the vacant plot--The serums, powders, pastes, or newly boughtDell Inst-o-matic Dial-

Up-DNA, which matches spermSamples to cell phone records--and these dumbContrivances are called "phlebotinum."Now, I can't confirm

The scientific fact of it,I know the feeling well: who doesn't craveA universal solvent fit to saveUs, make the pieces fit

In every case that we might piece-meal pass to glory or a second season,That we might shuck the shackles of our reasonAnd feel a new release?

I see my snide analysisOf crime TV as more phlebotinum,The feeble means by which I try to comeTo terms with all of this,

And now I can't remember whereI heard the story--Law & Order?  Prime-time news?--but someone hears the doorbell chimeAnd pushes back his chair,

Walks to the peephole and, withoutA care, peeks through; thugs shoot him in the eyeI am afraid of that--that he could dieSimply by looking out.

Submitted by Tim Raylor for English.

German Department

Liebes-LiedRainer Maria Rilke

Wie soll ich meine Seele haltlen, daßsie nicht an deine rührt? Wie soll ich siehinhalten über dich zu andern Dingen?Ach gerne möcht ich sie bei irgendwasVerlorenem im Dunkel unterbringenan einer fremden stillen Stelle, dienicht weiterschweingt, wenn deine Tiefen schwingen.Doch alles, was uns anrührt, dich und mich,nimmt uns zusammen wie ein Bogenstrich,der aus zwei Seiten eine Stimme zieht.Auf welches Instrument sind wir gespannt?Und welcher Geiger hat uns in der Hand?O süßes Lied.

Love SongBy Rainer Maria Rilke,translated by A.Z. Foreman, slightly modified

How shall I hold my soul and yet not touchIt with your own? How shall I ever placeIt clear of you on anything beyond?Oh gladly I would stow it next to suchThings in the darkness as are never foundDown in an alien and silent spaceThat does not resonate when you resound.But everything that touches me and youTakes us together like a bow on twoTaut strings to stroke them to the voice of one.What instrument have we been strung upon?Whose are the hands that play our unison?Oh sweet song!

Submitted by Anne Ulmer for German.

History Department

The Art of DisappearingNaomi Shihab Nye

Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (1994)

When they say Don't I know you?say no.

When they invite you to the partyremember what parties are likebefore answering.Someone telling you in a loud voicethey once wrote a poem.Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.Then reply.

If they say We should get togethersay why?

It's not that you don't love them anymore.You're trying to remember somethingtoo important to forget.Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.Tell them you have a new project.It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery storenod briefly and become a cabbage.When someone you haven't seen in ten yearsappears at the door,don't start singing him all your new songs.You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.Know you could tumble any second.Then decide what to do with your time.

Submitted by Harry Williams for History.

Gould Library

This Is Just To Sayby William Carlos Williams

I have eatenthe plumsthat were inthe icebox

and whichyou were probablysavingfor breakfast

Forgive methey were deliciousso sweetand so cold

Submitted by Heather Tompkins for the Library.

Happy Thought (from A Child's Garden of Verses)by Robert Louis Stevenson

The world is so full of a number of thingsI'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

Submitted by Lois Perkins for the Library.

Dreamsby Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreamsFor if dreams dieLife is a broken-winged birdThat cannot fly.Hold fast to dreamsFor when dreams goLife is a barren fieldFrozen with snow.

Submitted by Sandie Smith for the Library.

Marginaliaby Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,skirmishes against the authorraging along the borders of every pagein tiny black script.If I could just get my hands on you,Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,they seem to say,I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -that kind of thing.I remember once looking up from my reading,my thumb as a bookmark,trying to imagine what the person must look likewho wrote “Don’t be a ninny”alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modestneeding to leave only their splayed footprintsalong the shore of the page.One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.Another notes the presence of “Irony”fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,hands cupped around their mouths.“Absolutely,” they shoutto Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation pointsrain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from collegewithout ever having written “Man vs. Nature”

in a margin, perhaps nowis the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our ownand reached for a pen if only to showwe did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;we pressed a thought into the wayside,planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoriajotted along the borders of the Gospelsbrief asides about the pains of copying,a bird singing near their window,or the sunlight that illuminated their page–anonymous men catching a ride into the futureon a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,they say, until you have read himenwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,the one that dangles from me like a locket,was written in the copy of Catcher in the RyeI borrowed from the local libraryone slow, hot summer.I was just beginning high school then,reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,and I cannot tell youhow vastly my loneliness was deepened,how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,when I found on one page

a few greasy looking smearsand next to them, written in soft pencil–by a beautiful girl, I could tell,whom I would never meet–“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

Submitted by Iris Jastram for the Library.

The Meaningby Kellie and Emily Spehn

To love is to share life togetherto build special plans just for twoto work side by sideand then smile with prideas one by one, dreams all come true.

To love is to help and encouragewith smiles and sincere words of praiseto take time to shareto listen and carein tender, affectionate ways.

To love is to have someone specialone who you can always dependto be there through the yearssharing laughter and tearsas a partner, a lover, a friend.

To love is to make special memoriesof moments you love to recallof all the good thingsthat sharing life bringslove is the greatest of all.

I've learned the full meaningof sharing and caringand having my dreams all come true;I've learned the full meaningof being in loveby being and loving with you.

Submitted by Cindy Spehn for the Library.

Mathematics Department

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bareby Edna St. Vincent Millay (1923)Sonnet from The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,And lay them prone upon the earth and ceaseTo ponder on themselves, the while they stare

At nothing, intricately drawn nowhereIn shapes of shifting lineage; let geese

Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek releaseFrom dusty bondage into luminous air.

O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,When first the shaft into his vision shoneOf light anatomized! Euclid aloneHas looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they

Who, though once only and then but far away,Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

Submitted by Deanna Haunsperger for Mathematics.

Music Department

Music, When Soft Voices Die (1821)Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792–July 8, 1822

Russian Department

The Power of the Word, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ9Q6PbSMgA a video made in support of the beleaguered independent television station "Rain" in Russia of people in a Moscow trolleybus declaiming poetry by Pushkin, Fet, Tiutchev and Tsvetaeva. At the end it says, "Words have astonishing power - when they are free."

It seems like a good year for something elegiac, and there is no shortage in the Russian cannon. This poem by Boris Pasternak is from “The Poems of Yuri Zhivago,” that appear at the end of the novel, attributed to the main character.

Ветер

Я кончился, а ты жива.И ветер, жалуясь и плача,Раскачивает лес и дачу.Не каждую сосну отдельно,А полностью все дереваСо всею далью беспредельной,Как парусников кузоваНа глади бухты корабельной.И это не из удальстваИли из ярости бесцельной,А чтоб в тоске найти словаТебе для песни колыбельной.

Both items submitted by Laura Goering for Russian.

Wind-translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerny

I have died, but you are still among the living.And the wind, keening and complaining,Makes the country house and forest rock--Not each pine by itselfBut all the tress as one,Together with the illimitable distance;It makes them rock as the hulls of sailboatsRock on the mirrorous waters of a boat-basin.And this the wind does not out of bravadoOr in a senseless rage,But so that in its desolationIt may find words to fashion a lullaby for you.

Music, when soft voices die,Vibrates in the memory;Odours, when sweet violets sicken,Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,Are heap'd for the belovèd's bed;And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,Love itself shall slumber on.

Submitted by Lawrence Burnett for Music.

Religion Department

All the new thinking is about loss.In this it resembles all the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erasesthe luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunkof that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first worldof undivided light. Or the other notion that,because there is in this world no one thing

to which the bramble of blackberrycorresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.We talked about it late last night and in the voiceof my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tonealmost querulous. After a while I understood that,

talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,pine, hair, woman, you

andI. There was a woman

I made love to and I remembered how, holdingher small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

I felt a violent wonder at her presencelike a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish

calledpumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.

Longing, we say, because desire is fullof endless distances. I must have been the same to her.

But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,the thing her father said that hurt her, what

she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinousas words, days that are the good flesh continuing.Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,

sayingblackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Submitted by Lori Pearson for Religion.

Sociology/Anthropology Department

Raw ExperienceCherrie Moraga

1

There is this motor inside mepropelling meforward

I watch myself for clues.

the hands in front of meconducting me through this housea spoon too soon wiped cleanthe hands sweeping it awaybarely experiencingthe sensation of fullnessusefulness

I watch myself for clues.

Catch my face, a moving portraitin a storefront windowam taken abackby the dropin cheeklinemy face sinking into itself

I watch myself for clues.

Say "extricate"for the first time in my lifefeel the soundbulldoze out of my mouth

I earned that word somewherethe syllables secretly meeting within meplanning to blast me open.

There is this motor inside mepropelling me forward.I watch myself for clues,trying to catch upinhabit my bodyagain.

2

On the highest point of a hillsitting, there isthe view of three bridges

each one with a special feature

a coloran islanda view of the red rock

Each with a particular destinationcoming and going.

I watch them for clues

their secretsabout making connectionsabout gettingsomeplace.

Submitted by Liz Raleigh for Sociology/Anthropology

Spanish Department

El descanso del guerrero (Soldier's Rest)by Roque Dalton, Taberna y otros lugares (1969)

Los muertos están cada día más indóciles.Antes era fácil con ellos:les dábamos un cuello duro una florloábamos sus nombres en una larga lista:que los recintos de la patriaque las sombras notablesque el mármol monstruoso.El cadáver firmaba en pos de la memoriaiba de nuevo a filasy marchaba al compás de nuestra vieja música.Pero qué valos muertos son otros desde entonces.Hoy se ponen irónicospreguntan.Me parece que caen en la cuentade ser cada vez más la mayoría!

Soldier’s Rest

The dead grow more intractable every day.Once they were obedient:we gave them a stiff collar a flowerwe eulogized their names on an Honor Roll:in the National Cemeteryamong distinguished shadeson hideous marble.

The corpse signed up pursuing gloryonce more joined the ranksmarched to the beat of our old drum.

Wait a minute!Since thenthey have changed.

These days they grow ironic,ask questions.

It seems to me they realize that more and morethey are the majority!

Submitted by Yansi Pérez for Spanish.

The Writing Program

I'm sure lots of us had to memorize this macabre ballad back in the day. A year ago, when I was tending my 4-week-old granddaughter while her parents enjoyed their first dinner date since her birth, I discovered that ballads of all kinds, sung or recited, calmed her. This one was particularly effective; I suspect she picked up on rhythm and alliteration. She's perceptive.

- Carol Rutz

Annabel Lee

By Edgar Allan Poe

It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea,That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee;And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea,But we loved with a love that was more than love— I and my Annabel Lee—With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago, In this kingdom by the sea,A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling My beautiful Annabel Lee;So that her highborn kinsmen came And bore her away from me,To shut her up in a sepulchre In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven, Went envying her and me—Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know, In this kingdom by the sea)That the wind came out of the cloud by night, Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we— Of many far wiser than we—And neither the angels in Heaven above Nor the demons down under the seaCan ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, In her sepulchre there by the sea— In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Submitted by Carol Rutz for the Writing Program.