Most summers for the last ten years or so we have rented a farmhouse in New York for a week during the summer. (A post I wrote about it is here.)  We love it. It is on 70 acres with fields, woods, a stream, and a pond. It is a week of quiet and nature and peaceful joy. We weren’t able to go this year but today’s poem reminds me of just how wonderful it is and of the early morning joy of a walk up by the pond. Maybe next year… At Great Pond the sun, rising, scrapes his orange breast on the thick pines, and down tumble a…

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash Czeslaw Milosz was a Polish poet who won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1980. He wrote in Polish and then he and others translated his poetry into English. He “wrote of the past in a tragic, ironic style that nonetheless affirmed the value of human life.” His poem “And yet the books” will appeal to any book lover. And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings, That appeared once, still wet As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn, And, touched, coddled, began to live In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up, Tribes on the march, planets in motion. “We are,”…

I mentioned in my last post that I was reading The G.I.’s: The Americans in Britain, 1942-1945. When I was looking for a poem for today’s post I started wondering about the poets who were writing during WWII. E.E. Cummings was an American poet who wrote almost 3,000 poems. He used unusual syntax and a lot of lower-case spelling. Norman Friedman, who wrote a book about Cummings, said that Cummings’ innovations “are best understood as various ways of stripping the film of familiarity from language in order to strip the film of familiarity from the world. Transform the word, he seems to have felt, and you are on the way…