Whipped Cream Difficulties

Some people may be surprised by this, but: I like poetry.

I know, maybe I should turn in my man card. But I’m weird about the poetry I like. I find much of T. S. Eliot incomprehensible, but his imagery! Rod Dreher wrote a while back about the Australian poet Les Murray, and I want to read more of his work. Someone gave me a coffee mug with a quote from James Merrill’s “The Black Swan” on it and now I want to read more Merrill.

And Penny Arcade introduced me to “i sing of Olaf glad and big” which I find comforting from time to time.

“there is some shit I will not eat”

I believe there are two poets you don’t have to turn in your man card to like.

One is Kipling.

Charles Dance reads “The Road to Mandalay” during a 70th anniversary of VJ Day commemoration in London.

“The Power of the Dog”.

The other poet you don’t have to turn in your man card for? Robinson Jeffers. I think even TJIC would concede this point: you have to like a poet who apprenticed himself out so that he could learn stonemasonry, then used that skill to keep adding on to Tor House for the rest of his life.

He later built a large four-story stone tower on the site called Hawk Tower. While he had not visited Ireland at this point in his life, it is possible that Hawk Tower is based on Francis Joseph Bigger’s ‘Castle Séan’ at Ardglass, County Down, which had also in turn influenced William Butler Yeats’ choice of a poets tower, Thoor Ballylee. Construction on Tor House continued into the late 1950s and early 1960s, and was completed by his eldest son. The completed residence was used as a family home until his descendants decided to turn it over to the Tor House Foundation, formed by Ansel Adams, for historic preservation. The romantic Gothic tower was named after a hawk that appeared while Jeffers was working on the structure, and which disappeared the day it was completed. The tower was a gift for his wife Una, who had a fascination for Irish literature and stone towers. In Una’s special room on the second floor were kept many of her favorite items, photographs of Jeffers taken by the artist Weston, plants and dried flowers from Shelley’s grave, and a rosewood melodeon which she loved to play. The tower also included a secret interior staircase – a source of great fun for his young sons.

Judith Anderson reads Robinson Jeffers, part 2.

I’m leading off with this one because it contains two of my favorite Jeffers poems: “Hurt Hawks” and “The House Dog’s Grave”.

Part 1:

A shortish documentary from 1967:

Sadly, I can’t find any readings of my other two favorite Jeffers poems: “Be Angry at the Sun” and “The Stars Go over the Lonely Ocean“.

“…Long live freedom and damn the ideologies”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2020 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Art, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.