Richard Crashaw – 3 (“To His (Supposed) Mistress”)

December 26, 2017Simon Pettet
[“glist’ring shoe-ty..” ?  – Dorothy’s “ruby slippers” from The Wizard of Oz]
Allen Ginsberg on Richard Crashaw continuing from here
 
AG: Then he (Crashaw) also has another poem that has a very pretty triplet thing,It’s rare in English to find three lines (one short, one longer, and then one longest, with the same rhyme -“be/she/me”, “lie/eye/destiny”, “birth/ forth/earth”)
 
So I’ll just read two or three stanzas of it because I don’t want to hang on to it too long (because you don’t have the text) – “Wishes To His (Supposed) Mistress“
 
Who e’er she be/That
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A List of List Poems

December 21, 2017Simon Pettet
AG:  But by this anaphoric rapture, or anaphoric repetition, it {Crashaw’s poem “The Flaming  Heart”] actually builds up to rapture. So this is what Anne Waldman calls “a list poem”, actually, an early list poem. I taught a little poetry workshop this weekend and checked out list poems and the samples I used were (the) thirteenth and twenty-eighth chapters of Ecclesiastes (because there is “..or the golden bowl be broken”), and then I read Christopher Smart, I used “Like to the flaming of a star.”,  the little.. – I used that as a list
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Richard Crashaw – 2 (Saint Teresa)

December 20, 2017Simon Pettet
 
[Gian Lorenzo Bernini – St Teresa in Ecstasy (detail) ) c.1647-52]
AG: But better than those, there’s one other poem to Saint Teresa, which begins, idiotically, with the image that her heart was so hot that the angels would be set fire by it, rather than the angels setting fire to her heart, or something like that.. Saint Teresa – “(The Flaming Heart) Upon The Book and Picture of (the seraphical) Saint Teresa (As she is usually expressed with Seraphim beside her)” –  So the whole poem is not worth our time now, we’re limited, but the end … Read More

Richard Crashaw

December 19, 2017Simon Pettet
AG: Then we have now Richard Crashaw,  page three-five-six- There’s a funny Shakespearean line in that middle poem, “To The Infant Martyrs”.  Has anybody read that already? Anybody read on through Crashaw at all? (because somebody could read “”To The Infant Martyrs” – whoever starts reading could read it
Student -[reads] – “Go, smiling souls, your new-built cages break,/ In heaven you’ll learn to sing, ere here to speak,/ Nor let the milky fonts that bathe your thirst/Be your delay; /The place that calls you hence is, at the worst,/ Milk all the way.”
AG: … Read More