Monday, March 31, 2014

April is not the cruellest month

April is National Poetry Month.

Did they choose this month in order to counter TS Eliot's "April is the cruellest month"? ;)

Here are thirty different things you can do to observe, celebrate, a month of poetry.

This prosaic person will sample a verse or two.

K. 453

By Karl Kirchwey

On May 27, 1784,
as he followed Vienna's back streets home,
Mozart paused, startled, by a pet shop door
and listened to the allegretto theme

from his own piano concerto in G-Major
repeated by a starling in a cage.
He'd written it only five weeks before—
had God given them both the same message?

He counted out thirty-four copper Kreutzer.
Pleasure was like the iridescent sheen
in the dark plumage: an imagination livelier,
perhaps, more fecund and ready than his own!

He entered this in his new quarto accounts ledger,
but where the price should go, he wrote the tune
instead—transcribed it a second time, rather—
and then, in his small hand, wrote Das war schön.

2 comments:

Ramesh said...

What on earth is a "National Poetry Month". At the rate at which you assign days and months, can we have a "Free day" when nothing is observed. Perhaps that is asking for too much. Maybe a "Free Minute" !!

By the way, is that anecdote about Mozart, true. It could very well be ......

Plizzz to write one poem a day in your blog for the next 30 days.

Sriram Khé said...

Haha ... at least we are not at a stage where we are told that "this day brought to you by WeSuckYourWalletDry Corporation" ;)

Not a bad idea ... to somehow work into every blog post a poem ... will try ...