A strange and bitter crop

A poem with raw emotions.

Strange Fruit
By Abel Meeropol

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Here's Nina Simone's version:

Did Picasso have tenure?

Another blast from the past.
Hey, what can I say; from time to time, a professor needs to spend time listening to other professors pontificate ;)
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It is poetry month.

Prosaic I am, yes.  But, I love the idea of poems.
Having a book of poems around is like having flowers on the table.
Like playing an opera LP on a sunny afternoon.
Like having coffee with cheesecake.
Or better yet, having coffee with cheesecake while listening to an opera LP on a sunny afternoon in a room with a bunch of flowers in a vase.

But, prosaic I am.
Dull, boring, lacking in that poetic aesthetics.
That is me.

Some of us are born that way.

Yet, from time to time, I seek out poems.
Why?
Why not?

I searched for poems about teaching.
And came across this one.
It is funny as hell, especially if you are like me dealing with teaching and teachers.
It is sarcastic.
Here it is for you, also, to enjoy.


With Tenure
by David Lehman

If Ezra Pound were alive today
(and he is)
he'd be teaching
at a small college in the Pacific Northwest
and attending the annual convention
of writing instructors in St. Louis
and railing against tenure,
saying tenure
is a ladder whose rungs slip out
from under the scholar as he climbs
upwards to empty heaven
by the angels abandoned
for tenure killeth the spirit
(with tenure no man becomes master)
Texts are unwritten with tenure,
under the microscope, sous rature
it turneth the scholar into a drone
decayed the pipe in his jacket's breast pocket.
Hamlet was not written with tenure,
nor were written Schubert's lieder
nor Manet's Olympia painted with tenure.
No man of genius rises by tenure
Nor woman (I see you smile).
Picasso came not by tenure
nor Charlie Parker;
Came not by tenure Wallace Stevens
Not by tenure Marcel Proust
Nor Turner by tenure
With tenure hath only the mediocre
a sinecure unto death. Unto death, I say!
WITH TENURE
Nature is constipated the sap doesn't flow
With tenure the classroom is empty
et in academia ego
the ketchup is stuck inside the bottle
the letter goes unanswered the bell doesn't ring.

(Ok, ok, poetry month posts are not new at this blog. Click here for the post from 2014, and this is from 2013. Hey, even from 2010 and 2009!)

April is not the cruellest month

I am re-posting this from two years ago.

Why this recycling?  I will be away for a couple of days at a conference.  Too bad that I am leaving the Valley when it is going to be awesomely sunny, warm, spring days.  And the clouds and rain will be back when I return!  Oh well, a man has got to do what a man has got to do ;)
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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 dull, boring, 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.