Easy Poet Costume Ideas

Have you decided on your Halloween costume yet?  How about being a poet!

This page from Poets.org offers ideas for dressing up as Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, and---Sappho! They are all easy to do.

For example, dressing up as William Carlos Williams requires no more than donning a toy stethoscope and rubber gloves. For greater verisimilitude, carry a bowl of plums or trundle along a red wheelbarrow full of candy.

Emily Dickinson's "In a Library"

A PRECIOUS, mouldering pleasure ’t is
To meet an antique book,
In just the dress his century wore;
A privilege, I think,

His venerable hand to take, 5
And warming in our own,
A passage back, or two, to make
To times when he was young.

His quaint opinions to inspect,
His knowledge to unfold 10
On what concerns our mutual mind,
The literature of old;

What interested scholars most,
What competitions ran
When Plato was a certainty, 15
And Sophocles a man;

When Sappho was a living girl,
And Beatrice wore
The gown that Dante deified.
Facts, centuries before, 20

He traverses familiar,
As one should come to town
And tell you all your dreams were true:
He lived where dreams were born.

His presence is enchantment, 25
You beg him not to go;
Old volumes shake their vellum heads
And tantalize, just so.

The Importance of Reading Earnest

You'll find the list of classics for our 2012-2013 season down the left side of this blog. Later this year, we'll make a selection of the Orwell and Dickinson titles we'll be discussing and post it here. If you have any suggestions for titles you would like to have discussed, feel free to post a comment here.

We're tentatively planning to show a movie of "The Importance of Being Earnest." In that case, we'll begin the discussion an hour or so early. Check back for more details!

T. S. Eliot Poems for December

We've collaborated on this selection of Eliot's poems to read for our December discussion. As you see, the list is rather long. These poems all merit our attention, but some are more likely to figure in our discussion than others. So our suggestion is to read as many as you have time for, but concentrate especially on the italicized ones.

This way, you can read more widely if you wish, and the discussion will be enriched even if we don't spend a lot of time on each one of them. Contrariwise, people who are pressed for time in December can limit their reading to the lesser number and still be sufficiently prepared.

*The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
*Preludes
Landscapes
Gerontion
*The Hollow Men
*The Waste Land
Journey of the Magi
Marina
*From Four Quartets: "Burnt Norton" and "The Dry Salvages"
Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleisten with a Cigar
Sweeney Among the Nightingales
Ash Wednesday
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

If you're reading from one of the editions of Eliot's Complete Poems and Plays, you may find it lacking in explanatory material. I plan to follow Bill Combs' suggestion and find a Norton Anthology or other resource that contains some extra help! And at David Isaacson's request, I've embedded this audio clip of T. S. Eliot reading aloud. 

Thomas Wolfe's Vocabulary

Whatever else you may think of it, Look Homeward, Angel is good for a little vocabulary building:

phthistic: Archaic Any illness of the lungs or throat, such as asthma or a cough.

stipe: the stem or stalk-like feature supporting the cap of a mushroom

convolve:  to roll together; writhe.

octopal:   resembling or having the characteristics of an octopus. "all the slow octopal movements of her temper" — Thomas Wolfe

guerdon:  reward, recompense.

If you eat poison stipes, you may experience only a phthistic reaction, or possibly an octopal convolving of the intestines will be your guerdon. Better leave 'em alone.

Our October Selection....

Hope to see you October 20 for our discussion of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. We deliberately chose a short work to follow the marathon reading we did for Ulysses!

If you don't yet have a paper copy of the play, you can read it online here . A few scenes from the 1962 Judi Dench movie version can be seen here

Happy Bloomsday, Everyone!