‘Lines on Ale’ for New Beers Eve

Posted on April 6, 2023 by wordcloud9

Irene Fowler is on hiatus

April 6, 1933 – New Beers Eve: the night before the sale of beer becomes legal again in the U.S. the Cullen-Harrison Act goes into effect, redefining what an “intoxicating beverage” is to exclude beer from Prohibition – full repeal of Prohibition didn’t happen until the December 5, 1933 ratification of the 21st Amendment, repealing the 18th Amendment.

“Lines on Ale” is a curious artifact of the 19th century. It was originally attributed to Edgar Allan Poe. The poem is believed to have been written in July, 1848, at a tavern in Lowell, Massachusetts. It was found in an obscure source in the 1930s by Thomas O. Mabbott, who included it in the volume he was publishing of Poe’s poetry. Poe did visit Lowell in either 1848 or 1849, but the anecdotal evidence that he is the poem’s author is fairly sparse. Several Poe experts have since rejected it, but the attribution persists.

Whether it was written by some unknown writer or by Edgar Allan Poe, the poem is a celebration of drinking ale. For you precisionists out there, ale is “a type of beer with a bitter flavor and higher alcoholic content.”

To read “Lines on Ale” click:

Continue reading →

Posted in Poetry | Tagged , | 1 Comment

TCS: Postcards from the Place Where Dreams Are

Posted on April 3, 2023 by wordcloud9

Good Morning!

_____________________________

Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers
on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum,
so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in
your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.

_____________________________

“Keep the world safe for poetry…
If the world is safe for poetry, it
can be safe for many other things.”
– Anne Waldman

“poems fall … from the richly pollinated boughs
of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with
clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but
everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it
or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace,
communicated from one soul to another.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder

Continue reading →

Posted in Poetry, The Coffee Shop | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

A Poem by Marge Piercy on Her Birthday

Posted on March 31, 2023 by wordcloud9

Marge Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, on March 31, 1936. Her working-class parents were Jewish, and they lived in a predominatly black neighborhood, where the Great Depression hit hard. She became the first in her family to go to college, on a scholarship to the University of Michigan, where she joined and became an organizer for political movements like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Anti-Vietnam War/Pro-Peace groups. She’s a feminist, a Marxist, and an environmentalist. Piercy is also a prolific writer, with almost 20 novels and over 20 books of poetry published. She’s written plays, several volumes of nonfiction, a memoir, and edited the anthology Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now. Piercy also explores Jewish issues, and was poetry editor of Tikkun Magazine. She won a National Endowment for the Arts Award in 1978, the Carolyn Kizer Poetry Prize in 1986 and in 1990, the May Sarton Award in 1991, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction in 1992.

To read Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use” click:

Continue reading →

Posted in Poetry | Tagged , , | Comments Off on A Poem by Marge Piercy on Her Birthday

The Sun Came Out to Play

Posted on March 30, 2023 by wordcloud9

by IRENE FOWLER, Contributor

“I believe in liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms
and their souls, the right to breathe and the right to vote, the
freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride
on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming,
working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.”
– W.E.B Du Bois

“Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.”
– Charlotte Brontë, from Jane Eyre

“O, Sunshine! The most precious gold to be found on earth.”
– Thomas Mann

To read Irene’s new poem “The Sun Came Out to Play” click:

Continue reading →

Posted in Poetry | Tagged , | 1 Comment

A Poem by Ada Limón on Her Birthday

Posted on March 28, 2023 by wordcloud9

Ada Limón born March 28, 1976, is an American poet of Mexican America heritage, a magazine contributor, and an educator. Her 2015 poetry collection, Bright Dead Things, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, and in 2018, her book The Carrying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. She is the current U.S. Poet Laureate.

She contributed her poem “Salvage” to Greenpeace’s #ClimateVisionaries Project.

To read her poem click:

Continue reading →

Posted in Poetry | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

TCS: Dancing and Not Dying, I Sing to You in the Mornings

Posted on March 27, 2023 by wordcloud9

Good Morning!

_____________________________

Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers
on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum,
so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in
your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.

_____________________________

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal
down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
– Don Marquis

A poet’s work … to name the unnameable,
to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments,
shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.  
– Salman Rushdie

Continue reading →

Posted in Poetry, The Coffee Shop | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

A Poem for Tolkien Reading Day

Posted on March 25, 2023 by wordcloud9

Today is Tolkien Reading Day, started by the Tolkien Society in 2003. It is held annually on March 25, the day of the downfall of Sauron.

In addition to writing The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and related books like The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a number of short stories, and quite a bit of poetry.

To read “The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon” click:

Continue reading →

Posted in Poetry | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Another Poem by Billy Collins

Posted on March 23, 2023 by wordcloud9

NOTE: Irene Fowler is involved in a big celebration of her mother’s birthday this week, but will back with us next week.

In the meantime, to read “Life Expectancy” by Billy Collins click:

Continue reading →

Posted in Poetry | Tagged , | 1 Comment

A Poem by Billy Collins on His Birthday

Posted on March 22, 2023 by wordcloud9

Billy Collins was born on March 22, 1941, dubbed “the most popular poet in America” by Bruce Weber in the New York Times, was a two-term U.S. Poet Laureate (2001-2003), and has published many poetry collections, including Questions About Angels; The Art of Drowning; and Nine Horses: Poems. It was Questions About Angels, published in 1991, that put him in the literary spotlight.  Collins says his poetry is “suburban, it’s domestic, it’s middle class, and it’s sort of unashamedly that.”

To read his poem “Boyhood” click:

Continue reading →

Posted in Poetry | Tagged , | 1 Comment

TCS: Dragon-Seekers, Bent on Impossible Rescues

Posted on March 20, 2023 by wordcloud9

Good Morning!

_____________________________

Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers
on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum,
so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in
your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.

_____________________________

 “…Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions,
binding together people who never knew each other,
citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles
of time. A book is proof that humans are capable
of working magic.” – Carl Sagan, Cosmos

The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth
                                                         to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
– William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s
Dream – Act V, Scene 1

Continue reading →

Posted in Poetry, The Coffee Shop | Tagged , , | 1 Comment