Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

Welcome to the third installment of the darling bards of May (with apologies to Shakespeare). As you might expect, most of the poets are English and American, but we do have one of the most famous Italian poets, and a modern Swedish poet this week. As a group, they cover over 750 years of poetry.

Much has changed in that amount of time, including the forms of poetry, yet the content is often very much the same. Humankind has radically altered many of the externals of our existence, while the large themes that poets were concerned with in the past – Life, Death, Love, Loneliness, Joy, Despair, War, Peace, Oppression, Freedom, Eternity – are still concerns of poets now.
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May 14

• Mary Biddinger (1974 – ) was born in Fremont California, author of four books of poetry. She is a professor in the English department of the University of Akron. As senior editor of the Akron Series in Poetry, she oversees preparation of three collections of poetry each year, published by the University of Akron Press. Biddinger also founded the Barn Owl Review.

Parlor Games Are For The Weak

Calligraphy was for girls with nobody
to knife like a tree. Bowling

was for lives that never got lucky.
By the time I had my first

apartment, I kept a lipstick in every
room. There were exactly

three rooms. The garbage chute
backed up seven floors.

Old ladies of ghost vaudeville paid
for pints of gin with dimes

downstairs. Card games, violent
hairpieces, an illegal gray

monkey dressed as a rooster clown.
Certain days I swore they

boiled unpaired boots in the atrium.
Some tenants were never

seen, had Polish maids with elbows
like witch-handles, laundry

hampers and harp buckets. I failed
to comprehend a word.

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